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Links 2/13/2024

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Mutant wolves exposed to Chernobyl disaster have evolved a new superpower, scientists discover Daily Mail

Tools of the Wild: Unveiling the Crafty Side of Nature Nautilus (Micael T)

The Apple Vision Pro is one giant experiment on the human brain Business Insider (Kevin W)

WhatsApp Image Sender Becomes First Convicted Cyber-Flasher BBC

Why the world stopped having sex Telegraph. Sigh. Polls decades ago found women would rather eat ice cream than have sex. Hetero sex is basically defined as the man ejaculating. Aside from a comparatively small proportion of highly-sexed women, women don’t hunger much for sex. Most men are not very good at satisfying women and are too insecure to allow women to teach them. Worse, more men are seeing lots of porn which makes it harder for them to find normal women exciting, and that further reduces whatever inclination they might have had to want to satisfy a female partner. And that’s before getting to more mundane issues, like growing up with devices reduces how much people interact with real people, which almost certainly has impaired their flirting skills

#COVID-19

Climate/Environment

The Great Salt Lake Is Full of Lithium. A Startup Wants to Harvest It. Wall Street Journal (BC)

Climate Change Reversing Gains In Air Quality Across the US, Study Finds Axios

28-Ton, 1.2-Megawatt Tidal Kite Is Now Exporting Power To the Grid New Atlas.

China?

Afghan-like retreat debacle looms in Pacific islands Asia Times

China’s consumers tighten belts even as prices fall Financial Times (Kevin W)

How China Built BYD, Its Tesla Killer New York Times (Kevin W)

Africa

Terrorism in Africa increased 100,000% during ‘war on terror’ Responsible Statescraft (Kevin W)

Famine Looms in Sudan Aljazeera (Tom H)

South Africa’s failed infrastructure privatisation and deregulation CADTM (Micael T)

Old Blighty

UK steps up war on whistleblower journalism with new National Security Act The Grayzone (Kevin W)

European Disunion

‘Everyone should be scared as hell’: Democrats call for Trump-proofing NATO Politico

Republicans Seem Completely OK With Trump’s Alarming Russia Comments New Republic (furzy). What most people ignore is that NATO’s Article 5 obliges NATO member ONLY to consider aiding an attacked state, not to saddle up. Moreover, as Alexander Mercouris pointed out, Trump is voicing not-uncommon sentiments in the US, that NATO members have been freeloading and the time has come when they need to carry their own weight. However, that view does overlook the value to us of having lots of bases in NATO member states.

Gaza

‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 129: Israel bombards Rafah, killing more than 60 in a night Mondoweiss

The official version: Israel-Hamas war: Israeli hostage rescue in Rafah kills 67 Associated Press (furzy)

Netanyahu uses hostage rescue to justify Rafah strikes as his support dwindles Guardian (Kevin W)

US red line on Rafah blurs as Israeli offensive and hostage negotiations collide Middle East Eye. See subhead: “Biden administration signals it is open to Rafah offensive as it looks to press Netanyahu on hostage deal.”

* * *

CIA and Mossad chiefs to hold talks on Hamas hostage deal Financial Times. Looks like a big headfake to me. Mossad cannot commit the likes of Netanyahu or Ben-Gvir.

Biden’s Middle East Anti-Strategy American Conservative

Biden’s calls for Israel to mind the laws appear feeble, and ignored Responsible Statecraft

Warsaw-Rafah: Scurrying Cockroaches Norman Finkelstein

* * *

Not sure I’d call drug dealers heroes, but if this is where we have to find them:

Dutch Court Moves to Block Export of Fighter Jet Parts to Israel New York Times (BC)

* * *

Patrick Lawrence: The Crisis at The New York Times ScheerPost

New Not-So-Cold War

Chinese regime announces “support” for Russia in war with NATO in Ukraine WSWS

Big Brother is Watching You Watch

Martin Hellman: We’re playing Russian roulette InfoWorld (Paul R)

Imperial Collapse Watch

China’s Shipyards Are Ready for a Protracted War. America’s Aren’t. Wall Street Journal

A Little Bit Of News… Andrei Martyanov. Zircons on subs, oh my!

“In The War Of Propaganda, It Is Very Difficult To Defeat The United States” Caitlin Johnstone (Kevin W)

Trump

Judge in Trump’s Georgia case will hear evidence on prosecutors’ romantic relationship Politico (Kevin W)

A Brief Oral History of Wayne Barrett, the First Journalist to Doggedly Cover Donald Trump Vanity Fair (furzy)

Biden

What would a Kamala Harris presidency look like? Unherd

House speaker rejects Israel, Ukraine aid package ahead of Senate vote Washington Post. Quelle surprise!

AI

Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen The Register

US CPI Data to Show Disinflation Handoff From Goods to Services Bloomberg

The Bezzle

The Human Rights Industry: A book review Orinoco Journal (Robin K)

How bad is Tesla’s hazardous waste problem in California? The Verge (Miceal T)

Class Warfare

Chelsey Glasson: We need data on laid off pregnant tech workers Fast Company (Paul R)

Antidote du jour (via):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here

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192 comments

  1. Antifa

    NOT A CAESAR
    (melody borrowed from I’m A Believer by Neil Diamond as performed by The Monkees)

    Biden has a brain that’s full of fairy tales
    He thinks this world’s still 1943
    Nah, everyone’s got weapons better than we’ve dreamed
    If we go to war we will get creamed

    Biden’s frozen face
    Straight outta the freezer
    He’s out of place
    And out of his mind
    What’s to love?
    He’s not a Caesar
    He’s an old geezer
    And he lies . . .

    Biden is incapable of listening
    Seems he cannot hold a second thought
    He’s across the line he’s outlived his brain
    Can you recall one time he’s been sane?

    Biden’s frozen face
    Straight outta the freezer
    He’s out of place
    And out of his mind
    What’s to love?
    He’s not a Caesar
    He’s an old geezer
    And he lies . . .

    Ah this is worse than deadly
    He can’t be redeemed
    Let him wander off into his dreams

    Biden’s frozen face
    Straight outta the freezer
    He’s out of place
    And out of his mind
    What’s to love?
    He’s not a Caesar
    He’s an old geezer
    And he lies . . .

    Biden’s frozen face
    He’s not a Caesar
    He’s out of place
    And out of his mind

    Said he’s an old geezer yeah yeah
    Yeah yeah yeah yeah (He’s not a Caesar)
    Said he’s not a Caesar yeah (he’s an old geezer)
    Said he’s not a Caesar yeah (he’s an old geezer)

  2. digi_owl

    the Russian diplomatic corps sure know how to deliver stinging barbs.

    And frankly everyone should care about history, in particular the bad parts so that we can avoid repeating them…

      1. Reply

        Russians said America had become Not-Agreement Capable.
        Now we’ve doubled down to become Not-History Capable.
        What is next?

    2. Stephen V

      no longer quote classics like Shakespeare, Carroll,…
      As in Alice in Wonderland Carroll?
      Asking for a friend.

      1. gk

        No. E. Jean Carroll, of course. I’m waiting for her to get the Trump Tower as damages, and for her to rename it after herself.

      2. .human

        “Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’

        I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!” ~ Lewis Carroll

        1. Not Qualified to Comment

          “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

          Or words like “Rules-based Order.”

    3. Feral Finster

      Except that nobody cares, just as the playground bully doesn’t care thst he’s stupid as long as he and his friends can beat you up whenever he feels like it. For that matter, if you can beat them up, that has nothing to do with your ability to quote history.

      Our clever word games, our close readings of texts, our moral arguments are of no interest to the people who run things. They care solely about power.

      1. Wukchumni

        Can’t remember the last time I had to resort to a history lesson with the playground bully, we must run in different circles.

        1. IMOR

          Inspired by a scene from a late Alfred Bester work, I would occasionally give a current events lesson WHILE I beat on a bully… but I think we’re afield with our running (crop?) circles at that point, Wuk.
          ;-)

          1. Wukchumni

            I get it, we bore said playground bully to death by including the very same invective in every post until it being tired overcomes him?

            1. Feral Finster

              Well, trolling and stinging invective (which appears to be the approach chosen by Russian diplomats) doesn’t work.

  3. The Rev Kev

    “What would a Kamala Harris presidency look like?”

    I would suspect that Kamala would be very protective of her “legacy” as the first black Madame President and would compromise on all sorts of foreign and domestic policies just so long as her Presidency could look successful. In truth, she would be sidelined by the big players in DC who would never take her seriously and these players would have their own policies enforced. Certainly foreign policy would not change but remain the same – as it has for the past few decades under the different Republican and Democrat Presidents.

      1. Pat

        I hope we would be spared the three dimensional chess trope. Not even the DNC could believe that anyone would believe that of Harris.

        1. Anonymous Marin

          Don’t waste your breath. It’s gonna be Gavin.
          Here’s more of his “California Freedoms”

          Governor Newsom Sues 1.3 Million Californians who signed petitions to qualify the Taxpayer Protection Act (TPA) for November 2024 ballot.

          The outpouring of support shows voters’ desire for change and gives voters a say on new state and local taxes. In retaliation, Governor Gavin Newsom sued to prevent this vote and wants to remove TPA from the ballot.

          https://marinpost.org/blog/2024/2/6/governor-newsom-sues-1-3-million-californians

          1. Wukchumni

            Kam’s got poll position on team free Willie, Gav’s gotta wait his turn to see what Brown can do for you.

      2. Mo Newman

        What would it look like? Just look at the trail of jeers wherever Harris has been; San Francisco, Sacramento, Brentwood, the border, laughed off the stage in Europe.

        Caligula named his horse to the senate. Compared to Kackala in the White House, that seemed like a rational act.

    2. griffen

      Note to self, must finally watch Idiocracy from start to finish. I am not cynical enough to believe the above scenario to be possible, but can’t rule anything out no matter how ludicrous.

      Hey y’all in the southwestern border states, don’t you believe that I did a bang up job after being appointed to the role of border czar? \sarc

      3. Ken Murphy

        Absolutely watch Idiocracy start to finish. Maybe make it a double feature with Team America: World Police. Idiocracy was supposed to be a comedy, but is eerily turning out to be a documentary. It’s certainly appropriate as we enter a new time of absurdism.

        Ceci n’est pas un pipe!

    3. Feral Finster

      “What would a Kamala Harris presidency look like?”

      Obama 2.0. Self-congratulatory performative idpol, along with an endless litany of excuses from the khive.

      Otherwise, more of the same.

    4. Bugs

      Yup. Just hand the keys to Wall Street and the Kagans. She’ll have about as much actual power as the British monarch, and a lot less respect. It might induce her quit the sauce for a while though. So there’s that.

    6. Wukchumni

      What if instead, Kamala’s inner rapper comes out and ala ‘Mak is the 47th President who rhymes her way through speeches…?

      Brain cells are lit. Ideas start to hit/Next the formation of words that fit/At the table I sit, making it legit/And when my pen hits the paper. Ahh shit!

    7. Dessa

      Aren’t most presidents protective of their legacies and interested in the appearance of success?

      I’m not sure how her blackness or gender factors into that particular aspect of her rule so much as it would provide fodder for the commentariat to endlessly pontificate.

      Conservatives would call her a bimbo and a diversity hire, liberals would obsess over the historicity and use it to cover for the awfulness of her rule, and she would probably behave exactly as terribly as every other post-Reagan Democrat, but everyone would try to work in some angle about her sex and race. We’re already seeing this unfold in the comments today.

    8. chris

      “Looking isn’t as important as knowing. Because seeing is not how we know. Knowledge is how we know what we know, you know? Learning. Learning is important, not just knowing. Because the learning is the knowing. So we move “forward together”, seeking to know each other better, and in knowing that, we know more.”

      -acceptance speech from President Harris after Joe slips on a banana peel and Trump has a stroke while crowd surfing at a rally…

  4. Screwball

    RE: the COVID Tweet

    This is misinformation. Since Biden took office, 800,000+ have died, millions have Long COVID, and higher risk people remain indefinitely locked out of society and unable to access medical care safely. The media has largely given Biden a free pass despite many failures on COVID.

    This is only one example. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t remember the media being in the tank for an administration like they are with this one.

    1. t

      Part of this may be the nature of “the media.”

      I certainly remember non-stop coverage of the economy under Clinton and the run-up to war after 9-11.

      But it does seem as though from early in the primary Brandon has been a golden child.

      1. Cassandra

        If you are talking about the 2020 primaries, Biden was really *not* the golden child to begin with. The MSM regularly reported on his unpopularity at first. That changed only after repeated rollouts of the New Improved Democrats (Harris, Buttigieg, O’Rourke, etc) were absolute failures to launch. The Wizard had stated that he would only get involved “if it look[ed] like Bernie was running away with it,” which seemed to be the case as Super Tuesday loomed. Therefore, over the course of one weekend, everyone else but Warren dropped out and Biden was anointed the Savior of the Party, Defender against Creeping Socialism, and the Most Progressive Since FDR. The rest, as they say, is history.

      2. The Rev Kev

        He has been for a very long time. He was once paid $200,000 to make a speech on behalf of a Republican candidate against a Democrat candidate in an election and got away with it. I’m surprised that he was not nickname ‘Teflon Joe’.

      3. griffen

        Joe starts to remind me of a hybrid sort of person, if you’ll indulge my fictional imagery of his recent and prior performative gaffes.

        One part Ron Burgundy. The kid gloves media coverage leaves Joe in ” a glass cage of emotion! “. He’s getting feeble and older…we can’t be mean to him. It would be a mendacious tactic to parse his every word as a public official.

        One part, Governor William Le Petomayne ( Blazing Saddles ) who is both corrupt and easily compromised by a pretty, ahem, younger face as it were. The film is satirical of course, but Joe’s policies are very real.

        No fan of Trump but the media scrutiny is not on the same level.

        3. NotTimothyGeithner

          Le Petomayne recognized the need for a sheriff in Rockridge or corruotion only works if you dont kill the golden goose. Biden blew off disaster zones. We could use a man Le Petomayne.

          1. Marcus

            Hate the man, however, love the four years he was president as far as policy and the effects of the Trumpconomy on African American lives.

            Except for my embittered lesbian cousin, every African American that I know is going to vote for Trump, or not vote at all.

            No one is going to vote for any of the people on the DNC endorsement cards filling our mailbox and recycling bins.

            “Do Not Choose” is what DNC stands for.

    2. NYT_Memes

      Re: media in the tank for an administration

      I am a bit disappointed that the NC commentariat failed to refer to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 signed by Bill Clinton as one of the main causes of media group think in support of “Our Democracy”. An important reason why the Overton Window has narrowed so drastically is that the billionaire neo-fascists not only own all the key media but that the result of their management is to clamp down the screws on free thinking. Parroting the official line is not free thinking. Every year is worse. Every new administration is worse.

      Everything is going according to plan. (Hat tip to Lambert)

  5. zagonostra

    >In The War Of Propaganda, It Is Very Difficult To Defeat The United States – Caitlin Johnstone

    I don’t know about the specific nature of his Nord Stream insinuations, but Putin is definitely correct about the strength of the American propaganda machine

    If Caitlin Johnstone doesn’t know about “the specific nature of Nord Stream” then I suggest she’s become subject to the same propaganda that she is decrying and probably should study Jacques Ellul.

    1. Jessica

      Caitlin was just acknowledging that she did not know the details of Putin’s claim. She knows full well who had it blown up.

      1. zagonostra

        Details are one thing, Putin gave interesting reason why he would not provided them, I took issue with her use of the word “insinuations.”

  6. Dr. John Carpenter

    Re: Genocide Joe’s latest “flub”. This is the thing that I think could lead to him finally being sent to the farm. Granted, he has a long history of saying the quiet parts loud, but in the past, it’s been brushed off as everything from a stutter (eye roll) to “like you’ve never said the wrong thing in a conversation.” With the sharks sensing blood in the water, and the issue of G.J.’s mental abilities finally becoming ok to discuss, there’s bound to be more scrutiny on his accidental truth-telling. I know that ultimately he could “stutter” out every Blob secret from now until November and it would amount to “wadda ya gonna do about it?” But it does seem the Blob prefers functioning without any scrutiny, even toothless scrutiny.

    1. Wukchumni

      Genocide Joe is tantamount to that cranky uncle Sam, who can be counted on to say the wrong thing at the top of his voice @ family Thanksgiving, and you dread seeing him again 364 days from then.

      1. The Rev Kev

        Also the one acting inappropriately with women at that Thanksgiving like grabbing their ****s and who cannot be left alone with young children as he has this impulse to sniff their hair. But as he is rich and influential, everybody tolerates him.

        1. Wukchumni

          Sure he’s got a bitchin’ Corvette, but keeps asking if we can store his crap in our garage. It gets old.

  7. Vicky Cookies

    That story about Kafka at the top is moving; it reminds me somewhat of Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’. Then, we are taken to the other extreme in following Boris the Clown’s masterclass in failing upward. Humanity: a rather touching tragedy.

    1. zagonostra

      That a country’s citizens can countenance and even support a vile creature like Boris is a mystery to me, it’s a stark contrast with the “Humanity” that story on Kafka communicates. But then again, I know people who are devoutly religious, gently, caring, and devoted parents, who when I ask them about what they think on the genocide in Gaza, they respond that it’s “complicated” (I lost my cool with one such person recently, I really have to work on how to handle conversations with family/friends who are “tepid” in calling out evil ).

      1. IM Doc

        The first comment in that tweet thread is by the same author with his take on Keir Starmer.

        It sounds like my own brain. I am fed up with both sides.

      2. Amfortas the Hippie

        ived arrived at just not saying anything at all…at least to the handful of Dems in my real life.
        this weekend, as i may have mentioned…sent the kremlin readout of the tucker/putin thing to cousin, sons, brother…and my hot shrink lady over yonder hill.
        first 3 are1. well used to my erudite and long winded ramblings…and readily admit that ive been prescient for 20-30 years.
        brother thought i was drunk,lol…but at least admitted that i’m too smart…and that i have time to try to get all around things and dig into them, whereas most people, including himself, do not.

        the biggest blow was shrink lady. usually a heterodox Dem…laments the lack of new deal and great society stuff, because she sees the fallout of dog eat dog in her daily job…but her reply:”tucker loves him some putin”.
        sigh.
        her and brother are in the “must do anything to keep trump out” camp…and i’m like, ” well, i dont like the guy, but show me how biden’s policies are objectively better”
        and its as if i’ve dropped trou in church and whipped out the mighty sword.
        Caitlin’s exegesis on amurkin propaganda is spot on…especially regarding dems, at the moment, and regarding russia.
        gops have their gigantic blind spots, too, of course…especially the antitrumpers.
        the takeaway: americans are far too shallow and uninterested….and far too busy….to even attempt to learn whats happening in the world…and easily slip into aggressive jingoism when confronted with uncomfortable truths.
        i tell cousin: the easiest way for me to get my ass kicked is to go into any space where americans hang around and start talking about how we’re an empire in its terminal phase.
        so all thats left to do is sit back and watch the increasingly violent crumbling and try and get as many preps in as possible, before the trucks stop running.
        (seed order is top of list, right now…to shore up my seed vault with fresh heirloom dna)
        the saddest part: one never gets used to being a cultural isolate. i’ve been extremely heterodox for as long as i can remember…because ive always been curious about the world, remember everything ive read, and am congenitally averse to accepting Say-So from on high.
        and i guess whats most shocking(but really shouldnt be,lol) is how dems went from Bush2 era dissent, antiwar, anti-Stasi…to what they are today…and see no contradiction, at all.

        1. Amfortas the Hippie

          and now i get around to the Haz al Din thing…and find that i agree with him on most of it, as per usual(came across him a while ago, somehow).
          but his stance on Stalin sent me into a brief tangent….and his link in the bio:
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rSWhSBmfMA

          all of that runs so counter to everything ive ever known, that i find that i just dont know what to think,lol.
          its almost rote for me that “our side” has been lying about just about everything forever…so much so that ive come to expect it…whatever They say, i figger the opposite is true. This can usually be verified by a little research, even with the crappy state of search, these days.
          but Stalin?
          ive seen a few things lately…even in western media…about the popularity of stalin in the former ussr…but again…idk what to think.
          i have a long habit of questioning everything…and attempting to get all around it. early on, it was the Library…and news stands(remember those,lol?)…then the wild west of the http://WWW…and filling hard drives with saved newspaper articles, scholarly papers and foia docs, lest they be memoryholed(a lot of them have indeed been memoryholed)
          …but i have no idea how to reevaluate stalin,lol.
          its a conundrum…and a testament, i suppose, to the Ontological Crises we find ourselves mired in.
          (Pythia sez:” Socrates said “i know that i do not know”…and was therefore the wisest man in Hellas”)

          1. EMC

            There was a lot to unpack in that tweet. I didn’t go to your link. Regarding Stalin, I think he’s complicated, and complicated for Russians to put in place in their history. And it is for them to do so, not the rest of us. The general premise of the piece didn’t resonate for me, finding a root for the Russian value of history in Marxism/Leninism and by extension Stalinism, because of its historical perspective and holistic nature. It’s the cart before the horse. Perhaps Marxism took hold in Russia because of its historical perspective, a nation with a long, rich and complicated history; the holistic appeal with its roots in Orthodoxy.

            Just a thought.

          2. John Steinbach

            Back in 1986 was part of the first large group of Americans to take the riverboat cruise from Odessa to Kiev. Cruise was organized by the Gray Panthers & planned a year in advance. We were honored guests.

            My wife & I were hosted several times by villagers. Every home we visited had a large photo of Stalin hung prominently on the living room wall.

            1. Amfortas the Hippie

              see…i remember my grandparents having a framed pic of FDR in the kitchen(this was early 70’s).
              that gelled with their expressed sentiments about the man.
              but ive never been anywhere outside the USA save for mexico, canada and that tourist island off honduras…so all ive got to go on as far as rest of world is what i read….and what i hear from others who are from other places(unreliable sources, perhaps…see: Cuban expats in usa)…or have traveled abroad(also perhaps unreliable, due to class and wealth status)

            1. Amfortas the Hippie

              well,lol…that looks innerestin.
              if i only had a book budget.
              …and the bandwidth to tackle such a tome.
              my ’76 deluxe britannica set had, in retrospect, a decent treatment of things like the russian civil war(red vs imperialist white, backed by west)…but, just like with Mao, its hard to get a fair counterview to the incessant narrative.

              and now i’m ruminating on misremembering blackrock or someone investing large in ukraine…and thinking about the paywalls that keep me out of even the so-called “papers of record”.
              so all i got is headlines and first paragraphs.

              may be time for a holiday from paying any mind to all of this.
              since theres not much i can do, anyways, but look on in horror.

              1. Em

                The PDF is free. The translators intentionally picked a small leftist press and worked for free, because it meant the PDF can be distributed freely.

                I strongly encourage everyone to read it. It’s an enlightening book on how the West shapes perception against all their enemies. If you’re unhappy with the narrative that our rulers (not the politicians but the people who buy politicians) hand us, then we need to start looking for a different and hopefully more coherent framework to look at everything.

              2. Kouros

                Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast, the 10th section on the Russian revolution gets to Stalin as well. It is impossible to describe him in a sentence. But he went from high jinx bank robbery to fund the party to headHoncho of Human Resources in USSR, which greased his way to the top….

      3. Kouros

        That vile English “high class” has allowed the English proles to be vile with other people around the world…

    2. gk

      I think she refused to give these manuscripts to Brod. They were confiscated by the Nazis and probably destroyed.

    3. Feral Finster

      Of course Boris is loathsome. I’ve never met the mam and I could have told you that.

      However, he remains in politics and is circling around, waiting for anothershot at No.10, unless and until his career is ended

      Preferably with a wooden stake in the heart.

    4. Jeremy Grimm

      The story about Kafka the little girl and the doll suggested an origin for the plot line in the movie “Amelie” where Amelie steals her father’s garden gnome and sends it on a trip around the world with the help of her stewardess girlfriend.

  8. Chris Smith

    Telling me that I should be scared that Trump will shut down NATO is telling me that I should vote for Trump. I trust Trump to do nothing. Remember in 2016 when he said he was going to bring back the US steel manufacturing industry? But seriously …

  9. Wukchumni

    Doe caught in the headlights in your eyes all the way
    If I listen to your word salad sandwiches
    Would you say you’re a woman without conviction
    As if there’s anybody who doesn’t know
    How to sale a contradiction?
    Should Joe up and go, Should Joe up and go?

    Karma Kamala, Kamala karma, Kamala, chameleon
    Get ready for Joe to go, get ready for Joe to go
    Being President would be easy if it was a paint by number scheme
    Who gets the green, who gets the green

    And to hear your vapid words ever’y day
    When you used to be only good for a Tweet, eh
    I heard Willie Brown say that power was an addiction
    In got we trust, our loathe is strong
    When you go, you’re gone forever
    …meanwhile
    You let the MIC string you along, you let the MIC string you along

    Karma Kamala, Kamala karma, Kamala, chameleon
    Get ready for Joe to go, get ready for Joe to go
    Being President would be easy if it was a paint by number scheme
    Who gets the green, who gets the green

    Ev’ry day is like survival
    You’re not gonna be Donald’s election rival

    Ev’ry day is like survival
    You’re not gonna be Donald’s election rival

    Karma Kamala, Kamala karma, Kamala, chameleon
    Get ready for Joe to go, get ready for Joe to go
    Being President would be easy if it was a paint by number scheme
    Who gets the green, who gets the green

    Karma Chameleon, by Culture Club

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5WA79F4UCs

    1. ChrisFromGA

      The Karmala theory could indicate she does get sworn in before the election.

      It’s karma – America gets the prez it deserves. It also probably gives Hillary a stroke, and she can join Freeze Frame and Joe in the same high-end nursing home.

      First black woman president, just in time to rally the troops and forget about the invalid who had to step down for medical reasons. A case study for the ages in failing upward.

      Your mileage may vary.

      1. Wukchumni

        We do deserve her to be at the helm when the deal goes down, and historians look back hundreds of years from now, asking why their empire fell apart so quickly.

        1. Reply

          Little-noticed budget insertion for lifeboats financial transition assistance for select staff? Of course, Congressional healthcare to be provided. /ssssss

  10. timbers

    “In The War Of Propaganda, It Is Very Difficult To Defeat The United States” Caitlin Johnstone (Kevin W)

    On the other hand, I can’t be the only one who has noticed how almost every word out the mouths of neocons along with MSM headlines and articles are self protection. It happens without fail, 100% certainty. It is the most predictable of the predictable. Every time Hillary for instance pops into the headlines, it is verbatim accusing others the exact crimes she and her ilk have committed in plain sight. Biden, Obama, Blinkin, Kirby, Nuland, Zelensky, Pelosi, McConnell, Romney, Graham, all of them. Almost everything they say is self protection of the US or they themselves have done.

    It’s almost to the point I look forward to Hillary’s latest confession of criminality each time she pops into the MSM to comment the latest thing in the headline.

    2. Wukchumni

      It’s all part of the Bizarro World rules mutual USSR/USA collapses, everything being backwards.

      Was up at the Boeing museum in Washington state some years ago and they had a video of a Mercury space launch, with JFK announcing afterwards that the USA did everything in the open regarding their space program unlike the sneaky Soviets who only announce what happened after the cosmonauts arrive back, if they do.

      We had to be somewhat of an honest character before the curtain call of Communism came, and then it didn’t matter anymore.

      Anything having to do with our politburo isn’t all that different than the USSR counterpart late in the game, everybody wanted to protect their status quo.

      1. The Rev Kev

        I think that NASA did some of that old Soviet style decision making too. Like when they sent up the Challenger when conditions were dangerous but Ronald Reagan was going to have this amazing live photo op with Christa McAuliffe and they did not dare want to disappoint him with a scuttled mission. So up it went and boom!

        1. ilsm

          Reliability engineers remain as overhead! Especially in the MIC!

          After Columbia, NASA televised at least one of the press briefs from the investigation panel. At least one of the back ups for the admiral was top notch!

    3. Feral Finster

      Yes, all this is true. What does anyone propose to do about it?

      The neocons will keep right on doing this as long as it continues to work. Pointing out their hypocrisy is pointless. They know. They don’t care.

  11. SocalJimObjects

    “The US continues to see very high Covid transmission numbers”. One of the most viral WhatsApp messages currently making the rounds in Indonesia warns people from getting too close to anyone coming from the States.

  12. FreeMarketApologist

    Re: “Zircons on subs…”

    I’m confused — the missiles shoot payloads of glittery sparkly gemstones into communities, and we all end up with fun jewelry? What’s not to like?

  13. The Rev Kev

    “Senate passes $95 billion Ukraine, Israel aid package amid GOP divide”

    if the House passes this package, then this would be rocket fuel for Trump. He could go out on stage and say that they are sending money to the Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, Gaza, etc. but not a dime for border security. That any Republican which voted for it is only a RINO and not a true American. Unless I am wrong, it is these very same Republicans which are the one opposing Trump and by that I mean ones like Mitch McConnell. Do they really want to do that?

    1. Wukchumni

      I’ve always considered the Senate to be the Varsity to Congress being Junior Varsity, but have recently relegated the latter to being elementary, Watson.

      They have no passing game, and the only running is of the mouth.

      Trump senses blood in the water with Freeze-Frame, who turned turtle on some of his earlier advances. Mitch ought to retire before he’s forced, er upstairs.

      1. ambrit

        “Mitch ought to retire before he’s forced, er upstairs.” Do you mean into the House of Lourdes? Then he can bask in the glow of his new moniker; “The Profit of Wall Street.”

          1. Wukchumni

            p.s.

            Just after the turn of the century (too soon to use that phrase?) my better half had been going through dogma withdrawals, and we went to Portugal & Spain and she wanted to go to Fatima, which was in the middle of nowhere, where the deal went down a little over a century ago.

            There was a giant plaza that seemed to go on a long way with the large church at one end, and she goes into the church and it starts pissing down rain if not in buckets than by the cup.

            I retreat to a covered outdoor shrine with astroturf runners all around it that went out about 20 feet from said shrine, and there were women on all fours, a German lady with gout, a Norwegian with neuropathy, a Moroccan with migraines, not to mention an American with amnesia.

            Gout sucks-my brother in law has it, and perhaps propelled by the hope that Fatima could come through, the German sprung to a lead, narrowly missing the amnesiac American ambling on all limbs in the wrong direction, who then ran into the unfortunate Moroccan, easing her pain.

            In truth it was nothing like that, as they all kept in their ‘lanes’ @ the Fatima 500

            1. IMOR

              After 2020, I’ve used “turn of the century” pretty consistently, and have mostly stopped saying “turn of the LAST century” to reference 19th into 20th, so I’d say, no, not too soon.

        2. griffen

          I believe he retires once the proverbial dirt nap is his last and only choice. In recent public appearances, he increasingly resembles the scarecrow from Wizard of Oz. Who knows maybe Mitch is really stuffed with hay and rolled into the Senate for votes and varying photo ops?

          I do wish we could click our heels and return to normal…

  14. Alan Collins

    As a San Franciscan who lived here while Harris was DA she had a reputation for very obvious dishonesty. She slimed her way into the DA’s job by smearing the progressive incumbent, Terence Hallinan, and made a reputation for herself as locking up anybody and everybody.

    1. The Rev Kev

      Thanks for that link, flora. I have been seeing snippets of it the past few hours. One thing he said really struck home. He said that in Moscow it was clean and tidy and kinda looked like cities use to in America. Lots of people were saying the same in the comments section of Alex Christoforous’s videos when he was in Moscow. But when Carlson saw how filthy and dirty cities in the US and the EU were, he suddenly realized that it did not have to be this way. That it was a deliberate political choice that was made to let those cities go to rack and ruin. And that is why San Francisco which has its poop maps was suddenly able to become clean when President Xi came to town.

      1. flora

        The neoliberals’ “bridge to the 21st century” as B. Clinton called the changes brought in by the uniparty (the old Dem party no longer existed) resulted in what we see to day in America’s great cities. Can the 3rd-Way Dems, the neoliberals admit their policy program failed? Can they admit it is ruining the country? Of course not. Their egos won’t allow the admission. When they have nothing real to offer people they offer people derision instead. They blame the people for what’s happened to our great cities, not their own policies.

  16. t

    Gah! Another article about what’s alive in Chernobyl that looks like survivor bias to me.

    Always the same. Look, a bunch of animals are clearly mutants and that certainly suggests a lot of critters are having non-viabme offspring but since some populations are now strong yay! (though not stronger than a population in other areas where they’re protected from humans. )

    I get that it’s a unique opportunity for research. And I know grants and funding are usually for teeny baby steps. But….

    1. vao

      About 15 years ago, the research on the effects of the radioactive contamination that I read was quite ambiguous. On the one side there were reports about how resilient the fauna was (so many more wolves, boars, bisons, etc, apparently thriving without apparent adverse effects), on the other hand field studies showed that small animals (insects and birds) had diminished in number, diversity, and appeared to be seriously affected by radiation in physically detrimental ways.

      But there is one thing I have never seen studied: how much of the apparent resilience is due to a constant influx of healthy animals from outside the disaster zone that keep restoring the damaged genome of the irradiated population to viability, while retaining advantageous mutations. I presume this is all the more relevant for species like wolves that can travel quite far.

  17. QABubba

    NATO is not defensive, but offensive. What Trump doesn’t understand is it effectively doubles the size of the US military. It almost doubles the market for American weapons. It is heavily invested in planes and bombs because that is all that was necessary against the natives. As far as ground capabilities, it has very little.
    The US is not going to give up this added military capability, and added market.

    1. ilsm

      The MIC is built around 2.5 wars, NATO excuses the largesse for 1.0 war.

      How can the trillion buck MIC give up 40% of gross?

      And Zelenski might waste the ammunition for that 1 war!

  18. Wukchumni

    Why the world stopped having sex Telegraph
    ~~~~~~~~~~

    Being a child in the sexual revolution era was quite something, i’m not sure if it was a stewardess in a mini-skirt on a plane, or one of those tartan-skirted personal guides-with riding crop @ Disneyland that was my first sexual attraction circa 1971, but sex and/or the prospect of getting some was practically splattered in our faces on TV shows, movies & advertising, disco seemed be a lead in to having sex, rock stars were notorious for being inundated with offers, everybody was getting some except for me.

    We seem to be at a polar opposite to days of olde when anything went as long as the gender was opposite.

    Now nobody cares who you do it with, but nobody cares as much in regards to doing it.

    1. Pat

      I attribute much of that to the drugs. Almost every straight person I knew who was supposedly having tons of sex was also doing a lot of drugs. I began to take amount and how good it was with a fairly large grain of salt. Gay men didn’t talk to me about their debauched lifestyle in that period until after they settled down so them I believe.

      2. NotTimothyGeithner

        I agree with this and would add there are other issues like the cost of higher education a day other stresses.

        Public mores do change. I believe it was Liz Bruening who addressed small c conservatism among lefties types as not to confuse liberal and libertine. Despite a collapse of church attendance, we really should remember the power of the imperial church even in protestant countries as white immigrants still arrived. New identities replaced old identities. The morality doesn’t have to be linked to the institutions.

        Every politician during the 90’s turned out to be a creep. What is the effect on millennials? I would even add smaller families. Anecdotal experiences and discussions have led to a conclusion individual grades heavy in younger siblings tend to be much more wild than grades dominated by oldest siblings. I have an article that makes the claim this was a major distinction between first wave hippies who marched and the latter drug addled hippies of Woodstock.

      1. eg

        This. I am increasingly convinced that neoliberalism is so hostile to human flourishing that it acts as a systematic abortifacient.

    3. Ranger Rick

      I can think of one other reason why people wouldn’t, and I believe it even got linked here some days ago: STD infections are reaching record highs. This was already prevalent back when the phrase “hookup culture” was common, and it’s only worsened since then.

    4. MaryLand

      Much of the “free love era” came about because the birth control pill became more widely available. TV shows like Three’s Company and movies seemed to compete to see who could push the censorship the most. Some blame the boomer generation for it, but the producers of the media and CEOs of the companies controlling it were of “the Greatest Generation.” Add in increasing use of drugs by the white middle class and you get party time. I was in college in the late 60s and saw a lot, but most of my friends were very conventional. Not every boomer was a partier as portrayed in the media. In my experience maybe 15% did, but it was the Midwest.

    5. flora

      How many young men and women now have been raised on SSRI’s and ADHD drugs? 25%? More? I hear both of those do odd things to the sex drive. Add smart phones and you might have the perfect “zoning out” from real life, “zoning out” from your own body combo. / my 2 cents.

    6. JEHR

      I don’t believe the world has stopped having sex but I do know that some women have learned how to stimulate themselves without the attendance of a partner. This may occur when her husband becomes impotent because of erectile disfunction due to, for example, a prostate operation. The man probably believes he cannot feel satisfaction for himself without that function and so he no longer tries to satisfy his partner or himself.

  19. Hank Linderman

    A gem from the “Little Bit of News” link on Russia upgrading their subs:

    “Carlson did say that Putin seemed willing to negotiate with the West about both the end of the Ukraine conflict and a new balance of power in the world. Diplomacy is the art of compromise, and almost everyone “other than maybe the United States during the unipolar period” understands this, Carlson said. But while Putin wants the conflict to end, his position will only harden the longer it goes on, he added.”

    This is what I sensed while watching the interview – that Putin is willing to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine and more. A new balance of power? How about dialing back the doomsday machinery of war?

    Best…H

    1. Feral Finster

      “This is what I sensed while watching the interview – that Putin is willing to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine and more. A new balance of power? How about dialing back the doomsday machinery of war?”

      The sociopaths running Washington see this as contemptible weakness and smell blood.

    2. digi_owl

      Best i can tell, USA has never understood compromise.

      Ages ago i ran into a something from a Japanese businessman claiming he much preferred dealing with Europeans as at least they understood the give and take of negotiations. And it think it was from back in the 80s or some such.

      1. Feral Finster

        Europeans will do whatever they’re told. They have said that they do not care if their policies are unpopular, they do not care if their own people freeze or starve. They flaunt their undisguised contempt for ordinary people and their concerns.

        I suggest that you believe them.

  20. The Rev Kev

    “Israeli forces rescue 2 hostages in dramatic Gaza raid that killed at least 67 Palestinians”

    Probably find that the 7 were the Hamas guards while the other 60 were just civilians who had nowhere to flee to and could not find sufficient cover. Or maybe the Israelis are just counting up ages. So they killed two five year old kids and a fifty-seven year old woman and when you add up the ages, there is your 67.

    I think that a lot of Israelis are thinking that when this war is over, that everything will go back to the way it was in September of last year and that people will just forget. The same way that governments figure that if they ignore the Pandemic, that we will eventually go back to the 2019 economy. Well I’ve got some news for them and it is all bad.

    1. NotTimothyGeithner

      Jon Stewart last night derided Biden’s phony criticism of Israel’s “incessant bombing of civilians.” It may not seem like much but Stewart said Biden and Team Blue’s crocodile tears won’t be forgotten. It was mixed in with jokes about the gerontocracy, but I feel it was a warning shot.

    2. Pat

      I also believe that Israel’s cover as the innocent victim has slipped, and as a result of that the general population has discovered how hideously they have been behaving for years and that this isn’t just an aberration. Usually Americans would go back to just ignoring the undue influence that Israel has with American politicians, but deteriorating conditions here isn’t going to let that happen. Money and arms to Israel, while easier than Ukraine, is not going to go back to normal. And no it isn’t just Republicans coming to that, I think a lot of Dems are going to discover that Israel has erased any advantage that abortion gave them in November.
      (first test is now, even if it is complicated because both are supporters. I’m wondering if former rep Suozzi can prevail against former IDF paratrooper Mazi Pilip in the election to replace George Santos until November. His history on migrant issues seems to be the defining issue if ads mean anything. But neither seem to be talking about Israel even in discussing support or non support of the bipartisan bill that just died.)

      1. Wukchumni

        Swiss antisemitism shock at Davos shop sign saying no skis for Jews

        Posters in the sports shop window informed customers that, because of incidents, including theft, “we no longer rent sports equipment to our Jewish brothers”.

        The shop in question, part of the Pischa mountain restaurant, said in an initial statement that equipment was often not being returned, and its staff no longer wanted “the hassle” of scouring the mountain sides trying to find abandoned sledges.

        This was poorly worded and should have read ‘Israeli’ instead of Jewish, in that what inspired this shopkeeper to do such a thing are these awful cliques of 4 to 6 young Israeli tourists, most fresh off their IDF stint, and they are the worst ambassadors ever, in that i’m loath to mention how often i’ve seen said sets behave themselves in somebody else’s country. A rude awakening to watch their antics.

        And yes, there are rude Americans, but we don’t travel in packs of jackals.

        1. The Rev Kev

          Saw that story which seemed kinda strange but then this article mentioned that they were Orthodox Jews and it all made sense as these were the sort that kicks up stinks aboard planes or in restaurants and if criticized for their self-entitled behaviour, cry antisemitism. They were scattering hotel gear over the mountainside on a routine basis or would just take stuff from the storage room without permission and this has been going on for years this behaviour-

          https://www.rt.com/news/592338-swiss-resort-jews-ban/

    3. Kouros

      With a genocide label comng down the pipeline a some time in the future from ICJ, the future for Israel won’t be the same as the past…

  21. bassmule

    “NATO’s Article 5 obliges NATO member ONLY to consider aiding an attacked state, not to saddle up.” Um, I don’t think that’s what it says.

    “Collective defence means that an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against all Allies.”

    NATO Topic: Collective defence.

    1. vao

      … and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

      So:

      1) each country will take its decision individually,
      2) determining alone what it “deems necessary”,
      3) including, but not necessarily, “armed force”,
      4) and coordinate with the others when it comes to actually do something.

      That article 5 is quite weasely.

    2. dingusansich

      Um, I don’t think that’s what it says.

      From the text you linked to:

      Article 5

      The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

      Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

      Pick your way through the dense clausal underbrush to the phrase “as it deems necessary.” That’s not a “shall” or a “will.” The article leaves plenty of wiggle room. It doesn’t say, It’s war! It says, Each signatory will act as it sees fit, in keeping with the situation. That could include armed force. It doesn’t say it must. Here’s what the untangled text says, minus the throat clearing: “each … will assist … by taking … action it deems necessary.” So, if you’re a signatory, the question you’ve got to be asking yourself [punk] is, Do I deem it necessary? Happily, among the answers you may arrive at, in compliance with the treaty, is—um, no.

      Superficially it looks like the Three Musketeers; legally it’s Every man for himself. Why do you suppose it’s written that way, accident or design? IANAL, but I’m a guess design.

  22. The Rev Kev

    ‘Nury Vittachi
    @NuryVittachi
    A U.S. PROMISE to Taiwan has quietly imploded after the dramatic collapse of Germany’s industrial sector.’

    Very much worth reading this one as it puts a lot of information into context. Hopeful those in Taiwan see what has happened to Germany and will not be keen to follow their example.

    1. CA

      “A U.S. PROMISE to Taiwan has quietly imploded after the dramatic collapse of Germany’s industrial sector.

      Researchers at the Brookings thinktank said Taiwan’s economy would survive the shock of war in the same way that Germany’s industrial economy would survive the shock of losing its gas pipeline from Russia.

      But it’s now clear that the German economy hasn’t survived the loss at all.”

      There will of course be no war over Taiwan, what these words clearly show however is the moral and ethical emptiness of Brookings. The purpose of Brookings researchers being to press or sell war with no thought to what war actually is. After all, war is where the money is and america’s military budget is already well over $1 trillion yearly and climbing.

  23. Wisker

    “Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen”

    Leave it to the cranky old Register to complain about perhaps the only good use-case for LLM “AI” tech. I use JetBrains on a daily basis, and even paid for the AI subscription (it is not “forced” on you simply because you use the IDE). Best $100 I ever spent, and I care not a jot if snippets of my code get vacuumed up into the evil hive-mind to improve the models.

    As a novice programmer who routinely works with new and evolving code libraries, it’s a godsend. It’s 10-100x more effective than web searching and comes in very handy explaining code snippets from others that are poorly documented or you don’t otherwise grasp some aspect of. Probably of limited use to master developers, though everyone I ever worked with in my end of the tech industry was always in the process of teaching themselves something new in the field.

    If you understand its substantial limitations and use it accordingly, “AI” for code is a powerful tool–vastly more useful than any other LLM use-cases that I’ve seen.

  24. Koldmilk

    The article “Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen” is yet another datum documenting the AI pandemic. Though the stupidity of the unwanted feature is well known and nearly inevitable in any mature software base — AI is infesting everything, it’s no surprise that it’s manifesting here — AI is just so much worse. Rather like SARS-CoV-2, AI has mutated more rapidly, infected more widely, and does more damage, than the hated unwanted feature of normal “feature creep”. Every software company wants to create a “killer feature” that demolishes the competition and propels them to monopolise market share not realising that their “killer feature” is more likely to kill them.

  25. CA

    “China’s Shipyards Are Ready for a Protracted War. America’s Aren’t.”

    America for whatever absurd reason decided to contain China.  China being the size of America and having a population 1.4 billion.  Since America’s containment policy began, China constructed the largest shipbuilding facility of any country.  China now builds over half of the world shipping capacity, with the most advanced capabilities, completely domestically sourced. *

    The Wall Street Journal assertion about shipyards is as usual prejudiced, belligerent and an intolerably dangerous allusion.

    * With the exception of cruise ships which China has just begun to produce.

    1. NotTimothyGeithner

      American elites are all amateur phrenologists. They couldn’t conceive China wasn’t always going to stay down.

    2. CA

      https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-01-15/China-ranks-top-in-global-shipbuilding-sector-for-14-years-1qnyiiAqUyQ/p.html

      January 15, 2024

      Robust growth in 2023: China maintains top position in global shipbuilding sector for 14 years

      China witnessed strong expansion in output, new orders and orders on hand in the past year, with the three major indicators securing the top position in the global shipbuilding market for 14 consecutive years, according to data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on Monday.

      China has also become the only country in the world to achieve comprehensive growth in the three indicators.

      https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-01-15/China-ranks-top-in-global-shipbuilding-sector-for-14-years-1qnyiiAqUyQ/img/9ea270ec3349439cad66909ec87e861b/9ea270ec3349439cad66909ec87e861b.png

      In the past 12 months, China’s shipbuilding output reached 42.32 million deadweight tonnes (dwt), a year-on-year increase of 11.8 percent, accounting for 50.2 percent of the world’s total.

      The new orders rose 56.4 percent year on year to 71.2 million dwt during the period, taking up 66.6 percent of the world’s total.

      By the end of December, the volume of orders on hand was 139.39 million dwt, up 32 percent year on year, accounting for 55 percent of the world’s total.

      In 2023, five Chinese shipbuilding enterprises ranked in the global top 10 in output, seven in top 10 for new order volume, and six for holding orders, said the MIIT….

  26. SOMK

    Re: Sex and the decline thereof

    All points taken (though I somewhat doubt about the ice cream/sex dichotomy, after all being asked if you would prefer sex or ice cream is perhaps a little too close to a proposition for it to be a reliable data point!) there does appear to be a correlation between use of pornography and impotency and the definition of sex for most people isn’t so much sex itself as the fulfillment of a narrow kind of lust. However the relatively large size of human genitalia and their particular orientation, making intercourse uniquely for humans a face to face matter, seem to indicate a prerogative for sex having by a function above reproduction alone. Taoists and others would preach ejaculation itself is a mistake, that one should slow down at precisely the moment one feels inspired to speed up, that this capacity for forestall immediate pleasure (which is reductively what the late-to-develop new cortex does) is what separates us from the animals. Funnily enough the long tweet regarding Putin’s Marxist/Leninist deep historical perspective and the West fixation with ‘immediacy’ hints as something more fundamental/existential at play, m mass sexual ‘disfunction’ being a rather on-the-nose variation of the theme.

    There is an interesting documentary about sexology in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall called ‘Do Communists have better sex?’ , reductively the findings were East German women valued orgasms less and had them more often, as opposed to their more orgasm focused, consumerist West German women the essential thread being if you take care of the fundamentals, a house, a job, a place in society (per the recent post on Erikson and identity crisis) as opposed to the kind of unfolding mass engendered identity crisis we’ve had in the the west since… well where would you even begin?

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      The questionnaires were written, not in person or on the phone. And men way overrate sex because they are driven to have it. If women regularly had pleasurable sex, why do men have to pay for it implicitly or explicitly? One of my (as the Brits would put it) highly sexed women friends insisted women should be paid every time they had sex. And I will refrain from much more anecdata, but during my time in the New Age, I was in or on the periphery of several groups where the promise of getting sex was one of the big draws. There were repeatedly women who said they had had sex with literally hundreds of partners and never having an orgasm or having one only when on drugs. And conversely a dearth of women countering them and reporting on how satisfied they were.

      Now there are clearly quite a few women who have great sex lives and skilled partners. My point, which I perhaps should have put more tersely, is the level of sexual satisfaction among women is greatly overstated culturally due to sexualized media content + women faking orgasms + both genders finding touch to be rewarding (as in women can find non-climactic sex to be OK since they got some nice foreplay but as the same time there is a level of resentment for making sure the man got his orgasm when they faked theirs). But since men are on average bigger and stronger than women, women are always at risk of being raped or the lesser version, having to go along with sex they really did not want.

      1. Feral Finster

        I am not now, nor have I ever been female, but I have had multiple women tell me that sex is obviously more pleasurable for women than it is for men. Certainly, most men do not have multiple orgasms, while multiples is not that remarkable among women.

        However, from what I can tell, getting a female to that point is as much a state of mind, emotion and mood as it is of nerve endings and sensory stimuli, and consequently, more difficult and complicated. It can’t come any time from just anywhere or from any partner. The dude who drives one woman wild may leave another cold.

        For their part, Men can orgasm under just about any circumstances, if that’s what is available. (For instance, otherwise heterosexual men in prison). Lots of women, as you note, don’t get much out of casual sex with randoms, but the men involved just about always do get an orgasm.

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          To put your issue more simply, most women don’t orgasm from vaginal intercourse. Which raises questions about why sex is more reliably pleasurable for men than women, particularly the kind that produces babies.

        3. Ken Murphy

          We’re driven to it because we get punished, badly, for failing to do so. I’m sure there’s a medical name, but the term “blue balls” gets the point across. A ridiculously painful experience (or so I’ve heard…) that men don’t usually talk about because it means failure and people who fail are losers and no man wants to be a loser.

      2. zagonostra

        Brings to mind Libido Dominandi as St. Augustine writes about it. Yes men are “driven to have it” and it is that drive which is manipulated in a vast variety of ways, some subtle, some not. I can only imagine how difficult it is for an adolescent male to sublimate that drive to a higher purpose, until it can find its proper (you define) outlet.

        1. Reply

          The odds are increasingly against that adolescent male, graphically shown by the smart phone in his hand. Look at uptrends in depression and related for that cohort since, say, 2007, and downtrends in so many formerly positive themes.

      3. Albe Vado

        Could you perhaps elaborate more on what your friend was saying? Because I can interpret it in a couple different ways. Either that men are regularly so bad at sex that it becomes a chore for women and so they should be getting something else out of it in compensation. Or that women don’t have a sex drive, and that sex is inherently never its own reward for them.

        I find both options bleak, but the first is at least in principle solvable (if more men got more skilled at sex more women would actually want to have sex with them). The other option is hopeless.

        I also think the second option is just pure nonsense. One that I think relies on unfair stereotypes. I simply dispute the idea that men are uniquely ‘driven to sex’ but women aren’t. That doesn’t line up with either my experience as a man or with my interactions with women over the years.

        Evolutionarily it makes zero sense for women to have a capacity to feel sexual pleasure (and likely in fact a greater capacity than men) but for that to not factor in as a motivation. If women don’t care about sex for its own sake, why do women feel pleasure from sex at all? In fact why do women, uniquely, have an organ that serves literally no other function than being a highly dense nerve cluster? This line of argument would make more sense to me if women had less or even zero capacity to feel sexual pleasure.

    2. elissa3

      “making intercourse uniquely for humans a face to face matter”

      One of the insights/revelations of the prehistory movie “Quest For Fire” (1981). Very rich and sometimes hilarious. A female representative of a more evolved “homo something” tribe initiates a male member of another more primitive band. The final shot implies that human sexual relations can lead to a greater intimacy. (Not that other species cannot also have such). Back in the day, I was friends with the scriptwriter, Gerard Brach. His offbeat sense of humor is evident throughout the movie. Recommended.

  27. Roger Blakely

    Re: Why the world stopped having sex Telegraph.

    In any transaction there is a counterparty. It is easy for women to forget this. What happens when a wife stops having sex with her husband because she no longer feels like having sex with him? What happens when a husband quits his job because his wife stops having sex with him?

    Civilization depends upon male utility. Sex from women is a modicum of recompense that men receive from maintaining civilization. In the twenty-first century American women are enjoying the fruits of male utility without offering men the reward of sex. What happens when public health statistics show that American men in their twenties are virgins or at the very least have had no sex in the previous twelve months? Men stop maintaining civilization. Men drop out. Men quit playing the game because there is nothing in it for them.

    Last week we discussed the graphs posted on X showing the gender gap, i.e., the fact that women in South Korea, the US, the UK, and Germany are getting more politically liberal while men are getting more politically conservative. What is the end result of all of this? Trump is going to get reelected, and the Democrats will never again win the presidency.

      1. KD

        If we really wanted to get into the issue, it would make sense to focus on same sex couples, in which each sexes natural proclivities are not checked. Based on what I can tell, in general, gays are having a lot more sex than lesbians, which lends a lot of credence to the ice cream preference theory of sexual mismatch.

        My only reservation is that Western medieval depictions of women had them as wanton sex fiends, in contrast to our chaste Victorian stereotype, so how to separate culture and ideology from reality, when reality is itself composed from both in part? Also, does VD change sexual behavior and mores?

        1. Feral Finster

          A very good point. Look up “lesbian bed death” – and that cannot be readily blamed on male inability to sex properly.

        2. Harold

          Everyone knows that women are the maintainers, custodians, and transmitters of culture and civilization.

        3. Stephanie

          My only reservation is that Western medieval depictions of women had them as wanton sex fiends, in contrast to our chaste Victorian stereotype, so how to separate culture and ideology from reality

          I think asking people might be a good place to start.

          Failing that, mining MindGeek’s data (or whatever they’re calling themselves now).

          Failing that, remembering that cultures aren’t uniform – there’s a boatload of current media (some of it hosted by the Artist Formerly Known As MindGeek) depicting women as wanton sex fiends rather than chaste Victorians, so I’m willing to guess there may have been a similar gamut of female behavior during the European medieval period.

    2. CallMeTeach

      “American women are enjoying the fruits of male utility without offering men the reward of sex. ”
      So your argument is that women owe men sex for “maintaining civilization”? Really? THIS is why a lot of women eschew sex. Some men view it as transactional. Not surprisingly, those men don’t have sex.
      I find it impossible to wrap my brain around the idea that a sentient human being would type out a paragraph insinuating that women not putting out on demand will be the reason Trump wins. But here we are.
      God help us all.

    3. Pat

      Despite the clear paternalistic misogyny of your premise, let’s reduce this to a transactional situation.
      How many men can house, feed, provide healthcare and cleaning and childcare services for a woman and any children produced by the token of the transactional agreement, aka sex on demand? Oh wait, I am sure you expect the woman to clean, cook and provide all childcare AND sex on demand. The man only has to provide a home and food. So immediately the transactional agreement has added a massive amount of unpaid labor not just sex. How many can do this? Or are we also going to add hold down a full time job along with all the unpaid labor and sex. And what guarantees are being offered to the woman that they won’t be left supporting themselves and any offspring from the transactional agreement.
      The traditional “arrangement” may not always have been as one sided for a majority of women, and there are certainly exceptional relationships where men accept that just making a living or waging a war is not enough on their part, but for most of the last fifty years that traditional relationship really hasn’t been the bargain you seem to believe it to be.

      And for the record I don’t think successful long term sexual relationships are either that simplistic or that transactional.

    4. Jason Boxman

      I think dating apps changed the whole game; Back before then, you could actually meet people organically outside of high school or college. My experience, at least, is post-app, going to meetups or bars or whatever it was often 75%+ men. That wasn’t always the case. And on apps, men not in the top tenth of attractiveness need not apply.

      Seems like a dumpster fire to me. On the flip side, I live a very safe life with no social relations whatsoever. I wasn’t planning on been entrenched for a Pandemic, but it’s proved useful.

      1. Mark Gisleson

        Samuel R. Delany’s late ’70s “Triton” is best known for its mid-novel sex change (which happens off-camera and goes without mention for a confusing stretch of plot) and I also remember there being at least one tech-assisted remote sex/tele-sex scene. Half the world could go hikikomori and the new celibates would find vintage science-fiction ready to help them transition.

        While SF may not have always gotten tech right, they’ve covered most of the future sex bases quite well of which there are 37 all together but male-dominated Earth culture starts on 23rd base and then skips straight to 32nd base before falling asleep.

        Not unexpectedly, Wired wrote about SF future sex in 2008. 2008 was, apparently, a more innocent time. I would not recommend putting “future sex” into a 2024 search engine. With or without each other humanity will continue to reproduce, it’s the one thing we’re really good at.

        1. JBird4049

          This whole thread on sex is kind of goofy.

          It obvious that most people, regardless of their sex, do better with sex with good communication, a positive environment especially socially, and good physical and mental health; how common is it to have nothing on that list?

          Let’s add that too many people, but especially men, do not want to put in the time learning how to please their preferred sex, forget about their individual partner. This is also due to the f—- up physical, mental, and emotional state that people are in. Not having the energy, desire, or patience needed to learn anything.

          Men are less likely to be utterly dysfunctional is due to evolution and their lack of ability because of this is going to turn women, really anyone, off, but considering what the state of the world is, preferring ice cream over sex is very understandable.

    5. Albe Vado

      I’m actually kind of sympathetic to this comment. Not because I agree with any of it; I don’t, I think it’s a bunch of ugly, goofy nonsense (civilization is a collective effort, among other things).

      But I think it’s emerging out of the context of how modern American masculinity is in crisis. As women get more opportunities and increasingly realize they don’t need men, men don’t know what to do. On top of that there is often a genuine devaluing of men, their experiences, mental health, and so on. Men are actually in crisis, and the most common response from wider society is just to mock them. I can condemn the ugly and stupid ideas that come out of the MRA and incel quarters while also recognizing that they’re ultimately born out of a genuine social crisis. Because no one is diagnosing or helping any of the genuine problems, men left out in the wilderness then turn inward into very weird, hateful subcultures.

      Hopefully this is just a transition period, and things eventually settle down. Equality should go both ways. Raising women up shouldn’t come at the expense of driving men down. But part of that will be men coming to realize that a social order where women don’t actually *need* you isn’t a bad thing, or a threat to your purpose, etc. Partnerships of equals are actually very nice things to have.

  28. antidlc

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/02/13/covid-isolation-guidelines-cdc-change/
    CDC plans to drop five-day covid isolation guidelines

    Americans who test positive for the coronavirus no longer need to routinely stay home from work and school for five days under new guidance planned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    The agency is loosening its covid isolation recommendations for the first time since 2021 to align it with guidance on how to avoid transmitting flu and RSV, according to four agency officials and an expert familiar with the discussions.

    What a stupid, stupid timeline.

    1. ArvidMartensen

      Back in the day my committee work was being undercut by other members of a committee I was on. And everyone around me told me that it wasn’t sabotage, it was just human stupidity. I wondered if this was true. Until one of the committee copied me in on an email by mistake…….

      Whoever is driving these Covid rules that are coincidentally leading to more infections. Younger people getting Long Covid and older people getting Long Long Long Gone, Covid.

      Perhaps they are not coming from a place of human stupidity.

      As the old saying goes, if it looks like a democidal duck and waddles like a democidal duck and quacks like a democidal duck …….

  29. johnnyme

    South Africa has launched an ‘urgent request’ with top UN court over Israel’s targeting of Rafah

    CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — South Africa’s government said Tuesday it had lodged an “urgent request” with the U.N.’s International Court of Justice to consider whether Israel’s military operations targeting the southern Gaza city of Rafah are a breach of provisional orders the court handed down last month in a case alleging genocide.

    South Africa is now asking the court to consider further provisional measures against Israel, said Tuesday’s statement released by the office of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

    “The South African government said it was gravely concerned that the unprecedented military offensive against Rafah, as announced by the State of Israel, has already led to and will result in further large scale killing, harm and destruction,” the statement said “This would be in serious and irreparable breach both of the Genocide Convention and of the Court’s Order of 26 January 2024.”

  30. Carolinian

    That’s a good Caitlin written in rebuttal to the MSM’s Putin rebuttal. The latter:

    “The biggest [Western] news media companies are privately owned and operate without direct government control, in contrast to the state-controlled media landscape in Russia,” writes Politico’s Sergey Goryashko. “Russian state TV and the primary news agencies there are the property of the government, and the Kremlin controls other media or destroys those not willing to collaborate.”

    While she asserts that here the USG is in de facto control of the media perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the elites, who also own the media, are in control of the government–regardless of which bickering political party takes up DC management. This wasn’t always true and FDR had Republican press opposition even during WW2. But in a diminished press landscape only big capital–Bezos for example–is keeping the establishment press in operation. Putin tamed his oligarchs. Ours seem to have taken over.

    Perhaps this will change and, as Patrick Lawrence hopes re the NYT, the media will start to reassert their consciences and look to their reputations. After much slaughter they did so on Vietnam and in the 70s even the CIA was taken down a peg or two. Time for a repeat.

        1. JBird4049

          I believe Truman did say he regretted approving the CIA and claimed that he was misled as to its scope. Supposedly it was to be a central coordinator of information, not a corrupt, kill happy, country destroying monster.

    2. Pookah Harvey

      The opening sentences of Edward Bernays’ book ‘Propaganda‘ (1928)

      The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

      We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

      And they have had almost a hundred years to hone their skills.

      1. JBird4049

        >>>And they have had almost a hundred years to hone their skills.

        Yes, they have, but it is too bad that they have not spent some time on learning how to think. We are being governed by the unwise, the foolish, the ignorance who use their power to mold us into their image.

  31. ChrisFromGA

    Mr. market not so happy with a hot CPI.

    The Dread Pirate Powell looms in the distance, threatening to take away the lower rates that everyone on the street has already psychologically accepted and used as collateral for a new yacht.

    Argggh! He’ll send yer 401k to Davey Jones Locker. And piss in the punch bowl.

    REIT-wrecks, dead ahead!

    2. griffen

      No! inflation down and economy good, comrades. What is this evil, Russian plotting by Putin to inform the proles, that inflation is still gonna be a problem for Democrats in 2024?? \Sarc

      minds imploding on CNBC following that release…whilst I had it tuned in. Market prophet ( of a sort I suggest ) Jim Cramer had an awful take on why the measure for housing, OER, was being a sticky little bugger and throwing a wrench into the plans for sometime soon, they hoped, Fed rate cuts. The Paul Krugman ( by example ) wing of economic commentators have a problem on their hands, based on recent messaging to the lower classes…as recently noted here in weekend links people aren’t seemingly interested in the higher priced dog food.

      1. Wukchumni

        I, like most of my fellow countrymen, own no office buildings full of empty, but apparently the loans for this dreck have been spread across the globe, allowing everybody to feel the pain.

  32. KD

    While the Marxist outlook is well known for its insistence upon the division of society, and its focus on class warfare, many overlook the flip side of this view: The understanding of society and history as one, integrated concrete totality.

    This sounds more like a deep dive into the Hegelian substrate upon which Marxism rests, not to mention some flourishes that sound uniquely Heideggerian. Its true a lot of Western Marxists aged into Hegelian conservatives (Burnham, Genovese), perhaps this is the new Zeitgeist for the former Soviet bloc?

  33. CA

    https://twitter.com/Kanthan2030/status/1757082556456149197

    S.L. Kanthan @Kanthan2030

    Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei finally understands censorship in US/EU:

    “This is like a cultural revolution, which is trying to destroy anybody who has different attitudes, not even a clear opinion.

    This is such a pity that it has happened in the West.

    In Western universities, in the media, in the political sector, in every location, you cannot talk about the truth.”

    https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3251121/when-celebrated-dissidents-find-grass-isnt-greener-other-side

    11:41 AM · Feb 12, 2024

  34. Jason Boxman

    From The Vision Pro’s scary side effect

    That seems like a solution, but it ain’t. When people adapt to a perceptual change for long enough, the real world starts to look wrong in the opposite direction. If you wore glasses that turned your vision upside down, let’s say, you’d have to adapt again when the glasses came off. The longer you’re inside a funhouse world, the longer the weird perceptual aftereffects last. So people who spend their workday inside a Vision Pro might go home at night with a miscalibrated targeting system and what feels like a shroom hangover.

    You get this effect slightly when your distance vision prescription changes. It’s a complete mindjob seeing the world completely wrong, but after two weeks, it starts to feel right. Fortunately, the effect isn’t as pronounced, and you can both wear and not wear distance glasses and be able to competently interact with the world.

    1. Vandemonian

      I was left with double vision after surgery for a detached retina – the image from one eye was 5 degrees higher than the other. As you say, after two weeks or so the double vision disappeared. My brain had adjusted itself to align the two images. However, this subconscious mental effort left me with a constant nagging low grade headache. This went on for two or three years.

      Enter a smart optometrist. This guy gave a glasses prescription with a prismatic correction that made the two images align. I can see just fine, and the headache has gone. However, when I take my glasses off, I get double vision again, and walk around with one eye closed.

      I guess the Vision Pro effect would be the same: wear them constantly and accommodate to the device after a couple of weeks, or alternate with and without, and suffer from the addition cognitive load.

  35. Carolinian

    Re sex

    Bring on the orgasmatron, the dystopian device in Woody Allen’s 1973 comedy Sleeper for rapidly inducing sexual climax? In the futuristic farce, help is required as almost all people in the Sleeper universe are impotent or frigid, barring males of Italian descent.

    And in 2023 the biggest hit was a movie about dolls lacking genitals–wanting to be sexy but not sure what happens next.

    Perhaps an overpopulated world should accept the new trend–and get to work on that orgasmatron.

  36. JTMcPhee

    “However, that view does overlook the value to us of having lots of bases in NATO member states.”

    Not clear to me what possible value the continued occupation of Europe by the USUK Empire provides. USUK has pretty much hewn to its real purpose in creating NATO — “To keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” that was how NATO’s first secretary general characterized the purpose of the military alliance after it was formed in 1949. What would the world look like if the triumphant rise and collapse of Monroe-Doctrine industrial-financial imperialism had not been seemingly foreordained and inevitable?

    Would the Soviet Union “enslaved the West?” No tens, maybe hundreds of millions dead and impoverished by Imperial USUK and now Zionist top-doggery? Never know.

    And where to from here? What are the impulses and vectors that might lead to a survivable commensal world? Probably foolish to count on the wily Russians and CPC to foam the runway… or any set of BRICS+ “ leaders” and oligarchs.

    1. Expat2uruguay

      I too would appreciate an explanation of what is meant by this sentence:

      “However, that view does overlook the value to us of having lots of bases in NATO member states.”

      1. Skip Intro

        Cost-plus contracting is, I think, the answer to your question. Spending is a goal in itself, why spend $100 to give a soldier a PX Pizzahut Pizza, when you can transport them to Poland or Iraq and spend 1000x that amount.

  37. JTMcPhee

    And regarding “CIA and Mossad hold talks on hostage deal,” with an observation that mossad could not sway Yahoo or Ben Gvir:

    Given that both agencies have on many occasions used their “agency” to kill and otherwise influence leaders, including on the home front, with policies they don’t cotton to, I’m not sure that is an accurate notion. USZIO “talks,” like Oslo “deal” and everything else related to Palestine, are just laudable and can-kicking pending the mutually desired (as seems to me to be their heart-of-hearts) “permanent solution” — dead Palestine and Eretz Is rael from sea to shining sea.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      Rabin was a long time ago and if anything Netanyahu had a hand in it. So I am sure he knows to watch his back. And as many experts have pointed out, getting rid of Netanyahu changes nothing. The right wing is in charge and nearly all of Israel is united behind exterminating the Palestinians.

  38. hemeantwell

    Re “Putin’s Marxist-Leninist Subconscious,”.of late I’ve seen a scattering of people decrying “Western nihilism,” and here it takes the form of juxtaposing Trotsky’s supposed interest in liquidating culture and tradition and Stalin/Lenin’s interest in preserving it. At bottom, what seems to be going on is the denial of the possibility that it would be attractive to work to build a society that seeks to preserve and promote the lives of its members, etc, In other words, a society-in-formation defined by a social contract. Opposing such nihilism we get

    They realized that the cultural, national, and civilizational heritage of the Soviet people was irreducible to the decisions of institutions, but rather represented an organic, integral, and holistic culmination of the people’s historical existence itself

    This is another version of the narodnik dream. which Lenin actually thought of as superseded by a process of industrialization that kinda get in the way of a “holistic culmination” of cultural aspirations formulated in the bosom of Tsarist autocracy. Stalin, sitting on top of a remarkable bureaucratic machine that was a culmination of his voluntarist assault on the peasantry, drew on traditions that were, in a strong sense, rehabilitated by the Nazi invasion and the broadly appreciated necessity of unity and cohesion.

    I’ll put on the brakes here. But it’s pretty dismaying to see the ideological weeds that spring up when blood is being shed. Putin c. 2005 or so was going about trying to reestablish developmental state capacities that are, in a way, “universal,” any society might endorse them. They don’t need to be particularized as part of a “people’s historical existence,” unless one, as he is, seeks to encourage affirmative resonance between current institutions and the autocratic past. Trying to pitch that as part of a M-L subconscious is just bar talk.

    2. KD

      Stalin, sitting on top of a remarkable bureaucratic machine that was a culmination of his voluntarist assault on the peasantry, drew on traditions that were, in a strong sense, rehabilitated by the Nazi invasion and the broadly appreciated necessity of unity and cohesion.

      War is the great political crucible of a regime. If you look at Stalinism, what would it mean in the absence of the Great Patriotic War and the transformations of the Soviet Union under the crucible of war? If the USSR had just collapsed under the German assault, like the Tzar, it would be an entirely different thing from what it was. You can say X is just a result of historical accident, but the Nazi invasion was overdetermined. The Bolsheviks were under attack in the Civil War, and they never lost their fear of foreign invasion. Hitler announced his plans to invade in Mein Kampf in 1925, way before he even seized power. It is hard to imagine that Stalin was not aware of Hitler’s plan.

      The collectivization and push for heavy industrialization was driven by the need to mobilize for war, as much as any other historical factor. This was driven by fear of foreign invasion, and a desire to develop a serious deterrent. Stalin is criticized for the Great Purge, but he witnessed the collapse of the Republic in Spain and how quickly the country was divided and wanted to avoid the same fate. I do not see how you could view Stalin except as highly conscious of the threat of Naziism, intent on deterring and avoiding a Nazi invasion, and while he may have been surprised by Barbarossa, the USSR was the only country really prepared to fight when they entered the war. Britain was way over their heads, and France collapsed in 6 weeks.

      The idea that war, the fear of war, the need to deter and prepare for war was not a driving engine of Stalinism is not realistic. Marxist-Leninism as it developed under Stalin was directly related to the real existential threat posed to historical Russia by historical German imperial fascism.

      I do not see how “socialism in one country” can divorce itself from historical particularity, and Stalin’s appeal to patriotism and religion during the Great Patriotic War (not the Great Soviet War) is not just some cynical prop, historical accident, or some regressive compromise but part of a particular vision. Stalin was extremely cautious, and presumably understood the danger of patriotism and religion to the regime, but he wasn’t afraid to appeal to those historical forces when it was necessary. They were not antithetical to the Socialist Revolution, but unrestrained they could become a threat to the Revolution.

      No, I think the historicism of the post is closer to Hegelian or Heideggerian philosophy than Marxist-Leninism, but Marxism came out of Hegel, and retains elements of Hegel, like historicism, In some ways, the contradiction of Marxism is that on one hand, it develops out of a dialectical understanding class conflict conditioned not only by history but the material conditions of production, inverting Hegel (but still Prussian). [Hegal does have the End Times/End of History when all colors blend into one, but universalism is only realized at Ragnarok.] On the other hand, classical economics is an abstract and universalist framework (and thoroughly English), so if you focus on the economic dimension of Marxism, it goes toward a globalist/universalist understanding of the world. Because of the abstract, universalist frame, the neoclassicals have been able to formalize aspects of classical economics in mathematics, which is completely abstract, de-contextualized, and de-historicized. On the other hand, if you look at things from the sociological/historical dimension of Marxism, you get a very particularist account of the rise of the proletariat, which didn’t actually arise everywhere and at the same time.

  39. Tom Stone

    I see two advantages to a Kamala Harris Presidency.
    1) she does not have a death wish, being an abusive “Girl Boss” requires subjects who won’t be available after a Nuclear exchange.
    2) Hillary Clinton would have a stroke, 70 years to late, but better late than never.

  40. Carolinian

    Re BYD

    One of BYD’s newest models, the subcompact Seagull, starts at less than $11,000.

    So if China can make electric cars for that price then shouldn’t our AGW world be snapping them up? Musk himself had the chance to make Tesla a small car company and said no.

    Surely the logical approach, if one is serious about global warming, is to make cheap small battery EV for commuting while the ICE cars continue to exist for long distances. One of the biggest problems with Teslas–also making them expensive–would be the huge battery pack necessary for long range. Their business model is to replace ICE rather than supplement it. And clearly that’s not happening anytime soon.

  41. Snailslime

    In ancient Rome the number of prostitutes in relation to the population as a whole was apparently so enormous that for that to make any economic sense some historians argue that the Romans have to have had so much more sex than we do today (orders of magnitude more than was the case even in prior, presumably more sex filled decades of the 20th century) that it’s completely ridiculous.

    And that would have been on top of the fact that every roman citizen was of course completely free to rape their own non prostitute slaves (of either gender) to their heart’s content.

    And since sex, like everything else in roman society, generally was about status, power, hierarchy, control and domination, it was seen as improper for the dominant party to actually even try to satisfy or give pleasure to the dominated.

    There may have been some that did not fully agree with this view, judging by some of the erotic poetry, but supposedly it was at least extremely common a “philosophy” amongst upper class men.

    So, lots and lots of sex, but much or most of it can’t have been all that pleasurable or satisfying.

    1. Kouros

      There is a footnote in the “French Leutenant’s Women”” novel indicating that in Victorian London, 1 in 10 houses was a brothel. The industrialization and its abuse on the workers, men and women forced to flee their farming life, and without contaceptives, ended up making sex workers better off on average than the actual worker…

  42. Snailslime

    Mutant wolves 🐺 more resilient to cancer, that presumably evolved to deal with higher levels of radiation (or poisoning by Plutonium or whatever, the article didn’tvopen properly for me, so I could only see the subtitle)?

    That’s pretty damn cool by itself and if it could contribute to more effectively battle cancer in human beings that would be awesome as well.

    The only downside would be if our psychopathic Doctor Strangeloves, who want us to stop worrying and love the bomb already, damnit, were to see it and use it as another talking point to argue that nuclear war totes isn’t a big deal and in the long run even good for the health of the survivors.

  43. JBird4049

    >>>And they have had almost a hundred years to hone their skills.

    Yes, they have, but it is too bad that they have not spent some time on learning how to think. We are being governed by the unwise, the foolish, the ignorant who use their power to mold us into their image.

  46. steppenwolf fetchit

    About map of electric passenger rail in Kansas City in 1924 versus recently, and the statement that ” cars destroyed our cities” . . .

    It wasn’t “cars” which decided all on their own to destroy cities. It wasn’t the “cars” which diddit.
    It was a three-way conspiracy between General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Firestone Tire and Rubber ( or rather their human leaders and power-excercisers) who diddit through a whole bunch of shell companies like the so-called ” national city lines” and possibly other such. On purpose and with malice aforethought , to destroy all that transportation infrastructure in order to create a transportation vacuum to fill by selling cars and buses, tires, gas, etc.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines

    So it would take a massive political counter-conspiracy in towns and cities all over the Clinton Archipelago to rebuild such electric passenger rail transport systems as might be able to survive in today’s cities and might be able to displace the need and desire for cars and maybe even buses to an extent.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines

    Maybe if train transit can be revived and functionalized all over the Clinton Archipelago, some members of Trumpland may decide they want something like that in their areas too. It has to start somewhere if it is going to start at all, and it won’t start in Trumpland.

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