Dear patient readers,
If you see this note, it means I did not get back in time to complete Links before launch. Please come back at 8:00 AM EDT for your full ration.
If Corporations Are People, Then Animals Should Be Too New Republic (furzy). Simpler if animals incorporate, then they get the bennies of being people. No arguments about intelligence, self-awareness, feeling pain and all that.
First post: A history of online public messaging ars technica (Dr. Kevin)
Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies? A lawsuit dared to ask Guardian (Dr. Kevin)
Florida Bans Lab-Grown Meat NBC
Politicians can use social media ads to buy votes for €4 per person New Scientist (Dr. Kevin)
Jack London, Martin Eden and the liberal education in US life aeon (Anthony L). On its way to extinction.
#COVID-19
A massive MASSIVE Norwegian longitudinal study on Long Covid *with* controls and multiple validation tests with over 100000 people followed since the start of the pandemic.
It absolutely blows all the usual minimiser excuses out of the water. https://t.co/Hfs4fTH8c4
— David Steadson #NAFO 🇦🇺🇸🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺🌍 (@DavidSteadson) May 4, 2024
Lots of “allergies” going around. 😳
My husband’s colleague was suffering from “bad hayfever” on a call yesterday, so he suggested she test for Covid. Two hours later, she messaged to say it was positive.
People need to test. And public health needs to support that.#Covid19
— Dame Sa 🐝 3.5% (@LongCovidHell) May 4, 2024
Climate/Environment
European summers will be hotter than predicted because of cleaner air New Scientist (Dr. Kevin)
Lithium-Free Sodium Batteries Exit the Lab, Enter US Production New Atlas
Methane emissions from gas flaring being hidden from satellite monitors Guardian (Dr. Kevin)
Why You May Soon Be Drinking Synthetic Coffee Wall Street Journal
China?
This is actually quite funny. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) probably the most warmongering Think Tank in the US, unintentionally screwed themselves with this because if their adjustments for China's defense spending are correct, then it necessarily means that similar… https://t.co/tbumxY00n7
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) May 1, 2024
India
Three arrested and charged over Sikh activist’s killing in Canada BBC
Old Blighty
Conservatives crushed by ‘worst local election result’ in years Guardian (Kevin W)
Electile dysfunction causes outbreak of performance politics in Commons Guardian (Dr. Kevin)
The right’s Brexit ‘bonfire of red tape’ was just wind and smoke. And even Tories want more regulation now Guardian (Kevin W)
Boris Johnson barred from voting under his own voter ID rules Politico (Kevin W)
Gaza
“This Militaristic Approach Has Been a Failure”: Meet Hala Rharrit, First U.S. Diplomat to Quit over Gaza Democracy Now. Glenn F:
I don’t know if you have seen this or read the transcript that is included, but this is one of the most impactful interviews about the Gaza conflict and the American talking point lies being thrown out by our current administration.
It is absolutely stunning.
* * * Iraqi militant group claims missile attack on Tel Aviv targets, source says Arab News
Amid Unprecedented Air Defence Challenges, Israel Makes Unusual Decision to Retire Patriot Missiles: Friendly Fire Issues Cause Concern Military Watch. Sounds a bit “dog ate my homework” ish.
Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah risks killing hundreds of thousands, UN says
and Israel has briefed US on plan to evacuate Palestinian civilians ahead of potential Rafah operation Associated Press (CC)Why the Provisional Measures Order in Nicaragua v. Germany severely limits Germany’s ability to transfer arms to Israel Stefan Talmon (guurst)
* * * A tin of sardines falls from the sky ABC Australia (CC)
Democratic lawmakers tell Biden evidence shows Israel is restricting Gaza aid Sight Magazine (CC)
* * * Russia Calls for Independent International Investigation of Mass Graves in Gaza Defend Democracy
Demolition order issued for home of Bedouin girl hurt in Iran attack, later scrapped Times of Israel (Kevin W)
Gaza’s collapsing health system is one of the goals of Israel’s genocide Mondoweiss (guurst)
Prominent Gaza doctor dies in Israeli prison after four months of detention ABC Australis (CC)
* * * This must end
Netanyahu is blinded by rage and damaging long term relationships and support with reckless actions https://t.co/3YwkV9haU6
— Tim McDonald (@trmcdonald) May 2, 2024
Top Ways MAGA and Right Wing Zionism Converge, and Why Smotrich is Embracing Trump Juan Cole (Randy K)
* * * President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan delivered remarks at a meeting with the board members of Independent Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association (MÜSİAD) in Istanbul AK Parti (CC). Erdogan’s remarks on the suspension of trade with Israel
Gaza Protests
How Counterprotesters at U.C.L.A. Provoked Violence, Unchecked for Hours New York Times. (BC). You know it’s bad when the Times deigns to notice something like this.
NYPD Officer Fired Gun Inside Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, Manhattan DA’s Office Confirms THE CITY (Kevin W)
Campus protests over Gaza war hit Australia Agence France Presse (CC)
JUDITH BUTLER WILL NOT CO-SIGN ISRAEL’S ALIBI FOR GENOCIDE Intercept (furzy)
New Not-So-Cold War
Trump develops plan on peaceful resolution in Ukraine — Telegraph TASS
Kiev has lost over 111,000 troops this year – Moscow RT
Saudi Arabia and Indonesia Lobby EU to Halt Russian Asset Confiscation Sputnik
Macron; Europe in danger. Pirate says Ukraine on brink. 300 sanctions, Russia & China. Swiss Minsk 3 Alex Christoforu, YouTube (Brian M)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Senators Want Limits On TSA Use of Facial Recognition Technology For Airport Screening PBS
Imperial Collapse Watch
Opposing Every War But The Current One, Supporting Civil Rights But Never Right Now Caitlin Johnstone (Kevin W)
New Not-So-Cold War
SITREP 5/1/24: The Russian Steamroller Rolls On as Ukraine Braces for Impact Simplicius the Thinker (Kevin W)
Kremlin slams Macron’s statement about possible sending troops to Ukraine ‘very dangerous’ TASS (guurst)
Biden
Young Democrats warn Biden he must quickly change course The Hill
Biden cannot afford a boiling summer of protest CNN (Kevin W)
AI
GPT-4 passes Moral Turing Test Scientific Reports (Dr. Kevin). Sigh. That is because it has been trained for these “moral” tests.
US Official Urges China, Russia To Declare AI Will Not Control Nuclear Weapons Reuters
Human pilots face an AI-controlled jet for the first time in a real-world dogfight ZME Science. Dogfights are World War II. Planes nearly entirely face unmanned weapons these days.
Judge mulls sanctions over Google’s “shocking” destruction of internal chats ars technica
Apple Announces Largest-Ever $110 Billion Share Buyback As iPhone Sales Drop CNBC
The Bezzle
Baby boomers are losing their life savings to phone scammers claiming to provide tech support, authorities say Fortune (furzy)
SEC shuts down Trump Media auditor over ‘massive fraud’ Financial Times
Humans Now Share the Web Equally With Bots, Report Warns Independent
Guillotine Watch
It’s Time to Tax the Billionaires Gabriel Zucman, New York Times
Class Warfare
>Fresh Insights on Income Mobility From 2005 to 2019 Census.gov. Very clearly written, and highlights winners and losers.
Ten Years After the Flint Water Crisis, Distrust and Anger Lingerhttps://t.co/EBIgzDkosy
— ProPublica (@propublica) May 4, 2024
Long-predicted consumer pullback finally hits restaurants like Starbucks, KFC and McDonald’s CNBC (Kevin W)
The New Usury: The Ability-to-Repay Revolution in Consumer Finance Adam Levitin, Credit Slips
It’s the Private Economy that’s Broken, not the Federal Government Douglad Lamont (Micael T)
Antidote du jour. Robert P:
Fergus was adopted at ten and is now seventeen. Lives with me in Mesa, Arizona. This photo intends to honor the Arizona artist Ed Mell, who recently passed. See his work “Storm and Desert Wash” (2007).
And a bonus (guurst):
— Be Amazed (@BeAmazd) April 24, 2024
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
285 comments
Comments are closed.
“Trump develops plan on peaceful resolution in Ukraine — Telegraph’
Trump probably has all sorts of ideas but the only realistic one is where he forces the Ukraine to negotiate by throttling both money and military supplies until they come to the table. But Trump has zero leverage with Russia and may not understand that they are not, for example, interested in a conflict freeze. He could send out private feelers to the Russians to see where they stand but if he did that, the Biden White House and the media would label that as Russian collusion or something. In the meantime he has another bright idea. He wants NATO members to ramp up defense spending from 2% to 3% of GDP. Problem is that their economies may not be able to handle paying out such a large amount as the war has helped wrecked much of the economy of Europe.
“forces the Ukraine to negotiate by throttling both money and military supplies until they come to the table”….
That’s what many I know under 30 want us to do to Israel. “It’s being done with my money!” I’ve heard from more than one. Any why not? I didn’t pay attention to this conflict for decades, but I recall is was assumed back in the 70’s and 80’s that at some point, Israel would/must allow a Palestinian state. Then I woke up and started paying attention and that has been disappeared as the assumed eventuality.
Trump just joined Biden, many of his fellow Repubs and some now obvious tools in the comedysphere by condemning the students. Here’s suggesting that a Trump foreign policy will be a continuation of Biden just as Biden’s foreign policy was a continuation of Trump. In this, Putin’s statement to Tucker was exactly right.
Which is to say when it comes to foreign policy there is a deep state entrenched in our US establishment and the constant obsession with the war between parties is a deliberate distraction if only to convince themselves. Counterpunch now getting this while still pushing the Trump = fascism fantasy.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/03/roaming-charges-tin-cops-and-biden-coming/
Ohio, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
Find the Cost of Freedom seems more appropriate.
Of course. Trump is thuggish by nature, although pure coward. Not to mention, weak, stupid and easily manipulated.
Whatever else Trump is, he isn’t a coward. He has stood up for eight years to a Democratic Party, Justice Department lawfare campaign, aided by Democratic prosecutors in Democratic jurisdictions where a fair jury is almost impossible to find, and not caved. The outcome of all this is unknown. But what is known is that Trump is not a coward.
RFK Jr is probably rethinking his unwavering support for Israel right about now. That’s a lot of %s attending college the he frittered away just to placate AIPAC.
In the current conflict, Israel seems to me to be saying one thing and doing another. With the benefit of hindsight, this has been going on for a long time.
As a young teen (two thirds of the way through the last century) I read Leon Uris’s “Exodus”, and bought the spiel – plucky little Israel against a wicked world which denied its right to exist. The terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel, as represented in the book, was an act of pure heroism.
The first scale in my eye started to work loose ten years later when a work colleague came out with a spirited criticism of what Israel was doing to the poor Arabs. Now my History vision is a lot clearer. In retrospect Exodus was mostly hasbara, and I allowed myself to be conned.
Leon Uris’s “Exodus”
Now I remember where I first saw that book and a reference to it: The cable series Mad Men. Don Draper was courting a wealthy Jewish merchant named Rachel and he was introduced to the book.
Once I saw how pro-Zionist narratives gets pushed into popular entertainment, it’s gotten really hard to watch any Anglophone entertainment media.
Some enterprising influencer should start a “Watching Hasbara” show on Rumble or TikTok. Maybe have a “Watching the MIC” show too.
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.
Something tells me that Trump would come at the whole thing with his real estate background in mind and think in terms of lands swaps. But I do not think that what works in a New York city setting would work in a geopolitical setting and I don’t know if he realizes that or not.
Right Hand Jared is already working on Trump’s international real estate peace plan. First he will do Gaza waterfront, and those buildings that NATO bombed in Belgrade.
Every institution would wail in unison “Putin puppet!” Like in Afghanistan and twice in S, Syria, Trump would fold.
From The Cradle:
To Israel’s horror, Hamas brings ‘two-state solution’ back into focus
Not only has Israel failed to defeat Hamas, but it is being dragged into discussions on Palestinian statehood, which its Gaza genocide has put back onto the international agenda.
https://thecradle.co/articles/to-israels-horror-hamas-brings-two-state-solution-back-into-focus
Comparisons of 2024 to 1968 keep coming up this year.
Trump develops plan on peaceful resolution in Ukraine — Telegraph
Nixon’s Secret Plan to End the Vietnam War
Yeah, and now we know what Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” was. It was to secretly conspire with the South Vietnamese to wreck the peace talks so that be could beat LBJ, even though it meant extending the war and which led to the deaths of thousands of GIs-
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/aug/09/martinkettle1
But look at the bottom line: Nixon did withdraw the US forces from Vietnam. The drawdown was pretty quick–it proceeded almost as fast as was logistically possible.
Yeah, four years later. And after he extended the war into Cambodia.
“And after he extended the war into Cambodia.”
Cambodia which was never at war against the US, nonetheless was bombed ferociously by the US. There was more tonnage of bombs dropped by the US on Cambodia than all the bombs dropped by the US during WWII, including the 2 atomic bombs:
http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf
May 12, 2007
Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War
By Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan
http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf
May 12, 2007
Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War
By Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan
Exceeding the World War II Payload
The data released by Clinton shows the total payload dropped during these years to be nearly five times greater than the generally accepted figure. To put the revised total of 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II, including the bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 15,000 and 20,000 tons, respectively. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country in history…
[ Also, for the China-Laos rail line that was so recently constructed, China had to demine Laos all along the locale of the rail line. This from the Vietnam War which Laos never fought. ]
” The drawdown was pretty quick–it proceeded almost as fast as was logistically possible.”
After being prevented for 4 years. After having been short-circuited by Nixon’s secret deception to begin with.
She can’t win but the only possible choice, other than not voting, is Jill Stein. I voted for her over Obama’s re-election with no delusions that she’d win and I”ll do it again… if I vote at all.
We are in hell and will not be escaping during what remains of my lifetime.
And so I write songs that no one will hear, poetry that no one will read, eat well, exercise, and now, consciously, avoid as much stress as possible (and there’s plenty nonetheless) by not confronting the many beloved friends and family who will not hear anything but vote blue. It feels cowardly but it feels better than the alternative and I appreciate NC for showing me there are many many people who share my instincts overall and even though I don’t know you, you comfort me… even when we disagree..
My electoral strategy is to get out of the country for October and November. I get entirely too much “but what about voting?!” from those around me, and I simply tell them I’m not.
I left my ballot blank in 2012 and voted for Jill Stein in 2016. I confess with chagrin I voted for Biden in 2020, not because I had any illusions, but because I decided I couldn’t deal with another four years of hearing about Trump non stop. Well, that didn’t change, but it is easier to tune it out. There are more important things going on.
I applaud voting for Jill Stein. But because she isn’t going to win, I’m not changing my travel plans.
You and me both. Thanks for the commiseration. if we are crazy, at least we have company……
She can’t win because if she does, they’ll move heaven and Earth to make deny her victory and probably kill her before inauguration.
But every radical change is impossible until it happens. Meanwhile actual existing socialist countries and anti-imperialist countries are getting on, getting hypersonic missiles, and actually successfully fighting the West and Israel. But they don’t read Chomsky or Trotsky. They read Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Stalin, Mao, HCM, Castro…
Just remember leftists that if you ever get into power, immediately take over the security apparatus with your own people and purge the rights elements, then identify allies within the military and do the same ASAP. If you’re don’t do that, you didn’t have a prayer.
Look into the reason why you don’t know that Shiva Ayudurrai is running for President. For people impressed with credentials he has 3 degrees from MIT. At age 14 he turned into digital code the mechanical and telephone messaging system and paper interchanges used by multiple offices turning messages sent to individuals into the email system we use today.
By the time Trump is inaugurated, if he is, we won’t be in any position to dictate terms. But, stopping the cash (supposedly 10 of the 60 billion is cash) would collapse the Nazi government almost immediately. The really privileged elites in Ukraine have prepared escape routes well planned, I’ll bet. Better do it sooner than later, because Kiev is going to be a difficult place to escape from. No air travel, vulnerable train lines.
Meh. Trump is going to be in prison by next January.
Presuming he is allowed to serve from jail, what makes him think he will have any control over the situation? Kiev’s surrender terms will be dictated by Russia, and as you say, if he tries to force terms on the Ukrainians then the blob will cry “Russian agent!” and undermine him, the way they did when he tried to pull out of Syria.
” Trump is going to be in prison by next January.”
How? What case? This Manhattan trial? Please.
Ha, though, had a conversation with a friend about an idea for a new sitcom, “Trump in Jail”. It could be awesome.
On any available pretext.
This assumes that he will not prevented from drawing breath by then. The fear and loathing among the operational elites who oppose him feels homicidal to me. When “our democracy” is at stake anti-democratic means in its defense are fully justified⸮
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why hasn’t Trump been Boeing’ed/Epstein’ed? Suicide would be way too suspicious, as would the Wellstone small plane trick. But he’s old and fat. A “health issue” wouldn’t be too hard to scare up and they could pass it off with a straight face. It can’t be that they’re seriously afraid of the MAGA/Q people. Do they really think lawfare is their best option? Are they saving that card for if/when the legal options are burnt through?
Smart people know that whatever they do will likely be done to them. Trump is still a peripheral member of the class of Real People. Having him killed would likely make killing people just like them become more likely.
Not that our ruling class is very smart, but they do have some sense of self preservation. However, if Trump wins the election…
Because he is in on the scam. They are all laughing at us.
Then it will be Civil War by next January then.
Sic semper tyrannis
I don’t think that .44 derringers are still in fashion. More on point, less snarkily, I do not think that anyone is quite ready for a real war that soon as the last one took several years of steadily increasing lawlessness and violence before Fort Sumpter.
Just who is going to have both the courage and the desire to defend the current regime? There might be some people who would be willing to defend the Republic with its Constitution and the Bill of Rights with the centuries of history, thought, and actions. But the current regime run by the corrupt, greed-is-good, laws-for-you-but-not-for-me, socialism-for-the-wealthy-but-poorhouse-for-everyone-else, narcissistic, genocide supporting, lying liars? What do you think?
There are fools who are gladly taking a paycheck to abuse others into fearful obedience, but once it starts getting dangerous, will they stay around? I am not too sure about the people having the energy to fight, but I am pretty sure about the cowardice of the regime’s various gendarmeries.
One of the reasons for wanting soulless mobile AI Death Machines is to not to need the support of the population to stay in power.
However, too many people do want the whole world to burn.
During the American War Between the States there were draft riots, the famous one being in New York city in 1863.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots
These happened because the Northern Government instituted a draft, generally comprising of the “lower classes” of the time to fight in the war. The South did similar measures as the war ground on.
There is nothing to preclude the extant Government of the time from instituting some sort of conscription. Supply a cadre of trained officers and your mob becomes useable. One of the worries of the American Founding Fathers was that the establishment of a standing army would create a caste of ‘Warriors’ who could then be cajoled, bought, and otherwise suborned into serving the interests of a clique.
Remember, the armies of the Roman Civil Wars were generally already trained military units who just happened to be following different commanders. As long as they were paid on time, they cared little for the political differences between the competing elites.
So, the important thing to keep an eye on is what attitude the Army takes regarding domestic politics. So far, America has been lucky. The Army has stayed in barracks on the whole. (Kent State was a group of National Guardsmen. Not formal Army units. Now, if the students had started to shoot back….)
There was plenty of resistance to the draft on both sides, but the core of both’s sides militaries were committed to being there or at least believed that even if they did not want to fight or die, it was still a worthy cause or at the very, very least, their leaders were worthy of being followed.
There were plenty of generals who were killed, injured, or crippled as they were often in or right behind the front. Colonels died routinely being as they led from the front, which is a reason why they could get Union and Confederate soldiers to fight for years in such horrible places as Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg.
So, yes, people will often fight for pay, but only to a point. If the military and political leadership is feckless, and America’s are such, it is going to be a real problem especially as the military already has a manpower problem.
Will it prevent a Colonel Kilgore from sending in the helicopter gunships? No, but he might have nobody following him.
By the time of Vietnam, you had officers commanding from helicopters flying over their troops in relative safety. Sometimes they would be ordering their troops to move it fast when those troops would be faced with impenetrable elephant grass. It was not unknown for some of those helicopters to return to base with bullet holes in them that were not from AK-47s. If I recall correctlty, NATO doctrine requires officers to command from the rear in safety and that is how the Ukrainian army is fighting.
Yep. Or rather, lots of domestic terrorism. I still don’t see any real way for a civil war to be initiated and executed. Where would the boundaries be drawn? What is more likely is the whole country coming apart because of something like Pro-Israeli forces committing a massacre of students in a place like Austin or Philadelphia. But that would just begin a period of martial law. Now, that could create a civil war! But I still don’t know how that would proceed.
>>Yep. Or rather, lots of domestic terrorism. I still don’t see any real way for a civil war to be initiated and executed. Where would the boundaries be drawn?
Bleeding Kansas…
The American Civil War was not entirely sectional. There were Confederate sympathizers in the North called the Copperheads and large numbers in the South were anti confederate in places like the Free State of Jones and what is now West Virginia.
I suspect that the likely future conflict will be even more mixed. Most Americans after all do not like our current leadership regardless of our ideologies. Left, center, or right, most of it is feckless with the lack of competent leadership as the biggest problem we have.
“Most Americans after all do not like our current leadership regardless of our ideologies.”
Jay Gould would say that you can always hire one half of the poor to kill the other half. If that fails, you can always claim that the other half is Anti Semitic, etc, etc, thanks to identity politics.
I did not follow it closely, but a very strong feature of the wars after the fall of Yugoslavia was the lack of clear geographic clustering of the various ethnic group, Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Bosnians, and Macedonians (I think I might even be missing a group). Maps at the time showed that. So it’s not a requirement, sadly.
We have largely large in population blue cities mainly on/near the coasts, dependent on red areas for many supplies. The red areas could easily inflict a lot of pain on blue cities by withholding resources or even a blockade if the military stood aside.
Another historical example (and a very grim one) would be the dissolution of the Russian Empire and the Russian Civil War, starting right after the February revolution. I don’t even pretend to understand the thing in all its complexity, but most of the fractions did not follow the preexisting borders.
There are precedents for civil wars without any specific geographical or ethnic distinctions, some are just based on ideas. The Irish Civil War 2021-2023 as an example. The ‘pro-Treaty’ side was largely the urban and rural establishment, with the actual combatants mostly working class. the ‘Anti’ side was mostly made up of what you might call the lower middle classes. There were some minor geographic concentrations – the south west of the country was more anti-treaty, and the original strategy was to try to create a defensive line separating the south from everywhere else – but most casualties were in the main cities.
Unless I missed some contemporary news I think you mean 1921-1923. But it has been lots going on the last couple of years, so it would have been easy to miss :)
I knew a boy in high school who bragged of a plan to take over the Atlanta pizza market. He was
convinced that he could do this through various marketing and advertising schemes.
After working at his plan for two years and spending all of his family’s money, without
opening a single pizza parlor, he turned to robbing pizza joints. At first he stole the
tip jars, then later used a derringer he bought in a pawn shop for holdups. In the end he was caught because he always drove the same car get away car (or rather, his wife did). At his trial he was asked why he did it and he explained it was because he made the best pizza.
‘Florida-adjacent Man’
America needs more self-starter entrepreneurs like that guy
Indeed, I’m impressed my his Innovative skill set.
Classic entrepreneur. “Break things and move fast!”
‘And let everybody else be stuck with the job of cleaning up what you broke.’
Thank you. That was well told and hilarious.
Trump could push The Button over Ukraine and Team D, the spooks and the MSM would howl “Putin Puppet!” in chorus and besides, Biden would have pushed it sooner and better.
There will be no Trump peace plan. Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated.
Is Trump really willing to accept Ukraine’s neutrality and declare that NATO’s move est is done, over?! I don’t think so.
Trump made no efforts to expand NATO during his presidency, whether in Ukraine or anywhere else.
He didn’t recant G.W.Bush promised made in Bucharest 2008 to expand NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia and also started shipping weapons to Ukraine big time, which Obama did not do.
@Roland, Maybe not but he sure tried to overthrow a democratically elected president in Venuzuela and replace him with a US puppet and he, more than anyone, upped the rhetoric against China – including blaming them for Covid. Furthermore, Trump basically told Israel to keep going but to just be more secretive about the slaughter.
It is a joke to try to portray Trump as a man of peace.
It is a sad reflection on the state of the U.S. that our main choices in November are Trump and Biden.
The red party wants Oceania to be at war with Eastasia, the blue party wants Oceania to be at war with Eurasia.
The bi-partisan compromise is war against both.
It’s a world of slaughter
A world of tears
It’s a world of dashed hopes
And a world of fears
There’s so much that they’d rather not share
That it’s time we’re aware
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small, small country
There is just one chosen people who loom
They need more living room
And a bulldozer means
Foreclosure to ev’ryone
Though the dogma divide
And to think they could live by the tide
Instead of side by side
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small, small country
Oh my what a handsome fella, Fergus is obviously well loved and cared for.
And the photo is gorgeous. Makes me miss the Southwest.
You could almost turn that image into a painting and parts of it already look like one. And Fergus makes it look perfect.
Splendid photo in its own right. And as a paean to a fine artist I’d yet not seen.
Reminded me of this, as well, especially the colors at 4:05 and use of angles at 5:55
Stunning photo. Brilliant color with impressive play of light and shadow. Well done.
Beautiful kitty, too!
I love me a big orange pudding. Fergus looks rather content.
Nice cat, Robert P., thanks for sharing.
China?
Arnaud Bertrand: “This is actually quite funny. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI)…”
There is actually something even funnier than what Arnaud talks about in the AEI report and it’s in plain sight…that US annual “defense” spending is a mere $742.2 billion. Even conventional number crunching take that figure higher, and more nuanced analysis might put it closer to $2,000 billion ($2 trillion) but it’s really hard to say either way with war and aggression and national security/surveillance/censorship/propaganda spending now classified as a state secret that us plebians are not allowed to know.
Until we have our citizen freedoms and constitutional rights restored and are allowed to know what forces loyal to the American Regime are doing and spending with our taxes (and Fed money printing), it is probably prudent to assume at the higher end like $2 trillion.
Until we are allowed to know the facts, saying US defense spending is only $742.2 billion/yr is like saying inflation and the cost of living is only about 2-3% a year.
A big question is how much of that has ended up in the offshore accounts of congresscritters…
You have to read the Simplicius piece in full to get totally enraged, or just dumbfounded by all this. Here we are, after having spent all of this money, year after year, and it’s becoming obvious that we did it all wrong, and correcting it could take a decade or two, at least. Matt Gaetz grilling Lloyd Austin about the F35 is something, because, it’s a problem that some have known about for years, but it just keeps on getting worse. It’s a program that costs us trillions just to maintain the things, let alone gawd knows how much to make them, and the air force has admitted that they are only 29% combat ready! And that’s a hypothetical one month in and out Mission Accomplished war our great leaders are planning for, not the attritional grind of something like Ukraine. But, we can’t even use it anywhere near the Ukraine conflict, because the 29% will be shot down quickly today, if they even make it up in the air, because the support and logistics to get them there will be destroyed pretty easily.
The British touting the Challenger III this week after the dismal performance of the Challenger II, which literally sank in the mud, it’s so heavy, just tells me we have a western elite that’s just going to get us all killed after they starve us and put us on the street.
https://open.substack.com/pub/simplicius76/p/rusi-report-quietly-validates-russias?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3ib01N
Yeah the F-35 is a problem all over. Norway do not have the technicians to maintain its fleet, and so has to fly in contractors from Lockheed to keep them operational.
It’s all too soon to judge. DoD’s cost plus contracts may ultimately be adjudicated to be ‘the’ reason for a surprisingly quick and peaceful conclusion to the an American empire. Imagine the Mines of Moria scene from LoTR movies when Gimli reads from the big book…
“We just sent Moldova the rest of our munition stock last week. More should have been delivered 6 months ago and General Dynamics is waiting for legal clearance to use a Chinese made part to fix the widget tooling assembly. They promised to ramp up production by 50 percent by in two years… There’s a rumble at the gates…horde of elderly women in pink…
No one wants to open a new 155mm shell factory cause the contract is fixed price. So it seems someone finally tried to put their foot down.
Also, last year a report by the Pentagon, and another by the GAO stated that sub-contractors weren’t getting paid. Some had gone months without receiving a check. Raytheon and friends just take the cash and…?
Buy back stocks.
“There’s a rumble at the gates…horde of elderly women in pink…” LOL ……. a1000 Grandmothers…
I think F-35 airframe contracts fixed price incentive. The F135 engines are procured separately. Couldn’t find an answer, but wouldn’t be surprised if the weren’t also FPI. Of course there is also R&D for Block 4 and that may well be on cost type contracts.
They did reach acquisition milestone C in March, so approved for full rate production.
“…just tells me we have a western elite that’s just going to get us all killed after they starve us and put us on the street.”
Of course. The sociopaths who rule over us would annihilate us all before they give up their power.
The elites think that AI and robotics has advanced enough that they have solved the problem of: “who ya gonna get to do the dirty work if all the slaves are free.” They think they don’t need us anymore. So how are ‘they’ going to get 7 billion people to line up holding their children’s hands on the sides of the pits? ‘They’ won’t. Look at how many billions lined up to get the covid jabs that don’t even work.
I’d suggest this is a consequence of the “iron law of competition.” Capitalists in a free market reduce prices to gain market share, so profit gravitates toward zero. To counteract this trend, and since profit guides their management decisions, the C-suite guys adopt several strategies. For example, they buy out their competitors to dominate the market. Oligopolies and monopolies are price-setters, not price-getters, so they can dictate their own profit. Biden is beginning to enforce antitrust law to howls of protest that are understandable in light of this “iron law.”
Alternatively, they lobby to spend more on unproductive, but profitable enterprises. The military, with its cost plus contracts, is a prime example. Producing very expensive, elaborate, but finicky weapons is a consequence (F35’s). See the difference between the M16 and the AK47. The latter is reliable even in dirty combat conditions, the former is more expensive, and fragile.
Why are Russian weapons defeating US/NATO weapons? Because they’re purpose-built, not profit-built…even though the Russian military budget is 10% of the US military budget. And if you think the US and its lackeys don’t provoke conflict to justify these massive “defense” budgets, I’ve got some swampland to sell you.
Marx said “The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.”
https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categories=survey#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTksInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDNdLCJkYXRhIjpbWyJjYXRlZ29yaWVzIiwiU3VydmV5Il0sWyJOSVBBX1RhYmxlX0xpc3QiLCI1Il1dfQ==
April 25, 2024
Defense spending was 56.1% of federal government consumption and investment in 2023 *
$994.7 / $1,771.7 = 56.1%
Defense spending was 21.0% of all government consumption and investment in 2023
$994.7 / $4,745.1 = 21.0%
Defense spending was 3.6% of GDP in 2023
$994.7 / $27,360.9 = 3.6%
* Billions of dollars
Gore Vidal had an essay several decades ago (can’t find it on line at the moment) arguing that 90% of federal spending was for military purposes. Set aside the post office and social security, which are administratively and financially separate from the rest of the government. Then add, in addition to the official ‘defense’ budget add the ‘black’ budget, plus what the Dept of Energy spends on nuclear weapons, NASA spends on secret space launches, Dept of State spends on espionage and providing cover for secret activities, the DEA, most foreign aid which goes to allies to purchase weapons, and a hundred other lower profile programs (School of the Americas..) with budget lines scattered through all federal agencies. Include what is spent on political repression at home through the FBI, prisons, and police, and it is easily the overwhelming portion of federal discretionary spending.
Yes, but as has been noted here on NC, most of the money stays in the U.S., either as direct pay to the military or to various companies that manufacture the weapons etc. It’s our version of a jobs program.
“most of the money stays in the U.S.”
However, it became more apparent during the later military overseas adventures that a good deal of outsourcing and use of immigrant or foreign labor now occurs.
Vijay Prashad and Dimitri Lascaris discuss the rise of Neo-Fascism in the West
I wanted to link this today as I never tire of listening to either of these people, especially Vijay Prashad, who never fails to explain complex and troubling topics in clear ways. His explanation of Neo Liberalism is an excellent example.
I think he says that the US defense budget is actually $1.5 trillion.
But I could be mixing that up with one of several other good interviews I watched yesterday.
Whatever, this one is a keeper. I may watch it again, but I have twenty links from today and it is impossible to keep up.
I was always a fan of Gore Vidal.
THIS!!!!
Not only us plebians, but intelligence spending is also kept secret from most of Congress.
In case you still wonder who is really in charge.
> In case you still wonder who is really in charge.
I read that the US government is run by inbred ivy league frat clowns. Truly, it is one of the few explanations that make sense.
I shot the wirehair pointer puppy
But I didn’t meet with Kim Jong Un, oh no, oh
I shot Cricket
But I didn’t meet with Macron, ooh, ooh, ooh
Yeah! All around in my home town
They’re tryin’ to track me down, yeah
They say they want to make me feel guilty
For the killing of a puppy
For the life of a puppy but I say
Oh, now, now, oh
I shot the puppy
(But I swear it was in self-defence) oh no, oh, oh, ooh
Yeah, I say, I shot the puppy oh, Lord (and they say it is a political offence)
Yeah, yeah! Hear that
The left always hated me
For what, I don’t know
Every time I write a book
They said kill her Veep intentions, she has to go
They said kill them before they grow, and so-and-so
Read it in the news!
oh, Lord!
But I swear it was in self-defense
Where was the book editor? (Ooh, ooh, ooh)
I say, I shot the puppy
But I swear it was in self-defense, yeah! (Ooh)
Reflexes had got the better of me
And what is to be must be
Every day the bucket a-go a-well
One day the bottom a-go drop out
One day the bottom a-go drop out
I say
I, I, I, I shot the puppy
Lord, I didn’t meet with Kim Jong Un, no
I, I (shot the puppy)
But I didn’t meet with Macron yeah
So, yeah
I shot The Sheriff, by Bob Marley and the Wailers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG52YAe8Crg
Excellent.
Link for Fresh Insights on Income Mobility From 2005 to 2019
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/05/movs.html
“Amid Unprecedented Air Defence Challenges, Israel Makes Unusual Decision to Retire Patriot Missiles: Friendly Fire Issues Cause Concern”
On the bright side, the US can arrange to have all those Patriot batteries packed up and sent to the Ukraine to show everybody that they are “doing something.” It might even shut Zelensky up for a day or two – but don’t count on it. Bonus points with the fact that the Ukrainians do not have to worry about friendly fire from those Patriot batteries as they have hardly an air force left. If it is flying over Kiev, then it is almost certainly Russian. Tough luck for those countries that spent billions buying this junk though-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Operators
Seems like they learned a lot about US missiles.
https://m.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-799335
Raytheon’s new slogan – ‘Patriot missiles. Putting the miss in missiles since 1984!’
Little known fact: Jeff Baxter, session musician and sometime member of Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers was one of the designers of the patriot system.
https://now.northropgrumman.com/from-music-to-missile-defense-the-very-interesting-life-of-jeff-baxter
I seem to recall the Patriot system were found lacking even back in 91 when trying to shoot down Iraqi scuds.
In 30 years Raytheon has probably introduced tens of update packages called Block-12 Kill Capacity Extender or Block-15 Superior Freedom Defender.
I think, or recall reading, that Patriot still suffers from a fundamental design choice of the launch platforms having to be close to the radar and shoot over it so the radar can capture the missiles (for guidance) within a short window after the launch. Which is tactically very limiting for an area defense weapons system.
Infamously so… near 100% interception claimed by US military-media at the time. GAO report in late ’92 assessed 9% interceptions at best with the real number probably being zero.
Hey, you stole my link! /sarc
Two out of eight, that’s .25 and it’s abysmal. Back of a napkin style: if you want that, say, only one in ten missiles would leak, that’d be log(.1)/log((1-.25)) ~= 8. Eight interceptors for every incoming target.
Reg: If you want to join the People’s Front of Judea, you have to really hate the Patriot Missile System.
Brian: I do!
Reg: Oh yeah, how much?
Brian: A lot!
Reg: Right, you’re in.
That’s pretty much an admission, along with radio silence and no counterattack, that Iran won that short missile war a month ago. Unfortunately, the evil crazies are still in charge in Israel.
Getting rid of all those Patriot batteries is them saying ‘Well, we had better not try something stupid like that attack on one of their Consulates. They actually shoot back! Is that even allowed?’
Intriguingly, Professor Marandi just brought up in this interview at 11:50 ( https://youtu.be/cxjXuREgCek?si=k1MA6jCB6TjX5OXD ) that Iranian intelligence reported that over 50 Israelis were killed in the Iranian strike.
You can bet your bottom shekel thst is where these Patriots are going.
Aren’t these Israeli export systems PAC-2, not PAC-3 MSE? No doubt they want their money to go to David’s Sling.
«Simpler if animals incorporate, then they get the bennies of being people. No arguments about intelligence, self-awareness, feeling pain and all that.»
Vintage snark!
What bennies, of general applicability, would personhood (that perverted Citizens United notion) demand?
“All people are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Are Palestinians or Houthis or First People in Canada or pick a “disfavored group” of one’s preference, are they “persons? Favela dwellers in Argentina?
What forking bennies accrue to “people as a category?”
Biggest Bennie that could be provided to “animals” (like Palestinians, and pretty much all the rest of humanity, in the worldview of the forking Zionists, where “YHWH CHOSE US, IT SAYS SO IN OUR TORAH THAT WE WROTE”) is that once-current penumbra from the Bill of (Choke) Rights is “to be let alone.” In a world of greed and impunity, how the fork is that going to become “policy?” Where “policy” any more is not what the chimaerical “government of laws” ought to bring forth for the common good, but what corrupting wealth decrees. The best laws money can buy. And until something big breaks the gears, “the ratchet only turns one way.”
And of course animals-as-persons will need “guardians” to “protect their rights.” Ask a Native American how that inevitably works out.
The right to arm bears.
The new sharks of Wall Street…
😍
They already call themselves Bears and Bulls.
And all around a new take on “animal spirits.”
Alternate link for “Campus protests over Gaza war hit Australia” article at-
https://www.voanews.com/a/campus-protests-over-gaza-war-hit-australia-/7596352.html
This was the one I mentioned in a comment yesterday that a Zionist Karen wrapped in an Israeli flag went there to try to stir up trouble. The Australian Jewish Association is outraged by all these protests and is saying that Jewish students don’t feel safe, that antisemitism is on the rise in Unis, etc. with Sky News giving them a platform and mentioning all the usual slurs plus a few new ones-
https://twitter.com/AustralianJA/status/1786704861888987319
Caitlin Johnstone in a tweet (I believe, because I can’t find it in my over-flowing folder of her writings) said something like this, I’ll paraphrase and I hope I do it justice:
And of course the Hasbara fails to mention the Jewish students involved in the protests.
https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1786728771938394315
Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz
Israel’s Defenders Talk So Much About Feelings Because They Can’t Talk About Facts
The Guardian has an article out, titled “Israelis voice sadness and defiance over Gaza protests on US campuses”, subtitled “People in Jerusalem express little sympathy with anti-war demonstrators, with some accusing them of hatred for Israel”…
8:05 AM · May 4, 2024
Thanks, I saw that, it is the same tale in longer form.
It boils down to the pithy quote I paraphrased. It was a quite short tweet.
I never have too much of her writing.
The blowback to the response to those campus protests is just starting. There was a vote of no confidence for the president of Emory yesterday, and seventy five percent of the faculty voted against him. The student body votes in a couple of days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it2tkeAdgbI
What are those Jewish associations going to do when all of their allies get voted off the island?
The logic of the modern American university administration is truly perverse. The endowments for top tier schools are enormous. If they just cut the admin staff numbers and inflation adjusted compensation to 1990 levels, they wouldn’t have to charge tuition at all.
Yet these college presidents are entirely judged in how much fund raising they can manage from evil men like Kraft and Kushner’s felon daddy. Fire them all. Fire everybody associated with them.
Then hire some adjuncts into tenure track positions with the savings and get back to actually teaching kids.
Always wondered what Apple would do with all the cash they are sitting on….
I also wonder if this is a sign that they know the billions from Google are going to dry up once the trail is over.
They should have clipped at least $10 billion from that $110 billion to spend on research and development. You have to wonder if Apple will be still around in 20 years as all their fanbois & fangoils age out and start looking for the next thing.
The only thing they’ve got is bribing the government to ban their competitors from the marketplace. They can do that in the ‘garden’ while the ‘jungle’ dwellers move onto Huawei and Xiaomi devices.
You would think that with the current high interest rate environment stressing any company with significant corporate debt, they would hold cash and wait for buying opportunities when other companies comes under stress. But perhaps they have inside information that mortal persons like me aren’t privy to.
They goosed the stock price of Apple about 5%, boy howdy!
They upped the dividend from a smaller pittance to nearly a small rounding error on the quarterly statement of cash flows. These tech corporate behemoths are cash machines and given how sticky yields continue to be on shorter duration UST bills and notes, it’s as though the margins are bumping higher even with the lackluster quarterly change in sales ( mostly specific to Apple’s report ).
Just waiting to see how the next gen of Iphone X, Y or Z gets received…
An update from Dartmouth: Professor Annalise Orleck’s bail conditions have been changed so she can teach on campus. She is still banned from the green, Parkhurst(admin bldg), and the President’s house on Webster Ave.
Former State Department director cancels Dartmouth event due to protests
Snips: “On May 1, former State Department director Josh Paul canceled his Dickey Center for International Understanding event due to the College’s response to encampment protests that night, he wrote in a post on LinkedIn. Paul — who resigned from the State Department on Oct. 17, 2023 in protest of the Biden administration’s military assistance to Israel during the ongoing conflict in Gaza — was scheduled to participate in an event on May 2 titled “When American Diplomats Dissent” with former State Department career diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, Paul said he still attended meetings with faculty and students on May 2 and May 3, including two classroom visits, a meeting with Dartmouth Student Government representatives and a meeting with the Dickey Center’s War and Peace Fellows.
…
Paul said he arrived at Dartmouth on the night of the protests and immediately saw “riot police with truncheons [grab] peaceful protesters out of the crowd.” He added that a staff member told him that College President Sian Leah Beilock requested the police response.
“In light of that, I just thought that it wouldn’t be appropriate to go forward with what would appear to be, first of all, an endorsement of Dartmouth’s approach on this,” Paul said. “I also didn’t want to give the administration the ability to turn around the next day and say, ‘We do support this whole dialogue. Look, we’ve just had a State Department dissenter, Josh Paul, here.’””
Commencement season is going to suck this year, sorry to anyone who happens to be getting credentialed this spring. Anybody who’s free for the next few saturdays and can talk in front of a crowd without putting them to sleep should be able to pick up an honorary degree or two. I understand there’s a growing list of vacancies.
Roger Federer is our commencement speaker, and Liz Cheney is getting an honorary degree. I’m sure she loved the president’s (over)reaction the other night.
The tennis star??
Could have been worse. The commencement speaker could have been a spokesperson from AIPAC.
Rev Kev, I figure that’s Liz Cheney.
That will be Biden at Morehouse this year.
That commencement speech should be interesting. Will Joey be telling Morehouse grads they “ain’t Black” if they don’t support Israel’s genocide?
Yes, it should be. The president of Morehouse has been in the news here because of his refusal to disinvite Biden as commencement speaker. One of the students pressed him on the issue of Gaza, and he flat out had to say he wouldn’t answer the question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L11cfFi9QJg
I can only imagine the kinds of questions that Biden will face if he actually shows up.
You say that like any dissenting voices will be allowed within yelling distance of Genocide Joe.
Yes, that Roger Federer.
Graduating students always want to hear from legendary celebrities that can give them insight into success after college.
And Roger is likely growing his after-top-spin opportunities.
Honestly a better choice than most commencement speakers these days. At least he got where he did in life on his personal merits and didn’t ‘move fast and break things’ or spend a lifetime grifting along the DC-NYC corridor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/us/dartmouth-professor-police-protests.html
May 3, 2024
Police Treatment of a Dartmouth Professor Stirs Anger and Debate
A video showing Annelise Orleck, 65, being taken to the ground intensified criticism of the decision by the college’s president to call in officers.
By Vimal Patel
The video is jarring: A gray-haired woman tumbles, gets up to reach for her phone, held by police officers, and is yanked and taken to the ground. “Are you kidding me?” a bystander asks.
“What are they doing to her?” another adds.
Annelise Orleck, a labor historian who has taught at Dartmouth College for more than three decades, was at a protest for Palestinians in Gaza on Wednesday night, when she was knocked to the ground. Dr. Orleck, 65, was zip-tied and was one of 90 people who were arrested, according to the local police.
The professor walked away with a case of whiplash. But a short video clip of the episode flew around the internet, intensifying the debate over the relatively swift decision by Dartmouth’s president, Sian Leah Beilock, to call in police to arrest students and clear out an encampment.
Unlike other campuses where tents were tolerated for days, the police action at Dartmouth began a little more than two hours after the encampment first appeared, according to the college’s newspaper, The Dartmouth, and students who observed the events on Wednesday…
Shame!!!
What job is Sian Leah Beilock going to next? I doubt the Dartmouth students will be too keen on her keeping the one she’s got.
I imagine she’ll fail upwards as they all do, into a more powerful position of authority. She played the game the other night and pleased the overlords. And as long as the board of trustees is happy, that’s all that matters. Worth looking through who they are.
Here they are. Quite the well-heeled group, judging by where they live:
https://trustees.dartmouth.edu/board-members/current-trustees
Thanks, Petal. I think Josh Paul and the campus anti-g protestors are on the right side of history here.
Here’s the latest Netanyahu from Due Dissidence guys. ~15 minutes.
Netanyahu DEFIES Arrest Rumors at ICC, Vows Rafah Invasion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqQvdX612mU
Re: Lots of “allergies” going around
I had to go to the Big K yesterday for cat food. I was the only person wearing a mask. Never have I heard so much coughing throughout the store. Loud, hacking coughs I could hear from aisles away. It’s not cold and flu season here. Allergies don’t cause that kind of coughing, at least not in my experience. I am guessing we have widespread Covid in the community but no one is reporting on it, no one is testing.
Thanks for that rather ominous report, Lena. You can hide infection numbers but you can’t hide the loud, hacking coughs. Of course then you have to think about the other people that you see who are infected but who are asymptomatic. Yeah, wearing a mask here sounds like a really good idea.
I have read it claimed that avian flu is suited to entering through the eyes; I am hoping to get more info on whether that is the case. So masks might be just a reasonable start. I recently got sick from a get together that I thought was covid safe (and haven’t tested positive for covid).
Could it be influenza? Influenza A is showing up in the wastewater in my part of CA out of season, with especially big spikes in Gilroy (a farming area). Covid wastewater numbers here are very low.
Europeans are going to roast this summer because of cleaner air. Oh boy. Maybe RJReynolds could give everyone free cigarettes. Smokes for a safer Europe.
China: “This is actually quite funny…” Arnaud Bertrand
Arnaud thinks it’s funny that the PPP estimates used to paint China as on a military spending spree happens to also inadvertently reveal the truth about China’s economy being larger than America’s, but there is an bigger and funnier boo boo in plain sight, namely the $742.2 billion USA defense figure given in the picture.
Anyone paying attention who thinks America’s defense budget is anywhere near as low $742 billion/yr probably also believes American’s inflation rate is 2-3%/yr just like the Fed says.
American military spending in January through March 2024, was $1.03 trillion yearly and increasing:
https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categories=survey#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTksInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDNdLCJkYXRhIjpbWyJjYXRlZ29yaWVzIiwiU3VydmV5Il0sWyJOSVBBX1RhYmxlX0xpc3QiLCI1Il1dfQ==
April 25, 2024
Defense spending was 56.1% of federal government consumption and investment in January through March 2024. *
$1,030.0 / $1,837.3 = 56.1%
Defense spending was 20.9% of all government consumption and investment in January through March 2024.
$1,030.0 / $4,932.0 = 20.9%
* Billions of dollars
You might have to add in money in the black budgets (plural), money spent on weaponry in other government agencies like the US Department of Energy and then add in money spent on the spook agencies. It may be that the US government itself does not know how much money is really being spent on defence. But it certainly is well north of $1 trillion.
Department of Energy yearly spending for nuclear weapons is ~ $24.75 billion. * CIA spending is only made public at 10 year intervals.
* https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59365
Also not counting the VA budget, which is about 3 times that of the Department of Justice (which includes the FBI).
And I suspect a good chunk of the money is not appropriated but comes from drug running and arms running operations.
Anything that has a personality is a person, by definition, and should be treated as such. Anything without personality is not a person, regardless of what some judges may say.
My cats want to meet you.
Some of the best people I know are critters.
Where there is some overlap, there is also much contradiction. I think the US “right” is as divided and discombobulated by the Gaza issues as the US “left”. The self-contradictions are everywhere. Above all, Trump supporters are opposed to foreign wars and strongly isolationist. I am not convinced Israel is an exception this this for most, especially given their stances on Ukraine.
Exceptions abound on this as with the current (more visible) divisions on the left, but I cannot see the core Trump vote being carried along with another interventionist war to support Israel as the Middle East starts to ignite. Moreover, I think Trump himself is aware of this. His rhetoric on the war has been uncharacteristically cautious, I think because he has taken a better pulse than the media informed on the coast. Recall Trump has been traveling all over the US for months, A/B testing speeches and talking points in front of “flyover” crowds, and will know what is working.
I am referring to rhetoric, particularly election rhetoric. For Trump’s most likely policies in office, its better to look to the likes of Kushner to know what to expect.
I agree with you and I would say there is hardly any overlap at all; the ‘America first’ position that a lot of MAGA-types believe in doesn’t leave much room for sending endless billions of $$$ to foreign client states. It’s basically definitional. Even so, the pro-Israeli AstroTurfers are certainly spinning furiously into somehow shoehorning Israel into there as well; I suppose we’ll see how well that works. Israel getting endless billions of $$$, weapons, political cover, and even US military intervention while MAGA doesn’t even get a border bill for itself, and gets shafted with every other issue relevant to them? I just don’t see how that sort of coalition is supposed to hold.
These divisions on the right aren’t even new, there has been disquiet for decades with many conservatives over Israel. Who can forget Pat Buchanan’s “Gaza is an Israeli concentration camp”? Or Ron Paul’s consternation with US middle eastern foreign policy. What’s new, I think, is that the youth have a newfound disgust of Israel and it’s pernicious influence on America, and that is something that you see in youth on both left and right. The kerfuffle between Candace Owens and the astroturfers at the ‘Daily (Israeli?) Wire’ is quite instructive of that tension. As is the battle over TikTok – that’s where the young get their news, and the various ‘narrative shapers’ are hopping mad and panicky about losing their full narrative control. The really far right youth are listening to people like white Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes, who’s white nationalist ‘groyper’ movement is directly aimed at Israeli and Jewish influence over America. I hear that Musk will be letting him back onto Twitter(!!!).
Its a point that doesn’t mean anything, but drove the 75 miles on Highway 99 again from Visalia to Bakersfield yesterday and not 1 Trump sign.
I saw around 100 this time in 2020, to give you an idea of the dropoff in interest in him in the most fervidly red bastion of California politics.
Of course he shafted Big Ag by slapping tariffs on Chinese imports, and the Middle Kingdom responded by putting huge tariffs on nutmeats, killing any chance of profit for almond & pistachio growers, and destroying the market price.
Right around when Trump was elected almonds were $4.50 a pound wholesale, now they’re 1/3rd of that price!
Interesting. China has been shifting imports of almonds in particular to Spain, and is already increasing production of a variety of nuts in China.
I wonder if they will shift to Iran, Afghanistan, and West Asia. They used to be barred due to US sanctions and chicanery, but that’s mattering less and less now. Cost would be lower and less affected by American intrusion.
Xinjiang also has the dry climate and hot summers ideal for growing stonefruit, but the winters are too cold for pistachios and citrus. The warm winter parts of China are far too humid to grow really good citrus and stonefruit, which requires some water restriction to really sweeten up.
https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2023-12-23/Lucrative-China-Spain-almond-deal-boosts-industry-and-employment-1pKCIIvFE64/p.html
December 23, 2023
Lucrative China-Spain almond deal boosts industry and employment
By Ken Browne
Cordoba – The history of the humble almond goes back a long way.
For millennia, people have believed in their healthy properties and even China’s Empresses drank almond tea to help keep their skin fresh and young-looking.
In modern China you’ll find them in Cantonese soup, almond cookies and in many other dishes across the country.
Who is the biggest producer of almonds?
While the United States may be the biggest almond producer in the world, harvesting over two million tons a year, Spain is second on that list with an advantage that its varieties are arguably sweeter and higher in healthy fats and nutrients than their Californian counterparts…
Game changer
The key to this latest deal is in the detail.
Previously, Spanish producers could only sell processed and packaged almonds. Now, they can export entire shipping containers full of shelled nuts. This allows them to compete with the Californian producers.
It’s good news in terms of more balanced trade too. Spain buys more goods from China than it does from any other country but the trade imbalance between the two nations weighed-in at around 37 billion dollars in 2022.
This new deal allows almonds and persimmons to be sold in bulk on the Chinese market – a step towards a more reciprocal trade relationship, with China promising to open its markets further to European produce in the future.
That even Trump will risk losing the election (and ending up in jail?) by backstabbing his own MAGA supporters over Israel is instructive. Mike Johnson, who according to Trump is now “doing a very good job” as speaker, got bupkis for his voters in his epic giveaway and climb-down on the aid bill, and took a steaming dump all over the people they will need to vote for them. Hasn’t gone un-noticed, that’s for sure. Same as the way Congress will jump like trained monkeys when Bibi tells them that the anti-Israel protests “need to stop”, and the American government will quickly go out and beat up American college kids. Then quick as a dime, they pass blatantly unconstitutional ‘anti-semitism’ laws; the same Congress mind you that is incapable of solving a myriad number of other crises happening in the USofA. All for some foreign middle-eastern ethno-state.
It’s amazing to watch. One thing about GOP voters is that they do often punish their ‘representatives’, unlike the Dems whos voter base seems to vote them no matter what happens, so we will see what effect that ends up having. It would be the funniest thing ever if Trump loses because his America first con-job on his voting base didn’t go according to plan.
Biden is the ‘consistent evil’ to Trump’s ‘inconsistent evil’.
They should have sent half to Ukraine.
RE:Fast food pullback
I can buy a five pound bag of potatoes and make my own French fries for the cost of one large McDonalds fry. I thought one of the strategies behind fast food was to use economies of scale and pass that on to the customers?
I thought one of the strategies behind fast food was to use economies of scale and pass that on to the capitalists?
FIFY
And if done correctly, home made fries are much better as well.
Agree. My mother made the best home fries ever. Of course, in the Midwest, a meal is not a meal without potatoes. Which are not a grain, btw.
And there’s more! Assuming you’ve got the dirt to do so, potatoes are easy and cheap to grow. Now, if I could just learn how to grow cheese burgers.
How the hell are potatoes a grain?
It’s nutritional legerdemain!
Or it’s phantsmagoric
Or somebody’s euphoric
From that veggie we call Mary Jane
I think I last got McD fries about 10 years ago. It had no flavor and was only edible with ketchup. There are way better fast food fries with Five Guys being probably the best widely available option if you are into the homemade fries taste.
Homemade fries are tricky because you need to double fry them to get a non-soggy exterior. The best places to get fries are fancy butcher shops that do food orders. The fries are cooked in tallow and have amazing flavor and texture.
Re. Boris trying to vote without ID.
Oh, to have been the person who got to tell him, NO!
BORIS Surely you know who I am, I’m Boris, the man who got Brexit done.
PERSON Sorry never heard of you, and If I were you, I wouldn’t be boasting about that “achievement”.
BORIS But! I’m Boris!
PERSON Says Here that your name’s Alexander something, something, something……. and it doesn’t matter who you are, you can’t vote without ID.
BORIS Who says?
PERSON Some bloke called Boris.
‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go!’
Cromwell’s words to parliament are pretty much the entire UK population’s frame of mind after fourteen years of Tories like Cameron, May, Jognson, Truss, Sunak, and the rest.
Which is not to say that many have illusions about Starmer’s Labour.
I, for one, have no illusions about the Labour or any other party, they may as well all call themselves The Monster Raving Loony Party and be done with it. I’d go long on pitchforks, but it’s probably safer to go with big tellys.
You say you’re Boris Johnson? You look like a disheveled blowhard with bad hair to me.
So I guess that much checks out, but I’m still gonna need to see an ID.
Not relevant to the above Links but still worth a link–Construction Physics looks at the amazing details of how to make an integrated circuit.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-to-build-a-20-billion-semiconductor
Thanks for that link. In reading it, I was struck by how you would need a trained, dedicated work force of professionals to turn out these semiconductors. Nothing less would do and it is not an operation where you can cut corners. You boggle at the thought of Boeing buying a foundry and then deciding to make “improvements” and making the whole thing more efficient by using ex-MacDonalds workers to do the same work.
Except as the article makes clear when it comes to nano manufacturing there’s no wiggle room for mistakes.
Perhaps if Boeing had to do what the fabs do and discard imperfect copies they would wise up. Binary computers–on or off. It works or it doesn’t. We rightly scoff at smartphones but if you look at all that goes into one it’s a kind of miracle. Now do society all you smart people.
“Kiev has lost over 111,000 troops this year – Moscow”
I think that this was the Russians giving a message. The other day the Ukrainians passed a law to deny citizens living outside the country consular services with the idea of forcing them to return to the country where they could be grabbed and sent to the front. Of course Poland and one of the Baltic States thought this a great idea and started to make noises about helping round up these Ukrainian men and sending them to the Ukraine. A lot of those foreign-based men are angered by this shallow attempt to make them sacrifice their lives for nothing so the Russians announcing that they have taken out 110,000 troops just this year alone will galvanize them to resist this attempt to make them go back.
At least they achieved the hard part, getting out of the country. I still think the biggest downside of that conscription bill was the elimination of any possibility of being rotated out for much needed r&r and family time. You’re starting to see surrenders and mutinies increasing on the front line after that morale killer, and I’ll bet the families back home are starting to think, hey, we signed on to this for what, exactly, while the rich kids are partying in Warsaw and Berlin?
What I’ve heard, but it’s understandable hard to verify, is that the main consequence of that decision has so far been that what used to be (almost) free consular services have now merely become quite expensive (and under the counter, sorta).
In Ukraine service age men can only withdraw $2.5/day from their account until they visit recruiting office “to update their information”. On the other hand, Ukraine is hiring thousands of new border guards, I wonder if it’s to hunt those trying to run, of to replace those that already did run…
The force recruiters and border guards better have a good plan for the day after. I would ask for a Canadian passport to be out of range when the current regime falls.
From the land where
Money is free-speach.
Corporations are people.
Your vote counts.
A group of Republicans has united to defend the legitimacy of US elections and those who run them
Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, is part of an effort begun after the last presidential election that seeks to bring together Republican officials who are willing to defend the country’s election systems and the people who run them. They want officials to reinforce the message that elections are secure and accurate…
https://apnews.com/article/election-lies-trump-republicans-2024-legitimacy-f9b015fb3ead18f5c7b1432415680361
The tables aren’t crooked, the dice aren’t loaded, and the cards aren’t marked… sure, buddy.
Of course elections are rigged. And no need for anything so crude as “bamboo fibers in ballots” or “Venezuelan control over Diebold voting machines” or, for that matter, the entire asinine russiagate conspiracy theory.
“Bamboo?” Are you suggesting the Chinese are behind this conspiracy? Hmm… just who makes the computer-chips for those Diebold machines?
Finster, I think you’re on to something: I’m going to write my senator and alert him to this before it’s too late and we’re all eating Chop Suey and getting our news from the Global Times!
These are the voting machines he’s defending:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/expert-hacks-georgia-voting-machine-in-court-revealing-potential-election-vulnerabilities/ar-BB1h9SUJ
Always a good time for this classic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxd23UVID7k
Working link for:
New Census Project Tracks Geographic and Demographic Aspects of Income Growth Among Working-Age Adults Over Time
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/05/movs.html
(which shows up with AFP Australian protest piece but I could not find it, Rev Kev comments above)
Actually the links title is:
>Fresh Insights on Income Mobility From 2005 to 2019 Census.gov. Very clearly written, and highlights winners and losers.
It doesn’t have a link.
The latest NEW LEFT REVIEW is up online and it has an interview with Sahra Wagenknecht.
Sahra Wagenknecht: Condition of Germany
Interview by Thomas Meaney & Joshua Rahtz
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii146/articles/sahra-wagenknecht-condition-of-germany
Also, a long article by Richard Beck about US foreign policy and the(un)likely prospects for continued US hegemony.
Richard Beck
Bidenism Abroad
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii146/articles/richard-beck-bidenism-abroad
It comes to no conclusions that will be unfamiliar to NC readers. It has a few amusing lines, however.
Forex –
“Ward’s book ends with a near panegyric to Bidenism abroad. ‘America was ready for renewal’, the book’s final sentences read. ‘The world was there to remake. There were at least two more years to get it done.’
“All of this sounds a little psychedelic from the perspective of 2024, particularly the line, ‘The world was there to remake’, a fantasy that gets harder to sustain with each passing year.”
‘We’ — everyone in Washington — are all Baghdad Bob now, it seems.
A long-read, but a must-read imo… thanks.
That’s a great Jack London link and this paean to the the life of the imagination is surely correct that those who want to learn don’t have to be forced to do so any more than we have to be forced to eat. London is making the case for education, not universities.
But surely books alone are not enough and lived life is equally as important just as London himself and many of that era led their own lives of adventure and suffering. For this reason I’d say dial back the Aristotle who got much of his science wrong, and give empiricism its due as well. While vicariously benefiting from the experiences of others we also need to learn how to doubt.
Through reading London and similar works as a youngster, wildlife and particularly the wolf, developed a kind of totemic significance for me. As an adult I’ve spent a lot of time watching wolves and other critters such as grizzlies. Like Whitman “I stand and look at them long and long”, at an appropriate distance through a scope. The experience has only been amplified by education.
~NYPD Officer Fired Gun Inside Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, Manhattan DA’s Office Confirms
Last night Greenwald did a long segment on the NYPD film that was produced (complete with dramatic music) on their planning sessions and heroic take down of nonviolent students in Hind Hall. (Why is the NYPD producing such propaganda?) Along with the bone chilling comments of the mayor and police officials. I couldn’t watch it all (yet), it was so depressing. These people are authoritarians who have completely lost the thread, if they ever had it. Greenwald makes some unforced errors, when he says one can say such things, yes, citizens can, but in my view, not police or mayors who ignore the first amendment.
Post-9/11 “Terrorism” Hysteria Returns With a Vengeance | SYSTEM UPDATE #266
People like that are pretty brave when taking down unarmed, nonviolent students and I think that the NYPD has a budget bigger than many of the world’s armies. But these days you can never tell when blowback will occur. Actually, some times you can tell where blowback will occur. Here is one. Biden has just lost the youth vote for the November elections. For him, it was more important to arm & enable the Israeli genocide than to win re-election for he and his party.
‘For him, it was more important to pay back the crowd that bought him for between five and six million dollars these past forty-five years.’ And counting. Pathetic. He’s always been about Joe Biden. A-holey man.
I believe the NYPD even has a counter-terrorism office in Tel Aviv. Like isn’t that the FBI’s job?
Guess the Israelis wanna make sure the boot comes down when they give the order.
This isn’t a great utube, still a good video of an entitled Karen in meltdown claiming she is the victim… because she was directed by protestors to the protestors’ media liaison tent to have her questions answered. Oh, the humanity. / ;)
Zionist Karens are CRYING Over Campus Protests | Hasanabi reacts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0jH6HhXeRc
Lest anyone here still think that the working class is on their side, look at the enthusiasm with which the throughly blue collar and unionized cops are repressing dissent.
Should cops be unionized at all? Well, that’s really a tough question, but I do think the AFL-CIO should break their own affiliation.
Then there are the police agencies that get training from Mossad.
And one gets the unionized workers in the MIICC who have never seen a war they couldn’t get behind.
Other unions and the unorganized precariat not so much.
Some bearded guy long ago was talking about internal contradictions.
It also enthusiastically supported the Vietnam War (vide the so-called “Hard Hat Riot”). The US working class, by and large, is getting exactly what it deserves.
~The US working class, by and large, is getting exactly what it deserves.
I try to be respectful of the precariat, what they deserve is to have the boot taken off their necks.
However, there are the workers of the boot makers and they can be a different class entirely.
In the US at least there is no such thing as “the working class”–they are in fact much more diverse than,say, the professional (upper-middle) class. Ethnicity, religion, and locality play big roles in the diversity as well as independent thinking some of it highly fanciful some of it highly realistic.
For one hundred years or so, with the destruction of the I.W.W. which was a real threat to them, the ruling class has been been attempting to convince the better paid workers of the working class that they have graduated to the middle class and thus did not need a union. It has been an attempt to erase class consciousness in the US and it has worked, to a large degree. Notice that political leaders have long used the term middle class when the people they were referring to were better paid workers. If they weren’t paid well enough they were called the working poor. Workers (who work by the hour, well paid or not) are the working class. Another trick the owners play is to call a worker some sort of manager and have them receive a designated salary no matter how many hours they work. In recent years with the destruction of US manufacturing where those better paying working class jobs were to be found, this effort has stalled. Bernie Sanders only recently shifted from saying working families (the liberal norm) to saying working class. Notice also that Shawn Fein has resurrected the proud use of the designation working class. Sure, ethnicity, religion, and locality can be posed as diversity, but at the heart of the matter it comes down to what authority one has in their work. With a strong union, some, and much more than the owners want, without it, none.
I was waiting for someone to bring that up.
American workers definitely did not deserve to have millions of their jobs sent overseas, unaffordable health care, runaway inflation etc. I suggest you find a different scapegoat than the working class.
You may be right and I may be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time I let anger get the best of me and judge too many people in one broad stroke.
I just have one question: Would you still say what you are stating here if the American working class were in fact, broadly speaking, in favor of dropping napalm on a dirt-poor peasant population, as long as it elevated them into a comfortable middle class lifestyle and cemented their place in it?
Would that class still not deserve to have its jobs shipped overseas or suffer inflation? Personally, I can think of worse things people might deserve if they had what I described on their conscience.
That wasn’t how those wars were sold to the American working class. They may have been too afraid for their own good, but it wasn’t about cheap goods. Most honestly thought it was about protecting the American way of life as in Democracy. And for the record it was the working class that had their children killed or maimed, not the masterminds who started it, continued it and continue backing juntas in Latin America.
The people who most benefited from the worst policies of the US are NOT the working class. They rarely are.
But that was not actually true, though there was a mighty effort to make it look that way.
I’m genuinely interested in what evidence you have for that claim.
Were the 150,000 construction and other blue-collar workers who took part in a pro-war demonstration on May 20th, after the Hard Hat Riot, shouting, “USA all the way”, “love it or leave it etc.”, just a weird aberration, not representative at all of broad-felt sentiments?
Were they not part of any structural tendency of the working class in the United States to support the Vietnam War, be it for the lucrative jobs in steel, chemicals, automotive, aerospace and so on, or due to folksy pro-military “patriotism” and jingoism, resentment toward any expression of communism or liberalism (in the American sense of that word), vague or virulent racism (“just napalm those gooks”), or a combination of such factors?
None of this is to excuse the Dulles brothers, the Lyndon Johnsons (and yes, the John. F. Kennedys too), the McNamaras, the DuPonts, the Westmorelands, the Kissingers etc. of the world of their primary responsbility for the war. But this canonization of the US working class as by definition perpetual victim strikes me as a lie people tell themselves to soothe cognitive dissonance.
I believe Nixon invited hard hats to the White House shortly after that riot. He wasn’t saying explicitly that this was why he was rewarding them with his attention, but of course everyone knew the score.
Well, they’re the majority and actually do the work necessary to keep our world running. So I suggest we figure out some way to make them care and fight with us.
Well . . . that’s what President Clinton believed. That’s why he supported Forcey FreeTrade and got so many agreements passed . . . . in order to exterminate labor unions by exterminating their industries.
Cops are not and have never been friends of the working class. You appear to have zero knowledge of the labor movement or it’s history. Please take some time to read about police actions against Labor hell any working class organization.
I believe Jay Gould said that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
I was waiting for someone to produce that quote.
A feature of late stage capitalism is that it makes us complicit in our own degradation. I recall years ago reading a long form feature on the foreclosure crisis in Detroit, following the teams responsible for handling evictions. Practically every case was tragic and awful and horrible (in one case only children were living there, their only caregiver having died some weeks or months earlier).
Later in the article, the journalist talked to the eviction workers. It turned out that it was fairly common for them to be called upon to evict a friend or family member. All of them had done it, most more than once.
– ‘Top Ways MAGA and Right Wing Zionism Converge, and Why Smotrich is Embracing Trump’ – Juan Cole
Boy, I sure hope we get a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic majority in Congress in 2024. I know they would end this Israeli genocide that is enabled by Trump and the MAGAs immediately!
Oh wait…
The job of the Juan Coles of the world in articles like this is not to inform. It is to spew forth propaganda for the Blue Team. This article is ridiculous not for what it contains, which is pretty accurate, but for what it leaves out. What it leaves out is ANY mention of Biden, his administration, or Congressional Democrats whatsoever. As the “Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan,” Cole is one of our liberal “experts” on the Middle East. Whitewashing the Democrats’ crucial role in this ongoing atrocity is part of the problem. Even the liberal media and compatible “left” outlets like Democracy Now have occasionally acknowledged their role.
Thank you for the insightful observation.
In defense of DemocracyNow, which they often don’t deserve, they have been covering Palestine quite well for years. And they’ve kept it up to the present, IMHO.
Their piece (linked above) in the first televised interview with publicly resigned State Department Arabic spokesperson Hala Rharrit is well worthwhile.
I agree. That piece is a good one. The plight of the Palestinians has long been an acceptable issue of concern to liberals, one of the few where their “humanitarian” concerns are not used as cover for US hegemony. This makes the servility of the Biden administration and most Democrats even more striking. They are willing to ignore an important segment of their own dwindling constituency to kow-tow to Israel.
You are a little hard on Cole but I agree that up there in Michigan he knows a lot more about the Middle East than he does about America. In fact if there is a difference between Trump and Biden it is that Trump represents a faction–including some of them Christian Nationalists–that have little real power whereas Biden represents a faction that has all the power. No doubt Cole, once blocked from Princeton (I believe it was) by the Zionists, thinks by cranking up the TDS he will keep the Bidenistas off his back.
Which is to say you can regard Charlottesville as clowns with Tiki torches or as the vanguard of a new Nazi movement (with Tiki torches) and the latter is where Pelosi and Juan and many others hang out. In retrospect Biden seems to me at least a lot scarier.
Yes, that is why Cole and similar liberals are so irritating to me in their TDS mode. They ignore the faction that actually holds the power – and on this issue (most issues actually) it is bipartisan. I don’t see Trump providing much, if any, resistance on Israel. But Cole playing the partisan fear-mongering game just mystifies the political reality.
James Bamford wrote a piece on Trump/Israeli collusion on the hacking of the DNC emails. It was never picked up by the M$M for maybe understandable reasons. Trump recognized Jerusalem as their capital and in an another apparent quid pro quo for their recognizing Israel, recognized Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara, something that no one else did. So he would/will be as bad as Biden. Maybe worse, IF that is possible.
Both the D-rats and R-eptiles are in the same club (no offense meant to any animals).
And meanwhile Julian Assange, the world’s most distinguished political prisoner, languishes in a high security British prison.
Re: AI and ‘morality’
OK, I bit. I drilled down and looked at the ‘Supplementary Material‘** where the authors disclose (sort of) how they arrived at their result. They compared 10 AI-generated analytical blurbs against 10 very colloquial, half-literate ‘human’ blurbs, clearly selected for their inferior quality.
Then, based upon respondents agreement to the superior quality of the AI generated syntax and diction, the authors conclude AI is ‘moral’.
My conclusion: AI researchers are not moral.
** Amazed that Springer let me drill down this far!
Thank you for the link. “Quality questions: Which responder seems more trustworthy? Which responder seems more intelligent? Which response seems more rational?..”
Of course an LLM can generate a slick and glib passage.or two. That’s what those models are created for.
RE: Lots of “allergies” going around.
The problem comes when we go from one dominant subvariant to another. For the past several months the dominant subvariant has been JN.1 (a subvariant of BA.2.86). A new subvariant, KP.2, is taking over. KP.2 is a subvariant of JN.1, but it has a special feature that causes immune evasion.
KP.2 has been kicking me around for the past two weeks. If KP.2 is beating me up badly, it will beat up other people too.
KP.2 has arrived just in time for the summer travel season. Summer travelers should expect airport terminals to be full of KP.2.
Get well soon, Roger!
Wishing you all the best.
Watch out for Influenza A. Look at this strange out-of-season spike in Gilroy, CA: https://publichealthproviders.sccgov.org/diseases/influenza/influenza-and-rsv-report. It show up to a lesser degree nearby. Funny that it is in a farming area . . .
This is almost funny as you can imagine how Zelensky would react-
‘Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky appeared on the Russian Interior Ministry’s wanted list on Saturday. The exact offense he is charged with remains unclear.
The ministry’s website says the Ukrainian president is wanted under an article of Russia’s Criminal Code and contains his full name and photograph, as well as his date and place of birth. No data has been released about criminal proceedings against him.
The development comes a day after the head of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, Aleksandr Litvinenko, was also put on Russia’s wanted list.’
https://www.rt.com/russia/596991-zelensky-put-wanted-list/
I think that he will be spending a lot more time in his bunker from now on.
Maybe his dog and Mrs. Z could join him.
– Human pilots face an AI-controlled jet for the first time in a real-world dogfight ZME Science. Dogfights are World War II. Planes nearly entirely face unmanned weapons these days.
Yes. I saw this story on the news last night. It was really played up as a marvel of US technology. As if we are going to send out $90 million remote controlled targets to face swarms of drones and missiles. Who would be impressed with this type of cheerleading?
Gas stoves expose millions in the US to unsafe limits of nitrogen dioxide, and disadvantaged communities face higher risk The agastatude!
Meanwhile, soaring electricity prices, a grid that can’t handle current demand, let alone electric car mandates, brown and blackouts, programmed shutdowns and now we’re supposed to cheerfully give up natural gas for cold houses, cold food, cold showers?
That’s ok, we’re White, so we’ll just open the windows, turn the vent on over the stove, and keep the gas.
All those imputed victims of gas stoves can get a special dispensation, maybe non profits could be established to pay for $100,000 Tesla battery packs for BIPOC people?/sarc
Just did a new kitchen, and the contractor easily talked us into a new gas stove because the electrical work alone to accommodate a new electric stove negated the cost benefit of keeping the old electric. It’s awesome. I’m buying a wok again, it’s so hot. I’ve made it to old age using gas a lot, I doubt it will kill me now.
How did I ever live long enough to grow up? Mom’s and grandmas’ and aunts’ gas stoves and the neighbors’ gas stoves should have done me in. / ;)
I’m so old my grandma had a wood stove, and it heated the house! It did have a chimney.
So did mine! She used to get up every morning at 3am to light the fire to get it ready to cook my grandfather’s full breakfast as he had to be at the pit at 7am to go down and lay the explosives etc.
And we also had one, and my father used it to cook our porridge every morning and to heat the kitchen in the winter. My mother wouldn’t touch it, she used the electric stove that sat next to it.
Me? I love my gas cooktop.
We have a gas stove that has nozzles installed for a conversion to propane. If you enjoy cooking like I do, a flame is hard to beat. It’s possible they want USians to use less natural gas so they can ship it to the EU.
This again? This is just another attempt at causing a moral panic over gas stoves so as to con and trick everyone into going electric so that all the gas can be compressed and sold to Europe.
I really can be slow at times, but while thinking about the failure of the Patriot the thought strikes me that what we are seeing is that smaller nations can increasingly punch above the weight class thanks to electronics.
Because with satnav etc they can now hit at least stationary targets like bases and infrastructure from ranges that would previously need a sizable air force, thus risking expensive to train pilots and their planes.
And the missiles used are so much smaller than planes, that they are in effect stealth weapons. Because the concept of stealth is to design the plane such that the radar return is massively reduced. the B-2 supposedly has the radar return of an albatross. Likely a radar able to pick up a long range missile has to struggle with picking up large birds and even rain clouds.
And things may become nastier still. the Norwegian military has developed an anti-ship missile that can find its target based on optical recognition. Basically it can be programmed ot look for a certain ship shape, and fired in the general direction of where the ship is supposed to be.
Now given that factories and such already use similar tech to spot product defects, it may not be long before those long range missiles can even hit moving targets by spotting them visually.
Air forces may well go the way of the battleship…
And small countries will no longer need nukes to deter invasion. And once they’re off the USD and the NGOs are kicked out, what can the West do to control these countries?
I just wonder if all of the global south are just waiting until whatever the dollar replacement international trade regime goes fully into place, then will announce en mass that they will stop paying the IMF/WorldBank, pay the other dollar denominated debt in local currency, and break patents. If the West doesn’t like it then they can try to pass sanctions in the UN Security Council or go pound sand.
That day will be terrible for me on a personal financial level.. But I will be very happy for it.
Russians are not hiding. :-)
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-burns-gas-into-atmosphere-while-cutting-supplies-eu-2022-08-26/
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/26/energy/russia-burning-natural-gas/index.html
“Why You May Soon Be Drinking Synthetic Coffee”
Probably made out of crushed bugs and manufactured by the Klaus Schwab Coffee Company.
Don’t even think about the creamer or sweetener. :(
Soycaf, a cyberpunk staple.
That said, i recall reading about all manner of “wonderful” coffee replacements that were tried during the WW2 years.
I recall having a comment exchange here on NC about “pea coffee” mentioned in Moby Dick, as well as other Ersätze from the 19th cent. Peas, barley, rye, carrots, whatever, sometimes mixed with some coffee beans for the flavour. Also, chicory is a staple, and at least one store near me sells rye-barley mix. It’s ridiculously cheap but tastes surprisingly better than low-grade instant coffee.
Soylent Cream?
Latte…
https://soylent.com/products/soylent-cafe-latte
The book “Processed People” relates a prewar German who invented a way to turn coal tar into a butter substitute. the first fully artificial food, they claim.
Sounds like a variant on Margarine…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine
Is there anything enjoyable that Herr Schwab & Co don’t want to ruin? / ;)
Schwab will have nothing to do with it. Mother Earth (climate change) willbe making all the decisions.
The WEF is a bunch of technocrat dumbasses.
In Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books, when coffee ran out at sea they made do with water filtered through badly burned toast. At least we had Postum for that emergency.
It feels like we’ll get another grocery store empty shelves panic, sooner rather than later. H5N1 or some other supply chain interrupter. I’m planning for a pantry way overstocked with toilet paper and coffee. Other items may be scarcer.
Yeah, that would be ideal to stop the momentum of the Gaza protests and push everybody back home under ‘public health and safety’. Is it too paranoid to think that COVID was a convoluted scheme to push Joe Biden into presidency? (Yeah, it was probably just a plot to bring down China, haha).
Toilet paper hoarding is the highest priority (time to build up my strategic stockpile after finally using up my COVID stash this winter). At least with coffee, you could go dig up chicory roots and roast them for a coffee substitute.
https://www.avogel.com/products/bambu.php
“Bambu” is already sold in most Commonwealth countries and seems to be Schwab-WEF-free as well as caffeine-free.
Here’s a good morning laugh: “More SM-3 Interceptors Needed After Downing Iranian Ballistic Missiles: Navy Secretary”
If anyone is wondering how Yemen, with a grand total GDP of approx. $3 USD is defeating the US Navy in the Red Sea, take a gander at this:
SM-3 block IB missile production for 2024: 27 units. Cost per round = $12.5 million dollars
SM-3 block IIA missile production for 2024: 12 units Cost per round = $28 million dollars
And these morons want to fight China?
I know the MIC is a grifting paradise par excellence, but it will never stop being astounding just how expensive the US military is, and where the flying f*** all that money goes.
~where the flying f*** all that money goes.
It sure doesn’t go for artillery shells, we know that much.
Just 1s and 0s. It could ‘cost’ 100 times more and it wouldn’t use any more electricity to generate.
I am still waiting for the unveiling of the mighty Houthis hypersonic missiles. Oh my!
I was not familiar with Ed Mell’s work, but Fergus’ lovely photo certainly harkens back to a style I also have known from the hand of his contagious serenity. Thanks.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/17/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
Private equity finds its next bet: college admissions
From Taibbi and Matt Orfalea. utube. ~7 minutes.
Hate Crime Hoax: “Stabbed with a Palestinian Flag for Being a Jew”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTKJus4bUxw
Brilliant.
Not one reporter said, say, you look pretty good, considering you were STABBED IN THE EYE!
Apparently the topic came up in Taibbi’s America This Week podcast with Walter Kirn. I couldn’t listen to much of it. Embarrassing. I looked at the comments on Substack and a lot of people are surprised and disappointed.
The Atlantic did a hit piece on Kirn this week. No matter how much he falls inline on one issue they still attack him for not falling in line on all their issues.
Taibbi’s latest, public excerpt.
The Atlantic Compares Walter Kirn to Donald Trump
The latest “What happened to you, man?” piece goes next-level
Matt Taibbi
https://www.racket.news/p/the-atlantic-compares-walter-kirn
Nothing can beat this Orf classic: Donald Trump is a Dinosaur!
https://youtu.be/LQmbttoxUeE?si=2XX4tXDRZWNHyue6
RE: AI and general crapification
Had to take a short half hour trip today and more or less knew how to get there, but wanted to make sure I got off on the correct exit. In the past I have been able to type “how to get from address a to address b” into a search engine and get good directions very quickly. Today I did it, and the first thing that came up was AI-generated, and it was complete gibberish. The next non-AI results results were no better – search couldn’t tell the difference between the name of the road and the name of a nearby town. Luckily I knew how to get to the general vicinity, so I was able to tell the directions were BS, but had I not known, I would have been driving around to nowhere.
That someone thought it would be a great idea to turn decent IT services into complete crap really boggles the mind. My destination was a used book sale and I picked up a handful, so I at least have some small bit of knowledge not in danger of being bastardized by AI.
nippersdad posted a link in yesterday’s Water Cooler about the recent indictment of Democrat Congressman Henry Cuellar on bribery charges. I thought that deserved more attention so posting it again – https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/05/03/congress/cuellar-indicted-00155977
Cuellar is one of the more right wing Democrats and opposes many of the issues that are supposedly Democrat party core values. He is extremely pro-business and anti-labor, and is also anti-abortion –
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/21/henry-cuellar-labor-unions/
https://punchbowl.news/article/henry-cuellar-abortion-stance-breaks-from-democrats-greg-casar/
In 2020 and 2022 he had a primary opponent, Jessica Cisneros, who actually supported those causes. Guess which one the Democrat party establishment supported?
I’d like to say what an embarrassment it would be for party leadership if/when Cuellar is found guilty, but as we’re aware, these people have no shame.
Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn, Steny Hoyer and other influential Democrats were all in for Cuellar when he was a candidate. There is nothing “progessive” about the party these days.
Pelosi was stumping for him in the immediate aftermath of the end of Roe v. Wade. Yes, even as she and the Democrats were fundraising as the saviors of women’s reproductive rights. It was highly illustrative for anyone who wanted to look. The vast majority of Democrats chose not to do so.
Pelosi even donated a few thousand dollars of her own money to Cuellar.
The WiFi chip on my laptop died and it took longer to fix than usual because the tech I use has had a really bad case of the ‘Flu.
Since I was going to be in his area to pick up my laptop I called a Realtor friend to see if we could me for coffee, no go because he has the worst case of ‘Flu of his life…
I called my Daughter this AM as I do every week, and she’s down with a really bad case of ‘Flu.
So is her SO.
Sonoma County and San Luis Obispo.
Isn’t it kind of late in the year for the ‘flu’?
My co-worker’s have all had C19, some multiple times, and they still have refused to mask until this past week when several of them got it again. Suddenly they are all masking now. We work with the public and they are seniors, and none of them have been masking either. Thanks to Joe Biden, Covid is Over!
“Although the dominant mode of transmission for influenza virus is via the respiratory route, there is growing evidence to suggest that various human and avian influenza viruses are capable of entering the body following ocular exposure.
Influenza infection of the eye may be established locally, manifesting itself in the form of conjunctivitis, or it may spread to the respiratory tract via the nasolacrimal duct, which links the eye to the nasal passages. Influenza viruses which are more predisposed to infect via the ocular route and cause ocular symptoms, are termed “ocular tropic.”
https://virology.ws/2018/03/01/influenza-virus-in-the-eye/#:~:text=Although%20the%20dominant%20mode%20of,the%20body%20following%20ocular%20exposure.
In other words, masks are great for covid, but for Influenza A, eye entry may matter a lot too.
Instead of getting flu shots every year, maybe we should all just wear glasses.
From Long-predicted consumer pullback finally hits restaurants like Starbucks, KFC and McDonald’s
I still recall going for my “free” birthday drink, and being told what to do with myself, because if you don’t visit at least X times a year, they take away that “free” benefit. I guess they got wise to people just signing up for the birthday thing. I haven’t been back since. Must have been 8 years ago? Who knows.
The handing out of the Presidential Medal of Freedom From Prosecution gave the Chief Executive a reason to sniff each recipients hair as he came up behind them on the podium, securing the ribbon that came with each award around their guilty little necks…
Not exactly sure how Pro Publica managed to avoid mentioning Curt Guyette’s groundbreaking investigative reporting about Flint’s water scandal but they did. Knew Curt back in the day when salad figured largely in our menus. He’s an excellent writer.
https://www.aclumich.org/en/news/heres-flint-documentary-flint-water-crisis
There’s grift, graft, crime, et al that runs so very, very deep. The Metro Times started unraveling a scheme to sell Lake Huron water to Michigan’s residents. https://www.metrotimes.com/news/a-deep-dive-into-the-source-of-flints-water-crisis-3399011
“GPT-4 passes Moral Turing Test” Scientific Reports
https://dennymagic.com/best-magic-trick-box/
The 7 Best Magic Trick Box Reviews of 2023
I checked to see if GPT has made the list….
“Long-predicted consumer pullback finally hits restaurants like Starbucks, KFC and McDonald’s” CNBC
“In this environment, many customers have been more exacting about where and how they choose to spend their money, particularly with stimulus savings mostly spent,” Narasimhan said on the company’s Tuesday call.”
Biden still owes people $600. So what exactly is the evidence that the non-wealthy still have ANY stimulus money left? It never accompanies such pronouncements. In a recent interview, even Jamie Dimon gave a shout out to this allegedly large enough stimulus to last millions and millions of people for 4 years.
In short, yeah some did receive and are still getting stimulus and bailouts – enough to fuel inflation, but I don’t think it’s the wage earners that the Fed singles out to target in speeches.
They’ll also save so much money long term by avoiding their unhealthy, HFCS laden offerings. I do miss Starbuck’s crustless quiches. Costco sells them and they were a convenient and tasty household staple. But not going to give Starbucks another cent while they’re still supporting genocide and apartheid.
“Campus protests over Gaza war hit Australia” Agence France Presse
I clicked on the link and it took me to this story:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/05/movs.html/
“Through an interactive data tool, MOVS offers unprecedented insight into general and group-specific patterns of income and household change over time. This sort of detail is rare in existing data, which often relies on survey snapshots in time rather than on data collected by tracking the same people over long periods of time.
Income mobility refers to changes in the income of people or generations over time. It is an important measure of the economic welI-being of various groups and individuals relative to each other. For example, are children faring better than their parents? Is income growth among some racial and ethnic groups lagging others? Do men’s incomes rise faster than women’s?”
More ‘flu”:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/jonas-brothers-postpone-mexico-tour-dates-after-nick-jonas-gets-the-flu-im-not-able-to-sing-at-the-moment/ar-AA1o6Xym
Jonas Brothers Postpone Mexico Tour Dates After Nick Jonas Gets the Flu: ‘I’m Not Able to Sing at the Moment’
Kevin and I got a political divorce, and Fong ghoul, his man Friday-the error apparent is running for 2 different seats @ the same time, what if he wins them both?
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/02/californias-vince-fong-cleared-to-run-for-both-congress-and-assembly/73547755007/
Indiana University Bloomington is having its undergraduate commencement tonight. Overhead, two private planes are flying with banners supporting the Palestinian people. They say “Let Gaza Live”.
An alternative commencement was held in the encampment this afternoon. Students and faculty who were banned from campus after being arrested were able to attend while they appeal their bans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/04/opinion/alexandria-ocasio-cortez.html
Pay walled
I can’t stomach more.
She supports genocide and war. What more could the multi racial working class want or need?
But she’s a brown woman so she can easily dup I guess. Same policies, different look.
Re: Netanyahu is blinded by rage and damaging long term relationships …
That ship has pretty much sailed. There’s no repairing the damage to those “long term relationships” and a whole rising generation will look at what’s happening at universities now, and won’t be looking for any future relationship with Israel.