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Links 2/17/2024

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Joking in the jungle: Apes have humor and they love teasing each other ZMEScience (Dr. Kevin)

Apes Got the Giggles Millions of Years Ago ScienceBlog (Dr. Kevin)

Watch: Airboat glides across ice to save trapped man BBC. Darwin Award fail, at Little Bay de Noc, as in Escanaba, Michigan, one of my old stomping grounds. Above the fold!

Our human ancestors often ate each other, and for surprising reasons New Scientist (Dr. Kevin)

Pesticide linked to reproductive issues found in Cheerios, Quaker Oats and other oat-based foods CBS (Kevin W)

You’ve heard about incels but you should know about femcels: the secret world of involuntary celibate women ZMEScience (Dr. Kevin)

Aeschylus’ Prometheus Unbound: Rebuilding a Lost Masterpiece Antigone (Anthony L)

#COVID-19

Long COVID Seems to Be a Brain Injury, Scientists Discover ScienceAlert (Paul R)

COVID patients are 4.3 times more likely to develop chronic fatigue, CDC report finds ABC (Paul R)

Colorado Teen Has Had Long Covid for 4 Years, Celebrated Prom in Hospital: ‘The Virus Just Began to Take Over’ Yahoo (ma)

Climate/Environment

15% of Americans are in climate change denial. Are you living in a denial hotspot? Check this map ZMEScience (Dr. Kevin)

After scrapping nuclear reactors, Germany to spend billions on new gas power plants Politico. UserFriendly: “Green party my ass.”

China?

Yet another US lawmakers group heading for Taiwan Asia Times (Kevin W). No Houthi help for you!

China Urges US to Lift ‘Illegal’ Sanctions, Ease Travel Concerns Bloomberg

Old Blighty

Europe and the US are drifting further apart – and Britain will be left to flounder Guardian (Kevin W)

Gaza

‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 133: Israel cuts electricity to critical Nasser Hospital patients, forces staff to evacuate Mondoweiss

Nasrallah Responds To Israeli Attack On Civilians In Lebanon Moon of Alabama (Chuck L)

Jordanians form human chain to block trucks into Israel in solidarity with Gaza New Arab (Vikas S)

Israeli settlements stand in the way of peace. Biden can defund them all Guardian (Dr. Kevin). *Sigh*. You’d have to Nakba the settlers in the West Bank. Na ga happen as long as there is a state of Israel and even then a very tall order.

* * *

Energy firms face legal threat over Israeli licences to drill for gas off Gaza Middle East Eye (Kevin W)

* * *

I have a soft spot for these guys. Among other things, they’ve protested in NYC carrying Palestinian flags:

New Not-So-Cold War

AVDEEVKA FALLS, UKRAINE RETREATS UNDER THE EYE OF SAURON Larry Johnson

West Sends Ukraine 3D Printers to Make Spare Parts, But Won’t Solve Critical Logistics Problems Brian Berletic

Vladimir Putin Speaks about Tucker Carlson’s Interview, Biden, and Trump – English Subtitles YouTube (zach)

Scott Ritter and the Russian ‘Path of Redemption’ Scott Ritter

Russia is using Starlink in occupied areas, Ukraine says Reuters (furzy)

Putin’s points in his interview with Carlson confirmed by Western scholars InfoBRICS

Navalny

Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny dead, says prison service BBC. Awfully careless to let him die now.

Death of Aleksei Navalny: the Brits did it! Gilbert Doctorow (guurst). Glad he said it.

Biden blames Putin for Navalny’s death, urges House to pass Ukraine funding The Hill. Lead story at BBC, in extra big type.

“Navalny,” documentary nominated for March 12 Oscar, is crude disinformation Lucy Komisar. From 2023. By e-mail, she comments

Putin had no reason to want him dead. He was irrelevant to Russian politics, was a “leader” anointed only by the West, and even the US media had ditched him in favor of the WSJ reporter. On who wins who loses, Putin doesn’t win as it’s a propaganda morsel for the West.

Beyond that, prisons east and west are not great on health care. This could have happened and probably has in Mississippi or Alabama.

Big Brother is Watching You Watch

Leak of Russian ‘Threat’ Part of a Bid to Kill US Surveillance Reform, Sources Say Wired (Paul R). God, the officialdom is shameless. Arguably multiple motivations: Planetary Scare: Russian Doomsday Space Weapon Steals Headlines of Avdeevka Collapse Simplicius the Thinker

Senator: Data broker tracked visits to Planned Parenthood The Register (Paul R)

Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show Gizmodo (Paul R)

Imperial Collapse Watch

Cracks in the NATO Narratives and NATO Unity Chas Freeman, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen Rumble (Chuck L)

Trump

Judge orders Trump and companies to pay nearly $355 million in civil fraud trial CNN

Fani Willis hearing concludes in Trump Georgia case as defense ‘star witness’ fails to undercut romance timeline Washington Post (furzy)

Jesse Watters: Where Did Fani Willis get this cash? Fox (Li)

Biden

Biden’s Support For Israel Is Fracturing The Reproductive Rights Movement HuffPost (ma)

Immigration

Democrats eye new immigration strategy after Suozzi win The Hill. One robin does not make a spring.

Our No Longer Free Press

Countdown To Day X: US Suggests Assange Has No First Amendment Rights Kevin Gosztola (furzy)

Soros could take control of hundreds of US radio stations – media RT. Robin K: “Soros buys ore megaphones.”

Crime Blotter

Florida Cop Empties His Gun, Runs For Cover After Acorn Falls On Car Jalopnik. Paul R:

Florida deputy Jesse Hernandez screamed “shots fired,” and frantically fired his gun after an acorn fell onto the roof of his squad car, making him jump.

This is insane. Apparently there was a handcuffed suspect in the back seat of the car, and Hernandez thought the suspect was shooting at him. So he shot up the car.

Spotify Modifies Terms for Audiobook Rightsholders, Changes May Put Authors in Legal Peril With Narrators StoryFair Audiobooks. Paul R: “I don’t use Spotify but some people in Lemmy think this matters.”

Recession has struck some of the world’s top economies. The US keeps defying expectations Associated Press (Kevin W). Pride goeth before a fall.

AI

OpenAI Unveils Sora, an A.I. That Generates Eye-Popping Videos New York Times (furzy). Lambert: “Subliminally –AI Sora = eyesore…”

Air Canada ordered to pay customer who was misled by airline’s chatbot Guardian (Kevin W)

The Bezzle

It’s Apple’s Vision Pro, The Rest of Us Just Live Here Matt Stoller

Neumann! Puck. UserFriendly: “Paywwallled (on 14 daddy trail that will not renew) But HILARIOUS!”

Class Warfare

Trust me, important:

Barbara Lee calls for $50/hour federal minimum wage National Desk (Paul R)

Antidote du jour. CV: “A Kodiak bear.”

And a bonus (Alice X):

A second bonus:

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here

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244 comments

  1. Antifa

    THE GAZA LIFE
    (melody borrowed from Mack the Knife by Bertolt Brecht as performed by RJ Jacinto)

    There are people underneath here
    None of them shall come to light
    Bloody bones and broken teeth, dear
    Which we’ll try to reunite

    Let the tears flow from your grief, dear
    Plastic bags to wrap the dead
    As you stand in disbelief here
    Weep and pray with arms outspread

    When the bombs come without warning
    Shrapnel slices up your life
    What if all the world is mourning?
    You’ve gone to the afterlife

    What I see here makes me shiver
    There are screams from underground
    Will I still be a forgiver
    As my soul gets whittled down?

    Netanyahu is our jailer
    He’s turned Gaza into ash
    He lets in one tractor trailer
    And that food’s gone in a flash

    Where’s the UN? Where’s the high court?
    Who will stop Israeli tanks?
    The whole world is falling way short
    While stuffing profits into banks

    Death will be but sweet , dear
    This is Gaza this is hell
    When you lay a floral wreath here
    May it cover up this smell

  2. Lewis Schofield

    It is beyond doubt that oligarchs have the highest levels of the British establishment in golden handcuffs or mired in kompramat, and this has been the situation for many years.
    The fact that virtually no action was taken despite the attempted murders of the Skripals on British soil, or later the inadvertent murder of an unrelated citizen with the same narcotic agent testifies to this.
    The Russia dossier, compiled at the end of 2019, (conveniently) remains out of mainstream thought, which amongst other details reveals that Boris Johnson was found rat arsed wandering around the streets of Perugia after a weekend at one of the properties of Evgeny Lebedev (himself the son of a high ranking member of the KGB and owner of the London Evening Standard and made a Lord by, you’ve guessed it Boris Johnson)
    Boris Johnson also campaigned for the unmitigated disaster which is Brexit (which has destabilised the EU and promoted factions in other member countries to lurch towards right wing, nationistic, ideology) and was “at the helm” as prime minister largely due to his promise “to get Brexit done!” Well what actually got “done” by Brexit was Britain, as is obvious by any economic metric, compared to all other European countries.
    Make no mistake, malign forces have been at work for many years in the UK (and other Western countries) since the “end” of the cold war; Russian interference in UK governance and media and US neo liberal vulture capitalism being the most corrosive of these.

    1. The Rev Kev

      Yeah, I’m going to guess that this comment was meant for the “Russiagate Revived in Latest MI6 Operation Against Russia — A Spy Alone Is Spy Baloney” post. The ‘attempted murders of the Skripals on British soil’ was just a bad joke and has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese. Like the fact that the first person that stumbled on the Skripals just happened to be the chief nurse for the British Army. If I were the Russians, I would just sit back and let all those neoliberal capitalist destroy the UK instead without lifting a finger. They have already pushed the UK into a heavy recession and not only has the armouries of the military been emptied out but the British army would be hard pressed to establish two fighting brigades to send into combat. And last I heard the British Army had only ammo for about five days.

    2. nippersdad

      Even with as little attention as I have paid to the British aspects of the Russia Gate saga, I see at least two holes here. British oligarchs with Russian ties have had their football teams, bank accounts and yachts taken away from them, so not likely they are the ones with the power in that relationship, and Novichok is a nerve agent, not a narcotic. The UK has been trending to the right since Margaret Thatcher even as Russia has liberalized itself, so I suspect that no Russian influence was necessary in the Brexit kerfuffle.

      Your argument may need a little work.

        1. spud

          buyers remorse as not being stuck in germany or greece, let alone france or italy. i think the remorse could be that as long as the elites stay in power, the revolution will fail.

          the E.U. has many layers of elites that hold power, the U.K. has one group. i would rather fight one group, then a layered continent wide group.

          i just cannot grasp the mind set that giving up your sovereignty and ability to chart your own destiny, is somehow remorseful.

          1. Anonymous 2

            Well, in this case, it has made the British poorer. Living standards are down, public services are being squeezed harder and harder. The elite have tightened their grip on power. If charting your own destiny makes you poorer, why do it?

            1. spud

              again, have you seen whats going on in europe? have you seen the many layers of elites in europe that have tightened their grip.

              lower standards of living are a result of being in the E.U.

              at least you have your sovereignty and ability to change things, its a lot of work, and could be very dangerous for you. but in europe, its deadly.

              1. eg

                The strange case of Brexit UK is that it claimed to want sovereignty but subsequently refuses to exercise it on behalf of citizen well being.

              2. Yves Smith Post author

                No. lower standards of living due to cutting themselves off from cheap Russian energy, which the UK did too.

                The UK is too small to go it alone. Resource poor and small internal market. Countries like that need to trade and trade is pretty much always the most robust and easiest with neighbors. Brexit created all sorts of hard and soft trade barriers, making it less attractive for EU members to trade with them.

                1. spud

                  but seeing that they are now sovereign, changes can be made. that does not mean giving up sovereignty.

                  it means they have the freedom to chart their own course. not a course set by others.

                  the flip side to the going it alone because they are to small, is that if you free trade, you catch a pandemic called depression just like everyone else that free trades.

                  Gatt allowed protectionism, its no different than walking into a room full of covid carriers, and you are masked up.

                  the U.K. dumped free trade in 1930, and the depression was not as bad there as the rest of the west.

                  https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/feb/04/protectionism-free-trade-recession

                  Yet the data shows that Britain had one of the shallowest downturns of all the major industrial nations in the 1930s – a 5% fall in GDP. By contrast, Brown’s devotion to free trade and open markets sits uneasily with Britain’s massive – and growing – trade deficit. Policymakers today say that the problem with free trade is that the winners often fail to recognise the benefits they are getting from lower prices, while the losers are all too aware when the job they were doing is lost to a textile mill on the other side of the world. The downturn has made not just the actual losers – but millions of potential losers – painfully aware of their vulnerability.
                  ————
                  to chart your sovereignty also means getting rid of the elites that got you in the mess in the first place. no easy matter, but others have done it, and most likely the hard way.

                  1. Yves Smith Post author

                    You can’t solve being too small and too import dependent not to be in a lot of trade deals.

                    And as a small country the UK will get worse ones than it did through the EU.

                    It is too small to “chart its own course”. It can’t and it doesn’t.

                    The only country that maybe can is Russia due to having so many natural resources and a big enough economy to generate enough internal demand.

                    1. spud

                      you mistake what i am saying. i am not advocating that a small country can be russia, canada, brazil, or the u.s.. what i am saying is that under Gatt, they had sovereignty to chart their own destiny. that is if they found out they needed others, they can negotciate their destiny.

                      italy cannot, italy has lost its sovereignty, as well as any other country dumb enough to free trade, and now others, that is others(OLIGARCHS) from all over europe, as well as the world, now charts italy’s destiny.

                      that destiny is subservience, massive debts and poverty.

                      trade deals, or free trade deals. there is a difference.

                      free trade is not natural, and has never worked, trade deals are natural, and many times quite workable.

                    2. Yves Smith Post author

                      What you are saying makes no sense. All trade agreements now are “free trade” deals in that that is the terminology for reducing or eliminating tariffs and other trade barriers. Look at the pacts the UK entered into post Brexit. And it had less leverage to get good terms than the EU did on its behalf when it was a member. This was widely discussed at the time. The UK became a term-taker. It also had to capitulate in the end to the EU on how the “Irish border” was treated.

                      It took one minute to find this on the UK.gov site. You can see all the deals under negotiation are “free trade” deals and post-Brexit:

                      Trade agreements we are negotiating

                      The UK is currently negotiating with several countries to draw up new agreements.

                      The UK’s priorities in 2024 include progressing negotiations with India, Republic of Korea, Switzerland, Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

                      UK’s approach to negotiating an enhanced free trade agreement with the Republic of Korea

                      UK’s approach to negotiating an enhanced free trade agreement with Switzerland

                      UK approach to negotiating a free trade agreement with India

                      UK approach to negotiating a free trade agreement with Canada

                      UK approach to negotiating a free trade agreement with Mexico

                      UK approach to negotiating a free trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)

                      UK approach to negotiating a free trade agreement with Israel

                      https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/the-uks-trade-agreements

                  2. Em

                    The UK has an globe spanning empire in the 1930s and could go it alone back then. That empire is all gone except for a few small islands.

                    1. spud

                      if you read the article i linked, it plainly said the U.K. did not go it alone, and i never said they could,

                      the propaganda about free trade is that you either free trade, or build a wall around yourself.

                      that how propaganda works, its either black or white, never any in between.

                      the author states the U.K. was able to mitigate the worst of the depression, by dropping out of free trade, not dropping out of trade period.

                      so can the U.K. do that today with out its empire, maybe, maybe not.

                      but at least they now have their sovereignty and can try on terms that might be better than lets say greece got, and what germany is getting today.

    4. Alex Cox

      “Make no mistake…” is an old catchphrase of reactionary writers in the UK, just before they launch into a demented, evidence-free assertion. Private Eye used to parody this, before it became a home for such writers

    5. Not Qualified to Comment

      Make no mistake, malign forces have been at work for many years in the UK

      Let’s apply Occam’s Razor:

      1. A sinister cabal of devious characters have “for many years” co-operated to maintain and run a consistant, incremental, expensive and carefully planned campaign to…. what end exactly, and why?

      2. A parade of incompetent, shallow-thinking characters equating their bank-accounts and daddy’s influence with their intelligence and value to society have bought their way to a brief hold on the reins of power because they think they’re entitled to them, have absolutely no idea what to do with them when they have them, have driven the coach-and-four into the ditch as a result and then buggered off to let someone else clear up the mess.

    6. Kevin Walsh

      The idea that Brexit was the work of Russian oligarchs rather than more obvious candidates like the Murdoch media empire is beyond absurd.

      1. Michaelmas

        Lots of fact-free assertions about Brexit here. The London School of Economics did a couple of pieces by a female professor of working-class origins who actually went out and talked to members of the British working class during 2018-19 about why they overwhelmingly voted for Brexit in 2016, as they did.

        ‘We don’t exist to them, do we?’: why working-class people voted for Brexit
        https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/01/15/we-dont-exist-to-them-do-we-why-working-class-people-voted-for-brexit/
        Many working-class people believe in Brexit. Who can blame them?
        https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/01/31/many-working-class-people-believe-in-brexit-who-can-blame-them/

        The class politics of prejudice: Brexit and the land of no-hope and glory
        – Prof. Lisa Mckenzie

        Supercilious responses about how the British working class were ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ is usually the next rote attack on them. But in the real world, see this from 2022—

        UK sees fastest wage rises in sectors most reliant on EU workers
        https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-sees-fastest-wage-rises-sectors-most-reliant-eu-workers-indeed-2022-02-25/

        LONDON, Feb 25 (Reuters) – British wages are rising fastest in low-paid sectors where employers previously relied on workers from the European Union, new analysis from recruitment agency Indeed showed on Friday….

        Sectors such as construction, cleaning, driving, hospitality and leisure – where EU workers accounted for more than 10% of staff – had seen advertised wages grow 11% between 2019 and 2021, Indeed said based on an analysis of its data.

        By contrast, sectors where fewer than one in 20 workers were from the EU saw advertised pay rates rise just 5% over the period. “Importing workers from the EU is no longer the safety valve for businesses that it was before Brexit. Employers now have little option but to hike pay to try to entice workers,” Indeed economist Jack Kennedy said.

  3. The Rev Kev

    “Judge orders Trump and companies to pay nearly $355 million in civil fraud trial”

    Wait. A New York property developer is found guilty of lying and playing funny buggers with his properties? I am shocked, shocked that this could happen. What will this do to the reputations of all those other New York property developers?

    1. IM Doc

      I am seeing reports online and have now had it confirmed to me by a relative who is a semi trucker that there is indeed a real effort among truckers to refuse to deliver anything to New York until this is overturn.

      I know not much about the law, but the entire thing is clearly ridiculous, and the smile on the face of that judge was something out of Kafka. And I am nominally a Dem.

      My relative has not yet decided what to do, but is leaning toward the boycott. He has always been a happy go lucky kind of guy. It is unfathomable to me that a person like him has been radicalized to this degree. The lawfare tactics of these Bozos has been something to behold. They are subverting the very nature of our system. When lowly truck drivers who really rarely pay attention to politics are having their tripwires pulled, LOOK OUT BELOW!

      I am increasingly certain that this is going to be a very interesting ride this year.

      1. Benny Profane

        Re: The videos of James running for AG, with a damn bullhorn, shouting, vote for me, and I’ll get Trump. How can this happen?

        1. Neutrino

          Who expected to apply a Woody Allen line from a movie courtroom scene?

          This trial is a travesty of a mockery of a sham.

          or something like that.

          The lawfare charades continue to play out while more humans around the world see that the American notion of Justice has become more pliable, meaning laughable. The Georgia nonsense comes on the heels of Biden as too old to be tried, too young to be 25th Amendmented.

          Moral beacon, my ass.

      2. Michael Fiorillo

        It’s beyond the beyonds: the D’s are actually going to lead off their Lawfare Cavalcade with the Manhattan D.A.’s Stormy Daniels case (as an aside, fifteen million people lost Medicaid eligibility on the day of the Daniels/Trump indictment, per Biden administration policy, a fact which #McResistance liberals remain ignorant of, and likely wouldn’t care if they knew), which the Department of Justice passed on pursuing… so that it’s OK compliment yourself about your courage and saving Democracy, while you charge Hitler with jaywalking, because No One Is Above the Law.

        Or so I’ve been told.

        1. JP

          Right, and they got Al Capone for tax evasion not that he murdered and sold protection. Poor Al Capone, he had a target on his back, those evil prosecutors.

            1. JP

              Then I guess it depends on whether you think he is guilty of anything, jaywalking or subverting an election. Or, if you are referring to the kangaroo nature of the proceeding, I couldn’t say because I didn’t hear testimony only truth social.

                1. JP

                  Come on guys, they are all criminals. That doesn’t mean cus one gets away with it we shouldn’t prosecute any others. I would lock them all up but it is so hard to find a saint that will run for office.

      3. Pat

        Well as a NYer I am sorry to hear that, but as someone utterly appalled by this clear abuse of power by the AG and by the Judge I understand. I am hoping that at some point that not only will this be overturned, but that both James and Engoron are disbarred. Oh and if possible are personally responsible for paying for Trump’s legal fees for everything to do with this “civil” prosecution.

        It is clearer than ever why it was so necessary to eliminate Zephyr Teachout. It wasn’t just to protect Andrew Cuomo, which James also did.

      4. Yves Smith Post author

        A reader saw your comment and sent this. Mind you, the truckers going to the border was a bust but that was a leisure activity, not what amounts to a labor action. So there is an effort:

    2. Benny Profane

      Not one banker in jail or financial institution indicted for the frauds that brought us the crash of ’08. Hell, we bailed them all out for those screwups and said, please don’t do that again. Please? Many will argue that is the main reason Trump got elected. And now this. It’s obscene.

      1. ChrisFromGA

        And worse, IMO, Boeing executives are free to roam about the country.

        Despite a criminal indictment of the corporate entity for fraud in deceiving the FAA.

        Boeing fraud was the proximate cause of 350 some deaths.

        1. wilroncanada

          ChrisFromGA
          “Boeing executives are free to roam the country.”
          Yes, but they fly private jets, not Boeing planes,

    3. Randall Flagg

      When the verdict was announced and as part of it Trump barred from acting as a Directore or running a business, he should have announced: Fine by me, I’m going to be too busy running this country as President of the United States.

      Not advocating for Trump or any of those fools but looking at how tiered our “Justice System” is/has become, as someone said here earlier, This is some Third World Banana Republic Bullshit…

      1. Katniss Everdeen

        Well, I will advocate for Trump. He deserves it.

        While he is relentlessly vilified as a crude, egomaniacal blowhard, a less crude, less egomaniacal blowhard would have thrown in the towel a long time ago.

        At considerable personal cost, he continues to expose the abusive, corrupt, manipulated sham this government has become, for the benefit of a few lifer politicians only concerned with enriching themselves and their families at the expense of the nation.

        In this latest abomination, Trump is fined hundreds of millions of dollars for a “crime” that produced only satisfied customers, while his political “betters” openly tout genocide and perpetual war as “jobs” programs.

        That Trump is a “criminal” and biden a “leader” is as galactically bizarre as it gets IMNSHO.

        1. Randall Flagg

          Ms. Everdeen, I’m not going to disagree with anything you said, I used a poor choice of words when I said I wasn’t advocating for him. People make their own minds up without my opinions but now what the hell, nobody asked but I’ll go further.

          First there’s this from 2015/16 but has might as well put 2023/24 on it.
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDL3Yjl31K8

          I’ll add that years ago in his first campaign Trump had been talking to black voters telling them that they’ve been nothing but taken for granted and damaged by the Dems. They should vote for him because : What the have they got to lose?
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h–zr5s6dXQ

          Trump did something in that campaign that I think is most important. He gave them HOPE, or at least way to give their opinion of the current state of affairs in DC for the average Joe and Jane.
          Maybe nothing changed for any of them during his Presidency, many claimed broken promises but I would say, just another long list of presidents that broke promises. He was the dog that caught the car when elected, probably wasn’t ready for it and we all remember Shumer saying how the Blob would get him because of his reckless comments and attitude. He got rolled by so many.
          Has anything change for those folks in that Michael Moore speech now with 3+ years of Biden ? I would say no, it’s gotten worse for most of them.

          I’m not a fan of his constant saying the election was stolen, etc., etc. Just lays the groundwork for dems to bitch if they lose by a little, not that they hadn’t already before Trump. I would have rather he kept after Biden during his presidency, holding his feet to the fire so to speak with criticism of what he is NOT doing for the American people. It would have forced the MSM to defend Biden’s presidency and his actions and inactions rather then spend their time picking apart Trump’s claims of stolen elections. Keeping the news on Trump rather than Biden and his failing BS.

          I always voted for 3rd party just to keep numbers up in my state and options on the ballot, never enamored with the D and Rs up for president.
          But after the way the TPTB which used to operate under the cover of darkness is now just flat out in daylight exposing to us what a beyond corrupt system we have I will likely vote for Trump. Cause Biden just pissses me off. I look around at the self righteous liberal bags of $shit in the Green Mountain State worshipping at the alter of the Dems, who if they would quit practicing giving themselves a colonoscopy for two minutes, and pull their heads out of their ass would see what a corrupt POS Biden (and most of the Dems in “leadership” roles) has been his entire career and I’m supposed to think Trump is the end of the world? Talk about Blue no matter who in this State…
          Yea, I’ll color in the box for him, like a protest vote. And it’ll feel good. And I hope he will have learned a few lesson from the first time around.. nuff said rather than get the moderator really PO’d at me.

          Apologies for the disjointed rant from a guy that never did much in english or writing class in HS,and rip me to shreds if anyone wants, I don’t care.

          2. Screwball

            I never saw that video from Michael Moore. What a great video, and also the truth. Well said Mr. Flagg & Ms. Everdeen.

            I too am so fed up with the current crop of turds in this punch bowl, what they are doing and have done, I will gladly go with the giant FY vote. At this point, why not? Nothing for me is getting better and these people make it obvious Carlin was right back in 1991 when he said – they don’t give a *family blog* about you. It couldn’t be more clear.

            I’m going to lose my $30 monthly cable subsidy due to congress failing to extend the Affordable Connectivity Program (I’m retired and on fixed income so it matters) because all they care about is buying bombs to kill people all over the world. Inflation is running way hotter than the reported numbers, no matter the truck loads of BS Biden and the democrats tell me different. They tell us they fighting to save democracy while looking like a banana republic at the same time. Look what I do, not what I say, applies here.

            So FY it will be.

            I hope they not only get voted out, but get smoked by epic proportions. It might be wishful thinking, but that would also be the biggest STFU ever to the most arrogant closed minded snots on planet earth who worship the sleazy pricks who run this country. FJB, the horse he rode in on, and the man that sent him – as the old saying goes.

            1. Alice X

              The Affordable Connectivity Program is a Neo Liberal paragon. It’s odd that they didn’t renew it. But, what they should have done all along is institute a national internet program, which of course they never would, but at the very least they could forbid the states from blocking local jurisdictions from doing so.

              I’m on a fixed income and that $30 makes a difference.

              1. Screwball

                That $30 dollars does make a difference. But we need more bombs. To kill people…

                I can’t believe what I see.

          3. Paul P

            Trump cut taxes for the 1% and the 10%. He’s used immigration to distract from unaffordable housing, school,
            health care, and retirement, The Debt will be used to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The Democrats take African Americans and the working class for granted, yes. But, Trump gave people hope. Of what?

        2. Tom Stone

          The Dems have shredded any remaining legitimacy they may have had, and Trump may well be elected while in Jail because of that.
          Trump also did the unthinkable, he provided the American people with concrete material benefits, showing that it was possible.
          If “Biden” is reelected TPTB are counting on the Propaganda, censorship and surveillance industries to keep the rabble in line, they are arrogant enough to believe they can control chaos.
          “Disease X” is already here, it is Covid, “Bring out your dead” is now only a matter of time.
          Good luck spinning that.

          1. ArvidMartensen

            Speaking of propaganda.
            In 2015/16 there was a huge outpouring of support and news coverage for #MeToo, came out of nowhere, like magic. The woman who coined the phrase had over a decade where nobody took any notice of her at all. And then, Boom.
            But not long after the election, the #MeToo movement seemed to vanish from the media, just like magic really.

            In 2019/20 there was a huge outpouring of support and news coverage for #BlackLivesMatter and there were the marches and the riots and of course there were instances of racism to fuel it. And then after the election the #BlackLivesMatter movement seemed to vanish from the media, just like magic really.

            In my neck of the woods, like the US of A, we have Taylor Swift mania, and every media outlet is gushing about her. There are spreads in the old media with photos and her childhood story and even a journalist who interviewed her way back in 2009. Gasp!

            And hmmm. Is the DemSpookIndustrial complex trying to corral young women in the US, and are they seen as the saviours who will get the Biden over the line. And how will Taylor take to being just another singer after the election is over and the caravan moves on?

        3. Heidi

          Katniss, Trump is a jackass, but he’s OUR jackass and this former Democrat will support him in any way that I can to help build a true Democratic Party by flushing the fakes out of office.

          Besides rejecting every single person endorsed by our local DNC junk mailer on our yet to be mailed in ballot,– if you can’t stomach voting for a Republican,– leave the ballot blank, or, vote for the most radical Democrat, or Brother Cornel West.

          Besides that, our family, and everyone we know is going to go on a
          SPENDING STRIKE until the day after the fall election to help speed the Biden Recession and help discredit his administration.
          When you want to pull that discretionary item off the shelf, picture Palestinian babies with maggots in their eye sockets.

          Food and gasoline only, not one discretionary purchase until November 5th, if you can endure it.

    4. chris

      Yeah. That. What I tell my fellow PMC cohort in NOVA/DC/MD is that if you find Trump’s opinions and demeanor appalling then you haven’t been around enough high value individuals. As far as I can tell, based on my experience meeting and responding to requests from about 15 or so people who have net worths approaching a small country, everyone who makes north of $500 million has opinions about what needs to be done in the this country that are every bit as shocking as what Trump publicly voices.

    5. LifelongLib

      Sheer uninformed speculation on my part, but I wouldn’t exactly be floored to find out that Trump has very little in the way of net assets, and that those people with huge judgments against him won’t see much actual money. I welcome correction.

  4. Lewis Schofield

    …oh and I almost forgot, the monstrously out of control Eurodollar system which caused the GFC (or rather better named GMC) when it crashed.
    Well this zombie is still alive and ready to deliver GFC 2.0.

    1. FreeMarketApologist

      And that trash compactor was no more in their own residence than it was in any of the other 600+ residences in the building. Happened in Zeckendorf Towers, a mid-luxury 1980s condo building right off Union square in NYC.

      1. Yves Smith Post author

        There is an opening every floor. I consider that to be in the residence, just like the mail slot on every floor in one of my buildings and the laundries in the basement. “Residence” includes building features that tenants can use.

    2. JTMcPhee

      Sauce for the goose, sauce for the Trump Derangement System gander. F@ck with reality, again and again, in service to the overlords, and eventually reality might f@ck with you.

      “We will know our program of disinformation is complete when nothing the American public believes is true.” William Casey, evil CIA director and all-around worthless meatsack, 1991.

      1. NYT_Memes

        William Casey died in 1987 according to Wikipedia.

        I have seen a similar quote but I didn’t check into the time it was said. I never knew he died in 1987.

  7. digi_owl

    “Putin’s points in his interview with Carlson confirmed by Western scholars InfoBRICS”

    Ugh, shows how much we struggle with the notion of nation and culture.

    I’m probably butchering it badly, but i have this vague memory of someone making a distinction between two ways to define a nation and/or culture. One via shared history/norms/language or some such, what they deemed the French way, and one via shared blood, deemed the German way.

    What is getting increasingly ironic, in a very dark way, is that the “woke” are pushing the latter even as they decry everyone that disagree with them as nazis.

    That said, either approach can be taken beyond the pale.

    Sorry, now sure where i was going with this vent.

    1. undercurrent

      I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. When trump says that immigration is ruining the blood of the US, then that must mean that he’s ‘woke.’ Could you tell me then, what it means to be woke?

    2. Polar Socialist

      One via shared history/norms/language or some such, what they deemed the French way,

      My friends from Brittany beg to differ. According to them in the end of the 19th century less than half of French people spoke French as a primary language. That changed when in 1880’s mandatory education began and the local languages started to vanish.

      Reviving them is still an uphill battle, but it’s happening.

      1. The Rev Kev

        This sort of thing must have been happening with every country. I once read an account of a British officer that visited a Scottish Regiment in the first half of the 19th century and who was shocked to see that the commands to that Regiment were being given in Gaelic.

    3. Fried

      German nationalism was also interested in language and a shared past, see the Grimm brothers, who not only collected fairy tales but also wrote a big dictionary of the German language and heavy tomes on German mythology, which I have a copy of, and which just assume that you don’t only understand Latin and Greek but also Icelandic or Old Norse or both, which they always quote without translation.

  8. furnace

    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 133: Israel cuts electricity to critical Nasser Hospital patients, forces staff to evacuate Mondoweiss

    I’ve tried quite hard to put on a brave front for the past few months, but there is just something unspeakable in watching a genocide unfold and not be able to do anything. I feel both shattered and utterly furious at these depraved and demented monsters, the likes of which only the Hitlerites come close. Let Nemesis be decisive; let the entity turn to dust. But beyond all that, the world now owes the Palestinians their freedom.

    1. Vandemonian

      For me, the whole situation in Gaza raises a worrying question.

      If I had a loaded gun in my hand, and Netanyahu in front of me, would I be able to persist in my natural moral stance that I would never harm another person?

    2. Em

      It’s been almost maddening for me. I did find Justin Podur and Sina Rahmani’s YouTube channels to be helpful for me. Both to celebrate the unreported resistance victories and contextualize the overall struggle.

      The liberation of Algeria from French imperialists cost 1-2 million lives and liberation of Vietnam from Western imperialism cost many more million lives. Yet they paid the price and eventually succeeded because the alternative was intolerable.

      1. furnace

        Thank you for the recommendations! I am a firm believer that this will end much like Algeria did (AFAIK Vietnam didn’t have that much of a French colonist population), which yes, meant utter victory for the Revolution. Maybe there could have been an actual two-state solution if Oct. 7th had been merely a humbling moment for the entity. After genocide? They lost their mandate of heaven, and thus must collapse.

  9. The Rev Kev

    ‘Why you should have a cat
    @ShouldHaveCat
    He’s mine 😺’

    That’s not just a cat. That’s a battle-cat and will rip the arms of anyone trying to go near his human buddy.

  10. jefemt

    ZME climate-denier maps and data… where the dark money should focus it’s 2024 spending?

    Just need to link up and add a layer of voting age population density… the red zones in my state might tally 15K votes, total, in a State of 1.1 million, and a very few electoral votes. They don’t call it Bumphuc Flyover for nothing… we are a rounding error.

    Also, a very conspicuous absence of red in the NW corner of MT and Idaho panhandle. That is a glaring spotlight on bad data? Trumpeter secessionist god-fearing military weapon toting bootstrap country, if ever there were. Rabid Radical Right. The Bellicose Belligerents. Land of Freedumb!

    1. Milton

      A very lazy map. There is no metadata about how they derived republican + denialist (or the opposite). A better representation would have been a simple bivariate color ramp showing party affiliation and climate denial sympathies.

      2. ChrisPacific

        Worth noting that the 15% number is for hard denial (climate change is a hoax).

        If they were to filter for ‘soft denial’ (climate change is real, but can be fixed by [techno utopian fantasy du jour] or government tinkering, without the need for behavioral change or meaningful sacrifices by individuals) I suspect the number would be way higher, and would probably collapse almost all of the ‘influencers’ and regional variation into a single deniers bucket.

    2. Wukchumni

      Godzone here is fire-engine red, if Jesus ran as a Democrat he’d be pummeled politically, but the bigger question is, on his campaign signs along roads and highways, would he dare include his party affiliation on said sign?

      Lotsa hard core evangs on the valley floor who fervently believe they’ll be whisked away for a thousand year vacay with the big cheese upstairs, while we endure a hellish existence on this here good orb.

      Why would they give 2 shits about climate change in their awfully curious worldview where they want non-believers to suffer?

      1. NYT_Memes

        Re: Jesus running in fire-engine red rural California

        If Jesus actually spoke as in the Bible he would be pummeled regardless of which party.
        However watching evangelical true-believer heads explode would be a sight to behold.

    3. Eric Anderson

      We call it the ‘Redoubt”, thanks.
      The study was done by analyzing Tweets. Not exactly “tweet” country, the redoubt. I would venture a guess that the data wasn’t there to analyze.

    4. Lefty Godot

      They should have added “2020 election fraud” believers in there. Because that seems to be the trifecta: climate change is a hoax, COVID a hoax (or Chinese bioweapon), and Trump was deprived of a second term due to “massive voting fraud” (that no court, including judges appointed by Trump, saw any valid evidence of).

      After that you can go off into the real deep weeds (Antifa behind all Jan. 8 crimes, George Floyd drug OD, Great Replacement, QAnon, etc.) but that would get too complicated to do a color map for.

      I have to ask (for a friend), is there any evidence that Antifa even really exists? Or does it just refer to a bunch of decrepit old SDS alums talking big in the back of a bar somewhere?

      1. ChrisPacific

        There were elements of the counter-protest in Charlottesville calling themselves Antifa. That’s the only time I can recall seeing actual people who identified themselves by that term.

        Mostly I think it’s a label used by the right to legitimize the use of physical violence, repression, or dehumanizing language against a target. Compare the ‘punch a fascist’ meme for the left.

  11. Trees&Trunks

    Daniel Ek at Spotify is one of the WEF Young Global Leader and he is very much working hard on “you own nothing and you are happy”-concept. He and his services should be treated with the care and love that you have for WEF-people..

  12. Wukchumni

    I never paid much attention to Navalny other than to note that of all the political activists in Russia, he was by far the most photogenic.

    So I’m reading his obit in the NYT and its like 6 pages long and full of photos of him, I’d imagine his obit was much longer than Henry Kissinger’s In the very same fishwrap.

    1. Maxwell Johnston

      I flew out of Moscow early Friday morning and was shocked (but perhaps not surprised) to hear of his demise when I landed in Istanbul.
      What a stupid, tragic, ugly episode. There was no reason to treat Navalny this way; I doubt he would have polled more than 10% in any free and fair RU election. His pointless death will serve as one more nail in the coffin of RU relations with the west. But I must add:

      a. This is purely a RU internal affair and no one else’s business
      b. RU males are not the healthiest lot to begin with, and this particular prison has a bad reputation, so it’s not inconceivable that Navalny had an underlying condition that was worsened by his (unnecessarily harsh) incarceration
      c. The hysterical reaction of western media and talking heads is in pointed contrast to their restraint re the prison mistreatment of Assange, Epstein, and Lira
      d. Navalny’s decision to return to RU in early 2021 was, as Sir Humphrey would say, “courageous”. Did he not understand the risks? Maybe he wanted to become a resistance hero like Mandela, or maybe he believed that his return would trigger a revolution a la Lenin in 1917 or a la Khomeini in 1979. Either way, he fatally overrated himself.
      e. Stoltenberg really ought to keep his mouth shut. The head of a hostile military alliance speaking out re Navalny only reinforces RU suspicions that Navalny was indeed a western agent.

      https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_222617.htm

      Every time I think RU-west relations have hit rock bottom, they sink even lower. It’s turtles all the way down.

      1. Yves Smith Post author

        *Sigh*

        Our site Policies say that you are to read a post in full before commenting.

        We had a prominent tweet from John Helmer stating Navalny had known health problems and linking to his posts with details.

        Putin would have no reason to have him killed. He was very very much a has been in Russia.

        1. Maxwell Johnston

          I read Helmer before commenting, and I certainly didn’t intend to steal his thunder. My point (b) was related to my interest in RU demographics; specifically, the fact that RU’s overall life expectancy at birth (about 73, as per latest UN data of 2023) masks a giant gap between female life expectancy (about 78) and male (about 68). Many people aren’t aware of this, so when they see that Navalny was 47 they naturally assume that he enjoyed good health. Whereas in reality, many RU males at that age are already approaching the finish line. Navalny outwardly appeared to be in good health, but it was his first winter up north at that brutally cold prison camp. Toss in some pre-existing medical issues, and those tough new conditions alone might be enough to push him over the ultimate finish line (without any specific outside intervention).

      2. Wukchumni

        It’s a raze to the bottom…

        By the time I was old enough to understand by 1972, cold war rhetoric had been really toned down from relations say a decade before. I’ve never seen US-Russia relations at such a low ebb.

        This lionization of Navalny is really all the west can muster, its embarrassing to watch presstidigitation all pile on with the same oh Hosanna wont you cry for me, bullshit.

    3. Glen

      I barely knew who the guy was, and it’s tragic that he’s gone, but why the big fuss?

      Maybe we can all just lie and say he was born in Lahaina and his last wish was for his hometown to be rebuilt.

      I mean with all the garbage I see reported in the MSM now-a-days it’s not such a stretch is it?

    4. magpie

      Others have noted how quickly multiple media outlets published obituaries with photos, etc., upon word of Navalny’s death. As in, in less than 30 minutes, they were polished and posted.

      For at least twelve hours, my youtube feed has had a lineup of Navalny tributes by corporate press outlets I never even watch – they’re being promoted by YouTube to the top of my page. Nothing from the same sources about Avdeevka.

      I’ll pour cold water on my bias, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I’ll call it coincidence that this happened right after the Carlson interview and literally at the same moment as the grim Ukrainian defeat at Avdeevka. Just a remarkable, random twist of perception management.

      Cute how the media is eager to imply that Navalny was murdered because he died in state custody, whereas deaths in custody in the US are completely above suspicion.

      1. Lefty Godot

        On any allegedly suspicious event involving Russia, US politicians go into frothing-at-the-mouth “Putin must be made to pay!” mode before any facts have been established. Including some US politicians that I stupidly donated money to in the past. And the US media react in lockstep amplifying all the most rabid accusations. Funny, it’s kind of how we see the same entities reacting in a similar manner whenever Israel makes any wild accusation about some person or group they don’t like, no matter that the accusations turn out to be completely false afterwards.

        All these scripted responses, waiting on a hair-trigger for the prescribed event to happen…

    1. Em

      Considering that something like 500,000 Jewish Israelis already voluntarily removed themselves from Israel and 200,000 removed themselves from the northern settlements, I’m not sure that removal is as difficult as many in the West are saying it is. How many would really want to stay in a busted economy and getting shot at by Axis of Resistance forces, knowing that the IDF knowingly shot at its own and is putting in laws that forbid any criticism of the official narrative about 10/7, when many of them could freely live in Berlin or New York? I’m sure some Fascists will stay behind but even in Israel, the Kahanists represent less than 5 percent of the population.

      Comparing whatever fate lies before these settlers who knowingly illegally settled on Palestinian land to Palestinians driven out of their ancestral villages?

      1. Yves Smith Post author

        You need to listen to Alistair Crooke, who has dealt with you. He describes them as rabid. These are people who believe that God gave the Biblical Israel, which includes all of Lebanon and other territory not part of Israel now, and they plan to take it.

        The ones who left are the ones not on board with this project who have dual passports. Liberal and not very religious.

        1. Em

          I do listen to Crooke. He has good insights but there’s a great diversity of opinions on this matter, even in the West. Max Blumenthal is not so pessimistic on this point. People active in Palestine solidarity that I listen to such as EI and Jadaliyya seem far more optimistic about things working out as long as Palestinians are allowed to exercise their rights under international law.

          I am concerned with comparing what the Palestinians went through in Nakba and currently in Gaza, with removal of illegal settlers in settlements that are mostly quite new. Even if they were so fanatical that they want to make their settlements new Masadas, the legal and ethical dimensions are completely different from the genocidal forceable displacement of the indigenous Palestinian population.

          I do want to note that the internally displaced settlers who left and vowed not to go back until Gaza and Hezbollah are completely pacified, are not liberal Askenazis. They’re typically poor and quite fanatical Zionists, as they have to be to live in settlements next to the comparatively unpacified Gaza strip and Lebanese border. That suggest to me that settlers’ dedication to their new homes is not as firm as has been indicated by Western observers. West Bank settlers are wealthier, but I think that actually makes them easier to target through economic means.

          How many of these people would stick around if their bank accounts are frozen and their outside assets seized, their productions sanctioned so that they are unable to make a living, and they were forced to live under the building freeze regime that the Israelis have managed to inflict on 7 million Palestinians living under its control? All it takes is for the US not to stand in the way of international law and that’s probably the biggest stumbling block.

          It’s one thing to proclaim proud racism and genocidal fervor when all organs of the state are supporting them and another when they’re ostracized and living the life that they forced on Palestinians for the past 70 years. Maybe that’s an impossible position for the current Israel but then I think Israel has shown that it has no justification for further existence and will cease to exist soon enough.

          1. Yves Smith Post author

            The settlers are armed and are substantially part of the IDF, so the IDF will support them.

            Pray tell me how you get hundreds of thousands to leave their homes except via violence, as ever colonialist and now Israel is demonstrating. And who will administer that violence? The State of Israel never will.

            1. Em

              The settlers may be abetted by the IDF but aside from a few groupings, they’re not part of the IDF. However, the formal categorization doesn’t matter. Through commission of crimes against humanity and their poor performance against Hamas fighters, I do not believe IDF has any justification for further existence. They’re propped up by American arms and arm twisting of regional comprador regimes. This needs to end and then the IDF needs to be disarmed and pacified, much as other armies are pacified after losing.

              For “peaceful” removal of settlements. I would suggest freezing bank accounts and strong international sanctions against all Israeli and Western Zionists organizations that support the settlements, combined with some payment and support for voluntary departures. It’s not so inconceivable – Yugoslavia and Nagorno Karaba present many examples where people with very deep ties to the land (far deeper and legally convincing than anything the Israeli settlers can present) still left when it was clear that they have no future there.

              1. Em

                While I think settlements should be evicted or returned to Palestinian owners who may permit occupation of space under rental lease agreements, I don’t agree with the premise of the two state solution under which it is proferred.

                The two state solution is unworkable and unfair. Unworkable because it means a fractured microstate next to a still hostile, still genocidal, and still nuclear armed Israel backed by the West. Unfair to Palestinians because Jewish Israelis have proper ownership right of ownership to only 7 percent of historic Palestine and everything else is rightfully Palestinian land. Furthermore, the Palestinians have endured 75 years of deprivation, humiliation, and genocidal killings. They should be made whole via return of all their land and rebuilding aid from all the countries and individuals who have aided and abetted the illegal Israel project.

                To the extent that Jewish Israelis have any claim to staying in the land of historic Palestine, it should be at the sufferance of Palestinians, who like the South Africans before them, maintain a surprisingly humane and accepting position towards their tormentors.

                BTW, I feel similarly regarding private land and minerals right ownership in the Americas.

        2. Synoia

          These are people who believe that God gave the Biblical Israel,…..I have met some of these people. And listened as there was no room for my thoughts to intrude.

          This was eyeopening for me. I had never faced such a level of intolerance from intelligent people, and in my wondering I had met many different people of many nationalities, including the Afrikaans in South Africa – it takes a lot of determination to drive an ox cart for 2,000 miles to avoid subjugation by the british.

          1. The Rev Kev

            And a generation after they arrived they were subjugated by the British who came from the other direction. The First Boer war against the British established their independence but when diamonds and gold were discovered on their lands, the entire British Empire came roaring in to defeat them during the Second Boer war.

      2. flroa

        ” the Kahanists represent less than 5 percent of the population.”

        Not to be tiresome but that 5% controls the govt, the military, and the guns. So there’s that.

        1. Em

          I was addressing the possibility/impossibility of peacefully clearing the illegal settlements, not shifting political alliance within Israel.

          For the former, Kahanists represent a segment who might be crazy enough to “pull a Masada” in case their illegal settlements are evicted or put under Palestinian authority.

          For the latter, that’s like saying that Joe Manchin controls the government, when he is allowed to do what he does because the Democrats wanted it to happen. The Kahanists are full of convicted criminals with unsavory financial dealings – if the true powers in Israeli society wanted them gone, it could easily be accomplished. Now it says something about the morality of the entire Israeli society and government that they do not do so, but most of these people are merely evil and not necessarily suicidal.

          1. Yves Smith Post author

            Don’t you get it? There is no peaceful possibility. The Israel government will never back a two state solution save a BS one with them in charge of interpretation that allows them to preserve the status quo.

            The only way they leave the West Bank is if the state of Israel ceases to exist. Mark my words. It might if Israel is dumb enough to attack Lebanon.

            1. Em

              I agree with that the two state solution is unworkable and Israel is not going to evict the illegal settlements. But the reason is not because of the unusual violence (“Nakba”) of the eviction but because Israel is a supremacist state that will never fulfill its obligations under international law.

          1. The Rev Kev

            And a recent poll showed that 70% of Israelis are in support of an invasion of Lebanon. The Israelis may be able to bomb Beirut but they will be shocked when Hezbollah bombs Tell Aviv.

      1. Em

        If you want to consider commonly used legal enforcement mechanisms such as freezing bank accounts and seizing all abilities to make a living in their illegal settlement to be violence, then okay. But these methods were used repeatedly elsewhere including by Israeli authorities, to clear land. So there’s nothing particularly impossible about using them to clear illegal settlements.

        The world is standing by while live on our mobile devices, Israel is genociding Palestinian men, women, and children in the most cruel ways possible. And yet the West is still claiming Israel has a right to exist and shipping them bombs and oil for their murder machine. What does “possible” or “violence” even mean in this world?

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          Israel has its own central bank and currency. It will not do this to Jews who are citizens. That is one of the features of apartheid, lesser rights for the Other.

          1. Em

            I’m not saying that Israel as currently constituted will remove the illegal settlements, just that it didn’t require a high level of physical violence to accomplish the removal. Israel as currently constituted is a racist supremacist Jewish state, of course it’s not going to stop being that. That’s why it must end.

            1. Yves Smith Post author

              Please give me a historical example where a modern state has done anything like this against citizens with significant representation in government.

              Israel like the US has a heavily armed population. Crooke has stressed that the settlers are significantly represented in the IDF. Do you think any government will seize the property of citizens? In the US and most advanced states, they need to be compensated for the “taking”.

              Moreover, this is not a matter of legalities and money. The settlers and much of the leadership believes Israel has the literally God given right to take historical Israel.

              1. Bugs

                Didn’t Armenia just do something like that? It took a long time and a much stronger Azerbaijan, but the Armenians literally walked away from their illegal territorial claim.

                1. Yves Smith Post author

                  No, this was not done by the government by design. The Armenian government had been relying on Russia for protection. Forgive me for not firming up details, but my impression at a big remove is that it then did some stupid footsie with Europe and alienated Russia. Putin made a remark that was way more Putin-esqe, but it amounted to “We can’t stop people from getting in their own way.” There was also a slaughter of Russian peace-keepers as port of this story. Armenia did not want to lose this pocket but when it did, most Armenians fled out of fear of Azerbaijani ethic cleansing and not any Armenian plan or instruction.

                  Please tell me who is the Middle East is prepared to go into Israel and push the settlers out.

                  1. Em

                    It wasn’t footsie with EU but specifically not requesting Russian assistance, so Russia had no choice under international law but to step aside. Pashinyan intentionally did this because he wanted to toss an undesirable link to the Russians aside and because his EU associates wanted to please the Azeris. As Kit Klarenberg noted, this was short-sighted and stupid because the Azeris also claim other pieces of Armenia and Armenia has now alienated the only power that was willing to protect them from the Azeris.

              2. Em

                I already said that I don’t anticipate Israel to go against its worst people. A country where 95 percent of the empowered Jewish population wants to genocide Gaza is too far gone to act in accordance with international law. However, Iran has long cultivated the Axis of Resistance specifically to end Israel and expel American influence from West Asia. I don’t necessarily think they will succeed in the current round but Israel/West’s ghoulish behavior seems to increase the odds. After that, justice must be done and the wrongs rectified.

                Here’s what Ilan Pappe has to say on the topic. https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1758669844352840101#m

    3. Flavor Wallabee

      “Nakba” can refer to the Arab armies evacuating their area of operations before attempting to exterminate the Jews. The Israeli army did the same. It’s warfare. Despite the Arab nation’s best attempts, the Jewish people pushed the Arab armies back past their lines. The “catastrophe” is that unlike Druze, Bedouins, Kurds, Ismaelites, who would live next to Jews, others would not. Palestinians AND Jews were forced from their homelands. The “catastrophe” is that Egypt and Jordan, a military dictatorship and a monarchy, were either too brutal or too corrupt to administer Palestinian territory. The “catastrophe” is that the world is unsafe for Jews.

      After ’67 the Shin Bet’s number one task in these territories was to assist in Palestinian statehood, if for no other reason than to defend against invading Arab armies. Three attempts to bleed Israel white derailed these efforts: the PLO terrorist campaign, Munich Olympic massacre, and the ’73 surprise invasion.

      To be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic because it denies a people the right to have national aspirations. Maybe Israel is just another station in the Diaspora? — Criticize Israel, shame Israel, but know Israel is built to last. Israel outlasted Greece, Rome, Babylon, Persia, Constantinople, exile in the Pale — Israel stands.

      A Jewish State and Palestinian State will exist. Its people will be free to travel and live wherever they wish on either territory. The two states will be Federated for mutual benefit. Because of geopolitics, modern irrigation techniques applied to pastoral land, petro-kingdoms, the chaos of the British and French crumbling, exhausted, in the Levant, the development of nocturnal commando tactics, Jewish State stands.

      1. Kevin Walsh

        This is factually incorrect. The Arab armies did not evacuate the territories they controlled – for obvious military and political reasons, they urged the Arab inhabitants of Palestine to remain in their homes.

      2. Em

        You have no right to build Jewish safety (which is illusory, a Jew is far safer in Berlin or New York than in Israel) on the pile of Palestinian corpses and on stolen Palestinian land. Everybody in West Asia knows how Oslo failed and they don’t buy your fairytales. Once your bullyboy America fails to come through, your Jewish state will be dead in the water. And a fine day that will be.

          1. CA

            What deeply troubles me, from the violence of the political responses to attitudes towards international affairs from the administration and Congress, from leading media such as the New York Times, from the way in which Harvard’s president was removed, is that the possibility of learning objectively in the social studies is already limited and social studies expression at Harvard has become hazardous.

  14. The Rev Kev

    “Navalny,” documentary nominated for March 12 Oscar, is crude disinformation”

    Half the news on the TV tonight was all about Navalny so I just kept cutting the sound. Did see that bit about the Navalny documentary and saw something odd. The producer asked him to give his message in case he was killed which Nalany did. But then the producer asked him to do the same in Russian but his whole tone changed to insistent and he wanted to get that message on video. I guess that all those governments, NGOs and media organizations had his obituary ready on file to go along with action plans like people placing flowers and candles which all looks good for the camera. Could this doco win an Academy award? Why not. They gave one once to an Al Qaeda PR unit not that many years ago.

    But for Navalny, I do wonder it somebody decided that he would be worth more dead than just sitting in a prison. They had gotten all that they could while he was alive but dead he is worth more for PR purposes.

    1. NotTimothyGeithner

      Desperation move. The mood in Munich was almost euphoric. This is their hail Mary to use when dealing with global south countries.

      “China is bad because Navalny. Buy American weapons because Navalny. Those dead kids are a shame but at least we didn’t officially kill Navalny.” Their problem is Navalny is a legend in the minds of the rotten brains of the cable news addled.

      On the US domestic side, the grand immigration plan isn’t working to stop Trump. This is their ray of light. Given what the have said about Putin, it won’t move a needle. Why are we sending a torture advocate like Pelosi to represent the US?

      1. The Rev Kev

        What if they say ‘Your side killed Gonzales Lira and are trying to kill Julian Assange. And what about Gaza?’ If you thought that Pelosi was pretty bad, you should have seen Navalny’s wife get hugged by Ursula von der Leyen on camera. people were crying at that conference in Munich over Navalny’s death. Until the onions ran out that is.

      2. Feral Finster

        Of course the US and its vassals are raging hypocrites.
        They know, and as long as they control the narrative, they don’t care.

    2. Carolinian

      Glad I don’t watch our US TV news. They should try to make an AI Cronkite so we will believe them again.

      And Hollywood hates Russia with their The Americans and Red Sparrow. Even HBO’s Chernobyl show had a definite skew. That documentary sounds like an Oscar lock, followed by a standing ovation by the attendees.

    4. Skip Intro

      Exactly… Avdeevka shmavdeeka, our Guaido in Moscow died just as his widow made the arms lobby Security Conference speaking tour.
      On the other hand, on the theory that the Russia is holding back on big moves to avoid startling the crazy person, this distraction gives them some room to move the entire southern front north, and maybe the eastern front west.

  15. Rolf

    Thank you for posting Pavel Zarubin’s interview of Mr. Putin.

    VVP: We will work with any leader of the United States who has the trust of the American people.

    Well. He grasps the core problem, then.

    2. Acacia

      VVP’s comment about Blinken’s grandfather fleeing “pogroms in Russia” was interesting, as he pointed out that (1) Blinken has in effect been saying that Kiev is part of Russia, and (2) curiously, most of the pogroms took place in what is today Ukraine.

      2. Feral Finster

        Simple. Anything bad that ever happened in or with regard to what is now Ukraine is Russians. Anything good that ever happened is Ukrainians.

        This is how people can say with straight faces that “Ukraine” and not the Soviet Union liberated Auschwitz, when it was Ukrainians that were the guards there.

  16. Wukchumni

    Florida deputy Jesse Hernandez screamed “shots fired,” and frantically fired his gun after an acorn fell onto the roof of his squad car, making him jump.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~

    In the deputy’s defense, the acorn from a live oak tree really looks like a Nato round…

    1. The Rev Kev

      Good thing that a small pineapple did not fall on the roof of his car or he might have thought that it was a hand grenade.

      1. Wukchumni

        It’s worse than you know, a sheriff in Florida thought that a Burmese Python was a Bangalore torpedo and called for backup with explosive experts.

          1. Wukchumni

            I apologize for wild speculation on my part in making the parts fit just so in this particular joke that appears to have bombed.

            2. hk

              Well, fwiw, I was about to come up with a humorous reply about the Raj, except I couldn’t come up with a good one.

  17. The Rev Kev

    “Avdeevka FAlls, ukraine Retreats Under the Eye of Sauron”

    Saw a funny thing on the news last night. There was this western reporter outside Avdeevka telling everybody what he is seeing. Driving behind him from left to right was an APC but if you noticed, the side of it was blurred out in the grey of the vehicle. Just to conform this impression, a minute later he was talking again on camera and the APC was about 100 feet behind him. Again the side was blurred out which was confirmed when you saw a soldier walk in between also get blurred. I guess that this was a 3rd Brigade unit and the editors did not want viewers to see certain symbols painted on the side of that APC. Give a few more years development and an AI would be able to do that job seamlessly and viewers would never know.

    1. timbers

      Now that Avdeevka has fallen, Putin can concentrate on his plans to invade the Andromeda Galaxy and China her plans to take the Proxima Centauri star system, then from there both use magnatar stars and black holes to aim nuclear magnetic heat beams upon Europe Taiwan and United States. Biden needs to tell the American people these facts.

      Time to revive American’s Star Wars program.

    3. Not Qualified to Comment

      Saw what sounds like that clip on TVNZ’s main news last night and there was no blurring – the insignia on the side of the tank was in plain view. I very much doubt, though, that your average New Zealander would have been aware of the connotation and twigged the significance.

  18. ilsm

    Per Jake Sullivan:

    “We do not believe ‘that’ that serves the national security interests of the United States”.

    Read the US constitution! “national security interests….” are not innumerate or even mentioned!

    Therefore, those “interests” are outside of legal.

    A longer stretch than running up a “national defense authorization act” (NDAA) every year or so to get around no expenditure limits for the military industry congress complex…..

    To the administration “interests” trump the law!

    1. Wukchumni

      When Sullivan eventually has his day in court to address the gross dereliction of duty regarding the constitution in the Biden administration, he’ll probably just take the fourth.

      1. JBird4049

        Somehow, the idea that the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights bit, is suppose to limit the powers of the powerful and to protect people from the government, not to protect the government from the people. The Founders, for all of their faults along with the fears of the mob and the lower orders, were afraid of corruption and tyranny, which to them also meant the creation of a police state, which the American Colonies had become before independence.

        I think that they would have agreed strongly with Lord Acton words: Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

        I find it really fascinating that people like Jake Sullivan show no understanding of the purpose including the reasoning in the various bits of American political philosophy. From what I can see, their understanding of political philosophy or political science seems to be that of a very dumbed down version of Nietzscheanism without any of Nietzsche’s wisdom. People like Sullivan do not know just how ignorant, and therefore dangerous, they are to everyone, including themselves. Power without self reflection is a dangerous thing.

        1. Feral Finster

          “I find it really fascinating that people like Jake Sullivan show no understanding of the purpose including the reasoning in the various bits of American political philosophy.”

          Sullivan and those like him understand just fine. They don’t care.

          For them, checks and bEmpire. And everything else are just another tool to be used as convenient in the service of power and empire. Anything else is contemptible weakness.

          1. JBird4049

            >>>Anything else is contemptible weakness.

            That is why they are fools, for if they actually understood just the why the system was set up the way it was, they would not be doing it. At the very least, they would be showing some prudence, but all I see are the wailings of children and the justifications of bullies.

            I guess they would call George Washington a weakling. He could have become a king or kept adding addition terms of the presidency, but he did not. The man convinced the Continental Army to not to have a coup and rejected any attempts to expand his power. For that matter, there is Washington’s Farewell Address, which they, if they ever bother to read it, which I doubt, they would abjure the whole thing.

            This does not necessarily mean that the American Republic as it was set up is or was good, but it does show deliberate thought and prudence towards a hopeful future. Today’s elites are all about bombing and droning entire countries, lying to everyone, and betraying everything for no apparent reason besides pique from not getting everything they want on the way to the creation of their nihilistic Brave New World.

  19. DavidZ

    Florida Cop Empties His Gun, Runs For Cover After Acorn Falls On Car
    —————-

    Sounds like PTSD

    1. The Rev Kev

      That’s no help to that poor sucker handcuffed in the back of the cruiser suddenly find bullets whistling through it.

  20. floyd

    re: climate change

    LOL – does anyone really think that the US Government will effectively use the trillions of dollars it says it needs to fight climate change? The map arguably also reflects which sections of the country benefit massively from “such investments” and which ones don’t. Never let a crisis go to “waste”!!

    1. ilsm

      Multiplier for US G climate change expenses is <.45.

      While $60B more for the sunk cost fallacy aka Kiev multiplier is ZERO

  22. The Rev Kev

    “Jordanians form human chain to block trucks into Israel in solidarity with Gaza”

    Kudos to those protestors doing what is right. Because of Ansar Allah fighters, the cost of transporting goods on some China-to-Europe routes rose by around 400%, according to European Economy Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni. In addition, shipping times on such routes had increased by 10-15 days. But to have countries like the Emirate and Jordon help the Israelis supply themselves must feel like a betrayal by all the people living in this region. Those countries may be trying to play nice with Israel but a moment’s reflection will show that Israel will try to wreck those countries so that they will no longer be a threat to them as they expand.

    2. eg

      Je me souviens. My father, an electrical engineer, was a communications officer in the RCAF. We spent time in north Florida and Massachusetts (where one of my brothers was born) when I was a child.

  25. Alice X

    With Rafah Under Siege, ICJ Reiterates Israeli Obligations Under Genocide Convention

    A South African leader welcomed the court’s affirmation that “the perilous situation demands immediate and effective implementation of the provisional measures” from its earlier ruling.

    South Africa went back to the court on Tuesday, Israel responded:

    OBSERVATIONS Of THE STATE OF ISRAEL ON THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA’S “URGENT
    REQUEST FOR ADDITIONAL MEASURES UNDER ARTICLE 75(1) OF THE RULES OF COURT”
    DATED 12 FEBRUARY 2024

    1. Israel regrets that South Africa seeks once again to misuse the Court’s provisional
    measures procedure, this time by a highly peculiar and improper request that makes reference
    to Article 75(1) of the Rules of Court. (read more…)

    And a day later the Court issued its decision.

    “The Court notes that the most recent developments in the Gaza Strip, and in Rafah in particular, ‘would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences’, as stated by the United Nations Secretary-General (Remarks to the General Assembly on priorities for 2024 (7 Feb. 2024)).

    This perilous situation demands immediate and effective implementation of the provisional measures indicated by the Court in its Order of 26 January 2024, which are applicable throughout the Gaza Strip, including in Rafah, and does not demand the indication of additional provisional measures.

    The Court emphasizes that the State of Israel remains bound to fully comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention and with the said Order, including by ensuring the safety and security of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

    To restate the obvious, the court is paying attention and wants the previous Order followed, which it seems to me the IOF has not been doing.

      1. Lefty Godot

        The word “thug” is reserved for use by the New York Times in referring to Putin. Every time they mention him. So you may get a DMCA takedown notice for that comment. /s

        1. Em

          I prefer “ghouls” for describing Israel and its Western backers. Thug is far too kind a description for people who are inflicting famine, disease, and agonizing death on Gazan civilians.

  26. Roger Blakely

    Re: You’ve heard about incels but you should know about femcels: the secret world of involuntary celibate women ZMEScience

    This is the worst kind of article. This type of article is easy to find. This type of article starts out with Elliot Rodger, the twenty-two-year-old man who went on a killing spree in Santa Barbara in 2014.

    The rank misandry of articles like this are why young men are dropping out of society and why young men are attracted to figures like Andrew Tate. Are we going to paint a huge percentage of young men with that brush?

    Young men are struggling. Something like twenty to thirty percent of men in their twenties are having no sex. This statistic comes from the National Institute of Health’s General Social Survey from 2018, and it was reported in a famous 2019 Washington Post article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-americans-not-having-sex-has-reached-record-high/).

    This article about femcels doesn’t even do a good job of shedding light on why femcels are complaining. This article does little more than mention that femcels want the social power held by beautiful women, i.e., pretty privilege.

    The article doesn’t even pass the smell test. Here is a simple thought experiment. A guy walks into a bar and says, “I want to have sex with a woman tonight. Which of you women are up for it?” A woman walks into a bar and says, “I want to have sex with a man tonight. Which of you men are up for it?”

    What is so frustrating to men is that men often get rejected for something over which they have no control, i.e., their height. Women, on the other hand, could lose weight. There is a famous sixteen-second clip on Youtube from the Whatever Podcast (Whatever Clips) where a young woman says that men are superficial, but in the next sentence she says that she would not date a man shorter than 6’2” (Hypocrite says men are superficial, but she would only date a guy who is at least 6ft2).

    1. kareninca

      When men stop caring about women’s ages, women will stop caring about men’s heights. I’m not holding my breath.

  27. Wukchumni

    Our human ancestors often ate each other, and for surprising reasons New Scientist
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest, by Christy & Jacqueline Turner has evidence collected over decades of ad hoc ‘fast food restaurants’ that turned up in the wake of climate change forcing the Anasazi to up and abandon ancestral homes. Long tibia was on the menu.

    Could you imagine what California would be like in the wake of a 50 year long drought, as happened in Chaco Canyon and environs?

      1. Wukchumni

        Alferd Packer’s in Co. has a leg up on the competition there…

        Some members of the Donner Party were quite wealthy and one of them buried silver coins @ Donner Lake which were found in 1891, with them being about half foreign coins the size of a silver $-as really anything went in the USA until 1858. A very interesting snapshot of money in the mid 1840’s for a numismatist to glimpse.

        Until the Comstock Lode turned into the big bonanza just 65 miles away by car from Donner Pass, we had scant amount of places with silver deposits, so American silver coins were never sufficient for the economy then, and keep in mind there is no Federal paper money in 1846-47.

        https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DAC18910516.2.10&e=——-en–20–1–txt-txIN——–

        The bigger part of the Donner treasure was never located, one of the wagons was known to be carrying $15,000 in gold coins (750 Troy ounces = $1.5 million today) and it was buried somewhere in the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

        You can’t eat money though…

    3. The Rev Kev

      You wouldn’t need a 50 year long drought for that but a massive earthquake to break all the water and food infrastructure for L.A and San Francisco. How long would it take to evacuate the 40 million people that live in California? Worse yet, what would happen if all those people suddenly realized that they would be dependent on the Biden admin to help them? Their track record for helping Americans in disaster is not a stellar one.

  28. LawnDart

    Cannibalism? We’ve come a long way…

    When Terrorism and Organ Theft Connect… It’s ‘Israel’
    …
    Earlier in November (2023), Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor expressed concerns about possible organ theft from Palestinian corpses, citing reports by medical professionals in Gaza who examined some bodies after they were released by the Israeli occupation.
    …
    It reported that medical professionals found vital organs, such as livers, kidneys and hearts, alongside cochleas and corneas were missing.

    https://english.almanar.com.lb/2032032

    2. The Rev Kev

      There have been rumours of Israeli human organ trafficking going on for years and human organs from such places as Kosovo and the Ukraine have Israel marked as one of their destinations. Just remember – the only democracy in the Middle East.

      1. Em

        Israel has admitted that they have taken skin grafts and cornea from dead Palestinian detainees without permission, well before 10/7. There are some accounts coming out now of bodies of dead detainees being released without liver and other body parts.

        Israel is of course also a major center for money laundering, arms trafficking, and human trafficking. It also harbors hundreds of serious sex offender from justice in other jurisdictions.

        Jeffrey Epstein is just the tip of the iceberg.

        1. The Rev Kev

          New motto for the Israeli Tourist people –

          ‘When you visit Israel, you may find yourself leaving a little bit of yourself behind.’

  29. TomDority

    the following is my opinion – I don’t mind criticism for it.
    Trump committed fraud and should be tagged for it. “Lawfare” is a crap term…like ‘woke’ is a crap term often used to sooth the sores of sore losers – How Trump still goes on about a witch hunt or thinks that anything he did while in office is legal – while their is precedent for it.. it’s still malarkey. Trump is the ultimate con-man and coward but, it’s was a real travesty that in 08 the Dems would trade Hope-and-Change for – “My administration, is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” – which exempted the FIRE sector from being bagged and tagged for the con-job, the huffing puffing and blowing the housing market up which increased the cost-of-living to such an excess that we have an affordability crisis – of course that Trump coward, being a coward – looked to demonize the Mexicans…build a wall, they coming for our stuff, they the reason their are only low paying jobs.
    Now you got the good Barbara Lee calling for a $50 minimum living wage — while $50 dollars in that area would constitute a living wage…. it does not account for why it got to $50 minimum wage in the first place, which is IMHO the unleashed Asset price inflation caused by the FIRE sector bubble blowing. Further – after a $50 or the old everybody gets minimum income scheme like Long’s “Share Our Wealth Movement” or as Sinclair Lewis revised in It Can’t Happen Here: “Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on”… anyway, That increased minimum wage will most certainly be eaten up in a further surge in FIRE sector overheads and wall street burdens imposed in the name of Freedom and Democracy.
    So, the fact that Trump gets tagged for 350 million is not a result a “lawfare” or ‘Wokeness’ but a result of the utter ignorance, pathology and narcissism of a pampered, spoiled, cowardly little brat who did not get his way – tantrum.
    Yet we are going to get a choice between him and another heavy hitter….sarc. Why don’t the Dems see why they are doing so bad? Why has the game been excluded from the majority by the high price of admission – why is their never talk of campaign bribery- er finance reform? Could it be that the Corpos have already won – as posited in the Sinclair Lewis It Can’t Happen Here

    1. French75

      I dont think anyone on this forum or elsewhere is surprised that a NY RE developer had some crazy valuations, or that there might be a statute under which to prosecute.

      The question is why was this ONE developer singled out over the many? Was what Trump did in regards to his valuations and loan seeking so egregeous and harmful that it merits singling him out while all other developers get a pass?

      Or perhaps it’s politically motivated. That’s lawfare.

      Add to this that there are several other cases, one involving how a payment was categorized (not undocumented, not erased, just miscategorized) in campaign financing — as well as prior investigations over ties to Russia thar proved to be based on known exaggerations with poor sourcing — and you begin to wonder if there’s really a “there” there

    2. eg

      Both Team Pepsi and Team Coke have conspired to reduce much of America to an inland 3rd World (apologies if this old fashioned term is offensive) of sorts — it should surprise precisely nobody that its courts would be politicized in a fashion recognizable to denizens of former colonies elsewhere.

  30. Carolinian

    That Stoller on Apple Vision Pro is quite silly. Apparently people are already returning the $4000 “breakthrough” device because it is too heavy to comfortably wear, produces eyestrain and headaches, lacks the apps to make it more functional. In the movie world there are periodic spasms of 3d on theory that virtual reality will sell more tickets when the actual product is content rather than technology. Undoubtedly there are technical applications where VR is needed, but Stoller’s gush seems more likely a bid to get Apple to give him a free sample. The ritual scolding about Apple’s walled garden merely provokes a “ya think?”

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      I am glad most people are not impressed.

      Re the headaches….about 10% of the public does not have binocular vision. Some have mildly deficient depth perception, others have none….but I can’t imagine any of these 3D goodies would work well for them.

    2. cfraenkel

      Silly is a bit strong. Matt’s consistently been pointing out that the time to limit monopolies is before they get started. This version is meant for the segment of the population that doesn’t even see price tags, and if some of them get returned, so what? the rest of them still got worn, the buyers got wowed by the demos and then it sits collecting dust. Mission accomplished, it got that very rich demographic sold on the future of AR. Apple is investing in the foundational learning in software and HI for when the next generation of chips / batteries / displays make the product more viable. In the meantime, they’re working to dig the moat around the space, as Matt is warning.

      The counter view to your skepticism is to look at all of today’s posts on AI. Today’s AI is just a very good ‘stochastic parrot’, but it isn’t stopping corporations from shoving it into duty in your doctors office.

      New tech isn’t judged on if it’s any ‘good’, it’s judged on if it can generate profit. And monopoly moats lower that profit bar quite a bit.

  31. CA

    https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1758780853092765745

    Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand

    Everyone should read this immensely revealing account of an American reconstructive surgeon who just spent 10 days in Gaza:

    “I have worked in other war zones. But what I witnessed during 10 days in Gaza was not war — it was annihilation.”

    https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-02-16/rafah-gaza-hospitals-surgery-israel-bombing-ground-offensive-children

    Op-Ed: I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation

    4:10 AM · Feb 17, 2024

      1. CA

        “Read some of the comments giving a thumbs up to the IOF.”

        IOF should be IDF or Israel Defense Forces.

        That there is significant support for genocidal forces, should distressingly come as no surprise.  We have academic research supporting this, but an advisor of mine addressed this in a famous university lecture when discussing the importance of the “Grand Inquisitor” chapter of the Brothers Karamazov.

        Thank you, Alice.

  33. Wukchumni

    Pesticide linked to reproductive issues found in Cheerios, Quaker Oats and other oat-based foods CBS
    ~~~~~~~~~~

    So that’s what Battle Creek really meant to us on the receiving end of Cheerios and no doubt Lucky Charms too.

    1. eg

      Wasn’t part of Mr Kellogg’s initial mission to provide a diet which would reduce libido?

      The commitment to their founder’s goal after all these years is impressive …

  34. diptherio

    I must admit to some curiosity about your decision to include the tweet from Jack Straw with an easily debunked lie about a woman’s murder. While Straw claims she died in Huma’s residence, a basic check of the news from the time (2018) shows that the woman died in an apartment in the same building where Abedin and Wiener used to live. Decidedly not in Abedin’s residence.

    A woman who was found dead Tuesday inside a trash compactor near an upscale New York City apartment building — where Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband Anthony Weiner lived — fell down the chute while intoxicated, police said.
    https://www.foxnews.com/us/woman-drunk-before-deadly-fall-into-compactor-outside-huma-abedin-anthony-weiners-old-apartment-cops-say

    Not sure where the Soros bit is coming from. Probably because the woman worked at WebMD and Soros has an investment in that business. I mean, that tweet does not remotely pass the smell test, and a little poking shows it to be total nonsense…so why put it here? Is this some kind of test to see if anyone’s paying attention, or if people here are willing to believe any negative thing about someone they don’t like (just like some Dems I know)? I am honestly curious.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      We got it from a reader who has been reliable. I didn’t check as a result. I will remove.

      However, I have to say that having lived in NYC, it is pretty impossible to fall down a trash chute. For starters, for precisely that sort of liability risk, the openings are higher than waist height and not all that big.

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          You have a SERIOUS reading comprehension problem. Two very short paras and you can’t get it right? And then you go off half baked and shoot at me?

  35. bassmule

    Paging Hubert Horan!

    “While still well below pre-pandemic levels, taxi pickups at Logan have climbed steadily since hitting bottom in 2020, according to Logan operator, the Massachusetts Port Authority. In 2023, taxis logged more than 1 million pickups at the airport, up 5 percent from the year before but nearly double from 2021. That upswing stands in sharp contrast to the trend pre-pandemic, when taxi ridership fell to about 1.5 million airport pickups in 2019 from nearly 2 million in 2017.”

    Are Taxis Cool Again? At Logan Airport, There are signs of a rebound.

  36. Wukchumni

    Was reading that the Georgia Guidestones done got blown up real good and there’s an empty field in its place, and that’s too bad for we’ll have frankly very little left of us in a thousand years, to infer what we were here. Our dumps will have been gone over with a fine tooth comb-not much left in the most promising avenue to figure us out.

    Stone Mountain and the largest bas-relief artwork in the world is still intact in Georgia, and should it somehow survive to tell the tale, historians will discern that the Confederacy must have won the Civil War, as who puts up such an artistic effort to the losing side?

    Ironically here, the various Yokut tribes have left their calling cards over the past few thousand years in the guise of mortars (grinding holes in granite) that should be relatively intact for the next few thousand years or more.

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

    1. JP

      The Yokuts are a fairly recent occupation of these foot hills, 3-400 years. There was a previous culture that lived in higher elevations that was responsible for most of the so called indian bath tubs and grinding holes. The “bath tubs” were used to leach the tannins from acorns before grinding.

  37. junkelly

    I am interested to know if Mayim Bialik replied to Abdalhadi Alijla but don’t know how to look it up if anyone can help.

  38. Tom Stone

    Is Zelensky’ Mom still living in the promised land or has she taken a vacation?
    I’d guess that there are quite a few Israeli’s who would like to leave, but who can not due to financial constraints.
    If they need to sell their home in Haifa of Tel Aviv in order to afford a comfortable life elsewhere they might have a problem.

  39. Jason Boxman

    Colorado Teen Has Had Long Covid for 4 Years, Celebrated Prom in Hospital: ‘The Virus Just Began to Take Over’ (Exclusive)

    Like what the f**k even is this story? She gets COVID three times, so far. An unmasked prom at the hospital. It’s like public health and the medical system are trying to kill her. And I guess no one else in contact with her thinks maybe with a COVID infection, this might be them, and to maybe take precautions. And the article definitely doesn’t mention anything about protecting yourself against SARS2.

    It’s all other worldly.

    1. Alice X

      :-) – me too! They’re both so sincere! (Though I can do without Sachmo and his most syrupy song.)

  41. antidlc

    Opinion piece in the Washington Post:
    https://archive.is/wehBZ
    Covid isn’t over, and we shouldn’t act like it is

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s potential loosening of coronavirus isolation guidelines is a reckless, anti-public health policy that goes against science, encourages disease spread and puts everyone at greater risk. The bare minimum we should have learned from a devastating pandemic that has killed and disabled millions is that we should stay home when we are sick. Yet, inexplicably, by caving in to corporate interests, governments are encouraging people to not even do the bare minimum.

  42. BillS

    Ugh! The Navalny hagiography is getting extreme. I just saw that the Italian daily, la Repubblica, compared Navalny to Martin Luther King.

    I know that the Blob is busy having an orgasm, but don’t they realized when they’ve gone over the top?

  43. Ian McTigue

    I just read and tried to post the “Putin’s points in his interview with Carlson confirmed by Western scholars InfoBRICS” article to Facebook. They said it violated community guidelines. I slipped it through with a “dot” instead of a “.”

    Wondering if anyone else had problems?

    1. Sin Fronteras

      YES, I experimented. I could post a comment that duplicated the headline, but not the url itself.

  44. JBird4049

    Watch: Airboat glides across ice to save trapped man BBC. Darwin Award fail, at Little Bay de Noc, as in Escanaba, Michigan, one of my old stomping grounds. Above the fold!

    Nice story, but I do not think that the airboat crew should have bothered to go into the water again to rescue the cellphone. Since the man didn’t die, he should have received some penalty as a warning!

  45. caucus99percenter

    https://www.eugyppius.com/p/germany-announces-wide-ranging-plans

    “Germany announces wide-ranging plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents, in order to better control the ‘thought and speech patterns’ of its own people”

    A lot of the AfD’s popularity in former East Germany is due to people looking at the direction of the current traffic-light government’s direction re censorship + banning & punishment of “wrong” opinions, and concluding it heralds a return to East German style thought control, a travesty of democracy.

    1. The Rev Kev

      I guess that those who lived in East Germany (DDR) are a lot more familiar with how that works out then those in West Germany. They fought the DDR into extinction through their own efforts. Those in the east knows what is possible while those in the west have not a clue.

  46. Tom67

    Here my view that is contrary to anything you might have heard before. I have a more than passing knowledge of Russia, speak the language and worked there as a free lance journalist. Navalny was a brave man. In a way foolhardy. His main themes were corruption and nationalism. He exposed high ranking politicians in a way that was truly unforgivable for the powers that be. But interestingly he was also a Russian nationalist. And that might have been even more dangerous. There are two words for Russia in Russian. One is Rossiya and the other one is Russia. The first denotes the whole expanse of this vast country and all the different nationalities living in it. The second one refers to the areas were ethnic Russians live. Navalny was a nationalist in the narrow understandung of Russia. And he was a democrat in the sense that he wanted justice and the rule of law for common Russian people. By that he was endangering the wider Russian state.
    Democracy and the rule of law are not possible if you have such widely differing traditions as between Muslim caucasians who were only conquered in the 19th century and ethnic Russians. Basically the Chechen war ended by Moscow handing power (and huge sums of money – essentially a bribe) to the Kadyrov clan who established a truly distopian dictatorship in Chechnya. The Chechens (and other Caucasian nationalities) have ever since not stopped slowly but surely driving Russians out of the Caucasus. Even the FSB (the Russian equivalent of the FBI) will not investigate anything in Chechnya without permission of Kardyrov. Basically from the outside it looks as if Chechnya and the other Muslim territories in the Caucasus are firmly in the hands of the Kremlin whereas in reality Moscow has no say of their interior policitics at all. The price for that fiction is paid by local Russians and by the richer regions.
    Here just one exemplary scandal that was making the rounds in Russia and seemingly has not been registered abroad at all. Last year a young Russian and adherent of Navalny publicly burned a Koran in a Russian provincial city. By Russian law he should have been put in prison. His fate was much worse. He was handed over to Kadyrov (who makes a great show of being a pious Muslim) and then Kadyrov send one of his sons (12 or 13 years old) to beat this guy in prison. Beat this helpless man savagely! The Kremlin is paying a high price for the fantasy story of Chechnya and people who point this out are living dangerously in Russia. I think this is as much as or even more than his expose of corruption the reason for the death of Navalny. Other Russian nationalists (and opponents of the current power structure in Russia) have lately been sentenced to long jail terms. The two most famous are Strelkov who organized the resistance against Kiev in Donbass in 2014 and Pavel Gubarev who as the political leader of the resistance. Things are never simple in Russia and there are tensions within Russian society that never make the news. To complicated and might disturb the black and white view of the country….

    1. Tom67

      Before I forget: the beating of this young Russian in a Kadyrov prison was videotaped and then distributed in Russian social media. That is why it had such a huge impact.

      1. zach

        There are tensions in every society. Maintaining an empire the size of Russia obliges certain compromises. The Russian government aspires to live in “the real world.” It seems that their Decider in Chief has answered the question of the trolley problem for himself, and for the welfare of the country he leads.

        Maybe tovarisch hadn’t heard the expression “f*** around and find out?”

      2. Em

        That’s for Russians to decide, not Westerners who have plenty of blood of abused to death prisoners on their hands. Why don’t we care a little more about what our governments are doing to Julian Assange and Daniel Hale and a lot less about how Russians treat law breaking NED assets?

    3. Polar Socialist

      You did leave out a minor detail about the scandal: the young man is from Crimea and was acting on behalf of the Ukrainian Security Service to incite ethnic hatred in Russia. He admitted to being paid to insult the Muslim population of Russia, so the prosecutor’s office decided Muslims should be the judges of him.

      That, naturally, doesn’t justify the beating in no way or form, but it may explain why – during the current war and need to avoid ethnic friction – the Russian judicial system decided not to press the case (beating) after the initial investigation concluded that the boy was too young for prosecution.

      1. Tom67

        Sorry, but this is total BS. His name is Nikita Shuravelya, he is (was) 19 years old, born in Sevatopol but raised in Russia. He was studying in Volgograd where he also comitted his deed, taped it and then uploaded it to the internet. It was a clear political act and he was known to be an adherent of Navalny. After his arrest the state attorney claimed that he did it in behalf of the Ukrainian secret service. If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you.
        From Volgograd he was turned over to Chechnya although he had not even been sentenced yet. There he was savagely beaten by a 15 year old son of Chechen strongman Ramsan Kadyrov. Shuravelya somehow managed to convey this fact back to Russia and a clamour started in Russian social media. Kadyrov though didn´t say sorry, but doubled down and published the tape showing how his son beat up the helpless prisoner. This is all according to official Russian sources.

        1. Em

          He was obviously talking about Kadyrov’s minor son.

          Again, how about caring about what the West is doing to its prisoners and leave what’s allegedly happening in Russian, Chinese, and Iranian prisoners to their own citizens?

    4. Morincotto

      In the direction of that sort of mationalism ließ less democracy but more the genocidaires of Israel IT seems to me.

      But obviously there are plenty that consider Israel to be exactly the Kind of “democracy” they want.

      The problem is that events have
      shown that model to be completely unviable and a traap.

      Of course CIA and other spoilers would love for Russia to follow such a selfdefeating policy that rightly would alienate all it’s allies.

      And of course we know exactly how the West would react to Russia increasingly follow a policy of a more narrow ethnonationalism.

      Nice try, one is tempted to say.

      Whatever problems and tensions there are, the time to work through them very obviously after the West’s genocidal ethnonationalist mercenaries have been firmly put in their place.

  47. Susan the other

    The monkey and the parrot and the cat and the baby. Might want to play those to Netanyahu. They say it all.

  48. The Rev Kev

    So Cornel West posted this on Twitter-

    ‘Cornel West
    @CornelWest
    My prayers are with the precious family of the courageous Russian political prisoner the late Alexei Navalny, just as I pray for my dear brothers Mumia Abu-Jamal, Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, Leonard Peltier, and sister Narges Mohammadi and all other political prisoners in US and the world! Free all political prisoners under cruel and unjust systems of oppression!’

    https://twitter.com/CornelWest/status/1758665760870678710

    Which caused one guy to state the obvious-

    ‘Not voting for Genocide Joe
    @DoctorFishbones
    Cornel West praising a CIA asset like Navalny makes me suspect he’s one too’

    https://twitter.com/DoctorFishbones/status/1758871216037716201

  49. Willow

    > Incels & femcels

    Something perculiar to US. Root cause is the jock/queen bee social dynamics in American schools. Extreme social stratification leading to ‘caste effects’ and an unhealthy mismatch between aspirations, subjective status and inherent capability. Same dynamic US at geopolitical level dresses up as ‘rules based order’..

    On subject of behaviour, beware of old generals without glory. They will plunge a country into war without consideration of men or money. Not just US and NATO but imminently Egypt.

  51. David in Friday Harbor

    Undergraduate “Consulting Clubs” — are they serious? Isn’t the entire purpose of hiring a consultant to benefit from their greater experience and expertise in a specialized area of business?

    What do these undergrads bring to the table — other than the family and social connections that got them into Georgetown? Oh, right. The American kakistocracy at work…

    1. SocalJimObjects

      You want experience and expertise? I am guessing it won’t be long before these consulting clubs will start sprouting up in kindergartens frequently attended by the children of the elite. Pretty sure at one time there was this American president who asked one of his grandchildren for advice on how to handle some kind of world crisis (can’t recall the name), so start them young I say, heck if you don’t make partner upon graduation, you clearly are not cut out for the profession.

    2. The Rev Kev

      You have to admit that it was a fascinating insight into how those undergrads were selected for the inside track for the corporate world. With that route, they were able to bypass the majority of their competition by other undergrads and cruise to the upper levels with their “golden” resumes. Thing is, were they the best that could have been chosen or was it a matter of family and social connections? Looking at the recent performance of corporate America, you sometimes wonder if their leadership is being recruited from the shallow end of the genetic pool.

  52. Jason Boxman

    So here’s a visual, which I’ll have to describe, of ChatGPT affecting Web quality. A content garbage barge came online in December 2022, with an innocuous name. Family Nation. And it’s stuffed full of just random listicles and other nonsense on long-tail keywords. And you can see the organic traffic spiking to a peak, from nothing to 500k monthly in September, kind of like Nvidia stock’s rapid incline. Then just as rapidly it begins to decline. The traffic growth is shaped like an arrow.

    I can only assume that Google has gotten wiser to LLM generated garbage barges. It’s cratered to under 100k a month in January. I’ve come across other web sites like this. It’s interesting to see the collateral damage as this train wreck unfolds before us. And this is a more benign outcome of LLM availability.

    Now we’re getting that in a serious way in images and video, hooray!

  53. rowlf

    More Chas Freeman please. Glad to see him being interviewed.

    As I’ve posted in the past, a Lavrov – Freeman Valdai Club type discussion would be epic.

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