Yacht sinks after being rammed by orcas in Strait of Gibraltar BBC. “Scientists are unsure about the exact causes of the behaviour, but believe the highly intelligent mammals could be displaying ‘copycat’ or ‘playful’ behaviour.” And heaven knows we need more playfulness!
Debt — and delinquencies — are on the rise for Americans CNN
Climate
Canada fire smoke evacuates thousands Wildfire Today. Mask up!
* * * 4 Takeaways From Our Homeowners Insurance Investigation NYT. The deck: “Across the country, more intense heat, storms and fires are causing the home insurance market to start to buckle.”
Beverly Hills 90210 Mansions Lose Fire Coverage as Insurers Flee Bloomberg
* * * Siberia’s ‘gateway to the underworld’ is growing a staggering amount each year Live Science
The USDA’s gardening zones shifted. This map shows you what’s changed in vivid detail NPR. Swipe-friendly nteractive but still useful.
* * * Witnessing and Professing Climate Professionals JSTOR Daily
We Don’t Need a “Plethora of Tactics”, We Need a Climate Strategy The Anarchist Library
* * * Secrets from the rainforest’s past uncovered in Amazonian backyards Monga Bay
Water
Where did Earth’s water come from? This ancient asteroid family may help us find out Space.com
Kānāwai From Ahi: Revitalizing The Hawai‘i Water Code in the Wake of the Maui Wildfires Harvard Law Review. Interesting!
Pandemics
My rendezvous with the raw milk black market: quick, easy, and unchecked by the FDA STAT
Oldest Known Human Viruses Discovered In 50,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Bones IFL Science
China?
China’s biggest banks launch first sales of special loss-absorbing debt FT
Putin and Xi sign declaration on reinforcing strategic partnership France24
China Builds World’s First Dedicated Drone Carrier Naval News
It’s called “industrial policy”:
For years, the Chinese government has cheated by pouring money into Chinese companies which then dump cheap products onto the market, hurting competitors who play by the rules.
I’m announcing tariffs that will ensure American workers are not held back by unfair trade practices. pic.twitter.com/JHdJ6EcXWr
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 14, 2024
Try it sometime!
France deploys troops in New Caledonia as riots leave four dead Al Mayadeen
Myanmar
Patrick Winn on the Narco-Economy of Myanmar’s Wa State The Diplomat
Myanmar workers among fastest-growing group of foreign workers in Japan as society ages Channel News Asia
Syraqistan
Biden Advances $1.2B Transfer of Ground-Based Weapons to Israel Amid Rafah Raid TruthOut
US military says Gaza Strip pier project is completed, aid to soon flow as Israel-Hamas war rages on AP. Gonna be hard to do this on the pier, but they’ll find a way:
Israeli settlers attacked and vandalised humanitarian aid convoys travelling to the Gaza Strip, where people are desperately in need of aid from Jordan through the occupied West Bank. pic.twitter.com/zfcVyObhZJ
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) May 14, 2024
* * * Israel’s defence minister lambasts Benjamin Netanyahu over lack of postwar plan FT
Taleb on hasbara:
A system that requires continuous, pervasive, and unremitting misrepresentation and propaganda (via AIPAC, Hasbara, and manipulation of Western minds) to hide its attributes will eventually collapse. https://t.co/61xUskA0Jq
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) May 15, 2024
Taleb’s example can, I think, be generalized.
* * * Erdoğan says Israel will ‘set sights’ on Turkey if Hamas defeated Turkish Minute
* * * House Democrats Fume Over Unprecedented Israeli Rebuke Of Lawmakers HuffPo
Shameless Craig Murray. I have often wondered why United States elites — college presidents, say, on up through funders — identify so disproportionately with Israel. It may be that our elites see themselves as beseiged and outnumbered, understandably so. It may also be that they are ideologically compatible, ranging as so many of them do from Social Darwinist to outright genocidal, with stochastic eugenicism as the moderate position (“live your life”).
European Disunion
Slovakia’s prime minister no longer in life-threatening condition after surgery Anadolu Agency
Slovak PM shooting suspect named as 71-year-old writer Agence France Presse
Dutch far right to form coalition government FT. Geert Wilders.
Dear Old Blighty
Brexit border system outage puts perishable goods transport in peril The Register
The woman who built up Edinburgh’s army of street stitchers BBC
New Not-So-Cold War
US Secretary of State and Ukraine’s Foreign Minister have working dinner in Kyiv – photo Ukrainska Pravda. The photos the press didn’t include:
what do these two mean that it seems as if they changed out specifically for the Blinken picture? Also notice the Wolfsangel out of frame
[Veterano Pizza if you want to look it up btw, top result on google maps for Kiev Pizza, as it happens] pic.twitter.com/NT673R9ogP
— Brad Pearce (@WaywardRabbler) May 15, 2024
Yes, the photo is indeed of the Odessa Trades Union fire; the Wolfsangel (top right, partly hidden by lamp in first photo; top right, cropped in second).
* * * Zelensky cancels overseas visits as Ukraine withdraws from parts of Kharkiv region France24
Authorities state fortification works planned for 2023 in Kharkiv Oblast are 100% completed Ukrainska Pravda. Good to know!
Was There a Failed Coup Against Zelensky? The American Conservative
* * * 50 countries and organisations agreed to take part in Ukraine’s Peace Summit in Switzerland Ukrainska Pravda
* * * Georgia’s PM on the ‘foreign agents’ bill, sanctions, and the ‘global party of war’ JAM News
Global Elections
Why are Kashmiris voting in Indian election they’ve long boycotted? Al Jazeera
Biden Administration
Another Biden administration staffer resigns over US stance on Gaza war Al Jazeera. The resignation letter:
Today, I became the first Jewish-American political appointee to resign from the Biden-Harris administration over its policies in Gaza. Here is my resignation letter: pic.twitter.com/oqzit7leVD
— Lily Greenberg Call (@LGreenbergCall) May 15, 2024
Groves of Academe
Unions:
Harvard’s Crackdown on Gaza Protest Violated US Labor Law, Union Claims Bloomberg
‘Maximize chaos.’ UC academic workers authorize strike, alleging rights violated during protests LA Times. Statement:
UAW 4811 members have voted by a super majority to authorize a strike. pic.twitter.com/dmQGofq6ye
— UAW 4811 (@uaw_4811) May 16, 2024
MIT:
Four suspensions have already been shown to have no merit and thrown out, more are awaiting appeal. These suspensions are visiting disproportionate and long-term harm to our students, their families, and our institution, and they must be revoked immediately. For example…
— Nancy Kanwisher @NancyKanwisher@mas.to (@Nancy_Kanwisher) May 15, 2024
Digital Watch
Generative AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want to Be It Wired. The deck: “The best thing about brain-melting software like ChatGPT? It doesn’t feel remorse.” New hires:
When AI helps you code, who owns the finished product? The Register
How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex (PDF) Roberto J. González, Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs
Boeing
Boeing’s safety, labor battles heat up while CEO will walk with $34m payout Leeham News and Analysis
Supply Chain
Canada’s oil producers face potential headwinds from wildfires, railroad strike S&P Global
Collapsing Infrastructure
Pelican Island Bridge in Galveston struck by barge, causing portion to collapse: officials FOX. Commentary:
BRIDGE CLOSURE | A barge struck the Pelican Island Causeway, shutting it down in both directions this morning. The bridge connects the north side of Galveston Island just west of the Port of Galveston with the south side of Pelican Island.
Full story: https://t.co/Y0rXOcGs1n pic.twitter.com/3FD6o3DGuh
— KHOU 11 News Houston (@KHOU) May 15, 2024
Crew trapped on Baltimore ship, seven weeks after bridge collapse BBC. This is systemic; see NC here.
Gunz
How a Maine Businessman Made the AR-15 Into America’s Best-Selling Rifle ProPublica
Class Warfare
Harry Glasbeek on how the law keeps workers’ aspirations firmly in check Canadian Dimension
Huge, solar flare-launching sunspot has rotated away from Earth. But will it return? Space.com
Antidote du jour (via Ken Billington):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
165 comments
Comments are closed.
ENCORE
(melody borrowed from Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore by John Prine)
They’re arresting all our very best
Like they wanna start a civil war
When cops attack, sure, the kids push back
But that ain’t what they’re here for
Genocide can’t be sanitized
And it sure can’t be concealed
Prayers and thoughts for the poor have-nots
Won’t provide them any shield
Israel kills Moms and babies
It’s what Israel’s good for
They want all the Arabs routed
From the river to the shore
The British won’t send shillings
To feed the children any more
While Washington ships bigger bombs
And they yell for an encore
Yeah, the whole wide world is mourning
Half a year of a murder spree
Gaza’s streets run red with blood
And there’s no safe place to be
There’s no private place to take a shit
And the toddlers can’t be fed
You can leave or die right where you are
You’ll be hungry till you’re dead
Israel kills Moms and babies
It’s what Israel’s good for
They want all the Arabs routed
From the river to the shore
The British won’t send shillings
To feed the children any more
While Washington ships bigger bombs
And they yell for an encore
Tell the cops who shove their shields at us
By the orders of our rich elites
You can cause us pain but you won’t contain
All the protests in the streets
Just think of your child waiting
Days to eat some some bread
Think of your whole family sleeping
In the street instead of bed
Israel kills Moms and babies
It’s what Israel’s good for
They want all the Arabs routed
From the river to the shore
The British won’t send shillings
To feed the children any more
While Washington ships bigger bombs
And they yell for an encore
Appreciate this Antifa. On point as always!
“When AI helps you code, who owns the finished product?”
An alternate question. When AI written code causes a horrible mess somewhere, who is legally responsible for it? Will future coders have the experience to understand the code that an AI churns out? The author of this article mentions his extensive experience with 8085 assembly code, C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP and Python. Will the next generation of coders have this sort of experience or will they rely on a AI to do the heavy lifting for them?
In Canada, at least for now, the company that deploys AI is on the hook. Air Canada was forced to refund customers who were given incorrect information by their chatbot. Defense that chatbot didn’t represent the company did not fly.
I consider that kind of question to be in the domain of software engineering, as contrasted to “coding”.
I’d like an explanation for all of this myself. My current “headcanon” (I don’t pretend to have anything better) is that Western leaders are being put through periodic pro-Zionist struggle sessions. There was that one TikTok call.
From hasbara to Israel’s ambassador scolding US senators the presumption never ceases to expand, but our plucky, but spineless, congress critters can take it and come right back with their hands out for “campaign contributions” from AIPAC et al. In the envelope full of ‘benjamins’ will be instructions that as far as I can see are faithfully followed. I thought they represented me. I told my personal congress critters that I oppose genocide. I guess they are all in on mass murder. Who knew?
There’s that. I’m sure “the rules” are communicated in some way, shape or form.
And I think they know who butters their bread, and how quickly they’ll be ostracized from the management class and branded as untouchable if they dissent from that, or show even a whiff of conscience.
The threat of being kicked out is real, but I feel like we’ve never addressed structures that didn’t just tolerate Jim Crow or sexual discrimination but allowed it to flourish.
All we have done is open up who is “white” but not addressed those structures. RFK and Teddy went to UVA in the 50’s. Although we have these new global citizens, we still have the same institutions which have become too top heavy at the same time.
We see the “universities”, now we have to use the term loosely. Deploying storm Troopers on its own students. The power imbalance is absurd.
At the Ben and Jerry plant in Vermont, Israel is marked in Europe. Israel plays as the Guardians of the current “white” race with its emphasis on global citizenry.
I think this college president got in trouble in one day for not complying with the rules based order:
Sonoma State president put on leave for ‘insubordination’ for supporting Israel academic boycott, divestment
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-15/sonoma-state-president-mike-lee-on-leave-after-endorsing-academic-boycott-israel
But it looks like the rules based order may be cracking apart if more of this happens.
I think that quite a few of them are being blackmailed. After Epstein’s victims were kept hidden by his convenient suicide, we can only surmise that the powerfel remain uncompromised, or more correctly, that the compromised remain powerful. I am surprised that this is not discussed more openly: it seems one of the few remaining taboos among even the most red-pilled.
It’s so bad now, I wouldn’t doubt there is no way to gain power unless one is “compromised.”
“A liar always knows he is lying, and that is why liars travel in packs: in order to be reassured that the judgment day will never come for them. They need each other for the well-being, the health, the perpetuation of their lie.”
― James Baldwin
I would not be surprised if these rotten souls picked up on Epstein’s services according to the guideline: Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.
It is not just the one time after getting drunk or that one “mature” 16 year old individual. That would be understandable. Instead, it is often the systematic, years long victimization of multiple, unwilling teenagers or worse, prepubescent children.
Who wants to understand that our collective government is being run, in part, by child rapists? By people who willingly do the unforgivable? That is why people do not want to be red-pilled. It is more comfortable to just ignore it, to pretend that it is not real.
This is what made the QAnon operation/sting so clever.
It has innoculated the PMC against ever discussing or even reading about the possible big paedophile rings operating amongst the upper classes and their lackeys (their people) in politics. Epstein being one hydra head.
Any Democrat / PMC (but I repeat myself) club member who brings this up knows they will immediately be scorned as a knuckle-dragging Trump deplorable.
You know who controls you by what topics are taboo.
Jeff Wells on his blog Rigorous Intuition 2.0 wrote a series of posts about various aspects of that and related subjects and those posts are all bunched together in a category called:
” The Military-Occult Complex, ritual abuse/mind control, and “High Weirdness”
( That category also includes posts on UFO phenomena, which are also still a semi-taboo topic for people who wish to believe themselves to be Serious Thinkers of Gravitas).
Here is a link to the most recent article in that category. The article and screen it pulls up will also allow the reader to find the whole category partway down the right side of the screen.
https://rigint.blogspot.com/2007/02/shock-of-awe-part-two.html
Steve Rattner, Obama “car czar,” UAW hater and SEC pay-to-play target, was on “Morning Joe” today proudly sporting his Israeli flag lapel pin.
>Lily Greenberg Call
I think she was suspended from Twitter/X, wonder how that happened.
She doesn’t look suspended to me?
Hard to tell if below was false or if they re-instated…you have to take TwitterX with a large grain of sand…
AIPAC Tracker
@TrackAIPAC
🚨 Twitter suspended Lily Greenberg Call right after she posted her letter resigning from the Biden administration due to the President’s continued support of genocide in Gaza
https://twitter.com/TrackAIPAC/status/1790844862696173739?t=QwsBmG3G84bFwdn4tesAjQ&s=03
“50 countries and organisations agreed to take part in Ukraine’s Peace Summit in Switzerland”
Representatives from 50 countries and organizations will be attending? That sounds like just the countries and institutions of the Collective West then. The whole thing is a waste of time but for the purposes of reinforcing the narratives of this war, it is better than nothing I suppose. Russia said that Switzerland is hostile and can’t serve as a mediator. In fact, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that ‘It is not a neutral party, it has turned from neutral to openly hostile’ to which the Swiss said that they were still totally neutral and can be trusted – but with all the sincerity of Stormy Daniels claiming that she still believes in female modesty. Like a few other countries with very long histories of neutrality in this war, they threw all that way and are now discovering that they made a bad bargain with nothing to show for it.
Sounds like Eurovision Song Contest, but with less impact on geopolitics.
I don’t think it’s better than nothing … it will be a propaganda-fest, with lots of photo ops for Ze to brag on how many “coalitions of the willing” support Ukraine even though he’ll be illegitimatskii by the time of the conference.
“The whole thing is a waste of time but for the purposes of reinforcing the narratives of this war, it is better than nothing I suppose.”
That is the whole point. The point is to send a signal that the west will only continue to double down int he face of Russian indecision.
So? It doesn’t change how Russia and China will move forward, except to possibly make them more resolute in their current stances. And in fact, it will serve to further isolate the “West” from the rest of the world.
This is cope, writ large.
I would not call doubling down “cope”.
That being one crowing crow.
I like the catchy species name: Corvus Cornix.
> I have often wondered why United States elites — college presidents, say, on up through funders — identify so disproportionately with Israel.
Indiana University President Whitten was President of Kenneshaw University prior to IU.
> Whitten also was instrumental in securing pivotal gifts and financial support that will directly benefit students for years to come. In just the last 16 months, KSU was the beneficiary of three of the largest gifts in university history: $10 million for the KSU Journey Honors College, $8.7 million from Wellstar Health System to double the number of KSU nursing majors and $9 million to name the Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Radow College: About Our Benefactor
> The Radow Family Foundation supports the arts, special needs, the homeless and underprivileged, the Jewish community, and Israel.
Follow the money.
Yeah, Chapo had a former college PR manager on (he stayed anonymous) and he basically made this point, not specifically about this guy, but higher ed management in general. These institutions are run by the boards (often representing business interests of the universities) and presidents.
They know they’re their to bring in $$$ first and credential students 2nd (or even 3rd), and will not doing anything that jeopardizes the $$$ spigot.
Same banks, same financial system, all part of a big club
ed. Kennesaw State University
>Biden Chinese Tariffs & Nordstream
Economics and politics trump climate change concern. Inexpensive EV from China would sell like hot cakes in the U.S. when the average price of an ICE is well above $30K and finance charges are continuing to rise. But impact on domestic car manufacturers is a greater concern. The terrorist bombing of the Nordstream pipe line causes the world’s largest natural gas leak. But the politics of separating Russia from closer relations with Europe is the greater concern. Yet they want me to believe they are serious about climate change.
I wonder if it will be possible to drive over the border and buy a Chinese EV in Mexico or Canada, then register it locally?
Car registrations are a local matter, not subject (yet) to Federal pre-emption. As long as the local tax commissioner gets his/her cut, they probably wouldn’t care. Unless the Feds drum up some trouble by claiming they don’t meet safety standards …
The Feds stopped the legal importation of VW Beetles from Mexico over “air quality” issues.
Think, for EVs, say, “unsafe battery” issues.
Where there’s a political donor, there’s a way.
It won’t be “unsafe battery” issues but the accusation that those Chinese EV cars will be spying on Americans. In fact, they have already made this accusation thus ramping it up to a national security issue.
Hmmm…. How do you say ‘OnStar’ in Mandarin?
I’m glad the vehicle we just purchased from our middle daughter doesn’t have a GPS system ‘enabled.’ H—. I don’t even carry a mobile telephone on me any more. Just imagine some of the puzzled looks I get from cashiers when I tell them that I not only do not have their company’s “app” on my phone, but that I don’t have a phone on me at all.
It’s a Brave New World out there.
I’m like you. I only carry my mobile when I have to make a specific phone call. Otherwise it remains next to my bed as an alarm clock which is its most useful function.
That and as a reminder of who wants to talk to you, via voicemail.
I started my voicemail intro with “Greetings Earthlings…” Anyone who gets past that is worthy of consideration.
A car has to be DOT and EPA approved before it can be registered, with some minor exceptions, such as for cars over 25 years old.
Yes, but even the ICE cars over 25 y.o. must meet “smog checks” every two years in California. The “checks” are not as stringent as for new cars, but the engine must be well-tuned to pass inspection. What does affect new EV’s are federal highway safety standards (lights, collision, and braking).
I’m sure the Chinese can readily conform to US standards quickly.
Sorry, that will not work. They are illegal to register in the U.S.. I recently watched a video which was a review of one of the cheapest cars and a company imported one because they were an international corporation but said they could only drive it in their parking lot because they were illegal in the U.S.
And by the way, the review of the car was excellent and only cost $11,000.
Yves’s decision to leave the USA is looking more and more prescient.
You can say that again! I’m looking to leave too.
I believe if you get across the boarder you are technically correct and that it would depend on the details of the state registration process and requirements. That said, when you are at the boarder you are technically navigating immigrations and customs. If you think you’re going to just drive the car over the border without reporting or claiming it as an import, well then you’re potentially committing a federal crime. That said while I am not a lawyer, I’d think it would be better to ask a family Friend who’s a Mexican national to buy and register in Mexico and then drive the car to the US where they can then gift you the car or sell you the car for the price of an emergency return to Mexico plane ticket price.
I like the preciousness of the phrase, “competitors who play by the rules”…it’s an attempt at 3D Chess by an administration more equipped at checkers….also was true of the Trump admin.
China has heft and they are beginning to show it, methinks…some wiseacre cracked on TV yesterday we could ship the UAW head, Fain over to China and then US would be competitive..union wages must not be an issue over in China…\sarc ( Mostly ? )
“checkers?” More like Tic Tac Toe, minus one of the lines.
As for “American exports,” remember when someone suggested that the solution to the excess of lawyers in America was to export them?
Here’s my vote for making fluency in Mandarin one of the core principles in getting a law degree in America. It will come in handy.
Someone suggested? That was a tenet of faith for free trade because America has a competitive advantage at producing lawyers fit for foreign work. Free traders are such smug twerps.
“…smug twerps.” That made me think of Tolkien’s naming the Dragon of the Lonely Mountain ‘Smaug.’ (Where else to encounter advanced word play but University?) Said saurian coveted gold and despised all the “lesser beings” around it. Sounds like a lot of lawyers I have encountered in my time.
Take a bow, that’s a good one. Smug Twerp ENTRY 1. Larry Summers.
It’ll be a lengthy sort of names…only the best, meaning America’s worst, can qualify.
this mess is bill clintons mess.
https://qz.com/840973/everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-free-trade-is-wrong
Everything we thought we knew about free trade is wrong
America’s growth engine
“So what became of trade between nations during those years? Did trade simply fade from the economic picture? In some sense, yes. From 1950 to the mid-70s, exports and imports each hovered around 5% of America’s GDP. These days each equals closer to 15%.”
“This is a big reason why “comparative advantage doesn’t benefit everyone or even most people,” says Dean Baker, founder of the Center for Economic Policy research and author of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. In fact, says Baker, “the majority of people are losers.””
“In a way, the same goes for the factories that are now no longer needed. Countries that have invested in physical plant to manufacture one thing will seldom be able to use it to make something else, notes Steve Keen, economics professor at Kingston University London, and author of Debunking Economics.
“What Ricardo imagined was you could easily move the capital from one country to another, and you simply can’t do it,” Keen says. “You can’t take a spinning jenny and wave a Harry Potter wand over it and get a wine press out of it. It’s simply nonsense.”
Ricardo’s defining economic principle has another limitation that’s overlooked by proponents of free trade, who so often talk about it prescriptively, as though it were a recipe for growth. Comparative advantage offers a great description of how the market will shift around countries’ finite resources as they respond to the cheapening of production abroad. But, says Keen, it tells us very little about what economies must do to keep growing. And as Baker points out, next to nothing about how to actually improve people’s living standards.”
“By the time Clinton became president, America’s free-trade crusade—backed by the IMF—broadened beyond simply slashing trade barriers, into clearing the path for foreign investment. Though it bore scanty resemblance to the simple model that Ricardo sketched out, its prophets—a.k.a. Davos Man, free-marketeers, the Washington Consensus—still touted free trade deals as benefiting all. When Trump blames US leaders for favoring “globalism” over “Americanism,” it’s this world order he is condemning. The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) is its watershed.”
“By the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, when Nafta was being drawn up first by George H.W. Bush, then by Bill Clinton—the Keynesian presumption that workers are also consumers had long since been jettisoned. Tellingly, the most crucial focus of its many thousands of pages was on installing legal protections that encouraged and protected American corporate investment (which for Mexico marked a departure from its 1980s policies more focused on nurturing local industry and human capital).
Nafta—and many free trade agreements that followed it—opened up Mexico to corporate capital, while enshrining weak labor protections and environmental standards. By facilitating “race-to-the-bottom” offshoring, it did little to boost the skills base or purchasing power of Mexico’s consumer class.
In at least one sense, however, Nafta worked: Investment gushed into Mexico.”
“Despite its many flaws, Nafta set the stage for the US-led multilateral trade pacts that followed. In addition to opening up developing nations to the fickle flows of global capital, US negotiators demanded excessively lengthy patent, licensing, and copyright protections that enriched corporate giants in pharmaceuticals, entertainment, and information technology, says CEPR’s Baker—at the expense of both American consumers and its trading partners’ industries. And despite the careful attention to those details, American leaders consistently avoided confronting a problem that, not long after Nafta, began warping the US economy into the unstable mess that brought Trump to power.”
“Since America is already flush with capital, that easy money doesn’t flow into productive investments; it blows up bubbles in stock and housing markets. In the late 1990s and mid-2000s, first tech investors and then home owners took on the debt. Since the bursting of the 2007 housing bubble, the US government has shouldered the borrowing burden instead”
“For the 55-year-old former machine toolist who now earns minimum wage hauling boxes in a Walmart warehouse, it must rankle to be told cut-price tube socks from China have made him better off. But there’s more than condescension to be outraged about. What economists seldom explain is that the only way for the US to gain from cheaper production in China is by giving up those same jobs at home, according to Ricardo’s model, and employing laid-off workers in more sophisticated, better-paying jobs.”
————
and by 2008, we lost so many high paid manufacturing jobs, and the jobs that supported the manufacturing(the supply chain), that the deplorable could no longer service their debt, and bill clintons massive bubbles popped, the sonic boom heard round the world.
obama bailed out that mess instead of fixing it with another smoot-hawley new deal, setting up another massive collapse that might be noticed outside of our solar system.
Chinese robo-car factories are incredible! Look at this one making the EV, Xiaomi SU7.
https://iv.datura.network/watch?v=yezR-mH12xs
– 0 to 60 mph in under 3 seconds
– under $30,000 (!)
– 497-mile range
– 673 horsepower (!)
– top speed of 165 mph
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/xiaomis-first-electric-car-is-here-and-it-looks-amazing/
Biden: No Xiaomi SU7 for you!
Disappointed in the raw milk article. Kept reading and reading and was very surprised the purchased milk was never taken to a lab for analysis (or maybe it was?). Not an AI article, but it rolled along in very AI fashion, repeating itself using different words like a sophomore trying to hit the minimum word limit on an essay.
Social media expert said a while back that the pasteurization process can’t kill viruses, that the sustained amount of sufficient heat would ruin the milk. I’d love to know this from someone more authoritative. I’ve talked with FDA lab workers and they can find anything in food so I have to wonder if they ever actually get to scrutinize raw milk, or if they’re still running on the adminstrative fumes from the COVID miasma era.
I agree the article was low in quality information.
There are several methods of pasteurizing milk… less common these days and I’d suspect only used by smaller bottlers (I know one local to me – best milk in town) uses the vat method where they take the milk to about 145 and hold it there for 30 minutes. It appears there’s a method called High Temp Short Time where you can take it to about 160 for 15 sec, but even as a teen 35 years ago I was told the most common method was to take it to about 190 for 1-2 seconds. The Ultra Pasteurization method you sometimes see these days says they take it to 280 for 2 seconds.
I couldn’t find anything specific on the flu, but one study of covid says about 52 seconds is needed at 160 degrees. Not sure how that translates to 190 degree milk pasteurization but I suspect it’s not quite long enough if it’s only 1-2 seconds. At 160 the 15 seconds milk would be held there is way short of the 52 seconds for covid.
Yeah that article didn’t seem to have much of a point other than some low level fear mongering. The article even said there are zero reported cases of anyone getting H5N1 from raw milk.
Raw milk is not inherently dangerous. I drank it exclusively for the first 18 years of my life, pretty much every single day. And not because of any perceived health benefits, but because my family were dairy farmers, and it was there and it was fresh.
The reason raw milk can get contaminated is because people run filthy farms. Your average raw milk seller needs the money and word is going to get around quick if they are selling bad product that makes people sick. My cousin still has a handful of dairy cows and has sold raw milk at farmers’ markets or from her house for years with no issues.
I believe it was at NC in the last several months where I saw an article about the history of pasteurization, which started after big city dairies were selling bad milk that was killing children. Big farms originally opposed it due to the added cost, but soon realized that since the process killed bacteria in milk, that meant they didn’t have to keep their farms so clean in order to prevent disease and could use the pasteurization short cut.
Like many agricultural policies in the US, pasteurization is beneficial to the big guys moreso than the small farmer.
I also grew up on a dairy farm and drank raw milk growing up, but my family ran a clean operation. I remember my parents talking about the neighbor’s farm and how they’d never drink their milk in a million years. I would not trust raw milk from anywhere today.
I was also just as sick as all the other kids at school who weren’t drinking raw milk their whole childhoods, so the idea that raw milk grants some sort of super health benefits always seemed like an obviously woo-woo health marketing scam to me.
I had chicken pox in 3rd grade for a week. Other than that, I never missed a single day of school in my life. I didn’t drink raw milk for the health benefits, but I was also always very healthy and often didn’t catch illnesses that other people were getting. I’m not the only raw milk drinker in my family who’s been healthier than average over the long term. Whether there’s a connection there or not, I really can’t say. Could be some beneficial genes that keep getting passed down.
There was a raw milk dairy in Southern CA, Altadeena. A college friend had a hard core foodie mother (this long before foodieism was A Thing). They got all their butter and milk and cream from Altadeena because it tasted better.
The coffee and Ice cream shop I worked at in college in the seventies shipped their milk, cream, yogurt and ice cream in from Altadeena. And the shop was in New Mexico. (IIRC the only thing we could buy from the grocery if we ran out was skim milk or maybe it was just that they didn’t much care for it and bought as little as possible.)
Gotta say it took more than a few years to find ice cream I thought was equal to theirs after I left.
and I work on a few dairies as a teen, so I drank my fair share of raw milk as a kid. I distinctly recall always preferring it over the store-bought stuff.
You can get sick from 1 of 2 reasons when drinking raw milk… 1) drank too much milk from a sick cow OR 2) your milk was contaminated from other stuff usually associated with how the cows and milk were handled on the farm.
You mentioned the old city farms as the source for the push to pasteurize milk. As I understand it, it was because the cows lived in squalor conditions and were feed crap. This led to a LOT of sick cows and a lot of milk contaminated from those cows. Sadly, we call them CAFOs today and they are the complete opposite of most dairy farms I ever set foot in when I was a kid. Granted even 35 years ago there were farms like you mentioned where I’d have known better than to drink any milk from. But I also know/knew a farm back then where I described the place as clean enough to eat off the barn floor. A bit of an exaggeration, but an amazing place given they were milking about 100 cows back then.
Buy raw milk to opt-out of the food industrial complex.
You can pasteurize it yourself, as I do. It’s not magic. You simply heat it up to about 170 for 3 minutes on the stove. It makes the best yogurt, far superior to anything in the store.
The food industrial complex will do anything to demonize those who want to escape its toxic grasp.
Lambert has already REPEATEDLY posted that pasteurization will not kill the bird flu virus. You need to avoid milk if you are concerned.
Milk related: I have incurable cancer and can no longer swallow anything but liquids. I refuse to go on a feeding tube. I rely on a lot of cow milk (not raw) based smoothies and soups to get adequate protein and calories. The possibility of bird flu in cow milk concerns me (although at this point in my life, I probably shouldn’t care).
I wonder if NC readers, who I know are very smart, have any suggestions about other types of milks that would provide good quality protein as well as high calories? Most of them, like nut, oat or rice milk, tend to be low in both protein and calories.
If this comment violates any NC rules, please delete it. Thank you.
Sheep milk is VERY high in fat. I don’t know about the sheep milk itself but sheep milk yogurt is delish. Milder and richer than plain cow milk yogurt.
Also sheep milk and goat milk are easier to digest than cow milk because the fat molecules are smaller, which makes them more similar-sized than cow milk to human milk.
I am so so sorry about your condition.
Yves
We kept goats for 14 years when we lived on Salt Spring Island (between Vancouver and Victoria). What goats eat contributes to the taste of their milk. Their field had no trees from which to strip bark, for example. We milked them individually on a milking stand I built, in a clean parlour, and immediately chilled the milk. Any sign of mastitis or off-looking milk, it was disposed of. Our daughters were brought up on goat milk, raw, but from carefully kept animals. We had friends who also fed their boys, bi-racial, on our milk. They could not digest cows milk because of allergies, more common, apparently, among children who are not caucasian.
A method for increasing protein intake is to mix whey protein concentrate powder with greek yogurt, natural fruit (banana, blueberry, etc.) and water in a blender and drink it. You get high protein, calcium, and natural sweetener in a relatively concentrated meal.
Lena, the best to you. Tofu is a wonderful protein and soft. We often mix a bit in with various smoothies and it absorbs flavors well.
You are most definitely in a very tough position. God bless and I hope for the best for you.
A key thing for you here to navigate is how are the cows being raised. You can buy “organic milk” from cows that are raised in filthy CAFOs. The requirement for “organic milk” is that the cow eats food from organic sources, there is no requirement for that cow to ever see the light of day on an actual pasture despite all the marketing.
While have not seen any data confirming or denying, my bet is that cows getting N1H1 (at this time) is via fecal matter and if you’ve ever seen a modern “dairy” farm with 400, 800 or even over 1000 cows; it is a fecal mess!
This potentially creates a dilemma… how do you find cow’s milk that isn’t at risk of bird flu? There are not many, but there are some small bottlers who sell pasteurized, organic milk from PASTURE raised cows meaning they don’t live in CAFOs full of sh*t. Again, IMHO I’m not saying you can’t get bird flu from this milk, but I would suspect it is much lower risk at least today.
Another option is to find yourself an all pasture dairy that sells raw milk that is close enough to visit at least once so you or someone you trust can see the operation. I am NOT saying you should drink the raw milk, but you at least know with certainty where the milk came from and what conditions the cows were raised under. You can then self pasteurize the milk to remove at least typical known hazards. Google the “vat” method of pasteurization… it’s about 145 degree for 30 min. I also guess if you lucked out and had a pastured dairy nearby by that also bottled and pasteurized you’d be also but I suspect those are for the history book today.
Lambert keeps talking about ventilation… a CAFO cow lives in sh*t and a crowded poorly ventilated space. A TRULY pasture raised cow is living a significant portion of their life on a real pasture – they occasionally step on sh*t but don’t live in sh*t on the floor 100% of their life. I recommend being able to visit the dairy to confirm it’s not a CAFO trying to brand as something else.
One point of clarification…
While some farmers have always been part of the elite and done exceptionally well over our nations 200+ year of existence, the majority if farmers in aggregate have remained at the whips end of lawyers and bankers.
IF you find a local farm that has dairy cows raised on real pasture, UNLESS they say they do sell raw milk NO NOT rule them out. That said don’t go and demand that they help you. Farmers are notoriously companionate and fickle AND hands off protective. Let them know your situation and if you commit to at home pasteurization which likely will make them feel OK that a gallon or 2 of milk isn’t in the next truck and that they aren’t likely to be sued on Monday or the prime newspaper story in the next edition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/health/bird-flu-milk-cows.html
May 1, 2024
Pasteurized Dairy Foods Free of Live Bird Flu, Federal Tests Confirm
But the scope of the outbreak among cattle remains uncertain, and little human testing has been done.
By Noah Weiland and Linda Qiu
Additional testing of retail dairy products from across the country has turned up no signs of live bird flu virus, strengthening the consensus that pasteurization is protecting consumers from the threat, federal health and agriculture officials said at a news briefing on Wednesday…
Lena, I’m very sorry to hear of your condition. Best wishes to you.
A decade ago I suffered facial injuries in an accident that meant I had a liquid diet for several months. I found the protein drinks given to me disgusting and contained far too much artificial sweetener (and living off Frappuccino’s didn’t seem a long term option, even if they gave good short term relief), so I experimented with various options making drinks at home.
I found that I could make very good, and I think very healthy, drinks by buying a good blender and mixing raw vegan protein powder with raw pure chocolate, mint and macha. For extra nutrition, and depending on mood and what was available, I would add some nuts, creatine, powdered greens, ginger, psyllium (for soluble fibre), natto, kefir or kambucha (probiotics) and/or apple and blueberries to taste. I’m not a nutritionist, but I think that gave me most of what was needed to stay healthy – I still make variations on this as my breakfast meal. If your blender is strong enough (I use a vitamax), you can pretty much turn anything into a drink and you can save a lot of money by buying frozen fruit and veg to add in.
I don’t know if they send to the US, but German online company Bulk.com does very good value powdered goods for making up smoothies and their products seem good quality.
You might also want to check out the product ProLong, developed by Dr. Valter Longo, but obviously this is something you’d need to run past your own doctors first. There are some clinical trials of this product for cancer patients you might want to discuss with your oncologist if its something you want to try.
Soy milk is higher in protein than most if not all other common plant milks. And to my palate at least, it does a good job of living up to the creamy and almost malt-y experience of the cow milk of my youth. (And not-so-youth; I’m a vegan convert of a dozen years or so, and all thanks to my wife.) As long as you’re not allergic to soy, I would recommend trying it.
More importantly, no one puts the danger of raw milk into context. By the cases of illness per drinker it is only slightly more dangerous than pasteurized milk.
And both of these are much safer than raw vegetables, which are by far the largest source of food-born illness and death. If you are willing to eat a salad you should have no problem drinking the far safer raw milk.
“Dutch far right to form coalition government”
So now that the rubber is about to hit the road, the question arises. Will Geert Wilders just become another Giorgia Meloni so that he is allowed to take power? Marine Le Pen is currently doing her Meloni impression in time for the next elections in France. Or will Wilders seek to keep some of his policies intact such as emigration?
Nailed it.
Wilders could personally toss migrant children alive into piranha tanks on State TV and no institution in europe would raise so much as a peep, as long as Wilders stuck to the received pieties on American Hegemony in general and the War on Russia in particular.
“Dutch far right to form coalition government”
The Rev Kev: Given the policies of the Netherlands governments of the past few years, how will we outsiders be able to tell the difference?
Murray references those practitioners of stochastic eugenicism. That phrase only applies unfavorably to others, you know, the unwashed, the unschooled, the unhip, the not-in-the-know, the unfavored, fundamentally the subhuman ones against whom that great cosmic balance is clearly tipped.
There can even be an element of The Hunger Games, where the participants hear May the odds be in your favor and tell themselves, well, duh, obviously it could never happen to us.
The PMC tell themselves that they are successful because they simply are better people, smarter, harder working, more virtuous, more humble…..
“France deploys troops in New Caledonia as riots leave four dead”
The article only mentions ‘contentious changes to voting rolls.’ The change is that French citizens who have been on that island for 10 years get to vote in any elections there. So of course those voters will vote along the lines that Paris wants them to – while watering down the votes of the locals. The French resent being pushed out of Africa and it looks like they are determined not to be pushed out of the Pacific as well.
Was thinking this might be a rubric error. Should be in “Imperial Collapse Watch”
It’s should be noted that the aforementioned pizza place not only has Nazi logos and symbols inside, but the second poster includes a pic of an IDF logo above one of the tables…
my then-wife was Ukrainian and in 2018 we went there. I had been in 2013 (before Euro Maidan) and again in 2014 just after it.
In 2018, we stopped into a bar outside Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev and had an unpleasant experience with guys with shaved heads who took exception to me speaking a language that was not Ukrainian (English!).
I figured they were just typical 20-something street tough wannabes, but on the way out, I noticed on a shelf next to the door a stallhelm someone had painted a swastika on.
That threw me for a loop to see that displayed so openly in a bar in a nice part of town. Imagine a pub in Cambridge MA, on Harvard’s campus doing that?
(maybe not so far fetched, sadly…)
But being there before and after Maidan, you could see the fractures start in that society… and the gulf between the haves and the have nots start to increase. Everyone with a college degree it seemed wanted to start a “charity”/NGO to start bringing in dollars from gullible westerners. They saw the money spigot flowing…
Those who weren’t so positioned and didn’t speak English didn’t even know there was a money spigot. Their lives were just getting harder and they didn’t know why.
Remember when the Ukrainian Parliament’s human rights ombudsman was hysterically claiming that Russian troops were raping babies and children? Every western MSM outlet ran uncritically with that story for a while.
The whole thing fell apart when some do-gooder outfit wanted to be able to help the poor suffering tykes and Ukraine was unable to produce any examples.
Naturally, that one got memory-holed, tout suite.
Angelina didn’t even have the time to make a movie about it.
I am having a hard time reconciling nazis and idf in the same ideological space. Have the nazis evolved to no longer be anti-semitic? Has the ideology evolved to simply violent fascism?
nazism didn’t evolve, anti-semitism did. nazis still want to expel the jews, just like zionists want to expel the palestinians. Nazis want to expel the jews to Israel, Israel wants to expel the palestinians to Egypt and Jordan. It’s anti-semitic now to be against this.
“nazism didn’t evolve” – exactly. It mutated, into the USA.
Banderites used to kill Russians, Poles, and Jews, back in the day. Can you reconcile Poles and Banderites? They still hate each other, but work together, united in their hate towards Russia.
Nazi ideology most generally needs the “other” that is a threat to “Blut und Boden“. For Hitler, the Jews were a convenient scapegoat (that conveniently built on ancient prejudice that was present in many European countries). It did not have to be Jews. It could have been any other group that could be built up as a threat (and other groups deemed “lebensunwertige” did indeed suffer).
I was quite surprised to learn some years ago, Jewish Nazis were a thing. Their “other” is, of course, the Palestinians (and non-white Jews are also frequently a target).
Fascism and Nazism only need untermensch – they’re not particular about who the untermensch are.
And, if I may generalise, people who are attracted by fascist ideologies tend always to side with the ubermensch over the untermensch, wherever in the world the divide may be.
A sort of fascintern, if you will.
In the current fascist ideologies, Israelis are clearly members of the ubermensch, as they have been so assiduously and reliably wiping out their own untermensch.
This is simply a house slave, field slave issue. For the Azov types, they see house slaves, and both Israelis and Azov are potentially versions of
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Ruckus
from the Boondocks. If they kill enough unwanteds, they will get into white heaven. I see two groups of house slaves trying to dress like master and prove their worth by beating the field slaves.
Zelensky has discussed creating a second Israel. I wonder if this is their solution to the depopulated East if the Slavic hordes are pushed out. A separate white enough group will be a bulwark for the glorious Europe. Like Israel, they would terrorize the collapsed and broken apart Russia. The exceptional few would be welcomed into the West.
Not the first time that Zionists and Nazis have teamed up.
Wukuchumi can probably find images of Third Reich commemorative coins bearing a Star of David one one side and a swastika on the other, struck to promote Jewish migration to Palestine.
Yes, these are genuine.
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5072424,00.html
Never heard of such a thing, new to me.
It’s not a coin, just an ad token for the Angriff to be given out to new subscribers or something like that. Still quite interesting, as it’s from 1934 when the NSDAP had already become the single ruling party.
They have a weird collection of insignias there, indeed.
https://twitter.com/BowesChay/status/1790830917520384168
The SS-PzDiv Wiking has something like a cult following among the Ukrainian crazies. I can also recognize at least three different Azov patches and a Right Sector patch. And a lot of 2014-15 “volunteer” units, some of them disbanded for being too nationalistic, to put it that way.
What is conspicuously absent is any pre-2014 insignias. It looks like this restaurant is run by a very special group of vets.
(This “wall of patches” is genuine, for example, see the gallery here: https://restaurantguru.com/Pizza-Veterano-Kiev)
The thing that gets under my skin is the celebratory photo of the Trade union building in Odessa burning where 42 people were purposefully killed, and left to die.
It’s one thing to associate the Nazis with freedom from Soviet oppression, which a lot of people in Eastern Europe seem to do, however misguided that might be, but it’s another to lightheartedly reminisce about your compatriots being burned alive 10 years ago while enjoying your pizza. I can’t think of a way one could argue that isn’t plain evil.
I would respond with the final verse of Chumbawamba’s “The Day the Nazi Died”.
(I also noticed a Blue Line Flag patch…)
Hadn’t heard that song before. Thanks!
Not compatriots, but untermenschen. That’s the whole point. Dehumanization is essential to any supremacist ideology.
“Oldest Known Human Viruses Discovered In 50,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Bones”
It might add weight to the theory that viruses contributed to the extinction of the species.
I am more inclined to think that viruses have been essential, more than hurt, the evolutionary processes that have led to the millions of plant and animal species ability to adapt, flourish and become most well adapted to their particular niche. As the environmental conditions change at more rapid rates, and biodiversity declines… creating more empty niches… so virus and disease will spread and adapt to help infill those voids or find new hosts themselves
In my opinion it is just how the world of living things adapts to this space ship – the human specie just has found ways to separate its self from the natural evolutionary process -sort of like climbing a ladder up out of the soup but, by doing so has increased the potential for much more energetic decline or major susceptibility to pandemic – Like the intro of pox into areas never before exposed
I wonder if they have been testing those insects trapped in amber for any viruses that they may have, particularly the mosquitos. It might give a lot of insight to what was happening this far back. One flea they found had the plague bacterium and it was 20 million years old-
https://eartharchives.org/articles/trapped-in-time-the-top-10-amber-fossils/index.html
“Jurassic ER.”
Introduction to virus origins and their role in biological evolution
Esteban Domingo
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7173561/
My paraphrase of the main idea, as I understand it: The role of viruses as providing variation in organisms, upon which natural selection operates to produce evolution, is now being recognized.
Tony Blinken and pals at Genocide Pizzeria (rated: four swastikas!) in Kiev. Check out the TwiXt, and then, please read the Shameless post by Craig Murray.
First, a culinary aside: I can assure you that the Four Swastikas pizzeria undoubtedly puts pineapple on pizza. Which is not done. And certainly not at the pizzeria near me in Via Plana, where I can savor the lovely “Lady Mortaza.” Ahh, mortadella and mozzarella.
Back to the thoroughly dulled moral compasses of our elites: What is remarkable about the spectacle of Tony “Banality of Evil” Blinken in Kiyev is that he shows us that he is Eichmann. He sings the wrong song out of tune, and now he lets the oh-so-democratic Ukrainians drag him to an Azov meme emporium.
Either the Ukrainians hold him in such contempt that they seat him under a picture of Hitler’s Grandma, or Blinken is so morally flat-lined that he can’t be bothered to have a twinge of compassion for the victims of his policies and his masters.
The slaughter of a generation of Ukrainians is nothing to him. The destruction of a country is nothing to him. He somehow believes (operative word) that we groundlings and ungrateful citizens are so incapable of thought that we can’t see moral collapse.
Surely we can hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which I will call Fear, Plague, Lies, and Death, galloping across the heavens.
Craig Murray compiles a more detailed list, in Murray’s careful style of observation–and Murray’s words evoke a thousand pictures. Joe Biden will pop out and get a vanilla-genocide ice-cream cone with depleted-uranium sprinkles and try to deny Murray’s assertion: “Israel has announced that the Rafah crossing is to be handed over to a US mercenary force. The US can then say it is complying with Biden’s pledge not to put US forces’ boots on the ground in Gaza, while actually taking control.”
War crimes in real time.
Meanwhile, the protesting students are being blacklisted, just as during Scoundrel Time.
This will not end well.
Bibi just rolled the tanks right over Joe’s red lines. Of course, they’re resorting to the Big Lie to cover it up. It’s a “limited” operation, you know (wink, wink.)
Actually, a slower-paced destruction of Rafah probably suits Netanyahu better. He can string out the war another 6 months, hope that it disappears from the front pages, and then once the election in the US is over, finish the job.
I agree with Murray that the objective of the West is the total displacement of whatever is left of the Palestinians in Gaza into refugee camps perhaps in the Sinai desert.
The current trip screams Hollywood for ugly people which is how much of Team Blue simply see the role.
>Surely we can hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which I will call Fear, Plague, Lies, and Death, galloping across the heavens.
Being a resident in the good old USA and that being my only frame of reference, I can’t help but think the four horsemen you’ve described have landed and galloping around coast to coast and all points in between like a Pony Express of Chaos.
This will not end well feels like an understatement.
Even though you wrote, “Four Swastikas pizzeria undoubtedly puts pineapple on pizza,” I managed to dual process “pineapple” as both “pineapple” and “people”. Perhaps readers can confirm or dispute, but I recall Scott Ritter reciting one of Stepan Bandera’s tortures that shocked even the Nazis as eating part of a child he killed.
Sweeney Todd or Arya in the kitchen?
….Or the film Eating Raoul (quite a hoot).
In the ocean these intelligent cetaceans are the apex predator. So how long does it take for them to ram, not the yacht of an idle soul, but the working boat of a fisherman? Far from sinking it with impunity a stick of dynamite casually tossed overboard will teach that particular pod a painful lesson regarding Earth’s actual apex predator. And if the lesson spreads to other pods, scientists will thoughtfully nod and record how intelligent they really are.
…why stop there at such puny measures?
My dinghy has a battery of defenses against orca-straited terror attacks, including this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_depth_bomb
You just know that sooner or later some damned fool of a fisherman will accidentally drop a stick of lit dynamite inside the boat causing chaos among the crew. Why not do it the smart way and just tow a device that can put out a sound that will be painful to those Orcas. First time they try to ram the boat, you just ‘ping’ them and soon they will avoid those boats.
Fisherman . . . ‘Hmmm, $10 big firecracker or $10,000 ping-device?
If I’m mistaken in my assumption regarding 1st choice, what do you think?
Having been on Orca tours in BC, I’m guessing the Orca attacked the boat to protect the pod.
People drive their damn boats into the middle of the slowly moving pods. Day, after day, after day.
I know a large male of the pod we saw swam over to our boat — drifting safely away from the pod — and examined us closely to see if we were a threat.
re: Shameless – Craig Murray
“I see nothing whatsoever that indicates they can have any other long-term objective in mind than the complete Israeli annexation of Gaza minus its civilian population. What do you see?”
The Israelis are banking on the world forgetting Gaza (and soon the West Bank) and moving on. So one approach would be to ensure they’re very mistaken. Indeed, there can’t be any semblance of human rights or international law or even a Geneva Convention and what is the point even of a United Nations if this atrocity isn’t answered for. And should it go unanswered, the example stands that force, coercion, ignoring the rule of law, genocide, ethnic cleansing, is effective, works – so the same worldwide, everywhere, will be emboldened, including within the United States. Perhaps this is the end goal? To roll back civil rights everywhere?
Those brownshirts we saw at the Unite the Right in Charlotteville? They’re likely forming alliances with the Zionists attacking UCLA protesters, who are forming alliances with Proud Boys, etc. Every group who hates the gays, the trans, the “ragheads”, hates BLM, believes the universities are cultural Marxist playgrounds, the incels who think #MeToo went too far, the Steve Bannons looking to launch the 9th Crusades, the MAGA heads whose primary issue was invasion by immigrants. The Jordan Peterson’s building and socializing the framework for an understanding that equity is not possible, desirable or achievable, that the equity project should be abandoned. The Richard Spencers (who university admins wistfully rued their hands were tied and they had to allow speak because freedom) who patiently explained that he’s a White Zionist, wants what Israelis want for Jews, exclusivity, and a homeland exclusively for white people. Israel’s conduct in Gaza will be acting as a guiding light, a call to others of like mind.
Your theory of who is working with who seems unusually incoherent. The big claim about the Unite the Right march (which was a pretty tiny group) was that they were chanting “Jews will not replace us”. I don’t see how you would assume that they have somehow decided to be pro-Jew all of a sudden.
But you are almost certainly right that Israel is trying to annex the Gaza strip and remove the population with the plan that, after it is completed, everyone will forget about it. Hard to see how they are wrong about this, several million Jews and Christians were displaced from Iran and Iraq over the last twenty years and no one cares or even remembers it happened.
Not such a satisfying ending, but plenty of precedent for it playing out exactly like they plan.
If it were going to go differently you would see the Arab countries preparing to actually do something about it. This is not happening, just some costless verbal condemnations and propaganda to assuage their population.
A Zionist has no quarrel with any view that countries should export their Jewish population to Israel, rid themselves of Jews, and indeed during Nazi Germany the Zionists (controversially, and against the wishes of the World and European Jewish congresses) were assisting the Nazis with this. Meanwhile, a white supremacist such as Richard Spencer agrees that countries should deport their Jews, and should rightfully be singularly constituted according to one ethnicity, religion or “race”, as the Zionists believe. So you can see how Zionists and white supremacists would align on the same goals, provide each other with an assist, even if they both think they’re racially superior to the other.
Here in Toronto we’ve witnessed how the local Jewish Defense League makes overtures even to anti-semitic groups with one or two exceptions. The same groups show up at protests on the same side, again and again, and constantly interact and coordinate as allies. As long as they’re nationalistic, supremacist and anti-immigrant they see themselves as being on the same team and working toward the same goals.
And yes, it’s not rational or coherent.
what is the point even of a United Nations if this atrocity isn’t answered for
So we are at about the same point as the League of Nations in the mid 1930s, which was incapable of mounting an effective condemnation of such acts of aggression as the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy and of China by Japan, or of putting an end to the Chaco war — and of preventing the atrocities caused by these conflicts.
Back to the future.
“So we are at about the same point as the League of Nations…”
Other than Japan invading China, I had not thought at all about the existence of the League of Nations or these other conflicts
Japan invades China 1931
Italy invades Ethiopia 1935
Chaco War, Bolivia and Paraguay 1935
Spanish Civil War 1936
I will personally guarantee that I will not forget Gaza although just as the Holocaust has been marginalized as those who saw or survived it have died, so too will it be for the Gazan Genocide. And I do think that one of the goals of repression and lawbreaking is to roll back civil rights or to make they dead letters.
Commenting on how soon we forget is now clichéd, but it is still true, isn’t?
“How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex” (PDF)
Spoiler: Enhanced crappification
Reading Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto, where he connects Stanford and Silicon Valley with the Military/Industrial/Complex that powers the American empire
Cannot recommend it enough!
He connects Stanford and Silicon Valley to more than that – especially with regards to the history of Leland Stanford.
Wonderfully written and informative.
I am not real excited about the UAW about getting involved in Middle East issues. Seems like a real good way to dissipate the energy that has been going into their successful workplace campaigns.
One complaint against Unions has been that Unions work for the Union officials, not the workers. This seems to be going down that path.
UAW represents 48,000 workers in the University of California, they have every right to protest the oppressive working conditions arising from suppression of campus protesters. And any union should be outraged and protesting how the PTB are criminalizing and violently suppressing peaceful protest. This can be easily turned against them during their next strike
“UAW represents 48,000 workers in the University of California, they have every right to protest the oppressive working conditions arising from suppression of campus protesters…”
Necessary and perfect comment.
While I was driving into the city yesterday, listened to a brilliant speech by a young woman from a group of Unionists for Palestine. The speech is in here somewhere https://www.2xxfm.org.au//shows/stick-together-crn/ on 16 May.
She said things like:
Charitable organisations dedicated to ending homelessness have not spoken out about Palestine. Shame!
Organisations dedicated to ending violence towards women have not spoken out about the deaths of women in Palestine. Shame!
Organisations dedicated to ending racism have not spoken out about the deaths of Palestinians. Shame! etc etc
Long list of other socially progressive, helping organisations which are mute.
And the crowd started to also chime in with Shame. Was a great speech.
Unions in and of themselves are empty vessels, like corporations, which are driven by forces and channeled in directions by both leadership and workers. As such, they can be good or bad. Some unions, such as police unions, are almost always very bad for society, whereas others such as USW have been fairly instrumental in advancing progressive agendas, lend their space and resources to issues. And this is an issue where EVERYONE without exception should be getting involved, everyone without exception is unable to avoid. Imagine, a holocaust taking place in our time and unions not being allowed to have thoughts or official positions about it, staying away, especially given what Emma said…that employees are being literally and physically attacked by goons on command from employers? Any union that stays away from the issue will be ignoring their workers.
RE: Patrick Winn on the Narco-Economy of Myanmar’s Wa State
Thanks for that one – I’m very much looking forward to reading Winn’s book on the subject, Narcotopia which is next on my list.
I will also once again plug a fascinating book from anthropologist James Scott which would be an great one to read along with Winn’s book, called The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia . Scott references the Wa many times in this book, although before they became a narco-state. The book discusses the social dynamics of Southeast Asian societies over the course of hundreds of years, and how people often resisted being incorporated into the larger states and would head for the hills to make their own way instead. He notes that this practice largely ended several decades ago, and the tax man can now find you almost anywhere. The Wa are apparently one of the few holdouts who still manage to make a go of it independently.
I read this article with great interest- I had heard previously of a Myanmar province that the government army stayed away from. I had also heard that they were deeply involved in the traffic of precursor chemicals for fentanyl- who actually made the finished product was obfuscated – the sense I got was for China to have “plausible deniability”. This article states that products left the province via Thailand which supports that notion. I have a gut feeling that the author is coyly saying “meth” ( which is being made in bathtubs everywhere) instead of “fentanyl” which is where the money is. And quite likely, also is the CIA (which might explain the author’s deception). After abandoning the heroin rat line in Afghanistan, it seems a ‘no-brainer’ that they would set up shop there – excellent cover and the Myanmar government is still a US client. This is deeply troubling- I lived homeless on the streets in NorCal in 2021-22 and saw first hand the devastation that this drug causes- of course a massive increase in ODs (I carried Narcan in nasal and injectable formats for those at risk) but seeing meth users getting an opiate habit from adulterated supply and confirmed heroin users deciding that “fennie” was a better high (and probably cheaper) turned the streets into a dangerous jungle where everyone is a junkie – and junkies tend to rip-off friend and family before strangers (it’s safer when you get caught). I’ve been in a skilled nursing facility since then recuperating from an assault that did damage to my neck bones/ spinal cord. Prognosis is good- it’s just taken a while to re-learn how to walk etc. They say what don’t kill ya makes ya stronger- we’ll see ;^)
re: AI
Sasha Latypova did a little experiment or test of various AIs and came to this conclusion:
“After this little study, I have been on a buying spree for history books. Anything published before the 1980’s, earlier is better. Build your own library, as the information we thought we had at our fingertips is being erased.
“Additionally, free sources of books are still available. Check out Annas-archive.org. Post in comments your favorite sources of information/free archives, etc. ”
From her article:
“You are not allowed to think for yourself, peasant”, says the Blob.
A short experiment conducted on a long car ride: trying to find one well-known quote using several modern AI chat bots.
https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/you-are-not-allowed-to-think-for
Classic authoritarianism. In his novel “1984” Orwell was, again, correct in his observations. “Who controls the Past controls the Future.”
We can start using the term “Internet of Truth” without irony now.
“Slovak PM shooting suspect named as 71-year-old writer”
The shooter said that he shot Fico because of his political policies. A strange move as eight years ago he started a “Movement Against Violence”, ‘an emerging political party whose goal is to prevent the spread of violence in society.’ Then the Slovak interior minister said that what really got him to get his gun was because Fico had stopped the country being stripped of weapons to send to the Ukraine. So this shooter was against violence but decided to kill somebody because he stopped other people being killed. It was hard to reconcile those two things at first until I remembered that he was an intellectual which meant that he could have justified anything.
But that security detail has some questions to answer. Allowing five full shots to be fired is not what you want to happen and should have been stopped at the first one or two shots.
When you insert 5 bullets into the chamber, is that ‘Slovakian Roulette’?
Lone gunman, plausible deniability.
Sorta like the assassinations of MLK or Medgar Evers.
– ‘Yacht sinks after being rammed by orcas in Strait of Gibraltar’ – BBC.
It seems clear that Russia is training orcas to do this, perhaps a plot to impede Mediterranean traffic. Pretty soon more orcas will be attacking larger vessels. It’s Putin!
Moby Orcas. / ;)
I know you’re being humorous, but: there are people out there who will attribute anything–absolutely anything–to bad RU and evil VVP. Even whale weaponization:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/29/suspected-russia-trained-spy-whale-reappears-off-swedens-coast
Thanks. I had a recollection of an actual story like this and I think this was it. But as you say, it is easy to find stories blaming Putin for anything. I said this the other day, but satire is getting almost impossible since political reality has become nearly indistinguishable from something in The Onion.
“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.” — Tom Lehrer, 1973
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9
“No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.”
Lily Tomlin
Yep, Russians do beluga whales, and also dolphins. These orcas might be Chinese.
Gooooooood Mooooooornng Fiatnam!
The platoon had been advised their commander in chief was playing a Chinese Ire Drill, in order to stop the Middle Kingdom from muscling in on what was left of the domestic automobile industry. We circled the tariff 4 times.
‘I sing the body electric-by Fisher.’
In other news on the front, navy seals orchestrated a hit & run on a yacht with suspected rich people on board and sent it to Davy Jones Locker.
an aside: Body by Fisher trivia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_Body
Boeing plane engine catches fire after taking off in Indonesia
– ‘House Democrats Fume Over Unprecedented Israeli Rebuke Of Lawmakers’ – HuffPo
“It really is a stunning document,” said one Democratic staffer. “The tone of this letter is not reflective of the fact that the U.S. is the primary guarantor of Israel’s security. An unaware reader would assume that Israel is the superpower in this relationship and the U.S. the recipient of aid.”
The US is THE exceptional, indispensable nation — except for one.
I didn’t think it was possible to top the US in projecting arrogance, entitlement, and impunity to the rest of the world. I just can’t see this as ending well.
There’s very, very, long and old the idea in the West of reciprocity. Guess the Irs’s never heard of it. Shorter, or longer: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth…,.” etc. An old book quoth this line. Reciprocity.
Concerning the Nuland article, I don’t think I have ever seen so many lies in one place before.
I’ve been avoiding the recent Nuland sightings to keep from making myself ill. But when I saw your comment I gave in and read the article. You are right, of course. In a just world these people would be forced to crawl back under their rocks, or imprisoned, for the despicable criminal suffering their actions have unleashed on the world. Instead, they are rewarded with comfortable positions on corporate boards and in “think-tanks” until they are brought back for more swamp service. And in the meantime they can continue spreading their lying propaganda in articles like this.
Regarding the source of this article, the history of ‘Meduza’ is also instructive. Pretty safe to say that Nuland was preaching to the choir here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meduza
Canada fire smoke evacuates thousands Wildfire Today. Mask up!
4 Takeaways From Our Homeowners Insurance Investigation NYT. The deck: “Across the country, more intense heat, storms and fires are causing the home insurance market to start to buckle.”
Beverly Hills 90210 Mansions Lose Fire Coverage as Insurers Flee Bloomberg
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A good winter of clearing out burnables at the all cats & no cattle ranch~
Had 4 trees fall on me (figuratively) in the past year, 2 of them living-one came out of the ground by the rootwad and tipped over, the other cracked near the base and down she went, both around 16 inches wide. A lot of disassembly was required and in the end, ended up with yet more oak firewood in the guise of rounds, ready-to-burns and burn-pile slash.
I’m paying a lot of money for home insurance, but the insurance payment against something wickedly hot coming this way is all about leaving nothing in the path of the fire up to about 15 feet, which means excising dead branches on trees, and whatnot.
There has been intense development in the path of Mother Nature.
If the fire is wind-whipped, 15 feet of clearance is futile. Fire, unlike wind or water catastrophe, turns everything to mere ash. Little to recover.
Study the “Paradise” fire in northern Cali from a couple years ago. One of the most interesting things they learned, post fire, was the the soffit vents on the houses sucked in the burning embers due to convection. Man houses caught fire from inside the attic.
A good defense is to somehow close your roof vents if fire is approaching. If someone wants to get rich, start a biz and install remotely closing vents that grab closed tight with a simple magnet. No burning embers would be sucked in thus increasing the possibility the fire won’t catch the insulation on fire and burn the house from the top (inside) down. And if you have some money, install a metal roof as opposed to “3 tab”.
Oh, and have more than one road leading out of town.
from an Aspen Daily News columnist:
https://www.aspendailynews.com/opinion/marolt-if-i-haven-t-seemed-like-myself-lately/article_514db18c-11c1-11ef-a507-3fb6e81cde90.html
Marolt: If I haven’t seemed like myself lately…
My partner has autoimmune encephalitis. It seems to have started in early 2022 or before, but was a slowly worsening condition (in retropsect) until suddenly we were in Emergency and it was being treated life or death. Over maybe 12 months of development. No autoimmune disorder history in family. Condition is 1 in 100,000 people rare.
Not long after 4 injections of Covid-19 vaccines over a bit more than a year. And there may have been a bout of very mild Covid, hard to tell.
So I was very interested to find this study while I was looking for information about the condition. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36755772/
More and more brain impact conditions are being reported post Covid and maybe post vaccine. He is now much improved after treatment for AE. Best wishes to you for improvement as well from Long Covid.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/magazine/israel-west-bank-settler-violence-impunity.html
May 16, 2024
The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel
After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.
By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti
This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.
PART I.
IMPUNITY
By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.
Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now.
Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself…
I had a visit to a Dr yesterday, no masks.
When I saw the Dr he asked why I was wearing an N95, “Are you sick?”
When I told him I wore a mask to keep from getting sick with Covid he gave a contemptuos snort.
A good friend had a CT scan done at Sutter Hospital yesterday, only one nurse ( And He) were masked.
When He asked why He was told that they are not required because “Covid is over.”
While 1.3 Million Covid Deaths and 17 Million plus with long Covid are being ignored, I don’t think the consequences of widespread immune dysregulation can be ignored for much longer.
Cries of “Bring out your Dead” are coming, the only question is how soon.
I had a dental appointment recently and both my dentist and the hygenist wore N95s the entire time and there was a HEPA filter roaring away two feet from my head.
I love my dentist.
“why United States elites… identify so disproportionately with Israel”
I have always believed that much of the strong USA commitment to Israel is a type of moral response to the Holocaust; perhaps even a guilt assuaging moral response. I have never found persuasive the “left” argument that the USA commitment to Israel is because of big power colonialism, ie, Israel is the US’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the ME. Actual US military force basing is much more in Arab countries than Israel.
I think the “left” argument actually obscures the highly significant role of religious zealotry – in both USA and Israel. Recall that Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin — a military hero for commanding Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. — was assassinated after extreme orthodox rabbis in both USA and Israel declared Rabin din rodef for signing the Oslo Accords and agreeing to give back land in the West Bank in exchange for Palestinian acceptance of Israel’s right to exist.
Read the linked to Wikipedia entry on rodef — it’s very disturbing:
In Craig Unger’s 2007 book, The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America’s Future (New York: Scribner), Unger details the VERY close ties between USA neoconservatives and the Netanyahu faction in Israel, based entirely on an ideological / theological interpretation of Israel ‘s existence and end times prophecy. See especially pages 149 ff.
Breaking: McGill injunction request against the anti-genocide student protest was just rejected by Quebec Superior Court. So now we have legal precedent, at least in Canada.
This sort of court action will get a similar response to the college demonstrations in the US. All colleges here access federal funds in some manner. This makes colleges responsible to the Civil Rights Act, 1965 and the US Constitution. Enrolled students are also protected by the Family Education Reporting Privacy Act (FERPA) which mandates a specific course of formal notification of due process for disciplinary action by a college. All of which has been recently abrogated by Administrators.
FERPA also stipulates the composition of the Due Process Hearing adjudicators; a mix of students, faculty , administrators. Claiming exigent disruption where none exists is going to be a tough sell.
America’s “Diplomats” are the kind of people who give assholes a bad name.
RE: Canada Fire smoke
Central Alberta here. Smoke was bad on Sunday-Monday, gone by Tuesday.
Today is the second day of ceaseless rain. The greens of spring are finally emerging. The seasonal birds are almost all returned.
Things are looking up!
“Kānāwai From Ahi”
Seems to use the typical framing of good Hawaii natives vs evil colonists. In its history it is neglectful of the impact of the establishment of the Kingdom on traditional cultural practices. The Kingdom created its own class of elites, differing from the traditional alii system. That so many of the royal descendants died young no doubt hindered creating a stable government and institutions and also created an environment where immigrants from western cultures had a significant influence.
For their part, westerners viewed East Maui water as being wasted, while central Maui had abundant land that couldn’t be productively utilized. That much of central Maui land had come under royal family ownership I think also played a role. At any rate I think Alexander and Baldwin viewed the “problem” as needing an engineering solution which they supplied. The engineering itself was and is considered a feat. From the standpoint of the royals, I don’t think we will ever know if they were rationalizing acceptance of the water allocation, or really believed it was in the best interest of native Hawaiians.
Certainly over time the Alexander and Baldwin interests in Hawaii Commercial & Sugar and Maui Land & Pine came to dominate the Territory government as part of the “Big Five” and that is reflected in the assumption of “right” over water, while officially all water is held in “trust” by the state.
Natives v Westerner framing also tends to deny agency to Asian immigrants. The plantation labor system was extremely exploitative but post-WWII and Statehood the role of immigrants (from non-anglo culture) and their descendants can’t be ignored.