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.
Researcher discovers another astronomy book written by Galileo Galilei Medievalists.net
Fed fearful of doing ‘too little’ to stamp out soaring inflation FT. Barber-surgeons fearful of doing “too little” with leeches.
A far greater pain beyond our borders Claudia Sahm, Stay-At-Home Macro
Think About Minsky for a Moment Stephanie Kelton, The Lens
How Wi-Fi spy drones snooped on financial firm The Register
#COVID19
CDC recommends Covid omicron booster shots for kids as young as 5 years old CNBC (MR).
More Harm Reduction, Less Abstinence-Only in COVID Messaging, Experts Say MedPage Today. “Public health agencies, including the CDC, should be somewhat separate from government because ‘there just needs to be some insulation so that it’s not sucked into the vortex of the day-to-day getting a ‘one up’ on your political opponent,’ [Amesh Adalja, MD, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security] said.” The difficulty here is that public health agencies — CDC, WHO — engineered enormous, population-level debacles on testing, masking, and transmission while the political situation was still fluid. Crimes against humanity for which they have never yet been held accountable. (WHO”s tweet labeling #CovidIsAirborne as disinformation is still up.) I’m not sure what the solution is, but I know that doubling down on PMC class power via independent agencies isn’t the way forward, because the individuals who exercise power on behalf of that class have shown themselves incapable of acting in any interest but their own (see How Ashish Jha and Rochelle Walensky of Newton, MA Protect Their Children from Covid (But not Yours)).
China?
There is no ‘brake’ to apply if we let go: top health expert on need to stick with dynamic-zero COVID approach Global Times. China’s unwillingness to slaughter millions of elders to keep the West’s supply chains full of trinkets is incomprehensible, and a sign of poor governance. Commentary:
Because let's get serious- if the people who are screeching for us to drop Zero-COVID to validate their failure, can't buy the latest phone or laptop when they want because my classmate is gasping for air on her dormitory bed- they'll be screeching about economic warfare instead.
— Naomi Wu 机械妖姬 (@RealSexyCyborg) October 12, 2022
Tech war: China’s top chip equipment maker removes US employees from product development after Washington imposes restrictions South China Morning Post
What does the 20th Party Congress mean for shipping? Splash 247
Myanmar
The international community must get real about Myanmar The Hill. No, it really doesn’t. We are, naturally, sending weapons where they will do nothing but support fascists (Ukraine), and not sending guns that would be used to oppose fascists (Myanmar). What we don’t need is a gaggle of NGOs yammering for the return of (the well-known brand,) Aung San Suu Kyi. Or some sort of brokered settlement….
Myanmar’s Pivot to Russia: Friend in Need or Faulty Strategy? Fulcrum
Young, Underground Reporters ‘Fight a Gun With a Pen’ in Myanmar New York Times
India
Exclusive: India’s RBI asks banks to stop building positions in offshore market Reuters
Jamnagar’s ‘swimming camels’ in deep waters People’s Archive of Rural India
Dear Old Blighty
King Charles III Greets Truss With ‘Dear Oh Dear’ Amid Turmoil Bloomberg. Commentary:
A member of Truss's own cabinet tells me Truss's and Kwarteng's governance is so dire that some Tory MPs would vote against her in a confidence vote, preferring even a general election that cost them their seats to the current economic chaos
— Robert Peston (@Peston) October 12, 2022
Channel 4 buys painting by Hitler – and may let Jimmy Carr destroy it Guardian. We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the memes. We shall fight on the television. We shall fight on the Op-Ed pages. We shall never surrender.
European Disunion
Farmers join civilians in mass demonstrations, Germany The Watchers
EU’s Unity Over Russia at Risk From Political Limbo in Bulgaria Bloomberg
Syraqistan
EXPLAINER: Who is leading the crackdown on Iran’s protests? AP
Japan keeps up verbal warnings against yen sell-off to halt slide Reuters
New Not-So-Cold war
Russia Detains Eight Suspects in Crimea Bridge Explosion WSJ
EXPOSED: Before Ukraine blew up Kerch Bridge, British spies plotted it The Grayzone. Interesting, although it seems the actual perpetrators used a different “plot.” (We see email where the UK hooks up the planners with a former Lithuanian Minister of Defense. One might wonder whether the PowerPoints for blowing up Nordstream 1 and 2 were shared round the Baltic in a similarly promiscuous fashion.)
* * * Appraisal of The Recent Performance of Russian Intelligence in the Ukraine John Helmer, Dances with Bears. Well worth a read. And, readers, whatever you can read between the lines, please leave in comments.
‘Teilmobilisierung’ und Demokratie Gilbert Doctorow. Scroll down for the English version.
* * * ‘All It Takes is One’: Iran Gives Russia Help From the Air Foreign Policy
Two potentates meet up at St. Petersburg Indian Punchline
‘They are stealing Russia’: Adam Curtis on how hyper-capitalism wrecked a nation – and why Liz Truss must take heed Guardian (DC).
All moralizing aside:
Absolutely heart-wrenching pics of deplorable Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Only joking, they are pics of NATO bombing Serbia, Libya and Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/mvMur1s0Up
— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) October 11, 2022
The Caribbean
Haiti wants U.S., Canada to lead anti-gang strike force, diplomat says Reuters
Biden Administration
Anthony Blinken Raises the Pucker Factor on Dissent Matt Taibbi (TK News) who recommends Violent Crime is Fun! Matt Bivens, The 100 Days
Biden finalizes plan to open up Obamacare subsidies to more families CNN
The surprisingly high stakes in a Supreme Court case about bacon Vox
RussiaGate
FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million to prove dossier claims, senior FBI analyst testifies CNN (!!).
2024
The Jan. 6 committee readies its grand finale Politico. Awesome. Indictments?
Our Famously Free Press
Suicidal thoughts, resilience in a small-town Iowa newspaper’s fierce last stand The Iowa Mercury
Health Care
Health Insurers Get Government Cash, Then Jack Up Prices Lever News. Which is the cause of inflation: Firms increasing prices (q.v. Richard Wolff). But paying firms to cause inflation… That takes the biscuit.
Class Warfare
First rejection of Biden’s deal brings strike clouds on the US horizon again Rail Freight
Rail strike talks have yet to tackle pay, RMT’s Mick Lynch says Guardian. The UK.
Unions threaten to intensify rail and port strike after rejecting Transnet 5.3% wage offer MiningMX. South Africa.
* * * Starbucks ex-manager testifies he was told to punish pro-union workers Seattle Times
Teens as young as 13 worked at Kia, Hyundai parts manufacturer in Alabama, feds say Miami Herald
Home care workers file federal complaint against New York over ‘discriminatory’ 24-hour shifts Gothamist (MR).
Marx and Engels and Russia’s Peasant Communes Monthly Review
Can God Be Proved Mathematically? Scientific America
How Stoicism influenced music from the French Renaissance to Pink Floyd The Conversation. Today’s must read. Musical interlude.
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
229 comments
Comments are closed.
Lambert was poking fun at the Democrat’s Id-Pol “Big Tent” yesterday, so I thought I’d goof on it as well. To the tune of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s “Welcome Back My Friends”
Welcome back my friends
To the Tent that comprehends
Id-Pol certainly portends
Victory, victory.
We’ve got Whites and Blacks and Browns
Our diversity astounds
How our righteousness abounds
Come inside, come inside
Have a seat, as our strategists unveil
What our campaigns will next entail
Rest assured, it will win voters’ hearts
If their degree is Liberal Arts!
You’ve got to see the show, it’s a dynamo
You’ve got to see the show, and here we go!!
First up, if you please
See our Ukrainian refugees
Take a few of these
Win with ease, win with ease
Pay attention to Stage Three
See our latest strategy
Infant gender surgery
From a He, to a She.
Sit up! Sit up! Sit up!
See the show!
Performing on a stool
We’ve a sight to make you drool
Seven genders and a mule
Keep it cool, keep it cool.
We present with no regret
Our thirteen-ethnic gay coquette
Watch her sipping anisette
What a get, what a get.
We’ve much more to present
More categories to invent
But keep in mind this grand event
Has intent, has intent.
Keep voters atomized
They’ll forget they’re pauperized
But we’ll tell them that they’re prized
Be advised, be advised.
Come and join the Tent!
We’ll misrepresent
The root of discontent
Join the Tent!!
The tune:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VsifANR96s
soundtrack to my teens —
well done!
They were fun, weren’t they? Yve’s favorite band from her teenaged years so I like to pull them out of the hat from time to time.
Thank you for another worthy contribution to the Naked Capitalism songbook.
Is there really such a book? If not someone should collect these in one location. I’ve got some chord progressions looking for some lyrics.
JZ is compiling one. I wonder if we can put together a band and singer to play and record them? Think NC has enough pull, or are there some musicians here? (I’m not one.)
Song parodies are loads of fun but original songs are quite rewarding.
I’m a avid but mediocre musician;
post a progression and suggest a genre/style and I’ll make a backing track with band-in-a-box. We can team up on lyrics. clearly there are some excellent wordsmiths in the crowd…
Yes, zagonostra, as jonboinAR says, I am compiling one. I’m gathering them from commenters like Sardonia, antifa, and Wukchumni when I see them.
If you’ve written any, please contact me at zelnickertaxservice [at] comcast [dot] net.
I hope to have something publishable by Thanksgiving.
Sardonia puts the progressive in progressive rock, once again. Kudos.
Yes!
Weird Al has nothing on your lyrical prowess!
I don’t know. Amish Paradise is tough to top..?
I was seated about 50 feet away from a suicide blonde draped all over Weird Al @ a B-52’s concert in the mid 80’s @ the Universal Amphitheater, not that there was anything wrong with that.
And you’re here to tell the tale.
“We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the memes. We shall fight on the television. We shall fight on the Op-Ed pages. We shall never surrender.”
That’s what the now grown kids used to call winning the internet.
fine caption for today’s Antidote
A most pyrrhic of victories.
If only Putin painted. We could end the Ukraine war.
Politico: NATO is developing a 10-year plan to rebuild the Ukrainian defense industry , with the first meeting between the alliance and Kyiv slated for next week.
The meeting will be the start of a long process hinted at for weeks by U.S. and NATO officials of a long-term commitment to Ukraine to bring it closer to the alliance in both training and equipment.
“We will be looking at defense planning requirements to get Ukraine fully interoperable with NATO,” said a senior NATO official who asked not to be named due to ground rules for speaking to reporters during alliance meetings in Brussels this week. “It’s about shifting away from Soviet equipment … to NATO-compatible Western equipment .”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/12/pentagon-chief-ukraine-support-00061387
Ka-ching! And there is the real reason why the west wants to keep this war going. Military-Industrial-Complex contracts, service contracts, consultants fees, “special” deals, guaranteed investments, etc. Who care if any of those weapons work as promised. Twenty years of spare parts, baby.
How many people are we talking about when it comes to the “Deciders” and their key enablers?
100K in the USA?
Out of 338 Million or so.
300 Million of whom have lives best described as either precarious or dire.
How many in Western Europe?
Neoliberal Globalist Corporate States are a reality and we are seeing their influence in the Ukraine and elsewhere.
Big time.
We should practice appeasement. Want to invade a neighbor? Have at it. We will sit here and just try to maintain our standard of living. After all, its all about us, right?
The NATO Anschluss of the Warsaw Pact counties began under Clinton.
Exactly who has been appeasing whom?
Our aggression is self defense: your self defense is aggression.
I want to see the Biden Familia’s stock holdings.
I want to see the Biden familia’s holdings crash and Biden eat S%*t
Another never ending US / western war with large joint headquarters facilities, lots of PowerPoint and awesome career opportunities for generals, arms executives and think tank pundits. Not to mention donations for politicians and spending to “support high tech defence industries”.
The dying is then principally done by others, as happened with the Afghan National Army, for example. Very few body bags flow home, and the few that do are junior enlisted members of the professional military so nobody in the political elite or broad electorate is affected by it.
What is there not to like?
The only thing learned from Vietnam was to avoid drafts to avoid protests, everything is repeated doubling downs.
There are times i welcome a sizeable deployment of Russian or Chinese in Mexico…
Mexico has a history of being too fractious. Try the “People’s Liberation Front of Quebec.” The “supplies” can easily be shipped from Siberia to Hudson’s Bay during the Arctic ice free summers coming up.
[Google really has become S—. I typed in {Hudson’s Bay, Canada} into Googlemaps and all it returned were the locations of a department store chain in Canada named ‘Hudson’s Bay.’ We are well and truly buggered.]
Uh, that’s because the body of water is called “Hudson Bay.”
Hmmm…. I’ll venture a guess and surmise that my “spelling” of the place name is biased by my indoctrination in the neo-liberal hive mind. Everything is an object and thus a potential possession. Therefore, the possessive ”s’ at the end of the Hudson part of the geographic descriptor.
Secondly, why did Hudson, or his heirs and assigns, let the Crown take that wonderfully productive body of water away from him?
[I’m not talking my way out of this one. Blast!]
My grandmama was no neoliberal, yet she tended to possessivize place names as well (Montgomery-Ward’s was one of her favorites). It’s a tic of a certain age (or NADS culture).
When I was a tyke, my parents called it ‘Monkey Ward’s’
There was also a department store called ‘White Front’ in LA in the 60’s…
True that is its official name now, but it was originally “Hudson’s Bay” when the British started sticking names on water bodies and places in North America. In Canada the apostrophe s parts have been systematically dropped over the past several decades for the English geographic names that had them.
Hab’s or the Hab’s not?
Sounds too close to the “Hobb’s End” Underground extension project in the Quatermass story.
Someday, Canada will win the cup again.
I hadn’t thought of that. Reminds me of a controversy that arose when I was living in Montreal: whether the department-store chain Eaton’s could or could not display its name using the apostrophe, because there was one in English but not in French. Never did find out how or if it was resolved. Could “Hudson/’s Bay” be part of the same issue? And if it is, why do the Quebeçois tolerate “Hudson’s Bay Company,” which is indeed everywhere?
Very good point concerning the differences between English and French. Quebec is, after all, a Francophone Province. Me and my Anglo “entitlement.”
Be safe!
My better half from Buffalo told me that she and her sister would scamper over the border to a supermarket and have the French side facing out on as many goods as they could turn around, hooligans!
Did the “goods” want to turn around? Sounds like your ‘better half’ was a budding psychologist!
How long would Russia wait to send a Kalibr on a visit to one of those headquarters? The first PowerPoint attended by all of those generals might be more
explosiveexciting than they thought.I heartily agree. Once Russia finishes in Ukrainian, IMO she needs to start taking ourt select military installations clearly intended to agress her in NATO. Yes, NATO countries. And anything the US or NATO sets up US. Make a careful list, and just do it. After all the West said out loud NATO is at war with Russia.
Should be: “And anything the US or NATO sets up Ukraine”
I’m not surprised, but I’m still not sure how this translates to reality in terms of industrial production to make it reality. Of course training is relatively easy and lucrative, but equipment from the US MIC seems more like contracts that will juice share prices but may never be realized (or not realized on a time frame that makes a difference). Additionally, Ukraine won’t be able to pay for any of this. So this is going to be the US paying its MIC on behalf of Ukraine.
So kinda like the Israeli model where the US gives Israel billions each year and Israel uses it to buy American gear with.
Aka US politicians handing themselves billions of tax payer money, by being MIC shareholders.
If I’ve understood correctly, MIC won’t be able to send more stuff to Ukraine is a few years, so indeed need to start planning for longer
customer relationshipwar.‘Ukraine, you’re doing a great job being our meat-shield AND our meal ticket. Let’s keep this going for the next decade!!!’
Julian Assange explained it all a very long time ago-
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1547752702511263745
I imagine that Julian Assange and Smedley Butler would have a lot to talk about if they could.
I saw this last night, and what struck me was this:
“The wider effort of looking beyond the day-to-day battlefield needs of the Ukrainian military will require years of attention from partners stretching from Warsaw to Ottawa, an effort that could eventually transform Ukraine into a NATO country by default, even if it is not a member of the alliance.”
Which gives the lie to how “unprovoked” the war was for a Russia that has been saying that NATO in Ukraine was a red line since 2006. But the whole article is a mash-up of propaganda that has been debunked for months now, so the audience is clearly one that has already imbibed the Kool-aid.
On the other hand, the Germans appear to be getting restive:
https://alexkrainer.substack.com/p/will-germany-sink-the-eu
I think it’s quite uninteresting who plotted that Kerch Bridge attack. It is simply somebody attacking the enemy they are at war with. Business as usual.
The interesting story is who has cut Germany’s only realistic lifeline, because that attack was done almost certainly by an “ally” of Germany. It’s amazing how not everybody is on that case.
‘It is simply somebody attacking the enemy they are at war with. Business as usual.’
Not quite. If the Ukrainians had used a drone or a low flying fighter-bomber to hit that bridge, then you could argue that that was a military attack. Using a truck bomb driven by an innocent citizen of another country (who apparently left three kids behind) which killed a young couple in the car traveling next to that truck is a terrorist attack. As I said in a previous comment, you can use Wikipedia to look up the military inventory of every country in the world but in all those listings of tanks, artillery, APCs, etc, you won’t find a sub-category for truck bombs. ISIS & Al-Quada maybe but they aren’t State actors.
I heard Andrei Martyanov assert that MI6 was involved, which throws up the irony of adopting the IRA’s choice of weapon in the Bishopsgate bombing of 1993.
Speaki g of andrie, just read this:https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/08/how-russia-views-america/
A very good read.
I keep debating whether to get a subscription to AA or not. I have always been impressed by the scholarship there. The first hook was an article from some years back that did an analysis of the first Chinese General Social Surveys in the 1980s and had a total different conclusion about the root causes of the Tiananmen uprising: something on the line that the urbanites were dreading the opening up of society, including the influx from rural areas, that was going to affect their position and privileges…
Seems a recurring theme. Same points were raised about Hong Kongers lately. I suspect that this is both Chinese state propaganda and widely accepted truism in China that is likely true to a large degree.
I don’t know. I don’t make those kind of civilian/military distinctions as sharply as many do. Official military forces bomb the you-know-what out of civilians all the time, passing it off as “collateral damage”. What the heck is that? It means you’re allowed to kill civilians as long as you’re making a pretense of only attacking an armed enemy. It’s BS. So when a more-or-less out-gunned force kills some civilians while attacking a tactically significant enemy target, I don’t get riled up. TL/DR: Probably most attacks could fairly be described as “terrorist”, certainly many of the US ones in my lifetime.
Not to quibble, but I think the essential element of terrorism is the “threatening (and harming) of innocent bystanders so as to create a climate of terror and thus achieve political ends.” I don’t think the type of weapon used is particularly relevant, it’s the target and the strategy behind the attack. Using Molotov cocktails against tanks does not make you a terrorist, it just means you’re a combatant fighting a war using particular weapons.
The word “terrorism” has lost almost all meaning in the last few decades, and has just become a cudgel to beat people we oppose over the head with. For example, we have been charging people who publicized what was going on on factory farms with terrorism . But I think the above was the original technical meaning.
> Divinity is positive
Without this ridiculous, self-flattering, idealistic assumption, Gödel’s supposed proof of the existence of a divine being in fact proves only that humans can generate gods through attribution, which is 1) trivial 2) not that far from Graeber’s anthropological theory of value.
The PMC really are trying to turn themselves into a world religion. Yay for the pseudo-scientific American.
“Divinity is positive”
I think the idea is that “God” has, as part of its meaning, “worthy of worship.”
Re: Helmer’s article. Having perused the article in the original Russian language it seems to point out that the people at the head of СВР (Foreign Intelligence Service) seemed to have ignored the problem of Ukraine and didn’t conduct much spying since the collapse of USSR in the region until it was too late. Ukraine being a former USSR state and the fact that Ukrainian and Russian hoods trained at the same USSR institutions and many were friends as well as colleagues made spying on each other somewhat difficult.
As the context of the article is Naryshkin’s speech at the opening of exhibition of “Evidence of the Crimes of the Ukrainian Nazis and Their Associates” in Donbass, it comes out as a mea culpa – as in “how come we allowed this thing to go on for so long and did nothing”.
So it’s mostly for domestic public, as an explanation for the situation. I doubt “we simply didn’t know” goes down as well in Donbass, though.
>Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan, The Truman Show
I listened to Rogan’s interview of Tulsi yesterday that someone in the comments had linked to. Back during the presidential race I donated to her campaign and encouraged friends to do so as well. After listening to the interview I thought about the metaphor of the stage light falling that was the beginning of Truman’s suspicions that all was not as it seemed.
Around one and half hour in Tulsi gave her assessment of Ukraine, in short it’s that Putin has been humiliated that the Ukraine offensive was a success and exposed his weakness; that he is, as a result, in a tenuous political and military situation; that he is like a “cornered animal” and thereby very dangerous and thereby poses a nuclear threat that could destroy the world. Joe did not push back one little bit or proffer questions to counter her assumptions.
So, based on my reading of the war, having followed pretty much the same sources as NC, I am wondering what the heck she is about. I don’t think I can trust her anymore and that Rogan is very selective in his questioning.
Or maybe I am wrong. Is Russia really “losing” on the battlefield and is so desperate that he will use nuclear weapons because the military operation is a failure? Her conclusion that we have to stop the madness is correct, but her reasoning leaves me in a state of aporia.
I listened to that part of the interview. Your take is the same as mine. Not sure exactly what she is all about anymore, and like you, I was a fan. I’m all in with the “stop the madness” message though, no matter who it comes from.
****
In other news, the CPI print was not good. Market not happy.
There is a video of an AOC town hall floating around Twitter where she gets questioned about voting to fund Ukraine. Probably wasn’t as much fun for her as dressing up in Tax the Rich dress and going to gala’s with the elite.
Yes, I concur with both of you. And I even wrote in Tulsi for president in 2020.
I watched most of her first episode of “The Tulsi Gabbard Show” where she renounced the democrat party.
And while I was happy that somebody comes out and says some of those things (as they did in the AOC town hall push back video) I too was left wondering what Tulsi was up to.
I was pleased that she called to end the war in Ukraine, but complaining about democrats doing “woke” stuff and legislating about religion? Those are the least of our problems.
I was left with a strong impression that Tulsi is running for Trump’s vice president.
How could anyone actually believe that Russia is “losing” in their SMO? Ukrainian casualties conservatively outnumber Russian losses by an easy five-to-one, the Russian troops are massively better trained and equipped than the ragtag terrorist Ukies, and every seeming Ukrainian advance is a mirage, and will lead to encirclement and liquidation of the “victorious” advancing troops. Ukraine is on the precipice of defeat and only a few more good shoves and the entire region will be repatriated by Russia.
Russia, by the Ukraine’s own admission, destroyed 30% of the region’s energy infrastructure in a matter of mere hours and only stopped short of total destruction constrained only by deep humanitarian impulses. If I were Putin I would have finished the job and the Ukraine would already be negotiating a surrender. Russian compassion and kindness is their own worst enemy.
The total Russian victory is nearing and it will be glorious to behold.
It’s not that crazy of a view when you look at recent events and the media spin they’ve received.
Russia fails to immediately capture Kiev, and then withdraws from that front entirely? Ukrainians have a shot at winning
Russians annihilate Mariupol? Terrible news but let’s not pay much attention to it.
Russians take Kherson? Terrible news but rather than focus on that lets focus on the ‘inevitable’ Ukrainian march to Crimea.
By the way, did you hear that the Russians are out of ammo and are too corrupt to drive from point A to point B without suffering mechanical casualties?
Ukrainians make gains in the Izium area? Proof that Russia can’t fight and Ukraine is winning. If the Ukrainians aren’t taking Crimea they’ll be taking Moscow!
Tough fighting in Kherson? The best Russian troops are stranded there and once destroyed its only EZ conscripts and militia from here on out!
It’s not necessarily an accurate viewpoint (in fact I’m pretty sure that is very inaccurate) but it is the predominant viewpoint put forward by the mainstream media. Genuinely believe that Tulsi genuinely believes it too.
That’s disappointing but wouldn’t her one time ally Sanders say the same thing? I’d contend the point about Ukraine is not whether our leaders are wrong or right in their personal view of Putin but whether they are wrong in their zeal to mess with him. And she seems to say they are. Meanwhile her frequent interlocutor Tucker Carlson is gung ho to condemn China using propaganda talking points but can be right on other questions. It would be a refreshing change to have national leaders who can at least be sensible about something
It’s easy to jump to conclusions about Tulsi since she hasn’t yet been given much of a chance to present herself as a national figure. Maybe that will change. She has said that she will now campaign for some Republicans so perhaps a DeSantis/Gabbard ticket could really happen. .
Joe Rogan is a meathead so I don’t think it’s that he’s selective in his questioning, it’s just that he’s not particularly bright. Tulsi Gabbard is just another grifter, seizing the chance to “come out” at the opportune time to enhance her career prospects.
So, you’d rather watch her spar with the gang on “The McLaughlin Group?” Now also helmed by a Rogan.
I, too, was a fan until I heard about her support for Israel and ties to the Council on Foreign Relations. She now strikes me as a more polished Trump; good instincts when it comes to finding an audience, but shallow when it comes to the issues. I think you have found an example of that.
She knows very well that there is a market for anti-war sentiments, but when you drill down you find that she is not actually anti-war. Were she in power I doubt that she would have done much differently than has Biden insofar as she would have gotten her information from the exact same people.
This is the big thing. She’s never been anti-war, full stop. Because she has been willing to speak out against US military adventures on any level, combined with a dab of “sin of omission”, and people have made her into something she is not. She clarified in an interview once she is only against “unjust” military intervention and that told me all I needed to know. (And I say this as someone who still thinks she’s among the least bad options, aside from the fact that she’ll never been within 50 miles of holding an elected office again. Yes, considerable flaws and all. But don’t take that as an endorsement, more like if you put a gun to my head and told me I had to pick one.)
Agreed. But the tone seems a bit different this time. Before she was um, well, a maverick. Now she sounds scripted to appeal to Republicans.
I think she’s got a very smart group behind her. I really can’t wait for something resembling a news org to look into her current organization and people. I can’t help but think that there are only two reasons why we’re still flying in the dark on who the real Tulsi Gabbard is: either she’s the real deal and they want to suppress coverage of her, or she graduated from one cult only to front for another, smaller cult. NOT a cult of personality (HRC). I don’t get the sense that Gabbard is the only driver behind her ambition. I would, as they say in Starship Troopers, like to know more.
What’s this I hear about “United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, United States Army Reserve” in Mountain View, California, to which unit she apparently had been transferred in 2020? Especially given the state of the information space since then.
AKA Google.
Moffett Field, I think, but you’re right either way. The techies and the MIC are either twins or the same person. I haven’t figured out which yet. After a quick search, I have found that you are more right than I thought. Google has leased parts of Moffett Field as of 2014. Fascinating.
CarlH: … After a quick search, I have found that you are more right than I thought. Google has leased parts of Moffett Field as of 2014.
Moffett Field is just across on the other side the 280 freeway from the Googleplex. That part of Moffett that Google isn’t leasing, NASA’s Ames Center now owns.
Point is, it’s in some ways a small world at the top there in SV.
Peter Norvig, Google’s head of AI till recently — and the guy who responded to Noam Chomsky’s critique of brute force AI methods in science, which came up on NC recently — ran NASA Ames’s Computational Sciences Division before he went to Google. Norvig is also the co-author of what’s still the main college text on AI, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: A MODERN APPROACH, and he’s now at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.
CarlH: The techies and the MIC are either twins or the same person.
The military-electronic computers-IT connection is foundational to the history of computing.
The first electronic digital computer was developed by John von Neumann expressly to model fluid dynamics (explosions) for the Ulam-Teller Super (the H-bomb). In 1960, similarly, 100 percent of all microprocessor chips manufactured by Silicon Valley were bought by the Department of Defense, mostly for ICBM guidance systems and early warning radar systems like NORAD. As late as 1967, the Pentagon was still buying 75 percent of all microprocessors made by Silicon Valley.
It was the Japanese who opened up the electronic appliance market with the Sharp Calculator in 1964-66, which is where most of the modern IT industry (desktops, laptops, phones, etc.) evolved from, not Silicon Valley.
Thanks for this! I live in the heart of the silicon beast, surrounded by drones who think they are bettering the world. Well meaning people, but totally deluded about their “work”.
Wasn’t “The Polish Bombe” that spawned the Bletchley Park Bombe during WW-2 the first electronic computer? It did have moving parts however. By electronic, do you mean fully electric without moving parts?
Les Bombes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe
Then we have the Hollerith Machines that the Reich “rented” from a subsidiary of the American IBM Corporation with which to solve the “Untermenschen Problem.” They used electro-optical card readers to tabulate data. I remember using punch cards to program, the same concept as the Hollerith system.
I will agree not to bring up Jacquard looms or Babbage machines. Then there is the Antikythera device.
The first serious electromechanical computing devices in late 19th century were developed to better aim battleship guns, by calculating trajectories. So computing and military go back to the era decades before computers were invented.
Her full on support for the Hindutva RSS nuts and BJP was the deal-breaker for me. She’s damaged goods.
Yup. She’s also not antiwar, she’s only against “regime change wars” (whatever that is), is pro war on terror and plays up her military cred every chance she gets. And lest anyone’s forgotten she endorsed Biden in 2020.
The term grifter is overused these days but it fits Gabbard perfectly.
Gabbard and Sanders are two peas in a pod.
Perhaps they are Pod People?
Just to repeat my point wasn’t Sanders rather soft on Israel and when it comes to the CFR Bill Moyers–surely nobody’s idea of a conservative–was even a member.
I agree that we need to hear a lot more about Tulsi’s views but don’t agree that she should be blackballed by either the MSM or the left based on litmus tests. We have way too much of that already.
Normally I would agree with you, however Sanders could have been forgiven in ’16 and ’20 in a way that Gabbard cannot. He had clearly never had a very good grasp of foreign policy, it just wasn’t his bailiwick, and in the instance of Iraq he had actually stood up before the fact. There was no reason to believe that were he to attain the presidency he would not have spent a lot more time researching the issues, as he did with Iraq, than Gabbard would now.
Gabbard does not have that excuse, and the subsidiary talking points she is using mirror those of the worst kinds of war hawks. This is where the CFR comes in. Despite the anti-war clickbait headlines, if you drill down into her publicly espoused views she sounds like a Cheney, and if there are any Democrats out there who still despise those kinds of people it would be me. As such, from my perspective, she is officially cancelled.
We may have too much of that sort of thing, but when it comes to PNAC types, IMHO, one can never have enough of it.
We’ve had this discussion here before–about whether national office is a matter of position papers or “first class temperament.” My take has always been it’s the latter and I think Gabbard is a great political talent who could have helped the Dems and, if she does stay an independent, could help the process by shoving both parties in a more common sense direction. Indeed, they seem to be quite afraid of her themselves given their spokespeople are the likes of Biden, Pelosi, McConnell etc. Your contention is that she’s a phony and a stalking horse for more Cheney-ism. My instincts say that’s not true but I certainly agree that’s not much to go on. If some of us seem to be grasping at straws these days it’s because that’s all we’ve got.
“If some of us seem to be grasping at straws these days it’s because that’s all we’ve got.”
Something in which we are in 100% agreement. I am still having a very difficult time understanding where all of the pre-Obama anti-war movement went to. They cannot have all moved into the Bush camp just because Michelle has been hand feeding him kibble. I feel like they have all thrown up their hands and moved on to join the half of the country that no longer votes.
Gabbard IS a great political talent, but then so many grifters are these days that it is hard to tell them apart. I sincerely hope you are correct in your analyses.
Israel is a political hot potato nobody wants to come down hard on.
Just look at how some old comments etc was used against Corbyn.
And that was in UK. How the F do you think it would play out in USA, thanks to having both a massive number of rapture fanatics and a larger population of Jews than Israel itself?
It’s interesting to see the gamut of takes here on Mrs Gabbard’s JRE appearance. I’m three-quarters of the way through the interview. I’m not a U.S. voter, but Gabbard and Rogan discuss many issues that I would imagine are (a) important to U.S. voters and (b) virtually untouched in any other venue.
They discuss Gabbard’s debate experiences with Kamala Harris; her encounters with the corruption, bullying and cynicism of the DNC, including their initial enthusiasm for and subsequent discarding of her; the vindictive policing by the Democrats of members who choose to speak with Republicans or Fox News; her thoughts on the reckless profiteering of the military-industrial complex.
And on Russia, she recounts her efforts over the years to draw attention to the danger of the New Cold War; she and Joe excoriate the recent New York City PSA about how to survive a nuclear attack for its naivete; they play and criticize an old Colbert report segment where a guy from Foreign Policy magazine (CFR) glibly describes western meddling in east Ukraine; they soberly discuss the threat of nuclear war in a way I seldom see in any other medium anywhere.
Finally, Gabbard states her intention to become an Independent – not a Republican – because of her disillusionment with Democratic corruption and its inability to reform itself.
The issues she and Rogan discuss are conspicuously lacking in mainstream discourse. Her opinion on Russia’s strategic mentality is certainly not Douglas Macgregor’s take, but I sincerely wish that more politicians discussed soberly and realistically the danger of nuclear war and the imperative of forging peace. It’s easy to speculate on what militarism lurks beneath her words – she will never be president, and the reasons why, like the reasons for her departure from the Democrats, should be known.
Equating Gabbard with Trump is feeble, except only in that the establishment dislikes her.
Joe Rogan has many interests, but geopolitics is not one of them. Calling him a meathead – he’d probably agree. Calling him dumb is nonsense.
Again, I’m not a U.S. voter, but if I were, I would sure want to see more people talking like this.
It’s pretty clear you’re not an american voter.
Here in america we “vote” for a guy in the throes of dementia who screwed us over for 50 years because his hair isn’t orange, and trash someone who dares to jump out of the democrat bucket and speak unspeakable truths because she is Hindu.
We are so analytical in our evaluation of candidates, that slogans like “Vote blue no matter who” are actually powerful “election” winners, demonstrating the deep respect with which we regard our responsibilities as “voters.”
It’s how we in the u.s. have come to be so well an justly governed, and our country the idyllic place to live that it is.
“Her opinion on Russia’s strategic mentality is certainly not Douglas Macgregor’s take.”
So I assume you think that she is not being disingenuous. You take her at her word. This is what I’m struggling with. I think she does know better. If she doesn’t that God help us because someone who browses the internet in between working on spreadsheets like myself is more informed than a former member of Congress.
There are people like Taibbi–who lived in Russia–who have a less rosy view of Putin and certainly he spends a lot of time on the internet and is someone I wouldn’t call a poseur. There’s a more favorable view around here and one that I agree with although that too is more about “instincts.” It could be this discussion is putting way too much emphasis on talk over actions and other considerations. If Tulsi, or Taibbi, disagrees with me that’s not a deal killer IMO. Before he became president FDR campaigned on different ideas. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
IIRC, Taibbi was one of the editors of a magazine in Russia during the bad times of the Nineties, so his view of Russia may be dated even as his views of Western culture and politics have matured.
Many pixels have been sacrificed defending some of the stuff Taibbi wrote back then as “youthful hi-jinks”, in much the same way that Cenk Uyger has had to clean up his record as a shock jock. I can’t honestly say that I know much about the controversy, only that the controversy exists.
“Equating Gabbard with Trump is feeble, except only in that the establishment dislikes her.”
Nonsense. She has been on so many sides of so many issues that it appears clear she has no real bedrock of commitment to any number of them. Those she has proven committed to are rather unpleasant. Assad aside, I would hate to be a Muslim during a Gabbard presidency.
It has been fashionable to hate on Democrats for quite some time now, and we have the illustration of how valuable that can be in (former Democrat) Trumps’ campaigns. She is a very polished opportunist, and as the presidential race is about to start up after the mid-terms it would not surprise me in the least to hear that she is running with Trump as his VP.
The Democratic establishment may not like her, but that is one of her primary strengths; no one likes the Democratic establishment. What they think is only valuable insofar as it provides fodder for the political campaigns of those who want to distance themselves from a track record of failure. That is a powerful message for those bi-partisan donors who recognize that their duopoly’s line-up needs a facelift, something Gabbard would be perfectly capable of providing without the least twinge of conscience. Remember, this is the kind of “anti-war leader”* who had no problem taking campaign cash from the MIC until such time as it became untenable.
She is slick. I would watch just how slick she gets in the next year or so.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tulsi-gabbard-anti-war-campaign-donations_n_5c530708e4b093663f5bfa69
To be a Devil’s advocate, it does make sense to not push buttons to fully humiliate the other side in Great Power politics even if the MSM narrative were true and Russia were losing, lest the crisis can only escalate in the short term and diplomacy will be complicated in the medium to long term. The argument obviously applies even more if Russia is not losing, but actually winning. The only justification for the kind of humiliation that the West seems to be seeking (nevermind if they can actually get to a position where they’d even be close to impose it) is if they expect the other side to be completely vanquished and forever destroyed, and with respect to a major nuclear power, that’s a crazy thing even to hope for.
Personally, even if she does buy into the MSM narrative, I do find it reassuring (somewhat) that she draws a more reasonable conclusion from it unlike the rabid warmongers.
>Tulsi
Tulsi used to be *terrible* on Ukraine and Russia. Same page as Nuland.
Then she reformed. To the point that I strongly supported her.
What you are stating here aligns with what I’ve been hearing since yesterday.
And, no, Russia is not losing.
Re: The Jan 6th hearings.
There might be some indictments coming out of this, but not of Trump – at least not for a while.
I’ve been closely watching what the FBI is doing and why they are leaking what they are leaking, and why Bobb went to them for voluntary ‘talks’, and why, when they have Trump cold on the obstruction case, they aren’t doing anything but playing Trump’s legal games. Knowing a bit about how investigations work, my guess is that they are after Trump for something much bigger than obstruction, but they need some of his inner circle to crack. Hence the leaks, especially about who Bobb is pointing the finger at and how Kise wanted to work with the FBI instead of being so combative, etc.. Sooner or later the rats are going to want to leave the sinking ship and protect themselves – and the FBI can wait until that happens. Pressure and time.
Trump is already cracking – I’ve taken to watching his rally speeches lately – and he is getting more and more erratic about the investigations and saying more things that no doubt his lawyers have asked him to shut up about – sooner or later, those lawyers are going to realize that Trump’s mouth will sink them too!
And so the soap opera continues!
>”…they have Trump cold on the obstruction case…my guess is that they are after Trump for something much bigger than obstruction…”
An honest question: Why? Why not go for obstruction and forget the legal entanglements of something bigger? After all, obstruction is what brought down most of the Watergate gang.
He “needs” to be convicted of something that prevents his ever running for president again. Obstruction doesn’t do it.
Best story of the morning:
“More than a decade ago, Paris City Hall issued orders requiring stores to turn off all signs and window displays from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m., but the ordinance is widely ignored with little consequence….That is why On The Spot members have taken matters into their own hands.” The video is great!
With Leaps and Bounds, Parkour Athletes Turn Off the Lights in Paris
“Russia Detains Eight Suspects in Crimea Bridge Explosion”
Saw footage earlier of some of these guys being taken down by security forces and showing the weapons/bombs that they had with them. Maybe those police are from the Russian Federal Security Service but don’t know-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fln6-j2MUQQ (1:14 mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqeFw_1Uy7w (1:14 mins)
As for ‘some explosive experts’, just what the hell do they think blew up that section of bridge? We all of us have seen footage of that truck going up as it approached that up-slope and this article even shows you that film. This attempt to muddy the picture by suggesting scuba divers carting a coupla hundred kilos of explosives or mystery boats is merely an attempt to whitewash the Ukraine using a truck bomb. That footage of the truck exploding? Notice that they never show it frame by frame to show the exact center of that explosion to resolve this question? Then again, this is the Wall Street Journal. And I am willing to bet that some of their more important readers took financial positions at the beginning of this year based on how they think that the NATO-Ukraine war would develop – and are now going to be suffering serious loses. It would be hilarious if Goldman-Sachs bet the bank on a successful campaign but are now in danger of going into default.
>AOC Gets Wrecked By Her Own Constituents Over Ukraine War Funding:
Title says it all. Interesting only 4 views.
https://youtu.be/bUm60XFqWZU
Did you notice in that clip that even though it is AOC appearing there, that it looks like the bulk majority of seats in that hall are empty? What, nobody is taking her seriously anymore and now feel free to call her out on her bs? Now why would that be?
https://twitter.com/DoctorFishbones/status/1549451426312736768
finally! this should be amplified
so proud of these constituents, more of this please
(bet she accuses them of ‘violence’, misogyny…)
Her posture said it all, but the one little bit of her that I could catch was when she said the second constituent was being rude.
She is down to tone policing her own constituents. That is just sad.
yup, true to form
Obama-caliber gaslighter
disgusted I voted for both – once!
Hey, you are not alone. They are good at what they do. But, as you say, when it proves to just be a facade it cannot be kept up for long.
I’m so angry with Sanders I just don’t know what to do with it.
Did you vote for, or was it an algebraic vote against?
I can’t recall when I last voted enthusiastically ‘for’.
jefemt – I was skeptical of Obama (early tell, his praise of Reagan)
that time was a vote against Bush/Palin – esp. Palin (and her war against wildlife)
re: AOC – not enthusiastic, but never expected she was so phony.
her ilk – like Obama – do the worst damage with their mendacity
Sanders, just makes me sad – he was so close. Angry he dissolved his ‘movement’ instead of passing on the torch/mailing list to a worthy successor –
that was salt in the wound
oops, that should be McCain/Palin — not Bush
still awful
My last enthusiastic vote was for Sam(antha) who was in the first annual “Miss Bondage of the year” contest at Bondage A GoGo in SF.
A lovely redhead and a worthy winner.
Thank you for that! It is nice to see people standing up.
I never got the idolizing of Antoinette of color, she’s managed to not pass any legislation in her time in office, but who judges a politician on that anymore now that Twitter is here?
As they say in cattle country AOC is all hat and no cattle. All sizzle and no steak. Just like Sanders.
Re: the Supreme Court and Bacon
«In 2021, for example, Texas enacted a law that effectively forces major social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to stop removing content they deem offensive —
…
Even setting aside the fact that this Texas law violates the First Amendment, why should Texas get to decide for the entire country what sort of content appears on Twitter?»
So the First Amendment and ‘freedom of the press’ enshrines the right to censorship? We’ve come a long way since the Fairness Doctrine.
How Stoicism influenced music.
I have some doubts. I am also skeptical of Stoicism because it was theistic, which is why Stoics didn’t care much for the religiously skeptical Epicureans, let alone the Cynics. So there’s a tendency for Stoics to reinforce the general orthodoxy, which is why you see a highly placed Roman like Aurelius adopting the philosophy. So I suspect that musicologist Latour hopes that there is much Stoicism in music, but I’m not persuaded that she has found more than a small span of the gamut.
Besides: There’s another side to music that thoroughly refutes the Stoics.
Aretha Franklin and the timeless, “Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP-6REINKtI&list=RDGP-6REINKtI&start_radio=1
And there’s always Baduizm.
Its kind of funny how ‘epicurean’ slipped into English as a positive word, while ‘stoic’ developed negative connotations. I wonder if its the same in other languages.
On the subject of Pink Floyd and philosophy, Roger Waters was on Joe Rogan earlier in the week and gave a great outline of his political beliefs. He has a great story about how his mother set him straight.
As for other music with a Stoic view of the flow of time, it did remind me of a recent Rammstein song, also called Time (Zeit). (NSFW YT clip)
The “stoic” disposition, trudging stubbornly through adversity, is treated as a positive when applied to the working class. It’s a matter of perspective (and exploitability).
“I will work harder,” said Boxer, formerly horse, now glue.
“I will work harden,” said the steel to the forge.
Stoicism is to continue walking as the “rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born” is gaining on you.
Not sure “epicurean” is viewed as “positive” in some circles. It’s often conflated with hedonism, which it is not in it’s ancient Greek philosophical construction.
Stoicism can be found in a lot places if you know what to look for, and it’s one of those things that was popular once again in the late Renaissance and early modern periods. So, it makes sense that there are traces of Stoicism in some of the music of that time.
I would not distinguish the Stoics from the Epicureans in the manner you suggest. For one thing, Epicureans would be shocked to learn that anyone considers them skeptical. The skeptics, after all, were a different, competing philosophical school who were united in their opposition to speculative theoretical philosophies. The philosophy according to which everything consists of imperceptibly small, indestructible particles moving, sometimes randomly, in a void was, at the time, that kind of philosophy: speculative theory. Moreover, the Epicureans in fact believed in gods. The key point about the gods that distinguished the Epicureans from the Stoics is that the gods, according to Epicureans, have absolutely nothing to do with what goes on in this world and are totally indifferent to human beings. I suppose there is something to the claim that Stoics support orthodoxy, if by that you mean to indicate that they tended to be “conservative” in one of the usual senses of that word these days. Right. That’s because their ethical principle, “Follow nature,” is by itself almost completely vacuous. In order to follow nature we need to know what nature is, especially our own nature, and the latter, for Stoics, is largely a matter of the social role one has come to inhabit. Social roles go along with norms many of which, in the ancient world, were longstanding. Thus, traditional norms give Stoic ethics content that it would otherwise lack. Finally, the issue of whether erotic love is a good or bad thing was in fact debated by these schools and that debate doesn’t play out the way you’d expect. Lucretius, an Epicurean thought to be quite true to the philosophy of the founder, argues at length that such love is a bad thing which one should take care to avoid. If, for instance, you find yourself falling in love with someone, he advises that you pay for the services of a prostitute instead. Epictetus, the Stoic who was indirectly Marcus’ teacher, holds that erotic love is divine. That is, it’s somehow brought about by God for the sake of the good. It should be honored rather than disparaged.
“Baduizm”
As in Erykah “Baduizm”? (just kidding)
However, she thinks it’s a thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW28iWV7nxE/
Reading the Curtis article makes me thinking about equilibrium, and how economics seems to be the last bastion of the thought that “nature” is self-correcting and self-stabilizing. Instead it may look that way at a surface glance, but once one graph the statistics one find it at best oscillating wildly around some center never reached.
Anyways, i red thread through Curtis’ works may well be the rise of the idea of humans as biological robots. Starting with his take on the history and use of psychology.
Nature is indeed self-stabilizing, but ‘correctness’ is a spook.
Hmm, that is an interesting thread. The distinction between mechanization and automation, based on whether the machine behaves in response to conditions, seems important in this context as well. The PMC’s goal of a “‘rational’, reproducible social order” (Ehrenreich) is, in essence, the automation of society. Watch the Yang fanatics with this in mind. I get the bad feeling we’re going to be hearing a LOT from them after the election.
A few of his films cover this ground.
Will have to check out his latest.
What he’s saying is that business have to come up with money today (M) in order to fund their operations, without knowing whether the future will turn out the way they had hoped. When debt is used to finance a firm’s operations, it puts the business on the hook for a certain (i.e. known) sequence of future payments (debt service), with no guarantee that its future cash flows (M’) from running the business will be sufficient to service that debt.
From Stephanie Kelton…I’m thinking about this in regard to student loans to people who don’t even know what to major in…
Putin is waging “a crusade against our way of life”
Where is the lie? As usual, though, it all depends upon how you define the word “our”. The word “my” would have been far more appropriate.
“Our” being the US educated north Atlantic elite and their PMC retinue.
More and more it all feels like a shrill high school clique situation, where all those famous “rules” can change at the whim of the leaders of said clique.
One of the biggest ironies of the Ukraine conflict is that Putin deliberately used the “rules based order” developed by the US at the UN to break up Czechoslovakia, presumably to show just exactly how fluid the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was in international law. As a lawyer, Putin would have a field day in any international court that had not been bought out by US interests.
It really is a high school clique of mean girls, and every moment of this conflict only serves to underscore not only just how mean they really are, but also just how stupid those who buy their schtick must be. Anyone that has read the parts of Putin’s speeches that reference nukes would have to see that he is just responding to the gaslighting of the West; there are no threats there, just level headed mention of the potential repercussions should Russia be attacked with them.
I don’t think Georgetown is putting out illiterates, so the most charitable thing that could be said of them is really not suitable for a family blog like this.
But nobody reads the speeches, they are being force fed out of context snippets at best by the MSM propaganda apparatus (if not completely fabricated hot takes overlaid over him speaking in Russian).
His real audience of key governments in the Global South may read them, I guess. He is seeking to land his points with them.
I think that the Russians recognise that at most 5% of western populations will pay attention to what he says beyond the spin placed on it by corrupt corporate media.
Can’t recall where I saw it but I am pretty sure that Biden criticized Putin for fighting against the ‘Liberal World Order’. Not democracy, not freedom, not peace but this very specific word construct. If Biden had been more honest – yeah, tough call – he would have put a ‘Neo’ in front of that word construct. That would have clarified everything.
Oh Bloody H—! Scholz as the Grand Master of a ‘New Knights of the Teutonic Order,’ and Putin as Aleksandr Nevsky?
The Knights have effed around, and they are about to find out in a battle on the ice.
Nice metaphor!
Why would the Russians use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine? Why would anyone use a nuclear weapon anywhere at any time? Why did the USA use nuclear weapons in 1945? That I can answer. We had a brand new toy and exploding it in a desert was not much of a test. We used it to force the Japanese surrender. We used it to “send a message” to the USSR. We used it just because we had it. Any or all of those and others will do, but today only the arrogant, the delusional, and the insane even talk about using nuclear weapons. The Russians patiently restate their policy; their long standing policy. The propaganda mill in the DC Bubble & Echo Chamber grinds out its hourly and daily quota of chapters in the “narrative.” I am apprehensive about the US deciding to use just a little nuclear weapon as a false flag. Russia has the means to complete the defeat of Ukraine and the war would already be over were it not for the ambitions of the US/NATO/EU to weaken and/or destroy Russia, to see Putin removed from office, to “smite the evil Russkis.”
The problem for the Collective West is a refusal, or is it inability, to see the reality that their military, political, and economic policy has failed.
Anybody else think all this talk about nukes is setting the stage for a false flag? Naw, I must be reading too many Tom Clancy novels. / ;)
I sure hope nobody is “mad” enough to go that route, but lately they have kept disappointing me.
Many times, plain old inertia will “get the job done” without any conscious intervention from “decision makers.” That’s the most troubling possibility.
Ugh, that is the kind of momentum that gave us WW1…
Knock knock:
Who’s there?
Sarah
Sarah who?
Sarah Yavo
Another old Knock Knock joke I heard on television many years ago; very appropriate to today’s information battlefield.
Knock knock:
“Who’s there?”
“We ask the questions, not you!”
“The problem for the Collective West is a refusal, or is it inability, to see the reality that their military, political, and economic policy has failed.”
Yup. I keep thinking that all of our leadership is from an age in which the US could do what it wished with impunity combined with the fact that our present weakness is a direct result of their having done so for such a very long time. Age never improves arrogance, and it is not hard to discern why those who have acted on auto-pilot since the Reagan Revolution have the kinds of ossified world views that would put us in such a predicament.
TINA grade hypernormalization, with a hat tip to Mr Curtis.
the term hypernormalization originating from post-USSR Russia, as a way to label the social and political behavior right before the collapse.
Russia needs to wary of a nuclear first strike by the US/NATO. It may be in Russia’s best interests to launch a first strike instead. Not issue warnings of doing so, but actually doing so.
Russia has hypersonic missiles. My understanding is they do close to as much damage as a tactical nuke w/o the radiation. And we don’t have anything comparable. Putin has never in these recent exchanges referred to nukes. He’s referred to Russian weapons and pointed out some are more advanced that what Russia’s opponents have. That’s pretty clearly a reference to hypersonic missiles.
Are the “rules” referred in rules-based international order documented somewhere?
Sure. They have them for sale on e-bay.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=etch+a+sketch&_sacat=0
Calvinball is a game invented by Calvin and Hobbes. Calvinball has no rules; the players make up their own rules as they go along, so that no Calvinball game is like another.
Rules cannot be used twice (except for the rule that rules cannot be used twice), and any plays made in one game may not be made again in any future games. The game may involve wickets, mallets, volleyballs, and additional sports-related equipment.
There is only one permanent rule in Calvinball: players cannot play it the same way twice. For example, in one game of Calvinball, the goal was to capture the opponent’s flag, whereas in a different game of Calvinball, the goal was to score points by hitting badminton shuttlecocks against trees using a croquet mallet.
From: calvinandhobbes.fandom.com
“Can God Be Proved Mathematically?”
No. Actually, if that was true, you could perhaps prove that god did not exist. In either case I doubt it a useful exercise as you would first need to come up with the right questions. And maybe we aren’t even built to be able to ask those questions in the first place-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGBxUNaQI1I (39 secs)
No system of thought conceived of by mortal minds could prove or disprove the existence of an entity that by their own blinkered definition is beyond comprehension. God could both exist and not exist, simultaneously. Our rules do not apply to It. It is a transcendent Mystery.
Anyway, we already know that God exists because Claudia Cardinale exists:
https://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/7661055/740full-claudia-cardinale.jpg
To put it the other way around, if you can prove existence of God mathematically (or any other way), then as an object of faith God ceases to exist.
To prove the existence of God mathematically is to have faith that mathematics is a sound basis for proving the existence of God. No system of thought bounded by our limited mentation, bounded by our experience of reality, bounded by the parameters of reality outside of our experience for that matter, is sufficient to prove or disprove that which is transcendent of this reality and our mentation. This, however, is:
https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/2/claudia-cardinale–album.jpg
semper, natural cuteness + professional retouching does not quite amount to divinity.
AFAICT, Gödel merely expressed the value question mathematically, and conceived a being on top of it (as societies often do with their value systems).
“Cuteness”? “Retouching”?
Blasphemy!
A book called Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline is worth reading. Since axioms are taken as self-evident and not proved, the basis of mathematical systems is less certain than many people think.
God equals geometry of dimension. We are an aspect of a God as we discover our place in the scheme where our consciousness is evolving. Humans having a soul and spirt in the unfolding cycles of spirt and matter. Personality rules with its desires and needs until after so many rounds of birth and death it questions and searches for that part of itself that leads to more understanding (consciousness) and the path of the pilgrim starts to return to its source.
It only takes millions of years. Ageless Wisdom, tackles this for those who care to inquire. I only understand a small part of it.
Claudia Cardinal is a product of evolution… which is a random process …..
RK
not only a great Simpsons’ link (aren’t they all) but the commercial before the link was great too – I might actually buy the superguage…
Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/12/25/universe/
When you consider spookey action at a distance, believeing that God can exist doesn’t strike me as all that unsupportable. It isn’t belief in God that annoys me – its the belief that a being that is attributed to having created all time, all energy, all matter (if one wants to put a demarcation between energy and matter) and things like causality, quantum physics, and the speed limit of light, would want people to do some of the things that humans say God wants…and that humans think that a few other humans have God’s private telephone number.
What I actually said was that I had a direct line to the Woman Upstairs. If anyone interpreted that as having Her private telephone number, that’s their problem.
If such an entity exist, it is quite the sadist.
Why aren’t we all Gods individually, if there was only one of us-he or she would be thought of as somewhat omnipotent, but we’re so commonplace as it’s no big deal.
I like the writer Fritz Leiber’s idea from his Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories of there being in the big city they usually mess about in (Lankhmar) a “Street of the Gods.”
Doctorow’s reporting on the discussions taking place on Russian TV is quite interesting. The thing that struck me is that these Russian talking heads actually raise important issues that Russians must be considering as they move deeper into this war. Nothing of the kind happening on our all-propaganda-all-the-time American MSM even though use of nukes grows more likely. It seems that the European press is not much better as that entire continent is poised to jump into the abyss.
Russia has their elites too. But given the content of discussion taking place on mainstream, popular media, they seem much less afraid of their people than American and British elites whose news outlets treat us like fans who are being amped up for the big game. Trump, Carlson and a few of us contrarian lefties are about the only ones even thinking outside the propaganda box.
Doctorow’s reporting is indeed interesting, but in this recent case, I’m afraid he’s really gone off the rails.
The main focus of the article is on a speech given by Sergey Mikheev on Vladimir Solovyov’s pro-government talk show. Doctorow uses this speech as “Exhibit A” supporting his remarkable claims that mobilization of reserves has led to “the dikes of state controls on free speech…being swept away ” and has “breathed full-blooded democracy into Russia’s parliamentary government structure and broader society. ”
Unfortunately, he misrepresents the context and content of the speech, and the conclusions he draws are at best hyperbolic. At worse, they are just flat out wrong. The state controls on free speech have not been “swept away”, and there has been no sudden new appearance of “full-blooded democracy”.
There has indeed been a “sea change in Russian politics “, as he puts it, but it started with Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February, not simply public reaction to the setbacks in Kharkov and the September mobilization.
More importantly, it has been as much or more a top down affair, than a democratic revolution from below .
“‘They are stealing Russia’: Adam Curtis on how hyper-capitalism wrecked a nation – and why Liz Truss must take heed”
‘In the 1990s, Russia embraced an extreme economics that led to chaos and corruption. Now, writes the maker of explosive new series TraumaZone, Liz Truss is taking Britain down the same toxic path’
Without a doubt, this has got to one of the most ominous entries to a story that I have ever read. If the Russian experience carried over to the UK situation, then you would expect to see several million excess British deaths before the end of this decade alone as well as its near de-industrialization. And unfortunately the UK does not have the commodities base to ever build itself back again. So you would see a British diaspora not seen since the 19th century.
On a tangentially related issue, I saw this last night:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/12/military-force-putin-nuclear-threats-00061201
This…
“…we should be brutally clear to Putin in private: If he makes a reckless decision to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the U.S. will respond with direct military force against Russian troops waging the war in Ukraine, ensuring Putin’s defeat there.”
…sounds EXACTLY like the origins of Blinken’s freakout after Putin obliquely mentioned how the US has been using back channels to threaten them in one of his speeches. A lot of what we are hearing appears to have originated with the Panetta brain trust.
I suppose that it should come as no surprise that Clinton’s CoS looks to be at the root of a lot of our problems in Ukraine, but as concerns Truss it should bother us all that one of the architects of the shock treatment Russia got in the Nineties is still involved. What has been done to Russia can just as easily be done to Europe…..
…is being done to Europe.
Cui bono?
God I’m old.
I met Panetta for a few moments when he first ran for office.
He was giving a speech ( in Santa Cruz?) and I stopped to listen to the last few minutes of his talk and shook his hand afterwards.
My impression at the time was that he was a 36 Karat asshole and I have seen no reason to change that opinion during the ensuing decades.
I live about .1 second from his Institute as the ICBM flies.
Neoliberalism has deadly side effects. Because markets…
The Brits must really want to reenact Robin Hood. Liz Truss will play the role of Sheriff of Nottingham.
I guess the prince has been upgraded to king?
Word associations can be odd.
I managed Rental units for 15 years and every once in a while ( Once was too often) used a wire coathanger to fish something out of a tenant’s toilet that makes me think of Charles.
And the reverse is true, when I hear Charles name…
According to his description, it should have been swirling down, not sitting in stopped-up toilet bowl.
Rev Kev: If the Russian experience carried over to the UK situation, then you would expect to see several million excess British deaths before the end of this decade alone as well as its near de-industrialization … So you would see a British diaspora not seen since the 19th century.
Yeah, well, I don’t think we need to hyperventilate yet. In 1990, when the British rioted at Thatcher’s poll tax, Thatcher was done. In 2022, cosplay Thatcher — the Gollem-esque buffoon Truss — may not last till Christmas.
It’s not just the British people, but the establishment — most of Truss’s own party, the City, and the markets — who want her gone. If somebody in the King’s staff, FFS, released a video clip of Charles being snarky to her — ‘Back again. Dear oh dear’ — and it’s on all the international media, it’s been done with Charles’s consent.
Truss has no one in her camp and no legitimacy. She’s done. She’s just too stupid to know it.
That is either some razor wit or carelessness by the new king.
And given the family history, i hopefully lean towards the former.
Thatcher or Truss. Neoliberalism changes its avatars without missing a step. / ;)
Yeah, but why does that “step” always leave a footprint on my back?
Would you trade Truss for Kamala Harris?
When Kamala said she did dope, I just naturally assumed it was marijuana.
I would even trade her for a utility outfielder.
Or a compensatory pick in a later, unspecified draft.
“Can God Be Proved Mathematically?” Interesting to see such an article that does not even mention Nicholaus of Cusa.
Giordano Bruno drew extensively on Cusa’s works. In Francis Yates classic on Bruno, she identified a schism in science where one direction, the one the West took was toward the direction of Descartes and mathematization of all phenomena. The other, not taken, was toward the “infinite universe” as touched on Bruno’s l’infinito universo e mondi, written in 1584.
Good link and web site, thanks.
This is no surprise to NC readers. From the Wall Street Journal, Tuesday October 11, 2022.
Federal Officials Trade Stock in Companies Their Agencies Oversee
Hidden records show thousands of senior executive branch employees owned shares of companies whose fates were directly affected by their employers’ actions, a Wall Street Journal investigation found
https://www.wsj.com/articles/government-officials-invest-in-companies-their-agencies-oversee-11665489653
Some of these patterns are older than we might think. For example, Clintonitis was allowed to become endemic in DC, and the latest variants are not so mild.
Bob Herbert recommended otherwise. “Cut him loose,” Herbert implored. Stamp out the disease. But instead, it festered and mutated until all of Washington is oozing puss.
(I would link to that old Herbert classic if the “paper of record” were not now paywalling its 20+ year-old archives. All worship The Mighty Buck.
Did the War of 1812 ever truly end?
“‘All It Takes is One’: Iran Gives Russia Help From the Air”
I think that Foreign policy misses the design philosophy of those drones. Those drones may sound rough but they have been effective and that is the point. Countries like Russia and Iran don’t have the money to go after gold-plated solutions for weaponry. So they look for cost-effective solutions. Those Iranian drones may use a two-stroke engine but so what. It is just a platform to deliver a heavy piece of ordnance on target and have been causing all sorts of chaos for the Ukrainians. And because they are so simple, you can quickly and easily set up factory runs to make these things till the cows come home. And you don’t need a specialized vehicle to carry them but just an ordinary military truck. Here is another example of this cost-effective mentality at work.
So the US and Russia have huge stocks of ‘dumb iron’ bombs to drop from aircraft. The US wanted to turn a lot of them into ‘smart bombs’ so they strapped on this highly effective gear to each bomb to do the job. But each set costs thousands of dollars and of course was destroyed in the resulting explosion. The Russians sought a more cost-effective solution so they turned to an onboard computer. The pilot would fly his aircraft into an envelope where the computer would work out speed, height, winds, weight, etc. at the appropriate moment would release that bomb so that it would hit the target like it was a smart bomb.
And you can see the result right across the board where western weapons in the Ukraine are proving themselves fragile and highly complicated to use. The more sophisticated weapons are actually being run by NATO – oops – mercenaries which will be the case with all those air defence systems being sent to the Ukraine from the US, Germany, France, UK, etc. Don’t know what will happen when some of these “mercenaries” start to get themselves killed by those Iranian drones too. I suspect though that the reason that so many types of air defence systems are being sent to the Ukraine is to test them in battle to which ones will actually be effective. And last I heard, they are not going to bother sending patriots to the Ukraine.
On Cassad’s Telegram channel he referred to those drones as “infernal moped”.
I’ll admit to occasionally watching Alex Jones, only in hopes of watching him spontaneously combust on air-he being so tightly wound.
The push now will be to hard sell fake over the counter remedies even more so, as it takes a lot of dupes buying snake oil to pay for that billion $ verdict against him.
“Teens as young as 13 worked at Kia, Hyundai parts manufacturer in Alabama, feds say” Miami Herald
I’m sure there’s a formula that could fix this.
But getting ahead of myself even with that off-hand thought. People with the power to stop it have to think it needs to be fixed.
“…Alabama and federal labor officials are taking court action.
A Sept. 29 consent judgment from the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama prohibited SL Alabama from violating child labor provisions and from shipping any product made within 30 days of the labor violations, the federal release says….”
There’s something about “child labor training” mentioned that’s oddly sinister sounding. And something about more investigations being done.
Then:
“…Both SL Alabama and JK Staffing were also fined $17,800 each by the state Department of Labor, according to the department. In total, the department says it collected more than $35,000 in penalties from the two businesses.
The legal action comes months after a Reuters report said another Hyundai subsidiary in Alabama was employing children. Following the July 22 report, a Hyundai customer filed a lawsuit against the company….”
So sounds like this is going to become business as usual in Alabama.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/protesters-interrupt-aoc-town-hall-speak-against-vote-ukraine-aide-youre-liar-here
A pair of protesters shouted down Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday during a town hall.
…
“You originally voted — you ran as an outsider. Yet you’ve been voting to start this war in Ukraine. You’re voting to start a third world war with Russia and China,” the man continued.
============================================
Well, I guess 2 is better than none.
Are two people protesting newsworthy? I think not, even though I think the spector of nuclear war is the biggest story there is. And obviously, this is just reported because FOX doesn’t like AOC.
Maybe there would be more opposition to the war if the average person got MORE facts about the war.
But that won’t happen…
It really doesn’t matter whether it’s two or two thousand raising their voices against AOC. She is a fraud and should be called out. Those who don’t call her out, vote for her, and consider themselves “progressives” are frauds as well. The same applies to Bernie Sanders. He also votes to send weapons to Ukraine. He also endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. Shameless Bernie.
An unscientific survey conducted by Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig’s office indicates that 87% of Squaw Valley households prefer keeping the town’s name.
However, much to the ire of many town residents, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 2022 on Sept. 23 requiring the removal of geographic features and place names in California with the word “squaw.”
In addition, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has created a federal task force and issued an order to rename 650 geographic features across the country that include “squaw” — a word officially deemed derogatory by the federal government.
The top three recommendations other than retaining Squaw Valley were Bear Mountain Valley, taking on the name of neighboring Dunlap, and Bear Valley. A name popular among Native Americans, Yokuts Valley, was down the list.
https://gvwire.com/2022/10/12/supervisors-tell-feds-squaw-valley-wants-to-keep-its-name/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Isn’t the fix easy enough for Fresno?
Rename it Skwah Valley
What have you got against Sikhs?
First Nations up over are cool with Skwah…
https://skwah.ca/
Don’t they have their own musical style too?
How about The Squawd Valley?
Includes progressive connotations like bald black women, headscarves and women of color. Win Win Win.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/12/military-force-putin-nuclear-threats-00061201
n the 21st century, it is still madness to believe there can be an acceptable use of nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, it was clear that the consequence of a nuclear attack would be mutual annihilation. That has not changed.
===================================================
Therefore, Panetta thinks we should than get directly involved…which according to Panetta, leads to MAD.
Incredible.
This is your brain. October 1962.
This is your brain on Shock Doctrine. October 2022.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste. / oy
They seldom ever make any sense within their own realities. I would be shocked were it not so stupid.
Been backing off the news a bit but wife keeps me up on what she sniffs out as significant.
Last week it was “we haven’t anything from Belarus in a while. Means something’s up.”sure enough that night or the next day Belarus became very much back in the news.
Today it was “I thought Stoltenberg spoke good English?
I just listened to him and he was terrible, back round sentences like literal Norwegian translation.”
She said he sounded rattled.
That’s it from our house.
Bulgaria – EU’s Unity Over Russia is indeed at Risk From Political Limbo in Bulgaria. BG voters’ love for Russia is as irrational as MAGA voters’ love for Trump. During his brief leadership, Petkov expelled over 100 RU diplomats – odd given how small the country is until you realize that they are there to tell Bulgaria what to do. RU soon told Bulgarians to dump Petkov – which they did.
My impression is informed by maintaining a house in Central Bulgaria for the past 22 years where we spend several months each year. My Bulgarian spouse and I have friends all over the country from Sofia to the Black Sea. The cultural affection for Russia (languages are very similar) is deep. Just like those Trump rally man-on-the-street interviews where people cannot articulate their support for Trump one observes the same phenomena for Putin and RU.
Only 399 days, 14 hours, 9 minutes and 41 seconds until the first crack @ my entitlement that I put $XXX,XXX.xx into over my working years.
If my luck is somewhat bad and hyperinflation rears its ugly head, each month’s check might buy me a cola.
In other words, your previous involuntary contributions were worth far far more.
Like people who paid property taxes since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978–the money they paid bought far more back then in less expensive materials and services for the municipality.
Now people attack them because they pay lower taxes than their techbro recently arrived neighbors who pay higher taxes, but in inflation devalued dollars.
It may not bee all that bad as both parties rely on their senior bases to get reelected. With monthly COLAs you may be able to afford two.
(ducks head)
Congratulations. Wife just informed that the COLA increase next year is 8.7%. So there is that. Lower than inflation but same here in Norway. Pension benefits don’t ever keep up.
We’re lucky, so far. I’ve got three public pensions, the wife, two. Both have US and Norwegian SS, plus my union pension. Can’t bitch.
Welcome to The Golden Years.
Above meant for Wuk.
I prefer Seven-Up. :)
{clinks glass}
Good luck, Wukchumni. If you own your residence you’ve got it made in the shade (of your own residence). Inflation won’t be that big a worry for you. If you don’t, then it’s a concern. That’s because keeping a roof over one’s head is the biggest expense most of us face and if rents go crazy, living in a tent or RV is not really a pleasant or sustainable option.
I wouldn’t worry about the other expenses in your life. For all of them—food, gas, utilities, clothing, etc.—there’s usually a work-around of some sort. Beef too expensive? Switch to pork—substitution is a great way of combatting inflation. Gas too expensive? Drive less, walk more, ride a bike, take the bus. Utilities killing your budget? Switch to space-heaters in winter and fans in the summer. Clothing beyond one’s budget? Shop second-hand.
As I said, there are work-arounds. I learned this lesson about twenty-five years when I sold a high-interest government bond because I was worried about inflation. I shouldn’t have been. My rent (my major expense) was stable. I should have just held on to the bond, banked the generous coupon, not fretted about inflation, and cashed out at maturity.
Live and learn.
The best things in life are free, hanging out with the birds & bees who don’t need money, that’s what I want.
p.s.
My date with a 3,123 year old the other day went ok, but I was exhausted by the time I got there on the 3 hour off-trail steep hike to her place, so I took a nap alongside her roots.
If the high inflation environment continues property taxes in California will most assuredly increase by more than the 2% allowed for annually by Prop 13. The government has many ways to increase our taxes. Nobody owns a home “free and clear”.
Unfortunately, for many of us, when beef becomes too expensive, we’ll have to learn to rustle.
Gas too expensive, learn how to siphon.
Utilities killing you, live in the dark.
Expensive clothing, well, that one solves itself.
Human see-human doom.
Alas, we succumb to the wiles of evil priests from Stygia!
Davos must be where a reincarnated Thulsa Doom holds sway. Will no Hero enter the mountainous fastness and free us from base peonage? Alas, all we see are charlatans and thieves.
Invoke the Elder Gods. They are grim, but fair.
Embrace your wyrd, defend your life.
Dances with Bears is down
Zelensky works in front of a green screen. The alternate statement is it was to create a hologram for multiple simultaneous appearances.
Dan Cohen
@dancohen3000
The Ukraine conflict has been the most propagandistic in the history of human warfare. Now we know, as many speculated and were called “conspiracy theorists,” Zelensky and his handlers record green screens to project a false image of a brave wartime leader
>>>Haiti wants U.S., Canada to lead anti-gang strike force, diplomat says
So, Bloomberg says that the Haitians wants the United States, the very country that has overthrown multiple Haitian governments, invaded the country, used the marines to steal its national gold reserves, supported monsters like François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his Tonton Macutes, and generally has enabled the continuous looting of the country since before the American Civil War, to help it with its gang problem?
I… see.
My favorite SF Chronicle headline is “Democracy Restored to Haiti” BIG print, part of the pic above the fold. Accompanied by a photo of the new prez walking on a red carpet with an Honor Guard of US Marines.
The USAF Airplane he had disembarked from is in the immediate background.
The accompanying press release played it straight, no trace of Intentional irony shone through.
A wonderful example of our Press at work.
Marx and Engels and Russia’s Peasant Communes – Monthly Review
A very interesting piece, thank you!
Medicare, Medicaid, ACA, Medical Insurance via employment,
From Hannah Arendt
Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become.