Does Your Dog Truly Love You? Science Has the Answer Newsweek
Cops: Woman Defecated On Church Altar Smoking Gun (resilc)
Americans’ Views of Childhood Vaccines Remain Largely Positive Pew Research Center. This is not consistent with what IM Doc is being told by his patients, who disproportionately include top PMC and billionaire Dem patients. Two of many examples. Keep in mind is county is in the top ten in Covid vaccination rates in the US:
As an aside, I have now had 3 different parents in the office this week – 2 dads and one mom. They are suspending ALL vaccines from their kids. Measles, polio, whatever. One summed it up best for the group – “That lying prick Fauci – is no better than Monsanto” – I am not trusting my kids’ lives with these assholes no matter what.” I quickly learned there will be no amount of talking or cajoling I will be able to do to change minds.
Consequences. Get ready for more epidemics. They are sure to follow.
FYI – none of the three are MAGA – all “My body is perfection” Bernie Bros – man-bun wearing – avocado toast eating liberals. The media really has this all wrong.
And..
I have been informed today by 2 different patients that their grandkids will no longer have any vaccines. Here in blue America. I was in this Zoom meeting today where this issue was discussed at length. I am certainly not alone. Multiple people from all over the country are speaking up now about the incipient movement to stop vaccinating themselves and their kids. This knows no political borders – it involves every creed, race and group. In short – as I have been saying all along – the entire medical profession has shot its wad. Decades and generations of credibility tossed out the window.
After decades of neglecting women athletes, sport and exercise medicine is finally catching up STAT (Paul R)
Mosquitoes are most attracted to a chemical compound present in butter, cheeses and yogurts. Their deterrents can be a chemical found in plants, including cannabis. Business Insider. Easier to get a bug zapper.
We’re All Bored of Culture Tablet (Anthony L)
#COVID-19
"Effectiveness was not demonstrated when the XBB lineages were dominant."@WHO now recommends that updated vaccines only target XBB.
This *should* qualify XBB* as a new VOC under their own stated criteria, and thus it should be named "Pi".
https://t.co/CCOjAsVSuB— T. Ryan Gregory (@TRyanGregory) May 19, 2023
Masks and portable air cleaners reduced the spread of COVID-19 in schools, study shows
Full report Published in journal PLOS Medicine: https://t.co/mqOpwmjV4V#COVID19 #Masks #CleanAir #PandemicIsNotOver
Source: https://t.co/7AaNp4Tybw pic.twitter.com/zHnX3gx0d9
— Denis – The COVID info guy – (@BigBadDenis) May 20, 2023
FDA Says Telling People Not to Take Ivermectin for COVID-19 Was Just a Recommendation NTD
Climate/Environment
Birds Are Shrinking as the Climate Warms — and Small Birds Are Shrinking Faster Yale E360 (resilc) :-(
Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage Science (Paul R)
The Noah’s Ark for plants beneath the English countryside Agence France-Presse (furzy)
Who Said Recycling Was Green? It Makes Microplastics By the Ton Inside Climate News (resilc)
Crowd-Funded Startup Is Making a Coffee Cup That Can Be Eaten Bloomberg
Vast majority of global methane emissions go unregulated, says new study New Lede
Here’s Why Toyota Isn’t Rushing to Sell You an Electric Vehicle Jalopnik
A Chicken and Egg Problem: How Germany’s Hydrogen Boom Stalled Der Spiegel (resilc)
Heat insurance offers climate change lifeline to poor workers Reuters. Resilc: “Also needed for all the electrionixxx in your new carzzzz. Glued together connectorzzz melt and fail too.”
China?
The US Is Receptive To Kissinger’s Suggestion To Revive Talks With China On A New Détente Andrew Korybko
Austerity & a New Cold War With China Consortium News. Versus following story…
China’s loans pushing world’s poorest countries to brink of collapse Associated Press. Kevin W: “Thank god we have the IMF as an alternative!”
“I have no idea, not a clue in my mind, what China would do with information gathered from people who live in Montana.” https://t.co/GpuGWqo420
— Slate (@Slate) May 20, 2023
Myanmar PDFs getting the guns to turn the war Asia Times (Kevin W)
Old Blighty
Brexit blame game erupts again: how leaving EU came back to bite Tories Guardian
Rishi Sunak: Britain has moved on from judging people for being rich Guardian (Kevin W)
New Not-So-Cold War
National security experts: War in Ukraine is an ‘unmitigated disaster’ Responsible Statecraft (resilc)
Ukraine war: US to support providing F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine BBC (Kevin W). Note that the US is allowing others to send their F-16s. Also note per Scott Ritter, you can’t retrain pilots have been flying Soviet aircraft to use Western planes, at least if you want the pilot and plane to survive. The pilot’s reflexes are too deeply internalized to rewire. You have to start with new pilots. Plus this seems to be yet more virtue signaling. A bit heavy on Judge Napolitano today but he’s on a roll. From former intelligence officer Tony Schaeffer (at 16:30, who also says later it costs $10 million to train an F-16 pilot):
Giving F-16s to Ukraine is like giving an Audi 2002 TT to the team racing at the Indy 500. There are cars 20 years better and faster. I love the F-16, it’s like a little sports car. But it’s not adequate to have any net success in Ukraine.
G7 agree to ‘starve the Russian war machine’ BBC
In Kharkov, all medical institutions are overflowing with wounded AFU soldiers. Hospitals have no medicine to treat them, no blood donation. Medical staff complain that more Ukrainians are dying in hospital beds than in the trenches! pic.twitter.com/TNTJ1CTGQp
— Geo_monitor (@colonelhomsi) May 17, 2023
Oddly can’t embed this tweet (hat tip guurst):
Ukraine could join ranks of ‘frozen’ conflicts, U.S. officials say Politico (Kevin W)
Pentagon Says Accounting Mistake Frees Up $3 Billion More for Ukraine New York Times (resilc)
LIVE from Ukraine/Russia border – Patrick Lancaster Indy journalist Judge Napolitano, YouTube
Who is delusional? Gilbert Doctorow
Anatomy of a psy-op. Jacob Dreizin. Debunking various Khmelnitsky ammo dump explosion radiation spike rumors. If there was depleted uranium, that is very bad stuff, but it’s the alpha radiation, which does not penetrate skin, but if you inhale or ingest DU particles, it will mess with your organs. So this stuff is hazardous, but the reports on various claimed measurements are bogus. They don’t prove that there was DU in the dump that was vaporized, but that does remain a reasonable surmise.
Syraqistan
Understanding the Iranian Narrative Propaganda in Focus (Micael T)
It’s a bad idea for Biden to broker Saudi-Israeli normalization Responsible Statecraft (resilc)
The map charted by @shaulari shows (in blue and purple dots) the 147 "informal" settlement outposts and satellite neighborhoods that #Israeli minsiter #Smotrich has been empowered to foramalise, and where an additional 500K settlers will be transfered to, bringing their number to… pic.twitter.com/KoyTNfwJh4
— Itay Epshtain (@EpshtainItay) May 19, 2023
Imperial Collapse Watch
American Psychosis – Chris Hedges on the US empire of narcissism and psychopathy YouTube (resilc)
Indian diplomacy in overstretch Indian Punchline. Mainly about the implications of Biden being a no-show at the Sydney Quad meeting.
Sanctions Impede Diplomacy (Again) Daniel Larison
Democrats en déshabillé
People Close to Dianne Feinstein Are Joking That She’ll Resign When She’s Dead New Republic (resilc)
Immigration
Desperate Families and Gun-Toting Vigilantes Converge in Arizona After Title 42 Ends Intercept (resilc)
Our No Longer Free Press
Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The McCarthyism Reboot Matt Taibbi
Masters of Mediocrity American Conservative. On the New Yorker. Ouch.
Stuffing the Straw Man in Florida Erick-Woods Erickson (furzy)
Gunz
Michigan boy who used slingshot to save sister says he ‘was just lucky’ Associated Press (resilc)
Woke Watch
A Millennial Puzzle: More Diverse but More Segregated Wall Street Journal
AI
AI is great at one thing: Driving next waves of layoffs The Register
Professor Flunks All His Students After ChatGPT Falsely Claims It Wrote Their Papers Rolling Stone (furzy)
Debt Ceiling
White House optimistic about path forward despite ‘serious differences’ on budget talks The Hill
As of middle of the night:
White House, Republican team say no progress in debt ceiling talks https://t.co/O0b21Y7Xej
— CNBC (@CNBC) May 20, 2023
Most say pair debt limit increase with deficit cuts, but few following debate closely: AP-NORC poll Associated Press (resilc)
Why is trickle-down economics still with us? Guardian (furzy)
Americans’ Views of Federal Income Taxes Worsen Gallup. Resilc: “A stupid poll, for stupid people, of a stupid country….USA USA.”
The Bezzle
Australian Stock Exchange Says Software Overhaul Will No Longer Involve Blockchain Reuters
A forensic-accounting expert on how to treat the fraud epidemic Economist (Dr. Kevin)
Elizabeth Holmes: Inside the routine at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas BBC (resilc)
Class Warfare
U.S. Semiconductor Boom Faces a Worker Shortage New York Times (resilc)
Suicides in Massachusetts by Industry and Occupation, 2016–2… Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (resilc)
U.S. prison labor programs violate fundamental human rights, new report finds University of Chicago News (Paul R)
Antidote du jour. Embarrassed that this submission from Christoper W from Down Under languished in my inbox:
I have briefly seen our smaller bats in the night sky. Flying fast and feasting on mosquitos and other insects. Last night, I reentered my office when something chittered and I saw what I thought was a frog on the floor. It didn’t like me picking it up. I took it outside and put it on a plant. Didn’t like that either, high pitched chittering again. I finally picked it up gently and it latched its legs and wings, they felt like sharp hooks, onto my index finger.
So I returned to my office to see if it could recover, although I suspected it had broken a wing I stronked it and took this photo, which sadly is not the best. After about 10 minutes, the chittering recomenced and it spread its wings. Before I could stop it, the bat took off and crashed. I couldn’t find it. 15 minutes later, it landed on my desk. I picked it up and took it outside, where it took off into the night. To my and my partner’s delight.
What a great feeling…
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
226 comments
Comments are closed.
After a morning dose of news–stupidity, corruption, and despair…
I really liked the bat story.
Thanks.
The bat looks cute but it might be better to wear gloves when handling them due to the possibiity of rabies and bat lyssavirus that they may be infected with. Sorry to be a Debbie Downer here but you have to be careful in case they might bite you accidentally-
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/factsheets/Pages/rabies-australian-bat-lyssavirus-infection.aspx
Christoper W from Down Under
No rabies in Australia. Apparently poisonous jest about everything but no rabies.
Um, what?
Maybe I’m missing something but the link is from NSW.
And I thought Rev Kev was also from Australia…
I don’t know why it mentions rabies, no known rabies in Oz.
What they are actually trying to warn people about is catching lyssavirus from bats.
People who handle bats in Australia are at risk of ABLV infection. People who come into contact with wild or domestic mammals, including bats, in a rabies endemic country are at increased risk of rabies infection.
Another example imho of health authorities alarming people by badly written information and hence undermining their own credibility
So i did. Once a bat entered in my living room and seemed not able to find the exit. So, risking some bites from the unhappy Pipistrellus pipistrellus bat (much smaller than the beatiful creature in the pic) and using a cloth I captured it, felt a single bite through the cloth without teeth penetrating the skin, and managed to release the creature in the air. Family hero for a day!
Yesterday a skink got in the house and I was detailed to get rid of it. I managed to corner it but it kept avoiding me running back and forth against the wall. Finally I grabbed it, but low on the creature’s body such that it was able to reach around with its head and lock a bite on my index finger. I ran out on the back deck with it still attached to my finger and had to flick it with my other hand to make it release its hold. Although it did not break the skin I was surprised to see that skinks had teeth.
Skinks are rare! I know they exist but haven’t seen them in Spain.
Similar story: A blue-tailed skink found itself in the house and it was my task to “get it out!” Those things are fast, but I finally cornered it. And he latched onto my finger, too. No real damage, but reptile bites can be troublesome. The common Anole carolinensis of these parts doesn’t bite, though. I was raking a pile of wet, dead leaves one day and picked up a very large hellbender salamander in the pile. Shortened my life by at least a year.
If you piss off an Anole carolinensis enough, he, usually it is the male, will latch onto your finger. I used to get them from the garden in Miami and get them to bite onto my little sister’s earlobe. I once managed two and she wore living earrings for a half of an hour. She always threatened revenge but still loves little creatures.
How to get a bat safely out of your room.
Stay calm. Breathe.
Open all the windows.
From the kitchen get a light bowl or box and something flat to cover the top, like a thin cutting board.
Wait for the bat to alight on a flat and accessible surface.
Cover the bat with the bowl with one hand.
Don’t freak (the bat might).
With your other hand Slide your flat tool between surface and lid.
Hold tight and throw everything, bowl board and bat, out the nearest window.
Picked one up sans gloves six months back. Tiny bite, expensive rabies treatment. really painful shots into my thumb itself. Several return visits for shots in upper arm. Not painful. What else hurt? $800 visits (and this is with insurance). Anyway, won’t do that again, I promise, and yes, I’m that guy. The one who stops to save turtles, sloths, whatnot (sloths when we lived Panama for 15 years – many sloths saved). My advice is handle rabies-prone creatures with gloves . . . no matter what. Penalty for missing a small wound (I nearly did) is quite high. Beyond a certain death, it’s an ugly death, too Google rabies victims. There are videos of same. Bad juju as a way to go.
Windows open at night, and invariably one will accidentally enter the house, a two story Queenslander, as we are right in their flight path.
We are about 800m from the bush. Flocks of swallows during the day and these fellows, Bare-rumped Sheath-tailed Bats I think they called. They are rare and threatened but we see plenty every night. Probably see 20 species of birds in my garden every day. Feel quite lucky, but we have a very well designed tropical garden with rare plants, so they are attracted to what we have done.
Yes, Rev and others, best approach is to throw a tea towel over them. One did bite my finger a few months ago and I immediately washed out the wound with hand sanitizer. Guess, I got lucky.
Glad you found my email from a year ago, Yves (and good luck with the move. How exciting!)
Correct link for Business Insider article about mosquitoes
https://www.businessinsider.com/mosquitoes-attracted-to-chemical-found-in-dairy-products-research-2023-5
Should add that bug zappers don’t work for mosquitoes, but you suburban/urban people keep telling rural people how they do things.
I used to live in mosquito country. The folk wisdom there was:
1. mosquitos strongly prefer non-smokers to smokers
2. the best mosquito repellent was Avon Skin So Soft bath oil
https://www.avon.com/product/skin-so-soft-bonussize-original-bath-oil-56291
But how’s the serenity with a bug zapper-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng-Ss9FbiJM (5 secs)
Mosquito lore: a story:
The latest mosquits study inspired a zigzag zigzag into the past, Just before I returned to the US in late 1978. I spent a summer beside the Mediterranean, strictly adhering to the dietary suggestions of a Swiss naturopath, Mrs. Just (of Golders Green and blessed memory):who had delivered me from months of miserably recurring sinus infections. Her prescription: no wheat, dairy or sugar – up to 6 teaspoons of honey a day, though.
That summer I found that mosquitoes had no interest in biting me. They would sometimes approach the back of my hand, for example, and hover a quarter-inch away before flying off. There were outdoor dinner parties where everyone else would be slapping at them furiously while I sat untouched. Since I wasn’t drinking at the time, I sometimes thought that might be the key, but in after years, whether I’ve been drinking alcohol or totally abstaining, mosquitoes have recovered their appetite for me. (Cutters lemon-eucalyptus works and smells delicious.)
Now the study reveals that it’s the scent of butter, cheese, and milk that turns these winged attackers on.
If you live long enough, certain mysteries reveal themselves…
This appears to depend on the use case. I plan to use them indoors (you can get bitten quite a lot indoors in rainy season). The tests that question their effectiveness were done outdoors and still found dead mosquitoes in the traps:
https://www.mosquito.org/page/faq
Our house in the tropics, with plentiful Mosquitos and other biting insects, had two levels with the upper [level completely surrounded with mosquito netting.
It was well designed for a tropical climate. The Architectural Company is still in business in Apapa : Dys Trocca Valsesia & Company Limited
The house was made of in Concrete. Timber did not last long in the tropics at that time..
So the bivalent is 29% effective at Cleveland Clinic, eh? We’re maskers, and we hork with PVP-I in saline following our return from stores, doctor’s office visits, etc. Last week, about six months since last booster, we went back for our 5th. No adverse reactions, no sniffles, no aches, nothing. Facing travel in a couple weeks that will see us in close contact with 300 of our closest fellow humans for about 3 hours. Some will be infected, no question. I wish like Hell the vaccine had already had protections for newer lineages like XBB. Why not? What are they waiting on?
Data point re: IM Doc’s comments vice blue state avocado toast type, our 37 y/o daughter, mother of two, is not slowing down on vaccines. Yes to avocado toast (PMC wannabe) but also a fair bit of red state values. Hangs out on mom-type FB groups. Said, yes, there are some antivaxxers but daughter is of a type that basically evaluates information and thinks for herself, so thank God for small favors.
For a detailed analysis of vaccine testing requirements and the use and abuse of the regulatory processes I can recommend this very excellent book ….
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61605704-turtles-all-the-way-down
It has been in print now for a couple of years and afaik there have been no complaints from the medical profession or vaccine experts regarding its conclusions. The authors are Israeli & anonymous hence preventing any ad hominem attacks.
So, your daughter who “evaluates information and thinks for herself” may wish to evaluate this.
“FDA Says Telling People Not to Take Ivermectin for COVID-19 Was Just a Recommendation”
Ha! ha! Very funny. Saw a tweet on this yesterday-
‘The Perpetual Shadow Band 🏴☠️
@SpittinVenoms
FDA Then: You are not a horse, stop acting like one
FDA Now: We didn’t really mean it, it’s your fault if you believed us’
https://twitter.com/SpittinVenoms/status/1594764959421980676 (Check the replies)
I do not know about the US or the UK but here in Oz they actually made it illegal for a doctor to prescribe Ivermectin for anything related with Coronavirus. Not just a recommendation, they actually made it illegal. And the whole point was to stop people having alternatives and being forced to use all those wonky vaccines. So here I am going with ‘Never forgive, never forget.’
Don’t forget punishing docs who would prescribe it and pharmacies for filling the prescription for the C19. Still ok for parasites, though. / ;) But sure, it was just a “recommendation”. And Dr. F did not close a single school. sure. It’s interesting they’re now justifying their actions as not really actions at all. That means they’ll do it again in a New York minute. They’ve learned nothing.
Never forgive, never forget.
Perhaps they are trying to pre-protect themselves against coming lawsuits.
And don’t forget that many shipments of Ivm from India were confiscated at customs and the animal version were not allowed to be sold at feed stores. It can be found at feed stores again however. It sells out fast.
Was removed from circulation in both UK and France in JANUARY 2020!
People still got it from India , but it became increasingly difficult.
HCQ had a similar fate.
I will never forget or forgive.
Elizabeth Holmes, soon to be an inmate in a Federal facility. Rule number one, avoid the shiv and rule number two, avoid becoming someone’s “inferior inmate” for lack of a better description. I won’t say the word but it rhymes really well with formerly rich!
Maybe it won’t be too bad after all, and the others play nice. Then again, in the dulcet tones of Morgan Freeman, prison is no fairy tale.
I see that soon Elizabeth Holmes may be wearing khaki pants and a khaki shirt. Does anybody know if they also get issued khaki turtlenecks at that Federal prison camp as well? If she also has to do outdoor work, it might be the first time that we may see an Elizabeth Holmes with a deep suntan.
The place she is apparently going sounds more like a summer camp than a prison (no bars, no fences). Has she been allowed to keep all the money she took? That seems worse.
I’m starting to think people like her and Sam Bankrun Fraud and Anna Sorokin partly as victims of a ghastly system of incentives. For sure they are criminals but why do such cases get singled out for theatrical punishment with lots of media when much bigger white-collar crime is generally tolerated and ignored? I suspect it’s because these frauds operated mostly on an aesthetic level, presenting themselves in a way that is so seductive to investors that they skip due diligence. Eventually if the investors are shown to be victims of a confidence trick they can’t cover up they get so embarrassed that they needed revenge.
It’s not like I have sympathy for the individuals involved but there is hypocrisy and corruption at the heart of a plutocracy that plays these games and uses the state (i.e. us) to deliver the punishments they choose.
I suspect the punishment is correlated to the people they grifted. When you screw one of the overlord class (Kissinger and Murdoch), expect fairly severe punishment. Had they stolen from proles and the lower orders, they would have gotten off with a small fines.
That’s the rules based order in Oligarchia Amerikana.
Whatever someone’s transgressions, I think that prisons are essentially extra-legal places where unspeakable horrors are so common that we joke about not bending over to pick up the soap. As a society, if we want prisons to be a place where we brutalize, not just lock up, criminals, I think we ought to be honest as a society that this is the kind of punishment we’d like to inflict. Otherwise, we’re teaching evils to prisoners and guards that might find its way back out into society at large, or normalize it. And we shouldn’t normalize horrific violence anymore than it already is.
Unspeakable horrors by both the inmates and the guards with the worst of it in the South. This is why the prisons’ administration has mostly successfully blocked investigations into the system. This is why I believe that many murders in the jails and jails by the police and guards are successfully covered up as even when the cause of death is murder, hiding who did what is often successful.
About a decade ago we were at a bar the night before friends got married with a big get together and I met the bride’s brother for the first time and from the start he bitched and moaned about socialism and had every Fox talking point down pat, one of those types.
I asked what he did for a living, and he related he was a prison guard in Reno and his wife was a nurse there. He laughingly told me that ‘he kicks em’ and she fixes em’, not the least bit cognizant how socialized their jobs were.
If she goes to an elite Club Fed, shouldany of that be an issue?
I doubt it will be. I have to be a bit more exact when making attempted sarcasm about life in a minimum security prison, but in this case Holmes fleeced wealthy individuals and family offices out of their money so she has earned a healthy bit of scorn for that. Much like Bernie Madoff, I have little sympathy for the conditions Holmes will be facing.
Then there is the optics of the prison population exploding, and the for-profit corporations built on that larger population, after a certain Delaware politician was a key sponsor of the 1994 bill. Just paint me as highly cynical.
…or realistic.
Now that Ukrainian whinging is getting F16s, what’s next after those fail? Small yield nuclear weapons? And this news is coming from Hiroshima?
You think that Biden took his “nuclear football” to Hiroshima? Of all the cities in Japan, somebody thought that it would be great optics to have this meet up in Hiroshima. But here is a thought. Take a look at the image of those G-7 leaders in the story ‘G7 agree to ‘starve the Russian war machine’ and ask yourself. Would I trust any of them with my life savings?
Maybe they left it with VP Harris instead, just in consideration of the optics. You know, this administration has the performative theater down pat quite well. Watching the weekly news weekend edition, I am apprised that Kamala Harris was in attendance for an important hoops game among professionals. We are ruled by unserious people.
I am pleased that Griner is not rotting in foreign country’s prison. But yes I am taking a shot at our sitting Vice President.
https://www.cbssports.com/wnba/news/mercurys-brittney-griner-gets-visit-from-kamala-harris-ahead-of-first-wnba-regular-season-game-in-579-days/
I wonder what would happen if the Russians offered to exchange Paul Whelan & Evan Gershkovich for Julian Assange & Gonzalo Lira? Think that the Biden White House would go for it?
Think bigger. How about offering to take into custody Obama and Bush for war crimes in exchange for releasing Americans in Russian custody?
That would probably anger Julian Assange, it would be painting him exactly as Biden, Trump, and Obama gangs want him painted.
Went to my *gag* congressperson Dan Goldman’s newsletter and the one interesting thing was how it was either President Biden OR the Biden Harris administration.
Now that someone here pointed out that usage and how odd it was, Biden Harris administration stands out like a neon sign. I will have to keep watching, but my first impression is that “President Biden” or “President Biden’s” was used for things that are in place and could be sold as a public good. Biden Harris administration is agenda, plans, and more uncertain items, a working toward or fighting for type item.
Marketing in action, and distinctly unserious even at that.
“G7 agree to ‘starve the Russian war machine”.
Were they feeding it before? Just a thought.
Anyways, I didn’t see China and India at the table agreeing with any of that…
Probably yes, assuming the keys haven’t already been taken away from Biden. And the US has brought nukes to Japan before, Japanese elites have given them cover, and the US military had nuclear missiles installed in Okinawa for many years, so there’s precedent.
As for the optics — indeed they are bad, but who’s connecting the dots? —, this is probably just Team Biden trying to take a page out of the Team Obama playbook, as Saint O. made a “historic” visit to Hiroshima in 2016, and of course the Japanese were probably too busy bowing to call him out for his lies in the 2009 Prague Speech.
delightful bat pic and story – happy for everyone involved!
Thanks nyc!
Regarding the Pew Research poll: To me it’s further propaganda/narrative control! My wife in the Dominican Republic was forced to take the Moderna mRNA, her periods have never returned to normal! The mRNA “vaccines” are a failure on so many levels, they never went for eradication, like with polio, they went for greed and the clinical trials were fraudulent! We’ve been LIED to!
Bring back government vaccine companies, no more “for profit” greedy criminals! I learned a long time ago in the stock market, if you are willing to lie, cheat, steal and cook the books, you can be filthy rich! People do it and this is the result! Worldcom was one of the first wasn’t it? I worked for the branch compliance officer and a SVP broker at Lehman Brothers in 1987. Bernie Madoff was around then, now we’ve had Theranos and SBF, who’s scale is stunning There’s lots more, but if anybody knows, you do!
NC has been my “go to” regarding Covid from the beginning, I have learned SO much! Most doctors are too busy to keep up and they can’t jeopardize their licenses by swimming against the tide. I’ve been saving the most useful URLs as Word docs, by year. It’s quite a pile!
Thank you!
Drop the mic.
BOOM!
Might it be possible to write a comment with some of, or a lot of, those URLs in it to have them re-offered all in one place?
Toyota is not in a hurry to ruin their business model, and offers a realistic view of what going all in on the EV market really entails. Seems like a very rational approach to the business of selling cars, I wonder how this goes in Gavin’s futuristic California however.
While I currently own an older, reasonably functional Accord 2008 model, I’d put a gently used Camry on my next shopping list. Maybe not in a lime green hue, since that seems to be a thing (it looks horrid!).
Toyota can also go for nutty stuff. Their attempt to create a useful H2 ICE platform has been awful flop. The hybrid might fit better in a H2 derived low cost gas or wet fuel approach, like synthetic methane or methanol.
“Americans’ Views of Childhood Vaccines Remain Largely Positive”
I feel sorry for professionals like IM Doc having to deal with the aftermath of the vaccines fiasco. Back in 2020 somebody thought that it would be great optics if the vaccines were equated with ones like those for measles and polio instead of the flawed, experimental ones that they actually were. Now that you have had all these serious questions arising and the first lawsuits from people damaged by those vaccines, you not only have these vaccines being seriously questioned but all those vaccines that they associated with this as well. Said some time ago that trust is the glue that holds society together but the trust here was so severely abused that the blowback may be epidemics for decades to come of easily fought against diseases. Personally I believe that the people that made these decisions should be taken charged but we all know that they will or have been promoted, made book deals and will be seen on the speaker circuit.
It’s such a strange thing. My circle matches IM doc’s experience. It’s not so much the “MAGA” types that are anti-vaccine but the holistic liberals. I know a guy with a masters in Public Health who has two unvaccinated children. He and his wife believe that “gut health” will protect the kids from measles and mumps. I’m not denying that gut health and the right microflora within the human body system aren’t important, only that they’re probably not the essential protection against communicable diseases like measles and mumps.
If you’re over 50, and there isn’t a medical reason not to, the shingles vaccine is highly advisable. You don’t want to suffer from shingles. Extremely painful and nasty disease…
My local pharmacy noted that the shingles vaccine is free this year if you are on Medicare Part D. Previously it has been somewhat expensive.
Yup. 61 here and just got the first shingles jab yesterday
Not quite but soon. And yeah. My wife has an autoimmune disease and has dealt with multiple rounds of shingles. I’ll do what it takes to avoid that if at all possible.
I recall reading about PMC anti-vaxxers in CA long before the Pandemic, so some aspect of this isn’t new; I think the damage done to vaccines as a necessity to public health is incalculable, though.
Yup. I’ve been Vaccine cautious since my infant son had abnormal reactions at both his 6 month and 12 month vaccinations back in 2004. Before that, I just did what my doctor said. I stopped vaccinating and started doing research. I was kind of appalled at the one size fits all schedule. Why was I vaccinating an infant for Hep B when both his parents were negative for Hep B & were vaccinated against it? etc. We eventually started vaccinating again, but cautiously with each vaccine researched, and a protocol where we didn’t vaccinate when he was less than 100% healthy, waiting at the doctors office for 1 hour afterwards to make sure there wasn’t an immediate reaction, etc.
We said no to some vaccines and spread others way out time wise.
I’m a reluctant 2X Trump voter.
Before the Pandemic I would have thought public health was sacrosanct. But now I too would question such things. This I think is a pillar of social collapse.
Public health was sacrosanct because of the experiences enduring both epidemics and endemic diseases as well the vast efforts of previous generations to prevent them. There were reasons besides ideology for the large families that existed until midway of this effort as death from disease and environmental poison was routine.
When you add the efforts to fight pollutants like lead, smog, and raw sewage, poisoned food, medicine, equipment, clothes, paints, and dyes, it was an both immense, and immensely impressive, lasting about a century and a half. The support being universal albeit with some pushback from the more retrograde members of the monied classes.
But some of the reforms like immunization were questioned. Sticking some substance into the arm of a healthy person, trusting that it was a wise choice that would not harm, was often resisted. To be honest, considering the often poisonous medicines of the time including smallpox vaccines were dangerous. I was just that there was a greater chance of death from smallpox. A gamble. Then there were incidences like improperly made the polio vaccine that did harm or kill people.
I know the need for public health, but because of greed and incompetence the trust needed for some of it has been destroyed with some people overreacting and rejecting too much of it. We will get people accepting public health including the need for vaccines once children start routinely dying from disease; yet, another thing to damn our betters for.
>>>Yup. I’ve been Vaccine cautious since my infant son had abnormal reactions at both his 6 month and 12 month vaccinations back in 2004. Before that, I just did what my doctor said. I stopped vaccinating and started doing research. I was kind of appalled at the one size fits all schedule.
I have to say that while I am a strong supporter of vaccines, and have real problems with the anti-vaxxers, the pushback by the medical establishment that they are safe even with the current schedule and do not cause any problems while insulting the protesters is also a problem.
The anti-vaxxers sometimes deny the known benefits and refuse to look at the costs of not having vaccines, while the establishment refusing to even review and perhaps modify their suggested schedule of vaccinations despite the real possibility of safety issues is also a problem; denying the know past problems of vaccinations and insisting on “trust us” is not working in this time of extreme corruption especially the probable severe side effects of the Covid vaccines such as the mRNA ones arise.
It is okay to want safety, but there is no guarantee of such with any sort of medicine and the human body. There are only probabilities. But just how does one expect a parent to be comfortable with that and their child? I think it was only the regular pandemics with their routine deaths of children that go our ancestors comfortable with the risks.
Started with the whole aspergers/autism is caused by vaccines thing that came from some now disgraced UK doctor, and ramped to 11 thanks to Autism Speaks.
I didn’t know anybody that was autistic when I went to grade school in the 60’s and 70’s, i’m sure there was a few unbeknownst to me, but nothing such as the numbers now.
Must be a reason for it?
There’s a lot of environmental stuff since then, starting with PFAS.
Perhaps because back then autistic meant non-verbal.
As in they had not developed any language skills by the time they should start school.
Aspergers do not have that big flag about it. Instead the person sucks at reading non-verbal social cues. End result is that they were odd, but still “functioning”.
More recently Aspergers has been tacked onto the lower end of the autism spectrum, apparently in part because Hans Aspergers was a nazi back in the day.
And frankly i think it mostly flew under the radar as long as society had back office jobs etc, where one could get a living wage without disturbing too many.
And once the computer lab/room came about, that would be a similar refuge. Ironically the computer, and its ability to automate many of those same tasks, is perhaps why people started to take notice.
A lack of diagnosis in the 50s-60s could be one reason you did not see much in the autistic end of the spectrum: Aspergers was initially identified and recognized only in the 1940s, and with thanks to the efforts of one Dr. Hans Asperger… of course, with thanks also to the Nazi’s and their efforts to label and classify people: and just because they were Nazis doesn’t make them 100% incorrect about everything: people with what eventually became more widely known as Aspergers Syndrome in the ensuing decades were simply thought of before as “odd-birds” or the like.
My father is one of these, and as a result, I am intimately familiar with the disorder and of the consequences that a lack of recognition/diagnosis and therapy can bring for this.
Back when everyone I knew was taking the “we have ‘vaccines’ and they will end Covid” bull as gospel, I often found myself having to explain my anger at the Biden administration, Fauci, and the CDC. One of my first responses was always “I am not an anti-vaxxer, this is not a Vaccine”. And as it went on I even used the definition change to try to get a chip in the wall. One of my more hear everything out type friends finally crumbled, when I outlined all the reasons this was a disastrous approach and ended with “if even a quarter of what I have outlined here happens it will destroy trust in public health programs for a generation at least, and will probably increase distrust in actual vaccines exponentially. Think about it.”
This poll, which is probably a push poll, will hide things a little longer, but it is another false wall that will not hold. People’s “lying eyes” will win out.
As a child, I had whooping cough, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and polio. Before I could begin school, a small pox inoculation was required. My son had the DPT and polio vaccines. He had a bad case of chicken pox. Small pox was all but out of the picture when he came alone. No mumps and I do not recall his having measles. My grandchildren had none of those diseases because of vaccinations. That is the progression from the 1940s through the 1960s to the 1990s. The autism connection has been thoroughly disposed of except for those who persist in believing otherwise. I shall not besmirch their belief with snide comparisons. The Covid vaccines: I had a J&J shot followed by Moderna. I also tested positive later and had what felt like a 24-hour bug. Do I trust the Covid vaccines? The entire subject of Covid and the vaccines had been so politicized, polemicized, satirized, fictionalized, and financialized that it is all but impossible to tell what is real, what fear, what fantasy, what lies, what huckstering, what denial, or what a– covering that I gave up on trying to sort it out. I use a mask selectively. I continue to avoid crowded un-ventilated spaces and keep my fingers crossed.
Looks like my experience growing up in the 60s/early 70s was similar to your son’s, although I managed to catch mumps and measles in addition to chickenpox. Also had flu a few times and any number of colds.
Since I’m sometimes around grandnieces and grandnephews, my doctor suggested I get the new whooping cough vaccine. Apparently the disease still exists although I’ve never known anyone who got it.
What really pissed me off was that I caught chickenpox when I was 20. Having to miss a week’s work when I was living at or below “the edge” really taught me a lesson in micro-economics.
There was something hinky going on, imo, when pharma got the FDA to hide the C19 trial and test data for 75 years. A judge overturned that and the test/trial data is slowly coming out.
Another ruling–May 9 2023:
A federal judge in Texas ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make public data it relied on to license COVID-19 vaccines at an accelerated rate, requiring all documents to be made public by mid-2025 rather than, as the FDA wanted, over the course of about 23.5 years.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-orders-fda-to-speed-up-release-of-covid-19-vaccine-trial-data-from-23-5-years-to-just-2_5263217.html?src_src=partner&src_cmp=vigilantf
I hear reports that someone-or-other is planning to replace the classic flu vaccines we get nowadays with a ” one type stops all” mRNA para-vaccinoid for all flu strains at once. If this presages a broader move to try and suppress classical vaccines so as to replace them all with super-profitable mRNA para-vaccinoids for measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, etc. . . . . then the newly distrustful parents of small children will find themselves ahead of the curve in terms of “not trusting vaccines”.
Because if real vaccines are abolished and replaced with mRNA para-vaccinoids, then what will left to be trusted?
Which mRNA products made it all the way through the medical safety protocols without special assistance? Pre-Covid why were there no mRNA products approved by the FDA?
I work in a safety sensitive and very conservative industry and most of us avoided the mRNA products due to a past poor performance record.
So I had my annual checkup a little bit ago. I’m 73. My doctor is a Castle-Connolly Top Doctors gerontologist who works at Weill Cornell’s very well-regarded Center on Aging; she went to the waiting room to fetch me and spent an hour doing a comprehensive examination. She’s careful and conservative. Here’s our conversation about whether I should get a second Covid booster (I got two vaccinations and one booster, all on schedule, but nothing since):
MD: What about another booster? (It’s been over a year since the last one)
Me: I’m thinking about it. I know they’re supposed to be safe and effective, but I’ve read about a lot of significant side effects–and not on fringe websites, in serious research (she nods). I haven’t gotten it so far, so I’m thinking of continuing to build up my immune system and wait to see about the new variants….
MD: Sounds good.
So I don’t think the skepticism is limited to the laity. Or flyover country. Or even the PMC. At least as to Covid vaccines (she made sure I was up to date on tetanus, pneumococcus, and shingles–the old standbys that *work*).
Tik-Tok / Montana
“I have no idea, not a clue in my mind, what China would do with information gathered from people who live in Montana.”
All of a sudden, it dawns on me.
Is the REAL problem that the US intelligence agencies and corporations don’t think they have access to all information on Tik-Tok users? Thus they’ve called on their lap dogs (called government officials) to take care of the issue?
They fear any alternative to THEIR prying eyes…nor prying eyes.
That has been talked about for at least 5 years, that, in fact Tik Tok does not offer a backdoor to the FBI, CIA and all the other GOV Spy/Censorship groups. Of course they have to kick them out! The same thing happened to Huawei, no control over info flow, so bye-bye. We are headed for Full Spectrum Dominance, you know the term where the USA was gonna rule the world after the Soviet Union collapsed. But, unfortunately, it is now turned against US citizens!
And is it just me or did the focus increase on Tik Tok after this:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-rally-tiktok-crowds-tulsa/
Well the US needed some practice, what better than practice at home?
US hypocrisy knows no bounds.
I seem to recall that “recently” a false facade on one of its European embassies got caught by strong wings, revealing a bunch of antennas pointed at the various government buildings of the host nation (i want to say it was in Paris but searching for the story just brings up historical accounts of the soviet bugging of the US embassy in Moscow).
Never mind that we decry whenever China swoops in a scoop up a European company, but are quite mum about USA having done so for ages (like say when Nokia got a US CEO thanks to US investment funds on the board).
digi-owl: US hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Never has from the beginning.
‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’
— Samuel Johnson, 1775
I believe that the fight against TicTok is money driven. They are eating Google and Facebook’s ad revenue.
Bakhmut fell. Not that it should come as any surprise, but Prigozhin officially announced it just a bit ago.
Ukrainian channels still reporting that the plan is a counteroffensive to encircle Bakhmut. Frankly that seems like wishful thinking. It also seems tactically and strategically stupid at this point in the conflict.
Can you imagine right now the mood in Hiroshima? The Wagners went and spoiled their whole party and it will push their solemn pronouncements to the back pages. You can bet that they will be dirty about this happening to them while they were enjoying themselves. Prigozhin even said ‘Today, when you see [US President Joe] Biden, kiss him on the top of his head and tell him that I said ‘hi.’
Oh, I wouldn’t worry about our G7 “leaders.”
They’ll just retreat to the land of make-believe, where magical F-16s will surely turn the tide of war, by jingo!
The word “Bakhmut” has likely been banned as “hate speech” and since the press have all been captured and turned into stenographers, they won’t have to deal with any pesky reporters shouting inconvenient questions at them.
So don’t hold any breath waiting for acknowledgment of defeat.
Nice troll by Prigozhin, though!
according to kirby, and the plan is not released, the f-16’s are longer term capability for zelenski to deter(!) russian aggression…….
nbc somehow, no plan released, broached the sum of $11b for the f-16 deal, don’t know if that is loaded flyaway costs or some multi-year sustained flying ops deal.
hope the donation includes long concrete run ways with no pebbles or dirt along the dneipro, or far away fields and a dozen refueling aircraft to be shot down by s-300’s.
last thought: will the f-16’s be 40 year old dutch/belgium/etc to be replaced by f-35’s that do not fly or refurbished jets from the usaf bone yard?????
in any event lockheed needs to put together the base support packages, and get the pentagon to take spares parts, engines, etc from its already low combat ready f-16 fleet.
big bucks for lockheed and subcontractors!
Speaking of F-35s, Norway right now can’t maintain those jets themselves (in large part because trade schools have been underfunded for decades) and has to rely on contractors from Lockheed.
The whole thing reeks of pork barrel grafts for US MIC, who are likely to turn around and spend that on share buybacks favoring their congressional shareholders.
The F-16 is based on a platform that is almost 50-years old– closer in age to WWII fighters than Russian SU35s, SU57s, let alone the Chinese J20: it simply cannot compete head-to-head against these.
LOL. Prigozhin is the Russian platonic ideal of trolling. A master of the art. He and Lavrov should do sketch comedy.
Also the day of Mariupol’s liberation and the Avostal surrender. The west assumed Wagner missed May 9 but maybe today was always the goal?
> He and Lavrov should do sketch comedy.
… would totally pay to see this! LOL
Since there likely won’t be a “CNN special! The liberation of Artemosvk” with commentary by Wolf Blitzer, here is one of my favorite YouTube mappers on the fall:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ov4qLlw5ww
It seems that last night the final sector was essentially burned to the ground with incendiary bombs. How many died in part due to Zelensky and his desperation to have a media victory? Pulling out all the UAF and regrouping should have been done in March.
BTW Zaluzhny (the head of the UFA, I believe) is still MIA.
Dima says Prigozihn thinks he got blow up in a Wagner missile attack. They tracked him to near the front, and sent a missile. He hasn’t been seen since.
The war is not going well for the west in Ukraine. Does anybody really believe that sending F-16s are going to change anything?
Sanctions have also not worked. Does anybody think any further sanctions will do anything but strengthen Russia/China and further weaken EU/America?
But this all goes along with maybe finally admitting that pushing neoliberalism for the last forty years has wrecked America. That it was American elites themselves that off shored American technology, factories and jobs, and were instrumental in creating modern China. That those same elites destroyed R&D, were behind cutting support for universities and colleges across America. And when it finally went off the rails in 2007-2008, Obama (who was elected to rein it all in) gave the keys to the Fed to the very same elites, and they used the trillions they gave themselves to buy up everything average Americans needed: housing, healthcare, food production, transportation (railroads). They don’t create, they are strip mining our very country to the ground.
Sunak doesn’t want us judging the rich – well, I’m done judging. Our elites have used every cheap sleazy means possible to get ever richer, and they don’t care what they do to their country, their citizens, or the world. They must go.
Who knows? However someone is getting a profit and a bonus for those planes.
We’re past judging them — we’re moving on to executing them …
“That it was American elites themselves that off shored American technology, factories and jobs, and were instrumental in creating modern China.”
A critical point. American elites could have done things differently the last 30 years with China (and Russia). They could have had industrial and trade policies to keep more manufacturing on shore, to keep the USA more self-sufficient and resilient with better living standards. Instead they sold out for the benefit of the few.
This is no knock on China. The Chinese deserve respect for all they have accomplished and I’m happy for for them to have achieved better living standards for so many of their people.
The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have exposed how hollowed out American industrial/manufacturing capacity is and how that undercuts military capacity. I did not realize how bad things had gotten.
I truly fear for what may happen if there is not a change to a more restrained US foreign policy that seeks peaceful relations with all and only considers military confrontation as a last resort. I see no justication for a war with China over Taiwan. We gave our word on that years ago.
Certainly NOT a knock on China. To accomplish what they have done is an incredible effort. They have re-structured their country to make it possible. They have a rising middle class, they have great universities, they have amazing infrastructure. They are doing what they can to make their country great – and that is what countries are supposed to do for their people. But they also saw how stupid and greedy American elites were, and took advantage if it.
It was never a Chinese government official announcing to my fellow employees that the company was out sourcing, it was an American CEO.
As an engineer, I have spent almost my entire career on the factory floor. I could see clearly LONG AGO that off shoring manufacturing was going to be a death blow to American industry. To know how to do it, you have to MAKE IT. I know the old saying is fake it till you make it, but in my profession it should be if you’re not making it, you’re faking it.
It will take at least a generation for American manufacturing to recover, and that assumes that the Federal government makes it a priority. I don’t see that happening now, instead I see the government handing tens of billions to the very same American elites that wrecked American manufacturing. Further scamming and even more wealth for elites is assured. Rebuilding the industrial base? Not so sure about that.
Official American policy is that Taiwan is a part of China. Has that changed? It hasn’t – how in the world can America justify going to war over an Chinese internal matter?
very well said. i do not blame china, i blame the people who removed democratic control from the economy.
none of this would ever have happened, if it was not for bill clinton, his advisors inside and out side of government, and all of the congress people and their advisors that went along with this.
we need a truth commission, and one that is not tied up with the duopoly. other wise reversing those disastrous policies may never occur, and america melts down into some sort feudalism ripe with violence.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-bill-clinton-and-american-financiers
How Bill Clinton and American Financiers Armed China
Matt Stoller
Oct 1, 2019
———————
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/06/07/americas-big-china-mistake/
“The Clinton administration’s argument for bringing China into the WTO, widely supported by the economics and foreign policy establishment, was that doing so would liberalize China while dramatically reducing the U.S. trade deficit with Beijing. None of this took place.
China became more authoritarian. The deficit mushroomed from about $80 billion annually to $500 billion. Many U.S. companies moved their factories to China to take advantage of cheap labor, the absence of unions, and the lack of safety and environmental regulations.”
———————————–
https://listverse.com/2014/02/05/10-reasons-bill-clinton-was-secretly-a-terrible-president/
“The financial crash of 2008 was the result of so many complex, compounding factors that people still can’t agree on who, if anyone, was responsible. However, there’s one name that keeps cropping up again and again: Bill Clinton.
“The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was supposed to be the jewel in the Clinton crown. Created to allow free trade between the US, Canada, and Mexico, it was supposed to create jobs for America, boost the Mexican economy, and generally make the world a better place. Instead, it proved an unmitigated disaster for everyone involved.
NAFTA was meant to be a shrewd economic move by the US, but after two months, it had created a combined trade deficit of $132 billion with both Canada and Mexico. Prior to NAFTA coming in, the US had been running a trade surplus with Mexico. It also screwed over workers. In 2011, the Economic Policy Institute estimated the agreement had cost America nearly 700,000 jobs.
It wasn’t just the US that suffered. Before NAFTA, Mexico’s economy had been growing at around 3 percent every decade. After joining, growth fell to a measly 1.8 percent. Meanwhile, the follow-up Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) forced poor countries to eliminate tariffs, resulting in widespread poverty and even starvation. Clinton has since expressed regret over the policy, but that probably isn’t a great comfort to those unemployed and starving people the agreements affected.”
‘White House, Republican team say no progress in debt ceiling talks’
Yeah, I can imagine how that went-
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPnGqTYUxfOS10nJna0aXUbItY9Ehh4KFfwucsbGrX7CA3teqjvFuitMu0XVHoxQ_6VipQFxgSz7Rb5ISzm83Po4yPHl2sFlT3jKb68hblA6oZwsj6C6cHKEmJ6-zIq5EuJ8LBp-gLLzOxurQ6ghAcf_NepqHFTqLwCq-bJJOnb8d0sTVzZJdgWQimgQ/s631/rockyhatjan.JPG
Ooh-ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh
Take this hegemony off of me
I can’t use it anymore
It’s getting dark, too dark to see
I feel I’m knockin’ on Kevin’s door
Knock-knock-knockin’ on Kevin’s door
Knock-knock-knockin’ on Kevin’s door
Knock-knock-knockin’ on Kevin’s door
Knock-knock-knockin’ on Kevin’s door
Freedom Caucus is determined this round
To stop extending debt further more
That long bleak banquet of consequences is comin’ down
I feel I’m knockin’ on Kevin’s door
Knock-knock-knockin’ on Kevin’s door
Knock-knock-knockin’ on Kevin’s door
Knock-knock-knockin’ on Kevin’s door
Knock-knock-knockin’ on Kevin’s door
Ooh-owe-ooh
Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, by Bob Dylan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B327Xt2M3uo
Here is my somewhat informed conclusion on the discussion talks. Since neither party is on the high ground of responsible party; when we’re in power deficits matter less, but when out of power deficits definitely matter (so we can pass off this phony act to our voting base). Wait, what is it that our donors require?
Party A. You’re wrong. 2+2 = 8.
Party B. Nope, I’m right. 2*2 = 8.
Party A. Yeah we’re not getting around this ever, are we.
Party B. Only if you blink first.
I tried to add a comma.
…to the comment that just disappeared.
The blankness now on the page,
Is the sum of all our fears.
Burma Shave
Is that a haiku?
Sorry. I’m not really that good. I was trying for a Burma Shave parody. I had originally appended “Neo S—e” in an extra ‘post’ at the end, but it has disappeared.
Maybe something more in a Petrarchian Sonnet form.
With Kissinger in the news Doctorow has a newer post that I think makes a good point.
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/05/19/the-nation-new-positioning-with-a-lead-article-on-henry-kissinger-war-criminal/
I never read The Nation these days but from what I can tell at a distance they seem to be fully onboard with the left’s TDS obsession while turning a blind eye to the real problem. Doctorow:
IANAL, but there are those who say blowing up nordstream was a war crime.
The irony that putins war crime is moving children out of a war zone (depriving the gods their sacrifice?) is thick.
tegnost – According to reliable sources some parents were interviewed and those children were there with their parents blessings.
It was apparently an arts camp, i.e., music, painting, etc., for kids for a few weeks.
The PDS Force (Putin Derangement Syndrome) is strong with these people.
nordstream was a war crime
Nor am I a lawyer but the suggestion that blowing up Nordstream was an act of war against Germany’ (possibly NATO, Swtzerland, & the EU seems reasonable.
The key thing is that Germany never called for Article 5 because of that attack against their infrastructure. And thinking of that world’s record pollution release, Greenpeace never said boo either which is also strange. Perhaps that is one of the reason’s why Russia has just banned Greenpeace-
https://www.rt.com/russia/576592-russia-greenpeace-undesirable-organizatgion/
Greenpeace is a menace to Russia’s drive to dominate the newly-accessible Arctic Ocean. Of course they want Greenpeace wished to the cornfield. Also, they’ll be even more vicious than France to any interference by Greenpeace ships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
don’t forget who supercharged our for ever wars for free trade, this is the god father of war criminals.
https://listverse.com/2014/02/05/10-reasons-bill-clinton-was-secretly-a-terrible-president/
“Extraordinary rendition” is when shady government operatives stuff a bag over your head and fly you off to some foreign country where they can legally torture you. It sounds like something Alex Jones might dream up in a paranoid frenzy, but it’s a well-documented phenomenon under both Bush, Jr. and Obama—and Bill Clinton was the guy who started it all.
Clinton and Gore signed off on the first rendition back in the ’90s, despite being aware that it breached international law. Until recently, rendered people frequently wound up in the prison cells of places like Mubarak’s Egypt or Gaddafi’s Libya, where they were tortured with electric shocks, rape, beatings, and even crucifixion. It can sometimes go hideously wrong: In 2003, the CIA snatched a terrorist off the streets and beat, tortured, and sodomized him, only to discover they’d accidentally grabbed the wrong man. The victim just happened to share a name with a wanted criminal. His suffering came care of the Clinton/Gore dream team.
—————
https://theintercept.com/empire-politician/biden-iraq-liberation-act/
“In January 1998, the neoconservative Project for the New American Century sent a letter to President Bill Clinton calling on him to overthrow the Iraqi government and making that goal an official “aim of American foreign policy.”
“Joe Biden voted in favor of the act, which was signed into law by Clinton in October 1998. In touting his support for the law, Biden said, “So it seems to me that we have a big problem. Saddam is the problem. Saddam is in place. Saddam is not going anywhere unless we do something relatively drastic”
——————–
https://sputniknews.com/europe/201610311046907528-nato-russia-kosovo-yugoslavia/
NATO Bombings of Yugoslavia Aggression Against Sovereign State – Lavrov———————————–epeatedly insisted there was no such promise, that it had all been “myth” or “misunderstanding,” and moreover that NATO’s vast expansion had been necessary and has been a great success
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48586.htm
The US ‘Betrayed’ Russia, but It Is Not ‘News That’s Fit to Print’
New evidence that Washington broke its promise not to expand NATO “one inch eastward”—a fateful decision with ongoing ramifications—has not been reported by The New York Times or other agenda-setting media outlets.
By Stephen F. Cohen
—————————————we now know yugoslavia and milosivic were found innocent: Bill’s deeds have lessons for Americans. Had we learned them, maybe no U.S. forces would be fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere.
——————
https://www.ianwelsh.net/putin-looks-to-win-both-the-war-the-peace/
Meanwhile, China has been crystal clear that they are not going to cut Russia off. China’s foreign ministry statement:When the US drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategicweapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?… Did the US respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia when US-led NATO bombed Belgrade?Did the US respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq when it launched military strikes on Baghdad on unwarranted charges? Did the US respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Afghanistan when US drones wantonly killed innocent people in Kabul and other places? Did the US respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other countries when it instigated color revolutions and meddled in their internal affairs all around the world?It is hoped that the US takes these questions seriously and abandons double standards….
” Did the US respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other countries when it instigated color revolutions and meddled in their internal affairs all around the world?”
Has there ever in human history been a state apparatus that didn’t seek to foment domestic dissent and disturbance in the territorial domain of every serious rival state apparatus?
On the scale of the post-WWII US? I would say there has not been another “state apparatus” that has even come close. And most of these US efforts had little or no real “national security” justification.
Maybe the UK? I don’t say that to defend the US. Being in a dead heat or ahead of the world champion of genocide is no honor.
Thanks for the link to Ian Welsh, @spud. Very lucid statement of the geopolitical stakes of the Ukraine conflict.
there are a lot of people outraged at whats going on today, they throw out names that surely need to be taken care of, yet, they almost always for some strange reason i cannot fathom why, leave out the guy who plainly started this mess.
bill clintons illegal immoral war set the tone for america for the next 30 years.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/04/28/if-hashim-then-why-not-bill-and-joe/?mc_cid=d3b60ae0c3&mc_eid=868c0dc63a
“Former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi is currently on trial at The Hague for war crimes. Bill Clinton and Joe Biden supported him and enabled him to commit his crimes, while committing horrific ones of their own in Kosovo. So why aren’t they on trial too?”
Agreed. Indignation over war crimes allows elision of the US’ imperialist project, which grows war crimes like mushrooms in night soil. Leads to all kinds of confusion, as we’re witnessing when people try to analyze the causes of the Ukraine mess by going back to 2014, or waaaay back to 2008, or Bush II, pick your political flavor.
Spud is on fiyah!! (h/t Carolinian for planting the seed)
I’m happy to stay a lurker in the Best Commentariat Evah! A visit to the tip jar next- our humble hostess is overdue for some material love. This day just keeps getting better ;^}. Carry on all!
Henry Kissinger has very recently publicly expressed wrongthink on both China and Ukraine, changing his mind on Ukraine joining NATO and warning about escalating tensions with China.
The fact that Kissinger is a war criminal isn’t wrong or in anyway changed by these statements, but I agree that him being tossed under the bus would seem to obscure and distract from two-plus decades of blatant US criminality and contravention of international law: as far as I’m concerned, he should hang with the rest of the SOBs.
I disagree with the Doctorow statement that the slaughter in Ukraine serves no purpose: a lot of money is at stake, a point made clear in the discussion between Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson that was posted here a few days ago– two-trillion bucks is a heck of a lot of purpose!
But I would agree that once classically liberal publications like The Nation now serve as clarions to rally “Progressive Democrats,” the new footsoldiers of fascism.
I believe that the major turning point for the dems happened under the Clinton administration, with Serbia and Kosovo, and the descent to where we are now was made inevitable under Obama, who, as President, stated that we would “look forward and not back” with regards to the many crimes of the Bush administration, a majority of which we saw Obama continue to more-or-less quietly perpetuate. In 2008, the dems openly embraced and became one with the MIC and Security State, and publications like The Nation rapidly jettisoned any pretenses of objectivity for a deliberate editorialism and narrations that began to depart from more common but messy realities.
I used to read The Nation mostly for Cockburn’s column. He moved on and so did I. They did have other people like Greider and Gore Vidal would write for them sometimes. But even back then financial struggles seemed to be a theme and so Cockburn’s style of contrarianism was seemingly out. To paraphrase Sunset Boulevard, it’s the left that got small. Plus they probably figured they were still keeping the faith when compared to The New Republic.
A lot more than two-trillion bucks. If the plan had succeeded and the Russian Federation had been broken up, then it would have been a collective free for all for the west to the tune of tens if not hundreds of trillions of dollars.
and here is the group bill clinton started, to insure color revolution and the for ever wars.
really, he cannot be ignored.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47722.htm
Syria Emerging Victorious, The anti-imperialist camp: splintered in thought By Thierry Meyssan
“In all likelihood, the conflict that begins in Venezuela will not be held back by its borders. It will ooze out, embracing the entire North West of the South American continent and the Caribbean.
An additional step has been taken with military preparations against Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador following Mexico, Colombia and British Guyana. The team responsible for co-ordinating these measures is from the former Office of Global Democracy Strategy.
This was a unit established by President Bill Clinton, then continued by Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz. Mike Pompeo, the current director of the CIA, has confirmed that this unit exists. This has led to rumours in the press, followed up by President Trump, of a US military option.”
Re: Rishi Sunak: Britain has moved on from judging people for being rich
1. Wishful thinking
2. How the hell would he know?
KIng Charles told him.
My British contacts say No.
There will always be a place for upper-class twits, toffs and similar, as part of the larger universe of Rich, either in spirit, cash or kind. That is deeply ingrained in the culture and won’t go away with a pronouncement by Swishy Rishi or other newcomers.
You may as well try to take away tea.
Does Your Dog Truly Love You? Science Has the Answer Newsweek…..My Labrador Retreiver must have the Super Deluxe gene to befriend every human in sight, knowing it’s his key shelter food and companionship. After greeting fellow dogs, he makes a beeline to the human owner to deliver an enthusiastic greeting and if reciprocated will sit on their feet and bond with them. The breeder told me as a pup lift him in front face and talk to him while he’s small, say anything. She didn’t say why but it has resulted in him having no space issues – I can inspect his teeth gums paws with not a trace of resistance or concern, its totally normal to him. I’ve continued the tradition into his adulthood by saying “its time for some love” upon which he eagerly runs upon the bed and waits for me to sit next to him and talk to him. His eyes half shut in pleasure as he drinks in the acknowledgment.
The article mentions how most dogs have sharp judgement about people and don’t trust everyone. The Labrador Retriever is, I think, more given to trust than average and this is part of why they are good at jobs that require calmness in complex social situations, e.g. guiding the blind in public or working in hospitals.
I read in Steven R. Lindsay’s books that a certain minority of people are attractive to almost all dogs and another minority are distrusted by almost all dogs. I think what the dogs like and dislike needs a lot more study.
My pet theory (good pun eh?) is that dogs have an acute BS detector. Humans can use all sorts of human-only communication to deceive but most of that doesn’t work on dogs. And many of us BS ourselves quite a lot too. So I like to think it’s the no-BS people that are favorites with the dogs.
Always trust a dog’s gut when it comes to people. I’m one of those attractive to all dogs people, though I don’t credit it to my saintly personality. More that I grew up in a kennel, dog shows and kennel clubs. The dogs trained me and I assume dogs understand that.
Hah! Both my husband and my best friend are dog attractors while strange dogs mostly just ignore me. They both love dogs with total uncomplicated joy. I like dogs just fine, but I’m the person that cat owners are puzzled by because their anti-social cats just love me.
Whew! That article was a long read for zero payoff. The author, after maundering through paragraph after paragraph of irrelevancies, only at the very end attempts to answer the title question. In a few cursory sentences (enough filler, let’s wrap this thing up) the author informs any readers still with him that the answer is…wait for it…yes! Yes, your dog does truly love you!
This based on almost nothing written before. It comes off as an assertion without evidence. The subject of the article is a neuroscientist “pioneering” in the field of “Canine Cognition”. So far he has scanned the brains of a mere 100 dogs (wow, another hard-working researcher). Not too much on those scans though; he seems far more interested in relating anecdotes about dogs he’s owned or now owns.
Typical academic drivel. Little wonder the PMC gets its much-deserved reputation.
I will add this, just for fun. Is a dog humping your leg love or merely lust? Enquiring minds await an answer.
It is a manifestation of canine carnal love — deep affection — not lust
The dog might be having fun. Often it’s nothing sexual. Dogs engage socially using a wide range of attention-getting behaviors. A dog that really wants to provoke another dog, for play, or a chase or to start something, might use a hump. It’s often sufficiently annoying. Many very patient, permissive dogs will respond to humping. So it can be a learned behavior in the sense that the humper has learned that humping can get a rise where other maneuvers fail. Even a human that angrily shakes a humping dog off and scolds it has given the dog attention and maybe that’s what it needed.
Hmmm, i wonder. Friends in England used to have a doberman. Whenever I arrived wearing leather motorcycle pants that dog would hump my leg ferociously, tightly gripping it with his front legs. And a weird look on his dog face. Otherwise the dog didn’t have much time for me.
Magic pants i guess.
Either that or that dog had a leather fetish.
I actually started thinking that the article might have been written by AI. It has that florid and banal style that the tech elite think is “writing”.
ChatGPT has taught us that the internet is mostly filler.
“That article was a long read for zero payoff.”
The headline was click-bait but as a summary of what’s been going on in “canine cognition” I thought it wasn’t bad. I found the research by Vilmos Csányi and Ádám Miklósi more interesting than the finding by Gregory Berns that your dog does, in fact, love you. I’m really not that surprised that Flip could apparently discriminate between icy steps in the winter and non-icy steps in the summer when watching out for its owner—it does that for itself as well. (The location itself isn’t the discriminatory stimulus—the ice on the steps is.)
A few other thoughts: (1) trying to feed your dog his leporine friend in the form of a stew seems to me like the height of cruelty—no doubt Jumpy could smell the signature scent of his very recently departed pal; (2) training any number of dogs, much less 100, to sit still in a crazily noisy MRI machine seems like quite a feat to me; (3) with a dog’s nose being a million times (or whatever the enormous factor is) more sensitive than that of a human, we can’t really imagine what a dog’s experience is like and, for the most part, we’re unaware that we can’t imagine it. We’re trying to assess “canine cognition” but it’s more like how much human cognition can we map canine cognition to. It’s not easy—maybe it’s not even possible—for us to get an idea of what a dog “knows” because, compared to it, we’re smellblind. We don’t really know in an everyday sense—and maybe can’t know—what it knows.
‘New Not-So-Cold War’
You can tell that we are near the end game with this war. The US and other NATO nations are already looking for the exit doors. For Biden, he has to clear the deck of Project Ukraine as he has the elections to think about. The loss of Afghanistan was nothing as seriously, how many people had the flag of Afghanistan on their social media accounts? But the Ukraine is different as it was a total effort by the Collective West. He has to have a win and if this conflict was frozen, he could claim that as a win and point out Finland joining NATO. Maybe he will offer Russia limited – and temporary – sanction relief but only those sanctions that affect the west. Of course the Ukraine would be re-equipped, re-trained and re-financed for the next war in a coupla years time and US officials have already come out and said that this is the plan. And with a frozen conflict, the Neocons might get that regime change that they want in Moscow as the Russian people would not let this happening. It would amount to Minsk 3 but where the Russians know that it would all be a sham. So for the Russians, the only way to stop this all happening is with a decisive win. One that crushes the west’s plan for the Ukraine and puts the west on notice not to ever try that again. I regret to say that they will probably not try to save Europe destroying themselves and their economies to cripple any future threats from them. If there was wholesale change of governments in the EU there would be some contacts coming back but I do not think that Europe will ever again get that cheap energy that underpinned their economies.
“But the Ukraine is different as it was a total effort by the Collective West. He has to have a win and if this conflict was frozen, he could claim that as a win and point out Finland joining NATO.”
But is there a single person in this world (excepting, of course, those with advanced TDS) who might take such a claim seriously?
You can bet that the main stream media will give him total cover to say this and will never challenge him on it.
I finally got around to listening to the discussion at Geopolitical Economy Hour: “Shock Therapy in Ukraine, Economic Suicide in Europe”, linked a few days ago https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/05/ukraines-neoliberalism-on-steroids-europes-economic-suicide.html
The picture of ruin that emerged from this discussion of the impacts of the
Ukraine war leaves me wondering how Biden could possibly wrap the Ukrainian War disaster with pretty bows before the next Presidential election. All the perfumes of the wholly-owned u.s. press, even graced with a slathering of the happiest smiley faces will not hide the reek of the stinking mess this war has created. I suppose there may remain a few die-hard true-believers in the party of the ass who lost their sense of smell in the pandemic … but not enough to save the failed Biden-Harris Regime. Even a full scale Ukrainian victory in this war would not hide the rampant pillaging that u.s. Corporations are and will be inflicting on Ukrainian assets, and the issues around reparations will drive a permanent wedge between the u.s. and the rising Asian power structures. What remains of Europe will become a crumbling shadow of its past glory and decadence. Of course the Ukrainian war is only one of the many abject failures the Biden-Harris Regime has engineered.
The Biden-Harris Regime has tremendously accelerated the collapse of the u.s. Empire, far beyond even my most pessimistic expectations.
If America “has” an empire, then collapse of the empire is a good thing, especially if it lets us tear down all the empire-ists here at home and dance on their faces with golf shoes on.
If America ” is” an empire, then collapse of empire means collapse of America with all the unpredictability and instability and grinding around of the ice floes that would come after that.
The scary part coming is the collapse of the USSR was for the most part peaceful enough outside of Moscow, but under Bizarro World rules we have to do everything completely opposite and maybe DC is the peaceful place in being the Green$Zone and the rest of the USA is going through a bitter divorce & armed to the teeth.
Can’t say we don’t deserve this fate, we turned into an ogre that thought nothing of wrecking other countries vis a vis violence, comes around goes around.
I do not understand your distinction between the u.s. being an Empire and the u.s. possessing an Empire. Whether the u.s. Empire is a good thing or not, when it collapses those of us living in the u.s. will be in a world of hurt. For that selfish reason I had hoped the u.s. Empire might have held together until nearer the time the World Civilization built on fossil fuels and easily exploited resources begins to crumble — an Imperial longevity which seems increasingly unlikely. The Collapse of Civilization will be an even more painful experience, but at least it appears to be coming a little further in the future. Additionally, the attendant Climate Chaos proceeding as the Climate shifts into the depths of the Anthropocene instabilities offers further unhappy events. I retain some hope things may hold together until mid-century or a little later after I will be gone and can avoid the experience. Everything is happening too fast!
If you want to know whether America possesses the moral taint of “being an empire” v.s. just “having an empire”, go to the grocery store and buy some bananas. Notice how cheap they are. Notice that they were grown somewhere without a stars&stripes flag.
There’s your answer.
I doubt Russia will accept the war ending until Germany and France quit NATO and US is expelled from European continent. To that end, Russians will advance very very slowly, to tighten the screws on the Europeans. The West can keep spinning that as their “victory” all they like, but, in the end, it’s their alliance that gets wrecked.
That outcome would set America free too. At least the remnants of the America which objected to the Anglo-Wilsonian conspiracy to get America into World War One.
Gonna take more than a couple of years time. It’s gonna take more than a couple of years just to replenish U.S. stockpiles, much less NATO’s, and it’s hard to tell just how much faster Russia can replenish theirs. I don’t think Ukraine has enough men of combat-capable age to rebuild their army in less than ten years, and it would take about ten years to build an officer and NCO corps. Really, the announcements that the U.S. production of 155mm shells will reach something like 70,000 a month by 2025 is discouraging. Russia fires that many in three days, and they don’t seem to be running short. And then there’s the plan in the background to attack China by 2025.
Two days ago Deaths of Despair Now Significant Among the Young was posted here at NC, and elicited many theories in comments as to the reasons or causes for this, many of which would seem have a great degree of validity, when put together feel almost overwhelming.
It follows that lives lived in desperation would lead to deaths of despair.
I have another possible ingredient to add to the witches-brew and unsaviory mix, via a transcript/podcast that appeared in the Gray Lady yesterday: the effect of social media on preteens, teens, and young adults.
I call it a “possible ingredient” because I am undecided whether social media is a base ingredient or the delivery mechanism. Perhaps it can be both, but whatever it is, it is without a doubt a factor.
Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Jean Twenge
Jean Twenge is a research psychologist who has been deep in this data for years. She was one of the earliest to see something going wrong with teen mental health. And then in her 2017 book, “iGen” and her new book “Generations,” she’s put together reams of charts and graphs and theories and tests to try to understand what it is, what has happened here. And the leading candidate, in her view, is smartphones and social media.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-jean-twenge.html
I believe social media offers little more than a convenient scapegoat for explaining the deep malaise afflicting u.s. youth … and, I believe, also afflicting much of u.s. Humankind. Just driving on a highway and noting the way people behave toward each other in traffic conveys to me a sense of some terrible wrongness that social media cannot explain. The u.s. is become a most unhappy country.
An example: man at four times the legal alcohol limit driving erratically while firing a gun at nearby cars at 5 PM during Friday rush hour on I-90 through an affluent area of the suburbs. Only thing missing was driving the wrong way down the interstate.
I agree with you. Social media may be a factor in the misery, but it goes beyond that.
The battle has been joined: Big Tech versus mental health. Big Tech would have us sit at home all day in front of our computers or on our phones ordering stuff, watching videos, visiting websites, banking, reading the news, etc. Mental health, on the other hand, demands that we go outside, listen to the birds and look at the flowers, walk to the bank or the store or local pub, and actually interact with a real person.
Big Tech does not care about mental health. The model is in place. It reaps the profits as consumers pay the costs. One of those costs is deaths of despair through social isolation. This is not accounted for on Big Tech’s balance sheet. It is a mere externality, a cost passed on to others.
Oh, but they do care: https://www.ginger.com/
The awfulness of the site cannot be described in words.
This is a catch 22 of a horrible variety. It is difficult to get appointments with therapists. Demand for therapists has soared since 2020. Workplaces always had EAP benefits and now the employees really do need them. So how do you provide people with options and access so they can figure out how to get the care they need? Because most of the EAP programs I’m familiar with are actually quite generous. Like, the first 6-12 therapy sessions are covered for free with no co-pay. You can give people a lot of help working out problems over 6 to 12 sessions. But you can’t give them any help if you can’t get them to connect with a therapist. And therapists are also suffering from the same things we all are right now, and dearly appreciate working from home. So… the internet and apps. It seems like a fantastic idea to provide access that will result in actual care.
In practice, YMMV. Also, depending on what you need help for, I can imagine getting those sessions over a digital medium presents its own kind of risk. What if the therapist records the session? What if the phone or computer you use to participate in the session is hacked and the session recording is used for blackmail? What if the laws in your state for telemedicine don’t allow a therapist to recommend things that you need to have? What if you really do need a face to face session and can’t get one? I’m cautiously optimistic about all this because I think it could help a lot of people. I also think it’s ripe for abuse and that when we see the first large language model a benefits Corp can produce that’s a convincing facsimile of a therapist the option to see a real person will become prohibitively expensive.
” What if the phone or computer you use to participate in the session is hacked…”
I would assume that all electronic and most physical media that travels through the mails is monitored. Until someone comes up with a reliably effective crypto system, distrust all phone and internet communications.
Samizdat for the win!
Frederick Pohl had an internet ‘psychologist’ algorithm, named, appropriately enough, Sigfrid von Shrink, as a character in his very readable book “Gateway.”
I participated in a privacy conference where the owner and a VP made a presentation and while the privacy issues were abysmal, what was the truly horrendous thing was the peddling of medication…
I think perhaps the term we are looking for is amplifier.
The social life of teens have always been messy. But social media amplifies that mess massively as now there is no safe ground, no retreat to safety.
It was bad enough for me growing up as a village oddball without smartphones and social media recording my every faux pas to be replayed at will by my “betters”. But at least i could disconnect from it all by retreating to my room and hanging out with the few that i knew from experience didn’t judge.
Re dog article–a big slice of dog propaganda which I totally agree with. But not much of it is new. It even evokes this well known tale with which Carolinians have a personal connection
I had the privilege of meeting Doctor Pilley and Chaser. Both are now gone but the city put a statue of Chaser in our downtown square. Beats Confederate monuments.
However I do think it’s possible to oversell dog intelligence since so much of their behavior seems to be instinctive. If you watch them their actions, even across breeds, can be identical. But perhaps that’s true of humans as well. As to “do they love us?”–of course they do. Silly to doubt it.
“Ukraine war: US to support providing F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine’
They reckon that they can train a Ukrainian pilot to fly an F-16 in only four months instead of what should be about two years. This could be true – by skipping the whole training section that deals with landing these planes. If you send up a pilot with only four month’s training in an F-16 against a hot-shot Russian pilot in a Mig-31, then certainly he will not have to worry about how to land that plane.
I doubt it matters. Ship all the F-16s, A-10s, F-18s, F-22s, V-22s, early Patriot batteries, tanks, desert BDUs, HMMWVs, whatever, to be blown up in Ukraine. When all the old armament is gone, that’s when the “war” ends. The real money is in the resupply/replacement.
Veteran Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter pilot VK Thakur said in a tweet that the two 12 F-16 squadrons would have to operate together with US E-3 AWACS aircraft to make a difference, and that would make the US AWACS active participants in the conflict.
“Without AWACS cover, Ukrainian F-16s will be cannon fodder for RuAF Su-30SM & Su-35 flying underground radar cover on 24×7 air dominance patrol over the frontline. The F-16s will be just another straw for Ukraine to clutch on in its terminal spiral down,” Thakur said.
Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council and Former President Dmitry Medvedev warned last year that NATO personnel actively participating in the conflict will become “a legitimate target” for the Russian armed forces.
As EurAsian Times discussed earlier, an AWACS platform could be taken out using the Russian fighter-launched RVV-BD air-to-air (A2A) missile or the S-400 system-launched 40N6E missile.
For example, in October last year, a NATO AWACS platform in Poland and Romania operating in 24/7 mode allegedly failed to detect the Russian Su-57 fifth-generation aircraft, which resulted in a Ukrainian Su-27 fighter being shot down by an R-37M missile fired from a Su-57, marking the first air-to-air kill by a Felon.
The downing of a NATO AWACS by the Russian armed forces could potentially mark the start of World War 3!
https://eurasiantimes.com/f-16s-cannon-fodder-for-russian-su-30-su-35-fighters/
And then this from the same author:
Likely Impact of Integration
In simple English, Ryder said the US would provide Ukraine the equipment to use the situational awareness provided by US and NATO AWACS (Airborne Warning & Control System) on patrol 24×7.
The AWACS patrol outside Ukrainian airspace and hence cannot be attacked by Russia under US rules-based order.
Using the equipment supplied by the US, Ukrainian AD forces will be able to cue their Soviet-era medium-range missile systems, such as the S-300 and Buk, using real-time AWACS targeting data.
As a result, the Ukrainian systems can launch their missiles without switching on their search radars.
https://eurasiantimes.com/ukrainian-air-war-latest-us-military-package-could-end-the/
Didn’t Norway recently retire its entire fleet of up to date F-16s?
I suggest you use a search engine. AWACS = radars on Boeing 707s. Their range is 250 miles. They can’t see into the theater of battle (eastern Ukraine) w/o entering Ukraine airspace, which Russia won’t allow and they know so they say they won’t try. This is yet another empty gesture.
f-16 are sustainment deficient, have not met budgeted combat readiness in past 11 years per gao.
old frames from nato partners are problematic.
the gift will require large support tail, from either usaf or nato…
and engines!
I think a large portion of those Norwegian F-16s are in Romania now.
I doubt the Russians would bother to send up a plane. A couple of missiles, no more F-16.
Oh, but they certainly would want to try out their long range R-77, R-33 and R-37 missiles against a US fighter. Both to gain knowledge and marketing material.
If I’m not mistaken, even Ukrainians are admitting R-37 kills from distance of 180 km, which is way beyond even the detection range of the radar of any European F-16. Even if the enemy is not doing any radar jamming.
To be fair, based on past conversations with fed contractors, the people suggesting the F-16s didn’t think they’d really be needed anymore. They really all expected us to use rapidly deployed drones piloted by expert video gamers from bases in the US. The idea that real equipment, with real capabilities, that you can’t easily train for or replace, would become essential didn’t cross their minds. And this started around, oh, 2012? The revenge of the material world against the spreadsheet class has been mentioned on NC for years. This is another example of that IMO.
Wow Dreizin’s virtually unreadable screed is so ignorant and condescending it sounds like Rachel Maddow wrote it. One rarely sees this much energy and stupidity put into debunking something false. He blathers on about bismuth with a series of simply false claims that are highly dumb, but may confuse the ignorant in a Gish gallop.
Read the words of the clueless, lying with ‘facts’:
Combine
1) false science
2) guilt-by association (Russian speakers posted it out on Telegram!)
3) unintentional irony
4) the science hair clip art
we have a standard disinfo-warrior disinfo projection op exposed!
He even conceded that tons of DU were probably blown up, but claims that it is all OK, because Bismuth!
Actual expert Chris Busby has a different opinion:
Jacob Dreizin was good for some very unusual predictions / takes which mostly came true. Sadly he not only was in the anti-vaccine camp, but also anti-mask or any prophylactic measure. He believes getting C-19 is the best way to build immunity to C-19, and bragged about how many times he’s gotten it. Now I’m going to commit his sin and make a stab / un-researched guess that the umptieth times he caught C-19 has made some serious changes to his brain and mind, and not in a positive way.
I rarely read his material as it was just too much work to harvest the occasional gem. I suspect he probably can do better when being interviewed by a skillful interlocuter, but I just don’t have the time these days to find out.
correction:
…Accordingly I rarely read his more recent material …
Loridie, this is off base. For starters, Drezin is pro Russian but even pro Russians recognize Telegram is often a cesspit of rumor amplification.
Your contention on gamma is false. Gamma rays only travel at most dozens of feet, some experiments find only 80 cm.
DU ALSO emits only very small amounts of gamma according to every expert source. With dispersion there’s nothing to detect.
The alleged gamma spike was within normal background ranged and occurred the day BEFORE the ammo dump explosion.
And with this the real risk is glossed over. The risk is alpha radiation, which can’t be measured at any distance but harms people by ingestion or inhalation of DU particles.
This is indeed Russian propaganda. They are trying to create a DU scare with no evidence. There may well have been a lot of DU in that ammo dump but there”s no way to detect it with open air measurement approaches. You might be able to find it in blast residue.
The energy from the explosives and fire can and probably did cause a spike in radiation emissions, but how much? Doing the calculations even with good data would be brutal. I’m way over simplying for laymen, but in the nuclear power industry this is part of a number of processes we lump together in the term latent heat decay. It’s virtuous when achieving stable chain reaction on start up (smooths power curve), but it is deleterious for achieving a stable shutdown for refueling a reactor (costs time/money).
Say for for a beam of 22 MeV gamma rays passing through dry air at sea level, half will be absorbed in about 350 meters. Therefore from a distance of 1 km the number of rays will have declined by a cube root. The issue of detection is complicated by natural burst that occur all the time on earth, and the ratio of various energy level rays will change with distance, humidity, air pollution, etc. as well.
Calculation details: NIST gives the mass attenuation coefficient μ/ρ for 20 MeV photons as 1.705×10−2 cm2/g (it’s a little bit lower at higher energies). The density of air at sea level, ρ, is about 1.225 kg/m3 . Therefore, for 20 MeV photons, half will be absorbed in a distance
ln2/(1.705 cm2/g)(1.225 kg/m3)≈330 meters and the distance is 350 meters at 22 MeV.
We’re constantly under bombardment by gamma radiation, but life evolved to tolerate nominal background levels, some forms of life far better than others. I’m personally not too worried about this as a radiation source, it’s easy to detect and can be done so from a safe distance. It’s the gasified toxic metal stew (not just uranium) that is sintered with organic molecules that should scare anyone who plans to eat Brazilian pork raised on cheap Ukrainian corn sold by an American conglomerate on your breakfast sausage biscuit. It won’t show up on remote radiographic testing, is unlikely to be searched for in inspecting sanitary compliance, but will do a number on the long term viability of liver. Having looked this over, I think the last paragraph kind of sums up the existing capitalist driven food chain, I don’t see any hope of that being fixed.
Sorry Yves, You are not correct. The real danger from DU is the toxic chemical pollution from its combustion products, primarily uranyl nitrate. You haven’t provided any counter to the arguments from Chris Busby. Dreizin’s loyalty or that if various channels are irrelevant. The physics of uranium decay are well known, your assertions are unsupported.
The question wrt uranyl nitrate is its state post oxidizable substances and shock exposure, same for lots of other nasties. There was a lot of energy in those explosions, all at once imo. I can not think of any cases where such a mix of stuff went poof all at once.
So for me, I think, its all subjective until a physical examination is done.
The only other question in my mind is who thought it was a good idea to put – so much stuff – all in one spot and so near to such a sizable population. The cost of a couple of Kinzals vs cost of all the potential on the battlefield of everything that got destroyed, its Mfg/logistical costs, and its long lead times for new replacement. Not to mention all the plans that were based on having it, like having a x-mas tree go up in flames on x-mas eve with all the presents under it.
I repeat myself and note that Russia is just going to grind this out, likes Lambert says – its a two’fer – so on one hand they can destroy equipment and the personnel that operates it, especially the high tech stuff, harder to replace both man and machine, and on the other hand it slowly makes the Western propaganda the sick man as reality refutes it for all too see. It will be interesting to see how the rusted on travel as this all unfolds, more so as the political scene is going through a tumultuous time.
Wellie back to sanding and re-coating pine floors … big black dog hair makes it a wee bit of a challenge lol …
This is changing the grounds of argument, which is bad faith argumentation. The topic of discussion was radiation and whether it could be detected. You’ve now brought up an entirely different claim, which may or not be true, with no links to substantiate it. It may be true but it’s not on point with the current argument and you are dragging it in only to try to attack me.
Similarly, YOU were the one who tried ad homming Dreizen for questioning Telegram sources. Now you try smearing my response? You can go to hell. I’m not tolerating a personal attack on a line of argument YOU initiated. So this is a second instance of bad faith argumentation.
All sorts of independent sources say gamma can be detected at most at between dozens and hundreds of feet. Busby’s 250Km claim is facially full of shit.
And I already responded to Busby’s arguments. The gamma “spike” measured more locally occurred A DAY before the explosion and was with normal variations in background gamma.
I suggest you read here to get basic facts on gamma emissions: https://www.iaea.org/topics/spent-fuel-management/depleted-uranium
Busby is basically a crank, a chemist with a theory about radiation damage whose implications don’t hold up and have been rejected multiple time by expert panels….one in which he participated. He is most assuredly NOT an expert on radiation detection at distances, and his claims are contradicted by long-established bona fide experts.
Agree that Telegram is even way below Wikipedia in trust. Agree that Busby is a whack job, and someone is pushing him for their own agenda. I just want to posit please don’t trust the IAEA, I learned this before/after Fukushima which I visited as an external consultant as part of China’s WANO peer review team for a month visit about half a year before the accident. The recent events with Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant confirm this to most observers. They are nearly fully in the USA/NATO orbit, which means they tow a heavy load on DU propaganda. I wish I had a better laymen source to offer you right now, and will look for one later when I’m free.
> Desperate Families and Gun-Toting Vigilantes Converge in Arizona After Title 42 Ends
“…the first 24 hours in post-Title 42 America offered a grim suggestion of the days to come. Heeding the call of the state’s right-wing political leaders, armed vigilantes stalked and harassed humanitarian aid providers during the day and by nightfall rounded up migrant children in the dark.
…
Ahead of and after the end of Title 42 in Arizona, claims that the state is under invasion have only intensified…Rep. Paul Gosar, the ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorist representing Arizona’s 9th congressional district, has taken it a step further, telling his constituents that “America is under a planned and sustained invasion — we must act accordingly…[T]he Cochise County Republican Committee has taken it further still, with chair Brandon Martin calling on residents to “build an army” and “repel the invasion.””
Some Republicans also want to go to war with Mexico to solve the drug problem.
https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/4/21/23686510/mexico-invade-bomb-trump-republicans-cartels
Follow-up to a story discussed here earlier this week of veterans kicked out of shelters to accommodate migrants:
https://nypost.com/2023/05/18/advocate-lied-about-vets-getting-kicked-out-of-ny-hotels-for-migrants-pol/
https://midhudsonnews.com/2023/05/19/homeless-men-recruited-for-veteran-hotel-scam/
re: “I have no idea, not a clue in my mind, what China would do with information gathered from people who live in Montana.”
TikTok would be a good way for China to get a sense that young Americans don’t share the deeply rooted anti-Chinese bigotry of the older generations.
I imagine the elderly lawmakers think this would be super dangerous for the Chinese to know, also think the internet is kinda like plumbing and you just twist a knob and turn off this and that flow of information.
All they’re doing is underlining for our youth why their racist elders need to be removed.
I suspect most youth have not a care about who owns TikTok, and would not be surprised to see anti-Chinese TicTok posts.
Was is Newton that was vaguely reminiscent of a young Robert DeNiro, or was it the small black mole on his cheek?
> People Close to Dianne Feinstein Are Joking That She’ll Resign When She’s Dead New Republic
There’s nothing in the Constitution saying that congresscritters have to be living, right? Think of all the valuable experience we’re leaving on the table by restricting membership to the living and letting whippersnappers in their 80s and 90s lead the way. Not to mention the diversity — 100% of current and former congresscritters were alive when they served, and yet most people who have ever lived are dead.
https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-135/the-supreme-court-and-the-pro-business-paradox/
Enron should have run for office.
Brunner said that “capitalism is irresponsibility organized into a system.” The building block of modern capitalism is the corporation whose essence is a shield for the rich to avoid responsibility for the entities that made them rich. Rule by law is rule by a system designed by the rich to protect themselves from those they trample.
#MastersOfMediocrity
Coda:
“This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.”
Ouch indeed … in the way that the truth truly hurts.
One could also extend thus for the PMC: “feel virtuous without doing anything of virtue”.
H/T Naomi Wu (via Twitter)
CorrectlyLivingWith™ (@CaliforniaCodes)
A ray of hope amidst the misanthropy of the minimizers.
Hour long PBS show on Hunga Tonga which blew up real good last year, and responsible somewhat for the goofy weather & failed harvests worldwide.
https://www.pbs.org/video/hidden-volcano-abyss-qbyb5l/
Assuming the accuracy of the BBC article (in above links section) on the shift of U.S. policy regarding Ukraine to get F-16s provides another illustration of Yves’ comment on “fact checking” in today’s main article from KFF Health News-Politifact; it constitutes attacks on individuals, such as Senator Sanders, but not on larger institutional entities..
A stated reluctance by U.S. officials to authorize F-16s for Ukraine, has been the long time it takes to become proficient at flying the plane. The BBC reports that based on 11-1/2 hours of simulation training at an Arizona National Guard facility of two Ukrainian pilots, the recommended training time, with a number of caveats, has been reduced from 18-24 months to four. It’s likely “fact checkers” on the history and changes related to F-16 deployment matters and training will be MIA – missing in action.
Now look here Joe, quit acting like its war sport
Stop being that old brazen sort
Don’t you go sellin’ this country’s ammo short
No, no Joe
Just because you think you’ve found
The Ukraine procurement system that we know ain’t sound
Don’t you go throwin’ your F-16’s around
No, no Joe
‘Cause Hiroshima tried it and Nagasaki tried it too
Now the nukes are sittin’ around waiting to fire and did you know something?
They’re wondering what you’ll do
Now Joe we get it clear
You can push folks around with fear
‘Cause we scare easy over here
No, no Joe
What makes you do the things you do?
You gettin’ folks mad at you
Don’t bite off more ‘n you & Hunter can chew
No, no Joe
‘Cause you want a scrap that you can’t win
You don’t know what you’re gettin’ in
Don’t go around leadin’ with your chin
No, no Joe
Now you’re giving tanks, some fair size tanks
But you’re acting like a clown
‘Cause man Putin’s got tanks, a mess of tanks
And you might get caught with your tanks breaking down
Don’t go throwin’ out your chest
You’ll pop the buttons off your vest
You’re playing with a hornets’ nest
No, no Joe
You know, we think you’re somebody we should dread
Just because you’re seein’ the MIC well-fed
You better get that foolishness out of your head
No, no Joe
And you might be itchin’ for a fight
Quit braggin’ about how your vaunted military can bite
‘Cause you’re sitting on a keg of nuclear dynamite
No, no Joe
No, No Joe, by Hank Williams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_m3GVys3s4
I’m going to flaunt blog rules and not read the article. That said I am going to state for the record that it is a bad idea to have Biden “broker” anything. And that includes the for show bits they let him do now. G7, debt limit, Saudi/Israel, what the White House serves for breakfast…does anyone really believe that he is capable of doing any of it AND that he gets to be the final say?
Don’t get me wrong, we can still blame him. Even if he didn’t hand pick his ship of sadistic fools this time, with few exceptions they had been his advisors, owners, minions etc for years. That is what put them in charge now.
So I am going to clean up that headline a little, it is a bad idea for the current or any American foreign policy team to broker Saudi Israeli normalization.
Regarding the unembedable tweet about offering EU citizenship for service in Ukraine, I found the add in question here.
I don’t know much about the job market for mercenaries, but I would not trust such promises when the contact information is:
eu.citizenship.programme@gmail.com
I would expect any serious actors to at least be able to afford their own domain. I would expect scammers to use a free Gmail adress to make themselves harder to track.
Mercenaries beware, I guess.
Unusual for Japan to play these silly games springing Zelensky on non-G7 countries. Japan and Kishida come across as bullies.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-20/zelenskiy-s-surprise-g-7-stop-unnerves-critical-brazilian-leader
I think this just brought g-7 meetings to a new low. Brazil will now just meet with Russia & China in their home countries.
Zelensky came straight from that Arab meet up where he made a total a*** of himself and insulted the leaders there. I guess that they did not rush forward to give him a few billion for his “war fund” and so he went on a rant before he left. Nearly every leader in the Global majority dislike the guy after meeting him and he certainly insulted the Pope a few days who admittedly deserved it for not calling Zelensky out of destroying churches. The guy is a grub.
It seems to me that for whatever reason Japan has been more active in the international arena since Kishida took charge. South Korea too is aiming to become a global “pivotal” state whatever that means by wooing ASEAN countries, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3220960/us-china-rivalry-mounts-south-korea-wants-be-global-pivotal-state-its-not-easy-it-sounds?module=opinion&pgtype=homepage.
Both Japan and South Korea have very grand dreams of becoming international players. Perhaps if they team up together, they can be a force, but they simply lack the scale of China.
Apologies if I missed this appearing previously:
James Bamford
The Nord Stream Explosions: New Revelations About Motive, Means, and Opportunity
at least most of the comments to that execrable essay get it right…
I came to it via this week’s Jeffrey St. Clair Roaming Charges, which increasingly unappealing. Yes, Bamford’s piece is pretty much pure speculation.
And though he does mention Hersch, it is in a left handed way.
About the shifting correlation of forces in Myanmar . . . ” As the tide of war shifts slowly against a militarily beleaguered and politically bankrupt regime, the NUG and its MOD still have time to build a framework for strategic cooperation that ethnic forces can accept and support.” . . .
Speaking as a minimally informed MidWesterner way out here in Great Lakestan, my intuitive feeling is that the only framework that NUG and its MOD could build for deep acceptance by the ethnic forces would be a stated commitment to an ethno-Federal Myanmar with very broad and strong powers for all the Ethnic Regions, including Bamarstan ( the “Bamar Heartland”) which would have to reconcile itself to being just another ethnic region and no longer the declarator of what is Myanmarese culture and patriotism nor the leading ethnic ruler of a unitary state. Aung San Su Chi revealed herself to be a traditional Bamar racist in her support of the expellocide against the Rohingyas and if she is permitted even the slightest presence whatsoever in a “post-war” Myanmar, then Myanmar will have zero hope of any peaceful and equal future for all its constituent nations and peoples.
In my purely amateur opinion.
Meanwhile, the NUG and its MOD will have to watch and plan for ChinaGov and RussiaGov responses to its pulling equal to the Tatmadaw and threatening to pull ahead of them. The ChinaGov will watch, wait and see which side appears likelier to achieve final victory if China were to be zero-involved, and then China will back what it thinks is the winning side anyway, to make it win even faster and harder and restore profitable conditions for Chinese business. Whereas the RussiaGov will remain emotionally committed to the Tatmadaw Regime and will give it all possible support short of materially depriving its forces on the Ukraine Front. The RussiaGov is psychologically committed to helping the Tatmadaw and its TonTon Macoutes exterminate all resistance in Myanmar because the RussiaGov firmly believes the NUG uprising to be some kind of “color revolution” in need of extermination to prevent any other “color revolutions” from starting anywhere else.
In other words, for China; this ain’t personal, its business. Whereas , for Russia; its personal.
Again, in my purely amateur opinion. And my purely amateur intuition-based prediction is that the war will go on until one side has attrited the other side into totally unconditional and utterly abject and humiliating surrender. And if the losing side would rather be exterminated in total and particular personal detail than to suffer the humiliation of unconditional surrender, than the winning side will exterminate every individual member of the losing side so as to make sure the winning side has really won.
Events will prove me right or wrong and my amateur foreign affairs intuition will gain or lose credibility depending on events over the next few years in Myanmar.
Re: the woman charged for defacating on the altar of a chapel. What was the charge? Being a s**t disturber?
Dogma happens.
Heresy!
Saturday Night Live News ought to do an updated form of its running tribute to Francisco Franco ( ” Francisco Franco still not dead”).
It would center on Dianne Feinstein. ” Senator Feinstein has still not resigned. Also , still not dead”.
And run it every Saturday for the rest of her term. Humiliate her and humiliate her and humiliate her. Perhaps some of the humiliation will rub off on the Pelosi Family. They could run a Feinstein countdown clock or something.
Actually the news on SNL was more along the lines of ‘This just in: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead’.
Beau is more Franco than DiFi, Joe brings him up all the time even though he’s been dead for almost a decade, kinda creepy-but that comes with the territory.
Oh. I thought I remembered a long run-up to Franco’s death with “not dead yet”. I do, of course remember “Franco still dead”.
Still, some version of that against Feinstein would be good to see on Saturday Night Live News for as long as she remains an undead Senator.
Why not finish with And Nancy Pelosi is still an inside trader even if Congress has protected it for themselves.
Yesterday: “Robert Kennedy Jr. Makes Campaign Debut At Bitcoin 2023: ‘Free Money Is As Important As Free Expression’”
Well, that’s unfortunate, that Kennedy would support the Crypto Con and the Bitcoin Burndown of Earth’s Climate. Kennedy might still be a good bludgeon to fracture the DemParty’s skull with, but I wonder if he would be a non-dangerous President.
Well, I Yahooed RFKjr and climate change, and he appears to be a climate change global warming realist, so far as I can tell.
Which makes his support for bitcoin very disappointing indeed. The impulse is understandable ( freedom from government oppression by means of freezing your money) but autoclaving the global with bitcoin is not a good way to defeat government oppressing and persecuting people by freezing their money.
Watched the Preakness stakes and it was a from flag fall to that’s all finish, with the winning steed being a front runner.
The trainer is the bad boy of the ‘Oval Office’, Bob Baffert-who lost a thoroughbred in an earlier race when it was injured and had to be put down.
Horse racing is kind of its own worst enemy, in that yeah race horses weigh around half a ton and their lower legs are spindly, it’d be like us having 2 inch legs and doing 44 mph while running with say a little monkey on our back who is not merely holding a whip, but occasionally whacks us on our rump to make sure we’re all business.
Such an ugly race track-Pimlico. It has that 70’s look down pat-very glassy but probably wasn’t even classy back in the day-an eyesore compared to the majesty of Santa Anita where I went to school on a reverse scholarship.
When I followed the ponies there were tax breaks for owners of thoroughbreds and casinos only really existed in Nevada, and for what is now openly advertised in every manner of pro sports-you needed an illegal bookie to get a bet down if inconveniently in one of the other 49 states.
When I plied my traits each of the 9 races typically had a full compliment of 12 horses with 5-10 also eligible horses should any of the entrants scratch out or whatnot. Full fields made for more interesting racing.
There was just 7 horses in today’s race, and part of the madness of horse racing is that it costs about the same to board and train the worst horse as it does the best horse, and nobody is all that interested in the lower echelon claiming race (every horse is for sale-put a claim in before the race starts and no matter the result-you are the new owner. The commonest of races) horses as its almost a given you’ll lose your shirt, so sometimes you see fields of 4 or 5 horses, nobody wants to play that game and I can’t blame them.
How do you sell the fastest non motorized sport to young fans, when there’s a yawning gap of half an hour between races?
Tracks have offered satellite wagering from tracks all over the world for about 25 years now, and watching the races on tv isn’t the same as being there, I could place myself in any position i’d like to glimpse the race, sometimes right at the finish line or on the infield watching the action inside-out or maybe the top of the stretch, imagine sitting in 9 different seats each inning during a baseball game, giving you interesting vantage points?
And the horse who came in second had perhaps America’s most successful jockeyof the last few years, and one of its nastiest.He openly and often bumps his competition and if you watched all the derby day races, he even was clearly using his crop on another horse.
I love racing, but both the finances of it AND the unwillingness to really police themselves are going to kill it. (Don’t look into the numbers and excuses of horse deaths in Baffert’s barns if you love horses. He, and the owners that hire him, don’t just cheat at the races.)
JFC. Hope John Helmer is wrong for once.
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-23fe6-1412c8e
Is this real reason Biden has to return to US & skip PNG & Australia? Skipping PNG is at a huge cost of trying to keep China out of the Pacific. Why Zelensky was at G7 in Japan? And why there was this strange encounter between Macron & Sunak? https://twitter.com/Lyla_lilas/status/1659902200502530049
Trying to head off the expected Russian offensive? Whatever the reason it means WW3 folks.
Thanks for the link, @anon. To summarize a lot, Helmer thinks it is likely that NATO will initiate a major escalation in the war, by making a direct strike against Russian air defenses on June 12th, using NATO aircraft launched from Germany and Romania, under the cover of an exercise to ready NATO air power for a mobilization under Article 5.
Judging whether this scenario is plausible is above my pay grade, but perhaps other commenters here will weigh in.
I doubt the European NATO members have in any numbers military aircraft that can reach Russia from Germany carrying significant payload. Well, maybe Kaliningrad.
From Romania, if they avoid the “neutral” airspace of Moldova, they could reach Crimea or Kherson area but not much more. Trough Moldovan airspace they could hit most of the northern coast of sea of Azov, maybe even Russia proper in the Krasnodar region.
The distances there are huge, and airspace probably the most watched in the history of warfare, due to the constant Ukrainian drone and missile strikes.
“for once?”
Depleted uranium is very low radiation, less than some granites.
It’s also ferociously toxic heavy metal, and because it is pyrophoric, it burns and can spread small particles over a wide area.