World’s Biggest Pumpkin Crowned At 50th Annual Competition Weather Channel (furzy)
Giant Solar Storm 14,000 Years Ago Leaves The Carrington Event in The Dust ScienceAlert (Chuck L)
Lost ‘holy grail’ film of life in Brazil’s Amazon 100 years ago resurfaces Guardian (Kevin W)
‘Silent walking’ is taking off on TikTok, but what does it actually say about us? ABC Australia (Kevin W)
The world’s first true female car crash dummy is here — and it’s a big deal ZMEScience (Dr. Kevin)
Tragedy Beyond the Battlefield: Grief in Homer’s Iliad and WWI Poetry Antigone
#COVID-19
People who’ve had Covid at least 5 times describe how the illness changed with each reinfection NBC (Carla). Covid 5x???
"SARS-CoV-2 is now the only respiratory virus known to directly infect blood vessels.
The study adds to the already large body of evidence that COVID-19 is nothing like 'the flu.' It is far worse"https://t.co/6qTbDd1iy1
— Gregory Travis. Make schools #DavosSafe (@greg_travis) October 10, 2023
ma writes”Seems like Covid is getting a bit surgy around the globe….”:
Portugal
https://twitter.com/RPLerias/status/1710286836357095762England
https://twitter.com/Antonio_Caramia/status/1710042003906449843Canada
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-bc-covid-19-hospitalizations-up-58-per-cent-in-two-weeks-as-infections/Israel
https://twitter.com/BigBadDenis/status/1709692119508713859Singapore
https://twitter.com/KatePri14608408/status/1709135346053808258Germany
https://twitter.com/Pflegeherz12/status/1710219657251069993France
https://twitter.com/Brevesdepresse/status/1709240751949852696Italy
https://twitter.com/Antonio_Caramia/status/1710412533209678182
Climate/Environment
How the Winnemem Winto won their ancestral land back and help save Chinook Salmon Vox (furzy)
Climate-driven extreme heat may make parts of Earth too hot for humans ScienceDaily (Kevin W)
China?
Michael Pettis concluded that rising capital intensity is prima facie evidence of increasingly non-productive investments.
e.g. he is quite clear that the demarcation point when China started overinvesting was in the mid-2000s, when its debt/GDP "began to surge" pic.twitter.com/batV4vX31r
— Glenn (@GlennLuk) October 11, 2023
Canada-India Row
Trudeau Has Thus Far Failed To Internationalize The Indian-Canadian Dispute Andrew Korybko
European Disunion
Finland says ‘outside activity’ likely damaged gas pipeline, telecoms cable Reuters (furzy)
Damage to gas pipeline, telecom cable connecting Finland and Estonia caused by ‘external activity’ Associated Press
Gaza
If this is Israel’s 9/11, we should remember what happened next openDemocracy
The Qatari elephant in the room Jordan Schachtel (furzy)
Israel Confesses War Crime Moon of Alabama
After Biden cheered on Israel’s decimation of Gaza, The Grayzone’s @MaxBlumenthal challenged the State Dept on the calls for genocide and collective punishment by Israeli leaders, and pressed @StateDeptSpox to acknowledge that Israel has killed masses of children this week pic.twitter.com/hskUQOrcUj
— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) October 10, 2023
— Local Focus – Security Alerts (@LocalFocus1) October 10, 2023
Israel Has Never Needed to Be Smarter Than in This Moment New York Times (David L)
Israeli troops massing at Gaza border ‘ready to execute the mission’ BBC
In blistering remarks, Biden commits aid, intel, and military assets to Israel Responsible Statecraft
Jacob Dreizin, in his characteristic hyperbolic non-PC way, writes in his latest:
U.S., Polish, Spanish military cargo aircraft flying from Europe and as far as Dover AFB delivered additional war materiel to Israel yesterday (Tuesday), & that’s just what I know about, & it’s ONLY GETTING STARTED. Most deliveries so far are likely of bombs/fuses/JDAM kits, suggesting that Israel is cleared to drop AS MANY BOMBS AS IT NEEDS TO… which means GLOBOHOMO JUST… DOES… NOT… CARE ABOUT HOW MUCH CEMENT DUST GOES FLYING AROUND GAZA.
jdams. what the us used on the prc embassy in belgrade. maybe these are the "advanced munitions" US flying into Israel https://t.co/YXDtsnkq7X
— chinahand (@chinahand) October 11, 2023
After demanding that Palestinians leave Gaza, the Israeli army is now bombing and reportedly killing civilians attempting to escape through the Rafah crossing to Egypt. This is hardly the first time it’s done this. pic.twitter.com/RKKUEXS3WQ
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 10, 2023
Ben Gvir says 10,000 assault rifles purchased for civilian security teams Times of Israel. Kevin W: “Can you spell ‘vigilantes’?”
Breaking and very important.
There is a reasonable possibility that Jerusalem is about to explode.
Two Palestinian youths have been shot two death by Border Police in Silwan after firing fireworks at the Police.
Ben Gvir is already boasting about it.
Clashes all over Jslm
— Daniel Seidemann (@DanielSeidemann) October 10, 2023
Israel just shut a gas field near Gaza. Here’s why that matters CNN (furzy)
It Was Always Burning…Andrei Martyanov, YouTube. From a couple of days ago. Important discussion of the viability of Israel attacking Iran.
Israel-Hamas crisis tears a splintering ASEAN in half Asia Times (Kevin W)
New Not-So-Cold War
Russians pound Avdeevka with heavy bombs. Can the awaited Russian offensive be approaching? Gilbert Doctorow. Simplicius the Thinker has said no.
Why a joint Israel-Ukraine aid plan would struggle in Congress Politico
Two Former Top Officials Of Ukrainian Defense Ministry Suspected Of Embezzlement RFE/RL (furzy)
Zelensky Asks If This Is A Bad Time To Maybe Get A Couple More Billion Babylon Bee (Li)
Please click through to read in full:
🇷🇺SERGEY LAVROV:
"A series of recent joint exercises by the United States and its European NATO allies was something unprecedented following the end of the Cold War, along with the development of scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons on the territory of the Russian… pic.twitter.com/uLhxZ169ci
— Sony Thang (@nxt888) October 10, 2023
From Aftershock News via Google Translate. Note I searched for similar stories and found only things not in English. Pretty sure not to be mainstream among Romanian officials but the fact it is being said at all is striking:
Zelensky, who arrived in Bucharest, was called upon to return historical lands to Romania
Romanian senator Diana Shoshoaca demanded that Vladimir Zelensky respect the Romanian minority in Ukraine and return historical territories to the country. She shouted the statement during the passage of the Ukrainian delegation in parliament.
“Mr. President, do you want to talk to the Romanian senator about the Romanian minority in Ukraine? Look, this is a map, a real map of Romania, please respect our Romanians in Ukraine Return our territories , respect the Romanians and their language,” said the European politician.
Hhm. Keep in mind Russia has supported Israel defending its security interests:
To the question “why don’t I support Israel?” Telegram channel Joker DPR: "My spies from the SBU reported that more than two thousand Israeli military specialists, who served as advisers and instructors in Ukraine, are leaving for Israel through the Boryspil International… pic.twitter.com/pPwWSDSCZm
— Victor vicktop55 (@vicktop55) October 10, 2023
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Apple Patents Suggest Future AirPods Could Monitor Biosignals and Brain Activity Apple Magazine. Paul R: “They don’t mention their plans for all of us to be implanted with them at birth.”
Imperial Collapse Watch
US science agencies on track to hit 25-year funding low Nature (furzy)
Since people seem to be freaking out over the defense base, well I co-wrote this piece in 2019. The problem is Wall Street and private equity. https://t.co/ZEO1prauqD pic.twitter.com/akn9u5Jl7H
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) October 10, 2023
I keep telling readers that only 3% to 5% of foreign exchange transactions are trade related. More bi-lateral trade will have an impact but is far from sufficient to dethrone the dollar. However, it does have the very important effect of greatly reducing vulnerability to US sanctions:
Don’t worry about dedollarization – the yuan has a ‘paltry’ share of reserves, so the buck is going nowhere, RBC says Business Insider
GOP Clown Car
Rumors swirl over DeSantis’ cowboy boots on Trump social network Daily Kos (furzy)
Abortion
Abortion bans in America are corroding doctors’ souls Economist (Dr. Kevin)
Our No Longer Free Press
Billionaire Ackman, Others Pledge They Won’t Hire Harvard Students Who Signed Letter Criticizing Israel Forbes (Kevin W)
HELP DESK Washington Post (Dr. Kevin)
AI
How clinical AI models’ predictive power can degrade over time STAT (furzy)
Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here NOEMA (David L)
Dani Rodrik Says More… Project Syndicate (David L)
Biden to Expand ‘Junk Fee’ Crackdown With Proposed FTC Rule Bloomberg
The Bezzle
Analysis: Why Elon Musk might lose his latest battle with the SEC over Twitter probe Reuters (furzy)
THE CREEPY NEW DIGITAL AFTERLIFE INDUSTRY SpectrumIEEE (David L)
Private equity groups face investor scrutiny over tactics for returning capital Financial Times
Caroline Ellison Testifies Against Sam Bankman-Fried, Blaming Him for Crimes New York Times (Kevin W)
Bitcoin still trades like it's being propped up by some unknown CB that's part of the scheme, and likely can keep doing it for quite a while.
Not saying that's what's happening, just how it trades…— Warren B. Mosler (@wbmosler) October 10, 2023
Class Warfare
What We Know About the Effects of Remote Work New York Times (Kevin W)
Antidote du jour:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
234 comments
Comments are closed.
‘Max Blumenthal
@MaxBlumenthal
After demanding that Palestinians leave Gaza, the Israeli army is now bombing and reportedly killing civilians attempting to escape through the Rafah crossing to Egypt. This is hardly the first time it’s done this.’
The Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza has now been closed so no escape there-
https://news.antiwar.com/2023/10/10/egypts-border-crossing-with-gaza-closed-off-as-palestinians-have-nowhere-to-flee/
Also, Jordan closes the Israel border at Tel Aviv’s request-
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/jordan-closes-israel-border-at-tel-avivs-request
Did a quick check to see the relative size of Gaza and it is a bit smaller than Manhattan. Not even “Snake” Plissken could that many people out of that place. The following link shows its size compared to other places-
https://mapfight.xyz/map/gaza/
5 miles wide, 25 miles long. Two and a half million people, half of them are children.
And with the Axis of Evil focussed on their destruction..
“[Gaza] is a bit smaller than Manhattan.”
Gaza is 365/360 square kilometers (141/139 sq mi). (The MapFight site gives both sets of numbers.) Manhattan is 59 square kilometers (23 sq mi), according to the same site, so Gaza is a little over six times as large as Manhattan.
My mistake. I went by that page saying that ‘Manhattan is 0.16 times as big as Gaza Strip’ without actually checking. Thanks.
there is Gaza City and Gaza Strip.
overlaid on NYC, the Gaza Strip would run roughly from the north tip of Manhattan to the southern tip of Staten Island, or London to Gatwick Airport.
Israel would roughly run from Albany, Ny to the south tip of NJ or Newcastle UK to London
very small areas, by continental standards
Put another way, it’s 93km (58 miles) from Gaza to the West Bank (the width of modern Israel). Very small, indeed.
Fifty years of Israeli policy of expropriating Palestinian land for “settlements” has resulted in 300 settlements and a creation of a massive Palestinian refugee problem for which the UNWRA is requesting $1.6 billion to handle next year. Seems that maybe the present Hamas invasion is puny compared to what Israel’s done to Palestinians for the last half century.
Shhhh — do not disturb the slumbers of the goodthinkers …
By accident or design, Hamas adopted Russia’s war of attrition technique and dared Israel/Bibi to match it.
Reportedly (NYT), only 1,500 fighters caused all the chaos in Israel.
Let’s assume there are “only” 50,000 Hamas fighters. Now bring your own losses ratio….how many IDF deaths to “win” in Gaza? Mind you, Israel has only ~10MM people, including Arab Israelis.
Even 10,000 IDF dead = worse than US in World War 1.
If I was a IDF reservist, my biggest worry is that everything that the IDF-USA has done was entirely predictable post-mass casualty event (massiev air strikes, siege). What does Hamas leadership have up their sleeve and in their tunnels? IEDs on every corner? thousands of surplus anti-tank missiles from Libya/Syria? 100,000 fighters, not 50,000?
Any sci-fi book fans out there….this is Heinlein’s 1st battle of Klendathu in so many ways: politically, militarily, psychologically.
Maybe it is not so much Klendathu (Heinlein fan here) but more Iwo Jima where those US Marines went in knowing that the Japanese had years to fortify and prep that place. The idea seems to be to turn all the buildings in Gaza into rubble based on all the munitions being shipped in from around the world but I think that I read that for defending troops, this actually makes their work easier. And Netanyahu is just the person to order a ground offensive, no matter the costs for a short term victory. Long term, it will be a catastrophe for Israel.
Alternately, the Israelis could just maintain the “complete siege” (war crime) indefinitely and
bomb away for as long as it takes to satisfy the popular bloodlust.
But dagnabit, most of western – and Israeli – stocks of bombs and artillery have been depleted to be sent to the Ukraine. Several months ago the US pulled out half of the 155mm artillery shells that they had in storage for use in the Ukraine. Most of NATO’s armouries have been emptied out and any stocks that the US sends means that they will have zip to use against China for years to come. In the past Israel has gone for quick campaigns as they do not have that much ammo and the longer a campaign goes on, the more the pressure against Israel in the international media. There is already trouble on the border with Lebanon and I saw a video of an Israeli M1134 being taken out by a Kornet ATGM. The longer the war goes on, the more likley that they will find themselves in a two front war against Hezbollah. A long war works against Israel here.
It does not take a lot of weapons to destroy buildings. See the clip about 2 JDAMS being ablt to take out a pretty good sized building. This is not comparable to artillery fire to hit tanks and men in trenches and maintain “fire control” over roads.
I read a claim the West is sending 105,000 155 mm artillery shells. That’s only ~5 days of fire on a low-ish day when Russia was on the offensive v. Ukraine. But Gaza is undefended from artillery. I suspect that is more than enough to flatten a lot of smaller targets, or alternatively, support the ground operation after air-to-surface missiles flatten the place.
A lot depends on the basic structure of the building. Its striking how many of the old Soviet era precast concrete buildings in places like Bakhmut and Vukuvar have withstood massive artillery barrages without collapsing entirely. I’ve heard it said that in key locations they were deliberately designed by the soviets for dual use – its certainly true for some of the industrial structures, but I’ve never read any confirmation that apartment buildings were made for that purpose.
Just from visuals, Gaza buildings look to be flimsier than anything in Ukraine, but are still basically mass concrete, so very difficult to take down without a large amount of explosive in the core or under the foundations, hence the use of what look like 2,000lb JDAMs.
The problem for the Israelis are the tunnels. The only way of destroying them are very large earth penetrating bombs – its not even clear to me that a standard JDAM would do the trick unless it was a lucky strike, a lot depends on their depth and construction and the local geology. 155mm rounds certainly won’t. Arguably, artillery will make things worse as they will cover up the evidence of entrances, making it much harder for clear up operations. If an entrance is blocked by rubble, Hamas can simply dig through another entrance.
Depends on the concrete. Buildings in Egypt occasionally collapse because too much sand was mixed in the concrete.
Yes, the mix of sand, aggregate, cement and water are essential to making durable concrete. But it is steel rebar that gives a concrete mix its strength and crumble resistance. Placement is important, too. The way some of the Gaza buildings are collapsing, it appears steel rebar is minimal.
In the mean time, Israel is just settling by using white phosphorus on civilian areas-
https://twitter.com/pmofa/status/1711721412283507173
Unlike Russia, Israel is also not trying to minimize civilian casualties.
Rather the opposite.
Well, looks like some are agitating for more decisive methods:
From Middle East Eye
So, are they at the bunker insanity stage of thinking now?
Of course the radioactive fallout will remain in the air and land over Gaza only and not drift into Isr proper or other countries.
Ask the idiots who set on fire the derailed train cars in East Palestine Ohio how that worked out with the toxic smoke clouds they created.
Gen. Buck Turgidson. utube. 3 minutes.
My favorite George C. Scott performance ever – Gen. ‘Buck’ Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZm3qBdECdw
Easy peasy, just wait for a day when the wind’s blowing towards Egypt. Win, win!
One should revisit the Battle of Monte Cassino…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Monte_Cassino
If the IDF runs low on ammo or guns then they will have to slow the intensity or stop the shelling and bombing but they can keep the electricity, water, food and fuel turned off, and keep anyone or anything from entering or leaving. It may be a slower process and less dramatic in moving images for media but it should still work to kill nearly all Gazans, who have been reclassified as animals.
The US and its allies are suffering through a shortage of 155 mm shells. This shortage is the result of the massive amounts of shells being fired in Ukraine. Each of 155 shell holds approximately 20 pounds of high explosive.
The US Mark series of gravity bombs has 500, 1,000 and 2,000 pound versions. These are shared with allies such as Israel. These bombs carry huge amounts of high explosives. The 1,000 pound version, the Mark 83, for example, carries 445 pounds of high explosives, compared with 20 in a 155 shell.
US gravity bombs, unlike 155 mm shells, are also NOT on short supply due to the Ukraine war. What few bombing runs Ukraine’s old Soviet planes carried out were with Soviet bombs.
I expect Israel to use plentiful US bombs liberally with impunity. Gaza will be flattened from the air.
That’s the logical method in terms of brutal calculus. But it runs significant political risks, mostly internationally and even with some potential for backlash in domestic Israeli politics. It’s a short term solution with long term downside for Tel Aviv. IMO, the fundamental problem Netanyahu is facing is making short term emotional decisions with long term practical consequences.
I recall Magnier hinting he’ll soon (today?) publish an article describing how (he thinks) Israel is walking into a trap with this very predictable “gut reaction”.
One must not forget that both Hamas and Hezbollah are, besides fighting Israel, also opposing the pro-West attitudes of many Islamic countries. With Iran and Syria likely on board with that. What Israel is doing now will sooner than later destroy all the goodwill there exists towards West in general and Israel in particular in the “Islamic world”.
Just think how it goes down in the neighboring countries that US is sending aircraft carriers (and bombs) to the area, while Russia is speaking about establishing an independent and viable Palestinian state.
Mark Sleboda podcast mentions that Turkie and Russia are discussing a humanitarian sea convoy to Gaza, protected by the Russians.
Hmm. That might get interesting.
An irony of Gaza’s poverty is that there is little use of wood in construction—nearly eveerything is masonry
So no/few secondary fires to amplify the damage from an airstrike.
The IDF will literally have to bomb everything with a roof and then some.
As flora points out above: 2.5 million people, half of them children.
For every member of their family killed by the IDF whilst trying to flee, and for every one of them whose apartment building has just been pulverized by the IDF, how many of those children will seek revenge?
I’m not saying this is part of the calculus for the leadership of Hamas — such speculation is far above my pay grade — but just that the more Israel cuts loose on Gaza, the more fighters will emerge seeking revenge.
Mercouris has been saying 100,000. I read 100,000 as the immediate call up. I think Israel is well on its way to 300,000.
300k scaled to the US’s population is 10MM mobilized.
that is a lot bodies taken out of the Israeli labor force.
The Israeli commentary class hasn’t awoken to the level of lifestyle-changing mobilization that is on the horizon, if indeed 300k is the ultimate mobilization goal.
Note too that it will be the ‘ordinary’ Israelis that with be KIA, not the ultra-orthodox (essentially the religious far-right) who aren’t IDF. So the resulting population will have a higher proportion of the unbending types.
Israel has relatively healthy demographics which is always important for a mobilization, but the real question is how many people can be ‘safely’ called up given that the ultra orthodox and most Israeli Arabs can’t or won’t be used. They have a very big border for the size of the country to control, especially when you count the unofficial borders around settler locations.
The big unknown for Israel are the recent immigrants (many from Russia) who came looking for a better quality of life and may decide that there are better options if they are facing several years of warfare. And a lot of Israeli’s are dual passport holders (mostly Europe and US) so have options not available to Palestinians. There are also something like 300,000 foreign workers (mostly cheap agricultural labor from Asia) who may also decide they have better options.
Those aren’t bad points that. Just how many Israelis can be taken out of the economy before it has an effect on the economy itself? The economy is already having trouble right now and maybe some countries will want to pull out their investments because of the lack of security. And like you pointed out, the ultra-orthodox for the most part do not serve in the army or in civil life. Probably why the IDF is shaped around short, sharp campaigns that minimize loss.
Exactly this. In the current context, not all of the mobilized can be applied to Gaza. Hezbollah and “Syria” (to include militias based in Syria) don’t have to actually attack Israel to put pressure on it.
It’s also worth noting that the number of mobilized is necessarily going to be greater than the number of contact line fighters. I don’t know the IDF’s tooth to tail numbers, they’re probably similar to the US in theory (7 to 1) but smaller because of constrained geography. The next question becomes how many of those reservists are actually trained and experienced at a level that would allow them to effectively be used in dense urban combat? And finally, for as long as Hamas is running infiltration groups into settlements and cities, some amount of those reservists will be needed to respond. Some number of them will be needed to manage the West Bank, etc.
Just because I was looking it up a couple days ago, I kept finding the number that about 1 in 10 Israelis have dual citizenship, though I’m not sure precisely when the statistic was taken.
Yes, I’ve seen that figure mentioned too, although I suspect that plenty more would have the right to a passport if they needed it. A friend of mine is married to an Israeli and lives in Tel Aviv – so far as I know, his partner and child are not EU citizens, but they’d certainly be entitled to it if they applied, and I suspect they will if things get worse.
In terms of numbers though, the question of who leaves is more important than overall numbers, and I suspect that a lot of people, especially among the better off and more secular classes, will find an excuse to send their army aged sons and daughters abroad on some pretext or another.
It’s the other way around. Lots of people who served in the army and then moved from Israel are now returning back to Israel to be called up. You can see some photos here https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/sjdq81ebt
It appears there are (were – 2018 numbers as latest I could find) 89 duel Israeli/US citizens in US Congress. When I went back to get the link it was gone from DDG.
Hmmm. Apparently dual citizenship was not legal prior to 1967. I might not make it illegal but would probably put some restrictions, including but not limited to holding elected office and donating to political campaigns and action committees.
Not saying it is a guaranteed conflict of interest, but it certainly can be. (Protecting Israel no matter what has not been good for either country, for instance.)
(Let’s put it this way, pretty sure if even ten members of Congress held both American and Russian or Chinese citizenship heads would roll.)
Dunno about Russia, but China (and India) don’t allow dual citizenship.
I think I ran across this at Pat Lang’s website a few years ago by one of the commentators there:
I still have my first passport issued in 1965. On the back cover the following text appears:
“Loss of nationality. You may lose your United States nationality by being naturalized in, or by voting in the elections of of a foreign state; by taking an oath or by making a declaration of allegiance to a foreign state; or by serving in the armed forces or accepting employment under the government of a foreign state. For detailed information consult the nearest American diplomatic or consular office.”
Quaint, huh?
“The list comes from a 2011 article published by the magazine Jewish Currents to highlight Jews in politics and point out Jewish liberalism. It did not say the politicians listed held dual citizenship. The order of the names in Jewish Currents matched [that of a website cited as its source for the dual citizenship claim].”
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/feb/25/blog-posting/no-members-congress-dont-have-dual-citizenship-isr/
Yeah, from what I remember about that link the last time it was posted here, it’s a good thing it was zapped. It listed every Jewish member of Congress + a number more and wasn’t an actual list of Israeli/US citizens. It didn’t hold up against the most cursory check.
I’m supposed to believe that Bernie Sanders ran for President twice and it never came up that he’s a duel citizen.
Perhaps so, but apparently there’s not enough basic stuff (boots, and underpants) to outfit them, let alone arms. Mobilization is different from effective force projection. We shall see.
This number only becomes important if israel invades Gaza. I can’t see any reason why they would do that; just systematically lob bombs and maintain no food/water. It will take time for Russia/turkey to begin blockade running, plus how often can they escort a ship in; how many warships are readily available, etc.
Besides, they’re more likely to need troops in the north, just ring Gaza with tanks and shoot them when they try to break out. Even if the blockade busters are successful, Gaza intense hardships will remain.
In other words, behave more like Russia in Ukraine. And Israel will have far better western press than Russia has received, atrocities will either be ignored or justified.
Otoh, I have heard of secular Jews leaving Israel in the past, and Netanyahu is forcing changes they fiercely resist. Any call up might persuade many more to leave… do they need us or eu passports to ‘visit’ their favorite western country? Imo allowing religious Jews to avoid both mil and civ service while receiving gov support is seriously off putting to the seculars.
Perhaps I misread Louis Fyne’s comment, above, but I thought the whole question w.r.t. 50,000 vs. 100,000 fighters was about Hamas, not the IDF.
In any case, I agree that to achieve their goals, Israel doesn’t need to actually commit many troops to enter Gaza at this time. Just bomb from above, cut off water, power, food, supplies, etc.
If the history of warfare over the last century is any general indicator, World + Dog have done a pretty good job of ignoring mass killing via air strikes to date, though at some point there may be a reckoning for Israel.
If this continues, somebody will inevitably juxtapose images of piles of dead bodies in the camps at the end of WWII, with images of piles of dead bodies in Gaza, following IDF air strikes.
I was also wondering about additional surprises. Maybe for a carrier that gets too close? I think carrier vulnerabilities have been highlighted in multiple war games. I would be vigilant if I was them.
Taking out a Carrier would be a great win but the US reaction would be devastating…I’ve read that the US would respond to hypersonic strike against a carrier with a nuclear attack….Hezbollah..? MOABs in Southern Lebanon?
I’ve read about the Easter Bunny and the Loch Ness monster. That doesn’t make them real. Nor does reading about the U.S. nuking a country or group that sinks an air craft carrier. That isn’t real either.
The US nuking southern Lebanon is unthinkable. That goes for Israel nuking it too.
Russia likely keen on returning the favor for US helping Ukraine sink the Moskva. Ford would be a suitable equivalent. Where’s there’s a will, there’s a way.
Given some propaganda formatting, perhaps, “Bugs, Mr. Rico!” is not the best image….
I’m thinking TRK’s Iwo Jima (or maybe VietNam?) is a better analogy.
Yesterday’s L’Orient-Le Jour, the main French language newspaper in Lebanon, with good connections, had a long, “exclusive” article on alleged preparatory discussions for the Gaza offensive between Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Iran going back to early this year and taking place in Beirut. The article doesn’t seem to be paywalled and a decent machine translation should give you the sense.
Two points struck me in particular. One was the assertion that this incursion was the culmination of a series of trial runs and rehearsals, mainly carried out by Hezbollah, to see whether infiltration through the much-vaunted security barriers was actually possible. They concluded that it was. Likewise, the infiltration strategy itself was largely developed by Hezbollah on the basis of its own experience. As a number of us have speculated, LOLJ’s sources also suggest that Hezbollah’s main function was actually to act as a diversion, to keep the eyes of Israel away from Gaza.
The second was the extent of the political objectives, at least according to the sources. They involved
“reinforcing the control of Hamas and Islamic Jihad over the Palestinian territory and underlining the weakness of the Palestinian Authority … provoking incidents on the West Bank to tie up the Israelis on a new front … freeing the largest number of Palestinian prisoners and imposing conditions which could change the rules of engagement and the balance of power.” This could even “oblige Tel Aviv to lift the siege of Gaza, or even give it independence and official and legal recognition.” And at the regional level the idea is to block the Saudi-Israeli rapprochement (and similar moves) and establish Iran in the region as the main actor in any resolution of the Israel/Palestine problem. Hezbollah is not planning to intervene, but will do so ‘”if necessary”, ie if it looks as though Gaza will be destroyed.
None of this is really surprising , except perhaps for its ambitions, and the leak was presumably intended to pass a message to the West, through a newspaper which is widely read by specialists there.
Frankly I think that that story is just a plant. There are different factions seeking to make us of the present war in Gaza with the two most notable being those that seek to limit this war to just Israel and Gaza and those that want to widen this war and bring in outside actors like Hezbollah and even Iran. Having a story come out saying that it is really all about Israel versus Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad & Iran gives fuel to those who want to widen this war and neither Hezbollah or Iran would sanction any source coming out saying this, especially when it is almost certainly not true. Perhaps this planted story came from French spooks or perhaps they are doing this on behalf of the Neocons. Who can tell? And let us entertain the possibility of it being true for a moment. Has Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad & Iran never heard of operational security then?
I’m not sure you quite understand. LOLJ is a (very) long-established newspaper published in Beirut, and read mostly by Christians and by the educated middle-classes who all speak French (it’s the second language after Arabic.) Like all Lebanese newspapers it has its networks of contacts in the main political parties, of which Hezbollah is one, and, if memory serves, the journalist who wrote this story has very good sources in Hezbollah, from which the story almost certainly came. I know the country and its politics reasonably well, although I yield to anyone better informed and experienced, but as far as I can see the chances of a newspaper like LOLJ allowing itself to be a conduit for a western intelligence service (why?) to presumably influence its Lebanese readership (why?) with a story like this attributed to one of the journalists, are so small as to not deserve attention.
As with all such stories of course we don’t know how authoritative it is, but, as I said, there’s nothing inherently impossible in it. Senior officials from Hezbollah, Hamas and IJ met in Beirut earlier this year, and the meeting (one of a number apparently) was announced to the Press at the time.
I’ve read now in several places that Hamas and Hezbollah had a fall out when Morsi became president of Egypt and Hamas (being originally from Islamic Brotherhood) turned away from Hezbollah, Iran and others (regardless of several factions inside Hamas opposing such a move) since they figured Morsi’s Egypt would be their best bet.
Then army forced Morsi out, Egypt closed the border to Gaza and Hamas leadership started immediately patching relations to Hezbollah and Iran. Not that those had deteriorated too much in the file and rank level, anyway. That was 10 years ago.
I can stand corrected on this by anyone who knows the region better, but I’m not sure its true to say that Hamas and Hezbollah have every had a good relationship on the ground or otherwise. Hezbollah has been engaged in hot warfare with Hamas allies in Lebanon and Syria for as long as it has existed (ironically, they’ve often been closer to Christian and Druze groupings). Hamas has had strong links with Syrian rebel groups who were fighting Assad and Hezbollah in the civil war – they only formally regained links with Assad last year, after it was clear that their allies had lost. Hamas has similarly had closer relations with extremist sunni groups in Lebanon, who are Hezbollahs main rivals and enemy. Hezbollah have long worked better with Fatah and are no doubt fully aware that Israel has tolerated or even encouraged Hamas in order to split the Palestinian cause. Although I suspect they are suspicious of both on the basis of what they will have seen as various forms of collaboration with the US/Israel in the past.
Of course, to complicate things, Qatar is the main funder of Hamas, and is the closest of the sunni gulf states to Iran, so there may be some links there.
But I’m quite certain that any sense of allegiance they owe each other is entirely down to pragmatic reasons. They are religious and political rivals with very different worldviews.
Boggle… for my sins in depending on the American press for world news.
I went looking for a map or flow chart of who’s who and what’s what in the Middle East today, but everything I came up with was dated by years.
Here’s the latest what’s up from Magnier.
I don’t know if you count these writers as “knows the region better”, they certainly do know it better than I do:
Flexible Resistance: How Hezbollah and Hamas Are Mending Ties by Maren Koss, who literally wrote a book on Hamas and Hezbollah.
Also Beyond al-Qaeda: Part 2, The Outer Rings of the Terrorist Universe published by RAND. I know, I know, but it digs deeper into the fact that both organizations rejected al-Qaeda, and for a very similar reason. While both came from a very pan-Islamistic background (wali al-faqih and Muslim Brotherhood respectively), both in reality reject that and are very, very nationalistic in their program.
The same can be read from Shamir Shalabi’s thesis Hezbollah: Ideology, Practice, and the Arab Revolts – Between popular legitimacy and strategic interests from Arabic Studies in Lund University.
The only exception Hezbollah makes in it’s national agenda is the liberation of Palestine, because the holy shrines should be controlled by Muslims. And for this they see the Palestinian national movement (Hamas, Islamic Jihad etc) as a tool to an end.
The author is affiliated with The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which Wikipedia describes as “a pro-Israel American think tank based in Washington, D.C…focused on the foreign policy of the United States in the Near East.” By definition, that is a very ideological source. I can think of a number of reasons why this would appear in a “Francophone” publication in Lebanon. Let’s see if it is picked up or cited in other Western sources.
As I said in another comment, I can believe that Iran had some knowledge of, perhaps “monitored,” and supported the outcome of this attack. But the story makes this sound like it was a coordinated operation by the “axis of resistance” (why does that phrase sound familiar?). Could be. But given the interests who are furiously pushing this scenario, not the least of which is the powerful Israel lobby, I’m going to be cautious.
The tweets of the Executive Director of the The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Robert Satloff, will quickly disabuse anyone of the notion that this is not a pro-Israeli institute. Also, a hangout for ex US State Department people such as David Pollock. Nothing anywhere on their funding sources.
Yes. My comment may have been a little misleading in calling the author “affiliated” with the Institute. He is a Lebanese journalist who is not formally a fellow as far as I know. Rather, his work has been featured by the Institute, particularly on its Fikra Forum (which I believe is directed by Pollock, at least at one time). I would guess this is because there is a running theme of an “Iran Project” in his articles about the region, controlling, or perhaps subverting, interests of Hezbollah, Syria, Iraq, etc. The article in question here is quite convergent with the Washington Institute line.
Every Lebanese journalist I have ever met (and many academics) has a side gig: it helps to put food on the table. And even Washington can be right occasionally.
For what it’s worth, Al Akhbar, progressive but sometimes accused of being too close to Hezbollah, is also stressing the “coordination” between “the forces and governments of the Axis of resistance” which has intensified in the last 24 hours, and their direct contact with the Palestinians. Hezbollah (“the Resistance”) has, it said, put its forces on alert in case they have to join the battle directly as a result of escalation by “the occupier.” This seems to mean any attempt to displace the Palestinians, or start a full-scale ground assault. The paper also claims that the result of exchanges of fire across the border has been to calm Israel, and cause it to evacuate settlements along the border itself. Interestingly, the paper also claims that “the resistance” has fired Kornet missiles, which would be bad news for Israel if true.
‘LOLJ is a (very) long-established newspaper published in Beirut, and read mostly by Christians and by the educated middle-classes who all speak French’
Sorry but that means nothing. Let’s reword that to show you what I mean-
‘The New York Times is a (very) long-established newspaper published in New York, and read mostly by political players and by the educated middle-classes who all speak English.’
And we all know the NYT’s history. This sort of article would serve as rocket fuel for those wanting to widen the war to Lebanon and Iran which immediately raises my suspicions.
So where is Hezbollah? I keep waiting. Will Hamás bu hung out to dry again? The lack of solidarity with the Palestinian cause has led to this. Will this finally be the tome?
Just to be clear, Hezbollah are not Palestinians. Their explicit aim is the protection of Lebanon and the reclamation of lands lost to Israel, which they claim to be part of Lebanon, not Palestinian.
can you imagine….the fate of the Mideast might literally depend on an anonymous Jack Ryan-type analyst having to persistently explain, like a kindergarten teacher, to a DC briefing room the difference between Iranians, Palestinians, Hamas, Hezbollah….their overlaps and their differences.
Back when the US was getting ready to invade Iraq, somebody had to explain to George Bush that the Muslims were just not one group but consisted of Sunni and Shia factions. Maybe they told him how it was like Christians were mostly made up of Catholics and Protestants. He had no idea but then again he always was an ignorant man who had zero curiosity about the world and never even got a passport until he became President.
Americans in general are vastly ignorant about the rest of the world. No reason why that wouldn’t apply to party boy Dubya.
Trump is not much different in many ways which is why he was also able to be manipulated on foreign policy. Meanwhile smarter people like RFK focus on domestic issues while spouting the party line on this situation.
It’s this vast ignorance that has really given the hegemon the space to become the “empire of chaos” overseas. 9/11 was an indeed terrorist attempt to penetrate the sense of impunity as was this fresh example in the Middle East. Without that sense of impunity America’s rulers couldn’t act the way they do and the same apples to Israel. Slaughtering Gaza is bad, but how many did we slaughter after 9/11? It’s time for all the incessant virtue signalers in the US to call out bad actions by everyone, and not just the people they don’t like.
Shows how stupid and ignorant the electorate is in this country.
According to news sources, between 20 and 100 drones have hit northern Israel from Lebanon about an hour ago. Also “commando groups” have entered northern Israel from Lebanon by sea and by air. Originally it was assumed to be Hezbollah, but now the words is that this is still Hamas groups.
For all practical purposes, Israel is engaged in two front war. Since Hezbollah allows Hamas to use Lebanon as staging ground, Israel “has no choice” but to strike Lebanon. And then Hezbollah just “has to” retaliate. Not just the way the two have been sniping at each other over the no-mans-land for a few days now, but in a way more serious way.
Now IDF says the drones were a flock of pigdeons that looked like drones in radar. So the attack helicopters, flares and shooting in the Lebanese border was just very nervous IDF showing it’s high level of professionalism.
My apologies for not waiting for further confirmation.
But Birds Aren’t Real :-)
If I were Hezbollah, I would wait until the IDF was very well committed to its Gaza bloodbath (particularly having moved whatever ground forces and materiel hard by) before opening a big second front. It would make their intervention look morally justified and would do more to encourage formal/informal support from neighboring countries.
If I were Hezbollah, I’d sit this one out. While they are well dug into defensive positions in Southern Lebanon, they would be slaughtered if they left those positions to march on Israel. Sure, they can let some missiles fly, but for what purpose?
Also, as war is politics by other means, I don’t see any political goal Hezbollah would obtain by striking Israel now. Maybe Hezbollah and Syria will try to regain the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms once Israel is in the middle of a ground invasion of Gaza. That’s complete speculation on my part, bit don’t see Hezbollah doing anything now.
Hezbollah waiting “until the IDF was very well committed to its Gaza bloodbath” so US has to provide Israel with direct support on a second front by taking out Hezbollah positions. This would make an anti-US jihad “morally justified and would do more to encourage formal
/informalsupport fromneighboring” Muslim countries globally.This is not a local conflict. Its global implications are deeper, broader, and far far worse than the Ukraine/Russia conflict (which is bad enough by itself). This has been brewing for a very long.
they managed to spoof the AD in N Israel (or somebody got jumpy and pushed the wrong button). AD alarms all over N Israel, rockets, paratroopers, from Syria and Lebanon.
All seems to be a spoof, or mistake.
I think its not often appreciated just how much Hamas hates Hezbollah and vice versa – they have little in common apart from their main enemy. But that seems enough for now for them to work together.
I think its striking just how well trained and organised Hamas has been, and its very hard to believe that this is an organic development – they have clearly received a lot of training and technical aid. It wasn’t verified, but yesterday I watched what was claimed to be a training video of Hamas soldiers destroying security fences. It wasn’t geolocated, but its hard to believe they could have done this within Gaza, so presumably they have been able to train soldiers somewhere else – presumably in Lebanon or Syria or perhaps somewhere in North Africa. The techniques seem straight of the Hezbollah manual, although possibly with a lot of input from Isis types. And whatever you say about Isis, they revolutionized the way irregular forces can operate in the modern war environment.
So I don’t find the idea unlikely that there were formal agreements in place, although presumably Hamas is well aware that Hezbollah and Iran would only attack if it was in their interest. For now its probably in the latters interest to keep things within the unofficial ground rules of conflict over Israels northern border. But that could easily change. I think if things escalate its much more likely to come from unrest in the West Bank.
I am reserving judgment on such a complex, or convoluted, issue until more information trickles out. But this strikes me as the most accurate description of the relationship between these parties at present. As Rev Kev states above, there is a desperate neocon push to link all these entities together and expand this conflict to Iran, which of course is in the interest of Israel’s reactionary government as well. I have no difficulty believing that Iran was knowledgeable at some level. But as you point out PK, the idea that Hamas is basically a proxy for Iran or Hezbollah ignores a lot of recent history, e.g. in Syria.
Sorting out the maze of all the “pro-Palestinian” interests is pretty daunting. Bringing Turkey and the Gulf states into the discussion makes it even worse. All I know for certain is that the Palestinian people have been screwed for a very long time.
I’ve seen a theory that Erdogan is behind this. Says he is tight with the Muslim Brotherhood and therefore Hamas. In fact I believe this was linked here yesterday.
https://www.voltairenet.org/article219779.html
It won’t be too long before the networks break out the old Al Qaeda tapes from the files and claim that these are the training videos for Hamas. /s
So reasonable, so logical, so unlikely… you could almost forget the ‘banality of evil’ within the long range planning and strategy… like just another day at the office.
(‘The idea that many of history’s greatest evils, instead of being carried out by fanatics or sociopaths, were instead done by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and thus their actions, as “normal.”’)
They were ordinary people, but then tragedy and loss, grief and anger, and radicalization by those who would harness those emotions, and behind the lines, political ambition and expediency… and behind the politics, money.
“…there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into work every day and has a job to do” (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods.
It was the puns that put me off, I couldn’t read him. But the movies based on his books were fun and over time I’ve grown to appreciate Pratchett’s worldview more and more. Thank you!
Re: People who’ve had Covid at least 5 times …
And n=5
“I should have more immunity than I do.” […]
“Three people said their later infections were all less severe than the first — though there wasn’t necessarily a clear pattern of milder symptoms with each new illness.” […]
‘Although each reinfection should theoretically be milder than the previous one for most people, doctors said, cases like Keele’s do happen.”
Sigh.
> Although each reinfection should theoretically be milder than the previous one for most people
Although each concussion should theoretically be milder than the previous one for most athletes, doctors said…
One of the flaws that covid has laid bare is the gap between how we want things to work based on past experience and how they actually do. The first couple of months of it should have been a harsh teacher in that respect, but it seems that 3 years on some (many in positions of power/authority) haven’t learned much.
@Daryl: “3 years on some” (many running hospitals) “haven’t learned much.”
Here’s just one of the gems that got me in this article: a day care teacher gets Covid 6 times “Given that the age group she works with isn’t known for clean hands.”
Masking mentioned once.
Immunology doc stresses “young, healthy people shouldn’t panic about getting Covid multiple times.”
This whole article made my skin crawl.
Remember when you were in high school and perhaps collage and classes and PSAs and pamphlets in the nurse’s office told you, especially if you were male, not to panic about getting syphilis oe gonorrhea multiple times?
Yes that last sentence is creepy as hell. “Don’t panic” is the answer to everything… (just keep shopping).
I got the vax plus one booster the latter in December of 2021 and have had COVID at least three times since. My experience was that the successive infections were more mild than the first one, but in every case I felt sick for around three months. At this point I have ongoing mild fatigue and am unable to exercise as I once did. I still mask up when in public and keep the-drug-that-can’t-be-named handy. I have no idea how much I may have been damaged internally. We were taking plenty of zinc, vitamin D and other supplements long before the pandemic and I think it’s likely that I would be worse off if that were not the case.
I’m sorry it keeps getting you. Sounds like your doing everything right.
I noticed how carefully they danced around the elephant in the room.
All five people interviewed who had covid five or more times had been vaccinated against covid. Dr Grace McComsey was quoted, tactfully saying she’d seen a few patients with five infections, all of whom were vaccinated.
Are there any unvaccinated people that have had covid five or more times? If such people exist, they couldn’t find any for this story.
They’re dead Jim
I fear the recent crisis in Israel is a sign of the end.
Our humanity is unraveling across the globe just as we reach a critical point in our species’ history.
We cannot help but resort to killing each other like territorial chimps.
What a shame. We could’ve achieved so much more if prosocial behavior was better reinforced during our cognitive evolution.
Our humanity is unraveling across the globe just as we reach a critical point in our species’ history. Or maybe “because we are reaching”? Point being we, as we are organized, we don’t seem to be capable handling any kind of crisis at scale, but we are pretty talented at scaling up a crisis.
That about sums it up.
I find myself wondering quite a bit over the last few days, why does it seem that it’s usually easier to do bad things than to do good things? I’m probably being cynical but it seems like there’s almost some universal property akin to it being easier to break things than to build things. I would welcome push-back to this thought. Where do you (plural, everyone) find examples of it being easier to do something good/helpful instead of something bad/harmful?
Breaking things aligns with entropy. Building things does not.
Entropy wins.
I’m not sure about easier. The thing is that bad things are so … “bad”. You could have an extended period of good, day after day of people being kind to each other. Then one sick person with a black heart and a bomb can cause unimaginable suffering.
Protect your heart and hug those you love.
it is intimidating to share this – i could write things that would seem disingenuous – the depth of knowledge in this commentariat combined with the gallows humor does feed a comfort i need – last time i shared one of my poems, “Carnival of Hypocrisy”, i didn’t identify it as such and it probably seemed an extemporaneous writing – but it was Cycle 11 – #6, written shortly after the passing of Daniel Ellsberg and the sadness it brought – one of you commented in a kind and encouraging way –
when ‘sc’ asks, “I find myself wondering quite a bit over the last few days, why does it seem that it’s usually easier to do bad things than to do good things?” –
that comment reminded me what i wrote in “Carnival of Hypocrisy” –
“Idiots call it human nature,
But what kind of person has to be
forced to be good and refrain from evil
because of fear of punishment? There’s no
real explanation for this sick fascination.”
been writing these poems as a way to exorcise an embarrassment for being human – 12 years ago after finishing reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” for a second time a feeling moved me in a way that is difficult describe – i wish to be haunted like Gabriel García Márquez – this feeling compelled me to start the first cycle – Rowboat is Cycle 11 – #8 – never published – just sharing –
Rowboat
Life seems like a rowboat these days,
We sit facing backwards to the waves of life
supposedly seeing clearly where we’ve been and
occasionally glimpsing over a shoulder to
where we are going, satisfied if the sea
is calm, worried when there’s a storm.
Brief images fueling an imagination of
a destination of where we want to be and
keep on rowing. It’s in these brief moments
we hope to see the future beyond the pitfalls of
the rough seas ahead, like when there was a time
in our language no word described the urge to own
what is not needed and no admiration for ourselves when
eagerly grabbing to hold. We shake our head at the coming
storms to clear a head of old sorrows, trying hard not to hold
what is fleeting and fragile, providing a sustenance to our
anger and pride that gave cause to harm each other.
Wondering, always wondering if dying people
feel as if they had never lived, understanding
differences between memories and dreams.
You row realizing to have compassion is
the true source of a transformation
without violence, recognizing
the human in the inhuman
rather than the inhuman
in the human.
Night falls
continuing to row
with intentions misled
by false expectations. Always
searching for Polaris or Crux in
the clear night sky as a scent of earth
is mixed with the salt and a hope of some
direction as arms tire. No us vs them or we vs they
important any more, too dangerous to play with reality
that way. But we keep rowing even as a new light is
ushered into the darkness, and a
Respect for life is baptized
Incredible
Thank you so much for this poem.
It spoke to my heart, my soul, my spirit and my my unknowable.
Muchos Besos Jabura,
A True Treasure,
tawal
thank you – much appreciated tawal
Wow. Thank you jb. Visual too.
Night falls
my son-in-law mentions the same quality – thank you mrsyk – always appreciated –
I’ve often wondered how the western world must have seen its future
during WWI, and again during WWII. I once heard my grandfather deliver
a sermon in which he reflected on the prayers his family gave during
the Great War, in which they pleaded with God not to allow it to be the
end of the world. My parents were stationed in Germany in the early months
of 1946 (my brother was born in Munich December of that year), and saw
first hand the destruction of that country. Mother talked to me about the
war years (my father, who had been wounded, never spoke about the war) and
confided that many people thought they were witnessing the end times.
Whenever there is a crisis of legitimacy, war and other manufactured crises appear.
Definitely. The Rapture Index must through the roof.
Imagine just burning the resources that might have saved civilization from a hard collision with the climate crash.
“Humanity” has always had a tenuous past. Its just easier to see the horror inflicted upon others now.
The way the native americans were treated was comparable the current Israel/Palestine dynamic. Slavery in the Americas was even worse. And those are just the recent large scale examples that the US is responsible for. There are countless others throughout history from the Vikings, Romans, and Mongols and more
Artificial General IntelligenceGeneral Human Stupidity Is Already HereAt first I was enthusiastic about machine translation, because, however disfluent, Google Translate could be trusted to deliver unbiased translations. But with these latest language models, Google Translate can now be told to “spin the translation to imply the opposite of the original.”
Truth be damned, this is the general intelligence of the politician and the salesman: generate a coherent stream of words that says what the listener wants to hear.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
But with a few more politicians and salesmen.
Its striking how poor machine translation can be, despite decades of work and who knows how many billions spent. Maybe AI will make a difference (I’ve seem some very impressive examples), but so many fail when presented with the ambiguity of so much language – especially in context dependent languages like Japanese. My translator friends who ignored everyone saying they’d out of a job in 5 years are still at work, decades after the warnings.
Play “Chinese Telephone” (where a phrase is whispered in the ear of the person next to you and goes around the room and comes back to you) with A.I. via translating from English to a foreign language, then that result to another foreign language and look at the hilarious garbage you get at the end.
Wordplay:
Newsum
Noisesum
Newscum
Newscumbag
The most important lesson we are learning from the current AI hype is that we can make it say whatever. As more people learn this fact it will be incorporated into our ideology (the beliefs that govern our understanding and choices without us even needing to think about them). Assuming it does, where will we end up in terms of how we choose to trust utterances and texts?
The map is not the territory. All Google can do is manipulate the map and tell us it is accurate. We don’t have to believe it and I think increasingly we do not. There’s a dynamic in play that gives me some hope. As the ruling classes increasingly rely on manipulating the map as a (increasingly desperate, it seems to me) attempt at social control, the greater the differences between the map and the territory become and trust in the accuracy of the map decreases, and so the more they need to manipulate and insist on accuracy of the map, and so on…
It’s not working very well.
Civil law has been applied for years to deal with those who point out inaccuracies in the map or try to make corrections. Now we are applying criminal law. And the US federal government has abandoned denying that it is involved in manipulating our contributions to the map and defends its work saying that it is necessary for public safety or something. And the EU and UK have new laws that force the firms that run the mapping platforms to edit the map as the governments say.
That’s all very frightening but it’s also showing that a) the divergence of the map and the territory is getting out of control, and b) controlling the map isn’t remotely sufficient for social control and the harder they try the less convincing it gets.
Btw, by “territory” I mean concrete reality and by “map” I mean the words we use to describe it. Everything said or written by people (politicians, oligarchs, news people, preachers, tech bros, you and me, etc.) about what’s going on is in the map. Assertions in the map can in principle be compared with the territory by making observations although in practice this can be difficult, time-consuming, inconvenient, expensive, confusing, etc.
Wikipedia article that may clarify use of “map” and “territory”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation
The reasons I chose these terms for this comment are 1) Korzybski’s statement that Wikipedia quotes is quite well know, and 2) I want to emphasize that what Google and its ilk manipulate is not reality, it’s just a bunch of words; symbols that may or may not represent something.
Try Finding UK Staff Collage Shrivenham on a UK Mmap
Not difficult. (It’s part of the UK Defence Academy.)
The hype has to be milked for all it’s worth.
Re Our no longer free press
The front page splash on pretty much every newspaper in England today was the claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 infants, a story that has not been factually confirmed by any media and even the IDF is backtracking on it.
And while busily projecting the Israeli flag onto Downing Street and other government buildings in Britain, the government is now threatening to have anyone waving a Palestinian flag arrested!
Claims, no evidence so far. Sounds a lot like the claims just prior to the first Gulf War under George HW Bush (sr.) that Iraqi soldiers had thrown Kuwaiti babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and left them to die. It wasn’t true, it was propsgander to rile up revenge lust in the MSM news views at home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
And back in WW1 there were claims that the Kaiser’s soldiers would bayonet Belgian babies and raise them up in the air. And JohnA was correct in his claim that the UK is threatening people who support the Palestinians-
‘“It is not just explicit pro-Hamas symbols and chants that are cause for concern,” Braverman wrote in the letter. “I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world, and whether its use in certain contexts may amount to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offense.”
“Context is crucial. Behaviors that are legitimate in some circumstances, for example the waving of a Palestinian flag, may not be legitimate such as when intended to glorify acts of terrorism,” Braverman added, urging “swift and appropriate enforcement action” against those who “drive through Jewish neighbourhoods, or single out Jewish members of the public” and “aggressively chant or wave pro-Palestinian symbols” at them.’
https://www.rt.com/news/584599-uk-palestine-flags-police/
Graffiti such as ‘Free Palestine’ on walls in Britain is now being labelled anti-semitic.
Sir Kier Starmer, leader of the Labour party and supposed human rights lawyer, now says Israel has the right to cut off water, power etc., etc., in Gaza.
Not content with being labelled Sir Kid Starver, Starmer wants to starve Palestinian kids to death as well.
The Labour party is well and truly dead, and merely a branch of the Conservative and Liberal Dem party.
Here in Oz, the government is going to forbid a second rally in Sydney in support of Palestine as some people said some antisemitic things at the first. Because you know, that is how free speech works. Lighting up Parliament House in the colours of the Israeli flag was just a start but demonstrators said that they will go ahead anyway with a second rally. Both sides have their rat bag supporters and here is a Grayzone video showing some of those who support Israel in New York-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHqUO5J2L6M (2:59 mins) – language alert.
I’m think that it is the extremists on both sides that should be dropped onto an island in a real-life Battle Royal.
there are plenty of visually documented Hamas civilian killing, often uploaded by the Hamas-friendly side. It is ridiculous that social media decides to run w/the 40 babies.
shows you how the bizarreness of human sensibilities.
I was indifferent to 4 unarmed young men being shot to death by Hamas fighters in a beach bathroom, but 40 babies. whoa. where is my Israel flag?
I did wonder how there happened to be 40 infants in Israeli police stations, but hey, let that pass. The talk from Mr. Netanyahu and his Defense Ministry seems to indicate a Final Solution is being implemented. Is Bibi the New Hitler yet?
Twitter had it as debunked before Links fired. I didn’t want to dignify it by repeating it. Didn’t realize it was all over UK papers (not the FT which is the one I check religiously).
That claim in now appearing in The Hill-
https://thehill.com/policy/international/4248499-israeli-forces-say-theyve-uncovered-evidence-of-brutal-killings-they-cut-heads-of-children/
All seems pretty coordinated, imo. Bernays would be proud. /.
Are we really surprised at that? The Hill stopped being a respectable journalistic entity a long while ago.
It’s primary purpose lately is to serve pro-Ukrainian propaganda. Politico is worse, however.
We should all have as part of our innate defense system a mandatory 48-hour period of silence before taking any outrageous claims seriously.
I did watch some of Ben Shapiro’s show on X last night, and the scenes are horrific. Israelis being gunned down in the streets while they drove cars. It seems that the world has just reached a stage where we’ve all grown cold and numb to mass killings.
For me, the one where the guy in Vegas gunned down something like 100 people at a country music concert, from a hotel room, was the point where I realized that we’re no longer in Kansas, anymore.
Having grown up in the post-Reagan United States, my attitude is that this is what people do when pushed to the breaking point. I’m not surprised, nor horrified. I guess witnessing too many televised mass shootings here is responsible. Should people kill innocents? Of course not. Do they? Yes they do. How should that be prevented? By not breaking people.
The Hill nor any of the MSM described how the US soldiers threw babies up in the air and bayoneted them. Sorry I don’t have a link. I read it in one of the books describing the war in Afghanistan. So sickening.
Shades of Kuwaiti baby incubators ZOMG!
What amazes me is that people will fall for it, over and over and over again.
On Covid
“Did Sweden beat the pandemic by refusing to lock down? No, its record is disastrous
A new study by European scientific researchers buries all those claims in the ground. Published in Nature, the study paints a devastating picture of Swedish policies and their effects.”
“The Swedish response to this pandemic,” the researchers report, “was unique and characterized by a morally, ethically, and scientifically questionable laissez-faire approach.”
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-31/sweden-covid-policy-was-a-disaster
Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01097-5
“Michael Pettis concluded that rising capital intensity is prima facie evidence of increasingly non-productive investments…..”
wake me up when the Chinese 1% are spending 25MM USD for a shredded Banksy painting…..maybe they already are.
Ha ha, my better half and I were discussing the shredded Bansky just last night. It’s a particularly delicious art world metaphor with the legs to cover the crazy of our timeline, as you point out.
And Christo is gone with so much yet to shred.
Maybe not burning Banksy’s, but they sure like gambling on rocks.
They were spending on art and antiques. Buying Chinese antiques and repatriating them was seen as a patriotic duty. As for art, an internet search got me: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/are-chinese-buyers-bowing-out-of-the-art-market/ar-AA1hL5vz
For me, the highest profile example of non-productive investments was in soccer. Various groups (including real estate like Evergrande) bought soccer teams, then splurged on high profile foreign players. Reminds me of what Saudi Arabia is currently doing.
Chinese coins used to be worth not all that much, there was a silver Dollar issued in 1932 that was called ‘Birds over Junk’ and I bought and sold dozens of them for $200-275 in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, and now they fetch around $20,000.
From what i’ve heard, Chinese antiques have gone up ever more on a percentage basis.
https://www.ngccoin.com/auction-central/world/china-republic-scid-779/auctions/yr211932-china-landm-108-birds-over-junk-s1-ms-ucid-BL9C
Chinese art investment, another opiate of the masses?
Wars were once fought over similar addiction themes, and now accepting that capital intensity needs more prodding.
Pettis is one of those always wishfully and economic-sciency proving the demise of the Chinese economy.
“Zelensky Asks If This Is A Bad Time To Maybe Get A Couple More Billion”
I guess that Zelenski wants to buy himself a few more houses still.
So I was thinking today. I have described Washington as being made up of powerful fiefdoms. The anti-Russia fiefdom was been in the ascendancy for a very long time ago with people like Nuland and Blinken. But then there is the anti-China fiefdom that wants to get out of the Ukraine so that they can go confront China in the Indo-Pacific. After the Hamas attack, out came the pro-Israel fiefdom that is demanding loyalty from everyone and priority. But out from under their rock creeps the anti-Iran fiefdom that says that the only solution to all these problems is to attack Iran. The only problem is that the US has champagne strategic aims on beer resources.
humor twtr X from Musk. / ;)
When it’s been 5 minutes and you haven’t asked for a billions dollars in aid:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1708629197617336398
Needs a Venn chart.
I remember Cheney saying way back that Iraq wasn’t the goal, Iran was.
Has anyone else noticed that the propaganda pieces touting the latest Ukraine armed forces counteroffensive gains mysteriously disappeared from Business Insider, Politico, and other suss media right around 7AM on Saturday?
It is almost as if some script writers in a basement office near D.C. got distracted by something, or ran out of donuts and coffee.
Promoting support for Israel > because Iran >because Russia has the benefit of moving focus away from Israel’s past and now escalating crimes against the Palestinians, and Netanyahu’s authoritarian control. They can declare “unwavering” support for Israel because it’s all just one big fight for whatever they choose to call “democracy” (Including the fight against Trump).
I would add to your summary of key factions the anti-immigrant fiefdom who want funding allocated to war at the US southern border instead of to Ukraine.
Bitcoin still trades like it’s being propped up by some unknown CB that’s part of the scheme
I’m getting a sneaking suspicion that bitcoin and AI are in bed and having fun.
I don’t really get how Bitcoin has been incredibly stable in the midst of the FTX imbrogliou, where you can just see how Sam is gonna be a sacrificial lamb.
Sacrificial hyena, maybe.
Silent walking? Another thing I’ve been doing wrong. I listen to stuff to relieve the tedium of boring tasks. Not when I have free time to walk dogs or hike or ride. Also, what he family blog is wrong with you if you think you can train dogs or horses while listening to the news?
Love the juxtaposition of the ‘silent walking’ and ‘Apple AirPod patents’ articles.
I listen to podcasts in the car, over the speakers, 1-2x a week for a couple hours. I need fewer than the fingers on one hand to total up the hours I’ve spent wearing headphones or earpieces, for any purpose, over the past 3 decades. The fact that people think it’s novel to spend time without being plugged in is, for me, Exhibit A in the grim pile of evidence that the people love being passive sheep.
Hope they like the shearing, and being turned into chops.
I usually hike with friends and we walk at a talking pace sans connectivity other than what comes out of our mouths.
Today’s hike is to the Monarch Lakes in Mineral King…
Wear a sweater. It looks like winter arrived today in the foot hills but maybe the sun is out at 8000 feet.
My rule for pace is if you have to breath through your mouth, instead of just your nose, you are going too fast.
Beautiful sunny day until the clouds rolled in…
Mouth breathing is not recommended for any activity at any altitude.
Wearing earbuds is asking to be mugged.
Or get hit by a car.
Where I live in the suburbs on the western tip of Lake Ontario the odds of being mugged in broad daylight approximates to zero and when listening to podcasts on my walks I keep my head on a swivel.
just as 9/11 sent the US into a rage that lead to Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires and terminal imperial decline, Israel is walking the exact same path.
sunk cost, sunk lives fallacy for the foreseeable future.
I’m getting the impression that Isr would really like to take out or have the US take out Iran. Seems like their are plenty of Hawks in the Congress who are open to the idea, depending on how the PR campaigns go. Hope I’m wrong.
From Breaking Points again. utube. Ryan and Emily.
Lindsey Graham DEMANDS WAR With Iran | Counter Points
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeV-Klp-Nik
One of the lessons learned by Western forces in Afghanistan was that it could be quite difficult for soldiers to tell the difference between a Talib and an Afghan. It was a very important part of the job because the mission was sold to Western public as against the Taliban and not Afghanistan.
It seems to me we could be using this analogy right now. Taliban defeated the USA and NATO in a war in part because we couldn’t identify the enemy. The ability to target enemy fighters wasn’t good enough.
Hence in Gaza, Israel’s options appear now to be 1: fail in the same way they have so far (as the West did in Afghanistan) but at a higher rate of killing and demolition, or 2: to kill everyone and thereby kill some Hamas fighters in the process.
Western pols keep talking about Hamas. But I imagine Hamas fighters are a small minority of the Gaza population. We need to keep our pols straight on this.
“Hence in Gaza, Israel’s options appear now to be 1: fail in the same way they have so far (as the West did in Afghanistan) but at a higher rate of killing and demolition, or 2: to kill everyone and thereby kill some Hamas fighters in the process.”
You are getting warmer.
1209. Albigensian Crusade. Beziers Massacre. “How do we spare the Catholics and kill the Cathars?” “Kill them all. God knows His own.”
God save me from religion.
The difference is that Israel has its enemies already trapped in a little box, an open air concentration camp.
And this is just a taste of the conflict we’re going to be embroiled in as Climate Disruption ruins an increasing amount of the global for human habitation. (Not that either Ukraine or the violence in Israel are related specifically, just that we’re going to see increasing instability and violence that does directly stem from climate.)
Fun times.
Stay safe out there!
How a Series of Air Traffic Control Lapses Nearly Killed 131 People
Zero mention of COVID, illness, sickness.
Dossier on Qatar connection to Hamas.
Calling Hamas “genocidal barbarians” is like calling Sitting Bull a genocidal tribal leader.
Gaza is an evil invention, not the fault of Palestinians
The propaganda is dense
Schachtel is a neocon propagandist. He was trained at the Institute of World Politics “graduate school” then turned loose to spread the neocon foreign policy Gospel. As long as Qatar’s money and propaganda and jihadists – and Hamas, for that matter – were aimed at Syria, things were fine. Those were *our* genocidal barbarians.
“Trudeau Has Thus Far Failed To Internationalize The Indian-Canadian Dispute”
‘At this point, he’ll either cut his losses by dropping the issue even without a formal apology to India or turn it into an obsession at the further expense of his own and his country’s reputation. Trudeau dug himself a hole from which he’s struggling to extricate himself due to his immense ego, which is leading to disastrous consequences for Canadian interests. Hopefully his Western allies can talk some sense into him before it’s too late and the damage that he’s dealt becomes irreparable.’
I’m going with Door Number Two. A guy who goes to a party in blackface is one not for self-reflection. But I am not sure that those Western allies will talk him out of his tree as they were the ones that were giving him support to go after India. I would guess that Canadian-Indian relations are now a dumpster fire for at least the rest of the decade and that so long as Trudeau remains at the helm, they will stay that way.
Katie and Aaron on Useful Idiots. utube.
Useful Idiots Monday Mourning with Aaron Maté and Katie Halper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r89HAi_SvM
RE: Israel and Hamas/Gaza… then do what.
I am reading many of the comments here in personal frustration. As a secular, American Jew I am watching with a combination of fear and horror as to what Hamas did. Right now my friends and family in Israel are OK. A mutual friend not so much. His teenagers had three close friends visiting Israel, also teenagers. One is maimed, one is dead and one is missing. This story is repeating throughout the Jewish community. We have seen nothing like this since the Progroms (which most of my family perished in).
I watch scholars and reporters from Israel reporting that the State has never experienced panic like this and is scared. Hours of rockets being launched and seeing people gunned down for no good reason will do that.
Many of the comments so far are of course correct. There is propaganda, incorrect reporting, etc. To me that is not the issue. In the fog of war facts are the first casualty.
I also have no illusion that Israel played some role in turning Gaza into an open air prison.
But, again, what should they do? Hamas has a stated intention of destroying Israel. How does one do a ‘deal’ with them.
I agree with many this is going to get worse, before it gets way worse. How do you stop it after what happened?
I really would like to know.
In the long run, I think Israel would have to have to be “the bigger man”. By that I mean that Israel would have to do 1 of 2 things. Either tear down the walls, stop building settlements, prepare for and tolerate a certain amount of terror and revenge killings at first, treat everyone equally in the justice system, and give everyone equal rights. Or keep up the walls, pull back the settlements from the West Bank, make a land bridge between Gaza and the West Bank, share off-shore drilling rights and revenues with Palestinians, and make a two-state solution.
Either way, it’s Israel that has to give up the most (be the “bigger man”), but then it has the most power obviously to begin with.
There are those among us who seem hell bent on marching all of humanity to oblivion. Peace doesn’t even enter into the discussion. Stop it? Doesn’t look possible to me. We are dancing with the devil.
You don’t stop it. As you say there’s no deal to be had with the Palestinians on the terms the Israelis wish to impose and no security measures that are 100% foolproof – so what else is there to do but to accept that reality and come to terms with the fact that Israeli life comes with a non-zero risk of death by terror attack – much as Palestinian life does.
Israel could have made peace with its neighbors decades ago but instead insisted, in the words of Golda (now a movie), “there’s no such thing as Palestinians.”
And as you should know (but don’t?) Hamas was created by Israel. Zionism is a movement based on the belief that two wrongs do make a right. Nobody around here is suggesting that Israel should be eliminated but some humility and honesty would do them a world of good.
Please turn that on its ear and think about living in Gaza or the West Bank while Palestinian.
I don’t know the answer to your question, I only know that “how do you stop it after…” issue has been going on for the ones who blew up for a very long time.
curlydan says Israel would have to be the bigger man. I think an easier way to think of it is that it needs to stop being the neighbor from hell. I truly believe that most Americans would hate how America acts in the world, if they just thought about it. Unfortunately we let fear and superiority run rampant, and we have supported those who stoke those emotions. Israelis are in the same situation.
IOW I ask the same about us.
Hamas is a result of the failures in the 1980-1990s to make any progress towards a peaceful solution. For me, the assassination of Rabin in 1995 (by an Israeli nationalist) marked the turning point.
There is room to stop the violence but it takes real political courage, vision, and sacrifice.
What the US could easily do is say that it will not support Israeli if it commits war crimes in Gaza. A mere statement to that effect from the White House would be enough to force a reset. It would be in our national interest.
It will never happen.
It will be interesting to see if Trump picks up on this. By next November, I think he’ll be able to make a pretty good case that the world is at war because Biden. “Never underestimate the ability of Joe to f**k things up.” – B. Obama.
I don’t have an answer to your question, but I just wanted to share observations from the ground.
The people are still in shock but I don’t see any panic and don’t hear about it from the people who are closer to the conflict area. There is an absolutely massive effort to volunteer in every possible way (helping evacuees, donating blood, etc). People have been instructed to get supplies in case the situation gets worse, shops operate normally and I didn’t see panic buying. My friend has left the country with her kid, I also know of some recent migrants from Russia and Ukraine who have left. On the other hand, a lot of people with the requisite experience are coming back from abroad to be called up.
An emergency government has been formed with the leaders of the opposition who have been protesting non-stop for the last few months. It seems that no rash decisions have been made in the wake of the tragedy.
When did the tragedy begin?
I was referring to the incursion on Saturday. I’m aware of the many abuses and massacres perpetrated by all sides 2, 10, 70, 100, 1000, 2000 years ago here but that absolutely doesn’t justify murdering and kidnapping hundreds of civilians
The Israelis have themselves been fed the propaganda that Palestine was a land without people and Palestinians a people without land.
In 1918 the Jewish population of Palestine was 8%. Palestine was made a protectorate of the Brits who, after the Balfour declaration of 1917, allowed a Jewish immigration that it is difficult to imagine a sovereign Palestine would have allowed. By 1947 the Jewish population had grown to 33% but it held legal title to only 7% of the land. That November the colonialist dominated UN passed the resolution to grant that 33% 55% of the land. I have never heard it explained well why it was proper to give away someone else’s land. The Palestinians rejected the resolution. In April of 1948 the Zionists began full scale military operations to seize the land. ending up with 71%. They have by now seized another 20%.
No one has ever explained to me why it is not more often said that the Jewish population still has legal title to only 7% of the land and the rest is stolen. I imagine the Palestinians have been saying something about that all along, but few listen to them.
“By 1947 the Jewish population had grown to 33% but it held legal title to only 7% of the land…I have never heard it explained well why it was proper to give away someone else’s land.”
The answer might be that, perhaps, “someone else’s land” was not being given away, at least not by the terms of property law in Palestine at the time. According to the Survey of Palestine, Government of Palestine, 1946, p. 257:
Making some assumptions about what land was in private hands (e.g., “more than 7 ,000 [km²]…may be assumed to contain a preponderance of private property”—let’s say a “preponderance” there is 5000 km²), more than two-thirds of the land, approximately—maybe 18,000 km² out of a total 26,320 km²— was in control of the mandatory authority in Palestine and passed to the government of Israel as its legal successor.
I’m pretty sure that Irish people could weigh in on how certain lands are passed to a favoured group by an occupying power and that they would be very vocal about it. It is always easy to divide up another country’s lands and in this case it is the same power. That is why we have Northern Ireland as a country right now.
>…more than two-thirds of the land, approximately—maybe 18,000 km² out of a total 26,320 km²— was in control of the mandatory authority in Palestine and passed to the government of Israel as its legal successor.
Aside from the inherent initial problems of your assessment, there are two complete fictions: 1 – the right of the mandatory authority, the UK, and 2 – Israel as a state and a legal successor.
I don’t buy any of it. The UK was the colonial power, and Israel was its colonial project.
Your initial comment stated that the Jews had legal title to 7% of land but, under the same authority that recognized the Jews as having that title, the non-Jewish population (Arab and others) were recognized as holding title to roughly 23% of the land (making assumptions based on the text in that population’s favor). It seems untenable not to recognize that authority in one case—the percentage holding title of the non-Jewish population—while pointing to it as a basis for argument in the other—the percentage holding title of the Jewish population.
For the purposes of the point I was making, it doesn’t matter what authority was in charge of Palestine—the British under the Mandate, hypothetically, some authority under Arab control, or some other entity. The point is that, if that authority, whoever it was, was doing anything with 55% of the land, it wasn’t necessarily giving away “someone else’s land” because, according to the property scheme at the time, it held roughly more than two-thirds of the land. It was, in accordance with property law under Ottoman governance lasting more than four centuries, public land. I doubt any landowner—Arab, Jewish or other—would have wanted his or her title to property to somehow vanish when the United Kingdom——or, again, hypothetically, for that matter, whatever ruling authority—assumed power, no matter how illegitimate that landowner might have viewed that authority. Whatever was not in private hands was, by default, public land. I think one can hold the view of the right of the mandatory authority of the United Kingdom as being entirely fictional and still find those statements to be relatively uncontroversial.
That Romanian MP – Diana Șoşoacă – was threatening to cause a ruckus in the Romanian Parliament if Zelensky turned up because of his sending Ukrainian-Romanians to their deaths and it looks like she was true to her word. She is an independent who was kicked out of her party and I was reading that she has been smeared for some time for the things that she says. Here is an article from back in March-
‘The Robert Lansing Institute (RLI) think thank claims in an analysis published on March 23 that Romanian MP Diana Șoşoacă (former member of radical party AUR, later expelled from the party) has links with the Russian military secret services and that the latest GRU operation in Romania is the draft law she submitted on the annexation of part of Ukraine’s territory. GRU is the previous abbreviation of the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.’
https://www.romania-insider.com/romanian-mp-suspected-links-gru
And who is the Robert Lansing Institute? Their home page tells you all that you want to know about them-
https://lansinginstitute.org/
Funny thing is that when you put their HQ address into Google – 19 Holly Cove Ln., Dover, Kent, Delaware – on StreetView it just shows an ordinary house in a nice suburb. Weird that.
When I lived in Warsaw, I knew a guy named Marek. Marek was an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, convinced that Jews around the world hated Poland and had made it their life’s work to destroy Poland. Because Poland. Because Jews.
Marek’s specialty was to find some boogeyman in Polish history, Boleslaw Bierut, for instance, and then note that Bierut’s dog’s grandfather was trained by…..(wait for it!) a Jew! And Bierut really liked his dog! Marek could find a similar Jew-connection in any event in Polish history. All he had to do was look.
Referring to the Romania Insider article, like Marek’s conspiracy theories, those words “has links with” do a lot of work for them. Much of the russiagate conspiracy theory “connect the dots” was an elaborate game of “six degrees of separation”, where Trump knew someone or had a business relationship with someone, whose mother’s cousin’s hairdresser was once married to a Russian, and we all know what that means!
In the case of Marek, it turned out that had brain cancer which went undetected until he was near the end. I like to think that Marek’s paranoiac fantasies were really the cancer talking.
Most other conspiracy theorists don’t have that excuse.
Re: gas pipe
There was just a new press conference on the gas leak and the police said that the damage is caused by mechanical force, not explosive force. Signs of damage being done from the outside, but declining what it is. In Finland currently the “anchor theory” is popular: that an anchor just accidentally dragged the pipe. The police wouldn’t say anything about intentionality or who did it.
Most submarine cable damage, and likely also pipe damage, is caused accidentally by fishing boats trawling the sea bed.
“The Creepy New Digital Afterlife Industry”
This is going to be really bad for those people who just don’t want to let their loved ones go after they die and it could lead to a dependence. It did remind me of a scifi story I read many years ago where the technology had been developed so that you could visit the deceased virtually. So this young guy goes to a cemetery where his grandfather is buried and when he taps a panel, a hologram appears of his rascal of a grandfather who starts to talk to him and soon tells him to dump some shares as they are on the way down and never coming back. This was written years before AI became a thing and in this story, it is clear that this virtual grandfather is identical to the late real life grandfather. In exchange, the grandfather gets the grandson to come back to the graveyard at night and tap all the panels as he and the others want to party again and he has his eye on a blonde three graves over…
Carpenter’s Dark Star. The deceased commander of the ship is cryogenically frozen and the new captain goes into the freezer and talks to him sometimes.
And, isn’t there some contraption in the Richard Nixon library that allows visitors to choose a question and Nixon appears on a video monitor to answer it?
Is this the Nixon clip?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e9iWizfsm8
Rev Kev: It did remind me of a scifi story I read many years ago where the technology had been developed so that you could visit the deceased virtually.
A bunch of 1960s-era Philip K Dick pieces feature this. Most notably, his novel, UBIK, which revolved around it —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik
— till it becomes unclear who’s alive and who’s a ‘half-lifer’, or dead. UBIK is also the one where the protagonist has to pay his AI-controlled coffee pot to get his coffee and his apartment door to get in and out of his apartment.
Friends, this is clean-up time and we’re discounting all our silent, electric Ubiks by this much money. Yes, we’re throwing away the blue-book. And remember: every Ubik on our lot has been used only as directed.
I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.
Ubik — safe when used as directed
It reminds me of a Black Mirror episode precisely about AI simulation of dead people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
RE: Victor: Boryspol Airport has been closed for some time.
Much as I detest Israel as it is currently constituted, Imacall [FAMILYBLOG].
He always buys while others walk
He acts while other men just balk
They say its winner who takes all
And he strikes it rich playing Powerball
He knows the meaning of success
His needs are more so he needs excess
He looks at this world and once in all
Somebody strikes it rich playing Powerball
Any geegaw he wants, he’ll get
He will break anything without regret
His hopes of winning are all gone
His fight goes on, and on, and on.
But he thinks that the fight is worth it all
So he buys for next week’s Powerball…
Thunderball, by Tom Jones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_PKLhOBuxI
I am a little speechless about everything going on at the moment. I can only say that it is easy now to understand how the Holocaust and other such things unfolded as they did.
I am being persuaded by the Twittersphere that the Blob wants to cash-in on a 2 for 1 deal to attack Syria and Iran using Hamas as a pretext. No there yet, but the momentum is taking a life of its own
Hold your butts, the White House may learn the hard way that draining the strategic petroleum reserve for election year was a bad idea
Maybe it’s about time for Commander to take a bite out of crime by biting The Old Man.
Good boy Commander!
Even the thought is terrifying. Guess I should figure out where the nearest bunker is.
Unfortunately with brain trust that has directed our military and foreign policy decisions over most of the last three decades and their inability to admit that they are no geniuses on anything to do with strategy, foreign relations or pretty much anything but taken their tokens off the top this is not the ludicrous impossible idea it should be.
Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya name any action they have taken that made things better. And that doesn’t even consider their Ukrainian debacle, unthinking backing of Israel or their delusions regarding limited nuclear war. (And then there is Central and South America…)
Wesley Clark: “… seven countries in five years.”
It’s taken a little longer than planned, but the neocons have been doggedly persistent. Be prepared, and take advantage of those “Pearl Harbor Moments” when they arise.
> take advantage of those “Pearl Harbor Moments” when they arise
You’ve gotta admire their commitment to the bit!
Where’s Water Cooler? Did I miss the memo? / ;)
“Bitcoin still trades like it’s being propped up by some unknown CB that’s part of the scheme, and likely can keep doing it for quite a while.
Not saying that’s what’s happening, just how it trades…”
So I’m not the only one that had that thought.
And remember: it emerged from the era of easy money, low interest rates….
Wasn’t the theory with various cryptocurrencies and NFTs that their values were being pumped up by wash trades? For example, I sell you my cypto for $1, you sell it back to me for $2, we keep doing that for a while, pumping up the value, and then we finally unload it on some sucker for $50 and make for the exits. That is how SBF became worth so much on paper – he held most of whatever his crypto coin was called privately, while a little bit was allowed to circulate on the exchanges. As the exchange trading raised the price, the coins he was holding himself increased bigly in nominal value, he could then take out loans based on these valuations, spread political donations around, etc and it was never anything more than your basic pump and dump really.
I see no reason why the same – insiders holding most of the coin and artificially manipulating the price – couldn’t be happening with bitcoin. In fact at this stage I would be more surprised if it were not happening.
“Apple Patents Suggest Future AirPods Could Monitor Biosignals and Brain Activity”
Just bought a small ‘lightning to female 3.5mm jack adapter’. Now I can use normal headphones and sell my completely unused AirPods.
This seems real no bueno:
Alexei Pushkov: Saudi Arabia informed US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken that it is terminating all negotiations on the normalization of relations with Israel.
Source: LordOfWar TG, so take with some caution, but if so, better not get too used to $85/bbl oil.
Anecdotally at least, COVID is popping off in my neck of the woods: NW Massachusetts and southern VT.
Went to my internist for a checkup today and the nurse who took my vitals (she was masked) told me that there has been “so much COVID” recently, including one death. When I asked my MD (unmasked) if he was treating patients with long COVID–just one, he told me and then knocked wood.
can confirm. several friends who have been very careful and remained covid free have got infected in the last maybe 3-4 weeks where i am in so vt.
i do also note that some of them did drop their guard; it was as if the virus was just right there waiting for that one lapse into a casual non-decision that let it in.
Covid is like the original Top Gun’s “Ice Man”-
‘He wears you down, you get bored, frustrated, do something stupid and he’s got ya.’
I’m glad I had a 3M Aura N95 on the whole time.
I order my masks online from https://www.projectn95.org/
Re Silent Walking
While I’ve spent time walking with headphones the notion that they are necessary brings to mind those who can’t be at home without the television on,. It’s not just that silence allows you to think, but rather that it’s a big attraction in and of itself on top of the exercise benefit.
In my very walky neighborhood people can’t even seem to walk their dog without staring at a smartphone. Reality is so much more interesting.
Wanted to leave a link to this story I read in the Globe and Mail from a couple days ago; foretells of all the key set ups for collase and surveillance-need for innovation in banking, easier data scraping from customers.
About Canada ostensibly but has ref to US comment.
My takes:
Canada implementing “open banking” which gives financial institutions faster, easier, access to my data. Includes now “screen scraping” tech by some.
“As part of global trend to reshape financial services, done deal in UK, Australia. But boohoo, Canada is “falling behind”, say the TECH companies they “worry”.
US proposing same for this month. Ottawa “held consultations with DOZENS of stakeholders”. But probably not outside of the tech, fin, banking, business world-who controls the levers?
The ministry headed by (!!) Christina Freeland confirmed receiving a report on HOW TO IMPLEMENT it. Not reassuring.
(Article bemoans that Canadian Gov busy with HOUSING policy and the COMPETITION ACT!) I expect these will be painful.
“New era of competition”, yikes now rent tech and landlords will ‘integrate’ with banks et al, given the algo rent raising already forcing rents up.
Globe and Mail reports that it will help, in the US the schpiel is that “people” can get paid faster. Right! And, will help “avoid intrusive surveillance”, does he mean, help you hide your extreme wealth better?
Rohit Chopra heads the US agency and claims “making the financial system more dynamic will also make it make resilient” (announced on 15 anniversary of Lehman Bro collapse).
It’s like crypto, and derivatives and CDOs and lions and magic and bears oh my! “We need them to innovate”, says Canadian senator.
Me “who’s this we you talk about?
I may be off base but there’s alot going to happen under the radar now there are two, two, means of distraction (AKA, wars).
In the first months of the Pandemic 2020, Canada feds passed the most repressive anti-protest laws outside of Saudi Arabia. (Read that here on NC back then).
Ugh.
I’m not surprised that there are Israelis helping the Ukrainian war effort but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the state policy.
Most of Russian-speaking Israelis were born in Ukraine and when Russia attacked Ukraine a lot of them would have both emotional and pecuniary interest in going to Ukraine and helping it fight Russia. While Bandera has become the national hero there, the actual hate is directed primarily at Russia and Russians, and therefore it wouldn’t even cause much of cognitive dissonance.
¿Donde está Water Cooler?
Hope all is well with Lambert today!
> ‘Israel-Hamas crisis tears a splintering ASEAN in half’
Only Singapore & Philippines now on team West which is much much less than half. Plus Philippines has a sizeable & hostile Muslim population in the south. West is trying to move offshore manufacturing from China to Vietnam which is pro-Russia and Malaysia which is pro-Palestine. Indonesia is also a huge resource country with many critical minerals (esp. Nickel) plus oil & gas which was supposed to offset restrictions in Russia supply. Israel/Palestine war now means Malaysia & Indonesia will be solidly in Team anti-West. West has been check-mated by Russia/China in two moves.
Really important to note that this is why Russia is so important to China. Russia’s ability to bring the Muslim nations (plus India) onside, something China could never do. Russia has a lot more weight in the partnership than simply economics.
Best reporting I’ve found to date. 1 hour ago from Channel 4 news, UK. Interviews and reports from both sides. utube. ~37 minutes.
Israel forms war cabinet as Gaza runs out of fuel, power, food
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FysFqdRI50A
I’m thirsty and hoped to find a water cooler here at this time of day, oh well. ;)
Hidden treasure!
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/03/200pm-water-cooler-10-11-2023.html
Thanks!
Arigato gozaimasu!
Yes thank you! I will just say that Stuart Stevens from the LATimes who is complaining about Trump being an autocrat sounds awfully butthurt that the “normie” republicans like Bush/Cheney aren’t the ones getting to be the ‘deciders’ any more.
And to all thee TDS-infected who think Trump is going to bring autocracy or fascism or whatever to the US, I will ask again, Trump and what army?
The ones controlling the armies these days happen to be the liberals in most Western countries. I’d look there for the fascism, if there is some coming our way.
Default TDS answer seems to be: “The Proud Boys!!!”
What? Was a button not clicked?
Thank you. There’s a lot of “heady goodness” in that link.
RE: Female crash test dummy
This new invention is necessary and valuable. But the referenced science article on muscle mass similarities is flawed. The science article says men/women cyclists (serious riders) have the same percent of interstitial muscle fat in their gluteus muscles, as well as subcutaneous fat surrounding these muscles (in the sampled population).
The science article is ignoring there are two types of muscle mass “slow twitch” and “fast twitch” and men and women differ in these types. Cycling, powered by the gluteous muscles, is predominately slow-twitch. So men/women are going to be more alike. However, if you compare men/women who do sprinting, jumping, or weight-lifting that require fast-twitch muscles you will see a big difference in muscle mass. Just watch the elite in the WNBA and the NBA—the men jump higher, accelerate faster, and obviously have bigger muscles.
The crash test dummy for females is important because the female body is different than the male body, in general.
Addendum: Here’s a link to muscle types https://www.healthline.com/health/slow-twitch-muscle-fibers#slow-twitch-muscles