Time is an object aeon (Anthony L)
Students are increasingly refusing to go to school. It’s becoming a mental health crisis. USA Today
#COVID-19
Looking Back on the Sadism of the Covid-19 Shaming Campaign Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea, The Racket (KLG). Trust me, just watch the first few minutes of the embedded video.
Related to story above: a friend just saw Bill Maher, who is doing a tour. Maher had what friend said was an unusually long opener. Two segments: one about the importance of not getting (any more) boosters, and not allowing your kids to get trans surgeries. This was in a purple area. Maher is presumably doing the same act at every stop and they will be likely in purple or blue areas. Friend took this as a sign of where things stand in meatworld, as opposed to social media land.
URGENT: Huge new study shows mRNA Covid jabs sharply raise the risk of severe vaginal bleeds Alex Berenson (Li)
Climate/Environment
Endangered Elements ACS (Chuck L). Important.
Most of US faces elevated risk of blackouts in extreme heat this summer, NERC warns Utility Dive
Big Polluters’ Share Prices Fall After Climate Lawsuits, Study Finds Guardian
France Unveils Plan To Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions By 50 Percent By 2030 France24
How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’ Guardian (furzy)
China?
China zooms by Japan as world’s top auto exporter Asia Times (Kevin W)
TikTok Sues Montana Over State’s Ban of Its Service Wall Street Journal
Absolutely shameless…
The US imposed on China one of the most brutal acts of economic warfare, designed to restrict China's future development.
China doesn't retaliate for 8 months before finally doing the mildest possible thing: restricting some sales in China for the US… https://t.co/VC5rjms0NH
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) May 23, 2023
Sinn Fein wins in Northern Ireland local elections, urges return of government Associated Press (resilc)
Our defeat in context: Greece’s Erdogan-isation is almost complete Yanis Varoufakis
Ecuador’s “Democratic Backsliding” Has Been Ongoing Since 2017, With US support CounterPunch (resilc)
New Not-So-Cold War
After Bakhmut Douglas Macgregor, American Conservative. Today’s must read.
… 🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/ecHWtjNxeO
— Trollstoy (@Trollstoy88) May 21, 2023
Ukraine War Q&A Series: How Long Can This War Last? Peter Zeihan (resilc). An admission against apparent interest. And is the West that kept this war going after end of March 2022 by scuppering the peace talks, a fact Ukraine/Collective West stalwarts seldom mention.
West Wants Relationship with Ukraine to Follow the ‘Israel Model’ Libertarian Institute (Kevin W). A Zelensky ask that is apparently getting traction.
F-16s won’t fundamentally alter the course of Ukraine War Responsible Statecraft. In case you had doubts.
Wellie, this is quite the rumor but not totally implausible because Zaluzhny was seen as a replacement for Zelensky (hat tip Chuck L):
🇺🇦‼️Shocking discovery: Zelensky gave the coordinates of General Zaluzhny to the Russians, after which the rockets flew‼️💥
Former member of the Verkhovna Rada Ilya Kiva said that the coordinates and time of the location of the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,👇 pic.twitter.com/H9MpYfA97r
— Djole 🇷🇸 (@onlydjole) May 22, 2023
Russia transport nuclear weapons from storage facility in Belgorod Oblast – Intelligence Ukrainska Pravda (Dr. Kevin). Note that Alexander Mercouris said Monday at 36:00 that Ukraine had made false claims about an incursion into Russia in Belgorod, which the Russians disputed and Mercouris deems the Russian claims to be accurate (TASS cleared its throat, suggesting, consistent with what Mercouris said, that rumors were flying, but this sounds pretty minor compared to other accounts). Mercouris deemed this claim to be intended to rattle Russians. This may be more of the same.
Armenia ready to recognize Azeri sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh: PM The Cradle (Kevin W)
Syraqistan
Yemen’s Houthi gov’t enters oil exploration deal with China Middle East Monitor (resilc)
Pakistan’s ex-Premier Khan gets bail in multiple cases Anadolou Agency
Pakistani trans activists to appeal Sharia court ruling DW. Resilc: “Pakistan=Flowaduh.”
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
FBI Abused Spy Law 280,000 Times In a Year The Register
Leaked Government Document Shows Spain Wants To Ban End-to-End Encryption Wired
Imperial Collapse Watch
Media And Politicians Throw So Much Bullshit At Us That It Is Difficult To See Through It Moon of Alabama. Nice shout out, as well as quotes from Gilbert Doctorow and others.
2024
Tim Scott president announcement: South Carolina Senator makes 2024 bid official Washington Examiner (resilc)
The growing 2024 GOP field signals that prospective candidates don’t think Donald Trump has the race locked up and view Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a flawed lead challenger to the former president https://t.co/Rl1L4kBTsB
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 23, 2023
Biden
White House Official: Biden’s Migration Is an Economic Strategy Investment Watch Blog (Li). Not wild about the writing style, but they do provide quotes.
Southwest states strike landmark deal with Biden to conserve Colorado River water CNBC (Kevin W)
Our No Longer Free Press
Banned! Jokn Ganz (Randy K)
Gunz
AI Gun Detection Firm Evolv Markets to Schools, Doubles Earnings Intercept (resilc)
3-year-old shoots 2 people in Indiana, leading to arrest of man wanted for murder ABC
AI
‘I’m Making Thousands Using AI to Write Books’ Newsweek (furzy). This reminds me of my brother in the outsourcing business, as in making his living getting people fired.
AI scanner used in hundreds of US schools misses knives BBC
AI Bob Lefsetz. “It’s 2023’s NFT.”
Building a better NIH Brookings. Resilc: “Con$ultant$, money and private equity is the model for our plantation state.”
Envision Healthcare files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Healthcare Dive (resilc)
Debt Ceiling
McCarthy has little room to maneuver in debt ceiling talks The Hill
GOP’s cut to IRS funding in debt limit plan would backfire Politico
The Heaven’s Gate Option: Congressional Democrats Beg Biden to Make Them Constitutional Nonentities Jonathan Turley. That 14th Amendment idea has some very upset! I have heard arguments it only applied to Confederate-era debt. That is not how it was written…and if you are going to try “Constitutional Amendments have only era-of-drafting-limited interpretations,” what about the Second Amendment?
The Bezzle
Michelle Obama’s juice brand fails her own health standards, experts reveal Fox News (resilc)
Intel wins 2023’s most faith-friendly company as Fortune 500 warms to religious diversity Religion News (Kevin W)
Guillotine Watch
The world’s most expensive ice cream costs $6,696 CBS. Kevin W: “Nancy Pelosi to the courtesy phone, please.”
Class Warfare
The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won. Atlantic. Micael T: “If they already “won”, why do they keep on waging the war?”
Food Banks See Surge in Demand Driven By Inflation, End of Covid Aid Bloomberg (furzy)
“Once dismissed as a fringe theory, the idea that corporate thirst for profits drives up inflation, aka ‘greedflation,’ is now being taken more seriously by economists, policymakers and the business press.”https://t.co/x9S9zFhlYS
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) May 22, 2023
Immigrants’ Share of the U.S. Labor Force Grows to a New High Wall Street Journal
American Capitalism Has Produced Its Most Remarkable Innovation Yet: Breadlines Jacobin (furzy)
Protesters Shut Down Brooklyn Bridge to Demand Fair Housing https://t.co/0ILjU3EIYC
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) May 23, 2023
Along the highways, Indian restaurants serve America’s truckers Washington Post (resilc)
Antidote du jour. From .Tom:
I took this in 2017 on the deck of a neighbor here in Boston. It was very dark out and I could hardly see the cat as I took this. But it held still enough and so did I so I was lucky enough to get this. And I think that accounts for the wide open pupils of the cat’s eyes.
And a bonus from Chuck L:
The blue-footed booby (Sula nebouxii) is a marine bird native to subtropical and tropical regions of the eastern Pacific Ocean. It is easily recognizable by its distinctive bright blue feet
[read more: https://t.co/ZbR0bLiNtD] pic.twitter.com/mFIl5Xke7I
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 21, 2023
And a second bonus from martha r:
View this post on Instagram
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
178 comments
Comments are closed.
Solar farms are creeping across all the green fields of VT. All owned by PE from out of state.
Destroying the village to save it, etc…
What alternative do you propose?
Reducing power consumption across the board would be a good start.
This, thank you Rev.
Which we could do if manufacturers stopped adding useless features to toasters that require wi-fi…
Poor example. True, but not for any of the reasons people will read into your statement. The electronics & fancy engineering typically improve efficiency, but not by any significant amount.
The real issue is the concept of “new features” itself, which convince people to throw away perfectly functional old items and replace them every couple of years, to get the ‘new and improved’. The energy costs of turning rocks into a toaster is far far higher than the lifetime energy use of using the thing.
(a second order effect is the electronics shorten the lifetime of most gear, forcing the replacement cycle.)
It’s the people choosing to buy the new features that is the problem. So get rid of advertising & marketing and we’re half way to a solution.
I don’t usually back track on these posts after new ones come up because NC has so much good stuff that I feel like bringing attention to what was takes away from the current excellent content offering.
But there is a lot wrong with what you wrote and I think it warrants a response.
This isn’t marketing. These aren’t consumer driven features.
Most of these new features are not for efficiency, or convenience; they’re for crapification, planned obsolescence, and restricting what users can do with something they allegedly “own”. This is not benign neglect. This is active hostility towards consumers and citizens. Which is saying something because we’ve treated consumers as more important than citizens for a long time now.
In many cases these features create dangerous conditions that users don’t understand but are responsible for. This is the company putting software in the printer cartridge. This is your refrigerator getting a TV so it can monitor your habits. This is an android based smart TV that even before it is hacked spies on you. This is Tesla doing remote silent recalls. this is John Deere telling the Army they can’t make field repairs. This is everyone buying an air fryer rather than figuring out if the convection oven they bought actually works.
This isn’t marketing. This is manufacturers making worse product that needs to be replaced, can’t be fixed without breaking it, and abusing customers along the way. This is a zombie economy that has strangled innovation so badly that people are looking to put wifi in toasters because they don’t have any other ideas. This is people hiding shoddy engineering and worse designs that are assembled in foreign countries and sold at prices as if they were made in the USA.
There’s nothing to read into what I wrote, other than people are desperately trying to put unnecessary new features in products to justify profits. Toasters don’t need wifi. The related energy concerns are almost irrelevant until you fix the problems of planned obsolescence and crapification and spying.
Our small municipal utility dropped dropped it’s energy consumption from 450GWh to 350GWh from 2008 to 2018 while the population climbed by 10,000 and we had one the highest rate of EVs.
The major factor for this drop was the change to LED lighting by customers, commercial sector, and the city. Another driver is the requirements that appliance manufacturers had to reduce their electricity usage with each new version over time. This is something that Trump tried to do away with. At home, the energy usage of our old 18 cu ft refrigerator used more electricity than our new 29 cu ft fridge.
I would rephrase that as reduce consumption across the board. Degrowth, dramatic drop in consumption and commodification of everything, the opposite of capitalism. I don’t think we need to go as far as primitivism or Luddism but I think the only apparent solution is to decouple social norms of success from conspicuous consumption and wealth, and decouple wealth from power, and separation of wealth from state, and stop worshipping wealth and power. Yeah. That’ll solve the problem of those destructive solar panels spreading all over…
Would that include degrowth of population? Isn’t demographics the major driver of resource extraction?
Capitalism is the major driver of resource extraction.
Population growth is slowing, energy use is accelerating.
So far, declining life expectancy in the US isn’t showing up in energy use growth, so Neoliberalism is killing people for profit now while continuing the growth in energy use. It’s a twofer!
Maybe they want to go on with the status quo: keep poisoning the people of Louisiana and other refining states. Keep Vermont green by making ugly things happen elsewhere.
Solar fiddlers on the roof, solar panels over the fruitless asphalt plain, solar shading the interminable sprawl zones would be more efficacious for humans, but western economic structure demands concentration over and before distribution. The idea that every private rooftop be an energy source is anathema.
Fake green, like all the performative fake-@$$ left, will always pitch symbolic emotive wedgy nonsense.
Actual conservation types are, across the political spectrum, rather a more cordial and cooperative win-win bunch, who often demonstrate psychological stability and above tweet-level knowledge of relevant ecological chemistry, agronomy, electromagnetism etc. Everyone is welcome but snarky juvenile emotionalism is really just its own gloomy reward and helps nothing.
Yes, solar panels on all suitable structures. None in wildlands or farms except those powering the tractor or farmhouse which could be on barn roofs anyway. Blocking photosynthesis from fixing co2 is a step backwards.
We’re seeing this in Kentucky as well, prime farm land makes more money leased to a solar farm than leased to a farmer. It’s easy to install the panels and related infrastructure, but the downsides are obvious. Better would be putting panels on land that isn’t useful for much else, like hillsides or mountain tops flattened by coal excavation. But, that would cost much more in terms of initial investment.
Best…H
There is an emerging field of research on agrivoltaics, growing crops underneath solar panels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
Here is a link with more graphics:
https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2022/growing-plants-power-and-partnerships.html
Solar on parking lots, big box stores, and warehouses.
Better alternative is radical conservation, mass transit, and land use changes, but that’s going to take more than an election cycle.
Putting the solar closer to where the electric power is used – on the roof. Just an idea. Losses lower too that way.
Alternative: Install PV panels on all suburban and city buildings; place PV canopies over parking areas; use freeway RoW for linear solar farms; cover areas of the LA River (flood control channel) with PV; etc.
Place wind power and PV near the source of demand. Don’t like the visual clutter? Conserve more! Electrical power transmission eats 30% of source power.
30%? That’s a number pulled out of thin air, I’d say! At the utility I worked for, it ran 9.9%, and was hampered by a province that demanded the generation plants be located in economically “depressed” rural areas hundreds of miles from the main big city load. Well, that’s where the coal was. On top of that, one third of the physical area at one end of the province was supplied by generation at the opposite end, Not good. Most utilities run at 8% or so.
If losses run 30%, somebody needs firing for gross system design incompetence. Seriously.
Understand the frustration.
Given that it isn’t even clear that our current renewable technology can get the job done (however vaguely you define that), I am not sure where else you would start.
The articles like this Guardian one infuriate me. The status quo is not everyone happily doing subsistence farming, or everyone having a small wind turbine and a few panels on the roof. The status quo is that we are using absolutely enormous quantities of gas and coal to power our civilization. Any change inconveniences some people and this change will also inconvenience a few people.
Rooftop solar is nice but it doesn’t always solve everything. The roof of my house (condo in the US parlance) isn’t anywhere big enough to power all the apartments.
However west facing walls need to be added in the solar generating system (avoiding windows).
And as much insulation as can be installed.
So what would you prefer? Cattle farms? Monsanto roundup soaked grain fields? Fracking wells? Uranium mines?
False dichotomy.
“Planet of the Humans” demonstrates the truth about Mexico and USA can be applied elsewhere. “Poor Vermont, so close to New York State, so far from God.” Blaming people for not wanting to bear the costs of other’s prolificacy without recognize and address the issues isn’t going to help.
It is not in any way a false dichotomy. Even in temperate climes, to provide solar power for major urban areas requires a negligible quantity of land compared to farmland – even in very rainy Ireland its estimated that an absolute maximum of 2% would be needed, assuming 100% power needs (which is not what anyone would want, but as a worst case scenario). It is a relatively benign use of land that still allows for farming to be carried out. For resilience and efficiency you need a geographical spread of solar farms, not just in the most obviously sunny regions. And the most cost effective sites are often not the sunniest, but where the existing infrastructure can beneficially be used. It is also potentially a very good source of income for small farmers. There are, obviously, examples of bad practice, but that can apply to any form of development or large scale activity.
Rooftop solar is useful, but is nowhere near as efficient or cost effective as large commercial solar farms and can be problematic in terms of energy management.
Of course proposed farms should be well designed and built following local consultations. But by any objective standards it is nowhere near as damaging as pretty much any farm activity apart from the most low intensity livestock rearing. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never lived next to a cattle wintering shed or a wheat field.
The objections to large scale solar farms are largely not organic – they are deliberately whipped up by fossil fuel interests – the links have been well established by investigative reporters in various independent outlets.
The objections to large-scale solar/wind farms are real despite who generates them. Electrical utilities and labor unions love large, isolated PV farms as they can control wages during construction and the price of electrical power when distributed. There are viable alternatives.(See prior comment at 12:45 pm.)
PV/Wind power need to begin near the source of demand, first. Then consider agricultural land. Natural resource land, last.
Implement radical conservation: Energy Conservation Optimized —http://www.land2plan.com/?page_id=289
>”The objections to large scale solar farms are largely not organic – they are deliberately whipped up by fossil fuel interests…”
Anybody hearing anything about the blight of oil fields, tar sands, fracking, strip mining, oil refineries and gasoline stations, etc.? Didn’t think so. Apparently those are “absorbable” costs.
Solar farms are going beyond just electricity, there is a merger of both needs on one piece of land. The DOE says: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/08/22/agrivoltaics-growing-plants-power-partnerships/
This concept — of using PV installations to both create renewable energy and provide space for local agriculture or native habitats — is known as “agrivoltaics.”
Both solar developers and those in the local community who care for the land — whether as farmland, rangeland, or native habitats — can benefit from agrivoltaics. And when all sides understand how they can benefit each other, low-impact solar development becomes easier.
Research by the journal of Applied Energy show their dual benefits:
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/04/04/new-research-confirms-benefits-of-agrivoltaics/
“These results indicate that ground conditions and panel height play important roles in solar farm cooling and that agrivoltaic systems can potentially help to resolve the global food-energy crisis by improving solar PV conversion efficiency while enabling agricultural production on the same land.”
So it’s either solar farms or some combination of Cattle farms, Monsanto roundup soaked grain fields, and Fracking wells and Uranium mines. Good to know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Especially in cali new construction should all be required rooftop solar, but sempra wouldn’t like that, would they? They’ve always hated the idea that people could sell back to the grid as I was told by a (very well off, much more so now) sempra executive a good 10 years ago.
In the end it won’t help. Poland has been going gang-busters the last few years with everyone and his brother doing grid-connected rooftop solar. Recently, (last month, or earlier this month) the Power Grid had to disconnect the wind and solar input as it was just too much. It was an exceptionally sunny day with a decent breeze.
Countries going this route need to upgrade their infrastructure ASAP if they are serious about it. How much do you want to bet, it won’t happen?
yes, it’s another thing that could be done but won’t be.
Of course if amazon wants to build a data center next to a dam there’s always money for that…
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2023/05/amazon-secures-1-billion-in-tax-breaks-for-five-new-data-centers-in-eastern-oregon.html
Doesn’t that only show the power grid is not fit for purpose?
Well if that is the case the utilities are winning. The netmetering change that just went into effect for Cali have destroyed the economics for residential solar.
To make residential solar work for the residence they have to own a battery, which as of now costs more than the whole solar installation, and at that total price the ROI is probably 20 years.
Local Residential solar is done.
-Tim
We ended up going the solar plus battery route in Az after getting fed up with the peak demand charges only applied to solar customers. A battery or two let’s you nix the demand charge but it’s a huge outlay for the real world benefit. It only makes sense if you also have an EV since you get to charge it at a very low rate like 5ct/KWh – approx $1.25 for 100 miles driven.
The first time I saw what looked to be shimmering square lakes in the distance driving down Hwy 395 it threw me for a loop knowing there weren’t any lakes in the Mojave desert, and then driving up on Hwy 58 though Tehachapi I tilted towards windmills repeatedly as the highway snaked through the what many call the demarcation zone in a quixotic quest to determine the northern boundary of Southern California.
I feel for you. Capitalism and the rentier class suck bought the Constitution and it sucks.
I hear you. Here in Maine, the utility wanted to build gigantic towers through the western part of the state in order to channel “green” (I put it in quotes because there’s disagreement about whether Quebec hydropower can be considered “green”) energy to Massachusetts. Many people in both MA and ME say that climate change is a global problem, and thus the local interests of people in ME who don’t want their forests severed by such a project (there are many objections, on all kinds of grounds) don’t really matter. I see the truth in that, but I also know that MA utility companies would just LOVE to claim that their state is “carbon neutral” based on their use of “green energy” from Canada, damn the costs to people in northern New England. And I bristle at the idea that you destroy forests so the owner of an outlet store in Stoughton can feel okay about leaving the door open while he’s running his AC at full blast.
Northern Pass in NH was a similar project from CT-based Eversource that fell apart a few years ago. Eversource treated NH forests (public and private) as if they were mere inconveniences in the way of their virtuous and profitable enterprise. It’s not NIMBYism to expect the corporate profiteers to treat rural places with something more than contempt and indifference.
Agreed. NH and VT both told Mass to pound sound but Maine had to go ahead and prove Mr. Barnum right regarding the birthrate of suckers. I want to see windmills off Hyannisport by the thousands before I’m convinced Mass just can’t produce enough of its own power.
The real answer to all of this isn’t replacing grazing cows with the products of modern heavy industry in order to continue our species’ overconsumption unabated. It’s fewer people. But nobody ever wants to talk about that.
The world’s most expensive ice cream – made from truffle, parmesan cheese and sake lees! I will stick with vanilla or chocolate thank you.
The [London] Times had a puff piece at the weekend about a French Provençal rosé wine that costs £100 a bottle, apparently the favourite tipple of Victoria Beckham, Adele, and similar slebs. Where I live in Hérault half the year, a bottle of local rosé costs around €6.50 or some €2 or so per litre if you bring your own container. Works for me, anyway,
I was hoping to read the ice cream order might have included an ounce of gold (\sarc). Curious to observe, however, no expiry date but please rush to eat our product! Just odd, then again I am very far from a target audience for a luxury serving of ice cream. I’m in the cheap seats!
I thought the story would be similar to the one about the $250 cookie.
Imagine it’s late at night and you have the opened pint in one hand and a spoon in the other. As you’re dipping your spoon into the pint of ice cream, every time it came back out thinking ‘and there’s $200 (nomnomnom), and here’s another $200 (nomnomnom)… how do mere ingredients, however carefully curated, compare to the experience of eating your… wealth, or that of someone else’s? There’s price point where food ceases to be food and just becomes money.
https://www.browneyedbaker.com/the-famed-neiman-marcus-cookie/
I had not read or heard about the cookie recipe! If a pint of the above ice cream became suddenly within reach, say, I win the US powerball lottery, I would guard the precious pint much like Gollum regarded the much-fabled ring of the Tolkien trilogy.
It’s my…precious…
Doesn’t sound like a tasty ice-cream to me. I might be lucky that it’s too expensive to displace vanilla (by far the best ice-cream in my opinion).
Conspicuous consumption in action, basically.
Showing that one can afford to eat it beats the actual taste off it.
These kinds of spectacles will crop up more and more as consumerism takes a tumble.
This. Like the old movie* cliche of lighting a cigarette with a hundred dollar bill.
*may well have been Real Life as well. Don’t have enough hundred dollar bills to want to test the theory……
‘🇺🇦‼️Shocking discovery: Zelensky gave the coordinates of General Zaluzhny to the Russians, after which the rockets flew‼️💥
Former member of the Verkhovna Rada Ilya Kiva said that the coordinates and time of the location of the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,’
Could be this. Undoubtedly there is constant contact between the Ukrainian and Russians spooks on a covert level and would be the channel to send this info. And it was about this time that Zelensky embarked on his tour of the capitals of Europe – otherwise known as getting out of Dodge. And this would suggest that the US/NATO were in on this and set up these appointments in different countries to give him his excuse for getting out of the Ukraine while things settled down after this assassination attempt. And Zelensky for years now has been constantly eliminating rivals whether they be political or otherwise. It appears that being a rival of Zelensky and his cabal is not good for your health in the Ukraine and somebody in a reply to this tweet reminded people of that helicopter full of officials that was “accidentally” shot down several months ago. And as I suggested before, I believe that this channel was also used to give the locations of those ammo dumps so that the Russians could blow them up and thereby forestalling any suicidal counteroffensive effort. But hey, European values, right?
Ilya Kiva is known to have been “economical with the truth” quite often. So, even if it sounds plausible, I’d take a hefty dose of salt on the side.
Regarding the ammo dumps going boom, it’s as likely to prevent any “ally” for taking inventory as it for preventing suicidal offensives, me thinks.
There’s a form into this. Way back when SBU presented that Buk engine as evidence that Putin personally shot down the Malaysin airliner, and Almaz-Antey proved (by the serial number) that the particular missile had been delivered to Ukraine and even telling the storage it was supposed to be, that particular storage did suddenly burn down and unfortunately all the log books burned, too.
‘Regarding the ammo dumps going boom, it’s as likely to prevent any “ally” for taking inventory as it for preventing suicidal offensives, me thinks’
That’s not a bad thought that and sounds reasonable. I have a book by this guy who was in ‘Nam and he was talking about this helicopter that crashed and was destroyed. All the quartermasters started adding gear to the list on what was on that helicopter so that it could be written off and accounted for. Not really stuff stolen but all the items that goes missing, lost, misplaced, etc. in a unit in wartime. This guy was saying that by his own calculations, that the amount of gear “officially” on that helicopter weighed at least four times the carrying capacity of that helicopter itself.
No wonder it crashed. /s
Going AWOL in my unit at Ft. Riley was also grounds for having to buy all new gear when you were returned, because apparently AWOLs took all their stuff with them when they’d leave … and a lot of lost or misplaced gear from regular troops reappeared magically in their possession.
Supply sergeants … they are, shall we say, creative.
{scantily clad buxom beauty pirouettes around the ring holding aloft a placard signifying the 12th zero of the ‘Thriller in Vanilla’ is about to commence}
Both pugilists were punch drunk by this time late in the match holding up one another in a clinch and when one of them uttered ‘I can’t see a way out-cut me Mick!’ it was taken entirely the wrong way as both Irish-Americans felt so offended by the apparent slur that they decided the country wasn’t worth the effort (MIC exempted-naturally) and negotiations broke down once again over just how much more to go into debt, with uppercuts really having no effect, seriously-you want to be the politician that says no to the Big War Machine?
June gloom was a given and smelling salt sales were ramping up on Amazon, everybody knew the canvasing had all been for naught as the country lay prostate on the ground as the ref was doing a standing 8 count of numbers followed by a decimal point, but really what good was a crummy $99 million at this point in the scheme of things?
“I’m Making Thousands Using AI to Write Books’ “Newsweek
2,000 – 5,000 words. For this bit of breathless hype, “book” and “creativity” are both redefined to be meaningless.
The quality of Kindle Unlimited how-to books was already so low, they found a new low to scrape, apparently.
I guess copyright violation lawsuit lawyers must be rubbing their hands in glee.
“Pakistani trans activists to appeal Sharia court ruling”
Good luck with that one. Pakistan has some pretty harsh laws on the book already – such as blasphemy.
‘Those convicted of insulting the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, companions or close relatives will now face 10 years in prison, a sentence that can be extended to life, along with a fine of 1 million rupees, roughly $4,500. It also makes the charge of blasphemy an offense for which bail is not possible.’
Come to think of it, I am starting to see a loss of sympathy with trans activists in the US as well. Just today I saw an article about a transgender cyclist who won their race against a bunch of women. But when they stood on the podium to claim their victory, the second and third place winners refused to stand next to them. I am probably wrong but maybe this is part blowback from that Bud Lite fiasco and how women are also getting the short end of the stick in their own sports and rendering their training & effort pointless-
https://nypost.com/2023/05/19/trans-cyclist-alone-on-the-podium-after-winning-female-race/
There’s another one from this weekend, happened in a high school 1600m race in California.
I read an article about this a few months ago, and the solution that was presented was that trans gender women could only compete in womens sports if they had transitioned before puberty.
This sounded reasonable to me.
Which then assumes gender assignment and full on treatment before maturity is going to be the norm. Whee! Got to love the times we live in.
Then it will finally be brought up that baby males are actually bathed in testosterone in the womb at a certain point in their development which provides them some tangible, irreversible physiological measure of advantage over females too.
Open class (ALL are welcome) and restricted biological female class. Let’s eliminate the self-identification and personal decision making from the equation completely.
My solution to the trans sports debate is to allow them to compete, but give them an automatic DQ (disqualification) at the start of the event. This would allow the athletes to compete, but not win.
Boxing, wrestling, or other contact sports?
Females compete with males in American High School wrestling. I could also see females competing with males in other grappling sports. I understand your point about striking sports.
What if we let them compete with men? Why do women have to make way for some guy dressed as a woman? Why are women having to accommodate the whims and delusions of men yet again? Why are so many women ok with this?
The real solution is to have an open class of sports (formerly known as men’s sports) and restricted classes of sports for the physically less capable such as special-olympics, para-olympics, and biological female, with their own obvious specific requirements on being able to participate in those classes.
No matter who you are, or how you identify, all are welcome to be themselves in the open class. The only issue would be biological females taking testosterone which is a PED, but perhaps they could be given an exception.
And sayonara to Title IX….. (At least in US)
I suspect no one will pay much attention to what pronouns and bathrooms we use when we’re all trying to survive the nuclear winter.
excellent timing gregorio.
that one sneaked up on me and boy it is a good one!
Back in my uni days, during the Clinton era, gay marriage was the hot topic and I remember coming out in support, only to be quite shocked at the adversarial reaction. I had death threats, I lost a lot of friends. And overnight my so-called progressive profs went from treating me like a star student to persona non grata. I had one prof blatantly ask me to move to the back of the room, away from him. The graduate committee debated admitting me to the MA program, I wasn’t admitted and learned later it was because I supported gay rights. I still recall the widespread looks of contempt, hatred and disgust.
And I’m not even gay.
On the positive side, very many of the same people who were vehemently anti-gay marriage are now pro, so it wasn’t for nothing, we just needed to endure it until people eventually came to their senses in their own ways, on their own time.
I’ll remind everyone the Clintons voted AGAINST gay marriage. I’ll never forgive them for that.
After having been for gay rights and gay marriage long before it became an issue in the Clinton era, I now find myself being in the other side of much of the gender identity issue. I’m wary of the pronoun declarations. I am against so-called early transition, for reasons of both physical and mental health. I think that women’s locker rooms, sports, shelters and prisons should be entirely transgender free. But no matter the psychological reasons for transition, it doesn’t change that physically the body is male. If there have to be separate trans bathrooms, sports, shelters and prisons so be it.
None of that is about access to and freedom of discrimination for housing, education, or jobs, and Marriage between consenting adults. I will advocate for that.
And having watched Hillary play for both sides about women’s reproductive rights even longer than about gay rights…well let’s just say you are kinder than I am.
The science says there’s no such thing as gender essentialism, so as difficult as it may be to accept, we must. One can be born with one set of chromosomes and have the opposite genitals, and one could be born with one chromosome instead of a pair, making you technically neither gender. So either people born this way, though uncommon, are abominations, monsters, genetic freaks and defectives and should be put in a zoo or circus, in which case we are insistsing on genetic purity a la Gattaca, or we need to revise and broaden our understanding to align it with the natural world. Having shared locker rooms and washrooms with all genders and types I think the fear seems quite incommensurable to the reality, I think it’s one of those things we need to get over – like fear of homosexuality.
And even if there was no such thing as trans I think we’re already progressing towards a future where men and women will share the same locker rooms, showers, washrooms, etc. These are becoming more and more common and, should they become common, the whole trans in washrooms and locker rooms would become a moot point.
Sigh.
It’s almost impossible to cut through the baloney. There is no such thing as “gender essentialism” because there is no such thing as gender essentialism as a concept. It’s a straw-man, a non-thing, concocted by who knows who to reset the terms of the discussion onto a false track. The trans hustle is filled with such dodges and diversions. Anything to maintain the delusion.
The percentage of people born with DSD or Disorder of Sexual Development, is around .0187%:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/
a little bit less than “uncommon”, to put it mildly. And even those born with DSD are still chromosomally male or female, that’s locked in at conception, for developmental reasons they simply express some of the traits of the opposite sex. The chemistry of life is complex and outliers happen but this doesn’t negate the categories of male and female.
Your claim that we either lock up such individuals or suddenly upend all of human biology to create a new ill-defined definition of sex beggars the term “false dilemma”. We needn’t revise anything at all to accommodate DSD’s, the framework we have in place does that already. What we need to do is get the trans industry’s hands out of our academic departments, research facilities, and classrooms where scads of dollars are being spent to cement this idiocy into place. Trans is the biggest marketing campaign ever.
Good to know you are comfortable with all manner of genders and types in your bathroom space, there’s a rainbow pin in the mail for you. However, many women are not comfortable with men in their spaces despite the burgeoning Golden Age of inter-sex peace and mutual respect you paint for us. There is good reason for this, as men are many, many, many more times likely to sexually harass or assault a woman.
Of course, no one asked women if they had a problem with men suddenly sharing their private spaces. It’s because it’s a war on women. Trans is an assault, a war, against women by wealthy and powerful men who want to a. completely commodify human sexuality for personal profit and b. crystallize their perversions into an acceptable norm.
Well, good for Twitter banning John Ganz. Any moron who thinks his feelings are more important than other people’s capitalist property yet makes a living off of sappy petit-bourgeois bootlicking is a liar and, like every other liar, needs to be removed from the conversation about what is to be done about them.
You wouldn’t believe the things being uttered on my Twitter feed by the fire, feels like a bird world country around these parts at present with at least 8 or 9 distinct elongated utterances competing with one another for likes.
Never heard of the guy but The New Republic and The Nation are long deserted precincts here at my silo. The banning seems a shame considering how under represented “Brooklyn” is in our opinion mix. /s
Still, even bootlicker banning is bad.
I’d love to see a debate between you and Tom Paine. If all liars are removed, who’s left?
“The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won. Atlantic. Micael T: “If they already “won”, why do they keep on waging the war?”
Why?
I’m starting to look at this power dynamic of the global economy, not through only a class warfare lens, but a BDSM lens.
It’s especially heavy on the sadism.
It’s lonely at the top after crushing your opposition. After making so many enemies somebody might try to do that to you. So that’s why…..
It is the same trick that dates back to the early colonial era. Get various subgroups of locals to fight each other so they do not gang up on the colonist minority.
Same mechanism has been used in USA pretty much since the independence. First by getting Irish and Scotts to butt heads, and then get them to gang up on newcomers in turn. One can still see it going on along the border with Mexico.
Because for some people – a lot, maybe – it’s not enough that someone has. Someone else has to NOT have.
“When everybody is super – no one will be.” Syndrome, The Incredibles
Astonishing editorial in the Korea Times about 30 years ago complaining about the less-expensive grey color taxis that allowed just about anyone to afford a taxi. It was suggested that the greys be abolished so that those lording it about in their black color (more expensive, more luxurious) taxis would be seen to be as important as they believed themselves to be.
American capitalism and breadlines. Since being a child raised during the ’80s, that brings to mind this opener from a great song. Bruce Hornsby.
Standing in line, marking time,
Waiting for the welfare dime,
Cause they can’t find a job,
Man in a silk suit hurries by…
Just for fun he says get a job…
Some things don’t damn change I guess. The graph on food inflation is pretty jarring, but then many of us have commented on that dynamic for months’ on end.
I got hit up for spare change in the parking lots of Grocery Outlet & Home Depot yesterday afternoon, which in itself was not startling-but the idea that both were homeless women in their 20’s or maybe 30’s, was.
Food inflation is going to be the leading indicator going forward, as worldwide harvests are all down and unlike money, you can’t just bang on the QWERTY to conjure calories.
And this is likely to be The cause of actual civil
unrestwar in the United States as aside from water food is it for survival.Between from the New Deal and into the 1960s the federal government did a fair amount of planning and spent lot of money to create an environment where Americans would not go hungry. It was not perfect, but it worked; from the Teddy Roosevelt Administration to Ronald Reagan’s a lot of laws and enforcement efforts were made to make the food safe.
Both are efforts are being junked in a country that still has access to a vast amount of farmland and other resources with a heavily armed population. It would be possible to ensure enough food for everyone even if rationing was necessary, but Congress refuses to even adequately fund SNAP or food stamps. Anyone who is at all informed knows this and while there is the constant nonsense about welfare cheats, the food stamp program is still respected especially in the current economy.
The elites seem to want an uprising or to keep trimming the population by any means, but unlike say, Ireland or India, there is not a foreign army ready and able to slaughter enough unarmed people for effective control.
Check out this mix of Hornsby and Tupac. Tupac based his song on Hornsby.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=old5I1aWSbg
We gotta make a change
It’s time for us as a people to start makin’ some changes
Let’s change the way we eat
Let’s change the way we live
And let’s change the way we treat each other
You see, the old way wasn’t workin’
So it’s on us to do what we gotta do to survive
No wonder Pac didn’t live long. Brilliant mash up… same vibe as “Under Pressure” from Bowie and Mercury.
Interesting to note that Tupac was a Panthers kid.
look who has come right out in the open calling for labor discipline, the guy who helped shovel trillions into the pockets of the rich world wide, that help to set this mess up.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/ex-fed-chief-bernanke-says-093400976.html
“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A tight U.S. job market and rising wages are beginning to have more of an impact on inflation and could embed faster rising prices if the demand for workers is not brought into better balance with the labor force, new research from an ex-Federal Reserve chief and a former top International Monetary Fund economist has concluded.”
Greece–
Varoufakis has some bad news for any of us that thought leveling with the people was the route to electoral success. This is what he says about his leftist party’s approach in the recent election:
“Morning in America.” Greece’s “Success Story.” Voters, even in Greece that has suffered so much economic hardship for more than a decade, don’t seem drawn by honesty about hard truths. What is seen as the relatively easy electoral route out of self-destruction turns out to be not so easy after all.
The boys at The Duran put out an analysis of the Greek elections and the lack of enthusiasm of the voters for either party – whose policies are near identical. So they stuck with the people already in place. Somehow this sounds very familiar but I am not sure how-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdGf0kVYlmc (16:56 mins)
Happening all over.
Even the supposed “left” are really rich “investors”, culturally disconnect from the working class.
Varoufakis campaign was shoddy and badly managed. His policy proposals turned opponent one line jokes and fodder for sarcasm (Mitsotakis quipped about his proposed alternate payment system “how much would a gyro cost?”)
I personally voted for him. Uphill battle for sure. But as he says, Greeks are in denial about the hard truths. The transport minister who quit after the train accident that cost 57 young lives was a) a candidate again, and b) won his district by a landslide ffs. The man is a criminal and yet voters looked the other way and now he’s back. Education minister who is busy dismantling public education also won handily. My faith in humanity took another dive.
How high was abstention?
Mera25/Diem25 – name of party. Abstention was 39%; parties that didn’t reach the 3% threshold to get into parliament took 16%
What was the party name Varoufakis ran with?
However, he weaseled out by blaming Erdoganization and Orbanization of politics. There is nothin’ populist nationalism in the present winner’s message.
‘Antidote du jour. From .Tom’
That image of that black cat should come with a warning message. :) I scrolled down onto it and found myself dropped into uncanny valley territory because of the way the cat’s head was turned up and back. But it is a great shot.
Thanks, RK.
It immediately caught my work trained eyes. The colour and form of the flowers in various stages of bloom in the lower left, black object in the top having curve too it and at an angle w/shadow line below, which intersects with the spaces in the decking at a 90 degree angle which would normally be viewed as vertical too horizontal, and then a black cat with head tilted up and eyes wide with the only other colour in the photo just out of center to the right as contrast to the flowers.
Worthy of a frame I think Tom …. and in a prominent place IMO … it just oozes enjoyment …
Simple things can have a huge difference, per se wrapping the colour of a accented windowsill ledge across the front and down underneath to the edge of the drip line – about 3/5mm. Showed this to a client on a 1930 art deco brick two story and she was blow away with the difference before and after …
Anywho …. off to a 1903 hardwood Queenslander exterior in Red Hill, 9th house on same street in 5 yrs … you know Kev …
Thanks, i was wondering what kind of weird muppet i was looking at.
Ha, I saw the upside-down cat-face as an owl face to start with. Nocturnal predators resemble!
“Students are increasingly refusing to go to school….USA Today”
Long article, lots of hand-wringing, not much information.
The term used in the article was “school avoidance”. Just for fun, I pasted the text into notepad and replaced the word “school” with “prison”, and the article made a lot more sense.
This one puts it a bit more into global perspective as part of the hikikomori phenomenon.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201505/school-refusal-and-severe-social-withdrawal
Given the stories about the local schools, it’s astonishing they have anyone left. I should note the kids were basically home for two years and suddenly in classes they weren’t ready for. Kids being somewhat smart know they don’t know what is in front of them and simply don’t want to be seen being unprepared.
It’s better the kids were home, but the idea “show them your big America smile” was the solution was absurd.
I just watched a Hugh Jackman movie called The Son. The setup is that the father is told by his ex wife that their son hasn’t been to school for two months and is just wandering around NYC to fill the time.
I won’t divulge the whole plot but the film is intended as a serious warning about teenage anxiety and reports of increasing teenage mental health problems–like this one–are being seen.
In the film parenting and absent rather than always present parents are the problem. Perhaps we can throw smartphones, bullying and all the rest of it into the mix.
True enough. If, as is claimed, Terran humans are a social species, then youngsters being left alone, to their own devices for much of the ‘average’ day would be expected to result in dysfunctional social animals. Constantly present caregivers serve many useful functions. The “Atomized Family” is about as dysfunctional as one could imagine.
Perhaps we will return to some sort of “balance” when conditions demand a return to extended families and lower standards of living. Wait, did I just describe a form of The Jackpot?
Stay safe.
Caregivers are one thing, role models are another.
Everyone learn by observing their “elders” doing things.
A pretty chilling paragraph from that article:
“the shut-in.” A term once reserved for sick, lonely old people, now repurposed for young school kids. Quite the innovation for “our” technocratic society. I hear mark zuckerburg’s “metaverse” is a real great investment opportunity and those oculus headsets are a great Christmas present.
In a country with a functional “public health” system, I’d expect this situation to get flagged and internet obsession at least mentioned as a source of mental health destruction before it gets any worse, but confidence in u.s. “public health,” such as it is, is so low it’d probably start a riot. If you can’t “vaccinate” against it, it doesn’t exist.
No parent or grandparent should ever forget that the people who create these social media and gaming sites severely restrict their own children’s use of them.
At least the shut-ins won’t get covid or, presumably, “long covid” so there’s that.
>…you help the shut-in wean from excessive and consuming use of the internet…you set gradual, step-wise, realizable goals that include first leaving the room, then spending time with family, going out of the house, and finally going back to school.”
𝘠𝘰𝘶. It’s not clear who that “you” is, but I assume it’s the parents of the “shut-in”. If so, caring responsible parents (in other words, parents who actually “parent”) don’t need to be told this. It’s obvious. It’s called “discipline”, an inescapable parental duty.
Perhaps discipline is a bad word nowadays. Perhaps youngsters are so delicate today that parents must take great care not to interfere with their desires for fear of a tantrum. Or perhaps, parents would rather take the easy way out and pass on their responsibilities to “health-care professionals”.
𝘑𝘰𝘩𝘯𝘯𝘺, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶’𝘷𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦. 𝘋𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘮𝘦, 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥.
Call me old-fashioned (and I sure I am), but when I was a teenager sitting inside watching TV on a sunny afternoon, my parents would kick me outside and tell me not to come back until supper. And I am sure I’m better for it.
From the usa today link:
Someone needs to get a grip and it probably should be the “parent.”
I partially agree but when I was young I used to retreat into books. So I’m not sure it is anything new, but I agree that it is more widespread (partly because the Internet is more addictive). I am not really on social media (apart from using it to call, contact friends), but that maybe because I grew up before the Internet.
I keep wondering how much of what USA is struggling with right now comes back to the deeply dysfunctional school system.
But deeper down it may well be related to how the nation keep worshiping the “warrior”. From the cowboy with fast draw, to the overweight “peace” officer gunning down some driver over a broken light.
And that then may manifest itself in the school system via this weird “jocks vs nerds” dynamic.
USA is definitely a warrior society. (source: my college classics prof., seminar on Homer, 1973.) the more you think about that, the more you see it playing out in every realm of USA living, at all class levels.
warrior societies are shame-based. (same source.)
i’m sure any anthropologists here can explain this further better than i can.
If the United States truly had a warrior society, it would be desirable to a physical fit, truly brave, probably disciplined, and a bit self sacrificing. The exact mix of traits varied from society to society, but that is essentially it. I don’t see many Americans like that around.
The killer drone warriors, roided up cops fear for their lives, and the pseudo warriors ostentatiously carrying blinged out weapons would not be thought of nicely.
For that matter, most of our direct ancestors also not be impressed. Really, much of the current violence reminds me of robber gangs and armed prison guards.
Re Ukraine and the “Israeli model”–so that would be the United States offering unconditional support to another country while offering no rational explanation for doing so? Of course this wasn’t always the case for Israel either but some time around the ascension of Nixon and Kissinger an absolute commitment to Israeli security and UN defense of its aggressive occupation became a given.
Yes we definitely need another one of those. Endless “frozen conflicts” are good for the MIC. For America itself not so much but neither wing of the duopoly seems willing to go there..
Does the “Israeli model” mean Crimea gets to be the West Bank?
And Donetsk, Gaza, since they are going to keep hitting it for the sake of it?
They do have a hankering for hitting civilians cities, even when they use up irreplaceable weaponry in doing so.
Nah, it means soon USA begins pulling ammunition from Ukraine to defend democracy in the next boiling point.
I think Duda really meant the “Berlin model” – but this time the line has moved East so that Poland now gets to be West Germany. The Ukraine project has actually succeeded in building a new Wall between Europe and Russia that will not come down anytime soon. NATO keeps the Americans in, Russia out, and Germany down – just like the good old days! That seems to be the dream of the Polish leadership, along with the Russiaphobe neocons in the US. But I think the “Israel model” is less likely to cause hurt feelings among NATO members.
No way either of those will happen, as i don’t see Russia allowing anyone to set up border controls between Russia and Donbass.
The basic situation is that Gaza and West Bank is effectively large concentration camps. This thanks to neither Egypt nor Jordan being willing to challenge Israel about their control over the Palestinian borders.
No. Donbass is part of Russia now. The line is wherever Russia stops. Not saying this will happen. I’m saying it’s what Poland and the neocons would like – short of the impossible Ukrainian victory.
Ukraine is the wall.
An apartheid solution. Sort of an eternal vigil. Can’t have yuan and rubles contaminating the purity of the dollar.
Yeah, with Ukraine as Israel in year 70.
“Yemen’s Houthi gov’t enters oil exploration deal with China”
This sounds interesting. I don’t know how big Yemen’s oil sector is but it what is there is developed by the Chinese, it would give that country access to some hard currencies which could the relieve poverty in that country. And if the Chinese build in the infrastructure and sign long-term contracts, it might even lead to a measure of prosperity as well. Given the fact that the Saudis are looking for the exit and the Chinese are helping with negotiations, this part of the world may find a measure of peace and development. At least I hope so.
Although most media are determined to ignore it, it’s hard to over emphasise just what a big deal this is for Norther Ireland.
Sinn Fein, a socialist nationalist party has now become the largest party, but more significantly, the total vote for ‘nationalist’ parties is now greater than Unionist ones, making the Union highly untenable.
The election results are complex, but a number of things are clear: One thing is that Sinn Fein have routed their opponents from right and left. The centrist SDLP lost out badly, and the various left wing and green parties are disappearing to irrelevance.
Unionism continues to be in disarray since Brexit. They backed the wrong horse in Brexit and Boris and are paying the price. The main Unionist party, the DUP (essentially a religious cult in political party form) managed to hold their own, but the mainstream UUP and the various extreme smaller parties lost out. Only the vaguely centrist, lite unionist Alliance Party expanded. This is pretty significant in terms of a United Ireland as Alliance represents the ‘we are Unionist, but if it looks like everyone wants a United Ireland we won’t argue…’ vote.
In wider terms, Sinn Fein is doing exceptionally well in polling in the Republic. This makes them unique – a radical leftist anti-imperialist party which is doing extremely well and is likely to be in government, despite a very healthy economy and generally stable society. Every left wing organisation in the world should be studying what they are doing right (most notably, Syriza, who suffered from their politically idiotic ‘tell the truth’ campaign). Their likely success can’t be replicated everywhere, but they do have important lessons to teach.
From over here in the former Confederate states, one big lesson to be learned is that it helps a party’s polling chances mightily if it has a militant armed wing associated with it.
The Ex-Confederacy connection is that the revanchist political and social elements here had the Klan to do the terrorizing and “grass mowing.” It may be a ‘chicken and egg’ question, but it cannot be pure coincidence that the power and influence of both the Dixiecrat and Segregationist cliques waned alongside the decline of the power of the Klan.
Question: Do locals in Eire still view Sinn Fein as a Trotskyite organization?
Stay safe.
With Sinn Fein, it helps to know that when they talk about revolution, they know what they are talking about. Even their biggest opponents will acknowledge that they know that it means to take up arms.
Sinn Fein aren’t Trotskyist – in reality the Trotysky elements in the Irish left hate Sinn Fein. SF have never gone in for anything but vague leftist talk – their politics are far more heavily influenced by Latin American peoples movements and anarchism than conventional Marxism or similar. Various attempts to develop an orthodox nationalist leftist movements in Ireland have failed. The Trotsky movements are far too busy sticking shivs in each others backs or advocating electorally stupid policies like Lexit or gender neutral children to be any threat to anyone.
Their strength is in their ideological vagueness. They have been very effective at representing various marginalised groups without bothering too much if they are contradicting themselves or dropping various forms of dogma to do so. Thats why they can command as big a support among quite conservative rural farmers and workers as much as urban working class communities. They are going full on in on convincing voters that they will not put ideology in front of pragmatism, hence their quiet ditching of anti-NATO talk and their overt romancing of Biden. They have stayed well away from wokism, while aggressively promoting female candidates (while other left wing parties promote wokism and then put forward balding middle aged men as candidates).
In other words, they take politics very seriously, and the voters understand this.
So Sinn Fein is like the Arab Ba’ath Parties in Syria and Iraq?
Seems simple enough, they have not let themselves get hijacked by the neoliberal globalist lot and are instead sticking to the original socialist left policies.
Good story on those sprawling solar power projects. It seems ironic that you can visit a desert park like Arches and be forbidden to even step off the walkways and so disturb the “biocrust,” and yet one solar plant is disrupting an area “several times the size of Manhattan.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_soil_crust
And of course it’s not just solar. Any Western trip passing through Texas will encounter vast fields of windmills. Perhaps these are more visual pollution than environmental destruction and traveler sightseeing sacrifices must be made. Or perhaps the sacrifice should rather be not driving through Texas. We leisure travelers may need to give this a think.
I think panels in huge fields could be more symbiotic if they were spread apart and distanced enough where the Sun could still shine on the fauna, though less of course. It would be better than the entire planet being faunaless.
“After Bakhmut’
After Bakhmut? Endgame. I was just watching a train with dozens of Swedish CV9040 infantry fighting vehicles moving across Germany on the way to the Ukraine as the Ukrainians must be running short of fighting vehicles. But this sort of aid is winding down – running out really – which may explain why they are talking about only enough aid for the next four or five months. There is only so much gear that can be sent and then it is gone. But for the Russians, Bakhmut was the gift that kept on giving. The Ukrainians would send formation after formation into that city, only to get badly mauled. Here is a list of those units wrecked-
Brigades:
45th Brigade
43rd Brigade
26th Brigade
28th Brigade
62nd Brigade
63rd Brigade
53rd Brigade
60th Brigade
24th Brigade
57th Brigade
30th Brigade
Advance Rubizh Brigade
Advance Azov Brigade
Advance Uragan Brigade
Advance Spartan Brigade
109th Brigade
116th Brigade
119th Brigade
241st Brigade
93rd Brigade
77th Brigade
46th Brigade
4th Brigade
17th Brigade
61st Brigade of Jaegers
Special Forces and Spetsnaz Regiments:
5th Assault Regiment
8th Regiment of Special Forces
Kraken Battalions:
122nd Battalion
68th Battalion
214th OPFOR Battalion
49th Rifle Battalion
15th Mountain Assault Battalion
Omega
Border Guard Donetsk
8th Regiment of the UDAR UAVs:
Shershen
Adam
Karlsen
Terra
Skala
Madyar
Khartia
Kep
Seneka
WASP Legions:
Dudaev Battalion
Georgian Legion
Mansur Battalion
Shamil Battalion
Gonor
Normandy Legion
The closing sentence of “After Bakhmut”:
“More sober-minded leaders in Washington, Paris, Berlin, and other NATO capitols should urge a different course of action.”
I wonder whether the more sober-minded leaders would be sober-minded given what seems the extreme madness of leaders in Washington, Paris, Berlin, and other NATO capitols. Where have all the sober-minded leaders gone?
Anywhere but politics, because what is left is the DC crazies and their European attack poodles.
That list of destroyed Ukrainian army brigades seems lifted, without attribution, from Simplicius’ latest post for paid subscribers. Read it myself yesterday, because for some reason, the article of speculative Q & A’s wasn’t actually blocked for random visitors.
I know we talk about the Western elite being reality challenged, but do you think they are so deluded that they can miss that the warehouses are bare and there is little chance of them getting restocked for years?
I get that Washington lives in fantasyland, but does Europe really want to go on piling on Russia and China? True, they might believe Russia is in the same boat, but China? And what about new Russian allies in the MidEast, Asia and South America? Everyone that Europe would be able to call on has pretty much stripped themselves bare as well.
I suppose after watching them kneecap their own industries it is possible, but I am still finding it incomprehensible.
Deluded or… they’ve found a great scam enriching them even more? They live is a different world. / ;)
Here’s Whitney Webb interviewed by the PBD podcase , utube. long.
Whitney Webb On Jeffrey Epstein’s Connection With Elon Musk & Bill Clinton | PBD Podcast | Ep. 270
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOS8dqBuZe4
They have Amazon Prime memberships. After all, how could a country that recognized the magnificence of the G7 leaders to let them near power be a dump?
If the US is a shell and can’t simply be fixed with “America is back”, then we have to ask what the hell Joe Biden has been doing for 50 years. The deindustrialization chart under Obama is scary. That didn’t happen under Trump.
>”…we talk about the Western elite being reality challenged…”
Think of the current elites everywhere—not just in the West—as the new aristocracies. When the reality-challenged kings and queens of the 19th and early 20th centuries fell, they were supplanted by the rise of capitalism and capitalists. The new order became the divine right of money and the possessors of that money.
Looked at in this way, the problem—and the solution—is obvious. As the old entitled were destroyed by revolutions and/or wars, so will it be with the new.
So now the media is covering Tim Scott as potential presidential material?
One wonders why our Sainted Free Press refuse to acknowledge Marianne Williamson or RFK Jr. as declared candidates with significant polling but continue to highlight Republicans with no following…
Because TINA to Biden, but TMBAA (There Must Be An Alternative) to Trump?
Re: Brooklyn Bridge Fair Housing Protest — and Our Famously Free Press
Since “Democracy Now” had only a mention of this, and no further coverage, I went looking. All Duck Duck Go brought up was this, dateline TEHRAN:
https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2023/05/21/2899198/thousands-march-across-brooklyn-bridge-against-soaring-rent-prices-video
Tasmin News reports:
“Politicians have me sick and disgusted with their lies, their deceit,” shouted a protester through a megaphone.
“I think it’s really important that everybody shows up and shows support in this way. To be visible and to show the power of a collective that is in support of housing justice,” added a second protester.”
Well, maybe it’s not quite so important to be visible if there’s a news blackout of your protest.
Has anyone else found more US coverage of this?
I searched my google news feed. I typed in “brooklyn bridge” and the third autofill suggestion was “protest”. So I clicked on that and got a long list of articles, not a single one mentioning the current protest.
coincidentally enough, I’m not seeing anything on the Ukraine loss in Bakhmut. I do see some articles about brave freedom fighting Russians who support Ukraine “liberating” border villages in Russia from Moscow.
Time is an object, a long read over at Aeon, but worth your while.
This set of sentences stand out: “If the theory holds, its most radical philosophical implication is that time exists as a material property of the complex objects created by evolution. That is, just as Einstein radicalised our notion of time by unifying it with space, assembly theory points to a radically new conception of time by unifying it with matter.”
Which means that gnosticism and other forms of dualism–which is much of monotheism–don’t hold up. Time unites with matter, which means that “entities” are all of piece. (Ooops, there goes so much of the cheesy “theories” coming out of the social sciences in the U S of A.)
A further implication is that consciousness is embedded in time and is our way of reckoning with time. This would make consciousness more widespread than human beings are willing to admit–which is why the last few years have had so many articles about the intelligence / consciousness of dogs, bees, parrots, dolphins, whales, elephants, even something going on among the trees. It also explains why an ancient species of shortlived animals like our octopodi friends have evolved such an elaborate intelligence / consciousness.
So consciousness is a relation to matter and a relation to time.
And Herakleitos beckons: Character is destiny. One’s present consciousness / ethics tie to the past and future through one’s “daimon” (guardian spirit, timeless) or destiny (time over the long run).
I will ping Henry Moon Pie here to tie this to the theme of gnosticism that he is working.
There are also implications for how we might think about the I Qing and its complications / assemblies of hexagrams.
And the tarot cards, too.
Who said that physics isn’t spooky? Or that the stumbling, collective stumbling, of science through the known and unknown is not worth our while?
It is very Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin. Why not? But who can answer the age old question, Which came first, the particle or spacetime?
So non living matter is outside time? Do stars not go supernova and release new elements in the cosmos, elements needed for the emergence of life?
I don’t think that’s the contention. It’s just that without change, there is no way to measure time by the nature of the constituents of an object. Now we might not think of a star as living, but it has a track of development that it follows, so it seems to me it would have an Assembly number that could be calculated according to the mix of elements in it.
Stars are massive and then they explode into second generation particles and atoms and molecules and evolution is off and running. But here’s one: how is it that the “universe is expanding” aka “emerging” but … but the rock I found in Montana just sits there? I mean if indeed “space” expands or emerges universally both at the far reaches and at the level of matter (as implied) then my beautiful rock should be expanding as well.
Relative to those distance galaxies, your rock is “expanding,” at least moving away from them. But relative to the place where it sits, it’s motionless. But relative to that Aeon piece, there’s not much happening in that rock since it was formed. It’s not becoming more complex nor are the molecules within it.
As for exploding stars:
We are stardust (billion year-old carbon.
We are golden (just caught up in a devil’s bargain).
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.
“Woodstock”
It’s so sad to think of what became of this really prophetic call that Joni issued to my generation. Our society has run in the opposite direction ever since. I guess Wyatt had it right. No bombers turning into butterflies in this timeline.
If you and everything around you were expanding at the same rate as the rock, would you be able to become aware of the expansion?
Thanks for the ping.
What struck me was not the implications for Gnosticism but the clarification of how evolution produces higher and higher levels of complexity and differentiation despite the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Fritjof Capra has a succinct statement of this in his textbook The Systems View of Life:
We living in a universe in which a time ratchet is operating. Atoms and molecules swimming around in a soup can self-organize to a certain level of complexity, but to “advance” beyond that, the high Assembly number molecules discussed in the article are only created when the relatively complex component molecules already exist and when some sort of memory mechanism exists so that the newly created, even more complex molecule can replicate itself. With living creatures, that memory mechanism is DNA. Once that new, higher level of complexity is reached, new, even more complex possibilities come into play. That’s how an Earth that was once populated only by one-cell organisms is now inhabited by the extraordinary range of complex and beautiful creatures, plant and animal, that we see daily featured here on Naked Capitalism. It’s this ratchet that trumps the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The article’s authors are happy to extend this ratcheting process further. First, it’s quite natural to extend it into the creation and continued existence of the biosphere. The ecosystems that comprise the biosphere can also increase in complexity as more species of greater complexity are added. Assembly theory can look at the complexity of a biosphere and “calculate” the time required to reach such a level of complexity. Second, these scientists also extend this ratcheting process to human artifacts which also build upon the past as long as the knowledge of how to build these artifacts is retained over time.
The implications of this for our situation are pretty disheartening, I’m afraid. Understood this way, each species represents a hell of a time investment in building and propagating that particular plant or animal. If the species goes extinct, that is all lost. The ratchet slips. All the ecosystems in which that species participated will lose complexity as well, ratcheting back. With human knowledge, the same is true. If civilization slips backwards because of climate pressures or nuclear war, millions of man-hours are lost, not to be regained all that easily.
None of these effects seem likely to be linear to me. As more species are lost, biosphere complexity will drop even more precipitously with effects on growing food that are unpredictable. Or imagine the oceans as acidification and warming wipe out corals and what the effects will be on the rest of life in the oceans and beyond.
It’s so hard to believe that we have elites so blinded by the profit motive that they continue to demand the pilot’s seat but refuse to pull the plane out of its fatal dive.
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
Makes me think that the synergy pushing evolution is the evolution. But time, the undefined thingy in question, actually requires a little extra space to breathe as it were and so compact things don’t exactly evolve. What makes some elements lock together and hang on forever while other stuff erodes away? If time were a constant wouldn’t the two have the same rate of dissipation? so then what is the constant? Evolution looks like the last gasp.
About your reasoning regarding the loss of complexity…
First, it looks to me you are equating civilization with the biosphere (to encompass a more general perspective i would call it the living planet, meaning the biosphere plus all the planetary systems that sustain the biosphere, like for instance the weathering of the lithosfere, the carbon cycle, plate tectonics and all that stuff…)
From where i stand, civilization is a social (in the sense of comunal) enterprise by an element (homo sapiens) of said living planet, or if want it, biosphere… meaning that loss of complexity by our comunal endeavour we call civilization, it is always present and quite possible… And i believe apart from the circunstances you mention, there are a bunch more events or discontinuites that will result in a loss of civilizational complexity (to make the plug into a branch of my reasoning, for example, a meteorite hit… which as far as we know it was one of those that sent the dinosaurs the way of the dodo, and eventualy cleared the stage for the emergence of that other character, homo sapiens)
But the biosphere/living planet it is not a social enterprise (quite far from it) it is a (complex) system ruled at it’s core by a handful of (simple) physical laws (like the laws of thermodynamics), said core/laws from which emerges all the complexity of the system itself.
And it looks to me that civilization cannot emerge without the substrata that the biosphere/living planet provides… (just maybe in some eventual future it can sustain itself without that substrata, but for that it would need to climb quite a few steps in the ladder of civilizational complexity… but that is a whole other discussion…)
And second, you argue that the loss of biodiversity equates to a loss of complexity of the biosphere/living planet system… but… coming around to the meteorite hit, and the extinction of the dinosaurs, if you look at the geological record, the living planet has faced quite a few extinction events and some of those quite dire with a loss north of 90% of all living organisms… but the system rebounded attaining previous (or higher) levels of biodiversity… and i would argue that the complexity didn`t go away… on the surface it might look that it did, but for the reemergence of the levels of biodiversity that complexity is still there even if it is just on a few niches like some volcanic vents/hotspots deep underneath the ocean
I would add that are those simple physical laws that govern the system that allow (or nurture…) the emergence of said complexity.
Well this is turning out a long wandering… just to cut it short, i would add that if civilization (and by extension homo sapiens) goes boom, so be it… sure would be a loss and all those man-hours, and all that goes into them would be wasted… but life would go on, the living planet would still be here, and what’s to say what might come next…
As George Carlin said “Save the planet?! The planet is fine!”
Thank you DJG
Assembly Theory contradicts dualism, idealism and materialism. It is compatible with a kind of panpsychism. Maybe there is an even more general relativity of spacetimematterenergy?
Teilhard de Chardin?
I find it incredible that people can believe that animals and other lifeforms don’t have consciousness. Anyone that has any kind of medium term interaction with animals, or a particular animal, must know they have consciousness. But that in itself says a lot about modern society.
More cracks in the Wall of Western propaganda? I thought this Business Insider story was interesting. Here’s the main focus:
“There have been repeated requests for the delivery of American-made F-16s, leading to debates about how effective the fourth-generation planes would be in the skies. One former F-16 pilot told Insider he wouldn’t want to fly missions over Ukraine right now, saying that the aircraft can’t outmatch Russia’s air-defense systems.”
“Fourth-generation fighters “have no business in a modern-day battlefield,” John Venable, a 25-year veteran of the US Air Force, told Insider in a recent interview…”
https://www.businessinsider.com/former-f-16-pilot-aircraft-no-fighting-chance-over-ukraine-2023-5
Business Insider has been a pretty reliable outlet for Western propaganda since being purchased by the German company Axel Springer in 2015. So…?
I ignore anything coming out of business insider, Newsweek, or yahoo. I just presume it was written by the CIA or state department.
No doubt the CIA and the State Department try to influence what gets written, but that doesn’t mean they can just dictate it. I tend to agree with I. F. Stone, who said IIRC “you can always find the truth in an American newspaper, but a lot of times it’s buried in a paragraph on page 18”. I suppose today’s equivalent would be a paragraph in a link on page 18 of your web search results.
Business Insider picked up and expanded upon Mike Elk’s PaydayReport article on Christian Smalls’ ego getting in the way of organizing. No other left outlets that I’m aware of have written about this, and it’s very important, being that he was the face of the Amazon movement and he was promoted to high hell by many left outlets.
https://paydayreport.com/insider-cites-payday-reports-coverage-of-union-democracy/
https://www.businessinsider.com/chris-smalls-amazon-labor-union-president-fight-leader-2023-4?international=true&r=US&IR=T
The “Safety” video you recommend is more testimony to the buggy biological software called “supernormal stimuli”
We literally can’t have too much safety (or freedom, or justice, etc.). It’s blown all out of proportion, and we’re susceptible to the supernormality.
That’s from the abstract to the Swedish study published in BMJ, in the discussion we find
So, a bit of weaslery here, maybe. They’re not saying nothing’s happening, but rather that the correlation they observed doesn’t correspond to a “clear and specific mechanistic explanation.” while allowing that menstruation effects are a plausible consequence of immune system alterations.
Note that Berenson says the study classifies women 45 and over as post-menopausal, which I suspect would make the study meaningless. However I didn’t see that. In the discussion the authors state that they relied on healthcare providers using the correct reporting codes, so it appears to the data they analyzed included data on the pre- or post-menopausal status of the patient, and the researchers only looked at such for women 45 and over. This makes sense as a way to avoid certain types of confounders, but I would think that breaking out women 55 and over would be worthwhile for similar reasons. They don’t seem to have done this, and I didn’t notice any discussion of why not.
I’m sure some of you are sick of me dragging Berenson, but I feel I would be remiss not to point out that while trumpeting the study he appears to have believed it was designed in a way the would render any conclusions about effects in post-menopausal women meaningless. Additionally he hypes the “huge” study as if that’s all it takes for the observed correlations to be significant. Well, you could say the study had a huge number of subjects, because the public databases used are really big. But was the info in the databases good enough? Were appropriately huge resources available to analyze it? Berenson doesn’t give a damn, never has.
Your meaningless claim is all wet.
First, average onset of menopause is at 51.
Second, yours truly among others in your falsely omitted category had massive post vaccination bleeding, to the degree I needed a D&C to stop it. The sonogram I had noted at the very top, “Bleeding following vaccination.” In the heart of blue NYC. That’s close to an admission that they’ve seen this before, otherwise they would not have mentioned the vaccination part.
I’m not clear what your objection is. The authors of the paper dismiss the correlation they found. Berenson calls it vaccine apologetics or some such, while I suspect them of statistical sleight of hand.
Given the nature of their data sources I wish they had considered women 55 and over separately from younger women, because I think that data would be cleaner. It strikes me as curious that they didn’t.
There were anecdotal reports of post menopausal women getting severe bleeding. I was becoming anemic and had to have >$50,000 of outpatient procedures.
The authors of the paper ADMIT a correlation but try to dismiss it because they can’t work out how it came about. Sorry, that is not scientific. I see the reverse tendency in medical papers all the time, of treating correlation as causal.
This is particularly troubling because this is a new correlation and sudden pattern. Did you ever hear of a lot of heavy bleeding in late fertile/menopausal women? No, because it didn’t fucking happen before Covid. Look at the language in this early 2020 article:
https://www.foxchase.org/blog/5-things-know-about-postmenopausal-bleeding
I do not like oversharing, but heavy bleeding 25 days out of 30 is not a normal pattern for any woman, let alone a peri or post menopausal woman. Periods get lighter before they cease.
As indicated, I was becoming anemic. My MDs in blue vaccine happy NYC wrote my tests up in a way that linked the bleeding to the Covid shot. They had clearly seen other cases like mine and saw the vaccines as the only possible explanation for this out of band behavior. And I have never had Covid and my case was discovered before Delta, meaning in NYC you probably had as many if not more vaccinated as opposed to having contracted Covid, so it’s hard to pin it on Covid.
I was unclear in my remarks yesterday.
Although both my Sister and I have been diagnosed with Waldstrom’s disease her diagnosis is recent while mine was diagnosed in 2019 and successfully treated with Chemo in 2020.
Sis will be starting treatment next Month and I hope she has an easier time with Chemo than I did.
I will be having surgery on my cervical spine Thursday and am looking forward to no longer having less pain.
Memorial hospital has been very accomodating in regard to masking and in allowing me to bring my own HEPA air filter for the one night stay.
Being friends with two nurses there (Our kids went to the same pre and grade schools) one of whom runs the ICU doesn’t hurt.
Tom wrote: “and am looking forward to no longer having less pain.”
I sure hope the opposite! Take care, Tom, hope your procedure will alleviate your pain.
I’m an old Man, a few Months away from my “Three score and Ten” which is a happy surprise for someone who was first given the “Last Rites” in 1967.
Since then I have been reminded at least half a dozen times that every day is a gift to be grateful for, a lesson I have forgotten on almost as many occasions.
I have learned that there is no such thing as a small kindness and that happiness is a by product of right action.
There is beauty everywhere if you have the eyes to see it.
Can confirm, though the ICU’s one of the harder places to detect it (and you may be hallucinating).
All the best.
The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won. Atlantic. Micael T: “If they already “won”, why do they keep on waging the war?”
For the same reason the U.S. is still fighting WWII?
Welp, I understand the feeling, but the cynic in me might have made the rhetorical question this way, so I could go on a rant.
They won the war to create moar cattle, but now they have to fight amongst themselves over who gets to eat what cuts of the beef. Those idiots pumped up with Nazi ideology so they will march off to die in mass got that raving, lobotomized look. Who needs a scalpel, chisel, and mallet when one can simply broadcast self-help instruction.
Sure, that. And I suppose the whole “to the man with a hammer” dynamic.
I’m not sure if FBI FISA abuse even qualifies as news anymore, but the Register’s subhead is one of the great ones, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the Leaning Tower of FISA again.
re: F-16s won’t fundamentally alter the course of Ukraine War
As John Helmer has speculated, the F-16 story is cover for the use of F-22 & F-35s which have greater combat range, approx. 1,000km and 1,200km respectively. Which puts Romania to Crimea and possibly up to Mariupol into play.
I think Helmer has confused ferry and combat range.
The F-16s are supposed to be shot down, that’s the purpose of providing them when Ukraine looks weak, and when they really would be useless, rather than back in 2014 where they could have been integrated after 7 years of work. If they had been shot down under the later conditions, then that would make NATO and Uncle Sam even weaker that they do now. Its going to speed up sales of replacements. However, if Putin’s plan to push NATO infrastructure back to it’s pre-1990 works, then I don’t think sales are going to be so hot as K-Street anticipates.