Jesse Darling Wins 2023 Turner Prize New York Times (furzy)
#COVID-19
From a Detour to Global Dominance Eric Topol (furzy)
On goalpost moving: in fall 2021, (after the vax) Dr. Fauci said we could expect society to be basically “back to normal” if we can get daily COVID cases under 10k a day.
As of today we have over 850,000 new COVID cases per day. And rising. https://t.co/VmQ8PxDHF9
— Julia Marie (@julia_doubleday) December 5, 2023
Climate/Environment
Revealed: Sellafield nuclear site has leak that could pose risk to public Guardian (David L). Uh oh.
Can we make Vermont’s forests more like old forests, faster? Vermont Public (David L)
A paradise island vacation with no mosquito bites – and no chemicals CNN
US grants $110 million to improve wildlife road crossings The Hill. A friend of furzy points out that these crossings are costly and not effective. Better are cheap devices on cars that emit a whistle at decent speeds. These are pretty common in rural snowy areas and do a great job in scaring away deer.
We no longer need the Cop circus – technology and markets are already solving the climate crisis Telegraph (David L)
Good news 👏 👏👏👏👏👏👏
The EU has approved a ban on the destruction of unsold clothing. New rules will also ensure products are more enviromentally friendly and that goods are also more easily repaired and recycled.
Negotiators from the European Parliament and EU member… pic.twitter.com/rhUa049rmR
— Almuth Siegl🌍Environment and Animal Advocate (@AlmuthSiegl) December 6, 2023
China?
Western Firms Should Leave China Now Project Syndicate (David L)
Chinese warships visit controversial Cambodian naval base for joint exercise South China Morning Post
European Disunion
ASM Announces $300 Million Expansion Of U.S. Operations In Scottsdale Arizona Commerce Authority. Alex C; “A Dutch semiconductor company announced it’s opening a factory in Scottsdale. Prime Minister Mark Rutte was there to celebrate EU industry’s flight to the US.”
Old Blighty
UK interior minister signs new Rwanda treaty to resurrect asylum plan Reuters (Kevin W)
Boris Johnson considered ‘raid’ on vaccine plant in the Netherlands Guardian
‘El Loco’ Won the Argentina Election Last Month With Outlandish Ideas. Now He’s Backpedaling. Wall Street Journal
Gaza
Israel’s ‘Mass Assassination Factory’ Daniel Larison
Look what the Israeli occupation army are doing to us while the world is watching in silence. Watch to the end pic.twitter.com/NgYHVPj4lj
— MoTaz (@azaizamotaz9) December 5, 2023
Predicting Pestilence in Gaza Antiwar.com (Kevin W). Ahem, this was an obvious call (we made it). This seems oddly late in coming.
Netanyahu tells Washington no Palestinian rule in Gaza after war Anadolu Agency
U.S. imposes visa ban on Israeli settlers who attacked Palestinians Axios (BC)
Israel Weighs Plan to Flood Gaza Tunnels With Seawater Wall Street Journal. A day old but important not to miss. Note subhead: Move could drive out Hamas fighters but threatens to foul Gaza’s freshwater supply and damage infrastructure
Looks like a plan moving forward: Israel installs pumps in Gaza to flood tunnels ‘no one has been in before’ Middle East Monitor. BC: “Flooding the tunnels with sea water makes me wonder if this is some Roman style “salting the earth” destruction tactic used in Carthage in 146 BCE.”
Message I just received from an Israeli friend in Israel: "We need your urgent help. If there is no international intervention, we're gone. The entire Palestinian people are under a genocidal attack, and democratic Jews in Israel are under violent fascist persecution that…
— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) December 6, 2023
IS ISRAEL LOSING? THE TRUTH ABOUT GAZA’S TRUCE W/ ALASTAIR CROOKE! Danny Haiphong, Youtube (furnacewriter). From a few days ago, but this is a more complete explanation of the backstory Crooke has been presenting on the shift in Israeli politics when the Mizrahi got a majority of seats in the Knesset. This is a big part of picture that Varoufakis mentions above, about persecution of “democratic” Jews in Israel.
In the name of all Jews Yasha Levine. Nuanced, and badly needed when many are going full Manichean.
Biden works to create plausible deniability as he backs Israel’s assault on Gaza Mondoweiss
Bernie Sanders opposes $10 billion Israel aid RT. Sanders gets some guts back very late in the game.
More Israel losing the propaganda war:
The only thing you need to watch today 🔻 pic.twitter.com/4rYr99iCxd
— Naila (@BrownNaila) December 5, 2023
New Not-So-Cold War
Rus Advances Bakhmut, Liman, Avdeyevka; UK: Marinka Falling: Zaluzhny: Ukr Needs 17M Shells, $400B Alexander Mercouris, YouTube. Important discussion of latest Zaluzhny eyepopping $ and equipment demands in meeting with Lloyd Austin, signs diehard Lindsay Graham is cooling on Project Ukraine.
Ukraine war is undergoing mutation Indian Punchline (Kevin W). Note this presumed the Zelensky Congresscritter classified chat was on, which turned out not to be so. BBC claims Zelensky cancelled it, which seems not credible. At best there was a monster argument (in light of insane demand Mercouris describes in detail above) and both sides were in a complete snit. Bhadrakumar took the briefing to mean the Biden Administration was not giving up on Project Ukraine. So has that actually changed?
“In France, Russian propaganda attacks on several fronts at once,” says Elie Guckert All News Press (more extensive article in French: Link to more extensive article in French:
https://www.20minutes.fr/societe/4065011-20231204-guerre-ukraine-france-propagande-russe-attaque-plusieurs-fronts-fois-lance-elie-guckert). Jos O:Dutchman in France here. Just to show you how the propaganda war is being fought in Europe.
He accuses everybody and their uncle of being in cahoots with the evil Putin, or at least of being completely brainwashed by the ever-present “Russian propaganda”.
By the way, he “forgets” to mention that Russian Internet media have been blocked in Europe since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and that virtually all comment sections on news sites systematically cancel everybody who posts anything that can be considered a pro-Russian argument.
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Amazon ‘Cannot Claim Shock’ That Bathroom Spycams Were Used as Advertised, Judge Says ars technica
23andMe Hack Is a Wake-Up Call for Your Password Habits NPR (David L)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Do venture capitalists want forever war? Responsible Statecraft
Israel’s war with Hamas shows why even 50 years of upgrades can’t make tanks invulnerable Business Insider (BC)
Western education systems degrading – Putin RT (Anthony L)
Trump
Biden ‘not sure’ he’d be running if Trump was not in 2024 race Reuters
Trump-Era Controversies Had a Measurable Effect on Church Attendance Christianity Today
Biden
Immigration talks collapse, threatening to sink aid to Israel and Ukraine NBC
Will the Real Hunter Biden Now Step Forward? Jonathan Turley (Chuck L)
Justice Department Gave Hunter Biden ‘Preferential Treatment’ – US House Panels Sputnik
Democrats en déshabillé
Gold bars found in Sen. Bob Menendez’s home linked to 2013 armed robbery: report New York Post (Kevin W)
Andrew Cuomo would ‘trounce’ Eric Adams in Dem primary for mayor, polls show New York Post. When Cuomo looks better than the alternative, you know it’s bad…
GOP Clown Car
From Trump to Congress, Republican defense orthodoxy crumbles Defense News
Police State Watch
Pentagon Scientists Discuss Cybernetic ‘Super Soldiers’ That Feel Nothing While Killing In Dystopian Presentation Motherboard (Kevin W). If you think these forces/capabilities won’t be used against civilians at home, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
AI
McKinsey Sees AI Adding Up To $340 Billion To Wall Street Profit Bloomberg
Baaad Banks
Jamie Dimon takes aim at US bank rule proposals in Senate testimony Financial Times
Is the world’s most important asset market broken? Economist (David L)
Economists see Fed keeping rates at 22-year high until at least July Financial Times. Mr. Market seems more hopeful.
Class Warfare
Low wages are growing, but the decline in disposable income over 2021-23 due to the phase-out of Covid policies completely swamps that — not crazy to believe this is behind a lot of people's discontent with the economy pic.twitter.com/TKjPL2YQMT
— Gabriel Zucman (@gabriel_zucman) December 4, 2023
Let’s not be fooled by Kristalina Giorgeva and the IMF CADTM (Micael T)
Amazon employees are quitting over RTO, especially AWS staff Business Insider (Kevin W). BTW it was and likely still true that AWS is where Amazon makes nearly all of its profit.
Capitalism, with friends like these, you don’t need enemies Steve Keen (Micael T)
Antidote du jour. VERY late to publish this submission from Christopher W:
My partner had to acquiesce for work reasons and she will not take another shot after being sick after the second pfizer dose and our experiences with family and friends. Anyway, don’t get me started, but certainly not travelling or indoors with crowds. We have moved from Cairns about 20 miles south to Gordonvale. This way, I have a new project to renovate and we have less debt and more disposable income. And we find ourselves in a rare species ‘corridor’ with numerous permanent and temporary creeks. I have seen more tree frogs here in 4 months than I ever saw in Cairns.
Now, I have briefly seen our smaller bats in the night sky. Flying fast and feasting on mosquitos and other insects. Last night, I reentered my office when something chittered and I saw what I thought was a frog on the floor. It didn’t like me picking it up. I took it outside and put it on a plant. Didn’t like that either, high pitched chittering again. I finally picked it up gently and it latched its legs and wings, they felt like sharp hooks, onto my index finger.
So I returned to my office to see if it could recover, although I suspected it had broken a wing I stronked it and took this photo, which sadly is not the best. After about 10 minutes, the chittering recomenced and it spread its wings. Before I could stop it, the bat took off and crashed. I couldn’t find it. 15 minutes later, it landed on my desk. I picked it up and took it outside, where it took off into the night. To my and my partner’s delight.
What a great feeling…
And a bonus (guurst). Love the eyelashes!
🦉🦉🦉🦉🦉 pic.twitter.com/Gmro7i4zKj
— たま🦉🦉 (@ringo_en2015) December 2, 2023
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
208 comments
Comments are closed.
re: Israel Weighs Plan to Flood Gaza Tunnels With Seawater
One angle on this I’ve not seen covered anywhere: are Gazans using those tunnels to shelter from the bombing similar to how Londoners used the Tube during the blitz?
And if the tunnels are as extensive as we are told how will this destabilize the buildings above?
One would think that if Hamas could target and hit a nuke site inside Israel with a missile, they could also hit the 5 pumps and associated personnel on the beach of Gaza.
Would that much seawater in that many tunnel leak into the Gaza Aquifer? If so, could the Israelis be reasonably expected to know that would happen?
And if so, would this be a plan to sow the Gaza Aquifer with salt in order to make Gaza uninhabitable?
Should this be thought about?
“Immigration talks collapse, threatening to sink aid to Israel and Ukraine”
This one is a really hard one to understand. All Biden has to say is OK, I will fund the wall and in return you vote for money for the Ukraine. Done deal. Instead it ended up in a shouting match and a walkout by the Republicans. I can only think of two possible explanations why Biden is refusing to come to the table here. One is that he does not want to be seen giving a win to the Republicans in an election year. It does not matter that Biden has already been funding the wall. The second that he is doing so on a matter of principle. That he refuses to spend money on Americans at all and is much more concerned with the Ukraine’s borders than America’s borders. If the later sounds very unlikely, then tell me about all the money & resources going to East Palestine and Lahaina that Biden sent.
There seems to be a fair amount of agreement that these wars are just a scheme to transfer wealth from taxpayers to Blackrock at al. Why then are we looking for further explanations?
There seems to be a long history to this: fourdiedtrying.com
In addition to the wallRepublicans also want changes to asylum, parole, and detention policies.
As far as my limited tea leaf reading skills can help, there is no honest attempt at good faith negotiation here from Biden, Schumer, or any of the Dems, except maybe the gang of six.
Schumer’s offer to give the GOP the first amendment vote is a joke, because up-Chuck knows full well that it won’t get 60 votes.
For whatever reason they’ve decided to play hardball and let Ukraine aid die. Asylum policy changes and such might be a bitter pill to swallow for Dems, but they haven’t even made a counteroffer (border wall completion, for example.)
(I’ll throw out a theory that someone made the decision that the election year has already started, so why negotiate, and they might also know that Johnson will just kill any Ukraine aid anyways unless it has the Freedom Caucus version of border security which will never fly with the dims.)
Team Blue as too few people interested in the border to have a proper response from within congress, and the President is still the President and a bumbling oaf who will likely ruin any work that might get done. Biden doesn’t believe polls and still sees himself as a defender of freedumb. Losing on Ukraine doesn’t add up for him, but he doesn’t get the state of the country.
Besides Biden already put Harris in charge of the border, so he’s washed his hands of it.
Pattern noted:
Kamala gets put in charge of things Biden washes his hands of, now including Gaza.
She’s going to need a lot of hand washing soap and Clorox to get that level of blood out.
What exactly then is the bumbling oaf in charge of? Project Ukraine is looking like its going into mothballs at least for the next year. So, feeding the squirrels in the WH lawn?
He couldn’t even keep the White House Christmas tree standing, so pity the poor squirrels.
Is Kammy the de-facto president, then?
We should at least get an announcement from the WH and she deserves media recognition as our first female prez.
Bonus: live stream of HRC having a conniption.
She does have that Kam-do spirit when thrust into unenvied end games, but it does come with a lunch date consisting of a mixed word salad tossed with croutons of what passes for wisdom, gawd help us.
Good news Wuk. Your Kevin is leaving:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/us/politics/kevin-mccarthy-congress.html
Is he running? the centrist we deserve?
We should all chip in to buy him a condolence card.
Muh, Kevin, muh Kevin! Parting is such sweet sorrow. I’m sure that he’ll find gainful employment for Blackrock, Bayer, or some other parasitical blood vampire working for the ‘merkan peeps!
‘Fall of the House of Ouster’
Don’t expect to see him walking the streets of Bakersfield with a bindle stiff…
Dwight Yoakam & Buck Owens ~ “Streets of Bakersfield”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB7oUI32E1Y
Seeing as Cali is a no-fault state (well in terms of divorce, that is) I trust the split will be amicable, now that he’s decided against restraining order by running for reelection.
This also marks the end of the Young Guns era in politics~
p.s.
It isn’t as if its gonna be easy finding somebody to replace a fool who served well as a foil for me
“He’s gone, he’s gone
I’d better learn how to face it
he’s gone, oh woah, it’d take the Devil to replace him”
Paraphrasing Hall & Oates
Don’t underestimate that the Ukraine funding dustup is a Team Blue wet dream where Democrats get to be tough guys and Republicans are Frenchies.
If the Dims can steal an issue, they will win two votes for every vote they lose is how Neera types reason. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are confident the White House will be met with accolades any time now.
Biden pitched this on TV, but Team Blue elites can’t reason beyond the trap they set for Republicans.
Unless the Republicans can spin it by saying that Biden wants to send yet another $60 billion to the Ukraine, even though it is a lost cause, while refusing to spend any money on Americans whatsoever. They can easily make that one stick in any number of attack ads.
My suspicion (hope) is that the stench of failure is starting to waft out over voters from project Ukraine.
Sure, there was probably 80% approval back in March 2022, when blue & yellow flags were flying everywhere and saying anything reasonable like “but Russia has nukes” got you labelled a yellow-bellied Putin sapsucker.
As GW Bush found out in the first Gulf War, those 80% approval ratings can disappear fast. Ye Olde electorate is fickle. 21 months later, the man in the street is probably starting to think this whole affair reeks of Afghanistan. The new war on the block doesn’t help, either.
So, such attack ads would probably work.
It seems plausible that Biden can use the GOP’s refusal to fund Ukraine to shrug the blame for losing the war onto them. They’re giving him an out, if he can convince people that Ukraine was on the verge of victory when they were stabbed in the back by those craven, perfidious Republicans!
That’s my thinking. False flag legislation. Besides when congress is stuck, and nothing can pass, the stock market always goes up.
Yellen parroted this echoing a Ukrainian representative making the rounds in DC.
The $60B is $5B per month about half for the Kiev government black hole.
Of the other $2,5B per month all will be paid to the military industry complex whether replenishing drawdown of war stocks, or giving order status for delivery over the next several years.
Given recent events on the front lines, IOUs and dribbles of items taken from other needs will only raise the butcher bill, and profit the vendors.
No more waste for Kiev
It is simply beyond bizarre that 3000 miles of completely open u.s. border and unfettered illegal “immigration” is characterized as “threatening to derail” u. s. national security by holding up “aid” to two FOREIGN COUNTRIES thousands of miles away.
The steadfast refusal to control illegal migration into the u.s. for 3 years, on ostensibly “humanitarian” grounds, is particularly and mind-blowingly dissonant considering the “humanitarian” implications of the israeli genocide in Gaza that this government is so desperate to fund and support.
The contradictions here are as ridiculous as they are profound, and, to my mind, go far beyond the usual red / blue posing in advance of an “election.” I hesitate to accuse the “legislative” branch of nefarious motives, since the vast majority of them are shockingly low IQ bubble-dwellers who couldn’t see past the ends of their noses if their lives depended on it.
But somebody is pulling the strings, and I have to believe that whoever it is feels the insanity and instability being created will work to their advantage.
Here is a point. When the Israelis go to build back all those walls and fortifications for Gaza, guess who they will expect to pay for it. Some borders are more equal than others.
Thank you and well said, Rev.
What became known as Trump’s wall, but really wasn’t. was condemned by the same people who love Israel’s wall. It’s the same with the zionist state’s apartheid laws.
The US cannot be seen to turn its back on its longtime allie Israel. At the same time, the US cannot be seen by the world to condone genocide, the genocide of Gazans. The soft power losses will be enormous. Already, the UAE has stopped using the US$ for its oil trade.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/uae-officially-stops-using-dollar-for-oil-trades/ar-AA1kCMxH
The US has a tiger by the tail supporting Israel’s destruction of Gaza, imo. The US might “win” that battle and lose the war for influence in the wider world where the BRICS+ are gaining economic strength and diplomatic prestige. ( I hate the US diplomatic stupidity that’s brought the US and the EU to this pass.) / my 2 cents
adding: do China, India, and RU have open borders? / heh
There is some history I haven’t seen written in a comprehensive manner:
How did Israel and the USA get to become best buds after the USA totally ignored the Jews plight during WWII even going so far as to turn back a ship full (was there more than one ship?) of desperate Jews fleeing the gas chambers in German occupied Europe. (The USA also ignored the plight of the Jews dying in concentration camps.) How the Jews ever forgave the Americans has never been explained, at least to my knowledge.
Say again WHY the regime “cannot be seen to turn its back on its longtime allie Israel”? Past and present regimes have told lots of “Allies” to fuck off. The only difference I see is the Israel lobby has a lot of money and mastery of the levers of guilt. And lots history of deceit and manipulation. The tail wags the dog, vigorously. On the way to the hijacking of the end game of “manifest destiny.”
With an “Allie” like this, who needs enemies?
“YHWH GAVE us dominion over Greater Israel, the elastic borders of which cover the world.”
Well, the US offense regime wants Israel there as its “unsinkable aircraft carrier” and arms bazaar in the Middle East. It’s an unholy marriage, not an “ally”. The US has never had any problem whatsoever with massacre as a political tool (ex: “The Jakarta Method”). This is simply a PR problem to TPTB.
The growing acceptance of r-w politicians and parties in EU countries, including now Ireland, is very much coupled with the EU’s open borders policies of uncontrolled immigration, regardless of the effects on unemployment, wages, housing, prices of everything, and social services on the countries existing populations, imo. The “virtuous” sound surprised the working class isn’t impressed with the open border policies.
i hear talk of this open border..with hordes and stuff…a lot, where i roam…generally, the feedstore, beer and cig store, hardware store…as well as cousin’s after hours texts.
ive heard this rhetoric, in varying volumes, for 30 years.
but i also havent been to the border in almost 30 years.
and i also do not know anyone who has…let alone anyone who lives there.
my mexican friends…the hardworking immigrant community(greencard holders) are all down south for the winter…but last i heard, crossing back and forth even with all yer papers, is a giant PITA.
(i dont know any “illegal people”, btw…and i’m an honorary mexican)
as the premier distributed think tank, do we have any NC-ers that frequent or live in the border area?
a little on the ground reportage would be cool, me-thinks.
because…i am my lowest level of trust in media, ever…lol.
so with something like this, we need boots on ground.
Indeed, after all the endless articles about the kids in cages on the border, numerous deaths in the desert of desperate people fleeing the drug cartels and the US’ economic destruction of central America, on and on and on… what is this ‘open borders’ stuff? What about our Northern border, which is far longer and completely “open” (if you don’t mind a bit of hiking through the woods)? If we want the immigration to end, stop meddling in the countries they all come from, for heaven’s sake. The only effective wall ever built in history was China’s Great Wall, built to stop the Mongol hordes on horses. And even then, illicit trade across the wall with the nomads was rife.. lol
Immigrants – a wall won’t stop them. They have nothing to lose. Americans may not have noticed that after every “war” they get immigrants; vietnam, afghanistan, iraq, syria.
After years of “economic war” against Venezuela – we now have Venezuelans showing up at the border. Mexicans started to move to US after Free Trade of Corn (agro subsidies), caused their small farms to be uncompetitive (total loss of livelihood) against industrial & subsidised US Corn.
A wall is not going to stop immigrants, it’s a waste of money and useless posturing.
The wars conveniently make the refugees that become the “illegal” field hands and other slaves that support the imperial excess. A feature, not a bug. So many recursive functions.
A wall is not going to stop immigrants, it’s a waste of money and useless posturing.
Quite so. Norte Americanos will continue to flood into Mexico no matter how many walls are built.
Maybe whatever changes the apparently coming multipolar world will reduce causes of the terrors and dreams that bring the huddled masses to our blighted shores…
Nah. Humans being what they are.
And besides, American business *wants* them here. Smithfield is routinely busted for its factories full of illegals–which never seem to be replaced by legit citizens. Go figure. And what business in America wants, business in America gets.
Biden can only veto what is given him – Congress does not need to follow the presidents lead on what he thinks – it’s congress parties fight – Biden does not need to come to the table
I think – I could be wrong
Interesting. So much legislation is actually written by lobbyists and “stakeholders.” Including of course the Israel lobby. “Biden,” as we know, no longer has the chops to do legislation, and as the Senator from MBNA grew his career putting stakeholder demands into the bill hopper. So many of us still think in terms of the fictions we were fed in grade school, about how this government of laws, not of men, was said to work. And unlike Luke Skywalker facing the Dark Emperor, hearing “Only now, at the end, do you finally sense the true power of the dark side,” we don’t have a tap into the good side of the force to save us and defeat the evil.
Please remember Mexico is paying for the wall.
More likely, Team R will eventually cave, but they want to maximize their pound of flesh, and they want to time Ukrainian collapse so as to cause maximum damage to Biden.
And they want, all of them, the Grand Bargain, to put the last touches on the demolition of whatever the New Deal was, just a trick by the oligarchs to keep the lid on the proles until the net was tightened.
Just this morning on NPR I heard about how a Republican and a Democratic Representative want to create another Catfood Commission on the Debt in order to write up a reduce-or-abolish Social Security proposal for Congress to be “forced” to “vote on.”
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/05/1216131270/as-federal-debt-grows-a-bipartisan-push-for-another-commission-to-address-it
“Border law reforms” havent been resolved by any Administration for 30+ years. Didnt Obama have a majority in both Houses and still couldnt get anything through? And for all of Trumps theatrics, he didnt get very far either.
Sounds to me its the trope trotted out whenever a Party faction doesnt want to admit the real reason they want to block something.
It seems it is not about funding the wall by getting harsher policies for asylum seekers: i.e. not allowing them in the country…
“In France, Russian propaganda attacks on several fronts at once,” says Elie Guckert
“…independent journalist Elie Guckert, who worked for Mediapart or the British investigative site Bellingcat. ”
Nothing says “independent” like “Bellingcat”!
> Elie Guckert
Relative of Jeff Guckert??
I remember hearing about that turkey at the time. You would think that when filling out an application for White House credentials, that it would under penalty of Federal prosecution if false information was given. Guess not. Bloggers had a field day when they revealed that he had previously worked as a $200-an-hour gay prostitute who advertised himself on a series of websites with names such as hotmilitarystud.com.
In Sweden, right of centre national daily Svenska Dagbladet has labelled Greta Thunberg, she of school strike for the climate campaign, a ‘girl-Hitler’, for her continued support of Gaza Palestinians.
Swedish media are pretty much all in on Israel and the right to defend itself against terrorist Hamas.
Gooooooooood Mooooooooorning Fiatnam!
Middle yeast was needed to make the dough rise in bank accounts, the prophets of war assured us they had them on the run-but needed to continue flattening future sites of settlements, but really think of it more as pre-fab deconstruction, please.
“Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Yeast we forget—yeast we forget!” –after Rudyard Kipling, Recessional
That was pretty bad.
“Amazon ‘Cannot Claim Shock’ That Bathroom Spycams Were Used as Advertised, Judge Says”
I understand that Amazon is expanding the goods that they will be able to offer online. One will be white, windowless vans that as optional extras will have tinted front windows, retractable number plates, fitted mattresses on the back floor and text that can be added to the side of the van saying “Free Candy!”
I recognize this motto was once part of the Google / Alphabet mentality, the motto about “don’t be evil”. But boy oh boy does Amazon just encapsulate the absolute, worse than most, despicable practices of an evil corporate empire. Between the reports about the treatment of employees and the treatment of customers, one would think all those buyers on Prime would give a rip but that’s just me.
Bezos really does resemble Dr. Evil after all!
Jeff loves him some economists…
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/13/tech/amazon-economists/index.html
Re: antidote 2–
From my granddaughter’s collections of old nursery rhymes and songs that we sing:
Wow, as one who just got a $600 plumber’s bill for damage done to an appliance and its hoses by mice, I call out to all the owls in my vicinity, “C’mon over here! We love you and need you!”
Mice and squirrels just got the better of me too. Apparently some type of rodent crawled up in my engine and ate through one of my fuel lines. Now, how the rodent got there, and why the fuel sensing line is made of rodent enticing plastic, I have no idea. But yeah, send those owls my way too!
Apparently, squirrels account for pretty sizable damage to various cables in US (what I was told after some of them chewed through my internet cables, apparently…)
Peppermint oil can help.
And the ground hogs! Just asking for a little ecological balance.
Cats!
…we have the sacrificial sofa for the hair’m
They really aren’t car people~
A paradise island vacation with no mosquito bites – and no chemicals CNN
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
About a decade ago I must have inked a deal with the devil in my sleep, as suddenly mosquitoes wanted no part of me and I haven’t been bitten since. The same rules sadly don’t apply to deer flies, which typically give you enough warning to shoo them off before they do their worst.
The one biting insect that has just tore me up is sandflies in NZ, I remember doing the Milford Track in the early 90’s, and got on a big jet airliner back to the states shortly after the walk, and I couldn’t stop scratching myself silly the whole flight, it was as of the bites were time-delayed bombs.
My solution for deer flies is to put a piece of duct tape on the Back of a hat, then smear Tanglefoot on the tape. For some (hardwired?) reason the little bloodsuckers hit back there first. There is a commercial sticky tape product called Deerfly Patches, but they’re sort of pricey.
Oh yes, sandflies bad. I remember them itching intensely, but not for long.
“U.S. imposes visa ban on Israeli settlers who attacked Palestinians”
Even for the Biden White House, this is pretty weak tea. Those Israeli settlers aren’t going to be wanting to go to the US. They are already where they want to be – parked on somebody else’s lands in Greater Israel. I would not be surprised to learn that those very same Settlers regard people in the US as untermenschen so would have no need or desire to go there. Even the ones that came from the US would probably not want to go back.
Thank you, Rev.
Over here, IDF soldiers, men and women from here, are being lionised by the usual suspects. The usual suspects don’t ask why these racaille are not fighting for God, King and Country, like my dad, his best mate / my godfather, and a dozen other relatives. These racaille are often posing and being called British. They’re not British, are in breach of the 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act, should be stripped of their British nationality like Shamima Begum and prosecuted for war crimes.
That won’t happen, though. They will be feted at next summer’s parliamentary reception for such racaille in Westminster.
Don’t the majority of the settlers have dual US citizenship? Isn’t it kind of hard to keep out citizens.
I am curious if they can be charged for myriad crimes by US, though. Israel will not extradite, obviously, but they’d be arrested as soon as they step on to US soil.
Of course, I’ll be live this if I see it.
Yasha Levine gets the psychology mostly right but it’s funny how he dismisses it, “look, these stupid people worrying about being killed, why can’t they take off the blinds of their stupid 19th century ideology and see the big picture.” Possibly it’s due to the fact that he and his family are thousands of miles away and not in any danger.
I’m myself definitely for reconciliation, but I wonder how it’s possible not to see that a victory of Hamas (by their definition, one state with the right of return for all refugees) would cause, with a non-negligible probability, the same killings and rapes we saw on October 7 but multiplied by 1000.
Even without considering your misquote, it’s clear you missed Levine’s point. Yours is the same argument that was used in South Africa by those desperately clinging to the apartheid state as it crumbled. One phrase that was amplified was “one settler, one bullet.” This was supposed to capture the real motivations of black South Africans, if we can’t have one person one vote. . . But they weren’t monsters after all, they just wanted survival with dignity. It was known back then and is still evident today that the biggest obstacle to the future of a free South Africa was/is not the ill will and sure retribution of the native population but the problem of how to rebuild a country destroyed by minority rule. After decades of brutal efforts at marginalizing the non whites, they had to figure out how to put it back together.
Ain’t it funny how many Zionist arguments are just recycled apologia for apartheid South Africa.
History is long and any analogy can be found. In Haiti the whites who hadn’t fled were murdered.
How confident are you that in the scenario when the Palestnians become a majority in a hypothetical one state from the river to the sea and elect Hamas, like they did last time they voted, they would be magnanimous like the ANC?
So you have to go back 300 years to a slaveocracy to find your historical analogy?
Are you *sure* that’s really the argument you wanted to make?
For that matter, how many Jews had warm fuzzies for Germans in 1945?
The Zionists aren’t magnanimous as demonstrated in this false flag operation.
The civilian killings on Oct. 7 are now largely attributed to the Israeli Hannibal Directive, and as of yesterday none of the groups I follow can find any evidence of rapine by the Hamas forces. If you have links it would be nice to see them.
Another point. It has been sixty days – two months – since the outbreak of this war. And yet it is only now that Israel and Biden are coming out with all these stories. You would think that all these stories would have come out several weeks ago along with proof. I guess that it was finally realized that all those stories of forty babies being beheaded by Hamas fell flat so now they are looking for something new hence these stories. I guess that if this does not work, they can always claim that Hamas was working on Weapons of Mass Destruction.
“You would think that all these stories would have come out several weeks ago along with proof.”
I think you have put your finger right on the issue here. This started with Jayapal getting attacked this week end, and then suddenly it is everywhere. It is even at the UN; this is clearly coordinated, and it can only be because they have run out of horrors to discuss other than those perpetrated by the Israelis, themselves.
Yeah, exactly. My Google News feed led with “Hamas rapes” this morning. It’s amazing how successful Israel at getting its propaganda, however poorly sourced, on the front page.
Yes. The Electronic Intifada piece and the Mondoweiss article debunking this latest propaganda effort was discussed in yesterday’s comments. As I noted yesterday, I watched NBC Nightly News devote its opening five minutes to this “horrific” story (they used “horrific” several times; apparently a talking point). Literally *all* the sources for the story were those debunked by EI and Mondoweiss.
Here’s the Mondoweiss article again:
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/cnn-report-claiming-sexual-violence-on-october-7-relied-on-non-credible-witnesses-some-with-undisclosed-ties-to-israeli-govt/
I saw in passing that the head Rabbi of the IDF gave acceptance of rape by their soldiers. Also it was becoming apparent that Palestinians were subject to rape and torture in the IDF dungeons.
A previous rabbi said that it was OK to kill babies as well – not long before they made him head Rabbi of the IDF.
Most moral army in the world, my a**.
Those who are willing to commit genocide can not be trusted to speak the truth.
Here’s one survivor of the Reim massacre recounting what he saw to the Times of London https://archive.is/0Q7s3
here are more accounts collected by CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/17/world/israel-investigates-sexual-violence-hamas/index.html
If you don’t consider these sources reliable, or require video evidence, I don’t think there’s much point in continuing the conversation
The Mondoweiss article I linked to above deals specifically with both of these. There are all sorts of reasons to consider these sources unreliable. And as near as I can tell, they are the basis for *all* of the stories that have bounced all over the media echo chamber over the last several days.
Eh, no. Mondoweiss is a garbage source and this article doesn’t debunk anything.
It doesn’t deal with the Times testimony at all.
As for the CNN article, the supposed inconsistencies don’t make any sense
“She was accompanied by a paramedic who said he didn’t see what she mentioned. ” – the source didn’t say she was accompanied by a paramedic on October 7, only that they gave their testimony together. So this is simply a lie, or absolutely egregious incompetence.
“The woman was not present in the briefing, the police officers played a recording by her without further details.” – so what?
“The witness escaped from the music festival, what she describes was seen while hiding.” – perfectly sensible that she first hid and then escaped
“…perfectly sensible that she first hid and then escaped.”
And where can we find her testimony about all of those people and cars that were the recipients of Hellfire missiles fired at them by the IDF? I hear they have about a thousand cars that they are going to shred up and bury, so maybe she will have something to say about how they got that way.
Or maybe she was just too worried about being raped to notice such things?
It would have been very hard to miss all those IDF helicopters shooting everything in sight and blowing up every car that they saw. Funny that although probably everyone in that area had a mobile in their pocket or purse, that no footage at all has emerged of those attacks. The noise would have been incredible. The IDF came out and confessed that they did a Hannibal Doctrine on everyone that they saw but where is the footage. Come to think of it, where is the footage from those IDF helicopters?
Not to in any way diminish the crime of rape, but it just strikes me that it requires a degree of time and leisure to engage in such activities that we do not see from the record.
If the plan was to go over the top and head for an IDF base so that you could take them out, as they ultimately did in what appears to have been a very professional manner per Ritter, what are the odds you are going to engage with an intervening music festival to the extent that you would stop to rape people, either on the way to the objective or on the way back with your hostages?
It doesn’t make any sense, professionally, physiologically or psychologically to me.
You are right that Mondoweiss does not discuss all of the Times info- that is in the Electronic Intifada video – which I will assume you consider a “garbage source” as well. Nevertheless, it points out the inconsistencies in Yoni Saadon’s various stories. Much of the rest of the Times “testimony” comes from the notorious liars of Zaka, the “babies baked in ovens, fetuses cut from wombs” folks, who have already been shown to be pathological in what they will say to justify genocide.
I could go on. But as you say, probably not much point in continuing the conversation.
To which I would refer you to pjay’s comment above referencing material that addresses your citations. Recycling things even as they have been debunked does not help your case.
The specific reference to Yoni Sadon in your first article is addressed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPMf3CIa_BA
And here is an article by the Grayzone that I have yet to read, but you may find it interesting as well:
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/12/06/scandal-israeli-october-7-fabrications/
Alex, I would sure appreciate your comments on that Grayzone story linked to above.
Yeah, there were several reports that turned out to be false https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-personnel-false-information-7-october-attack (the original investigation was done by Haaretz but it’s paywalled). It seems like the Grayzone article mostly discusses these cases. I don’t know ZAKA well enough, so I don’t want to speculate whether it was deliberate or just honest misunderstandings.
Note that neither of the examples I provided rely on ZAKA evidence.
And what did you think about Yoni Sadon, one of the people you did cite that was covered in the video, also being known for leading white supremacist marches in Israel?
I’m sorry, but the video is one and a half hour long, which part of it deals with Yoni Sadon’s evidence? Or, ideally, a printed summary
On the contrary, a lot of the Times article came from Zaka – and it was not “evidence,” but stuff they *said* they saw. And then the Israeli propagandist Elkayam-Levy used this non-evidence to lay out her own scenario and express feminist outrage at our failure to condemn this massive sexual violence.
Murder of innocent Israeli civilians certainly occurred. Incidents of rape may have as well; they often do in war. But this mass rape story is propaganda, and pretty transparent propaganda at that, to fire up the Zionists and keep the rest of us from looking at the much larger atrocities taking place in Gaza.
I was referring to the first paragraphs with the words of Yoni Saadon, who is not associated with Zaka to the best of my knowledge.
As to your second paragraph, I agree that it’s impossible to know how “mass” it was, they didn’t have much time after all on October 7. A lot of potential witnesses are dead, so we may not know the exact number even in future.
You can see the paywalled Haaretz article here:
https://archive.is/CUiCh
I wonder whether we’ll see the Western mainstream media touch this story.
It’s appalling to think that Israeli lies should have had such leverage. Even now people are still talking about burnt babies in Israel, when according to Haaretz this never happened. (Only two babies died in Israel according to Haaretz: Mila Cohen, who was hit by a bullet, and the baby of a highly pregnant Bedouin woman who was also hit and whose baby then died in hospital.)
Meanwhile, there must by now be hundreds of actual burnt babies in Gaza. And it is acquiesced to in large part because of this atrocity propaganda. It is maddening.
Still needing sources for the rapes on Oct. 7th. There seems to be very little if any evidence. As for the killings, I myself have seen tapes of Palestinians killing Israelis, but it is very difficult to discern who did what, because when the fence was breached it wasn’t just Al-Qassam (the very professional military arm of Hamas) who streamed out, but just about any Palestinian with a grievance who wanted revenge (the same can be put forward to the rapes, if they did in fact occur. Not impossible, but not yet proven).
That aside, I still read this as being akin to Algeria. The fact is the French shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The violence is simply a byproduct of the previous (and current) horrors. To wax tragic about the fate of the settlers is just plain hypocrisy. Besides that, pretty much all factions currently fighting explicitly want a secular state in which Jews would be welcome as in pre-Mandatory Palestine. One can doubt their true intentions, but in any case this are the facts on the ground. I’m tired of seeing people treating Palestinians as some sort of barbarians and savages when in fact the Zionists are an evil so radical that Arendt herself would blush.
You’d think that the Israelis would have rape kits handy, unless there is no sexual assault in Israel.
Similarly, the lurid tales of rampant sexual assault by Russian troops in Ukraine fell apart when western do-gooders wanted to help the poor victims and Ukraine couldn’t produce any.
“pretty much all factions currently fighting explicitly want a secular state” what’s the source for that?
Also, if anyone believed in the supposed mellowing of Hamas manifested in their 2017 charter, the recent events should have disabused them of that notion
So you have no sources other than a say-so.
See above, I’ve provided a couple. Still would love to see the source for your statement
Pardon me for the delay. Here is the source, as reported by Red Stream Media. Sadly I could only find it published in their telegram channel, and one is free to doubt this source. In any case the fact is there is no explicit call for an Islamic State (one can doubt their “true” intentions, but then again that’s how it goes). This is a classical anticolonial movement, and thus the form of the government of Palestine after liberation is yet to be decided.
So you’re predicting one million more Israeli Jewish deaths (i.e. 1000 times approximately 1000)? I think Levine must have been very right–you view this as an existential threat. If Israeli Jews really want some type of internal safety, they must compromise to end the hatred, but they largely are pulled into and trapped in this existential vortex. Hamas’s hardcore all or nothing stance isn’t much different.
Until both sides are prepared to eat a “s#!+” sandwich (i.e. compromise with things they really don’t like), expect terrible things to happen and no safety or security for anyone in the region.
Who is going to rise up above the hard core mindset to get something done to actually save lives?
amen. tie their tails together and stick em in a sack, as my grandma might say.
but that would first require…ahem…lifting the veil for usaians as to how nonperfect israel is.
there’s the mountain in the way, right there.
and to that end..that sprinter guy on twit says this is different behavior for the Red Cross…to speak out so clearly.
https://twitter.com/sprinter99800/status/1732362758782624118
i have no idea about ICRC media policy…but i can say that i dont remember ever hearing something like this from them.
they seem to command a lot of respect, even among my local teabillies.
I’m 70 years old, I’ve been paying attention for 60 of those years and I have NEVER seen anything like this statement by the Red Cross.
Good for them, maybe it will make a difference…
I said that it’s a possibility that cannot be discounted. Even if it’s 10%, wouldn’t you do a lot to prevent it?
As to the shit sandwich, believe me, I’d be willing to accept quite a big decrease in my living standards and accept many things I don’t like in exchange for a durable peace.
Also, shit sandwiches come in many forms. Russia achieved a real victory against Chechen insurgents by co-opting some of them, investing lots of money in reconstruction and ruthlessly eliminating those who chose to resist, to much consternation of liberals in Russia and in the West.
Well, the last time someone on the Israeli side tried to do what you call for ( Rabin), Netanyahu and the Likud Party plowed the ground, foamed the runway, created the conditions for, etc. etc. for the Rabin assassination.
There is a counterfactual scenario in which Shimon Peres could have immediately called Snap Elections on the question ” Who Governs Israel?” And if he and the Labor Party and other allied parties had won them, they could have begun extensive purges of the Likud-and-etc. side from politics, public life, the economy, universities, the IDF, the Intelligence agencies, etc. But Shimon Peres did not have the strength of character to do that. Instead he just limped along serving out the remainder of the assassinated Rabin’s term.
And “center-left” Israel lost the only chance it had to win a Civil War with the Right comprehensively enough to exterminate and depopulate the Right into obedience to the Oslo Scenario envisioned to be unfoldable.
” Center-left” Israel couldn’t possibly win such a Civil War now. The only thing “Center-lefties” can do to save themselves is to emigrate . . . and emigrate all their knowledge, business, etc. ( if any) along with themselves. And let the Israeli “right” march along to its own desired endstate of Masada 2.0, with the backing of its American Rapturaniac and Armageddonite supporters who want to get Israel to trigger off the global nuclear war which is supposed to bring Christ back to Earth for his Thousand Year Reign of Righteousness or whatever the spiritual descendants of Bishop Darby call it.
How many “rapes” did we see, exactly? Sources?
– ‘Western Firms Should Leave China Now’ – Project Syndicate
LOL! This is quite the history lesson. You see, after the fall of the Soviet Union we went in to help develop the Russian economy with the idea that solid economic relations would make us friends. But once they began to recover, the devious Rooskies turned on us and went back to their aggressive imperialist ways. That is the lesson for Western capital in China. Get out now! the Chinese will turn on you and take advantage of all your good will and naive hope of friendship just like their Russian friends!
Did Simon Johnson really need the help of two international economists of Ukrainian descent to write this ridiculous piece? It’s an almost grade school level morality tale. But it did provide a good laugh to start the morning.
Agreed. When I saw that the third author of the piece, Ilona Goloub, was editor of VoxUkraine, I decided I didn’t need to waste any time reading it.
Re; China?
This was the headline on Politico (European edition) this morning:
China’s Xi goes full Stalin with purge
In a sign of instability in Beijing’s top ranks, foreign policy and defense officials are vanishing as Xi roots out perceived enemies.
https://www.politico.eu/article/chinas-paranoid-purge-xi-jinping-li-keqiang-qin-gang-li-shangfu/
According to the article, Xi is on a killing-spree, and the authors are worried that in a moment of impulsive madness he will invade Taiwan.
Are certain nations jealous of not making the visa-free travel list? Or will this become fodder of Taiwanese nationalists to cite in advance of next month’s elections?
I heard that Xi was also personally chopping off baby’s heads as well. /sarc
Too late for that…
> Israel Weighs Plan to Flood Gaza Tunnels With Seawater
…And Abimelech, and the companie that was with him, rushed forward, and stood in the entring of the gate of the citie: and the two other companies ranne upon all the people that were in the fields, and slew them. And Abimelech fought against the citie all that day, and he tooke the citie, and slewe the people that was therein, and beat downe the citie, and sowed it with salt.
Following the script quite literally, aren’t they?
If Israel floods the Gaza tunnels and it sours the Gaza fresh water supply — what about the water supply in Israel? How well are the flows of underground water known? Similar question: When the oceans flood the u.s. coasts what region of fresh water sources be soured?
I guess that, should the seawater flooding of tunnels be truly extensive, the impact might not be circumscribed to the strip itself — also because tunnels were prolonged outside the strip.
If the groundwater table is contaminated with salt water and possibly all chemicals seeping because of the destruction of Gaza, then the kibbutzim in the vicinity of Gaza and possibly towns like Sderot will become uninhabitable as well.
As another commenter commented, it wouldn’t take much to take out any Israeli tunnel flooding team.
More Hollywood fantasy presented as fact.
“Chinese warships visit controversial Cambodian naval base for joint exercise”
Much ado about nothing. Last I heard, Cambodia is an independent country and can host whoever the hell they want. It’s the least that Cambodia can do as China paid for the new docking facilities. So I guess that old Joe will label Cambodia as an ‘authoritarian’ country and set the NGOs on them to try to regime change them. In any case, ever since the Great White Fleet the US Navy has visited about every country there is and still sails down the Taiwan Strait to get a stir.
> McKinsey Sees AI Adding Up To $340 Billion To Wall Street Profit Bloomberg
>> “This creates a catalyst for more firms to invest in AI and there’s even more value in AI.
As the light fades in autumn, I have been diving into Odum’s sutras on thermodynamics. There’s a story in the units of measurement.
#4 is measured in Energy/area, how much solar energy falls on a piece of land. #5 is a ratio of how many solar energy units it takes to create a denser energy source (photosynthesis creating sugar). #6 measures energy density (wood < sugar < gasoline). #7 measures energy per buck, implicitly looking for the cheapest energy source.
But as money feedsback, there is a change from local control to central control of all levels (Economy). Local is, a rick of wood for cash in hand. The central money feed back is something like: Bank to Commercial property, AND business loans, AND private property, AND private loans…
At the top, there is an inversion in values, from a high energy density being 'good' (E/$), to a high cash return ($/E) being preferred. Productive variants are quashed. I seem to recall oil companies buying solar patents back in the last century, as an example.
Let’s just cut to the chase and call it – the AI bubble is here. We cannot know the form it will take, but the rough outlines are, and “it’s never different, this time”.
Will it be a tiny bubble, like the metaverse? (sorry, Zuck, you picked the wrong horse)
Or as Keith Jackson used to say, “the Grandaddy of ’em all!”
Here’s more on the recent OpenAI kerfuffle from James Li:
EVIL Villains Are Now Running OpenAI!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMzM1-IbAsI
Yes, I think we’re going to see a huge AI bubble where AI is going to “solve” everything.
I’ve also been trying to learn more about LLMs and how these are impacted by the quality of the training data. I think it’s fair to say it conforms pretty well to the GIGO model we’ve had forever in the IT world. If that’s the case, how will LLM AIs compare between competing superpowers? We comment here on the fact that a neo-capitalist economy seems to be able to pervert truth telling at multiple levels – even published science papers. What does that do to your AIs?
“Israel’s war with Hamas shows why even 50 years of upgrades can’t make tanks invulnerable”
The article says that Israel has lost nearly two dozen tanks since the war began but you can be sure that it is a helluva lot more than that. Israel and the Pentagon would know how many but they ain’t saying nothing. Hamas has destroyed and damaged so many tanks that it has forced Israel to break out the older models of the Merkava tank out of storage. Tanks are very useful but in modern warfare, they are just as vulnerable as any other piece of military gear as shown in the Ukraine and now in Gaza. I hope that the Israelis are not stupid enough to send in the old M113 APCs into battle. The ‘A’ stands for Armoured but aluminium is not my own idea of armour. Last time the Israelis went into Gaza they lost a whole bunch of their guys when one of those old M113s was hit.
Next you’ll be saying Iron Dome doesn’t work either (does it???).
Israel’s true secret weapon these days seems to be making sure its targets are defenseless. That doesn’t seem to be working out with the tanks.
Iron Dome afaik seems to work (it works through saturation, not through precision), but it has the problem that it is a lot more expensive and hard to make (thus scarce) than the rockets it is shooting down. So it’s just a matter of time until the cupboard is bare.
The M113 was built to be a battlefield taxi, not a tank or even a infantry fighting vehicle (IFV), with the “armor” being resistant to bullets and shell fragments and not much else. The original model was supposedly light enough to float, which would have been a help in Vietnam. An IFV usually has a little heavier armor and nice autocannon. Putting a M113 into direct combat is just stupidly murderous to the crews.
Having taken them across rivers, I can certify that yes, they float. Not because “light” so much as because “volume.”
Proper preparation is important, as one driver found out. They can submerge pretty quickly if drain plugs are not properly installed….
On the status H. Res. 894, you know the one that had the clause:
(4) clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism; …
The Judiciary committee voted to reconsider it without objection, but the House as a whole
On motion to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays: (2/3 required): 311 – 14, 92 Present (Roll no. 697).
The Vote
The squad voted no, but more surprising to me was that my former and current representatives both voted “Present”, and yes both are Jewish. Nadler has not always toed the line, he did vote to support the treaty with Iran and was unsuccessfully primaried for the first time in forever because of it (not the one because of the district change). New guy Goldman was bombastic in the first days, but may be reading the room. Either way, though I would have preferred flat out nays it did indicate there was some realization this was a step too far.
Still it does prove the House is full of idiots – racist, religious, or both.
Tlaib voted no. My rep Dingell voted present, real courage there! Also there were 17 not voting.
Another roll call of shame!
“…racist, religious, or both.” Don’t forget “bought.”
Yup!
My rep, NJ-11 Mikie Sherrill (D and military pilot) voted present. Neighboring district, NJ-9 which includes Paterson, home of a large Arab population (and other ethnic groups that tend to be Muslim), voted yes.
I had to go check the vote for districts which I knew contained large Jewish populations with large voting blocks. The first is Lakewood, one of the largest cities in NJ, home to the largest yeshiva outside of Israel, and majority Haredi. NJ-4 Chris Smith (R) voted no. I then checked the vote for New York’s Kiryas Joel, majority Hasidic. NY-18 Pat Ryan (D) voted present.
Of course Nadler is in no danger from AIPAC but good for him.
Thanks for the info. Especially appreciate the specific vote from roll call. Like to point out the cheesy vote of the the ‘Freedom Caucus,” but that would be like shooting “fish” in a toilet tank.
‘Julia Marie
@julia_doubleday
On goalpost moving: in fall 2021, (after the vax) Dr. Fauci said we could expect society to be basically “back to normal” if we can get daily COVID cases under 10k a day.
As of today we have over 850,000 new COVID cases per day. And rising.’
There have been three main observations about the late Henry Kissinger. That he wanted to protect the American Empire. That he was utterly and totally obsessed with his personal career right to the end and that he was the cause of three million deaths alone. So I wonder after Fauci eventually dies what they will say about him. Maybe they will say that he wanted to protect the American Economy. That he was utterly and totally obsessed with his personal career right to the end and that he was the cause of an unknown number of deaths as they are still being counted daily.
IMO – Fauci did a very decent job in his particular situation. The govt didn’t want lockdowns; they were forced into it by the situation in NYC where Elmhurst hospital was inundated with sick and dying, body bags were piling up and there was no room for the newly dead.
Then we had, Trump (it’s only a mild flu).
We also had a bit of “we want to spend our money on US produced goods etc” – where the US govt decided not to obtain testing kits from Germany. This created a situation where the US was way behind in testing for Covid19, and when you can’t test, you can’t confirm and can’t stop the spread.
Vaccines were supposed to be the big saviour, and giving a nuanced message – they may work, may not prevent transmission – doesn’t really work well. People pick up on that nuance and will say – well if we don’t know if it will work well, why bother.
And with short time frames like 3 weeks of trials with Pfizer / 4 weeks for Moderna – there was no way to know the long term situation.
Then of course the overlords also wanted the economy to “open up” – a lot of rich people and middle class + political class.
Who thinks a lone voice or even a couple, would make a big difference when they would be out-competed by the mega-bucks media + their political friends?
“Who thinks a lone voice or even a couple, would make a big difference when they would be out-competed by the mega-bucks media + their political friends?”
Uhm, an ethical person, that’s who.
No, Fauci did not. He has form. And if he hadn’t already screwed things in a similar manner during the early days of AIDS, I could accept giving him a break. But no. The overriding factor In Fauci’s decisions and choices is always about financial gain.
And sorry, we should never have had the ripping off of the masks and lying about the vaccines. Not only was it guaranteed to come back to bite public health in the rear, it also guaranteed that people would get Covid. As for reluctance about them, guess what it happened anyway. And now people who were fired are getting large payouts because it turns out the reasons for the mandates were specious.
If we had had genuinely public minded people in the key positions, especially Fauci’s, a lot of the bull shit of deriding masks and ignoring the clear facts about transmission methods would not have been allowed to take hold. And it would have taken quite awhile for them to be removed and replaced.
And that doesn’t even consider Fauci’s illegal gain of function labs.
Thank you. The vaccine rollout and subsequent mandates had very little to do with public health and very much to do with locking in billions in profits for Pfizer by forcing untested treatments on people. Treatments that turned out not to work very well, and definitely not as they were touted by any number of politicians.
Still waiting for an explanation of why those in the global south had far better overall results while using far fewer Western pharma treatments.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.”–Margaret Mead.
and, i’ll just note that this whole thing is the plot of the most recent iteration of the X-Files…where an engineered alien disease strips away immune systems…jess sayin…
Fauci has a long history as a shill for the Medical/Pharma complex starting with his handling of the AIDS epidemic, when he should have been charged with crimes against humanity.
Anyone defending Fauci’s record is either ignorant of it or a Psychopath.
It’s not Fauci. It’s the US, it’s political systems and the values of the nation.
Let’s say Fauci is a flawed person (who isn’t); Trump & the politicians could have stepped up and said – “what is the best way to protect our people?” and then given marching orders to the bureaucracy to get it done. The Commander in chief was too interested in his own re-election therefore the – covid is a mild flu – nonsense. So were a lot of other politicians.
Then there was the masks – we lied to you because we wanted to save them for the healthcare workers – that definitely made people lose trust in the government.
Gain of function research – that’s was probably government policy for years probably. Also if you believe this, then you have to give credence to the Russian claims that the US is involved with research to target specific races.
HIV/AIDS – America was (and still can be an extremely homophobic) society, wasn’t it Reagan under whom HIV & AIDS was spreading and he (plus the republican administration) didn’t care (from what I understand, no detailed knowledge here).
Blaming Fauci is easy – the problem for a public employee is
– you get a fixed pay.
– there aren’t magical 7 figure bonuses (like in the private sector).
– you do an amazing job, you may get a commendation at best (can’t eat it or buy a house with it).
– you mess up and you get savagely pilloried for it.
– you do a really good job and you may still get pilloried by “special interest” politicians in Senate/Congress because someone paid them for it.
These are skewed incentives.
Re: Deer whistles
Wikipedia suggests they work better on ‘roos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_horn
I always thought the animal crossings were more about migration than car accidents. Out west predators and other wanderers need large territories.
They are mainly about deer. Deer don’t migrate.
Western Mule Deer, Pronghorn, and Elk sure do migrate – often long distances and perilously these days along traditional routes to winter ranges in areas with minimal snow
“The big highways, a lot of the herd is using. Once you identify those, that becomes an important target for conservation,” said Matthew Kauffman, USGS lead scientist for the mapping project.
Human development—homes, roads, fences, oil and gas fields and mining operations—increasingly interferes with Western migrations, sometimes with little awareness of what’s at stake for animals cherished by wildlife watchers and hunters alike”.
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-migration-tools-big-game-west.html
they migrate to my pasture and to the bar ditch on opening day of hunting season.
this leads me to believe that they have calendars.
because its like clockwork, every year.
Technically, no.
However, they do roam from lower to higher altitudes seasonally.
Mountain old timers gauged seasonal trends by observing deer “migration “ patterns.
Of course it’s all changed now.
When I took the Empire Builder train across Texas and the Southwest Desert states I saw what at first looked like the strangest thing . . . smallish grated culverts passing under various roadways here and there. Then I saw a peccary-javelina coming out of one. They were clearly built to allow peccaries to cross under the roads here and there.
I only saw a few of them. And I can’t find a single picture on line, perhaps because I don’t know their exact name.
> When I took the Empire Builder train across Texas and the Southwest Desert states …
Erm … doesn’t the Empire Builder run from Chicago to Seattle?
You know, I probably have the name totally wrong. What I took was the train which ran south from Chicago into pretty-far-south Texas, and then back West and North along the Rio Grande River to El Paso, and then across New Mexico and Arizona and Southern California to Los Angeles. I saw a lot of interesting stuff.
We have a lot of deer around here. Back in the ’80’s when deer whistles came on the scene a lot of people purchased them. If you DDG “deer whistles” you will find some literature on them that states it is not known whether they are effective or not.
Now, around here, we still have a lot of deer and nobody has deer whistles on their vehicles. It appears the consensus is they don’t work as advertised. What does work is staying vigilant and when a deer is spotted on the roadside give them a blast of the horn. Works every time except during the rut.
Nothing works during the rut. When a buck is on a doe’s trail he is moving fast and he has a one track mind. A friend had some goats once. The females were in heat. It was interesting and hilarious to see the intense desire triggered in the male goat by the does in estrus. Goats are similar to deer.
One major issue with deer whistles is sound compression; when a motorcycle approaches, you hear them far less than once they are leaving. The bumper stickers advocating hearing motorcycles are made mostly pointless by this phenomenon. Studies seem to mostly indicate that higher-pitched sounds, such as those most used to alert deer compress further than other sounds.
Another factor is whether such whistle alerts under compression are sufficient to give deer the time necessary to avoid collision, studies also seem to show they don’t.
https://www.deeranddeerhunting.com/content/articles/deer-news/how-effective-are-deer-whistles-to-avoid-vehicle-collisions
As to whether over or under passes are a good idea, bear in mind that highways mostly separate animals from natural areas of habitat and thus prevent natural grazing, breeding, and interacting to prevent reducing the gene pool to a unsustainable level.
The Swedes have a system of fencing and overpasses to control moose and ruminant access to highways, and locals indicate it has improved fatality rates for humans as much as it has for moose and deer. From first person accounts, you do NOT want to hit a moose! Imagine a windshield-height cow, only bigger, impacting your passenger compartment, there are very few good outcomes!
Lastly, from classes I’ve taken, the global South is done with taking our discarded clothing. Mismatched shoes and inappropriate clothing is the norm of what we “donate” to them. They have no effective way of disposing of our “good’ intentions. I’ll climb down from my soapbox now…
When I visited Pittsburgh back in 2016, I wandered around somewhere west of East Liberty, and came across a tree with some bats not unlike that, flying about in the night. It was a strange sight to see so near the city. The AirBnb I was staying at was a 3 story historic townhome, and they had just raised that person’s rent to I think $850! With all the tech workers, I bet you can’t get anything like that today. I was sure the stairs were gonna collapse, they so rocked when I’d walk up them. Unnerving two story drop.
Not a fan of bats here as they can carry all sorts of viruses-
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/factsheets/Pages/rabies-australian-bat-lyssavirus-infection.aspx
We have been hearing them a lot lately in our trees so had to make sure that the tubs for food and water for our horses were not under any trees.
My favorite bat fact is that their teeth are so sharp and small that many people cannot feel or see a bat bite and anyone who has handled a bat should seek medical attention.
My second is that my friendly local bat advocacy non-profit has a bat stylist who makes them look their best, fluffed and groomed, for photo shoots.
We had some get in our house a few years ago. I caught one and shooed it out of the house and there was no evidence of biting, but to be on the safe side we went to the doctor. They of course recommended rabies shots. The shots were $3k each and we had insurance – without insurance they would have been over $10K each. We decided on one for the kid – my better half and I took our chances.
Lovely healthcare system we have here in the US.
We see them at twilight here.
The pictured furry critter looks awfully like a “Hogzilla” with wings.
One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpxeT7LKVlU
What kind of bats are these in Australia? If they are insect-eating bats, one has to wonder . . . if they went extinct, how many insect-species would reach problem levels for agriculture and etc.? If these bats are heavy eaters of mosquitos in particular, if the bats went extinct, would the mosquitos thereby set free to go forth and multiply spread more diseases then the percent of bats who are infected ever spread themselves?
One wonders if some bat-spread disease is a price one pays for the way huger amount of insect disease and destruction thereby avoided.
1. never handle a bat without welding gloves…tongs or something is better.
and 2. Austin makes a big deal about the bat colony under the Congress Ave Bridge.
tours and everything.
it is pretty dern impressive to watch them at either twighlight.
there’s a wilderness bat cave to my south…gotta drive through James River twice to get there.
on gravel/rock roads.
big hole in the ground, benches all around, so you get a front row seat to the giant column of bats emerging.
https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/places-we-protect/eckert-james-river-bat-cave-preserve/
Prices have gone up the last few years but we bought our house in Pittsburgh at the peak of the pandemic and got a three story, 5 bedroom victorian with a lot of original woodwork, stained glass, a garage and pay 975 a month. As medium sized cities go Pittsburgh is extremely cheap, because the in city limits population is half what it was in the 60s so there’s a ton of extra housing stock and empty lots.
Eric Adams losing to Andy Cuomo is not that big a shock. The city is in big trouble, and Adams is in over his head, although that was probably going to happen even if there were only new minor challenges. Thing is I am not so sure that it really is Andy people are jonesing for. Nostalgia is at play here, someone I know recently wished we had Dinkins and Cuomo back, but they meant Mario. There is enough in the poll to indicate that Andy’s comeback campaign is not making all that much headway, but honestly other than nostalgia for his father the only advantage he had over Adams is that he wasn’t being investigated by the FBI.
Re: Amazon employees quitting — These highly paid tech workers working for AWS complain of the company’s “lack of basic human respect” in forcing them to return to the office. What B.S. They know perfectly well they work for Amazon, which treats warehouse workers and other lowly creatures like s**t. They just thought (and undoubtedly still assume) that they’re on a higher, better plane of human existence, and as such, deserve to be treated with “basic human respect” that is reserved for those on their rarified level. Their own blazing inhumanity is on full display and they make me sick.
I briefly interviewed for a contract position, remote, at Amazon for something related to their robotics in warehouses initiative. The leadership principles are for real. I glossed over them, sounded kind of insane. The interviewer, on the call, was actually in what appeared to be one of the snack closets.
They have a series of specific questions to ask, the first of which is “describe a situation where you went above and beyond for a customer”. After asking her to repeat the question, I asked how many of these sorts of questions were there. Apparently a slate of them. I thanked her for her time and suggested this wasn’t the position for me; she looked extremely annoyed, and then I quit the Zoom. Felt good. Why not set the job requirements to whatever “above and beyond” are, then pay at that level.
I really don’t understand all this resistance to returning to the office. Well maybe I do, but I don’t have much sympathy in general. I think most people probably look for a job first and then set up their living situation around the job, often resulting in a pain in the neck commute, perhaps in an area they don’t really want to live in to begin with. Then the PMC-types buy up 2nd or 3rd homes with their outsized salaries and escape to greener pastures as often as they can, slowly turning the nice rural state I live in into the very place they’re trying to escape from, “disrupting” the local economy all the while and making it difficult for locals to afford. These people got a nice respite from their commutes, maybe even moved to a cheaper locale, keeping their higher salary all the while. I can sympathize with employers in this case – if you can do all your work remotely and never need to come to the office, it’s quite possible your job is bull**it to begin with. How many middle managers holding zoom meetings in their jammies to decide what work other people should be doing do we really need?
I’ve always moved to where I wanted to live first, and then found a job nearby. I’ve never had a commute of much more than 20 minutes, and that’s usually on public transportation where the drive time is slower but I get to read and don’t have to fight traffic myself. If I drive myself, the commute is more like 5 or 10 minutes. That’s always worked for me, but I realize I’m decidedly in the minority on that.
yeah…all those “essential workers” were soon forgotten,lol.
its really all about the PMC and their smug superiority.
and…my area has been seeing the same influx…just over a longer time frame.
we’re fortunate that we’re so far out away from real grocery stores, eateries and things like doctors, i guess.
keeps out the riffraff(richy rich imposeurs)
we have seen a slow motion invasion of more of the landed gentry/oil investor/tech millionaire(escaping communist cali) sort of rich people moving out here…really since the 08 GFC.
they buy a bunch of land from legacy pioneer ranches, build a nice hillfort with giant windows, and play at being ranchers.
they have driven the property values way up…but the taxes are still rather low.
biggest visible impact is all the wine tasting rooms that have materialised around the Square,lol.
they have been getting somewhat uppity about local ordinances, however…but only 2 of them have run and won some local position…and their weird orange county ideas havent gained much traction, so far.
like livestock in the city limits,lol…people threatened to rise up …if they disallowed goats and chickens and such.(pigs have been banned within city limits forever–part due to the whole east side of town(where the old, new and redneck barrios are) were a giant pig farm from late 1800’s til 1930’s)
covid didnt really accelerate this influx, as near as i can tell….likely due to those property values being so crazy high.
Several decades ago the farming town where I grew up in rural VT built a nice resort that attracted wealthy tourists, and some decided to stay permanently and purchase homes. We have slowly been overwhelmed by people with way too much money ever since as farms have dwindled down to mostly nothing, except for a few “gentleman farmers” who purchased an old barn and have a couple llamas milling around, but don’t do much actual farming.
Funny story – there was an old farmer named Cy who raised a few animals and did odd agricultural jobs, one of which was a knacker, and he kept working well into his 80s even as the town changed. For those not in the know, a knacker is someone who takes care of dead farm animals, and this guy used to do pickups at all the local farms. One of my favorite sights was watching Cy drive through this quaint little New England town full of tourist Beemers and Saabs in his beat up old pickup with four stiff hooved legs sticking up from the truck bed.
He raised some pigs on his property and also did some of the rendering there as well. Some wealthy flatlanders (as out of staters are called in VT) bought property near him, evidently without eyeballing it much ahead of time, and after moving in, soon complained to town officials about the smell. Luckily at the time there were still some old time selectmen, and they told the newcomers that Cy was there first, had been there his whole life, and they’d could either put up with the smell or sell.
Wasn’t there an article sometime back on how Amazon intentionally treats all it’s workers badly, not just the meat robots in the warehouses. Maybe the remote working was a way people could stand this type of ‘management’. Going back to the office would then be a much more negative affair than if they had positive management policies.
US grants $110 million to improve wildlife road crossings The Hill. A friend of furzy points out that these crossings are costly and not effective.
Study is ongoing but the wildlife overpass on I80 outside Salt Lake City seems to get a lot of traffic.
https://www.kpcw.org/park-city/2023-02-06/cameras-at-parleys-canyon-wildlife-overpass-show-plenty-of-animal-traffic?_amp=true
A few other wildlife crossing projects that have achieved modest results:
Arizona — Since 2000, Arizona has constructed at least 20 corridors, including 17 underpasses, each augmented by funnel fencing. Their presence has brought about a 90 percent drop in wildlife-related highway accidents in one stretch of central Arizona known for migrating elk populations.
Banff — Between 1996 and 2016, 44 structures — six bridges and 38 underpasses — were built for wildlife to traverse the Trans-Canada Highway, the nation’s longest road, which bisects the park. During that time, park officials documented more than 150,000 crossings by elk, moose, black bears, cougar and grizzly bears. In addition, the mitigation contributed to an 80 percent reduction in motor accidents involving wildlife.
white tails are far less predictable…otherwise i’d happily put up with the construction hassle such an endeavor would take.
theres a lot of meat on these highways.
eldest hit one a month ago…right after we accidentally let insurance expire,lol.
they would have totalled it and screwed us anyway…so we’ll fix it ourselves.
for such a small and delicate creature(compared to elk or even mule deer), they cause a lot of damage…in his case, mostly superficial.
A Washington state study looking at the benefits of wild life crossings “estimated the average vehicle-deer collision resulted in economic costs of $9,175. Hitting an elk ballooned the average cost per collision to $24,242 and a moose even more, $42,652 per collision.”
Another recent study of the efficacy and economics of wildlife crossing structures concluded that “each crossing structure could save society between $235,000 and $443,000 annually through collision reductions. The savings varied based on structure size, design and location.”
Good news for just about everyone except body shops I suppose….
yeah. the radiator, the little radiator for the transmission and the frame to hang all that on will cost us around $700-$900 for parts…and the frame we’ll hafta find at a pickapart down san antonio way.
the cosmetic stuff and the bumper…a good $2000 more.
ive been on him since he got that truck to get a grill guard…now, it looks like he’s a believer.
i dont drive after dark(or hardly at all,lol) so i dont fret about it.
but he’s been tending bar on the square as a side gig…so its midnight when he heads home.
From Revealed: Sellafield nuclear site has leak that could pose risk to public:
So now with COVID induced brain damage, we really shouldn’t be having any nuclear revitalization! There are enough mistakes as it is!
Sellafield (formerly known as Windscale) has form for this kind of thing. From fires to dumping liquid waste in the Irish Sea.
“Do venture capitalists want forever war?”
Just a reminder: any time you see a categorical or taxonomic modifier preceding ‘capitalist’ or you can ignore and discard the modifier.
the 23andme article link is broken
Adding a furin cleavage site should fix it.
‘In The Name Of All Jews’
‘There have been calls for what amounts to an ad hoc excommunication of Jews from the Community of Jews for even most mild criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. It might sound crazy to outsiders but it’s true. That’s because zionists see Israel’s fight in Gaza as an existential battle for Jewish existence. And if you don’t support this fight, you’re against the Jews. That makes you irredeemable and not a Jew, even if you are legally Jewish by Israel’s maternal bloodline obsessed rabbinical court. These calls have been coming not from some ultra-orthodox settler extremists but from respectable leaders of Israeli and American-Jewish organizations.4 These people have been absolutely going crazy. They’ve been condemning us Jews who criticize Israel to the lowest pits of hell.’
Like the Aryans then, only the purist Jews should have any claim to being Jewish? Is there a possibility of war breaking out within Israel over the definition of ‘Judaism’ and who may legitimately claim it?
Oh, that’s rich.
Wasn’t there always such a conflict? WW2 provided the excuse for one side to shield itself from criticism. But I think synagogues hanging Israeli flags and the like is highly questionable in a country where religion and politics are supposed to be separate. When oh say Baptists use their religion to interfere in government there’s a great hue and cry among those who defend the same by the Zionists.
Between Jews and Arabs, yes and it’s a very old conflict. Between Jewish Nationalists and non-nationalists heating up within Isreal, this is new or it just hasn’t reached my ears and I’m newly aware.
‘Israel’ was a race-based arrangement; it was agreed that the Jews are a race. To say ‘you either agree with us or you’re not Jews’ sounds like racism, even if one not based on skin color. Instead they’re arguing that being Jewish is ideological, ‘agree with our interpretation of that ideology or you’re not in the club any more’. For that I like the word ‘bigotry’. The Zionists are political bigots, well funded by the U.S. and this should worry us deeply. It’s a proxy war for the nationalists in our state capital. Gawds help us if the Republicans get back in… and before anyone goes to town saying ‘well, the Democrats aren’t any better!’… I didn’t say they were. The Republicans just worry me more.
Revisionist Zionists ( descended from Jabotinsky and then Begin) see it that way. General Zionists ( descended from Weizman and such) didn’t and don’t. Labor Zionists ( descended from ben Gurion and such) didn’t.
But its the Revisionist Zionists and the Red Heifer Zionists ( and their Christian Zionist end-times Rapture and Armageddon worshippers) and the Messianic Lubavitch end-timers and the West Bank Pogromist settlers and such who are in command now.
$4.01k update:
I’d gloat but you can’t really tell if somebody is actually gloating online, and i’m not sure if the sky is the limit or perhaps not, but the worlds favorite imaginary money is nearly $44k, after testing the lows of around $16k when the FTX imbrogliou came out.
I did a Ctrl-F to see if this has been posted and saw nothing, so apologies if it has been discussed.
I ran across a single headline about this, and I’m not sure I totally understand, but life insurers are making free money (or milking taxpayers) from Federal Home Loan Banks? What the hell is going on here?
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/life-insurers-binge-us-financing-aimed-helping-housing-2023-12-05/
RE: “Pentagon Scientists Discuss Cybernetic ‘Super Soldiers’…”
I wonder what the Pentagon could come up with if they overcame their squeamishness about physically altering draftees without worrying about consent. The last time there was a draft in the u.s. no one worried about the consent of the young men they drafted and sent to war. They did not worry about what became of those young men in battle or after they came home from the war. With a little more control over the Populace young men and young women could be harvested from those underclasses for use in our forever wars without worries over consent or return to civilian life. The underclasses have considerable under-exploited value that a little rewiring of their brains could develop to support maintaining and expanding the Empire. This could mean a richer, more luxurious life for those of us who matter. \s
Isn’t this an old idea. It’s certainly been around in sci-fi for a very long time.
I may be late to the party, but I instantly recall Watts’ Echopraxia with its military zombies. (In some respects Watts is a damn prophet.) Basically, human soldiers hired from the underclasses, fitted with various augments and used for guard and combat duties. And rewiring their brains is critical. The whole point is that they’re technically not even conscious most of the time.
I’ve tried to find a short quote, but probably the best description that sums up the idea is from one interview of his:
===
I approached the subject not from the shambling, brain-eating zombie of pop culture, but the philosophical zombie of the cognitive sciences: simply, a non-conscious being. Most of the zombies in the novel are military in origin: corticohypothalmic implants allow soldiers to shut down their self-awareness during combat. This both makes them better fighters — reflexes and tactical decision-making all happen a lot faster once the bottleneck of conscious awareness is removed — and less prone to fits of post-combat remorse and PTSD. (You’re not nearly as likely to be guilt-ridden over mistakenly gunning down a village full of innocent civilians if you don’t remember doing that, if the conscious “you” wasn’t even online when it happened).
===
https://www.actusf.com/detail-d-un-article/interview-vo-2015-peter-watts-for
He also made a mock-up recruitment ad, just for fun.
https://www.rifters.com/echopraxia/recruiter.htm
I did a Ctrl-F to see if this has been posted and saw nothing, so apologies if it has been discussed. Sorry for dupes.
I ran across a single headline about this, and I’m not sure I totally understand, but life insurers are making free money (or milking taxpayers) from Federal Home Loan Banks? What the hell is going on here?
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/life-insurers-binge-us-financing-aimed-helping-housing-2023-12-05/
RIP Denny
“From Trump to Congress, Republican defense orthodoxy crumbles Defense News”
I suspect that it’s not that Team R has suddenly developed a conscience, it’s that they want Biden to have another Big Fat L on his record.
Give Ukraine just enough so that Team R can’t be accused of abandoning The Beacon Of Democracy but not so much as to slow the inevitable significantly.
Team R wants to make Ukraine a fiasco and they want Halfwit Joe to own it,
You can’t be too cynical when talking about politics. It is always a power move.
Finster’s First Law readeth thusly: “No matter how cynical you think you are, the people who really run things are way more cynical than that.”
Then Team R can run on ” Who Lost Ukraine?” But Team D will also be running on ” Who Lost Ukraine?”
That should sound pretty dissonant and discordant.
“US grants $110 million to improve wildlife road crossings The Hill. A friend of furzy points out that these crossings are costly and not effective. Better are cheap devices on cars that emit a whistle at decent speeds.”
One attempted system i have seen around here recently is roadside mirrors meant to reflect the light of passing cars onto fields were deer etc gather.
“ASM Announces $300 Million Expansion Of U.S. Operations In Scottsdale Arizona Commerce Authority. Alex C”
This is not just any odd company, this is THE supplier of fabrication machines for the latest microchips. If this factory was going up in China, DC would be baying for war.
“Migration crackdown which would stop Brits earning less than £38,000 from bringing foreign husbands and wives to UK ‘could be blocked by human rights laws’ as experts warn it could lead to a wave of cancelled weddings Daily Mail”
Marriage as a concept has long felt obsolete.
RE: Jesse Darling Wins 2023 Turner Prize
Is it just me, or is Jesse Darling really not much of an artist? Couldn’t see much behind the NYT paywall, but here’s a Grauniad article with some pics of his work – https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/dec/06/turner-prize-winner-jesse-darling-clown-dancer-skyfall-bond Looks like the detritus you might find by the side of the road after something falls off the dumptruck or a homeless encampment is cleaned up.
If you read the artist’s curriculum vitae however, there’s an inkling that he might just be pulling the wool over the Turner people’s eyes by piling junk on the floor and calling it art. Marcel Duchamp had a crack at that back in the day, and while I don’t see that Darling is the sculptor Duchamp was, if he is pulling a prank here and cashed in on the vanity of the artworld hangers-on, then kudos to him!
“Capitalism, with friends like these, you don’t need enemies Steve Keen (Micael T)”
Another solid one from Steve Keen.
The bullet points on the Blinder survey is particularly interesting, As they seem to once again verify what the bearded one was writing way back when.
And it should not be surprising, as his partner in “crime” was the son of a factory owner and thus could observe the processes and numbers first hand.
but economics is overrun with easy chair theorists that would not know a wrench from a hammer.
That X video by MoTaz of a scene in Gaza after an IDF bombing is beyond heart-rending. If it were to happen only once, it would be horrifying. But it happens multiple times per day.
Bugger history, old scriptures and fairy tales, “learned” clerics pronouncing nonsense vengeances based on some fusty old Torah horsemanure, and all crock-of-shit “justifications” for killing civilians because some Hamas soldier might have been present because Israel really doesn’t care if they’re present or not. The blood lust is up .
So this is what humanity is really like. I’m almost four score years old, and this current war in Gaza is the most egregious example of man’s inhumanity to man I’ve personally witnessed. I’m sure the Baghdad bombings by the US were even more horrifying, but no on the ground aftermath video then. Any old Iraqi was indiscrinately slaughtered. But the bombing wasn’t remorelessly plotted out on map squares to kill civilians, nor last as long — just shock and awe. Nor was there any on the ground video in North Korea, levelled by US/Allied forces bombing to kill Commies for Christ.under the Imperial Philipines and Japan Viceroy MacArthur. For Freedom. As if.
People in Gaza are being liquidated merely for existing. If you find my comment trite or banal simply because “we all know it’s happening and sure it’s awful”, time to give your head a shake. The killing is unconscionable, period. And if we let this horror be absorbed as routine in our day -to-day lives, we lose our soul. I think mine is pretty near gone already — I had to force myself to watch that video instead of skipping it.
How about you?
Christopher W . . . all I’ll say is my wife found a tiny bat on the ground, I moved it onto a open box to carry to the treeline. Never noticed the moment of the bite, and it was tiny beyond belief that it even *could* be a bite, with a minuscule drop of blood smaller than a pin prick. Washed up with IPA and thought nothing of it but upon advice of my doctor, ended up going to the ER the next morning to begin a course of rabies injections. Insurance paid-not paid so each shot cost me $400 (times four rounds). The first, the one into my thumb, was excruciating because she had to wiggle it around and administer the dose of thickish liquid and achieve full distribution. The term she used was infiltrate and I had to think hard to recall it because I put it out of mind intentionally.
And note; I’m *that* guy, the one who when we lived in Panama stopped to move sloths out of the road, and who to this day stops and moves gopher turtles, here in FL. Anyway, I’ll never again handle a bat with bare hands because a rabies death is certain and ugly beyond belief. There are YouTube videos of sufferers in India and it’s the stuff of nightmares. Please, nobody go and relate the one or maybe two people in the entire world who have survived it, I know they exist and their quality of life post that experience makes one wonder. Respectfully, head up because wildlife does not seek out human comfort no matter what you may choose to believe regarding your status as a Disney princess. Please inspect yourself carefully and if there’s an open wound, seek medical treatment!