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.
And for those who are new here, this is not a mere polite request. We have written site Policies and those who comment have accepted those terms. To prevent having to resort to the nuclear option of shutting comments down entirely until more sanity prevails, as we did during the 2015 Greek bailout negotiations and shortly after the 2020 election, we are going to be ruthless about moderating and blacklisting offenders.
–Yves
P.S. Also, before further stressing our already stressed moderators, read our site policies:
Please do not write us to ask why a comment has not appeared. We do not have the bandwidth to investigate and reply. Using the comments section to complain about moderation decisions/tripwires earns that commenter troll points. Please don’t do it. Those comments will also be removed if we encounter them.
Do Animals Dream? Atlantic (David L). Of course they do but I am not sure how often. I have seem my cats in REM sleep.
Colorado Springs man becomes fourth person to push a peanut up Pikes Peak with his nose Colorado Public Radio (David L).
This robot dog just taught itself to walk MIT Technology Review (David L). Kill it with fire.
Human-on-a-chip system replicates rare neuromuscular disorders, finds new treatment without animal testing ZMEScience (Dr. Kevin)
“Self-boosting vaccines” load multiple drug doses into a single shot New Atlas (furzy)
The Enemy of Promise Christian Lorentzen, Harpers (Anthony L). On Christopher Hitchens.
#COVID-19
Science/Medicine
SARS-CoV-2 infection produces chronic pulmonary epithelial and immune cell dysfunction with fibrosis in mice Science (David L)
Study results encourage SARS-CoV-2–infected mothers breastfeed to protect infants from COVID News-medical.net (Kevin W)
A Nasal Spray Seems to Help Clear Coronavirus in Clinical Trial Gizomdo (David L)
US
COVID sick leave crisis: Workers are running out of time off, and companies don’t care. Slate (resilc)
CDC ends its COVID program for cruise ships saying they can ‘manage their own COVID-19 mitigation’ USA Today (Kevin W)
Monkeypox is about to spread like wildfire because we’re not prepared. pic.twitter.com/B6TQjEIuDe
— #FreeMarvinGuy (@GNCordova) July 18, 2022
Climate/Environment
Corinne Le Quéré: ‘Could we just adapt to climate change? The answer is no’ Financial Times (David L)
IT’S JUST THE WEATHER pic.twitter.com/4dkb9seafA
— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) July 18, 2022
Nearly half of EU exposed to ‘warning’ drought levels, report says Euronews (resilc). If you were already worried about hunger this fall….ag output in Europe is certain to fall well below expectations.
‘Melted Runway’ Halts Flights Out of British Military Base Gizmodo (Kevin W)
Watch: Train is surrounded by wildfires in Spain BBC (resilc)
State of the environment: shocking report shows how Australia’s land and wildlife are being gradually destroyed Guardian (Kevin W)
California went big on rooftop solar. Now that’s a problem for landfills Yahoo (Brian C)
China?
Record-breaking Chinese bridge clears hurdle to faster transport in border province South China Morning Post. Resilc: “It would take 20 years to build this in USA USA.”
Nancy Pelosi to visit Taiwan next month amid China tensions Financial Times. Hoo boy. We can only hope she gets Covid again. One hates to wish ill, but if she fell and broke a hip, that would put her out of commission even longer…..
China Warns Taiwan Visit by Pelosi Would Have ‘Grave Impact’ Bloomberg
Africa Live: Nigerian outrage as wanted man made chief BBC (resilc)
Old Blighty
Second Live Tory Leadership Debate Cancelled After Sunak and Truss Pull Out Sputnik (Kevin W)
Trust me, watch to at least 1:05:
Tory leadership debate! pic.twitter.com/cNs1kKN8Ip
— Matt Green (@mattgreencomedy) July 18, 2022
Which candidate has the most public support and is the most likely to win the next election? And is that even the right question? Conservative Home
Italy’s hard-right parties ready to fill void if Draghi fulfils threat to quit Financial Times
New Not-So-Cold War
OPERATION Z – DON’T INTERRUPT Helmholtz Smith, Son of the New American Revolution.
Why Russia Is Not Running Out Of Ammo. Andrei Martyanov
* * * ‘Putin Wanted Less NATO. He Got More NATO.’ Atlantic (resilc). The triumphalism seems premature. Putin’s “less NATO” was less NATO on Russia’s borders. Recall that Ukraine was NATO lite, with its military trained to NATO standards. Even though Russia is still understandably touchy about NATO members with missiles as neighbors, the SMO has revealed NATO to be a paper tiger. On top of that, the EU is immolating itself on its Russia economic sanctions and its members likely won’t have the dough or public support to rearm (see this anecdata from the UK). Plus it is not a given that Sweden and Finland will join. Erdogan had made clear that he expects payment in full for the various bribes to get Turkey to approve Finland and Sweden membership, and he has yet to see the money.
U.S. Security Cooperation with Ukraine United States Department of State. Resilc: “Remember when you pay estimated taxes…..”
Interview: Archbishop Gallagher on Vatican diplomacy, Ukraine and the threat of World War III America Magazine (Robert K)
* * * Canada Sends Repaired Gazprom Turbine To Germany OilPrice (Kevin W). As I read this, the very earliest it could arrive is July 22. But Ukraine acts as if it has a vote: Ukrainians won’t accept Canada’s decision to return Nord Stream turbine to Russia – Zelensky Interfax.
FWIW, the Russian Foreign Ministry reaffirmed that Nord Stream gas would be supplied as usual once scheduled routine maintenance was completed (see here in the weekly press conference on July 14). But on July 15, Wolfgang Munchau, who was once believed to be a reporter, completely misrepresents Zakharova in his July 15 post. It’s enough to make a rational person extend the Scott Ritter principle on Ukraine, that 100% of what Ukraine says is a lie, to the West’s commentary on Russia generally.
Exclusive: Russia’s Gazprom declares force majeure on some gas supplies to Europe Reuters (BC). This story went live yesterday AM early. As it reads, the action applies to all of one EU customer, and recall that Gazprom customers are usually private utilities, and often more than one per EU nation. So there are a lot of them. Recall also that Putin issues a decree that provided for special economic retaliatory measures. The initial targets were various Gazprom Germania subsidiaries and JV partners, presumably because Gazprom Germania was nationalized by Germany and then stole Gazprom assets, such as storage units. Consistent with this being a narrow action, I did not see this story featured at Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, nor mentioned on the Russian Foreign Ministry, Kremlin, TASS or Interfax sites.
Analyst says EU shows more caution in imposing new sanctions on Russia as they hurt bloc TASS
* * * Meeting of Council for Strategic Development and National Projects Kremlin. Note:
As you know, it is not just that restrictions are being deliberately and specifically used against Russia today, but the near total closure of access to foreign high-tech products….This is exactly where they are trying to put up obstacles for us in order to restrain the development of Russia. It is clear that this is a big challenge for our country.
However, we are not going to give up, feel at a loss or, as some of our well-wishers predict, fall back decades. Of course not. On the contrary, realising the enormous pile of difficulties we are facing, we will intensively and competently look for new solutions, effectively use the existing sovereign technological reserves, and develop domestic innovative companies….
I understand that this is a difficult task…One of the main goals is to further develop end-to-end technologies.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s article «Staged incidents as the Western approach to doing politics», published in Izvestia newspaper Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation
Ukraine war: Putin to visit Iran in rare international trip BBC (resilc)
Pakistan Rupee Drops to Record, Bonds Fall as Fitch Cuts Outlook Bloomberg
Syraqistan
Militias Armed And Ready As Libya’s New NOC Lifts Oil Blockade OilPrice (resilc)
Israel sends veiled threat to attorneys of outlawed Palestinian NGOs +972 (guurst)
Belarus reveals mass executions of Iraqi refugees by Polish soldiers Al Mayadeen. Chuck L: “Almost a month old but….”
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Toronto’s Scrapped Smart City Reflects Distrust in Tech SURFACE (resilc)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Human rights abuses by US, allies persistent, systematic: FM spokesperson Global Times. China will keep eyepoking the West every time US officials make a stink about Uighurs.
How the U.S. Enables ‘Reckless Driving’ By Its Clients Daniel Larison
In case you missed it:
This is the real reason Assange is in prison. #FreeAssange https://t.co/rxIQoaM9dj
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) July 15, 2022
1/6
Two Trump White House officials expected to testify at prime-time Jan. 6 hearing Thursday NBC (furzy)
Democrats en déshabillé
John Fetterman is the kind of political communicator the Left needs Jacobin. Resilc: “Too bad he is near death, if he wins should challenge Byedone right on. Fuck the DNC man.”
SEN. JOE MANCHIN AND HIS WIFE DIRECTED MILLIONS TO THE WILDLIFE AREA SURROUNDING VACATION CONDO Intercept (Paul R)
The House will vote on legislation protecting marriage equality after Clarence Thomas said the Supreme Court should ‘reconsider’ gay marriage decision Business Insider (Kevin W)
Abortion
Just 3 Weeks Post-Roe, The Stories Emerging Are Worse Than Anyone Imagined Jezebel (Dr. Kevin)
Read this story a few days ago and it hasn't left me. San Diego cops stood by while a woman was terrorized by a stalker in her home for 12 hours, even as neighbors begged them to do something. Stalker then emerged and told them the woman was dead. https://t.co/DUeCpNOj53
— April Wolfe (@AWolfeful) July 18, 2022
Supply Chain/Inflation
Will Falling Oil Prices Alter The Fed’s Aggressive Rate Hike Plan? OilPrice. IMHO this decline is temporary and due to China’s off and on lockdowns and knock-on effects.
FOCUS ON MÍLA – Ardian partners with Iceland’s national telecoms network Ardian. Paul R: “Entire Iceland telecom infrastructure may be sold to private equity.”
The Bezzle
Constant scam attempts are impacting our mental health Washington Post
Shrimps and whales keep crypto afloat Bangkok Post (furzy)
Class Warfare
Sacramento’s homeless population soars by 67% and is now HIGHER than San Francisco while crime rises in tandem with robbery up 42% and rapes nearly doubling: Activists blame skyrocketing price of rentals for the crisis in California’s capital city Daily Mail. Lead story in US edition.
The Age of Weird Men: Gonzo Politicians From Berlusconi to BoJo CounterPunch. Resilc:
I was welding in the barn the other day with New England NPR station on. Katie Tur was promoting her book. Guy asks will you ever run for office. HELL NO was the response. She told story of Congressional friend who said all we do is raise money all the time. That when in Congress you have to make it look like you want to do something, but if you actually do something, it becomes a very significant danger to your career. More money will be raised against you than if you only look like you will change things. So only look like you want to change things is best. Explains sen. crapo, if he really exists
Antidote du jour. From Tucson.com via Jim H. No tortoises were hurt:
And a bonus:
Poor dog.. pic.twitter.com/F5Ly2zoNtK
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) July 18, 2022
And a second bonus (Mark T):
Holy crap this is wonderful pic.twitter.com/kSUiQd0XQP
— David (@p4ndr_) July 15, 2022
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Constant scam attempts…and/or lack of integrity…yes it is flow read duh but goodness…is it desperation or just disregard for common human decency…the level of nonsense in the real estate industry has certainly expanded exponentially…fake buyers looking to simply imagine one will sit there, be badgered by scripted nonsense about how the property has issues but they will do you the favor…so they can flip your property for free…title insurance companies insisting their agent hiding a property line issue which suggests the septic sewer system was not actually purchased by you is not covered and is your problem…real estate agent scamming seller into agreeing to fix the problem and then turning around and threatening to sue the seller when they forget to mention the fixing will cost the seller 15 grand to be handed to the former two deeds ago owner due to a scriveners error back then…but hey you’re making a profit…I would go look for a cave to live in but probably some fake code enforcement board would fine me 500 per day for refusing to hook up to their water system…
And don’t even look at the disease cropping industry. That it’s formally called Medical Insurance is a total scam. Pay more every year to get less until your copayment covers anything you actually get and the premium is pure profit. At that point, all the administration costs are gone because you’re buying medical care retail AND paying a direct rent for the right to do so!
Occasionally I’ll get scam texts to my phone # but addressed to my mother, offering to buy the house in Florida that she & my dad already sold…back in 2018! This never happened before 2020.
“Monkeypox is about to spread like wildfire because we’re not prepared.”
Is she f****** kidding? Monkeypox has been in the news for months but from her story, no prep work has been done at all by the medical establishment. I do not know that unfortunate girl’s circumstances but I was wondering how much in medical expenses were being racked up through all those doctors and medical visits. Tough luck if it was a person that has no choice but to work and survive from day to day. This is really starting to have a January of 2020 feel about it so I am going to make a prediction right now that sooner or later, we will find that Lambert will likely be setting up a Monkeypox section in his Water Cooler as numbers explode.
Walked by an outdoor vaccination site for yesterday in New York. No signage so I stopped to ask. Monkeypox. There were several tents, a gate keeper, very few candidates… to qualify (and the gatekeeper seemed reluctant to talk to me) one must be a man who has sex with men and transgendered, and have had annonymous sex with the past two weeks. This kinda made no sense. The gatekeeper said all three criteria must be met.
I told my family weeks ago that they were going to blame this coming monkeypox pandemic on the gays. Seems like things are continuing apace. Initial (large) outbreaks occurred during pride events, so off we go.
Are we going to have the Gay Disease baloney again? Even something like HIV/AIDS is not just a venereal disease, and even then is not just a problem for European and American gays. Straights, sex workers, diabetics, hospital patients, needle using addicts have all been victims of it. In many parts of the world it is the straights, including their wives or husbands, who are the main victims.
The commonalty with Monkeypox is the extremely close contact between victims, not whether they had (gay) sex. I want to say this is stupid, short sighted, or moronic, but it is more than that. Mental derangement, maybe?
My money is on it being a deliberate policy of distraction. Blame it all on a ‘marginal’ demographic and play to people’s hates and fears while conveniently obscuring the egregious faults of the “official” medical establishment.
It’s all “Spy vs. Spy.”
Maybe just roll up all the new pandemics into one section ?
In weather news, it’s 41°C in Normandy today. Records getting broken all across France.
Where is the nearest drive to a cooler place at present from Normandy?
I think in the near future we’ll treat heatwaves like hurricanes in that why sticky it out in harms way?
Well…this is supposed to be the “cooler place”… we were on the lovely Belgian Riviera (not a joke, it is lovely) for 4 days in the first week of July and it was fantastic. There was even a bit of cool rain. But it’s 37′ in Ostend right now, so I guess the answer is Denmark? 26′ in Copenhagen.
My sister is visiting her in-laws in Calabria, and says that its significantly cooler than the south of England right now.
Meanwhile, it’s 22.8 in Dublin. The ocean must have a moderating effect there.
The wine cellar?
I am in Donegal at the moment. 16degC today. Sister in law had 39degC in Cambridge and the lowest overnight temperature with her will be 20degC, still hotter than here! And 26degC at midnight….
Yeah, the core of the heatwave is over south-central Europe extending out to England – the front marking its boundary with cooler north Atlantic air has been wavering over the Irish Sea – when it advanced it made southern and eastern Ireland very hot for a couple of days, but it never quite stretched up to the north and north-west. A couple of English friends who are cycling the coast of Ireland have been complaining to me that they seem to have missed the good weather entirely – they are in Down now. Belmullet in Mayo somehow seems to have had a very cold summer so far. And yet in Dublin, even my Vietnamese friends mother, visiting from HCM, has been complaining of the heat! But, back to normal now, its much cooler today in the city, around 22C I think.
“no prep work has been done at all by the medical establishment”
Who is going to fund research that might discover an effective repurposed cheap vaccine/treatment that would preclude an emergency use authorization for a new patented expensive TINA drug?
I predict Lambert will have the monkeypox section set up by Halloween……roughly three months from now….
Kafka is alive and well in the US Medical system. Sheesh.
I recently asked my PCP about getting Evusheld, a prophylactic Covid antibody treatment for the immune deficient, so that I can more safely get some necessary dental work done. Although 4 times vaccinated, I’m 75 with pulmonary and other chronic health issues and have been diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue, Immune Deficiency Syndrome (CFIDS).
The PCP tells me they don’t prescribe Evusheld, that I should talk to my Chronic Fatigue specialist. The Chronic Fatigue specialist tells me that, in spite of “immune deficiency” being in the actual name of the condition, that this does not make one eligible for Evusheld. So wherein lies the bullshit: the diagnosis or the eligibility criteria?
I escalate up the chain of command at the Chronic Fatigue clinic in question and am then told that I should get an antibody test to see if my immune system is doing its job. It has been 8 months since my last jab. But I am under the impression, and believe this widely known, post-vaccination antibodies fade and become serologically undetectable within a few months after vaccination. To the degree that there is sustained Covid disease resistance conferred by current vaccines, and this varies among cohorts and individuals, it would reside in the B and T cells, which will not be detected by an antibody test.
So, either my current layperson’s understanding is incorrect or I have reason to doubt the Covid competency of my health care providers.
Or both.
Can anyone understand the complex web of misinformation uttered by our so called “Experts?'” ?
William A. Haseltine, who writes for Forbes, had enough pull to get Evusheld. It did not work for him: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/covid-19-vaccines-not-enough-need-new-antivirals-by-william-a-haseltine-2022-06?barrier=accesspaylog. For what that is worth.
So she, and we, never find out what the girl-in-the-video’s “rash” is.
It’s a testament to the power of irrational disease panic now gripping the nation that her self-diagnosis goes immediately to “monkeypox” since she doesn’t seem to fit the profile of those who get that affliction, and not…say… shingles, which seems to be experiencing a renaissance as a result of covid “vaccines,” but is being downplayed for that very same reason.
At any rate, with all the doctors she’s seen, it’s a wonder no one mentioned that she should keep her hands away from her face and eyes and anywhere else she’s got a breakout, and stay out of the sun, which is advice that has been being given since time immemorial for rashes in general.
And “call the cdc”? I’d love to know what she, or anyone, expected them to do. They’re politicians, not doctors.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.
lol
anyone can get Monkeypox. It can transmit through touch and shared air, things that non-gay people also do (though thankfully it’s not as transmissible as SARS2, and at least “herd immunity” should actually obtain in this instance, considering we’re determined to do nothing to control its spread – this lack of preparedness is in fact the point of the video, not whether MPX is her affliction or not). Another lesson we will have to learn the hard way. I can only echo JBird4049 et al above; the hackneyed propaganda (not gay? no worries!) has worked with miserable predictability, and you seem to have fallen for it.
and far be it from me to feed irrational disease panic instead of vaccine panic, but the increased prevalence of shingles is almost certainly predominantly caused by Covid (a retrospective cohort study drawn mostly from patients pre-vaccine campaign).
A “perturbation.” Doesn’t sound like “…almost certainly predominately…” to me. But that’s just me.
Now that sounds more like it.
Crypto commentary, this morning CNBC was running an in depth story into Celsius. Some pretty damning information based on what I heard, such as the CFO did not receive a proper vetting prior to his onboard and hiring. Unfortunately I did not hear the story in total.
The former CFO story appears to be a late 2021 news story, but Bitcoin and crypto was not yet burning down like a house on fire.
SEN. JOE MANCHIN AND HIS WIFE DIRECTED MILLIONS TO THE WILDLIFE AREA SURROUNDING VACATION CONDO Intercept (Paul R)
———————————————
Call me cynical but the real problem with this story is that so many people don’t see these actions as corruption. They see it as exactly what they’d do given the same opportunity. This story will not even see the light of day in the NYT or the WP.
The rich are different.
The
richPelosi Portfolios are in better shape from all that front-running.Combine that with those tales of constant money-raising and there appears to be, to any sentient being, that the problem of wildlife areas, Wall Street and so much else is Congress.
It’s for the No Pelosi Grandchild Left Behind program. This is to insure the offspring enjoy all the trappings of capitalism without the necessary labor involved. You know, like the Rockefellers and the Mellons and the Mars families.
Not sarcasm.
On a related note, I ran across this story yesterday:
Nancy Pelosi’s husband just bought over $1 million of this chip stock right before a $52 billion subsidy vote — is there time to tag along?
The money quote:
“While politicians can’t predict the future of the market, they are connected to the country’s economic movers and shakers. They also have access to a wealth of first-hand information that investors would die for…”
So what is called insider trading on Wall Street is simply business-as-usual on Capitol Hill. This isn’t just tolerance of corruption, it is admiration for it.
Nancy’s husband was caught dunk diving?
There’s a finance app designed by a couple of Wisconsin twin wizz kids that has congressional trade data so you can run it in your analysis. Quiver Quantitative.
This was on the top part of the front page of MarketWatch today. That surprised me, but it was moved down the page a bit later. I’m guessing if the NYT or Post ran the story it would be on page 235. But then again, that crowd would blow it off anyway, because…
If you do Twitter, look up Unusual Whales. They do lots of tweets on congressional insider trading, and even have a pinned tweet at the top of the DC traders for 2021. Both sides are guilty, but get away with it.
Someone can correct me, but if they miss the disclosure the penalty is only like 200 bucks. Whoopie!
Hell of a gig if you can get it.
The template…Credit Mobilier. It was my understanding that congressmen actually came to blows because some thought that they got the short end of the stick.
Anyone remember Donald “Wear a Hat” Hodel? Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan, best remembered for the infamous quote that a hat, sunglasses and sunscreen could reduce any risk of skin cancer from manmade chemicals damaging the Earth’s ozone layer.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-05-30-mn-3572-story.html
Hodel’s record includes support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and an attempt to cheat the Navajo out of royalties for coal mined on their land (they eventually sued and won). He does get some credit for his role in creating lots of new wilderness areas; however, this was his idea of “compromise” with environmentalists in exchange for allowing the fossil fuels, logging, and ranching industries to run rampant on federal lands. After his term was up, Hodel and his wife moved to Silverthorne, Colo., elev. 8,700+, surrounded by the White River National Forest and several wilderness areas, with 360-degree panoramic views.
This kind of thing is a major reason for the existence of groups like The Nature Conservancy, which so far as I can tell, exists to buttress the real estate values of the Overclass: most Conservancy properties I’ve been to were in affluent areas.
I don’t know how the Nature Conservancy gets its properties, but my Dad started a conservancy, and all of their land was donated, mostly by wealthy folks. He saw Levittown eating up farmland and could see the boomer wave coming, so he set his Conservancy up in our humble basement and saved over 1000 acres of farm and forest land just outside a metropolitan area based on his reputation and hard work. He never drew a salary. His board forced him into retirement so they could cut deals with developers … sigh.
Re: Cancellation of Tory debates. How ironic that Sunak and Truss were “advised” to pull out of the debates by party members because the debates were embarrassing the party!
Of course the party is not embarrassed by food and medicine shortages, lower GDP as businesses try to cope with post Brexit paperwork, increasing prices, strikes, a starved and eroding health system, educational challenges especially for middle and lower classes— sorry this list is getting too long.
And a climate crisis they have prominently ignored for decades, which only now is directly impacting their citizens.
The UK will, in 2022 and 2023, be the country in Europe adding more renewable capacity seconded by Spain.
The Tories should be toast except Labour managed to cough up Keir Starmer. You can’t beat even a clown show with nothing.
> A Nasal Spray Seems to Help Clear Coronavirus in Clinical Trial
Times change, maybe? I can’t help but wonder if Enovid emerged this time last year, before the obvious limitations of the vaccines were widely accepted, whether news of it would have been received so magnanimously. Likewise, I can’t help but wonder if Ivermectin were emerging in Summer 2022 as The Next Big Thing in Covid treatment whether it wouldn’t be received with the even-handed reasonableness of that Gizmodo article, especially now that the inclination for timeously strain-matching the vaccines or offering improved vaccine products has disappeared completely. Different drugs (and of course ivm and the nitric oxide sprays are different drugs too), but I can’t help but recall this Rolling Stone article against PVP-I from last year. I remember semi-ironically remarking in a group chat to friends about this time last year: “you better hope the horse paste works, because we’re going to need all the help we can get”. I imagine they better understand that sentiment now that the magic bullet promise has worn off, although the relative “mildness” of Omicron, particularly during the acute phase of illness, has certainly lulled people into a false sense of security.
Thankfully NC is getting the word out. Otherwise, listening to MSM, I’d be wandering around maskless and getting infected every other month. I have a friend who is on her 3rd bout with Covid and this after getting 2 doses of vax, a booster and having Covid in May. Getting some Enovid soon. I’m already taking the povidone iodine nasal mist. Do others take both? One before doing something and the other after?
I hork with PV-I before and after risky activity (visit a doctor’s office, hardware store, whatever) and I absolutely do not go to theater, restaurants, etc.
0.05% PVP-I in saline (3tbsp of non-iodine salt in 2L). Boil the water!
Administer 2-300ml ahead of going out, and 300-1000ml upon return depending on how risky things felt. Doctor’s office? 1000ml guaranteed. Hardware store where I didn’t get close to anybody and the place wasn’t crowded, maybe just to 200-300ml once again. How? Nettie pot or squeeze bottle available off Amazon for <$10.
@Kengferno — Enovid instructions advise using daily, and particularly immediately before and after being in higher risk environments. You may use it up to 5 times a day.
BTW, israelpharm.com has the best price I’ve found: $45 for a month’s supply (based on 3 times a day use).
I used a Betadine gargle before I got ahold of Enovid nasal spray. Haven’t used the gargle much since. I wouldn’t mix the nasal treatments, but that’s just me.
Thanks for the info! Much appreciated.
I can personally attest to the fact that Omicron is not “mild”, unless you think that 3+ months of fatigue and inability to exercise or work hard is “mild”. The first week is no picnic either. After 14 weeks I’m just now starting to feel some strength return. I was triple-vaxxed, had been taking Vitamins C and D for years and became ill two weeks after the mask mandate was lifted.
“Ukraine war: Putin to visit Iran in rare international trip”
I can’t see Putin going to visit a country in the EU, even if they allowed his plane in. Not only has Europe cut itself off from Russia, but Russia has now fully turned their backs on Europe – and maybe for good. They are done. The EU is fussing about all that oil and gas coming from Russia but they needn’t worry. As the majority of those contracts run out, the Russians will probably not renew them and instead direct those resources east instead. They may make exceptions for countries like Hungary but otherwise no. And as it was cheap Russian energy that powered the European continent and made their services and products competitive against other nations, it may be that this will eventually turn Europe into a backwater and one that other nations will happily plunder. But only ‘friendly’ western nations will be allowed this privilege mind. Meanwhile Putin is turning his attention to other important countries like Iran and Turkey who will be the building blocks of the new multipolar order, hence this visit.
This trip is being presented by the MSM in Europe thusly:
Russia, isolated on the diplomatic scene after its aggression against Ukraine, is desperately looking for partners and can only find them in another enemy-of-the-West pariah like Iran. Putin hopes to secure much-needed drones for its war, a new path to export embargoed Russian oil via the Caspian sea through Iran to other countries, and tips on how to live with and eschew sanctions — a state of affairs Iran has been living with for decades.
Oh, Erdogan is there too. Well, Russia, Turkey and Iran are involved in Syria and Putin is desperate not to have that front flaring up again while he is hard-pressed in Ukraine, and thus hopes to placate Erdogan somehow — who has been rattling his saber for weeks now.
Interesting post. Can Russia realistically afford to do that? Looking at the trade flows (e.g. this helpful oec visualization) Russia greatest import demands are for fairly advanced manufactures (computers, machine tools, transportation equipment). The #1 country it imports from is China (23%) and this share will undoubtedly grow. But “turning their backs on Europe?” There are things Russia wants that probably only Europe can reasonably provide. IMHO, when Ukraine is fully neutralized as a threat to Russia, as it will be, economic sanctions will eventually give way to practicalities. Of course, that assumes eventual return to reason of Western leaders. I think voters will take care of that, under the impetus of economic realities (inflation, recession….).
The West has divorced Russia and Russia does not want to go back. Russia has raw materials and engineering expertise. It’s already adapting better than anyone expected to the loss of EU imports. Putin indicates that the big challenge is high tech, not middle level tech.
I’ve thought that Putin’s full compliance with the contracts when he could have just walked is an indication he sees this as a separation, not yet a divorce. Russia and the EU nations have been dating for three centuries with an occasional bit of violence and a real drag-out fight about 80 years ago. And while being married to the EU is no prize, the Iranians and Turks don’t exactly look like catches either. Plus the last time the Mongols showed up they really trashed the place.
Geography, endogomy and the urge to keep expenses down often win-out in the end.
Perhaps, but I doubt it.
First, Putin/Russia are playing to China, India, and the Global South. They want to make clear that Russia is a reliable partner and it is the West that it untrustworthy.
Second, related to that, starting with at least the Munich Security Conference of 2007, Putin has talked about the need for the US to accept the need for a multi-polar order, and with it a law-based, as opposed to a rules-based regime, since everyone who is not in the US/NATO/Five Eyes/US Protectorate (Japan-South Korea) bubble gets that “rules-based order” = US makes its own rules, does not respect treaties, and does not even feel compelled to be consistent over time. This view was greatly expanded in the 5000 word statement that Russia and China issued in early Feb 2022, which amounts to their statement of “New sheriffs in town, this is how things roll now.” Law-based order was a big theme.
Third, I am also told that culturally, Russians are very legalistic (up there with the Swiss) and Putin has a law degree.
Thank you NC! Antidote du jour videos really great. Made my day.
I would have given in to the temptation to buy that dog an ice-cream if there was a stand nearby. No chocolate of course.
yes, the emu video was great! I have a long-running enemy relationship with an old emu on a friend’s property – it fell deeply in hate with me from the first time we met and every time I visit there is some comical event that leads to me running out of the paddock to escape it. They’re pretty scary when they’re really angry, they have claws that can cut you and they hiss and rear up. Thankfully there is only one on the farm and it is old, I would never get in a pen with multple emus.
You got out, luckily. Emus are tough and during the great Emu War of 1932 (yes, this happened), the Australian Army was sent against them armed with Lewis guns but ended up having to retreat in defeat-
‘The machine-gunners’ dreams of point blank fire into serried masses of Emus were soon dissipated. The Emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics, and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made use of the military equipment uneconomic. A crestfallen field force therefore withdrew from the combat area after about a month.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War
and here I thought the US had a monopoly on stupid, overly-destructive schemes to rid themselves of bird crop pests!
Emulation is the sincerest form of flightery?
John Cleese is making a movie about it.
Sounds like the UA forces.
I am afraid the antidote du jour is not enough for me to overcome the depression caused by the links regarding the coming climate apocalypse.
I am ready to throw away what little I have left and walk around like the Peace Pilgrim for the rest of my life only as an example to show people you do not need to mass consume to survive.
Mass consumption? Or just 7 billion people trying to have decent lives? It would be nice if we could blame capitalism for all our problems but I suspect the truth is uglier — we’re all the problem.
I have been getting a great deal of my information about the world from Naked Capitalism for many years. I cannot afford all the subscriptions I would need to take advantage of the full content because of the ever rising number of pay-walled sites. This seems yet another feature of our neo-liberal world: keep them ignorant and they will be unable to complain. The grifter’s answer to Orwell’s New Speak.
Thanks for your kind words!
I know some readers get annoyed that I link to paywalled sources like the Financial Times, but there are hopefully enough other links to compensate.
Hi Folks. A “paywall avoidance” link is here. Copy past the URL and it works most of the time. https://archive.ph/
This is an excellent resource and it works well with NC links because the time lag means the link will probably already be archived. If it’s not archived, it can take a while for the site to pull it up but it’s worth the wait.
I advise against using or visiting any archive.today/archive.xx sites unless your device is very well hardened. I have received malicious content injected while using one of the archive.today services to archive a site, in the form of a pixel gif served by a domain name owned by National University’s Henley-Putnam School of Strategic Security.
archive.org is not (obviously, anyway) affiliated with the IC, and it is (apparently, anyway) safe to use.
More than compensated! Between Links and 2:00PM Water Cooler I am much more informed, inspired, and challenged by what I read here than I would ever be were I to rely on however many subscriptions I might afford. In fact, the quality of reporting from the two newspapers that cover my area has declined significantly over the course of the pandemic. I subscribe to both.
The Torrington Register Citizen (founded in 1889) was consumed by Hearst in 2017, who applied the standard post-acquisition policies we’ve come to expect: layoffs (the Litchfield County edition is now handled entirely by one person), sale of physical plant and other assets, and hiking subscription fees. In the last two years Hearst has introduced using AI-generated content, most prominently in reporting home sales. Otherwise, apart from local and some state original copy, the newspaper relies on Associated Press content.
The Waterbury Republican-American is family-owned since its founding in 1844. They have a deeper bench of reporters who cover local and state stories – not hard when the competition has only one, who is responsible for two other CT newspapers, the daily Middletown Press and one of the eight weekly local newspapers bought at the same time as the Register Citizen.
https://www.registercitizen.com/business/article/Hearst-buys-The-Register-Citizen-Connecticut-11960275.php
I’ve decided my money is better spent supporting NC and 2:00PM Water Cooler, and will be increasing my monthly contributions accordingly. (As soon as I can wend my way over the hurdles and through the hoops put in place by both papers to cancel, that is.) After all, I’ve managed to stay uninfected by SARS-CoV-2 thanks to the reporting under the NC masthead, including that provided by the Most Excellent Online Commentariat In The Universe Ever. That, as the cliché goes, is priceless.
Hi John. Try this Firefox add-on for your paywall problem. (Exists also for Chrome and Android.)
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
There’s a paywall “bypass” called “Behind the News” which, upon visiting a paywalled NYT article, feeds the title into a neural network trained on thousands of paywalled NYT articles and sets the predicted text into the page as a substitute article body. As Folger’s Crystals invited us, “Let’s see if they notice.”
Would NYT editors notice?
I assume that the plugin uses a “generative adversarial network” which, as I understand it, is sort of like throwing spaghetti against a wall to find the stickiest strands. Any carbon-based editors remaining at NYT probably implement the same algorithm, so I doubt it.
As far as I know, this add-on only fools the subscriber “gatekeeping” script of these websites. There is no need to personally identify yourself. I use it all the time and it seems to work pretty well. Anyway..who wants to give their increasingly worthless money to the Guardian, NYT or the Wash. Post for viewing a web page. At least with the printed newspaper, you could wrap a fish or wipe your a$$.
Yes, having a printed newspaper will be essential to scrape by the next national run on TP.
I don’t even want to read the “news” from these pay walled sites. I just close the tab when I see the paywall or when the site doesn’t let me open it w/ cookies blocked.
I don’t want to read these sources unless NC tells me an article is worth reading. You’re missing some good stuff!
I can usually find related articles after spending a few minutes to research for a hopefully available story even if it’s a shorter form article. That’s been a pretty good working approach. Others mileage may vary, of course.
as a security measure, i disable javascript on my main browser, only turning it on when it is absolutely necessary.
while it can be a hassle, there are many side benefits as well.
hint, hint
I found this tool from a commenter at Morris Berman’s Dark Ages America blog. It works most of the time.
https://12ft.io/
UK pay falls at fastest rate on record as inflation hits
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62218706
Capitalism in a nutshell – the self checkout line. The tech often doesn’t work, customers hate it, it costs business more money than if they’d just hired a human being, but they’re going to keep doing it anyway just because everybody else is – https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/09/business/self-checkout-retail/index.html
“It’s an arms race. If everyone else is doing it, you look like an idiot if you don’t have it,” said David D’Arezzo, a former executive at Dollar General, Wegmans and other retailers. “Once you let it out of the bag, it’s pretty difficult not to offer it anymore.”
White hot stupid.
At this point I won’t be surprised if a supermarket opens the back of a trailer, says “grab what you need”, and has you checkout yourself on an app. All to make money on leasing the real estate in the store to vendors.
Sam’s club already does this.
oh, and a small town grocery was profiled on this site that also does this. there are no attendees in the store whatsoever. just a membership card and app to give access during biz hours.
i love self checkout. i don’t have to make small talk giving repetitive motion injuries to an oppressed worker who is never given enough hours to pay their rent, yet is told by management that if they don’t “engage” me properly in idle chitchat, they will be fired. i don’t have to risk them giving me covid or vice versa.
granted, that old saying comes to mind about the only thing worse than being oppressed by capital is to not be oppressed by it.
we should be giving these people better things to do than act as the assistant to a machine. and i can prevent crappy bagging (or any bagging) of my junk that i need to live.
I read about something similar in Oz in the late 19th century. You heard that phrase ‘There is no such thing as a free lunch’? Well pubs back then started to offer a free snack to not only entice customers in, but the food in their bellies let them drink more booze. But then a pub would then offer free sandwiches and another would counter with more food like cakes until it got to the point that people did not have to buy their meals anymore but just eat from the lavish food offerings in those pubs and I mean lavish. Of course having to give away all this free food hammered the budgets of those pubs so in the end the owners of them all got together and agreed to drop the whole thing.
I don’t know if it was actually true, but Around the World in 80 Days (the Verne novel, not its adaptations) offers the same description for establishments in Western US. May have been a fairly common phenomenon in 19th century.
kind of in the same vein, I remember as a kid when I watched older movies sometimes there would be a character, obviously a liar, who would say something like ‘hey, you wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses would ya?!’ right as they were being run out of somewhere after being caught for whatever they’d been up to. And I always wondered where that came from, if it was based on a real event somewhere or what, but given the way things have been for the last decade, I anticipated there would be some new shorthand for bad faith interlocutors to replace ‘you wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses’. Maybe it will be certain flashy adjectives like disruptive and innovative?
Honestly the historic parallel with web/smartphone tech that seems most likely to me is radioactive isotopes slapped into every consumer good in the 1920s-1930s that ended in medical disgrace so bad (in the US at least) they’ve never again been used in consumer goods. Shoehorning a computer of some form into every financial transaction just to support these insanely expensive (financially and environmentally) systems to enable corporate looting and surveillance is another neolib ponzi scheme that will collapse under its own weight eventually.
“But he’s evolved!”
Re glasses, maybe the lenses would break easily, be expensive to replace and/or cause injury? Or else anybody with glasses was a weakling who should be immune to attack e.g. “I don’t beat women, children, or fools”…
Not in Queensland. There was a story about a Depression-era journalist who used the trick to wander around New South Wales. (If you quietly picked up someone else’s almost-finished beer, you could avoid buying your own drink.) He got to a Queensland pub and was told sharply by a barmaid that things were different up here.
In the US the key was to give away salty things so they had to drink.
We’ve caught pricing mistakes at the checkout lanes. With Grab and go cellphone purchases, who many people would even notice that they were charged the non-sale price or even for a different item from the one they grabbed?
I refuse to use self-checkout unless I need to leave the store quickly and the line is short. Otherwise I will wait in a 20-30 minute checkout lane. It’s not like self-checkout gets one out of the store that much sooner. Plus the whole could be accused of stealing bit. Mostly I think there needs to be more well-paid employees manning the registers.
And many of those self-checkout machines don’t accept cash.
Re: The Self-Checkout
I was in my local Walmart early yesterday morning, very few customers. No checkout staff, they disappeared about a year ago, debit or credit only, DIY only.
So what did I get for my $56 worth of patronage? Instead of a smiling, cheerful, chatty clerk (hopefully) I got some security staff-person lurking five feet away from me and carefully watching every item I checked out. Yes, five feet away, and she wasn’t discrete about it.
I had no idea I had the appearance of a common thief. Thanks for enlightening me Walmart, I’ll change the way I dress and groom myself from now on. /sarc
And by the way, I thought you had security cameras which were supposed to take care of the problem of theft in a less intrusive, more tactful way.
I nickname the self check out @ Wal*Mart, ‘The OK Corral’ as shoppers are herded into something that approximates one, and are let out by the gate after being milked by machines.
Another sign of the griftpocalypse is shoplifting at dollar stores. When people have to resort to theft of many low-priced items, like food, then that ought to be a warning to those above the lower orders that something is really wrong. Too bad they don’t want to notice.
Do you carry a very large purse?
Not condoning the behaviour, but they could be simple-minded like that about security.
No, just a wallet and a re-useable shopping bag. And no bulky clothing.
You also have to keep in mind that the security cameras are often there for the company to watch the employees.
Perhaps the “Goon” reads NC and recognized you as an “uncommon criminal.”
Our local WalMart had a fire in the Tires and Batteries Department over the weekend. The place is closed for a week, maybe longer. The version of reality I got from a mid level manager at the other WalMart just outside of town, ‘you know, close to where the rich people live,’ is that there was significant toxic smoke damage. The entire store inventory is to be sold into the Salvage market and the place cleaned and restocked. It neded it anyway.
The only way you would know that the store is closed is if you were a regular peruser of the company Facebook page. The local “Newspaper” ran one item about it. The best information I could find, except for my personal contacts, was on the Nextdoor e-mail site. I seriously look there every morning now because it has the most accurate and timely news concerning petty crimes in the town.
To which I will add that the public perception of the crime rate here is that it is exploding in the small time thefts department. Bicycles, lawn mowers, and assorted carport items are being boosted with regularity.
The difference between the two stores was noticeable. The “rich neighborhood” outlet is clean and well maintained. The “Ghetto WalMart” which is how the locals refer to it, was always dirty, the aisles filled with pallets of merchandise to be stocked, the bathrooms seldom clean, etc. etc.
Both outlets usually had two or three ‘regular’ checkouts open, but the two self checkout zones in each store are truly corrals.
I can say similarly about the local Safeway grocery stores even for stores with in the same city and zip code. When I had to move to a more, let’s say economical location, I was amazed at the differences. It is not just good and ghetto, but more a close tracking of the local economic classes. High, middle, and low all get an individualized store that reflects this. They send the incompetent and the crooked to one store, the competent and honest to another, and finally the best to the high end. When you see employees taking a smoking break and loudly complaining about the customers right in front of the main entrance…
You should see this in action at McDonald’s. Their typically older clientele hate using the kiosks. They are so confusing and take so much longer. But they avoid people having near the registers so they get even more angry.
That just happened to me recently – hadn’t been to a Micky D’s in years and was surprised when I went in. I asked why there was no one at the counter to take my order and an older woman said to use the kiosk. I said I didn’t know how and she offered to show me, I refused and said I’d like someone to take my order and pay at the cash register with cash. Then she had to get someone to teach her how to use the cash register – quite the comedy of errors.
I won’t be going back any time soon, especially since the “food” was borderline retch-inducing.
Every time I use the self-checkout at walmart I manage to walk out with something I haven’t paid for because I forgot to ring it up without realizing it. I can’t be the only one.
Last time it was two cases of water.
That would be about $8.00 for 5 minutes work or $96 per hour. With food inflation continuing at a blistering pace, the “raises” are coming fast and furious.
Just like when every “manufacturer” had to have a “china strategy” to get their products made overseas whether it made financial sense or not, they’ll get the message sooner or later.
To be fair to Walmart, I can see the mistakes some seniors (and others for that matter) might make with its relatively new technology. However, though I am a senior myself, I am mentally and physically fit and not in need of “helpful supervision” at the self-checkout. If I require assistance I’ll ask for it.
Even if you’re a senior, if you’re buying alcohol you’re getting “assistance” at the self-check whether you need it or not.
A friend of a family friend screwed up in that way about five years ago, entirely accidentally of course, and she was taken into the back room and the cops were called; she was held for hours. She is middle class and white. This was in CT.
I refuse to use self check out even if I must walk out and leave the cart. I will be double damned if I will pay high prices for whatever I need and then I have to check it and bag it myself. I am a Union person, I and my family are all Union. I will not help anyone eliminate someone’s job. However, when ever I tell them NO I refuse to check myself out because you will eventually lose your job. Crickets….. they look at me like I am insane. Both the people who work there and customers in line for self check think I am crazy.
There’s a tee shirt for that.
“NO! I will not drink the Kool Aid!”
All printed on a multicolour tie dyed tee shirt.
Keep the Red Flag flying.
Interestingly, in line with not taking someone’s job, a grocery store I went to last week had the cart corral in the parking lot -per usual- placed there for the customers to return their carts. But what wasn’t usual is they now want you to sort the full sized carts from the small half-sized carts for them. Maybe we can all take turns and come in at night to stock their shelves too? What a racket!
‘Self-Boosting Vaccines…’
‘All plastics are polymers, but not all polymers are plastic’
My first thought is that this may do for delivering probiotics to the colon, getting them past the harsh chemistry of the digestive tract, then slowly releasing microbial lines that have been wiped out by multi-generations of antibiotic use… but there are first up more worthy uses, if approved.
If you’re curious about what ‘biocompatible’ may mean:
https://www.cascobaymolding.com/biocompatibility
Hubert Horan’s piece on Kaminska’s blog about “the Uber Files” is free to read for 48 hours. It’s very good.
Thanks for that link. It provides a good overview of what appears to have been a combined arms attack (media, academia, politicians) against localities and workers. And then there was the economic front where all these losses were funded. It would sure be nice if somebody could trace the sources of funding for all this effort to learn which billionaire(s) are behind this “clever” idea
this “clever” idea to a somewhat less appified extent has been progressing a long time with outsourcing staffing.
those people who set up displays in retail stores, for instance–have no guaranteed hours but a set task list given to them over their work device, where they also report their progress.
Salesforce provides the software that enables these companies to hire many gig workers, although before that was in effect they did it the old fashioned way.
these ideas are just adding on the layer of technical sophistication to make them easier for management to essentially take more. they charge up to twice what they pay the worker to the company they are providing the “services” to. a worker who is essentially kept below subsistence with the old “flexibility” story, which they may have good reason to desire (child, eldercare or other responsibilities).
Ah, yes…I knew he would be all over this.
Thanks for the link.
I am sure many of the investor-lemmings and Uber drivers truly believed they would/will get rich. Don’t know that many investors, but friends who drive/drove for Uber stayed in way longer than was rational. Basically, until their relationships fell apart since they were always driving or looking to, and/or their cars fell apart and they couldn’t afford to replace them. That Uber was a pipe dream became obvious to the most casual observer fairly early on, but people do like to believe their fairy tales and losing gamblers will bet the farm (see crypto).
However, I have long thought that Uber’s real value to many
global oligarchswealthy investors would be as shock troops to de-legitimize the legal authority of municipalities and states. Sort of like hiring Academi to riot in a country whose regime is to be changed. ‘Move fast and break things’ for hire, as it were.To Henry Moon Pie’s question, lemme think, who on earth would pay for such a service?
Solar panels
It’s a pretty fair article, and you’ve got to read the last few lines where they address some mistakes.
I expect that recycling costs will come down dramatically over time, but for now it’s about $50 per panel. And there are few locations to do the work, Arizona being a big hub for the west coast.
That cost is about 1/4 of the cost of a new panel. And I think you have to pay freight to get them there. So most will end up in land fills. I don’t worry about any toxics but sure sucks to waste all that high grade material.
I know of some companies in CA that are selling used modules for super cheap vs having to pay to recycle.
I sure hate the graphic.
What a weird time.
We’re about 8 years into our panels, so we’re a long way from recycling and we probably won’t still be living in this house by then, but… we’re already thinking about the next house and the next generation of panels.
Last week I sent Husband this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8crjuL8FFs
Like the idea of panels that don’t use rare minerals… and aren’t fragile! Maybe one of these will pan out.
The guy in the video does quite a good review of the state of play in not a too long video. Good job. I hope those tandem perovskite/silicon cells may not be that far from market. Yet, as the guy says there is no need to wait for improvements it makes sense now installing roof top PV. Specially in commercial buildings.
I have some 25 year old or so panels that are still producing well. Then I have another array of panels about 15 years old that are still doing well. Then another array that are about two years old. The newest panels are not as sturdy as the older ones so perhaps they will not last as long.
Ours are German designed and American manufactured. Did the source of design/manufacturing matter in your panels?
My oldest panels were made by Siemens in Camarillo, California. The 15 yos are by Canadian Solar. And the newest were made in China by US Solar. The source of design/manufacturing didn’t matter to me when I bought the panels, however it will in the future if I buy more.
But there is no plan.
“It’s going to be a really large issue in a number of years,” Johnstone said. “So it would behoove local governments, county, state, and it can go federal too, to have a plan in place for all these panels that will reach their end of life in 10 to 15 years.”
Just like there is no plan for disposing of ICE vehicles with all the hype and money changing hands to push EVs.
Just like windmill turbine blades:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills
“Can’t be easily recycled” must mean “Can’t be recycled at a profit”. So they are being landfilled
They’re fiberglass (essentially) and so while the fibers might be recyclable, the epoxy like binder is not. Note, I don’t know exactly what the binder is. I do know that one Scandanavian manufacturer recently issue a bulletin about formaldehyde exposure potential for wind farm workers who enter the blades. Yes, people enter the blades to perform structural checks on the material; if it’s minor damage, they grind it out and relay new fiberglass.
I didn’t get to go up into a windmill or enter the blades because the required safety training wasn’t worth it but i did spend a week on a huge windfarm monitoring for formaldehyde and VOCs. I also saw the massive pile of old, broken, failed blades in one section of the farm.
The UK National Composites Centre is working on new materials reusing turbine blades. A former colleague is an early stage investor considering a spinout.
In Ireland, they use old blades as bridge structural members for Greenways.
Great video, thanks, PK!
STOP!!!
The image at the top of the article is an “artistic expression” not an actual pile of solar panels. I have been involved with solar PV applications since the nascent appearance of PV panels in the early ’70’s. The lifespan of a PV panel can vary and is much longer than 10 to 15 years.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has been testing PV panels for over 50 years. NREL has determined the average EFFICIENCY degradation rate to be 0.4% per year. That means a panel would still produce at 80% efficiency after 50 years. While recycling PV panels will need to be resolved, the picture of mountains of discarded PV panels is over-the-top!
Even at 80% capacity the panels are useful. They could be sent to low-power consuming villages in tropical latitudes (more solar irradiation) and used for water pumping, home lighting, cell phone tower power, etc.
THANK YOU!
and lay the blades horizontal and mount PV (used or new) to them while we figure it out(faaaassssttt)
Modern solar panels are expected to last at least 30 years with total output greater than 90% of nameplate. One manufacturer offers a replacement guarantee of any panel that fails within 30 years. There is actually no reason why, with good maintenance, well-made solar PV panels can’t last 50 years or longer. With continual evolution and technical refinement, it is easy to envision utility grade solar PV panels lasting a century. Recycling problem fixed!
I hate to say it but I do not think that panels are going to be the way forward in a world of climate change. I mean the expense and technology required to build them and then when they get to old, the disposal problem will not be sustainable. I am coming to the viewpoint that the solutions that we need will be ones that are low-tech and do not require electricity or internet access to work. In the same way that there is a push to go to EV cars to keep the suburban lifestyle going and driving season a thing as internal combustion engines are left behind, these solar panels are their suburban equivalent. But it is only when you think about EV cars and solar panels and ALL their associated costs from start to end do you realize that they both have sustainability problems. And in a world of climate change, we may not be able to afford either.
Certainly Everything should start from the notion of Radical Conservation
Yes, everyone one always wants to do more to fix problems when in fact is that the solution is actually doing less.
Hi Rev.
going to disagree with you about the solar part.
Of all the current energy sources that are non carbon, solar does pretty well. About 1-2 years to payback the energy it took to make, then 23 more warrantied years plus maybe more.
I have not seen the energy ROI for recycling but the 2 largest energy parts are the cells and aluminum frames. Even if it takes the same energy, then it’s still 1-2 yrs.
Wind in good location is about 6 months ROE, better than solar and can produce at night, storms etc. also it’s kinda like spinning reserve so actually better for grid stability than solar.
Nuclear is also really good, even lower or about even with wind/solar for carbon over time.
I am in agreement about reduction is first on the list, but that is a tough sell in USA USA. You can ask jimmy carter about that.
I’m more convinced that nuclear fission is kinda our only hope. I don’t see storage/renewables doing the job they need to be doing and certainly not fast enough and more is it all that inexpensive.
And it really doesn’t take too many cases of what’s happening in Texas or California to rethink what’s going on. A lot of wrong conclusions will be arrived at, but one thing is very true. More base load and peaker plants are needed for most of the country. Especially as more push towards electric loads and climate change requiring more AC and more heat.
Is it a surprise? Nope, this has been foreseen for a long time.
Hi Solarjay – In my comment I see that I left out something important and that I was not talking about the next few decades but from about the mid-century on. There will come a point in our technological/industrial society when we will literally not have the resources we need to keep it going much less to waste it like we do nowadays. So as an example, the internet may go back to being a text only medium – where it exists. And the materials and industrial complex to manufacture solar panels may not be able to be justified. If ones could be designed that would last a century or more, maybe. But the present type I would say no. As a society we will for the first time have to justify where our limited resources go.
Thank you SJ. I always find your comments informed and insightful. Your Technical adds and numbers have broadened everyone’s understanding of Energy —imo.
The Proprietary nature of Formulations—as in Plastics—are surely a huge barrier for Recycling.
A Feature, not a Bug, IMO.
So this, by Shah(DoE) should be the next step in EPR.
‘ Shah, who is now director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, said that policymakers need to require manufacturers to come up with a standard design that makes panels easier and cheaper to recycle.
“It’s far more cost-effective for manufacturers to be forced to work together … where they try to greatly reduce the cost of all that collectively. That happens through policy,” he said. “It doesn’t happen through people opting in.” ‘
Thx Rod.
Agreed that having OEMS work under some kind of directive such as car emissions or mileage helps.
Currently there is nothing standard with modules. Volts, amps, physical size, connectors are all unique.
Solarjay, numerically, Is 75% power for 30% new price roughly representative? I see used 240W panels (assume exhausted to 180W by now?) for sale for $80. Almost every Arduino experimenter I know would be pleased to have a cheap, easy watt or so of electrical power whenever the sun is full, and I’m curious how easy weatherized modules would be to divide into individual wafers.
Not sure exactly what you mean because would all depend on when/cost new.
About 2007 they were about $9 per watt. In 2008/9 they dropped to about $3. Now they are about $1 retail, but online maybe $.5-.7 watt, and $.25 or less watt at the OEM.
As to trying to disassemble a panel it’s not possible. They are a combo of glass,glue,cell,glue/back sheet then heat and evacuated process.
All of that is to keep moisture and air out. Corrosion is a large destroyer of panels “, from cracks in that encapsulation process. The cells are like a super thin sheet of glass, a few pieces of paper thick. Super easy to break. And they don’t last forever there are actual processes that cause degradation. Hence the 25 year warranty to 80% of new warranty.
As to a few comments above. The quality is most definitely way worse.
Thinner cells have greater flex and micro fracture potential. Everything has been cut to reduce cost sacrificing longevity. Yes old panels from the 80-90’s might still work. The panels today, maybe residential might go 25+ years but utility scale at 1000-1500 volts they are not lasting. ( from my friends who have to do troubleshooting on multi megawatt arrays. ). Part of the reason is larger format, and thinner glass meaning lots of flex and heat expansion/contraction.
I’m all for recycling the panels, it’s just that especially here in the USA, we haven’t set up the process and we don’t make them here so they go back to China. Yes recycling takes energy but overall it’s a net gain.
As to the hoopla about wind turbine blades, it’s the same thing, compared to what? Ok so more coal,oil, gas instead of blades because we’ve been stupid and not come up with a reuse design? So we stop wind because we can’t figure out how to recycle blades but we can dump billions of tons of invisible carbon?
Head meet wall.
The older blades didn’t have the engineering/life span that the new ones do.
Most new blades are expected to live the life of the turbine, about 30 -35 yrs.
J
Much of the surplus panel supply is still very usable. There’s a company in AZ where you can buy used 250 watt panels, that still offer the majority of the original output, for $63. I’ve been considering buying a couple pallets and using them as a carport roof.
RE: Nearly half of EU exposed to ‘warning’ drought levels, report says Euronews (resilc). If you were already worried about hunger this fall….ag output in Europe is certain to fall well below expectations.
And drought is not good for nuclear energy where you need to spend a lot for refrigeration. This is actually quite problematic in Spain were there is simply not enough water now to fulfil all the necessities. This summer we have reached record temperatures in river waters above 22ºC in the Mediterranean side, this meaning also less cooling capacity. In Spain we cannot go nuclear: there is not enough water for it.
I heard today that crop yields are expected to be lower across the whole world this year (on The Duran I think) and that there were only two countries that were expecting increased yields – Russia and China. The food riots this year will be epic and not all of them will be in less developed countries. One hopes that the upcoming G20 meeting later this year will concentrate on this problem but to be honest, I suspect that the agenda will be hijacked for some countries to do some grandstanding.
And the wildfires raging in much of France and elsewhere cannot be helpful with regard to water shortages.
That’s stunning to think about, Ignacio. Talk about painting ourselves into a corner. Meanwhile, there’s discussion about whether the crypto miners who migrated to the libertarian dystopia known as Texas should cut back during this heat wave so there aren’t blackouts that shut off people’s cooling devices leading to people dying for a coin of questionable value.
“A coin of questionable value”–containing precisely as much value as it contains matter.
France is already cutting nuclear power output significantly due to rising temperatures of inland waters (its not so much a shortage of water, but that the water is too warm). They are, of course, changing the regulations to allow a higher temperature of water to be discharged, which will almost inevitably cause a lot of damage to fish and habitats downriver.
Use the sea! Most UK nuclear power stations are coastal rather than lacustrine or fluvial (lovely to give those words an outing!)
The problem with the sea is that its full of jellyfish (and even more so in the future thanks to climate change and overfishing). Nuclear plants don’t like jellyfish.
‘Read this story a few days ago and it hasn’t left me. San Diego cops stood by while a woman was terrorized by a stalker in her home for 12 hours, even as neighbors begged them to do something. Stalker then emerged and told them the woman was dead.’
So, is it too soon to come up with a name to describe why this happens so often? Should we call it the Uvalde effect? The Uvalde doctrine? Uvalda tactics? Blue Lives matter?
Home of the Brave effect.
“Call the police when you need help and whatever you do, don’t buy a gun for personal protection in your home effect…”
As soon as he broke through the door she could have blown him away. Instead she’s dead and he’s not.
So, is it too soon to come up with a name to describe why this happens so often?
“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a cop. To me, being a cop was better than being President of the United States. Even before I first wandered into the cabstand for an afterschool job I knew I wanted to be a part of the force. It was there that I knew that I belonged. To me, it meant being somebody in the neighborhood that was full of nobodies. The cops weren’t like anybody else. I mean, they did whatever they wanted. They double parked in front of a hydrant and nobody ever game them a ticket. In the summer when they played cards all night, nobody ever called the cops on the cops.”
Call it the Goodfellas Effect.
Uvalde was the tipping point for me. If law enforcement refuses to protect and be proactive about it, then people are on their own (see Greenwood Mall). That supports vigilantism and undercuts gun control efforts. At this point, I’m ok with that.
Legally armed citizens have stopped two mass shooters within the last two weeks by killing them.
The saying that “When seconds count the police are minutes away” has a great deal of truth to it in well run jurisdictions.
Then they stand outside for hours while children are murdered or women are savagely beaten because “Blue Lives Matter”.
And others don’t.
The Cops are too busy with parking ticket quota’s and asset forfeiture to waste time on matters that don’t produce revenue…
an aside: t.g. for the pizza delivery guy here. really.
25 yo pizza delivery man runs into burning house, saves four children who tell him another might be in the house. He goes back in, finds the girl, jumps out a window with her
-Jake Coco
https://twitter.com/jakecoco/status/1549142094354210816
That was one gutsy performance by that pizza guy. The moment came and he did what had to be done, no matter the dangers.
WHathappened to the pizza? Did he get a tip?
And this kind of police response really isn’t that new. Residents in areas of lower socio-economic status have been sounding the alarm about this for decades.
Now with cameras everywhere, the “war on terror”, and the prevalence of mass shootings, people are paying more attention to police response times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZDIitWz8Go/
Public Enemy – 911 Is A Joke
“I dialed 911 a long time ago
Don’t you see how late they’re reactin’
They only come and they come when they wanna
So get the morgue truck and embalm the goner…”
After a domestic terrorist let loose a barrage from a multitude of Steely Dans in Pavlovegas-killing 60 and wounding 600, their solution was to make a veritable shitlode of ‘Vegas Strong’ bumper stickers that citizens of sin city could affix on the rear echelon of their vehicles.
‘Uvalde Proud’
Yeah, that’ll work.
‘Vegas Strong’? Didn’t they steal that from ‘Boston Strong’ after those bombs went off? Even after all those years there are two things that I have never forgotten about the later. The first was when the police were ordering people out of their homes and they had to have their hands on their heads with guns trained on them. That was creepy that. The second was when those brothers visited their homelands, the Russians kept an eye on them and when they returned to the US the Russians tried to tell the FBI that these were potential terrorisst but the FBI said ‘Nah! It’ll be fine.’
Yeah, we’re reduced to Omission Accomplished statements in the land of the free, home of the brave, etc.
Land of the flee, home of the grave?
Oh there are videos of the cops being on the floor below the shooter at the Vegas shooting, waiting there while you hear shooting going on above them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TseEhAtIlZo
I am happy they got bumper stickers though!
I have a colleague who is the kind of PMC former republican that the DNC salivates over. He is very clear he only votes for Democrats because Republicans have become too bat guano crazy for him, and was very critical of “defund the police.” This is what he had to say after Uvalde:
“Fund the police, defund the police. Doesn’t seem to make any difference.”
COPS: Cowards Only Protecting themSelves
And the 1% dont forget
A name to describe this phenomenon of police standing by while violent crimes occur? How about “progress”?
Post-George Floyd / BLM, a huge spotlight was put on the police: “All Cops are Bastards,” remember? Riots, police stations trashed, cop cars burned, “Defund the Police,” remember?
And now all of a sudden we still want police officers to be noble martyrs, selflessly risking their lives for “us”?
Maybe we actually got the kinder, gentler policing that everyone was rioting for two years ago: instead of barging in, guns blazing, maybe today’s “community officers” are different: they pause, reflect, take a deep breath, go to their happy place? Maybe they think for a few minutes about what a just response might really look like, and maybe just do nothing? maybe just walk away and let people figure things out for themselves in their own way?
Congratulations America, you got the police you really wanted!
And now you complain about it?
No, there is a *huge* difference. They are still being paid.
Excuse me, but no one was advocating not doing their job. There is nothing about demanding a non violent response to a guy selling loose cigarettes on the street or a kid playing with a gun that justifies standing around as someone shoots people especially children. Requesting that an officer takes a moment to confirm there is a reason for force doesn’t mean stand around and wait for however long it takes the coroner to remove the body or bodies. It doesn’t take hours to evaluate that a situation is dangerous.
There is a giant abyss from being reckless, violent and trigger happy to not doing a damn thing but checking their phones. But if they want the public to think there is not only no reason to pay a premium for police but to pay for them at all, they may be on tthe right track
There are videos of NYPD trashing their own cars and in one case setting their car on fire during the BLM protests.
Agents provocateur are common, or have you forgotten the FBI plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer?
That’s not it at all, The two things are actually hard linked together.
The “overly aggressive arrests”, “pulling your gun and shooting the suspect at first sign of trouble”, and “intentionally not engaging a known armed and dangerous suspect, even when lives are at risk” all come from the same motivation.
What we have is police with a “I’m protecting my own ass first” mentality.
Call it the Democratic Party effect.
That story reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huez5QyZ5lI
Tracy Chapman is a great artist.
Lynx in the links. good stuff.
file under class warfare. from skynews with their spin, still the guest they interview is very good.
There is a ‘deafening media silence’ on global protests
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG660H1JjWU
adding: “Latinx” / ;)
adding: greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to climate change. The elephant in the room is China.
https://rhg.com/research/preliminary-2020-greenhouse-gas-emissions-estimates-for-china/
The West cannot do it alone, or at this point even mostly. Should we destroy our economies – see Germany’s problem heading into winter with no RU gas – to reach a laudable goal which may be quixotic, considering China? Why no modern nuclear plants, for instance?
Should we destroy our economies … to reach a laudable goal which may be quixotic, considering China?
China claims that it intends to build nuclear plants every time I’ve I heard — though numbers announced have fluctuated over the years — and also for the last twenty years they’ve been doing increasingly wide-scale weather modification/geoengineering operations.
Re. that latter, I suspect the West’s MSM don’t report on it because our rentier lords hope to get the neoliberal ‘carbon trading’ and ‘ecosystem services’ contracts and legislation locked in first, though some of the Chinese weather engineering projects are getting rather big to ignore. I’ve also noticed at least one Chinese company trying to sell weather modification/geoengineering services in Africa; don’t know how big it is and how successful it’s been.
Watch what they do – big increase in new coal fired plants.
https://time.com/6090732/china-coal-power-plants-emissions/
and
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2317274-china-is-building-more-than-half-of-the-worlds-new-coal-power-plants/
Watch what they do
Oh, I know. For the last fifteen-plus years, whenever anyone I know talks to any mainland Chinese guy about all those coal fired plants, the answer is always,”You wait and see, we’re going to throw up a whole bunch of nuclear plants.”
Claims for numbers thereof, as I say, have fluctuated over the years.
We offshored all manufacturing to China and this resulted in more pollution there and now we blame them for greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. For a country that manufactures so much less we sure put out a lot greenhouse gas!
Exactly. Thanks for pointing out this obvious fact that people seem to always forget when demonizing China.
I’m not demonizing China. I’m pointing out the obvious. The Western manufacturers sought to present an enlightened environmental front by simply offshoring their manufacturing to another country with fewer or no environmental laws. (Much more profitable to manufacture with cheap labor and no environmental cleanup costs, don’t ya know.) Call it a form of early carbon offsets trading.
Sacramento’s homeless population soars by 67% and is now HIGHER than San Francisco while crime rises in tandem with robbery up 42% and rapes nearly doubling: Activists blame skyrocketing price of rentals for the crisis in California’s capital city Daily Mail
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sacramento is on the fringes of Godzone, but the land of little reign only extends to Elk Grove and that dogma won’t hunt there, as the Capital city is full of lefty politicians who once went to church on a dare when they were dating a religious hottie and wanted to score points.
In its favor, it’s the only big city in Cali with adequate surface water in the American & Sacramento Rivers and if I was homeless, that’s a plus, for when i’m in the Sierra on a backpack trip, every creek, river and lake is a chance to take a bath, what’s that worth?
As far as I can tell, the main attribute of the place is that it is only a couple hours drive to Lake Tahoe, otherwise. I wonder how the homeless population is like in Tahoe?
There isn’t a whiff of chance of seeing any in Sequoia NP as far as I can tell. I’ve asked a few parkie friends and they’ve never seen any homeless, plus the tyranny of distance and entrance fee into the park is a great dissuader. What would a down and out Euell Gibbons eat anyhow?
Walked by a 200 foot stretch of wild strawberries on the Hockett trail the other day in Mineral King in the East Fork Grove of Giant Sequoias, and i’m doubtful they’ll fruit this year which is often the case during droughts, and if we were flush with winters bounty, a really big one would be half the size of your pinky fingernail.
The commonest fruit on the vine are thimbleberries that grow from around 6,000 to 8,000 feet and they have a piquant taste bordering on sweet but not quite. I once picked a liter nalgene full of them on a bumper crop summer day. There won’t be much of the blood red when ripe berry this year though.
The place i’d hang out if I was homeless and wanted to be in the wilderness?
Reds Meadow on the backside of Mammoth. It’s a resupply station for backpackers on the JMT/PCT and the way it works is you mail a bucket of food there and for a fee, they hold it for you when you walk there from starting from Yosemite. A surprising amount of people who attempt these walks don’t finish them and thus their food doesn’t get picked up, and i’m not sure what happens to the largess, but i’d make buddies with the people who run the place and explain how I could help them out in getting rid of it
A Nasal Spray Seems to Help Clear Coronavirus in Clinical Trial
I’m glad to see Enovid/Sanotize getting some mainstream media coverage. This trial looks promising, and I hope that it gets approval in the US so I don’t have to order it from Israel for $45 dollars a bottle.
But at this point I have to wonder if people would use it even if it was cheap, effective, and widely available. After all, masks are already cheap, effective, and widely available.
Using a product that prevents you from getting covid would go against the idea that the pandemic is over. People seem determined to get themselves infected with covid over and over again out of spite.
Masking is widely disparaged on the conservative Youtube channels I spy on. It’s not helpful that our elites are often spotted maskless at galas and confabs with dozens of other unmasked elites. It’s seen as just another power play to engender conformity to authority. I was in mostly maskless NJ this week and got a few side-eyes for my mask.
I had a medical procedure early this morning. Anesthesiologist came in to introduce himself while I waited in my bed all dressed down in my gown and cute little non-slip socks. When I started to put on my mask, he said “Don’t bother, we are past this.” I replied that “Actually, no, we are not past this and put on my mask.” He shrugged. Every other employee in the Ambulatory Care Center was wearing a mask. A third of the staff in my office has COVID. The younger patients seem to be having the worst of it.
I wear my mask, but in my work as a research scientist masks have been common for a lot of what we do. But I do think people would use a nasal spray that worked, provided it was “affordable,” as in free at the point of use. How much could be manufactured and distributed universally for the $50B+ we are funneling to Raytheon et al. through Ukraine?
“Heatwave engulfs much of Europe as wildfires rage”
Saw this on the news tonight and it did not look good. Another guy fighting these fires in Tábara, north-western Spain nearly got it. He was using some heavy machinery to dig a trench to save his town when the wind changed direction and engulfed his vehicle. He managed to make it out if the flames but some of his clothes were on fire. Afterwards he was airlifted to a hospital suffering serious burns-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XToTs7GzVOM (1:14 mins)
It hearts watching it. What a horrible summer we are having. Some of the fires destroying natural parks.
Summer started in May this year.
It was 112 down in tiny town I was told, and when that was happening, up @ 7,000 feet drinking tea inside the Silver City Resort with my friend who owns the oldest cabin in Mineral King, watching it come down in buckets for 30 minutes-so much so that I rented an ark from them and the only thing I could pair up was mis-matched dogs and maybe a few marmots. It got down to the mid 50’s and settled in the high 60’s for a spell, while it was sweltering down below in a hundred and hell.
Here (Veneto region, Italy) 34°C (93°F) and no rain since the end of April. Farmers here are making back-and-forth trips with their autobotti to the river to water their crops. Fortunately, the river is still flowing. No end to the heat or drought is in sight. Latest anticyclone is nicknamed “Apocalisse”. The trees are starting to drop their leaves. If someone thoughtlessly flicks a cigarette from a car, the forest here will go up like a torch. Even going to the mountains offers little relief. The freezing point is at or above 5000 meters. https://youtu.be/Zk_rDOuRmBk
Unusually cool and wet summer here in Siberia.
Wow. Siberia! I have always wanted to visit Siberia. It seems so mysterious to me for some reason.
Climate is getting weird everywhere. Might this be related with reduced ice cap in the north pole? What we see in Spain and West Europe is hot air from Sahara more frequently going North above parallel 40ºN and less influence from the Atlantic. This time, and this is quite unusual the centre of the anticyclone is over the Bretagne peninsula in France. West Mediterranean is now cooler that West Atlantic and this is weird.
The manager of my local pizza joint and I have become buddys. He told me that he recently had his yard turfed but that the grass is withering. He noted that you can clearly see the edges of the blocks of turf because they can’t grow together. Sadly, he isn’t the type to try sustainable landscaping.
‘John Fetterman is the kind of political communicator the Left needs’
Wasn’t aware of Fetterman or what ailed him. I’m a little surprised (and pleased) the Berniecrats are still out there competing. Does it still help to have Bernie endorse your campaign? I can’t tell any more and we’re three months from the mid-terms.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-candidate-fetterman-almost-died-stroke-vows-return-trail-2022-06-03/
Then asked Google if all blood thinners are the same:
https://medlineplus.gov/bloodthinners.html
https://www.everydayhealth.com/atrial-fibrillation/treatment/new-guidelines-for-afib-patients-better-blood-thinners-less-aspirin/
I was calculating his odds of both winning and living to enjoy power.
The Pulitzer Prize Committee says that even though Russiagate was completely made up, the reporting was solid except for the parts that weren’t true.
These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.
https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-pulitzer-prize-board-2
Some of the news that’s fit to print. The rest, we make up.
Add the Pulitzer to the list of institutions with falling public trust. This is just sad.
At least the Pulitzer Prize Committee is now acknowledging that their wonky award also applies to works of fiction.
Pretty rich considering how the Pulitzer committee yanked one or two previous awards in the recent past for “plagiarism”.
To recap: it’d perfectly okay for a Pulitzer winner to lie or make up facts — long as they don’t steal them first. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised considering “our” President is a serial plagiarist.
Colorado Springs man becomes fourth person to push a peanut up Pikes Peak with his nose Colorado Public Radio (David L).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I once tried to push a cashew up Castle Rocks, but lets face it, they don’t roll like peanuts.
“Sacramento’s homeless population soars by 67% in three years and is now HIGHER than San Francisco”
Thanks Gavin Newsom, you did as governor for Sacramento what you did for San Francisco as mayor.
BTW, numbers are bullsheet. San Francisco has around 8,000 homeless.
Just think what this clown could do for America as president.
Note dates: July 20, 2014.
Last month, the city’s Human Services Agency released a report detailing the status of San Francisco’s Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, which was instituted by Gavin Newsom in 2004.
“In ten years there will be no need for homeless shelters as my plan will eliminate the need for them.”
“San Francisco has so many services geared toward helping the homeless that it warrants an entire 1,114 page wiki. There are different services for food, housing, medical, employment, different services for veterans, for women and children, for legal services, for special needs groups, and dozens more. Each different service has its own acronym and its own plethora of boxes to check.”
https://hoodline.com/2014/07/ten-years-later-a-look-at-the-city-s-plan-to-end-chronic-homelessness/
San Francisco under Newsom became a magnet for homeless people from all over the nation. Here’s an image of where they came from and to where they were sent back.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-IWl6SDjUzHQ/U8m654-nL0I/AAAAAAAAXsE/YhzP3cYOrlc/homewardbound.png?imgmax=1600
San Francisco’s homeless problems predate Newsom by a couple of decades. The situation has always been bad, but it has been accelerating for years to a point well past dystopian. I live a few miles south of the city and no longer want to go there at all. I get so angry for the poor people who have been left destitute by our psychopathic society and so angry at the “happy shiny people” who run everything and who do nothing but make things worse for everyone but themselves that it just makes me ill. Oh, and every administration in SF has had a bold, brave “plan” to fix the issue. But as to Newsom, he is perhaps the slimiest and most shameless of them all, though he has very stiff competition in His Honorable (lol) Willie Brown.
Think of redlining and urban renewal back in the day. Think of all the displaced people back then. A long thread worth reading, imo:
from Segregation by Design
https://twitter.com/SegByDesign/status/1549037979095961600
Where did the people go?
It really is heartbreaking and enraging. Thanks for this thread.
The cream always rises to the top and survival of the fittest dictates how the market distributes wealth to the successful …
I mean how is the market to clear – ?????? – if the dead wood is not burned …
I think even eight thousand is an under count. About five years ago, I did a little research and concluded around twelve thousand, maybe fourteen is more accurate. Still, it’s thousands with 0.5 to 2% of the city’s population. Even eight is just a sliver under one per cent. To be fair to the official counters, which I do not want to be so, it is hard to count them as people live everywhere while trying not to be bothered.
The lucky ones found something they could afford to live in. The others to the streets, the parks, the trees in the hills, or their car. The Golden Gate Park is common especially as it is a small forest. And in the various parts of the Bay, cars, vans, RVs are covertly parked hiding from the police to avoid tickets with small communities in forested spots. Or just in tents and scraps.
For forty years there has been constant agitation, planning, speechifying, programs, grants, loans, donations with the problem never getting better, but some people are making bank off of it. Jobs in the cities, counties, the umpteen nonprofits and the old charities up and down this state. Money streams that never seems to get to the people who actually need it aside from small programs that never do anything.
Can the Democrats be any more inept? Remember, the Pennsylvania state legislature is controlled by the GOP. Let’s give them a trifecta. We can fund raise off of how awful these guys will be.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/19/mastriano-pennsylvania-governor-race-00046423
Democrats boosted a MAGA longshot in the Pa. gov’s race. Now he’s got a real shot at winning.
Well the DLC/Clinton Cabal dastardly plot to have Donald Trump as HRC’s opponent was so successful why wouldn’t they try it in other races. /s
You do have to remember that when you have nothing to offer as a candidate, the only thing you can do is point out how bad the other guy is. Unfortunately they forget the other guy may actually promise something tangible that mitigates their nebulous evil qualities.
The Dem estab’s promotion of T in the GOP primary was called the Pied Piper strategy. They’re still using it. (Leaving aside the question why they might think they can’t win against a moderate GOP candidate.)
You’d think that a fairly long article with a headline that says Democrats boosted Mastriano in the Republican race would contain in its body at least one line that was an example of Democrats doing that. But you would be wrong. Nothing in the text demonstrates the headline’s thesis at all.
Which is not to say that it might not have happened, but if it did this article provides no evidence of it.
You give an evang politician an inch, they’ll take a cubit.
Politico is late to the story.
From Business insider:
https://www.businessinsider.com/democrats-boost-far-right-candidates-hope-be-easy-to-beat-2022-6?op=1
From NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/27/1106859552/primary-illinois-colorado-republican-candidate-democrats-ads
Not that hard to find if you have a search engine.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/13/ny-times-democrat-runs-ad-intended-to-help-doug-mastriano-win-pennsylvania-gop-gubernatorial-primary/
https://crooksandliars.com/2022/05/please-dont-worry-about-josh-shapiros
Yes. But if you put it in the headline it should be in your article.
“CDC ends its COVID program for cruise ships saying they can ‘manage their own COVID-19 mitigation’ USA Today
You’ll have to picture my response. Imagine every clown emjoi ever created….
My thought was that if the CDC ends its COVID program for cruise ships, then they can’t be sued for the consequences as they appear. Here in Oz, Sydney has had two cruise ship arrive recently and in each there were “officially” 100 people infected but nobody really tried to stop all the rest spreading out near on far, especially on bus tours inland.
Western media rarely pull a Bagdad Bob.
Usually their lies are by omission, by keeping unfavorable news off air.
Thus the Ukraine coverage has been one of crying women and children, delivered by reporters that can’t go anywhere without their Ukrainian “bodyguards”.
Goooooooood Mooooooorning Fiatnam!
Many in the platoon were stricken with Moneypox after contracting it visa via putting all their pay into cryptocurrency, and many were going through withdrawals although they couldn’t actually make any withdrawals because the exchanges weren’t putting out anymore.
That is pretty funny Wuki. Do you eat or smoke it? :)
I in jest mass quantities of mirth and tend to wake up funny.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-62179004
More of the current UK/US Sinophobia campaign. Big public splash by MI5 about Christine Lee as an “agent of influence” (a designation that seems to be without legal meaning).
“The government and the intelligence agencies have the intelligence tools to identify some of the activities going on,” says Lord Evans, a former MI5 head who now chairs the Committee on Standards in Public Life. “But the question is, if you identify those activities, what can you then do about it?”
(since no laws seem to be being broken)
“Over months, officials looked to see if there was enough evidence to prosecute Lee for any crime. But they drew a blank.”
(seemingly confirming that the ostensibly sinister activity is perfectly lawful)
“That left an alert, publicly naming her as agent of influence.”
(ie, a pr offensive to stigmatize lawful activity)
That Jezebel story about Post-Roe piqued my interest. But my interest vanished as soon as I saw this part of the deck below the headline:
“We knew pregnant people’s lives would be threatened.”
My questions: Since when did this pass for acceptable discourse? And what is so awful about noting that women are the ones who are pregnant?
Oh, if you really want to lose all will to live, read the comments after the story. The reason that all of these bad things are happening is because of our failure to vote for Hillary in 2016!
After the Roe decision, I commented here that for a variety of reasons its very common for successful social movements to overstep the mark when they achieve their initial aims. This almost invariably leads to a backlash – a particular example here in Ireland was when anti-abortion activists became more and more extreme after winning a constitutional amendment, eventually pushing even their own supporters into rejecting them. I predicted that this is exactly what would happen in the US, where all but the most extreme anti-abortionists would be repelled by a constant repetition of horror stories involving young rape victims and dead women.
The problem of course is that for things to change you need an opposing side to be patient and ready to take an opportunity to win the middle ground (which as with most things, includes the majority of people) with reasonable and moderate arguments. From the rhetoric I’ve seen, exactly the opposite is taking place. You may well end up in a situation where the majority of people are equally repelled by the arguments being made by both pro and anti abortion activists. I’ve no idea what the result will be, but I doubt it will be pretty.
The problem of course is that for things to change you need an opposing side to be patient and ready to take an opportunity to win the middle ground (which as with most things, includes the majority of people) with reasonable and moderate arguments.
This is a very important point. Thanks for stating it. It’s hard to keep from being swept up in hyper-emotional rhetoric, but avoiding that is what’s needed to move the arguments into reasonable discussions and acceptable compromise, instead of heels-dug-in extremes few people want (though good for fund raising for some organizations).
In most important political things in life, you can either campaign in a way that makes you feel good and morally superior, or you can campaign in a way that is likely to win. Certainly in the US, the right is far better at the latter.
I haven’t seem granular polling, but I suspect that people who believe absolutely that life begins at conception and that an abortion is the exact same as murdering a child, is a relatively small minority. Likewise, I think that most people don’t believe that a woman’s right to choose is an absolute right (for example, with very late term pregnancies). I suspect that the majority of people fall somewhere between ‘I think a foetus is a baby, but I understand that sometimes a woman just has no choice’, and ‘I support a womans right to choose, but I’m not comfortable with the idea that an unborn foetus has no rights at all’. A lot of people have probably never given it a lot of thought. These are the people who you try to persuade. And you don’t do that with hectoring language, patronising lectures, hysterical exaggerations or gory pictures.
If US progressive NGO’s were really serious, they could do worse than visit Ireland and find out how the gay marriage and abortion constitutional referendums were passed. In both cases, after many defeats progressives learned that you have to be patient, you have to do your groundwork, and you have to pick and choose your political moment carefully. You pick your spokespeople very carefully (the most passionate campaigners are often the worst at persuasion). And when needed, you have to be prepared to fight dirty and lie -the most famous case of a woman who died after being refused an abortion was probably a gross exaggeration of her actual medical problem.
Maybe someone somewhere is encouraging the US anti-abortionists to find a middle ground, but they’re moving on to further extremes, defining “life” as beginning with fertilization, considering ways to punish interstate travel, attacking contraception. The young girls and dead women are reality. That’s what happens when abortions are illegal. Either people care about that or they don’t. I think the stories should be told.
“Pregnant people” (erasing women for some reason), like “Latinx”, is academic leftism at its finest – for some definition of finest. / ;)
All is not (yet) lost! They refer to ‘life of the mother’ when they could have said ‘life of the birthing person’.
Now this is where I should have meant that social creativity comment from yesterday to land. ;)
But it’s not leftism, as there’s no material analysis implicated. It’s a class and cultural phenomenon that has some material implications. I think they call the dimension you’re talking about “moral entrepreneurialism”, which is definitely capitalist, which is an authoritarian-right ideology. Which explains their tone problem. I really gotta settle in with some Bourdieu.
That discourse infects academia, NGO’s, and government at all levels. My pet theory is that it’s a form of social control. You promote a culturally caustic and intellectually ludicrous ideology then when the majority cries “BS!” you crack down. It’s a self-licking Rainbow popsicle.
2+2=4
I started noticing”Help Wanted” posters for home health aides several months ago, they are on every bulletin board I’ve seen in Sonoma County for quite a while.
Full time or part time, pay is $18-$30 per hour.
They have the little pull off tabs with the phone # at the bottom and the most I’ve seen torn off is two tabs and I have seen a couple of dozen posters.
I wonder if the reason has something to do with a thing that rhymes with Maxine. As in, you must accept the presence of Maxine within your being or you will not be considered for this job.
Ah, you have a point. It is beginning to look like one of the main goals of the “Maxine” mandates is to scare off or kill off as many of the “health care professionals” as possible and thus facilitate the ‘robust’ culling of the population.
is $18-30/hr enough if you have to drive your own car? in Sonoma County? with rent etc?
Something I notice a lot lately is how many women have alopecia and have shaved their head as a result. It’s a common side-effect of Covid, even asymptomatic cases.
I’ve heard that posters of these help wanted ads will frequently tear off a couple of tabs to “prime the pump” when they post the ad.
This is an effort to get future onlookers to believe others have judged the offer to be worthwhile.
Two torn off tabs might actually represent zero torn off tabs by interested parties..
Russia’s been sending ordnance over at an astounding rate in UKR. They must have been running their munitions factories 24/7 for at least a year to get prepared.
How come none of our genius’s at the Three Letter Acronym agencies noticed this?
That’s a very big, potentially trillion dollar question. The abject failure of western intelligence agencies to anticipate Russia’s ability to maintain such an intense war of attrition will be seen as one of the biggest failures since… well, the last catastrophic failure of western intelligence (I’ve lost count).
The simple answer is the agencies suffer from bureaucratic rot and simply exist to beget themselves in the absence of oversight. Mark Warner is the chairman of the intelligence committee and he’s worried about TikTok.
On a different level, the “end of history” brain disease means Western elites can’t conceive how anything works. Kardashian sponsored items ordered from Amazon on their IPhone magically arrive in a UPS truck. America has wunder weapons. The Russians don’t even have Yakov Smirnov anymore. The “OMG Russia” types laughed at how the US Airforce would crush Russia’s only plane. Its not a perfect answer, but the problem presented by 2500 USAF planes and 800 foreign bases doesn’t reach these people. The problem is self evident, but they just see the world in magical terms.
I suspect it’s as simple as a question of priorities. Intelligence agencies can only study so many things at the same time, and they will move their resources to areas that the political leadership regards as important. Put simply, for the last couple of decades, agencies have been recruiting Arabic and Pashtun speakers, experts on South Asia, and people who know their way around technical Mandarin, and can study Chinese military procurement, as well, of course, as the inner workings of the Communist Party. Russia simply hasn’t been that much of a priority and, to the extent that it is, the focus has been on the political side and on Russian foreign policy. To really study the Russian armaments industry, as was done during the Cold War, you need people who can at least read technical Russian, and have a solid background in engineering and industrial production. And then you need to devote resources to actually acquiring the information in the first place, so that you can analyse it. I suspect other things have elbowed those kinds of studies aside. Even then, when you consider all the other priorities in the world, it’s hard to argue that, say a year and a half ago, anyone would be particularly interested in Russian ammunition and missile stockpiles, as opposed to a dozen other current topics.
This is well argued, but there is actually a case where the focus on the Near-East, Arabic speakers, etc, intersects the Russian world: Syria.
The intervention of Russia in Syria should definitely have drawn a close attention to the tactics, weaponry and especially the capabilities of Russia to sustain a long-running (since 2015!) military operation, including logistics and the production of “consumables”.
No, Syria does not have the scale of the Ukraine operation, but still. I remember there were some commentators stating early on that Russia would be bogged down and could not mobilize enough forces and sustain them long enough so far away from their Russian bases to win. And yet Russia achieved surprisingly a lot with limited forces, choosing judiciously where to engage them — again, a parallel to what happened in Ukraine.
So I personally tend to think that Western intelligence agencies mucked up; the Russian intervention in Syria should have motivated a thorough study of what Russia was actually capable of; apparently, this was not done.
It comes down in the end to what the political leadership thinks is important, because government agencies don’t make their own priorities. I suspect that there just wasn’t enough political interest in what the Russians were doing in Syria, and that if you trawled through proxies for what interested western foreign policy establishments a couple of years ago – semi-official media, think-tank reports, speeches, communiqués – you would find an obsession with Afghanistan, China/Taiwan, Iran, the Islamic State and so forth, but very little interest in the Russian military.
I could believe that theory if their stories weren’t so totally off the mark. It’s five months straight of predicting Putin is going to run out of various things in the next few days, weeks max. I don’t think hiring more people will fix the problem of not being able to spot that something doesn’t add up. And it’s not like recruiting Arabic speakers have had any noticeable effect on the final deliverable either.
But requesting more money to hire more people is what they will try, no doubt about that.
It is good to read your insights on intelligence matters and the world in general. I look forward to your comments here at Naked Capitalism and find myself searching for them in the afternoons. There is another site which I no longer visit where I believe you made some of the better contributions. If I am wrong please don’t correct me as I am happier this way.
That’s kind. Like others, I suspect, I’ve reduced the number of sites I comment on to almost nothing, in recent years. There are times when it’s just not worth it.
I suspect Western Intelligence was seduced into complacency by the siren song of Western analysts that the “Russia Federation has the GDP of Italy” and other nonsense. NATO expansion, despite Russia’s warnings, can be explained as a 2-decade display of indifference and ignorance about the real extent of military power that has been building there since the dissolution of the USSR. John Mearsheimer’s constant warnings since 2015 that the U.S. is inviting the total destruction of Ukraine by Russia was (he candidly admits) considered heresy by all Russia experts except Henry Kissinger. How can such a poor, backward country like Russia possibly do that if Ukraine is backed up by the U.S.? We are now finding out.
Westerners schooled in market economics can’t conceive of how a command and control economy can actually work well, as Michael Hudson has pointed out on this website. They laughably equate dollar-ruble exchange statistics with actual production capacity. But in fact the Russians continue to maintain a modern nuclear arsenal and associated delivery systems; first rate conventional hardware and munitions for the price (so cost effective that poorer countries like India prefer them); and some of the best scientists and engineers in the world. And yes, they’ve stood up to us in Syria and elsewhere. Hmmm.
One must assume that the very public collective failures of our “intelligence” community (when was there a success?) are indicative of systemic causes. If so, this means that everywhere they operate in the world is making the U.S. weaker, not stronger, due to group think and stupidity at all levels. What to do?
April Wolfe
@AWolfeful
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Read this story a few days ago and it hasn’t left me. San Diego cops stood by while a woman was terrorized by a stalker in her home for 12 hours, even as neighbors begged them to do something. Stalker then emerged and told them the woman was dead.
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At that point, dispatch records show the call was upgraded to a higher priority, and officers started staging at a parking lot nearby. About 45 minutes later, they arrived at Connie’s condo and knocked on the door.
“They finally show up,” said Michelle. “They’re walking up and I’m noticing them looking around and I come out of my door and I point to the unit and I say he’s in there, and they just nodded their heads. So they flashed their light, they could totally see the broken glass.”
Police say officers tried calling Connie’s phone and looked for her car. But since Connie didn’t answer the door, officers ultimately left.
“At this point, I’m like what is going on?” said Michelle. “Where are they going? What’s happening? You have no idea what he’s going to do. He can easily break into someone else’s home. Especially on the first floor if he got into the second floor. And I was thinking why is it not an emergency? Why are they just walking away?”
The next morning, just before 8:30 a.m., police say Chambers came outside and told a neighbor to call 911 because Connie was dead. Surveillance video obtained by NBC 7 Investigates shows officers arresting Chambers minutes later.
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Does every police department now operate using Uvalde procedures? As someone who has always been a big believer in gun control, because, you know, you don’t need a gun because we have police for protection. I have to say I am reevaluating my beliefs.
Its like we can’t do anything when the police committ brutality, and we can’t do anyting when they don’t do their jobs.
I wonder sometimes, especially with the mayor and the cops now praising the Greenwood Park Mall “Samaritan,” are we returning to the Old West? Gunslingers, bandits, posses, vigilance committees, the whole nine yards? Even as little as a year ago I would have considered such a thing well within the realm of alternative history fiction.
Alternative history?
“Civil Asset Forfeiture” is armed robbery under color of Law to the tune of more than $4,000,000,000 annually.
Ever hear of Homan Square?
I could go on,but the idea that Police are there to protect the public or any individual member of the public who isn’t wealthy or powerful is absurd.
The duty of the police is to maintain public order, period.
The supremes ruled on this issue some years, If a cop witnesses a violent rape taking place while eating lunch they have NO duty to intervene.
And yes, that is a real example
stories like this have been going on for years. i can’t remember the name but i saw a documentary where a woman had a restraining order against her husband, he showed up on the front lawn in the new place she was renting with her kids, she sees him and calls the cops and tells them about his previous attacks and the restraining order against him, and then he breaks down the door, chases her outside, knocks her down and breaks her neck. she was paralyzed from the neck down for life. and the cops hadn’t even shown up yet. even though him chasing her around took 20-30minutes.
a restraining order is essentially just a piece of paper.
i had a former boyfriend stalk me, showing up at work and at home and calling hundreds of times per day. i went to the police with his threatening voicemail messages on tape from a friend’s answering machine. they said “we can’t do anything until he does something to you. get a restraining order.” when faced with the bureaucratic process through which i would have to do that (finding out where he lived, which was nowhere and having him served and showing up to face him in court with evidence of his harassment, all while i tried to live and work and go to school as usual), i just bowed out and disappeared for a year, quit my job and hid in a friend’s house. then took up with an entirely new job and new friends so that they couldn’t pass info back to him. my own mother didn’t have my phone number nor address for some time, because even she could not be trusted not to give the info away to someone else from whom he could wheedle or extort it.
i have seen cops show up to a man beating a woman, and her just making defensive guarding motions with her hands to protect vital bodily areas while he did so because she knew that if she fought back, they would take her to jail as well and her child would be without any parent (the beating man was her child’s father, who came over just to beat her up that day). and when the cops arrived, they again said just that: “ma’am, we would have to take both of you in right now. if you want him to go, you will have to go too.” they convinced him to move along, but because he was smart enough to stop beating her after the police were in hearing distance (i had called them at her screaming for me, and i shouted that they were on the way and he kept beating her virtually until they parked in front of the house and started walking up to the porch), they did not witness the attack and essentially decided it was “he said/she said”.
my mother was beaten so badly by her partner that she was in the hospital with a crushed cheek and orbital bone, breathing through a gash ripped in her face penetrating the sinus after being pistol whipped, with half her hair torn out. the police told my grandmother “well, if you went over there yourself with a baseball bat, we probably wouldn’t do anything about that but we can’t do anything for her unless she’s going to press charges”. of course, they knew my mother wasn’t going to go through the process of that, because her partner was a drug dealer in a larger consortium, in bed with that very police force and for her to put him in legal jeopardy would put the entire family’s lives in mortal jeopardy.
cops protect rich people “on the hill” and their property. as long as the rabble kill, rape and murder each other they will have little to do with it.
and anyone who doesn’t realize that probably lives “up on the hill”.
I have to wonder if there is a “woke problem.”. The danger of being accused of abusing power and using excess violence and/or using them to “deprive X’s civil rights” might be such that cops could easily be holding back in situations that could place them in awkward situations. It does not means that there aren’t serious abuses (eg excessive and arbitrary civil asset forfeitures, etc), but, in a lot of instances, all we get are a lot of shrieking, sloganeering, and pontificating in a lot of such incidents (functional equivalent of “believe the women.”). Isn’t there a way to balance the two? The choice doesn’t need to be between arbitrary abuse of power and total lawlessness, surely
Alas, once we have advanced to the point where the “arbitrary abuse of power” is implicitely condoned, the only effective response is “(targeted) total lawnessless.”
As some say, that would be Quixotic in the extreme, considering the disparity in force and technology available to either party. However, we don’t have to make it easy for the b—–s, do we?
It may be that police have been so systematically demoralized, militarized, underpaid, and disrespected for so long that finally, only those that are in it for the enjoyment of personal power are left. I imagine they don’t see a big upside in confronting actually dangerous people.
re How US Enables Reckless Driving by Clients
Recent episode of the American Prestige podcast discussed think tanks using the recent scandal at Brookings as a starting point. It was, for me, very illuminating as it went into some detail about funding by foreign governments and corporations, revolving door of people between think tanks and government jobs, and the very low ethical bar they set for themselves. Shockingly low. As in lower than lobbyists.
https://www.americanprestigepod.com/p/e50-thorny-think-tanks-w-eli-clifton#details
My main take away was that after Congress decided to cut funding in the 80s for in-house research, think tanks developed to fill the void. But this outsourcing exposed the government’s policy making brain to corrupting outside influences. Which perhaps explains, in part, why the US gets played so easily by its client states.
But I’m old and cynical so perhaps I’ve drawn too negative a conclusion from an otherwise interesting discussion.
As to animals dreaming, I read something so long ago I could never find it but…. When dreaming the whole brain is involved but: Humans have the most neural activity in their visual cortex, dogs have the most in their brain’s smell centers, while rats have the most action in their whisker cortex.
We are barely even aware of the information we receive from our facial hairs, imagine having dreams built out of it! I think there may be a metaphor there.
Our cat dreams all the time. He’s very active in his sleep.
Both of my cats were dreamers. You could watch them flex and twitch, in a manner that reminded me of how they would play and stalk during their waking hours. Unfortunately I think they may also have had nightmares as I saw both awaken abruptly to get into an almost defensive stance just to see where they were look around, get that I didn’t do that face, and then snuggled a little closer while settling back down into a curled sleeping position. It only happened a couple of times over the years, but it was noticeable.
From COVID sick leave story:
So, the solution is to forfeit your employer sponsored health insurance while you’re sick with COVID? That sounds much much worse than simply losing paid work days? Maybe this person had health insurance through a spouse or is so young that being on a parent’s plan is possible, otherwise, wow, that sounds like a terrible decision, to be at the mercy of ObamaCare policies, but how to afford if you rage quit while sick?
If only we had universal health care, in the middle of a Pandemic. Naw.
Maybe that is one of the issues with universal health care – for some – removal of a lever of control[tm].
I live in Ontario. We have fairly decent health care but it was getting the blasted, idiot, Gov’t to mandate a couple of days paid sick-leave that was the problem.
On the topic of colliding catastrophes, I highly recommend John Barnes’ 1994 novel, Mother of Storms (ISBN 0-312-85560-5). The plot touches on many themes we’ve often read about and discussed here. Set in an unspecified time “in the early 21st Century”, an ongoing US vs Russia conflict has led to nuclear missiles being fired from space targeted on methane clathrate beds on the ocean floor, thereby releasing phenomenal amounts of methane almost instantly. This supercharges the atmosphere and hurricanes of ever-increasing intensity develop until the earth is dominated by one massive “mother of storms”, capable of crossing Central America from the Pacific to the Atlantic and back, spinning off countless smaller hurricanes all the while. In the midst of all these very consequential storms, the New Madrid fault outdoes its 1811-1812 efforts (Mississippi River reversing course for a while, for example), and earthquakes take out most bridges and flood control structures along much of the Mississippi. Some parts of the US become dominated by religious and/or common warlords, in other parts cooperation and mutual aid dominate.
One of the most interesting characters is a wealthy man who’s business model was to anticipate future lines of innovation and gain patents on as many elements in those paths as possible. Then, he sits as a gatekeeper on industrial and technological development, and he makes most of his income from licensing fees. There are many more memorable characters. Barnes’ science fiction has always been well grounded in the science of the time. In SF, extrapolations into the future are often off the mark by decades or more. In Mother of Storms, “in the early 21st Century” looks to be more “in the mid-21st century” or “by 2200”. By the standards of writing SF c. 1990, anticipation of most of the scientific/technical innovation explored in MoS was very common. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read it.
Regarding the proposed sale of Icelandic telecom network Míla to private equity house Ardian, there is hope that the sale may be blocked, according to an article yesterday from state broadcaster RÚV.
The Icelandic Competition Authority has put conditions on the sale that Ardian seems reluctant to swallow – here’s hoping it stays that way!
“there will be emus in the zone.”
chris marker, ‘sans soleil’
With regards to Taiwan, does their seem like there’s a willingness foe the country to become the next Ukraine among the population and politicians? I don’t have Chinese language skills so I can’t go to the local media unfortunately, but all the English language media on Taiwan focus on commentary from the US with at most a single quoted line from some Taiwanese dignitary, so if anyone has seen anything in the Taiwanese press their insight would be most appreciated.
Given the way the Ukraine war is going and with America’s support for the country looking like it’ll end soon I’d be genuinely surprised if the Taiwanese were keen for a repeat of the experience, but maybe their opinion doesn’t count because democracy and freedom
There is always the possibility that the views of the government officials are more hawkish re China than of the public, that the public prefers independence but not at high cost.
A good interview I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0YGLDafG1o