One Million Years Ago, Our Human Relatives May Have Challenged Giant Hyenas for Carcasses Smithsonian
Airports Want To Make Travel More Miserable By Letting Anyone Into The Terminal Jalopnik
You Should 3D Print Your Own Space Shuttle Jalopnik
Scientists Say They’ve Found Huge Number of Mysterious Circles Around the World Futurism
11 Scientists Found a Room-Temperature Superconductor. Now 8 of Them Want a Retraction. New York Times
Climate/Environment
The Bold Idea To Move Millions To Climate Havens NOEMA
The Microplastics Are in the Clouds Now Gizmodo
PA Fails to Buffer Homes from Fracking Belt Magazine
Water
‘A ticking time bomb’: Why California can’t provide safe drinking water to all its residents Los Angeles Times. It can; it just doesn’t care to.
#COVID-19
Hundreds Test Positive for COVID at Disney World, Lockdown Initiated by Report Moderators Inside the Magic (LS)
Looks like schools just reopened without updated vaccines for kids, without masks, without airborne mitigations. Naturally, #COVID hospitalizations surge for kids. Who could have foreseen this? 🤦🏻♂️ #CovidIsNotOver #CovidIsAirborne https://t.co/DWqNaOVIMo
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) September 30, 2023
“Endemic” COVID: More total hospitalizations in 2023 than 2020.
But it’s cool because daily hospitalizations “remain at far lower levels than the worst points in the last few years.” pic.twitter.com/KY5n3tek54
— Dr Ellie Murray, ScD (@EpiEllie) September 30, 2023
SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers pro-atherogenic inflammatory responses in human coronary vessels Nature Cardiovascular Research
Old Blighty
The electoral (wrong) turn: beyond the binaries of Labour Red Pepper
The Sahel
The Sahel Will Define the Next Decade of Counterterrorism Operations The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies
India
Are Food Grains Going to Emerge a Chokepoint if the India-Canada Spat Escalates? The Wire
HEAT-PROOFING INDIA Science
China?
China’s Micron Ban: A Tacit Admission of Domestic Manufacturing Proficiency? The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies
AI will help the US maintain its economic dominance over China, strategists say Insider. The strategists also said it was a great idea to offshore US industry to China.
China’s manufacturing expands for first time in 6 months in latest sign of stabilising economy South China Morning Post
Decline of traditional supermarkets linked to worker protests across China China Labour Bulletin
***
Taiwan’s New Submarines Will Be a Mixed Blessing The Diplomat
European Disunion
Critical approaches in EU law – still a blindspot Transformative Private Law Blog. “We need more critical legal engagements within EU law, because there is mounting evidence that the EU law is in part responsible for the high levels of inequalities that persist and the reproduction of various intertwined power structures. For instance, some have uncovered the ideological underpinnings of EU citizenship law that privilege economic rationality and perpetuates discrimination based on class, others the pervasiveness of the market logic in private law, the links between economic (neo) liberalism and authoritarianism, how the EU economic governance undermines and re-configures the notion of ‘social Europe’ in a context of austerity measures becoming entrenched within EU economic governance, or explored the legal architecture of money.”
New Not-So-Cold War
Grant Shapps to ramp up support for Volodymyr Zelensky The Telegraph. “I was talking today about eventually getting the training brought closer and actually into Ukraine as well.”
Who Is Operating Ukraine’s New Abrams Tanks? Presence of U.S. or Polish Contractors Likely Military Watch Magazine
German Federal Cartel Office Gives Go-Ahead to Joint Venture Between Rheinmetall and Ukrainian Defence Industry Defense-aerospace.com
Ukraine can use German missiles to attack Russia – Bundestag RT
***
Germany’s Die Linke produced a detailed report on Ukraine’s official commemoration of Nazi collaborators like Bandera and Shukhevych, and asked Berlin to condemn
The gov’t refused, likely because denouncing the heroes of post-Maidan Ukraine would undercut military aid to Kiev https://t.co/xToJ6F3BPl
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 30, 2023
Right now, #Kyiv has a thoroughfare leading to Babyn Yar, recently renamed (NOT, definitely not under the Soviets) after Stepan #Bandera, an ethno-nationalist fascist whose Ukrainian nationalists participated in the Holocaust, mass-murdered Poles, and tried to get their own Nazi… https://t.co/ZYMGnvEDZn
— Tarik Cyril Amar (@TarikCyrilAmar) September 30, 2023
Canadian Journalists Are Worried A Nazi’s Feelings May Be Hurt The Maple
***
Russia raises military budget for 2024 by 70%: what does this mean? Gilbert Doctorow
‘The Source Of Russian Brutality’ As Proven By Fiction Moon of Alabama
Ukraine’ Assassination Program Has Gotten So Out of Control that Some of Its Members Are Starting to Speak Out Covert Action Magazine
South of the Border
Deploying Kenyan Police in Haiti is Unconstitutional Black Agenda Report
THE LATEST US EXPORT TO BRAZIL? LEGALIZED LABOR EXPLOITATION Law and Political Economy Project
O Canada
Canada’s Great Grocery Ripoff The Deep Dive
Biden Administration
Ten Reasons Why the Biden Impeachment Inquiry is Justified Jonathan Turley
2024
Liberal group in Michigan sues to keep Trump off ballot, citing 14th Amendment The Hill
Antitrust
“Never Seen Anything Like It:” The Biggest Month in Antitrust in 50 Years BIG by Matt Stoller
Democrats en déshabillé
Against the Current Harper’s. “Where’s the support for Democratic insurgents?”
Feinstein Is dead! like I did with Other dead people, I need to stop anyone from white washig her legacy…
So here we go: pic.twitter.com/PybLuUqYBC
— Esha K 🥭 (@eshaLegal) September 30, 2023
Shutdown Row
Ditching Ukraine aid, U.S. House in bipartisan vote passes bill to avert shutdown Maryland Matters
Rep. Bowman under investigation for pulling fire alarm before government funding vote The Hill
Shutdowns and paycheck-to-paycheck living Speaking Security
Realignment and Legitimacy
Anthony Fauci Was America’s Warmup Dictator Matt Taibbi, Racket News
Right-wing ‘constitutional sheriffs’ movement comes to Minnesota Minnesota Reformer
Police State Watch
Forced Labor Continues in Colorado, Years After Vote to End Prison Slavery Bolts Mag
Imperial Collapse Watch
A New Era Of Mass Armies Approaches Ian Welsh
“‘The undiscovered country.'” Patrick Lawrence, The Floutist
AI
Sam Altman Says He Intends to Replace Normal People With AI Futurism
I Deepfaked My Own Nudes. They Were Not as Hot as the Real Thing GQ
Bush the Younger Legacy
George W. Bush Is Building a Memorial to the War on Terror. He Wants Your Feedback. The Intercept
Screening Room
Martin Scorsese Sees Characters Like Travis Bickle Everywhere: ‘Now, Tragically, It’s a Norm’ IndieWire
Groves of Academe
Students once made Oxford the murder capital of late medieval England ZME Science
Supply Chain
The IRA and the US Battery Supply Chain: One Year On Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia
De-risk? Decouple? A Chinese official says it’s just the West disrupting supply chains South China Morning Post
The Bezzle
Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital co-founder arrested at Singapore’s Changi Airport Channel News Asia
Class Warfare
Accounting for the widening mortality gap between American adults with and without a BA Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Brookings Institution
Truly exceptional:
The Life and Death Stakes of Labor Power How Things Work
***
How will the city implement forced treatment for people with mental illness? 48 Hills. San Francisco. California CARE Courts start today.
Sacklerama! The Baffler. “Why we can’t look away from opioid epidemic entertainments.”
How Kierkegaard Connects Our Surging Anxiety to the Spirit of Our Age Mad In America
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
167 comments
Comments are closed.
“Airports Want To Make Travel More Miserable By Letting Anyone Into The Terminal”
As if arriving at and going through a terminal is not hard enough already-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3GGKF6CsjY (27 secs)
The Airport clip, Surely you can’t be serious…
Yes I am. And don’t call me Shirley.
I guess you picked the wrong week to try to give up meth…. Hehe
Perfect
RE: Eric Feigl tweet: “Looks like schools just reopened without updated vaccines for kids, without masks, without airborne mitigations.”
On masks and airborne mitigations agreed. On vaccines without risks/benefits i totally disagree.
Risk/benefit analyses
As I read it my thought was “updated vaccines” should have been replaced with “improved ventilation” but hell I want the school environment to be healthier rather than the germ growing Petrie dishes we seem to have built and not just because of Covid.
We have so much evidence that the health and well being of children is of even less importance to our rulers than that of the general population as bad as that is. This is just business as usual. Covid as the permanent early retirement plan from the population continues apace.
If they are trying to stealth-infect millions of schoolchildren, then we have reached Jackpot on Steroids.
Covid-cautious parents may well begin home-schooling their children en masse to keep them out of the government-decreed public petri dishes.
What if hundreds of thousands or millions of parents who are too time-poor or cash-poor to homeschool their children all kept millions of children out of public school until every public school was made Davos Safe? A National School Strike?
I like the concept, but the majority of parents don’t see covid as a problem. We ended up homeschooling our kids, but still participate in other kid-related activities (while masking). Other than some other homeschoolers, there is no one taking any precautions at all.
Parents say that covid is just another cold or a flu and no big deal. No one is familiar with any of the risks associated with covid, and even my own family thinks I’m a conspiracy theorist and paranoid when I reference articles that have been published in Nature and other reputable journals. They say people are more sick now because of “immunity debt” or the vaccines, and I live in a screaming liberal town. I wish people would demand clear air, but no one else seems to care.
If I had a dollar for everyone who’s told me “COVID is just like the flu” or “the pandemic’s over”, I’d hire Elon Musk to mow my lawn.
Well . . . all we can do then is to keep ourselves and eachother safe or at least safe-ish, keep our children the same one way or another, and offer our best views and information on the subject if/when it seems socially appropriate.
Beyond that, we just have to accept the sad fact that . . .
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
There are none so dumm as those who will not think.
There are none so lost as those who will not read a map.
And if the blind-dumm-lostness is due to a carefully engineered government and elites-based propaganda campaign against a billion citizens to make them that way, then that would be best addressed by Nuremberg Trials with death penalties handed down and carried out when appropriate. But what would get a billion citizens ready to support such a thing?
The Many Lessons of the Ukraine War – Chas W. Freeman, Jr.
A must read…
Agreed that it is a good piece but Chas Freeman is one person whose words I respect. I might disagree with a few points like where he says ‘mutual animosity has erased the Russian myth of Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood based on a common origin in Kievan Rus’ on the grounds that there are heaps of families that have relations on both sides of the border. Nonetheless, he is a lot more clear-headed than a lot of people who should be more clear-headed – but aren’t.
I would also disagree with his assessment that Russian intervention was illegal. Putin is a lawyer, and one of the things that had been made very clear throughout the run-up to this war was how punctilious he was in taking advantage of the R2P laws created post hoc at the UN to rationalize the NATO dismemberment of Yugoslavia and Kosovo/Serbia. If nothing else, he was required under the auspices of the Minsk agreements to do something to protect the Russian speaking populations of the Donbass in the face of Ukraine’s buildup of forces prior to a probable invasion of their own.
And these are both things that it would be surprising that he would leave out; they are conspicuous by their absence.
> things that it would be surprising that he would leave out;
Given the audience(s) he is presumably hoping to persuade, perhaps he reckoned that it would be counterproductive to explicitly affirm that RF is less lawless in its international dealings than is US.
The thought also occurs that among the “audiences” are the tech monopolies that, if I understand the stories correctly, seem to cooperate with USG narrative management agendas. It may be advisable to let the truth out in dribs and drabs in order to not find oneself deprecated in internet search.
perhaps a kind of “domestic diplomacy”
That is probably exactly what is going on. This…
“Washington needs to support Kyiv in challenging Russia to recognize both the wisdom and the necessity of respect for Ukrainian neutrality and territorial integrity.”
…is just ludicrous considering he had just spent most of his column pointing out that it was Russia that had tried to achieve these very objectives for decades prior to the onset of the war.
Washington is still trapped in the Cold War mental world of Kissinger and Brzezinski, a 50+ years old outlook, imo. They are still fighting the last war, still building their Maginot Line, only to drive RU and China and India closer together. Uh… winning? / oy
Re: fighting the last war.
You may find this funny. It was attached to a comment in the MoA story, and shows how we have to ignore the last war in addressing this one. Richard Medhurst on the Golan Heights….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKCi4tFkeb8
…or how Lavrov drinks Blinkens milkshake.
Wow. Thanks for the link.
Blinken: “legalities aside …”
These people really are shameless.
I sent the link to a friend employed in tech and he couldn’t read the article on his company laptop as the site was blocked as a “security risk”. Perhaps a coincidence.
I agree with the above comments, but it has become unusual to read criticisms of the US responsibility as the arsonist.
Study German militarization of Rhineland in early Hitler/German rearming.
Russia had motive if mostly correct to respond to arming so near. Ignoring the positions which allowed German unification! Basis for deNATOfication.
The ethnic cleansing attacks infer moral imperative. Basis for deNAZIfication.
When diplomacy is refused is war illegal?
Freeman sounds quite sensible overall, but there are a few zingers like this:
Whut? Maybe in some other parallel universe…
EDIT: now I see that nippersdad‘s flagged the same passage. So, yeah, this.
Yes, it is good.
But… but… Whence and Whither NATO? is the most Harvard Lampoon, WASP, William F. Buckley section title I’ve seen in years.
“Liberal group in Michigan sues to keep Trump off ballot, citing 14th Amendment”
This is a spectacularly stupid idea this and here is why. Let’s take a trip down memory land to see how this may have played out if this was a thing in earlier times-
1933 Newspaper headline – ‘Liberal group in Michigan sues to keep Roosevelt off ballot, citing 14th Amendment’
My understanding w/the legal semantics is that that aspect of the 14th amendment was written for federal bureaucrats, not elected officials.
That said, if Trump is booted off of a state’s ballot, someone’s going to try to get Biden (see 10% for the “Big Guy”) off of someplace like Oklahoma
Sounds good to me. I don’t care for either of them.
and many others…
A look at Feinstein’s homes, supposedly worth >$100 million.
Don’t cry for me, Argentina.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12578503/Dianne-feinstein-death-property-private-jet-fortune.html
About the only thing that wasn’t vomit worthy was the picture of the maybe four or five lonely flower bouquets outside the gates of her San Francisco home. No great outpouring of grief here.
The coming battle over the estate looks to be nasty, sadly it is for far too much money and property, but otherwise is a proper legacy for such a nasty piece of work.
Meanwhile, the battle to sell off America’s great WPA era post office buildings is not over. Feinstein’s capitalist parasite, last of three husbands, Richard Blum had an exclusive contract to do so through CRE Real Estate.
She was part of the Democratic Supermajority-Willie Brown-Kamala Harris-Gavin Newsom constellation of looters and mediocrities that has destroyed California, and given a further chance, America.
https://theintercept.com/2015/05/05/watchdog-slams-company-part-owned-feinsteins-husband-abusing-huge-post-office-contract/
Newsom’s buddy, the Netflix lobbyist whose birthday party he attended at the French Laundry while Californians were locked down at home, that guy must have some real pull.
Newsom just vetoed a bill that would have allowed striking workers to collect unemployment insurance, the premiums of which they pay while working.
Major strike is currently agains Hollywood, and Netflix.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/newsom-unemployment-strikes-18390221.php
Eva Duarte de Perrón helped distribute a lot of money and power to the poor and unionized workers. Still beloved by millions of people with an entire museum/shrine in Buenos Aires. I looking forward to visiting the shrine to DiFi.
Evita’s sin was the sharing, not the stealing. And the fact she was stealing from the haves more than the have-nots.
Ditching Ukraine aid, U.S. House in bipartisan vote passes bill to avert shutdown Maryland Matters
There is buzz that a side deal was made with McCarty and Dems to pass Ukraine aid, separately. Wouldn’t surprise me it ends up being bigger and fortified to last for a much longer time period.
Jaysus! You’re undoubtedly right.
Cha-ching!
“Widening mortality gap”. Hard to put reaction into words, horrifying, nauseating, gut punch. Thinking about line cooks and nurses and packinghouse workers who died for the CDC’s sins, while a lot of us whined about the tribulations of staying off the streets.
Now here we are, and the elites’ further gift to the working class: asset inflation of stocks and real estate for the fortunate, grocery inflation for those struggling to survive, much less eat right for their health.
You win the internet today!
>>>grocery inflation for those struggling to survive, much less eat right for their health.
Or to eat at all. I am very blessed to be able to eat right, but in the past, not so much, and plenty of Americans do not have enough money for any kind of food at all, forget about housing and healthcare, but SNAP is always under threat of more cuts.
Cantillon Effect in action. he who touches the money stream first wins.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/biflation.asp
Whether intentional or not, doesn’t the action by Rep. Bowman just further highlight, that we are being led by the most unthinking and uncritical elected officials…it’s like high school all over again. High jinks and pranks, and then we all get serious in time for mid terms and final exams.
Clowns. Just various shades of a red, or a blue clown, but clowns in general. To borrow a timeless quote from Aliens, “We’re on an express elevator to hell, going down”….
You have to understand. Jamaal Bowman only pulled that alarm because he knew that he was entitled to do so. To defend ‘our’ democracy of course. It is a pity that there are no cameras in that building that could have showed him pulling that alarm that might have backed his now saying that it was an accident.
In a complete aside: The fire alarm reminds me that Trudeau’s first apology for the Hunka fiasco was given in what looks like a hallway of some sort. He was standing just to the side of a red and white fire alarm. Is that the Bat Signal to Davos and Schwab? / ha
Utube from The Hill Rising. Just watch the first few seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ynz07mI1gQ
In another complete aside, what did you mean by WEF in regards to Tulsi?
World Economic Young Global Leader, member for at least 5 years at her own dues paying expense (that’s how it works I think), until she recently sued them to have her name removed as it was becoming (imo) politically unfavorable to be associated with WEF in the US given the disastrous national policies its members pursue in the cause of WEF global corporate control ideology. Think Arden in NZ, Trudeau in CA, and Macron in FR, among others. Mayo Pete is WEF. Newsom is WEF.
There was the WEF’s infamous paper and youtube clip (both since removed) saying that by 2030 “you will own nothing and you will be happy.” There’s a lot on the internet about the WEF, its chief backers, and Schwab – a Henry Kissinger protege. / ;) They promise nirvana but create destruction for regular people. / my 2 cents.
Thank you Flora, that’s what I thought, absent your much appreciated details.
Well, one should own nothing and be happy, rather than as in a capitalist dystopia, where the happiness would be solely for surviving the exploitation, which I suspect is what the youtube clip was about, is diametrically also a congruence of anarchism, where happiness would be in the mutual ownership and aid of social relations. I’ve been close to the first facet all my life and generally close to the second. But as the world goes, it is more to having survived the exploitation.
When the WEF says we should own nothing and be happy, they don’t mean anarchical co-ownership. They mean that the WEF-classes will own everything and rent it to us for lifelong streams of money. They will then own the money as well as the everything they rent to us of which we will own nothing. And of course they will own everything they get to buy with the money. So they will own everything and be happy.
You want a goldfish? You will not own the goldfish or the bowl or the water. You will rent all these things from the WEF and you will be happy.
That’s the WEF Davos Man vision of your future. Is it your vision of your future?
My Forbes link on that “you will own nothing and you will be happy” idea has gone MIA but fortunately I found an archived link-
https://web.archive.org/web/20210319013318/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/how-life-could-change-2030/
I think that I will save it to my computer before it goes MIA too.
Thanks. The author lists all the scary things we regular people will avoid if we give up owning anything. The WEF spends a lot of time trying to frighten us into giving up little things like free speech and the Bill of Rights – as a matter of ‘safety’ don’t you know. For our own good. / ;)
I’ll take FDR’s ideas any day:
“The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself… nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Just finished saving and cleaning up that article to my computer but which led me to a second link called ‘Davos 2017 – What If: Privacy Becomes a Luxury Good?’ In other words, if you want privacy you will have to be rich. Everybody else will be ‘transparent’. Note too that this link was from six years ago and they are still talking about it as seen in Links recently-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woHe5DIUnnc (1:00:12 mins)
The idea seems to create a sort of techno-feudalcy.
Oh man, they satirize themselves, a la Saturday Night Live. I could only watch a few minutes without the gag reflex kicking in. Heh. They plan what’s “best for us” because they are… them. But they aren’t us.
A musical interlude, NYC street style.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3yxSO0F2kg
Hey, we just take the soma that these Alphas want us to take, we will be happy with nothing.
When I was forced to read the Brave New World in high school, I was under the impression that this was a warning of a possible dystopia that we wanted to avoid. However, as with the novel The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young, the fools seem to take it as a suggested manual of management.
>>>It is a pity that there are no cameras in that building that could have showed him pulling that alarm that might have backed his now saying that it was an accident.
It sure is, and isn’t amazing how cameras can’t be found in areas like the White House where that pile of nose candy was found?
Or is it like all that “lost” or “missing” footage from police cams compared to all the footage always available vis-à-vis police malfeasance and innocence?
How do I know that pile of nose candy wasn’t brought into the White House by a secret Republican agent so the Republicans could scream ” Look what we found in the White House!”
Why shouldn’t I believe it happened just that way?
We in NY and NYC are so proud. /s
Could be part of being a young NY Democrat. Bowman isn’t used to the power brokers he has hitched his little red wagon to being successfully opposed and denied. He should probably get used to the deplorables eating his lunch. But my bet is he will instead continue to embarrass himself because he is in denial about his lack of entitlement.
Seems he’s also into screaming.
https://jonathanturley.org/2023/09/30/rep-bowman-accused-of-pulling-fire-alarm-in-congressional-building/
Of course the Dems have been pulling the metaphorical fire alarm for years now. If you can’t pound the facts pound the table.
Well, at least the senate pulled back on the hoodie dress code revision. Dear lord, then it really would have been like high school. Have you seen how kids dress these days in school?
How could one live without seersucker day?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seersucker_Thursday#:~:text=Seersucker%20Thursday%20is%20an%20annual,third%20week%20of%20June'%22.
It would be the end of civilization as we know it!
They are cozy in their seersucker outfits, and in those omnipresent pajama bottoms. Both are cries for help.
Even here in the South seersucker suits and dirty bucks were/are always a show of class standing, just as the three thousand dollar suits are. That kerfuffle is not a cry for help, that is a show of class standing.
If the kids in schools these days are wearing pajama bottoms it may be because they can afford no better. In that it is a cry for help on their parts, but I would never conflate the two.
Fetterman was just trying to virtue signal to his base something his actions have proven untrue about him, and it got the response that he expected.
“♫ Elevator going down, going down, going down” — from the musical Hair:
https://youtu.be/odFGFlQxkus
AI (Futurism): …”median human,” a phrase that seemingly equates to a robotic tech bro version of “Average Joe.”
English law and I assume Limited Liability is based on the “reasonable man” or nowadays the reasonable person. Can the law cope with unreasonable computers pretending to be average joes making unaccountable decisions? Can corporations which unleash AI to its full potential retain limited liability?
[Will jury trials and Judges become redundant and it will be AI versus AI?]
I think that by now we should have been told.
Pip-pip!
No, you are conflating case law with economics. While law and economics has infected some rulings, it isn’t anywhere near as extensive as you suggest.
I like his idea.
Many historical laws assume that the individual actor has a moral compass generally inline with societal norms. Much of corporate law defers to prudent business people. One an argue that much of this deference in corporate law, and in many other areas such as family law, and even tort law, to individuals is in recognition that they are individual units who have imprinted in them somehow a version of the shared “natural” law (which originally meant something like the way the deity told us to act, but can be understood by a modern as something like general cultural norms).
Me, I would argue that this is what smith referred to by th invisible hand: everyone seems to be acting in self interest, but social good is served by the invisible hand. Morality being invisible to “empiricists.”
Computer actors will not have this in their actions. They will just have positive law. It does raise an interesting question of how the law should be adapted for entities and actors who don’t have human “common sense” or “rationality” or “reasonableness” (cal it what you will) underlying their actions.
Scorcese article, “…every other person is like Travis Bickle…” Taking that statement out of context, one can easily spin about with open cans of worms aplenty. Opinions vary I will suppose, but that does seem (to me) to be stretching the analogy quite broadly. If behavior modeled after the film’s character is becoming more pronounced, maybe it’s the US/global economy bearing down on the poors, the helpless and the lowest classes that is causing such problems.
Heck, in the middle 1990s we had a spate of crazypants cults and doomers. Koresh in Waco, McVeigh blew up a federal building in OKC, the Unabomber, Columbine just to start a short list.
Or how about the 1960s and the assassinations which were more the inspiration for the film. I’ve never much liked it and think Scorsese in general was overpraised by Kael and the others. But he is a camera whiz.
re: Liberal group in Michigan sues to keep Trump off ballot, citing 14th Amendment The
B and the Dems’ internal polling numbers must be in the tank, way worse than they say. Not the look of a confident party.
Team D doesn’t care if they have to win ugly, as long as they win.
“One Million Years Ago, Our Human Relatives May Have Challenged Giant Hyenas for Carcasses”
I’m thinking that our hominid ancestors must have used fire to chase way those early giant Hyenas away from a kill. Modern hyenas hunt and travel in packs of up to 130 individuals so would not be frightened by a bunch of hairless apes. Think too that modern spotted Hyenas have a jaw strength of 1,100 PSI which is on par with that of a Grizzly bear so what about those earlier Hyenas? Those early humans needed an edge and fire would have given them that. Bonus points as they could have use fire to cook that meat once they retrieved it.
Watch wolves or even ravens convince a bear to give up a carcass, and one can observe that it is less about outright fear that drives it but the cost in energy to keep fighting vs walking away and finding another.
I read about the hypothesis that hominids were scavengers before they were hunters in the book Africa: A biography of a continent (1999), by John Reader, which won an award from the Anthropological Society (I forget which). This version noted that humans are diurnal whereas hyenas are mostly nocturnal, thus they mainly didn’t compete with one another. Proponents of the scavenging hypothesis believe that the goal of the hominids was high-fat, high-quality marrow, rather than meat. Apparently the theory is controversial, since the “man-the-hunter” anthropologists are loath to give up their point of view and insist that scavenging wouldn’t have supplied the large quantities of meat that, in their view, humans require. The matter is not settled, but Reader’s book is very good (some reviewers have described it as “awe-inspiring”) and worth reading, nonetheless.
I’ll put that on the list. Thank you. Scavenging makes more sense from a common sense perspective and that it would develop into large game hunting. Of course chimps are known to hunt even for sport but these are always game much smaller than chimps.
Man the hunter also under-emphasizes both the gathering and early cultivation of wild plants. Dollars to doughnuts it was women who figured out how to remove fibers from plants (especially the baste plants) and turn them into cordage, thread and fabric. Without the cordage it’s pretty hard to secure a sharp rock to a stick for killing animals.
Without the cordage it’s pretty hard to secure a sharp rock to a stick for killing animals.
Our hominin ancestors were endowed with quite a lot of ingenuity and developed a variety of resins made of tar or pitch, beeswax, and ashes to secure their stone blades to wooden handles.
Modern experimental archaeology shows that these mixtures provide for strong glues.
People have a tendon-cy to underestimate the creativity of our ancestors, yes…
>>>Apparently the theory is controversial, since the “man-the-hunter” anthropologists are loath to give up their point of view and insist that scavenging wouldn’t have supplied the large quantities of meat that, in their view, humans require.
It has only taken a century, but they are slowly going to woman the gatherer, man the scavenger, and then, man the hunter. However one looks at it, the further back in time, the smaller the hominids, the less effective the tools, and the more horrifying in size were both the predators and prey, meaning the more impressive people were. I am amazed, really, reading of people four foot, nothing in height surviving somehow predators that dwarf anything today while being their prey.
Man the hunter is more myth than fact. It has taken three million years under multiple successive species, but humanity has beaten much of the earth down.
Movie recommendation: Quest for Fire (1981) by Jean-Jacques Annaud. His screenwriter was a friend back in the day. Took the director 2-3 years to get the movie made the way he wanted to. If you can get the DVD, the “extras” are worth looking at.
“HEAT-PROOFING INDIA” every few weeks there is another article in Links that reminds me of the Kim Stanley Robinson book “Ministry for the Future” – and here we are – par-boiled to perfection –
Here is one partial solution to all that heat and which has a proven track record in different continents-
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230803-the-town-where-people-live-underground
Not a total solution but hey, whatever works.
not a total solution but definitely works –
Turkey has one already built and ready – your link mentions it – Derinkuyu here’s some pics
https://www.insider.com/abandoned-underground-city-derinkuyu-turkey-photos
of course cannot forget that great dark comedy movie “A Boy and His Dog”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPRGiRD1GG0
always wondered why Roscoe liked to lick me so much – better go throw the frisbee for him
The Greatest Film Never Made (Antiwar)
Involving full-color footage — long suppressed by the U.S. government — taken in Hiroshima and Nagasaki immediately after the atomic bombing.
‘Against the Current’ – Harper’s. “Where’s the support for Democratic insurgents?”
A depressing, though pretty accurate, discussion. But the striking thing about this article was the section on Kennedy; first, because there *was* one, and second, because it was easily the most positive coverage I’ve seen in a mainstream media source. I was a little surprised at this coming from Cockburn. He even downplayed some of Kennedy’s worst policy statements, such as those on Israel/Palestine. He is also right about his appeal to possible Trump voters. I’ve been seeing some conservative Trump supporters who thought it was great when Kennedy was running as a Democrat getting nervous about his running as a third party candidate. Some are even calling him a “Trojan horse” for Biden now. Personally, I’m not sure whether Trump or Biden would be hurt more by a Kennedy run. He will likely go the way of other third party candidates, but it would be nice if he could force issues like Ukraine (and Russia) into the larger public debate, as did McCarthy and his father in 1968.
yeah, this:
“Mehlhorn is determinedly of the view that people can only be motivated by fear: “You cannot get people to vote by getting them to believe that voting and participating will materially improve their lives,” he told Ryan Grim of The Intercept. “What you can get people to get really excited about is: ‘If you participate in politics, you might be able to prevent something really bad from happening to you.’ ” This theory evidently finds fertile ground in the Democratic camp, where Trump’s probable nomination as the Republican candidate is reportedly viewed with joyful expectation as a certain path to victory for the incumbent. As one Democratic strategist told me: “It will be America versus MAGA.””
i, personally, disproved the part about ‘materially improving lives” pre-primary 2016, in the damned feedstore parking lot.
and i didnt need a million dollars in ad buys, either..merely a $2 bumpersticker and a willingness to engage with whomever that sticker poked sufficiently to ask.
if i could do that…HERE,lol….
i think team blue has a problem….the genpop of this big asylum is even less afraid of trump than last time.
i predict he wins in a landslide, and pardons himself out of jail…which will be a spectacle akin to 9-11.
“Airports Want To Make Travel More Miserable By Letting Anyone Into The Terminal Jalopnik”
Back when i was a kid a local airport had a restaurant that overlooked the runway, so that we could watch the planes come and go while we ate.
Toys Are Us is back and opening some small new stores in US airport terminals. Airport terminals.
Maybe they figure that this is a good location because they will not have to worry about a flash mob pushing their way into their stores and stripping the shelves empty like you see in some cities. There is too much security and typically airports are located in remote locations. And maybe too they figure that if you have the money for an airplane ticket, that you might have the money to get a toy for your kid to keep them happy on the flight.
Or hope that parents out traveling may stop by to grab a gift of the kids back home.
Maybe they figure they’ll be safe from private equity bust-outs if they don’t have any real estate, assets, or much inventory.
I saw a Lego Store in JFK as I was running to make a connection last week. Is there really a contingent of people who walk by a Lego Store in an airport and buy a $500 Lego Titanic set on impulse? Where is the market for this coming from?
Check it out, buy used on ebay for less than 1/2 price?
My 19 year old coming home from college last Christmas had a flight delay in the Las Vegas airport. He spent $50 in the LEGO store.
my youngest is a lego person…although he doesnt spend that kind of jack on it.
closing his window the other day in order to turn on the ac, i merely brushed a lego bonsai tree on the window sill, and the top fell off.
i was in the doghouse for 3 days,lol.
so, yeah…its a thing.
Makes me think of an episode about Heathrow airport, where after a flight to the middle east had left the gate crew could pick brand new sneakers out of the trash bin. This because some passengers had gone over the weight limit by packing all kind of gifts to the relatives back home.
Same here. My dad loved airplanes and if we’d drive to one of our nearby cities the airport would always be a destination. At Charlotte there was a little roof deck where you could stand and feel the prop wash from the DC 7s.
You can still do that at our downtown private plane airport. No DC 7s though.
I left a couple of quotes from Polish born (b. in Warsaw, 1928) American national security advisor to several US presidents. Here are a few more quotes. These seem to be the ideas US pols have embraced and worked toward for over 50 years.
“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
” This regionalization is in keeping with the Tri-Lateral Plan which calls for a gradual convergence of East and West, ultimately leading toward the goal of one world government. National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept.”
—
I used to laugh at this as mere wishful thinking on the part of the most lunatic fringe of the national security organizations. But here we are, complete with Klaus Schwab and his one world govt ideas … taken seriously by so-called serious people.
adding: The Dulles brothers must have loved those dreams of US absolute power. It seems even dreams of absolute power can corrupt absolutely. ….
I used to cringe at the black helicopter crowd, the ones that thought there already was a one world government (in the form of the UN) and it was coming for them. Now I know they were half right, there IS a one world government of sorts, but it is comprised of transnational corporations, with powers way beyond any nation/state. And it is certainly coming for them, and us.
Time and time i think the one thing that kept the post war west from going completely police state was because politicians felt the need to appear better than the communists.
“Critical approaches in EU law – still a blindspot Transformative Private Law Blog.”
I suspect that part of the problem is that EU do not write laws in the strict sense. It issues directives, and then it is up to each member to turn those directives into laws.
As regards both our New, Not-So-Cold War and our No Longer Free Press:
In September 1914, when the leisure classes of Europe were drunk on free-flowing nationalism, and her working-class was dying in the mud, Hermann Hesse had the sense, and humanity to write the essay “O Fruende, Nicht Diese Töne” (O Friends, Not These Tones), addressed to the aforementioned writers, artists, and intellectuals of the warring states. In it, he decries the censorship by cultural elites of foreign art, and the unthinking, bloodthirsty patriotism of the rich, though he does not so define them.
The title of his piece is a reference to the opening lyric, from Schiller, of Beethoven’s 9th, which, ironically enough would be among the cultural gifts from official enemies banned in America as the propaganda was rolled out in order to incite a “bestial rage”, as Hesse puts it, applied to Europe.
I wonder if anyone else saw the letter to the editor in the NYT the other day under the heading “Ban Russian Performers”. A Mr. Shapiro, of NY, advocates just that, using the logic of sanctions (which don’t work). I was going to write a larger essay on the attitude this represents, but even in translation, Hesse speaks better English:
“At the same time we see artists and scholars joining in the outcry against certain belligerent powers. As though today, when the world is on fire, such utterances could be of any value. As though an artist or man of letters, even the best and most famous of us, had any say in matters of war.
Others participate in the great events by carrying the war into their studies and writing bloodthirsty war songs or rabid articles fomenting hatred among nations. That perhaps is the worst of all. The men who are risking their lives every day at the front may be entitled to bitterness, to momentary anger and hatred; the same may be true of active politicians. But we writers, artists, and journalists – can it be our function to make things worse than they are? Is the situation not already ugly and deplorable enough?
…
All these manifestations, from the unscrupulously invented ‘rumor ‘ to the inflammatory article, from the boycotting of ‘enemy’ art to the defamation of whole nations, have their source in a failure to think, in a mental laziness that is perfectly pardonable in a soldier but ill becomes a thoughtful writer or artist.”
“Can we let things come to such a pass that only the bravest Germans dare prefer a good English book to a bad German one?”
This transcript rambles a bit but I think it is so very much worth a read. Scheer and Blumenthal ponder what happened to the Democrats. They both seem to agree that the Clinton administration was some kind of turning point.
If one doesn’t want to read the whole thing scroll down for Blumenthal’s spot on screed near the bottom. And he grew up in that world with both parents working for Clinton.
https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/29/max-blumenthal-where-did-it-all-go-wrong-for-the-internet/
Thanks for the link.
Blumenthal’s insights here are enlightening, especially given his background. The reflections of those who came by radical politics via a path of disillusionment are always interesting to me; I am a ‘red diaper baby’, so the whole ‘I was lied to!’ epiphany is foreign, and educational. I’m very glad such talented folks came to the conclusions they have; we all gain understanding from their work. The Clintons, as Blumenthal illustrates, are the worst. If not for their influence on foreign policy, how many might still be alive? Millions, at this point?
For “what happened to the Democrats,” read The NEW Democrats and the Return to Power, by Al From. He describes the creation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Clinton’s election, and what the New Democrats joyfully did to destroy the New Deal. In my opinion, Hillary was even worse than Bill, and a warmonger as well. Although the DLC went out of business in 2011, many of its members are still in office.
“Are Food Grains Going to Emerge a Chokepoint if the India-Canada Spat Escalates?”
To say the quiet bit out aloud, it looks like Trudeau’s Canada intends to semi-starve India to force them to toe the line on what the west demands of them. So a form of a starvation blockade. And I suspect that India knows that if they bend the knee to this, then the demands will never end but will always escalate. India can get potash from Russia as well as grain as Russia is having a bumper crop. But if I were India I would immediately diversify where I got my agricultural produce from if I could not grow it myself as I do believe that it will be in the pipeline for the Collective West to do a sanctions embargo on India to make them abandon BRICS, confront China and to criticize Russia while shipping weapons to the Ukraine. If Washington could not tolerate an independent EU, then they will never tolerate a powerful India.
The Wire article is speculative at best and degenerates into inflammatory rhetoric. For an interesting counter argument see
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/3235953/india-slows-lentil-imports-canada-amid-sikh-separatist-killing-row
I do not know who is correct with who shipped what when and why. I do know that for many years India and Canada have been in various spats over preparation and shipping of pulses that have interrupted importations by India.
The Indian government has suspended issuing visas to Canadian
This is likely giving pause to exporters who may be worrioed about financing and payments if things get nasty.
What if India could grow all the survival food it needs within the borders of India itself? Is such a thing even possible? Even theoretically? Because if it were, think of the power of food-blockade-proofness that India would confer upon itself thereby.
“The Bold Idea To Move Millions To Climate Havens”
At least this article acknowledges the fact that a designated safe area may, through climate change, rapidly become a dangerous one. But then there is this bit-
‘Planned migration must be part of a comprehensive reinvestment strategy for places formerly hit hard by globalization that may now present an opportunity for renewed economic resilience.’
He is talking about shipping people to the Rust Belt. So how exactly is that ‘renewed economic resilience’ going to work? For those people to live there, they will need jobs. Ones that pay enough to support themselves and their families. And you will need infrastructure like water, sewerage and electricity supplies. And these ares will need hospitals, banks, shopping centers, police and fire stations, post offices, etc. to support all those people. And all this would require the government to totally abandon the economic policies of the past half century and to invest in the country once more. I’m sure that the Biden government is exactly the one to carry out this sort of program.
Though hinted at throughout the article, they buried the lede:
“It would base national economic resilience on a more circular and “pre-distributive” model, thereby irrevocably legitimating economic planning along quasi-socialist lines.”
So, a new New Deal of the sort that built the South. And, no. The former Senator from MBNA is not the guy to carry this out.
I read this and am unsure if it is a set of policy recommendations or a plot outline for a sci fi novel. Ok, that’s probably unfair.
Disclaimer here: after decades living and working in the semi-arid climes of Southern California and Denver, Colorado, (where we became excruciatingly aware of the fragility of the water supply, not to mention ginormous wildfires) we have retired and moved back to ‘ancestral lands of spouse.’ LOL. Chautauqua County, NY (and its neighboring Pennsylvania counties to the south) has water. And fertile agricultural lands. North County, as it is known, lies along the benign shore of Lake Erie, whose moderating influence allows grapes and fruit trees to flourish. Mostly. South County is hilly (tip of Appalachia) and snowy and is bested only by Seattle (where we winter, with son and family) in number of cloudy hours. The area, once home to furniture factories, cloth mills, thriving tool and die shops and other suppliers, has been abandoned by the government. Our population could be the poster child for Case-Deaton’s Deaths of Despair, what with drug overdoses and suicides. The local radio station news at the top of the hour is a dreary litany of traffic stops leading to discoveries of fentanyl in the glove compartment and unregistered guns in the trunk. Downtown Jamestown is a ghost city, no people living on the street, thanks to low rents, but wraithlike figures wander the streets near the new, expensive and highly touted Comedy Center and Lucille Ball Museum.
Sorry to rant on ….. back to the subject.
So, geographically, the area is ideally suited to weather climate disruption. Probably. The population, understandably, is angry at Government, which has left them twisting in the wind. Aside from the few Dems in South County and more in North County, due to the presence of SUNY Fredonia. And the wineries. But, the working (or what’s left of it) class is already hating immigrants, who they view as competition for scarce jobs. They are not very welcoming of Blacks either. Right over the state line in Pennsylvania, Trump signs from 2020 have never been removed; they have been amended to 2024.
Then there is the funder of the publication: Berggruen Institute. Founded by billionaire Nicholas Berggruen. Who, according to the internet, made his billions in private equity. Using as startup, a meager $250,000 trust fund. (Sob.) Ok, his heart is in the right place, assuming he has one (sorry, couldn’t resist.) But the incongruity of a man who made use of the worst vehicles and opportunities that Capitalism and The Market have devised, to extract billions of dollars, then, his future secured, sets himself up to cure the solve the climate crisis by advocating their complete abolishment and the imposition of central planning, leaves me just a little bit skeptical.
But, yeah. If we leave the next 50 years to the tender mercies of The Market, we will devolve into chaos. And, I am always ready for a good sci fi read to change people’s minds.
I agree with your thesis that The Market leads to chaos, and alternatives do sound like sci-fi because we’ve been living in TINA for so long.
But if The Market leads to chaos, somebody has to be cheeky enough to embark on the greatest social planning task in human history. How do you bring consumption down quickly and fairly without society breaking apart? It’s a very complex system we’ve constructed. How can we change its goal without crashing the whole thing and millions or worse dying?
But what’s the choice? As crazy as it sounds for someone to be modeling how we can finally get on the Limits to Growth “SW” option, the day may come when enough realize the people in charge have no plan other than personal escape. On that day, people who’ve thought some about how as many as possible can survive this may get a listen.
That’s what Hickel, Kallis and Steinberger are trying to do. They call it the Post-Growth Deal.
I’ve been in a greater funk than usual after reading the Murphy piece. And thinking back to a Nate Hagens interview with Steve Keen that took a different vector but arrived at the same conclusion. There is no way out.
Thanks for the link, Henry. I have put the video on my listening list. The effort to convince people that life is worth living without an in-door ice maker in one’s 30 cubic foot refrigerator is going to take some cheeky planning.
Yes. I’ve always been skeptical of these climate mitigation plans that involve mass migration of people. In addition to the need for jobs and infrastructure and other items you listed, people who are moving will also need housing. And we’re in the middle of a housing crisis right now. There’s not enough housing available for people to make such moves.
And even worse, people will only want to move out the climate-unfriendly areas if they can sell their existing home to somebody else and thereby recoup most of their investment. But if they re-sell their home, it means somebody else will still be living there, and the primary purpose of moving people out of that particular area is defeated. To get people out of dangerous areas, we’d need people to abandon their homes, and for most Americans, the family home is the single largest asset they’ll ever have.
I have great difficulty imagining such a program being accepted and working smoothly.
I’ve struggled to come up with a name for the tranches of lethality that our ruling class has been layering up, from deaths of despair through Covid. “Social murder”? “Depopulation agenda”? “Eugenics”? None of them seems to take.
Perhaps “working class cleansing”?
” Deploracide”? If the “deplorables” decided that covid is real and is part of a plot to exterminate them preferentially and selectively, they might suddenly become aggressively and militantly covid-realistic in their tens of millions. And that might force the adoption of pro-public pro-health policies from an unexpected demographic direction.
“Canada was ashamed to have saluted a Ukrainian who fought for Hitler. But that salute didn’t come from nowhere”
Canadians will know when they get their country back again when the government sends jackhammers to reduce those Nazi memorials to rubble and make all future ones illegal. So long as Nazi memorials are tolerated, then nothing will really change.
If contractors, ones that don’t care about their low life expectancy.
Unless the tanks are kept at Kyiv for its defense. The Abrams, like the Leopard, was designed for the defense against a Soviet invasion of Europe, which means its heavy weight and fuel consumption would be less of a problem.
If the report of the Leopard tank being ‘run’ by Bundeswehr sourced “contractors” on the Ukraine front is true, then Americans ‘contracting’ to run Abrams tanks would not be too surprising.
There is always a pool of “young and dumb” folks who really believe that they are “invincible” available to fill such roles. That’s a primary reason why young men predominantly populate the ranks of front line combat troops. The older and more experienced men, (and it’s still mainly men,) are much more risk averse.
“There are old soldiers, and there are bold soldiers, but there are no old bold soldiers.”– Don’t know who said it, but I agree.
The M1 Abrams is a good tank (I was an armor officer back in the 80s), but I doubt it’s any better than RU tanks. Probably marginally better than the T-80, probably marginally worse than the T-90. But RU has developed lots of very good anti tank missiles and drones, and has introduced tank bounties (1m rubles or so) to motivate troops to whack western tanks. So I really wouldn’t want to be operating one of those M1s in UKR, regardless of what salary was on offer.
According to the story on 23 September, they weren’t Bundeswehr “contractors,” they were Bundeswehr soldiers, apparently a brigade (though maybe only part of a brigade). The story hasn’t been repeated by the Russian Ministry of Defense, and does not seem to have been picked up by any major MSM player. My guess is that Russia is not anxious to publicize the event.
Once again, the “narrative” omits a rather important function, breathing.
Mask on!
Have always wondered about microplastic fibers from masks entering the lungs.
Although https://www.strategic-culture.org/ was memory-holed or deemed harmful to our eyes, I managed to find this article at their new address (and it is scathing):
Crime and Impunity… One Year Lying About U.S.-Led NATO’s Nord Stream Terrorism Breeds More War
The fact that Biden and the U.S. have been permitted to get away with the outrage of Nord Stream terrorism is why Washington and its NATO acolytes have continually escalated the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia over the past year.
The sheer total impunity over the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipelines raises an appalling vista of the lawlessness and barbarity in today’s world…
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/09/29/crime-and-impunity-one-year-lying-about-us-led-nato-nord-stream-terrorism-breeds-more-war/
I think that Russian patience is wearing thin.
Yes I had to find the new address by happenstance so thanks for linking it up. Guess Skynet no longer blocks the url here.
Alastair Crooke has a column there every Monday.
strategic-culture doesn’t help themselves by the webpage not showing anything with javascript disabled. The text is there when viewing the page source.
I have javascript disabled in one of my browsers and have no trouble reading it. Try disabling style sheets (Firefox text menu via Alt key: Style/Page Style/No Style).
Re the site in general: it has its share of ranting but mostly prints thoughtful alt views–many of which also appear somewhere else including Crooke’s.
Yes! Many thanks… a very useful tip.
Make that ‘view/page style/no style’
Sunak is now walking back the British troops training Ukrainians in Ukraine, although all the Ukrainian and Russian TG rumors are that the Brits are currently working with Kiev for a crossing of the Dnieper around Kherson as well as potential landings on Crimea.
I thought the bigger announcement was offering the Royal Navy as Black Sea escorts for Ukrainian shipping. I assume that the British minister of defense would have a firm understanding of the Montreux Treaty and that Turkiye has initiated the clauses about military passage through the Bosporus, but maybe not. Perhaps he expects that Turkiye will make an exception for the Royal Navy, or maybe he plans on demanding it of Erdogan because NATO. Or maybe he’s just really ready for WWIII.
I have noted that the British seem to be treating that statement as if it didn’t happen rather than addressing it.
Somebody must have pointed out to him that if he sent British troops into the Ukraine, that the Russians would hunt and kill them. And with good reason. That ‘unspecified naval support in the Black Sea’ would have meant more drone attacks on Crimea which they do not need. Better to kill the men providing the expertise, in this case British soldiers. Sunak may be dumb but he isn’t stupid. The optics of British troops getting bombed in the Ukraine would not have been a good look for him politically so now he is pulling his horns in. Probably to the relief of a lot of British soldiers.
That someone was none other than former president of Russia, a one Dimitry Medvedev. He referred to Shapps as a “newly minted cretin” who is pushing for WW3, and that British troops in Ukraine will ” legitimate targets” who would be “mercilessly destroyed, and no longer as mercenaries, but precisely as British NATO specialists”.
I love the way they use the English language. Zakharova and Lavrov are also always a bright spot. They can cut right through the babble.
One reason to train Ukrainian soldiers in Ukraine is because many of them who were sent to Britain for training were smart enough to escape from the camps and live underground as illegal immigrants. Not sure what their status would be were they to apply for asylum.
Where did you find this info about UKR troops ditching their UK training camps? I’d like to read it.
I’m sure you’re aware of Sean Walker’s article in the Guardian detailing the brutal, desperate conscription efforts of UKR’s military. It was printed in mid-August, and includes allegations of widespread draft dodging, in addition to massive bribery of recruitment officials.
Allegedly these are new problems for Kiev. Supposedly UKR’s best military talent was recruited (and conscripted) last year, and later burned through at the front.
I hope the info reported by Walker is true. I’ve always believed this war would hinge on how long UKR can stretch its limited manpower pool. I thought the UAF was toast as of the summer 2022, only to be proven wrong by Kiev’s subsequent, successful fall offensives. But a year down the road things may be different (in a bad way) for UKR.
The Guardian, like most US/UK mainstream media, rarely prints anything reflecting unfavorably on UKR’s war effort. That makes Walker’s report all the more remarkable, IMO.
The British tried to invade part of the black sea in the Gallipoli Campaign, also known as the Dardanelles Campaign and were more or less was as successul as Cargidan with the charge of the light Bragade. Churchill also went adventuring in that part og the world in WW 1 with the the Galloppi campaign.
I fear the british troops in the Ukrain will not enjoy reoeating the prior British adventures in that part of the world.
Those who do not know their history are condemmed to repeat it.
“I Deepfaked My Own Nudes. They Were Not as Hot as the Real Thing’
Before and after images would have been appreciated. Out of scientific curiosity of course to compare the two.
At least you’ll admit to interest for the nudity and not just for the ‘articles’. ;->
I’d be more interested in a comparison of the results of Magdalene Taylor’s attempt to hot herself up with these graphics/video tools versus those of some artists skilled in the use of those tools can do with the same source material.
Yep. A classic example of a “Lick Bait Headline.”
We’ve been ‘rickrolled’ yet again.
[I’m still waiting for my pre-purchased copy of Hustler Magazine’s “Jeoffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book of Elites Behaving Badly.”]
‘Canada’s Great Grocery Rip-off’
I wasn’t aware some co-op systems paid their members dividends… still a Canada thing? We belonged to our local co-op for years while living in Washington state, made very convenient by the main branch being two blocks from our house. Their profits seemed to go into buying their buildings, making improvements, opening new branches, and keeping their bulk prices low. I thought Amazon would put them out of business, but not so. The members have remained loyal.
Also what little I knew about their boards over the years is that they were often made up of radical lefties. I knew this because I went to college with them. They all seem to have taken a vow of poverty like monastic monks. They smelled strongly of patchouli and could use a shower.
The Co-op had the freshest, tastiest salad bar in town, only to find later it was second best compared to Boise. Yes, twenty years ago, ..Boise.
The co-op that operates the “Konsum” supermarkets here in Dresden, Germany, also pays dividends.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konsum_Dresden
The Food Conspiracy Coop in Tucson offers a similar rebate to dividends:
“In profitable years, receive a patronage rebate: a cooperative practice of sharing earnings with owners of the Co-op. A rebate returns a portion of the store profits back to you based upon how much you spent that year.”
https://foodconspiracy.coop/becoming-an-owner/
Our Coop used to, and then a few years ago after a major remodeling of one store and opening a 3rd store in Vermont, they stopped sending an annual cheque, and it switched to a program where you’d get 10% off one total purchase once a month(like one checkout), and then a few months ago it changed to get 1% of what you spend as a bonus, so it saves up as you go and then you can spend it on your purchases.
Both of my Coops in Michigan offer rebates, when there is a surplus.
Anthony Blinken points out that the Nazis killed 34,000 Jews at Babyn Yar. Then he stretches credulity by implicating the Soviets, Putin, and Russia decades after the fact. He concludes by saying the US is committed, in the here and now, to achieving justice for the victims.
Bluntly put, Blinken’s suggesting America’s Ukraine policy is about holding the guilty accountable for Babyn Yar. That’s how he justifies spending untold billions prosecuting war in Ukraine, to kill tens of thousands of Russians and (maybe) topple Putin’s government.
This kind of talk from a guy who did Harvard? What’s going on in Blinken’s head?
I don’t know the answer. But this week Professor John J. Mearsheimer said something interesting on Judge Napolitano’s live stream.
Concerning Blinken, Prof. Mearsheimer does not waste words.
Sep 2023, Roman Catholic Church beatified the Ulma family, martyred by Nazi soldiers, and sympathetic local police for saving Jews.
The site is just west of the Ukraine border, people like those sympathetic locals are serving Ukraine today….
Harvard seems specifically tuned to produce some of the most twisted people known to modern man.
Uh-oh. Now the WEF is coming after your water. Look out, Louise! (Love the way her hands make the grasping gesture when she talks about water.) twtr. / ;)
World Economic Forum “agenda contributor”, Mariana Mazzucato: Our attempt to vaccinate the entire planet failed, “climate change” is “too abstract” for people to understand, but the coming water crisis is something that everyone will get on board
https://twitter.com/wideawake_media/status/1708082741370139037
I don’t have a Boat. May I please be excused?
Just the re-decanting of MPS or Rev 2.0 … best bit its all of them are elite funded … some might forget that elite money imported these sorts into the U.S. back in the day to fight the scourge of socialism they feared as a result of New Deal policies.
The antidote looks like a composite photo because the striped legs have hooves unlike the paws on wolf like animal. ??
It is a brown hyena, the fur is just covering up its’ paws.
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=569871516&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS926US926&q=image+brown+hyena&tbm=isch&source=univ&fir=zOnHEzSrsh-MTM%252C4dP7P_x8G4H8EM%252C_%253Bv_F7lDN66mscdM%252C5UVo2gm9gsUH5M%252C_%253BX5QEHe0KWVLu0M%252Ck4OYz-EK7hgFXM%252C_%253BDAVA3AuHpj3gYM%252CGwTI_oEkeTQq6M%252C_%253BTeGjVETamCkzRM%252CqBzq1O99hhEqpM%252C_%253BF6hNfPuutTYVTM%252CC7lP2RbgVrcFNM%252C_%253BB7RT6NvrdFH65M%252CapGH_FjP6X9d3M%252C_%253BfMvbqEuBXjWz1M%252CbEwkBRuaM2phuM%252C_%253B0WaKk4Wscn6tJM%252CyF6gS0930yj1SM%252C_%253BE9PzrYeEpZfDbM%252CfPPBtd0NBvFnuM%252C_%253BKkRdo0rYgVy9YM%252CgEDLH_o_lz8nXM%252C_%253BnbuTvy8l1AL0IM%252CpcA1Zlt5CmfAuM%252C_%253BuMghc6F8lB-t2M%252CqBzq1O99hhEqpM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kSGtHBSDPIVDZtjOXeCZJz1YeJLYQ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjS9PfzrNWBAxWeJkQIHY3ACfwQjJkEegQIGRAC&biw=1366&bih=650&dpr=1
IMO, those are just about the ugliest critters imaginable.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. They probably think we are ugly too. Personally I think hyeanas look cool.
Why Can’t We Stop Unauthorized Immigration? Because It Works.
If illegal employers don’t face legal action, then of course there are jobs to be had. There’s a bipartisan consensus to ignore that aspect of this, for the most part.
From ScheerPost, Matt Taibbi:
Matt Taibbi: Footnote: I, Faucius
https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/01/matt-taibbi-footnote-i-faucius/
Lawsuit NY vs Trump organization, a question from the cheap seats. Is real estate valuation about to be turned upon it’s head if a sitting judge deems valuations by “any” leader or organization to be overwrought and highly inflated? Heaven help us, a lot of heads would be rolling if a “mildly inflated” valuation for residential, or commercial, real estate transactions begin to percolate through the courts. What I mean to clearly add – is this the first of many such court undertakings?
I do mean to say, I wouldn’t pretend to defend the Trump organization practices. I’m still catching up on the week’s events, so indulge me if this is or has been already covered. This just seems…weird to observe for a country that went all in to bail out a horrible organization like Citigroup.
https://www.cfodive.com/news/3-valuation-takeaways-fraud-ruling-trump-asset-case/694942/
WTF is wrong with “Science”? Early in the article about “heat proofing cities” I came upon this:
“By 2025, cities are expected to house more than half of India’s population, now at 1.7 billion.”
I thought “wait a second, no way are they at 1.7 yet,” and I checked, and in fact they are at 1.428.
Why should I even read their stuff if they can’t get something like that right? Am I supposed to believe anything else in that article?
> Truly exceptional
Rule #2 (2014, I might add).
#BracketBuster #Feinstein
Well, everyone betting on Harris –> Feinstein’s Senate Seat had their bracket busted today …
California Gov. Newsom will appoint Laphonza Butler to fill Feinstein’s Senate seat (via CNN)
… and there we have it. There’s less hope for Dems now. It’s Biden unless he croaks/drops-out. If either happens, then it’s Harris, and barring some kind of startling metamorphosis, she’s not going to beat anyone. Maybe the worst Nate was right … it’s too late.
I clicked and saw a photo of a younger Feinstein in a goofy outfit, but no text, discussion thread, tweet thread, or anything else. Maybe that is a Musk thing, since I don’t have a Twitter account. Am I missing much?
Try this:
https://nitter.net/eshaLegal/status/1707915190488952845
Mahalo! That’s quite a well-documented trail of evil.