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Links 4/27/2024

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Adorable black footed kitty Gaia whose species is world’s deadliest shows off her scary side in adorable new clip…then celebrates her 1st birthday with treats Daily Mail (Li)

The ‘World’s Largest Wildlife Crossing’ Will Help Animals Walk Safely Over Eight Lanes of California Traffic Smithsonian (furzy)

Tweak to Schrödinger’s cat equation could unite Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics, study hints Live Science (furzy)

CTV National News: Donairs at Rogers Arena CTV (furzy)

Train-Surfing: A Global Look S(ubstack) Bahn (Micael T)

Over 1,000 New Additions to Our Solar System Were Hiding in Hubble’s Archives ScienceAlert (Chuck L)

Startling Discovery: Cancer Can Arise Without Genetic Mutations SciTech Daily (Chuck L)

#COVID-19

Climate/Environment

Noise From Traffic Stunts Growth of Baby Birds, Study Finds Guardian

China?

MI5 to vet British academics for Chinese spy links – media RT (Kevin W)

TSMC’s debacle in the American desert RestOfWorld (Kevin W)

Japan

Yen dives past 157 against dollar as BOJ stays put Nikkei

IMF now claiming that Japan has to inflict austerity when the government’s current policy settings a maintaining stability Bill Mitchell

Africa

Pentagon Confirms Delayed Withdrawal Of U.S. Troops From Niger Moon of Alabama. Moon needed a procedure but all is well! Separately, Scott Ritter has a very good discussion of the now-failing “keep them down” French and US strategy in Africa here: WARRIOR UPDATE WITH SCOTT RITTER EPISODE 65 – UKRAINE COLLAPSE – BEEFING UP IRAN’S Garland Nixon, YouTube

European Disunion

Complaint against Bayer to the OECD Tagesschau via machine translation (guurst)

In German schools: Children convert to Islam out of fear Bild (furzy). “Fear” seems to be an exaggeration. “Desire to fit in” looks more accurate.

Gaza

‘It felt like pulling my heart out of the earth:’ testimonies from the mass grave at Nasser Hospital Mondoweiss (guurst)

The geopolitics of labor: Israel’s quest to replace Palestinian workers with Indians The Cradle (Micael T)

Gaza Protests

Columbia protesters say they’re at an impasse with administrators and will continue anti-war camp Associated Press (Kevin W)

D.C. police rejected GWU’s plea to sweep out university protesters Washington Post (furzy)

State responses to student protests fall along red vs. blue lines The Hill

Empire Managers Say Russia, China And Iran Are Tricking Students Into Opposing Genocide Caitlin Johnstone (Kevin W)

New Not-So-Cold War

Pentagon to ‘rush’ Patriot missiles to Ukraine in $6bn package BBC

The Russian Turtle Tank Is The Weirdest Armored Vehicle Of The Ukraine War. The Craziest Thing Is, It Might Actually Work. Forbes (Li). Scott Ritter has repeatedly stressed that Russia is taking its battlefield experience and feeding it very rapidly into weapons production, as in upgrading/adapting on the fly.

Versus: Russia has found the critical vulnerability in Nato’s American tanks Yahoo (Li)

Special operation changes the role of snipers on the battlefield vz-ru (Micael T)

100-mile US glide bombs fail in Ukraine Telegraph (Li)

* * *

Sergei Shoigu: “The NATO alliance’s troops approached the Russian borders and created additional threats to military security. I want to emphasise that it was not us, but they came to us. This once again shows that it is impossible to believe the Western countries” International Affairs (Micael T)

Ukraine: A Guide For The Perplexed Aurelien

THE REBIRTH OF SLAVERY IN UKRAINE: ZELENSKY’S POLITICAL PROXIES KIDNAP AND SELL PEOPLE, MAKING MONEY FROM THE SLAVE TRADE Foundation to Battle Injustice (Micael T)

Imperial Collapse Watch

Patrick Lawrence: The Impotence of Antony Blinken ScheerPost (Randy K)

Further thoughts on the economics of imperialism CADTM (furzy)

A Michael Hudson two part interview: People are Outraged by Israel’s War on Gaza – Israel is Losing and Russia Has Crushed Ukraine’s Army and Russia-China Partnership Growing Massively Dialogue Works, YouTube

Trump plans to sanction countries for refusing to use dollar – Bloomberg RT (Kevin W). Lordie.

Trump

Trump’s potential plan for Fed raises alarms The Hill

Trump’s Two Bodies Unpopular Front (Randy K)

What Harvey Weinstein’s Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump’s Trial New Yorker (furzy)

2024

Biden says he’s ‘happy to debate’ Donald Trump CTV (furzy)

Supremes

The Court Just Sealed Everyone’s Fate, Including Its Own New Republic (furzy)

Our No Longer Free Press

Through authority control for “media freedom” Multipolar via machine translation (Micael T)

Gunz

Why America fell for guns aeon (Micael T)

Antitrust

Coach, Michael Kors Tie-Up Opens a Curious Bag of Antitrust Concerns Wall Street Journal. Li: ” Why is the FTC pursuing this case? The market is hard to delineate. Plus women pay too much for everything. You could calculate a separate women’s rate of inflation and it would be higher.”

Ban on non-compete agreements sends shockwave across Wall Street Financial Times

Why I Don’t Invest in Real Estate Tomas Pueyo (Dr. Kevin)

Intel used to dominate the U.S. chip industry. Now it’s struggling to stay relevant CNBC (Dr. Kevin)

AI

“

Microsoft and Alphabet enjoy AI-powered gains from cloud divisions Financial Times”

The Bezzle

The specific process by which Google enshittified its search Pluralistic (Robin K)

Oxford shuts down institute run by Elon Musk-backed philosopher Guardian (Anthony L)

Canadian Housing Market Craziness Ian Welsh (Micael T)

Class Warfare

Are My Neighbors Job Killers? Les Leopold (Chuck L)

Court Upholds New York Law That Says ISPs Must Offer $15 Broadband ars technica

Western countries and their allies are home to one seventh of the world’s population – but account for some two thirds of global military spending. As the arms industry gains weight in Germany, economists predict “guns without butter German Foreign Policy (Micael T)

Antidote du jour. Robert H: “The late, great Henry”:

And a bonus (Chuck L):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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219 comments

  1. The Rev Kev

    ‘Nury Vittachi
    @NuryVittachi
    SNIPER’S CAR TO BE BURNED OUT
    THE HONG KONG SNIPER would start shooting people in the immediate aftermath of the double-bombing in Wan Chai, a court heard yesterday. He would then be collected in a car that would drive at speed to Clearwater Bay, where the vehicle would be set on fire.’

    Would it be too cynical to suggest that when that vehicle was going to be set on fire, that perhaps the body of the sniper would be in it? Perhaps they should ask the sniper – David Su – where he was in 2014 and if he was ever in Kiev.

    1. digi_owl

      This also seem like an evolution of the tactics employed in South America.

      Less targeting of powerful individuals, more creating a mass panic that allows the chosen group to rise up with a promise of safety.

      1. Emma

        They’re not going to create a Maidan no matter how many times they try. What they’re trying to do is to provoke a Chinese overreaction and then lie about it. The 2019 ‘protests’ were over a long overdue law trying to ensure that a murderer could be extradited to face punishment for murdering his girlfriend. It was also timed to affect the Taiwanese elections at the time in favor of the DPP.

        China and Russia have been playing the long game in humoring the US. I know it frustrates a poster here to no end and it certainly frustrates me greatly to see innocents being killed in their millions and (economically, politically, intellectually) debilitated in their billions. But why step in when the US is doing such a good job of showing people around the world and within its own borders, what it really is?

    2. PlutoniumKun

      I’ve been following this case since it started. Unless I’ve missed sometimes there have been no allegations in court or in the HK media of any Taiwanese or US connection. That seems to have been pulled out of the air by whoever those people are on Twitter.

      It makes no sense when you read up on the details of the case. The allegations are that they stole and tested crude weaponry out in the hills in HK – this makes no sense if they were trained professionally. The allegations are that they are part of a small radical sub-cell of the protestor who had plotted to set off small explosive devices. There is a long history of such radical anti-colonial groups in HK going back to the 1960’s at least. The British were very successful in suppressing them, the Chinese have learned from them.

  2. Terry Flynn

    I’m not going to post Twitter links as we’re not certain of things and the conversations are predictably toxic already. However clinicians spotted signs that the presenter of the main UK ITV News at Ten (Rageh Omaar) may have had a stroke live on air. He CLEARLY was horribly ill yet ITV did nothing and he struggled through to end of bulletin. ITV then pulled the one hour catchup channel.

    IIRC I have seen two links in last week on NC re stroke increases, one in context of COVID sequelae. This looks bad. MSM have started picking up on it.

    1. The Rev Kev

      It must have been horrible seeing that guy stroking out live on TV. Was there nobody else that could have picked up the printouts and read that news in his place? Maybe he can sue ITV if it comes to it.

      These days, I would have no worries about AIs replacing all these talking heads on TV. I put the TV on at night time for the news and you have these coiffured idiots lying there faces off about what is happening around the world (A genocide in Gaza? What genocide?). A programmed AI could do the same sort of lying – but cheaper.

      1. Terry Flynn

        I am clicking on “trending” topics less and less but I wondered why this guy was trending. I’m not squeamish but did see the final minute or so of the bulletin and thought “I’m not clicking on any of those other clips from earlier in the bulletin, this is horrid”.

        A woman watching live who said she’s an ICU Stroke nurse says she contacted ITV at 22:10 and spelled out his symptoms and he needed an emergency ambulance. That’s 10-20 mins before bulletin ended, if ITV scheduling for the news hasn’t changed. Her tweet is currently high up but I ain’t linking to it. I did notice the next tweet was “why have we seen this on TV so much in the last 3-4 years?”. Hmmm.

        ITV have said NOTHING on their news this morning about it, according to mum who just watches daytime TV non-stop. The Guardian has referred to illness without saying more.

    2. Bugs

      My 85yo mom has had two since having Covid. Never had cardiovascular issues prior. Friend’s dad died after a massive one a few weeks after recovering. My anecdota.

      1. Glen

        Lost an uncle due to a stroke after exposure to covid back in 2020. It was very unexpected, he was in his late sixties and in good general healtrh. We have had many other older relatives (at least four) suffer strokes of varying degrees in the last four years. Of course, everybodies getting older, but it did seem like many more than normal were having strokes.

  3. upstater

    As solar capacity grows, some of America’s most productive farmland is at risk Reuters

    There are thousands of acres of farmland in our region are given over to solar. Meanwhile residential and commercial buildings have limited solar and economics intentionally downgraded for rooftops by regulations while huge incentives are created for private equity and utilities. Being rustbelt there are tens of thousands of acres of brownfields sitting unused many with HV transmission access.

    NY State has excellent potential for pumped storage hydro but none are proposed, much less built (we quit serious engineering projects over 50 years ago!). A far smaller footprint and mitigates intermittancy of wind and PV.

    Energy policy is based on greed exclusively.

    1. Pat

      Yup, I am beginning to think that our state symbol should be the hand gesture for where’s the money.

    2. PlutoniumKun

      We need to get real about this.

      As a ballpark figure, to provide 100% of all power (not just electricity) in the US would require solar farms taking up around 35,000 square miles.. Thats around 1% of the land area of the US. Total farmland in the US is around 17% of all land use. Therefore, to go 100% solar, and only building on farmland, would take around 7% of agricultural land. Thats assuming no rooftop, no solar farms in the desert, none on any other kind of land. And of course this would displace the 60 million acres of farmland now used to make biofuels.

      Plus, of course, solar farming does not take the land out of agricultural use – it can still be used for grazing.

      Of course, in a logical world, solar farms should optimally be put on non-productive land, but there are many other factors at work. For one, the farms need connections to the grid, specifically to transformer stations – this is the no.1 criteria for solar searches. It also makes sense to scatter the farms to match local grid capacity. This is actually the prime reason good agriculture land is used instead of lower grades – show me a major solar farm and I’ll show you where two circuits meet near a transformer station. This is perfectly sensible and rational.

      Now while small scale solar is very important, it also has to be acknowledged that rooftop solar is far more expensive per watt than large scale farms. Plus, there are all sorts of implications for grids (although also benefits, but this is quite a complex topic).

      Ideally, we should be putting solar farms in industrial lands, especially over carparks, and the roofs of industrial/retail buildings, or other areas where there are additional benefits, such as floating farms on reservoirs (they significantly reduce evaporation). But this costs money. And there may well be much better places to spend that money.

      But we can’t get away from the fact that sometimes the optimal site is also good agricultural land. And its very profitable – in Ireland solar operators are offering farmers 2K rent per hectare, whereas a typical dairy farm operates at a profit at around 1K per hectare. Hard for a farmer to turn down.

      It should also be noted that non-prime farmland tends to have a higher visual quality (i.e., hills), and is often of much higher ecological value. Solar operators often find there are less regulatory barriers to open fields in flat land.

      As for that article, I call BS on that farmers concern about dust. Yes, of course a badly managed construction site will cause excess dust arisings. But this is corn land, annually ploughed and drenched in glyphosate. Tell me that doesn’t produce vast amounts of dust. That guy is just looking for compensation.

      1. Louis Fyne

        solar output peaks at solar noon, US warm weather electricity use peaks at 3p to 5p local time.

        solar also needs batteries or other form of energy storage like industrial chillers for institutional A/C

        1. cfraenkel

          And? This is textbook whataboutism. Can’t think of anything to refute PKs argument, so you just throw in whatever talking points come to mind.
          (and nothing is stopping you from pointing the arrays 30 deg to the west to shift the peak later. Kind of a stupid strategy, but if you’re that worried about AC use, a solution is readily at hand)

          1. Polar Socialist

            There was a time about 140-200 years ago, when human life was build around “use energy when it’s available” concept. I’m talking about wind, of course. Millers pulled 72 hour shifts when the wind was good, tea arrived to consumer when the winds allowed and so on.

            It’s not like we are unable to do what our great-great-grandparents though was the normal. Yes, it may take some adaptation and innovation, but people with less education could do it.

            Check out things like sleeping porches or iceboxes and wonder how clever people used to be. And how dumb we’ve become since everything works with just a flick of the switch.

            1. digi_owl

              Speaking of wind, i think i read something about sailing cruise ships becoming a thing now.

            2. PlutoniumKun

              Yup, there is far too much focus on energy storage, and not enough on managed consumption. We’ve already hit the stage in many grids worldwide where daytime electricity is close to zero price due to excess solar at those times. Sometimes there is a ‘natural’ match, in, for example, hot dry climes where peak demand happily matches peak solar, but most areas aren’t so fortunate. While we tend to focus on domestic consumers, in reality the most flexibility is in commercial and industrial users. This isn’t new – nearly all commercial users will have contracts specifying pricing per period and permitting the supplier to cut off for X hours when the local grid is under strain, but there is huge scope to improve this.

              There is a lot of focus at the moment on flexible hydrogen and ammonia production to use surplus power – its already viable in some grids. But when power is cheap, someone will almost always come up with a sensible use for it. The trick, as always with electricity supply and demand, is to get all the competing sources/uses in line.

              The whole story is vastly more complex than just ‘oh, we need lots of batteries’. Thats just one small element of it. But this isn’t new – small grids have been working on this problem for more than a century. Ireland had substantial hydro storage capacity built in from day one of the grid (1930’s), plus demand management such as encouraging night time storage heaters.

              A key problem is conceptual – grid managers and engineers in very large catchments have essentially lost the skill of careful load balancing – for half a century its always been about producing lots of cheap electricity. Neoliberalism hasn’t helped, although its not the core problem.

              1. JW

                ‘The whole story is vastly more complex than just….’ Indeed.
                Take your E7 tariff, for storage heaters example from the 70s and 80s.
                Cheaper prices encouraged much uptake especially in no-gas areas. So the daily peak moved from 17.30h to 01.30h and it sometimes was double the size. In those days (expensively) coal-fired generation was brought on line to meet the demand. Not much chance of that with ‘must run’ nukes, solar, or wind; especially at 01.30h. And that wasn’t the worst of the problem, the local distribution and sometimes the transmission systems weren’t designed to meet those domands. The cost of upgrade was unsupportable.
                E7 was curtailed.
                The only thing that has changed over 50 years is that the available generation to quickly ramp up to meet new demand peaks is no longer there. Just shifting demand around does nothing to solve this. And of course then there was some attempt to meet economic criteria for investment, now its supplanted by ideology.

      2. heresy101

        Agrivoltaics will eventually put an end to the anti-solar bs.

        “Agrivoltaics has the potential to help farmers adapt to climate change and diversify their income through land lease payments or other business structures. Research in the drylands of Arizona found that farming under solar panels can decrease evaporation of water from the soil and potentially reduce irrigation requirements. Agrivoltaics can also improve crop yield and crop resistance in extreme weather, such as droughts. Adding farming to existing solar energy sites is being explored as an approach to increase access to land for historically disadvantaged groups, such as Black and immigrant farmers. At the same time, questions remain for farmers about how to do agrivoltaics, including which crops are suitable in a shaded environment.”

        https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/potential-agrivoltaics-us-solar-industry-farmers-and-communities

        Agrivoltaics is still a nascent business model. Based on data collected so far by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, there are over 2.8 GW of agrivoltaic sites in the U.S., the majority of which involve sheep grazing and/or pollinator habitat. Growing crops under solar panels has been largely confined to research test plots, though this is beginning to change. At least five commercial solar-crop sites are operating in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Maine.

        1. PlutoniumKun

          Yes, the solar and wind industries can be their own worst enemy, especially when governments invite a free for all, which is essentially what market based energy grids represent. But they’ve learned – most solar operators are now moving away from just covering everything with panels and paying more attention to land use. In India, for example, putting solar panels over reservoirs and canals very significantly reduces evaporation loss. Spacing panels out on land can have surprising benefits on some agricultural land, but obviously it depends very much on the local climate and soil types.

          Not to mention that its become a very important extra source of income for small farmers.

      3. Pat

        Not to dispute everything in your response, but upstater was discussing NY state. Even though weather seems to be shifting, if this spring is any indication the lack of snow would be offset by the clouds and rain. If the state is going to demand electric heating, electric cooking and electric transportation it needs to also provide for more and dependable electricity. And that means that solar is NOT what should be the focus when there is a better option for the state.

        Adding solar to buildings or industrial areas where it would be a supplement should be on the agenda. And I would think it should be much higher of the options in more year round sunny areas. But upstate NY is not that.

      4. upstater

        PK, did you look at the photographs or have you seen a typical PV installation on ag land? Unless the farmer is grazing chickens, the land cannot be used for any sort of agricultural production.

        Upstate NY is loaded with tens of thousands of acres of brownfields that still have transmission access. All of the rustbelt is similar. These sites don’t get used because of the ease in permitting greenfield and challenges in brownfields.

        State regulators have created huge incentives for greenfield utility scale solar and huge barriers for residential and commercial building PV. And last week NC posted that McKinsey is the strategist for the New York Power Authority’s renewable program – and NYPA itself built huge hydro facilites 50-65 years ago using in-house engineering and management talent:

        https://hellgatenyc.com/nypa-mckinsey

        Biden’s IRA, McKinsey and PE will not lead us to sustainability. Full stop.

        1. PlutoniumKun

          I’ve seen dozens of solar installations, large and small around the world – US, Europe, Asia. I even helped build a small one on a friends smallholding. I’ve also, as it happens, have explored mines, oil wells, frak wells, nuclear plants, hydro plants, windfalls, gas ccgt plants, etc. Thats what comes with being an energy nerd with a fondness for hopping over fences I probably shouldn’t hop over. Some solar installations are crude and ugly, some are just ok, some are extremely well designed and fit into the landscape in a subtle manner. Just like any other type of development. None have zero impact – there is always some loss – farmland, someones view, somewhere the birds roosted, or just a little local bit of scrub with some ecological value.

          The reason there are lots in NY State is that NY is a very heavy energy user, with a lot of legacy circuit capacity. Thats why NY has lots of nuclear plants, coal plants, and pipelines to Pennsylvania gas fracking wells. In a sensible world, there would be DC lines connecting NY to Arizona. But there aren’t. So until then, the solar farms will be built where there is energy demand, not necessarily where the sun might be.

    3. lyman alpha blob

      My better half is somewhat involved with placement of solar farms in Maine. One positive thing they’ve been able to do is encourage their development on the cloverleafs on interstate on and of ramps. Nothing else is going to be built there or grow there, it’s not animal habitat, and the scenery is already pretty trashed by the highway already, so just about the perfect place to put them.

        1. cfraenkel

          Especially in the southwest. The shade might be more welcome than the electricity. I remember crossing parking lots in Vegas and sinking into the asphalt.

          1. juno mas

            Take a look at today’s Link to the microprocessor plant in Phoenix, AZ. The photo shows acres of PV covered parking.

    4. cousinAdam

      IIRC, one such “ pumped storage “ project was proposed for the Hudson River a bit south of West Point. Largely greed-based and ecologically myopic, it planted the seeds for what grew into ‘old Pete’ Seeger’s reproduction river sloop Clearwater project which has arguably done more to clean up the ‘river that flows both ways’ (the indigenous people’s name for it) than even the mandated removal of PCBs upstream from GE’s semiconductor and electrical transformer manufacturing back in the day. It is now safe for swimming, recreational and some commercial fishing . Last I heard, the sloop was undergoing a massive overhaul (even a new keel!) as its ancestors were built to have a 30- something year service life. I look forward to a visit once I return from the west coast in the near future!

  4. lyman alpha blob

    RE: Tweak to Schrödinger’s cat equation could unite Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics, study hints

    Better headline writers please! There is no “Schrödinger’s cat equation” – there is the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment about the live/dead cat in a box, and there is Schrödinger’s equation, which describes the wave function. The article itself is better and doesn’t make the same mistake. These science sites really should have people who have some understanding of science write the headlines. Maybe they are now leaving it up to AI, which understands nothing.

    1. Terry Flynn

      I was about to say “This problem pre-dates AI….” but then re-read the link source and realised this time round we can’t blame the Guardian. However, sub-editors who typically write headlines/summaries are generally terrible at scientific nuance.

      I’ve replied to the letters editor who contacted me with questions after the Guardian invited letters to an opinion piece drawing on “UK polling evidence” last week. I’m now wondering if that editor was actually an AI chatbot.

        1. Terry Flynn

          To quote Francis Urquart “You might very well think that – I couldn’t possibly comment.” :-)

          (Just in case they do print my letter, hehe)

    2. Captain Obvious

      It’s not about AI but about human I. Most people on the Internet have no interest in equations, but do in cats. These science sites care about clicks more than about science.

    3. digi_owl

      Never mind that the whole cat thing was Schrödinger trying to highlight the absurd results quantum mechanics was suggesting.

      1. Kevin Walsh

        Yes, it wasn’t a metaphor as the article describes it.

        The ideas described in the article are interesting, though.

    4. marcel

      Between the smallest object in the universe (a quark) and the largest one (the universe itself), there are about 60 orders of magnitude.
      Between Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, there are about 120 orders of magnitude.
      So definitely, one of those theories is wrong, and perhaps both of them.
      But if you say so, you are the end of your career. Or they’ll reply that the theory works in their specific domain. That’s like replying to Galileo that the geocentric model is fine when looking at the sun and the moon.
      So Schrödinger’s cat will remain in its box. Because the real question is whether there is a cat.

      1. lyman alpha blob

        Heh – it’s cat holograms all the way down!

        Far from a physics expert here, but if I had to pick either relativity or quantum mechanics being “wrong”, I’d go with the latter. Sure, it works as far as making predictions goes, but I’ve never liked the fact that when people question what it all means, the shibboleth given in response has often been to “Shut up and calculate”.

        1. digi_owl

          To be a bit of an ass, epicycles also “worked”.

          I just hope that far more educated people with far more decades of work in the field has not overlooked such a shift in reference point.

      2. Revenant

        Magnitudes. The differences in scale you are referring to are magnitudes.

        Orders are the scaling behaviours of functions and algorithms: for example, a search function might take increasing time in the order NlogN for N items as N increases.

        This whole sorry confusion comes about because some people took the phrase “order or magnitude” and turned it into “order of magnitude”, which makes no sense. The former is a behaviour, the latter is an attribute.

        I had this drummed into me by Roger Needham in his introductory lectures on algorithms.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Needham

      3. JP

        Of course they are both wrong. Neither is a complete working model of reality. Large questions still remain.

          1. witters

            How on earth could one possibly know that “all models are wrong”? (And a good reason a model might work is that it gets things right.)

            1. Captain Obvious

              A model is always simplifed version of reality. That’s the whole point of making it. There is always someting missing.

              Models that work get some things right. That’s what makes them useful, for specific purposes. Newtonian mechanics is a good example of that.

              P.S. That sentence is a quote. I’m sure the Internet is full of discussions about its meaning.

              P.S.2. In case there is terminology misunderstanding,
              In scholarly research and applied science, a model should not be confused with a theory: while a model seeks only to represent reality with the purpose of better understanding or predicting the world, a theory is more ambitious in that it claims to be an explanation of reality. (copy-paste from Wikipedia)

              1. witters

                I’m with you.

                But not the cavil:

                1. “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
                2. “Models that work get some things right.”

  5. SocalJimObjects

    “IMF now claiming that Japan has to inflict austerity when the government’s current policy settings a maintaining stability”.

    I am not advocating austerity, but a low unemployment rate does not mean everything is hunky dory. How can something like this, https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/japan-jan-household-spending-logs-biggest-drop-35-months-2024-03-08/ be a sign of a healthy economy? The US also has a very low unemployment rate so everyone should be commending Biden for a job well done, no? A low unemployment rate should also translate to much higher wages, but that’s also not happening in Japan, https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/7/18/japans-workers-cry-out-for-a-raise-after-decades-of-stagnant-pay. Before the very small pay bump last year, average wages in Japan had not changed in the last 30 years!! On reflection, that’s also a form of austerity, isn’t it?

    If only the 2011 Earthquake had not happened, at the very least, Japan would be able to rely on nukes for her energy needs, but with the Yen depreciating like crazy, something has to give way soon. Also Japan’s days as an export powerhouse is very much in the past, so there’s no natural counterbalance to the dropping Yen, not even overtourism (yes, this is a serious problem in Japan now).

    I love traveling to Japan, so I only wish the best for the country, but the feeling that the country is slowly dying out is very hard to shake.

    1. The Rev Kev

      Austerity is not the solution though. Even the IMF’s technical experts come out and say that austerity does not work – while the IMF leadership demands that countries follow austerity. The UK Tories brought in austerity a decade or so ago and all it has done is to wreck the country and tear the social fabric. I found the history of that Vitor Gaspar interesting as he seems to be a one-man financial wrecking ball. I checked his Wikipedia entry and found the following-

      ‘Without any previous political activity, he was appointed Minister of Finance in Pedro Passos Coelho’s cabinet on 21 June 2011. In this capacity, Gaspar’s policies included a firm intention to accomplish the European Union/IMF-led rescue plan for Portugal’s sovereign debt crisis.’

      This shouts to me that he did not rise on merit but was appointed by the EU and the IMF to do a hatchet job on Portugal. If so, mission accomplished. Hopefully the Japanese will be wise enough to send him on his way with a flea in his ear.

      1. digi_owl

        That seems to be the unspoken reason for austerity, “discipline” labor.

        I suspect said “sovereign debt crisis” came from the same one as Greece’s, the government picking up the tab for the corporations to avoid mass bankruptcy.

        For some reason private debt is never a problem, but government debt always is.

        1. Terry Flynn

          All true. Perhaps most seriously, Japan faces a unique and very scary real problem that will require real work to solve: its nuclear power plants must either be properly and permanently decommissioned or rebuilt on higher ground. This is because NIMBYism decades ago caused most of their plants to be built in areas dominated by weaker factions of the ruling LDP – areas which are also incredibly vulnerable to small rises in sea level.

          My friend who informed me about these things, causing me to make that comment on here, loves Japan but is realistic about the real (as opposed to monetary/financial sector) challenges that face Japan as a nation. Practically all nuclear power plants (whether still in use or not) require serious work to secure them, given the almost daily worsening projections of climate change and potential “tipping points”.

          1. digi_owl

            The locations probably also gave ample access to cooling by putting the secondary loop out at sea.

    2. Mikel

      Japan went from being a country led by strong industrial policy to being hyper-financialized. That’s the general impression I get.

      When property prices first hit those fantasy finance numbers, and prices have to stay high by any manipulation necessary, it’s usually a sign that a country has begun hollowing out industrial capacity. Often monopolization and/or offshoring are key signs.

      1. The Rev Kev

        Decades ago I read that the valuation of Tokyo’s CBD was worth more than the real estate value of the United States. The problems arose when Japanese corporations took out loans with those land valuations acting as their “collateral”. And it worked – until it didn’t.

      2. SocalJimObjects

        The Plaza Accord (thanks Uncle Sam!!!) and Japan’s refusal to face the consequences of the bubble are still haunting Japan’s economy to this day.

    3. digi_owl

      keep in mind that official unemployment stats only include those that have been actively looking for work in the last couple of months, but not finding any. If one has not been looking or have been offered but declined, no matter the reason, one is not counted as unemployed. There seems to be a ever higher number of “NEETs” running around, both in japan and elsewhere.

    4. Pearl Rangefinder

      I love traveling to Japan, so I only wish the best for the country, but the feeling that the country is slowly dying out is very hard to shake

      Not just a feeling unfortunately, it is quite literally dying out. There was an article in FT a few weeks back that was startling to me: Japan’s native population declines at record rate as births plunge

      According to official data released on Friday, the number of Japanese nationals dropped by the biggest amount in a year since comparable records began in 1950 — a fall of 837,000 in the 12 months to October 1 2023.

      That decline represents a daily drop of 2,293 people, or just under 96 per hour.

      100 less people per hour! I mean, Japan’s population is pretty huge, but that is still a stunning number when put into those terms. And as they say, Japan is 20 years ahead of us…..

    5. PlutoniumKun

      Its notoriously hard to ‘read’ the Japanese economy. There is certainly no real shortage of jobs, but wages have been stagnant for a very long time, and the declining yen has hit Japanese people hard. On the other hand, its good for their government pensions, as the Japanese government holds vast dollar holdings.

      Exports aren’t doing too bad – by some measure they’ve been consistently growing.. But mostly due to high fuel import costs the days of a big export surpluses are gone. I do think the rise of Japanese and Korean EV’s could be a disaster for Japan though as Japanese companies are laggards – Toyota and Nissan look very vulnerable, and they are a very big chunk of the economy, taking account of their supply chains.

      Everyone is scratching their head about what the governments real plan is – they may pull a rabbit out of the hat or they may seriously lose control. But certainly the country is in long term decline. But if any country can manage it, Japan can.

      1. Oh

        As long as the Japanese govt listens to the US and its sycophants the Japanese economy will go nowhere but down.

    1. griffen

      Kind of alarming, but at that size it appears the FDIC found a readily available institution to acquire the failed bank’s operations. I find it doubtful that Fed rate cuts are coming anytime soon. This week at my day job, I’ve noticed some price moves on bond holdings that would surely bite, as yields went higher … generally speaking that is.

      CNBC was breathless yesterday on a related topic, ie if a second Trump term puts the independence of the Federal Reserve as a front and center type of concern. Bond market investors would not like that at all, if the alleged plan has any truth attached to the headlines.

    2. Neutrino

      Doomsday Clock, meet Jackpot Clock.

      The concept applied to nukes seems apt for the financial nukes.

  7. Wukchumni

    Following the global demobilisation in 1945, McKevitt shows, surplus war firearms flooded the US market at dirt-cheap prices. This influx was facilitated by the ‘new gun capitalists’, a group of little-known entrepreneurs who imported and sold these guns to US consumers. They reshaped the US gun industry by establishing a mass market for civilian guns that had limited practical use elsewhere and faced stricter regulations in other countries. Capitalising on the surplus of inexpensive imported firearms, the new gun capitalists learned how to stimulate demand through marketing foreign guns as desirable consumer goods for the everyday American. They mass-marketed these imported guns to consumers flush with cash and eager to acquire these one-of-a-kind war arms from across the globe.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    A 2nd dirt-cheap chance came along in the 1990’s, when ex-Soviet and Helsinki Accord countries small arms ammo flooded the market in the USA… rounds costing almost nothing, and one of the few leftovers from Communism that was marketable in the west aside from various militaria. I could have been a Soviet general for around $200-as long as the uniform fit, and could’ve outfitted many divisions with everything but the guns-which unlike the cheap ammo, weren’t sent to the USA as far as I could tell.

    The 1990’s is when the country really went whole hog on guns as far as i’m concerned, was the cheap ammo a catalyst?

    I asked my brother-in-laws in their 70’s, who have recently in the past decade got all armed and dangerous, whether they would shoot somebody that was stealing their stuff?

    Both without hesitation replied, ‘oh yeah’, and when I questioned the wisdom of killing somebody over a 70 inch HD TV, it didn’t seem to faze them, and these are old men who are well off that could buy another $500 TV without blinking an eyelash.

    1. Joker

      It’s not about $500 TV, but about the ability to kill someone and get away with it. Usually people have to join the army and go overseas for that, which is not comparable with doing it from the comfort of your own home.

      1. Jesper

        My guess would be that you’re right that it is not about TV. But I believe what they see it as being about is that it is not a – it is about their TV.
        So they’d fight using lethal weapons to protect theirs and also to make sure that they are not seen as easy victims. They might fear that if they are seen as weak and/or easy victims then they’ll be targeted and risk losing a lot more. If they’ve been around bullies/sociopaths who believe in might makes right then that might be the lesson learned.

          1. jonboinAR

            I’m pretty sure, world-wide and throughout history, people have reserved the right to use lethal force against intruders and to protect their property. The idea wasn’t just introduced by some sort of recent media or other propaganda. People everywhere are violently opposed to being victimized or otherwise made to feel helpless.

            1. GramSci

              Yep. Too Much Testosterone. But by IK’s categorical imperative, who’s to say testosterone is wrong?

    2. R.S.

      > which unlike the cheap ammo, weren’t sent to the USA as far as I could tell.

      They were, but it was mostly antiquated Soviet surplus pulled out of storage, like those dirt-cheap Mosins. In Russia you could (and probably still can) buy some ridiculous “demilitarized” stuff, like a single-fire Maxim gun certified as a “hunting carbine”, no kidding. But that’s more like collector’s delight.

      1. The Rev Kev

        Speaking of Mosin, I saw a video from the Donbass where this guy pulled up in a car and started to distribute Mosins to the squad waiting for him. I guess that they would be modified for sniper work but you could see from the crate they were in that they had been in storage for a very long time.

    3. digi_owl

      What i find curious is that USA Was hardly the only nation with access to surplus firearms after WW2. Yet i suspect most places picked up Mauser rifles and like, as they were suitable for hunting.

      1. jefemt

        Ah, the coveted Argentinian Mauser as the base for a customized ‘sporting’ rifle.
        Remember Shotgun News? I am an old hobbling anachronism..

    4. JakSiemasz

      I have very well-off neighbors with the same attitude…good christians also so they tell me. Walk around carrying guns in their fancy hidden holsters driven by Fox induced paranoia. They all suffer from Hero Fantasy – the belief that they will save somebody in the event they are present during a crime, not realizing their most likely reaction will be to freeze up. Bogles my mind.
      Oh yeah, several weeks ago one of them accidentally shot himself in the foot and had to have it amputated. They look at me dumbfounded when I tell them their gun is much more likely to cause harm to a family member than ever preventing a crime.
      People need to quit hating.

      1. fjallstrom

        I read somewhere that (perhaps some) US gun instructors use the concept of “safe room” in order to get their trainees to be less likely to kill family members. Have a designated safe room where in case of emergency you gather the family.

        Makes it more likely that you realise that the sound your paranoid mind thought was an intruder was actually the cat / a drunk neighbour trying to get into “their” home / teenager sneaking in after curfew / family member going to the bathroom before tragedy has befallen the family. And if you actually are in a horror movie you have a better chance to defend a room with defined access paths than stumbling around with a gun in the middle of the night.

  8. The Rev Kev

    “‘It felt like pulling my heart out of the earth:’ testimonies from the mass grave at Nasser Hospital”

    So what happened when the Israelis were asked about these massacres?

    ‘Israel will not investigate the mass graves found at Gaza hospitals, as it has already dealt with the matter and found no wrongdoing by its troops, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has told Politico.’

    IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told Politico on Friday that reports of Israeli troops having anything to do with the mass burials were “fake news.”

    When asked whether that meant that Israel would not investigate the matter, he replied: “Investigate what?”

    “We gave answers. We don’t bury people in mass graves. Not something we do,” the spokesman insisted, without specifying to whom those answers were given.’

    https://www.rt.com/news/596655-gaza-mass-graves-israel/

    ‘Tis a mystery.

    1. Feral Finster

      Why does this surprise you?

      Did not some Israeli bigwig tell the troops shortly that after October 7th that they would not be held responsible for anything they did?

      That Israeli assuredly knew that Himmler said the same thing at the beginning of Barbarossa,.for if they study nothing else in Israel, they study the Holocaust.

  9. digi_owl

    “The ‘World’s Largest Wildlife Crossing’ Will Help Animals Walk Safely Over Eight Lanes of California Traffic Smithsonian (furzy)”

    I suspect many a city could use something similar to help those unable to drive.

    1. Neutrino

      Smaller versions of the over-crossing are found around some western states with roving deer, elk and friends. Glad to see SoCal giving the four- and more-legged critters getting some assistance, and maybe even a few birds out for a stroll, too. ;)

      The article sparks a few questions.

      Why are the concrete beams so heavy, given the relatively light weight of the crossers? There would be a likely separation among crossers to avoid being consumed, or to be careful at the entry and exit to avoid becoming takeaway meals. Those would seem to indicate a lighter structure.

      Are there special mitigations for the neighbors that will experience those intermittent parades? Higher fences that are cougar or bobcat-proof? Ban on barbecues to avoid enticing carnivores?

      1. steppenwolf fetchit

        When I took a train recently across South Texas, southern New Mexico and southern Arizona; I also saw some “undercrossings” . . . smallish tunnels built under roads and highways for peccaries and such to get under the road from one side to the other. I saw a peccary coming out of one.

  10. digi_owl

    “In German schools: Children convert to Islam out of fear Bild (furzy). “Fear” seems to be an exaggeration. “Desire to fit in” looks more accurate.”

    Indeed. We are so inundated by messages about individualism that when kids default to group adherence we seem incapable of processing why.

    But religions seem to understand this, and thus their strongest non-corporal punishments involve shunning.

    1. PlutoniumKun

      Years ago, a Turkish friend of mine was visiting her German relatives and she told me she was horrified by how religious her cousins had become – all her female cousins had voluntarily opted for headscarves – and this was in a generally very secular family.

      To an extent its a natural process of people trying to assert their identity, a common thing among a second generation of immigrant, but there are also other processes at work I think. Taleb has written about the processes whereby a very small, but very determined minority can imprint their needs on a much larger population, if the larger population is not particularly bothered one way or another about the issue.

      Its often assumed that there is a one way process from ultra religious to secular, but history tells us otherwise. Countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, for example, were largely secular or mixed in the mid 20th Century, but have become much more orthodox Islam in recent decades, often due to clumsy interference from the west in wiping out communists, who were also generally the secularists.

      1. digi_owl

        I seem to recall reading about a similar phenomena in the Balkans. And the claim was that it was related to Saudi sponsored Wahhabi preachers visiting.

        1. Feral Finster

          Hell, Pakistan has become a much more conservative society since 1948, at least among the upper classes.

          The average frustrated Pakistani is more or less the same.

      2. hk

        It’s not just the Muslims. Asian Americans in US are often more obnoxiously “Asian” than most Asians, despite hardly having any ties to their alleged ancestral lands. I’ve seen/heard the same from other “identity groups.”. One might also note that the fascination with the Confederacy and its symbolism in the South (and some parts that are not really the South) in the US is also a fairly recent “identarian” phenomenon (not earlier than mid 1960s among the elites, but the mass variant seems a good deal more recent.)

        1. digi_owl

          Why i have lately taken to considering USA a zoo for obsolete customs.

          I seem to recall reading elsewhere an anecdote from Silicon Valley about a Indian working for some of the tech companies having his mother visiting from India to attend a wedding. And said mom exclaiming she was glad to once more experience a traditional Hindu wedding, as they rarely happened any more back in India.

  11. digi_owl

    “The Russian Turtle Tank Is The Weirdest Armored Vehicle Of The Ukraine War. The Craziest Thing Is, It Might Actually Work. Forbes (Li). Scott Ritter has repeatedly stressed that Russia is taking its battlefield experience and feeding it very rapidly into weapons production, as in upgrading/adapting on the fly.”

    Nifty. I seem to recall some months back we saw a early version of this where they had fitted a chain link “roof” to catch drone dropped grenades etc. I guess as Ukrainian pilots got better, the need for side coverage grew. That said, i suspect they could improve on this to avoid blocking the turret as much. But then it may well be that with the fighting being mostly trench to trench, there is little need for maneuvering. Also, this brings to mind a system of hanging chains that Israel has used on their Merkava tanks to ward off cheap RPGs.

  12. digi_owl

    Well hello there Yogi.

    And funny how everyone backs well off when the skunks come in with raised tails.

    1. The Rev Kev

      Kinda startled me when a bear came into the picture as I was not expecting that. The guy who published that video should set up a YouTube channel where there will be highlights of the visitors from each night. Was not expecting there to be so many types of animals.

      1. digi_owl

        It helps that the video do a quick cut from a small animal existing one side and the bear being in view, as the change in scene is so abrupt.

      2. Mark Gisleson

        When I read the Tarzan books I learned that all the jungle creatures from Numa to Cheetah frequent the same water holes.

      3. lyman alpha blob

        You would be surprised how many animals you can spot with those cameras, even in suburbia. I trained one on my garden to try to find out who might be helping themselves and got pictures of skunks, raccoons, foxes, possums, and wild turkeys along with the neighborhood cats. I’ve also seen woodchucks and porcupines, but didn’t get those on camera. Only ones I caught in the act were my sworn nemeses, the squirrels, who were caught climbing the sunflowers, downing them, and making of with the seeds. While they were already the prime suspects, it’s nice to have proof.

        Turns out the main damage to vegetation was not caused by our mammalian relatives, but by earwigs and slugs, who like to munch the shoots, and then the corvids, who for some reason take offense at certain seedlings, mainly broccoli and peas, and feel the need to pluck them from the ground and then leave them. Not exactly sure what they’re doing it for, but a neighbor has caught blue jays doing it.

        1. fjallstrom

          Maybe the corvids has no use for broccoli and peas so they prune the weeds to make more room for useful plants? Useful for them, that is.

      4. Terry Flynn

        Am I the only person who, at the end, thought the bear was about to use the litter tray?!

  13. lyman alpha blob

    RE: Why America fell for guns

    Article states the rise is gun ownership begins around 1945 and attributes it to several factors, all very plausible. One they fail to mention is Hollywood (although they do mention advertising, and both can be seen as marketing enterprises). Hollywood was pumping out gangster movies, cowboy movies, WWII flicks, etc. all featuring gun-toting heroes. And they never stopped. I’m sure most people here are familiar with the statistics showing the average number of gun deaths any given person sees on the screen during their lifetime.

    Surely that has had some effect on the collective USian psyche.

    1. Carolinian

      As I’ve previously suggested, if you browse through my library’s DVD collection about half of them have an actor with a gun on the cover. Meanwhile the movie world’s previous obsession with sex has declined and Pauline Kael’s 1960s book Kiss Kiss Bang Bang might now be simply titled Bang Bang. So even as the good liberals of Hollywood join the Dem obsession with a popular uprising they don’t mind showing the public how to hold their side arms with the proper two handed stance.

      But hey actor/millionaires gotta eat, right? We shouldn’t be narrow minded about these things.

      Kael didn’t like all the violence in movies back then but found nuance in an antihero film like Bonnie and Clyde. In the original script for the movie the Beatty character was supposed to be bi so all those phallic barrels may have held symbolic importance. Now that they dominate we may have to admit that Freud was right even if a cigar is just a cigar.

      1. The Rev Kev

        Others may disagree but when you have a Quentin Tarantino glorifying violence in his films and it being popular, you know that something is seriously wrong.

        1. griffen

          The first installment of the John Wick movies was on one of the more obvious cable networks last evening, might have been the USA network ( not that it matters much ).

          Talk about some really violent scenes ! John mows down a small army of well armed body guards in more than one scene. Cinema in America…and to add that, well you don’t steal the man’s car and murder his puppy, so hell is what he brought.

          2. Kouros

            John Wick’s supported orphan in Gaza gets killed, bloodbath at the White House. Now that would be a movie I would like to watch…

      2. lyman alpha blob

        “…previous obsession with sex has declined…”

        My family and I unfortunately watched the exception which proves that rule recently, Poor Things, which got a best picture nomination. I was expecting a fantastical romp through Europe a la Gilliam’s Time Bandits , but instead was treated to something pretty close to a soft core porn flick. NOT the movie to take your teenaged daughter to!

        Proving the rule was American Fiction, which I recently saw. Can’t recommend that one highly enough. Didn’t see Oppenheimer and probably won’t, but for my money American Fiction deserved best picture.

        1. Carolinian

          Skinny Emma Stone isn’t much of a porn star. I quickly found myself scanning through Poor Things which I hated. Two hours of arch is way too much.

          In defense of H’wood the Swinging Sixties are over (good riddance to Hefner) but were more photogenic than the androgynous (20) twenties. A lot of movies now don’t seem to know what they are about. Meanwhile the romance minded still have Hallmark.

          1. Neutrino

            Ol’ Hugh had a two-fer. Salacious publication, for more than just the articles, and plenty of volunteers from the studios, business and budding models for his grotto hidden cameras. Screen test pipeline to supply needs near and far.

      3. Es s Ce Tera

        In a different context, and a different time, I once suggested that obsession with guns was because guns were phallic.

    2. digi_owl

      Speaking of gangsters, the symbol of the period, the Tommygun, was meant for the US Army during WW1. But as Thompson didn’t get it into production before the war ended, he instead started selling it on the civilian market. And it found use not just with gangsters and police, but also with striking miners.

    3. Lefty Godot

      I’m pretty sure my father said the government gave him, at the time he was demobilized, the option of buying at cost the gun they had provided him with in World War II. He wasn’t interested. But I imagine many other discharged soldiers might have taken Uncle Sam up on that offer.

    4. Benny Profane

      You forget video games. It’s a massive shoot them up obsession for millions. I’ve been having issues with the kid below my condo, that fortunately has mellowed. Maybe he discovered girls, and girls are not into that. It’s scary to hear the profanity laced screaming, and, he’s not the only one, there are playmates out there he’s either trying to kill, or on his team. Definitely an emotional addiction of high order. Im guessing he will soon graduate to drugs and alcohol in large quantities, like a lot of his generation.

      1. Pat

        My neighbors unfortunately might get a dose of profanity laced screaming rom me practically every time I look at the news. The last time I held a gun was almost fifty years ago. And my PS3 had exactly one game, as I got it as the cheapest most full featured upgradable Blu-ray player at the time. No judgement from me for him… ;)

  14. digi_owl

    “Intel used to dominate the U.S. chip industry. Now it’s struggling to stay relevant CNBC (Dr. Kevin)”

    Groan. Intel was doing ARM chips back in 2002…

    Where Intel got derailed was when TSMC and ASML managed to get EUV chip fabs working, while Intel was failing at a different approach as they had deemed EUV “impossible”.

    This meant that for the first time in “forever” they were not the leader in chip production tech.

    1. Pearl Rangefinder

      What you are saying is definitely true, Intel took a (in hindsight) wrong turn in the technology bets that they made. But their business was also ran into the ground at the same time – let us not also forget that Intel spent $84.5 billion in stock buybacks instead of, ohh I don’t know, maybe spending it on your business? Especially in such a capital intensive industry like theirs is.

      Intel & TSMC on Chip Shortage: After Blowing $84 Billion on Share Buybacks since 2011 and Now Woefully Behind, Intel Clamors for $50 Billion in Subsidies for US Chip Industry

      As the kiddos say these days, “surprise Pikachu face”.

    2. Carolinian

      The linked article seems like a fair and thorough summary to me. My impression is that Intel fell behind because the market changed as devices became ever more generic rather than market segmented consumer boxes versus “power PCs” which were the specialty of brand centric Intel.

      1. digi_owl

        Funny thing is that x86, Intel or otherwise, were not the choice of serious computing back in the day. Workstations ran on SPARC or MIPS or RISC, not x86.

        1. LY

          All those machines were replaced by faster and cheaper Intel x86-64bit machines running Linux.

          This is my personal experience at places that were strongly attached to Unix, like Bell Labs and UC Berkeley.

    3. Robert Gray

      re: TSMC’s debacle in the American desert

      Very interesting piece, this. It almost seems like they were deliberately trying to make American engineers — engineers! aren’t they supposed to be the serious ones?!? — look like whining snowflakes. It’s amazing that in Europe Americans are still viewed as hard-working people.

      1. Benny Profane

        Oh, c’mon. Does your boss expect you to put in 60-70 hour weeks? I was surprised the young man had weekend activities. And does your management rule by insult and expect you to perform well after demeaning you constantly? As stated, our economy is advanced enough that engineers, who are in short supply, have a variety of companies to choose one. Not the poor Taiwanese kids, it seems. As implied, I’ll bet a lot of them who came over are searching for a sweet 40 hour week for maybe better money.

        And, of course the Euros think we work hard. Have you ever been to Italy or Spain? Hell, they finish dinner near midnight in the latter. And nobody can get fired in most of the EU, which doesn’t exactly inspire hustle.

        1. Revenant

          The Spanish white collar class is surprisingly hardworking. They just arrange their day differently. They work from 9ish until say 2pm, take a long lunch in the heat of the day and then go back in at 5pm or so until 8pm. They eat late but that is partly a function of Franco and then Brussels adopting Berlin time for a country that is entirely to the West of the Greenwich meridian! If these times were on UK time, they would be early starters (8am), not so late lunchers (1pm) and normal diners (8pm).

          Europeans in general work the same length office hours as Americans. The difference is that we take proper vacations!

          1. Benny Profane

            Ha, I used to work for a company that gave five weeks vacation after five years, Xmas week, a pension, fully paid health care, and unlimited sick days. I always joked that it was like working in France.

      2. Carolinian

        I agree and worth a look for those who wonder what all the talk about Chinese culture means in practice.

        Since the article seemed vague about the location I looked it up for those of us with some familiarity with Phoenix.

        The TSMC factory, or fab, is massive and will feature state-of-the-art technology when it begins commercial operation in 2024. It sits on more than 1,000 acres in north Phoenix just west of Interstate 17 along West Dove Valley Road — the huge cranes and new buildings are visible from the freeway. The campus measures nearly two miles by one mile and has enough space to fit six fabs, though only one is currently under construction, with the second slated to go up and start operations around 2026.

        https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/2022/12/07/what-to-know-phoenix-taiwan-semiconductor-factory/69707994007/

      3. LY

        Americans still put in more hours, except for East Asia. Part of that is the lack of vacation and sick days. Less work culture or work ethic and more cracking the whip.

        I worked with engineers in Europe, Asia, and US. No one questioned the productivity, effort or results of the European engineers. If anything, mild jealousy.

        It did seem they did have relatively lower pay and/or status in Europe, so smart young ambitious people didn’t rate moving there.

        1. digi_owl

          Because young people are not yet in the position in life to value the healthcare etc that said “lower pay” provides.

    4. LY

      Intel’s stock buybacks didn’t help, as the tech moat protecting its market was being bypassed by smartphones and web apps. No Intel in smartphones or tablets, and with web apps, didn’t need Intel in servers.

      Now that renewed efforts are underway to get Windows on ARM…

  15. Joker

    100-mile US glide bombs fail in Ukraine Telegraph (Li)

    They actually wrote mud as the reason. You can’t make this up. :-)

    1. Benny Profane

      Not surprised. The F16s, if they are taking off in Ukraine, need pristine runways, because the air intake is low to the ground and can suck up stones and whatever may be lying around. These runways require a 24/7 sweeper crew. So all Russia has to do is bomb the runways periodically, and those things aren’t even taking off.
      The famed wonder weapon British Challenger tanks aren’t being used because they’re so heavy, they sink in the mud.

      This war is not a good promotion for the incredibly expensive western weapons industry.

      1. digi_owl

        The article seems to indicate that this is the SAAB-Boeing developed GLSDB however:

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

        They are meant fired from MLRS and HIMARS platforms, as an alternative to cluster munitions.

        Would not surprise me if mud was an actual problem, leading to the vehicles not getting close enough to the front before getting bogged down. Or failing to get away after launch, thus allowing Russian counter-artillery to take them out.

        And that would be on top of the GPS guidance failing thanks to Russian jamming, further limiting their effective range.

  16. The Rev Kev

    “Ukraine: A Guide For The Perplexed”

    Several points come to mind but there is one that I would like to mention and that is the subject of negotiations. On the front line there would be negotiations going on at the local level but here I am talking about the national level. Just who exactly do the Russians negotiate with? Zelelensky brought in a law making it illegal for him to negotiate with Russia while Putin was President. But why would the Russians negotiate with the Ukrainians in any case when they have backed out of several agreements at the last moment with Istanbul being the most consequential.

    And the Russians have been betrayed by the west so many times that there is absolutely zero trust with them and I mean zero. There is literally no point, especially as they say one thing and do the opposite as the Chinese have noted. Can they really trust the likes of Biden, Macron and Scholz? So it looks like the only thing that the Russians can do is establish facts on the ground and let the Ukraine and the west deal with it. I cannot see any alternative here. For the Russians, there is literally no one to negotiate with.

    1. Bugs

      The final negotiations will probably be with Poland, Slovakia and Romania to set up border security arrangements for the rump Ukraine, mostly to keep out weapons and contraband. Moscow will probably ignore Moldova.

    2. Feral Finster

      Who is going to enforce this law and how?

      The law applies, if and to the extent that the Americans say it does.

      1. Feral Finster

        In Ukraine, the law and constitution are what the Americans say they are.

        If the Americans say Zelenskii can sign a treaty, then he can. If they subsequently change their minds, then the signature and the treaty is void insofar as the Americans say so. Unless they change their minds again.

        If the Americans decide that Zelenskii is in fact Mickey Mouse, then he will be deemed to have big round black ears and a tail for purposes of Ukrainian law.

    3. Benny Profane

      They’re waiting for Biden to lose to Trump or die, or at least stroke out, both of which could be soon. Not that Trump will be easy, but, much better than the raging old man who doesn’t want Afghanistan II on his watch.

        1. yep

          It’s not a joke. China and Russia make long term plans, and prefer predictable enemy. Trump is chaotic, just like the Argentinian guy.

    4. Skip Intro

      And soon Zelensky himself will no longer be a constitutionally legitimate head of state, so there will be no one in Ukraine with authority to sign any treaty.

      Did you see that some Germans were whinging about German tanks on display in Moscow, claiming they were stolen? I would say they were abandoned in Russia, and bill Germany for salvage, transportation, and disposal costs, as well as applicable fines and penalties for improper parking and permitting.

      1. Feral Finster

        Sorry, should have posted above.

        In Ukraine, the law and constitution are what the Americans say they are.

        If the Americans say Zelenskii can sign a treaty, then he can. If they subsequently change their minds, then the signature and the treaty is void insofar as the Americans say so. Unless they change their minds again.

        If the Americans decide that Zelenskii is in fact Mickey Mouse, then he will be deemed to have big round black ears and a tail for purposes of Ukrainian law.

      2. The Rev Kev

        ‘Did you see that some Germans were whinging about German tanks on display in Moscow, claiming they were stolen?‘

        Well that can’t be right. Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that as soon as those German Leopard 2 tanks went into the Ukraine, that they were now Ukrainian Leopard 2 tanks.

    5. VietnamVet

      Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan are united in their belief that the goal of the proxy WW3 is to defeat Russia & gain access to its resources, keep Israel viable as the West’s Middle East aircraft carrier, and to take down the Chinese Communist Party. Except, the ultimate outcome for such hubris and incompetence is the fall of the Western Empire itself (like Rome’s fall when defended by foreign mercenaries not Romans). The splintering apart of the USA and the EU are the only possible outcomes of such delusions if there is not a global nuclear war first. The only other alternative is if either Donald Trump or Jill Stein become the President in January 2025 and UN Armistices between the combatants are signed and a new Cold War 2 starts around the fringes of Eurasia.

      The only way the Suez Canal will operate at full capacity if a Gaza cease fire is signed and the Axis of Resistance allows the reopening of the Red Sea. Scientists, engineers and workers will migrate to where industry, money, jobs, food, livable habitat, and resources are still located on Earth.

  17. lyman alpha blob

    RE: Pentagon Confirms Delayed Withdrawal Of U.S. Troops From Niger

    Not surprising that the US isn’t going to follow the rules based on the orders of some non-Western country. However I’m sure Niger is aware of recent events in Afghanistan, where Trump had reached an agreement for troops to leave by May 2021, an agreement which Biden delayed, only to be embarrassed once the Taliban decided they’d had enough and gave the US a little incentive to hop on the choppers and get the hell out in September of that year.

    1. Mikel

      Niger should be aware of the Iraq situation as well.
      Or maybe Afghanistan and Iraq should have paid more attention to loitering US troops and “advisors” in other countries and asked themselves why they thought it would be different for themselves.

      1. lyman alpha blob

        It was the gigantic pallets of cash that did the initial persuading in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the current Keystone Kops in charge of things in the US seemingly intent on destroying all trust in the US dollar, perhaps massive bribes are less persuasive than they were a generation ago.

        1. Neutrino

          But, ya see, the West Wing focus group consensus said that the kerfuffle would be over in time for the next news cycle. Now, onto the next photo op and news dump. /s

      2. Polar Socialist

        Remember when Kazakhstan went up in flames and Russian paratroopers flew in to help (a tad over two years ago)? A certain Anthony Blinken said: “one lesson of recent history is that once Russians are in your house, it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to leave”.

        Russians left five days later, when the situation was under control.

        1. Vandemonian

          Poor Anthony. He was probably doing a Biden – saying “Russians” when he meant “Americans”.

  18. SocalJimObjects

    Sergei Shoigu: “The NATO alliance’s troops approached the Russian borders and created additional threats to military security. I want to emphasise that it was not us, but they came to us. This once again shows that it is impossible to believe the Western countries”

    I think this guy Shoigu might be suffering from Long Covid with the attendant loss of 3 IQ points, or he probably has a poster of the X-Files hanging in his office, you know the one with the tagline “I want to believe”. This is two years after the war started, and almost 10 years after Maidan, and he’s still scanning the skies for signs of trustworthiness from Western countries. My question to this guy Shoigu is, why the hell are Starbucks, McDonalds, etc still operating in Kiev? Where’s the final electrical infrastructure implosion that will make even a million Patriots useless?

    1. digi_owl

      By now Russia has given up on speaking to NATO, and is instead reminding the global south about the duplicity of NATO.

    2. Maxwell Johnston

      The big news story in RU these days is the shock arrest of deputy defense minister Timur Ivanov. Widespread media coverage. The scale of his corruption is epic; together with his high-maintenance trophy wife, it is weirdly reminiscent of the last tsar’s minister of war, Sukhomlinov:

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

      FWIW, the comments sections on Runet sites are delighted at this (finally) happening. Recall last summer’s Prigozhin mini-revolt and his accusations of large-scale corruption and incompetence at the RU Ministry of Defense, and Prigozhin’s popularity (especially among the young) prior to his abrupt demise.

      Timur Ivanov is 100% Shoigu’s guy, so I’m guessing that Shoigu is in very deep trouble. The investigation is expected to expand significantly.

    3. chris

      That is a good question. Why are all these big multi national companies still sending billions and even trillions of dollars over seas to places like Russia and China if those countries are now our sworn enemies? The answer is… the US government is not really in control here. If the Biden administration or anyone else gets too uppity, our oligarchs think they can shut them down.

      But maybe, with the advent of things like the FTC eliminating non-compete clauses and our own envoys advocating for the removal of ISDS, they can’t? Maybe we’re past that? In which case I think we’ll see one staple of sci-fi and cyberpunk come to pass very quickly – corporate sovereignty.

      1. digi_owl

        Different companies, different oligarchs.

        The ones backing Biden and wanting to see Putin taken down a peg are likely the ones that lost their holdings when Putin clamped down on the Yeltsin period excesses.

        Others likely saw little change in their earnings.

  19. alum

    Re: AOC’s appearance at Columbia, I wanted to share with the commentariat the following statement from the coalition at Columbia. The group is regularly releasing these kinds of statements. The organizers are conducting this in a practical and mature manner which, as recent graduate, I would not have expected of my cohort at the university. When I attended, all was wailing about Trump. It felt somewhat radical to support Bernie on campus. A vast majority of students now supported the divestment referendum and many clubs and student orgs are publicly and straightforwardly in support of the coalition. It seems to me in the post-2020 years, we have a much more serious and more radicalized contingent represented strongly in the student population. Further, many students are likely experiencing and experimenting with communal forms of cooperation for the first time. Many of these efforts, it seems, started on somewhat of a whim, but are now becoming highly organized around practical needs and intellectual life. I recommend this post from UT Austin to attest to this. Note especially the takeover of the school’s multicultural center. There is a rejection of institutionalization and co-opting of social justice demands. Those of you who are more seasoned dissenters may rightly have your skepticisms about this movement, but this is a massive moment in the political consciousnesses of us younger folk. The aforementioned statement:

    “On Opportunists

    The Gaza Solidarity Camp is a liberated zone for all people. Columbia University is eager to restrict community access and limit freedom of movement of its own students while it contributes to displacement in Harlem and genocide in Gaza. We will not mirror the checkpoints and gates of fascist institutions.

    Zionists, opportunist public figures, and hostile admin have all entered our camp over the past week. Despite the presence of individuals who seek to harm or use us, we continue our teach-ins, our art, our organizing and our protest. We are committed to protecting our community. We will not platform or give attention to those who enter camp for publicity stunts.

    While we appreciate the support of public figures who stand on the right side of history and use their platform to push for Palestinian liberation, we will not highlight any politicians’ presences so as to not detract from Gaza. This student movement is important, but we are not on this lawn to get videos with celebrity figures. We gather on this lawn to educate, to radicalize, and to center Palestinian and Gazan voices.

    We see through the politicians who previously were silent, refusing to acknowledge their complicity in the ongoing genocide, who now come to our campus seeking photo-ops for political campaigns.

    To all public figures – if you choose to visit our encampment, utilize your power and position to fight for Palestine. Otherwise, you are failing to uphold the tenets of this movement.

    Do not turn this into a free speech issue. This is about the genocide in Gaza and we have made this abundantly clear.

    If you are unwilling to take an anti-Zionist position and if you are unwilling to condemn Israel’s genocide so as to not lose political funding, your presence at camp is hypocritical and self-serving.

    What began with a few students has grown into a vibrant community space, far more educational than a college course.

    In the face of mass slaughter and our own complicity in imperialist oppression, we gather together knowing that the strength of this camp comes from the Palestinian people. We honor their struggle and their resistance. We learn from their histories, their creativity, and their love.

    Disclose. Divest. We will not stop, we will not rest.

    Free Palestine.”

    3. pjay

      “If you are unwilling to take an anti-Zionist position and if you are unwilling to condemn Israel’s genocide so as to not lose political funding, your presence at camp is hypocritical and self-serving.”

      Out of curiosity, has AOC used the G-word yet in describing what is happening to Gaza?

      I just watched a short Grayzone segment where Max and Aaron rip AOC for her impassioned call for Ukraine funding during Congressional testimony leading up to the vote last week. To make it worse, she did so while lavishly praising the testimony of professional Russiaphobe Tim Snyder. She did try, rather weakly and meekly, to distinguish support for “democracy” in Ukraine from her position on Israel. So I suppose the latter led her to vote against the final funding bill… oh wait.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dP6MexA99s

  20. The Rev Kev

    Re Robert H’s cat Henry in today’s Antidote du jour. There is something relaxing at seeing a cat asleep in a woollen garment. He really did look like a good cat.

  21. pjay

    – ‘Trump’s Two Bodies’ – Unpopular Front

    “In the criminal trial in Manhattan and the Supreme Court oral arguments, the two different sides of Donald Trump are fully on display. On the one hand, in Alvin Bragg’s criminal trial, we have Trump-in-himself: he’s a petty conman, a quasi-gangster, who lives in a world of pornstars and pay offs to tabloids. There he’s an old man who is falling asleep in court…”

    “… On the other hand, before the Supreme Court, he have Trump-for-others, the way Trump would like to appear, and the way many of his supporters would like him to be: le Roi, the King, the state embodied, a figure above the law.”

    This is an interesting way to frame the “Trump” phenomenon, but of course it completely misses the point. The transformation from petty conman to “le Roi” was not primarily a projection by Trump or his supporters. Rather, it is very much a creation of a fearful Establishment and their lackeys in the liberal media who have created this ginormous Hitler/Stalin cartoon caricature threatening to impose a Fascist Monarchy on us all. This bogeyman of their own making now haunts their dreams and every waking moment.

    Given my own political orientation I don’t think much of Trump’s “immunity” defense. For the same reason, the obviously coordinated wall-to-wall lawfare offensive to take down this “petty conman” has been quite disturbing. That doesn’t much reflect the “legal philosophy” of a “republic” to me, either.

  22. The Rev Kev

    “The Rebirth of Slavery in Ukraine: Zelensky’s political proxies kidnap and sell people, making money from the slave trade”

    Hardly surprising. They have a booming human organ trade by taking the organs from Ukrainian casualties already so why not slavery as well. Of course that puts a nasty twist in this story. It can be hard just trying to ship a perishable organ to a hospital in the EU, the US , Israel, etc. that deals in black market organs. So what if some of those slaves shipped out of the Ukraine are not really slaves but are actually – unknowingly – transporting their own organs for delivery to a hospital where they will be relieved of them. And of course any death certificate after will list their cause of death as drug overdose or some such.

    1. digi_owl

      I seem to recall that trafficking from east to west has been a problem pretty much from the day the Soviet system vanished.

  23. pjay

    – ‘What Harvey Weinstein’s Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump’s Trial’ – New Yorker

    Speaking of TDS, I was wondering how long after the Weinstein decision it would take for this article to appear. That was pretty fast, and in the New Yorker, yet! Almost as if it had already been queued up. Yes, *of course* Trump paying off a stripper to keep quiet about a consensual affair is equivalent to Weinstein serially assaulting multiple women whose careers he controls.

    Yes, I know that this article is suppose to be about a technical legal issue of admissible evidence. But we all know what the real message is.

    Here is a more direct link:

    https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-harvey-weinsteins-overturned-conviction-means-for-donald-trumps-trial

    God, I hate having to keep defending this petty conman.

  24. The Rev Kev

    ‘Bwog
    @bwog
    Replying to @bwog and @persianjewess
    @AOC in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University.’

    If she just wants to visit, fine. Let her get her PR photos. But if she goes to those students and offers to negotiate on their behalf with the uni admin, they should tell her to go take a hike. You would never know on whose side she would be negotiating for.

  25. Es s Ce Tera

    re: Empire Managers Say Russia, China And Iran Are Tricking Students Into Opposing Genocide Caitlin Johnstone

    The younger generations know where they’ve received their own ideas and it wasn’t Russian propaganda or Tiktok, the Palestine-Israel situation is easily and fully discoverable and verifiable without reference to either, there are such things as books, for example, or maps, or video records, or historical artifacts, legislative records, etc., so all the powers are doing here is making these generations also doubt the official narrative around Russia as well, which is a good thing.

    During Occupy there was a point where the mainstream media all at once stopped covering the protests at the direction of and in coordination with the DHS Anti-Terrorist Fusion Centers, just prior to the also simultaneous nationwide breaking down of the various camps, and meanwhile Facebook simultaneously introduced an algorithm to limit the reach of “happening now” posts which until then were key to organizing. I remember thinking this was a generation of kids that are learning something very instructive about media, social media, police and the powers that be, and carrying those lessons forward.

    So, that was 2011, fast forward to 2024 and a big welcome to the new generations arriving at the same lessons via a different route.

    1. The Rev Kev

      ‘and in coordination with the DHS Anti-Terrorist Fusion Centers’

      It came out about this time period that the center in New York had desks with reps from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc. seconded there. Guess the occupation was really making them nervous.

      1. digi_owl

        Well the initial message was targeting them directly.

        Why the agent provocateurs needed to diffuse and redirect the message onto anything other than finance and class.

    2. rowlf

      I’d like to share an odd data point about Occupy. During the time Occupy was active one of my aunts was passing around emails from her nephew who was an US Army infantry company commander in Afghanistan. Most of the time the emails included a picture of him showing a map to villagers with the caption that he was lost again and needed directions, or the work it takes to take care of all of the people he is responsible for, but what made me have a What-Just-Happened? moment was when he mentioned how popular the Occupy cause was with his soldiers and they were having frequent discussions about the news.

      I wonder what all of these veterans think now about the disconnect between the news media and reality.

      1. digi_owl

        I seem to recall most US soldiers these days are either X generation brats (and those are dropping as most advice their kids not to enlist these days) or from poor background where the choice was basically fatigues or gang colors.

        So it would not surprise me that Occupy would resonate with them, even if they have VA medical coverage etc upon returning home.

        1. LifelongLib

          Except maybe for the Civil War and WW1, in the U.S. mass service in the military was a historical anomaly, basically dating from the run-up to WW2 through Vietnam. For most of U.S. history the military was small, and the enlisted ranks were often refuges for ne’er-do-wells and dumping grounds for juvenile delinquents. Sadly today economic conditions in parts of the U.S. are such that for many people the military is their best option.

          1. digi_owl

            Yeah i think i saw a quote from Churchill about how the Korean War was a blessing because it halted the US demobilization after WW2.

            And given that USA only has the land border with Mexico to worry about, it really do not need a large standing army of it is meant only for defense.

  26. flora

    re: The Court Just Sealed Everyone’s Fate, Including Its Own

    I tried to read it but had to stop after a few paras. By then I was laughing at the breathless blinkeredness of his argument. Really guy? You don’t think the Court was acting to protect current and past presidents or the presidency regardless of party?

  27. Es s Ce Tera

    re: The Russian Turtle Tank Is The Weirdest Armored Vehicle Of The Ukraine War. The Craziest Thing Is, It Might Actually Work.

    Anyone who has studied Russian conduct during WW2 should know they were masters of improvisation, it’s deeply ingrained, by historical necessity, into the culture and mindset. Almost every piece of equipment, every tank, every plane, every strategy and tactic, was improvised, was about combining something with something else in imaginatively creative ways due to a need to work around some limitation or other, and the creative mindset itself is born from a long history of poverty, lack and suffering going back many generations.

    Come to think of it, this in itself is a huge advantage over the west which is accustomed to silver spoons and abundance.

    1. The Rev Kev

      They seem to epitomize that old saying-

      ‘If it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid.’

    2. digi_owl

      Speaking of silver spoons, i seem to recall the venerable Sherman was hilariously tall compared to others during WW2 because it needed to fit an actual seat for the driver.

  28. flora

    This David/Aurelien link was in yesterday’s comments. It’s one of the best essays on modern public education and how we got here that I’ve read. I think he has it perfectly placed how public education is now viewed by the current PMC class, and how that view differs from the recently displaced older views of the purpose and reason for education. He makes a sound argument, imo.

    The Revolt of the Outer Party.

    https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-revolt-of-the-outer-party

    1. Steve H.

      This line

      > the aspiration to making the working-class literate to enable them to read the Bible and thus lead better lives

      got me thinking on the Ages of Universities.

      Post-WWII: Be educated to make your life and the world a better place.
      1960’s: Universal education to universal enlightenment (‘poverty solved’)
      1990’s: Learn skills for a better job.
      2000’s: Learn how to learn (‘seven careers and twenty-one jobs’ – Miles Brand)
      20??: ‘_ University is a Credentialing institution, not an educational institution’
      Current: credential overproduction; learn right language/signals to be personed.
      Soon: Flexnet/Fraternal/Tribal; admin sets up meetings (Black sorority group meets McKinsey alums)

      This last is nearly education as fashion – the right colored shade of crimson, shared experiences acting like Somali ancestor lineages for who is excluded.

      Specific to a case I’m thinking of: increase revenues and enrollment through international recruitment and big-bucks ‘gifts’. [‘raised its research profile, grew enrollment, and finalized the three largest financial gifts in its history.’]

      O and maybe replace pesky adjuncts with AI. But that might take a 100G fiber backbone and an in-house research base.

      1. flora

        Thank you. I believe your by-decade timeline is accurate based on my uni experience. I also think your social and monetary assessments at most unis post-2000’s is accurate.

  29. The Rev Kev

    ‘Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו
    @netanyahu
    Anti-Semitism on campuses in the United States is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. The world cannot stand idly by.’

    https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/1783191454308864300 (2:08 min video)

    The whole video is just one lie after another and he gave it in English for western audiences. He is practically calling those college protestors Nazis and genocide enablers. I am sure that those kids have now firmed up their thoughts on Israel. Thing is, Netanyahu did not have to do this but he seems to want any western authorities to crack down and arrest those students like it was the OWS movement. This does not portend well for Israel as the years go by and those students go into the economy.

    1. digi_owl

      How it has been with Israel pretty much from the start.

      Anything vaguely to do with Jews happen, the nearest Israeli ambassador will be hogging the cameras to tie those events to Israel. And any time anyone question Israel as a state, the same ambassador will be out there decrying them as nazi death camp guards.

        2. hnd

          Saw an old tv show the other night, This Old Bibi, where Bibi and his crew demonstrated how to destroy an entire civilization. Show ended with Bibi atop a backhoe, wearing a ten gallon Stetson, promising a follow up, next week, So You Want To Build A Cemetery?

        2. rowlf

          Many of the protesting students are themselves Jews protesting the genocide.

          While listening to NPR earlier this week while commuting (yeah, my life sucks) I was surprised when the NPR coverage of the protests noted that some of the protesters were Jewish. It seemed like an Armenian Radio/Radio Yerevan moment when a piece of truth gets loose.

          There was probably a meeting held quickly to make sure the news stories stick to official guidelines.

    3. Lee

      Here’s another video from Friday’s PBS Newshour about the trials and tribulations of the internally displaced Israeli’s. At minute 2:30 one obviously well off woman who in the name of the war effort eschewed her annual Passover purchase of a new dress and shoes to go with. Oh, the humanity! Is the Newshour subtly or inadvertently expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments? You be the judge.

    5. Acacia

      This does not portend well for Israel as the years go by and those students go into the economy.

      I wonder if we’ll see the blowback even sooner than that.

      40+ million Gen Z will be eligible to vote this November, and the US Census Bureau reports 51.4% of eligible Gen Z voters cast ballots in 2020.

      And now Genocide Joe is trying to take away TikTok.

  31. cfraenkel

    FYI – the CTV Donairs link up top has an extra “http://Donairs_” at the beginning of the URL

  32. JonnyJames

    Off-topic, but I just saw this on the Guardian: Not surprising but still outrageous.
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/27/elite-force-bucks-trend-of-ukrainian-losses-on-eastern-front

    The infamous neo-Nazi Azov Battalion gets praises from our good friends in the MassMediaCartel. Openly cheer-leading for these criminals shows the Guardian’s true colors. This paper used to be considered pro-labour, leftish, but now they promote far-right, warmongering propaganda. The hypocrisy is off the charts as usual: the Guardian is a far-right, racist “news” outlet that puts a fig-leaf of a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter to cover for it’s bloody, warmongering agenda.

    As Craig Murray said some years ago, after the Guardian threw Julian Assange under the bus, The Guardian is a mouthpiece for MI6.

    1. Benny Profane

      From what the guys at The Duran have been saying recently, the Nazis have been picking and choosing their battles during this great retreat, and it really is shaping up as an end time retreat, with a big middle finger to Syrskyi and Kiev. The poor farmers and kids who just got “drafted” are being put on the front line as fodder.

  33. ChrisFromGA

    Aurelien’s latest essay on Ukraine is calming, and I hope he’s right about the war inevitably ending in some sort of de-facto ceasefire or agreement preventing the West from re-militarizing it. I’m certainly not going argue with his wisdom.

    However, I fear we have too many whackjobs in leadership positions throughout Europe and America. The odds of someone not overreacting or blowing up something these days seem bad.

    Putin is not immune to political pressure, even having been recently re-elected by an overwhelming margin. Should the crazies in MI6 or the CIA pull off another terrorist strike on something like the Crimean Bridge, I doubt he can just hop off the escalator.

    1. Benny Profane

      It’s inevitable that the bridge will be hit. But Russia has solved that future issue by putting roads and rail lines in the new land bridge. It will be a headline for a few days to a week, it will be repaired (I’m guessing they are prepared with crews and material for that), and life will go on with the destruction of the Ukraine military.

  34. urdsama

    I find the New Republic article interesting in that it is complaining about the logical, albeit extreme, end game of the current lawfare tactics being used against Trump. It would be one thing if the majority of Americans saw it for what it was and were horrified, but that does not appear to be the case. Today we are going to abuse the legal system, tomorrow we’ll just cut out the middleman. And while I usually agree with the slippery slope argument, more and more I don’t feel that applies to politics or government behavior.

    It really does seem that people have lost the ability of nuance – critical issues of the day are seen in binary terms. When it comes to presidents, it really boils down to how does the PMC feel about him/her. Will they jump on command? Cool, they can get away with war crimes and assignations of US citizens. They don’t listen and mock us? Not good, let’s make sure we find everything we can even if most real estate developers and politicians do the same thing every day.

    It’s one thing to point out a seriously bad decision by the Supreme Court, it’s another thing altogether to act shocked and outraged when you were one of the groups that help walk us down that road.

  35. ChrisFromGA

    Odds & ends, from Telegram channels so consider unverified

    + Blinken’s trip to China did not go well, he was sent to the airport by himself with no diplomatic escort.

    + The Houthis shot down another US Reaper drone. Oops there goes, another billion, oops there goes, another billion …

  36. Benny Profane

    This is a very modern story. A school employee in upper Baltimore county used AI to fake his boss making racist and anti semetic comments on social media, and got caught. Hope it’s not behind a paywall. He’s under arrest for witness tampering.

    https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/k-12-schools/eric-eiswert-ai-audio-baltimore-county-YBJNJAS6OZEE5OQVF5LFOFYN6M/?schk=YES&rchk=YES&utm_source=The+Baltimore+Banner&utm_campaign=14cf6101e9-NL_ICYMI_20240427_1100&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-14cf6101e9-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&mc_cid=14cf6101e9&mc_eid=381381958e

  37. rowlf

    I’d like to see the protesters really flip the bird to media censorship and story smothering by wearing shirts with images of sliced watermelon. It may even cause a certain country to have a sad that they can’t control the imagery.

  38. Kouros

    “As priorities in Germany shift, military expenditure will squeeze out other federal budget allocations. With a budgetary share of 10.9 per cent, defence is currently the second largest budget item after labour and social affairs.[7] Yet this major share does not even include the debt created for the government’s “Special Fund” for the Bundeswehr upgrade. Factoring in this allocation, the military share of spending comes to around 15 per cent. In the long term, this can only be at the expense of spending on healthcare, education and social welfare. As the President of the Ifo Institute, Clement Fuest, recently put it, “Guns and butter? That would be nice if it were possible. But that’s only in the land of milk and honey. It can’t happen.” Fuest puts it succinctly: it’s a future of “guns without butter”.”

    The question is how long would hoi polloi, German or French or Italian, put up with “guns without butter” and with likely conscriptions for the military and other such shenanigans, and prepared to die for the American hegemony?

  39. CA

    https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1783751888141451323

    Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand

    This type of politicization of medical research is absolutely disgusting, and downright harmful.

    This is @wellcometrust, a large global charitable foundation focused on health research. Their mission, I quote, is to “improve health for everyone by funding research”. Everyone… except for the Chinese apparently.

    Here they’re offering to fund research to the tune of £5 million for research into dengue and Zika, two virus infections that do occur in China (especially dengue which is endemic in the southern provinces). And they make it extremely clear throughout the description of the project

    ( https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/schemes/infectious-disease-award-understanding-dengue-and-zika-spread )

    that any organization in the world can apply for this grant, literally “anywhere in the world”… “apart from mainland China”!

    This isn’t only shocking for the obvious singling out of one specific country but also because it runs counter to the very principles of science: what if the one scientific team in the world that’s most competent to further research into dengue is actually Chinese? Are we saying that because they’re Chinese that means we’d rather set science back than have them work on it? What kind of world are we preparing for ourselves where nationality and race take precedence over scientific progress? I remember a certain country doing this in the 1940s and it didn’t work too good for them…

    https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1783751888141451323/photo/1
    https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1783751888141451323/photo/2
    https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1783751888141451323/photo/3
    https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1783751888141451323/photo/4

    2:56 AM · Apr 26, 2024

  40. anon

    I am confused as I look at the Stanford wastewater chart for Influenza A. From what I read, influenza (even in CA) is a winter ailment, and last year it only appeared on the chart in the winter.; there was no influenza at all out of season. But now a spike is starting in late April; not huge yet but vertical (https://healthalerts.stanford.edu/covid-19/wastewater-dashboard/). Would avian flu be included in an influenza A wastewater sample?

    I have read it asserted that the pieces of avian flu virus in pasteurized milk could act as a killed vaccine for people who drink it. I doubt that is at all likely, but it does raise the question of what effect if any those pieces would have. There seem to be a lot of them.

    An acquaintance of my mom’s just came down with advanced stage cirrhosis due to obesity (not alcohol at all). Along with being terrible, what makes this strange is that she is not terrifically fat. The only other person I know who developed cirrhosis of this type was a close relative who was enormously obese. But this lady was a very healthy seeming 70 year old retired schoolteacher who was plump like small town ladies are typically plump. Really most of the area’s population is just as plump, even teenagers. I wonder if this is partly due to the spike protein, either from covid itself or from the shot (or both). It does not seem normal. If this is going to start hitting people who are in her weight range, we are in big trouble.

  41. steppenwolf fetchit

    Maybe AOC is too dumm to understand about covid, masking and self + community care. Maybe she will earn a Darwin Award and a Herman Cain Award at the same time.

    1. cyclist

      Not all of those student demonstrators are wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID. The Canary Mission tries to identify protesting students and smear them as anti-Semites with potential employers. I have seen videos where protestors explicitly cite this as the reason for masking

      BTW, does anyone know of a college campus where the admin is simply letting a peaceful protest to continue unmolested, as one might expect for an institution with some degree of integrity?

  42. steppenwolf fetchit

    . . . ” IMF now claiming that Japan has to inflict austerity when the government’s current policy settings a maintaining stability Bill Mitchell ” . . .

    Does the IMF have the brute force power to MAKE Japan inflict austerity? If it DOES, then Japan HAS to inflict austerity. If it DOESN’t, then Japan doesn’t HAVE to do a g*d*mn thing.

    1. SocalJimObjects

      The US is the main power behind the IMF, and Uncle Sam started the destruction of the Japanese economy by shoving the Plaza Accord down the throats of the Japanese. So the answer to your question is yes, if need be, the IMF does have the power to inflict austerity on Japan, possibly during the next crisis. The only hope is if the US were to somehow enter dissolution due to some political crisis or natural cause, otherwise it’s just BAU.

    2. The Rev Kev

      When you think of it, the US has successfully destroyed the ability of the EU to compete with the US in the past two years. It would make sense for the US to go after other nations that compete with it such as Japan.

      ‘There can only be one.’

  43. Jorge

    As to the “turtle tank”, it is all about not offering surfaces to drones.

    They might also show up with an inflatable parachute/balloon surrounding the tank to create an impregnable surface, like the antipersonnel weather balloons (“Rovers”) in “The Prisoner”.

    Thinking about it again, Israel is the one place I would expect “Rover” from “The Prisoner” to show up.

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