Hybrid ‘Brolar Bears’ Could Spread Through The Arctic as The Planet Warms ScienceAlert (Chuck L)
Sheep flocks operate as a type of ‘collective intelligence’ and elect temporary leaders to guide them while moving ZMEScience (Dr. Kevin)
What is the Boundary Waters worth? Counties and Forest Service disagree Wilderness News (Chuck L)
NASA’s Webb Catches Fiery Hourglass as New Star Forms NASA (lyman alpha blob)
FBI, Air Force Agents Mysteriously Raid House of Guy Who Runs Area 51 Blog Gizmodo
‘New’ weight of Earth revealed RT (Chuck L)
“Anna’s Archive” Opens the Door to Z-Library and Other Pirate Libraries Torrent Freak (Mark G)
The Union Pacific Silvis Heritage Donation Move – Departing Cheyenne YouTube (resilc). For train fans.
The Dengue Virus Has Been Found in Arizona Gizmodo (David L)
Our Earth, shaped by life aeon
The Dirt on Pig-Pen Elif Batuman, Astra (Anthony L)
What makes us dance? It really is all about that bass NPR (David L)
Michael Wood · Cage in Search of a Bird: Kafka’s Worlds London Review of Books (Anthony L)
Michael Dirda on why we should read the classics and old, forgotten books Washington Post (Anthony L)
#COVID-19
Science/Medicine
RAT COVID TESTING:
It's so important that you swab the inside of your cheek (especially at the level of your upper & lower molars), under your tongue and the back of your throat before you swab your nose. Sensitivity of available RATs increases significantly with this approach.— Christopher Leighton MD, FRCPC (@ccleighton) November 16, 2022
Washington Post backs Republican-led witch-hunt against scientists WSWS
Asia
Chinese city of Guangzhou struggles to rein in record Covid outbreak Financial Times
Climate/Environment
The carbon conundrum: Plotting emissions, as COP27 enters its final week chartr (resilc)
California Releases Sweeping New Climate Action Plan to Reach Carbon Neutrality KQED (David L)
Experts explain slowing ocean currents PhysOrg (David L)
Vertical Farming Needs to Grow More Than Salad Wired (resilc)
China?
Currently reading Elbridge Colby's "Strategy of Denial" since it's becoming a very influential book in the US.
Most striking to me is that the book is based on the premise that China is a threat to the US.
But the explanation for why that is is incredibly insane.
Small 🧵
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) April 16, 2022
China’s new satellite-hunting radar aims to blind US Asia Times
China Tops US To Take Research Crown At Global Chip Conference Nikkei
🇸🇦💰🇨🇳It is reported that during the last Airshow China-2022 exhibition in Zhuhai,SA signed contracts with China worth 2 billion USD for the acquisition of a line for the assembly of the TB001 unmanned aerial vehicle (including technology transfer) and 300 Caihong-4B UAVs pic.twitter.com/2RQBcdoJRn
— AZ 🛰🌏🌍🌎 (@AZgeopolitics) November 19, 2022
No hope in improving China-UK ties if London continues to provoke Beijing’s bottom line Global Times
Old Blighty
Higher taxes look to be here to stay, says IFS BBC (resilc)
UK opposition parties to table amendments to delay deletion of 4,000 EU laws Guardian
New Not-So-Cold War
🇷🇺🇺🇦 Situation in the Zaporozhye Direction until 11:00 on 19 Nov 2022(30 minutes ago)
▪️ The AFU command continues to concentrate forces in forward positions for a likely offensive against Melitopol. According to residents in the region, 25,000 to 40,000 troops pic.twitter.com/503c3hJxkt
— AZ 🛰🌏🌍🌎 (@AZgeopolitics) November 19, 2022
>Ukraine. Military Summary And Analysis 18.11.2022 YouTube. 10 Russian soldiers trapped by Urkaine forces urged by Ukraine to surrender. They did and were then machine gunned in cold blood per videos posted by Ukraine. Russian MoD analyzed them, said soldiers shot in the back of the head. Russia promises retribution, including v. Zelensky.
Why a Diplomatic Solution to the Ukraine War is Getting More and More Elusive CounterPunch. Resilc: “Vicky Nuland sez nooooooooooooooowayyyyyyyyyyyyyy.”
* * * Ukraine says half its energy system crippled by Russian attacks, Kyiv could ‘shutdown’ Reuters
Poland will not invite Ukraine to co-host missile strike investigation DefenseNews. Kevin W: “Because they saw what happened when the Ukraine co-hosted the MH17 investigations?”
* * * * * * NYT, Again. Andrei Martyanov. Some back of the envelope calculations to debunk the never-stops-being-flogged “Russia is running out of missiles” story.
Will Biden Sell Advanced Drones to Ukraine? Intercept (resilc). Wowsers, very captured piece. The US is considering selling/provided downgraded Grey Eagle drones. As Brian Berletic explained, the official reason is that we are afraid Russia will capture one of them. He says the even more likely reason is that it won’t perform well due to Russian signal jamming and other reasons. The magic Turkish Bayrakters didn’t.
Syraqistan
Mohammed bin Salman: Saudi leader given US immunity over Khashoggi killing BBC (resilc)
Israel deploys remote-controlled robotic guns in West Bank Associated Press (David L)
Imperial Collapse Watch
America’s Suez Moment American Conservative (resilc)
A Smoldering Fuse James Howard Kunstler (Li). On Ukraine and FTX. The usual great phrase-making.
The G20 is dead. Long live the G20 Indian Punchline (Kevin W)
Pentagon has no idea how much military equipment it left in Afghanistan Task and Purpose
Trump
Special counsel Jack Smith to oversee criminal investigations into Trump BBC. Kevin W: “A former war crimes prosecutor?”
Fmr. Pres. Trump Gives Statement on Special Counsel Appointment C-SPAN
Trump Posted Classified Satellite Imagery On Twitter As President NPR
187 Years Later, Congress Thinks About Seating a Cherokee Delegate New Republic (resilc)
Abortion
Anti-abortion groups seek to overturn FDA approval of abortion pill Politico
Our No Longer Free Press
15 Automakers Elon Musk Could Have Bought Instead Of Twitter Jalopnik (resilc)
Elon Musk begins reinstating banned Twitter accounts, starting with Jordan Peterson and the Babylon Bee The Verge (Li)
You can vote on whether to reinstate Trump on Twitter, but poll closes soon, I think as of Noon PST: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593767953706921985
The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
We’ll know in not all that long if Musk is blustering. But he has enough $ and profile in this that he pretty much has to make it work, even if that means redeploying a lot of coders and code minders from Space X and Tesla.
Democrats’ Trust and Favorability in Twitter Plummets Following Musk Take Over Gizmodo (Kevin W). I like the new Twitter much better. On the stuff I follow, signal to noise ratio has improved.
Elon Musk’s chaotic reign boosts Twitter — and its smaller rivals Financial Times
However, this is not well thought out:
New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
Inflation/Supply Chain
New Englanders Are Fed Up With High Energy Prices OilPrice (resilc)
The Bezzle
Pregnant Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for multimillion-dollar blood testing fraud conspiracy Daily Mail (Li)
Bubbles Aren’t Just For Stock Markets Ian’s Blog (resilc)
FTX boss accused of using offshore funds after bankruptcy RT. Headline buries the lede. SBF et al claim Bahama authorities made them transfer crypto post bankruptcy filing to a wallet controlled by Bahama.
Is Effective Altruism to Blame for Sam Bankman-Fried? New York Magazine (Jules). There was a lot of upset in comments on Water Cooler yesterday when IM Doc worked out that the FTX Foundation was the sole funder of a so-sloppy-as-to-not-be-reliable study that was widely touted study that found ivermectin to be ineffective. FTX had famously pledged to give 1% of its net fees to charity, via the FTX Foundation. Bankman-Fried’s family is part of elite medical academia. There is normally no money for clinical trials for old off-patent drugs. There was moral panic among the Biden Administration and Team Dem over ivermectin, particularly over the possibility that it would reduce vaccine takeup. So this is really not any surprise.
After FTX, Crypto Exchanges Struggle to Convince Customers They’re Safe Bloomberg
Justice Department Said To Investigate Ticketmaster’s Parent Company New York Times
How America’s top real estate agent sells 16 homes every day The Hustle (resilc)
Class Warfare
Security guards at Doha World Cup park claim they are paid just 35p an hour Guardian (resilc)
60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck heading into 2022 holiday CNBC (resilc)
Antidote du jour. Robert H: “Picture from bird watching friends near D.C.”
And a bonus (Chuck L):
Baby hippos learning to swim at the @CincinnatiZoopic.twitter.com/kTzs0YT3At
— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) November 16, 2022
And a second bonus (Chuck L):
"Excuse me, I'll tell you when you've finished" pic.twitter.com/TP3kBhbQgG
— Paul Bronks (@SlenderSherbet) November 17, 2022
And last but not least (guurst):
Adjusting your proposal to the grant requirements pic.twitter.com/zC4df9pRY2
— PhD_Genie (@PhD_Genie) November 17, 2022
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
220 comments
Comments are closed.
THE OLIGARCH GAME
(melody borrowed from Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind? by The Lovin’ Spoonful)
Do you want to play the Oligarch Game?
To strip mine the planet for cash in your name?
Well, go grab some assets, some stuff you can claim
Go grab it all without any shame
It could be cobalt, bananas, or gas
Or a patent for oil made from Mexican grass
Just something to sell to the poor working class
Some product that will really kick ass
You will have to pay off some top politicians
Tax lawyers, too, and accounting magicians
And bankers who dwell on some tropical shore
(If you bribe the right people then you get to keep more)
And when you sell a thing the whole world desires
You can cut down the jungles and burn them in fires
When you’re selling something the market requires
For as long as you can find you some buyers
You know the top oligarchs make guns and munitions
They launch proxy wars between coalitions
Everyone profits with jobs all around
While the dollars stack up just like the bodies on the ground
So if you want to play this game like the best
A whole lot of folks have to be dispossessed
But you’re only here now to feather your nest
And to fatten up your own treasure chest
It’s so fun to have an old melody from my youth rekindled – with much better lyrics. Thanks!
Perhaps you never had to. Once at about fourteen years old the young hippy chic living alone downstairs offers me pot and sex. I look her and the outstretched joint up-and-down a moment: long cotton dress, straight brown hair, the bangs – and tell her that I am too young. She understands. Best call I ever made.
Excellent!
“FBI, Air Force Agents Mysteriously Raid House of Guy Who Runs Area 51 Blog”
‘Earlier this month, agents from both the FBI and the U.S. Air Force raided multiple homes belonging to a man who runs a little-known blog about Area 51. That man, Joerg Arnu, said the swarm of federal agents in riot gear busted into his primary residence, handcuffed him, then marched him outside to wait in the freezing cold while they rifled through his apartment and took pretty much every piece of electronic equipment that he owned.’
Aaaaand that is precisely how you get the Barbra Streisand Effect. Until this week, probably nobody outside Nevada much heard about this guy and his website. But now? It’s news around the world! Would have been better to just have a coupla beat cops serve the warrant and toss his place over.
They are sending a message, I think, to the Area 51 investigator community. Poke around and all your gear gets stolen. They probably don’t mind if it gets spread around.
Regarding Twitter now compared to 3 months ago……
Twitter, in my opinion, is now back to being useful again. For the past year or so, I have been avoiding it like the plague. I follow many colleagues and others and in the past month there has been a noticeable improvement in the quality of the conversation. Just yesterday, I learned many things in a very long thread regarding the pros and cons of the bivalent booster in college kids.
I have noticed a marked decrease in obvious bot traffic and more importantly the obvious decline in self censorship. My colleagues and I are having adult conversations again just like free people should.
Twitter is back. I would be more than willing to pay the eight dollars a month. It is worth it to me. I am going to wait and see for the next few months if this is sustained. If so, I am in.
As for the self righteous Puritan scolds, good riddance. Go enjoy your own site – you will not be missed. Hone your censorship skills among yourselves. Knock yourselves out.
At the turn of the Century (1900) the American PMC referred to a Table’s “Limbs” , Ladies Glowed, Men perspired and Horses sweated.
To paraphrase Mencken many of the better sort were obsessed with the thought that someone, somewhere might be having a good time.
It’s a class that always approves of censorship and disarming the rabble, one must use the right language and ritually display your virtue on every possible occasion through words and symbols (Flags are popular here.)
Musk is one peculiar dude and he is “Bucking City Hall” in a way that will be immensely clarifying, it will be one heck of a show.
And it is in some ways a battle between the Barons and the King, the obscenely wealthy Vs the centralized power of the State.
“it will be one heck of a show.”
Why is everyone trying to get me to join Twitter? Are you people agents of Musk? How’s that new Tesla ride?!?!
May I ask booster advice? My wife has her immune system mostly suppressed (mixed connective tissue disease). She got the early vaccines and boosters and then was given evushield. The docs told her that has no worth anymore but pretty much shrugged their shoulders in terms of advice on what she should do.
Booster advice: that is such a difficult question. If have seen people boosted and re-boosted having very bad time with Covid very recently. Particularly a case that had Covid and after two weeks worsened again. But this is anecdotal. In my view boosters are useless and might be problematic. This is only my view, not my advice. I am not boosting anytime soon except if a new and better vaccine strategy is developed. With proper proof of it, not the bloody “trust me even if i can’t show proof” scheme currently in play. With suppressed immune systems other pre-emptive strategies are a must, boost or not boost. Best wishes for her!
I agree. The wife is a somewhat special case though, complicated by her chronic illness already claiming 50% lung function. But even in the first wave I was of the opinion that it was 50/50 for her since the worst cases seemed to be extreme immune system reactions that she probably wouldn’t experience because her immune system is turned off. (She can get weird asymptomatic infections.) But for her the docs all said “who knows” when it came to vaccine efficacy at all.
I’m no expert but to my understanding the old vaccines and Evushield target the Delta/Alpha spike protein whereas the newer bivalent vaccines has some of the old spike and some of the new Omicron spike. And since most COVID these days is using the Omicron spike, I think, the risk/reward on the new booster seemed worthwhile to me, a reasonably healthy 45 year old. And I’m pretty careful about not getting COVID and have so far to my knowledge dodged it. If there is much possibility of COVID at all I think that the new bivalents or Novavax are a good bet unless there is some particular reason to think there is some downside to being vaccinated. I’m a little skeptical of the vaccine testing protocols, but I’m a LOT skeptical of the long term safety of COVID.
Thank you for this Ignacio. I am vaccinated and twice boosted. Most reluctant to go for a fourth shot for all of the reasons you cite. I am exercising, immune boosting, masking and social distancing & will do without another shot until something better comes along.
I haven’t noticed any difference, but I’m not exactly a Twitter devotee. I check Blyth and Mosler regularly; gave up Tooze because he’s just too prolific.
Antidote overdose.
Want to give that hippo snause a bop, but i know that is a bad idea.
I don’t think hippos in general terms to be a cute animal but that was adorable to watch. And the fox picture above, I must wonder if they roam freely around Buffalo or the upstate of NY today. Nothing else will be roaming or moving much after a whopper of a snow storm.
The Bills game was transitioned to play indoors in Detroit, because of the snow !
Snow is perfect for foxes, as rodents try using it as cover.
When I lived in Buffalo area: more or less from 1976 to 2005, I saw numerous foxes, especially in outskirt, more rural areas. Have even seen some white ones, but the tail has some black so don’t disappear completely in snow times.
Yeah, I know what you mean. It looked like it was practicing chewing on people with that rubber ducky and when it saw that camera, practiced its lunging skills. Those cute eyes and cute ears don’t fool me for a second. Here is what they are like when they get big-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn_AP9liBKw (1:17 mins)
Love how they are glancing over, knowing full well they are on the defensive while crossing.
Here is the story of Humphrey the Hippo, the “pet” of a South African farmer. The farmer claimed he had a “relationship” with Humphrey despite the hippo having killed some pet cats, “treed” a man and his granddaughter, and chased golfers after breaking out of his enclosure. One day, the farmer’s body was found floating in a river after having been chewed on:
https://youtu.be/nwKTz2z7NrE
The chameleon was my favourite. I was expecting it changing to the colour of the hand but the video stopped!
Me too! I didn’t realize they could change colour so quickly. I am not a video expert but did not notice any editing between colours. And those little hands, too adorable for words.
Did it change color? Wow, all that I was looking at the whole time was the expression on its face and its angle to the straws and then its little feet at the end. I didn’t notice that it changed color. I wonder what else I am not noticing.
When I lived in South Africa, I can remember being told on visits to Kruger that hippos are actually the most dangerous animal. Don’t fixate on lions, but do worry about hippos was the basic message.
The gist of it seemed to be that they cannot see too well, are very territorial, get frightened easily and then lash out at perceived threats. Once they do then your chance of survival is apparently very low.
But that baby looks positively gorgeous!
They’re the most dangerous animal. My wife comes from the Lake Victoria area of Kenya. They kill the most humans; even more than snakes. Hippos are like 10x momma bears when you get near their babies.
I had a long twitter is useless and has no social value rant comment that i never posted yesterday and good thing as my argument has been completely foiled by a hippo, kangaroo and chameleon.
The net was better when it was more about fun and cute, and less about politics…
Not exactly opposable thumbs, but those chameleon paws are pretty neat!
Two fingers on one side, and three on the other.
I wonder if the filming stopped because the claw was about to sink deeply into the hand of the straw holder?
Really? Our hosts find many useful Tweets to share with us. Both Yves and IM Doc have mentioned that in the early days of Musk ownership there seems to be less noise and not activity. Lambert finds lots of good content and info where he works in Twitterland. I thank goodness regularly that Lambert and Yves do the Twitter work so that I don’t have to go there.
Did you hear that CBS is pulling the plug on their twitter presence?
‘CBS News announced on Friday that it will cease using Twitter, citing “uncertainty” over Elon Musk’s changes at the company. The platform’s new CEO has laid off more than half of its workers and restored several prominent accounts banned for reasons such as “hateful conduct” and impersonation.
“In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform,” CBS correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti said in a report on Friday.’
https://www.rt.com/news/566834-cbs-news-suspends-twitter/
Will anybody notice?
The corporate media is disengaging from Twitter? No wonder the signal-to-noise ratio is improving…
Sorry, That’s bot activity
“Trump Posted Classified Satellite Imagery On Twitter As President”
As President Richard Nixon once told famed interviewer David Frost-
‘Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.’
But I am reliably informed that that satellite image was the Kremlin’s Christmas card photo for that year.
>‘Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.’
In this particular case, correct.
From paragraph 15 of the NPR article:
By extension then, whatever material he took into retirement was declassified to him as well. I’m sure that a good lawyer would be able to argue that, especially with anon in so cal’s example below in mind. And Hillary was only ever SecState.
Were these on an unsecured personal server in a basement?
“The Spy Satellite Secrets in Hillary’s Emails
These weren’t just ordinary secrets found in Clinton’s private server, but some of the most classified material the U.S. government has.
Most seriously, the inspector general assessed that Clinton’s emails included information that was highly classified—yet mislabeled as unclassified. Worse, the information in question should have been classified up to the level of “TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN,” according to the inspector general’s report.
In short: Information at the “TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN” level is considered exceptionally highly classified and must be handled with great care under penalty of serious consequences for mishandling. Every person who is cleared and “read on” for access to such information signs reams of paperwork and receives detailed training about how it is to be handled, no exceptions—and what the consequences will be if the rules are not followed.
In the real world, people with high-level clearances are severely punished for willfully violating such rules.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-spy-satellite-secrets-in-hillarys-emails
>>>In the real world, people with high-level clearances are severely punished for willfully violating such rules.”
I think in the real world it is rules for thee and not for me; the higher up you are the less the rules apply while a schlub like me would spend some time in Club Fed.
It’s not all doom and gloom out here in the hinterlands. Some days it’s just plain old bad luck.
Re, the chameleon antidote: I say we run that little fellow for national office. He has the primary ‘skill set’ needed to be a big time politico down pat.
Wait just a minute. Do you mean to tell me that our reptilian friend is affiliated with the Rainbow Party already? Blast! There goes another revenue stream.
Well they managed to go stoplights in Germany, so…
There has to be a long compound word for that.
Elon Musk and his choices to buy an automaker instead of buying Twitter. Well that could run the gamut of better uses for that large sum of money, acquiring a supposedly a broken shell of a technology company, Whereby a mere few week into his ownership, the crucible of the Election Week was the first test to bring the technology to it’s knees. The test for Musk’s Twitter empire this week is the FIFA Cup played in the welcoming arms of Qatar. BYOB but not into the stadium.
I dunno, he could have bought the Washington Commanders several times over and built more than one stadium to make all interested parties unhappy to host NFL football games 8 to 10 times per year. Including pre-season games, clearly not playoff games.
‘he could have bought the Washington Commanders several times over and built more than one stadium’
Let’s not be silly. Building stadiums? Like any good billionaire, Musk would have had Joe Taxpayer shell out for them and be given title to them.
Let’s see now, didn’t Elon run a solar panel company whereby the taxpayer fronted the solar rebates to Elon. He made money on leasing the panels and also tens of thousands in rebates from the government? What a deal!
Always figured, if Auburn & AUDI made innovations to CARS, Elon’s lawyers & bean-counters would re-invent ripping off virtue signalling yuppie imbeciles, AGW mitigating government largess & workers, sacrifice-zone inhabitants & seriously innovative, well-engineered EFFICIENT or competitive companies?
Thank GOD, he didn’t buy KIA or BYD!
https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/eco-friendly-cars/#best-eco-friendly-cars
I write this only since it is true. Jerry Jones built about $1.1 billion new stadium for them Cowboys which opened the doors in 2008 I believe, or thereabouts. Jerry did hit the city of Arlington for funds to the tune of $300 million or so; the rest was from his coffers or okay probably the team coffers but it is a family owned business. The Dallas Cowboys are either the most valued, or on the short list of top US professional franchises based on valuations by Forbes (or comparable ranking).
Jerry knows business better than most modern NFL owners. His contract negotiations with now or soon to be overpaid offensive players notwithstanding.
Re: Twitter…
I’m still seeing the qualifier State-affiliated media under pro Russian or China accounts. Perhaps Twitter is not casting such a wide net nowadays but as long as that remains I won’t buy that musk has changed much.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/state-affiliated-china
I’ve never posted on Twitter. But, curious about the culture, I signed up using the handle (?) BlackBillClint1.
It took less than 24 hours, and I’m still a twitter virgin. Curiously, I can read tweets even after my Twittershaming.
But I’m not allowed to vote for Trump.
I searched for you there and it says your account is suspended.
It would annoy me less that twitter does that if they were actually consistent. The CBC from Canada and the BBC should be labelled the same way for example, but so far as I know they aren’t. Happy to be corrected if it turns out now they are now, though. (Not holding my breath.)
Nope. Only the “bad actors” are.
On Lizzy Holmes getting 11 solid – her lawyers have to be either total sycophants or macrodosing to have pleaded for 18 months house arrest when the prosecution was asking for 15 years. To top it off, did no one in her family or defense team bother to tell her that timing her pregnancy to be heavily showing at sentencing is practically contempt of court?
I guess I answered my own question.
‘Lizzie Holmes was a reptilian,
And had the Market give her nine billion;
When they saw what she had done,
They gave her eleven years in sum.’
With apologies to Lizzie Borden.
“Lizzie Holmes was a reptilian,
And had the Market give her nine billion;
When they saw what she had done,”
Market gave Congress a larger sum
“With apologies to Lizzie Borden.”
Indeed. She was acquitted.
Something that intrigues me these days is how long “Justice” takes.
Back in the late nineteenth century murderers could be apprehended, convicted and even executed (I do not agree with that last part) in several weeks. This lady only starts to serve her sentence in late April, having been convicted as long ago as July.
I have no idea why things always take so long today, yet we have the fastest communications technology ever seen. People from the past would be shocked by these timescales.
Am not convinced either that all this leisureliness gives more accurate outcomes. It is almost a metaphor for societal decline in my view. A bit like how the US could churn out ships in a few weeks back in 1942 but now takes months just to award contracts to build things with construction times often being measured in decades not weeks.
Not saying that the rest of the west is any better, either.
Far more technical evidence and court precedence to trawl through?
Back then people got strung up based on a couple of “witnesses” swearing on the good book it was the defendant they saw running from the scene.
didi_owl – Your comment made me think of this Johnny Cash song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnXUPlsn31o (3:06)
More “crime” given the expansion of the carceral state and less public resources to deal with our expansive definitions. We love funding “good people” with guns. We hate funding people who hold them accountable. See: public defenders and judges. Also see: neoliberalism.
I’m convinced the average Joe/Jill in the U.S would entirely scrap due process protections if it saved them $5.00 annually on their taxes.
The Law and Order pantheon of cop fellation shows plays a role in this. Producer Dick Wolf is unabashedly “pro cop”. I’m sure that dust-bin of “B grade” actors and has-beens CSI , and it’s various spin-offs, does the same. The otherwise dreary John Oliver did a show about Law and Order recently:
https://youtu.be/DNy6F7ZwX8I
These shows are, for many people, the only education about the US criminal justice system they will ever receive. They even shape cop’s understanding of it and how they conduct themselves and investigations. They are enthusiastically promoted by the brass in a manner similar to how the Pentagon liaisons with movie makers.
This has some rather dire effects. In the shows, for example, sexual assault cases are solved with clockwork regularity. In reality, NYPD solves a fraction of the cases, if they give them any attention at all.
Public defenders are portrayed as criminal loving, cop hating douchebags who harry law enforcement as they try to do their good work. They whine about things like “defendant’s rights” and other such annoyances. They are sometimes portrayed as being physically unpleasant; one such character is an overweight, sloppily dressed schlub whose appearance at the precinct causes consternation and eye-rolling amongst the heroic detectives.
This is unfair to the original series (didn’t watch the others) which had numerous instances where cops abused suspects, wrong person was arrested and prosecuted etc. Its biggest defect was probably that it was set in Manhattan, often among the well-off, so that the accused got much better lawyers than real-life defendants usually do.
Or were those instances of “bad apples”, examples of aggressive cops and a flawed judiciary that were supposed to off-set the overall gritty wholesomeness of the NYPD and the Manhattan DA’s office? I wouldn’t know, as I would rather watch grass grow than any of that (rap. In general, I think any show about state authority is going to tend to bend towards promotion rather than criticism. Dick Wolf is, after all, a media establishment figure and a multi-millionaire.
What annoys me is the frequent showing of search warrants being gently applied with everything neatly searched, put away nicely, and a receipt is given to the searched party, which is what should happen.
In the real world, the police often tear a place apart, leaving an absolute disaster. Some police departments will rip apart a kitchen, dumping the food like flour and rice on the floor. I must note that the poorer the victims are, the more unpleasant and destructive the police usually are. When the police can routinely beat, cripple, and occasionally even murder often innocent, often unarmed or resisting, and frequently uncharged or even un-accused, people without consequences…
The disconnect from what one sees on the show and what happens in reality is really disconcerting. Law and Order is great propaganda.
My mother watched those shows. They show routine cop bad behavior, like breaking in after a single knock and tearing places up during searches. They don’t candy coat that stuff.
Special Victims Unit is a good show. Shows many of the investigations failing, often due to police screw ups, and prosecutions doing harm.
The public defenders are portrayed sympathetically, either as being well meaning but overstretched, or when a capable one shows up, the prosecutors tearing their hair at proper process being used against them. It’s the defense attorneys that the rich scumbags hire that are portrayed unsympathetically. But they are still shown as skilled and effective.
What annoys ME is main character women cops and young male cops are WAY WAY too good looking.
Sure, in Law&Order and SVU, at the beginning of some episodes, you sometimes get the bad cops for the story’s setup, and they also thrown in screw-ups occasionally, but the detectives are always very proper, strictly following the rules. (Well, nearly always.) It still doesn’t seem to jive with all the stuff I can so easily find. Even in the Bay Area, which is usually better than some other parts of the country.
Honestly, if the real world legal system was as good as that shown on those shows, it would be a fantastic improvement.
And just what is so wrong with seeing all those people with the flawless skin, the perfect and gleaming teeth, beautifully well done hair, and wonderfully applied makeup, and the men with no five o’clock shadow ever, at all hours of the day and night? It’s something for us to aspire to! ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfXCb9hSBMg
SVU is just sex crimes….and the main character in the early years of the show, Eliot Stabler (sp?) had big time anger issues, regularly got too physical with suspects, to the degree it screwed up cases. The later shows have a pretty woman cop from the South who has a gambling addiction and a sister who is a bona fide super weasel addict (if Zelensky were reborn as a Southern women, he’d be her).
Many of the guest roles are SUCH New York City types, they have that down really well.
The show that gets all treacly with cops is Blue Bloods. All SO NICE and SO EARNEST.
But will all those superannuated enabler worthies* from the Board come visit her?
Maybe they’ll carpool.
She could auction off naming rights. /s
*George P. Shultz — former US secretary of state
Gary Roughead — retired US Navy admiral
William J. Perry — former US secretary of defense
Sam Nunn — former US senator who served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
James N. Mattis — retired US Marine Corps general
Richard Kovacevich — former CEO of Wells Fargo
Henry A. Kissinger — former US secretary of state
William H. Frist — heart and lung transplant surgeon and former US senator
William H. Foege — former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Riley P. Bechtel — chairman of the board of the Bechtel Group Inc., a construction company
Ever notice a pattern? These people are the elite and the best of the best. And yet they got suckered by an obvious huckster like Holmes. And look at the same elites and top people who got suckered by FTX led by a kid who I would not trust to run a MacDonalds and his ropey friends. And then there is the disastrous handling of the pandemic, the running down of the economy and the total cock-up with Ukraine.
So maybe our best of the best elites are mostly just a bunch of idiots whose power, wealth and influence is not justified by what they can bring to the party.
Well… based on performance and not sweet words you have a point, but doesn’t the world run on perception?
(facepalm)
nattering nabobs etc etc etc
It’s so charmingly old fashioned, that she got pregnant so to plead her belly before the gallows. Hopefully the child won’t be raised by this psychopath.
also on-brand: how reckless and entitled to put her kid(s) at risk of growing up with their mother in the can?
clearly she was no more concerned about their care, than she was about the shmoes whose health she risked with her bogus blood tests
indeed Leftist Mole, they might be better off without her
She’ll appeal. I imagine her lawyers will now be able to speak with her in less dulcet tones. Probably 3 years, not in a hard core place. This is her fault. When you’re white and pretty, and have a decent budget, you can negotiate. She was reckless.
Her kids will likely live with her parents and get a Latina nanny, who I pray to the goddess of all that is just, will be a hard core Stalinist.
I do feel sorry for her in regards to one thing only – the perp walk ritual. A sickening American cultural anomaly that makes the commie bullet in the back of the head seem like kindness.
I don’t see any basis for reducing her sentence. You need to show a misapplication of law by the trial court judge.
Well, if she is heavily showing, she should get a month with the baby before having to report. The woman is thirty-eight, I think, which means that she would be forty-nine when she got out, which is a little late trying to get pregnant. So, I am a little sympathetic for her getting pregnant now although I do wonder about that poor child.
Wellie she also needs to keep the rich father around so she doesn’t have to go on welfare when she gets out. Prison and age won’t do much for her looks.
The court was not happy that he hadn’t married her. Obvious so she could have access to his dough w/o him having to pay her fines.
She couldn’t even be bothered to do charity while she was faffing around being unemployed.
File under The Bezzle and Class Warfare:
Yesterday’s WC had a link to this long utube explanation of crypto and NTFs – and so much more.
Yesterday’s WC link linked below starts at chapter 6 of the presentation, the second half of the whole presentation. I highly, highly recommend watching both the link below and whole entire presentation. It moves briskly along.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4352&v=YQ_xWvX1n9g&feature=youtu.be
adding: the link above starts in the second half of the presentation and feels at first like I’ve been dropped into the deep end of the pool with no warning. Keep floating along til you catch what’s being said. It’s worth it. (The first half of the whole presentation is simply getting viewer up to speed about crypto and NFT’s before launching into this part, the second half.)
What he applies to NFTs can be equally applied to other schemes, imo.
‘Humiliating and degrading’: Patients wait months for answers on vaccine injury claims
In Australia:”Only a fraction of claims through the coronavirus vaccine injury scheme have been finalised, raising concerns the process may be inaccessible for some genuine claimants.”
As Lambert would say, everything’s going to plan.
Eugenics by stealth?
And to think that the tinfoil wearing man complaining about the fluoride in the water was just being a paranoid nutter.
From Biden admin moral panic to (captured) FDA financial panic: Quoth:
During a public health emergency, the FDA can use its Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) authority to allow the use of unapproved medical products, or unapproved uses of approved medical products, to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases when certain criteria are met, including that there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-emergency-use-authorizations-medical-devices/faqs-emergency-use-authorizations-euas-medical-devices-during-covid-19-pandemic
IVM is clearly an “adequate alternative” to vack$.
Rishi Sunak seems to have visited Kiev for the first time.
Guess he wanted some cold air after being in Bali.
Whenever things are tough it must be great fun to be courted by sycophantic Ukrainians and play at bromance with Zelensky rather than have to deal with unruly British people at home.
Given the mess his party has made of things over the past decade one might expect that he would not budge from his office until he has started to turn them around.
I think Sunak is intelligent enough to know that the chances of turning anything around in the UK at the present are very remote. He probably reckons on two years in the job maximum before moving on to cash in on being an ex-PM. Leave the mess to Labour. The next ten years in the UK are probably going to be brutal so why would you want to be in charge?
As if it will be a party anywhere else…
Short of development something like nanotechnology and holding it on the island, the UK is especially boned. I loathe Blair, but his and others moving to the EU was the recognition they needed to join an economic bloc like the EU or simply be a less diverse out of the way place in the grand scheme. Even now all trade in that part of the world will be influenced by Brussels and the long term ramifications of the New Silk Road.
UK industy isn’t all rent productivity leader. They all rent rent as dynamic as Japan, and places like South Korea and Turkeye are coming.
“The City” wealth can be moved with pushes of buttons. It’s still a big economy, but change is coming.
When he lost the leadership contest to Truss there were rumours that he was going to head over to LA and live there. Guess his current role just means he postpones things by a couple of years.
“Ukraine says half its energy system crippled by Russian attacks, Kyiv could ‘shutdown'”
I’m willing to bet that it is a lot more than half. And those Ukrainian engineers can’t fix what they don’t have the spare parts for. Zelensky might be telling the EU right now that unless he gets a coupla billion like Erdogan gets annually, that he will open the gates and let people flee to the EU. If he gets the money though, he will force those people to stay home. Meanwhile, this is what they were seeing in Kiev only two days ago-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKyoxFwOjHU (32 secs)
If one buys into the idea that Nuland meant what she said, destabilizing Western Europe is as good as probing Russia.
A good longform history of the results of a change in Presidential policy
“Bill Clinton’s wholesale rejection of his predecessor’s Russia policy laid the groundwork for the current crisis between Russia and the West.”
“Bush wanted to avoid the impression that he was issuing orders to a defeated rival.” And according to the historian Joshua Shifrinson “Rather than trumpeting the collapse of the Soviet system for political points, the American transcript [of the meeting] suggests that Bush was willing to downplay changes in Soviet ideology if doing so would help maintain U.S.-Soviet relations writ large.”
Once the USSR fell, Bush and his team recognized the combustible reality on the ground. The most well-known expression of Bush’s policy towards the emerging post-Soviet states was made on August 1, 1991, during a speech to the Ukrainian Rada where he pledged that the US would take a hands off approach. Bush told the audience that the US “cannot tell you how to reform your society. We will not try to pick winners and losers in political competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America.”
Bush also warned he would “not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”“…
Which was all completely (and cynically) reversed by Bill Clinton in pursuit of short term gains.
…”In a recent interview, former US ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock (1987-1991) revealed that…
“The real reason that Clinton went for it [NATO expansion] was domestic politics. I testified in Congress against NATO expansion, saying that it would be a great mistake, and that if it continued, that certainly it would have to stop before it reached countries like Ukraine and Georgia, that this would be unacceptable to any Russian government, and that furthermore, that the expansion of NATO would undermine any chance for the development of democracy in Russia.”
Matlock continued:
“But why, when I came out of that testimony, a couple of people who were observing said, ‘Jack, why are you fighting against this?’ And I said, ‘Because I think it’s a bad idea.’ They said, ‘Look, Clinton wants to get reelected. He needs Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois; they all have a very strong East European…’ Many of these had become Reagan Democrats on East- West issues. They’re insisting that the Ukraine [NATO] expand to include Poland and eventually Ukraine. So, Clinton needs those to get reelected.
Clearly then, NATO expansion was driven by Clinton’s political agenda. US national security interests didn’t enter into the equation. Clinton’s rejection of Bush’s “go slow” policy was a fateful error, and one that has helped to bring about the current proxy war between Russia and the West in Ukraine.”
And there right from the Clinton beginnings …”a team which included the young foreign service officer Victoria Nuland…”
via https://natyliesbaldwin.com/
originally posted at
https://usrussiaaccord.org/acura-viewpoint-james-w-carden-november-1992-the-hinge-of-history/
The CEO of DTEK, Ukrainian energy company said that while there’s no emergency, if would be much, much better if the citizens spent the winter in some other country.
And I think the mayor of Ivano-Frankivsk asked the city dwellers to seek accommodation in the country side, since the city will very likely be uninhabitable during the winter.
I’m sure that all those people can head off into the countryside to their private dachas.
With all the money poured to Ukraine by The West™, every Ukrainian family could surely afford at least a 500 sqft dacha…
Though I’m sure the good mayor was thinking that everyone there has relatives in the countryside.
What a very silly tree, I bet it loses all sorts of green leaves when it doesn’t get around to cutting them off until after the snow starts.
So far Musk has proposed changing the blue check from identifying a verified person/entity to indicating a paid subscriber; privileging the visibility of subscriber blue checks; and suppressing visibility for some (to be determined?) definition of hate speech.
Allowing but suppressing visibility for some definition hate speech means the target will see it, but others who would counter it with arguments, consider it as part of evaluating the credibility of the author’s other content, or offer support to the target will not.
How subscriber content that’s promoted and “hate speech” (or “conspiracy theories” or any other category of content) that’s allowed but demoted will balance out remains to be seen.
I assume twitter will become an environment reflective of whatever Musk believes is worthwhile speech and worthwhile speakers. I regularly browse a small number of accounts, and some of their links and replies, not varied enough to notice a difference in participation or content at this point.
I have noticed that some accounts I follow have many fewer replies to posts than they used to get. Where they often had 50+ replies now it’s maybe 10. I have noticed it especially on accounts that are critical of Musk.
Better yet, the “state-affiliated media” tag could be expanded to some five-word, neutral description of someone’s pedigree. Wouldn’t that be better than an aristocracy of fame? Wouldn’t it be more actually meritocratic?
The checks were useful in verifying that an account is the person/organization it claims to be, whether or not the account holder (or tribe thereof) also valued it for status, or the anti-tribe saw it as an indicator of unearned status.
If a blue-checked account name said they were “XYZ news” or “X Doe” or “X-town emergency services” that was useful information. Account holders sometimes add their own version of their “pedigree” in the “bio” section, and a reader can also look for more information if their credentials, history, etc. are of interest.
It would be nice if Musk found a way to preserve the functionality, but he seems to be among those who saw it as an unearned status symbol.
One of the smartest things I’ve heard in a very, very long time. I once donated $500 to Bernie’s campaign during the primary with a request that they never text, email, or snail mail me ever again, along with a promise to donate more during the general. I got a nice postcard in return that said they agreed. It was the last communication I have received from him. This last election I got a text from some politician in a different part of the country that claimed Bernie had given them my info. I was actually able to find a phone number for them and called them up and gave them a severe dressing down. After I repeatedly asked who gave them my number, who sold my number to them? Of course they refused to answer so I cussed them out and hung up. I am so sick of getting text messages from politicians.
https://crooksandliars.com/2022/11/democratic-fundraising-spam-turning
I once got a text message from the NYCLU (the gigantic New York ACLU state affiliate that shared–shares?–offices with the main organization in NYC) to vote for a candidate. I told them off because it showed just how much respect the ACLU had for its traditional values.
Completely agree on text messages from thr political class.
ACLU has now gone so woke that at least one former leader is speaking up against them.
digi_owl – My father left $10k to the ACLU Foundation when he died in 1994.
He must be spinning in his grave now. Sadly crappified like everything else.
OMG, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are 2 of the absolute worst. I gave $10 to Planned Parenthood long ago. They then spend that $10 and probably $100 more to snail mail spam me for years. Same with the ACLU although I probably donated to them a few more times before I had to call and tell them to stop. And of course I had to call a few times before they each finally stopped contacting me. That was all back before these people started using text messages. I have found that sending a text response with some very obscene and offensive words, followed by the almost useless ‘stop’ text, works better than just the ‘stop’ text. Looking at the comments on the dkos article, it looks like texting the reply ‘stop all’ actually stops more spam texts.
I had a similar experience with Doctors Without Borders — I gave to them after the Boxing Day Tsunami and ended up getting my contribution returned to me in the form of a tsunami of ham-fisted, emotionally manipulative snail mail begging for more money that went on for years.
I gave to the UN’s World Food Program at the same time and I get one, sometimes two, snail mails per year asking for a donation.
Needless to say, Doctors Without Borders never got another dime while the WFP gets regular donations.
Your donation is a matter of public record. Every state has different reporting rules, but at some point the campaigns with enough money will buy lists from firms that put together these lists. It’s why the fabled Obama list was meaningless unless he was sharing it with broke primary challenger types.
A state senate primary candidate and winner of the primary called me out of the blue despite being a hike away, and at that point, she was away most certain to have been given a list because she likely couldn’t afford the vendor.
Terry Mac spammed me to death the second he was endorsed by a primary competitor, but he had the list from the firm that supplies VAN, the Team Blue database. It’s like anything else…are you making good use of the data?
Of course, I mean it’s not impossible to simply pull the lists and have them find their way to other campaigns via staff moving on, especially for things like volunteer and issue positions that don’t get on the vendors lists.
Your donation is public record, but that does not have to include email address or phone number. It’s the candidates and PACs that pass that stuff around, and according to the study, to their detriment. I noticed someone from Actblue spamming the dkos comments saying they don’t sell your data when you donate through them, but they do give it to the candidates ‘for reporting’ even though email address and phone number are not required. 2 people on that thread tried to continue to deny that they are a huge part of the problem and finally got called out and repeated denials that didn’t address the issue. Doesn’t matter if they don’t sell the data but simply just give it away. They don’t have to spread that info around, but they do because they are the PMC and don’t understand how much people hate it when they contact us. I love all the comments about Warnock, apparently he’s one of the worst. I have a new policy that I will now vote for the opponent of someone who cold texts me.
It is not a matter of public record if you give <$200 to a candidate in a single year.
Vertical farming is a dead end. Whenever it is promoted with saving water, pesticide use, etc there’s always a failure to discuss that it’s massively energy intensive. The lights, ventilation and pumps (especially hydroponics) are the limiting factors. LEDs help but don’t solve the problem. Leafy greens are the only economically feasible crop at this point because they need the least amount of light of food crops, they’re short and they don’t have to be taken through flowering/fruiting.
Weed has been an economically feasible crop for indoor agricultural (horticulture) because of its high value. But when that is done at scale the energy input is staggering. I know of a 15,000+ plant operation which uses more electricity than the nearby auto factory. (To be fair, the facility was not equipped with LEDs at build out.) The non-light environmental controls are huge energy hogs and those rooms do crazy flips between light cycles. All the lights make heat which lowers rH, but when they flip off the temp drops precipitously and the rH spikes. That causes really large loads on ventilation equipment.
Pest/pathogen control is theoretically less in these setups. However, you have to run them almost as clean rooms because if anything gets in it runs rampant. Again, with leafy greens it’s less of an issue than it is when you try to grow anything else.
Yeah, they should likely be called vertical greenhouses rather than farms.
From my observation of indoor gardening, pathogen control is much harder inside and many producers in my neighborhood resort to prophylactic chemical treatments, one of which is a very close (and very toxic) relative of the drug that must not be mentioned. Some people do do things organically with compost tea sprays and predator bugs etc. but not most of them.
MIC, Crypto, the surveillance State, health insurance companies, the Daily Kos, and indoor grows are ridiculous waste of energy. As for grows, it’s also a weed and grows like one. At least 80 percent if not 100 should be cultivated outside. Viability/potency shelf life is probably 10 months before it starts dropping like a stone. 100 would be easy if the U.S. allowed a “friend” like Columbia to import 20 percent.
To the contrary. If properly stored, it will keep quite well, with no drop off in quality
I quite agree on indoor cultivation. And besides being wasteful, it produces, in my eye, an inferior product.
The first year of hermitage I grew, in the sun, my allotted six plants, and, despite a certain amount of loss (maybe 25%, mostly caterpillar damage), the harvest was so big I almost gave up trimming.
I vacuum packed it (in approximately 3 dz. quart jars, along with a humidity pack), and store it in a dark and cool spot. It has not lost any potency or flavor. Each time I open a jar I’m amazed how fresh it feels and smells.
It’s better than anything commercially available, and after two years, I still have enough for next year, at least.
Abbondanza!
Interesting. I wonder how long older vacuum sealed product lasts once unsealed? Have to remember how often commercial people and customers are breaking seal, repackaging over time. I mean year old oregano opened several times throughout is half or less tasty than the week it was cured and bottled. Should be thrown out in the compost bin. I’ve never been in a sin tax dispensary but I’ve noticed none of the product is dated on friends prescription bottles. Harvest date should be on every one of them. imo.
Some of us live in places where outdoor is nearly impossible (without a real greenhouse) because of not having enough short days before frost/freeze. But the massive, commercial indoor facilities are ridiculous and wasteful. I’m against Big Weed on principle. We did just fine supplying local markets in the bad old days with a distributed production from small grows.
Everything Lex says, plus it still doesn’t change the input/output for food from plants.
Leafy greens are good because you eat almost the whole plant, but that means in turn that you need to input everything that plant is made of before you start (except the carbon).
Legumes might cut out the nitrogen (partially), but then you’re harvesting fruit and abandoning the plant, and in your clean room environment compost is a pain to try and incorporate.
The other big thing these vertical farms use is plastic plastic plastic. Consumables everywhere.
Raise your weed outdoors! Fun, rewarding, slightly risqué and pretty easy to do.
My neighbors have a good supply growing in their gardens. I get the occasional bud for helping care for their pet or other odd help. Also instead of a fruitcake I get a nice little bud package at the holidays.
I keep mine in the freezer sealed as best i can and it stays fresh for quite awhile. I popped a frozen bud in my pocket on my way out the door to go skiing once and half an hour later the car smelled like well…
“What makes us dance? It really is all about that bass”
Don’t believe that for a second. That 12% increase in people dancing with more bass could be as much about being a cultural thing than what is normal for most people. Dance transcends cultures, eras, peoples, beliefs and is an innate part of us when encouraged. We, most of us, respond to dance and even if we don’t dance, often want to when given the chance-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2ta5P_RlB8 (6:11 mins)
What little I read from the article, they tested EDM people in an EDM setting. So basically people who enjoy being hit with a low sonic boom do actually enjoy being hit a low sonic boom.
From personal experience, regarding general population, the most effective thing that makes us dance is alcohol. In more specific setting, among people with a dance as a hobby, it’s a function of knowing the music, knowing the dance style/steps and the company.
I don’t buy it either. The instant thought in my mind was of people dancing to bourees, waltzes, gigues, etc, in the 17th & 18th centuries, with no bass evident except for arguable bass in the drum sounds themselves (when present at all). People have danced to nothing but flutes & tin whistles, and heartily.
Then I thought of all the old jazz I’ve heard where the bass was buried in the mix to the point of practical nonexistence, often from antiquated recording techniques or live recording, though a lot of it wasn’t exactly dance jazz (e.g. Charlie Parker’s One Night in Birdland, where poor Curly Russell is shut out by Blakey’s artillery barrages from the drum kit and all the other activity).
I’m fairly certain that dancing and toe tapping are much more related to rhythm, and even “hooks” in the melody (and yes, sometimes bass too, which – among other things – can take the melody), but I’m not working up a doctoral thesis to prove it.
Yeah it may well be that they care confusing bass for rhythm, as often bass (and/or drums) are used to lay the rhythm.
Yep. Undoubtedly, most common ‘drums’ in history or prehistory were clapping and stamping and leg slapping from a crowd (and hootin’ & hollerin’).
We’ve all heard of or seen a fiddler alone just ripping it and making people dance a jig. That aint bass, though often there is some, but only in the form of someone blowing into a jug. :)
‘…and the children danced to the pipes of Pan.’ [Spinal Tap]
Or some old hollow tree trunk getting beaten on with a branch.
Very, very high on the list, tho I’d still speculate that self drumming of all sorts (autopercussion? Self abuse?) is most common of all, because there isn’t always a stick to hand, so to speak. It has the same ‘us’ property that voice does. The instrument called yourself goes wherever you, yourself, do.
Gorilla chest beating comes to mind.
They are. The thing about bass, especially in the context of this study is that it’s propagated at such low frequencies that it can literally be felt. And in EDM it’s more rhythmic than melodic. So it is literally vibrating bodies at the frequency of the bass playing a rhythm. A 32 hz bass frequency is an air wave that’s about 32’ tall (approximation). It’s also EDM so usually a very simple rhythm that’s easy to follow. Frequencies too low to hear would have an effect.
I’m pretty sure the ‘height’ of a wave has everything to do with its amplitude, and nothing to do with its frequency, but I could be wrong.
“The lab was equipped with special special speakers that can play a very low frequency bass, undetectable to the human ear. The set lasted about an hour, and researchers introduced that very low bass every 2.5 minutes, and found that the concertgoers moved more when the speakers were on – even though they couldn’t hear it.”
I think the article/study is trying to describe bass frequencies contribution to rythmic pulse and harmonic movement more so than any particular instrument or prominent sound.
Anybody ever live in an apartment and hear your neighbor’s stereo playing? All bass and nothing else. Did you feel like dancing?
I sometimes hear the bass of the entertainment system before i hear the car passing in the street…
Bass in apartment: Make me feel like dancing? Hell no.
Makes me feel like punching. Really irritating. How about bass and guitar amps being used in practice sessions next door before a gig – at club levels.
Like a hammer on the inner ear. The perps won’t hear if you knock on their door – and if you catch them on a break and ask to turn down the bass – they are likely to look at you with wide eye wonder?
Time to practice the bagpipe lessons then, especially if you can’t play.
Bagpipes! We live off the San Lorenzo River – on the other bank is a cemetery. We sometimes are subjected to, I mean treated to funeral bagpipes. (Such as last week) Bagpipes are louder than sadder. Louder than my banjo. Though both don’t do much in the bass frequency dept.
But, Yes, in close quarters they might give the damn bass a run for the money – of course – then we’d have to hear the bagpipes too – earplugs not withstanding.
So, music is supposed to be pleasurable?
A true bagpipes story. So at the end of WW2 some Russian regiment was having a big do with members of a Scottish regiment. Came time for the music and the Scotsmen deployed their bagpipes much to the consternation of the Russians who had never seen them before. The Russian general was watching them closely, then was seen tapping his fingers and then excitedly turned to his hosts and said “They’re playing a tune!”
I stayed in Dundee, Scotland for 3 months in 1985. Walked everywhere – heard not a single bleat of bagpipe the entire time.
Aye, dead true.
Did hear someone playing a vinyl recording of the Yank – Tom Waits.
Vinyl: Remember those?
> A true bagpipes story.
From the interweb comes a not-true bagpipes story — but one which is delightful nonetheless. Unfortunately I’m late to the party with this one and it won’t get the eyeballs it deserves but I trust those of you who see it will enjoy. :-)
“Time is like a river. You cannot touch the water twice, because the flow that has passed will never pass again. Enjoy every moment of life. As a bagpiper, I play many gigs. Recently I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends, so the service was to be at a pauper’s cemetery in the Nova Scotia back country. As I was not familiar with the backwoods, I got lost and, being a typical man, I didn’t stop for directions.
“I finally arrived an hour late and saw the funeral guy had evidently gone and the hearse was nowhere in sight. There were only the diggers and crew left and they were eating lunch. I felt bad and apologized to the men for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down and the vault lid was already in place. I didn’t know what else to do, so I started to play.
“The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around. I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family or friends. I played like I’ve never played before for this homeless man. And as I played ‘Amazing Grace’, the workers began to weep. They wept, I wept, we all wept together. When I finished, I packed up my bagpipes and started for my car. Though my head was hung low, my heart was full.
“As I opened the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, ‘I never seen anything like that before, and I’ve been putting in septic tanks for twenty years.’”
As Comic Lorne Elliott said, “The pipers marched in FRONT of the armies in Scotland.” And for good reason!
The Simon Fraser University pipe band, from Burnaby, BC Canada, has been world champion six times. This year they were again in the top 6, and their drum core were first.
A famous cartoon showed damned souls entering hell and being issued accordions.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/11/rat-instictively-move-time-music-ability-previously-thought-uniquely-human-study
James Howard Kunstler points out that SBF, and the Bankman-Fried extended family are elite members of the PMC leadership…
…and that broadly speaking it’s the collective predilections of these sort of folks who decide which direction the economy and the ship-of-state are headed in.
It is rapidly becoming more clear by the day, that that direction is toward the rocks.
Notice that SBF and Ellison’s parents and relatives are credentialed and tenured at high levels in prestige institutions, but the kids graduated and went right into finance, rather than trying to climb the academic ladder. Is there just too much competition for a smaller chance at tenure, with too high a risk now that you’ll be relegated to living in your car as contract faculty? Or maybe earning your bucks in finance first is the new credential. There is a story here about generational changes in the PMC as they respond to changes in opportunity to sustain themselves.
Academia used to be a refuge where people could make a decent living while pursuing obscure subjects. Of my two friends who went into it one was interested in ancient architecture and the other in classical music. Not exactly paths to money and power. As you say I suspect today’s academia is not nearly as welcoming.
Yep. For contract (adjunct) faculty, the number that generally gets offered now is about 75%, i.e., 3/4 of all courses in colleges and universities are being taught by temp workers. Meanwhile, admins are often earning $225 to 250K/year — even in public schools like Univ. of California.
Kunstler:
Breathtaking in both style and content. Well worth another read.
Column provides a peek at the new style of interlocking directorate that has been largely invisible to the general public. Combine that with LinkedIn profiles and similar resources to see that there is a separate PMC world where the who you know and what you know intersectionality have mutated. Lost in the process was any sense of ethics.
If even a tiny bit of the story is true about the money laundering through Ukraine then that could help explain why there has been such abject panic in DC, and so many billions shaken loose.
“We were so busy seeing if we could, we never stopped to ask if we should”?
Trying to remember the timeline. Did Nancy retire from Dem House leadership after the SBF story broke or before? / ;)
“Meritocracy” to cover nepotism. If the top 100 credentialed PMC families, like Bankman-Frieds, disappeared, would America become a better place?
I was thinking about this earlier. Haven’t looked up the timeline with her husband’s attack either. Worth a look
I’m as much of a fan of a good rant as anyone, but Kunstler has become a broken record these last ten years or so. (has it really been that long?) He lost me in this one when he used “jacobin” to describe these denizens of the very top of the pyramid. Somehow, I don’t think that word means what he thinks it does.
(not that there’s anything wrong with pointing out the incestuous PWB, as he does here. It’s that his language and screed has gotten stuck in a deep rut.)
From his columns that I have read he seems to be a remarkably optimistic soul. He repeatedly writes that on account of some recently disclosed developments this group or that group is about to get its comeuppance, but that never seems to happen. I like his paintings shown on his website though.
Agreed. He seems to view the left as an amorphous blob, unable to have an incisive and objective view of the realities, pros and cons of the left. The use of Jacobin as a general slur got me too
“What Makes us Dance? It really is all about the bass.”
Their dance lab was equipped with special speakers that play a bass frequency so low people can’t hear it. But they found people moved more when the special speakers were on. That seems a little odd. Isn’t it obvious that a good hearable base makes people want to dance? I tried to think of songs with a heavy base that made me want to dance and came up with this one. Wait for Danny Divito’s saxophone solo:
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n3sUWR4FV4&list=RD-n3sUWR4FV4&start_radio=1
We dance to rhythm not melody (usually). Bass is in the grey zone between them, melodic rhythm say. But those low frequencies below what we can hear are such large waves that we feel them. They literally vibrate our bodies. In that study it was EDM which is usually very simple, rhythmic bass lines.
There used to be a section at Grateful Dead shows for deaf people. They’d hold balloons in both hands so they could feel the music (especially the bass).
WaPo on the Great Books
That’s a relief cause I was really worried about what WaPo might think about my reading habits. Now if they could just apply the same policy to the pages of their newspaper. Are we turning the corner on intellectual freedom?
Then the Washington Plot engages on its own games of bigotry and tries to game with our mental horizons. RE: Washington Post backs Republican-led witch-hunt against scientists WSWS
This is another game of feeding the readers with the narrative they want to read. The bloody Wuhan Lab theory as origin of the pandemic that eeeeeveryone wants to be true. This includes a lot of people that should know better but they are attracted irresistibly by the narrative and of course you find wanting people anywhere from the Island of Pascua to the Kamchatka peninsula. Lot’s of people KNOW that SARS CoV 2 is a lab creature even if they don’t know anything about virology but including some that know a bit or more than a bit. So, here the Washington Plot plays a safe game. Bloody idiotic but safe.
I am so old-fashioned I still spend inordinate amounts of time reading books. The beauty of a book, old or new, fiction or non-fiction, is that no matter how closely one vets it before purchase or borrowing it will always hold surprises which might broaden one’s mind and even, maybe, change one’s opinion.
A book from a good writer and a good publisher will usually be carefully researched and fact-checked. In such a book there will occasionally be facts or thoughts or ideas from the author that are unexpected to the reader and new to his or her way of thinking.
In fifty years of reading this has happened to me many times. Nuggets strewn on the trail, I like to say.
US relationship to Indian tribes is example of two tropes: “not agreement capable”, and “doing the right thing after trying everything else”.
For Indian tribes, it’s the advent of gaming and casinos, and the well overdue moves for representation, but also fundamental changes in law enforcement. From my wife’s nephew (who works for the FBI) the FBI is on a major staffing spree in eastern Oklahoma, as the 2020 McGirt ruling removed state law enforcement jurisdiction from that area.
‘The AFU command continues to concentrate forces in forward positions for a likely offensive against Melitopol. According to residents in the region, 25,000 to 40,000 troops’
And when they do, waiting for them will be the tens of thousands of troops that were previously stationed in Kherson. And after the murder of those ten Russian soldiers who surrendered, they will be in a foul mood. If you look at that map, the Russians are operating on interior lines so can quickly move troops around. The Ukrainians, operating on exterior lines would have had to bring their troops in a much wider arc to where needed. With the train lines probably not working due to lack of power, this is going to create all sorts of problems for Ukrainian logistics. Though snow has started to fall, you can bet that a lot of the fields are still muddy which will hamper movements.
About mud: considering that Russian have clear advantage in tracked vs wheeled vehicles at the moment, the rasputitsa hinders them much less than one would think. Naturally, even if one can drive trough mud it does consume more fuel and is more taxing to the crew. And logistics would have serious difficulties to follow any bigger advance.
About operations in Zaporozhya, I’ve seen pieces of information that, if correct, would lead one to think that Ukrainians are actually building defenses on the region. Like “the second line of defense” being prepared for rocket launchers and the main Ukrainian troop concentrations being 30 miles apart.
I’d assume the troop concentrations in the area after Kherson evacuation must be about equal or maybe even a slight Russian advantage already. And also considering the much higher mobility of the Russian forces, I’d be lured to think that Ukraine HQ should understand that their chance of offensives are over, whereas the Russian winter offensive is a reality. Going into defense would be the smart move now.
What’s With the Logs on Soviet Tanks? | Koala Explains: Tanks – Tracks and Traction
Tracks allow tanks to make short work of even harsh terrain, by spreading out the vehicle’s weight evenly over a wider surface area. However, sometimes even these tracked all terrain fighting vehicles can get bogged. The Soviet Union came up with a very simple, rudimentary way of dealing with this issue…
https://youtu.be/y-6vLJi4xOs
According to the narrator, the RF still use logs for traction.
British WW1 tanks used to carry fascines and beams of wood for the same purpose when they were crossing trenches.
I do wonder if the modern awesome MIC in the west has figured out a high tech and obviously more profitable alternative to logs.
Specialized engineer vehicles, in a chain all the way back to base.
I found this site, Gary’s Combat Vehicle Reference Guide, (You’re welcome, Rev. ;) ) which details the M88. :
https://www.inetres.com/gp/military/cv/eng/M88.html
What happens when this thing gets stuck?
Your analysis sounds convincing to me.
Not hard to speculate on this story: blackmail
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11374411/Missing-ABC-producer-James-Gordon-Meek-seen-public-time-FBI-raid.html
How so? (Genuinely curious)
Kunstler
This sounds on the money and particularly with regard to the current White House. Trump talked reckless and occasionally did reckless but was a piker compared to the Bidenistas who indeed acknowledge no norms while constantly alleging that they are protecting them. It’s all a big snow job as far as they are concerned.
And they do so because they know they can get away with it. Perhaps Trump was somewhat more honest only because he couldn’t rely on the same luxury.
“Why read old books? A case for the classic, the unusual, the neglected.”
Author – among many other things – John Michael Greer is of the opinion that it is a good idea to read books not of this century. They, being written in a different era and different social conditions, tends to breakup the thought pattern how people think nowadays is always the way that people have thought. Reading earlier works shows that this ain’t necessarily so.
I read a lot of first person history. I like to get accounts from the source about what lives used to be like, exactly for this reason. There is the statement ‘people are people,’ and on a base adjectival level that’s true (jealous, ornery, friendly, gullible, etc, etc).
However, people really were different in all sorts of specific behaviors, speech, and gestures at various points and places in history, and that’s why so many period dramas put 20th & 21st c. characters into costumes and it feels wrong. Even quasi-medieval fantasy makes this error. Game of Thrones was like that for me.
Religion alone has been a great behavioral modifier, but also the notion that if you said the wrong thing at the wrong time, someone might simply have run you through or cut your hand off (which GoT at least got right). Reading Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier was a simple recent example, for me, of realizing that at one point and place in history, people were very, very different from where and when I live now.
Sailor Bud,I recommend checking out both the Bancroft Library catalogue of publications and that of the University of Oklahoma.
Reading the personal accounts of people who traveled through California between the early 1820’sand @ 1850 is fascinating and so are some of the early accounts of the Gold Seekers.
Novels in particular are sociology. I doted on English 19th century novels in my salad days. By contrast older books about science or ideas can be a mixed bag.
‘A Smoldering Fuse’
Someone read my mind but not my nervous system. I was in fact curious what James Kunstler might say about the FTX story but was afraid to look… for good reason it would seem. I was afraid to look because I already knew what I’d find there.
I heard him say those two families are made of people on the spectrum (wink), accumulating power, influence, and money, and doing their level best to bust up American cultural norms they don’t like and don’t fit into. So they’re trying to change the rules of the game, and buffer themselves against the backlash of the Normies they’ve upset.
Well, no s**********t! This has to be one of the oldest stories in human history.
According to this article Bahamas Government Says It Ordered SBF to Hack FTX after transferring over $600 million of crypto it was swapped for Ethereum which is now worth $330 million. Quite a haircut. Does that mean when your favorite pretend coins can’t be wash traded the true market rate of crypto is 50% less?
My mention of a young Nancy Pelosi with the handsome young Senator JAck Kennedy seemed to puzzle people.
That picture was probably taken in 1958, the year Sputnik was launched.
Nancy P was involved in American Politics at the National level ( Inevitable given her intelligence, drive and Father) the year the first satellite was launched and she still is.
Somehow that puts her career into a clearer emotional context for me than saying she’s been a politician for more than six decades does.
Vampires can unlive for a long, long time…
Re; A Smoldering Fuse
Sadly, most Americans still have no idea how corrupt and self-serving our aristocracy is, or even that we have an aristocracy. It’ll be nice to see what the FTX web lays bare.
“most Americans still have no idea how corrupt and self-serving our aristocracy is”
Of course they do. How else can anybody explain all the anger that is evident.
Oh, there’s plenty of anger in USA– no argument there– but it often seems poorly directed, misdirected.
Agreed. Misdirection is also evident.
The angry masses on all sides are mostly not at fault for erroneously failing to direct their anger at those really at fault for their hurt. The media, which is part of the PMC does an incredible job of misdirecting anger – especially by routing that anger toward Russia and by dividing the angry masses into opposing sides that are caused to hate each other.
Vertical Farming Needs to Grow More Than Salad Wired (resilc)
Spit take. A little too funhouse/contemporary-politics for my first Saturday morning read: “Detach the plants from their environment and we can massively reduce the environmental impact of our food system.” I mean, if a Bayer lobbyist squints at a clown grooming his nosehairs in curvy mirror…?
Guess I’m awake and ready for the day now.
Whoa–Canada and assisted suicide
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-collapse-of-consent-in-canada/
Of course the triage mentality is not exactly absent here in American hospitals but they try to be less blatant about it. On the other hand perhaps Canada’s proximity to ice floes means they are more inclined to use them?
It is the American Conservative so the above article may be exaggerated.
Disability advocates having been warning for several years that the loosening of Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) law would have unintended consequences. Namely, that the poor and disabled would use it since public supports are way too low. Unfortunately, we can’t increase payments so that people don’t live in pain and poverty and decide dying is better.
From last year, but a brief explainer below. Podcast episode linked in the article is heartbreaking.
https://www.canadaland.com/madeline-medical-assistance-in-dying-priced-out-of-life/
Will likely only get worse with next years planned expansion to cover those with mental illness.
So Lizzie Holmes gets 11 at the Hotel.
Now if the rest of the corporate crooks were to think that a perp walk was in their future, we might be getting somewhere.
This makes me think of a similar outcome with Martha Stewart. In Stewart’s case, she was the only woman involved in the stock “shenanigans” and the only one to do time for it. So, I wonder if there is a cabal of crooked men associated with Holmes who similarly avoided doing prison time for the same crime?
Now compare how ‘onerous’ doing time in Club Fed is for today’s elite crooks versus what happened to Oscar Wilde a hundred and twenty-five years ago.
‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45495/the-ballad-of-reading-gaol
I have had to correct a few people about Martha Stewart’s sentence in recent weeks. It wasn’t just that she was it and a woman, because she didn’t go to prison for stock shenanigans. She was convicted of lying to investigators and obstruction of justice. They didn’t really have a case for insider trading. (And much of the lying and obstruction case had enough reasonable doubt that I am not sure I would have convicted her on the other charges as well.)
Mind you I did think of Martha when Clinton and her lawyers got the Feds to agree to no recordings or notes when they finally got to interview her about her server. It was clear to anyone with a brain that Clinton was going to both lie and obstruct but knew better than to let them be able to make a case AND the investigators knew the fix was in so allowed something they wouldn’t for most anyone else.
Regarding a topic I daresay NC will be revisiting in the future, I think this Millenium 7 * video does a good job explaining the predicament the effectiveness of relatively cheap drones puts militaries in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDaW8mRi2yY
The host doesn’t mention it, but the situation has some marked similarities to the era when aircraft were first being introduced. In the end vast resources, which planners might have imagined would be devoted to offensive formations, were required for air defense. U.S. Navy vessels famously got so many extra AA mounts welded onto them that seaworthiness was sometimes significantly affected.
23 years ago today, 11-19-1999, was a Very Odd Day, the last of that millennium.
The next one won’t occur until 1-1-3111.
23 is one of those prime numbers that crop up, so there is that.
St.Petersburg gas pipeline explosion:
https://t.me/ghostnewsx/2772
Boston area utilities called, said they’ve got that wicked beat. And PG&E will see St. Pete this one, and raise by several dozen dead, two record conflagrations caused by transmission line neglect, and a far sleepier Public Utilities Commission.
And I doubt the Russian agency wii need to subcontract to get competent repair personnel.
FTX/Ivermectin
“There is normally no money for clinical trials for old off-patent drugs. There was moral panic among the Biden Administration and Team Dem over ivermectin, particularly over the possibility that it would reduce vaccine takeup. So this is really not any surprise.”
And most likely panic from their pharma donors. If there was already a existing treatment for the virus, there would have been no emergency approval for their novel treatment (the shots are a threapy for the infected) that did not pass the bar for virus prevention from the beginning.
Scientists Are Uncovering Ominous Waters Under Antarctic Ice
> The problem is, if you have a lot of fresh water being pumped into the ocean, it buoyantly moves up toward the base of the ice, and it’s dragging warm ocean water up with it, melting that ice,” says Dow. “That causes that grounding line to retreat. And then all of the ice that was formerly grounded is now floating to instantly add to sea level rise and destabilize the whole system.” In other words, the ice doesn’t have to melt to raise water levels, because its massive bulk displaces liquid too.
I’ve been saying for awhile that the models are lagging the data (the ratchet only turns one way). This is the first time my prognosi have been credibly leapfrogged. That’s good for science (better accuracy), not so much for critters living around sea level.
The effects of climate change are not linear, and there can be exogenous events which affect climate dramatically over the short term.
Krakatoa comes to mind.
For the most part we know what’s coming, how quickly it comes is another matter…
Elbridge Colby said the quiet part out loud: the US status quo requires global primacy, based on the power to kill.
Growing up watching images of farms being napalmed by the US, it is hard to believe that educated readers need to be told that. Stephen Walt’s The Hell Of Good Intentions, an otherwise worthwhile book, rested on the unrealistic assumption that members of the Blob have good intentions, or at least wear them as outer signs of their election to power. Colby is presenting the real calculus of power. Interesting that in his view, enlightened self-interest seems to have no role in foreign policy, just as you see in domestic policy.
China?
We are becoming China US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes
I’ve never seen cameras pointed into windows, only streets and public walkways.
Your government is becoming more draconian but there’s no need to drag irrelevant parties into your comparison to make yourself feel better.
Biden’s clearly running. And the Times has some flak cannons up.
President Biden Is Turning 80. Experts Say Age Is More Than a Number.
I’d like to see the picture painted of what the next six minutes might look like in Biden’s dull-eyed head…the man wanders about aimlessly at times, shakes hands with the thin air, and is terrified of the Easter Bunny. He does seem to perk up when there are children about, though. That’s something, right?
I have known some people his age who have run mental rings around me. There are people who remain sharp until they die of extreme old age, but he ain’t one of them.
I really think that his handlers who pushed him into the Oval Office are monstrous. Certainly, cruel or uncaring.
better link to the Asia Times tactical ‘satellite tracking’ story:
https://asiatimes.com/2022/11/chinas-new-satellite-hunting-radar-aims-to-blind-us/
The story itself seems a master class in misdirection & saying one thing and meaning another. I suspect the real story is spelled out in the original url there.
“Tactical” satellite tracking is silly. There’s a reason the US has only a few satellite tracking radars – you don’t need any more. Once you get a handful of positions, you know where that bird will be for the next 3+ weeks. Maybe not if you need accuracy to intercept, but more than enough to tell you when it’ll pop up over the horizon at any given point on the planet.
Besides, once the radar can see the satellite, the satellite can see you. So how are you going to ‘hide’ tanks or ships or whatever in the maybe 10 seconds warning the ‘tracking’ radar might give you?
On the other hand, any antenna that can be used as a tracking radar can also be used as a jammer. Which seems like a more useful tool for a battlefield commander….
Nice to see a mention of arch-maga Dion Fortune in the WaPo article about old books! I’m a big fan. She was a talented writer in more than the mystery genre…
I think that the most likely reason that the VC funds which invested a total of more than $1 Billion in FTX might not have bothered to do their own due diligence because they knew that Suzanne had researched it…
Anyone residing in the northeast or NE states able to chime in in regards to home heating energy and expected costs to stay cozy in the forthcoming winter? Given the blast of cold air off the lake effecting record snowfall yesterday (Buffalo is NY I know), it’ll be curious what passes for getting the attention of your favorite Congresscritters…Wait I know who can solve this. Someone get Secretary Pete on the phone.
And to add, the winter solstice is practically a month away yet. It is such an odd thing to read those articles and understand the US is still utilizing an outdated process for shipping LNG.
RE: No hope for UK improving China ties if it keeps provoking China’s “Bottom Line”
The “Bottom Line” is also a bright RED line. The Red line, which it has been shouting from the rafters from this (to a deaf West) is all about Taiwan and arms sales. It seems the U.K. very much wants to sell arms to this very strange place. It’s a place that the Washington Post calls “self governing island democracy” but it’s also a part of China. When was it ever OK to sell arms to a province of a country without that country’s approval?
Why, oh why, is the West so deaf?
Also in the links is this quote:
Other than making stuff that is so good and cheap that we buy so much more from China than we sell back (and hence huge negative trade balance), and having a pretty potent MIC themselves, why is China a threat? I thought we were in symbiosis?
Can anyone here at NC make sense of US policy toward China?
Paul Triolo
@pstAsiatech
Not surprising…Dutch Minister of Foreign Trade: “Any restriction will be on our terms. This will not be a carbon copy of the US export controls.”
https://twitter.com/pstAsiatech/status/1593842539278217216
Coalition of the unwilling and waffling on maybe ….
The China thingy looks more and more like it does not have an economic foundation …
FTX Bankruptcy Jurisdiction Fight: Bahamas Regulators Now Confirm They Directed SBF to Move Assets
Two questions re FTX. Will Hunter Biden’s name emerge out of the morass? And who is the mysterious Gary Wang?
>>>“Anna’s Archive” Opens the Door to Z-Library and Other Pirate Libraries
Has anyone ever notice that intellectual “property” enforcement has turned into a vast censorship and grifting operation usually only to the benefit to the wealthy and powerful?
I would be much more incline to copyrights if I didn’t have to either pay with my left arm or if what I wanted was actually available.
podcasting is praxis reports sam friedman was followed around by the writer of “the big short” for the last six months.
Possible sarcasm, but it didn’t seem so.
The link that comes up when you google it…
https://twitter.com/samfriedmansoc/status/1250741697061040128
“From Aristocratic to Ordinary”
“What does this all mean.First, todays’s ‘ordinary elites’ continue to be distinction-seeking, with popular tastes still tilting toward legitimate artists.But popularity of everyday recs signals something beyond distinction, and peculiar to moral threats facing contemporary elites”
No idea what that means, but I think he’s saying tennis is so passe.
So, sadly, I have to report crypto isn’t dead yet. I get emails:
(bold mine; The ecosystem of frauds?)
Great! Theft at Web3 speeds!
My usual reply to these is simply: “I’m not a believer”. Because crypto is a religion.
argle-bargle morble whoosh
building foundational infrastructure
next generation of builders
developer-focused custody solution
new wave of innovation
ecosystem
security first approach
yeah, no.
Covid Almost Broke This Hospital. It Also Might Be What Saves It.
wtf kind of society is that? Why do hospitals have to make money? And why doesn’t the federal government fund the public commons adequately? What’s up with that? And we’ve got 100 whatever billion for the Ukraine this year?
Small wonder our political Establishment has killed a million Americans so far this Pandemic.
That’s messed up.
Same issue in rural safety net hospitals. It’s almost like liberal Democrats don’t care about the poor where ever they actually live, whether it’s poor black and brown people in the cities or poor white people in the country.
Trump is back: Elon Musk Says He Will Reinstate Trump on Twitter
Happy tweeting!
Good news for democrats really, with the current state of the republican party.
Re FTX–this Berenson is worth a look. He has some harsh thing to say about his former NYT employers.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/citizen-reporting-beats-legacy-media
I raised Icelandic sheep and can tell you that they are unlike any other sheep that are raised. They are like the original sheep that the Vikings raised and have not been ‘improved’ genitivally using European bloodlines. They have a bloodline they call the Leader Sheep. These sheep lead the flock and when moving the sheep from one pasture to another, the Leader goes first and then the flock will follow. They wont go through the gate without the Leader going first. Unlike the dumb white sheep most folks raise.
Damn that KQED article about California is such crap, I can’t even bother. My god. There is absolutely no reduction going on, and continuing fracking, with massive methane ….check out capital and main’s articles.
Thanks for the recommendation; I know how good Capital & Main is, but I keep forgetting about checking the site. It is pathetic that the MSM ignores so much, which forces us to hunt out alternative sources of news, or be ignorant ourselves, or maybe that’s the plan?
All about covid in BC again, this time from CBC news, article dated today:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mandatory-self-isolation-covid-rules-dropped-bc-1.6657946
Move to drop mandatory self-isolation for COVID-positive people is concerning, says health policy expert