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.
Cheetahs Will Soon Be Reintroduced to India The Conversation
I Went Seaweed Foraging in California and Hit the Mother Lode NPR (David L)
This is near Cromwell, OK. Brent Havins shot this video of a wind turbine that got struck by lightning. pic.twitter.com/jBjUNas0yc
— Mike Collier (@MikeCollierWX) July 22, 2022
Ways of Living Aeon
Tour de France: Jasper Philipsen and Jonas Vingegaard Crowned in Paris Tour de France
‘Parentese’ Is Truly a Lingua Franca, Global Study Finds NY Times (David L)
The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home – Part II Construction Physics (re Šilc)
It’s Okay To Compare Australia In 2016 With Nazi Germany, And Here’s Why New Matilda
#COVID-19
Science/Medicine
The Fögen Effect Masks a Big Methodological Issue McGill
“He predicted that over time, as vulnerable older people died, deaths caused by the virus would fall and the virus would become increasingly endemic.”
The beauty of the dry tinder strategy is that the more deaths happening “now” the better you’re doing!https://t.co/aplRAMSmDz
— Dr David Berger, aBsuRdiSTe cROnickLeR (@YouAreLobbyLud) July 21, 2022
After COVID: Unhappiness Is Worse Among Single and Non-Religious Americans Institute for Family Studies (re Šilc)
US
COVID-19 ‘is Going to be with us Forever,’ White House Says Yahoo News
Tucker Carlson’s Banned on YouTube Discussion of Biden, COVID, and the Injections Sage Hana (Richard R)
Monkeypox
Lawmakers Step up Pressure on Administration over Monkeypox The Hill
The Agony of an Early Case of Monkeypox New Yorker
Monkeypox Explained: How to Protect Yourself and What to Watch Out For NPR (David L)
Why Monkeypox is Spreading, but Not as Fast as Covid-19 The Indian Express
Climate/Environment
Europe’s Not Ready for a Hotter World Politico
“American Scar”: The Environmental Tragedy of the Border Wall New Yorker (furzy)
Heat Waves Worsen Mental Health, Especially for the Most Vulnerable The Grid (Kevin S)
Thousands Evacuated as California Wildfire Grows Dunya
‘Explosive’ California Wildfire Near Yosemite Spirals Out of Control’ Daily Mail
China?
U.S. Attempts To Make China An Enemy Require A Lot Of Fantasy Moon of Alabama. From over the weekend, still germane.
China Plans Three-Tier Data Strategy to Avoid US Delistings Financial Times (Kevin W)
Old Blighty
The Forde Report’s Villains Now Control the Labour Party Tribune
Race for Number 10: The Key Truss and Sunak Backers in Line for Top UK Jobs Financial Times (Kevin W)
Deconstructing the Cult of Winston Churchill: Racism, Deification and Nostalgia for Empire The Conversation
Worst NHS Staffing Crisis in its History is Putting Patients at Serious Risk, MPs Warn The Guardian (Kevin W)
Train Strikes Revive British Unions, with Alex Gordon Belabored
Italy
Technocrats Will Never Stop the Far Right, in Italy or Anywhere Else Jacobin
New Not-So- Cold War
US Bolsters Cyber Alliance to Counter Rising Iran Threat The Hill
Defiant Orban Doubles Down on Russia Policy, Arch-Conservativism Bloomberg
NATO Is a Luxury Good the United States Doesn’t Need Foreign Policy
For Those About to Rock, NAM 2.0 Salutes You Pepe Escobar (ctlieee)
Syraqistan
Israeli Supreme Court Rules Citizens Can be Stripped of Status for ‘Breach of Loyalty’ Mondoweiss (guurst)
Inside Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Build a Skyscraper That Stretches for 75 Miles Wall Street Journal
Sri Lanka
Rights Group Seeks Arrest of Ex-Sri Lanka President in Singapore Al Jazeera
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Amazon Already Knows a Lot About Me, but One Medical takes it to a Whole New Level CNBC (Kevin W)
1/6
The Criminal Case Against Trump Is Getting Stronger The Atlantic (furzy)
In Jan. 6 Hearings, Gender Divide Has Been Strong Undercurrent NY Times (furzy)
Biden
Supremes
Supreme Court Leak Probe: So Many Questions, So Few Answers AP
Abortion
‘Everybody Is Dug In’: Kansans Fiercely Debate the First Post-Roe Vote on Abortion NY Times (Kevin W)
Police State Watch
Has Florida Man Finally Met his Match? Meet Florida Sheriff AP
Supply Chain/Inflation
The Fed Must Emulate the Tactics of Volcker’s Fight Against Inflation Financial Times
Elizabeth Warren: Jerome Powell’s Fed Pursues a Painful and Ineffective Inflation Cure Wall Street Journal
The Fed’s Mission Improbable: Beating Inflation Without Causing a Recession NPR
Class Warfare
‘Nobody Would Choose This’: A Turnpike Rest Area and a Van Become Home for One Maine Family Press Herald
The percentage of 25-34y old living with parents or relatives in the US
1970: 11%
2020: 29%Says something about wealth was distributed.
Very little upside in real wages, and a lot in financial assets and house prices. pic.twitter.com/n4lcL4ouqt
— Alf (@MacroAlf) July 23, 2022
(ctlieee)
America’s Child-Care Equilibrium Has Shattered The Atlantic (re Šilc)
Antidote du Jour (ChetG):
The reds (squirrels) have much character and are rather fierce, given their small size. They have a splendid war cry too, something that can strike terror in gray squirrels or chipmunks.
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour: here.
159 comments
Comments are closed.
It’s so dry in northwest Arkansas I can’t remember that last time my river valley hit the dew point.
I know it’s all a bad joke but what does a behemoth like amazon have to do to trigger anti-trust limits around here? And all this tracking must be as energy intensive and meaningless as bitcoin.
I find it curious that after all this time, the CNBC article details how this is the last straw once it comes to Amazon. Sure you rely on prime shipping, Whole Foods, use Alexa and have Amazon streaming services, so pretty much they have you exactly where they need you.
That’s just mind boggling. Or to quote Ron Burgundy feeling trapped in a glass case of emotion.
I don’t rely on any of it, never have, and I really don’t see a downside to not having it. Serious comment here, I am not missing anything nor wanting for anything without it.
I agree although I do from time to time use Amazon for obscure electronic doodads and other items that in a small city like mine lack store retail. The prob with Amazon was always its utter megalomania and cheating ways when it came to manipulating governments and the tax system not to mention labor rights.
My brother though practically lives on Amazon, the new Home Shopping Network. Clearly the now retired Bezos has skilz when it comes to building the better Skinner Box.
NOmazon is better than Amazon.
Ideally, exterminating Amazon from existence would be ideal.
But we live in a real world, and in the real world we live in, less Amazon is better than more Amazon.
Supposedly Amazon can’t get access to and is prohibited from seeing your HIPPA protected medical data however, what’s to stop Amazon from providing all your shipping, order, delivery, facial, sound and voice print from Alexa, personal history data to One Medical which then becomes the new advertiser, data constellation?
Oh, and all that, plus your Ring Doorbell info is available to any cop at a fusion center, or perhaps, any police department desk?
“Trust in institutions is good, actually, so anti-trust is bad” goes their logic.
For starters, they have to be not associated with any party with an effective veto. And all that “tracking” is what holds capitalism together and keeps the “present value of future work” from running off.
I’m South African. I experienced the Knysna fire in 2017, the biggest in South Africa’s history. Thereafter, in Durban, we’ve had three major floods, for which two found cars floating on the highway nearest me. We’re going to have provincial watershedding for one year, an insult to injury as electrical loadshedding is our national past-time. And, last year, we had political upheaval which transformed into food riots which closed our city. Climate change is real, made worse by politicians who have failed to address it and fix aged infrastructure (which leaks water and gets clogged with rubbish). The poor suffer the most. Half our country is unemployed so I fear for our safety and future when anger boils again.
“‘Explosive’ California Wildfire Near Yosemite Spirals Out of Control’ ”
Those fires were so large that passengers aboard overflying jet liners were getting an eye full from their windows and in fact could smell the smoke in the cabin-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8706551/Passengers-photo-shows-plane-flying-clouds-smoke-California-wildfires-continue.html
So much for cabin air filtration.
I’m not worried,the worst of the California fire season is usually over by mid October.
Except when there’s a drought.
Oh,wait.
I find the endless destructive fires heartbreaking. The California I grew up in is gone, certainly for the rest of my life (I’m 64). The smoke is like Mordor, turning the sun orange and the dry grasses gray. Always there, the smell reminds of the failing biosphere. Anger erupts as the bloodless, shallow climate change denialists spout their nonsense about recovering Greenland Ice (not) and polar bears (not). Early last year, it all became too much and we moved to the PNW and the south of Puget Sound. It’s lovely here, but this week it will be 20 deg above normal, just for a few days. Those high temps are made easier by the shade and breezes, although it’s dead calm out this morning with a cloudless sky as the heat dome moves in.
Climate change is inescapable, relentless and I suspect making everyone tense at their animal level where we know things are not right. When will humans unite around fixing the threat to their existence?
As long as the fossil fuel industry continues to rule the world very little will change. Plus, very few people are willing to reduce their own carbon footprints, so what you are seeing you will continue getting.
Climate change is inescapable…
‘Climate Catastrophe’ Feared as Congo Moves to Sell Critical Ecosystem for Oil Drilling
I was glad the Washburn fire skirted the Mariposa sequoia grove. It was a high-profile victory for controlled burning. The Mariposa grove has been subjected to many limited controlled burns over 50 years. When the wildfire hit it, there wasn’t much left to burn so it went around the grove.
This is the url and headline of an NPR story from six days ago. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/19/1111807299/yosemite-national-park-mariposa-grove-sequoia-trees-wildfire-california Decades of ‘good fires’ save Yosemite’s iconic grove of ancient sequoia trees
RK
Flew back from San Francisco (to Fresno, natch) late Saturday night and we saw the flames – can’t say we smelled smoke in the cabin. First time I ever saw a CA wildfire from a plane.
And contrary to the right wing sites I read, did not see any human excrement in the streets of SF, nor any syringes, and we walked all over SF. Only 2 or 3 deranged people. As it turns out, the only public urination I observed was of myself – I did have to pee outdoors a couple of times (there is a surprising plethora of nooks and crannies hidden from pulic view, so I was able to get away with it). Of course, maybe I shouldn’t drink so much…but in my defense, I thought I could make it to the next bar, but so many places don’t open until 5 pm, and at my age my pee pee intervals are getting ever shorter.
Oh, hey, thanks for visiting my city and whizzing on it! LOL.
Let me know your cell # so the next time I smell urine on my front steps you can come and bleach it so I don’t have to. I won’t ask you to come if I have a repeat of my favorite task from last month (explosive diarrhea right through the fine-mesh iron security gate, which required 3 hours of scrubbing with a toothbrush).
Some years ago, a bathroom I used at a work site never had toilet paper. Unsurprisingly, some people (not me) knew this and brought paper towels into the stall, using them in lieu of toilet paper and flushing them. It was an act of desperation, but obviously the toilet then clogged. One day, I visited the problem-prone bathroom and saw a large official notice posted that admonished people in large letters, “Do not flush paper towels.” Someone had hand-written under it, “Then provide toilet paper!”
A similar problem exists in SF. If there were a reasonable number of accessible public toilets, people probably wouldn’t be using steps, gates, nooks and crannies, etc.
The tourist areas are well patrolled. Mustn’t make the money unhappy after all.
If you want to see people with “issues” or just homeless, they are concentrated in specific area. lower half of Market as well as SOMA, Tenderloin, and parts of the Mission, the western shrubbier, half of the Golden Gate Park, as well as libraries especially the main (and the whole western half of the plaza), areas around methadone clinics IIRC like on the one Golden Gate Ave, Sixth Ave, or Haight-Ashbury. Then the alleys tend to have a person or two complete with tent or cardboard.
“The tourist areas are well patrolled. Mustn’t make the money unhappy after all.”
Substitute “money” with “huge hotel/restaurant tax revenues that keep the City funded, including $300 million a year for “homeless services” and you have a more accurate portrayal.
Re: “It’s ok to compare Australia in 2016 with Nazi Germany and here’s why”
Thank you, Jonah Birch, for including this important link today. How we citizens in the US treat the immigration story here is heartbreaking — both for the immigrants and our country.
A coupla years ago I was reading this Aussie writer talking about the illegal immigration problem for Australia and he said something quite profound. He said that if you want to know how your own government really wants to treat their own citizens, then look at how they treat illegal immigrants. How they treat them will tell you all that you want to know about what they would like to be able to do to their own citizens as those immigrants don’t have the legal protections that their citizens do – for now.
Wow. QUITE profound. I am going to steal this, and sprinkle it in random conversations to appear “deep” and “thoughtful”. Which I demonstrably am NOT.
Incivility creeps in on little cat feet…
Add in the ruling of the Israeli Supreme Court and you realize that your “citizen” status is tenuous at best. We are all potential “illegal aliens.”
FIFY.
We are all potentially “Enemy Combatants”.
George Carlin was quite plain about it in one of his sets that all we have is temporary privileges not rights.
Makes sense. Government treats the weakest members of the society worst, so the mistreatment creeps up, and the weakest “citizens” are still weak.
However, it does raise an interesting question: should the standard of treatment be “relative”? One common reason (more US centric as I know nothing about how things are in Australia) why resentment against group X sells is the perception (usually partially justified) that it is unfair that X should get certain treatment when there are “real citizens” who don’t get similar treatment. (Most of these accusations are false in terms of facts and are often cynically fanned by political opportunists, but are broadly “true” in the sense that they are grounded on actual and widely-held sense of deprivation.) In practice, this rarely has much to do with group X getting that treatment (even if political opportunists on the other side, in turn, try to exploit that to their advantage) as much as there being “lesser citizens” who genuinely feel disrespected. Long story short, I wonder if the causal mechanism is a bit off: improving treatment of illegal immigrants does not lead to government treating its own citizens better, but treating illegal immigrants better in a society where government is already perceived to mistreat many of its own citizens is not practically feasible (and trying to address the former without dealing with the latter is liable to backfire badly).
Not only that. There is a long running argument in the US that the militarization of the US police force is due to the endless conflicts abroad, with that mentality seeping in the domestic realm, which is slowly but surely becoming a domestic front…
It’s known as blowback.
I think the term culture war is German too. And spear point, and homeland…
― Frederick Douglass
I realize it isn’t this way everywhere in the US, but in my neck of the woods, immigrants are treated pretty well, at least those we hear about. Hundreds were out up in a local arena a few years ago until more permanent housing could be found and they were given all kinds of donations of food and clothing. We have programs to set new immigrants up with jobs, and a lot of vegetables in the local farmer’s markets are grown by immigrants. I’m assuming there’s some assistance program that made that happen.
It’s been so good (relatively speaking of course – I’m sure most didn’t really want to uproot their entire lives to come here) for immigrants that they are earmarking Maine as a destination when they show up at the southern US border, and so many have come here that it really has put a burden on public services. My city which recently built a new school with some extra capacity is now overflowing with no extra classroom space as a result. We’ve had to ask the state to stop sending people here.
The interesting thing is that the arena where the immigrants were first brought was quite near a public park that has increasingly been taken over by the homeless, who are not treated nearly as well as the new immigrants. Gives the new arrivals a sense of what’s in store soon if they can’t get with the capitalist program.
Regarding today’s “Nobody Would Choose This” link, I can corroborate that story. We were driving the Maine interstate yesterday and saw some people who had set up tents at the edge of a park and ride, and it sure looked like they were living there, not just setting up for a weekend in the woods. We never had this kind of homeless problem before but there just isn’t any affordable housing anywhere. The cheaper hotels in my city are filled up with immigrants and homeless, and the housing stock is being increasingly snatched up by wealthier people from Boston and NYC who can telecommute, grossly overpaying for smaller houses to the point Maine wages will no longer buy a house in Maine any more.
One thing nobody ever brings up in the immigration debate is what causes it in the first place. I’m all for a reasonable amount of immigration, but you just can’t have hundreds of thousands or millions of people on the move and expect that there won’t be adverse consequences. So how about a few less Western engineered wars to pry open new markets to keep the world safe for capitalism? That would go a long way to easing some of the immigration pressures being seen worldwide.
So a Jewish guy compares the failure of Australia to legalize illegal immigrants to the holocaust experience of his family. Grandma committed suicide because she could only escape to Chile, not the US.
The holocaust was mass murder, filled with personal tragedies and led to the creation of the state of Isreal- which allows no immigration by people unless they are Jewish. In that way it agrees with China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and almost all of the middle east and Black Africa. Only “people like us” are allowed to move here.
I see a certain set of contradictions here. One standard for Australia, one for most of the rest of the world.
I’ve intentionally not capitalized “holocaust” and will continue to do so as long as all the other causes which led to massive deaths with a known causal agent like “the Irish famine”, “car accidents”, “the Afghan war”, “infaticide”, “the great leap forward” and even “abortion” fail to get capitalized.
I believe the Pope just visited Canada to appologize to their indigenous for the mass graves.
No word on Australia. I dont think that apology came with any cash either.
Not to nit pick, but half of those do get capitalized.
The breathless commentary about Israel stripping citizenship from palestinians does not hold up. Britain has historically stripped citizenship from terroristis this on the basis of “upholding the public good” and the European Court of Human Rights has sustained those actions.
Here, as mondoweiss points out:
The ruling was made in response to two appeals filed by Adalah and Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) on behalf of Palestinian citizens of Israel who were convicted of being involved in attacks that resulted in the death of Israeli citizens.
Israeli justice is so well known for fairness and impartiality and decency and never finding facts that are just not so. Ever since the days of yore recounted with such pride in the Pentateuch. /s https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/perverted-justice/
The issue is that citizenship can be revoked even if it would make the person stateless, which is contrary to the international law. Other countries have procedures for revoking the citizenship and to the best of my knowledge, all of them include a clause where the citizenship cannot be revoked if it makes a person stateless.
So it’s not the stripping of the citizenship that is problematic, it’s that it can be done in a way to leave people with no legal status or protections. There is a clause in the law that if a person is stateless Israel must grant permanent residence or similar status, but this is still likely to cause massive issues for people, as it restricts travel, voting rights, property ownership, etc.
The article also notes that the law has already been used to strip a Palestinian human rights lawyer of their permanent residence status for “breach of allegiance”, so it’s not used just against people who commit crimes, it’s used against people who inconvenience the state.
Not sure where Sage Hana is coming from. Watched a Tucker YT video yesterday where he reluctantly explained that he was given proof by a friend at a DC funeral that his emails were being sucked up by spooks.
He then said his only recourse was to lean on R’s in Congress to perform oversight.
IMNSHO they are all now in the same Kompromat club. Le plus ça change…
It would be nice if the “article” described what Carlson said and the points he covered.
We refuse to subscribe to pro-Israel, often pro-war Fox. Instead Carlson’s show, well worth watching, is posted almost immediately on youtube with Fox copyrighted video replaced with Trump’s picture.
Some goofy kid that uploads it, posts his online video blurb, but hey, it’s free, and with Firefox and Ad Blocker, there are no commercials.
Thank you, Jonah.
Further to the dear old Blighty links, they sort of fuse into this reheated and, dare I say, inspiring, Blairism, https://labourlist.org/2022/07/four-quick-takeaways-from-keir-starmers-big-speech-on-the-economy/. This followed the shadow chancellor’s interview in the same vein this morning.
In the past month, Starmer and the leading Blairite candidate to succeed him, Wes Streeting*, have stated that private sector involvement in the NHS will only grow. This was also the view of Owen Smith, who challenged Corbyn. None ever explains that they have received money, advice and staffers from United Health. *The Pete Buttigieg of Britain for US readers. Laura von Kuenssberg’s sock puppet for UK readers. Nuff said!
United Health has also provided executives, not clinicians, to the NHS and is now running general practitioner practices, and eye gouging for the privilege.
If Corbyn had played hard ball, proceeded with mandatory reselection of MPs and used the dirt provided by insider sympathisers, often at some risk to themselves, on his tormentors, some of this may have been avoidable. Unfortunately, much of the left prefers to grandstand, rather than fight fire with fire and even get the retaliation in first. Lee Atwater and Karl Rove knew what to do and enjoyed doing so.
Thanks Colonel
The slow ongoing privatization of healthcare in Canada proceeds apace. Following the neoliberal game plan of gutting jobs and services in public institutions so that the private sector can come to the ‘rescue’ – our healthcare workforce has been decimated, COVID being the icing on that cake. Not enough support workers in hospitals thus leading to nurse and doctor burnout. Allowing family doctors to age out without any replacement plans and new grads unwilling to take on the heavy workload (because physician shortages) of a family dr…. The shortage of family doctors has also been an extra burden on hospital emergency departments, adding to worker burnout. Hospital administrators can’t figure out why they can’t find new nurses when they often are only offering part-time or contract work – people won’t re-locate for those jobs.
Long term care was privatized long ago (note that the ones that are still public had much better results fighting COVID). Pharmacists have been giving flu shots for some years now, and of course COVID vaccinations and will soon be able to prescribe medication for certain ailments. Pharmacists work for or own private companies and yet we see our system so overwhelmed that people are happy for pharmacists to step in and fill those gaps.
There were other ways to solve the nurse and doctor shortage, mostly by not allowing it to happen in the first place…more support workers could have stemmed early retirements, setting up clinics with nurse practitioners and physician assistants all on in one location to support the docs. Tuition reimbursement for grads willing to go to more remote locations, help finding their spouses jobs. I am not a big fan of stealing nurses and doctors from other countries, but if they are going to our come, we could have done a much better job of setting up ‘apprenticeships’ for them to work along side Canadian drs and nurses while they learn the regs, culture and language of Canadian medicine. I agree that every ailment doesn’t require the attention of a doctor but letting the private sector in is not the answer. The only family doctor I could get after moving to eastern Ontario works in a private walk-in clinic and also maintains a small family practice, billing the provincial government for his services. I don’t know how the costs differ from a fully public family practice but a rainy day project is do some digging on that. There was a time when I thought I might be gone before the worst of neoliberalism ruined Canada but I think times will be rocky before I die if I live another 20ish yrs (matches life expectancy).
Thank you, CanCyn. I am sorry to hear, but not surprised.
Trudeau is connected to what was the Scottish merchant class / elite in Montreal. Aucune surprise.
Indeed Colonel. Many Canadian politicians come from rich families and it seems to me that more and more as in the US work to keep their family and friends rich or richer
Thank you, CanCyn.
Mark Carney is part of the Canadian and British elites. He met Cameron and Osborne at Cornbury, a country estate owned by the family his wife’s sister married into in Oxfordshire. At a summer gathering there, it was suggested that he become governor of the Bank of England.
Thanks Colonel. Canadians were so proud when Carney got that gig. It was though he was everyone’s son collectively. Though it was clear to some to wonder about a connection.
Seconding CanCyn’s thanks here, Colonel. I have long suspected that Canada is pretty much run by a modern Family Compact. It’s something to learn that’s really true.
Yes, once it has been shown that the present system of healthcare is no longer working, then it is time to introduce (more) privatization! The system is not working because each provincial government seems incapable of providing the required family doctors, specialists, nurses and other healthcare workers for the public system. Once it is shown that the public (single-payer) system is not working, then provincial governments can quietly introduce full privatization. It seems that it only took one pandemic to make this switch a possibility. Our federal government seems not to realize what is going on in our healthcare at the provincial level. In my province, the Conservative government began to close small hospitals and open ERs only when there were doctors and nurses available to work. What kind of healthcare system is this?
JEHR – the privatization started quietly long before the pandemic, it just took this crisis to get more people to notice. And I think the feds know exactly what is going on in the provinces with regard to healthcare and they are either quite happy to let it proceed or help it along. I have no doubt that their appt calendars would show meetings with US insurance companies and they are learning just how to ‘let’ them in. The phrase ‘this is not a serious country’ is often uttered around here. I would argue that Canadian politicians and rich folks of all stripes are very serious about letting private enterprise take over many aspects of public life. If I have one niggling iota of hope it is that neoliberal capitalism has gone too far and there just may be enough people awake enough to start picking up pitch forks. We shall see.
Yes, this has been a long term strangulation policy imposed on healthcare in Canada. For instance, I have not had a family doctor of any sort since high school when my family moved to another province. Once moved out and on my own, I once tried to get on the list of a family doctor who was just opening his practice in a large prairie city. Even with a car just to get to the office took nearly two hours because his office turned out to be in the industrial boondocks because he couldn’t afford office space in a more accessible and central area. Two hours due to distance and having to travel during high traffic periods to make a during work hours appointment. Most people my age try to get by as best we can with the awful private clinics. If you are a university student or employee, the on campus medical centre is often very good, but overwhelmed. They were among the first to really bring on nurse practitioners in order to expand hours and service availability in my experience.
To C.O., CanCyn and JEHR
Certainly, Canada has been in the business of privatizing health care ever since it wasn’t able to prevent one provincial government from starting single payer with hospital care. The federal government has been deliberately starving the system for 30 years by withdrawing most of its support as the only currency issuer. That leaves provincial governments their only option of taxing to spend. All of our prime ministers and their governments have been neoliberal for the last 60 years.
You said it Wilron! People are just waking up to reality now because of the pandemic and related (and unrelated) retirements that are wreaking such havoc, especially in emergency wards and long term care. The smugness of many who think our system is vastly superior to the US is starting to fade, at least amongst the PMCers I know. But they don’t believe we can afford to continue to fund it. Convinced a friend to read Stephanie Kelton. He was more disheartened to learn that, indeed, nice things are affordable, I got no thanks for bursting his bubble.
C.O as I said above, I too am now using a walk-in clinic dr after moving. Even knowing what I know, I had no idea it had been so bad for so long. I feel badly for your situation. Prior to this I’d had the same family dr for decades. She was retiring when we moved but a recent grad took over her practice and kept her roster of patients. I knew there was a wait for family doctors in our new area, but I had no idea how bad it is.
And thank you as well, Can Cyn. I think it is hard to gauge how difficult things have gotten when our mass media is so compromised. I certainly had never appreciated that clinic space costs were contributing as much to the problem until the long trek to get to that doctor’s office. Dentists can afford to have offices in prime areas, GP clinics land in strip malls out in the older suburbs at best in the cities I’m familiar with.
Yes, thank you Wilron! There is a special kind of mean spiritedness characteristic of so many federal governments, and Canada’s has that extra frisson of passive aggression to go with it. Tighten the screws on the provinces that don’t have the capacity to fix things, while taking advantage of provincial government strategic steps founded in being “more neoliberal than thou” to claim they have no choice but to keep tightening the screws.
Thank you, Colonel. It is good to know that in the UK that both political parties are on the same page as far as looking for innovative solutions to the UK’s problems-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mku-rUTG3eg (2:55 mins)
I wonder sometimes if Corby reflects that maybe he should have been as ruthless as his enemies were. And that what is happening to the UK may not have happened if he had been PM – maybe. But like Sanders in the US, he came up to his first major barrier and refused to jump that it.
Thank you, Rev. You are right to point out the similarity with sheep dog Sanders.
Listening to the last part of Mike Duncan’s Revolution podcast, the one dedicated to the Russian revolution, I could not help but think that Lenin went on with his approach out of pragmatism and understanding that if you want to do what you want to do, you must have the power…
So if Doc Martin ever has another season his struggles will be against United Health rather than hemophobia. Some of us Yanks have always been great fans of this show where the grumpy doc has seemingly saved half his Cornwall village from unusual catastrophes. In his one doctor town he even makes house calls!
The percentage of 25-34y old living with parents or relatives in the US
1970: 11%
2020: 29%
Will someone please tell the evangelicals this is why single people are unhappy?
If young people cannot really afford to marry and form their own homes, then you would expect to see marriage rates drop and young people staying at home. And as those young people cannot afford to have, much less raise a family, then you would expect to see a high abortion rate. Oh, wait…
Twenty-something’s coming home and staying home regress. I’ve seen a lot of that — parents dealing with 25-year olds behaving and expressing thought like 15-year olds in the home. It’s a problem at the family level and I suspect it will increasingly be a problem at the political level: resentment + magical thinking + black&white thinking + inability to self-regulate + solipsism.
I’m sure most will grow out of that. Eventually. But not quickly or completely.
Are they “regressing” or are they just reacting to the same tyrannical parent crap that made them leave in the first place
Family is complicated and does bring on regressions.
There have been a lot of really great younger people I’ve worked with who, when their parents show up, turn into sniveling juveniles. And the more of the family shows up, the worse the regression. Since becoming aware of this 20 years ago, I’ve made efforts with my own family to act my age, parents in the 90s and sibs in the 60s, its embarrassing but it’s not easy! I’m comforted it’s not just us.
This, I’m sure, is why most heart attacks and strokes occur around the holidays, when the family gets together and fails to emulate “the narrative,” maybe this generation will be spared that.
My 25 year old moved back in with us with his girlfriend. They do not in any way, shape or form act like 15 year olds. They are trying to start their own business, and it is really difficult. We have the space, they have plenty of privacy and it’s nice having them around.
I’d rather they save what money they can for their own place and get on stable financial footings than pay rent that is gone forever.
Paying rent should seen as a rite of passage. As is managing one’s own finances, doing one’s own laundry and grocery shopping. Not to mention cleaning and maintaining. Coddling one’s own children rarely works out well.
Really? An extended family in a household can result in less debt and certainly force people to get along. My wife and I lived with her parents for a few years. We could have caved to everyone thinking that was a silly idea. Then again we had enough money to get a down payment on a house when we were 24. Now 29 and still almost none of our friends have a house. We are way ahead, not paying rent was a big contributing factor. Don’t let pride get in the way of helping your children. People have been living in family units since the beginning of time.
Our kids did that in our unconventional old multi-family on the “wrong side” of Cleveland. Now they might be thinking buying that house in the ‘burbs has drawbacks like a mortgage and no live-in baby- and dog-sitters.
If a family can stand each other, better to ditch the “starting your own nest” and circle the wagons as a group. Cut expenses to the max and, as a result, the need to be a wage slave. Rotate in and out and combine with developing a truly valuable skill like raising chickens or welding. (thinking of amfortas).
When we had two kids and their significant others, the neighbor across the back fence, having heard who was living here, said, “You’re living like Koreans.” (She’s Korean.) My reply was that Koreans were smart.
you don’t understand rev (sighs)
we need a vector for covid transmission into the nucleus of the the family cell in order to kill off the, um, what do you call them?…the one’s who’ve been around for a while…
marriages can accelerate after the inheretance kicks in…
oddly this is also the impetus for killing off the billionaires (just theoretically, like in economic theory kind of thing, I have neither weapons nor intent…just spitballing as they say) as they would pass their wealth down to those irresponsible basement dwellers who would certainly just go and waste the money which would be great for the economy. I’m sure Larry Summers will steal this idea and put it in his next book, which, also by the way, will retail for about $550.00…clearly I should have been an economist but I just couldn’t find the door out of the basement…
It’s virtue signalling, not an honest attempt at diagnosis.
That they are still repeating this arrantly arrogant nonsense after hundreds of years is malicious idealism. Bourgeois politics is in reality attrition warfare via operant conditioning, and I endorse beating them around the proverbial head with their own ideological senility and epistemic invalidity until they stay quiet enough to learn something.
side note, thanks for correcting me on ‘inheritance’ in Pandit et al.
:) De nada, Steve H. I do think the lowest of the middle ranks is the most precarious substratum as such. It is the lowest rank that is considered to have “personhood” in most class societies, and comes with a clear qualitative and quantitative separation from the lower class, whose members are seen as imperfect or incomplete. In addition to the general risk of compression out of “personhood” due to economic circumstances, its membership also experiences pressure from automation and protocol developed by system-producers further up the hierarchy, who have a greater capacity to produce kinds of relations that favor their desired effects.
As the elder member of a multigenerational (currently two, with a third on the way) household, I wish to point out that such arrangements have been and remain the norm both historically and culturally throughout much of the world. Assuming one can master the tendency toward intrafamilial dysfunction, a kind of art form in and of itself, it can be highly adaptive in times when holding fast and hunkering down are the order of the day.
Yes, it can work, but in the modern context, it’s more a consoling hope than a happy prospect.
I was particularly struck by the “Tweet This” “highlights” of the Institute for Family Studies’ homily. Who needs robots when you’ve got a flock?
Absolutely Lee,
Not noted in the statistics are Hispanic households increasing population in the U.S. where this is the norm. Multi generational families living together is a form of wealth accumulation.
One internet connection, one utility bill, one water meter, one garbage collection, one land line, one rent payment or one property tax bill, built in babysitting, built in security, errand consolidation, all these save money. Here’s an analysis of how a large household thrives, although these are not relatives and these numbers may have changed with utility inflation:
https://verdant.net/sharedhousing.htm
Total monthly costs $4610 shared by 7 people= $658 per person per month or about $ 22 per day per person for all housing and essential food costs.
Monthly Expenses divided among all seven people:
$2720 Mortgage. Because owner gets all the tax advantages of interest write-off, she pays all property tax and insurance costs.
Utilities, Gas- about $150 month in winter and $60 month in summer. Averages $130 month. Pre-solar panels, electricity was about $150 a month year round.
$150 water approximately
$90 Garbage and recycling.
$102 cable Internet access…cable soon to go up, we’re going to dump it and use neighbor’s wifi with their permission. [Not illegal. They chose to leave it open for others to share].
Analogy, is it illegal to use a neighbor’s porch-light that shines in your window? Or, we’ll let the neighbor piggyback on ours with a 50% shared payment of costs offered with low introductory rates.
$140 two land line shared phones. Will drop as some opt for own cell phone.
$228 community agriculture vegetable delivery (2 boxes)
$900 food for communal meals and sundry expenses.
Much depends on one’s need for privacy and living space. Some people don’t mind at all tight living quarters. Others mind it very much.
Probably why these arrangements is usually found in latitudes that allow one to be outside most of the day and year.
That said, if the place is large enough one can have individual “apartments” within it (like say one floor each).
Cheers to Speaker Pelosi for her valiant efforts to get the failure in Ukraine off the front page and replacing it with an even bigger failure in Taiwan. Maybe she knows about a sanctions package ready to go that will certainly bring China to its knees in weeks.
Pompeo was originally planning to fly to Taiwan on a separate trip this coming September, but now he’s trying to tag along Nancy’s. Success or failure, it would be bipartisan!!!
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4605600
I feel this is desperate turd polishing on her part. Her time in the leadership has been one steady rightward drift. She’s done well financially, but for all her time, she can’t really point to great leadership moments. A trumped up highway bill, pathetic emergency funding, ACA (something that needs to be fixed annually), etc.
Pelosi wants to go with keeping America safe.
China may posture, but why in the world would it try to do anything to harm Pelosi? Heck, she might be replaced by somebody competent. Look at the trend since Pelosi has been in Congress (1987) and then been Speaker (2007). America’s been nothing but going down since she’s been there and a practical death spiral since she’s been Speaker.
Why in the world would China want her gone?
US buddy UK, keen to join the new war. The Tory election debate has become Who-Hates-China-Most-Becomes-PM. Sunak’s tweet yesterday: “China and the Chinese Communist Party represent the largest threat to Britain and the world’s security and prosperity this century. Read this thread on how I will face down China.”
“I plan to have a Chinese hukou within the next 12 months without telling the British people.”
Pelosi’s
brokerpartner has some Taiwan-adjacent stonks to pump?Wind machine.
A 100m/300’ tall steel tower mounted on a huge concrete and rebar base deep in the ground is a pretty good ground rod.
Lightning rods or devices to protect against lightning are usually to dissipate the electrical potential between ground and air, reducing the potential for a strike.
But this one got smacked and probably ignited the grease in the slip bearings. Which then ignited stuff in the fiberglass nacelle, which then got to the blade/s which are a combination of fiberglass and other fibers. The fibers are glass and don’t burn but the resin does.
They usually have fire suppression equipment in the nacelle, but a few million volts/amps overwhelmed it. Happens. The whole machine and possibly the tower will be removed and replaced.
Interesting, watching the clip I started trying to puzzle out what path the strike took, but man, that’s a potentially very complex environment!
Would the turbine have been trying to feather itself? It seemed to just be spinning merrily along.
Re: Israeli Supreme Court Rules Citizens Can be Stripped of Status for ‘Breach of Loyalty’
So only politically motivated violence triggers this? Common murders, even mass murders with gunz don’t count?
Israel today, USA tomorrow?
Voting the wrong way might have consequences. But only once, since after they take away your citizenship, you don’t vote anymore.
There are Republican legislatures foaming at the mouth right now.
Tomorrow?
Erm.
Italy, from UnHerd:
How Mario Draghi Broke Italy
https://unherd.com/2022/07/how-mario-draghi-broke-italy/
It begins:
Mario Draghi’s defenestration has left the Italian — and indeed international — establishment reeling in horror. This is not surprising.
Couple this story with re-reading the intro to Thomas Frank’s last book, “The People, NO.” It gives Frank’s introduction a especially loud ring. From Frank’s intro:
“What has happened, the thinkers of the Beltway and the C-Suite tell us, is that the common folk have declared independence from experts and along the way from reality itself. And so they have come together to rescue civilization: political scientists, policy advisors, economists, technologists, CEOs, joining as one to save our social order. To save it from populism.
“This imagined struggle of expert versus populist has a fundamental, almost biblical flavor to it. …”
To which I ask how well the experts have done these last 3 years? How the food shortage situation, gas prices, inflation, trust in govt agencies, the supply chain freeze, the airlines, etc. The highly credentialed, so-called “experts” are doing a “heck uv a job.”
Experts used to just tell us what was good for us, and that seemed kinda true at the time. All relative I guess, as there is such little truth in anything coming out of the modern experts. Who ya gonna believe, a politician or your lyin’ gas pump?
Those earlier experts didn’t have the benefit of so many handlers and communications specialists. They even stood a chance of having had what passed for a real job interacting with actual ordinary people. On the theory-practice continuum they were not as far removed, a few standard
deviationsdeviants, from life experience as today’s self-promoting geniuses.Who in their right mind expected that there would not be disastrous fallout from, pick one, abrupt policy changes that don’t even make it to the level of ill-conceived?
Some mythologists call themselves “seers”. The history of the PMC makes a fine case study in religious caste formation, from their conceits of a particular, exclusive “way of seeing” to the ascendancy of buncombe as their mode of discourse to their having achieved the same class consciousness and counter-revolutionary subjectivity.
Futurist was a title at one point. The most famous claimed we would see self-improving AIs within our lifetimes, aka the singularity (or rapture of the nerds as some relabeled it).
Ever heard the old saw — “throwing out the baby with the bath water?’ There’s a big problem with throwing every scientist, economist, researcher, policy advisor etc. into one big box called experts!
Some are, indeed, paid hacks of governments and corporations. They are generally the ones who turn up as talking heads on every TV station in the world or have open access to newspapers to write their opinion pieces.
But there are very many independent and critical thinkers who present very different and honourable (and unpaid) perspectives on a range of issues of public importance. You have to work a bit harder to find them but some appear in the links here. Please don’t consign them to oblivion by labelling them with the cheap and lazy label of “experts” as though that’s all that needs to be said about anything.
But there are very many independent and critical thinkers who present very different and honourable (and unpaid) perspectives on a range of issues of public importance.
We need a different descriptor than expert I guess, because that word is in the junk heap, right over there next to “smart”
But there are very many independent and critical thinkers who present very different and honourable (and unpaid) perspectives on a range of issues of public importance. You have to work a bit harder to find them but some appear in the links here.
I agree with you. “…harder to find them” often because they’ve been silenced by the narrative minders, banished from utube or twett or fakebook, etc. The experts, real experts who come to their work in a disinterested way, are not the vaunted “thought leaders” we see in the media’s narrative management. The well-credentialed political hacks – in economics, science, intel, diplomacy, and foreign policy seem to be everywhere in the media.
Frank wrote this in his introduction:
“The backlash against populism typically comes down to us from the citadels of higher learning — from think tanks, university presses, and academic conferences — but it is not a disinterested literature of social science. Although they don’t like to acknowledge it, the anti-populists are combatants in this war, defending themselves against a perceived assault on their authority. Which is to say that anti-populism is an adversary proceeding. Our thought leaders related to populism not so much as scholars but as a privileged class putting down a challenge to itself.”
I would add to his description my opinion that any unchallenged authority is ripe for being corrupted by the money interests.
So I agree with you: there are very many disinterested experts doing very good work, experts we’ve probably never heard of because they have no high govt or media place, experts who probably haven’t fallen prey to corruption by money interests. I’m very glad for that.
adding a chicken-or-egg question: are the real disinterested experts in important topics not seen in the media or in high govt positions precisely because they haven’t been corrupted by the money interests? Which comes first? That’s the chicken-or-egg question.
Flora,
You’ll love this Burning Platform:
During questioning from Ohio Republican Representative Jim Jordan, Deborah Birx hired on as the Covid Response Coordinator now admits she knew of natural COVID-19 Reinfections as Early as December 2020. So much for vaccines as a solution.
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/07/24/its-not-safe-or-effective/
These days i think it is less silenced and more buried in flack.
Things basically hit a point of no return when arXiv.org came about, and media started mining it for outrageous claims that had neither been peer reviewed nor actually independently replicated.
End result has been a gish gallop of “science” news, making it impossible for the public to figure out what is true.
Never mind the news in recent years that everyone from oil to food has paid “scientists” to either bury finds or direct focus away from the ill effects of their products.
Internal documents show big oil knew about the global warming issue since the 60s, tobacco companies tried to bury the lung cancer connection for ages, while food companies directed attention away from sugar and onto fat.
We enjoy the counsel of the best experts money can buy — who follow the science facts that ooze from the best science that money can buy in the Neoliberal Marketplace of ideas. The Neoliberal Marketplace of ideas does not provide the same kind of science we once knew.
re: Covid with us forever
Taking a long view (or a Long COVID view), as multiple reinfections and accumulating debilities become the norm, I suppose we can kiss good-bye to military readiness and worldwide full-spectrum dominance.
Maybe, behind the curtain, it’s actually a secret and highly effective peace movement.
There was a moment in the spring and early summer of 2021 when it felt like we were done. After the horrors of December 2020 and January 2021, infection rates bottomed out in May of 2021. Then came Delta. Then came Omicron.
Earlier this month Lambert posted a graph of wastewater concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 in Ireland. Ireland has been COVID Island since the arrival of Delta in June of 2021. Since Omicron spun out of Botswana in November of 2021, it’s been off to the races around the globe.
To me living with COVID means minimizing the amount of SARS-CoV-2 inhaled. Vaccination and previous infection will never provide enough protection to allow me to life before COVID. To me living with COVID means avoiding all crowded indoor spaces. Unless virus prevalence is at its lowest possible level, I will be avoiding restaurants, airports, and church on Sunday. I will be wearing a respirator in the grocery store and the gym.
Same here, re precautions. But is there a contradiction among the Covid narratives? OTOH, Covid is here forever. OTOH, a sterilizing nasal vaccine effective against all possible Covid variants is just around the corner.
If the latter is the case and a potent nasal vaccine emerges, it will be interesting to see whether the righteous anti-vaxxers stick to their personal-liberty guns or quietly sneak around to get a Covid-thwarting sniff.
No One Would Choose to Live Like This…
I bet there are literally thousands of underoccupied second/vacation homes and cottages that see 3-4 weeks of occupancy per year in Maine, and northern New England.
Not a unique phenomenon to US, or Canada— exists globally.
Spaceship Earth, for ME, not thee.
I haven’t rented for a long time but I’d say that would be a decent amount of rent around here. So perhaps the affordability crisis also has to do with where you are. They say in Silicon Valley it’s quite common for some employees to live in company parking lots due to the housing shortage amd the premise of Nomadland was about older people wandering the country for work, with the always gentle Bezos providing parking space next to out of the way Amazon warehouses.
None of which is to diminish the tragedy for the victims or of a country increasingly dotted with….let’s call them Congressvilles.
You’d win that bet – https://wgme.com/news/local/maine-has-the-highest-share-of-vacant-homes-in-the-country
It’s always been that way in ME and VT – I remember hearing 30 years ago that something like 50% of all the housing in both states was unoccupied for part of the year back then. Now that phenomenon is encroaching on the urban areas that used to be more immune. The city of Portland is more or less operated for the benefit of tourists now with a lot of housing stock being used for Airbnb, despite recent regulations meant to curb the damage somewhat.
will the fine cost less than the income?
Liz Warren article in the WSJ; her first line is this “Even as the pandemic continues to take its toll.” Then she goes on to talk about the Fed.
Why don’t you explain that very first line Lizzy? Continues to take it’s toll, huh? Why is that?
Maybe president Cheney can do better.
Would we all have to apologize for having walked in front of another Cheney gunshot?
If Liz Cheney is the president, shoot yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCVyWtmbIC4&ab_channel=TheJimmyDoreShow
“Europe’s not ready for a hotter world”
Not sure how Europe will cope. Will they be told to learn to live with the hot weather? What about the thousands of people that will die due to heat stress. Will they die of the heat – or will they die ‘with’ the heat? I thought how bad can it get in Europe. And then I realized – it could get worse. So I think that most people will say that it is climate change causing this ferocious heat in regions that do not normally experience it. But what if climate change also causes the Atlantic conveyor belt to shut down? That is the major current that transports heat from the tropics north which gives Europe its temperate climate. Of it shuts down, then conceivably you would have a European summer that would experience these ferocious heat waves and in the winter time, they would have the same weather as Siberia.
Rev, the Atlantic Conveyor has shutdown periodically in the past and it is very likely to do so again within the lifetime of many who are alive today.
We have screwed the pooch and the pooch had the clap.
“. experience these ferocious heat waves and in the winter time, they would have the same weather as Siberia.”
Or known in the US as South Dakota
The air currents also seem to be as important as the ocean currents. There have been a couple of articles posted recently on NC about the jet-stream spin-offs linked to persistent areas of heat. See, for example,
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31432-y
and
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/with-record-breaking-heat-europe-glimpses-its-climate-future/
While double jets and other jet-stream spin-offs are hypothesized to be linked to recent heat during this summer, former splits in the jet stream may have also brought the joy of split polar vortices snow during winter
https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/polar-vortex-split-2021/
Jonah, I am over the top impressed with the quality and “must read” links you provide. Someone mentioned that this service may not be your “jam” or “passion”, but please consider the old quote “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the individual.”
My wife calls my twice daily sessions with NC “doom scrolling”. If indeed that is the case, you make doom scrolling downright enjoyable! I would love an opportunity to do it long term.
Thanks Jonah
Thanks, Jonah. Great links and so very much appreciated.
Your wife must be talking to my wife :-) And, yes, NC is the best!
Ukraine allegedly/reportedly tried to convince Russian pilots to defect to the West for cash and EU citizenship.
Russian pilots called Russian counter-intelligence and Ukraine revealed anti-aircraft positions, intel assets to Russia (necessary so that defectors can plan and don’t get shot down on the flight to the West).
https://twitter.com/ZimermanErik/status/1551537720069070848
as always stuff like this is reported in Russian media/Russian social media, doesn’t get independent traction in western media.
The Ukrainians were also offering EU passports for those pilot’s wives as well – who once in the west would become hostages for forcing those pilots to do other work. As for co-pilots and crews in planes that took more than one man, it would not end well for them. And wouldn’t you know it, Bellingcat was involved in this as well which means British intelligence as well-
https://www.rt.com/russia/559528-fsb-ukraine-spies-hijack-warplanes/
Supreme Court leak…was by a conservative justice and was a grave dance celebration…gloating…a form of celebration…and we know whose wife has a problem with keeping her thoughts to herself…and who “protested” of the new issues of trust at scotus…which is why there won’t be any “findings”…if it was not one of the conservatives on the bench, it would have been “found” by now…removing the black gentleman from the high court will be interesting but he knows there are not enough republican senators willing to vote for removal on an impeachment
Thurgood Marshall spinning i his grave?
Seems we’ve reached an all time low…
it took alot of effort and 30 odd years of dogged determination.
I might be heard somewhere muttering “I told you so” like some kind of grumpy old man….
I need a hill, and all…
we’re lucky we didn’t get borked at least
Thank you again, Joe Biden.
Kudos to them for sure but to me the big news of the weekend was Sydney McLaughlin 400 m hurdles at the world championships. Splattered the world record and it looked to me like she was more than 20 m ahead of the 2nd place runner at the finish line.
“CNN Exclusive: FBI investigation determined Chinese-made Huawei equipment could disrupt US nuclear arsenal communications”
Sounds like a bit of projection to me. Maybe the FBI is remembering the time that the US/Israel used German Siemans-made equipment to disrupt Iranian nuclear facilities using the Stuxnet virus.
To be fair, Iran shouldn’t have been using Western IP and equipment in their centrifuges. Had they taken the earliest opportunity to replace all that stuff with domestic-origin code running on common consumer Arduinos, they wouldn’t have had such problems.
That underlines important material facts hidden by the current chip war narrative: trailing-edge nodes are valuable to the material world; leading-edge nodes are valuable to the fantasists who bind humans to care for their material needs.
John Berger is brilliant, thanks for the link. I’d recommend “Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing” as well: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/299810.Permanent_Red
…and red squirrels!
What’s not to like?
What link are you referring to? Should your comment have been attached to thread following some comment above?
Ways of Living AEON (toward the top of the Links)
Thanks! I will go back and read it.
Berger presented this BBC series “Ways of Seeing” in 1972
pretty interesting stuff….dunno how much today’s academic art criticism has moved away from what Berger’s thoughts, but I liked it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=john+berger
This just in
President Manchin has the covits
I’m having an “is there really a god?” moment…
“COVID-19 ‘is going to be with us forever,’ White House says”
‘We thought that at one time we might have been able to control it but under Fauci’s leadership, we soon put paid to that.’
But I can hardly believe what White House pandemic response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha was saying. He said ‘It’s really, really important that people build up their immunity against this virus.’ Well no, you can’t do that with a Coronavirus and that has been obvious for a very long time now. A very long time. But when he says ‘that vaccination is the best means of doing so’, who is he trying to kid? That was the message from Biden’s “Mission Accomplished” moment last year and how well has that worked out? I think that in the years to come that countries like the US letting this virus spread willy-nilly and in fact, helping it to spread among their population will be seen as an inflection point but how it will play out in the coming years I have no idea.
Rev,the BidenAdministration has the absolute tippy top best advice when it comes to selecting Persons (They,Them) who look right for the job.
And sound right for the job,voices are important.
There was the roan horseface ( Not a pretty face like the BAD ORANGE MAN’s spokespeople).
Then the African American Gay Woman with the classy frenchified name…
And of course the Estimable Jha, who always says “Ja” to his handlers.
He looks JUST RIGHT.
And the voice is perfect.
This is what the Biden Administration does well.
He’s doing what he’s being paid to do and I suspect he’s enough of a sadist to enjoy his job.
I agree, Tom, but I don’t think the good doctor was a very good negotiator for the position. After all, he was a Director at Harvard, moved up to Dean at Brown. Surely he’s worthy of Czar rather than mere Coordinator.
Indeed, Jha is demonstrably a moron. So it makes sense Biden tapped him for this supposedly important post. NC was posting back in like Feb 2020 that corona viruses don’t confer lasting immunity, and thus this was likely going to turn out the same. And here we are 2.5 years into the Pandemic and we have complete morons in public health that don’t understand what a corona virus is, or are willfully misleading people. At this point, it makes sense to assume the latter, that Jha is acting in bad faith and encouraging social murder.
WHOpox is likely to play out similarly badly this year. I’m not optimistic. Public health in the US has learned nothing, and seems to have known nothing to start.
Public antihealth in the US knows how to accelerate and entrench and permanentize a pandemic on purpose and still get away with making it look like an accident or incompetence or whatever.
> public antihealth
We’ve learned a very important lesson during the pandemic: We can slaughter a million people during a pandemic without civil unrest. Not only that, we can get the survivors to believe There Was No Alternative.
Now . . . can we get the survivors to change what they believe to . . . It Was All Done On Purpose? And if we can, then what?
At the very least, can we increase the number of people ready to absorb and use counter-disease information in the spirit of defeating or evading the government’s effort to kill them?
” I tell you, the man and the dog are definitely working together.”
That Miami mansion is starting to look a lot better:
Russia has expanded its military goals in Ukraine from seizing control of the eastern Donbas region of the embattled country to regime change in Kyiv, the Kremlin’s top diplomat says.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking to envoys at an Arab League summit in Cairo late Sunday, said Moscow is targeting the “absolutely unacceptable regime” of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-expands-its-ukraine-goals-now-seeks-to-oust-zelenskyy-s-unacceptable-regime-live-updates/ar-AAZW1FI?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=d2ee13558ae3426abd50e5e0f88f724f
Gonzalo Lira asserts a recent comment by Jake Sullivan indicates there’s a contract out on Z.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mactoSForFY
Didn’t people speculate early on that he was most likely to be offed by his Azov minders? But that assumed that given his background he could not be a dyed in the wool Banderite.
I guess Moscow has now given up on legitimizing Donbass self governance by brokering a deal with Kiev, and is instead signaling that they are willing to negotiate with others should there be a coup.
Perhaps because they are seeing Ukrainian command structure hitting a breaking point, with Zelensky ordering them to hold ground and soldiers selling out fleeing officers to the Russians (or taking pot shots themselves).
I’m HORRIFIED!!!
Russia is threatening Regime Change in Ukraine?.
A Nation of Criminals, I tell you what.
‘Murika would NEVER do such a thing.
Man,if you want Russian Pilots to defect ya gotta offer them something sweet in the way of an inducement!
Maybe a couple of pairs of Levi’s and the latest “Rolling Stone’s” tape?
It’s nice to know that Bob Dobbs is honored in Ukraine as well as the USA…
Ugh, so the bad news from the Walgreens tracker is that they no longer update daily; The cadence seems to have slowed. That’s a shame, as this was useful daily information that is difficult to get elsewhere.
And the information available continues to deteriorate, in the middle of a Pandemic. Hooray.
Stay frosty!
Rising on how Woke ideologues are gutting public service non-profits with endless in-fighting and racist and illegal demands on the staff:
https://youtu.be/f40TOeDnQeQ
The fishhook in the bon-bon: The Clinton Foundation…who would have thought it?
Rising on the chip shortage and the CHIPS act:
https://youtu.be/z4BAgxb9g14
Setting aside Robby’s knee-jerk libertarianism, co-host Badya provides a great overview of the chip making process and industry. Also, it appears Mr. Pelosi was not in line to profit from the act, as some have claimed.
‘I Went Seaweed Farming and Hit The Mother Lode’
I’m ambivalent about that piece, in the ‘be careful what you wish for’ kinda way.
I take Omega 3 every morning that is algae-based and pay more for it, because I don’t want little fishies removed from the food chain that could be feeding bigger fishies, but are instead rendered and packed into capsules to keep humans like me healthy.
We’ve also been supporting by small yearly donations Greenwave for several years, an outfit that teaches sustainable regenerative ocean farming. I have vague notions about how farmed coastal waters means a greater number of vested small business interests, that will vote and lobby to keep our oceans clean because their crop/livelihood depends on it. I grew up in Western Washington state and remember what happened when local fishing and logging collapsed. Trucks and boats were sold; families went hungry, and those ways of life never recovered.
My feelings about foragers on the other hand is mixed. Some are very careful about what they pick, where they pick, what they take home or sell up the chain. I’ve been an almost lifelong wild blackberry picker. Picking then was local and tribal. You had your spot, you returned to it every year, everyone knew it was “your spot”, and no one trespassed lest they wanted to be trespassed against. Oh yeah, they’d go biblical on your ass if they caught you… but with shotguns.
That changed in the late 80’s and now it’s just a free-for-all. There are no rules. ‘Money’ had gotten into the game, set up a booth, and paid for the berries. ‘Money’ didn’t care where they came from; anonymity was preferred. It’s a short season; the pickers are ravenous and aggressive; the native wild vines are the least hardy of the blackberries. The Pickers seemed to be on a search-and-destroy mission. Grab everything, leave nothing edible behind, salt the woods and enjoy the lamentations of their women.
Some part of me wants seaweed demand to go up, another part wants to fence off the tidal pools to protect them from the ravening hordes… she typed while sipping coffee from a roaster in Vancouver and popping nutritional supplements in an air-conditioned home office. Sigh. There is no virtue without hypocrisy. It’s probably one of those philosophical equations I’ll get to argue about in hell.
(so-called) Australia has always and indelibly been comparable to Nazi Germany in that it is one of the white supremacist settler-colonial states, along with those in Africa and the western hemisphere , whose foundational genocides (ongoing projects in the anglosphere) were explicit inspiration and invoked justification for Adolf Hitler’s personal, and the NDSAP’s more generally, genocidal settler colonial-agenda in the east. There is global settler solidarity on the suppression-through-omission of this very easily verified reality, for the simple purpose that their empire’s hegemony and indeed survival depends on it in no small part.
Florida man meet Florida sheriff. Well, it’s a funny read if you have a cynical or sardonic sort of humor; featured in the AP story is one county sheriff from Polk County. Had a good friend living there in the middle ’90s, and back then he called the county the 4×4 capital of the state. I took him at his word.
So it seems Verhoeven got it wrong when he located Robocop to Detroit…
https://www.wsj.com/articles/calling-in-sick-or-going-on-vacation-workers-arent-showing-up-this-summer-11658741402
Calling In Sick or Going on Vacation, Workers Aren’t Showing Up This Summer
Employers struggle with staffing as high Covid-19 infection rates, a longstanding labor shortage and vacation season converge
——————————–
So what’s the problem?
Staffing shortages result from “living with covid”.
Maybe the business community might finally figure out that “living with covid” isn’t good for business.
> Defiant Orban Doubles Down on Russia Policy, Arch-Conservativism Bloomberg
In which Bloomberg reports that Orban has reiterated his criticism of the EU’s policy on Russia, i.e. stating positions that are commonplace here at NC. I can’t find anything in the article about Orban’s conservativism, arch or otherwise. Orban panders to Hungary’s popular nationalist resentments but so does Macron. And he’s in coalition with the Christian Democrats now, while Jobbik campaigned with the Socialists.
Re abortion–here in SC our state lege looneys want to make it a crime to even hint how some pregnant woman can obtain an out of state abortion or self administer. Turley tries to explain the Constitution to them
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/07/24/south-carolina-moves-to-criminalize-sharing-abortion-information/
Of course free speech is already gasping for air here since it’s a crime for state University professors to criticize Israel and harm our vital trade relations (???). The latter law likely only holds on against court cancellation because not challenged and Turley says the former will go down as well. But expect much more Dem outcry about the former than the latter.
Well, it was a former republican president who installed the justices that put Roe v. Wade out of commission and set the stage for looney republican state legislators to turn states such as SC into Gilead.
Look at the variety of excuses that the Democrats trot out in order to justify their largess to the Semi-conductor industry:
https://japantoday.com/category/tech/semiconductor-bill-unites-sanders-the-right-—-in-opposition
Good on Sanders!
Once again sanctions have succeeded. Oh wait.
the Forde report. should be called the pathetic limp enabling left in the west.here is the loser Corbyn in action, pathetic!
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=43876
the pathetic left in the west. the dim wit canadian socialists have back stopped for the fascist True Dough. the so-called left is now viewed as the enablers just like bernie and the squad, just like Corbyn in the u.k..
the so-called pathetic left fears the conservatives so badly, that they back outright blatant fascists, and cover their eyes, ears and mouths. no wonder they keep losing and are viewed with contempt.good chance True Dough would be gone by now if the socialists had not back stopped him. now they will get even worse policies, as they blindly flail out in the next election as they lose to the right.
https://jacobin.com/2022/07/water-systems-wastewater-private-capital-investors-cib-infrastructure-bank
07.24.2022 Canada Commodification Cities Canada’s Infrastructure Bank Is Seeking Private Capital to “Renew” Cities’ Water Systems ByMitchell Thompson “Justin Trudeau’s Infrastructure Bank is facilitating private investment in the water sector.
But municipalities’ water systems will not be improved by the good-heartedness of private investors — they will take their pound of flesh by hook or by crook.
”in america,bernie, my friend Joe, and i wil back hillary no matter how many times they will cheat me. plus i will vote to support the nazi’s, and never exercise my power, same goes for the so called squad and DSA types.