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Links 10/18/2022

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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.

* * *

Half the World Has a Clitoris. Why Don’t Doctors Study It? New York Times (Dr. Kevin)

Ultra-Processed Meals Are Unhealthier Than You Think Guardian

#COVID-19

Science/Medicine

Long COVID symptoms in SARS-CoV-2-positive children aged 0–14 years and matched controls in Denmark (LongCOVIDKidsDK): a national, cross-sectional study Lancet Child & Adolescent Health

Omicron boosters could arm you against variants that don’t yet exist Nature (Dr. Kevin)

Unique study links specific gene variant to COVID vaccine efficacy New Atlas (furzy)

US

American Inquisition James Howard Kunstler. The evidence of malice is important. In defamation cases, the plaintiff has to prove “actual malice.”

US scientists create new lethal Covid variant RT (Kevin W)

Climate/Environment

Let us not forget the US and EU export C02 via having China as their factory:

All that plastic in the ocean is a climate change problem, too Grist

20 Nations At High Risk From Global Warming Might Halt Debt Payments New York Times

Florida Coastal Living Reshaped by Hurricane Housing Codes Wall Street Journal

Tomorrow’s corals aeon

China?

How Xi Jinping is reshaping China, in five charts Christian Science Monitor. Note selection of countries in last series.

Blinken Says China Wants to Seize Taiwan on ‘Much Faster Timeline’ Bloomberg

Xi’s Call To Win Tech Race Points To New Wave of Chinese State-led Spending Reuters

Apple Bows To Pressure, Drops Plan To Buy Chinese Memory Chips AppleInsider

Ex-UK pilots lured to help Chinese military, MoD says BBC

Japan plan to raise taxes to fund defence budget ‘dead on arrival’: analysts South China Morning Post

Old Blighty

I’ll lead Tories into next election, says embattled Liz Truss BBC (Kevin W). This kind of statement usually closely precedes a defenestration.

Six great ways the Tories can get out of this f**king mess Daily Mash

Anti-Bird flu measures in place across Great Britain BBC. Kevin W: “Remember Emmanuel the Emu who was featured on NC recently? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tiktok-star-emmanuel-emu-sick-avian-influenza-caretaker-says-rcna52464

La belle France

France faces massive national strike on Tuesday Anadolu Agency (Kevin W)

The Threat of Civil War in Europe American Conservative. Wish I had worked this out first. See the passing mention of cell phone outages as a consequence of power cuts. Frankly, this is likely to be done pro-actively with energy as the pretext to inhibit organizing if/when the citizenry gets too uppity.

New Not-So-Cold War

A war Russia set to win MK Bhadrakumar Tribune India. Brutal. For instance:

Plainly put, the Europeans have been nicely played by the Americans. India should take note of the US’ sense of entitlement. Basically, the Biden administration created a contrived energy crisis whose real aim is war profiteering….

India should expect the defeat of the US and NATO, which completes the transition to a multipolar world order.

Forget M.A.D., Can Russia Defeat The United States In A Nuclear War? Larry Johnson

* * *

Russian strikes prompt power cuts across Ukraine BBC. Moar strikes as of 10/18.

Note that Andrei Martyanov contends that the current attributed-to-Iran drones are actually Russian but are very similar due to parallel development to meet same military objectives, but this sounds like a separate deal. However, per BBC story above, the West is claiming they have collected Iranian drone wreckage.

* * *

The US is already very upset with Turkey over economic cooperation with Russia. What punishment will they try to inflict over this?

Dozens of LNG Carriers Back Up Off European Ports Waiting to Unload Reuters (guurst)

China To Stop Reselling LNG To Europe OilPrice. Ouch.

* * *

Russia: Military plane crashes into residential building near Azov Sea coast DW. FWIW, TASS says a training accident.

* * *

Secretary Antony J. Blinken Interview With 60 Minutes on CBS With Scott Pelley US Embassy in Georgia. guurst: “On selling stale donuts.”

Elon Musk’s pro-Russian peace deal is ‘classic Putin,’ and there’s a clue of the Russian leader’s role, Fiona Hill argues Business Insider. Fierce enforcement of warmongering narrative.

Big Brother is Watching You Watch

New EU border fingerprint checks could ruin British families’ summer getaway next year – with Dover especially-badly hit, the port’s boss has warned Daily Mail. Wellie, no more EU visits for me. Not that my actions matter.

Former WSJ Reporter Says Law Firm Used Indian Hackers To Sabotage His Career Reuters

Li: “Today in psyops:”

More backstory: The Truth Behind ‘Birds Aren’t Real’ Vice

Imperial Collapse Watch

Biden’s National Security Strategy Is a Defense of US Domination, Not Democracy Truthout

Other Countries Have Reduced Stillbirth Rates. Why Not the U.S.? Undark

In this category as an indicator of where the US is:

1/6

The Trump Subpoena: Why the Jan 6 Committee’s Timing is both Terrible and Telling Jonathan Turley

What Republicans Really Thought on January 6 Atlantic (David L)

Biden

Jill Biden booed by crowd in Joe Biden’s home state (VIDEOS) RT (Kevin W)

White House ‘plans to release another 15 MILLION barrels of oil’ from the US’s emergency stockpile this week in a bid to balance markets and crack down on rocketing gas prices Daily Mail

2022

Democrats focused on abortion rights worry they’re losing independent women The Hill

Democrats’ midterm hopes fade: ‘We peaked a little early’ Politico

GOP seizes momentum in battle for Congress The Hill

Groups mobilize to help voters confronting new election laws Associated Press (furzy)

Nancy Pelosi’s husband bought at least $1 million in Alphabet stock days before House leadership proposed a congressional stock trading ban Business Insider

Supremes

Supreme Court won’t take case raising past rulings denounced as racist Washington Post

The Bezzle

Bitcoin Fails To Produce 1 Block For Over An Hour Coindesk

Regulating DAOs Bruce Schneier (David L)

Facebook’s Metaverse Is Apparently Filled With Mostly Empty ‘Sad’ Worlds Kotaku (Kevin W)

Forecast for US Recession Within Year Hits 100% in Blow to Biden Bloomberg

Class Warfare

Hardship and heartbreak as Devon families lose homes to Airbnb lets Guardian (Paul R)

FedEx abandons its last-mile delivery robot program ars technica

Oakland Cops Hope to Arm Robots With Lethal Shotguns Intercept

Antidote du jour (CV):

And a bonus (guurst):

Another from guurst:

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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216 comments

  1. Antifa

    TO HELL WITH KIEV
    (melody borrowed from Okie from Muskogee by Merle Haggard)

    They say it’s rather pleasant when you’re freezing
    You shiver first but then you feel so warm
    You can’t resist the urge to pull some clothes off
    And take a little nap — where’s the harm?

    Most European families will hit Christmas
    With scant income or firewood or heat
    No eggnog and no stockings and no presents
    And lucky if they have enough to eat

    We were proud to support Ukraine in the sunshine
    We welcomed Ukie refugees to town
    But as the depth of winter starts to bite us
    We’ll hit the streets to shut this whole thing down

    Sleepin’ in our snow boots ain’t a lifestyle
    It makes us dream of carts and guillotines
    For leaders who say Europe stands with NATO
    Or politicians who support the Greens

    To hell with Kiev and their hopeless battle
    The days when we could back them up are gone
    Our factories and our jobs are bound for Asia
    And our support for Ukraine’s been withdrawn

    America blew up our Nord Stream pipelines
    And there is no LNG from the USA!

    1. Sardonia

      My God, you have an eclectic playlist of songs you use. I love it! Between this, and Taps, and England Swings….

      You probably had as much fun writing this as ol’ Merle had writing his anti-hippie lyrics. :) Brothers from a SERIOUSLY other mother.

  2. Toshiro_Mifune

    Half the World Has a Clitoris. Why Don’t Doctors Study It?
    I’ve been conducting my own, albeit informal studies since my teens.

    1. Sardonia

      I once went out to dinner after a workshop with a group of professional Sexologists, and one of them was talking about how the clitoris has absolutely no biological function – except for the generation of pleasure.

      At the time, I was going through a lengthy phase of being an enthusiastic hedonist and libertine, and I thought about that and shared my realization that that’s who I am – I am the Earth’s clitoris. My only function is to have pleasure.

      They got a kick out of that….

      1. Festoonic

        I feel bad for sexologists — sexology is a clumsy word for an important field of study and sounds like it was coined by a 13-year-old boy. It has all the gravitas of a degree from Hamburger University. Sex deserves better.

        1. fairleft

          So, no -ologist …

          sexicist
          sexician
          specialists: sexinomicist, sexosopher

          Nothing very dignified so far.

    2. Kouros

      In one of James Clavell’s novels centered in HK, one Chinese character is caught with a huge collection of pictures of vaginas/clitorises… I always thought that fiction was based on some real fact.

  3. Louis Fyne

    Not because of ideology, but because of non-bubble common sense, the NC commentariat can run a better election campaign than the Democrats (tho’ it is making wine out of rotten grapes).

    had a pleasant conversation with a canvasser in my Biden +30 town to get sa feel of the campaign…..

    the 2022 Dem. slogan should be: let the listen to NPR, then have some sustainable gelato.

      1. Geo

        Of course they will. They’re still running away from Mondale and that was more than a few election cycles ago. Its hard to come up with campaign strategies when you don’t have principles or ideas and you live in walled off worlds far away from your deplorable voters. :)

    3. Hank Linderman

      Running for office is the most difficult thing I have ever done, by far. It’s filled with threats to your morality, your emotional, financial and spiritual well being. It’s amazingly inefficient, there are *vendors & consultants* who are only interested in $$, and it pushes your self control to the limit. You learn or you break.

      But, it is also rewarding – if you care for people, if you care for the future. I’m the 3rd time D nominee in a deep red district (KY-02), and my elevator pitch is something like this: “My name’s Hank, I’m running for Congress. I’m a damn Democrat, but I’m a working person and I think we need more working people in our government.”

      I also say, “If Bernie says it, I probably agree, but I’m no idealogue. I don’t care which answers – conservative or liberal – work to solve problems.”

      I have had R party officials tell me they will vote for me. I go to R events as well as D events, if only to show I don’t have horns and a tail. Grassroots campaigning is less about policy and more about showing that you care about the people you meet. Once you get past the front gate, most of them are lovely.

      I recently went to a Rand Paul and Brett Guthrie (my opponent) event. I wasn’t allowed to speak, but the party chair indicated they would invite me to a meeting, probably after this year’s election. That’s fine with me, I’m planning on continuing no matter what happens in November. I sat in the chair closest to the podium, my opponent couldn’t look at me as he claimed Ds want abortions up to the time of birth, that Rs had tried to add an amendment, “What if the baby was BREATHING??”. You can’t confront this sort of thing through social media, you have to be there.

      These impossible races are ignored by the state and national parties. They are an opportunity to organize the grassroots and to change your own party. Ds are strong in CA, NY and DC. In KY, they might just be ready to try focusing on working people (biggest group of voters) and rural people (the most over represented voters). I can see a R running in Santa Monica as a party reformer.

      Thomas Frank has said it will take a populist movement from the left to change the nation’s path. He also says he has no idea how to do that. It’s what I think about all day, every day.

      Best…H

      2. Mark Gisleson

        Citizen candidates are the best! I’ve seen some of your stuff and like your style, hope Kentuckians think likewise.

        1. Hank Linderman

          Thanks Yves. NC is a big part of my daily studies, so deepest thanks to you and Lambert and everyone else.

          Best…H

          1. orlbucfan

            It sounds like you’re applying the simple principle of the 50-state-strategy: go everywhere in the area you are campaigning in, and meet the people there. It works. Very, very good luck to you!! From a veteran political volunteer and proud lifelong Progressive in east central FL.

      5. Tom Stone

        Hank, I’m in California which is a Dem stronghold…look at our incarceration rate and the demographics of those incarcerated.
        Look at our Gini Coefficient.
        Pre pandemic the SF Chronicle reported that 40% of San Mateo’s populace was food insecure.
        Homelessness is widespread and many of the homeless are employed…part time or gig because that’s what’s there.
        How many abandoned oil wells are poisoning California?
        It’s been 33 years since the ’89 quake, the various public safety agencies in the SF Bay Area still do not have compatible communications systems.
        CalPers is not unusually corrupt or incompetent for California, the lovely Eastern span of the SF Bay bridge was so badly built is it less safe than what it replaced.
        it will collapse the next time the Hayward fault lets go and BTW it cost 8 times the originally estimated cost and it is already a maintenance pig.

        It is not a matter of this party or that, it’s a broken system on an uncontrolled flight into terrain.
        Good luck in your campaign, the fight is always a worthy one no matter the odds.

        1. Expat2Uruguay

          Tom Stone, I can absolutely vouch for what you say about the Eastern Span of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, as I worked on that project for 15 years in the design review area and for 9 months as a construction inspector. The design with a self anchored suspension span that is asymmetrical of all things is not one I would want to be anywhere near during an earthquake. And while I was in construction I saw The lax oversight by Caltrans of the general contractors. I was in fact quoted in a newspaper for one of my daily logs documenting water seeping into the pre-stressing strand ducts. This is a very bad thing (it has caused bridge failures in Florida) and I said so repeatedly at the time. When it was discovered about a year later, Caltrans paid one of the California universities $800,000 to produce a report saying that there would be no problems from corrosion of pre-stressing strands!

          I was so proud when I was put on that amazing job, and by the time I left I was absolutely disgusted with Caltrans!

      6. lyman alpha blob

        I like your strategy – keep talking to everybody. The Democrat consultant types will tell you not to waste time talking to Republicans who probably won’t vote for you anyone, but that hasn’t been working too well for them or making the party more popular.

        My better half ran for local office and eschewed the Dem-approved tactics, walked the whole town and talked to everybody she could. She had people with her opponent’s sign in their yards tell her that she had their vote, simply because no politician from any party had ever stopped by to ask them what they though before. Took a couple tries, but she’s currently in office.

        Keep up the good work!

      7. Bugs

        Good for you for putting in the real effort to reach people. The head of the fish is where the real rot is, unfortunately. I’ll be watching your race from here. I have a vote in America’s Dairyland but the situation is looking dire there. Barnes was the wrong choice to go against Johnson. They had someone better who would have had cross state appeal but I think she wasn’t diverse enough to get DNC support. And the maxim still holds – all politics is local.

        Break a leg!

      8. Oh

        Thanks for your efforts. And for the feedback on the real situation. Money’s everything, isn’t it?

  4. timbers

    US scientists create new lethal Covid variant RT (Kevin W)

    Wonder how long before this shows up as first known spotting outside the lab in Donbass area?

    1. LawnDart

      I think with a bit more time, Mother Nature could do as well if not better herself.

      They could really impress me and mate covid and ebola to get… …Cobola! New and improved– aerosol and fomite action!

      1. John

        Did they mean to create a more lethal variant? If yes, take away their toys immediately. If no, why did they not destroy it. We, poor fools who do not understand, lack the scientific curiosity and derring do to appreciate this feat. I understand fully that it could never escape THEIR lab. What could possibly go wrong? Seems like hubris to me.

        1. Michaelmas

          John: Did they mean to create a more lethal variant? If yes, take away their toys immediately.

          The truism is that ‘to fight the bad bug, you must understand the bad bug.’ Unfortunately it’s true.

          There’s nothing in biotech that isn’t dual use. All biodefense labs are simultaneously bioweapons labs. That’s how the US can claim that its Ukraine-based bioweapons labs — which was what they were — were in fact biodefense labs.

          John: Why did they not destroy it?

          Bless you. What do you imagine that would do? It’s 2022, the genetic sequence would still exist in silico to be synthesized in vivo. That’s how Moderna got its sample of COVID19 from China, and within two days they’d designed their mRNA vaccine and synthesized real COVID to test it on.

        2. ArvidMartensen

          Yep they get to prove to themselves just how awesomely clever they are. Call THAT the world’s deadliest virus?, taking test tube from behind back. Then they fu and it escapes.
          Nope, nope, nope, not a lab virus, you conspiracy theorist you – must be zoonotic, quick round up some skunks …

      2. Michaelmas

        LawnDart: They could really impress me and mate covid and ebola to get… …Cobola! New and improved– aerosol and fomite action!

        Amateur hour. Consider ebola and influenza in a binary inoculary architecture. As follows —

        Biopreparat, the former U.S.S.R.’s bioweaponeering program ran from 1971 to 1989-90 and employed as many as 100,000 personnel. I interviewed its former boss, Ken Alibek, who was just a glorified pathologist, and a couple of former Biopreparat scientists, one of whom was interesting. He said (among other things) : “I know that those who ran the Soviet bioweapons program studied the possibility of a plague-Ebola binary inoculary. I can talk with certainty about a synthesis of plague and Venezuelan equine encephalitis, because the guy who did that presented the data to me.”

        This scientist was talking his book, of course. But if the synthesis was influenza virus plus Ebola, for instance, the first symptom would be thos of the flu and the infectee would walk around spreading that till they went to the doctor and were treated with something as simple as tetracycline.

        The tetracycline would itself be the trigger inducing expression of a second set of genes, in this case that of Ebola.

        With the binary inoculary approach, the bioweaponeer obviates the difficulty that Ebola in nature is far too virulent and burns through its victims far too rapidly to be a good weapon, and creates an agent with the lethality of Ebola and the infectiousness of influenza optimized for maximum spread. Or of Ebola and COVID19. In principle, the possibilities are endless.

        Two points: —
        (1) There’s no guarantee these splices would have been what the scientists call ‘environmentally stable’ once released. In other words, Biopreparat might assign two-hundred or so of its scientists to a proposed ‘designer pathogen’ and they’d work for nine months to create this bug — this was your grand-dad’s genetic engineering in the days before automated DNA synthesis — and in the bug’s second generation the genetic circuit they’d painstakingly introduced would simply not be retained.

        (2) On the other hand, these were the possibilities the Soviets addressed between thirty and forty years ago with the extremely primitive technology then existing.

        1. LawnDart

          binary inoculary architecture

          Wow, that’s really something to think about– the “cure” actually triggers the kill.

          Or flip it around a little, I suppose one could create a prophylactic vaccination against a feared but usually asymtomatic infection (except for when it wasn’t, hence the fear) that triggers the timer of a bomb set to explode in years… …they’ll never connect the dots or figure out what hit ’em as some once rare disease (maybe a cancer, common enough– I think a little splice of HPV might work well here) eats them alive.

          With some imagination and todays tech, we have seemingly endless creative possibilities on hand together with the tools necessary to create mindboggeling GM, custom pathogens.

          Thankfully people are more ethical and less evil today than they were 30-40 years ago, so treaties against biowarfare are clearly quaint and unnecessary.

        3. Revenant

          I don’t think Cold War genetics was up to making viral chimeras I don’t think modern genetics is, if the viruses are from such different viral families.

          The binary inoculum would have been two separate pathogens in one pot. Presumably with the idea of the first disease masking the second until too late or, even more cynically, ensuring that it spread as a nosocomial infection among patients hospitalised for the first disease and wiped our medical facilities.

    2. Screwball

      Why are we doing that in the middle of Boston and not on an island in the middle of the pacific?

      And that’s only the first WTF question about this.

      1. Amfortas the hippie

        aye.
        i remember when bush the younger put a bsl4 in downtown galveston, and we went there for vacation with mom the next summer.
        ambling up and down the Strand, with that hospital complex right there, housing the worst pathogens on earth…and watching all those people wandering around right next to it…and thinking about the prevalence of Human Error…to say nothing of elite malice…
        sigh.
        and people wonder why i prefer to just stay out here on the dern farm…

  5. zagonostra

    >Elon Musk’s pro-Russian peace deal is ‘classic Putin,’ and there’s a clue of the Russian leader’s role, Fiona Hill argues – Business Insider.

    Putin plays the egos of big men — gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they’re just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin

    This quote from Fiona Hill is not much different than AOC’s comments following the recent town hall meeting that went viral when she was challenged for supporting the Ukraine war. AOC stated that the protestors where just spouting “Putin talking points.”

    There are two articles I read before this one. One was on a book deal that Zelensky was given by Crown, a Penguin Random House division. That states, “The former actor and comedian was elected in 2019. He found himself suddenly transformed into a wartime leader after Russia’s invasion in February.” Notice no mention of the Pandora Papers that revealed that he didn’t “suddenly” do anything, he was funded by Igor Kolomoisky, a shady oligarch billionaire, who, for anyone that has peeled back Zelensky’s history knows all about. The other article I read was in the Off Guardian titled ” The Gaslighting of the Masses.”

    For me the question always seems to get reduced to whether these people, like Fiona Hill and AOC believe what they are saying or have they made the decision that the rewards for misdirecting the public are somehow justified; that they purposely omit information, such as the one dealing with Zelensky’s book deal, or purposely gaslighting people.

    There are a slew of books like “Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American People” by Servando Gonzalez and the classic “Tragedy and Hope” by Carroll Quigley, to mention just two that make me think that what I’m reading in the headlines and links is part of a bigger project. I don’t know…

    https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/10/18/zelensky-to-publish-book-of-wartime-speeches-in-december/

    https://off-guardian.org/2022/10/17/the-gaslighting-of-the-masses/

    1. KD

      Psy ops don’t put food on the table or wood in the fireplace. Civilization is 3 meals away from ending.

      1. Michaelmas

        zagonastra: For me the question always seems to get reduced to whether these people, like Fiona Hill and AOC believe what they are saying or have they made the decision that the rewards for misdirecting the public are somehow justified

        Both, of course, or they wouldn’t be where they are. You’d almost certainly do the same. Few people can afford or have the guts to walk away ( or, maybe, just be so stupid as to do that).

        Fiona HIll, for instance, was born a coal miner’s daughter, County Durham, in northern England. Now she’s a member of both the Trilateral Coalition and the Council on Foreign Relations. If you were her, could you bear to go back to where you once belonged in County Durham or even to some grubby little provincial university.

        1. JBird4049

          >>> If you were her, could you bear to go back to where you once belonged in County Durham or even to some grubby little provincial university.

          Why not? If she has the ability to reach to join the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Affairs, then she can have a very good life almost anywhere without selling the people that she grew up with into greater poverty and despair for some financial bling or ego puffing. She has talent, education, and connections to do anything else.

          It is a disease with many people who can never, ever be high enough, wealthy enough, powerful enough as if they have this unfillable emptiness that they are trying to fill.

    2. Sibiryak

      Elon Musk’s pro-Russian peace deal is ‘classic Putin’

      Prior to the annexation, Musk argued at the conference that Kherson and Zaporizhzhia ought to remain up for negotiation in order to provide Crimea with water supplies.

      [Fiona] Hill explained in the Monday interview with Politico that the two territories essentially control all water supplies into Crimea, a dry peninsula lacking in rivers.

      “It’s unlikely Elon Musk knows about this himself. The reference to water is so specific that this clearly is a message from Putin,” she told the outlet.

      No way a guy like Musk could possibly be informed about Crimean water issues, okay, but how did Putin slip his “message” into Musk’s brain?

      1. The Rev Kev

        My own take is that Musk jumped aboard the Ukrainian band-wagon back in February for good PR and to also demonstrate the military applications of Starlink. As the bills sky-rocketed and he realized that the Russians were learning to neutralize those Starlinks, he wanted out and so suggested his peace plan which was a reworked Minsk 2. When he found that he had been put on the Ukrainian kill list, that shook him. Maybe he began to learn who he was actually dealing with. And you can bet that DC lent on him. And now he has had to reinstate those Starlinks and found that he now cannot get out but is trapped. Just when he thought he was out, they dragged him back in again.

        1. Wukchumni

          Gonna find my Pentagon funders, gonna get the green light
          Gonna offer Ukraine some Starlink delight
          My motto’s always been ‘when it’s right, i’m right’
          Why not muddle in the middle of an endless fight?
          When everything’s a little clearer in the sky up there
          And we know propaganda has to come from somewhere

          Thinkin’ of Ukes is workin’ up my appetite
          Looking forward to offering Starlink delight
          Rubbin’ sticks and cities together makes the sparks ignite
          And the thought of connecting you is getting so exciting
          Sky rockets in flight
          Starlink delight
          Starlink delight
          Starlink delight

          Started out with this feeling so polite
          I always thought a calculated risk wouldn’t bite
          But you’d think it wouldn’t be neutralized
          A little Starlink delight
          Sky rockets in flight
          Afterthought delight
          Afterthought delight
          Afterthought delight

          Please be waiting for me, Joey, when I come around
          We could lose a lot of money if the link goes down

          Thinkin’ of Ukes is workin’ up my appetite
          Looking forward to offering Starlink delight
          Rubbin’ sticks and cities together makes the sparks ignite
          And the thought of connecting you is getting so exciting
          Sky rockets in flight
          Starlink delight
          Starlink delight
          Starlink delight

          Afternoon Delight, by Starland Vocal Band

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5SgNyYt0jc

              1. John Zelnicker

                Not yet. I’m still compiling. I got a slew of older songs from one of our writers and haven’t yet put it all together.

                Once it’s done and in a suitable format, I’ll announce it in comments to Links and Water Cooler and maybe other posts.

                I’m a tax accountant and I’ve been swamped with tax returns at the deadline.

        2. Yves Smith Post author

          He really is in a mess.

          I doubt he has the ability to surmount Russian attacks, assuming as many do that the Starlink outages were not due to Musk cutting back.

          So when Starlink continues to fail, that will be depicted as Musk at best trying to profiteer (get Pentagon to provide help on its dime) or at worst affirmatively aiding Putin. That will be presented as treasonous even though legally it isn’t since the US is not officially at war with Russia.

          1. John

            Some guy at the end of the bar could come up with a peace deal that was intellectually superior to what Elon had to say, but lacking billions no one would listen or laugh.

          2. Stephen

            The so-called Zelensky curse that has rolled across European governments with various regime changes maybe applies to tech entrepreneurs too!

          3. Aumua

            I never side with Elon musk, out of principle. but I don’t disagree with a lot that’s being said here. it just sucks that a billionaire like musk, and the rabid right also are able to claim this anti-war territory. because the liberals and Democrats are actively taking the opposite position, and the voice of the legitimate anti-war left is being drowned out. they certainly don’t have the megaphone that musk has, and the right wing has its own mainstream media apparatus supporting them as well. it’s a sad State of affairs all around.

              2. Aumua

                yeah well, I don’t see any commentary here on the info pinning the AOC ‘protesters’ to the Larouchian vector. For myself, I ain’t down with those mf’s and I don’t care what noises they’re making. That’s just me though.

        3. digi_owl

          There is also the whole Twitter debacle, where he claimed he wanted to buy it to remove some rules and such. Then he dropped the offer when the topic of bots came up, and now there is a lawsuit going to try to force him to complete the purchase.

          2. Yves Smith Post author

            Yes, and the funny bit some of the pols and pundits who are charging him with being a Putin stooge want to punish Musk by not allowing him to buy Twitter!!

            So one wonders if he’s playing “Don’t throw me in the br’er patch” by not fully backing down from his peace, um, Putin talking points patter.

            1. John k

              Yeah, but you can see their problem. First, they believe their pr. So imagine the horror of having a putin stooge that runs his mouth so far off the endless war narrative owning a platform like twitter.

      2. OnceWereVirologist

        Always new depths of journalistic malfeasance to plumb. Politico itself published an article called “Russia’s War on Water” back in May. How could Musk possibly know about Crimean water issues if he wasn’t personally briefed by Putin – unless of course he read one of the dozens of articles from dozens of different news organizations that pop up if you google “crimea water” and detail this precise issue. Of course the hoopleheads who read this article and I guess Musk, too, are just assumed to be too stupid to remember that it was widely reported only a few months ago that one of Russia’s highest priorities post-invasion was to blow the dam that shut off the water flow to Crimea.

        1. hk

          The topic came up years ago, right after (or was it before) the annexation, that Crimea is so dry that Russia would need to build pipes from Kerch to bring water if Ukrainians cut off water supply. Not hard to look up maps at that point to see where the water sources are. Not a big fan of the Crichton novel Rising Sun, but the characters who everyone else regards as having the mysterious power of “knowing the inscrutable Japanese ways” had this to say about how he knew stuff: “I called the police in Osaka and asked around.” (Paraphrased)

        2. nippersdad

          As you say, the number of self congratulatory stories about Ukraine cutting off Crimea’s water supply were off the charts. Operating well within the security structure of the Pentagon, such as Musk and Bezos would have been poor businessmen not to have known about the opportunities for digital sabotage Russia having to pipe in water presented years ago; no Putin required.

          But then Hill would have known all about that, as she prolly presented them with contracts to look into it while working for the National Security Council.

      3. Ben Joseph

        Maybe they think Putin has special evil powers. He can get Trump to beat Hillary and sneak bits of truth past the narrative.

    4. semper loquitur

      Oooops, Fiona forgot to say “big, white men” in order to further crystallize what the Identi-Left’s supposed to think of anyone trying to forestall a nuclear war….

        1. anon in so cal

          Fiona Hill was mentored by Richard Pipes, funded by UA oligarch Pinchuk. Her job was to cook up Russia regime change schemes at the Brookings Institute along w Strobe Talbott, Clifford Gaddy.

          “Fiona Hill says it makes sense that “the Russians” are supporting Bernie Sanders because his candidacy “exacerbates, exaggerates the polarization in the country.”👍🏼”

          https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1237033907331182593?s=20&t=hbHWiM-Xv8bsUNFCHjdVeg

  6. The Rev Kev

    “White House ‘plans to release another 15 MILLION barrels of oil’ from the US’s emergency stockpile this week in a bid to balance markets and crack down on rocketing gas prices”

    The US uses about 20 million barrels of oil each and every day. So you could reformat the title of that article to say-

    ‘White House ‘plans to release about 18 HOURS worth of oil’ from the US’s emergency stockpile this week in a bid to balance markets and crack down on rocketing gas prices’

      1. hk

        I think they’d been decimated after taking part in Ukrainian “offensive” around Kharkov, the Kraken that is.

      2. ambrit

        As a cynical Anglo American Geezer, I must observe that the American Social Security Cost Of Living Adjustment for next year has already been “set in stone.” Higher natural gas prices be d—-d.
        The Ruling Elites probably can get away with a degradation of the Social Security “safety net” for now. What I hear from Veterans casts question upon the level of care that is given to the ex-military population in America. Start cutting the Veteran’s Administration and you weaken one of the main legs of the stool supporting the Ruling Elite, the military. Disgruntled Praetorian Guards have a long history of acting in their own best interests. American Spring anyone?

    3. Mel

      Hmmm :)
      “White House plans to release oil to last till 6PM Monday from the US’s emergency stockpile this week”

  7. Old Sovietologist

    “A war Russia set to win MK Bhadrakumar Tribune India”.

    I have just returned from a symposium in Managua (Nicaragua) on multipolarity and unsurprisingly the war in Ukraine was one of the key topics

    Attended by Marxist academics, mostly from Latin America but with representatives from other continent’s. Interestingly the consensus wasn’t so far apart from Bhadrakumar’s article that Russia is now set to win.

    What didn’t surprise was the gulf that has opened up between Marxist’s in the west and the rest of the world on Ukraine. Its a very stark divide and can be summed up very simply as – A defeat for the Ukraine, is a defeat for US imperialism.

    1. The Rev Kev

      Alexander Mercouris of The Duran was mentioning in his latest video that the Ukrainians sent up one of their few remaining jets to shoot these drones down. It succeeded in destroying one but debris from it must have gotten sucked into that jet’s engines causing it to crash. Now the Ukrainian Air Force has one jet less.

    2. JohnA

      With all the panicked skyward firing of bullets at the drones in populated areas, one has to wonder how many of the reported civilian casualties come from stray bullets rather than Russian drones. That never seems to be suggested in the mainstream media.

      1. OnceWereVirologist

        Just wait until they break out the 57 mm S60s to counter the drone threat. 2 kg fragmenting projectiles fired at a low angle of elevation in an urban environment are going to be a civilian’s worst nightmare.

    3. Ignacio

      On this I believe that in a city like Kyiv they might try to locate their defence systems wherever they can. Not surprising one or some must be close to the places they want the most to be defended, hence in or close to residential buildings.

  9. griffen

    So still a slight chance of recession, in the next 12 months, I see. While it’s not an absolute certainty, it is certain that brief video clip will come back to bite POTUS much like his many gaffes. It does seem slightly possible that the US economy just bumbles through the first half of 2023 at a below optimal growth rate. But I’m not staking a claim on that idea.

    Stay in the lane you know best, Joe. Which lane is that, well I defer to others who know better than myself.

    1. SocalJimObjects

      Slight chance of recession, a much bigger chance of depression. POTUS is setting fire to the entire European economy. If he’s expecting just a slight recession out of that, then I have a bridge to sell him.

      1. nippersdad

        If the fall of Lehman Bros. had the ensuing effect of contagion in Europe, one can only imagine what will happen over here when nearly every European bank goes under.

        There just aren’t enough computers out there to print that kind of money. Here come the Basel II bail-ins.

  10. Wukchumni

    Gooooooooood Mooooooorning Fiatnam!

    Operation Loan Backer was our attempt to bond the Fiatnamese into the stone age where the only Law was John’s, and even if you didn’t make bank on the Mississippi Bubble, it made for one hellova liar’s poker word, so there’s that.

    Jet ink printers would take off on bonding runs and occasionally we’d run out of toner or somebody would set it on sepia-ruining the look of the promise sorry notes, but this was the cost of doing business.

        1. Wukchumni

          I have learned that In quiet places, reason abounds, that in quiet people there is vision and purpose, that many things are revealed to the humble that are hidden from the great.

          Adlai Stevenson

  11. s.n

    a companion to the guardian’s piece on ultra-processed meals:

    Cheap, delicious – and only three years out of date: my week of eating food past its best-before

      1. kareninca

        I just opened a box of Safeway Shredded Wheat that was only two weeks past expiration and I smelled it and it was faintly rancid. I’m eating it anyway, of course, but sometimes the date does matter. I’ve had Trader Joe’s food (bagged salad and a dried bean and rice medley) go bad before the expiration date.

        1. Raymond Sim

          That smell is more obvious to some than others. My wife, for instance, generally needs fresh flour to compare to. Personally I find it extremely noticeable and off-putting. I suspect a fair number of people who dislike whole-grain goods actually mostly dislike rancid ones.

        2. Felix_47

          Bagged salad. It is impossible to assure safety. They do a good job of washing it in the Central Valley but I would not count on it. If it is anywhere near its expiration date better not trust it. It just does not save much time either.

  12. mistah charley, ph.d.

    One might have hoped for better from Tulsi, but for now we seem to be stuck in this particular timeline.

    Believe it or not, I once was cautiously optimistic about Barack Obama prior to his election – suggesting that his pro-war political positions were taken to promote his election, and that he might surprise us afterwards:

    http://mistahcharley.blogspot.com/2008/10/is-barack-obama-snake-in-grass.html

    Even then, I recognized it was somewhat unlikely that things would change.

    On the other hand, maybe the following verse, following the format of Lewis Carroll’s The Mad Gardener’s Song, is a better prediction of the future:

    She thought she saw a candidate
    Who’d put an end to war.
    She looked again, and found it was
    The Same Game as Before.
    “If that’s the way it goes,” she said,
    “Then what is voting for?”

  13. russell1200

    “The evidence of malice is important. In defamation cases, the plaintiff has to prove “actual malice.”

    Actual malice is the standard for public figures/public officials. The doctor, while well known, doesn’t seem to be a “public figure”.

    “Concerning private figures, however, the Court ruled in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974) that actual malice is not required for recovery of compensatory damages, but is the standard for punitive damages.”

    “the court explained, there are also “limited-purpose public figures,” people who have voluntarily engaged in a public controversy in an attempt to affect the outcome”

    https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/889/actual-malice

    https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1010/public-figures-and-officials

  14. The Rev Kev

    “Forget M.A.D., Can Russia Defeat The United States In A Nuclear War?”

    It doesn’t really matter. Nobody wins in a nuclear war after nuclear winter sets in. The initial strikes might kill hundreds of millions but as soon as the weather goes to hell, you will have billions of people dying-

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0

    And the elite can only stand living in a converted missile silo for so long until they go nuts after realizing no more trips skiing on the snowfields or sunning themselves in the Caribbean anymore.

    1. Jeremy Grimm

      When General LeMay was named vice chief of staff of the Air Force in 1957, General Thomas S. Power became commander in chief of SAC and was promoted to four-star rank.

      General Power defined victory in a nuclear war:
      “At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!”

      1. hk

        Mao Zedong said something similar (vis a vis Khrushchev) some time just before Sino Soviet Split: at the end of the nuclear war, there will be a million Chinese, 50,000 Russians, and 100,000 Americans. The communists will have won (paraphrased: I know these aren’t the right numbers that Mao said, but these capture the spirit )

        We know now Khrushchev was deathly afraid of a nuclear war. Cavalier attitude like this freaked him out, as I understand it.

  15. Lexx

    ‘Ultra-processed meals are unhealthier than you think’

    ‘The government may not care what people eat (although it certainly cares about the growing NHS bill for dealing with it) but we will have to be much more attentive about it ourselves. Healthy eating is a big business nowadays, the problem is that a great many products that pass themselves off as healthy – from protein bars to some milk substitutes – are really nothing of the sort.’

    I’ll repeat here the gist of a comment I made last week… if you really want to know how the food you’re eating effects your blood sugar and possible inflammatory response, you have to purchase a blood glucose monitor and collect those numbers yourself. An A1C test result from a lab is not enough. First thing in the morning, and hour after eating breakfast, and again two hours after. Record the numbers along with the carb count for that meal and track all the numbers over a month.

    My last A1C at UC lab in January was 134 and my nurse practitioner didn’t even raise an eyebrow. That was fasting, first thing in the morning. The numbers I’ve collected in just the last two days are higher and I’ve been on a high protein/low carb diet for 6 weeks now. The numbers say I’m an unmanaged unmedicated diabetic and probably have been for years, with diabetes on both sides of the family especially my mother’s. The nurse practitioner is aware of this history and says nothing except ‘take your medication’, which is metformin and seems to have no effect in mediating my blood sugar.

    I have this idea that were I a patient at the NSH, I might have expected an earlier and more concerned response from the nurse and from all the doctors who saw numbers from labs like that over the last, say, 25 years. They monitor for symptoms (excessive thirst, frequent urination, rapid heart rate, sudden weighty loss? No.) and wait for a crisis, then someone addresses the crisis (not GP’s!), probably Urgent Care or the Emergency Room. But often that crisis never comes, they bob along for decades in Subclinical Land, getting sicker and further away from a course correction that may extend their health and their lives.

    Upstairs my husband takes his own blood pressure regularly with a cuff he bought through Amazon. He takes a very low dose statin that keeps him in the “normal” range. He too has a family history of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. We don’t just have to be ‘more attentive’, we have to be our own doctors, making actual doctors more and more only the gatekeepers of lab tests and prescription pads.

    1. Jason Boxman

      That’s how I’ve seen doctors for ages now; As mostly uncooperative prescription writers and test providers. Sigh.

    2. anon in so cal

      “My last A1C at UC lab in January was 134 and my nurse practitioner didn’t even raise an eyebrow. That was fasting, first thing in the morning”

      Did you mean to say fasting blood glucose?

      An A1C test “reflects your average blood sugar level for the past two to three months. Specifically, the A1C test measures what percentage of hemoglobin proteins in your blood are coated with sugar (glycated).” Below 5.7% is considered normal.

    1. The Rev Kev

      Not looking good for the UK either-

      ‘The “deepest, darkest evenings” in January and February could be marked by three-hour blackouts, the head of the National Grid ESO, John Pettigrew, said on Monday, emphasizing that he was talking about a “worst-case” scenario linked to the energy crisis in continental Europe.

      Speaking at the Financial Times’ Energy Transition Summit, he explained that if the weather turns extremely cold and if gas supplies to feed power stations are insufficient, the company will have to switch off gas and electricity in parts of the country. It will be happening “probably between 4pm and 7pm in the evenings on those weekdays when it’s really, really cold in January and February,” Pettigrew said.’

      https://www.rt.com/news/564888-brits-blackouts-winter-crisis/

        1. The Rev Kev

          The winter of 1946-47 was one for the records as well-

          ‘December 1946 started windy and rainy, but there was a cold snap on the 16th. Temperatures fell suddenly, with a low of -14C recorded at Yeovilton in Somerset. Heavy snow fell across south-east England. By the 22nd a thaw set in, and it seemed to be all over. But this was just a curtain-raiser for the hardest winter in living memory.’

          https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/15/hardest-winter-living-memory-weatherwatch

          Wikipedia has a longer take on this bitterly cold winter-

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_1946%E2%80%9347_in_the_United_Kingdom

          1. You're soaking in it!

            Also known on the continent as the “Hunger Winter”. Not a metaphor, and one of the main drivers for the creation of CARE packages, to mitigate widespread starvation.

      2. Questa Nota

        UK energy blight, today’s echo of that potato blight.
        Which modern greedy grain-exporting landlords oil people will be identified for their roles?

  17. Seth Miller

    Actually, the burden of proving actual malice in a defamation case only applies to suits against what SCOTUS calls a “public figure,” (see, NYTimes v. Sullivan), or to overcome a privilege. I suspect that in Maine, the statements of a professional discipline board may be privileged, triggering the need to prove malice.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      No, see “limited-purpose public figure” which the MD arguably is in this case:

      The Supreme Court has defined “limited-purpose public figure” as a person who “voluntarily injects himself or is drawn into a particular public controversy and thereby becomes a public figure for a limited range of issues.” (See Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 361 (1974)). The thinking is that people who fall into this category have assumed the risk of defamation to a certain extent, and because of their position or notoriety, they generally have greater access to the media than private individuals, so it’s easier for them to rebut falsehoods.

      https://www.virginiadefamationlawyer.com/limited-purpose-public-figures-must-prove-malice/

      And:

      https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/proving-fault-actual-malice-and-negligence

  18. haywood

    That hacking article is wild. I spent an hour this morning going thru Reuters archive of investigations into Indian hacking companies working on behalf of law firms engaged in high stakes litigation.

    It makes sense that a lot of hackers contract out to law firms. I guess I hadn’t considered corporate espionage to be such a big market compared to scamming and state secret stealing but of course it would be.

  19. Chas

    That turtle story really hit home with me. I woke up this morning cursing the darkness, realizing the days are significantly darker now at both ends and we are soon to make it even darker longer by switching to daylight savings time. Last year I refused to fall back and made it through two weeks before I finally bit the bullet and fell back. That was a solitary rebellion but what if thousands of people refused to fall back? Such a spontaneous rebellion would be good for the American soul about now. If only ten per cent of the population refused to fall back, that might sow enough confusion in the economy to force change. There is a bill in the U.S. Senate to end DST but months have passed without any progress on it. Congress won’t take action because there is no money to be made on it.

    1. John

      Agreed. No political or $$$ advantage so why bother. I submit that if DST simply stopped or was never stopped, most people would not notice unless it was pointed out to them.

    2. jefemt

      General Strike. Global General Strike. US Thanksgiving through Chinese New Year.

      Just stop. Quiet Quit. Talk . Do a lot less , eat a lot less. 2000 watt lifestyle.

      Talk about demand destruction!?

      Could General Strike be more popular than General Washington is his time?

      Anyone out there reading or have read Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson. Quite a read… as is The Overstory.

      We simply need to just stop. Covid showed us a glimpse… imagine if we did it out of free will, and not mandate or reaction to a Plague?

      Return to normal. sheezus

    3. Eclair

      Our Amish neighbors here in Chautauqua County, New York and neighboring Warren County, Pennsylvania, stay on standard time year round. It has become a running joke during Daylight Savings Time, when we arrange for a meeting: is that 9 AM Amish Time or 9 AM English Time?

    4. Amfortas the hippie

      ive always been terrible with dates…and time in general…
      most of what i do relies on sun up and sun down.
      and, since wife died in june, i note the phase of the moon…just shy of full when she went…and i notice that every (lunar) month since.
      a lunar calendar like the turtle one would gel quite nicely with my life.
      and i loathe the time change…just pick one and stick.
      i, too, fail to reset my clocks twice a year…went as long as a month once.
      but everybody else dutifully switches…like the school, especially…so i must at the very least calculate the time difference between me and the rest many times per day.
      like my farm is in its own time zone.
      i find this just as difficult as the time change itself.
      year and a half to go before i no longer hafta do this…as my youngest will by then exit high school.

      1. Wukchumni

        My longtime backpacking partner sez there are only 2 times in the back of beyond, daytime & nighttime.

      2. Acacia

        True story: all the clocks at my High school were connected through a system so that one master clock in the main office could advance/retard all of them for DST, twice a year.…except for one clock in the shop class. The shop teacher somehow deactivated the central control.

        One day, a student pointed our that the clock in the shop class was an hour off, to which the teacher (a devout Mormon) replied: “Son… in his room, we’re on GOD’S TIME, not gub’mint time.”

    1. Raymond Sim

      Last I knew it seemed well established that in SARS-2 the L452R substitution most likely facilitates evasion of cellular immunity in persons with, if I recall correctly, HLA4-A24. (Confidently misremembering alphanumerical designations is a special talent of mine though.)

      Whatever its designation, this trait is common in persons of Eurasian descent, and is very prevalent in East Asian, Southeast Asian, and Native American populations – to include most Hispanic populations in the U.S.. It may explain the born-in-the-memory-hole excessively high death rates in SoCal during the second wave.

  21. ex-PFC Chuck

    Re: “Fake “anti-war” fraud @TulsiGabbard endorsed pro-Trump neocon Don Bolduc . . ”
    I listened to the entire Rogan/Gabbard podcast on which she announced her severance from the Democratic Party, and when the discussion turned to world affairs she parroted the entire official DC/EU narrative regarding Ukraine.

    1. Carolinian

      Let’s concede that Gabbard still has political ambitions and if she defied that narrative in the current climate those would be over. Even the few Republicans who are opposing the funding probably accept the narrative as practically all of the Dems do. I think the goal here is not to put Gabbard on a pedestal or knock her off of it but to find a politician who isn’t nuts.

      1. John k

        Yes.
        Politics is the art of the possible, it’s not possible to fight this narrative at this time. I appreciate Bernie et al are in the same boat and give them some slack, though aoc seems a bit too enthusiastic.
        She might be aiming to be trump’s vp, if he does run I hope he picks tulsi.. certainly won’t be pence, thank dog.

    2. marym

      Gabbard also said yesterday she’ll campaign for K. Lake, former TV news anchor, occasional Democrat, and currently AZ Republican candidate for governor.

      As their main claims to fame Lake considers votes cast for Democrats as fraud; and Gabbard’s position on war is similar to Obama’s in 2002 when he claimed he wasn’t against war, just dumb war.

  22. trapped in Europe

    Jorge Wilches has written unsettling articles about the relative uselessness of gas storage filled to the brim if there is no gas flowing in from pipelines. Unfortunately i have no idea whether he is right about these things or not.

    Apparently i’m not allowed to link to these articles (have tried 5 times, post simply doesn’t show up), and directly posting the links doesn’t work either (same result), but you will find the articles at the Saker blog.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      Someone in comments at Moon of Alabama said he was wrong with details.

      The Saker became hugely abusive towards me over a series of e-mails over my request to take down a post he’d reproduced in full without permission: my site was obviously failing, I was the personification of American greed and illustrated why the US would lose v. Russia, etc. So I am not driving any traffic to his site after that.

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          No, he was charged with incorrectly attributing issues with propane to nat gas. Per the MoA person, who seemed technically knowledgeable, it invalidated Jorge’s claims.

          1. marku52

            Propane is a 2 phase liquid/gas solution. Nat gas is just a gas ( you have cool and pressurize it to make a liquid, LNG). The pressure in a propane tank is constant (dependent on temp) until the tank runs dry, as the liquid phase vaporizes to keep the pressure, called the vapor pressure constant.

            Nat gas in a container will flow out as long as the outlet pressure is less than the tank pressure.

            1. Revenant

              I will go and read the comments at MoA on the article but my first thought is that he is right. The only way to remove the gas (assuming no liquid phase also present that is out-gassing) is to have a pressure differential, as you say.

              But you cannot do this by pumping because the vessel is closed. You need to let gas into the vessel at the same time. So what do you fill it with? Air will not do (explosive mixture!). CO2 might be acceptable and, being heavy, it would fall to the bottom and displace remaining gas out. But when refilling with natgas you would have to inject replenishment gas into the bottom to physically eject CO2 and even then the output would be mixed CO2 and natgas and you would have to recover natgas from the CO2 and reinject to reach a pure natgas fill.

              How DO you get the gas out of a storage cavern, if it is not under pressure? And once it reaches one atmosphere pressure, no more will come out.

              I suppose you could heat it but that seems, er, foolhardy. You could chill it and suck out the liquid, I suppose.

              1. Polar Socialist

                Don’t shoot me if I’m wrong, but having lived close to a gas storage facility, they have these huge round buildings with a heavy roof (also called a cap) that kinda floats on top of the gas.
                In that kind of storage there’s always enough pressure to deliver the gas to consumers, because the weight of the cap will keep the gas under pressure.

                1. Revenant

                  What you describe would seemingly be what is called a “gasometer” in the UK. These are large telescopic towers which sit above a water pond (which seals the bottom of the tower) and the tower expands and contracts with the gas pressure inside. In the UK, every town had a cluster of these because, before the system was replumbed to use North Sea natural gas in the 1970’s, the UK ran on “town gas” (a mixture of CH4 and CO, that’s methane and carbon monoxide, produced from “reforming” hot coal with steam – the carbon monoxide component is the reason that putting your head in the oven was a suicide method!).

                  With the switch to natural gas, most of the local gasometers have been removed and in the last couple of decades with high land prices they have also been remediated (the sites are filthy with hydrocarbon carcinogens and heavy metals). In some places, the towers have been retained and apartments constructed inside them! However, a few gasometers have been retained because the natural gas network requires them for pressure balancing / stabilisation.

                  Returning to the main topic, the sort of gas storage that is relevant on a national scale, rather than pressure balancing, involves much larger facilities, e.g. the Rough gas storage facility in the UK which has been mothballed is a now-depleted gas field.

                  Having looked it up, the gas has to be pressurised to push it into a storage field and it will flow out under pressure apart from the base gas (the volume that cannot be recovered, i.e. is left behind when the working gas volume is extracted). So if the stored gas stats being quoted for the EU countries are for working gas volumes rather than base gas volumes, the gas should be accessible.

      2. trapped in Europe

        Thanks Yves, didn’t know about the terrible behaviour of the Saker and couldn’t figure out why i couldn’t post a simple link. Also good to hear that Wilches is probably wrong.

      3. Keith Newman

        Sounds like the Saker has gone off the rails.
        Perhaps he has been overwhelmed by his personal problems (poor health and house almost destroyed in the recent hurricane).
        He invokes the almighty in most of his posts now, not a positive in my opinion.

        1. Michael Fiorillo

          There’s a lot of nasty anti-Semitism (not just anti-Zionism), as well, semi-veiled on the Saker’s part, right out in the open among commentors. I stopped reading it months ago.

          1. hunkerdown

            There seems to be a lot of that going around the blogosphere whenever Western interests are under threat and commentators diverge from the canonical narratives. Psyops are done for effects; making people feel bad about reading alternative media is a win for the hegemon.

          2. Michaelmas

            There’s a lot of nasty anti-Semitism (not just anti-Zionism), as well, semi-veiled on the Saker’s part, right out in the open among commentors

            Boy, is there. It’s far from all the commenters, but there’s reliably some straight out, pedal-to-the medal “Da Jooze! Da Jooze!” stuff, with the Anglo-Zionist conspiracy and occasional gratuitous sideswipes about, say, that mulatto prostitute who married into the Royal Family (I paraphrase) or whatever thrown in to break up the monotony.

    2. John k

      What he said never made any sense to me. This wasn’t my area of expertise, but afaik all gases behave in accordance with the gas laws. Pressurize a balloon with gas at, say, 3 atm, open the valve (untie it) and 2 atm is expelled leaving 1 atm inside as it was before initial pressurization. Don’t know how many atm the cavern can take (100 atm?) but I assume all except about 1 atm should be recoverable simply by opening the valve.
      Btw, the us northeast similarly stores gas in the summer because the pipes from Henry hub to northeast aren’t large enough to meet the big winter demand. However, both eu and us northeast use the stored gas as a supplement to normal supply, not a replacement of it. Eu may be in trouble because normal supply is down ~40%. Otoh, much of heave industry is shut, high prices are muting other demand, and some lng is arriving… unknown is how cold will winter be?
      I assume that if pinched priority will be electric generating plants, not homes.

  23. The Rev Kev

    “The Threat of Civil War in Europe”

    The author seems stuck on the idea of a fight between immigrant groups and neo-Nazis in Europe. But what if they don’t? The yellow vest protests were to an extent a class protest by those effected by increased fuel costs in the provinces and those in the cities who would not be effected so much. But with the looming train wreck about to hit countries like France, every group will be effected by lack of power and heating and the indifference of the ruling elite. So what happens if you have a revolt of such disparate groups like Yellow Vests, right-wingers, immigrant groups, students, etc. as all these groups will be suffering from the cold and the dark. I don’t think that the French riot police would be able to handle that large a number.

    1. NotTimothyGeithner

      In the cycle of revolts, there is always a large scale protest prior to the famed one followed by a series of broken promises. Macron being the guy in charge during the Yellow Vests is at particular risk if they don’t steer out of the energy crisis.

    2. Quentin

      You joke. The French riot police have no mercy, whatever the number of protesters. They are prepared to take on the whole population. Think army. The German government has approved the use of the army, with or without police assistance, to deal with protests. Don’t underestimate the deterioration of rights and freedoms supported by European governments. The EU resembles the Soviet Politbureau increasingly more. Officials elected directly by the people and not other bureaucrats? The EU has never heard of the notion. Just ask Ms. van der Leyen. Shut up they say, nowadays ‘because Ukraine’. Tomorrow because of the EU bosses’ salaries and power.

      1. hk

        French gendarmes are (or were, until recently) part of the army, no? And the model for the Tsarist/Soviet/Russian “internal troops” and the old Japanese Kempeitai?

        1. Bsn

          Gendarmes are not the problem. les Bleau are nothing compared to the CRS. They are the ones with chips, and machine guns, on their shoulders. First hand (actually head) experience.

      2. The Rev Kev

        Even those police and soldiers have families. What happens when they go home after their shift and see their own families sitting in the dark and wrapped in blankets to try to stay warm. They might start to reconsider whose side they should really be on, especially after a few pointed questions from their wives and partners.

    3. digi_owl

      The problem is that the left had completely dropped the language of class for the language of identity. Thus the extreme right has been allowed to roll in and take up the mantle of the defender of the working class. Even though most of the leaders are small business owners etc.

      Except that said extreme right will point to “immigration” as the source of all working class ills (“they are stealing your jobs” etc etc etc). But this is happening at the same time as those extreme right leaders are bringing in planeloads of migrant workers to undercut wages, mostly form within the EU system.

      1. semper loquitur

        Bingo. As I have relayed here before, the Right is making big bank off of the lunacies of the Identi-Left. I just watched a Matt Walsh speech at a Christian University. The place was packed to the gills. He’s framing it as a struggle of good versus evil and, frankly, it’s hard to disagree. He’s calling for lawsuits against “healthcare providers”, parents, and politicians. He’s asking his audiences to petition their faith leaders to get involved.

        Tucker accurately accuses the Identi-Left of anti-white racism and misogyny. Other groups, not necessarily on the Right, are leveling charges of homophobia against them. The synthetic Left is losing that all important battle for the “Narrative”, even as they seek to weaponize the legal system. Their penetration of the medical professions, education, and academics is fueling further suspicion against institutions that are already held in low regard by large swathes of the population. I suspect they will find that Twitter isn’t a defensible position.

    4. David

      This is an attempt to throw a lot of things together that have happened, may be happening or could possibly happen, to make a story out of it. For a start, it once again misuses the term “civil war” for effect. Civil war, as the name implies, is a war between organised groups for control of the state or to change the nature of the state itself. Nothing remotely like that is happening in Europe, nor does the author suggest it is.

      “Large-scale popular unrest” would be more realistic, but would not make such a good headline. Yes, with inflation, shortages of goods, the cost of living, no petrol and no heating, there’s a very good chance we’re going to see massive unrest this winter. Judging by the French example from 2018-19, this is likely to escalate quite quickly to a level the authorities cannot cope with, and if it spreads to the poor suburbs (which it didn’t then) then it will indeed become uncontrollable.

      But none of this has anything to do with radical violence or immigrant groups. In spite of hundreds of dead since 2015 and much provocation, there have been little if any revenge attacks on Muslims: in France there have been none at all, and there is no sign that this will change.

      1. Ben Joseph

        Reminds me of the anecdotal rich fat man telling the poor white man that the poor ethnic was stealing cookies.

        Let them fight amongst themselves.

    5. MartyH

      I find the dichotomy of “Youths” and “Far-Right Nationalists” unhelpful (at a minimum it elicits the worst propaganda memes). Unassimilating (maintaining home national/cultural identities and morés) “communities” encroach on traditional local communities and demand changes in values. The Far-Right Nationalists acquire sympathizers (educate those uncommitted to “diversity”) and the movement “grows left-ward”.
      Remove the euphemisms and you kind of have to admit that flooding jurisdictions with uninvited/unwelcome newcomers is quite likely to annoy those residents already struggling to achieve a better quality of life.

  24. The Rev Kev

    ‘Note that Andrei Martyanov contends that the current attributed-to-Iran drones are actually Russian but are very similar due to parallel development to meet same military objectives, but this sounds like a separate deal. However, per BBC story above, the West is claiming they have collected Iranian drone wreckage.’

    The Iranians could have sold the Russians the blueprints, a few working examples, and a team of trainers to teach the first batch of Russian instructors how to fly them properly. Maybe some technical advice how to set up the production line as well. The Turkish TB2 Bayraktar itself has a helluva lot of foreign sourced components but I would imagine that the Iranian drone, being simpler, would be sourced from all Russian components thus making that drone fully “Russian.”

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      I have not run down the Martyanov remark, but I bet he is right. Per Mercouris’ recounting, the drone type being used now to hit the electrical grid is deviously simple, a very clever degrading of what normally goes into drones to make them special purpose. They are the utter antithesis of special tech.

      As I understand it, many (nearly all???) normal drones have a human operator, since they are either surveillance drones or attack drones hunting particular targets. Some conventional attack drones are kamikaze drones.

      As I understand it, these kamikaze drones are more like mini cruise missiles. Flight path fixed at time of launch so as to hit a particular static target. They evade detection till they can be seen near the target because they fly very fast and I think low and of course are small. They emit very little infrared so they can’t be detected that way. They don’t talk to the mother ship so they can’t be seen via sending signals nor can they be signal jammed. They thus also take way less in the way of chips (simpler and fewer) and so can be made cheaply and quickly in big quantities.

      1. The Rev Kev

        And at about $20,000 a pop, they are far cheaper and just as effective as a high-cost precision missile. Best bit is that it follows one of the principles of war – economy of force – and they certainly seem to get a lot of bang for buck with those drones.

        1. digi_owl

          Would not surprise me if you could build something like this from a smartphone, a large model airplane, and an age old dumb bomb

          1. cfraenkel

            Hmm.. If you’re meaning that parts are readily available repurposed from civilian uses, sure. To your specific comment though – a smartphone would be the last choice unless you are needing the cell connection for control (which this usage would be iffy – if you’re using the cell connection, the cell towers are tracking you the whole time). Smartphones have no I/O connections, are encumbered by a bloated operating system etc. Single board computers are readily available in bulk and a lot easier to connect to stuff (flight controls, relays etc).
            And most model airplanes aren’t built for 100+ kg payloads. Age old dumb bombs are heavy!

            1. digi_owl

              Do not underestimate the USB port on most phones these days.

              And i was thinking smartphone in that it has all the sensors needed to guide a aircraft, from gyro to compass to sat nav reception.

              As for carry capacity, i have seen people build models that are the size of a human and driven by small jet engines.

              But frankly it was a off the cuff musing about the ease of a assembling such a drone using mostly consumer parts and spare ordinances.

        2. Greg

          It can’t have escaped attention that the current Geran-2/Shahed-136 strategy in Ukraine is basically the Millennium Challenge 2002, Air Defense Edition.

          It’s got to be causing some hair pulling in worldwide military HQs. While the NATO air superiority based model is currently failing against this tactic, it would probably work as well against current Russian missile and artillery based doctrine.

            1. Greg

              He’s right about missile defenses, and the link back to the anti-ballistic missile treaty that was mentioned here the other day was interesting too.

              The point I was failing to make clearly was that Russia’s awesome missile defense would also struggle to fight these drone tactics, as the missile vs drone costs and numbers are completely imbalanced.
              Russia has great defenses against big cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and jets. They have a gap against these swarms of low slow missile-like drones, although maybe not as big a gap as the US/NATO doctrine.

      2. Greg

        Again, Mercouris is mostly right. The only quibble is speed – the Geran is slow compared to other missiles and shorter range drones, even slow compared to relatively lumbering US Gray Eagles and such.

        The Geran/Shahed’s are indeed being used tactically as cheap slow cruise missiles, largely to attack first and soak air defense before the more expensive missiles come in and hit said air defense.
        They’re also not evading detection very much. Watching telegram Ukrainian and Ukrainian/Russian channels, its non stop air alerts across the country. Oblasts light up noting the missiles and drones passing over them, heading to Kyiv/Kiev. They seem to be attacking in waves every 3-6 hours, non stop for the last three days. Missiles from the Black Sea fleet, not clear where drones are being launched but probably places just behind the front, given they’re truck deployed.

        Incidentally, the Iranian sales material has the Shahed capable of being used by a controller in short range modes, but this doesn’t seem to be used in the Russian variant. There’s also images floating around purporting to show that some Russian editions have a 2 cylinder instead of 4 cylinder engine, which probably reduces their range. It would make sense to strip them down further based on the specific tactical role and reduce the cost.

        1. Polar Socialist

          the Geran is slow compared to other missiles and shorter range drones

          That’s what I’ve been thinking – the laws of physics kinda dictate that you can pick only two of the “small”, “fast” and “long range”.

          1. Greg

            Absolutely physical limits in play – the Geran is slow but in exchange it has range and uptime more in line with full-size war drones like the reapers and gray eagles, even though it remains a (relatively) small system.

      3. Raymond Sim

        As I understand it, these kamikaze drones are more like mini ballistic missiles.

        I would say ‘cruise missiles’, but yeah. It’s an approach Hezbollah appeared to be using back in 2006, with a round-trip flightpath, to spot their long-range rocket artillery rocket fire directed at Israel. They didn’t require real-time updates, and an autonomous version of an r/c hobbyist’s toy cruising over Haifa with a nice camera could do everything they needed. In the past I would have said ‘scaled-up hobbyist’s toy’ but have you seen what those guys build these days? And of course the Houthis’ equipment also functions in the way you describe.

        It’s a category of weaponry the Iranians would have had strong motive to optimize, but which most military-industrial complexes can be relied on to sabotage, primarily because they’re cheap, and acknowledging their effectiveness prompts investment in other cheap systems (AA guns) but also because recognition of their effectiveness tends to prompt recognition that certain bellicose foreign policy approaches are imprudent.

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          Yes, I recollected Mercouris incorrectly. He said mini cruise missiles, not mini ballistic missiles.

          I wish I knew more but I believe these drones are fast by drone standards and fly pretty low. And if they fly faster than an airplanes, that makes it hard for humans to try to shoot them down on sight (small arms or shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles).

          Shorter: slow for missiles may be plenty fast relative to defensive options. Remember small size and lack of many normal signatures makes them harder to follow in flight (I think they fly low relative to normal radar ranges, and so going in and out of radar ranges = easily mistaken for birds or just noise).

          And as others have pointed out, using regular missile defense systems to try to get these drones is incredibly costly v. the price of the drones and risks hurting civilians.

          1. Raymond Sim

            …slow for missiles may be plenty fast relative to defensive options …

            Judging by their sound and configuration the delta-winged craft shown on the videos I’ve seen employ piston engines driving propellers. Other options would certainly be available, but the piston and prop approach is likely optimal at low altitudes. The propeller though will keep speeds down in the WWII range. WWII-era lead-computing gunsights got good enough to make getting within 200 yards of a U.S. Navy ship in an airplane very dangerous. All of which is to say, defending critical infrastructure from these sorts of systems is more doable than the havoc they’re currently wreaking might lead one to believe. It’s just that the weapons you’d d use were obsolete till last week.

              1. Raymond Sim

                Nonetheless, in the videos I’ve seen the sound was, to my ear, more consistent with a high rpm piston engine. Note also that, whatever it might be driven by, the propeller is what constrains top speed.

                And bear in mind that powerplants can be swapped out. It’s entirely possible that mission configuration of the airframe involves choice of powerplant. Since I do have a bit of homework under my belt I’m going to stick to my assertion that a piston engine could well be optimal at the low altitudes they’re seen flying at in the videos.

    2. Jason Boxman

      I guess we’re also pretending that what Summers says matters. Why isn’t that guy enjoying retirement? Like Hilary, he needs to go away.

    3. skippy

      Per comment below this tread …. I’m fine with Larry Summers memo [time for the 2/3 world take on the burden of the toxicity of uplift thingy] to be a test subject for the arming of robots with lethal weapons ….

      I’m also OK with giving it the market treatment by turning it into a reality TV show for the whole family to watch in the evening …. something about a learning lesson …

      Here comes the – RAIN – in Eastern Oz … stay tuned …

  26. AHRjr

    Okland armed robot story is so bizzare to me. First it was drones spying on you and now this?! I don’t want any robots with gun near me at any time! Hopefully this is some kind of out of season april’s fool joke.

        2. semper loquitur

          I cannot find it now but there was a video on Youtube of a young woman who laid down in front of an Amazon delivery-bot. It stopped for a moment, retreated and moved forward a few times, then tried to roll over her. Now imagine someone collapses from heatstroke on a street and a robo-van comes along…

  27. lyman alpha blob

    RE: American Inquisition

    Thank you for this one. For those not familiar with Meryl Nass, she is a researcher on anthrax and other bioweapons and got a bit of a following years ago during the investigations over who sent the anthrax letters. She was considered an expert then at least, when her missives put the Bush administration in a bad light. I’d been following her blog off and on for many years and checked in periodically over the last few to see if she had any thoughts on the rona. Turns out she did, and not ones the current medical establishment wanted to hear, but I hadn’t heard that the state of Maine was after her.

    I hope she sues the [family blog] out of them.. And if there was any chance that I might have cast my vote for Janet Mills for governor, that is now gone. One more race I’ll just leave blank until we can get some competent candidates.

    Here’s Nass’ blog for anyone interested: https://merylnassmd.com/

    Looks like she has a substack now too: https://merylnass.substack.com/

    1. digi_owl

      What is there to investigate? If there was anyone other than “allies” near the pipe when it popped, they would be shouting it from the rooftops already. Ship traffic is heavily tracked, both via civilian and military means.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      I have explained this REPEATEDLY up thread with links. The MD is a “limited-purpose public figure” and is therefore subject to the actual malice standard.

  30. Wukchumni

    Back from a delightful stay @ our favorite drive to hot springs of all-Saline hot springs in Death Valley NP…

    We’d wondered about what a couple of 1-in-1,000 year rain events within the span of a month (now officially 1-in-500 year events, right?) had done to the 42 mile dirt and crushed lava road and there was some erosion and new gullies here and there, but no biggie in the scheme of things, as most of the deluge and damage occurred in the main part of Death Valley NP to asphalt roads which were undermined by the flooding

    The days were muy calliente near 100 with the nights in the 70’s, my 40 degree sleeping bag being overkill.

    ‘Whadya do all day?’ is a common query I get, and I get it.

    I try to be in the hot springs around 7 to 8 hours per day, with the majority of time in the wee hours or after shade from the palm trees swaying nearby envelop a watery envelope.

    There’s an open air hot shower which I found myself taking 5 per day when it was hot out, and no towel is needed, you just walk 100 yards back to camp, attired in birthday suit.

    The scene is similar to backpacking as there is no connectivity (aside from XM Radio) so everybody talks to one another and the conversations are scintillating in and out of the water.

    Our camp of 9 included a couple of genuine rocket scientists* from JPL, a dominatrix from Cleveland, and the usual cast of those really into hot water-which has no social or economic factors to those drawn like flies to it. Watching the dominatrix talk politics with a rocket man will be an enduring image, to say the least.

    We’d heard that the bats which frequent the hot springs had died off recently-and we saw not a one, which was unusual in itself-but led to a veritable shitlode of flies compared to all of our previous stays-on account of the winged ones not being there, missed meals and all.

    * One of them explained his idea to use underground lava tubes on the Moon as our base there, by drilling down into one of the chambers and inflating a balloon like cocoon within. It would keep humans out of the extreme temps on the surface not to mention all the radiation.

  31. The Rev Kev

    ‘PUTIN’S TURKISH GAS HUB PROPOSAL IS THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY PLAN FOR EUROPE SINCE THE TURKS DEFEATED THE VENETIANS 305 YEARS AGO. IT’S A MUCH BIGGER DEFEAT FOR GERMANY THAN BERLIN HAS YET REALIZED & FOR THE GREEKS AND CYPRIOTS’

    This has got to be one of those tectonic shifts that mostly go unnoticed. The EU has been keeping Turkey at arm’s length for half a century now though they had to pay them off to stop the flow of migrants heading to Europe several years ago. But with the Nordstream pipelines destroyed, where to get the gas that the EU needs from? Putin has made Erdogan an offer that is truly to good to resist. Putin will pump that Russian gas through Turkstream where it will get mixed in with gas from other countries before going on to the EU. And here is where the hammer falls. At this point, it will be Turkey’s Erdogan who will decide which countries in the EU get that gas. And to make it sweeter for him, it will be he that will determine at what price. So from then on, the EU will be in the barrel and Erdogan will be raring to go. How much sovereignty will the EU lose as a result of this? For that you would have to ask Turkey’s Erdogan who has always been a bit of a boogyman for the EU. This development was certainly not on my bingo card at the beginning of this year.

    1. NotTimothyGeithner

      There was a time no one had an alliance between France and the UK/England on their bingo cards until it happened. With the advantages of modern states, the old rivalries between the Rus and Turks don’t need to happen. There are bigger prizes than the Hellespont, and at the same time, Turkey has been a good steward of trade there.

      Berlin didn’t want Constantinople and the Anatolian heartland to enter into the EU because it would rival Germany in the long run, turning the EU into the EU. Instead of having a real foothold in Asia, the EU has created the conditions where the world can simply cut it off.

    2. Tom Stone

      Talk about putting a knife in the heart of NATO, one already weakened by America’s recent betrayal of Western Europe.
      A brilliant move on Russia’s part.

  32. Glossolalia

    Omicron boosters could arm you against variants that don’t yet exist

    That’s the implication of two new studies1,2 analysing how a booster shot or breakthrough infection affects antibody-producing cells: some of these cells evolve over time to exclusively create new antibodies that target new strains, whereas others produce antibodies against both new and old strains.

    So is that saying a “breakthrough” infection and a booster have the same effect?

  33. zagonostra

    Winter Heating Oil Prices in PA

    I was looking at the prices for heating oil in Central PA. I’m going up from FL for a couple months and wanted to make sure I have a full tank. Last year I paid ~ $2.80, now it’s ~$5.69 for 100 gal. minimum. I think there are going to be some very pissed off people in PA come this winter. I can afford it, but I know many people who can’t. PA has many small towns with an aging population on fixed incomes that will suffer severely this winter.

    I wonder if Venezuela still has a heating oil assistance program to the poor of the United States as it did under Hugo Chavez.

    https://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/strange-bedfellows-venezuela-low-income-americans-warm/story?id=18650347

  34. semper loquitur

    re: Multiverse of Malaise

    I’m shocked to learn that Metaverse’s isn’t overflowing with visitors. I have an idea! Make a world where you get to fire rocket launchers and flamethrowers at the Zuckerborg avatar! Make sure that it’s head and appendages can separate from it’s body and that it screams in agony! I know I’d sign up….

  35. Keith in Modesto

    Did anyone else read the twitter thread from Dr. Lisa Iannattone about the “biodiversity hypothesis”, that “a more diverse microbiome is associated with a lower risk of immune system disorders like allergies and celiac disease”? I’m very interested in this as I’ve been diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease. It prompts me to wonder about ways to increase the diversity of one’s own microbiome, beyond eating probiotic food, which I already do.

    1. Vandemonian

      Good question, Keith. Try using your favourite search engine to look for “enhance diversity of human microbiome” or similar (without the quotes). You’ll get a lot of hits, of variable quality.

      One interesting item I found included this list:
      1. Increase your fibre intake
      2. Eat as many types of fruit and veg as possible, and try to eat seasonally
      3. Pick high-fibre vegetables
      4. Choose food and drinks with high levels of polyphenols
      5. Avoid snacking
      6. Eat plenty of fermented foods containing live microbes
      7. Drink a bit of alcohol
      8. Steer clear of artificial sweeteners like aspartame, sucralose and saccharine
      9. Spend more time in the countryside
      10. Stroke animals
      11. Avoid antibiotics and non-essential medicines
      12. Don’t be hygiene obsessed
      13. Spend time close to a lean person
      14. Avoid food and vitamin supplements
      15. Eat like the Hadza

      Source: https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-to-boost-your-microbiome/

      1. PlutoniumKun

        To add to that very comprehensive list, there is strong evidence that fasting (short and long term) can aid the biome. It seems to work by reducing the overall number of microbes which prevents ‘bad’ bacterial dominating and preventing good stuff in whatever probiotics you are eating from getting a foothold. Obviously, when you finish the fast is a very good time to focus on the right foods and to take probiotics.

  36. Wukchumni

    My Kevin (since ’07) is pretty sure of himself, being in lockstep with the devil in the details…

    House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is expressing extreme confidence in his chances of becoming Speaker next year if Republicans win control of the House in the midterm elections, suggesting that divine intervention is the only thing that can keep him from the gavel.

    McCarthy said in an interview with Punchbowl News published Monday that he believes he can win the votes of the House Republican Conference no matter how large a GOP majority is, that the prospect of losing does not keep him up at night, and that if he doesn’t win, it wasn’t in “God’s plan.”

  37. Slaine

    I’m not sure if this has been mentioned earlier, but I tried to schedule a Novavax COVID shot and was told that because I had already been given Modern (Spring 2021) that I was not eligible. This was per the current CDC guidelines. The pharmacist agreed with me that this was stupid and he had hoped that this guideline would be waived soon. I sen$e the guiding hand of Pfizer somewhere behind this decision.

    2. Yves Smith Post author

      How did they ascertain you had had one? Did you go to the same pharmacy where they had a record?

      My understanding is the only record is with whoever paid for it (your insurer or the Feds if uninsured). The Feds are not paying any more. Could you pay out of pocket at a different pharmacy?

  38. none

    Oakland Cops Hope to Arm Robots With Lethal Shotguns Intercept

    Is that the future? AI-controlled machine gun turrets permanently installed in every classroom, shopping mall, and traffic light, to protect the children! And also to settle them down in case they or other citizens get unruly.

    You have 15 seconds to comply!

  39. KD

    Looks like a prior remark was struck. Let’s try again. . .

    It is truly depressing to see Gabbard announce her “independence” and then start stumping for Bolduc, who appears to be a hyper-partisan tool with some crazy, reckless foreign policy ideas. I assume that this will help her politically, as it demonstrates her willingness to put partisan loyalty over any professed ideals.

  40. Karl

    RE: Health risks of Ultra processed foods

    If these foods get absorbed more quickly by body tissues (leading to obesity) then what do these foods do to brain tissue? Can obese bodies correlate with “obese” brains, and what might that entail? We know that obesity rates are highest in the South and poorer rural areas. Could “Red vs. Blue” be due (at least in part) to dietary impacts on brain function?

  41. John

    I have come to believe after all these years of reading nc that its just a purveyor of depression and bad news. So tired of it

    1. Karl

      I think we’re all trying to understand the truth about reality. That can be depressing if you let it. Me, I’ll paraphrase Mencken: this site gives me a front row seat to “the greatest show on earth”– the USA-World Follies.

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