Giant Rice Straw Sculptures of Animals Take Over at the 2023 Wara Art Festival in Japan My Modern Met (David L)
The Sphere Just Held It’s First Live Show and the Visuals Inside Are Mind-Blowing My Modern Met (David L)
The Ostrich Defence: Trafficking Antiquities London Review of Books (London Review of Books)
Seismic Activity Near Naples Is Intensifying Newser (Dr. Kevin)
How open-source software could finally get the world’s microscopes speaking the same language Nature (Kevin W)
How a Big Pharma Company Stalled a Potentially Lifesaving Vaccine in Pursuit of Bigger Profits ProPublica (Kevin W)
#COVID-19
We Should Have Known So Much About Covid from the Start New York Times (David L). Lambert will be banging his head on his desk, as will be IM Doc about his shocking enthusiasm for getting Covid. His meticulous records show more Covid exposure (mRNA vax > 3 or 4, plus infections) is found in the population that gets bad cases of Covid. On top of that, from a recent e-mail:
Melanoma, lymphoma, leukemia, and renal cell interestingly is the exact list of cancer types in which immune surveillance plays a critical role. These are all the tumors who so far have had the most success with immunotherapy.
This has been known for a very long time. This is true of melanoma in particular.
The colorectal situation he describes [see here] is what is now being referred to as turbo cancer. Interestingly, I thought I was not seeing enough to make that jump. It has seemed there has been an overall slight increase in cancer rates but nothing to write about. Unlike the blood clots, PE, strokes and heart issues. That unfortunately is obviously on the rise. I have been seeing a bit more cancer than usual, but nothing dramatic. and nothing like this turbo met issue.
Now September has happened. TWICE this month, patients came in with vague abd pain and tenderness and eventually found to have massive Mets in their entire body everywhere. Very very small Mets by the thousands everywhere. Perspective….I have seen this before. Almost all untreated cancer patients will do this eventually. However, this is NOT how they present usually. Cancers are found on screening. Or incidentally or they cause pain, etc. They are found as solo lesions the vast majority of the time. They do not often “show up” this far advanced. It is a sign of massive and rapid failure of immune surveillance.
As an internist for 30 years, I have had this PRESENTATION precisely 6 times. The last of these being in 2015. 3 ovarian CA, 1 colorectal CA, 1 pancreas CA, 1 primary peritoneal CA. That is it.
And now 2 in September. Workups not complete so I do not know the source. And that is just it with these. You cannot know the source from anatomy and imaging – they are everywhere. Modern medicine can tell with tissue biopsy called brown staining. But it takes a while to get the path back. And it really does not matter much – this is assuredly terminal.
In these patients, one had 6 vaccines and Five Covid infections. The other had 6 vaccines and 4 Covid infections. 11 Covid detonations. And 10 Covid detonations.
This is my potential concern about this. The number of smacks being delivered to the immune system by Covid and/or vaccination. This has been my ongoing concern with what seems to be that the vaccines are causing or allowing people to be infected more often.
China?
The EU launched probes into Chinese EVs even without industry complaints:
“While no formal complaint was received from EU industry to launch proceedings, the EU's anti-subsidy rules stipulate that EU industry be requested to cooperate in the ex officio investigation.”🙂 pic.twitter.com/HQI9jbB0UG
— Guan Xin 关馨 (@GuanXin411) October 5, 2023
At this point, China simply trolls the US by existing https://t.co/heAhON9HBm
— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) October 6, 2023
Climate/Environment
‘Sponge cities’ could be the answer to soaking up urban flooding NPR (David L)
Arizona to cancel leases allowing Saudi-owned farm access to state’s groundwater Associated Press (Kevin W). Water rights are a big deal in the West and are regularly traded.
New research finds that ancient carbon in rocks releases as much carbon dioxide as the world’s volcanoes PhysOrg (David L)
Monoculture carbon plantations threaten biodiversity and have little benefit for the climate REDD-Monitor (Micael T)
Lahaina Banyan Tree Has Sprouted New Leaves Since the Devastating Maui Wildfires My Modern Met (David L)
European Disunion
Shrinking foreign trade German exports are falling unexpectedly significantly Tagesschau (guurst)
Germany about to see its first big property crash in recent history. 🇩🇪🏠📉 https://t.co/FeuUCVL3Nw
— Philip Pilkington (@philippilk) October 5, 2023
Should we cancel national debt owned by the ECB ? CADTM (Micael T)
The impasse of dependent Europe and the key to its rebirth Defend Democracy (Micael T)
Old Blighty
House-building slump brings biggest UK construction fall since 2020 Reuters
International comparison shows England & Wales pandemic deaths relatively high Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (ma)
New Not-So-Cold War
House Speaker turmoil imperils future Ukraine funding The Hill. We called this before the Speaker vote. The nixing of Ukraine funding in the continuing resolution and McConnell acquiescing was more radical in and of itself that was initially acknowledged in the press. Now see:
The assistance had already faced a tough path to passage, as more Republicans have come out in opposition to additional aid. But as the race to replace McCarthy heats up, the road ahead has only become rockier.
US Funding for Ukraine Gov’t Reportedly to ‘Run Dry by November Sputnik. Remember, the $24 billion, then $6 billion, were extra authorizations for 2023 apparently because Project Ukraine burned through just about all its money. Both the House and Senate approved the 2024 Defense authorization (they have to be reconciled but I am told that should go pretty quickly). They cannot be opened up in any way without throwing more sand in the gears of getting the 2024 budget approved. As we also said, the Pentagon is sure to find some spare change under the sofa cushions, but not $24 billion, and not likely $6 billion.
EU’s Borrell Warns Europe Can’t Replace US Support For Ukraine Agence France-Presse
‘Our allies ask us to advance with a gun at our backs’ London Times. Discussed at some length here: Shoigu Visits HQ; Rus Seeks Odessa, Kharkov; UK/NATO Admit No Ammo; UK MSM Ukr Army Demoralised Alexander Mercouris
Patrick Lawrence: Depleted Ukrainium Scheerpost (Anthony L)
Grenade fragments found in bodies of Wagner crash victims, Putin says Washington Post (Kevin W)
Morawiecki Suspects That Zelensky Struck A Deal With Germany Behind Poland’s Back Andrew Korybko
Still germane:
This is David Ayzenberg , a Ukrainian Jew born in Kyiv in 1926 . He was one of the very few survivors of the Babyn Yar massacre, which we commemorate its 82th anniversary today . Just listen to his testimony ; He testifies they were led by Ukrainian nationalists and not by… pic.twitter.com/eceWPCysvy
— Holocaust In Ukraine (@ShoahUkraine) September 30, 2023
Civilizational code and nuclear doctrine: what Putin said at Valdai Club meeting TASS (guurst)
Leaked Documents Reveal Ukraine’s Zelensky and the US trying to Hire ISIS (DAESH) Terrorists in Iraq Devend (Micael T)
Why Turkey’s Expanding Military Footprint is Unstoppable History Legends
Syraqistan
Syria war: At least 100 dead in drone attack on cadet graduation ceremony BBC (Kevin W)
What’s behind the sudden US good will towards Iran? Defend Democracy (Micael T)
Spoils of War: General Electric’s role in Iraq’s energy crisis The Cradle (Micael T)
JP Morgan’s European boss: Middle East is in a ‘Golden Era’ International Affairs (Micael T)
Israel: Spitting on Christians in Jerusalem ‘not criminal’, says Ben Gvir Middle East Eye (Kevin W)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
— chinahand (@chinahand) October 4, 2023
I’m the real Siri — I’ve been forced to change my name after Apple’s latest system update New York Post (BC)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Thirty Months Later… Andrei Martyanov. Chuck L: “Martyanov’s prescience.”
When 80 percent of US generals go to work for arms makers Responsible Statescraft
Estimate of U.S. Post-9/11 War Spending, in $ Billions FY2001-FY2022 Watson Institute Brown University (Paul R)
US cancer centers still see ‘widespread’ shortages of life-saving chemo drugs, survey finds CNN (Kevin W)
Trump
MILLEY ALWAYS TOLD TRUMP WHAT HE WANTED TO HEAR Seymour Hersh
GOP Clown Car
US House Republicans fear loss of their ‘rainmaker’ Kevin McCarthy Financial Times
Matt Gaetz Says He Wants To Negotiate. Democrats Should Take Him Up On It. The Intercept
Supremes
This Supreme Court’s ‘Originalism’ Doesn’t Have Much to Do With History Brennan Center for Justice
AI
Men Are Cheating With AI Instagram Bots, Because Men Rolling Stone (furzy)
Recession? Joe Costello (Randy K)
September Jobs Report May Be Last Good One Before Sharp Slowdown Bloomberg
The collapse in Treasury bonds now ranks among worst market crashes in history Business Insider (Paul R)
Good Morning Everyone! I can’t believe I am saying this but the slump in 10-year and 30-year bonds is approaching the epic drops we saw in stocks during the 2008 financial crisis and the dot-com bubble bust:
📉 10-year bonds are down 46% (vs. 49% for dot-com stocks)
📉 30-year… pic.twitter.com/2eLKqXp9Zk— Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA (@GRDecter) October 5, 2023
The Bezzle
Twitter Is at Death’s Door, One Year After Elon Musk’s Takeover Rolling Stone (furzy)
Orange County Doctor of Osteopathy Indicted in Quarter Billion Dollar Fraud Targeting Pandemic Program for Uninsured Patients United States Attorney’s Office (BC)
Class Warfare
Value chatter and the devaluation of values NachDenkSeiten (Micael T)
The Game Theory of the Auto Strikes Wired
“Homeland economics” will make the world poorer Economist (David L). Conveniently ignores that most people value stability in their jobs and communities more than more stuff.
Antidote du jour:
And a bonus (Chuck L):
“Yesterday I witnessed something that took my breath away. I heard a sound at the window of the cottage. When I looked, a cedar waxwing had hit the window and fallen to the deck. It’s mate stood beside it. It was clear that the fallen bird was dead. I turned away for a moment and… pic.twitter.com/8JxBqwWfSt
— The Dalbo Dog (@Dalbodog) October 4, 2023
And a second bonus:
Cats are weird.. 😂 pic.twitter.com/20pNTafGa8
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) October 5, 2023
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
160 comments
Comments are closed.
Would anyone be so kind as to provide a glossary for IM Docs’s email? What are “mets”? What is COVID “detonation”?
mets = metastases = additional tumors elsewhere produced from cells that have migrated (“metastatized”) from an existing cancer site
A met is a metastatic lesion. It is a lesion wherein the tumor has traveled through the blood or lymphatic system to a distant body part. For example, lung cancers are often seen to be metastatic to the regional lymph nodes in the chest and adrenal glands on initial discovery. It is uncommon at best for them to be spread by the thousands all over the body at initial presentation.
A detonation is just my slang word that night after no sleep of encounters with the spike protein.
Is this possibly even related to Covid? Who knows…the presentation is odd. And to suddenly have two in one month is really odd…….but I have gotten used to “odd” in the past 2 years or so.
Is this COVId? Is this the vaccine? Is this cumulative of both? Is this unrelated?
Critical questions. Not just cancer but many other issues I am seeing. Is anyone in authority truly investigating? Are they allowing others all over the country to have the data to investigate? Just this week, I went to CDC site at the prompting of one of my colleagues and a question I had about all cause mortality, and was kindly informed that as of September, they are not putting these numbers online. You can go to their wonder and “some” may be available. FYI, wonder is a very old database style with very difficult interfaces and almost impossible to use. I just do not have the time as an individual practitioner to invest to try to make it work. Is that their goal? To discourage the peons from asking their own questions?
I have never seen anything like this. It is very disturbing. Not at all in line with how we practiced medicine at least 5 years ago much less when I was a kid. It would be so nice if our agencies were actually doing this work, if they would share it in real papers and presentations, all raw data and hard questions included. Instead, we are told to be “ fetch” and we get obvious propaganda pieces masquerading as “science”.
I do not know the answers to these questions. I am seeing what I am seeing. I am doing the very best I can to guide patients through what is becoming a mockery of what they used to expect of their health agencies. I would love to know these answers or at least rest in assurance they are being taken seriously. Until then, I have gone into the mode we were all trained with of evaluating everything on your own and doing your rational best for those under your care.
Thank you.
An aside: this paper was published last year. The idea presented is ignored by public health agencies. The abstract portion is understandable to a lay audience, imo. These questions need to be tested and challenged by public health agencies. Instead, they are dismissed. / my 2 cents.
Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes, and MicroRNAs
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9012513/
The spike used in the vaccine alone has no known mechanism that causes immune suppression.
The whole virus on the other hand is full of additional proteins that do that.
The spike in the vaccine does seem to cause clotting issues (still at a rate vastly lower than the virus itself, because the latter goes everywhere and replicates to orders of magnitude higher levels, but very much non-zero either), but this is a different thing altogether.
If a doctor is telling you they are purposefully obfuscating the data, how can you make these claims?
Because I am a scientist in a relevant field and I have closely followed the literature for the last nearly four years, which literature is quite enormous now.
And I am well aware that the epidemiological data has been fake for a long time. But there are studies on individual patents and in vitro and in silico, from which we know a lot.
Indeed, this is the entire crux of where we have been dumped.
There are all kinds of studies, case observations, individual patient reports, in vitro, in silico, in vivo – you name it – it is out there.
All of these things are very helpful and can guide us, however, how many times in my life have things in the lab not held up or been radically different in the real world. The basic scientists doing in vivo work told us that VIOXX would be a revolution – it would be a NSAID that would heal arthritis without the renal and GI problems – They were wrong. The basic scientists assured us for years that timed release opiates would not cause addiction – their lab animals and in vitro studies showed this conclusively. Years of pain and suffering and death by millions have shown they were wrong about that too. Right now, I have seen scientists say exactly what you are saying in one ear and quite conclusively, and other scientists saying the exact opposite, quite conclusively. I then have what is going on before my eyes with my patients every day. Often inconsistent with anything I am hearing from basic science.
The basic science data and research and observations are critical for guiding us – the real world epidemiologic data is critical for what is actually happening in real people, risk stratification, who gets what, what are the safety issues, who is most at risk for them, and so many other questions.
We are flying completely blind without that data. Again, the only way answers will be had is to release every scrap down to the finest granular details. Let all of us look it over, see everything, debate, disagree – see what needs to be done for further elucidation. See what is confirming the basic science. See what is not confirming the basic science – and most importantly – HOW IS THE DIFFERENCE HAPPENING? In my experience, that is where answers often lie. It is the only way.
Thank you. And a very personal and entirely correlative, correlation is not causation aside, a very dear older relative was prescribe VIOXX in place of her older prescription for arthritis pain relief. Within a year she had a massive stroke that killed her. But again, correlation is not causation. But one does wonder.
For those wondering as I was:
GIGO and all that.
I would caution not calling everything in silico as GIGO.
Computer simulations are absolutely essential for much of what basic scientists do. For example, how proteins are folded. How drugs will fit into various receptors on cell walls. This is all work that is done in silico, at least partially. Computers are much more rapid and reliable with this type of thing. This is especially germaine to COVID and COVID vaccine research – where the various amino acid substitutions are causing the spike protein for example to be folded in all kinds of different ways and interact with the different receptors in our bodies. In silico is critical for this kind of thing.
Where I very much agree with you about garbage is on the epidemiological modelling where big assumptions are made and then you let the computer “model” out what is going to happen. This has been an absolute disaster for years and has been repeatedly a total debacle during COVID – a la Niall Ferguson. At times, this truly is GIGO.
niall ferguson was exactly whom I was thinking of, but point taken.
My $0.02 on ‘in silico’.
My PhD was in molecular biophysics, designing, synthesising and characterising peptide maquettes of protein structures and metal binding sites. We found in some of our model systems that minute changes in the bonding/structural energies, on the order of a single hydrogen bond, could cause significant structural rearrangements.
Many protein structures are determined in environments that are light-years away from their natural/normal conditions. For example protein crystals grown for high resolution x-ray measurements are typically generated in high-molarity salt solutions. These abnormal environmental conditions likely impose significant distorting forces on the structure, such that the ‘angstrom scale resolution’ image you get might have multiple deviations from the actual in vivo protein. A few angstroms here or there are really, really significant when it comes to binding affinity. So the GIGO is not the fault of the computer, but rather the mechanisms we use for determining the structures that get fed into the computer.
All this work is deep in the unclear murk of Heisenberg indeterminacy, so it is sometimes nearly impossible to know if the mechanism of measurement if affecting/changing the resulting data. The scientists are giving it their best effort, but this sort of work is really complicated and hard!
That’s what I love about this site. Thank you for this inside info
Total agreement. Observations from actual practitioners, and not public relations hacks, is where we get the information we need to approach the “truth” of the matter.
That’s why I appreciate IMDoc’s complaint about “insufficient data.” It shows the rest of us that “something wicked this way comes.”
Stay as safe as you can!
The vaccine delivered Spike is known to cause downregulation of both innate and adaptive immune systems though the mechanism involved is not known (I suspect driven by excessive inflammatory response to vaccination) as well as in “breakthrough” infections suggesting a role of long non-coding RNAs. It also has been shown vaccine induced IL-18 is involved in vaccine associated miocarditis and this very same citokine is known to be a metastatic inducer in cancer patients under treatment.
I think that IM Doc is exactly on the right path. The effect described in the first paper is described as persistent and if you are constantly boosted we can change “persistent” with “nearly constant” for a long time and that might be a good explainer of the observations made by IM Doc at the hospital. He is quite right: the immune system is involved in the maintenance of cancer in dormant state and changes in its function have been shown to spur metastasis.
Bait and switch.
We aren’t talking about mild temporary innate immunity modulation, we were talking about the kind of T-cell derangement that can result in control of nascent tumor development shutting down altogether.
Very different things.
We have no idea the effects of repeated cycles of inflammation by repeated vaccination and/or infection which aren’t exactly mild in the case of Covid vaccines not to mention infections. And we don’t have idea because we didn’t want any research that might cast any doubt on Covid vaccines. We knew about chronic inflammation and metastasis with cancer but this was prior to Covid. We didn’t have prior experience of any boosting like crazy with a highly inflammatory vaccine as Covid vaccine is. What is being seen in hospitals warrants research in this area. Fortunately the run for boosting is ending or at least at very low numbers at least in Europe.
Fortunately, we have control groups.
The UK mostly didn’t bother vaccinating children, then didn’t even make them eligible for boosters.
And yet you see how for example last year more than twice as many kids died of Strep A than the worst year on record before.
It isn’t just Strep A that has been running rampant either.
So clearly something wrecked their immune systems and it wasn’t the endless boosters.
Tell me how many times had been seen, before COVID, vaccine-associated myocarditis as an example of such “mild” and “temporary” inflammatory processes.
The kicker for me is getting mRNA vaccine whilst dropping all non invasive protection which results in infection is compounding.
That would mean that the way things were done for non medical reasons made the situation manifold worse in a time with little or bad data to work with. Necessitate the mother of all cover ups or all hell would break lose.
Just IM Docs recent observations about knowledgeable and experienced people with yonks in the profession bailing out.
Just a few examples of “mild” and “temporary” effects of COVID vaccines to have in mind.
Inflammatory arthritis.
Hyperinflammatory syndrome.
Autoimmune diseases.
Thrombocytopenia and Thrombosis.
Of course Myocarditis in 1,4/100.000 in Denmark according to the paper.
Then why not adding the typical idiotic article by the NYT:
Feeling Terrible After Your Covid Shot? Then It’s Probably Working.
Oh I have been watching Ignacio and confer with my contacts here [US born&educated immunologist working here at Uni] and in the states [family going back to head of Chicago U Medical department which has now branched out to big medical insurance mobs].
Heck even my youngest daughter who deferred from Vet tech to work and ski in Banff resort with friends and caught last plane home only to end up working front desk in ED at big private hospital. Saw all the hectic stuff and how it effected everything in running the hospital to patient treatment. I know one of her Dr bosses at the hospital that is about 60 yr old and talked too her about it all.
I am with IM Doc on the issue with proper studies being funded and done full stop, concerns that funding is seeking a ordained conclusion or funding goes poof and with it your standing and future. Thank for the reply, I’m bit tetchy these days …
We have only a hazy idea of what percentage of the population was infected in 2020* but we can be confident that a very large fraction were unaware of it.
I believe we can now take it as known that the virus exploits the vascular inflammation it causes to hijack macrophages. Viral persistence in vascular tissues seems pretty thoroughly documented as well. Brain Trusters: Am I leaping to conclusions in thinking there are obvious implications for vaccination of the previously infected? Isn’t this a plausible explanation as to why IM Doc’s “detonations” might result from vaccinations as well as infections?
* The last time I looked at this, which was a couple years ago, I reckoned that 80%, while truly dismaying, would not be truly shocking. But obviously even a much lower number could have enormous public health effects.
Incorrect, people did serosurveys (which before mass reinfections started did give a very good estimate of the overall attack rate) and in the US and Europe it was still a minority of people infected all the way until summer of 2021.
Totally asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic infections that people were completely unaware of were nowhere near “a very large fraction”.
That is a classic minimizer talking point, BTW.
It is a classic minimizer talking point, I remember that Ionnaidis nonsense too. But if you acknowledge reinfection and cumulative harm as realistic possibilities, then it takes on a different color.
“Totally mild and asymptomatic” is a very strict criterion for “Previous infections people didn’t recognize as Covid.” But even so, are they such a small cohort as to disqualify them from potentially providing the lion’s share of puzzlingly severe vaccination sequelae?
If so, then so be it, but I’m still left with my main question: Is it not plausible that, in the context of persistent infection, immune response resulting from vaccination (said response perhaps being potentiated by the infection) may be exploited by the virus in a way has the potential to exacerbate or hasten the course of Long Covid?
Just so readers are clear: I’m not suggesting reinfection would be preferable to vaccination. I’m curious about the apparent correlation of vaccination with poor outcomes IM Doc has reported seeing in his practice, and about how the vaccine spike could cause some of the problems it seems it may indeed cause.
True. But the expression of a foreign protein in human cells cannot be assumed to be benign, and that is what is done with mRNA vaccines. I once expressed the naked regulatory subunit of a protein kinase in cells and they died. We did not proceed down that mechanistic rabbit hole. Lack of time, lack of money, lack of resources. But there was no reason to expect this result. Except…expression of unbalanced ratios of hemoglobin subunits in the cells of thalassemia patients makes those cells sick, too. I suppose I am too literal minded as a molecular cell biologist, but this seems to be a flaw in the entire strategy of mRNA vaccines. If expression of an exogenous protein in an experimental model, cells or mice, makes them sick, that is an interesting observation that might tell us something. In humans, not so much.
If my recollection serves me, there’s a pre-pandemic study that found evidence that expression of coronavirus spike (SARS?) was injurious. I continue to be suprised by how little discussed it seems to be.
What do you think infection does?
I was suprised by the potential consequences of merely expressing the spike, so I guess I learned something about what infection does.
But that naturally also made me less blase’ than I had been about exactly which aspects of infection a vaccine might be simulating. And it seems to me the mRNA methodology is now being employed in an environment not conceived of by those who tested it, and hence one which might not conform to all of their underlying assumptions.
I don’t feel too batshit saying that, but I guess I’d be the last to know. For what it’s worth, given a do-over, I’d take Pfizer shots same as before. Felt like crap for days each time too.
Which is why this technology had been tested countless times in all sorts of systems before it ever got to being used for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.
There is absolutely zero evidence to suggest that the mRNA itself is doing any harm.
Because guess what — myocarditis is seen with all the vaccines. It was in fact first detected with the AZ one, which was adenoviral, and you see it with Novavax too, which is not even a vector at all.
One has to be some combination of irrecoverable conspiracy nutcase or total moron to pick on the mRNA aspect of it and then claim that vaccination is much worse than infection.
Infection produces the exact same spike after all, but in orders of magnitude greater quantities, plus all the cytopathic and all kinds of other damage.
It’s absolute lunacy, and is directly playing in the hands of the people who are the real villains in this story. The more confusion and obfuscation, the better from their perspective.
It makes sense to me that the immune system is not catching a break. I wear a proper respirator at all times in all indoor public settings. Yet I have been suffering from various rashes since June. The rash started on my chest and spread to my face. At one point in July I would stand over the sink and brush off all of the dead skin several times per day. The focus of the rash is no longer on my chest and face. Now the rash is on my forearms.
My guess is that the rash is the result of my immune system working overtime to control daily exposure to SARS-CoV-2. What is happening to ordinary people living their daily lives without attempting to filter out the SARS-CoV-2? It makes sense that their immune system would not be able to cope with the constant onslaught of SARS-CoV-2.
Roger, it could be stress associated with having to be so careful in indoor settings. I have spent a lot of time in hospitals of late as a close relative of a very sick patient, and I find it stressful, but get a headache, not a rash.
Or it could be an allergy to some particles given off by masks. My dentist, who has irritated airways caused by years of hauling hay for his horses, finds some masks give off particles that irritate his airways and cause him to cough. He has to tell patients he is not sick, just affected by his mask.
But I have also wondered if I get sub-infectious doses of viruses all the time from being in indoor spaces, and especially the hospital. And does that give me a bit of extra immunity?
‘etiSh
@etish_
In America, a luxury vehicle was stolen by sending a signal to its keys inside the house.’
Pro tip. If you have things like these high-tech keys, then maybe spend a few bucks on a Faraday bag.
Quite the video indeed.
I am guessing the loop antenna is hooked to a laptop and a Software Defined Radio (SDR) that in essence acts as a signal repeater to make it seem like the key fob is next to the car. Thus triggering the automatic door unlock, allowing a second person to enter and hit the ignition button.
Funny, since the battry died on keyfob for wife lil suv thing(gmc yukon xl), if one leaves the key in the car, itll lock itself at random.
Dealership where we got it says they cant fix it.
So spare key in my wallet.
And this one is low tech next to moms spaceship.
If i ever require another vehicle, it will be stupid, not smart…even if that means a mule and a buckboard
Don’t buy a new washing machine!
Why would one leave the key in the car and get out of the car???
I had a Faraday wallet for a few years and the annoyance of having to take my metro card and key cards out to “swipe” eventually wore me down.
Btw, considering how easy it supposedly is to steal from cards with the “contactless” function, it is amazing that doesn’t happen more often.
The Ostrich Defence: Trafficking Antiquities London Review of Books
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By a wide margin, coins are the commonest of all antiquities in the west, and hoards of say tens of thousands of cheap Roman bronze coins 1,700 years old worth a few bucks each are found all the time from the UK to Israel and all points inbetween, kind of a drug on the market, with no highfalutin museum officials doing clandestine deals to acquire the yeah whatever booty, they typically get filtered into the marketplace, as coins are different than other antiquities in that they really don’t show well in a museum, and museums devoted to coins are few and far between, its pretty much strictly an individual coin collector market, unless there’s something interesting in the hoard-as per the story below
Here’s a hoard of 52,000+ cheap Roman coins found in the UK in 2010 that a museum acquired for the princely sum of £6 per coin, big whoop!
Provenance means nothing generally in numismatics unless we’re talking about great rarities and the most valuable coins are American, hardly antiquities.
Yes, as long-time readers will recall, you mentioned much the same thing close to three years ago in connection with 100,000 coins found in a ceramic jar “at a 15th-century former samurai’s residence” in Japan but it’s interesting to know that, as a general rule, coins really don’t show well in a museum.
A small correction: there are a TON of small coin museums around the world, like seemingly in every largish city I’ve been in, and even quite a few small towns, and many more art and history museums with coin collections, but as you noted, the supply so vastly outstrips the demand of museums, and also they don’t display well, you need a magnifying glass and then a lot of of the detail is distorted.
It occurs to me that one innovation would be to allow people to hold the coins. That would be just about the only way an average person is going to hold a centuries-old museum-quality piece of art. Since the coins aren’t fragile and usually not that valuable, it could be done with supervision and would breath new life into these little places.
> The Sphere Just Held It’s First Live Show and the Visuals Inside Are Mind-Blowing – My Modern Met
Nonplussed to see that nowadays not even the Modern Met cares enough to make the proper “it’s / its” distinction in its headline. It’s puzzling because farther down in the article there’s a pull quote in big type that gets it right.
That’s what you get when you lay off your copy editors.
Also, this artificial entity (the Sphere,) is given “agency” by the writer(s) of the article?
What next? Sonic soundscapes by Siri?
I’d assume that autocorrect is also in play there: it always insists on “correcting” all instances of its to it’s, at least in my case.
I blame autocorrect. I make plenty of mistakes but I spend as much or more time correcting the autocorrected items as I do my own. My favorites are its/it’s and were/we’re, the there/theirs get in on the action as well. I also blame austerity hiring that means there are few if any copy editors and proof readers.
I’m worrying about the near term roll out of “Autocorrect the Record.” “Code is Law” will be literally correct(ed.)
Whatever. I just wish this the greatest success and it becomes incredibly profitable, so that Dolan decides to move to Vegas and sell off his assets in NYC, and then maybe the Knicks will win again and Penn Station can finally be transformed into something, anything, better than the literal hell hole it is today. Shades of the Godfather.
Take it from a superannuated proofreader: Headlines are the last things written before deadline, often by whoever’s about to punch ‘Send.’ It’s the likeliest (as well as most flagrant) place to blow it.
Maybe they discovered NC, realized that the greatest journalistic endeavor of our time does not have any copyediting, so why bother?
I don’t think mymodernmet.com is in any way related to “The Met”, the museum (metmuseum.org).
They seem to be just a small (3 employees?) internet operation running out of Los Angeles: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/my-modern-metropolis
Probably an overworked intern, or who knows, even the owner of the company, who made the mistake on the headline.
Oho, I see — the name My Modern Met also has a stealth aspect, that of piggybacking on (cashing in on positive associations with) someone else’s brand.
Absolutely! I definitely also made that association in my mind when I first hear of them. And I’m sure that was completely intentional for promotional purposes.
Rep. Ro Khanna:
The American people believe Congress is broken.
What is needed is not just a change of speaker, but also a bold reform plan to clean up the mess.
Ban PAC and lobbyist money, ban stock trading, enact term limits, and ban members of Congress from becoming lobbyists.
https://twitter.com/RepRoKhanna/status/1709689081788051938
I understand that Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has said that whoever the next Speaker is, that they have to fully support Project Ukraine to get the support of the Democrats. They haven’t learned a damn thing.
They know who funds their campaigns. What else do they need to know? / ;)
Here’s the old 1889 political cartoon from the time of America’s so-called Gilded Age.
The Bosses of the Senate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bosses_of_the_Senate#/media/File:The_Bosses_of_the_Senate_by_Joseph_Keppler.jpg
It has been updated. The new Bosses of the Senate. (And House.)
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjHHOOKJeCTPMQoNqksbJrC3YzVVzjNTaNFTYQA6EGgh6AN34gLQkiOzlS9cDDEXJVvlFcV_ZO7oNBMQ6QpUGzXnfqVatQXImgXC9RamKqYp2oBD1k_2Iwu3j2iOJ4OWulVW6p_rs6O-Sr8gI8x9az2fBwlRKo2FhkjJ8XGVWR2yH7Q9xfD4aPgFdUy0g=s683
trivia: my favorite bit in the cartoon is the large, wide open door for the moneybag Monopolists, while the small, upper gallery door for the Peoples Entrance is marked “CLOSED”.
It just goes to show that government is not newly broken. It actually has a lot more guardrails now but works like it always has, business as usual.
Project Moneyclip.
Hakeem Jeffries.
Umbra sprite.
The Ryan Grim/Intercept piece in the links above has that covered. I usually get a profound sense of emptiness when thinking too hard about congress, but maybe there could be something with the Gaetz/Khanna affiliation.
GG has laid out the perversity of the previous character assassination against Gaetz having him on his System Update in the past. That doesn’t make me like him, but I don’t like the Dems either. At least they should talk. They have already been allies.
Yes, but the problem is not in the speaker or the tweeter, it’s in the base.
The only problem with the base is that both parties’ establishments ignore their base in favor of the big money. Oligarchy is such a foreign idea in America; the question is how else could it be described.
Perhaps we just fail to understand who is their base.
Hint: it’s not us.
How sick is it that the prospective california senator is a lobbyist for uber and air bnb?
We’ll give you an uber job that doesn’t pay the rent because all the landlords make more on air bnb?
A swamp creature if there ever was one. And she lives in maryland…oh, ok…
Hillary wants to de-program large swathes of America.
Cha-ching!
The new Senator from California can work her magic by lining up Uber and AirBnB contracts while processing a nominal service charge. Say, 10%?
She was sworn in on Tuesday. She came from humble beginnings and did good as a labor organizer. But if one pals around with Republicrats one will be tainted. She’s pals with Kamala.
Kamala’s brother-in-law is the Chief Legal Officer at Uber. Certainly not a coincidence.
Ahso! I don’t think Butler is a lawyer so I’d interested to know what sort of advice she was giving them.
My cynical thought:
She provided the list of the price tags of the various members of Congress.
The American people KNOW Congress is broken…it’s not a “belief”or a “feeling.”
We might be better off is the whole enterprise is shutdown and everyone goes home permanently; Let the states run their own affairs.
I’m mostly kidding; states are as wantonly corrupt as Congress, even liberal Democrat single party states.
Good ideas but insufficient. Sortition might help, though constitutionally forbidden. But I do like Patrick Deneen’s idea to expand the House to 6,000 members.
“Civilizational code and nuclear doctrine: what Putin said at Valdai Club meeting ”
I found the following bit very interesting-
‘However, Ukraine won’t last without foreign help. It will “come to a halt” unless it keeps receiving $4-5 bln every month, and without Western weapons supplies, Kiev “will last only a week.” ‘
Reason being, Lindsay Graham came out a coupla days ago and said that they had to vote $60-70 billion to the Ukraine. Since Biden was talking about ‘only’ $24 billion, I wondered where Graham was getting this figure from. But if the Ukraine needs $4-5 billion every month, then it may be that Graham’s number is based on all the money that the Ukraine will need between November when the money runs out and next November when the Presidential elections is held. If the Dems get back in, then they will go for more money. But if the Repubs get in, then the money runs out and it is all their fault that the Ukraine collapses if they don’t vote more money.
Good math. You sometimes wonder if they just grab numbers from the sky, but, that makes sense. Not gonna happen, though.
“Shrinking foreign trade German exports are falling unexpectedly significantly” Tagesschau
Does this take into account German industry exports from whatever country the manufacturing may be in?
For any country, that means looking at a corporations’ exports as divorced from national interest or origin.
This account is trying to blame it all on less demand and rising interest rates. Yeah, nah! No mention of the war, the blowback of the sanctions and the destruction of the NS2 pipelines leading to higher energy costs in Germany today. The boys at The Duran put out a video today called ‘Russian economy not in tatters. German economy in tatters’ and is worth watching-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biZkwTAQlDY (20:33 mins)
Those making these geopolitical decisions will never admit the destruction their decisions caused.
They may have to admit defeat, but nothing will ever be their fault in their minds. It’s more important for them to try to maintain the illusion of superiority and that is what they are teaching their children…like SBF and that ilk.
Even taking “less demand and rising interest rates” as given, why is there less demand and what is causing interest rates to rise? What are they doing that?
Is this some kind of odd meteorological phenomenon?
’Tis a mystery!
Re: German property crash
I was struck by how that graph took a nosedive immediately after the sabotage of NordStream. Somebody was paying attention, but they’ve kept pretty quiet about it. Good Germans :-/ .
As Dad used to say: “The only Good German is a Debt German.”
The first person I heard say that was a Ukrainian.
“Sponge cities”. That’s called wetland protection and restoration.
There’s no way Jim Jordan or other Red Scare acolyte can garner enough votes to become Speaker, is there?
Isn’t it funny that Gaetz got the job done, whether you agree with it or not, by ‘forcing the vote’. Now where have I heard that concept before? Seems familiar somehow but can’t quite pin it down…
Maybe it is because I do not live in the US but I have seen no TV interviews with ordinary people in the streets if they agreed with this happening. Plenty of political actors giving their opinion but absolutely none from the ordinary people that I have seen.
Gaetz is the consigliare, a gadfly’s gadfly in the oral majority.
Politicians here in the states stopped putting party affiliation on their campaign billboards, advertising and what have you on both sides of the aisle 20 years ago, thats how alienating they are to the ordinary man and woman on the street, they do nothing for us other than supply the goods to provide the faux rancor they so desire.
Watched the Republican debate and they spent 5 minutes seemingly on trans issues, but not a whisper on climate change.
They pretend to pay attention to us, and we pretend everything still works.
Going by his Wikipedia page, he really is hard, hard right and a third generation politician in his family to boot-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gaetz
But he did help it make it permissible to talk about if all that money to the Ukraine is justified.
The synchronicity of a sinking Ukraine and Gaetz et al only bringing it up as the gunwales are lurching into the abyss in an unwinnable war on account of the west losing the arms race, isn’t lost on me.
Its a double pass for both parties, the Pachyderms could claim they were against funding the Ukraine any further and the Donkey Show can claim that victory was in sight but they were cut off by lack of funding.
Hold on, wasn’t that what went down in the aftermath of Vietnam?
After WW1 the German officer class said that they were stabbed in the back and so could not win the war. After the Vietnam war I have seen the military in the US and Oz claim that they were stabbed in the back by protesting hippies which undercut the war effort. That lie never ages but just has a long, white beard to it.
they could all unite around Yellow Peril, but then where would good Murikins get their color TVs?
‘Tis a dilemma!
Yellow Peril was the moniker bestowed on the cream colored, well really custard 1979 Cadillac Seville that owned me for about a year.
It had power everything, some of which still worked in the later 80’s when I was persuaded into purchase.
It broke down 3x, a couple of times with the same friends on board, thus the nickname.
OK, now you are showing your colors. I have met people (salesmen mostly) who say they can tell everything they need to know about a man from the shoes he is wearing but I think the car he drives is more revealing.
Full disclosure: I had a 1936 Indian motorcycle. I think I pushed it more miles than rode.
If there’s anything the last few decades of US politics ought to have taught us, it’s that practically anybody can garner enough votes to become practically anything.
“Milley always told Trump what he wanted to hear.”
Can only see the first bit of Seymour Hersh’s article but the title surprised me. Milley always does this ever since he became Chief of Staff back in 2015. It is part of his job. So the proper title sequence would be this-
‘Milley always told Obama what he wanted to hear’
‘Milley always told Trump what he wanted to hear’
‘Milley always told Biden what he wanted to hear’
But the guy is a snake. The photo in that article shows Trump, Milley and a whole gaggle of officials going across the street to that shut down church for a photo op during the riots. So what did he feel the need to wear battle-fatigues that day? Certainly he has said lots of inflammatory statements about countries like China, Russia, Iran, etc. when it would have been better to say nothing. But he is the sort og general that Washington wants in that job.
Well, the answer to that is in another of today’s links: When 80 percent of US generals go to work for arms makers. The big question in Milley’s head right now is how to transition into retirement wealth, er, as, um, discreetly as possible. It’s his reward for putting up with the Ahole politicians with a stiff jaw and always a yes sir.
This is not a Milley problem, or even a military problem. This is how people advance within their organization. I have seen this behavior over and over again in upper management where I currently work. This behavior, along with how our corporate and government leaders can repeatedly fail without consequence just seems to be how our country works (or doesn’t, since this is definitely rewards people willing to lie, cheat, and steal.)
Absolutely. The modus operandi is agree to do everything the upper ups want, promise even more (bigger and shinier), then get outta Dodge (promotion or lateral move) before it hits the fan with the farewell message that the job is 90% done. We used to call it “failing up” and marvel at its most agile practitioners.
The hardest problem in tech, naming things…
That said, these voice assistance systems are downright dumb.
there is no training to separate “owner” voice from others. No direction or distance detecting. And being audio only they can’t do the visual check we humans do reflexively when we think we hear our name, to see if the speaker is actually talking to us or not.
All in all, i am surprised that Apple et al has not tried to sell some kind of fashionable brooch or similar as an alternative trigger. After all, they sold a $17000 version of their first watch back in the day (now no longer supported apparently).
‘All in all, I am surprised that Apple et al has not tried to sell some kind of fashionable brooch or similar as an alternative trigger.’
Star Trek has already got you-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t7er3Jw28A 910:28 mins)
Where i got the “idea” so to speak.
That said, there is a company set to unveil a self contained device of a similar nature soon.
Pretty sure that Bill Gates issued something like these things to the visitors to his house a coupla decades ago but in no way was that creepy at all. No siree. Not with Bill Gates.
A popular meme among the computer geek world thirty years ago envisioned fifteen years ago for your viewing pleasure:
I am Bill Gates of Borg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ4KbXRrd00
And now, like a lot of sci-fi I read as a kid, I’m starting to feel like I’m living it.
The comedy troupe Firesign Theatre had a “person in the street” routine – answers to “What is the future?” My favorite: “THIS is the future. You got to LIVE it, or LIVE WITH it.”
They did not explicitly mention the other option: at a time TBD, one gets out of the way.
Meta comment, as I have written before, I very much appreciate the news you share here and have since the financial crisis.
My ability to read in shades of red is deteriorating because of optic neuritis. I realize you have many priorities, but if you could at your convenience consider changing the color of your headlines, you would help me continue to read here.
As a suggestion, what about changing how your browser displays colours on your computer. So then you would not have this problem on any website that you visit. Here is one page that gives instructions and is about half way down the page-
https://recoverit.wondershare.com/computer-problem/change-web-page-font-type-color.html
I believe that you can install extension on your browser that let you control individual sites. I have also seen people that change the display on their computers to have the text white and the background black on their screens.
Thank you. I will look into it. Speaking generally, websites should be designed for accessibility, but I recognize that this is a small site with limited budget.
Yes, check into accessibility options on your computer or operating system. My Dad has advanced macular degeneration and is red/green color blind as well. Of course, all the features will only work for a while. My Dad used Cortana to read stuff to him, but that was recently retired. He had to load Windows 11 to get some voice options back but it isn’t as cohesive.
Siri on his iphone is very helpful, but gas it’s own issues.
It can be changed on your end with extensions, depending on the browser you use. I don’t have any to recommend as I haven’t used them much. The only one I have used is Midnight Lizard (I prefer my OS and software to be in “dark mode” because it is easier on my eyes) but it has some side effects. What they basically do is apply cascading style sheet (CSS) to the web page to change the way it is displayed. Midnight Lizard displays NC with black background, white text, blue unvisited links and purple visited links (old school link colors) and can be customized to only apply to certain sites.
Agree about the browser extensions. You should also consider Firefox’s ‘reader view’. It strips almost all the css from sites and makes them look like articles from back in the early days of the web, when they were still legible. The advantage is it’s a simple button in the address bar, so you only turn it on when you need it.
RE: Twitter Is at Death’s Door, One Year After Elon Musk’s Takeover Rolling Stone (furzy)
Change a few words in this excerpt–Musk (biden) and entrepreneurial (hegemonic) for instance–and let “X” = america, and this could very well be an “obituary” for the country formerly known as the “united states” itself.
Whenever I see a political story in Rolling Stone today, my default assumption is that it is either false, or distorted to support its obvious preexisting biases. It strikes me that this used to be my reaction to any story I would see in, say, National Review, or on Fox News. How things have changed from the old days. And it’s not me – it’s them.
Yeah. At a much younger age, they were my Naked Capitalism/YouTube bloggers. After all, Taibbi opened my eyes a lot, there.
The headline made it sound like they had some news to report. Sadly, no, just a warmed over rehash of the last year’s missteps. Nothing new beyond their creative writing, more an opinion piece than news.
Lahaina Banyan Tree Has Sprouted New Leaves Since the Devastating Maui Wildfires My Modern Met (David L)
That will be nice for all the new landowners that bought the land cheap from desperate people who just lost everything, some their lives. I bet they spent more money saving that tree than any household. Good for the future value.
Yeah, yeah. Nice tree. But I am afraid that they are going to have to bulldoze it down to make way for the future, exclusive restaurant that will be built in front of the planned super-yacht marina.
They spent zero dollars. It’s an all-volunteer effort to save the trees in that area, and particularly that historic banyan in the middle of town. The reason it gets so much reportage is how interested third parties (i.e. tourists and diaspora) are in the survival of that particular tree. The arborists involved are very quick to point out how unimportant their efforts are compared to other, far more important recovery work for the survivors and those affected.
The Banyan is showing typical “bud growth” for a tree in stress. Dicot trees have the ability to generate “bud sports” just about anywhere on the tree; branches, main trunk, even the roots. That appears to be happening (as I look at the photo).
My recommendation would be to keep foot traffic to a minimum anywhere within the dripline of the tree. While providing water and nutrients to the roots within the dripline, intermittently. The tree may recover, it may not. They need to let the root sprouting progress, as this “leafage” will help create carbohydrates for tree growth. If the tree branches show recovery (improved leafage) then the root sprouts can be slowly eliminated.
Trees are tough! As long as you don’t damage the cambium layer.
– ‘Thirty Months Later…’ – Andrei Martyanov. Chuck L: “Martyanov’s prescience.”
I admit that I don’t read Martyanov as much as I used to; his postings and videos are often repetitious and predictable. But this one is good – and “prescient,” as Chuck L says. It’s a useful overview of our general political-economic and “strategic” (irony quotes) situation today, and why we are here. It also reminds the reader of just how much the Clinton administration contributed to our current situation, even while leaving out a lot of that story. Worth the read.
It certainly is sad reading. Clinton and his like sold Americans down the river with all those trade deals that financially benefited themselves but in doing so, sold America itself down the river and are leaving it isolated in a new world.
A psalm of lament for REITs
Listen up, all ye denizens of yield-chasing nations
A watery grave awaits thee, laid down by the gods of the Federal Reserve.
All who chase the false prophets of rent-seeking
Shall perish in the abyss of higher for longer.
Pray to the almighty God of pivot to show mercy.
And protect ye from the perils of the great Powell!
Do not remain fettered to the value traps of days past.
They are a snare – sell, you fools!
‘Carl Zha
@CarlZha
At this point, China simply trolls the US by existing
Sharing Travel
@TripInChina
Oct 5
Double-deck high-speed rail.😃😃😃’
Growing up in the 70s if you were asked about the future of rail, this video would be what people would be thinking how it would develop in their imagination. Super-fast, modern, sleek, clean and welcoming. But in the end, it really took off in China which was totally unimaginable back in the 70s. In countries like the US and Oz, plans for them just never got off the ground. And just to add insult to injury, if you look at the interior of that train you will see that they are done up in 70s colours.
The idea of any kind of choo-choo that goes from Chinatown in LA to Chinatown in SF is simply preposterous in superCalifragilisticexpialidocious.
MGM Resorts Refused to Pay Ransom in Cyberattack on Casinos
Fallout will have a $100 million negative impact on quarterly earnings, Las Vegas-based company says
https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/mgm-resorts-refused-to-pay-ransom-in-cyberattack-on-casinos-3a53fa6d
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Cryptocurrency seems to have 1 main usage, and that is to pay off hackers demands. How else would Boris Badenov et al get the money?
I shed not a tear for a casino losing 1/10th of a billion on account of a hack, but eventually they are going to shut down something of importance to me, and none of it could happen without using cryptocurrency as the go between.
p.s.
$4.01k update:
Bitcoin is holding steady just below $28k, my investment is now worth exactly half of what I paid, getting in at the $56k level @ the Coinstar terminal in the Winco supermarket utilizing mostly pennies for wherewithal.
Dollar-cost-averaging– load up on the cheaper shares at the diminished value, and just keep adding, regardless, or irregardless (depending on yer phraseology) the Cost Basis?
My modest 1-figure investment in Bitcoin assures that I keep abreast of the action as it were, so no need to lost average.
I have had a sneaking suspicion for awhile that it isn’t just supply chain and corporate profits fueling inflation.
Casinos have some of the most sophisticated security in the world. They’ve been hacked. The only reason we know about MGM is they are announcing it. Anybody want to bet Wynn escaped? Let’s expand that. How about Con Edison? Other large electrical companies? Pfizer? State Farm? The entire insurance industry? My former payroll company got hacked. As far as I know they weren’t held for ransom, but a lot of very large companies used them for payroll. Want to bet that in all of their “private” information there wasn’t a way to provide a back door into a few of their operations?
“Recession?”
“Leaving aside the government shutdown of the US economy in 2020, it’s been 14 years since the last recession…”
2009? Oh, that’s right…the BS narrative of “jobless recovery” was invented right after 2008 to obscure the economic destruction.
Why did the US Attorney find it necessary to clarify that the corrupt doctor was an osteopath? Got a very weird AMA-enforcer vibe from this intensely parsed headline. Orange County signals rightwing, osteopath is clearly code for quack and uninsured patients is meant to suggest “bottom feeder.”
I am very uncomfortable with our prosecutors engaging in such over-the-top agitprop. This headline is on an official government webpage. This is how our government speaks now: with a sporked tongue.
GOP Clown Car Update (Drama Queen Edition):
Ramaswamy says angry protesters rammed his car in Iowa. Police say no evidence crash was intentional.
“Police say the woman told them she was not there protesting anything, had no idea whose vehicle she had hit, did not intentionally cause the crash and did not flee the scene. Police say there is no evidence to substantiate the claim that protesters intentionally hit Ramaswamy’s campaign vehicle and sped off.”
Has it been mentioned that Bernie had ten Code Pink anti war protestors arrested outside his office? Gawd, what a topsy turvy world. Biden, of all people, hits a UAW picket line, and all Mr. Medicare For All can do is tweet support for the Kaiser strikers. I want my money back.
I read somewhere on the internets that by using Google Earth, you can actually see the skidmarks on Bernie where the Donkey Show bus ran him over, and if you really zoom in, you can see another set, where Bernie requested the bus back up over him again, just to be sure.
Ha Ha Ha
YO – BP – it is quite a fall from grace – and Bernie didn’t even have the kindness to use vaseline – i feel so debased and used – not really, just the sound you hear are the last scales falling from my eyes
“Have They Gone Mad?” – https://www.racket.news/p/have-they-gone-mad
no but Hellary certainly has gone full-blown Maddy Albright – y’all remember Maddy who said on 60 Minutes , “the price” of sanctions against Iraq was worth the humanitarian cost when Leslie Stahl noted the death toll of children – and Maddy told women voters when Bernie was gaining traction against Hellary “There’s a special place in hell for women that don’t help each other” – Taibbi notes “Hellary…increasingly unmoored from reality, as well as willfully deaf to the political consequences of (her) words…” – Ya think, unmoored? – i say full-blown cuckoo – WOW!
Open sociopathy.
I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 or in 2020, but he’s not the totalitarian here.
Holy jeebus. But, yeah, this is why she lost. You don’t run for President insulting half of the people who vote.
The DNC has to put a cap on her, but, that’s not gonna happen. With her spouting this stuff and Biden just, well, talking (Just saw his press conference. Gawd, he declines by the week. It’s really bad), we may have a President Jordan in 25.
I’d like to see another poll measuring her popularity. Two years into Trump, she still stood at the same 35ish percent favorability than when she was in ’16. After two years of that man tweeting garbage daily. She will go down as the worst nominee for president, because she lost to Donald Trump. Dubya chuckles.
We Should Have Known So Much About Covid from the Start
I had trouble sleeping after reading that. Michael Mina is sick. He discredits his own argument. If malaria is no big deal to those that suffer it frequently, and it’s only travelers with naive immune systems that need fear it, why have we spent 100 years trying to eradicate malarial mosquitoes? I mean, it’s no big deal, why not stop mosquito control in the US. What a waste of resources. We just need to get on with getting on with getting malaria repeatedly throughout life, because we’ll be better for it.
Or, maybe, malaria, like COVID, is bad to get, and bad to get repeatedly?
David Wallace-Wells and Mina also minimize long COVID, with the unchallenged claim that few people get long-COVID any longer, and that most people have or will completely recover.
This column ought to go down with the GBD in its pervasive evil.
Yeah. It’s not even consistent by its own logic. When asked what we should have done differently, he quotes telling people about seasonality of COVID. Huh? COVID isn’t seasonal. All you have to do is look at the graphs and compare them to flu graphs to see that. How can he claim to be an epidemiologist and yet be this divorced from reality and basic evidence?
I saw a paper recently on psychopathic behaviour, generally defined as having little to no empathy for others, while being selfish and self-centred.
The authors did an experiment to factorise empathy and selfishness and came up with 5 attributes: Lack of empathy = callousness + sadism, and Selfishness = dishonesty + vindictiveness + entitlement.
And so, if you detect the attributes of low empathy and selfishness in a person from their behaviour, then these 5 attributes are the reason why you never try to argue with them because they will never argue in good faith.
And you take notice of them only so far as you try to work out what their agenda is, and then take steps to protect yourself.
So perhaps it is useless to take any notice of anything these characters say, as they are probably not writing in good faith.
No, I liked this one but didn’t have time to respond this morning. This is how plague works, how it has always worked for humankind immemorial.* It’s just that we’re living through this ‘intro to virology’, a bit like AIDS but with a wider slice of the population at risk. It’s Mina’s references to viruses running their courses and each immunological reponse that makes the article interesting. If you somehow survived The Black Death, what happened next and to every generation after that? Were you free and or had the battle shortened your life by years? Who tracked and recorded what those survivors finally died of and could anyone connect the dots with evidence, or just speculation? And your children and grandchildren? Was it just the luck of the draw, your particular branch of the family tree?
We try so hard to be aware, to control and prevent, only to learn with age we don’t have as much control over the events of our lives we thought we had, and neither does medicine… but there’s is some small measure of comfort considering how much worse the first years of Covid could have been were it not for that same healthcare system.
The question is what is making some people more susceptible to repeated infections (apart from old age) and is there anything they can do about it. The answers are worth billions.
*Except when we interbred with other species and imported their immunological gains. Life eats life?
2016 primary voted for Bernie – stopped listening to NPR and national public radio because disparaging coverage of Bernie – found WRCJ with nothing but classical and jazz without constant harping on the hour with what is called news – found Naked Cap and subscribed – have actually lost friendships because i won’t hold my nose and vote for the Husk – how dare i suggest debates or a primary – what censorship are you talking about – polarizing hardly describes what is going on this election cycle –
Alternate link found at the MOA site.
https://archive.ph/BSVJ0
>Twitter Is at Death’s Door, One Year After Elon Musk’s Takeover
Elon’s takeover of Twitter reminiscent of Warwick Fairfax’s taking private John Fairfax Holdings Limited just before the 1987 stockmarket collapse. Fairfax media was one of Murdoch’s main competitors in Australia at the time. Will Dorsey do a Kerry Parker and, having sold high, buy back the company at a step discount?
Alternatively, Elon is a present day Alan Bond.
Yeah, not a bad analogy that. And I remember his fall from grace. The tide went out and it was revealed that he was swimming naked.
OK lit fans. Name the novel that starts with a poem about a waxwing that dies by flying into a window.
Pale Fire – Nabokov
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
I think that’s a real stretch. What Article III says is “The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour”. I suppose someone could construe being demoted to a lower court as continuing to “hold their Offices”, but I don’t think most people (or even most SCOTUS justices) would agree.
Matt Taibbi. public excerpt.
Have They Gone Mad?
Hillary Clinton suggests “formal deprogramming” for seventy million
https://www.racket.news/p/have-they-gone-mad
Have they gone mad? Watch the bobble-head utube thingy.
She will never forget nor ever forgive all those voters who pushed Trump into the Presidency way back in 2016. Her one shot at the Presidency and she blew it, mostly because she regarded 2016 as not so much a race as a procession. She reminds me a bit of Nuland. Victoria Nuland suffers from daddy and grand-daddy issues hence her obsession with Russia. It seems that Hillary has Trump-voter issues and is destined to like a sort of hamlet’s ghost on the American political scene in the years to come. I guess that in her mind now, that she figures that she should have been in the final two years of her eight year term by now.
Er… um… apologies to John Milton… / ;)
HIgh on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold,
Hillary exalted sat, by merit rais’d
To that bad eminence; and from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain Warr with Heav’n, and by success untaught
Her proud imaginations thus displaid.
This is why I love to read the comments.
Yes, all dems have tds.
And not one would question anything in their bunker if Biden starts ww3… we finally got him!
Impulse control? Or not? / ;)
EXCLUSIVE: Hunter Biden withdrew $20,000 from daughter Maisy’s college fund and spent it on hookers and drugs after bankers warned he had just 44 cents left in his account
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12598997/Hunter-Biden-withdrew-20-000-daughter-Maisys-college-fund-spent-hookers-drugs-bankers-warned-just-44-cents-left-account.ml
Father of the Year nominee.
Well this must have been embarrassing. King Charles has re-organized the Royal Family and has put members of the family down into four categories – “Senior Royals, Working Royals, Non-Working Royals and Others.” Harry and Meghan? They are in the Others of course along with Price Andrew-
https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/royals/king-charles-shock-new-titles-for-meghan-markle-and-prince-harry/news-story/30b128f9ac2fff9886899195d7734fd7
Wallace-Wells’ systematic erasure of non-pharmaceutical interventions is really stunning. “Vaccination without mitigation” all the way. Stochastic eugenicism in action.