By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Patient readers, I am finishing up a post on social media, so today you must be content with an antidote. My apologies. Talk amongst yourselves! –lambert
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Walgreens is up 0.7% as of 10/23. Tests current week and prior week both at roughly 11,600. Big action in the midwest and also some in the northeast. South mostly green including TX and FL.
COVID-19 Variant Dashboard – USA by Raj Rajnarayanan shows HV.1 is our winner at 14.76%. FL1.5.1 next up at 10.95%.
Positively rate been north of 20% since 5/5/2022. Congrats Biden, Walensky, and Mandy!
Stay safe out there!
From my observations in Central CA. I was at Smith’s grocery store over the weekend and I was surprised how many people were wearing mask. Granted they looked over the age of 60. I work with college students and was told that there are many students that are sick currently. Most don’t seem to get tested these days.
Be safe.
For discussion, because it ties together a few things and made me realize how pernicious some of the trends propagated by the PMC/elites are: I think those 32 oz graduated water bottles that are everywhere are awful.
Theyre awful because they assume you have control over your schedule for bathroom use. Something that all the delivery drivers and other work people don’t have. They’re awful because they seem like an easy solution to people being dehydrated but they’re not something that poor people, the homeless, shift workers, or others who don’t work from home or out of a nicer office can actually use. Yet, just like “eating clean”, they seem like such an easy solution to a problem that most offer it with out thinking through what it means to use that and drink a minimum of 64 ounces of liquid water a day. They’re awful because rather than changing our society so that workers have time during the day to sit down, eat, use the facilities, and drink as much as they want when they want during a typical meal time, we’ve decided to make hydration a side hustle that you perform when you’re doing everything else you’re supposed to be doing. And we’ve made it easy to measure because metrics are everything.
I was recently assessed as someone who is chronically dehydrated and my doctor told me to get one of these bottles and make some other changes to my diet. Since I’m not around a bathroom when I’m in the field working the reality of using this method to keep “properly hydrated” hit me between the legs very quickly! I can’t imagine how much worse it would be for a delivery driver.
In the United States public restrooms are hard to find nearly everywhere one goes, so those out and about toting their hefty water bottles must have strong bladders. I typically drink most of my water early in the morning and later in the evening when I am generally home. During the day I limit intake of water and other liquids simply because toilets are hard to find. I guess neocons rarely have to pee.
In our area, which is not heavily populated but a medium city, with decent tap water – I always drink the tap water and reject bottled. My theory is that if everyone drinks bottled water, then no one is drinking tap water. And if that’s the case, no one cares about their tap water. My action often start a conversation about water quality and things like, how to keep it decent, how it’s being taken cheap and sold by Nestle et al, things like that. Good luck with your hydration and health!
most bottled water is tap water.
From Rolling Stone today:
>When he was in office, Trump would repeatedly scoff at this collective-defense clause of the North Atlantic Treaty, known as Article 5. One former senior administration official recalls to Rolling Stone a moment in the Oval Office in mid-2018 when the then-president started reading from a written list of smaller NATO countries, some of which he argued most Americans had never even heard of before.
>Trump then vented that “starting World War III” over some of these countries’ sovereignty made absolutely no sense, and that he shouldn’t be forced to automatically commit American troops to any such crisis.
When the man’s right, he’s right. Trump reading from a list of minor and forgettable European states is such an amazing image.
Lithuania?!? What kind of [family blog]ing [family blog]hole country is that? If I can’t pronounce it, I’m not sending any missiles to it. Are they going to help us when China sends their beautiful bombs to New Jersey? I don’t think so. Lithuania, you’re fired from NATO.
Lithuania earned its NATO protection for running CIA black sites in the early GWOT. Apparently they had facilities and experienced personnel or willing trainees.
Poland, too.
Everyone is right once in a while. The amazing thing about Trump is that he’s right more often than our putative experts. Which is another way of saying that the PMCs are almost never right on the big issues but that once in a while Trump is.
I’d point out that Trump can be way more wrong than our very special elites, but when he’s wrong it’s in stupid and inconsequential ways. Quips don’t start wars, expanding NATO starts wars.
The Blob is trying to run the table even though their blackjack strategy doesn’t seem to work at roulette but you can double down at any table in the casino, they’re not going home losers! Win big or lose it all (there’s always NZ!).
Let’s see….running up a, what, 1.7 TRILLION debt this year….no way to replenish ammo let alone uniforms helmets missiles planes ships….no way in hell we can supply any overseas troops in a major war because we dont have the ships ready….a president and secretary of state almost begging for a war….nearly the entire non western world against us….half our congress paralyzed and stuck…..and if and when our PMC realizes we are actually in a real conflict situation what can they do? Hollowed out industrial base, no draft, sure to spike gas prices as another oil.embargo approaches, a public blinded by siloed media and travis and taylor, and an administrative state crippled by decades of staff insults and resuctions such that normal everyday things like water garbage and roads no longer work….
The sudden and shocking reality we will face when suddenly things dont work will be dire, and will be soon, I fear….
For those of us below the poverty line, it’s already much simpler and more manageable emotionally to assume that institutions are incapable of delivering actual help even if they were interested – which experience informs us that they are not. As this reality begins to, shall we say, trickle up, once hard material limits are reached, at least the reaction by the entitled will be amusing. If you think hyperbole is running amok in the media now, wait until we start reading think pieces from folks in the leisure-class about their personal experiences with, say, degenerating health care, or bureaucratic indifference/incompetence.
> once hard material limits are reached
Ding ding ding ding ding. We call them “shortages” and believe they are temporary.
Where I am seeing this is with elder care. The safeguards that used to ensure that elderly people were tended even after they ran out of money, are disappearing. Even well off people are being affected, and even if they aren’t they can see that they could be or that their friends and relatives are. Here in Silicon Valley, several years ago four hours of visiting CNA care was $200; I’m sure it is more now, and there is no government program that is going to soften that.
A unimillionaire is not as rich as a decamillionaire is not as rich as a centimillionaire is not as rich as a billionaire.
Do the billionaires mind if it reaches the centimillionaires as long as it stops there?
No men, no uniforms, no factories, no ships, yet they want to start multiple wars at the same time. What do they think this is, 1999?
Not to start wars, but to get pulled into them… What I’m seeing in my feed is that three US bases in Iraq have been attacked and Biden cut short a presser to disappear into the WH situation room.
All one has to do is place a few tens of thousands of troops around a powder keg and wait. No US president ever lost an election by bombing a foreign country.
Feels like semantics when USA is trying anything they can think of to provoke the other side into shooting first.
The particular fighting in ME may have been unplanned, but they are still trying to provoke China over Taiwan while keeping the proxy war going in Ukraine.
And why, so some 80 year old with a fail-son can get reelected?
> No US president ever lost an election by bombing a foreign country.
In 2016, counties with casualties voted disproportionately for Trump.
Two thousand zero two three party over, oops, out of time!
I think all this talk about the US running out ammo and other war materiel is overdone. If there were to be a true national emergency the US can relatively quickly produce vast quantities of armaments (see WWII as a prime example). These days, most of the war mongering is more bluffing than anything. The US elites are not so crazy as to start an actual hot war with Russia and China. Instead, they talk about doing so in order to justify ever increasing military budgets. The aircraft carrier groups are mighty impressive out there at sea, but the US will be very, very hesitant to send them in real harms way. In some ways it reminds me of a neighbor who keeps a shiny late model Mercedes sedan in the driveway to impress the neighbors. It is rarely driven. Much of the United States foreign policy is bluff. That is actually a good thing in my view.
In WWII they retooled existing manufactories that have all been offshored now. Not only do we no longer have the plant to make such things in bulk, we no longer have the skilled workforce. When Silicon Valley comes out with an app for that, they will still lack the phone number to attach it to.
You are also forgetting that both Russia and Iran have supersonic missiles that our aircraft carriers have no defense against sitting within range in both the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. It is almost like we are daring them to sink our fleets.
Sometimes bluffs get called, and it looks like we are in need of better poker players.
I believe you’re thinking of hypersonic (above Mach 5) missiles, which Russia not only claims to have but to have used in Ukraine for over a year and a half (since March 2022). Given that Ukraine has yet to collapse, I suspect the Kinzhal is either in very short supply or falls pretty well of Wunderwaffe status.
Iran has (or claims to have) a hypersonic missile of its own, the Fattah. More than that, deponent knoweth not, save that overwrought descriptions of the capabilities of weapons systems are not a US monopoly.
> Kinzhal is either in very short supply or falls pretty well of Wunderwaffe status
Ukraine would be hard to sink even with several Kinzhals. Not so aircraft carriers. Perhaps Russia was practicing?
At the end of the 1930’s USA had a lot of excess industrial capacity due to the Great Depression. And even then it took 4 years for the US to get to speed with the production and actually build armed forces.
At the beginning of 2020’s USA defense industry has worked hard for decades to get rid of any excess capacity. And in 2020 National Defense Industrial Association’s report concluded that US industry had no means of replacing attrition on the levels of a modern peer-to-peer war. It was estimated that after nine months of attrition US would be able to sustain two brigades.
You could reconfigure the F-35 assembly locations into making 155mm shells, but a caveat in that said armaments can only be shot westward on a Tuesday with prevailing winds aloft favorable.
I’ve been to the F-35 line in Fort Worth a few times. I think there would be facilities easier to convert to assembly of ammunition.
Yeah, but it’s a great way to keep the ol’ money spigot flowing, isn’t it?
But the “US is running out of ammo” is not made up. We had to go scrounging to get Patriot missiles for Ukraine. We are now down to cluster munition version of 155m shells, which are inferior and suited to hurting people rather than, say, damaging buildings.
Whacking Soleimani was stupid, but I don’t think it will be inconsequential when Blinken goes to war against Iran for things done to our bases in the ME by his militia groups. Nor will they have forgotten what his Abraham Accords were supposed to achieve.
Inciting overreach through asymmetric warfare has become an increasingly effective tactic since 9/11, and Blinken should have that embroidered on the pillow he sleeps on every night lest he forget it.
I think i have said it before that USA seem to suffer from a cultural auto-immune disorder. A minor event (in the global scheme of things) results in an over-sized and self-destructive response.
It is ironic that we are apparently telling the Israelis not to do what we did after 9/11, only to do the very things that, per OBL, incentivized the attacks in the first place. I guess it just goes to show that you really cannot teach old dogs new tricks, and we appear to be governed by some very old dogs.
The Abraham Accords predate Biden’s election, to say nothing of his inauguration. There’s no point in blaming Biden or Blinken for something that was supposedly cobbled together by that noted international relations savant, Jared Kushner.
“There’s no point in blaming Biden or Blinken for something….”
Yes, I had meant Trump pushing the AA, but one could just as well blame Biden and Blinken as they are still trying to implement them. A lot of pundits appear to believe that the Hamas attack happened when it did specifically to short circuit the AA, but I don’t really see how they would have made much of a difference to the plight of the Palestinians. The screw keeps on getting turned for them regardless.
I have the impression that performance of obligations under Article 5 is kind of discretionary, in the Treaty as written. Assuming that DJT was aware of that, he was not intentionally speaking outside (his understanding of) the letter of the Treaty.
——
My favorite inconvenient-to-the-PTB utterance of DJT:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/05/trump-asked-why-cant-medicare-simply-cover-everybody.html
Why not, indeed?
Article 5 basically says NATO will call a meeting and decide how to respond. Individual members (meaning just the USA) can respond on their own or they can opt out (unless the USA coerces them to act).
There’s no need to speculate, when the full text of the treaty is available online:
So yes, there would seem to be some discretion about whether to commit troops.
Scott Ritter (who also refers to this text) has repeatedly stressed that Article 5 does not amount to an obligation to defend, that it means each NATO member gets to decide what if anything to do.
I should have used the sarcasm font, sorry. I meant to imply that the US would bully its vassals, etc.
Sadly i do not recall the direct quote, but i found myself thinking about something Churchill supposedly stated about the Korean war. Something about how he himself had not even heard of the place until the year before. But the one good thing about the war, in his opinion, was that it got USA to rearm rather than continue its post-WW2 disarmament.
One wag once said that war is how Americans learn geography.
Mini Zeitgeist Report – Economics division.
Well, yours truly had a bequest from Mom. So far, so good. (It’s always a horrible way to “come into funds.”) Mom hid away some funds in CDs and divided the result between the children and the grand children. The Sisters, being there in Florida, went down to the bank branch. The funds are in a directed disbursement account. Everything was figured out in advance and committed to paper. Sisters presented a Death Certificate and Identification Papers ten days ago and received cashier’s cheques right away.
I, and the out of Florida grandchildren are now being told by the bank that we will be contacted about the funds in two weeks time. All this four weeks after Mom went. Hmmm….. Something doesn’t add up here. (Banks are supposed to be good at adding “things” up. Aren’t they?)
Our son called the bank last week and was told that the holdup was due to the bank having to figure up the division of the “spoils.” Now it turns out that this was after the Sisters got their parts. Which means that the division of said “spoils” had already been managed when son was given the ‘excuse’ for the delay.
Anyway, one big rule in banking seems to be: “Let not thy Left hand know what thy Right hand doeth.” Which ties in well with the idea that banks consider anything that they do that benefits the customer as being charity.
Stay safe all.
Know your Customer inquiries, I dunno for certain but would venture a reasonably informed, educated guess…and to make sure they are not sending out funded checks to those on a “Sh” list might be placing you in the queue for a bit. There is all manner of checking and confirming, unless you wheeled in duffel bags filled with cash from your “realty company”, Tony Montana ( very much an LOL tone ) to a local Wachovia branch ( when they existed anyway, or an HSBC branch ).
The bank calculates the division of amounts, honestly maybe that’s covered in a document the Florida siblings retained but every state is different. To the good maybe you get spotted a few weeks interest at 0.01%, you know, helps with inflation and all. Best of luck though! An added thought, while an unfortunate method of savings being distributed, beats the heck out of hey here come the collectors. Helped my brother back in 2015 to 2016 with our late mother’s belongings, and holy crapola how the stuff was piled up.
Yes. I finally bit the bullet and let the son and middle daughter have at it. If they cannot get anywhere with the bank, then it cannot be done at all.
After all, the Bank, really a Credit Union, has had this money for over twenty-five years now. Maybe they have become attached to it.
As for lists; I wonder if commenters here on NC are on some Homeland Security watch list.
“Keep an eye on any large financial transactions by this bunch. They don’t ‘conform.'”
My Sisters did the clean up of Mom’s things. I don’t envy them that task. They were much closer to Mom than I was. It had to hurt.
Stay safe.
> a bequest
I’m sorry to hear about your Mom (who sounds like a very organized person).
Readers will correct me, but in my experience, nothing to do with an estate was fast. OTOH, everything was very structured; our society is quite serious about the transfer of property. That said, I would consider calling the bank on behalf of your son, or better yet (if you have a copy of the will and it’s worth it), his or your lawyer. I don’t see a reason why the distribution wouldn’t be made simultaneously to all the beneficiaries (unless the records were screwed up in some way, which maybe a call from you would fix, and might even be a pretext for a call (“Just wanted to make sure everything is OK, and do you need anything from me or my son?”)
Thanks. It seemed Mom, who was very organized, had set up a post-decease distribution schedule for the bank accounts. This set those funds apart from regular estate items. Roughly, since they were pre-determined, they took precedence over Trusts and Estate. Having an iron clad will, she avoided Probate. The house she helped Little Sister and her family build and in which they all lived, went to Little Sister. No problems there with me or Older Sister.
The Bank problem I and the Grandkids encountered is that the Sisters went to a bank branch in person and had the entire disbursement for themselves done within a day. The Bank seems to be giving the rest of us the run around simply because they can. We live in other States, etc. etc.
This evening our Middle Daughter got a hold on the Bank Branch manager, after a twenty-five minute holding pattern, and read him the riot act. I understand that Phyl’s sisters husband, the California Lawyer was mentioned as an “encouragement to induce excellence” in performance of one’s duties. He promised definite action by Friday.
Mom would have rather enjoyed the spectacle of it all.
Time will tell.
> “encouragement to induce excellence”
That’s a keeper. Sounds like you have a functional family. Congratulations!
Thank you. All of my worrying over the years seems to have been in vain. The kids have turned out pretty well. My mistake is in having let the “perfect be the enemy of the good.”
If I knew then what I know now.
Hang in there grass hopper, i’m in the same boat although maybe not as leaky as your banking establishment, as my dear mom passed away in July @ 98, and i’m going through the motions too…
Sorry to hear about that Wuk. At that age, Mom was under ten years younger than your Mom, a lot of personal “resonance” builds up. The shock is still hitting my Sisters hard. I’m just beginning to “catch up” to the finality of it. As with your Mom, a big chunk of history has left us. Now we must navigate the past by supposition and faulty remembrance.
I used to kid Mom about where she should hide her Krugerrands. Well, it seems there might have been some, but that Mom’s brother made off with them when he visited Mom fifteen years ago. And he was living in South Africa at the time! Talk about taking coals to Newcastle.
Stay safe in the Defensible Position.
ambrit…
She was a treasure, and not too bad with handling the family treasury. One thing my mom & dad did for most of my adult life was give out the maximum in tax free gifts each year.
I think the max is $15k per person, and if you were a family member be it a newborn or nearly a curmudgeon you got a gift. I think she was up to nearly 20 recipients, and it became a way to distribute inheritances when you could really use the money-as in now. Much of the family wealth was doled out in this fashion over the decades, beating the rush as it were.
In a tiny measure I admire her timing in checking out, kind of similar to the writer Joseph Roth (i’m in the midst of The Redetzky March, a family traipse generationally through the end of the Habsburg empire) & Sigmund Freud-both dying in 1939, never knowing how the deal went down.
The claim is that you aren’t really an adult until both of your parents have passed on, but i’m content to remain a mischievous 12 year old boy, trapped in a 61 year old man’s body.
I think it was Jung who said that. A mysterious figure he.
Your Mom seems to have known what she wanted and worked towards it. Good for her. Plus, she first went through having to abandon her homeland and jumping to a strange one. (How did Canada and Czechoslovakia compare back then?) Then rebuilding in that strange place. She sounds like a strong one.
Oh, and when I was in school I remember more than a few 60 year olds in 12 year old bodies. (Some of the girls in my middle school could make you believe in Original Sin.)
I wonder what Hapsburg War Bonds were trading at after 1918.
I also wonder what American Treasuries will be trading at by the middle of next year.
Stay safe and enjoy the spectacle.
Hyperinflaton hit Austria well before the Weimar hyperinflation everybody is familiar with, and although not as stupid with the gigantic numbers of Marks needed to equal 1 greenback, it was just as bad in wiping out any semblance of the old world order, adios Archduke et al.
I really hope that hyperinflation does not strike America in the near future. Americans in general will not know how to cope. Social bonds will not break, they have basically already been dissolved by the relentless promotion of “rugged individualism,” but will reappear, not necessarily along lines “approved” by the Social Elites.
That’s when local polities will come into their own. Living way up there, maybe you could collect recipes on how to grind the acorns in the old stone ‘bowls’ like the Wukchumni Tribe did to make “Macrobiotic” flour, etc. Also, they may be tough, but bears are edible. And do consider Marmot Surprise! “First, you ‘surprise’ a marmot….”
Be very safe.
Marmot Cong is doing the big sleep until April, so ‘Marmot Helper’ is out of the question until next spring, and right now is go time for as many acorns as you could ever want, no human will battle you over the largess on the ground.
A gent born a few weeks premature in his Mineral King family cabin in 1938, confided to me that ‘young bear meat tastes good-old bear meat tastes horrible!
A potential good thing about food becoming scarce, is all of this monkeyshines about what you should or shouldn’t eat will become the mootest point.
‘Oh, there’s no way I could eat acorn gruel unless it is gluten-free!’
p.s.
Don’t really see hyperinflation in our future, in that I feel more of an all of the sudden surgical strike will happen on our hegemony, not sure how or when, but the 1 thing hyperinflation gets you ready for is the death of a currency, essentially financial hospice.
Still, as the Boy Scouts say – Be prepared!
https://www.gunsamerica.com/digest/hunt-365-simple-gourmet-spiced-braised-marmot/
Here I shall settle for fried roo meat.
Many decades ago a hunter-friend of my father gave him some bear meat. I never know the age of the bear.
I asked for a small piece. ” Shall we waste it on the kids? Ah ha ha ha . . . ” I was four years old at the time. He did give me a small piece. It was very tough and chewy. Not hard, though. Just tough and hard to reduce through chewing. It tasted very good. As I think back, I would describe it as a combination of beef and lobster in taste.
“Nice marmot!”
“Hey! Simon, Theodore, he doesn’t look like Dave! Run!”
“Thanks. I just had it stuffed.”
It could be that you bank is getting your money – as well as a lot of other people’s money – and putting it into very short term investments like an overnight money market and keeping the interest earned before releasing your money. Knew a guy once back in ’81 who went from Oz to the UK over a three months trip and the bank was making one excuse after another why he could not get his money along the way. When he got to London he confronted the bank about where his money was and after checking, found that it was part of an investment in Haifa, Israel – but that he could not have it as it still had 3 more months to go. When he loudly complained they kicked him out of the bank so he walked down the street to the Oz Embassy who were rapidly able to sort it out causing him to walk back to the bank to get his money. True story that.
And for what it is worth, my condolences over your mother. It sounds like she tried to do right by her kids and grand-kids right to the end.
Thanks Rev. Yes, Mom was an “Old Fashioned Girl.” Money was for investing and she never touched the Principle. She even left funds for her Grandchildren, apart from the Children’s Mite. Well organized and focused on her preferred outcomes.
She did not live like an Anchorite. With some of the interest income she took trips, cruises in the Caribbean, a jaunt to Alaska, etc. I’m glad she enjoyed herself. She deserved to after a life of Traditional self denial. Many “moderne” women do not realize just how badly their Mothers, Aunts, etc. were held down by the social system. Birth Control alone freed women from the tyranny of “inconvenient” conception. That was a paradigm shift in the relationship between the sexes. Mom lived through all of that and was a Secret Suffragette for Women’s Rights. Sometimes I think that Dad, raised to be a Traditional Patriarch, never quite knew what hit him.
Stay safe down there in the Antipodes.
PMC rant. The Gaza war. My PMC friends were talking about the hospital that was destroyed. One person told about an alternative theory of what happened and who did it – not the official narrative from the government. Of course he was called out for believing in an alternative theory – why would you believe that – and not what our VERY OWN government says?
LOL, that’s easy, IMO.
He went on to explain how we went to war in Iraq over faulty information (the famous Powell speech and all) so he had reservations about what we are being told now. Oh, that explains it – that was a big mistake but it was done by a republican administration, not this one. How dare you question anything that comes from this one. It didn’t stop there.
“We are on the verge of WWIII and if we can’t trust what they (.gov) tell us, there is little hope.” And, even better maybe; “I doubt anyone browbeat the Canadians into agreeing with the US assessment – they tend to enjoy any chance to be contrarian with the US establishment.” So it must be true.
Incredible. These people are so funny to watch. The pretzels they will twist themselves into, the depths they will go, and the $hit they will believe – all for the purpose to defend the democratic party. They absolutely worship these people, think they are as clean as fresh snow, and are fighting to save us and democracy from all enemies foreign and domestic (GOP & Trump especially).
It drives me nuts. How can people be this…ignorant? Is that the word I’m looking for? I really don’t know, because I really don’t know what makes these people tick. These are the same people who want endless money to throw at Ukraine, regime change in Russia, thinks most of the GOP is on the Kremlin payroll, Joe Biden is FDR, Mayo Pete is a genius and without a doubt future presidential material, Rachael Maddow is a top-notch journalist, Keith Olbermann is King Keith, and the late night comedy people are actually funny.
JFK Jr., Cornell West, and MW are complete and utter jokes and nutjobs and never to be voted for, but would have no problem with Liz Cheney or Adam Kizinger as Speaker. Oh, goody, more war mongers. They are also the same people who wished anyone who didn’t take the experimental vaccines die on sight. I can’t believe how many were all on board with that, but first to shout “my body, my choice” when the topic changed. Hypocrites all.
These are also the same people who will get his epic $hit show we have in office re-elected. NO THANKS – ENOUGH. All that said, I have come to the conclusion – these people ARE a large part of the problem (I guess this is what endless consumption of blue BS through the MSM turns you into). Turns fairly intelligent people’s brains to mush.
It’s almost impossible to talk to them, if not impossible. When challenged, they just dig deeper because they are never wrong and don’t want to be needlessly challenged. We can’t talk to them and we can’t change them. If we can’t vote our way out of this mess and I don’t think we can (and the other team is awful as well and they have their version of PMC as well), what can be done? I don’t like what I see going forward with the economy, the wars, and the idiots running things.
SOS & FUBAR!
> How can people be this…ignorant?
If one were to rephrase this as, “how can fully rational, deeply self-reflective, intelligent embodied organisms” be this … ignorant?, I think the answer presents itself.
We’re not fully rational and we’re definitely not deeply self-reflective. We are “embodied organisms” but the kind of intelligence that it takes to deal well with the scale and complexity of present problems may not yet have evolved on Earth.
Humans are not rarional animals but rationalizing.
Humans are first and foremost tribal.
Agreed to both.
Re: the fundamental tribal character of human societies,
Steve R Waldman has an interesting piece at his “drafts” ‘blog.
Granting his argument, the loss of state capacity in US does not augur well for the future of America as “one nation”. SRW goes on to discuss “state” and “nation” in the context of Israel/Palestine.
How can the US government be fully backing and arming and protecting with its military forces a genocidal campaign of collective punishment and … that odious term … ethnic cleansing? When the theocracy is fully established will the secular Israelis be similarly driven into some desert to die?
Bibi’s dilemma is this: he hangs on to his position in govt by placating the most theocratic wackdoodles in his govt, stays in power, and thus avoids prison; or, he stands up to the wackdoodles and likely loses his govt position and power and then goes to prison. Question is: does Bibi care more about himself than he cares about the future of the state of Israel? / my two cents.
Bibi’s popularity in Israel has really tanked – to the point where I doubt even a coalition with the whackadoodles will save him when the war is over.
“We are on the verge of WWIII and if we can’t trust what they (.gov) tell us, there is little hope.”
This is what is called “an argument from consequences”, especially in light of the fact that the government, whether Team R or Team D is nominally in charge, has repeatedly been shown on numerous occasions.to be disseminating conscious lies.
That said, I suspect that neither the PMC nor our European vassals and lackeys would be nearly so gung ho over an identical war of aggression, if Trump were in the white House. That CIA memo from 2008, suggesting that European support for the War On Afghanistan was dependent upon the election of Obama, was prescient.
Dude, I think you’re harshing the mellow.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair
It’s even harder to get someone to see that there are negative consequences for an action when those consequences do not impact them at all. Or when there’s only a possibility of negative consequences in the future. Our brains don’t work well when presented with those kinds of things.
But consider their point of view and think of how impossible what you’re suggesting seems to them. Are you saying that a hideously well funded nuclear capable government is intentionally misleading not only its citizens but itself? That no one really knows what to do or what could happen if they choose to act and that such horrible things are happening that they have to act? That the best and brightest are just winging it and there’s no difference between who is leading the country?
You can’t come from a corporate or academic background and consider any of that possible. It must be wrong. Therefore… you’re a conspiracy nut.
And remember, they will dislike you for bringing up contrary points but they will hate you with a burning passion if you’re right about anything they believed when you had that argument.
It’ll be interesting to see how RFK Jr. responds to the Israeli war. He mentioned in the interview with Greenwald that he’d review his stance on Israel but I haven’t heard if he has. I sure hope he will, but if he were to become a bit more nuanced or objective, now’s the time to make that adjustment. If he did, i.e. become more level headed about the mid east, he’d surely get many more votes. At least 2 from our family.
I expect him to be an ardent supporter of whatever Bibi wants. I remember when his father jumped into the primaries after Eugene McCarthy’s strong performance. I was disappointed about his rabid support of Israel. I was too young to vote but thought he was a bad candidate. I could readily believe Sirhan did it as he was Palestinian but isn’t that what you want in a pasty? Since then I have learned that “The autopsy of Kennedy’s body suggested that all four shots that hit him came from behind, and powder marks on his skin showed they must have been from close range. But Sirhan was in front of Kennedy when he fired, and after shooting two shots was overcome by hotel staff, who pinned him to a table. Also, Sirhan fired eight shots in total, yet 14 were found lodged around the room and in the victims.” ‘Tis a puzzler.
Both ‘alternative’ candidates have moles running their campaigns. They’re not going anywhere.
Whoever had RFK Sr shot are the same people who wanted to make sure RFK Sr would never get to be President in order to make sure he would never get to re-open the ” who shot John?” case.
And maybe some of the same people who shot John to begin with . . . in the widest sense . . . as in planning it out, setting it up, getting the shooters successfully away from the scene, and leaving behind a convenient disposable Oswald, or a disposable Sirhan as the case may be.
They are indoctrinated from early life to believe in expertise. Many people do not know how ignorant they are outside of their field of expertise. They also are quite adept at ignoring experts that challenge their assumptions. I can not share Norman Finkelstein at work but I wish I could see their reactions to his recent Jimmy Dore and Katie Halper interviews.
I see you have been to Balloon Juice then. While the people there are a full example of what you describe above, they do serve a purpose to study and observe how the PMC/liberals think…sort of like a PMC zoo.
The problem is that our ape brains are still full of our hierarchical, territorial, violent, and selfish behaviors that we evolved millions of years ago before humans split off from the great apes and they have been carried over. Chimpanzees are some of the most aggressive and violent animals on the planet and they are our closest relative. The bonobo split off from the chimpanzee long after humans and chimpanzees diverged from our common ancestor, so the bonobo was the evolutionary road not taken in terms of the behavior of our species as bonobos did not have to compete with gorillas for food and resources in the area of Africa that they evolved in, unlike chimpanzees.
These instinctive traits that helped us survive millions of years ago are now ill-suited for modern society, yet they remain. Unfortunately, we are largely stuck with them as evolution takes millions of years, not thousands. The best we can hope for, I think, is to recognize how hardwired a lot of our selfish and hierarchical drives are, and to think of ways to work around them.
This is a really interesting comment, thank you. I’ve always said we are nothing but “advanced” animals. As a family we always had pets, learned how to train them right – almost like a “human” animal. Us. Not a reach from apes to us, is it?
Some of our arrogant know-it-all friends who are all that and a bag of chips are going to find out what it’s like to have animal instincts for the first time in their life when this global powder keg blows a gasket.
Humans didn’t split off from Great Apes; we ARE Great Apes
Well, arguably, many are, at best, Barely Adequate Apes and the world has a large portion of Substandard Apes.
Cf. Great Apes, by Will Self.
Could be worse. You could be one of your PMC friends – and not seeing the banquet of consequences being laid out for them. Thing is, the reason that they got that way cannot be cultural as you see the same sort of behaviour in other countries as well that do not even speak English. So maybe educational? Our education system is not set up for critical thinking and there is more the element of group think about it. New information is not welcome if it does not fit the narrative. Maybe the problem is thinking in terms of narratives and an early example of this line of thinking was seeing who the goodies are and the baddies and all thought afterwards were base on that initial take.
And that has been the case for at least fifty years. I remember being in a senior level history course in college where the first paper was handed back with the professor reminding the class that he already knew what he thought and he wanted to know what we thought and why. And that he graded accordingly. There were a lot of shell shocked students that day. Regurgitating the lectures was all they knew.
It was one of half a dozen incidents over my years as a student that let me know thinking was not encouraged and rote learning was actively encouraged most of the time. And I firmly believe that things are even worse now.
Here is Bill Maher’s recent take on higher education and the recent events in Israel:
https://youtu.be/fMF0bser1aM?si=66Qpw4LQ8Cd4Az8I
Pretty brutal and lots of (mostly), shots at Harvard.
I have my problems with some of what the Harvard kids said, but Bill Maher is an idiot when it comes to anything involving Israel.
He can be an idiot on a fair amount of things, but like any comedian one can agree or disagree with (in his monologue, he used Obama as an example of a nice guy that came out of Harvard), there are always kernels of truth to be found.
Fortunately for us in the UK, we had the Skripal case to get us used to the idea.
I explained to my friends that I wasn’t prepared to believe that “two Russian men, in ordinary street clothes, walked up to a front door in a Salisbury suburb on a Sunday and casually sprayed it with the world’s most deadly nerve agent, without anybody seeing them”, solely on the basis that my government said that was what happened.
That made me a conspiracy theorist, and “Why would they lie?” and “Okay, you explain what happened then” – with anything I could come up with, from the limited information available to me, being subjected to much more cross-examination than the official story ever was.
Screwball, you’re dealing with a cult and cult like thinking. And like Hillary said, they have to be deprogrammed.
Sh$t, wait, was she talking about the MAGAs or the PMCs? LOL.
I get confused…
But seriously, it is something to behold, the pretzels they twist themselves into as you correctly said above.
It is. I hear them say “everything they (anyone not them) accuse us of doing is what they are doing.” Oh boy! It becomes so silly. They pile on Trump for the slightest little slip from a teleprompter – the outrage of the day – while apparently never watched “end of line” Biden.
I just don’t get it.
Today I learned:
Monsanto manufactured PCB’s from 1935 to 1977. So they’re not some new kid on the block when it comes to product liability. Glyphosate is just their latest trick.
completely aside: I was so taken with Lambert’s post on K-Pop yesterday I’m adding these two old Motown hits. I’d forgotten how much I liked the music, the Motown sound.
The Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTBmgAOO0Nw
and
Martha and the Vandellas “Dancing in the Street”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdvITn5cAVc
Returning you now to your regularly scheduled programming, as they used to say. / ;)
Piggy backing on your comment to add, when I hear the song title “What Is Love?”, I think of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqxuAtuzEeg
Video doesn’t have the noteworthy choreography, though.
> I was so taken with Lambert’s post on K-Pop yesterda
[lambert blushes modestly]
The best party I ever organized was a Motown / Wine Tasting Party. We had 3 of them over a couple years. It was “in the day” so one had to enter the door with a bottle and a Motown LP. Incredible time. Within about 45 minutes, and a couple glasses the dancing was unstoppable. Plus, it was interesting to see that some “white folk” put out some Motown as well as Hendrix and a few others that would surprise you. Try it sometime.
Those must have been some great parties.
For younger readers, Motown = Motor town = Detroit and its auto workers then importance.
adding:
The current strike by US and Detroit auto workers is a thing. WaPo. My 2 cents.
Autoworkers strike at Stellantis plant shutting down big profit center, 41,000 workers now picketing
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/10/23/auto-workers-union-strikes-stellantis-pickup-truck-factory/30ce3536-71b1-11ee-936d-7a16ee667359_story.html
$4.01k update
In what must be on account of Gazans squirreling money away, Bitcoin has gone up to $31,600+, and i’m sharing in the windfall like all other crypto players, no FOMO here and nor are we going to let that little FTX thing with S B-F dissuade us from what appear to be strictly market forces which foisted themselves upon the online bourse in a dramatic fashion.
What a great day to be alive!
Have you been to Sihanoukville, Cambodia? Most of the global bitcoin scams originate there. So, it you wish to make it big in bitcoin pack your bags. :)
I made it small in Bitcoin with my modest nearly mid 1-figure investment…
BTC up 12.6%(!) in 24 hours — Hot Triple Sevens on the One-Armed Bandit of Crypto !
Inflation anecdote, a friend buys an Apricot pie at Mom’s on HWY 116 every year as a birthday treat.
Last year it was $19, this year $35.
Uh oh note.
A week ago yesterday I ordered refills for two medications on my pharmacy’s auto refill site, both needed an OK from my Dr (Required periodically) to be refilled even though they were blood pressure meds and not happy pills.
Dr pinged via Email Monday.
I called the Pharmacy Wednsday after lunch, they pinged the Dr again, Friday I called the pharmacy right after their lunch and then called the clinic where my primary care physician works.
Spoke with one woman who took all the info, then put me on hold before transferring me to a second woman who asked for and got the same info.
Hold again for 10 minutes, then transferred to a third woman who asked for and got the same info the first two had.
She said she’d let the Dr know that it was urgent…
Saturday the Pharmacy texted me to let me know my prescription was ready late in the morning.
One prescription.
I went in and after talking to the Senior pharmacist got enough pills (An advance) to last 3 more days.
These are meds I have been taking for years and they are not happy pills.
And the same thing happened last Month, with similar non happy pills.
you don’t say which pharmacy but I have been having repeated experiences at Walgreens of that ilk—AIs instead of people providing service which goes wrong in a million comical (laugh to keep from crying) ways and corporate restrictions so staff on the ground are hindered in their ability to fix the problem.
Planning to switch my part D because the one I have has them as the “preferred” pharmacy.
Most recently, I used the AI to order a refill using the # on the label but discovered when I got home they didn’t fill that Rx at all but another for the same med at a different dosage—which would not be sufficient. Then because that was filled their system would not allow the pharmacist to put the correct dosage through (“too soon”).
I feel your pain…
Hang on! I’m in the UK and recently drew a blank on arriving to pick up a repeat prescription from my usual pharmacy: Boots, which is Britain’s old High Street faithful. The adjacent GP surgery told me the pharmacy’s failure to put in orders was increasingly common (they suspect that branch is about to close), so they switched me to a different company.
Boots: In 2012, Walgreens bought a 45% stake in Alliance Boots, with the option to buy the rest within three years. It exercised this option in 2014, and as a result Boots became a subsidiary of the new company, Walgreens Boots Alliance, on 31 December 2014.
I’ll be willing to wager that the Boots company employee’s retirement scheme has been looted by the new “Home Office.” That happened to the company one of my uncles worked for back in the 90’s. He ended up having to go on the state managed retirement scheme at one third of what he was originally supposed to get.
the Archdruid has a new one:https://www.ecosophia.net/bracing-for-impact/
pragmatism.
i sent it to both my boys.
they’re all like,”dad, we already know all that!”
Attacks continuing on American “presence” in Syria:
https://t.me/kalibrated/5728
Wait until all those oil trucks stealing Syria’s oil start getting attacked.
https://x.com/fitterhappieraj/status/1716584951255331032?s=46
And Lambert will love this:
All done by volunteers at the mercy of NGOs.
https://x.com/theosanderson/status/1716463132925657459?s=46
Let’s pretend for a minute that this does not have the blob’s prints all over it. How does the world come to deposit the largest genome database to some random guy that may have been born in few different countries during maybe a few different years?
https://www.science.org/content/article/invented-persona-behind-key-pandemic-database
You’ve got to be sh***ING me.
This present day mob would still burn Giordano Bruno at the stake.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
All you have to say to meet today’s Inquisitors in a dark dungeon is to say: “But it still infects!”
Tom, this seems to be what happens to us for anything! No one seems to care whether something needs to be done or not. Went through similar for medication for our cat.
I have been handling my mothers affairs after she passed away last year. Never a fun thing, this has been a horrific nightmare. Mail horrible, now taking weeks to arrive. Statrted sending everything priority mail. That took four days. Send overnight. Two days. Only to have the bank, mortgage services lose it. Have to send again! Usually this was something that took three times to get it to correct Individual. Then days to get it back. If I faxed it, they gave me wrong fax number and document was in another state. No one is competent. No one cares. I don’t know what the answer is any more. You have my sympathy.
> No one is competent. No one cares.
mediocrity is the name of the game—just aping our betters!
Don’t forget. The mediocre are always at their best!
Is this why Washington is supposedly being run by “centrists?”
Bi-partisan is just another way of saying, “Has no integrity.”
It’s a lot like having “access” to something. It’s right there, but you are not quite good enough to have it.
I nominate “access” as the mediocre word of the day.
I worked for the USPS in a variety of roles in the 1990’s including working in mail processing facilities. Delivery standards from the West Coast were: within 100 miles, next day. Within 250 miles, no longer than 2 days. Anywhere beyond (as in anywhere in the continental US), 3 days.
Standards were met 95%+ of the time. Now, it can take a week or more to send a letter 100 miles. And delivery happens maybe 3 days a week, depending on the weather (no more “Neither rain nor sleet nor snow will keep this messenger from his appointed rounds”)
Now I know I sound like a old boomer, but things really are going down hill.
Is Recovery Just the Beginning? Persistent Symptoms and Health and Performance Deterioration in Post-COVID-19, non-hospitalised University Students – A Cross-Sectional Study