Gonzalo Lira was born today; like Frederick in the Pirates of Penzance, February 29 would have been his birthday. –lambert
The Groundhog Watchers Nautilus. Citizen science!
One of world’s smallest fish found to make sound as loud as a gunshot Guardian
‘Dune’ stunt double? Terrifying creature may be even weirder than movie’s sandworms Study Finds. But most are less than six inches long. So far.
Berkshire Hathaway’s 2023 Results — Overview The Rational Walk
Climate
Nature’s Heartbeat, Visualized Climate & Capitalism
Texas wildfires forces shutdown at nuclear weapon facility. Here is what we know AP
The reawakening of America’s nuclear dinosaurs Searchlight New Mexico
#COVID19
Why Are We Still Flu-ifying COVID? Katherine Wu, The Atlantic
China?
‘Two sessions’ 2024: China signals more fiscal pump-priming for the economy South China Morning Post
China broadens legislature on state security to include ‘work secrets’ Business Standard
Welcome to China’s Cat Island, where lucky strays wait for a new home WaPo
AI in Southeast Asia: As bad actors gain new high-tech weapons, so too for the defenders Channel News Asia
Vietnam’s ‘rice bowl’ cracks in monster heatwave Channel News Asia
Sri Lanka ends visas for hundreds of thousands of Russians staying there to avoid war Independent
One in Four Town and Village Elections in Japan Going Uncontested Nippon
India
With handouts, piped water and cooking gas, India’s Modi woos women voters Channel News Asia
Syraqistan
Beyond the Houthis’ attacks on shipping: The absurdity of the India-Middle East Corridor Hellenic Shipping News. “Dry canals cannot compete with ‘wet’ canals! And that is why there is no truly dry canal in the world.”
Israel, ICJ and the movement for a principled and just world order Al Jazeera
New Not-So-Cold War
Pro-Russian separatists in Moldova seek Moscow’s ‘protection’ France24. The tail end of Moldova is about 60km from Odessa….
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry on appeal by Transnistrian “lawmakers”: Russia cannot be a peacemaker Ukrainska Pravda
* * * ISW: Russia holds offensive initiative Kyiv Independent
‘There’s only Plan A’: Defense leaders fear failure in Ukraine Politico
Nord Stream: Denmark closes investigation into pipeline blast BBC. So I guess Blob appendage Anne Applebaum’s husband was right. His famously deleted tweet:
* * * Emmanuel Macron’s provocative advocacy of European troops on the ground in Ukraine Gilbert Doctorow
Germany rules out sending any troops to Ukraine Anadolu Agency
Estonian PM supports Macron’s idea of Western troops in Ukraine Ukrainska Pravda. No doubt.
Fire Jens Stoltenberg Now Before It Is Too Late! Weapons and Strategy
* * * Russia-Ukraine War: China’s Vanishing Neutrality The Diplomat
The US art market is a sanctions black hole FT
Biden Administration
McConnell departure leaves GOP’s Reagan wing reeling Politico
House Freedom Caucus mocks McConnell as ‘(D-Ukraine)’ after retirement news The Hill
* * * Congress reaches fiscal 2024 funding deal, new stopgaps in hopes of averting shutdown Government Executive
Johnson ‘unchanged’ on Ukraine, border crisis despite pressure at ‘intense’ White House meeting FOX
* * * Biden executive order aims to stop Russia and China from buying Americans’ personal data Engadget. But not in the United States–
The Government Really Is Spying On You — And It’s Legal Politico
Antitrust
The $25B Kroger-Albertsons Merger Is Going to Fail Matt Stoller, BIG
2024
Biden just got a physical. But a cognitive test was not part of the assessment NPR. Here is the Physician to the President’s memo (PDF), addressed to Karine Jean-Pierre, interestingly. (Biden seems to be on a lot of medication, including statins, but presumbly interactions aren’t significant.) On gait: “The team concluded that much of his stiffness is in fact a result of degenerative (‘wear and tear’) osteoarthritic changes (or spondylosis) of his spine.” As readers know, I’m not a fan of remote diagnosis (and I’m still waiting for a White House “reporter” to ask Biden to count backwards by sevens during a presser). That said, the dogs aren’t barking in the night on this. The first non-barking dog is the White House: Given the givens, it seems reasonable to conclude that no cognitive tests were run because the White House, at a minimum, was unsure what the results would be. Therefore, the conclusion that “Biden has cognitive issues, known to his inner circle,” seems inescapable (and says nothing about their nature or degree, or the effects of hyypothesized “juice”). By the same token, I would expect the efficient Republican oppo machine to have produced serious, medically-driven videos documenting Biden’s gait, flubs, etc., by now. That hasn’t happened either. Perhaps they want to prop Biden up just as much as Democrats do?
The Supremes
The One Big Question (PDF) Richard M. Re, University of Virginia School of Law. “Should courts, particularly the US Supreme Court, have a lot of power?”
Spook Country
The CIA in Ukraine — The NY Times Gets a Guided Tour Patrick Lawrence, ScheerPost
The Bezzle
A marker:
Prediction: A national government will be revealed this year to have been buying Bitcoin—the modern replacement for monetary gold—without having disclosed that fact publicly.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 28, 2024
Digital Watch
Google CEO calls AI tool’s controversial responses ‘completely unacceptable’ Semafor. Nonsense. This is PR-driven “Honey, I’ve changed”-style cope by Pichai. Anybody who knows anything about software development, especially in large corporations like Google, knows that Gemini was approved by multiple layers of management at every step of the way: whiteboarding, PowerPoints, demos, stand-ups, meetings, blah blah blah, and probably meetings with key vendors and clients, too. Gemini does everything that Google wants it to do, and any “guardrails” (how I hate that trope) installed now can be removed by Google at leisure.
Welcome to the Era of BadGPTs WSJ. “A new crop of nefarious chatbots with names like ‘BadGPT’ and ‘FraudGPT’ are springing up on the darkest corners of the web, as cybercriminals look to tap the same artificial intelligence behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT.” Implying, of course, that ChatGPT itself is not based on theft, and does not drive fraud. But nevertheless.
OpenAI sued, again, for scraping and replicating news stories The Register. The deck: “The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet want damages and to have their content removed from models.”
* * * An update on the BBC’s plans for Generative AI (Gen AI) and how we plan to use AI tools responsibly BBC
Indexing the information age Aeon. Dublin Core (DC) metadata, 1995. Happy, innocent days. And today:
That was like, my entire work history from 2013 – 2018, videos that went insanely viral and were still bringing in thousands of dollars a month – just scrubbed from the internet, there isn’t even any record they ever existed.
— Jules Suzdaltsev (@jules_su) February 24, 2024
Assange
Julian Assange’s Grand Inquisitor The Chris Hedges Report
Justice Minister defends house arrest power for people feared to commit a hate crime in future Globe and Mail
Transportation
All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train Asterisk. Terrible headline, well worth a read. Deep-dive into public transportion cost structure, in the US and worldwide.
The Culture of Aviation Safety (excerpt) James Fallows, Breaking the News
The Carry-On-Baggage Bubble Is About to Pop The Atlantic
Zeitgeist Watch
This bookshop in Fort Collins is paying people to sit down and read quietly The Colorado Sun
Odd thrift store donation found to be a WWII-era grenade, prompts evacuations: ‘A rarity’ FOX
The Final Frontier
The mathematically perfect exoplanet system — a great place to search for alien tech Space.com
Guillotine Watch
A billionaire-backed campaign for a new California city is off to a bumpy start AP. “[Former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek’s] California Forever company can count on the deep pockets of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, including philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.” Then I’m sure everything will be fine.
Class Warfare
Scenes From the Bat Cave Maureen Tkacik, Prospect. The headline is cute but doesn’t match the impact of the post, which shows how private equity looting turns hospitals into death traps.
Environment: The wealthy cause climate change; the poor suffer its consequences Pearls and Irritations
Is The New York Times’ newsroom just a bunch of Ivy Leaguers? (Kinda, sorta.) Nieman Lab
Amid cholera outbreaks, desperate countries face depleted global vaccine stockpile Center for Disease Research and Policy. I blame the lockdowns.
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
203 comments
Comments are closed.
KENTUCKY
Mitch McConnell announces he is stepping down as Minority Leader.
I done married a gal from Kentucky
She’s wider than tall which is lucky
She’s as strong as a bull
Lord the things she can pull
Which helps when my tractor gets stucky
From DC Mitch heads home to Kentuck
As if anyone there gives a shuck
He’ll get lots of his favy
Corn grits and pork gravy
No more oysters and snails and pressed duck
McConnell’s Kentucky home state
Has a high unemployment rate
Their coal hills get stripped
Coal gets burned and gets shipped
Yet the workers find beans on their plate
For several hours each year
Mitch would try to fetch jobs for us here
A warehouse or mill
Jobs that need no skill
We endeavor to persevere
Kentucky’s a white reservation
We don’t hold with no miscegenation
Our Confederate pride
Well it has never died
This Union thing’s just a flirtation
A Senator out of Kentuck
Went to DC to try out his luck
He stayed cool and calm
As he greased every palm
And made SCOTUS a huge fustercluck
In Kentucky you can’t wed your sister
Though she’ll marry whomever’s kissed her
Any gender she likes
Then she’ll raise little tikes
Provided whomever’s a Mister
Y’all know Harlan County by name
Where they have no restraint and no shame
Should you manage to thrive
You won’t leave there alive
Boot Hill is their hall of fame
Well done! Arguably as a state, some of the state’s best products are thoroughbreds, whiskey, and varied brands of men’s college hoops ( avid followers can wear Kentucky blue while jeering the Louisville brand of red ).
I’d suggest that Muhammad Ali gets the brass ring for best Kentuckian ever, born in Louisville in 1942. While still boxing under his given last name, Clay won the gold medal at the 1960 Olympics. Clay later converted, and became a world renowned boxing champion and humanitarian. When professional athletes today celebrate their fame and fortune with earnings that can reach $40 to $60 million per year in their peaks years, they all owe a debt to Ali and those who came from that era of amateur and professional sports. Russell, Oscar, Jim Brown…only to name a few.
In case anyone would be interested in watching this, posting so there’s enough time to plan: Today, 8-9pm (EST US) free on youtube at the link.
An Election on Trial: A Conversation with Jake Tapper ’91 & Neal Katyal ’91
“The Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth and the Dartmouth Minority Pre-Law Association invite you to a timely conversation between CNN Anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent Jake Tapper ’91, and Neal Katyal ’91, Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of Law at Georgetown University and Partner at Hogan Lovells. The discussion will focus on the unique legal circumstances surrounding the 2024 general election”.
The other blurb for it:”An in-depth conversation focusing on the unique circumstances of the 2024 general election and how former President Donald Trump’s legal challenges are shaping the election. Anthony Fosu ’24 hosts. Herschel Nachlis and Anna Mahoney moderate.”
CNN, Jack Tapper? God bless you. I don’t have the intestinal fortitude for either. I often wonder why people go back to the same poisoned well to drink. I guess someone has to report out…
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/02/06/nyt-hamas-report-hillary-clinton/
The majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” a CNN staffer told journalist Chris McGreal.
Yep, he’s one of the College’s trustees, too. My dog likes us to go to bed around 7, so I doubt we’ll be tuning in. Just posted in case folks are interested in hearing what their line of thought(heh) is.
understood — my dog also strict about bedtime!
Glad to hear mine isn’t the only one! He has honed his harassment skills over the years. He makes me stop working and do things to relax and settle down. “Food & Walk Lady, it’s time to stop now.” It’s good for both of us-relaxing and cuddles. He’d prefer 630, but I try to stretch it to 7.
My girlfriend’s (now wife’s) cat let us watch The Next Generation till 10, then camped at the bedroom door staring at us while we chatted. Not at all aggro, but guilt cuts deep. I didn’t mind.
“Estonian PM supports Macron’s idea of Western troops in Ukraine”
Prime Minister Kaja Kallas supports Macron? Of course she does. The women is an idiot. No, change that. The woman has extreme ambitions and in this case she wants to become NATO’s next Secretary General and the way to do that is to prove that you hate Russia the most. Doesn’t mean that you are about to have an Estonian Brigade head off to the Dnieper though. That would require political courage and that is not Kallas’s department.
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick supports Macron’s idea of Western Troops in Ukraine. / ;)
Rise up, Fenwickians!
Ah, but those cunning counselors at the Court of Grand Fenwick planned to lose their war. Is Estonia that devious and byzantine in it’s planning?
she wants to become NATO’s next Secretary General and the way to do that is to prove that you hate Russia the most.
What I have read is that Mark Rutte is the favourite candidate, because important NATO countries prefer his lower-key demeanour and definitely do not want a russophobic harpy who might cause diplomatic (or worse) damage with uncontrolled pronouncements.
Is Chrystia Freeland still in the running?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/chrystia-freeland-nato-1.6575239
I hope so!
It’s pretty obvious that the Trudeau liberals will find themselves as the opposition after the next election and chrystia will be out of a cabinet job.
Unfortunately she’s my MP, from a solidly Liberal downtown Toronto riding and will be re elected.
I would love to see her off to greener pastures and NATO sounds like the perfect bureaucratic morass for her.
As I said previously, once you read that an escalation is “under consideration”, the matter has already been decided.
See, e.g. tanks, ex-Soviet aircraft, F-16s, long-range missile, etc. for Ukraine. First comes the “consideration” along with the frantic denials. Then an American snaps his fingers and the puppets fall into line.
The mouse that bored!
Succession plans always matter, whether in business or politics or heck even in major college sports programs. It will be interesting in the near months, who steps up to follow Mitch “Semi Pro Freeze” McConnell. Politico article quotes a few potential candidates, one supposes; whether it is (Peter Thiel-supported) Vance, Rubio or Hawley (ick) it will be more akin to Lord of The Flies…
Last man ( or woman ) with the shell gets the role !
Hmmm…. A game of Musical Chairman? (As usual, keep an eye on who is calling the tune.)
Never discount ineptotism, when selecting those least suited for the job.
I fail upward and You can Too! just do what the marketers tell ya, and accept lobbying at all hours of the day…
Be sure to smile and kiss even the ugly babies, but not the young women…that is reserved for grandfatherly figures who like ice cream…\sarc
How ‘young’ is “young?” (Measured in Epstein Units of course.) Asking for a fiend.
Rule of thumb…say if the father or parent of said child saw me getting far too close and offered me a choice. Door # 1, keep my life or Door # 2, that parent will end my life…not a difficult choice for many I suggest.
Was watching in the past week, one of those Dateline NBC episodes whereby a main suspect had a rap, and a history, having served time for his interest in underage children. Some people are just flat creeps, and highly creepy.
The old rule of thumb was Team Blue followed seniority rules more than the Republicans ever did, so with that in mind, McConnell staying on as leader as long as he did likely indicated there is no potential leadership replacement. He probably recognized that except for continuing resolutions governing is over until 2025. Hawley is a weenie. Rufio betrayed the Bushes and is a joke to the Trump base. Vance is kind of there. The Politico article is basically a random name list.
Ernst, though she might be on the short list, and Thune are obvious. I don’t know who raises money, but the GOP gets so much money they don’t care as much. How much do you need in Alabama?
Grassley is the ranking member of the budget committe, so he’s use to the work the position requires. Occasionally, these guys are showman and hard workers , but the spots are rarely filled with showman who golf. There is a reason Clyburn wanted to the primary calendar and not the chance to be Speaker. He’s not going to skip golf and cocktails.
Hmmm…. Perhaps they could try using Sorta-tition.
“He’s sorta electable. She’s sorta a campaign donations ‘magnet.’ It’s sorta an Establishment approved Governing Unit.” Etc. etc.
I’m no weapons nerd so please check I understand Stoltenberg’s proposal about UA’s use of F16s. These should fly from bases in NATO because RF can prevent then from flying from UA runways. RF will shoot them down if they get close so all they can do is launch missiles. So how us UA actually functioning as a proxy? How is Stoltenberg’s idea different from NATO launching missiles at RF?
If an F-16 fighter takes off from an air base in Poland or Moldova or Romania and proceeds to attack a Russian target in the Ukraine, then international law says that legally the Russians have the right to attack the NATO base that it came from. And there you have an all out war between NATO and the Russian Federation. Unfortunately you have a bunch of lunatics with power that thinks that this idea is just great as that is what they actually want. Of course the Russians will be hunting those F-16s and as all Ukrainian anti-air missiles are all about to run out in March, the life-expectancy for an F-16 pilot will not be very long, even if you have a western pilots at the controls.
Unless they are down in Moldavia, those NATO can’t come close enough to do something useful without refueling in-air. So Russia can just have fireworks in the (Ukrainian) sky to get rid of those F16s.
Good point, but that is what standoff weapons are for.
It’ll be described as “unprovoked,” just like the Doolittle Raid….
Who cares what international law says? Certainly, nobody of influence and authority. The only question is what is anyone going to do about it.
Just like how Western government are ending their support of Israel, because international law. Somehow, they don’t seem to care.
Yep, these days it is all about the US decided rules based order. Better known as Calvinball…
Of course, that is what is going to happen.
What Stoltenberg might be considering is that there are about 4000 F-16’s in active service, but (according to Wiki) only an estimated 1200 Russian planes ranging from MiG-29s to Su-57’s.
So he’s probably trying to find a way for NATO to be engaged in direct conflict just so NATO can use that numerical advantage. NATO planes are probably now stockpiled across the EU countries, waiting for the go ahead to saturate Ukraine and Russian airspaces.
I think Stoltenberg is tipping NATO’s hand, they intend to engage mainly by air.
We know the Russians have stockpiled massive amounts of air-to-ground and ground-to-ground missiles, but what do we know about ground-to-air quantities and total S-200/300/400 batteries? I guess this is the wildcard, a bit untested compared to the ground space.
However, if there’s no Ukrainians left on the ground then what good is winning the airspace?
Seeing as it is NATO that Russia has seen as the threat for decades, and it is well aware of the size of NATO airforces (Well, really just the US airforce), it seems rather unlikely that they wouldn’t have plenty of missiles plus small change for all those planes.
Such an extremely obvious priority doesn’t seem like something they’d ever overlook.
Indeed I’ve heard it said countless times that the numerical superiority of the US airforce after the 90s was THE number one reason why Russia started to invest so massively in it’s missile programm in the first place.
It would seem incredibly, suicidally stupid for NATO to try their luck up that alley.
If true, as usual more something cooked up by politicians than by actual military strategists.
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1762874647362879717
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
The UN special rapporteur on the right to food Michael Fakhri says the UN has “never seen a civilian population made to go so hungry so quickly and so completely” as in Gaza, and that “this is now a situation of genocide”.
https://theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/un-israel-food-starvation-palestinians-war-crime-genocide *
Given the extreme importance ICJ judges place on expert testimonies from the UN, this is a critical voice in the case against Israel.
Here’s what Fakhri said in more details:
“There is no reason to intentionally block the passage of humanitarian aid or intentionally obliterate small-scale fishing vessels, greenhouses and orchards in Gaza – other than to deny people access to food.
Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime. Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian. In my view as a UN human rights expert, this is now a situation of genocide. This means the state of Israel in its entirety is culpable and should be held accountable – not just individuals or this government or that person.
The speed of malnourishment of young children is also astounding. The bombing and people being killed directly is brutal, but this starvation – and the wasting and stunting of children – is torturous and vile. It will have a long-term impact on the population physically, cognitively and morally … All things indicate that this has been intentional.
It was already a very fragile situation due to Israel’s chokehold on what goes in and out of Gaza. So when the war started, Israel was very easily able to make everyone go hungry because they had most people on the brink.
We have never seen a civilian population made to go so hungry so quickly and so completely, that is the consensus among starvation experts. Israel is not just targeting civilians, it is trying to damn the future of the Palestinian people by harming their children.
Israel will claim there are exceptions to war crimes. But there is no exception to genocide and there’s no argument as to why Israel is destroying civilian infrastructure, the food system, humanitarian workers, and allowing this degree of malnutrition and hunger … The charge of genocide holds a whole state accountable and the remedy of genocide is the issue of self-determination of the Palestinian people.”
Fakhri also says that countries that cut UNRWA funding are complicit: “Ending funding almost instantaneously based on unsubstantiated claims against a small number of people has no other purpose other than collective punishment of all Palestinians in multiple countries. The countries that withdrew this lifeline are undoubtedly complicit in the starvation of Palestinians.”
* Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians, UN rights expert says
11:17 AM · Feb 28, 2024
Michael Fakhri appeared on DN today.
Israel Kills 104 Palestinians Waiting for Food Aid as U.N. Expert Accuses Israel of Starving Gaza
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/29/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
February 29, 2024
In Chaotic Gaza Scene, Many Killed and Wounded as Israeli Forces Open Fire
The Palestinian news agency reported that Israeli tanks had fired at thousands waiting for aid. Israeli officials said Gazans were trampled and run over by aid trucks.
MoA also has a post on this. The food trucks were sent by the Israelis and then their troops opened fire. How can this continue? The cold, inhuman cynicism of it defies my understanding.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/02/zionists-use-food-bait-to-attract-and-kill-starving-civilians.html
“The cold, inhuman cynicism of it defies my understanding.”
Thank you for the words. I am appalled but have no proper words, so I use yours.
Oh, I can understand the reasoning behind the Israeli actions because I am assuming that the Israeli génocidaires do not think of the Palestinians as human, but as untermenschen. Subhuman. Maybe the more appropriate term would be lebensunwertes leben or “life unworthy of life.” Once I replace the term Palestinian with either of those terms when thinking about the Israeli actions, it becomes clear.
Honestly, I have never thought that my studying the Holocaust would be helpful to understanding the current genocide, but there it is. There is also the Rwandan Genocide and to a lesser extent, the Cambodian Genocide, not as to the methods of the actual killing, but the systematic dehumanization of the victims as well as the dehumanization of the perpetrators.
There’s a method to it. Make the victim as “cockroaches” as was in Rwanda and convince “your” that like vermin they must be exterminated. Then create a bloodlust in the community to hack their victims into pieces or get the young ones, those who are easily manipulated into monsters to suffocate in bags or bash their heads in with rifle butts and shovels. Or if you have an modern western army, you can use bullets and bombs, but in examples the perpetrators can see the unarmed, the old, the young, the crippled and ill people that they are murdering. The ones that have not completely lost their souls often become alcoholics or spend their lives desperately trying to rationalize what they have done, trying to convince themselves that they are not monsters.
Ain’t history so freaking wonderful to study? God damn it.
Don’t cite to NYT when there are far more reliable sources like NY Post and randos on Twitter. Sure it’s still read by tens of millions of braindead liberals, but that’s like saying we should take QANON seriously because it had tens of millions of believers at its peak.
Bitcoin pricing. I was up and at em a little earlier this morning, and on CNBC they interviewed a bullish analyst and a bearish fund manager on the future / near future outlook on Crypto and Bitcoin in particular. None too surprising the analyst with the bull take shared his firm’s price target for Bitcoin, by year end 2024 to be 100,000. Makes for a nice,rounded number even if that sounds far fetched but I’m a cynic on the varied cryptocurrency offerings.
Let’s see, the math for a YTD price increase on Bitcoin shows it has increased in price, from say 42,500 at 12/31/23 up to 62,450 quoted this morning. Insane this seems, just insane.
$4.01k update:
Finally after what was tantamount to a tiered struggle of compounded downturns on my nest egg purchased on the basis of $57k @ the top of the market, I was finally able to break free of the tyranny of losses and turn a profit, now looking at about a 8% return on account of the fiat lady singing.
p.s.
In a real money intrusion, the only person I know of that invested in Bitcoin was one of my mom’s Filipino hospice nurses. She was all-in, and this was in July when it was $30k.
What do you do, sell and back into the fortress of 5% guaranteed return on your money in the bank, or ride that train, high on acclaim, Satoshi Nakamoto you better watch your speed.
I think you tap the button saying “Sell” and count your winnings. That’s just me, since these strong tailwinds that support such a remarkable higher move can also reverse in a spectacular fashion.
I can’t help but think of the Simpsons episode, where they are riding the Enron rollercoaster…”We’ll all be Rich !”…
The only time I ever saw the public doing the right thing en masse was in 1979 during the Hunt Brothers silver bubble.
The Bros took silver from $6 to $48 an ounce in about 8 months flat, and there were lines of proles at every coin store looking to sell-no buyers to speak of.
What made this bubble interesting was the Hunts wanted Comex deliverable 1,000 ounce pure silver bars-actual physical possession as was their right.
Some silver was in pure 999/1,000’s form, but a lot of everything else was various finenesses, with US coins being 90% pure. It all had to be refined into pure to be salable into the bubble, and there weren’t many precious metal refineries, and no way-no how could they keep up with everything coming in, they were months behind when the Cinderella silver story value came back down to Earth in 1980.
1979, by Smashing Pumpkins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aeETEoNfOg
Millions of Salvadoreños, Turks, Nigerians, and Argentinos very happy to be on that train. This gringo also happy, you probably should sell.😁
Maybe this is a frivolous comment, but we seem to be headed toward some serious conflicts, perhaps a big regional war in the Middle East, a confrontation between NATO and Russia, perhaps a war, which neo-cons think will be brief (they are right for the wrong reasons) between China and the United States. I recall reading that Iran, Russia and China have really good state-sponsored hackers, and that their first targets in the US will be the power grids, weeks or months before missiles might fly. How much will Bitcoin be worth when when there has been only intermittent or no power in the big cities of the eastern US for a month, undersea cables are cut, and the global internet is eroding away? How will Bitcoin compare with gold then? I just cannot believe that fantasy money can survive when the really big fantasies of the last generation–the the US can be a superpower without manufacturing, that societies that revel in identity politics don’t crash and burn, and many other fantasies–die a hard hard death.
What I tell friends and family is that the “value” of any investment means -nothing- until it is cash in your bank account. -Everything- else is just a promise.
Gooooooood Mooooooorning Fiatnam!
It was the best of times-it was the worst of times if you were a politician whose last name started with Mc, as in Rocky when the pugilist demands of his corner man: ‘Cut me Mc!’
Perhaps having a name such as ‘McSeeyalater’ would make it easier on the Pachyderms, in ridding themselves of the old guard?
Not so fast there, pardner. “Glitch” may be stepping down from his leadership role but he already said that he is sticking around till 2027 when his terms ends so ‘Four More Years! Four More Years!’
Freeze-frame
I could see it was a rough-cut Wednesday
Slow-motion weekdays stare me down
His lack of reflex got around
There were no defects to be found
Video image froze without a sound
Thursday morning was a hot flash-factor
His frozen face still focused in my mind
Test-strip, proof of senility is hard to find
By Friday the spotlight will no longer grind
Stop-time for Kentucky if he lost his mind
Freeze-frame (freeze-frame)
Freeze-frame (freeze-frame)
Freeze-frame (freeze-frame)
Freeze-frame, now freeze
Now I’m lookin’ at a flashback Wednesday
Zoom lens feelings just won’t disappear
Close-up quiet, no sweet-talk in my ear
His bot-spot moment was so strong
This freeze-frame moment can’t be wrong
Freeze-frame (freeze-frame)
Freeze-frame (freeze-frame)
Freeze-frame (freeze-frame)
Freeze-frame, now freeze
Freeze-frame (freeze-frame)
Freeze-frame (freeze-frame)
Freeze-frame (freeze-frame)
Freeze-frame, now freeze
Freeze-frame
Freeze-frame
Like a freeze-frame (freeze-frame)
Freeze-frame
It’s like the freeze, he’s a quiet breeze
Freeze-frame
It’s like the freeze, he’s
Freeze-frame
Freeze-frame
Freeze-frame
Freeze Frame, by J. Geils Band
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk27lbGNwes
Future historians, when looking at media of “Glitch” McConnell, will have to look behind his figure to see if anybody is moving to determine if they are looking at a video or an image of him.
AI: Taibbi’s latest. public excerpt:
I Wrote What? Google’s AI-Powered Libel Machine
Misadventures in Gemini, Google’s dystopian deep-slander invention
https://www.racket.news/p/i-wrote-what-googles-ai-powered-libel
From the longer article, after listing several AI potentially libelous abuses, Taibbi has these 3 para’s:
“Incredibly, AI programs have been hailed as tools journalists should use. Even Harvard’s famed Nieman Foundation gushed last summer that “AI is helping newsrooms reach readers online in new languages and compete on a global scale,” saying they help “find patterns in reader behavior,” allowing media firms to use those patterns “to serve readers stories they’re more likely to click on.”
….
“God knows what Gemini did in my case, but if caricatures of me riffing on Jews with penis-noses are what come out when Google’s “creative tool” runs my name through its Rube Goldberg machine, it’s hard not to wonder what lunacies go on in products like Google search for people generally. The potential for abuse is mind-boggling and almost makes you wonder about the reasons Google released this flawed product.
“Did Google accidentally reveal errors, or is it advertising new dystopian capabilities? Neither possibility is reassuring. If their executives signed off on releasing this train, imagine what they’re not showing us. ”
My aside: If newpapers are planning on using AI to suppliment or replace real reporters I think they’ll need large pool of in-house lawyers to fend off the inevitable lawsuits.
I read that yesterday. Gemini is something else. Who asked for it?
One of the ways that we can clearly demonstrate to those who believe in American democracy the nature of the duopoly is that either side could easily take a position on any of a whole range of issues with massive bipartisan popular support and do something or challenge the incumbent to. Fixing spam phone calls? Everyone hates them. Same with these AI horrors. Reputation, indeed life destroying BS against anyone is just clicks away. The psychopaths that made these pollution-spewing machines somehow get to shield themselves from liability. Fix that, why not? You could win the next election in a landslide on that alone if you really made the effort.
> Gemini is something else. Who asked for it?
https://twitter.com/ChrisJBakke/status/1760162756429545872
> Pretty crazy that Google Gemini is only a team of 47 people.
> 2 engineers
> 16 PMs
> 29 senior global directors of DEI
Wow! 2 engineers can inflict a lot of damage if they have enough managers to look after them.
Maybe this is their version of quiet quitting
Maybe this is the Engineers’ version of card counting teams that bankrupt casinos?
edit, should read:
“If their executives signed off on releasing this train wreck to the public, imagine what they’re not showing us.”
Reality will be tailored to each individual. Our chippy Oracle will feed us our daily bread of news and views to keep us smiling on the hamster wheel. My reality will be different from yours, and since our attention will be glued to our AI-directed device, we’ll never converse and learn how different our AI-constructed “worlds” are.
Chayefsky had it pegged 50 years ago. It’s a religion. And like the Fundamentalists, it denies the history of human evolution.
I love that scene. Thanks for reminding me.
What’s a bit different here is that in their desperate race to win global dominance of AI, the tech firms are poisoning the well they drink from. Music, films, TV, online and hard-copy texts, all that culture that we strove so hard to crate, to rank and filter for value over so many years will soon be indistinguishable to anyone, including to the AIs, from the AI BS pollution. The cost of belching out AI BS is negligible and the purposes served by doing so are not compatible with the purposes inherent in the traditions of human culture. AI’s successes (such as they are) depend on the quality of the culture well it draws on. AI is going to pollute the culture to the point that its value as a training set for AI is gone.
We need statutory damages for ingestion of anything we hold rights to if it is ingested into an AI without our permission. None of this DMCA safe harbor nonsense with take-down notices. They need to get permission first.
A good friend just happened to be there, when Mother Nature let loose with a whole lotta hillside on the beach down in San Diego. The video is 10 minutes long and skip to around 8 minutes in to see the meaty bits.
He has a few other Youtube videos but nothing really, and when he puts this one out, the eyeballs start multiplying en masse, and his kids tell him to monetize the video, so he does and now 10 million views later, he told me the other day he’s up to $6,500 in free money, thank you very much.
How hard would it be to duplicate this via AI?
Torrey Pines landslide, ends with a boom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0TjcmNsjPE
“…AI’s successes (such as they are) depend on the quality of the culture well it draws on. AI is going to pollute the culture to the point that its value as a training set for AI is gone…”
The snake eating its own tail. Some of that has been seen with the advertising business model. The artistic creations in a culture have no instrinsic value, but value is assigned according to the creations’ usefulness to big corps and their brands.
Or it’s not the skill of the content creator that makes them their money, but the t-shirts and mugs they sell.
Bitcoin et al is a bet on human behavior. The last buyer is the loser…
P.R.amid Scheme?
Reading the Fatto Quotidiano on the bakery terrace between the not-winter-not-spring rains we are getting. This morning:
Joe Biden e il cono di gelato: “Altro che gaffe tipica di Biden: è una scena che per raccapriccio etico ed estetico lo rende diverso da Trump solo per una gradazione di orrore.”
Quoting the estimable novelist and commenter Daniela Ranieri, describing Joe Biden and his famous ice-cream cone: “Rather than a gaffe typical of Biden, it is a scene that in its ethical and esthetic repugnance renders him as different from Trump only by a small degree of horror.” [translation DJG]
Fatto Quotidiano, 29 February 2024, paper edition page 5. Ranieri’s observations mean that I will wait a few months before having gelato.
I love the play on words, gradazione di errore / orrore
Italian journalism is so lovely sometimes. I could spend a whole morning outside the bakery reading the paper. What a life… sigh.
I was in India for this whole month and literally, all that’s left in English is The Hindu, which I read religiously every morning with multiple masala teas. There may be other holdouts from the Modi mind virus in other languages, but I feel like things have really hardened and the election is going to be a s***show for the INDIA alliance (Congress + other anti Hindu nationalist parties).
Re the Politico article on McConnell’s announcement as the end of an era for Reagan Republicans:
Please note that the Reagan wing of the Democratic Party is doing just fine.
Yes. The headline reminded me of the good old days when the neocon “Reagan Republicans” took over the GOP and the “Rockefeller Republicans” moved on over to the Democrats. Soon the neoliberal Dems managed to jettison most of their “populist” facade and continued to “evolve” as the neocons made themselves at home. It will be interesting to see what the marketing of both parties will be in the next few years. Regardless of their respective slogans, neither will represent the people.
As far as I can tell, the Blue team will ask your preferred pronouns before grinding your neck beneath their boot. They will also make sure that historically underrepresented groups will be among the boot wielders.
to me it looks more like the Goldwater wing
All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train. For an article that advocates learning from other countries, I could not help but sense some hostility from Alon Levy towards learning anything from Japan, and it’s easy to see why, after all most train lines in Japan from 1987 onwards have been built and operated by private companies, and the later have done a most excellent job in keeping trains clean and running on time, while remaining profitable!!! They have also continued to invest in next generation trains, including the upcoming Shinkansen Maglev train that will run from Tokyo to Nagoya (178 miles) in 40 minutes. The Toei subway lines in Tokyo are operated by the city government, and those are equally good too, so Japan basically just does trains really, really well, public or private, surely there’s something to learn from that before making the conclusion that a competent public bureaucracy is a necessary condition for having good public transportation. I’ve never met a fellow tourist who does not want to take the Japanese train system home.
Speaking about labor costs, Japan’s income per capita is the lowest among the G7 countries, even lower than Italy which is a “low cost” country, quoting from the article.
There is also the Japanese citizen propriety to include in explaining those tidy trains and schedules. People and cultures can, but certainly don’t in all cases, hold and encourage others to behave to accepted norms. Witness one recent sports example where the fans cleaned the stadium seating areas of litter before exiting.
They did a lot better with Covid too. And their history over the last generation could be seen as a gradual and fairly angst-free adaption to degrowth.
They have their problems too, but there’s a lot more social glue left there than in the Anglo countries or Europe.
Yes. I suspect they will do a much better job dealing with Overshoot than a lot of other countries.
Not a very informative article. I certainly agree that the US lacks a competent, empowered bureaucracy to manage public transit. But we also lack the technical and engineering expertise for transit and rail. Another issue is lack of standardization of equipment and plant, some of which is a legacy problem, some parochial. The result is every light or heavy rail system is essentially bespoke. The federal government also shares considerable blame with onerous requirements, US content and sluggish response.
There simply isn’t a lot of rail transit or intercity passenger rail. If an industry has been essentially gutted, it takes a generation to rebuild, assuming there is a political will to do so. There isn’t.
Chatting with my neighbor he told me about his brother in law who is a big name manufacturer in high quality precision ball bearings for racing bikes. When asked if he was considering bringing his factory back to the U.S. he said that the main problem was that the U.S. no longer makes the machines that make the machines and materials he requires. That is, a whole ecosystem of specialist suppliers of the means of production he requires to has ceased to exist in the U.S.
A very important point.
I lost him when he said how hard it was to get information about Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco because it is all in French…..
The ownership system of Japanese railways is quite complex – while most are now private companies up until quite recently both central government and lower tiers could have controlling stakes. These companies are mostly operators – actual construction of major lines is mostly funded directly by government. This is not dissimilar from the set up in France and Spain, both of which have notably cost effective systems. Looking across countries, the most successful systems seem to combine public sector design and construction, with private sector operators. As the article says, engineer led design bureaucracies tend to be much better at keeping costs down, although there is sometimes a price to be paid for this (I could rant about some of the designs I’ve seen, but it would take up all my word count).
Much as I love the Japanese railway system, especially those dinky little trains serving remote rural communities, it has its issues, not least painfully high prices for many routes.
It should also be said that the history of Japanese construction companies operating abroad is not very good – I suspect its a cultural issue – many domestic Japanese companies really struggle to get their heads around differing governing systems. This isn’t unusual – I once worked for a partnership company involving US, British, French and Danish engineering companies. The cultural differences were striking. For what its worth, the French were IMO by far the most efficient, despite (or maybe because of) their habit of long, alcoholic lunches.
If you look at successful contractors around the world, its a good indication I think of a healthy industry. The French and Spanish are particularly successful, especially in the Middle East for implementing high quality railway systems. Unsurprisingly, they both have probably the best domestic systems too.
The article does I think overlook a key distinction between the cost efficient and inefficient systems – the most cost effective ones almost invariably have long term construction plans featuring multiple lines. This allows a systematic build up of deep institutional knowledge across the industry and allows private construction companies to invest and tool up on specialist plant. One-off lines are a horribly inefficient way to do things – you spend a couple of years working out how to build something, and then at the end the entire design and construction crews are scattered to the winds. Its an idiotic way to do build infrastructure.
Coincidentally SY Lee published on Substack the a 2 part The Death and Privatization of Japanese National Railways (Part 1, 1949-1982). And today’s Part 2
Considerable detail about the ideological politics and financial aspects of the privatization.
Many thanks, those are fascinating articles (well, to those of us with a nerdish interest in public transport policy).
Anecdotally, my Dad, who was a piping engineer at base, got a job when we moved to Florida in the 1960s with a company designing the Miami State Road 112, (now the I-195.) Dad was put on the team designing the on and off ramps, most of the interchanges then being designed as classic “cloverleaf” designs.
First, the main contractor had never done a roads project before.
Second, the company did not hire enough, (Dad said none at all,) traffic design specialists.
Third, no outside specialist ‘consultants’ were utilized.
Thus, the on and off curving ramps of the eventually built project are too tight for ‘regular’ speed use. Those ramps had high accident rates for a long time. I’m not sure how the problem was fixed, (if it ever was.)
Having worked with many engineers who have ‘jumped’ specialities, this is far more common than you’d think. I encounter this every day on a local cycle path which was clearly designed by someone who had only previously designed highways (as it happens, I know the engineer who did the design, I can regularly tease him about it).
I also have a vivid memory of a meeting where a railway engineer patiently explained to a group of former road engineers that transition curves can operate vertically as well as horizontally, and if they ignored this they would have the amusing experience of watching a TGV train go airborne.
Alon Levy is tanking about urban mass transit not intercity rail.
This is going to blow most people’s minds, but let’s take the city of Tokyo in Japan. Off the top of my head there’s the JR Lines, the Tokyo Metro lines, the Toei lines and the Keikyu line, all but the Toei lines are operated by private companies. So yes, I am talking about urban mass transit lines not owned and operated by the government. And it’s not just Tokyo, in Kyoto, there’s JR, Hankyu, Keihan and Kintetsu, all private companies.
Yup, the system in Tokyo is madly complex. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Unless you are in possession of a JR pass and can’t work out which turnstiles will let you through….
re: Justice Minister defends house arrest power for people feared to commit a hate crime in future – Globe and Mail
““There’s a lot of bad stuff out there. But this is not about the bad stuff. This is a much higher level,” he said. (Oh, yes, I’m sure it is a much “higher” level…. as in “politically higher” level. imo.)
So the “Justice Minister” does not believe in free speech. He sounds like his thinking a perfect of example of this lady’s description of Marxist thought. I left this yesterday, but it fits here as well. Xi Van Fleet grew up in China in the 1960’s during the cultural revolution.
Tucker and Xi Van Fleet. utube, ~45 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIay3uL17Jg
adding: I like her description of claimed Marxist thought as seeing the world entirely as oppressor or oppressed. That claiming to fight the oppressors is only being a good-thought front or ruse to gain power. It has nothing to do with ending oppression.
“Meet the new Commissar. Same as the old Commissar.”
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1762998581450121301
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
Must-read Nature editorial: “Why it would be a dangerous folly to end US–China science pact”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00577-9 *
* Why it would be a dangerous folly to end US–China science pact
7:29 PM · Feb 28, 2024
Notice that 3 of the top 5 high-quality world science research publishing institutions are Chinese. Seven of the top 10 high-quality science research publishing institutions are Chinese… That the US has not renewed the science pact with China could be astonishingly self-defeating for US science advance, but somehow US political leadership has not yet understood this.
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/generate/all/global/all
The Nature Index
1 October 2022 – 30 September 2023 *
Rank Institution ( Count) ( Share)
1 Chinese Academy of Sciences ( 7545) ( 2259)
2 Harvard University ( 3625) ( 1122)
3 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences ( 3199) ( 646)
4 University of Science and Technology of China ( 1860) ( 642)
5 Max Planck Society ( 2574) ( 638)
6 Nanjing University ( 1437) ( 608)
7 French National Centre for Scientific Research ( 4269) ( 602)
8 Tsinghua University ( 1856) ( 592)
9 Peking University ( 2210) ( 591)
10 Zhejiang University ( 1450) ( 557)
* Annual Tables highlight the most prolific institutions and countries in high-quality research publishing for the year
There’s one co-operation that should be stopped Immediately. Gain of Function research is still going on. Jimmy Dore. utube. ~11 minutes.
U.S. & Chinese Scientists Working To Make MORE DEADLY Bird Flu Strains!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdxypKGWASY
Those are some talented pangolins, with bat lab assistants or is it vice versa? /s
“Welcome to the Era of BadGPTs”
“A new crop of nefarious chatbots with names like ‘BadGPT’ and ‘FraudGPT’ are springing up on the darkest corners of the web, as cybercriminals look to tap the same artificial intelligence behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT.”
What? No Rule34GPT yet? Somebody has been slacking off. In the past century and a half they have come up with electricity, telephones, aircraft, automobiles, precision machinery, penicillin, computers, mobiles, the internet, etc. but for the past twenty years all they can come up with is cryptocurrency, AI and ChatGPT.
You forgot the Metaverse.
Technically mrna vaccines. The just nave the been put into use for their intended method. Though I suppose they were orgiinally developed in the 90’s. A local hospital had a story about a patient with a second round of cancer being given a cancer vaccine. Since it was a media general paper, we can’t expect much, but its likely testing on a terminally ill patient of a designer mrna vaccine.
The Chinese and Russians have neat stuff going on. We sent William Shatner into low earth orbit.
A visit to Pixiv with the NSFW content box checked will show you plenty of samples created by some manner of rule34GPT. Rest assured that that community is well-served by automated content.
That may get one more than one bargained for…
These types of “cautionary” articles inevitably appear to prop a more nefarious establishment position. Like the “disinformation” charade, the goal here is to promote ideologically driven censorship and manipulation.
These data tools are only functional to the extent they are driven by reasonably unrestrained utilitarian logic implemented by nerdy programmers. Imperfect and often market-driven to be sure, but still vastly superior to the brave new world of curated data.
I think most here have probably experienced the recent propaganda refresh of search results on Google, Youtube, etc.
In a slightly earlier iteration of this arms race we had the example of Google News. It used to draw from a pretty wide pool of sources, including indie and alternative news outlets. These got whittled down by the early stages of the “disinformation” wars over “harmful” articles about Palestine and the like. It’s now useless: an ever-narrowing list of approved sources and articles.
The spectacular results of this censorship and steering have since been replicated in Google Search and the result is almost comically distorted search results on any ‘controversial’ topic.
For all the garbage spewed out from GPTs in hopes of squeezing some cash from them, they are a tool with a few genuinely valuable use-cases. Fear not, a horde of imperial ethicists and disinformation experts are swooping in to save you from the horrors of insufficiently-curated data.
Brethren and sistren:
Last night, I chanced on a video by Marianne Williamson stating that she was “unsuspending” her campaign. She’s back in the race. Curiously, this video is not posted at her YouTube channel.
This morning, I see that Forbes has picked up the story.
So is she running again? Has she clarified her position on Israel? I also got the impression from her “back-in” video that she’s mainly running against Trump and doesn’t seem to have the chops to go against ice-cream-cone Joe.
Please advise.
I don’t think she has the chops to go against an ice cream cone. Who, apart from Krystal Ball, wants this?
LOL. You two guys make a good team.
Last I heard from her was that she was for Israel and for a cease-fire.
Not understanding why a produced video needs to be relinquished from a local drive as it’s being pushed out to servers. I’ve produced and published many of our company’s videos to sites like YT and have never failed to save the finished video along with its components on my local machine.
I feel sorry that the guy lost five years of his work but god, has he never even heard of backups? Copying files to a local hard drive? If all your work sits on somebody else’s servers, then you don’t really own it. This was brought home to me when I heard about the image and video hosting company Flickr about a decade ago. Turns out that when you uploaded any images to Flickr – which included a lot of amateur and professional photographers – that Flickr then owned the copyright to that image. Surprise! And Flickr was monetizing those images to all sorts of organizations. Lots of people did not see that coming.
He was an employee, wasn’t he? If I tried to move something from a work server to a personal thumb drive or unauthorized file system, my head would roll.
Could have pirated from home, though. Perhaps he should look on YouTube to see what’s there.
Yep. This was apparently videos made for a “news org”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NowThis_News
Likely it got wiped as part of some Search Engine Optimization to avoid some old controversial stuff dragging down their overall score.
Seen plenty of streamers and youtubers bemoan this and panic deleting backlogs as Twitch (Amazon) and Google change their policies in response to the political wind.
In severe cases a decade+ old upload can get a whole channel memoryholed by the corporations in a self preservation move.
Basically the net made book burning almost automatic.
If you read the terms of service Facebook did the same. I am not sure they marketed either the images or text, but putting it on Facebook makes it theirs.
And could the gentleman’s complaint be related to compensation from those videos. If he was still getting some fee attached to the production of them? Not saying he was, but as with others I find the idea that he did not have a personal copy of videos he produced to be unbelievable. Even if he would probably be enjoined from posting them.
The reason some of my photographer friends preferred Flickr was because you CAN set the license, which is something Facebook, etc. doesn’t let you do. My own photos were set to a flavor of non-commercial Creative Commons.
Yes, I was going to say that – and it’s a great feature because that means that if you do want a photo for reuse, you can easily search Flickr and see what the rights are. It helped an art director friend of mine put together mock ups that she could show her clients to lock down the job. She also of course respected photos where the photog kept full rights. Good times.
And computer storage now is ridiculously cheap compared to the old days. There’s no excuse not to do home backups.
Presumably “the cloud” sells itself as being more convenient and keeps the spybot aspect on the q.t.
One use of blockchain, since it’s a shared/distributed and encrypted database, it can be used as a backup for information or creative works. But noooo, people want to use it as a ledger, are obsessed with the financial aspect instead of the keeping information free aspect.
Texas wildfires forces shutdown at nuclear weapon facility. Here is what we know AP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
While drivin’ a herd of Pantex employees out of harms way
Headin’ east at Amarillo on a hot February day
Tryin’ to get out before a potential radioactive pyre
We never counted in the odds of a winter western prairie fire
A hot south wind was blowin’ and the air was gettin’ dry
Somethin’ far away was spellin’ trouble in the sky
Comin’ closer was a sound that topped the devil’s choir
Then we knew we had to race a raging prairie fire
When all at once a flame is seen a-lickin’ at the sky
And every heart has quickened and there’s fear in every eye
We’d just one chance to get away for there’s no place to hide
Gonna be like Slim Pickens on that fateful Dr. Strangelove ride
The herd is gettin’ tired but we’ve got no time to rest
I try to clear the red dust that is gatherin’ in my chest
From ridin’ tail on 4,200 head with the weather gettin’ dry
The black cloud in the west is warning, “Drive, drive, drive”
The roarin’ heat is closer ashes fallin’ by the nuclear site
And every beast and bird is fleein’ with its warnin’ cry
It’s yet to hit Pantex but it’s still ten miles or more
And close behind us we can hear that wild infernal roar
But fate had other plans, for we won that fatal race
We lost neither man nor bomb, no danger taking place
The mighty conflagration subdued its rage by veering away
We did our best to get away but now its all clear on the bomb bay
Now on the blackened prairie, far as the eye can see
The grim remains are there to show that Gaia rules you and me
Just one reminder left to tell the tale just one was the desire
We nearly radiated the Panhandle thanks to a raging prairie fire
Prairie Fire, by Marty Robbins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2theVkJGHp0
U.S. Airman’s Winding Path Ended in Self-Immolation to Protest Israel NYT archive
Aaron Bushnell, the cyberdefense operations specialist who lit himself on fire to protest Israel’s killing of Palestinians, had left an isolated Christian community for the Air Force before turning to activism.
Biographical notes. RIP Aaron Bushnell
Looks like a new atrocity this morning, see CNN:
https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-02-29-24/index.html
“Many deaths at Gaza food aid site resulted from trampling during escape from Israeli fire, journalist says”
Maybe things are turning if even CNN is now reporting honestly on the atrocities of the IDF.
RIP Aaron.
Zionists Use Food-Baits To Attract And Kill Starving Civilians
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/02/zionists-use-food-bait-to-attract-and-kill-starving-civilians.html#more
The degree of impunity with which Israel acts is truly astounding. That the US continues to facilitate this blatant genocide is barbaric beyond words.
I’d like to think that such horrific events have forced some truth on even the likes of CNN or the NY Times. But I actually expect to see another Hamas rape story pretty soon.
This story reminds me of a segment from this movie: A Fistful of Dollars
Thank you for the link, while overall a brief article which took a few minutes, at a minimum we can get a glimpse into the life he was leading before the Air Force.
>Covid vaccine mandate ‘unlawful’ – Guardian
I may have missed this on Tuesday’s links…
Covid-19 vaccine mandates for Queensland police and ambulance workers were made unlawfully, the state’s supreme court has found.
The court on Tuesday delivered its judgments in three lawsuits brought by 86 parties against Queensland’s police ambulance services for their directions to workers issued in 2021 and 2022.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/27/covid-vaccine-mandate-queensland-emergency-workers-police-ambulance-unlawful
So I guess all vaccine requirements (mandates?) are illegal now?
Let’s spread measles and other diseases?
This is utterly ridiculous, with no thought for public health.
“vax and relax” is a thought for public health?
You are confusing or conflating traditional vaccines like the Measles vaccine, that are long tested and work to prevent infection and transmission, with a novel experimental jab that does neither, and is still not officially approved in the US. (The one that got the approval is different and not available in the US.) Apples and Oranges. (I write this as someone who’s had more real vacs than you can shake a stick at. / ;)
Fully agree. The ‘old’ vaccines were fully tested, before public distribution. The mRNA Coronavirus “vaccines” were never fully tested. Indeed, one can go so far as to assert that the public roll out of the mRNA “vaccines” constitutes a ‘Phase III Trial’ of said “vaccines.” (Some have opined that the public roll out of the Coronavirus “vaccines” was really a ‘Phase II Trial’ of the “vaccine.” In this scenario, ‘The Jackpot’ will be the real ‘Phase III Trial.’)
The entire Coronavirus Pandemic and the subsequent reactions to it remind me strongly of the Thalidomide disaster of the last century.
Except that this time there was no Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey to stand athwart the Bridge of Khazad-dûm and say, “The dark money will not avail you, flame of Pharma. Go back to K Street. You cannot pass.”
https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_182.html
“old vaccines”
Give me a break. Plenty of Americans are already not vaccinating with “old true and tried” vaccines. So this is just another nail in the coffin of public health.
Let the grim reaper loose!
Shifting the debate points? Sliding away from your first implied point? Moving the goal posts?
adding, in argument or rhetoric:
Moving the Goalposts
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Moving-the-Goalposts
Not to be pedantic, but logic is part of the Enlightenment’s power in the real world, imo, and abandoning reason and logic is a primrose path. And so, logic and logical rhetoric are both ancient forms of inquiry and as important now as then, imo.
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1763208078101753953
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
Rare good read in French media on China. @renaudlambert in @Monde_diplo ( one of the more reasonable French media ) dismantles many preconceptions, showing that China is in fact a very decentralized country that does NOT seek to remake the world in its image.
https://mondediplo.com/2024/03/02china
The power of the periphery in the Chinese state under Xi
China: the invention of the roadmap to global power
It’s well known that everything in China is determined at the centre by the autocratic head of the CCP in Beijing, who dreams of global power. The only problem is it’s not true.
9:22 AM · Feb 29, 2024
Tucker Carlson was interviewed on Lex Fridman’s podcast
I’m 1 hour in and tucker comes off as an elite who is out of touch with the rest of society.
– talks about how he is afraid of sending his kids on the subway in NYC; I highly doubt he has been on the subway in years, there are kids, old people, working people all going about their lives, going to work, school, after school activites, grocery shopping etc.
– he talks about how there is too much regulation; it’s like he has totally memory-holed the GFC, mortgage fraud by the brokers and financial institutions – because the Bush Administration didn’t want to check for fraud and then enacted laws to prevent states from enacting laws to ensure fraud was not happening – all this after the FBI put out a report saying there was a lot of fraud in the housing market.
– he also talks about how expensive NYC is becoming that he wants to move out; this coming from a millionaire trust fund baby is a little too rich to swallow.
“Job-killing regulations!” has been a trope of the business lobby for a while. It’s sad to see Tucker taking it hook, line, and sinker.
Tucker is center-right, imo.
And today, ‘centre right’ does not mean what it did even forty years ago.
I’m convinced that today’s “Conservatives” wouldn’t recognize a real leftist if one came up and shot them in the ‘sitting down part of the Terran human anatomy.’
Carl Tucker is definitely a conservative by the standards of the past and almost a leftist by the standards of today. Going by the past, the Democratic Party, aside from its Identity Politics, is a business friendly, conservative, center right party, and the Republican Party has gone insane. Donald Trump might be able to drag them back to where the Democrats are today without the IdPol.
We cannot measure the political establishment by yesterday’s standards because the entire landscape is different. Scoop Jackson would be considered a dangerous commie pinko, Putin lover even though (from what I remember) he was the standard New Deal, civil rights Democrat who very strongly supported military Keynesianism.
Yesterday’s Democrats had a full faction of New Deal Democrats. The Republicans had one as well albeit weaker. Today’s Democrats are not only military keynesianists but all war, all the time.
Maybe it is because I did not sleep well, but I see almost no difference between the Democrats of today with the Republicans of the past aside from IdPol, which is mainly a façade used by the leadership; IdPol is real and pernicious, but still a cover for the extreme economic positions it has today. Really, the entire political scene including the various factions is completely different today than the 1980s, forget before. The political genius of those groups who managed to subvert almost all of the political, social, and religious organizations across the Western world while blinding people to that reality is impressive. It does make talking about today harder because you have to rip this façade off before you can understand what is happening. And then you have to do the same to the people you are talking to. People, like the Covid deniers, refuse or just cannot see what has happened.
Bluntly, Western Civilization has been mind screwed, a deliberate mental breaking into incoherent, fantastical thinking. A mental and emotional blindness. I believe it was done to get and maintain control of the world and its population for the proper manipulation and pillaging, but what happens when the unanticipated, unplanned for occurs? Some where so busy putting the now drunk driver into the seat, tapping the eyes shut, cutting the brake line, and jamming the steering wheel that they forgot to plan for happens if the boulder or tree fall across the road.
Dwight Eisenhower’s stupid faction really is still really stupid, unwise really, but it is no longer small. Their number is negligible and they are stupid. It has been seventy years since the letter was written.
(I have to say that after reading Eisenhower’s letter, I am impressed by his thinking. I do not agree with it all, but it is so much more intelligent than the drivel I am hearing at any level today.)
The language of politics really need new labels to replace the threadbare language of left right liberal and conservative.
Never under estimate the power of Fox News or CNN to make people stupid. Carlson was saturated in that poison.
He still maintains a good deal of the poison in the very fibers of his being. In interviews he continues these tropes.such as Putin is a thug, China is a dangerous enemy
Plotting our demise. Regulation is bad. And last but not least, talk of the “radical left”. In any event I can see that while he may do and say some things that seem like he is reformed, look no further than that fake aghast face he wears when people say things that he cannot even begin to conceptualize in his right wing rich guy persona.
I find myself turned off by the strange facial expressions. I have tried to watch a few of his interviews/podcasts but get fixated on the furrowed brow thing. In your opinion, is it a tic or a cultivated expression?
I found the interview curiously interesting in places (though not his extended feud with Jon Stewart). He does the exaggerated astonishment thing, but part of what he’s astonished by is the difference between the propagandized version of Russia and what he actually observed there. Who else is going to convey that message to his audience?
Who else with that sizeable audience is going to have a lengthy conversation with Glenn Greenwald on air?
He does strongly imply that cleaning up American cities is a matter of policing, and he is similarly ignorant about the reasons behind the proliferation of drugs and suicide. However, since after his separation from FOX, he has shown a certain willingness to be astonished, wouldn’t it be useful to continue to open up a dialogue with him in hopes of drawing his attention to aspects of our American experience that he tends to willfully dismiss.
I noticed – that Jon Stewart interview really hurt Tucker Carlson and to this day he can’t seem to understand what Jon Stewart’s point is and why it resonated with lots of people. Tucker thinks that Jon Stewart resonated with people because he was more popular, instead of Jon Stewart was correct. Then Lex Fridman jumps in to dump on Jon Stewart – a total pillock!
Journalists job is to report on what is happening in society + politics – to hold the powerful to account.
Tucker Carlson doesn’t seem to get that point. he talked for probably 20 minutes about that one interview.
mortgage fraud by the brokers and financial institutions – because the Bush Administration didn’t want to check for fraud
The crime may have been under bush 2, but the failure to prosecute was the other guy, you know, Mr. Hopey Changey
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/why-corrupt-bankers-avoid-jail
from 2012, which would be the first year I added not voting for dem presidents to my continued habit of not voting for republicans. At this point the dems have leap frogged the repubs as greater evil…institutionally corrupt.
I saw a man pretending to be dumb in the style of George Bush 2 and Joe Rogan. Only made it to the 25 minute mark.
His dad was CIA. He is CIA. I don’t know this for a fact but it is like next to the only thing that makes sense. Say probability .95 or above.
I am about halfway through the Fridman-Carlson interview. Which I am watching as an adjunct to Carlson’s interview with President Putin. It’s a fascinating exploration of the muddled mind of Tucker Carlson. But it may be that he is in a transitional stage. He talks of his horror when he learned that the US government had really been ‘interfering’ in the affairs of other countries, contrary to what he had been taught. Many of us can relate to that.
But he keeps insisting that in the US, contrary to ‘authoritarian’ countries like Russia and China, we have ‘freedom of speech.’ Then he goes into a long discussion of how MSM (and he says that MSM is the mouthpiece of government) newscasters cannot discuss or question certain policies or situation, or they will be fired. And how this fear of being left without a job (or health insurance!) stifles open discussion.
But I can understand how he became, and has remained, popular. He has a real folksy charm, kind of ‘aw shucks, I know I’m a d**k, but let’s just get together and shoot the breeze.’
And perhaps he possesses that Trumpsian facility of reading the vibe of the room and feeding it.
The guy has already proven that being fired do not phase him, as his personal wealth insulate him from the biggest dangers.
But yeah, if Playboy was published today the pearl clutchers would not have gone to the supreme court. They would have instead badgered payment processors and banks into refusing Playboy service.
I’d say the US (but not most of the West) does have freedom of speech in a sense that’s meaningfully different from the situation here in Russia, or in China, or in France. Unless I’m much mistaken, there are no laws punishing speech directly, outside of clearly marked special cases like libel. That is a meaningful difference, or it certainly looks that way from the outside. Of course there are many other ways to limit speech, and the Americans are very good at those; also, relatedly, there are many other ways to punish people for talking. But you wouldn’t get arrested for expressing an opinion.
March Hadness coming to the Sierra Nevada starting later today. The storms heretofore have been of the pineapple flavor and not really big snow producers, with not much frozen water on the down low. but that was then and this is now and NWS is calling it a blizzard, batten down the hatches…
https://americanliterature.com/author/bret-harte/short-story/the-outcasts-of-poker-flat
Re Patrick Lawrence/Scheerpost–he cuts to the chase and talks about the rot at the Times
Meanwhile at the WaPo the CIA relationship is almost overt. Hollywood too has changed from making sinister anti CIA thrillers like Three Days of the Condor in the 70s (an excellent movie) to an endless series of beat ’em up/shoot ’em ups where current or former CIA may be played by long in the tooth stars from those same 70s. The moguls too (and chuckleheads like Ben Affleck) have come to stop worrying and love the spooks.
If one wants to step further back the CIA was always a creature of the US ruling class just as the Times and the WaPo now are. So the joined at the hip relationship is hardly surprising, just hypocritical for organizations that are always going on about democracy.
A long history and many good books on the subject, this from the safe shores of Wiki:
Ralph McGehee, a former CIA officer, stated that the CIA often placed news stories anonymously in news publications to spread false ideas favorable to CIA goals. Stories that CIA planted might be picked up and further spread by additional newspapers and other third parties, in a slightly altered form, or even picked up as news and then rewritten by a journalist.[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinion
I remember reading Don DeLillo’s book Libra, a semi-fictional account of the runup to the JFK assassination, in the early 90s before the interwebs. There’s one scene where a spook tells another character the real story of some current event and the other character is incredulous, saying they read the exact opposite in the newspaper recently. The spook says “Who do you think planted the story in the newspaper?”.
At the time, I was a bit incredulous myself that such a thing really happened. Now I think of how naive I was then.
a more recent film regarding the provenance of the cia: the Good Shepherd.
i watched it with my dad, who worked in image analysis for the DIA in the pentagon in the last years of LBJ(why i was born in Falls Church,VA.
he kept saying…whenever there were uncouth or otherwise ugly goings on in the film:” yep…thats what they’re like”…or “thats how it was”, with regards to the paranoia/commies under every bed.
mom inadvertently filled in blanks when rhapsodising on long road trips about living up there….about how they were instructed to trust no one…the iranian neighbors…the spook who lived next door whom gave her and his own wife a ride to work and never said a word…and so on.
this inside track…however anecdotal…has informed my view of such creatures ever since.
of course, dad wasn’t around for the origin story that makes the 1st half of the movie…Wm Donovan, etc.
but he did confirm that practically everyone he knew in that world was upper crust…and that he was the anomaly in this regard(image analysis was apparently a specialised skill).
watching that film with him and having him get so chatty about all that was rare, indeed….he only spoke of that time one other time, years earlier…after divorce, on a road trip…sitting in the jeep with hamburgers and he suddenly launched into a soliloquy. …about how “They” have “dossiers” on me and my brother…and numerous anecdotes and other sundry incomprehensible(at the time) things(i was 13).
brother and i were speechless,lol.
(and bro doesnt remember it)
that all good Liberals/Dems were supposed to suddenly fall in love with the cia and fbi because trump won an election will not change my views on this one bit.
i regard such organisations as evil, and the enemies of most americans.
and…on that note,lol…sitting here waiting on the resubmitted medicaid thing for my youngest(filed beginning of december)…as well as proving my identity to the Fafsa people/machines(wife made an account 4 years ago, but we dont know login…working on that since middle of january)…and i wonder….am i flagged, or something?…or is this normal, and due to underfunding and general enshittification?
I’ve seen it. Of course the Dulles brothers were very much from that world. Interestingly rich guy Tucker Carlson now admits that he once tried to join the CIA.
Truman may have professed innocence about his creation but he had quite a bit to do with the Cold War that fueled it.
Of course our upper classes have always been mad about the UK and no doubt felt they had to keep up with the cousins spook wise.
A completely aside comment about “the cousins”, see Kevin Phillips’s book “The Cousins’ War.”
https://www.amazon.com/Cousins-Wars-Religion-Politics-Anglo-america/dp/0465013694
Three Days of the Condor’s chilling ending sticks with me to this day: “How do you know they’ll print it?” Quite prescient. Made during a very brief window in our history that was quickly closed tight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZNnDiDSUiI
A very good response to the Times’ CIA stenographers by Lawrence, as always.
Regarding Biden and cognition, I listened to his speech on Fox radio the other day, and just out of dumb luck, they also played a clip of him talking in 2020 during the campaign. The contrast was striking.
I was immediately struck by how much clearer his speech was back in 2020; he now sounds like he has marbles in his mouth or maybe a mouthful of food when he talks.
Whatever that means, I am not qualified to say, but I would speculate that the part of his brain that controls verbal functions is rapidly declining.
The DNC’s best bet might be to hope advances in AI can intercept his speech and “filter” it in real-time kind of like auto-tune for singers to fix bad pitch. That wouldn’t help with the gaffes, though.
Auto-speech Joe?
I’m afraid the only Auto-speech Joe is that photo op of him in his ’67 Corvette, frankly the only time he ever manages to look cool.
Motor neuron disease? Perhaps primary lateral sclerosis (PLS). It affects movement in the legs but can also cause speech, swallowing and breathing problems as it progresses. Cognitive impairment (memory deficit) is found in PLS patients as well.
The change in 2 years and especially in 4 years is pronounced in his speech, gate, and memory. I know that older aging works sort of like compound interest – one day 1 thing hurts and then some time later 2 things hurt, compound ailings – but the speed of these changes in B is alarming to me.
Gait is used by physical therapists to assess mobility therapies for the elderly. Soon Air Force One will have an escalator instead of a stairway.
Air Force One would do us all better with a Guillotine.
I would not discount the impact on his health of Biden having had Covid—twice so far? Trump also had it–once so far? I saw some footage of Trump walking through an underground corridor, and was struck by how old he looked in his movements when he didn’t know he was being filmed (you couldn’t really see his face).
Don’t forget either that both of them have the benefit of Hollywood caliber makeup artists to spiffy them up.
I can only imagine what Biden’s wizened mug looks like in the morning with no pancake makeup.
I’m guessing something like this.
Somewhat interesting Fallows for airplane heads. He says speculation is that the pilots of that jet that landed on the freeway in Florida may have accidentally pulled the throttles back so far they shut off the engines.
My brother loves those air crash shows on cable and the lesson from them–and here as well if Fallows is right–is that air crashes are almost always pilot error.
Fallows wrote decades ago about being in the backseat of a fighter jet and getting quite a workout from the g-forces and impacts of gravity. Probably in The Atlantic, but didn’t find a reference.
See the link for some insight about how the jet jockeys handle it, or try to.
Predator 1 snarls at predators 2 and 3 to keep them away from its kill.
Comments on this Maskless Mandy tweet are great:
https://twitter.com/CDCDirector/status/1762660436145582494
Mandy K. Cohen, MD, MPH
@CDCDirector
Sat down with @USATODAY
to talk about how we are bringing expertise, investments & lessons learned from Covid to protect health and improve lives.
In other news,
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/s-0228-covid.html
Older Adults Now Able to Receive Additional Dose of Updated COVID-19 Vaccine
“…this season’s vaccine.”
With the virus’s continuing mutations and the vaccine’s waning immunity, every season is Covid season.
Dr. Seuss
Happy Leap Day, for those that observe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/business/china-dissidents-aleksei-navalny.html
February 29, 2024
China Has Thousands of Navalnys, Hidden From the Public
China has no dissident with the kind of public profile that Aleksei A. Navalny had. The government has many critics, but they all disappear from view.
By Li Yuan
[ The daily way in which the New York Times attacks and sets out to destroy a benign 5,000 year old civilisation of 1.4 billion. ]
Sure, but on the other hand, who cares about the NY Times?
And the few that read are fanatical and incurable China haters anyway.
“Sure, but on the other hand, who cares about the NY Times?”
The New York Times has over 10 million subscribers and is especially influential. Also, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post echo the Times on China, and there are echoing broadcast outlets such as Fox. The message for years now has been China is a threat and that is as effective as dangerous.
What is reassuring is that China is overwhelmingly strong economically, but there is far more:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216248120
June 27, 2023
Caught in the crossfire: Fears of Chinese–American scientists
By Yu Xie, Xihong Lin, Ju Li and Junming Huang
Significance
Our study reveals the widespread fear among scientists of Chinese descent in the United States arising from conducting routine research and academic activities. If this fear is not alleviated, there are significant risks of underutilization of scientific talent as well as losing scientific talent to China and other countries. Addressing the fear of US-based scientists of Chinese descent and making the American academic environment welcoming and attractive to all will help retain and attract scientific talent and strengthen the US global leadership in science and technology in the long run.
>>>Our study reveals the widespread fear among scientists of Chinese descent in the United States arising from conducting routine research and academic activities.
There are Manzanar the Creel Committee, the Palmer Raids, the Red Scare and McCarthyism as examples of what the United States can do.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216248120
June 27, 2023
Caught in the crossfire: Fears of Chinese–American scientists
By Yu Xie, Xihong Lin, Ju Li and Junming Huang
Abstract
The US global leadership in science and technology has greatly benefitted from immigrants from other countries, most notably from China in the recent decades. However, feeling the pressure of potential federal investigations since the 2018 launch of the China Initiative, scientists of Chinese descent in the United States now face higher incentives to leave the United States and lower incentives to apply for federal grants. Analyzing data pertaining to institutional affiliations of more than 200 million scientific papers, we find a steady increase in the return migration of scientists of Chinese descent from the United States to China. We also conducted a survey of scientists of Chinese descent employed by US universities in tenured or tenure-track positions (n = 1,304), with results revealing general feelings of fear and anxiety that lead them to consider leaving the United States and/or stop applying for federal grants. If the situation is not corrected, American science will likely suffer the loss of scientific talent to China and other countries.
Politico as always leaves a lot of info on the cutting room floor.
Good thing the blues still have abortion to throw out there.
When I was growing up I had a right to privacy, if you wanted to tap my phone you needed a court order, and if you were a corporation, not law enforcement I could sue you.
No Longer.
I’m speculating that scraping phone data is the new drug trial, just put the treatment out there and scrape texts for symptoms/problems so to escape/avoid/cover up liability.
Smoldering city on a hill, if something is shining it’s a piece of broken mirror and maybe one of our best citizens will stumble and see their own reflection amidst the ruins…
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/us/politics/biden-chinese-electric-vehicles.html
February 29, 2024
Biden Calls Chinese Electric Vehicles a Security Threat
The president ordered an investigation into auto technology that could track U.S. drivers, part of a broader effort to stop E.V. and other smart-car imports from China.
By Jim Tankersley
[ The daily way in which the Biden administration attacks China economically. The economic attacks have been continuous since President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton decided to contain China. ]
But the Biden admin won’t do a thing to stop other cars from harvesting lots of personal data from their drivers. The brands that do this include (takes deep breath) Toyota, Ford, Chevy, Hundai, Mazda, BMW, Volkswagon, Mercedes, Fiat, …… I ran out of breath.
RE: Nature’s Heartbeat
This is another article that gives the impression that the planets ecosystems have a regular ‘stasis’ or balance. The planets ecosystems are not at all like a heartbeat, over time. As the article below it in the same publication indicates. Changes to the AMOC are likely going to change the ‘heartbeat’ of the planet. The ‘heartbeat’ metaphor is based on plant productivity; which is based on seasonal/climate fluctuations which are likely to change plant productivity (if not human productivity). That change is likely to persist for a very long time. The planet will experience cardiac arrest for some and new opportunity for growth for other things.
From Welcome to the Era of BadGPTs
Hardly a surprise. OpenAI took the lazy approach: appropriate everyone’s content on the Internet. Garbage in, garbage out. Worse, malicious content in, malicious content out. Building up a training set of billions of parameters cooperatively would never be possible in a capitalistic system, so mass theft is the only approach conceivable.
Granted building a model collaboratively would be extremely difficult. How do you review billions of pieces of content that you’re licensed to use to ensure it meets whatever agreed upon guidelines society has setup? We’ve got a big debate about wokeness. Imagine that times 10.
Given the givens, it seems reasonable to conclude that no cognitive tests were run because the White House, at a minimum, was unsure what the results would be. Therefore, the conclusion that “Biden has cognitive issues, known to his inner circle,” seems inescapable (and says nothing about their nature or degree, or the effects of hyypothesized “juice”).
Of course, which is why Nate Silver’s idea of having Biden demonstrate his cognitive fitness is so desperate and hare-brained.
Those in power don’t like tests that they can’t pass or games not rigged in their favor. The people who know Biden best, know that there is a non-zero chance that even a carefully pre-selected doctor will give him a pass.
Those Superbowl participants can take heart that Ol’ Joe skipped the interview because he was worried about CTE? /s
Johnson ‘unchanged’ on Ukraine, border crisis despite pressure at ‘intense’ White House meeting FOX
I actually am pleasantly surprised that Johnson has held out as long as he has.
RE: Sri Lanka ends visas for hundreds of thousands of Russians staying there to avoid war
If you only read the headline, you’d think hundreds of thousands had fled from Russia to avoid the conflict in Ukraine. But of course, coming from a Western “news” outlet with its hate on for Putin, those are just more weasel words. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have visited Sri Lanka over the last few years –
But how many are still there trying to avoid being conscripted by the evil one? Why, nobody knows!
Funny that they can accurately count those coming in, but have absolutely no idea how many left. ‘Tis a mystery!
Sri Lanka is warm, has beaches, etc. Russians are not visiting the Riviera nor Greese nor Cyprus. I wonder if Russian tourism is picking up in Sri Lanka. From a Russian site: Sri Lanka plans to triple the Russian tourist flow in 2023
A few months ago, Gilbert Doctorow reported that the Seychelles Gov’t was looking for a Russian translator due to increased Russian tourism.
Sri Lankans tell me it is picking up.
SL also needs all the money it can get.
Yes, this is silly. Sri Lanka has been a popular destination here in recent years, as in pre-SMO. It’s no Egypt or Turkey, but it is getting there, or it was. Of course some people ran away to their favourite tourist countries when this started, but I think the “2022 diaspora” is mostly in the Balkans, Transcaucasia and Kazakhstan.
RE: Biden Physical</em
While hip, knee, and ankle degeneration do affect gait, it is the muscles in your upper leg (quads) that lift your leg up and then forward. Biden has not such muscle mass (as seen in pictures of him lounging on the beach last summer). He has little strength or balance to extent his foot forward confidently, so his step is short and tentative and not long. strong and confident. This is typical muscle atrophy for anyone over 75 years.
It seems as though Macron never learned Denis Healey’s First Rule of Politics: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. His justification for saying, not that European troops should be sent, but that “nothing should be excluded”, is to apparently preserve, or restore “strategic ambiguity” about the West’s potential reaction at some unspecified point in the future. I don’t know what it has done to the Russians, but it’s certainly caused ambiguity in Europe, where nobody really knows what to think. It doesn’t help that “strategic ambiguity” is something that’s historically been associated with nuclear weapons, though that’s not what he means here, assuming he knows what he means. But then Macron has always massively underestimated Russia, and still, apparently, overestimates what “NATO involvement” would mean, and thinks the Russians would genuinely be afraid of it. After all, in 2022 he was warning against “humiliating” Putin in any conclusion to the war. Boot, meet other foot. It’s interesting that even the anti-Russian French media is mostly telling him to calm down.
Doctorow is therefore wrong to suggest that Macron was “advocating” sending western troops, still less in a combat role, but I suspect that’s how the Russians have decided to play it. It doesn’t help that the French are still talking about “victory.” Likewise the “Foreign Legion” point: if the Russians had any actual proof of this they would be screaming it from the rooftops. As we discussed a few weeks ago, it’s quite likely that some of the foreign fighters in Ukraine are ex-Legionnaires (and therefore by definition not French) who left after their term of service and went to Ukraine. Indeed, there are bound to be quite a few Ukrainian nationals in the Legion anyway.
Most of all, I think he overestimated “European unity”. I agree that this was almost certainly a purely political move with no military implications – he probably just wanted to play continental leader – but I’d say the pathetic bickering that ensued means it has backfired.
Ukraine is looking more and more like Korea, except that Russia has far more disciplined people in charge than that hothead MacArthur.
“The reawakening of America’s nuclear dinosaurs” and “All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train” links above are both about government that no longer works.
Clearly, the US system of designing and building transportation infrastructure is broken but so is the military procurement and logistic systems. The two trillion dollars for the Sentinel ICBM and new plutonium pits for the warheads (upgrading the nuclear triad) are unaffordable and very likely money for nothing. Another Obama/Biden Administration military project doomed for failure.
The root cause is very basic. The West’s ruling ideology is that only money matters. The government and its projects are now simply means of moving public money into private hands. In other words, the Western Empire is too corrupt to serve or protect its citizens. Without competition and government regulation, corporations will raise prices and increase rents with no corresponding increase in the quality of services or goods to the consumers. Natural monopolies, like utilities, must be publicly owned or heavily regulated to serve the public. Besides the military and transportation, this also applies to healthcare, education, and the judicial system. If food or shelter become unaffordable, unrest is assured.
What worked was New Deal but it and communism/socialism were mostly discarded in the 1990s and early 2000s. Even China which is still run by the Communist Party, but has been opened up, has placed the economy ahead of the lives of Chinese and ended the Zero-COVID policy. Two million Chinese with three times the population reportedly died compared to 1.2 million Americas with COVID.
The fall of the Western Empire, like all Empires before, is assured if North American and European governments do not regain sovereignty. The continued habitation on earth depends on finding affordable systems that allow human societies to survive and prosper collectively not the current conquest, aggregation, and genocide for individual gain.
Even China which is still run by the Communist Party, but has been opened up, has placed the economy ahead of the lives of Chinese and ended the Zero-COVID policy. Two million Chinese with three times the population reportedly died compared to 1.2 million Americans with COVID…
[ Forgive me, but there is not the slightest reason to think this comment on China is correct. I find this comment painful.
The Chinese economy could never ever be placed ahead of the lives of Chinese by the Chinese government. The Chinese would find the suggestion highly offensive. This is a country that has completely ended severe poverty and is now working to insure that those who were poorest will now live significantly more comfortable and fulfilling lives. The issue is addressed in the media repeatedly. ]
NBC News;
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-excess-deaths-zero-covid-study-rcna101746
Yes, the publication of “China had almost 2 million excess deaths after the end of ‘zero-Covid” is one result of the economic conflict with China by the Obama, Trump and Biden Administrations. Also, there is manipulation of the news around the Coronavirus Pandemic but this story appears to be valid not propaganda. The Spanish Flu in 1918 caused 675,000 American deaths but its impact was forgotten by later generations. Because coronavirus is still endemic, mutating, and causes long COVID, plus the endless European & Middle East wars, and economic repercussions; these impacts may well force reforms of governments and healthcare systems that allowed this to happen in the first place in the West and elsewhere where people were adversely affected.
Also, the United States has been economically attacking China since the Obama Presidency. The Wolf Amendment of April 2011 was meant to end the Chinese space development program. China was meant to be contained. The economic attacks against China have grown in intensity and frequency.
China fortunately is very strong economically and has been able to resist the attacks and is doing just what is necessary to continue to grow and strengthen. China as argued before the UN Security Council has a right to develop, as should every country. The US opposed such a right, but nonetheless China is continuing and will continue to develop.
China’s development has been altogether wonderful:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=16TkI
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China, United States, India, Japan and Germany, 1977-2022
(Percent change)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=16TkM
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China, United States, India, Japan and Germany, 1977-2022
(Indexed to 1977)
Just because someone is good at something does not mean that he is good at everything. Proper economic management is different from proper management of an epidemic. Since Covid is now permanently endemic unless actions like filtration, masking, treatment, testing, and tracking for everyone, it will continue sicken, main, and kill. Are you prepared to provide serious evidence for China doing any of that? If not, I will assume that China, like the rest of humanity, is
suffering from endemic Covid with same consequences.
re: “The root cause is very basic. The West’s ruling ideology is that only money matters. ”
Indeed. See Philip Mirowski’s essay, (one of his many essays on the subject),
Neoliberalism: The Movement That Dare Not Speak Its Name
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/neoliberalism-movement-dare-not-speak-name/
My take is that neoliberalism assumes a static world, a fixed world, an end-of-history per Fukiyama world analysis. What is true to day will of course and always be true tomorrow forever, per neoliberalism’s western focused markets ideology. However, the world is not static today and never has been and never will be static.
Not static, moving in only one direction. The direction that was seen between 1989 and 2008. But after 2008, and in particular after 2016, their efforts to maintain that direction has become ever more shrill and fevered.
Much shorter: Fukuyama and the neoliberals, (hello, Chicago School), told the West it could rest on it’s laurels. Resting on laurels is… well, you know the usual outcome from that sort of hubris.
Covid flu-ification by Katherine Wu
—————-
I read that article and I have a bone or two to pick with it on its accuracy
1. no mention of all the potential problems that Covid causes – lung/liver/heart/brain/blood vessel/kidney/pancreas damage.
2. No mention that Covid is infectious up to 2 days before any symptoms and plenty of asymptomatic people. Plus researchers have a decent idea that covid is infectious up to 21 days after symptoms start – again no mention
3. “as the population’s immunity has increased, COVID has become more flu-like” – quotes Roby Bhattacharya – with no fact checking to see if what they say is accurate or not. Any moron with a credential can say whatever they want – doesn’t make it true. Also we KNOW that immunity from covid, whether after a vaccine or infection drop very very fast within months, not to mention new variants almost 1 or 2 a year!
4. The number of death seems too low + no mention of excess deaths + no mention of covid contributing to higher incidence of all other diseases.
5. “Most of those measures weren’t sustainable.” to drop Measures to protect public health against covid were a political choice and we can sustain whatever we can politically swallow (ukraine? gaza? homeless? drug deaths?). It’s a choice!
Well, it was the FT wasn’t it? I think the point is even those dolts are finding it hard to ignore, and yes, they can’t even write about it proper even when they try.
The beautiful antidote today is a Sandhill Crane and chick.
Amazingly, they’re already showing up in Wisconsin, much, much earlier than before we ruined the climate.
https://eu.jsonline.com/story/sports/columnists/paul-smith/2024/02/29/migratory-birds-returning-to-wisconsin-already-in-february-after-leaving-in-january/72771553007/
Flocks of Sandhill Cranes fly over my area every spring. Gorgeous sight.
‘Emmanuel Macron’s provocative advocacy of European troops on the ground in Ukraine’
Small French leader with military ambitions seeks to build an army to attack Russia…
Hmmmm…. I seem to have heard that somewhere before.