Lambert and I, and many readers, agree that Ukraine has prompted the worst informational environment ever. We hope readers will collaborate in mitigating the fog of war — both real fog and stage fog — in comments. None of us need more cheerleading and link-free repetition of memes; there are platforms for that. Low-value, link-free pom pom-wavers will be summarily whacked.
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–Yves
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A giraffe gets modified leg braces designed for humans NPR (David L)
Happy the Elephant Has Lawyers Arguing to Free Her From the Zoo Wall Street Journal. Resilc” “Happy the Elephant LLC.”
CAN INSECTS BE CONSCIOUS? LET’S LOOK AT BEES FIRST Mind Matters (David L)
Soldier Is Killed by Brown Bear on Alaska Military Base New York Times (resilc)
Calling a Man Bald Counts as Sexual Harassment, UK Judge Rules CNBC
Why smoke follows you around a fire Boing Boing (resilc)
We Just Got Closer to Mapping Nearly Every Single Cell Type in The Human Body ScienceAlert (Kevin W)
#COVID-19
Science/Medicine
Long COVID-19 exercise capacity linked to abnormal blood clotting markers MedicalXPress (guurst)
Asia
Coronavirus: I’ve endured 20 days of lockdown in Beijing. No one can tell me when it will end South China Morning Post (David L)
North Korea: Covid outbreak a great disaster, says Kim Jong-un BBC. Resilc: “The NoKo CDC management will be abruptly changed soon. Kim is more results oriented than Trump/Biden.”
US
Trump officials and meat industry blocked life-saving Covid controls, investigation finds Guardian
NEW: Prof. @Alison_Galvani & colleagues find groups with lower health insurance coverage had significantly higher COVID mortality.
"Providing universal insurance coverage should be part of our campaign to reduce COVID-19 mortality," they write.
Study➡️ https://t.co/ll87U7T4hm pic.twitter.com/hU17XiPFJ0
— Yale School of Public Health (@YaleSPH) May 13, 2022
Fauci’s Royalties And The $350 Million Royalty Payment Stream HIDDEN By NIH OpentheBooks. Where is the left on this? Even if the motivation is partisan, this is rank corruption, and IM Doc has been talking about this for some time.
Climate/Environment
No Sea Serpents, Mobsters but Tahoe Trash Divers Strike Gold The Skanner (David L)
Birds fall from the sky as heatwave scorches India Reuters (resilc)
Pakistan city hits nearly 50C as blistering heatwave grips nation Al Jazeera
A colony of blue-green algae can power a computer for six months Interesting Engineering (furzy)
China?
Fresh Off Russia, the U.S. Just Can’t Stop Provoking China CounterPunch (resilc). As we’ve been sayin’….
1/ China's new policy restricting minors from participating in livestreaming are super interesting. What stood out: The rules forbid apps from using some of the UI / interface reward mechanisms that entice young users to tip influencers. A thread. https://t.co/QSwmcoBVbs
— Kendra Schaefer 凯娜 (@kendraschaefer) May 11, 2022
Indo-Pacific strategy adrift in an illusion Indian Punchline (Kevin W). Ouch.
India
India: Elderly couple sue son over lack of grandchildren DW (resilc)
Sri Lanka on the brink GZERO Media (resilc)
Brexit
‘We don’t need lectures’ on peace process, says Frost RTE. Bluster is in high supply these days.
Hah, I used “bluster” above before seeing Chris Grey’s latest: For all the bluster, Johnson and the Brexiters still have no realistic answer to the ‘Northern Ireland border’ question
On Article 16, Pascal Lamy former WTO head and EU trade commissioner tells BBCPM: “If UK acts unilaterally saying there will be no border… it is the UK saying we negate Brexit. The very decision to Brexit entails the existence of a border. You cannot have your cake and eat it.”
— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) May 13, 2022
New Not-So-Cold War
Funny the complete absence of reporting on this in the West: Gazprom subsidiaries in Germany stopped receiving gas from Russia – German minister and Gazprom confirms Russian sanctions prohibit use of Yamal-Europe pipeline capacities Interfax (guurst). Note this is what we predicted was the most likely first move under the countersanctions. The closest thing we could find to a Western story was this: Kremlin says foreign energy companies that fall under Russia’s sanctions won’t participate in gas supplies CNN. No mention that they are in response to Germany stealing Gazprom assets, and Germany is therefore losing supply (not yet clear, due to state of reporting, if this means most or all). Nor hard to think this is why Scholz called Putin, particularly since Scholz called Putin about the gas for roubles payment requirement, but the Kremlin readout is thin.
Gas Supply: The State of Pipeline Flows and Storage NDR (guurst; German original here)
Meeting on economic issues President of Russia. Inflation is falling. As the US is anticipating a bad wheat harvest, note:
We are expecting a good harvest this year. According to preliminary expert estimates, we may harvest 130 million tonnes of grain, including 87 million tonnes of wheat. If this happens, then the projected grain harvests would hit an all-time high in Russian history. This will make it possible to meet domestic demand, with a substantial safety margin, and to expand global exports for our partners; this is highly important for global food markets.
* * * Nato member Turkey hits out at Finland and Sweden membership bids Independent (Kevin W). Erdogan may just be playing NATO and Russia for bribes. But Independent piece does not mention that Sweden recognizes the Kurdistan region. Sweden has an embassy there.
We don’t write the rules anymore, and when we try, we make things worse Responsible Statecraft (resilc)
* * * The Bizarre, Unanimous Dem Support for the $40b War Package to Raytheon and CIA: “For Ukraine” Glenn Greenwald. As Scott Ritter has pointed out, one of the reasons the numbers are so large is the US is now directly funding the budget of the Ukraine government, in particularly pay to its soldiers. So we are directly funding the Azov Battalion and other Nazis in arms.
Nazis Are Actually Fine Now, According to the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League Michael Tracey (Glenn F)
"Sawing a person’s torso in half with a carpenter’s saw
…Cutting open a pregnant women’s abdomen and pouring in broken glass
Nailing a small child to a door…"— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) May 13, 2022
Briefing: analysis of documents related to the military biological activities of the United States on the territory of Ukraine May 11, 2022 The Saker. Hoo boy:
For example, materials indicating the intentional use of a multidrug-resistant tuberculosis pathogen in 2020 to infect the population of the Slavyanoserbsky district of the LPR were examined.
The flyers, made in the form of counterfeit currency notes, were infected with the tuberculosis agent and distributed to minors in Stepovoe village. The organisers of this crime took into account the behaviour of children, who have a habit of “putting everything in their mouths” and taking food with unwashed hands.
The results of bacteriological studies have confirmed the resistance of the isolated bacteria to first- and second-line anti-TB drugs, meaning that the disease caused by them is much more difficult to treat and the cost of treatment is much higher.
According to the conclusion of the Lugansk Republican Sanitary and Epidemiological Station, “…the contamination of the notes was most likely carried out artificially, as the material contains extremely dangerous strains of the pathogen in concentrations capable of ensuring infection and development of the tuberculosis process…”.
In his conclusion, the chief doctor of the Lugansk Republican TB Dispensary also notes that “…there are all signs of deliberate, man-made contamination of the flyers with highly pathogenic biomaterial…”.
The Art of Disinformation–Western Lies About the War in Ukraine Larry Johnson. Important. FYI Johnson is a former CIA analyst. Covers the Lloyd Austin call to Sergei Shoigu and the Russian losses in trying to move troops over a pontoon bridge, which seems to be one of the few bona fide black eye Russia has taken in a while (the helicopter hits on some storage units in a refinery in Belgorod was a bold and impressive move, if not very consequential). On the latter:
The western media has been crowing about the mighty Ukrainians wiping out a Russian BTG. Yet no photos of Russian medical units recovering the dead and wounded from the battle site have been published on Ukrainian or Russian sites. But let us assume the claim is true–the Ukrainians reportedly ambushed and defeated one BTG. It is meaningless as far as the progress of the Russian war effort is concerned. If the Russians were concerned about the battle over a pontoon bridge they would have deployed fixed wing and rotary wing support aircraft armed with rockets and delivered an artillery barrage on the attacking Ukrainians. That apparently did not happen either.
Readout of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III’s Call With Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoygu Department of Defense. Yes, indeed, Austin asked for a ceasefire.
Russia River Crossing Setback, Advances Elsewhere, EU Drop Oil Sanctions, Erdogan Opposes NATO Bid Alexander Mercouris. Watch at 1.5x speed.
Syraqistan
Photos: Israeli forces attack Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral Al Jazeera (resilc)
The closest video of the #Israeli police suppressing the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Aqleh as the coffin was leaving the French hospital towards the cemetery pic.twitter.com/TaOsvCUUCd
— Rushdi Abualouf (@Rushdibbc) May 13, 2022
Why a Bullet Is the Focus of Investigations In Journalist’s Killing New York Times. Resilc: “I would trust the GoI less than my local used car dealer.”
Iran arrests dozens protesting sudden price hike in food staples France24 (resilc)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
San Francisco Police Are Using Driverless Cars As Mobile Surveillance Cameras Vice
Imperial Collapse Watch
Texans asked to limit electricity use after six power plants go down ahead of a hot weekend Texas Tribune (Kevin W)
New suicide attempt linked to USS George Washington, family says WGN Radio
Trump
Trump’s Potential Document Tampering Now Under Federal Investigation Rolling Stone (furzy)
Judge orders Steele dossier firm Fusion GPS to turn over 22 emails to John Durham New York Post
Biden
Tucker: They are hoarding baby formula YouTube. I hate having to link to Carlson, but the Biden Administration has made it trivially easy to put together segments like this. And if they don’t solve this problem soon, this is going to become the Biden analogue to Carter’s Iran hostage crisis, but with far more tangible impact. This is the same Administration that embraces the old Creel Committee tactic, successfully deployed by Ukraine, to milk sympathy for babies as a key way to move public opinion to support wars. Think that sort of thing can’t be mined domestically, in this case as war on the Dems?
Worry and fear as US faces baby formula shortage BBC (resilc). Most watched video as of now. The mothers are really stressed.
“Pro-Life” Republicans Complain Biden Isn’t Starving Babies at the Border Truthout (furzy). This bombs as a counter-message. I don’t know how many but at least some Dem spokescritters are telling mothers “Let them go breastfeed” when most have gotten the memo that breastfeeding is better but they 1. don’t produce enough milk; 2. work and can’t express milk often enough at the job and/or 3. have a baby with digestive issues so he needs some/all formula. Oh, and preemies gain weight faster and show more improvement on other development metrics on 80% breastmilk/20% formula than on 100% breastmilk. So the right may have found a hot button among parents who are normally not very interested in the border row, since women in what amounts to border detention don’t have the time/space constraints v. breastfeeding that many working mothers do.
Big Bottle: The Baby Formula Nightmare Matt Stoller (Kevin W; Lambert featured yesterday in Water Cooler). Important. The piece describes why this problem ought to be not hard to fix, or at least significantly alleviate, because it’s not an overall supply problem but a state-by-state issue due to industry-enriching Federal buying practices. So if this isn’t better in a month, there’s no excuse. Also explains why this is also an Imperial Collapse Watch item:
Baby formula is not just food, but the primary or sole nutrition for a vulnerable person in a stage of life in which very specific nutritional requirements are necessary for growth. Baby formula was created during the 19th century as we developed modern food preservation techniques. Before this remarkable innovation, baby starvation was common if a mother couldn’t breastfeed her infant (which happens a lot). The invention of industrialized formula was one of those creations we take for granted, but like antibiotics and other medical and scientific advances, it was one that fundamentally changed parenthood and the family.
The Squad” Doesn’t Exist Outside Of Social Media Caitlin Johnstone (Kevin W). See Aaron Maté calling them “The Fraud Squad”.
The Supremes
When Roe v Wade is overturned, convicted terrorist Raychelle “Shelly” Shannon can claim that she firebombed a path for the white Christian patriarchy's destruction of abortion rights in the U.S.. https://t.co/77MFvwYI1q
— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) May 12, 2022
Our No Longer Free Press
Tech groups ask Supreme Court to put Texas social media censorship law on hold CNN. Note the law is limited only to big platforms, so the implicit argument is they are the town square, and no long can hide behind presenting themselves as private publishers.
FITTON: Impeach? Biden Corruption Threatens National Security Judicial Watch Rumble. Note I have not watched this video, so I don’t have a point of view on it. But Judicial Watch, which is right wing but not cray cray, has had its YouTube account suspended for a week over this clip.
I once talked to the man in charge of it, who talked about how the resource he’d put together to help the public find useful research had had to be repeatedly armored-up against requests from academics hammering the bejasus out of it to find out how many cites they had. https://t.co/9T89IDBUtX
— Henry Farrell (@henryfarrell) May 14, 2022
Crypto’s steep decline has investors worried. What do celebrity boosters say? NBC (furzy)
Mr. TerraUSD should listen to his lawyers and stop talking:
Decentralized money is second-rate money.
Money is a system of measurement and governance. It takes a central party to administer.
We all deserve better money, but creating thousands of different private "decentralized" units of account isn't the answer. https://t.co/PfIALZkqwM
— Lev Menand (@LevMenand) May 14, 2022
Samsung Is Reportedly Planning To Raise Chip Prices By 20% PCMagazine
Class Warfare
Joe Biden and the Democrats Have Nothing to Offer Organized Labor, the ALU Included Black Agenda Report (resilc)
This North Texas city just approved free healthcare for all residents WFAA (Chuck L)
Antidote du jour. Nick Corbishley’s nine month old Nina:
And a bonus:
Farmed animals just wanna have fun – they’re here with us, not for us. pic.twitter.com/Vqg25kmeoD
— GreenFuzz (@molesuk) May 11, 2022
See yesterday’s Antidote du Jour and Links here.
328 comments
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Re: “heatwave scorches India” and “Pakistan city hits nearly 50C” — shades of Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Institute for the Future.” A good read, IMO.
THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE is Robinson’s title.
Oops, you are right of course! Senior moments are SO embarrassing!
Might be one case of forgetfulness that involves suppression. Robinson’s depiction of a deadly heatwave was one of the most sickening pieces of horror writing I’ve encountered. I was also engaging in some major blurring of the author, the title, and the scene for a while. It definitely worked to establish the rationale for anti-elite terror later on.
And closer to home, breaking news for non Texans among us but summer might arrive early. Apparently the powers that be at ERCOT still seem unable to get their collective behinds to do anything about electricity grid limitations.
Texas authorities can bide time by saying a deep freeze in Houston is rare, but seriously it starts getting hot and stays hot every damn year. Forecaster for Dallas or Ft Worth in months of July and August – “will be hot, continuing to be hot, until further notice”
expecting 105 in a day or two…in May.
it IS unusual to get this hot this soon…but yeah…it’s Texas: it gets real hot in summer(really, all the way to October.).
there’s no excuse, re: ERCOT.
even more worrisome, at least around here, is the “Exceptional” drought.
we’ve had 1/2″, 1/4″ and another 1/4″ for 3 nights in the last week, and my rancher neighbor actually danced a jig out there among his cows.
it would take 10″, spread over at least a week, to “bust” the drought…if not more.
CPC is sayiong that we’re in for a likely triple dip La Nina….as in 3rd year in a row…so barring a hurricane coming into Corpus Christi and washing over the Hill Country, we’re screwed.
long term, based on my observations, which concur with those of the weather guys, we’re in for feast or famine going forward…La Nina means drought, and exceptionally cold winter weather….then switch to El Nino, and get flooded out.
if i had my druthers, i’d be spending $ during this dry spell getting a couple of ponds put in…and more rainwater collection capacity…for when the thing turns over.
pond liners are cheaper now than i’ve ever seen them…as are water storage tanks(used to be a rule of thumb: $1 per gallon…now it’s closer to 60 cents, depending on materials)
Amfortas!! If the pond liner is too $$, get a couple of pigs or a flock of ducks, the use of an earthmoving-type device for a day, and gley the ponds instead! My off-grid fam in AR and OK have successfully done it with ~20′ diameter pools and ducks. You make the hole and then run the animals into the depression until it fills naturally. Here is an explainer… here is a link to a Permies thread with pics of a successful very big pond! Keep us updated!
cool! thanks/
i’d never heard of “Gleying”
we have a thick strata of this black clay in the back pasture, but much more sandy loam on either side of it(i’ve done ‘core samples’ as best i can, with post hole diggers, all over this place)…
nevertheless, in the Farm File this goes
While I left for the east coast later in the year, during May 2015 the northern TX region and Dallas was getting dumped on with epic, dare I say it Biblical, portions of daily rainstorms for like two weeks straight. April and May were usually the high point for sudden storms and tornadoes.
I don’t think the watershed south of Dallas for the Trinity River held up all that well.
We are having the warmest May I remember in Spain. We will see. May 2015 was also hot but for now we are at temperatures 10ºC above the average for the month.
India is really coming under the hammer at the moment. Just read a short while ago that India has now banned the export of wheat. As the article mentions, India recently said that its granaries were full and that it was ready to “feed the world.” But that was then and this is now-
https://www.rt.com/news/555468-india-wheat-ban-ukraine/
In other words NOW would be a good time to send that exceptional American diplomat that the Saudi Prince was screaming at, over to India to splain why India needs to get on board with sanctions on Russian wheat and oil.
Are you talking about Daleep Singh? He’s an exceptional communicator. /s Right now he’s on leave to spend more time with his family!
It was Jake Sullivan who was yelled at by MbS! Daily Mail link on it because of the pictures they chose to juxtapose the pair. I still chuckle thinking about MbS wearing shorts to appear ‘cool’ and then yelling at Sullivan when he tried to apply pressure.
When it hit 121 in British Columbia last summer, I knew the fix was in.
The highest temperature here in tiny town was 118 one day about a decade ago. I remember driving in 72 degree splendor in the confines of my four wheeled chariot curious what the highest temp i’d ever been privy to, felt like?
I opened the window to an ad hoc blast furnace and quickly sent the pane back on its way upwards, ye gads was it hot.
Could we hit 128 here in the CVBB, and seeing how Mother Nature as of late has a penchant for destroying crops all around the world, could the 666 million nut & fruit trees take the big heat?
If they can’t and all succumb to the elements, we’ll have to forego tree crops for a couple of reasons, in that aside from almonds which can produce commercial crops in 4 years, everything else takes a lot longer to get to that stage, and a hungry world can’t wait. Why plant food trees if the heat is periodically going to fry them?
This is where we take a page from the past and wheat will be the dominant crop grown in the Central Valley again, as it is perfect for climate change in that we now are getting water earlier in the year from either high up rain events, or the largess melting off sooner rather than later, when it does you little good.
They used to call it ‘dry farming’.
p.s. KSR’s The High Sierra: A Love Story comes out next week, can’t wait!
Arnold Rojas wrote “These Were the Vaqueros” that goes into some anecdotal detail about the San Joaquin before the arrival of the deep well turbine pump.
No Resnicks, no Farm Bureau but lots of Tule Elk, swamps, marshes, fogs, etc. and semi wild cattle that were deadly for people afoot.
“Mas” Masumoto writes movingly about the ‘hardpan’ he has had to break up with a tractor up around Fresno.
It’s estimated that the San Joaquin water table has dropped hundreds of feet since pumping began.
If agriculture were forbidden everywhere throughout the delta, and every bit of drained marsh were reflooded again, would the restored marshland re-suckdown all the peatcarbon that it skydumped when it was drained for agriculture? How much skycarbon could the delta re-suckdown if it were completely rehabilitated all the way back to its pre-exploration status as delta marshland?
I don’t know. The instigating incident in that book is a heatwave that kills millions, thus finally pushing governments to do something about climate change.
The pandemic has shown a more likely response by governments to the deaths of millions.
Best opening line for a sci-fi novel ever.
“Soon it would be too hot.” — The Drowned World, J. G. Ballard, pub. 1962.
An Inconvenient Truth
Ice Age
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
“An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth’s surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth’s climate alternates between ice ages and greenhouse periods, during which there are no glaciers on the planet. Earth is currently in the Quaternary glaciation….”
When the ice cover melts on the North and South Poles, we will be back in a greenhouse period. oh my
— in particularly pay to its soldiers. So we are directly funding the Azov Battalion and other Nazis in arms. —
there are widespread allegations in UA social media that ordinary soldiers haven’t been paid for weeks and death benefits are not being paid.
UA’s military-security complex is in three broad camps. The ultranationalist paramilitaries, the SBU (FBI-CIA equivalent), and the regular military.
No one in Congress knows how the money and aid is being split by those three. And it is a fair bet that most resources are going to the SBU and paramilitaries.
I’ve seen comments (by returned foreign fighters, so TMMV) that on Ukrainian side soldiers have to seek for their kit and pay for it. Also their food is often “provided by the local civilians”, which at least in East Ukraine (according to civilian testimonies) may not be a completely voluntary process.
British soldiers have to buy their own kit and reportedly Russian troops are expected to ‘live off the land’, so I don’t think this is necessarily unusual?
It’s standard practice that when we, the U.S., pays the troops in corrupt regimes the pay isn’t delivered. Then we wonder why the troops don’t stand their ground in defending their democracy whether it’s Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam. Why will Ukraine the most corrupt country in Europe be different ?
As I understand it the latest 40 billion package to Ukraine has been scuttled (at least temporarily), by Rand Paul demanding an Inspector General be appointed to oversee and account for the distribution of funds to
Ukraine. Good on him.
https://www.businessinsider.com/rand-paul-singlehandedly-delays-40-billion-ukraine-aid-package-2022-5?op=1
> an Inspector General
If you trust Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, Ukraine is 122/180 worldwide, below Eswatini (née Swaziland) but above Niger. In Europe, Denmark is the least corrupt, followed by Finland. Ukraine is the second most corrupt, below Bosnia and Herzegovina. Russia is the most corrupt, so there’s that.
So what is Paul’s issue?
An accounting of how the money Is spent, or distributed into a country as corrupt as Ukraine is claimed to be on that list? ( Nice to see we rank 27th, sarc. off). Most likely Mr. Paul, as with everything else just peeing into the wind with that request.
Once the war is over (or frozen like the Korean conflict), most probably to the detriment of Ukraine, I expect those three camps to settle accounts against each other with whatever NATO weaponry they still possess.
Reasons will not be lacking: attribution of responsibilities for the disappointing outcome of the war, recriminations about who got money and armament in what quantities and who should have legitimately received them instead, vociferously staking claims as to who will have the say in the post-SMO world as the “true” representative of the Ukrainian nation.
And no doubt accompanied by Western lionization of the literal Nazis for standing up for “democracy” ™ against the “pro Russian” regular army who stabbed the former in the back.
What percent of Ukrainian soldiers are Ukranormals? What percent are Ukranazis? Does anyone know?
Rumor was that the committed ‘nationalists’ make up something like 10% of the army, and were scattered throughout the armed forces as defacto commissars to provide coercion to the rest.
> What percent of Ukrainian soldiers are Ukranormals? What percent are Ukranazis?
Given that many, if not most, young men of draft age fled, I think it’s fair to say that the remainder are, er, more ideologically motivated than the norm.
There is also the issue of where the Ukraine government has placed them. The Banderites like to fight and kill people, so they get placed at strategic points like Mariupol and Odessa.
China is not going to open up anytime soon. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/14/china-withdraws-as-2023-football-asian-cup-host-due-to-pandemic
“The 24-nation tournament was to be played in 10 cities in mostly newly built stadiums in June and July of next year.”
Interesting they pushed ahead with the winter olympics (and apparently did an excellent job handling the safety of the athletes) but aren’t bothering with this. I suppose that one reason might be that compared to many of the winter olympics athletes, the footballers will mostly be professionals and the clubs that pay their wages might not be accepting of covid protocols for their players (a quarantine period might eat in to time with their clubs, or their training regimen).
In theory the Olympics is about the athletes, particularly winter sports have much lower demand for on-site participation so a socialist China could eat the loss, restrict access to venues by overseas public. Soccer is out in the open all about the money, stadiums empty of fans = failed capitalism.
Separately, Russia still has not published a readout of Austin / Shoigu phone call, I imagine Shoigu was too busy calling Chang Wanquan and having a laugh about the inability of Austin to speak coherently under the slightest pressure(God, can you imagine this man having to lead a real hot war?) to bother signing off on the transcript or readout.
I am not sure that this idea that Austin called because he is weak is correct. Given the mental abilities of the misleadership I would not be surprised of the cease fire order was followed with a new escalation threat or actual escalation.
It wasn’t a cease fire order but a request to Russia. Austin even tweeted it.
—Big Bottle: The Baby Formula Nightmare Matt Stoller—
This was a very interesting article re. the economics of formula. I wasn’t aware that government policy distorted the market so much.
Also explains why in the Before Times, Costco was selling its Kirkland store-brand formula at literally half the price ($0.50 per oz, $9.99 a carton) of the other Mega Lo Marts and grocery stores, the Kirkland formula’s price was the essentially WIC price and Costco passed on the savings.
We took are daughter to Germany as an infant to visit family. I could not believe how much cheaper formula was there compared to the U.S. It was even cheaper across the border in France, and we filled a suitcase with it for the trip home.
Pretty clear it’s a racket here, just like everything else.
Americans have little idea how much they are being ripped off for everything unless they travel for comparison. After we spent seven months in Thailand where prices are low (we paid $200 a month rent for a small studio apt, $20 a month for cell phone service, cheap pharmaceuticals, etc) we felt like we were hemorrhaging money as soon as we returned to the US. Even in the EU things like internet service are far cheaper.
Travel really opened our eyes, from the 80s on. Non travelled friends and relatives didn’t want to hear it; nothing in any other country could possibly have anything better or anything we could learn from. I remember one friend, when we said something complementary about France, saying, “Oh but they don’t have our freedoms.”
> We felt like we were hemorrhaging money as soon as we returned to the US
Yes, but what about the quality of life?
And don’t forget the size of our refrigerators! As well as their automatic ice cube makers and their ability to spout cold water through their door!
Mayo Pete will solve that logistics nightmare, just you wait and see. No more long lines of boobs lined up in the harbor for Americans seeking nourishment. /s
Buttigieg must be fuming Psaki landed an msdnc gig while he is stuck at the same job once held by Mitch McConnell’s wife. Is it my imagination but has he gone mia again? I guess the highway bill isn’t turning into the accolades he expected.
No NTG. He’s one of the boobs lined up in the harbour seeking sinecure/er,nourishment.
Was that bear a Ruskie sleeper agent? /s
Want to reduce heart attacks, DVTs, strokes and PEs? They are out of patent and made by the ton.
That willl make health care a lot more affordable.
Take proteolytic enzymes. They dissolve clots and remove internal scarring. But, as they have no LD50, they are not poisons, so they are not legally ‘medicines’
OR–>
What foods are high in proteolytic enzymes?
Two of the best food sources of proteolytic enzymes are papaya and pineapple. Papayas contain an enzyme called papain, also known as papaya proteinase I.
…
Kiwifruit.
Ginger.
Asparagus.
Sauerkraut.
Kimchi.
Yogurt.
Kefir.
Kiwifruit heal canker sores. I discovered this somehow (prolly read it online) and tried it out–bingo. I just peel and slice the fruit, then hold a slice against the sore with my tongue for 20-30 seconds, chew and swallow. Repeat with remaining slices. Usually one kiwi will do it. Sometimes I repeat a few hours later or the next morning, and that invariably does it. Brilliant!
They say dill pickle juice (and probably sauerkraut brine) will also work, but I think kiwifruit taste a lot better.
BTW, to unclench a muscle cramp, swallow a tablespoon of dill pickle juice or eat a teaspoon full of mustard. Relief within seconds.
I read that a glass of pickle juice will cure a hangover and other types of headache too. I gave up hangovers in college, and haven’t had a migraine headache since loosing weight, so I can’t personally vouch for this theory but it probably worth a try.
Yes it sort of makes the hangover easier to bear because there is a lot of salt in the pickle juice, just like in Coca Cola.
Salt, salt, salt!
The kiwi fruit has several “northern hardy” relatives in the same genus. Here is a bunch of pictures of various norther hardy kiwi relatives with the URLs they came from, in case anyone wants to go URL diving.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0geKYwQOoBicyEAijpXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=northern+hardy+kiwi+fruit+images&fr=sfp
Two species names which come to mind off the top of my head are Actinidia arguta and Actinidia kolomitka. If these northern hardy “kiwis” have that same ability to heal canker sores, then people in the hard-winter zones can grow their own canker-sore relief for when the supply chains can no longer deliver kiwi fruit to stores.
Actinia arguta is the so-called ” tara vine”. Here is a bunch of images with their URLs for anyone who wants to go URL diving.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A2KLfSvWOoBiJcsAfQRXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzIEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=tara+vine&fr=sfp
> BTW, to unclench a muscle cramp, swallow a tablespoon of dill pickle juice or eat a teaspoon full of mustard. Relief within seconds.
I get muscle cramp from carrying a heavy tripod. At least I think its a cramp as opposed to a pull (I can’t tell the difference).
Before I eat a teaspoon of mustard — what brand? — can others readers confirm?
Any kind of mustard will work. I always have Dijon on hand, so it even tastes good.
A cramp is paralyzing. I don’t know if that’s true of a pulled muscle.
An acquaintance of mine refused to believe this would work. At a luncheon, she was grimacing in pain with a terrible foot cramp. I went to the kitchen of the hostess and retrieved a teaspoon of mustard. She was sort of shamed into trying it, and 10 seconds later, her cramp abated. She couldn’t believe it, but we all witnessed it.
A thin slice of garlic applied on the incoming canker sore, because one knows the symptoms, will also deal with the problem expeditiously, albeit less pleasantly than with kiwi fruit. But no vampire threats.
My friend Matthew owned a health food store, until online ordering drove him out of business. Smart and real, he only had megadose recommendations on three products: Vitamin C, probiotics, and enzymes. High quality necessary. He was talking a half-a-bottle or more at a time.
Outside of Vitamin C, I never saw a study that wasn’t industry produced. But even then, it was difficult to get funding to study medical alternatives.
But Janet’s Mom collapsed, and we went to Evansville to the hospital, and I took two breaths in a restaurant on the way to the outdoor patio and caught Covid. And I thought of gut/immune interactions, and I ate a bunch of enzymes, and the next day a bunch of probiotics, and will continue to do so regularly. So far like water, MSM, and IVM, low downside and high upside.
We wouldn’t have known we had it, except the one day I upchucked both vitamin sets in the day. We both go heavy on Vit-D, K2, zinc & quercetin, and Janet had Vit-D levels over 90, where 50 is the benchmark. FLCCC protocols ongoing. (A side note, the protocols state don’t take IVM and quercetin at the same time.)
Janet popped positive too, despite my isolating immediately. They’re delaying the funeral in hopes she can attend.
I have been recovering from COVID B.A.2 for four weeks and am now 90% back to normal. The thing that seemed to help me turn the corner was probiotics. After I quadrupled my daily intake of kefir etc the digestive and other symptoms waned noticeably. I think I got the idea from NC as there was a recent piece about how COVID can live in your gut for quite some time after the initial infection.
Whelp, really need to rethink this strategy:
STUDIES IN BLOOD COAGULATION : V. THE COAGULATION OF BLOOD BY PROTEOLYTIC ENZYMES (TRYPSIN, PAPAIN)
Crude or crystalline trypsin in proper concentration causes the blood or plasma of human beings, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, and horses to coagulate.
The proteolytic enzyme papain also coagulates blood. In this case the enzyme does not activate prothrombin, but acts directly on fibrinogen to form a fibrillar gel resembling fibrin.
Fibrinolytic enzymes, that’s the key. Pineapple, natto, earthworms.
“But, as they have no LD50, they are not poisons, so they are not legally ‘medicines’..”
I’m appreciating the sly humor and then have to wonder, wait…does it have to be poison to be considered medicine by the establishment here?
Paracelsus: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.”
I just learned hydrangea (one of my favorite shrubs) are mildly poisonous to humans and animals, which is why deer generally leave them alone — although they have occasionally nibbled off some of my hydrangea blossoms. Maybe the dose of poison in the blossoms is less than that in the leaves and bark?
That’s inconsistent with my experience here on the North Olympic Peninsula, where the black tailed deer routinely munch my hydrangea down to bare sticks. And these are not starving, deer food is plentiful all winter as it is mild here.
How rainy is it where Carla lives? If it is way more rainy on the North Olympic Penninsula, maybe the “poison” is way more diluted in the North Olympic Penninsula hydrangea leaves, to where the deer can eat way more of them.
Just a thought . . . .
“They aren’t poison/medicine because they have no LD50”
Don’t kid yourself. A foundational principle of toxicology is every chemical is toxic at a high enough dosage.
Even H20 and THC have an LD50 and are possible to overdose on if one really tries:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosspomeroy/2014/04/24/its-easier-to-die-from-drinking-too-much-water-than-smoking-too-much-pot
The Saker. Hoo boy
The flyers, made in the form of counterfeit currency notes, were infected with the tuberculosis agent and distributed to minors in Stepovoe village. The organisers of this crime took into account the behaviour of children, who have a habit of “putting everything in their mouths” and taking food with unwashed hands.
***************************************
Whatever their faults, God bless the Russian leadership’s patience and restraint. Decisions to do things like this were almost certainly made somewhere near Washington at some point. Less patient me would have wanted to respond.
Honest question: do you think anything really come of this? War crimes against the US? Come on … Perhaps people in the non-aligned Global South will know/care but I just don’t see a pathway for Russia to present this information in any method that won’t be shot down as “Russian Disinformation.
Happy to be told otherwise but I’m too cynical to believe that this will even be a blip on the margins.
The US has a long history of playing with “the demon in the freezer”, the livestock incident near Fort Detrick in the 60s and the anthrax incident in 2001 are reminders that this stuff is still in play. But to deploy this to kiddos? That’s depraved beyond recognition.
Now you got me wondering if those stories about cows with missing bits were not UFOs but tests of weaponized flesh eating bacteria.
Honest answer to honest question – nothing but a well placed Russian hypersonic missile squarely upon the CIA (or whatever agency runs those biolabs) would make anything become of it. Maybe if/when that were to happen Victoria Nuland would just happen be there (that would truly be tragic for sure). That’s not likely to happen so…the only thing to become of it will be general slight deepening of cynicism towards the US amongst the whole world that’s not part of the self proclaimed “The Whole World.”
Vicky is not the type to ever handle a restaurant tab, so it will be a challenge to give her something like a glass of water dosed with drug resistant TB.
Pretty much the “Whole World” would cheer and celebrate if Mr. Kinzhal paid a visit to Agency HQ (well, at least if it did not lead to immediate nuclear war, which it of course unfortunately would).
Not necessarily openly (though many would, even in the USA, I suspect).
But outside the western MSM bubble, one would probably be hard-pressed to find anyone shedding more than crocodile tears for what is probably history’s worst terrorist organisation.
This is a case where the information alone is the point. The Russians have shown before a preference for actual “on the ground” gains versus propaganda gains.
I would worry most about how the Russians will respond clandestinely to this. After all, biological warfare is a notoriously uncontrollable method. Given the ease of spread globally of pathogens of all sorts, due to international air transport, artificially induced “blowback” of biological warfare exercises ‘overseas’ into America is quite possible.
Or, to continue this just one step further, what about the p[otential for a ‘mysterious’ appearance of a wheat blight in the American midwest next spring? Russia says it will have a big grains harvest this year. America?
This can spiral out of control very quickly.
Scott Ritter said he thinks that the Russians incinerated all the bio labs that they did not capture by using thermobaric missies, indicating that they were surprised at what they found (else they would have torched them sooner). My guess is Russia will go for the moral high ground and will not start releasing bio-weapons.
Supposedly Ukraine have already started on the war crime (show) trials against Russia.
Quite right. Here is a link-
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61441907
Accusing those of atrocities that which they themselves have committed. I think that was a Goebbels quote and is appropriate in this case. The west has been all about projection during Russia’s military operation.
Yes. We are three-months into the kinetic part of this conflict and our shelves, in the markets and the armories, are bare. We don’t have the industrial capacity to replenish either of them. The $33 bln grift, or $40 bln, or whatever number they settle on is for naught. Just digits in some electronic ledger that at best feed our rampant inflation, at worst are the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back of our financial kabuki. Things are so bad that Our SecDef just begged(demanded!) his Russian counterpart accept a cease-fire. The most ignominious part of this defeat is that we dealt it upon ourselves.
The ancien regime seems immortal until it is not. And as our power decays and our institutions lose their pull and loyalty, I think the Russian memory will persist and deliver justice, as they see it.
Between that and the tweets on torture right above it, one start to wonder who is the real devils in this world are.
And also, i am going to need something much stronger than the daily antidote…
I think understand apocalyptic thinking now, and it’s appeal.
The origins of it too, perhaps, why (not completely psychopathic) people might get to a point where he wish for everything to end in a big, cleansing fire.
The impression impression that there is this monstrous evil beyond all imagination that is absolutely relentless and just keeps winning always and everywhere, perverting EVERYTHING beyond recognition, crushing even the tiniest sliver of humanity, decency and hope underfoot, and perhaps worst of all, it at least seems like pretty much everyone is serving it in one way or another, cheering it on enthusiastically, crawling over each other in eagerness to sell their souls, and even the few that have some genuine good intentions find all they do ending up contributing to the horror nonetheless, sometimes in ways they never could have foreseen.
All the while the monsters thrive, and everything seems to bend meekly to their will.
Who would want to live in such a world, if they are not monsters themselves.
It’s not that is a healthy or exactly sane reaction, nor necessarily a truly accurate perception of reality.
One can very easily fall for it though, and it is certainly closer to how things are than one would want to believe.
I can certainly understand now how someone might conclude that it would be better for such an abomination of a world to destroyed.
Of course, this sort of thinking is very commonly itself susceptible to being put into service to evil.
Yes. I think JM Greer pointed out that the extremes of thought be they pollyanna-ish or apocalyptic, give people an excuse to be passive.
Personally, as an elder, everyone I know is oh-so-comfortable and smug in their cartoon ignorance. Seeing this in everyone I know IRL while the world around us is going up in flames makes flights of fantasy apocalyptic rage satisfying.
In support of that story it would be helpful to pull tales of US biowarfare during the Korean war up from the archives. There was a surge in interest at the end of last year, as in this Counterpunch story.
It’s hard to know what to make of this, partly because the status of the document isn’t very clear (a “briefing” can mean many things) and the illustrations in the Saker article don’t appear in the Russian MoD link, so it’s hard to know what status to give them. The illustrations aren’t linked to anything, and most of the documents are impossible to read. What is shown is essentially a series of photographs of people and logos of organisation. The illustration referring to “experiments on mentally ill people” has just a series of photographs of alleged experimental sites and a photograph of a “Florida native” alleged to be involved.
As with previous documents of this type, the “briefing” mixes up a whole lot of different issues and says different things at different points, without any kind of sustained argument. Early on, it says that:
“Ukraine is essentially a testing ground for the development of biological weapons components and the testing of new samples of pharmaceuticals.”
This is a coherent argument, if we understand that the document is being written in somebody’s second language. A native English speaker would probably say something like “In Ukraine, experiments are being carried out using biological warfare agents, and also to test new pharmaceutical drugs.” Each of these activities take place in all advanced states, and the first is intended usually to test BW protection and detections systems. For obvious reasons real agents have to be used. Given the lack of a verification protocol for the BTWC, all sensible states have to assume that BW agents are out there and might be used by others.
But by the end, this has morphed into:
“Thus, (sic) the information obtained confirms that the United States is implementing an offensive military-biological programme in Ukraine to study the possibility of forming controlled epidemics in specific territories.”
But very little evidence is provided for the latter claim. The story about contaminated banknotes implies that TB can be spread that way, although everything I have ever seen (and IANA doctor) suggests that TB is spread primarily from person to person, by droplets. Indeed, one representative health site says that:
“Kissing, hugging, or shaking hands with a person who has TB doesn’t spread the disease. Likewise, sharing bed linens, clothes, or a toilet seat isn’t how the disease spreads either.”
I can certainly believe that the US and other states are funding BW-related activities in Ukraine, partly as a means of getting insight and influence, and partly because the US (at least) wants to carry out experiments that are regarded as too dangerous to do at home. They may also be doing drug trials that would be ethically suspect in the US or Europe. As regards an offensive BW programme, we can’t send the jury out yet, because no evidence has actually been offered: essentially just a series of assertions. We’ll have to wait until something is actually put forward. As a number of us have pointed out, the idea of conducting an offensive BW development programme in Ukraine, so near to Russia and so easily infiltrated by the SVR, seems like madness. That said, I think it’s quite possible that the Russians have got hold of a whole batch of documents from different sources and in different languages, and they are struggling to make sense of them, and fit them into an overall scheme. In a political culture which fears aggression, suspects the worst and is prepared to find evidence of evil-doing, I suspect that they’re making claims based on inferences, rather than what the evidence actually says. The key will be any trials they may try to hold on the subject, because then actual documents will have to be entered in evidence and we can look at them.
I believe the Russians have delivered documentary evidence to the UN. Presumably this will become part of the public record. Then maybe there will be less room to “sow fear, uncertainty and doubt,” couched in measured tones and paragraphs, or “whatabouts,” or modified limited hangouts.
The stuff laid out to date by the Russians covers a whole lot more than just infecting kids with untreatable TB. Looks like these programs and places facilitated development of biologicals outside national regulatory frames, for the profit of pharm corps and rich folks. People ought to follow this carefully, and not be lulled by notions that this activity was “just slightly beyond the pale.”
“The story about contaminated banknotes implies that TB can be spread that way, although everything I have ever seen (and IANA doctor) suggests that TB is spread primarily from person to person, by droplets.”
That’s exactly what I thought: “TB?! Why on Earth TB?!”
Maybe because there is a lot of talk of the relationship between TB and war? Or because of this that I have just read in the Lancet?
“Ukraine has the fourth-highest TB incidence in the WHO European Region and the fifth-highest number of confirmed cases of extensively drug-resistant TB in the world.”
TB is already very difficult to get rid of, can stay dormant for decades if the body fights off active disease, goes extra-pulmonary in kids quickly, and ~25% of the world already has it. (Latent, dormant form.) So harder to trace as a bio weapon because so prevalent. A gift that keeps on giving. If used as a bio-weapon it adds to the disease burden in your enemy’s general population for generations. And if exhaled by a symptomatic person in a poorly ventilated room can stay airborne for 2 hours.
Testing is usually a skin test and requires a return visit. The BCG Vaccine is very old and only partially effective.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31221810/
The question here is: how can you get infected with TB? As far as I know (no expert), TB is airborne. But as you say, it is very prevalent and, according to the Lancet, Ukraine is already a very bad place for multi-resistance. And, as a cursory screen of the internet shows, TB is always a great concern during a war (very bad general conditions and disruption of health services and long treatments), and this one is no exception. None of this makes it a good candidate for biowarfare, in my opinion, and certainly not as described.
Probably not, but that likely wouldn’t prevent some Nazis with more fanaticism than reason from trying out of pure spite, if TB was what was available to them.
Why should I believe this actually happened? Because the Saker gives it his Good Information Operation Housekeeping Seal of Approval?
If the US was using biological warfare against the North Koreans seventy years ago (proven), what makes you think that they would not be considering doing the same now to Russia and China? Think that you will see all this confirmed on CNN? MSNBC? BBC? Fox? The New York Times? The Washington Post? Name one main stream publication where such reports will be conformed in the west.
Yes, and this is exactly what would make it a perfect bullshit story to run up the flagpole – for those with an anti-American bias (and the Saker et al certainly know their market – just look at the comments above apparently taking this uncritically at face value) the proof is already baked in. They did it before (and successfully covered it up for a while!) ergo they must be doing it now. Maybe, maybe not. But this reasoning is, of course, obviously fallacious. There is a reason that propensity evidence, in Australia at least, is only rarely admitted under very specific circumstances in criminal trials. In this case, a much higher standard of evidence is required than what you say above (and in criminal trials – which is the standard of proof we should probably be holding ourselves to for, yknow, alleged war crimes – believe it or not, evidence does not typically come from reports in media outlets – unless it’s very detailed and careful investigative reporting, which is vanishingly rare nowadays), or what Saker is presenting. David I think lays out the limitations of the evidence very well above.
Said it before and will say it again. You wanna do highly dangerous bio-experiments, you stick it on a deserted island off the main trade routes. You don’t put it in the most (officially) corrupt country in Europe and on the border of your major adversary. Or in one of the biggest cities in China – another adversary. Even a country like Spain might, might be acceptable for the Russians as it is at the other end of Europe but having it in a potential conflict zone – as it is now – is merely begging for the conditions to be set up for a retaliatory nuclear strike on America if “funny things” start popping up in Russia. And come to think of it, do we really know what is going on in Pine Gap?
An exceptionally standard of evidence has been brought to the fore with the release of the famous videoclip of the helicopter team gunning down civilians and reporters in Iraq. The consequences were Manning in prison for years and now likely, her publisher, in prison for life…
This is how the US rolls…
and Wikileaks, The Saker ain’t.
Not to mention US poisoning Cuba’s crops with bio-agents for years hoping to starve the populace and weaken them so they’d welcome Batista type rule back, for many harvests/ years running, well documented and known for decades. When you serve God (the Almighty Mammon $$$) killing others, including non-combatants is of course acceptable, just like when they burned those Vietnamese hamlets (old men, women and children) to “save” them from the scourge of Communism (= self-rule, not by the white run West.)
> The flyers
We’re sure this isn’t propaganda?
Can someone explain what baby formula is, i.e. what are the main ingredients? Can you make it at home? Obviously I’m clueless about this, but it sounds important.
milk, lactose, various veggie oils, whey protein, vitamins and minerals.
problem with making formula at home is that infants can’t wholly digest off-the-shelf animal milk or soy juice.
and invariably home made formula likely would lack all the essential vitamins/minerals needed for optimal growth. the percentage growth of birth to18 months is insane when compared to the rest of one’s life.
not really a place to experiment with DIY options unless there is no other choice. IMo
https://turcopolier.com/diy-baby-formula/
One person in comments says honey in formula for age 1 year or less may cause botulism.
Botulism requires an anaerobic environment.
If you mix it fresh each time you should be OK, although see below about caveats re getting all the needed nutrients in a home-brew formula. Making it and storing it could be a risk.
Yves Smith: It is contamination with the C. Botulinum endospores that causes “honey botulism” in children. It is a real-enough syndrome.
Some odd info about its dangers off Wikipedia: “Infantile botulism shows geographical variation. In the UK, only six cases were reported between 1976 and 2006,[132] yet the US has much higher rates: 1.9 per 100,000 live births, 47.2% of which are in California.[133] While the risk honey poses to infant health is small, taking the risk is not recommended until after one year of age, and then giving honey is considered safe.[134]”
My sisters and nieces didn’t give their kids honey till after the age of one. I know someone whose son had a fairly bad episode as a toddler just from sampling some baklava.
I’ll admit not knowing how the spores get into honey. Honey is an antiviral…
I know The CDC has kind of worn down its reputation with covid, but for what it’s worth here’s what they say about honey and infant botulism.
Short take: no one really knows what it is about an infant digestive track that allows botulism spores to multiply and grow and produce the toxin.
https://www.cdc.gov/botulism/prevention.html#:~:text=For%20reasons%20we%20do%20not,year%20of%20age%20and%20older.
Babies are particularly at risk from honey, for some reason.
https://www.cdc.gov/botulism/prevention.html#anchor_1491857426143
I stand corrected. No no no honey for babies.
I admit to not liking the idea of giving corn syrup to babies and looking for a better option.
Hhhmm. I’m wondering about maple syrup. Or maybe even (gasp!) pure cane sugar.
Apparently, is more common in the USA, for some reason, and extremely rare elsewhere. I had never heard of any problem with honey so I looked it up and found that the first case detected in Portugal was in 2009 and also this:
“Infantile botulism is rare in the UK. Only 10 cases have been reported between 1976 and 2009”
my mother-in-law swore by goat’s milk, but she must have been adding something else because her son is quite healthy other than seasonal allergies and has very good teeth as well. she said he had a much better time digesting that than whatever they were selling 50 years ago.
goat’s milk powder is usually on the shelf somewhere at the big box places.
My grandmother still kept a goat when I was a small kid. I used to drink a glass raw straight from milking. I like the taste.
Our three daughters drank almost exclusively goats milk from ages 7,5,3, to 18,18,16. They helped with milking, and each looked after a kid for many years. Since it was & is unlawful to “sell” raw goat milk, we had an artist friend with two biracial sons “invest” in our goats.
When I had to temporarily stop nursing my son when I got mastitis and had to take antibiotics, I did some research and discovered that (as Yves notes below) goat’s milk was much more like human milk than cow’s milk is. I don’t remember the details–said son is 45 now–but I think it’s more watery, with less protein and more (and more human-like) sugars. Many people swore by it; anon y’mouse’s mother-in-law was in good company. My son didn’t like it much, either because it was in a bottle or because it tasted different (not bad–just different), but drank it all down and thrived until I could start nursing again. He did smell pretty rank, though.
BTW, Mr. Stoller seems not to know about the millennia-old practice of hiring wet nurses if you couldn’t or didn’t want to nurse. It would have been very unusual for babies to starve if their mothers couldn’t nurse them. As wet nurses went into the business because they were good milk producers, and milk production increases to meet demand, their own babies did well too. (In case it isn’t clear: wet nurses were women who were lactating, typically because they had babies of their own but also because they kept the milk flowing after their own babies were weaned, who hired themselves out to nurse other women’s babies.)
I hate to beat up on you, but this is privilege speaking. The well off could afford wet nurses. The working classes could not. Stoller is right and you are not. And it’s not “millennia old”. Wet nursing was restricted to the ruling classes and expanded only into the upper middle classes in the 1900s.
See here, confirming that only the well off would hire wet nurses, at their doctor’s insistence and even then they were typically despised:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3789462
And from a comprehensive article:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/159189643.pdf
There are numerous articles that in fact describe pre-modern formulas based on cow’s milk which were clearly inferior to breast milk. And the babies may not have starved but would have been sufficiently unhealthy as to not have lived long. See this on Twitter a few days ago:
https://twitter.com/NeolithicSheep/status/1524492027823542273
Please don’t make me expend time on search engines clearing stuff like this up. Most of the time, I simply send comments like yours straight to Trash. I know Stoller and I know he had an evidentiary basis for his statement (he does his research). You provided no independent support for yours and that alone was reason to discount it.
I’ve seen formulas on the site, so you can find it with a search engine. The simple ones parents used long ago require diluted evaporated milk + a bit of sugar or gah corn syrup, but I wonder if you could find a formula that uses molasses or honey or pure maple syrup for the sugar content.
BTW re Louis’ comment above re animal milk, cow milk is pretty different than human milk due to size of fat molecules. Goat milk is way closer but it tastes like goat milk!
The recommendation for when babies can have honey continues to be after age one. That includes both honey in its raw form and other foods cooked or baked with honey. The AAP Pediatric Nutrition Handbook states, “Infants younger than 12 months should avoid all sources of honey.”
https://www.verywellfamily.com/when-can-babies-have-honey-284244#:~:text=The%20recommendation%20for%20when%20babies%20can%20have%20honey,12%20months%20should%20avoid%20all%20sources%20of%20honey.%22
I have to take some exception to the goat milk comment. I don’t doubt that whatever you’ve had was goaty, but from personal experience I can say that if the milk is chilled relatively quickly after removing it from the goat, it has no noticeable goaty taste. I gave some of our fresh goat milk to my mother, who has a famously sensitive palate (“this ketchup is too spicy!”), and she didn’t even notice the difference from her usual bovine dairy. It’s all in the process, I tell ya.
Photo: Rural homestead life in 1927. When a woman wasn’t able to breastfeed or died in childbirth when a wet nurse was not available a goat nurse maid was brought in to save the starving infants life. (original post here)
absolutely, we raised goats for some years and all folk who keep goats know to chill the milk immediately after milking – no goaty taste at all….
I wasn’t able to breast feed my son. But, he absolutely could not handle cow’s milk. He was in extreme pain after feedings for months until I found a pediatrician who recommended an infant formula made with soy milk. While searching for the soy milk recommendation I saw a nutritionist who gave me a recipe for formula made of almonds and seeds. It looked so unhealthy that I never used it. I don’t know if soy formula is still available. But it worked wonderfully and he was on if for the first two years of his life.
We fed our goats on field grasses and alfalfa mostly. Definitely no tree bark, but blackberry plants and occasionally milkweed, whatever was in the field. Our neighbour, who kept cows, had a glass of goat milk from our refrigerator, and cod not tel the difference. Taste comes from the food the animals eat, and perhaps some from the pasteurization process.
Babies do not have fully formed taste buds; it’s why they will eat poisons, per Dr Spock if I recall correctly. They won’t mind goat milk; I am told it’s what I was given (allergies).
The Weston A. Price Foundation offers a recipe that seems very complete.
https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/childrens-health/formula-homemade-baby-formula/
You can Google recipes, but I have no idea how reliable typical suggestions are.
A common theme in a few I have looked at is that they use raw cow’s milk (which I think must have higher fat content than store-bought whole milk — the cream hasn’t been removed) and then supplement with vegetable oils to get the mix of poly/mono/un-saturated fats close to human milk.
One would hope that the public health authorities would take an interest in this problem and publish some trustworthy guidelines.
But perhaps trust in the authorities is already squandered.
——
On a recent trip to the grocery, I noticed that the bulk packages of powdered nonfat milk were sold out. I hope this was not being used for DIY formula; one needs more fat than cow’s milk, not less.
I wouldn’t think raw milk is a good idea. I understand babies used to die all the time from what my mother called Second Summer Diarrhea, which she attributed to unpasteurized milk given to babies recently weaned from the breast. My toddler brother had it the year we spent in Zurich in the early ’50s and it was touch and go. Later the whole family switched to goat milk from the dairy herd next door.
Ha! My mother would wrinkle her nose at an ugly yelliw-green item and say that it looked like baby’s second summer.
Also clueless but I am familiar with this group (we gave a local chapter here in flyover)
https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/childrens-health/formula-homemade-baby-formula/
But if a young mother is not in the habit of shopping at a natural food store or having a relationship with local farmers: big problem! Peeps will have to group up and share info and resources, quick like.
We should have a sane family leave policy allowing women to stay home at least 6 months to exclusively breastfeed. The WHO recommends 2 years of breastfeeding.
If I were in this position I would find a breastfeeing mom that pumps and pay for her supply. Many mother’s that pump have excess supply that they can not get rid of because people are worried about contamination/drug use.
There are homemade formula recipes. You would need to find a mineral/vitamin blend to make up for the lack of nutrients intrinsic to formula.
I do not trust the infant starvation angle. IA woman’s body will literally pull the nutrition out of her own bones and tissue to supply an infant with milk…true starvation will stop this process but if you feed the mom you can feed the baby.
I can imagine an isolated family suffering this fate but in a large community it would be easier to find a friend/family member to help feed the child until her milk came in. Breastfeeding mothers do that today in the US when it’s possible. My wife was never able to do that…but our Facebook connections have been able to create such a system.
Most working women can’t pump milk often enough at work (or not at all) to feed a baby.
Some women don’t produce enough milk regardless.
Some babies have allergies or are colicky or need extra nutrients and therefore require formula.
Many decades ago my wife had so much extra milk we froze it and the local hospital took it for their preemies.
Had a lot of dead time and a vivid imagination back in the stone age, where if you opted out of being in the phone book, you might as well of not existed.
Went through a stage where my partner and I would try and outdo one another on phone calls, and he set a high bar in calling a maternity place that rented breast pumps, by inquiring as to how much by the week or month, when the lady asked how long do you think your wife will need it?
And he replied, no, it’s for me.
And you can only imagine how the conversation deteriorated in his favor, protesting that they were genderistic and other missives all hitting their mark, with the helpless lass almost speechless in response.
My best ones were always to eateries that had showed up in the monthly closed down for vermin infestation or gross contamination and the like.
Tampico Tillies on Wilshire Blvd was a frequent offender, and the subject of many calls, including me going through a food poisoning episode asking if that burrito I had last night might not have been the culprit, and I did see you mentioned in the LA (Brrrrrrrghhhh!) Times yesterday.
We used Hipp or Holle formula from Germany to supplement breastmilk way back when. The ingredients seemed better, the german safety standards higher, and the taste was waaay better than the US formula samples given out at the hospital. Best, the baby poop came out looking very similar to poop from breastmilk – a good sign! It was worth the extra cost back then, and from what I’m hearing seems like it might actually be cheaper given all the price gouging going on.
Where I used to work, we did have a decent nursing room, but I still knew only a couple if women (out of dozens) who successfully breastfed/pumped for very long after coming back to work. The most successful woman was able to take almost 4 months off after her baby was born and then spent the next 8 months doing a combination of pumping at work and breastfeeding at home. Her schedule was breastfeed her baby in the morning, pump mid morning at work, go home at lunch to breastfeed, pump mid afternoon, and then go home for the evening and nighttime feedings. This lady was salaried and could work extra at night from home to keep up her workload since she would lose an hour a day at work pumping. Grueling even though she had a good environment with a supportive boss. I chose to leave the work force for 2 years when I had my kid and was able to breastfeed for 18 months doing minimal pumping to have some frozen milk for an emergency. Pumping is unpleasant and not anything like actually feeding your baby.
I was in awe of my colleague.
In olden times, royalty and the elite had wet nurses, sometimes for convenience and sometimes because of the high incidence of maternal deaths and infant death.
The formula my brother and I were raised on, along with most of our cohort (1940’s-’50’s) was 1 can Carnation evaporated (not condensed) milk, 1 can boiled water, 2 Tbsp corn syrup (eg, Caro light). Some current recipes include a squirt of infant vitamins, which sounds like a good idea. Put into sterile bottles and refrigerate until feeding time; warm to wrist-drop test in a pan of hot water.
When I was a kid back in the 50’s I remember my mom using condensed milk for my younger siblings. I don’t recall anything about formula back then although I’m sure it was available.
Impeach Biden for corruption? Somewhere on the Saker blog – can’t find it anymore – I read a claim that Sleepy Joe visited Ukraine 43 times during his Vice-Presidency. Seems like a smoking gun, if true.
There is a video out there, where Biden boasts of threatening to withhold a big check from the US unless the then President Poroshenko fires the prosecutor who was investigating corruption related to Hunter and others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3Ibbq_LG-4
PS in this clip Biden says he had been to Kiev 12-13 times.
My mom and dad were quite the travelers in their day, they really got around the bloc party, but never made it to the USSR.
They went for a month in 1992 after the fall including a week in the Ukraine, and i’ve mentioned this quote of my mom before, and I think it’s so funny.
Upon their return I inquired as to how the Ukraine was?
She smiled a little bit, and replied ‘Like Iowa, but without the charm.’
Biden’s visits, support for Nazi elements, money laundering, plausible claims of biological warfare, et cetera.
The frantic administration and media support for Ukraine looks like misdirection to allow time to cover up or bury evidence of a mountain of misdeeds. $40 billion, or even a penny, considered for Nazis and others?
If and when the truth comes out, from Fitton and others, that will signal the end of the line for supporters.
Can insects be conscious? Intriguing article.
Let’s consider this idea: Consciousness is complicated behavior that results from constant and precise monitoring of the outside world as well as inner states.
Thinking of Epikouros: We can trust the evidence of our senses. (Which means that Epikouros tended to be more or less agnostic with regard to gods and other transcendent causes.)
Thinking of the many anecdotes of the day here at Naked Capitalism: Starting with today’s article on honeybees, their memories, their dances (play!), their ability to calculate the shortest distance to nectar, their amazing vision that extends to colors that humans cannot perceive–
and adding the many photos and articles here on dogs, parrots, octopodi, wolves, foxes, hoopoes, elephants, crows, ducks, just which of these creatures is not conscious?
And as the Buddhists and Saint Francis of Assisi tell us, we have a responsibility toward these animals. Saint Francis is said to have arranged with the citizens of Gubbio to feed the wolf, with the wolf not to eat citizens of Gubbio–and there is a story that the bones of a wolf have been found buried there in the cathedral.
How do we have an “environmental ethic” that isn’t just pretending to repair the Earth? (See other posting today on the dire consequences of profit-seeking on the Earth.)
Consider a sunflower. Is it not “conscious” in its behavior as it bends to the light? Is it not “aware” of the sun?
Or consider that many birds are thought to migrate by the magnetic fields of the earth. Then cleave a lump of magnetite. Is it not “conscious” of the disruption of its force field?
Why do people doubt that insects are “conscious”? Why must parts of nature be made Other?
Monica Gagliano and Michael Pollan on plant intelligence: video.
my go-to is that all living things are conscious. that it is one of the properties of life itself.
supposedly, First Nations also include the non-living in their consciousness scheme–the rocks and rivers (set aside for now the living things making those places their abode) are alive, and probably the sun and moon as well.
aye.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God….”
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur)
and:
““Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair….”
(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8664037-forget-not-that-the-earth-delights-to-feel-your-bare)
of course critters are conscious…including bugs.
and trees and the Land, in general.
one has only to be still, and listen.
I sometimes have encounters with large, active spiders… they seem acutely aware, and intelligent, so much so that I have to think that if they have no consciousness I must be imagining my own.
Gerard Manley Hopkins indeed. “Men have trod, have trod, have trod….nor can foot feel, being shod.” Such a poet he was, and a very unique and unusual individual. Thanks for the link. It’s a poem I turn to regularly and it rarely fails to produce a frisson.
I had to rid a house of yellow-jackets, with the final chore being vacuuming them up in a half-daze from the chemicals–probably me as well, just different chemicals. Anyway, the queen knew what was up and avoided the vacuum hose like an apex mammalian predator. There was cogitation going on, I could see it.
I’ve often opined that plants are the highest form of life on earth: they consume the purest diet of sunshine and water, and thus aren’t burdened with the need to endlessly move around in search of sustenance like us hapless animals.
Materialists trying to explain the immaterial, so of course they’re going to be pretty confused.
Materialists are forever saying things that are not only unprovable but ahistorical, a-philosophical, and unscientific. Take this genius Antonio Damasio regarding the hard problem of consciousness:
“Every bit of evidence we have is that the mysteries of the universe have been gradually solved by science.”
Right, solved until they aren’t solved. This silly notion implies that the answers science provides are final. This is patently untrue, witness the recent discovery that the “W” boson isn’t playing by the rules:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/07/science/particle-physics-muon-fermilab-brookhaven.html
“A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics”
Does “upend the known laws of physics” sound like the problem has been, per Damasio, “solved”? Of course not. That claim demonstrates a profound lack of understanding on his part of what science is and what it does. But that’s no surprise. The attempts to gut science of it’s philosophical moorings leads to all manner of idiocies, perhaps best exemplified by Neil D’Grasse Tyson’s philosophical assertion delivered on a podcast a few years back that studying philosophy as a scientist will “really mess you up.”
Forgot to include the first link to Damasio’s statement:
https://mindmatters.ai/2022/02/neuroscientists-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-isnt-so-hard/
I agree that the article was interesting, I’ve had a crush on bees since childhood and the idea of the little guys doing interpretive dancing to convey info is a hoot.
Discussions of consciousness can benefit from using a more complete account of what human consciousness involves and then working “down” from that to what the organism in question is capable of. The article talks about a kind of self-awareness, but only in the sense of the bee’s awareness of itself in relative proximity to other objects. That doesn’t necessarily imply that the bee thinks of itself as an object, which is something, as Piaget demonstrated, children start acquiring early on.
I haven’t fully come to terms with the wonderful vids that keep popping up here showing intra- and interspecies cooperation. Too bad Descartes isn’t around to see his “animals are machines” debunked by flipped turtles.
All critters, all living beings, are conscious. Science can look for the seat or origin of consciousness, but I’m betting they will never pin it down. Consciousness is not a material “thing”, it only exists when we are alive.
As for sunflowers, I cannot attribute sentience to vegetables, even tho vegetation responds to sunlight. C’mon NC critters – can’t you tell the diff between an animal and a vegetable?
I have a feeling little honey bees are asking one another if humans are conscious because destroying the biosystem with which they depend is, well… … Unconcsiousable.
How would you know that consciousness only exists when we are alive? We only know consciousness when we are alive but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it only exists when we are alive.
OK, if we adhere to Buddhist, Hindu and even Christian beliefs, our “consciousness” or spark of awareness, goes on to another incarnation, or heaven.
Back in college, I briefly dated a girl who called herself a “fruitarian.” At the time, I was a vegetarian, so no worries. But when I asked her to explain what a fruitarian is specifically, she replied she only ate the fruits of plants, not the plant itself. In other words, eating apples is Ok because the tree survives the picking, but she can’t eat carrots because by harvesting the carrot, the plant dies.
When I asked her why it mattered if the carrot plant died, she said she could “hear the carrots screaming” when she pulled them up out of the garden dirt. And that’s why the dating was brief…
But you can place the carrot tops in water and grow a new carrot! It’s not dead, just undergoing a living vivisection. That’s something, right? Now, if you chopped off Carrot Top’s head…
Good call on resurrecting the carrot tops! There’s a religious organization somewhere in there just waiting to be founded…
Right now, my wife is reading this book, Finding the Mother Tree:
https://suzannesimard.com/finding-the-mother-tree-book/
and it appears trees do have some behavior and communication abilities, which implies some sort of consciousness…
Not saying I believe the LOTR is a documentary and Ents are real, but there are many things we don’t understand about other life forms, so never say never…
Maybe screaming carrot girl was dialed into something most of us can’t experience? And maybe she was just nucking futs. I dunno…
“The Sound Machine” by Roald Dahl is a great read. It’s a fictitious account of a machine that can detect plants’ sounds.
Quantum physics shows us that all particles “observe” and come into existence as they intra-act with eachother. Thus there is a Basic Universal Consciousness. (the term intra-action is in Karen Barad’s sense).
Life is an emergent property of intra-acting BUC to the extent that lifeforms have a awareness, or simple consciousness, of their own intra-actions.
Human consciousness is consciousness of consciousness. We know other people become conscious as they intra-act with our consciousness. This can only happen through language, so all human consciousness is discourse, as poststructural linguistics says.
Thus there are 3 dimensions of consciousness and non-human animals and vegetables are both conscious in the second degree.
“Quantum physics shows us that all particles “observe” and come into existence as they intra-act with eachother.”
Can you provide a bit more background for this claim? It seems to gift particles with consciousness but how would one prove that? It smacks of pan-psychism but that is hardly a settled subject, to say the least. Unless by “observe” you mean something other than observing.
Furthermore, how can these thoughtful particles come to exist in the first place, if their existence depends upon them already existing in order to “intra-act”?
Human consciousness is not merely reflective of it’s own existence. It exists AND it experiences it’s existence. Why do other people only become conscious when they “intra-act” with our consciousness? And vice-versa, I suppose? Were I the lone living thing in the Universe, from it’s inception, with no language to exchange with another, would I not still be experiencing something? And therefore conscious?
Intra-action is a concept coined by Karen Barad in her book on quantum mechanics “Meeting The Universe Halfway”. The words “interaction” or “interconnection” don’t quite grasp how the reality of things come into existence only through their relationship with eachother.
To say that particles “observe” is to insist that human observers are not necessary for particles to do their quantum physical things. Barad is developing the ideas of Niels Bohr who unfortunately maintained an anthropocentrism in his concept of phenomena, even though he was not as naive as Schrodinger and others who thought the universe revolved around physicists in labs in the 1920s.
Pan-psychism fails to show the utterly limited extent to which particles have what it calls psyche. However, the self-awareness of animals is obviously dependent on quantum particles, but is different in degree. And by extension human consciousness can come into existence only after the evolution of animal life.
We agree that human consciousness is not merely reflective: that is what I meant by consciousness of consciousness. We are also animal and particle, prior to human.
We need language to become fully humanly conscious; we learn from others and come to be only through intra-action with other humans. If you were the only human, like a child brought up by wolves, you would be merely animal and hence self-aware only to the extent that a wolf is (notwithstanding the fact that if you were found by other humans you could still learn language.)
As for your question about how quantum particles come into existence in the first place, a cosmologist or a theologian would give a fuller answer, but I’m content with “The Big Bang”.
Yeah, I don’t know:
https://youtu.be/wAXY6WayAZo
It all comes down to information, bits. Once that particle pops into being and reacts to another, bang you have a bit, and it all stems from there. Informational turtles, all the way down. There is One Big Note.
African tribes did the first known binary code with their talking drums.
A very smart and interesting take on consciousness is the scifi novel Echopraxia by Paul Watts (I think) which treats a first contact between humanity , a species with consciousness with an alien entity without consciousness… Preeety cool.
Crypto decline, lots of talking this week on the CNBC television station. As discussed around these parts, I believe majority among us have had significant doubts as to the lasting impact of the many flavored offerings of digital / crypto currencies. I struggle to understand the end use of this.
Fortune favors the brave stomach. You need stronger guts than most to continue with the HODL approach.
Well of course those celebs won’t be saying anything as they are hoping that people will quickly forget about their roll in this if they lay low. By coincidence, I was just watching a video on YouTube that was talking about Crypto and what the deal was that they were offering using people like Matt Damon to hook people in. I was gobsmacked about the whole thing as it sounded so outrageous in how it was set up and how fragile the promises but here is that link and it is only a short video. Bonus bit at the end of the video-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGFtgQwmYic (6:09 mins)
I’ve watched ponzi schemes unravel (Bruce McNall was my favorite) before, but they were by and large hidden from the public in an era before this contraption came along.
I struggle to attain an interest rate on my savings that is about the same as the legal limit for driving under the influence @ .08%, and Crypto.com was essentially giving 8% interest on the great unwashed’s moolah, ha ha.
Fortune flavors the brave souls, grill for 20 minutes on both sides.
Pretty pretty :-(
https://screenrant.com/super-bowl-larry-david-crypto-ad/
Wow that video does a reasonable job at describing more detail around the potentially ( I say this gently ) fraudulent marketing effort targeted at those younger age cohorts. If it’s not fraud then it’s just duplicitous like almost every large corporation.
As with most of these topics, the kids of SP just nail the satire.
Hey Rev. I love how this video starts. When the link opens, the video is frozen on the first frame before you press play. The frame displays Matt Damon apparently in mid sentence. The expression on his face is most revealing however. It’s exactly like his tongue is pushing into his right cheek. As if to communicate he is, totally, taking the piss and making a mockery of us. The casting of Damon is not an accident, by the way. His carefully cultivated public persona (what, you didn’t think it was a persona?) is of being honest and nice. A ‘good guy’ who can do no wrong. If he tells us something, we should believe it. (After the success of Good Will Hunting early in his career, he had a plan for dealing with his new found fame and public attention. Damon explained in interviews, his co-star and girlfriend Minnie Driver advised him to create a nice friendly public persona and name it ‘Guy Smiley’. If he was boring and nice in the public eye the papparazzi would leave him alone. He has stuck to this formula ever since)
Matt Damon stars in the new Hollywood Block(chain) Buster: Shoe Shine Boy. He is being paid in US Offshore Dollars.
“No Sea Serpents, Mobsters but Tahoe Trash Divers Strike Gold”
Seems that when there were bodies to be sunk, mobsters did not want to use Lake Tahoe as they lived there, man. Instead, they drove down to Lake Mead. Now the lake is draining due to drought and climate change and already two bodies have been individually found – one from the 70s.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-05-11/skeletal-remains-found-at-lake-mead-tells-story-of-climate-change-crime-in-las-vegas
As well, all sorts of other goodies are being revealed as the water levels drop, including an old B-29 Superfortress from 1948-
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/what-else-is-hidden-underwater-at-lake-mead/
A little closer to home, or particularly my native state of North Carolina, there is this exhibit currently on display at the NC Museum of Natural History. The section where this site was discovered is about an hour’s drive from my childhood home / small town in eastern NC.
https://www.visitraleigh.com/event/river-bridge%3A-sunken-secrets/83346/
And more detail on the actual researchers and divers who worked on uncovering all or much of this.
https://www.pilotonline.com/history/article_a5ea509a-762e-11e8-b943-5f2ea7fbe7ee.html
My company was working on a dredging project in the detroit River a few years ago, just “downriver” and so in the industrial zone of Detroit. The first month was just pulling cars out and checking for bodies then waiting for the police if there was a body in the car. Popular place to dispose of evidence.
Darn, Ayosha! All those people aiming for one of those bridges to escape across the river to Canada and missing.
That’s my old stomping ground! Episode 7 “Downriver” of The Confession Tapes on Netflix featured a car in the water with a family in it. Not that unusual an event unfortunately.
Got this book in audio form at the library:
Mudlark
In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames
“Long heralded as a city treasure herself, expert “mudlarker” Lara Maiklem is uniquely trained in the art of seeking. Tirelessly trekking across miles of the Thames’ muddy shores, where others only see the detritus of city life, Maiklem unearths evidence of England’s captivating, if sometimes murky, history—with some objects dating back to 43 AD, when London was but an outpost of the Roman Empire.”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/605608/mudlark-by-lara-maiklem/9781631494963
About all you need is rubber boots unless you buy the T-Shirt.
Just a quick note on Russia sanctions:
The potentially most impactful sanctions aren’t the blockade of Russia’s financial system, or the attempted bans on exports from Russia – they are the bans on imports TO Russia, both of high-technology goods, and of IT-services, and especially of chips and high-end electronics. This is also aggravated by the fact that the threat of secondary sanctions makes many suppliers in ostensibly neutral countries not deal with Russia regardless (example: Lenovo, Huawei). It is these high-tech components which are both critical to any advanced economy and the most difficult to “import-substitute”; the problems with import substitution are aggravated by the fact that over the past 8 years “import substitution” in reality has been “supplier change” and upbeat reporting to the higher-ups.
We’ve said this before but South Korea is not partaking of the sanctions and neither are Taiwan or China, so all Russia loses in chips are ones from Japan, and I doubt if there are any/many that are uniquely sourced from there.
And Russia can buy IT services (as in software development/consulting) all day from India, as the US does. Plus it has a pretty decent bench of its own.
IMHO the much bigger issue are machine tools (Germany dominates) and car/aerospace parts.
I recall Malaysia also making noises that they were more than happy to provide Russia with any and all semiconductors needed. They make about 30 billion of those a year and expect 10% growth this year.
Has there been a change on Taiwan?
https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/special-focus/ukraine-crisis/taiwan-semiconductor-ban-russia-catastrophe
Also, we’ve seen that companies oftentimes break contacts even without a direct order to do so, perhaps in anticipation of future sanctions.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/samsung-elec-says-shipments-russia-suspended-donating-6-mln-aid-2022-03-04/
Again, I’d be curious to know if this changed.
Even in China, we’ve seen companies like Lenovo under severe pressure to exit, and many have wavered before coming back; however, with enough international market pressure, they may be forced to leave Russia or lose too much in worldwide sales.
Once again, I realize that one can set up “totally not Lenovo/Samsung” production lines for clandestine sale to Russia, but again, this takes time, which Russia has in short supply because of the war.
Yves, as for machine tools / car parts, I’d like to ask a pair of questions, out of curiosity:
(1) does China use a lot of German machine tools, too; and (2) have you heard of using stereolithography 3D printing for investment castings of complex parts? This technology seems perfectly suited for manufacturing smallish batches of automobile replacement parts, if it were available to Russia. What do you think the future extent of SLA casting will be in the fully-developed economies?
As for aircraft parts, various telegram channels say that the biggest kick in the teeth will be with small aircraft, like Cessnas and so on; the big-ticket airliners are in much less demand than they were due to Aeroflot restrictions, and so can be cannibalized for spare parts until domestic production replaces enough of them. Meanwhile, the small aircraft clubs will get wrecked.
They also lose access to US and European chippery, that is made in those areas but also manufactured in Taiwan and Korea for US and European fabless companies. Over the medium to long term Russia can increase its own chip design and get those made in Taiwan foundries for example substituting for US and European chips. I’m thinking microprocessors and microcontrollers for example.
US produces less than 10% of computer chips.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/26/us/politics/computer-chip-shortage-taiwan.html
Europe makes 10% of computer chips.
https://www.economist.com/business/in-the-global-chips-arms-race-europe-makes-its-move/21807603
Give that sanctions started in 2014, I would assume Russia has moved chip acquisition for anything military away from the US and EU.
Russia has also strongly hinted it intends not to respect IP of unfriendly countries. That would include chip design.
It may allow China, which has not been big on respecting IP, to be the formal violator.
PC and server processors are primarily manufactured by US companies notably Intel and AMD. Intel does a fair amount of the wafer processing in the US, the rest is Ireland, Israel and some at foundries in Taiwan. AMD has its wafers processed primarily in Taiwan at TSMC. But all of this x86 architecture PC and Server processor production is off limits to Russian companies I would guess since these are US companies. As for finished product like laptops and servers I wonder if they are able to import from Chinese companies like Lenovo. Can the US stipulate that finished products containing controlled chips cannot be sold on by Chinese or Taiwanese companies?
Take a look at the length of Russia’s borders. If the USA hasn’t stopped Iran from developing smart drones, a nuclear fuel cycle, etc, do you really think it’s going to have any success against Russia? As to exports, how do you think Marc Rich made his billions, purchased a pardon from Bill Clinton? I can even remember when Toshiba got into trouble for selling the Russian’s the machines the US used to make nuclear submarine propellers, but guess who’s still in business under a different name?
Any interest in buying a bridge in Brooklyn?
PS. This can be considered a reply to your very similar comment on May 9.
Understood. Perhaps what I didn’t get across is that I suspect that Russia is under much more time pressure than Iran was, since Russia is currently fighting a war against Ukraine+ with the possibility of having to fight against a NATO expedition. This means that Russia needs the critical components NOW, not in a year after some kind of supply chain is replaced. At the very least, missile and drone stocks have to be maintained. And smuggling lines aren’t very reliable, or high-volume, IMHO.
Russians do have their own chip, Elbrus, which is used at least in S-400 systems. The development was started in the 70’s for the space program, nuclear research and military.
Since Putin took the reins, Elbrus has seen 8 generations of development. I’d venture a guess that while Russia can’t produce millions of cheap chips for consumer electronics (at least not for 10-15 years) it can produce thousands of (more) expensive specialty chips for it’s military use.
And since they did prepare their economy for something this for the last 18 months, they may have stocked up on critical semiconductors, too.
And who says that the Russians haven’t already stockpiled critical parts?
Some ‘peoples’ are capable of long range planning. Not everyone is hostage to the ‘Quarterly Report’ short term thinking idea.
No idea what is in Enfalac, etc. What was called baby formula in the 1940’s and ’50s — what my brother and I and most of our cohort were raised on — was 1 12oz can of evaporated milk (eg, Carnation), one can of boiled water, 2 Tbsp of corn syrup (eg, Caro light) or sugar. Later versions included a squirt of infant vitamins.
Notes: use evaporated milk, not condensed; do not sub honey, apparently it can cause problems for babies.
Re: Trump officials and meat industry blocked life-saving Covid controls, investigation finds Guardian
You read stories like this and think about all the resources deployed to make this happen, the lawsuits and fines after the fact. Honestly, wouldn’t it have been cheaper to do it right in the first place and put people first? The whole thing could’ve been taken care of in a few weeks. At least the basics with continuing tweaks to follow.
I know I know cost per dead person and impact to the local community is minimal. Tiny insect bite. Barely an annoyance to keep the risk department and lawyers busy. Probably a rounding number when it comes to the increased profits made at the time.
Still isn’t the fact that it is a such a tiny rounding error an indictment? If the companies had put workers’ lives first, made changes to the lines, etc. How many resources would that have cost vs. what they did instead?
It’s not really about “the money,” it’s about the control of quality of life as well as life and death. What I learn again is that widgets in this corporate world are interchangeable and disposable.
Work in Meat and poultry along with chicken is done by immigrants from south of the border. No one cares about these people. Most of the meat cutting industry works these people under horrendous conditions most are crippled due to constant repetitive work. After 3 or 4 years, their done in. Have to quit or are fired. They could care less the cost in human lives. Neither would Trump along with Joe Biden.
I’m old enough to remember when meat packing jobs were union, payed well, and -gasp- actual white people who maybe had a problem graduating high school could make a decent, if unpleasant, living. I knew people who did it, growing up in Des Moines.
>The fears were baseless – there were no meat shortages in the US, while exports to China hit record highs
Uh, I remember a lot of bare shelves during the pandemic.
and i remember freezer warehouses near the ports full to brimming with meat meant for export…while our supermarket meat cases were empty.
harkonens, etc
i remember no chicken and no potatoes worth mentioning.
and we raise and grow a crap ton of both of those things.
so where were they going?
the Irish Potato Faminers could probably tell us.
i also remember headlines on thousands of gallons of milk dumped and thousands of animals euthanized for no reason due to the inability to get to processing plants in time during the covid thing. although it seems that plants did nearly nothing to ensure the safety of their oppressed workforce, so what was the delay about really?
“For all the bluster, Johnson and the Brexiters still have no realistic answer to the ‘Northern Ireland border’ question”
So of course what Northern Ireland needs at the moment is a stable government after the elections the other day so that they can make plans and help with negotiations. The Democratic Unionist Party, however, has other plans and have just blow up the government. Angry at their loss in the recent elections, they have now refused to support the election of a speaker in the assembly. What that means is that ‘all parliamentary business cannot proceed: no attempt to appoint ministers to a new power-sharing government, no formation of scrutiny committees, no business at all.’ The DUP’s leader – Jeffrey Donaldson – has said that it ‘will end only if Britain unilaterally breaks its post-Brexit trade protocol with the EU’–
https://www.politico.eu/article/a-dormant-stormont-dup-confirms-it-will-shut-down-northern-ireland-assembly/
Why do I suspect that Boris is behind this somehow?
The NI thing is a reminder that DC learned everything about (not) dealing with wounded pride from Westminster. You would think they could have cut the place loose long ago. But then i guess Dublin is also not sure they want to deal with the clusterfuck. After all, if they were to take over they would have the unionists turn nasty pretty much over night.
Re the depths of Lake Tahoe–a dredging of our local stream would bring up 90 percent old tires although we had quite a supply of shopping carts there for awhile.One suspects that most of these come from a poor neighborhood upstream, the one where all the Confederate flags are, and are a result of the state’s tire recycling fee. It’s hard to imaging too many yuppies taking the trouble to haul home their old tires from the tire store and pitch them into the public waters. Or perhaps it’s the tire stores themselves doing the dumping. It’s all a big mystery including the shopping carts.
Clearly tony Tahoe likely to have a higher level of detritus–not just sunglasses but designer sunglasses.
Baby formula shortages, failure to act on the Courts, when will the Biden war on women end?
Do Team Blue strategerists even know the bulk of their voters are women?
Women who will immediately blame the Republicans.
The pivot on a dime about Nazis is reminiscent of the CPUSA’s about face after the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact.
Once a Nazi would be shot, see
That was then the party line.
Now a Nazi’s hotsy totsy,
Trotsky’s laying British mines.
Except Trotsky never turned on the USSR. He always called for the defense of the USSR from external forces seeking to overturn the revolution. He did want to overthrow the ruling bureaucracy. He was disgusted with the pact, as he felt Stalin did not take the Nazi threat seriously enough early on to mobilize and prepare for an eventual war which put USSR in a corner and the pact a reality. Now all the useless countless trot groups that came after Trotsky were a different story.
Yes. But you would not have known that from Pravda or our Daily Worker.
“Calling a man bald counts as sexual harassment, UK judge rules”
The three members of the tribunal who decided on the ruling – Judges Y. Brynner, B. Willis and T. Savalas – were most emphatic that they were sick and tired of all the bald jokes. Like being gifted combs because the gifters knew that they would never part with them. When asked for a comment, the plaintiffs former co-workers at the the British Bung Manufacturing Company said that it does not matter as he is still a “bald c—”
RK
bald is an obvious microaggression. The cromulent term is Follicly-challenged
I prefer the expression “a perfect head” myself. Of course it can be received as microaggression by those who have to cover their less than fabulous noggin.
I was thinking of an Aussie joke about how a bald guy lost his hair but it uses an Aussie euphemism and would probably not pass muster here anyway.
The more hair I lose the more head I get.
britzklieg, losing it faster is balderdash.
That’s a North American Deep South joke if I ever heard one.
If I’m understanding the redacted part correctly, then I’d say his claim is half correct….
The UK judge was likely wearing a horsehair wig at the time as part of the court uniform, whether hirsute or otherwise underneath.
But were they wearing anything underneath their black, silk gowns in Court?
There was that Monty Python sketch with Eric Idle talking about a well-hung jury. Maybe he knows the answer to that.
For certain I thought somebody else would post this ;)
Sorry about the ad.
Until there is a court case about making fun of short men, I’ll remain diminutive.
Because the NYT has to muddle the IDF assassination of a senior Pal journalist (with a “random” shot that went right under her helmet) with on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand obfuscation, such that in two more news cycles no one will remember it.
The news here said that she was shot in the head which sounds almost clinical, ignoring the fact that she was wearing a full helmet. I guess that they did not want to say that she was actually shot in the face.
If it was a .50 cal sniper rifle, there wouldn’t be anything left.
.308s and .223s do a quite messy enough job, esp the preferred “pink mist head shot…”
If the sniper used a mercury round, the Izzies would be very keen to make the evidence go away.
There are war crimes, and there are War Crimes.
I am perplexed by what the relevance is of the Eva Karene Bartlett. The link is to a RT article and the horrific quotes are from an acts supposedly committed in 1943. No doubt there has been shady and inhumane stuff going on, but it seems like a reach to start going back so far and not even properly framing the context of the quotes pulled from the article.
Because they never stopped doing it. Seriously. You want examples? Just yesterday saw an image of a captured Russian soldier. He had been bound to a tank trap and had been burnt to death. And think about all those torture videos that the Ukrainians proudly released – like shooting prisoners and letting them bleed out while some were burnt to death. Or those Ukrainians identifying dead Russians so that they can call their parents/wives/girlfriends and boast how they were dead and send them images. Years ago I saw a video of these Ukrainian parents proudly showing their very young son stabbing something and using a stock phrase that translates as ‘knife the Muscovites.’ For years now when the Donbass Republics swapped POWs with the Ukrainians, the Donbass soldiers had been typically tortured. This is why the Donbass Republics fought so hard – because they knew what awaited them and their families. The Russians in their advances have found torture rooms and the remains of some still there. I could go on but you get the picture by now. This is not about stuff that happened back in the 1940s. This is still going on as in right now. They never stopped. It is why Nazism found a home there as you had a portion of the population that were receptive to messages of death and torture and superiority. I’m sure that the EU are in for a big surprise with some of those Ukrainian refugees. In Poland a day or so ago a Polish guy in Warsaw was protesting when some Ukrainian ‘refugees’ were hassling some local girls – so they knifed him to death and ran. You won’t see mention of that on CNN or MSNBC. All this info is out there on the internet if you look for it – and if you have a strong stomach.
OK. So it seems there is ample evidence from more recent events. If the twittee(?) needs to pull stuff out of context from 80 years ago, seems kind of week. If everyone is to be judged on stuff that happened 80 years ago, glass house analogies come to mind.
You could change ‘advance’ to ‘retreat’ and ‘Ukrainian’ to ‘Russian’ and your description of atrocities would be equally valid.
And wasn’t the USSR/Russia pretty much in control of the Ukrainian lands until 1991 or something?
You know that the examples that I gave were from only the past eight years but Eva links it to their past history as if effects their present. And it does has an effect over time. Two examples? The US’s Victoria Nuland. And Canada’s Chrystia Freeland. Neither of them born there as in at all but that history has nevertheless still twisted them and their personalities. And you can throw in the Vindman twins too.
Thanks to Polar Socialist for the link. I don’t disagree that Ukraine has done some horrific stuff. But, there seems to be a lot of ‘whataboutism’ going on. And in the case of the Eva links, they are specifically presented quotes out of context of the content of the article, as well as the actual source (also hidden behind the wayback machine link.
If the seeds of issues can go back 80 years, you could argue the Nazi issue was seeded then and the USSR/Russians had 50 of those years to address it. Post Ukraine ‘independence’, if the current Russian government was concerned about eastern Ukraine, they or someone else could have used these 2016 reports to push thru reforms in the UN, or raised public discourse thru other means. Resolving this via special military operations and their own trail of atrocities makes the ‘solution’ pale in comparison with the ‘crime’. It seems like the 2014 pretty much eroded any credibility of the altruistic aspects of Russian motives though.
BTW – Most anyone who comes here for information, likely doesn’t spend a lot of time on CNN or MSNBC.
And how does 2014 ‘erode’ the credibility of the Russians? Didn’t the Americans foster the Maidan Coup?
The basic point is that the atrocities attributed to the Ukrainians being exposed are evidence of the ‘Gangster’ nature of the present Ukrainian society. People are not born murderous thugs and killers. They grow into that status. A good question here would be, what proportion of the “evil” elements in the Ukrainian military forces are home grown, and what proportion are “imported?”
Search for “Second report – War Crimes of the Armed Forces and Security Forces of Ukraine.pdf”. Should be available on OSCE and other sites. It’s evidence collected in 2014, so not up to date. And it’s published by a Russian foundation, not OSCE itself, so it’s not “official”.
Sorry I’m not putting a direct link here, but it’s so ugly stuff that I’d rather people went looking for it than bring it to a polite conversation myself.
I love the phrasing. how closer is closer?
My aching and overloaded memory remembers that we had mapped human DNA, we had mapped brain activity and there is no clinical output so far.
I am not even confident that we understand what occurs within a single cell.
Rather droll Michael Tracey. Presumably when not no commenting the ADL would reply that Azov are the good Nazis on an “enemy of my enemy is a friend” basis while Trump is a bad Nazi on an (imaginary) friend of my enemy is my enemy basis. Of course such an attitude was what helped the Nazis rise in the first place as the Brits and some US fat cats hoped Hitler would knock off Russia.
So the only true intellectual consistency boils down to Putin-man bad. Who knows why?…
because he can’t be bought well enough to sell out his own country entirely, a la Yeltsin.
oh, and anyone who refuses our dominance and final veto on everything of importance that happens within or related to their own country gets on our *hit list.
*insert missing letter here
So it’s about money and power rather than “democracy.”
One should bear in mind that the founders wanted a republic rather than a democracy and got it. However they seem to have been serious about “pursuit of happiness”–that thing that money allegedly can’t buy. Those long ago people who could read Latin and Greek may have been smarter than us.
“Democracy” means private property. And that’s what the Founders wanted. They were very serious about “pursuit of happiness”. They actually voted down the right to “property” as implying a right to be landed, which defeats the whole point of private property if you can’t deprive others of it and extort them to do your will.
Also, please don’t worship dead elites. That was what started this whole mess 5600 years ago.
I said that they were smarter than current leaders (not a big ask), not that I worshiped them. But I do think their ideas deserve credit. Worshiping elites is exactly what they didn’t want or at least most of them. They didn’t want a king.
King George or King Joe.
“King Property” is not much better.
and since the inheriting and accumulation of property tends to become concentrated, aristocracy/oligarchy is essentially a guaranteed outcome.
then who needs a king? an elected president and bunch of political stooges to take the rap and the heat off the actual Owners and Controllers is a great deal to keep this racket going.
It is more like an appointed president… rather than elected…. the candidate of the CEO job starts in the primary and the horse trading starts and it is all networked. And that is the problem with the organizational structure in the US, that is all networked and layered. Even a smart executive like FDR had problems fighting it and the successes, were ultimately only temporary… Oligarchy is very resilient and will not shy away from using force. This is why, sometimes, I do understand why the Frenchies and the Ruskies did what they did with their revolutions, which ultimately couldn’t find a way to escape the predicaments of the Iron Law of Oligarchy/Bureaucracy.
Worshiping elites is exactly what they didn’t want or at least most of them. They didn’t want a king.
Spare me. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, together with Virginia and the rest of the southern colonies joined up for a revolution against England only after Dunmore’s proclamation in 1775, when Lord Dunmore promised he’d free all African slaves who joined the loyalist side —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunmore%27s_Proclamation
This followed the Somerset Trial in 1772 in England, when Lord Mansfield ruled American colonists were not going to bring slaves into England and expect them to remain slaves: –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart
Lord Mansfield: ‘The state of slavery is … is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.’
Once the facts are examined, the Revolutionary War was a war fought to (1) maintain slavery in America (2) disregard the treaties the British had made with the Indian nations so as to annex the Indians’ lands, and (3) to not pay taxes for the war the British had fought to secure the land from the French. That’s it. That’s why Thomas Paine went back to England heartbroken.
And as the US began, so it’s continued. The ‘Texas Revolution’ of 1835-36 was largely driven by the fact that Mexico had officially abolished slavery in Texas in 1830, and Anglo Texans desired to maintain it.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/how-leaders-texas-revolution-fought-preserve-slavery/
Once the real history of the US is studied — not the propaganda they teach in grade school civics classes — it’s blazingly clear that this country has been run by and for the benefit of a colonial kleptocracy not dissimilar to Brazil’s. The Owners of this country have always sought to have a mass population — be they indentured servants, then African slaves, then the poor, huddled masses of the 19th century, then Asian refugees and nowaday entire towns in the outer SF Bay Area mostly populated by H1B visas — to exploit and pay as little as possible to.
That’s why America’s ownership class think they can prioritize maintaining a ‘healthcare’ system that loots $7-8 percent of annual US GDP over maintaining the health of its workers. That’s why they let more than a million Americans die during the COVID pandemic. They believe they’ll just import some more.
Yes, Roosevelt’s New Deal was a different order of things. To be sure, during that period the US was the richest mass society in history and went to the Moon. But the Owners of the US didn’t like that and wanted their country back.
And now they’ve got it. And that’s the mentality of the US’s Owner class.
With respect, I must disagree here.
While much of American history is and continues to be odious, reducing the Revolutionary War to this extremely simplified narrative is at best extreme hyperbole. It also ignores the half of American history which is not odious and is sometimes even inspiring.
British ineptitude, corruption, and stupidity in governing the American Colonies is well documented; this and the reluctance to pay taxes in the new ways that the British government wanted them to. There were still very real and serious disagreements about how the colonies were going to be governed.
If anyone had argued that the Sons of Liberty in New England back then that they were fighting to maintain slavery, they would have been laughed at. Does anyone say that the initial fights between the New England militias and the British Army was that of slaveholders trying to keep their slaves? Just look at the various ways the British brutalized and made into extremists the American colonists. It was the same dynamic in America’s current and past wars, which is very interesting. The more brutal the British became, the less loyal the colonists were.
Slavery was already dying out in the north and only expanding in the south. Considering that the sale of slaves, but not owning slaves, was only happened in 1807 after much resistance from the Caribbean plantation owners. That is thirty four years after Somerset and thirty two years after the first battles of the revolution.
One can make the case that the wealthy Southern plantation class wanted independence so that they would been in charge of the colonies. That is because some of the wealthy elites did really want to have it all. Some of them, including George Washington, schemed to get rich with shaky, even quasi legal land dealings. However, many like George Washington also wanted an improved, fairer, less corrupt version of the British. There was also always a class of land hungry farmers, often the poor who were trying not to be so; these farmers often stole land from the natives to replace the land stolen from them by the encroaching rich.
Thanks for making a much better and more detailed reply than my own. To me the key aspect of those late 18th cent Americans is that they were rationalists, not saints, who cared about ideas. Call it the “realist” school of nation building. And while their mantra of “freedom” has turned out to be, as Michael Hudson describes, a freedom in many instances to exploit it also has much to do with that “pursuit of happiness” on an individual basis. As a country we are a bundle off contradictions, not some cartoon good versus evil fable.
it is called cognitive dissonance…
https://www.lancasterhistory.org/events/slavery-and-the-declaration/
You have the 1619 party line down pat but the attitudes of the founders including the evil Jefferson were considerably more nuanced and the Constitution that resulted a compromise that was seen at the time as necessary to produce the document at all.
As for England, their history of colonial exploitation includes a slave trade that they considerably profited from and a 19th century empire full of many other horrors. Just to repeat, it’s the founders ideas that matter and they are hardly pablum. Their actions were in many cases as compromised as, oh say, those of our modern wealthy.
I do not know about smarter, but they definitely did study their history, the ideas of classical liberalism, based some of the Constitution not only on Greek democracy and the Roman Republic, they also used the Iroquois Confederacy. Restated, it was the work that they did and the national, not just the Founders’, debates, that got us that system of government.
I probably underestimate the importance of intelligence although I have never gotten a satisfactory answer; I also think that too many people believe sheer brains as opposed to some combination of study, thought, reason, and even plain, honest debate is the more important thing for success.
The goal was of a system that could tamp down on the rabble without getting an oligarchy or a king that would control everything. It was “we want to have the Will of the People to be followed, but not too much and avoid Tyranny”(their word and often capitalized). Have your cake and eat it too.
And on some of these comments, the Founders (and others I believe) thought that there would have been another revolution like theirs long before now. They expected some group of people to get too much wealth or power and need violent overthrowing. IIRC, Thomas Jefferson(?) mentioned watering the Tree of Liberty with blood from time to time.
Funny. They and their contemporaries would be considered dangerous radicals by almost all of the current government. Revolutionaries.
I really need to read again on the Revolution and particularly on the political philosophy being used. It’s been two decades since I last gave it a good study.
If anyone has some suggestions, I would really appreciate it.
demodogs were going to fix the Post Office but I guess they’re saving it for another day. Like dry powder.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/05/13/green-groups-push-dejoy-hand-over-secret-documents-polluting-truck-deal
joe b. said nothing going to change.
Biden was a Senator for nearly 40 years and vice president. I’m convinced part of his problem is he has never had a real job since his Cornpop days. The idea of work is just foreign to him.
Are you saying being an extortionist and running a protection racket isn’t work?
Biden was Senator for decades in Delaware. I never tire of telling people it is a state with more registered corporations than registered voters. That tells eveything about who he serves.
If back in 2008 anyone was ignoring the fraud alerts about Obama’s candidacy, the text announcing Biden as his VP pick should have been convincing.
The VIce is always a minder who represents the real powers in the party, the only exceptions being when the president was once a minder himself. Just think of who the VP’s were starting with Truman. They all had much more influence on their parties than the corresponding president.
Come on, pal, bet Joe can knock out more push ups one handed! \sarc
Kidding aside I prefer the politicians in DC work less so as to reduce the likely risk of more harm.
Mail is so bad here, that it takes 4 days for a letter or bill to just get across town. Brandon could care less.
Yep, my cousin sent me check because she’s nice person. It made it to the PO in record time but it has been a week to from one side PO to PO Box. I hope next week it will found;-)
Caitlin Johnstone provided the best description of the Democrats I have ever heard. They are like an unplugged remote you give to your kid brother so he will stop pestering you to let him play your video games with you.
odd how the litmus test for what is quite possibly true has quickly become “has Youtube blocked the video or Paypal removed the funding mechanism?” and the prevailing opinion means that if either is true, then the info has more weight than before.
extreme reactance! who was it that used to say “if they have denied it, it must be true”?
of course, now that i’ve noticed this it will be gamed with people saying bannable things just for street cred.
The history of the diplomatic relations between Sweden and Kurdistan might be said to be complicated.
As is then the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) claims there is an embassy office in Kerbil:
https://gov.krd/dfr-en/foreign-representation/embassy-office-of-sweden/
However, Sweden says it is a consular office in Iraq:
https://www.swedenabroad.se/en/embassies/iraq-baghdad/
Iraq claims that the region where the office is located is part of Iraq:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-kurds/iraqcourt-rules-no-region-can-secede-after-kurdish-independence-bid-idUSKBN1D617O
The representation from KRG does not appear to be on the list of recognised diplomatic representations:
https://www.regeringen.se/sveriges-regering/utrikesdepartementet/sveriges-diplomatiska-forbindelser/
But still the representation got to meet with the Swedish foreign minister:
https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/15122021
& yes, there are quite a few elected Swedish politicians who publicly condemn Turkey & some opposition against NATO-membership has focussed on Turkey and the leader of Turkey as arguments against joining NATO. It is probably not as bad as claimed here but still:
https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/turkey/13052022
It might well be that Turkey will allow Sweden and Finland to join NATO only after Turkey has joined EU (which is unlikely to ever happen). Alternatively some other deals can be worked out, hopefully not but who knows.
“The Squad” Doesn’t Exist Outside Of Social Media” Caitlin Johnstone
Social media is a series of platforms for pseudo-events. Those events are key to the existence of politicians these days.
Re: Judicial Watch
Somehow I ended up on their mailing list. Yesterday, they sent a link to one of their podcasts featuring Larry Johnson. The Uniparty consensus seems to be crumbling if an organization that has a lot of clout–check out our federal bench beginning with SCOTUS–is promoting Johnson’s views.
At some point during the 2000 election legal back and forth Johnson stood to ask a question among the assembled reporters and said, “I’m from Judicial Watch, a non partisan organization” and the whole room laughed at him.
“Twitter is boring until the Americans wake up tbh.” Zuby is a British rapper. At least he thinks the US is lit:
https://mobile.twitter.com/ZubyMusic/status/1525084742772838402?cxt=HHwWhMC-lcmfmKoqAAAA
Stop dismissing the risk of long covid
By Ezekiel J. Emanuel
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/12/stop-dismissing-long-covid-pandemic-symptoms/
wasn’t this the same guy who once said that people over 75 just need to commit seppuku for the good of society?
how old is ol’Zeke anyway?
Wiki says he is 64. He has 11 years left until he can commit “The Resolution” like on Star Trek TNG(“Half a Life”) where the culture dictated you had to off yourself at 60. In Zeke’s case, it can be 75, since he uh brought it up.
Or, if we follow the Logan’s Run plan, Zeke is very far beyond “last day” (age 30, IIRC) and should welcome termination by the Sandmen.
I believe what he said was when he turns 75 he will no longer take medical steps to prolong his life. Or something to that effect. He never suggested off-ing oneself at 75.
Why I Hope to Die at 75 Zeke Emanuel, The Atlantic.
I think Emanuel’s views can be caricatured (indeed, I may have done so). But rereading the piece, the pervasive assumptions are of choices Emanuel can make. Many if not most Americans do not have similar choices. (Emanuel, for example, won’t be selling off his assets to get Medicaid).
Replying linking with “Long COVID-19 exercise capacity linked to abnormal blood clotting markers”
The marker?
Low ADAMTS13?
https://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/Q76LX8
ADAMST13 needs zinc to work.
Maybe Zinc deficiency is causing the blood clotting issue in these patients?
Role of Zinc in Hemostasis: A Review
It’s over? I currently have it (since Tuesday) and last night lost my sense of smell, after testing negative on a home test two days in a row. This is the sickest I’ve been since Asiatic flu as a child. I am not going to bother with a third home test. I am quadruple vaxxed and use an N94 mask when I go out. But things have been getting more crowded lately. It’s a bummer.
Another claim by the CDC is under fire. They have posted on their website that the shots do not cause variants.
Well, requests asking them to produce documentation backing this claim has produced 0 documents.
Anyone else heard about these requests for documentation about that claim?
A very low power microcontroller drawing 0.25µW not equals “a computer” in layman terms.
This is comparable to the very cheap solar panel on a very cheap calculator.
Interesting perhaps, but unimportant.
The function of such news items and the websites they appear on is that lifestyles don’t need to change, thanks to panacea hopium.
It’s a 32-bit processor, so reasonably punchy.
I found it interesting not because of the processing power but because of the potentially low-tech nature of it. Algae can reproduce itself or be cultivated easily, unlike normal batteries which imply resources and a supply chain that aren’t necessarily always going to be around.
Needs some reproduction though.
Gotta admit that I like the look of Nick Corbishley’s nine month old Nina in today’s Antidote du jour. That is part terrier, isn’t it?
My reflex was, “is that a Jack Russell Terrier?” and to wonder when she’ll reach the important developmental milestone of ‘climbing trees.’
I think my dog (pound rescue) is a “Jack Rat” (mixed Jack Russell/Rat Terrier). By far the most fun dog I ever had, smart, playful. Can’t pass him off as a “therapy dog” though. I sometimes feel like I need therapy after I deal with him…
Any Terrier should really be called Terroriers. Here is an old quote-
“Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs are, and it will take years and years of patient effort on the part of us Christians to bring about any appreciable reformation in the rowdiness of the fox-terrier nature.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, “Three Men in a Boat” 1889
Nice. We had a rescue rat terrier who was probably a breeder, and she was super docile. When I later met non-abused rat terriers it made it a much sadder situation, to know the extent of her aburse. But she loved us and had a good 10 year run!
I worked side jobs at kennels for over a decade. The first Jack Russell I ever walked had a fixation on a young German Shepard that he apparently wanted to kill. Threw himself at the Shepard’s pen in a frenzy of rage every time we passed. I remember thinking at the time that this breed would become extinct from pure cussedness if humans weren’t around to protect them.
Not just part, Rev Kev. She is a 100% rough coat Jack Russell terrier. She is tough, wild and wily, hugely affectionate with humans and other dogs alike and great fun to have around. That said, judging by the way she mercilessly disemboweled the fluffy rabbit in the photo, I wouldn’t want to be a small rodent within her striking distance.
‘Samsung is reportedly planning to raise chip prices by 20%’
Come Christmas we had been perched vulture-like for a year on accumulating Amazon points, planning to use them to help replace our 10 year old television (more of a monitor, really). I had completed the 52-week Challenge for the third time, and handed Hubby the wad of cash as an x-mas gift. We just needed to wait for CES and the announcement that always followed after the show, that they were slashing prices on last year’s models… but the announcement never came. So much for all that discipline and butt-numbing patience.
So in March Husband ordered the model he wanted anyway. When it arrived and he opened the box, he saw that the styrofoam was damaged, the bezel was bent and had to return it. (I’m not sure I would have noticed but he spent 10 years in electronics repair.)
Odds that if we ordered another from Amazon it would be fine? Naw.
Ordered the next one from Best Buy, same price, picked up locally and not damaged. We might have ordered the new model but they aren’t making them in a size that will fit in our cabinet. Samsung is chasing the ‘home theater’ concept, pushing much bigger models and much bigger prices. We paid around $1400; the new relative-sized television would run around $3k. We had just stepped up to 4K, the definition was mind-boggling! How much more lifelike did they have in mind?! Come on, gamers… find something about reality to engage with… it’s not all bad, some aspects are quite pleasant and there’s cookies.
by “gamers” i hope you meant to include those who have to watch sports balls on teevee.
those fanatics were always the ones out buying the latest & greatest & largest sets in the days when “computer graphics” was an oxymoron at best.
i remember going to an in-law’s house and waiting while they were at work for the new giant teevee to be delivered by two bulky men. when they turned it on to test it out, the screen talking heads were bigger than my entire torso, which was more alarming than a horror film to me.
granted, i had not yet seen Videodrome.
Just a thought… I wonder if the undertrodden are starting to realise that Dems and Repubs really don’t differ that much in what they execute (not what they say). Covid, border walls, student debt, surveillance-cops-liberty, punishing institutions, legalising abortion, pro-war activities.
So Dem/Repub battles over, say, redistricting are more about local power struggles over who gets on the gravy train, rather than strategic importance.
Why COVID is a key suspect in severe hepatitis cases in kids worldwide
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/severe-hepatitis-children-covid-suspect-1.6451267
The first articles on this was “is the Covid shot causing hepatitis?” Those can’t be found without a bit of digging. I find it amusing that after a year of kids catching Covid and not having the shots there was nary a mention of hepatitis. Now that there are clusters, the obvious look-for is ignored.
Thanks for the link Verifyfirst.
Milton,
The article from cbc touches on study of kids in India from last year. The kids had covid or had prior infections. None of the kids had any sort of covid vaccines. Other than children in the vaccine trials, India did not even begin vaccinating children till this year.
“”Suddenly there was a drop in [COVID] cases and we did not find any [hepatitis] cases for the next six months, until COVID reappeared again.… So that is also highly suspicious that these cases are actually related to COVID.” from the author of the study.
Chris Hayes from MSNBC was out with COVID. Gee, I wonder if he got it at the WHCA dinner/parties??
He makes this tweet:
https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1525218838056521728
So everyone getting COVID once a year is a “tolerable equilibrium” if it doesn’t put you in the hospital.
There are a LOT of replies saying everybody getting COVID is NOT acceptable and long COVID should not be ignored.
I guess this is the new talking point…we should just accept getting COVID once a year (even though people are already getting it multiple times.)
.
It’s not an equilibrium, but at best a quasi-equilibrium on a secular downward trend.
COVID once a year could entail multiple long COVID injuries per decade. That would seem likely to shorten lifespans.
Kelly Rippa, Savannah Guthrie (second time in six months), Anderson Cooper. Stephen Colbert said on Twitter he “was experiencing symptoms consistent with a recurrence of Covid” and that his show isn’t taping “new episodes until further notice.” Gates, Obama, Pelosi, AOC, Harris and husband…..
It would be helpful if some of them developed long-covid, especially someone like Colbert who is on TV every night. Otherwise they just become part of the effort to normalize “getting Covid”. Going to guess all these people were well-vaccinated (and treated immediately with the best stuff).
How come Joe missed out?
Just look at him. How would we tell?
Do you honestly think any self-respecting virus would want to proliferate in that body?
From the things I’ve read that we linked here, Hayes won’t be getting Covid once a year and staying healthy for long.
I know that people like him have what amounts to concierge medical care (what we used to call having a family doctor), but their predilection for society events may mean that being a PMC may constitute a health risk.
Chris Hayes is making out that Coronavirus ‘is just the flu, bro.’ It wasn’t true in 2020 and it sure as hell isn’t true in 2022.
This is good news. The PMC is committing mass suicide so they can show their smiles at parties.
gossip on the grapevine:
i have heard that long haul truckers are talking among themselves about the increasing propensity for cargo theft, and preparing how best to protect themselves during robbery.
the solution put forward has been carrying shotguns. granted, i doubt any trucking company will encourage this and some may in fact prohibit it based upon some idea of third party liability (and it may actually be a violation during road inspection, not sure), but that’s not going to matter to people who have to sleep next to a barely secured wheeled warehouse of goods on a dark and shady by-road truck lot. they are going to protect themselves and let the goods be taken. some have even said they will drive over anyone trying to hijack them on the road or back up over would-be thieves.
Looked to see how many truckers on the road are owner-operators or leasers these days. Google says between 9 to 11%.
One of the jobs I had in my youth was truck stop waitress, more than forty years ago. The truckers who stopped in were 99% white, male, and the average age was around 35 then. Mostly company men but also quite a few independents.
Something has changed. It was just a glance but I’ve been thinking about it since. I was driving down through Cheyenne last year, stopped at one of the truck stops just outside town to fill up on gasoline and walked inside to get something to drink. Lots of truckers inside, about half were Hispanic and not driving alone but in threes. All male and young. I wondered if they drove in 8 hour shifts to get around the rules of having to sleep. I watched for a while, they rarely lingered, and sure enough they all got back into sleeper cabs.
Advantage could be that they drove continuously, so no down time. And it’s a lot harder to rob a speeding truck… not impossible but dangerously hard. Back then company drivers tended to watch out for each other; they were short-haul driving family men. I’d be willing to bet that the trios I was seeing were related.
if one’s goal is to save to buy a farmstead back home in Mexico/whereever, a 3-man team is pretty smart. save money in rent, living expenses, relatively decent quality of life compared to other possible jobs.
good luck to them and hope they have safe travels
San Francisco Police Are Using Driverless Cars As Mobile Surveillance Cameras Vice
I’ll see your driverless car and raise you a pair of Rayban sungasses with a Meta camera. Nothing can go wrong here, right? They even “shift between clear & dark in changing light for day-night use” for those times when you want to wear prescriptionless sunglasses at night.
The U.S. demonstrated the need for a central currency in 1835 when Andrew Jackson paid off national ‘debt’ entirely, thus withdrawing all U.S. dollars from circulation. Roughly 7,000 different bank notes of varying solvency proliferated, and business (and taxes) were conducted with specie (gold & silver).
One additional consequence of withdrawing all the currency: The panic of 1837. All such significant ‘debt’ paydowns are followed shortly by Great-Depression-sized holes in the economy–this includes the Clinton surplus and the Great Recession.
When a history buff acquaintance told me what “really” caused the panic of 1837, he said that Andy Jackson stole the Southeastern U.S. from the Indians–Remember the “trail of tears” when he marched the Indians to Oklahoma? After this, the cotton farmers vastly expanded their acreage. The result was a bumper cotton crop that tanked the price, even with 60% of the crop in storage. They had to default on the loans they got to buy slaves, and a wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures resulted. That default was intensified by the ‘debt’ paydown–the elimination of their dollar savings. So government surpluses inject fragility into debtor/creditor relations. Mike Norman says we’re going into surplus now.
Surplus on what? Housing, maybe? It has been in a bubble for a while and I can see a pop making much more housing available.
Nazis Are Actually Fine Now, According to the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League Michael Tracey (Glenn F)
What was, once again. For similar reasons, it would seem. Fashion, I tell you.
cue the David Bowie song, which is brilliant – and he was doing salutes around that time
My crapification anecdote:
A couple of weeks ago, the IT dept at work contacted me to request that I bring in my desktop unit for some software updates. Since I was going to be working at home & out in the field for a few days, it was no big deal.
When I picked it up on Wed & reconnected everything, it was a complete disaster. They’d installed a new Windows version, plus a bunch of updates to various MS Office standard programs, including Outlook.
My system was rendered almost non-functional. I was never able to get Outlook to open a message in my Inbox – it completely stalled out. My workaround was to access email through the web browser version of Outlook. It was still excruciating. When I went to type in a new message, I could get almost a full line keyed in before any characters appeared on screen! Then I had to go back and correct all of the typos, with lags at each one. It took almost 3 mins to write a 2-line message.
It was excruciating!
The IT folks here are good people, and I knew that this wasn’t their fault. So I fell on their mercy, and the upshot is that they’re ordering me a whole new system, even though I’d told them that the old one (before the update) would have been perfectly OK until I retired next year.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates trots around, telling the world how to fight pandemics!
Windows 10 includes a lovely feature called Memory Compression, where, instead of telling you it has run out of memory, it will simply slow down to a crawl while it repeatedly compresses and decompresses information from memory. Running the operating system on its minimal RAM requirement is an exercise in frustration.
If your previous version of Windows allowed you to restore to an earlier point in time, you may still be able to do that. When Windows 10 was dumped onto my Windows 7 computer, I just restored to an earlier point in time to get rid of it. It worked.
Farmed animals just wanna have fun – they’re here with us, not for us.
Note how the sheep’s butting action involves 1) straightening the spine from hip to skull, 2) raising forelegs so that the entire body mass is between the point of traction (rear hooves) and the point of impact (forehead). This maximizes the kinetic energy transferred to the strike object, driving velocity from the hind legs. The sheep (or goat) shapes its body into a hammer to strike the hardest blow. Skull, spine, and hips are all evolved to facilitate this action. But the timing is not completely innate and has to be learned (or discovered, not a hard line between) and practiced, as we see when lambs and goat kids play.
Sports desk commentary, golf edition. It is typically rare for pro golfers to mix with politics, if you think about just the recent timelines and events within the US alone. Currently, in the US most touring professionals are on the PGA Tour and not really much else; the best 15 to 30 European tour players might and often do overlap playing tour events on different continents.
Currently there is a nascent overseas start up tour, with a scheduled event in early June. The big money ( and honestly it is a huge pot of golf gold ) is supplied from the Saudi Arabia government and perhaps the sovereign fund(s).
The problem is Greg Norman, a major champion and long time lurker on Sunday afternoons, is your CEO. And this article below is worth seeing in full just how idiotic, dare I say tasteless, comments about recent history of activities by the royal Saud family truly appear. Greg should quit interviews for just a wee bit.
https://awfulannouncing.com/golf/greg-normans-latest-quotes-defending-saudi-arabia-and-pushing-his-liv-golf-agenda-might-be-the-worst-yet.html
It’s so funny. GWS seems to model himself after DJT, with whom he is mates. Australians, usually very supportive if not downright protective of our celebrities, especially athletes, have pretty much washed our hands of him because he is such an embarrassment. The golf industry, pretty much from head to toe, seems to want nothing to do with him except for a few pros who want to take the money and leave what they consider to be an overbearing PGA Tour (which it probably is, and the PGA Tour as a weekly spectator event is supremely lame in many ways so could do with a viable competitor, but Norman’s venture ain’t gonna be it). Phil Mickelson got into extremely hot water and, after winning the PGA Championship last year at 50 and earning many plaudits for the effort, is now something of a persona non grata for wanting to take the Saudi money.
And then of course there’s the built in sanctimonious hypocrisy of many of the critics of Norman’s tour (the bonesaw tour is one of its nicknames, after Kashoggi’s murder which seems to be the main source of outrage as opposed to, yknow, the barbarics against Yemen) while they are more than happy for the PGA Tour to have strong relations with those august champions of human rights, the US armed services (who if I’m not mistake help out with those same barbarics against Yemen). It’s all a lot to take in.
A pretty entertaining listen where regularly comes up is the the State of the Game podcast, if you can be bothered.
Nina is adorable! Happy new home and happy new puppy!
Thanks Pat. She is indeed adorable and has made our home an even happier place.
Re the baby milk formula shortages. This one guy blames not being able to get supplies from say Canada on Trump’s United States Canada Mexico Agreement but can’t tell of it is true or not-
https://twitter.com/Stonekettle/status/1525455621440552967
A link to a Politico article buried in those tweets indicate that it may be true-
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/pro-canada-preview/2018/10/29/dairy-deals-china-connection-334880
Ukraine wins Eurovision. Imagine my surprise. President Zelensky says ‘We will do our best to one day host the participants and guests of Eurovision in Ukrainian Mariupol’–
https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/555496-ukraine-eurovision-mariupol-zelensky/
The Rev Kev: Can’t get this to work as a reply but Ukraine had to win. Who can but delight to the charm of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me – Cabaret“
I’ve never managed to see that film but man, that was creepy.
And it is all English ready, no need to translate it from German…
The NY Times editorial board wants you to know that you can f– off if you have student debt.
And they perpetuate the myth that somehow interest payments are funding government spending.
No. It just drains funds from the private sector unnecessarily.
Instead.
Why not do both?
This do-nothing-ism is what passes for elite solutions to real world problems today.
Scott Ritter says he has “radically changed” his overall assessment of the war in Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/m4SlSILtlpc?t=2875
That is not good news and is making for a longer war if its true that the heavy equipment resupplies (howizters etc) Scott mentions has made it through to Kharkov and is being used against the Russians and the Russians couldn’t take it all out beforehand.
He is probably right:. I’d imagine that the number of troops that Russians can actually deploy to Ukraine is fairly small: for example, you want to draw from professional soldiers, not draftees, and the number of frontline troops relative to support in modern armies is quite small these days. Even fairly small losses among professional frontline troops would be very debilitating. While the Russian casualty claims by Ukrainians are absurd, Russians must have suffered enough losses that they became as timid and gun shy as they have been last couple of months, relying on slow methodical advance on the ground backed by heavy artillery rather than serious maneuver. Further, that Russian air force and navy have never been quite first class is apparent: that they are still shooting down Ukrainian fixed wing aircraft means that they never quite achieved air supremacy. The smart thing for the Ukrainians would be to conserve their aircraft and use them in hit and run attacks, essentially as aerial guerillas and that strikes me as what’s going on. (This was what the Fins did during the Winter War and what, I believe, the Swiss, Swedes, and Yugoslavia planned during the Cold War, should hostilities break out.).
The analogy to the Winter War is probably apt: the material disparity and lack of Western resources and resolve are such that (practical aid for Ukraine even if the 40billion bill eventually goes through would be too late and, likely, too little.) Russians will “win,” but will be seriously bruised. But did the Winter War actually change the world, or even Soviet worldview? About the only thing that it did outside Finland was to convince Western Allies and Germans that the Red Army was a joke–which it was, in some sense, but not nearly as weak as it appeared in the Winter War, as the next 5 years would show. If anything, it might have slightly (but only slightly) contributed to German defeat by inducing misunderestimation, but probably not much in the grand scheme of things. The real consequences, if everything goes up in nuclear explosion soon, will be in the long run.
Unless, not if. Doh.
I didn’t watch the whole thing, but the part about Finland was quite interesting, too. Especially the suggestion that Russia would have to pounce on Finland before the end of June. Ahem.
I think Scott has some points on Ukraine, but is way out on Finland. There are political / indirect military-technical solutions for Russia in Finland that were never possible in Ukraine.
Separately I wonder/be amazed if those howitzers are not being operated by US troops if they don’t break down after a few fire missions, based on what Scott and other Pundits have said about their need for tender loving care by specialist to stay in the field. Russia would do well to suck in as much as possible of this material and similar along with and more importantly and personnel from Europe/US. Internal lines favor an envelopment and capture. Loads of foreign troops being marched into POW camps would be an interesting problem for the west.
re: Fauci’s Royalties And The $350 Million Royalty Payment Stream HIDDEN By NIH – OpentheBooks
Thanks for this link. The data tracks with other things I’ve read about FDA and NIH science “funding”, and with what I remember about Fauci and the drug AZT back in the late 1980’s early 90’s. Public health captive to public/private financial interests. aka financial corruption. What could go wrong?
WHO is Fauci working for again? Us? Or Pharma? It’s a puzzle. ….
You’ll be happy to know that Putin now has blood cancer according to a secret recording of a Kremlin insider obtained by New Lines magazine. It has been picked up by other outlets. He is still fanatical in their descriptions.
And best of all Fortune, and Yahoo, have it on good authority, the Ukrainian intelligence chief, that the coup to remove him is underway.
Mind you hasn’t there been either been a coup or a coming coup report almost weekly since February.
Putin is not a spring chicken. At some point he will leave office with about the only unlikely scenario being a coup. At some point Biden will as well, coup also unlikely no matter how deeply deserved. Which also means our not so free press will eventually be right and will conveniently forget their multiple earlier predicted version.
Unfortunately it still won’t stop the boondoggle being pulled on America by its leadership, one that might start WWIII.
You’ll be happy to know that Putin now has blood cancer according to a secret recording of a Kremlin insider
But according to the article that you linked to, this is “according to Ukraine’s head of military intelligence.” A proven, trustworthy-source indeed, though most-definately not a “Kremlin insider.”
Keep in mind that Putin is keeping old Soviet ultra-nationalistic hard-liners in check, ones in the Duma who think that Russia should just get WWIII over-and-done with, and as soon as possible. Pray for his health?
Via Col. Cassad, translation by Yandex:
Expanding the Starlink network
…SpaceX has published an updated map with the coverage areas of the global satellite communication system Starlink.
In the territories where Starlink is used, Russian TV and radio channels are completely banned from broadcasting.
Connecting the population of countries allied to Russia to Starlink will allow you to control the flow of information passed to the consumer, blocking everything except “useful” for the West.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7614952.html
I’d assume that he means to say that information could be effectively censored if there were no other means of internet connectivity available. And I’m unclear as to how VPNs might be affected.
Still, I haven’t the links at the moment, this isn’t the first that I’ve heard of Starlink being militarized, and allegations that it currently being used in an attempt to assist the Ukrainian army. If this is the case, what might we expect when Musk gets his hands on Twitter?
Cassad is not a great source. I’d like to see confirmation.
Cassad is not a great source.
Yes, I’m seeing this too. There are a ton of other Russian language news websites out there that I am only beginning to explore and become familiar with, and his site is probably one I’ll leave behind.
Cassad appears to have it very wrong, for example (headline’s enough):
“Only at gunpoint.” Musk refused to block the Russian Mass media – RIA Novosti, 05.03.2022
ria.ru › 20220305 › starlink
The Russians are concerned about Starlink, but these concerns have nothing to do with censorship, and everything to do with the system’s military potentials, or dual-use capabilities. The following article highlights some of these noted, but not alarming, concerns (which are thematic to ones voiced in other Russian media outlets):
Free Internet or a threat to the country: Why Starlink Elon Musk is called dangerous for Russia?
…in 2020, what everyone was afraid of happened: the Pentagon became interested in the Starlink program. The US military decided to transmit via Musk’s satellites “some amount of data” to see how quickly you can get them. How exactly this will help guide cruise missiles, which in most cases have an inertial guidance system (and satellite guidance is extremely rarely used), was not specified.
https://life-ru.turbopages.org/life.ru/s/p/1441889
Until I read this article, I was not aware that Starlink has a British competor that has begun the process of adding another 3000 satellites to the sky–OneWeb.
China, not pulling its punches, rips Uncle Sam a new one:
US unqualified to lead global pandemic fight: Global Times editorial
Any effort that could help the international community combat the pandemic in solidarity and in a scientific manner is supposed to be welcomed, but it’s regrettable for the world to see Washington still politicizing the pandemic even if the virus continues raging and the US epidemic fight has seriously failed.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202205/1265600.shtml
Ouch. I really can’t find any ground for disagreement with what they have written. Perhaps another reader will be able to point out at least a few inaccuracies or mischaracterizations.