50 Fantastic ‘Cat Memes’ To Help You Get Through Hard Times Bored Panda (furzy)
South Korea passes law to ban dog meat Anadolu Agency
Peregrine moon lander carrying human remains doomed after ‘critical loss’ of propellant Live Science (furzy). Those Native Americans have some serious mojo! Recall they fiercely opposed the moon burial as desecration. Or maybe the moon itself agreed with them.
My 50 Favorite Albums from the Golden Age of Capitol Records (Part 3 of 3) Ted Gioia
Problematic: My favourite English word kamilkazani (Randy K)
Cells Across the Body Talk to Each Other About Aging Quanta (David L)
#COVID-19
Brain Injury Markers Not Detected by Normal Blood Testing Found Months after COVID-19 Infections Inside Precision Medicine (Anthony L). From December, still germane.
Hospitals strained across the US as over 2 million Americans now infected with COVID each day WSWS
COVID means more illness, more disability, more death, it also means healthcare shortages, staff shortages, record absences, and dangerous and inconvenient delays
NOT sustainable. Zero public health is not the answer to a pandemic that mutated around vaccine protection QUICKLY https://t.co/EOVdE4YG0f
— Julia Marie (@julia_doubleday) January 9, 2024
Climate/Environment
Earth shattered global heat record in 2023, flirting with warming limit, European agency says 9 News (Kevin W)
How global trade could fragment after the EU’s tax on ‘dirty’ imports Financial Times
Power companies paid civil rights leaders in the US south. They became loyal industry advocates Guardian (Paul R, Dr. Kevin)
Massive winter storm batters US, knocks out power ahead of brutal freeze Reuters. Our moderator katiebird lost power for >4 hours but still kept working on her phone. How many of you lost power?
China?
China Credit Woes Ease as Big Borrowers Reveal Payment Plans Bloomberg. Gee, just a few weeks ago, the financial and pundit press was speaking with close to one voice that a Chinese debt crisis was coming soon.
Mao’s famous Cultural Revolution swim across the Yangzi River finally explained Ramin Mazheri
How US curbs on China may revive its rust belt – the former industrial powerhouse near Russia South China Morning Post. Userfriendly: “Maybe not how I’d place the rust belt (geographically) for a Chinese audience, nonetheless a quite informative take on restructuring in China.”
Death and debt in China: how a ‘half-baked’ bankruptcy law offers few individuals a fresh start South China Morning Post. Userfriendly: “Holy shit it’s a wonder they have any economy at all, much less one rivaling our own. You are literally putting your life on the line just by starting a business.’
Old Blighty
European Disunion
Eurozone economy heading for another downturn, warns ECB vice-president Financial Times
New enemy images: the “Nazi farmers” and the “pitchfork mob” and Farmers’ protests: All wheels stand still – but so does the analysis Nachdenkseiten via machine translation (Micael T)
Germany could face its own ‘Maidan’ – Medvedev RT
France is simply not a serious country anymore. Our new Prime Minister – Gabriel Attal – is 34 years old.
Here's his CV:
– Went to one of the poshest high schools in Paris (École Alsacienne)
– Graduated university (Sciences Po) in Paris in 2012 with a Master of Public Affairs
-… pic.twitter.com/xGzHSNwqsA— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) January 9, 2024
South of the Border
Gunmen storm Ecuador television studio live on air BBC
Ecuador declares ‘internal armed conflict’ as gunmen take over live TV broadcast CNN (Kevin W)
Gaza
Video shows ‘assassination’ of 3 young Palestinian men, Israeli jeep running over a body Mondoweiss. Limited press access leads to more atomistic focus.
This Genocide Is Being Live-Streamed. We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know. Caitlin Johnstone (Dr. Kevin)
Blinken’s window dressing tour of Arab capitals Indian Punchline (Kevin W)
Netanyahu ‘In Real Trouble,’ IDF Can’t Control Gaza – Analyst Sputnik. Elijah Magnier.
US Palantir CEO flies company board to Israel in show of solidarity Times of Israel (Kevin W). This is the best Israel can drum up?
New Not-So-Cold War
Number of heavily wounded Ukrainian soldiers up by 30% — ABC TASS (guurst)
Russian mockery: Trying to give Sweden a geopolitical weight that the country does not have Expressen via machine translation (Micael T)
Seizing Russia’s frozen assets is the right move Andrew Kosenko and Joseph Stiglitz, Kyiv Independent (Kevin C)
West ready to back Ukraine ‘for years’ – UK foreign secretary RT
Germany protests. WSJ, Poland hiding Nord Stream info. Elenksy, Crimea counter-counteroffensive Alex Christoforou. Kevin W: “Alex gives Naked Capitalism a great shout out for sending him the story of the German manufacturer shutting down which he made his main Clown World. About the 40:30 min mark on.” Moi: We featured this story in Links, referred by Chuck L.
Imperial Collapse Watch
Severe Personnel Shortage Forces British Navy to Scrap Newly Refurbished Frigates: Broader Fleet Decline Continues Military Watch
Sunsetting the War on Terror — Or Not Karen Greenberg, TomDispatch
Biden
A Party of Short Sellers: Why Democrats Need to Re-Think Hunter’s Contempt Messenger
GOP Clown Car
Roger Stone reportedly said leading Democratic congressman ‘has to die’ Guardian. Userfriendly: “Paid for by the Eric Swalwell for senate campaign. I mean seriously. I guessed which congress-vampire (critter is too humanizing) half way through the title.”
Budget Brinksmanship
Border and immigration deal ‘doubtful’ this week amid bogged-down talks Politico
Speaker Johnson faces conservative unrest over funding deal The Hill
Our No Longer Free Press
Twitter changed my life for good. But the platform I loved no longer exists Guardian (Kevin W)
AI
Volkswagen says it’s putting ChatGPT in its cars for ‘enriching conversations’ The Verge. Paul R: “Double facepalm.”
AI Threatens to Push Human Fashion Models Out of the Picture Bloomberg (David L)
OpenAI admits it’s impossible to train generative AI without copyrighted materials EndGadget (Kevin W)
Studio Trickery New Left Review (Anthony L). From year end, still germane.
Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem Experiments with Midjourney and DALL-E 3 show a copyright minefield Spectrum IEEE (David L)
GenAI could make KYC effectively useless TechCrunch. Paul R: “Slightly overblown, basically says deep fakes can fool online id checks where you upload a selfie holding your driver’s license. I always hated those anyway, and refused to do them.” Moi: Banks use that approach?!?!? I’ve never had one ask for anything so dumb.
The AI Octopus Project Syndicate (David L)
Falling Apart Boeing Airplanes
Boeing Supplier Ignored Warnings Of “Excessive Amount Of Defects,” Former Employees Allege The Lever
The Truth About Airplane Safety New York Times (David L)
The Bezzle
Bitcoin slides after SEC social media account is compromised, sends false ETF approval post CNBC (furzy)
The Latest Dirty Word in Corporate America: ESG Wall Street Journal (BC)
How to get rich in the 21st century Economist (David L)
Class Warfare
How Bankers Profit From Our Broken Economic System Gerald Epstein, Counterpunch
Walgreens sets sights on healthcare: What physicians need to know Becker’s Physician Leadership
Antidote du jour. Tracie H:
This little possum only LOOKS ferocious. A few years ago I was so worried about the stray cats in our backyard in all kinds of weather, that I made holes in coolers, and in this tub, and filled them with straw and a bit of Styrofoam for insulation. I think the holes were too big, because it didn’t seem that cats ever used them.
We only ever checked them when we needed to shift them someplace.
That’s what Don was doing when he discovered this possum. At first, h
e thought the expression on its face meant it was mad, but we soon remembered there’d been a baby possum in our yard back when a tegu (very large lizard) made an appearance, and there’d been a confrontation between the tegu and the baby possum after which we thought we’d seen the possum had a wounded mouth.We are so happy to see the wound had not been mortal.
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
168 comments
Comments are closed.
>Problematic: My favourite English word kamilkazani (Randy K)
I would nominate “challenge” as a close runner up. When I encounter a problem at work, in meetings I’ve learn to say it’s “challenging,” if I were to say it’s hopeless and that we have to scrape current and previous approaches and start again, I would become “problematic” and jobless fairly quick.
I miss the old days when you could say that something was a ‘problem’ and not a ‘challenge’.
At my last corporate job, we didn’t have “problems” or “issues”. We had “opportunities”, in line with Corporate Value #1 for employees: Positive Mental Attitude.
Ah, the “opportunities”. That’s what salesforce calls “orders” these days – salesforce, the platform that largely doesn’t work. I’ve wanted to kill that terminology with extreme prejudice ever since I first saw it.
Do like the Professor in Futurama. Start with “Good news everyone …”
or when you could call a problem a “problem” and not an “issue”. I noticed this substitution starting in the UK quite a few years ago though I can`t really say exactly when. I think by the nineties it must have been gathering steam. Now it is just about universal. I`m guessing it started in the US as it seems this extensive use of euphemisms has been going on for years there. This substitution robs English of one more nuance and it still saddens me every time I hear it.
I`m always amused at the way on the French mainstream media whenever they are talking about some situation which is bad, often awful they say it`s “complicated” (complique`, but I have no accented vowels on my keyboard) – and they use it all the time.
We can’t even call a work assignment “challenging” anymore. Now, impossible lifts for work are called “stretch opportunities.”
In the corporate world the word “ask” is fairly prevalent – as in “it’s not an unreasonable ask for you to work this weekend”.
Yea, the word problem was not allowed. How can you fix a problem unless you admit you have one? That’s why you can’t call it a problem – it might get fixed. Crazy, no? Corporate America in a nutshell.
I got in trouble once (more than once) for telling the truth about a “problem.” We were in a meeting and I was representing my department. When asked about “troubled” areas (the main goal of the meeting was to make things better and avoid costly issues) I saw in my department. I told the truth; we are labeling things incorrectly that could in the future come back to bite us quite hard by litigation (mislabeling load values on a consumer product that could allow us to be sued for millions as the cause of death).
IOW, mislabeling loads and inflation values on a car tire. We were producing tires with the wrong numbers. If someone was killed and the values were wrong, we could be sued for huge amounts of money. They even had training classes to teach us what mistakes were worse than others as far as cost.
Anyway, I told the head of this meeting the truth – at times we are only guessing what numbers we are putting on these tires. I didn’t care if I got into trouble because my name were on the drawings and guess where the blame would end up? I told them we were going to get bit for this ignorance, while being as diplomatic about saying it as I could.
It didn’t go over well. I could tell by the body language. Then they said; I don’t like your negativity. Really??? This was one of those times I knew that what I was about to say shouldn’t be said and I will get in trouble – but I did anyway.
“You don’t like my negativity? I’m sorry, but my mom used to beat me for not telling the truth, would you rather have me lie to you and we continue to mis-label our product and potentially get sued for killing someone?
Crickets. That was the end of the meeting as the head weenie walked out the door without a word. No other meeting followed. We eventually got sued as well. Luckily, I was gone by then.
I hated corporate America.
I think problematic is a useful term for data that is indicative of or potentially could cause a problem without rising to the level of or having the knowledge of the area in which to open a formal problem report. For example, a logged warning without any application issues. It could require investigation, or just noted and move on depending on circumstances.
Perhaps overused in less structured environments, still seems useful as a way to describe something as ‘associated with/indicative of a problem’.
I know exactly what you mean. I was working for a small commercial plumbing contractor in an “unknown” Southern state and was put in charge of working up a budget for a medium sized, (for us,) project. The son of the founder called me into his office to go over the budget proposal I had submitted. (I was also working in the field at the same time. Small business at it’s best!) He zeroed in on a line near the end of the proposal.
He: “You have put in an extra ten percent here. Why?”
Me: “It’s for those unavoidable screw ups. Everyone makes mistakes. May as well budget for them now.”
He: “We are supposed to be professionals here. We do not ‘make mistakes.’ Cut this item and resubmit.”
Me: “Yes boss.” (What else could I do?)
I knew then that I would not last long at that company. I was proven right.
So he was saying he controls the weather, labour conditions [sickness/injury et al], supply logistics/quality issues, and whatever other trades and services in relationship to the job being quoted …. bawhahahahah~~~~~
Although it is recommended that rather than a line item, one spreads it around all the rest. This also enable one to be more flexible due to work conditions e.g. going well means one can add more quality/value add or if challenging ensure a pass on the first go without constant reworking.
Heck with the weather were having these last two months were pushed back a month on other projects, plus having to ad hoc in pieces jobs at the moment. Have to constantly watch the radar on my phone, heat and humidity means organizing works to minimize its effects, etc …
To think the young bloke I came on board with 6ish years ago was a dyed in the wool Rothbardian, completely different now, business is great, less struggles and in demand, remember watching the gears in his head when I asked what business did Rothbard ever own/run successfully rather than be subsidized to opine/proselytize about stuff out of whole cloth … mirth …
Awaiting peak cyclone season here …
Reminds me of the time my (newish — I had recently been transferred) boss informed me that a former co-worker would be coming to join my department. In possibly the least diplomatic moment in my career I replied, “Family blog! That guy is a lawsuit waiting to happen!”
I wasn’t wrong …
No, no…you can’t say, ‘scrap the work and start over’. You have to say, “Maybe we should consider other options?”
How about “issues”?
I used to always get corrected at early meetings in my new at-the-time job that I was a part of whenever I said things along the lines of “I think we might have a problem with that” or some such.
The leaders of the various meetings would always correct me saying, “Please, the proper word is not problem, it is issue.”
Now that I’m retired and get called from time to time over things I have insight into, I have happily, and specifically, reverted back to the word problem.
Does the damn thing work flowchart
“challenge” vs. “problem”?
We need to have a “conversation”.
And I thought it was just my work that refused to admit that anyone ever made a mistake that caused a problem for someone else.
Many years ago I remember reading an article about disgruntled workers. The authors gave a survey to a bunch of people in the oil industry if I remember right. The #1 reason given by employees for not being overly gruntled was not the pay, or the benefits – it was the fact that they had seen problems coming down the pipe and brought them up, only to see them ignored.
>Seizing Russia’s frozen assets is the right move Andrew Kosenko and Joseph Stiglitz, Kyiv Independent
Well, Stiglitz whose views I have respected in the past, has gone the way of Robert Reich in my estimation. Analysis is without any historical context, the Russian “aggression” began 24 February 2022. As if it wasn’t the U.S. that “was planning (for) a major war.” What an inversion of historical facts…very disappointing.
Seizing Russia’s frozen assets would not affect other countries’ assets or change the incentives of governments that are not planning a major war…G7 leaders should send a clear message: no country can have it both ways. By deterring other bad actors from violating international law, such seizures could act as a peace-building measure…
Of course, no amount of money can ever undo the immense damage that Russia’s war of aggression has inflicted on Ukraine’s economy and its people. But the frozen Russian assets can be viewed as a down payment on the reparations that the Kremlin should eventually be compelled to pay.
The Ukraine must have seen how Poland is demanding $1.3 trillion in reparations from Germany for the damage that they caused in WW2 and are thinking that they can eventually ask for the same for themsleves. You can buy a lot of mansions with that amount of money.
Ukraine would have to deduct from what they’ve already stolen through corruption. It’s a good thing the U.S. Congress in their infinit(esimal) wisdom decided not to appoint an auditor for appropriated funds.
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has claimed that an internal probe of the country’s military procurement practices revealed $262 million in theft-related costs
https://www.rt.com/news/590358-ukraine-audits-military-corruption/
“… $262 million in theft-related costs.”
In retail that is known as a “loss leader.” We’ll make it up later in volume.
$262 million seems a bit light. 10x that figure is likely more accurate.
Wellie one has to consider how much of those funds end up coming back home to the right people after moving through the Ukraine, see Hunter antics et al.
If it was a Richard Smith post one could only imagine the flow of funds through a maze of entities ….
Yeah, lets forget that Poland got a huge chunk of Germany in the WW2 settlement and ethnically cleansed millions of ethnic Germans. The Poles have learnt nothing from being too arrogant and obstinate to come to an agreement over Danzig with Germany in 1939. Their stealing of a large chunk of the Soviet Union during the Soviet Civil War also didn’t work out too well for them. The Polish elites are so predictably self-defeating while they still dream of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
I have no idea how much effort or time it takes to freeze assets of any central bank, but I do find it amazing that when Russia invaded on Thursday, February 24, the assets were frozen on the next Monday, February 28.
It’s almost as if all these sanctions were prepared just for that unprovoked invasion? Oh, wait, Bjoern Seibert actually admitted as much.
The sanctions stated BEFORE the SMO started, on Feb 22. The trigger was Putin announcing the recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics, on Feb 21, and entering into a mutual defense pact with them the same day.
See the date on the White House announcement:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/02/22/fact-sheet-united-states-imposes-first-tranche-of-swift-and-severe-costs-on-russia/
And this bit:
“Today, the Administration is implementing the first tranche of sanctions…”
Remember the frozen central bank assets were overwhelmingly in the EU. The US, EU and UK all froze central bank assets. The delay to the 28th looks like the time required to get the central banks all in synch.
Although I should not be shocked by anything anymore, I was still taken aback by this full-throated defense of the Global Empire by Joseph f_ing Stiglitz! Good Lord! And the rationalization is so transparently one-sided and ridiculous that I can’t believe he could be serious.
The Great Clarification continues.
Yes, we see the true colours coming out.
“Right” has nothing to do with it. Only “what we can get away with”.
It doesn’t matter whether Russia was justified on not in the war. The only thing that matters is what the consequences will be if the West simply confiscates Russian assets.
It doesn’t matter how much money the regime in Kiev stole, laundered, frittered away or used for murderous ends, because those responsible never will be held to account, unless a scapegoat is needed (and then the facts won’t matter, either, other than the need for a scapegoat.)
Bertrand R. quote: “It’s not who’s right…it’s who’s left.”
Yeah, I hadn’t heard from Stiglitz in a while, and was very surprised at this take, especially this part –
“Moreover, by not seizing these funds, Western countries are signaling that governments waging brutal wars of aggression can violate international law and simultaneously benefit from it to escape the consequences of their actions.”
You mean like the US has done every single [family blog]ing day for decades on end, Joe? Unbelievable he could write that with a straight face.
Thinking about the antidote, reminded me of a funny way to answer random phone calls.
Hello, this is Roadkill Diner. You kill ’em we grill ’em !! I have been gently corrected in the past by a Louisiana born life long friend, that possum isn’t such a bad meal. As it stands, I trust this friend at their word.
“Severe Personnel Shortage Forces British Navy to Scrap Newly Refurbished Frigates: Broader Fleet Decline Continues ‘
Going to pin the blame on this on the politicians. Years ago they decided that the best use of Britain’s resources was to build two supercarriers – the HMS Queen Elizabeth and the HMS Prince of Wales. Myself, I do not think that they were really needed in terms of the defence of the UK but were built so that it would give them credibility with Washington. This was reinforced when you had USMC aircraft training on those ships. Being able to bring two supercarriers to the table meant that it would bolster the ‘special relationship’ and would give them a seat at the table where the big decisions were made. But to build and maintain them meant that it sucked resources right across the board and now the Royal Navy has to mothball two ships as they do not have the manpower to man them. And it is having all sorts of side effects. Like how the Royal Navy was advertising for a Rear Admiral to head up their submarine fleet on LinkedIn instead of grooming candidates over the years. This is no longer the Royal Navy of 1945 but something else. I was reading the other day engineers from defense contractor Babcock damaged a number of bolt heads used to hold together cooling pipes in the nuclear reactor of the HMS Vanguard -so they fixed it with superglue. It was only noticed when one of the bolts fell apart during a routine check ahead of a scheduled first firing of the reactor at maximum power. Unfortunately, the Royal Navy is being run down into a hot mess and the ghost of Nelson would be furious.
The Queen Elizabeth class of aircraft carrier are actually quite tiny compared to US or the new Chinese supercarriers. They are arguably a bad compromise between a ‘real’ carrier and the sort of mini carriers other less ambitious navies have built, although at least they are not as expensive to run as the real supercarriers. The big problem for them is that the Type 45 Destroyer is essential to protect them from air attacks, and these are proving to be too expensive to build in sufficient numbers to provide real protection. Without an effective missile screen they are sitting ducks.
The problems in the Royal Navy go way back – arguably to the immediate post war years when a combination of lowered budgets and a number of badly mishandled carrier designs (especially the notorious Majestic class) set back the entire UK shipbuilding industry. Britain went from having the largest and probably best Navy in the world in 1939 to being also-rans 20 years later. It still amazes me how, despite spending billions, the DoD in Britain managed to pretty much lose its centuries of accumulated know-how, such that none of its big ships are even close to best of class today. The only important area of construction where the UK is still a (near) competitor is in submarines, and even that’s debatable. The French, to mention just one, seem to make submarines cheaper and better, if export sales are any guide. Even the Swedes, Italians, Spanish and Danes seem to have more success with building domestic ships at a reasonable budget.
Many a book has been written about the travails of the post-WWII Royal Navy, but at heart it seems to be a story of the UK having too many ambitions for its Navy without the cash to back them up, resulting in the budget being spread so thinly that constant cancellations and postponements has resulted in a catastrophic loss of human capital in the basics of shipbuilding.
Yep, there is a reason why they are fielding the STOVL (B) version of the F-35 rather than the C. Because these are a continuation of the “through deck cruiser” euphemism the Royal Navy came up with after WW2 and the budget shrinkage that forbade them building carriers. And back then they could only exist thanks to the Harrier jet.
Note BTW that the USSR went a similar direction with the Yak-38 and the Kiev class of ships.
‘Britain went from having the largest and probably best Navy in the world in 1939 to being also-rans 20 years later.’
Got that right. The Royal Navy of 1939 was something else altogether-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWD5hBUh_zw (5:38 mins)
I suppose the truth of the matter is that it took the wealth of the British Empire at the time to build that Navy. And when the Empire went away, so did most of the money that made that Navy possible.
Naval power is what built the empire, and perhaps why they went out of their way to hinder any overland alternative between Europe and Asia.
Lately i have come to wonder if the ongoing idiocy in eastern Europe is more a UK than a US thing, and a remnant of their imperial worldview. A way to keep Europe dependent on the sea routes to Asia, sea routes that were UK controlled and are US controlled.
The UK has a vested interest in stirring up strife, so that it can demonstrate its slavish fealty to its American Master.
Sort of like that yappy little dog following Spike the Bulldog around in Looney Toons cartoons. “Yeah yeah you’re my pal, isn’t you, Spike?!“
There is a book that touches on the exact issue: The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan
My cousin, now in his 80’s, likes to tell the story of how their father, Uncle Winston (who had a Very Good War and from being conscripted at the beginning ended up a Lieutenant-Colonel running the British sector of Berlin at the end of it), took him and his two brothers to the great harbour of Plymouth in the late forties or early fifties to stand where Drake stood four hundred years before and watch five ships of the line leave harbour after the naval review and told them very, very firmly that this sight would *never* be seen again….
The Navy was pretty good until the 1980s: in 1977 I remember, quite by accident, seeing the ships assembled for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee all lined up at Plymouth on my way back from France. It was quite a sight. And few other navies in the world could have done what the British did during the Falklands. But it’s been downhill ever since, largely because, from Thatcher onwards, successive British governments have treated the armed forces as assets to be managed cost-effectively, not instruments of national policy.
Didn’t Winston Churchill have something to do with building up the navy prior to WWll?
moved them from coal to oil
I think Churchill successfully argued for this pre-WWI, not WW2, when he was at the Admiralty. With the resulting British strategic dependence on the Ango-Iranian Oil Company, Suez, Aden, Gibraltar etc.
The history of naval competition is rather more complicated and I have the hazy impression that openion is divided as to whether the the inter-war Navy had fully learnt the lessons of WWI when it came to what new ships to build or whether it pursued an incoherent mishmash of political and austerity-politics choices. Plus ca change… :-)
Luckily, it didn’t seem to matter. The WWI German had been scuttled in Scapa Flow and the Third Reich had not got much of a new navy onto the water before Hitler took his gamble on defeating France and Britain. Britain was able to keep maritime superiority in the Atlantic and much of the Med and Indian Ocean, Atlantic U-boats not withstanding, and thus her supplies of food and oil and minerals were never truly in doubt (albeit at times the monthly balance was a close run thing).
If the Atlantic Coast occupied countries’ navies had sided with Berlin rather than just sailed away to join the Royal Navy or been scuttled in port by the British, it might have been rather different.
Its more than just a lack of money. They’ve conspicuously spent more money while getting less out of it than nearly all peers. Their current destroyers and frigates are very expensive, but, judging from their lack of success in export markets, are not rated by potential purchasers. The French in particular seem capable of building top class vessels with a lot less fuss. I think this comes down to a more focused policy on consistently maintaining capacity and a knowledge base. A dozen or so generations of practical ship engineering knowledge was just allowed to dissipate.
Air and missile defense (AMD) destroyers, no aircraft carrier nor amphib landing dock ship can voyage w/o 3 or 4.
While Japan, a big U.S. aircraft carrier, needs several USN AMD destroyers cruising station bc it can’t afford more of its own, and don’t trust to buy their US ground based long range radars, much less engagement assets.
Think why Russia claims those U.S. Aegis Ashore launchers in Poland and Rumania have cruise missiles!
“Britain went from having the largest and probably best Navy in the world in 1939 to being also-rans 20 years later.”
Keep in mind that the Japanese pimp-slapped the RN in 1942.
That’s putting it a bit high. They very tastily dispatched the RN’s best ships off Malaya (quite a lot of arrogance and incompetence on RN’s part) and took Singapore by ungentlemanly behaviour like walking in the open back door but that was it. There wasn’t much of the RN in Asia to start with compared with the Atlantic and Mediterranean and Home fleets and there was even less after the Japanese finished with it but (for obvious reasons, they were in an entirely different theatre of war) they hardly touch the Royal Navy as a whole.
The US, on the other hand….
The Japanese did remarkably well with what was a pocket navy but, like the German army, they were not able to sustain the losses it took compared with US and British and Russian production. The German Navy did even worse and ran out of fuel and stayed in port in the last part of the war.
I was thinking more of the attack on Ceylon than the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse.
A “pocket navy”? I’m not sure what you mean. At the start of the Pacific war Japan had more aircraft carriers and submarines than Britain. It was the third largest navy in the world.
The gentry still hold a lot of sway in the armed services and they love the navy and the air force, not so much the army now that they can’t ride around on their horses. The two “aircraft carriers” are a huge vanity project as is the “independent nuclear deterrent”, both massive money sucks. The UK have no natural enemies given the peaceful Western Europe. All that wasted money, industrial capacity, and skilled people could be used to rebuild the UK productive capacity. And then of course we have the state terrorists of MI5/MI6 and the SAS.
‘Keep Calm and Carrier On’
The Empire’s yappiest poodle is increasingly toothless.
The problem goes back to the meeting the chiefs of staff had in the Bahamas in 1947. There, they agreed on splitting the Defense Budget equally between the three services (the Navy pays the Marine Corps). Once they had that agreement (which also gave helicopters to the Army, the Air Force didn’t want them), they were free to be as corrupt as they wanted. Their toys were guaranteed, so they chose the most complex, modern, cutting edge options. In the case of the F-35 and the latest super carriers the options hadn’t even been designed when the contracts were let. Of course, this means the new equipment is much more expensive than the equipment being replaced, so we always get less than we’re throwing out.
I’m sorry I can’t provide a link about the 1947 conference. I learned about it while I was serving in the Army, over forty years ago. I’ll continue researching.
The most relevant reference I’ve found so far in Wikipedia, The Key West Agreement.
Prior to 1982 (when I retired), I’m sure I had read about a meeting that took place in the Bahamas. One detail that stayed with me was a reference to hummingbirds. I don’t know if they have lots of hummingbirds in Key West. I’m also sure I saw references to the meeting at least three or four times. I’ll keep looking — trouble is I read too many books.
Massive storms, heavy rains dumped basically all day in South Carolina until late afternoon. Flood watches were pretty consistently updated throughout the day. Looks like the regional Greenville Spartanburg airport reports about 2.8 inches of rain through a 6 hour period yesterday, per a national weather service update.
We had really heavy rain here, south of Richmond, VA. Our neighborhood lost power for only 90 minutes and to offer credit where it’s due – Dominion was out and in force and the power was back on 15 minutes after the bucket truck brigade rolled by the front window.
The James River is running high, but it’s the tributary creeks that look insane this morning. Falling Creek runs very near my house and it was very high. Tornado watches persisted all evening but nothing in our area materialized. I have seen images from around Richmond of flooded underpasses and trees on houses, but where I work in Chester, VA, right up against the River itself, things are drier than I would have expected. I think the River will crest in a day or so.
Supposedly another high energy storm in inbound for Friday night. Less rain but more severe weather risk. More trees will surely come down if we get more 40 MPH winds on such saturated ground.
It was 61* when I went to bed last night and next week, lows in the teens. This is pneumonia weather.
I think it was more like 4 inches in 12 hours in your Greenville. Where I live our nearby paved walking trail was completely submerged by the creek it parallels. They will have to go in with Bobcats and scrape off the mud.
Of course flooding in a flood plane (the only available park space) is not unprecedented but the intensity of this storm was unusual.
We here in the Half Horse Town got 3.25 inches of rain over a few hours when the front moved through. Several tornados to our east, but no casualties. We too are looking at an Arctic cold front next week. Predicted highs in the 30’s F to lows in the 10’s F. Very cold for this region.
High winds causing problems here in central Texas, and staring down the barrel of a bad cold front early next week.
My manager just returned to the US from Brazil last weekend (he was there dealing with a family situation). Monday was his first day back at work in Houston in nearly a month, and of course he lost power for most of the day. 3+ weeks in Rio no problems, but one day back in Texas…
I told him the problem is that he insists on working from a third world country.
We are in a small community in WA state and as of yesterday have been advised to boil water for an indefinite period… big fun. I’m guessing the ground became saturated from the rain so that something in the water system failed. In Seattle there was a wind storm that blew down a friend’s fence. Coming on the heels of this is some very cold weather for western WA, a low of 11 is forecast for Friday night.
Re: Peregrine moon lander
Wait, so they’re all going to slam into the moon, and with a Navajo curse to boot?
That’s a rather ignominious fate.
Something tells me that Bill Shatner is staying put on Earth.
Apollo already left human waste up there so if visiting aliens need human DNA to grow in a culture dish it may be available. Then they can build a big black slab…..
Propaganda… to the moon! (rocket ship emjoi)
It seems that the spacecraft will indeed land, but on the ash heap of history instead of the intended target.
Nope, he’s up there already ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKo4FMzt_hM
Can someone explain the purpose of the Peregrine moon lander, besides wretched excess?
From the article: “Controversially, the spacecraft is also carrying human remains, including those of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke; Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry; Roddenberry’s wife, Majel Barrett; and Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan and DeForest Kelley, who played Nyota Uhura, Montgomery Scott and Dr. Leonard McCoy, respectively, on the classic sci-fi show. Stored alongside these remains are samples of DNA of the U.S. presidents George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.”
Without a doubt, one shouldn’t be disturbing the dead where they lie. But shooting a bunch of pieces of celebrities to the Moon? What’s the point?
Next up: Proxy war in Ukraine run by Alzheimer’s-addled turbo-aggressive U.S. president.
If this is reality, I’ll take fiction.
Doing my due diligence: A backgrounder.
The whole article is report on a world of crap, with the Navajo officers the only ones making any sense.
The outsourcing of missions to some clown company?
The pseudo-religious posturing from the pale faces?
The cameo appearance from absentee manager of transport disasters, Pete Buttigieg?
Sheesh. Besides the Navajos, I wonder if the goddess Artemis may have had a hand in the self-destruction of the pod? Diana, is that you?
Oops. Forgot to give you the link: The CNN buncombe-o-ganza:>
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/05/world/peregrine-moon-mission-navajo-nation-objection-human-remains-scn/index.html
The deities have handed this sim over to their tweens to keep them quiet in the back seat.
Cassandra: So you think that Diana couldn’t be bothered and handed the pod over to some mischievous Cupids?
They had to get a license for the launch and it included some science experiments as an excuse.
In our new Gilded Age space is the next frontier of conspicuous consumption if only from the grave. Maybe they can find Walt Disney’s cryopod and shoot it up there.
and to add spiteful insult to injury they include Rayguns with JFK, Ike & George Washington – hope it misses the moon and journeys on into deep space –
I wonder if any DNA from living scions of the ruling dynasty (or Celestis execs) was sneaked aboard.
Sounds like they’ll end up getting buried in deep space, not the moon, now that the mission failed.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/private-mission-moon-wont-land-lunar-surface-malfunction-rcna133082
Proof that money cannot buy you everything …
Deep Space… “the Final Frontier” Fitting for the Star Trek Gang…
A set of stories that could only exist by handwaving away the issue of energy, and waste heat, via the warp core running on fictional dilithium.
Fitting for the early nuclear era, when there was even talk about using nukes to excavate harbors.
If it were me, that would be the more preferable outcome. Why go to the moon when the whole universe is out there?
As in The Loved One from 1965? A film noir, of course, in which the heroine embalms herself and the (anti)hero sends her into infinite space (earth orbit) as a fitting memorial. In the context of the movie. Memorable: I saw it as a teenager and have never been able to forget it.
The purpose of the Peregrine Lander is to transport payloads to the surface of the Moon.
Celestis purchased the delivery of a payload.
From the initial picture, it looks like things got pranged up a bit during the launch. My ignorant guess would be a particularly vigorous Max Q got things shaking inside the fairing.
Astrobotic is not a new enterprise. They’ve been aiming at the Moon for many, many years and have gone through several lander iterations. Celestis has been in business even longer delivering ashes to orbit for a “space funeral” since the 90s, IIRC.
In the event we develop our economy to the point where we are tapping the material and energy resources of our celestial sister, we will need transport solutions to/from the surface of the Moon, just as we need transport solutions everywhere we have an economy here on Earth. Astrobotic is an early entrant in that field. This is not weird economic juju, why is everyone having such a hard time understanding basic logistics?
Speaking of Juju, why is it that the Navajo specifically get to call taboo on the Moon? The Moon has been sacred to countless cultures and individuals throughout time and space. My cultural value, should I happen to find myself on the Moon when I die, would be to have my body recycled into the gardens of the Moon to help sustain humanity’s presence there. I am not alone in that regard. What makes the Navajo’s claim more noble or just so as to deny mine?
And the scientists worried about economic activity destroying the value of the Moon? Not a lot of empathy. They’ve had decades to prioritize exploration of the Moon, and have done little because they’re all focused on Mars, and the Moon has no value except as a way to get to Mars. Except it’s now that someone else is showing interest in the Moon, in its own right, that they’re all No, wait, you can’t…
“Hospitals strained across the US as over 2 million Americans now infected with COVID each day”
Simple kitchen mathematics tells me that at that rate, that the whole, complete, entire population of the United States will be infected in only about five and a half months. Minus those who are still taking precautions of course. Those people will need to be socially shamed for not doing their bit.
I’ve still managed to avoid it, and I imagine people like me will be avoiding travel to the US for the indefinite future. Which has me wondering about better destinations…
There are always the Moon and Mars. The Earth is under a “Special Pandemic Operation” (SPO) at the moment. {I would suggest various Lagrange Points, but you know how long that would take.}
“Zero public health is not the answer to a pandemic that mutated around vaccine protection QUICKLY“
It’s not like we weren’t warned, https://37b32f5a-6ed9-4d6d-b3e1-5ec648ad9ed9.filesusr.com/ugd/28d8fe_266039aeb27a4465988c37adec9cd1dc.pdf
Gertrude Vanden Bossche warning from March 2021
I skimmed the “List of Epidemics & Pandemics” Wiki article.
Covid is already #5 in historic raw numerical death toll (not as acute-phase Infection Fatality Rate or portion of the global population death rate). Presumably Covid will “defeat” #4 HIV/AIDS on this metric in the next few years.
Is Covid a unique disease in known human history in that it has:
1 may have significant “Long” mortality/morbidity impact beyond the acute phase, in terms of reducing life expectancy and “Quality-adjusted life year”. I read that Polio may have been similar in that some of the infected had “Long Polio” symptoms.
2 Is an endemic airborne virus which until now there seems to be no long-term immunity from infection or vaccination, and thus patients can be reinfected repeatedly, with each infection potentially increasing morbidity/mortality. If I recall correctly the NO sterilizing immunity via vaccination or infection has been to date possible against any member entire Betacoronavirus family, which includes SARS1/SARS2/MERS & various versions of “the common cold”.
Am I understanding this correctly that Covid is unique in human history in being an endemic significantly harmful disease that has both of these 2 attributes?
Smallpox was both very dangerous and also debilitating although I don’t think the effect was cumulative, similarly with polio. It has been argued that Spanish Flu was primarily responsible for the very sharp rise in heart disease in the mid 20th Century, but I don’t know how widely that hypothesis is held among experts (very much a minority view I think).
Asiatic Flu of the 1889-1890 seems to the template. With historical descriptions of multisystem symptoms, cross-species transmission, and recurrences over a least five years.
It may have been a coronavirus, though https://theconversation.com/some-believe-the-1889-russian-flu-pandemic-was-actually-caused-by-a-coronavirus-heres-why-thats-unlikely-220484 suggests it may have been flu and later coronavirus.
Some of my related thoughts…
1) Lots of infections can lead to long term health complications. Yes, covid appears to produce “Long Covid” at what is likely a higher rate than many other infectious diseases, it’s not unique. My grandmother had a bad case of strep throat at the age of 16 and the infection attacked one of her heart valves. She had to have that valve mechanically replaced at the age of 37 (one of the first open heart valve replacement surgeries in Upstate NY in 1971). She had that valve replaced 2 more times of the following 40’ish years.
2) The accurate history of medical and mortality records is in many cases pretty short. New York State (USA) alone didn’t require the recording of deaths until 1881 and even then it wasn’t enforced across the state until about 1914.
3) History itself… there were a lot of localized breakouts of various diseases centuries ago that are lost to time. A personal example… while doing some genealogy research a couple years ago I came across a string of family members who were all living in the same community and not necessarily genetically related (i.e. spouses, sister/brother-in-laws, etc…)… 8 of these people died in about a 6 week period and none of them were elderly. This was in the early 1800’s in frontier Upstate NY. I have never been able to find any recorded evidence of a specific illness hitting this community, although the cemetery records would hint otherwise.
4) And the word airborne… if covid has proven anything the official understanding of how many infectious diseases are transported through the air needs to be revisited.
Also newish that we have a novel and dangerous disease in a time of unprecedented mixing.
One thing I’ve used to talk about Covid with women in the US – Mary in Little House on the Prairie. Blind after an illness. I had a high school friend and then a collage friend who had no sense of taste and almost no sense of smell after childhood illnesses. And there are scores of wealthy children in California and the northwest who will never have normal lung capacity because their woo parents didn’t vaccinate for pertussis.
It should be pretty well understood that you want to avoid the stress of major illness and injury.
Even in the first half of the 20th century there many effectively endemic diseases, which is why we have so many vaccines. In the United States, diseases like malaria, yellow fever, tuberculosis, polio, and smallpox were endemic. Not to mention all those childhood diseases such as scarlet fever, rubella, and whooping cough.
I get the concerns about vaccines especially with the number of shots done close together for children and the arrogance of the medical community but we have them for a reason. Spread out the timing of the doses and ask questions, don’t just stop the vaccinations.
There is a very good reason why families had so many children back then, and it was not just as a labor force. Talk about grief.
Two centuries of effort by the United States to create a massive and effective system of disease control has been destroyed for “efficiency” and all those people who have any concerns about vaccines will not trust whatever the CDC says from now on. Covid is bad, but what worries me is something with the 20 to 30 percent lethality of smallpox appearing, which is likely. It is something that hasn’t been faced by the general American population since my grandparents were children.
So, I believe that I confidently say that the CDC and various agencies around it, including the people in many state and county agencies have already pre-killed many people in whatever future pandemic arrives because of the incompetence and lies creating mistrust.
As for France’s new PM, perhaps if Trump’s second term never comes to be, he can hire Jared Kushner as his trusted advisor. It would be hard to tell them apart.
Re French PM
Denmark had a 26 year old minister of tax in 2011. His only job experience was being an “advisor” for one of the government parties
So….chin up? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Age means yak all, as they can easily reach their 50s without leaving the political bubble. NATO “boss” Stoltenberg was in his early 40s when becoming Norway’s Prime Minister, and in all those years only one was outside of the Labour Party structure.
Yeah, Germany’s Jens Spahn is another clear example of that. His only “real” job AFAIR was something like a year as a bank clerk after school.
#Climate (Yikes!) Here’s a graph of “Daily Sea Surface Temperature, World” by Sam Carana, Arctic News. Look at the gap and the velocity.
I’ve been calling what happened to Sea Surface Temperatures since March 14 2023 a Delamination, completely out of touch with all previous values.
However, if you blank out the years 2014 and above, and roll into the 2015-16 El Nino pressing individual years successively, all the lines are at or above the 2-sigma lines. Since 2019, every year has delaminated from the previous values.
But 2023 was like a Can-Can dancer kicking up its skirts.
we are past the tipping point and only a matter of time before AMOC shuts down – as mentioned previously by commenters, my generation(i’m 74) is fortunate to probably avoid the the catastrophe’s greater impact – ain’t got no crystal ball for the details of the future, but the broader forecast seems baked in at this point unfortunately –
Actually, the collapse of the AMOC is more of a “Baked Alaska” effect, at least for the Northern Hemisphere.
or maybe just the British Isles?
My take was that 2016 was year that gapped, but the following years fell back to the previous level and rhythm until ’23 when again there’s an ominous gap. I’m rather nervous that, unlike ’16, ’24 appears to be gapping again, making a floor out of 23. Velocity on top of velocity.
mrsyk, that’s what I thought, also, but the data after July 26 2014 are pretty much a cluster unto themselves. You can see it if you click through the individual years on the Climate Reanalyzer chart. It looks like 2014 acted like a floor as well.
Velocity on top of velocity, indeed. Velocity squared.
Thanks. This is a sorry timeline..
https://mailchi.mp/caa/groundhog-day-another-gobsmackingly-bananas-month-whats-up
January 4, 2024
Groundhog Day. Another Gobsmackingly Bananas Month. What’s Up?
By James Hansen, Makiko Sato and Pushker Kharecha
Abstract
December was the 7th consecutive month of record-shattering global temperature, driven by the combination of a moderately strong El Nino and a large decrease of Earth’s albedo. The El Nino will fade in the next few months, but we anticipate that the string of record monthly temperatures will continue to a total of 12 and possibly 13 months because of Earth’s unprecedented energy imbalance. By May the 12-month running-mean global temperature relative to 1880-1920 should be +1.6-1.7°C and not fall below +1.4 ± 0.1°C during the next La Nina minimum. Thus, given the planetary energy imbalance, it will be clear that the 1.5°C ceiling has been passed for all practical purposes.
Appreciating the linky goodness you’ve been spreading, CA.
Yes, thank you.
There’s a moon in the sky
It’s called the moon
And everybody is there, including
Arthur C. Clarke
Gene Roddenberry, and his wife Majel
NIchelle Nichols, James Doohan
DeForest Kelly
Most of the Star Trek cast
Roll-roll-roll-roll-rollin’ in Andromeda
Won-ton-ton-ton drama-in-Andromeda
There’s too many broken things—This is the Space Age
There’s too many impactful human beings —This is the Space Age
Just ain’t no atmosphere tonight
If you’re lucky you get to ride in a Peregrine lunar lander
If you’re not, you get a mouth, a mouthful of crater dust
You better move that lunar rover
Here comes a do-over
Presidential DNA
Destination moon
If you’re in outer space
Don’t feel out of place
’cause there are dozens of others like you
Others like you
Others like you
Well there’s a moon, it’s in the sky
It’s called the moon
And everybody is there ‘cluding
Washington
Eisenhower
JFK
Reagan
Destination moon
Many notables around it
No atmosphere surrounds it
This is the Space Age
Please don’t worry
This is the Space Age
Just don’t worry
This is the Space Age
Others like you
Ahhh ahhh……….
There’s a Moon in the Sky (Called the Moon), by the B-52’s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kBPYgWTF6I
Twitter changed my life for good. But the platform I loved no longer exists.
If you base your life on a platform, well, you don’t have a life.
Stages of grieving.
Older people passed through the XP mourning.
Way back, getting the White Album on another medium would’ve been a thing.
/s
“New enemy images: the “Nazi farmers” and the “pitchfork mob”
If I were those German farmers, I would be draining my bank accounts and converting it into cash. Just in case Scholz decides to do a Trudeau and freeze the bank accounts for those farmers and anybody else associated with them. Could that start a bank run? Maybe. But once that toothpaste came out of the tube in Canada there was no way to put it back again.
If not account freezing, then bail-ins looming in various countries?
This is why nobody of influence and authority is concerned. There are already plenty of points of leverage to make the protesters go home, shut up, and do as they are told.
No, it is not legal. So what? Nobody of influence and authority is going to stop it, so those levers will be used.
Mao Zedong’s swim across the Yangzi. Ramin’s Substack.
Fascinating, even if a tad raggedy in parts. (I believe the U.S. metaphor would be Trump swimming the Delaware, not the Potomac.)
What’s important? Setting a symbolic act that has been misinterpreted in the West into its cultural and political context. Talk about yer performative speech, eh?
That Mazaheri is Iranian reminds me of how much U.S. interpretation of Iran’s goals and strategies stems from crass Orientalism. Oh, those mysterious Iranians, all touchy about interference from Anglo-America!
All in all, worth a read.
I’d venture that Mao was also invoking Bodhidharma, who famous crossed the Yangzi on a reed.
https://aboutjapan.japansociety.org/bodhidharma_crossing_the_yangzi_river_on_a_reed#sthash.v9rK2WuF.dpbs
Ben Franklin, swimmer. Yep, he swam the Thames many times while in London and it created quite a stir. People in general (excluding fishermen/women) just didn’t swim often in the western world. He made it not only popular but is an important skill taught to youngsters around the world. Here’s a book about this history. Benjamin Franklin, Swimmer: An Illustrated History
Fascinating person that Ben.
I recall he was a vegetarian and did an air bath every morning after getting out of bed. An air bath is throwing open the windows and being in your birthday suit taking deep breaths. My guess on the deep breathing.
Harold Holt emulated Mao…
I found it narrowly interesting in doing what it says on the tin and providing an explanation for Mao’s symbolic actions. But there’s a bunch of ancillary stuff in that article I’m not impressed with.
‘Well he’s still popular so he must have been pretty okay’ is a ludicrously poor metric. Plenty of people also think Confederate leaders were heroes, and not the thuggish slave empire defending reprobates they actually objectively were. Most people are political and historical imbeciles who actually know precious little and generally lack any understanding of context or even basic facts. The Chinese are no different. Popular perception of someone or something often bears little resemblance to its actual substance.
A huge, unavoidable part of Mao’s legacy is an absolute mountain of corpses from the time when, in an act of religious-political fanaticism that reveals ‘the science of Marxism-Leninism’ to just be another cult, he attempted to ‘leap forward into true communism’. How many million exactly he managed to kill becomes irrelevant when it’s at least 15 million. My point isn’t that Mao is actually a mustache twirling supervillain, but that he wrought horrible suffering out of earnest, ideological self-assurance.
The Great Leap Forward was likely always deeply conceptually flawed and could never have been successfully executed in any scenario, but how it actually played out was often utterly absurd and says absolutely nothing good about the Party and system Mao had built. And not just in a vague, handwavey way where you chalk everything that went wrong up to ‘corruption’ that Mao valiantly but futility attempted to eradicate (‘if only the Tsar knew…’). Moves like ‘kill all the sparrows you can find’ were articulated straight from the top by Mao himself. It wasn’t party cadres screwing up further down the chain; it was the big boss himself being a f**king idiot.
And call me crazy, but Pol Pot isn’t popular probably because of that time he murdered two million people and set the country back decades. Remember that obscure little factoid? Also, ‘he was a xenophobe and thus no true leftist’? What a strange attempt at gatekeeping. The only way you can possibly defend it is if you think supporting international workers cooperation is a prerequisite to being on the left, which, no, it just isn’t. ‘Well national workers movements are dead ends doomed to failure.’ Well that’s unfortunate I guess, because internationalism was tried and totally and utterly failed.
I would say Pol Pot was not a leftist in substance because there’s no clear explanation as to how ‘declare the end of history, depopulate the cities, and send everyone to die in indoctrination workcamps run by psychopath children’ actually advances the interests of the working class. But it is absolutely foolish to try and pretend that Pol Pot wasn’t some strange tumor that emerged out of mid-20th century Southeast Asian leftist circles, because he was.
“Death and debt in China: how a ‘half-baked’ bankruptcy law offers few individuals a fresh start” South China Morning Post
I read things like this and looks more like BRICS is shaping up to be the flip side of a two-headed neoliberal coin.
“Death and debt in China: how a ‘half-baked’ bankruptcy law offers few individuals a fresh start”
SCMP writers have generally been educated in a British system, which means a British perspective on Chinese matters that may have roots many centuries in developing. The Chinese perspective on debt is that debt should be shared and in the sharing is the protection for the individual. So we find cooperatives from rural China to the likes of urban Huawei. There are lots and lots of startups, but lots of these are family prospects. There can be considerable protection in sharing debt.
“Volkswagen says it’s putting ChatGPT in its cars for ‘enriching conversations’”
Yeah, I can see how that would work in practice-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUbyQmtZ_6E (28 secs)
Last night on the news they showed some big conference where they were talking about putting ChatGPt into everything, and I mean everything, from fridges to kitchen utensils. As they said when the phonograph first came out over a century and a half ago, ‘Why would I need a talking machine when I already have a wife?’ (ducks head)
“Bitcoin slides after SEC social media account is compromised, sends false ETF approval post” CNBC
The ultimate joke (SEC) meets the ultimate nightmare scam (crypto)…doing everything it can to get access to that insured fiat bailout money that its denizens claim to crtique.
I follow a few authors on XTwitter. I gather it is helpful in promoting their work, and some use their account to promote issues of interest to them, such as Jeff Vandemeer posting about environmental issues around Tallahassee. Seems a common experience has been trying out alternative platforms only to find they are speaking to empty rooms. Most have stayed on X.
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale
a tale of a fateful trip,
that started from this tropic port,
aboard this underage bordello of sorts.
The mate was a mighty sellin’ woman named Maxwell,
Like Epstein brave and sure,
Many notables set sail back in the day,
for a pedophile tour,
a pedophile tour.
The weather started getting rough,
Epstein’s cell was tossed.
If not for the courage of Virginia Giuffre
the details would be lost.
The details would be lost.
The jets landed near the shore of this Caribbean isle
with Randy Andy,
Bill Clinton too.
Orgies urged,
Some movie stars,
Stephen Hawking and Alan Dershowitz,
here on Epstein’s Isle.
Re German Farmers Protest, journalists talk about “potato mobs”, “Nazi farmers” and statements like: “Driving a tractor obviously makes you stupid”/ Sadly familiar to “deplorable”. These “journalists” sound awfully familiar as well.
“Russian mockery: Trying to give Sweden a geopolitical weight that the country does not have”
Maybe somebody should point out to Sweden that they don’t even border Russia. And to get to Sweden, the Russians would have to go through Finland first. Of course the Swedes could always station their army in Finland because NATO solidarity or something.
Sweden has had delusions of grandeur on the international stage since perhaps the thirty years war.
Just wait, they’ll call all the trolls home to Trollhätten* and then the world will see! /s
*Site of former Saab plant.
Massive Winter Storm: We had a foot of snow combined with freezing precipitation here in flyover . Our utility lines and trees are weighed down and we hope the predicted winds do not start snapping them. High temps this weekend are 0 degrees.
Twitter changed my life for good. But the platform I loved no longer exists Oh boo hoo, cry me a river. I guess British Intelligence is not getting room at Musk’s moderation table. Seems that X is not yet the mouthpiece of the government.
“West ready to back Ukraine ‘for years’ – UK”
More whistling past the graveyard. The Ukraine is running out of troops, the equipment that the west could send got burned during the big offensive, that Biden demand for $61 billion is stalling out in Congress now that it is an election year, the EU cannot possible give the Ukraine enough money to keep this war going, most of the armouries in NATO are empty now and one wonders what will happen this spring. Project Ukraine is done but there are still frantic efforts to keep in going in the forlorn hope that it will damage the Russians, in spite of the slaughter of the Ukrainian. But, hey, best investment ever, especially if you work in the MIC where you have orders come flying in the door.
Last I checked, Germany has some 600 Taurus missiles in inventory. France already has offered an additional 85 Scalp missile to Ukraine, presumably as a way to tell Germany to get off their duff. This is baked in the cake, as will be seized Russian assets (to be doled out to Ukraine for as long as the war continues and not a moment longer).
Yes, those missiles will be used to terrorize Russian civilians. Everyone in Europe, Washington and Kiev knows this. However, as long as they can do so with impunity, they will.
Russia needs to stop dithering.
With precious few of those western missiles, instead of using them on military targets the Ukrainians opted to use them to kill civilians in the center of Belgograd on New Year’s Eve. The EU came out and said that of course this was legal and it was only self-defence – like the Israelis are saying – which made the Russians furious. Then ‘the Foreign Ministry in Paris said that Ukraine was “acting in self-defense” while Russia was “an aggressor state” responsible for any “human tragedies that accompany” the conflict.’ At that point former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev lost it and called them ‘scum, bastards, freaks’ but now the French are sending 85 more Scalp missile to Ukraine to be used against Russian civilians. With that French-Russian relations have been flushed down a toilet for at least a generation-
https://www.rt.com/russia/590098-medvedev-french-scum-belgorod/
Yup, Ukraine will use those missiles to kill civilians. They’ll use cluster munitions as well, and Germany will look the other way.
As long as that gets the West what it wants, they do not care. And, for that matter, France doesn’t care about its relationship with Russia.
Russian impotence in making moral arguments is laid bare. Sociopaths understand force, not morality, and the West is ruled by persons whose behavior is indistinguishable from that of sociopaths.
I generally don’t like to blow my own horn, but I had a personal accomplishment to share.
At a somewhat advance age (let’s just say no man’s land between 50 and being eligible for SS) I made it through my first semester of law school. Grades were not as good as hoped but good enough to keep me in good academic standing and keep scholarships.
I’m hoping to take this semester by semester. I’ve come to the conclusion that corporate IT is a young person’s game and besides, corporate America sucks. It is evil and I want no part of it. My long term goal is to have a law license and practice to the extent possible as a third act before Medicare and SS go sideways. I figure I’ll need income until I’m at least 70.
Fewer parodies may be forthcoming … although that could be an outlet.
Many congrats, and sounds like you’ve got a plan in the works for the coming period to navigate that path, prior to “cashing in” Social Security markers. No lawyer jokes today, I will suppose !
Was actually looking at my retirement hopes and wishes ( it’s a plan ) earlier today on the Schwab website calculator options. Absent an apocalypse scenario that replicates 2022 when everything was in risk off mode, the outlook by circa 2040 seems, at least currently, promising.
There’s a plan but I am aware of the old adage that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
In my case, the enemy is the gap between my current age and being eligible for Medicare, and wife being younger and further away from Medicare than I am. And throw in Medicare blowing chunks by end of decade.
Congratulations! That is quite a feat, and with scholarships! What school are you attending?
I had wanted to do the same thing, the last time I went back everyone already seemed to be so young, but I have long since decided that I had just aged out. I am impressed that you did not fall prey to the sense of pessimism that I did, and hope to see further reports on your progress. One never knows when one will need a lawyer, and, from my perspective, one with NC bona fides would definitely be a recommendation.
I’m doing part time nights at John Marshall (located in downtown in ATL.)
Part time works best for me, with drawback of taking longer. Believe me there was a lot of pessimism to overcome … like a lot of us on NC I tend to fall that way. Being around younger students has been one of the biggest bonuses of the adventure.
I used to work at the Journal, just off Five Points, and went over to John Marshall on my lunch hour to collect info on how to apply. I agree that part time is a good choice, especially for an advanced degree. I am looking at my Con law books and just shudder to think how much time one would have to put into a full schedule. That class, alone, even with a really good prof, just ate my life.
But, yeah, the last time I went back to school the proximity to all the younger people really opened up the world for me in a way that was surprising at the time. Middle age, and middle aged thinking, really does creep up on you unawares, and those kids were a great antidote for that.
Once again, congrats and good luck!
Rock on. Very inspirational. I have a friend who, in his late 20’s, with a new baby child, and while working full time at a plywood mill, completed his GED, attended community college full time, quit the plywood game to transfer to an engineering program, and completed his BS all in about 5/6 years. I have a lot of respect for people that can grind like that. Keep plugging!
Congratulations and many Kudos! Good luck on your continuing journey and may that aced bar exam come even sooner than you expect.
Congrats! Pick your area of expertise carefully. AI is coming for some areas of law. I know someone who specializes in real estate law who rose very high in large real estate companies. Real estate related businesses in general are very cyclical and she was prepared for downturns by saving much of her salary. What she was not prepared for was AI. The only job she could find in the past 2 months was training AI to do her job and the salary was very low. She is now considering getting certification in another area of law. Consider which areas of law are the least likely to be taken over by AI.
That’s good advice. I am worried about AI, as well. I am hoping that the ABA circles the wagons and lobbies legislatures to make things like using AI to generate a motion or official court document (without human editing) illegal. Or perhaps strictly liable, as in if you do it, you can get sued for malpractice with no need for the plaintiff to show proof of negligence. There have already been cases of lawyers getting in big trouble for using AI when it generates fake cases. Disbarment is a heavy price to pay for laziness.
However, I can easily see a lot of the basic legal research and boilerplate legal form generation being at least augmented by AI, at the junior associate level. Professional standards and ethics should insist that such research be verified and checked by an actual human, but law firms are not immune to the same pressures that corporations are to cut corners.
I’m guessing that one area of law least likely to be subject to AI is criminal, where the stakes are so high.
Good luck to you!
“I Object”. It could be your new licence plate number. Go Chris, you dah mahn (or woman)!
Some FinTech companies do use the show your ID+show your face system. I forget which ones, but I’ve seen it a few times now. It is definitely creepy. I haven’t had a traditional bank do it so far that I recall.
The opinion column by Zeynep Tufekci is somewhat comical, in that this woman, unqualified as she is, is adamant that those that suffer from long-COVID, while tragic, are just unlucky in some way that makes them special, and no one else is vulnerable to this outcome. (Her comments on the Twitter in past years.) So the professionalism and competence that she describes in these pilots in this column that reacted quickly to avert loss of life, might not exist in another 10 years. In part because of her opinion columns. Nor the competence and effectiveness of the regulators, as she sees it.
Louisiana politics, its like Bobby Jindal deja vu all over again! Colorful to say the least.
Who is Madison Sheahan, Jeff Landry’s new pick to head wildlife agency? (Nola.com paywalled, December 20, still germain)
Captain of the women’s rowing team at OSU require leadership qualities, easily transferred to cajun country natural resources.
I understand that she’s getting a ride from south dakota to louisiana on that GOP clown car that’s mentioned so often in links. All aboard, as the saying goes.
Re: Blinken’s window dressing tour.
That headline was just the perfect way to describe what Blinken was up to. I watched his press conference in Tel Aviv yesterday, and he was just all over the place. His body language, alone, showed how uncomfortable he was. He also doubled down on Kirby’s statement that South Africa’s suit at the ICJ had no merit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-RwbSLSLWo
I imagine this was right about the point where he was jealous of Austin, and wanted a week off that was, basically, anywhere but there.
Rusalka (Song to the Moon) by Dvořák, sung by Frederica Von Stade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwVYFpY3VL4
Re Netanyahu in real trouble,
I can’t help wondering if the liberal endgame will be to have Bibi take the fall for everything so that the genocide can be whitewashed and continue. “Clean coal”/” Clean Zionism”?
I’d imagine that’s why he’s playing the Zelenski game: if he goes, then he’ll take everyone else with him–onward to endless escalation!
Not just Netanyahu, but Israel in general is in real, and long-term, trouble. I think John Mearsheimer spells it out pretty clearly in this recent interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxeqfgPzVc&t=185s
For my money, today’s must read is the historical dive into the Asian world order in aeon.
“One of the greatest benefits of moving beyond Eurocentrism and thus having more examples outside of European history to think with about our present challenges is that such examples expand our imagination as to what is possible. Until recently, international relations scholars had imagined that international orders do not change very much in terms of their building blocks – it was assumed that only the number or the identity of great powers changed. Until recently, international relations also did not allow for the possibility that the liberal international order may unravel or be replaced by an entirely alien order (in a similar vein to the ‘End of History’ thesis of the 1990s). Such conclusions are somewhat inevitable if one looks at the world only post-17th century. But world history teaches us different lessons.”
How to get rich in the 21st Century?
Simple – find a gimmick and then monetize it.
Or put “slick 50” in all used cars before you sell them.
Regarding the Peregine landing . . . object lesson, in my opinion. I’m thinking maybe they’ll think twice before thumbing their nose at Tklehanoai next time. Not like they (Navajos) didn’t try to warn them. Met with the President and everything! Instead, were told to pound sand. Sand, to the Navajo of all people! The sheer hubris to forget nemesis is what always follows. Too funny!
Debt and staring a business, and an opinion you are literally, ‘putting your life on the line just by starting a business.’
I watch folks start a business, begin to generate a bit of cash flow and start spending it on all the goodies they’ve felt they were owed and couldn’t have. The gals buying a large luxury SUV, the guys a large luxury pickup truck. Large being the magic word as it related to the 6,000-pound vehicle tax deduction rule (tax code allowing a $25,000 deduction of a vehicle’s purchasing price on their tax return).
Problem is, the business doesn’t need such a vehicle. So, fundamentally lacking an understanding, or any education about how to start a business, many entrepreneurs founder inside a year, or two.
Source; 40th year of me signing the front of the paychecks, driving 15 y/o truck, with ready ability to buy a new one every year *if* I were profligate. Prefer, instead, to create more FDIC limit bank accounts. No, not Scrooge, just not ambitious enough to want more house than we can keep clean, nor anybody to impress.
Note; running a business is every bit as hard as it’s made out to be, and can be very rewarding (all the tax laws in America advantage the businessman), but you must maintain discipline and focus. Must.
What if you self identify as a communist, and rather than engage in profligate spending instead offer deals on your time and labor to your clients and end up owing $2-$3k in taxes on $18k of earnings? Asking for a friend.
“How US curbs on China may revive its rust belt – the former industrial powerhouse near Russia”
China has been gradually reviving the Northeast rust-belt for years, and the revival is being accomplished beyond the help or hindrance of the US.
A recent example of revival came along with the Winter Olympics in China, since the Northeast offers just what is needed for winter sports and tourism attractions. The Olympics experience proved highly attractive for a country that had been fairly little interested in winter sports or tourism previously. China built all the infrastructure necessary.
https://english.news.cn/20221215/09d6ecbc102047ea9fc79df1627f7489/c.html
December 15, 2022
China’s old industrial base makes headway on revitalization
* Northeast China, an old industrial base, is endeavoring to promote innovation-based development while adopting a global vision for reinvigorating the economy.
* So far, a total of 127 foreign-funded companies have entered the China-Germany Equipment Manufacturing Industrial Park of Shenyang, the beating heart of the revived regional economy and the region’s manufacturing industry.
* In Jilin Province, one of the country’s breadbasket provinces and home to many important manufacturing companies, the satellite information industry is taking off…
. . . ” Netanyahu’s political future may depend on a second Trump presidency, says one observer.” . . .
If American disapprovers of Israel’s genocide/cleansicide of Gaza vote against Biden, will that help Trump win and keep Netanyahu in power longer and secure the total expulsion of all Gaza Palestinians into Egypt?
Which President would actually help the Israeli genocide go on longer and be more complete? Will expressing disapproval for the genocide by voting against Joe actually help Trump to help Netanyahu make the genocide go on longer?
Is voting about good results? Or beautiful gestures? And which is which anyway?
Decisions . . . decisions.
Tradeoffs . . . tradeoffs.
One of those days you take a couple of runs and call it a day on the slopes… cold, windy, sideways snow and low visibility all amount to no fun, as the great indoors was calling my name.
The father of a brother & sister in the Dartful Codgers was quite involved in Apollo 11 back in the day 54 years ago, and they regaled me with tales of being at the launch in the VIP section with their family when they were 8 & 10 years old. I tried to conceal my envy, but was unsuccessful in that regard.
If Apollo 11 had suffered the same fate as the Peregrine lunar lander-it would have been a national tragedy, but now nobody really cares, do they?
To the moon!
I had to wiki that. I like your humor.
> Severe Personnel Shortage Forces British Navy to Scrap Newly Refurbished Frigates: Broader Fleet Decline Continues
UK a failed experiment in neoliberal policy draws as much from the ideology of the selfish-gene and the idea that greed motivated competition is good/optimal. When economic gains are from socialised behaviour and adherence to an ideals of professionalism (Bourdieu on left & Posner on right).
David Sloan Wilson and the chicken experiment : ‘Two experiments using chickens show another aspect of evolution regarding selection. In the first experiment, groups of chickens in cages were evaluated for egg-laying. The best egg-layer within each cage was chosen and put together with the other prolific egg-layers. The second experiment took the best caged groups of egg-layers. The result of the second experiment after a few generations was healthy, sociable, egg-laying chickens. The result of the first experiment after a few generations was fighting and anti-social chickens that maimed and killed each other.’
Improvements in evolutionary fitness of group selection is fast. Most of the gains are by the third generation, increasing thereof by 4% per generation for the following chicken experiment: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8786932/
So its no wonder in reverse it only takes a couple of generations post Thatcher era and everything is going to crap.
Just in (4pm PST): UN Security Council votes “demanding” end to Red Sea attacks. China and Russia abstained. So, we’ll see how well that demand flies.
Just hours before the UNSC vote, Houthi’s launched a swarm of 18 missiles/drones at various ships in the Red Sea. None reached their targets or caused any damage. The warship HMS Richmond shot down 7 of them. I thought this was interesting, from the Guardian:
The article doesn’t say how many Vipers it took to shoot down 7 Shaheds but even assuming 1:1 (doubtful) that attack was costly for the defenders. Another Guardian quote:
I think what he means is, eventually the good guys will run out of air defense missiles, then the drones will get through.
So, backing up the UNSC “demand” may give the U.S. the green light to go into “an offensive posture” against the Houthi’s if there are any more attacks.
Any thoughts on whether the Houthi’s will comply with this demand?