These Cute, Fuzzy Bumblebees Are Precision-Engineered Pollinators Smithsonian
Climate
Opinion: Climate Doomism Disregards the Science Michael Mann, American Physical Society. From 2023, still germane.
How droughts and worsening soil health can increase carbon emissions Monga Bay
Beat the Heat: How Workers Are Winning Fans, AC, and Even Heat Pay Labor Notes
Norway starts stockpiling grain again, citing the pandemic, war and climate change SFGate
Water
Seventeen manure pits reportedly overflow at large feedlots in southern Minnesota Star-Tribune
Groundwater in the Colorado River Basin will struggle to recover from warming temperatures, study shows Colorado Sun
Syndemics
Feds pay Michigan farms $81M to stamp out flocks infected by bird flu Michigan Live (MN).
Bird flu could survive pasteurization, study finds — The Checkup WFYI
Finland MOH: Target Groups For H5N1 Vaccination Avian Flu Diary
* * * New strain of monkeypox causes miscarriages and spreads rapidly without sexual contact, experts warn The Telegraph
* * * Pandemic Profitability: Understanding the CDC’s Proposed COVID-19 Isolation Guidelines Pandemic Accountability Index. From February, still germane.
“Panel stacking”: John Ioannidis versus a Delphi consensus statement on COVID-19 Science-Based Medicine
China?
‘We’re like gears grinding until they break’: Chinese tech companies push staff to the limit FT
Nixon on China:
I recommend listening to Nixon's post-presidential interviews.
There are lots of things to say about him — Goldwater said Nixon was the most shameless liar he ever met — but he was at the center of key 20th Century events for decades.
Here his explains why he went to China: pic.twitter.com/SputyvV9Ba
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 23, 2024
Myanmar
AA Seizes Thandwe Airport Near Rakhine’s Ngapali Beach, Local Sources Say The Irrawaddy
Yangon parties on in war-torn Myanmar despite tough circumstances Straits Times
India
India faces rising social inequality across religious lines Channel News Asia
Africa
Kenya shocked as protests over finance bill turn deadly in Nairobi Al Jazeera
Internet goes dark in Kenya in the wake of major protests over finance bill TechCrunch
A TikTok revolution? Africa Is a Country
Biden designates Kenya as ‘major non-NATO ally’ Anadolu Agency
Syraqistan
Israel’s high court orders the army to draft ultra-Orthodox men, rattling Netanyahu’s government AP
The Collapse of Zionism New Left Review
India exports rockets, explosives to Israel amid Gaza war, documents reveal Al Jazeera
Antoinette Lattouf’s unfair dismissal case against the ABC to head to trial ABC Australia. Commentary:
ABC sacked me for sharing this HRW post.
ABC had already twice reported this exact @hrw report.
My manager told Fair Work Commission there’s nothing wrong with my post. We’d talked about only posting from reputable sources.
Yet the ABC is tripling down. https://t.co/gk4PJ4Uit5 pic.twitter.com/tkbPdZIsTk— Antoinette Lattouf (@antoinette_news) June 25, 2024
New video and documents revive questions about Saudi role in 9/11 attacks NBC
European Disunion
Negotiators seal EU top jobs deal for von der Leyen, Costa and Kallas EuroNews
Hungary’s allies in the Balkans are sabotaging their EU accession hopes BNE Intellinews
Dear Old Blighty
Is there even a British equivalent for “Hot enough for ya”?
I'm gonna explain to y'all why Britain considers 78°F/25°C hot. I know hot because I grew up in Texas and spent half my life in Las Vegas. So I am absolutely qualified to explain this to the rest of you who laugh at UK "heat waves".
— Josh Ellis (@jzellis) June 24, 2024
New Not-So-Cold War
The complicated restructuring of Ukraine’s debt (excerpt) Le Monde
* * * U.S. Cluster Bombs Kill Russian Children at Beach Matt Bivens, The 100 Days
US military contractors may be allowed to go to Ukraine Ukrainska Pravda
Should Ukraine Keep Attacking Russian Oil Refineries? Foreign Affairs
* * * Zelenskiy orders purge of state guard after assassination plots Reuters
* * * How a Texas Factory Is Emerging as a Key Ammo Supplier for the U.S., Ukraine WSJ
* * * The historical record:
"NO EXTENSION OF NATO'S JURISDICTION FOR FORCES OF NATO ONE INCH TO THE EAST of a unified Germany" – US Secretary of State Baker to Gorbachev, 1990. pic.twitter.com/qEP8J1v3px
— Robin Monotti (@robinmonotti) June 21, 2024
The Caribbean
Biden: International police force will provide ‘much needed relief’ to Haiti The Hill
Our Famously Free Press
Assange
Iraq to NSA spying: The biggest revelations by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks Al Jazeera
The Happiest of Days Craig Murray
After 13 years, Julian Assange walks free Pearls and Irritations
The Wild Story Behind the Assange Plea Deal Spytalk
Assange is Free, But Never Forget How the Press Turned on Him (excerpt) Matt Taibbi, Racket News
The Bezzle
Judge rejects $30B Visa, Mastercard ‘swipe fee’ settlement The Hill
Digital Watch
Mastercard To Expand Digital Biometric ID and “Behavioral Biometrics” Reclaim the Net
The Zeitgeist
“Why Are You So Negative?” Good Question. Here’s the Answer: Real Life Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds
What we got wrong about depression and its treatment Beghavior Resarch and Therapy. From the Abstract: “Nonpsychotic unipolar depression (but not bipolar mania which likely is a ‘truedisease’ appears to be an adaptation that evolved to facilitate rumination in the service of resolving complex social problems in our ancestral past.”
Brain chemistry basics Chemistry World
The Final Frontier
How the Moon is making days longer on Earth BBC (RK).
China’s Chang’e-6 lunar probe returns world’s first samples from far side of the moon Guardians
Class Warfare
The UC Strike Injunction’s Second Fatal Flaw On Labor. Part one.
Denver gave people experiencing homelessness $1,000 a month. A year later, nearly half of participants had housing. Business Insider
How Karl Marx Influenced Abraham Lincoln and His Position on Slavery & Labor Open Culture
You have to work so hard to be poor in America Bracing Views
Computation Is All Around Us, and You Can See It if You Try Quanta
Antidote du jour (Richard Ling):
Bonus antidote:
Tiger Tiger burning bright …forests come alive during Monsoons in India 🇮🇳 🐅 pic.twitter.com/Fo60rLo5Ef
— Prem Mohanty 🏏⚽️ (@philipbkk) June 23, 2024
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
223 comments
Comments are closed.
AULD JOE BIDEN
(melody borrowed from Oro Se Do Bheatha ‘Bhaile [Irish War Song] as performed by The Dubliners)
(A Banshee — “woman of the faery mound” or “faery woman” — is the female spirit in Irish folklore who foretells the coming demise of a family member, usually by screaming, wailing, shrieking, or keening from a distance.)
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
‘Come rest ye in my arbor’
Auld Joe stands with his features frozen
Hears her wail as she says he’s chosen
Crows and owls while the shadows close in
‘Come rest ye in my arbor’
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
‘Come rest ye in my arbor’
The Banshee wails with a lonesome tiding
His future fades as his age is biting
This voyage ends at the dockside gliding
‘Come rest ye in my arbor’
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
‘Come rest ye in my arbor’
Wander off with the woodland faeries
Rest your soul from the weight it carries
Gaze on high to those distant eyries
‘Come rest ye in my arbor’
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
‘Come rest ye in my arbor’
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
Auld Joe hears the Banshee calling
‘Come rest ye in my arbor’
Recently I discovered this category of beings: Psychopomps, and Banshees are in it! Also noting that Old Joe seems to have one foot in the next world already.
https://worldhistoryedu.com/15-most-famous-psychopomps-from-pantheons-around-the-world/
‘Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
I recommend listening to Nixon’s post-presidential interviews.’
And so here we are half a century after Watergate – realizing that Richard Nixon was actually a young, healthy, mature person capable of strategic thought and seeing through the international stage to understand what the vital interests are for the US and having the courage to act on those calculations. Are future generations going to say that Richard Nixon was one of the last Presidents to get consequential results for the US? His environmental laws, getting the US out of Vietnam finally, overseeing man landing on the moon, etc. And if I could go back in time and tell my younger teenage self all this, I would have wondered if we were talking about the same person.
I had a history teacher in middle school (late 80s) who’d created a shrine to Nixon in one corner of his class room. We the middle-schoolers all thought the guy was nuts, but he was nevertheless well-liked: the class ahead of mine made him a t-shirt with his favorite phrase “Nixon: He’s tanned, he’s rested, he’s ready”. I am guessing he would’ve been the first to say Nixon was indeed the last President of consequence for the U.S. (and that’s why they had to take him out!).
One minor life regret was not buying the ‘Tanned, Rested, and Ready: Nixon ’88’ t-shirt I saw in a Key West shop in Spring of 1988. My dad, rest his soul, hated Nixon, was once eyed by the Secret Service after *not* shaking his hand at a campaign rally, so I bought the ‘Die Yuppie Scum’ shirt instead. I’m mostly ok with it, but it now seems a missed opportunity.
Seek and ye shall find-
https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Nixon-He-s-Tan-Rested-and-Ready-1988-by-AstroZombie6669/154344589.XNZKR
In todays political world Nixsons behavior would be normal.
In today’s political world, Nixon would be to the left of both Biden and Trump and would be regarded as a raging Leftie because of his environmental laws. He actually talked to competitor nations like Russia and China which is the same as rewarding them, amiright?
Nixon appeared to present a clear alternative to the democrats. Who knows, he may have learned a lot from Eisenhower.
I grew up, graduated high school 1968, with LBJ and Nixon! In 1972 my first vote was for Nixon.
Back then we had the Birchers, they were loonies. Today US has loonies running both halves of the uniparty stick!
Vietnam was a huge mistake, the loonies wrong.
Ukraine is an immense mistake and these days the loonies won’t be questioned!
If Kiev can grab the Russian cultured oblasts as ‘sacred sovereign rein’ (loonies’ speak) then Beijing has rights to Formosa.
The loonies want the Caucasus, and more!
The default for every issue should be peace!
My first vote was for Nixon. And even though I was always a huge Pauline Kael fan I guess I was one of those people she heard out there in the dark, breathing.
Of course Nixon was bad in so many ways but compared to the things we now know about Johnson and JFK perhaps he had some justification for his “why pick on me?” The truth is that the period was remarkably like our own insofar as the in crowd was picking their preferred winners and losers (the Kennedy cult was off the charts) and the klutzy Nixon was desperately uncool. He may have done evil things–how many presidents can say they haven’t?–but he wasn’t dumb.
“the klutzy Nixon was desperately uncool.”
I think you nailed the problem. Hell, it’s pretty much accepted why he lost to Kennedy, especially after the debates. Kennedy was cool. Dick and his five o’clock beard and sweat was not.
Then he was President in a time of long hair and drugs and bell bottoms and free sex and rock and roll. Made him appear much more uncool. Didn’t help that he legally harassed John Lennon, of all people.
Like Neil Young sang, everyone wants to be cool.
My first vote was for Nixon,1960. He was an excellent foreign policy president. He understood where the political main stream was. As at least one commenter said, today he would be deemed a left wing crazy and when you can say that about a man as viscerally conservative as Nixon you begin to understand how far the political whee; has turned. He was hounded out of office. His words and action and those of his minions did him in. Of course, it was all unnecessary. He was going to win big. That was obvious at the time. His insecurity, his fears, call it paranoia if you will drove the train.
I believe he did learn from Eisenhower, but what he could not learn was the certainty of knowing exactly who he was that guided Ike. I did not think so at the time. I was glad to see him leave office. It was not too many years before his virtues as a leader and the value of his accomplishments came into clearer focus.
Goldwater was correct. He was a great liar. He was a deeply flawed man. He was also the last President who was fully up to the job.
This is my favorite picture of Nixon, learning the joy of fly-fishing from Eisenhower.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2013/02/17/books/review/17SUBSCARBOROUGH2.html
On an otherwise innocent looking wall on Bailey St in uptown Whittier, Ca. is a mural of Tricky Dick in what appears to be his ‘I am not a crook’ look, larger than life. It startled me the first time I was caught unaware.
https://whittiermuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Gazette-October-2016.pdf
I had one of his presidential pics hung on my wall, framed in a gold psinted toilet seat. I wouldn’t waste the paint on any of the current crop.
I stole Richard Nixon’s Sunday LA Times. It occurred sometime around ’74 or ’75 when I was an over fed, long haired leaping gnome and going to uni in Fullerton California. I was up early Sunday morning for a long ride on my road bike and ended up in Yorba Linda where I saw the Nixon Library. It was early enough so that no one was around so I pedaled up to the front door and looked around. It was then I saw the bundled LA Times. So in a fit of anti-war, anti-Nixon sentiment I scooped it up and stuffed it in my back pack and high tailed it out of there. Expecting at any instant to have the notoriously red-neck Orange County Sheriffs on my back. Safely back at my apartment I impressed my friends with the story. I am only confessing this now in the belief that the statute of limitations has occurred.
This is mine: https://time.com/4894301/elvis-president-nixon-photo/
If you read Peter Guralnick’s excellent two volume bio of Elvis, this whole meeting is described in about as good detail as you can get, especially how it happened, which is a hoot.
Elvis, at the time, wasn’t cool.
Somehow the title of Elvis the Narc is not as appealing as Elvis the King.
Look at his eyes. He was really really stoned.
He’s also packing heat while shaking the POTUS’ hand!
I’d imagine such a thing being allowed might have served to keep politicians a little less disdainful of their constituents.
Man, if there was only a photo of the caped King bowling with Tricky Dick in the alley in the White House basement that Milhous had installed, that’d make my day.
I don’t go for the “getting the US out of Vietnam finally” concept. That is, by itself true, but before that he extended the war into Laos and Cambodia as well as doing his best to continue the war in Vietnam. One of his main motivations for continuing and expanding was how the CIA (remember them?) took over the drug trade in SE Asia. Once the N. Vietnamese kicked our behind, we had no choice but to leave. He didn’t “get us out”, we were expelled while he happened to be around. After him, we were off to Central America for it’s coke and then off to Afghanistan for its poppies. Gotta pay them bills and we had CIA mouths to feed.
A sargeant I knew told the story of being approached in Phenom Phen to look the other way for $$$ cash while GI trucks would be rolled away.
By 1973 the corruption was widely known.
Now we have Zelensky playing Saigon puppet with no votes.
Unpopular and corrupt, even US’ vast “horses and men”…
Nixon has to have been the most mixed president in U.S. history. I think that Dickens in his Tale of Two Cities has most appropriate Nixon measure: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, . . .”
Another way of measuring Nixon is to compare what came before (Johnson) and when came after (Carter). Johnson gave us Medicare. Carter gave us terrorism.
Guns, butter and, whoops, don’t worry about impending floating rate currencies and the end of the Bretton Woods era.
LBJ, still loathed by so many.
I’ll admit one thing. All that talk about him being paranoid…what President that close to 1963 wouldn’t be paranoid? Johnson had that southern bluster that may have hid it better.
The year Nixon was appointed apprentice dog catcher, was the year my dad immigrated to the USA and having seen the Nazis and Soviets tactics close-up being a teenager and young adult, he saw something quite sinister in Tricky Dick riding the coattails of McCarthyism and was as far as I knew, his biggest hater for the longest time, his fear and loathing getting going way back.
He was hopelessly too small fry to make on Nixon’s enemies list though, not even an honorable mention.
I doubt anybody else’s father threw an impromptu celebration party on August 9th 1974, as he did.
Nixon was a traitor. Three weeks before the 1968 election President Johnson had a conference call with Nixon and Humphrey telling them that the North Vietnamese had agreed to sit down for peace talks. Nixon had the wife of a general (I think Chenault) who was Chinese go to the leader of South Vietnam and convinced him Nixon would work a better deal with them and to back out of the peace talks.The rest is history as they say as 20 thousand more Americans and 1 million Vietnamese would die before the war was over.
Nixon was smart, I will give him that, and much smarter than the republicans who followed him which makes me thankful that since he was president then that he is not now. A Nixon or someone like him would be the death of the republic – it almost was then.
I’m dulled by covid atm (nine days in) and so may be unable to muster the necessary subtlety. However ffs, Nixon did sink peace negotiations (oh, but he had a plan to end the war) and did escalate in Vietnam and did play the race card against the Civil Rights Act. In the midst of the ensuing wreckage there was OSHA and all that, but his “savvy” politics helped develop the template for Republican pandering to racism.
Nixon was afraid of the liberals of the time (still new dealers though soon to expire) which drove his first term domestic policies. He was pragmatic, but at his core hostile to those policies. In my view. The contradiction for the Dems of the time was their subservience to the MIICC, something that Nixon shared.
Is it maybe fair to think that Nixon “opening China” was like the monkey in the joke about the farmer aiming to win the state fair prize for the fattest pig? Seems he corked up the pig’s anus, and fed it generously Pig got so huge it took a semi and flat bed trailer to get him to the fair. Took first prize, by far. Farmer took him back to the far, and puzzled how to relieve the pig. So he trained a monkey to pull every cork it saw. Farmer invited a couple of neighbors to observe the event, and the monkey dutifully did its thing.
The three woke up in the ER. Doc asked the farmer the last thing he remembered: “A solid wall of sh!t coming right at me!” Same answer for first neighbor. Third neighbor, “What’s the last thing you saw?” Reply: “A little monkey trying to plug up a hole…”
My late father-in-law spent a few years on Wall Street in the early 60s. He noticed that no one would go to lunch with one individual in particular. Curious, he decided to break bread with this man, so as suss out what made him tick, as it were.
He came to the conclusion that he was, as he discretely put it, an a$$h*le.
We still have a photo of my wifes’ father and mother, alongside Richard and Pat Nixon. It is neither framed nor on display.
>Jamaal Bowman loses most expensive primary race ever – BBC
Mr Latimer was supported by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while Mr Bowman was backed by House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, left-wing representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.
I may have missed this from yesterday’s links/stories. I didn’t know HRC was supporting Latimer. I picked up on that in the devastating Jimmy Dore clip below (250K views as of this morning after only 19 hrs posting) which contrast the crowds that Bernie used to be able to bring out with the rally he and AOC had where no one came out.
The emperor’s minions have no clothes either. And, calling Bernie Sanders “Independent” is BS.
https://youtu.be/gFkO2hh7j6c?si=WMVEOGmPeh5yp3fr
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz99x0w65dyo
Saw that video a little while ago and what a difference four years makes. Back then Bernie could draw a crowd of 25,000 people in NY but this time around, he and AOC could not fill a brewery if they offered free beer. One of the people in that video said that there was a crowd but then Jamaal Bowman pulled a fire alarm and they all fled.
The dividends of empty rhetoric.
When you lie down with rats, you will get fleas. This is all that happened.
Hey, do you remember, what, about a month ago when Trump held a rally in, I think, the same spot in the Bronx and the snarky media types zoomed out with a drone and said, look how few people showed up for the Orange Devil! Actually, I thought that crowd was pretty good for the Bronx coming out for him. Well, here we are, and Bernie and AOC are talking to nobody, but I haven’t seen the drone shots in the NYT.
The Dems have some really serious urban vote problems. Nobody is going to get out to the polls.
Here’s a video of the contrast between the rallies – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqrz-IN_0KQ
I’ll grant that this is from a right wing source and likely edited to make AOC and Bowman look as poorly as possible, but still, ranting and raving and dropping f-bombs in front of a tiny crowd probably isn’t the best look for a politician.
Sorry, but a historic analysis is needed here. There have been bottom up movements and mass anger at the system throughout American history. In most instances, there is often successful state and capitalist repression and small crumbs thrown to working people. When there is a systematic crisis, like the Great Depression, there can be structural changes, but only if the radicals are strong enough and living alternative models exist that can scare those in power. I don’t think the New Deal and Great Society programs, for example, happen if the USSR and its system didn’t exist. There is nothing to scare those in power now, and no system or clear model we can organize towards. Plenty exist, but not one guiding a national movement. They put down the uprising and then we get back to the grinding misery of the managed decline that is modern America.
Our “radical left” is basically mid 20th century social democrats. And that is even too much, as we stare down an environmental crisis that is far beyond carbon emissions. The changes we need are radical and comprehensive, and there is not only no mass movement pushing for this, but there is no mass consciousness to even get that started.
An openly corrupt, right wing ghoul won with massive support from right wing front groups, in a primary when a small percentage of people that can vote do vote. It illustrates more than anything how corrupt and dysfunctional this entire political system is. And while Bowman had serious flaws, was he more flawed than the horrible person he lost to? Let’s keep in mind that this is a primary where a very small percentage of voters take part, the pro Israeli genocide crowd is highly motivated to vote, and it’s an open primary.
This country is toast though. We vote on the rate that things will get worse. The left is still weak nationally, so we can choose to slow down or speed up societal collapse. That’s the reality. In many ways, we never entered the 20th century and we likely never will, forget looking beyond mid 20th century social democracy, because the environmental crisis is on us. Bernie in 2016 was a real chance to at least change the trajectory and now many have lost faith in electoral politics all together.
Because people, particularly on the left, have lost faith in electoral politics and the Democratic Party. The hope was that it could be a means to address the many crises facing us, a possible chance to deal with abysmal long term trends. The Democratic Party is actually the biggest opponent to the left in this political system. It faces candidates on the left in its primaries far more than Republicans do in general elections. The Democratic Party is where the left goes to die. It beat back the internal threat and we are back to the corrupt, sociopathic neoliberals, as if Bernie never happened. And we’re 8 years more into an environmental crisis that capitalism simply has no way to address. We have a national housing crisis, a horrible healthcare system and those in power have no solutions to any of it.
(Apologies if this has already been posted.) “…most expensive primary race ever…”
While bowman is certainly no prize, his opponent was recruited and financed by aipac, ostensibly because bowman, as a member of “the squad,” was insufficiently “supportive” of unlimited financing of israel’s Gaza genocide.
https://theintercept.com/2024/05/16/aipac-jamaal-bowman-attack-ads-george-latimer/
There can be no “democracy” in a country where a few people have enough money to buy the “government,” and a “government” that is so willing to be bought.
Thank you. This is the important part. This is what outrages me, and that it is utterly legal.
I really really don’t ever want to hear any of the usual Democrats say anything about Russian interference ever again.
The Democrat Party should fear receiving the Goering Treatment, (the quote is misattributed to him, but, eh,): “When I hear the words “Russian Misinformation,” I reach for my pistol.”
The irony is, Bowman was fairly late to the pro-Palestine party and, up to that point, had been a typical Dem regarding the situation.
And while there’s no doubt the money dumped in the race didn’t help him, making it all about the money lets Bowman off the hook for being such a disappointment to his supporters. Had he not been a typical fraud squad member, the money against wouldn’t have mattered as much, if at all. I agree that the money situation is obscene. But it’s part of the story, not the whole story. The video of the rally above really tell the other side of the story.
…examples have to be made of by Talmuddy Hall
Bingo!
Bubbeleh. Are those votes in your pocketbook, or are you just happy to see me?
It has been reported that Hillary Clinton went all in for Bowman’s opponent, but I imagine a lesser known story would be intrigue by the Crowley and Engel crowd as well. Lots of pay back going on there, and AIPAC was likely not the only group in search of scalps.
I don’t entirely disagree with you, but having seen the campaign the outside groups, as in not clearly associated with Lattimer, ran on him, it was non stop fairly specious smearing. It seriously wasn’t just about a first term congressman’s inability to deliver. And I have no problem saying that without the nonstop attack ads I don’t think Lattimer would have won. He was largely invisible in comparison to the attack ads and His big campaign promise was to support the Biden agenda. Bowman iirc with an almost 90% record on that wasn’t good enough.
One of the ways this type of money really hurts is that neither Lattimer nor Bowman were running for the office by talking to and seeking to represent the voters. Other than largely negative marketing there is little there there.
So, I guess it remains to be seen whether the Bronx primary voters will get what they think they’re getting with latimer. Not having seen any of the ads, I’ve no idea what that is, but it sounds like bowman’s congressional “performance,” or lack thereof, was fairly easy to exploit.
By the same token, I’d guess that most of them have no idea that the challenger was put forward for only one reason–to support genocide. I suspect, at least I’d hope, that that wasn’t the top issue on those voters’ minds, and that wasn’t the main “issue” used to market latimer.
“…market latimer.” Which goes to the heart of the matter. Lattimer being a “product” to be ‘sold’ to the public conveniently obscures the facts of exactly who manufactured this “product,” and for what purpose?
Is this the Hill the Democrat Party wants to die on? Golgotha on the Potomac?
Pretty much. And for those that wonder the majority of ads being run were outside groups. Direct ads from Bowman and Lattimer were limited and no Lattimer did not pledge undying loyalty to Israel, it was subtler than that wit references to Biden’s foreign policy amidst his being the support Biden needed, hard on crime etc.
I am not in the district so the flyers might be more specific but frankly there was little there there from either of them.
“So, I guess it remains to be seen whether the Bronx primary voters will get what they think they’re getting with latimer.”
Only a small part of Bowman’s District is in the Bronx, and last I saw (Tim Black’s show) he got around 83% of the vote there. Bowman lost in Westchester County; much larger, much wealthier but also less populous.
It sounds like it was a really interesting race. Latimer has worked with the Working Families Party in the past, and from this Intelligencer article it sounds like he has been both omnipresent and a comparatively low profile conservative Dem in Westchester for many years now. But to your point about Israel being the top issue, they have this to say about it:
“Notably, the AIPAC-funded ads said nothing about Israel, instead focusing on Bowman’s alleged lack of loyalty to Joe Biden, who is liked enough by many Democrats.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/bowman-latimer-primary-aipac-result.html
The antisemitism inferred complaints in the attack ads did not reference Gaza or recent events. Apparently being a casual viewer, I didn’t borrow Lambert’s waders, I also got that lack of focus Israel and that it was all dog whistles for Biden support. Oh and being a liberal soft on crime.
It is now a confused district. I’m not sure making Westchester happy is going to work. But that’s to be seen in the future. And not for nothing but Lattimer will face the same Republican Bowman did in 2022. Based on his state senate races, the Republicans were far more competitive against him. If Flisser adds ten points to get into the forties percentage wise….
I guess I am wondering if some Democrats will stay home in November.
https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1805974844053278812
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
The most difficult achievement in US politics is to remove an incumbent from Congress.
Re-election rates are comparable to Brezhnev-era Soviet politics.
Only one group – AIPAC – has shown power to remove incumbents repeatedly: as punishment for insufficient support of Israel:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GRAb3R7WcAANrL4?format=png&name=small
10:42 AM · Jun 26, 2024
“Had he not been a typical fraud squad member, the money against wouldn’t have mattered as much, if at all.”
Please notice the way in which Representative Bowman is attacked and demeaned, as a “typical fraud squad member.” However, AIPAC spent a record $15 million attacking and demeaning Bowman because the Representative was asking for a ceasefire, an end to the killing of innocents, in Gaza. There was no fraud about Bowman, only a campaign to save lives.
I agree. There’s much to criticize him for, but his position on Palestine evolved quickly for the better, and he courageously stuck to it despite the attacks.
re “fairly late to support Palestine”, in December ’21 Bowman’s endorsement by DSA was challenged because of
.
https://x.com/asadabukhalil/status/1805939709903827240
asad abukhalil أسعد أبو خليل @asadabukhalil
The race/racist aspects of what AIPAC did to Bowman won’t be forgotten by black voters across the US. AIPAC and the Democratic Party can look forward to that.
8:22 AM · Jun 26, 2024
The view of a socialist black voter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrGsQBBHXPs
He is not feeling the love.
And another one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G75enJuHpf0
Yes, for trying to save a people from Genocide, for trying to save the lives of Palestinian children, Jamaal Bowman will be recorded as heroic. Jamaal Bowman has sought to walk in the steps of Martin Luther King and I honor the Representative for that even as I honor a Representative John Lewis.
https://x.com/mtracey/status/1806126723140145167
Michael Tracey @mtracey
The sleaziest thing AIPAC did re: the Bowman/Latimer race, was dump the most money ever into a single House race, and then only run the most innocuous-seeming ads that made no mention of Israel. Why conceal the true reason donors were flooding the district with unprecedented $$$?
https://x.com/i/status/1806126723140145167
8:45 PM · Jun 26, 2024
I recall a similar story of a CBC reporter who was likewise dismissed. There seems to be a layer of PMC commissars in place in MSM outlets, making a mockery of any nominal legal responsibility held by editors or producers. I wonder how many industries have these?
The UK weather phenomenon is real. 6 degrees never bothered me… Until 2 years into my acclimatizing of Sydney winter weather living in eastern suburbs with gaps below doors and no ac/central heating.
You really do adjust your internal thermostat/sensitivity. We’ve had lovely weather for 2 days and everyone is complaining already.
Do you think that its due to people being indoctrinated to believe everything, including the chaotic weather system, is manageable? People may actually believe ‘average’ weather conditions ever really exist. So when its slightly hotter or colder they think something is ‘wrong’ and complain, which of course is a British tendency anyway.
I think most people just want the temperature that suits them and their convenience. I blame weather reporting. It’s alway about how the weather is going to affect our day or ruin our weekend, etc. If they talked about the effects of weather on farmers and people who work outdoors instead of our recreation and convenience maybe people would get it.
Yes to acclimatizing. After many years I have convinced my husband that keeping the house at 20C regardless of the temperature outside is not good for us. It has been hot here and we are keeping the house closer to 25ish most days. He is finding it much easier in the heat on the golf course. Quelle surprise!
Starting with Rush Limbaugh, I think, many folks are smugly convinced that global warming is a scam to make money for libtards. (I have no idea why Rush was beating that drum or what, if anything, he believed.)
It goes beyond how people understand weather. It’s a culture war thing, a way to hate “Climate Crazies” who are stupid, jealous, and trying to steal from you.
Good questions and a big part of me tends to agree with your thoughts!
Unfortunately I have no good answers beyond anecdotes. These days with “tipping points” in climate modelling (which were not uncommon in the statistics I used to do) I hesitate to speculate.
The weather is real, the reported discomfort is hysterical in both senses of the word.
It’s 27 degrees here in Devon (shade temp) and rather lovely. Yes, it is too hot on the glass-roofed verandah (sun trap) but on the grass under a tree is delightful. I do admit I am currently pressed into the far corner of the kitchen sofa but that is only because, despite its north facing shady coolness and the open shade-side window, the Aga is on (cannot turn the cast iron Moloch off!) and this is the closest point that’s an acceptable temperature. :-)
Nights are a bit sticky but nothing that sleeping naked under a sheet with a cross draft won’t cure.
The writer’s disproportionate reaction seems to have three elements:
– he is in poor cardiovascular health (huge scar on his cheat from an op in his other tweets), which is going to affect his ability to thermoregulate
– he is living in London which has a vicious urban heat island effect. It is probably worth 3degC in the day and 5degC or more at night, reradiating the stored heat of a million masonry buildings and stone pavements. Plus suburban gardens have been paved for parking, nature street trees cut down for cheaper management etc. London is nasty in the summer and always has been – get out of the city! A/c will just displace and exacerbate the problem: I’m all right Jack, have my waste heat!
– he comes from cultures that fight their climate (as opposed to ad hoc fighting their seasons or weather). Humans shouldn’t live in Texas or Vegas with lifestyles dependent on AC. They should stick to climates that can be cooled by natural ventilation and adjust their cultures. Siestas, tropical indolence etc.
We get 1-2 weeks of hot temperatures in the UK if we are lucky in a summer. Nobody needs air conditioning in the UK. Most old housing stock (90% of houses) stays cool in summer: the heavy curtains would have been drawn against the sun and the windows opened for cross ventilation.
Also, the writer complains in other tweets he has to surface mount his wiring but any competent electrician would chase the cabling in to the masonry beneath and replaster. The fact only one side of his house has plumbing is just historical: that’s how water and sewerage were connected when first laid on and if you want more taps and toilets you need to renovate. I don’t think he understands traditional buildings. He just has a cheapskate landlord (sadly, the usual kind).
The UK grid would cope with air-conditioning – we have a power surplus in summer, winter evenings are the limiting event -/but most houses are not wired for it internally, with just single phase 13A ring mains for small appliances and only 30A spurs to the kitchen for cookers etc.
In line with this heat hysteria, the media were full of warnings earlier this week that bathing in open water *or the sea* could kill you! We are now told that water <15degC should be considered dangerous. Jesus, have these people ever had a beach holiday in Cornwall, let alone Scotland? We would kill for reliable 20deg heat and 10 deg seas!
Yes, every year some teenagers die swimming in a quarry and some old people stroke out but compared with the public health crimes of corona virus, these deaths by misadventure are genuinely the price of freedom and a matter of personal responsibility. The world is being run by bedwetters and gaslighters!
>MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled – Offline Variety
Something similar is happening on Ytube. The contents are being scrubbed. The Web is being defanged. The forced sell off of Alex Jone’s Infowar, whatever you may think of him and his show, is a indicator of things to come. A recent podcast by Nixon Garland also demonstrates how Ytube is purposely shadow banning programs and contents they don’ approve of, even though no rules are being broken.
Julian Assange may have been allowed to have his freedom, but the throttle on information and the punishment of those who provide information that is not to the ruling elites liking, will continue on and most likely intensefiy.
https://www.youtube.com/live/cocyxIzK-PM?si=0KiwOWrVVA6jLG6h
I keep reading things like this,
as if the Wayback Machine is not a struggling non-profit but a reliable public service like the US Postal Service in 1956.
Related, I’m starting to think that AI is purposely being allowed to “infect” the internet with the goal of no one being able to trust it. One can’t trust video, pictures, text, recordings etc. People will turn away from the internet and its current ability to help in research and finding source documents. We’ll soon have only the “press” to rely on. Back to basics.
There’s loads of stuff I never bookmarked/saved and which I can’t find on YouTube now.
I’m pretty sure I’m using same search terms etc but…. Nothing.
I’ve begun to download YT videos I like.
The Winston Smith’s are very busy these days ….
The problem I have with this is the word information. The bulk of a lot commentary is really speculation. This site is one of the best but is often riddled with pure speculation about motivations and intents.
I think speculation is valid when it is labeled as such, like just spitballing here, but Alex Jones was just perniciously making shit up to ring the cash register. Maybe it has missed you but bullshit has run wild to the point that a critical thinking person can’t trust anything they read or hear anymore until it is cross checked twelve times. Much of the problem is driven by conformation bias and the stupid human need to believe, that is, to chose a team.
There is of course outlets that lean on the scale or “don’t approve” of content that is valid and any large MSM is beholden to the gov’t for unofficial releases. But they all now heavily indulge in opinion sometimes disguised as news with the NYtimes and the Hill opinion writers citing other opinion writers to validate their stilted opinions.
My point is free speech and free press is essential to free thinking but that is not what is happening here and somethings got to give. My personal solution was taught to me as a child in the 50’s. Learn to read between the lines and read a lot of different or conflicting sources. Also one has to be above the fray.You can protest injustice without joining a team.
In case you were wondering where Hillary Clinton stands on the Julian Assange case:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeDqKxC1rkc
One wouldn’t want too much freedom of the press, now would one?
I come to bury Clinton not to praise her.
This was the same person who in the middle of an official meeting asked if they could not drone Assange, the law be damned. Everybody there laughed at this but she was actually quite serious. I read that he really damaged her 2016 Presidential aspirations.
Hilariously as part of his deal, Assange will never be allowed to visit the US without special permission. I ask you – why would he ever be crazy enough to do that and let himself be arrested on some bogus charges again. Edward Snowden is more likely to go on holidays to the US.
The US Dept of Justice said “Assange is prohibited from returning to the United States without permission.”
Technically correct, as the Northern Mariana Islands are a US-occupied territory and he just left the territory after being there for a few hours, but this makes it sound like the US was home for Assange and now they’ve kicked him out.
Or more probably, the Dept of Justice considers the UK also to be part of the US…
You mean Airstrip One? Now Assange has just landed in Oz, otherwise known as Airstrip Two-
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_Yjcd-i3qS0
~Airstrip Two-
ha!
Read somewhere that, in negotiating the plea deal, it was Assange, himself, who refused to set foot in the “agreement-incapable” u.s.
Also, the mighty u.s. government refused to let him fly commercial, requiring a private, chartered flight that he and his family had to foot the $half million bill for. They had to borrow the money.
america, america, god shed his grace on thee
and crown thy good with brotherhood
from sea to shining sea…..
I read that there is a GoFundme page to pay down that money and when I saw it several hours ago, it was at 63%. Our government is giving billions to the Ukraine and Israel but is forcing a citizen to pay for a private jet instead of a commercial airline just so that they can saddle him with a crushing debt. I saw an interview of Julian’s father and he mentioned that all his savings are gone as well as his house to use that money for his son’s defense. He seemed to be a real genuinely nice guy.
I found two GoFundme pages, but neither seem to be directed towards his immediate travel needs. I would donate (it would be tiny, but I would all I could). Do you have a link.
According to ZHedge, no link to avoid getting it kicked, “within 10 hours, an anonymous Bitcoiner paid over 8 Bitcoin to the fund, almost clearing the goal of $520,000.
“The single Bitcoin donation was the largest donation to the fund, more than all other donations in all currencies combined. As a result, Assange will arrive in Australia debt free.”
A tiny bit of justice in this massively fucked up world.
Thank you! DN has (excepts) of the Oz press conference with Stella Moris Assange, Jen Robinson and Barry Pollack. Stella was incredibly strong, I have a bucket full of tears. Our leaders give reptiles a bad name.
https://x.com/Stella_Assange/status/1805573781303308326
£405,672 / £520,000
Thank you!
At this time the amount is £418,682. So let’s see what happens.
here is the link, maybe people want to pitch in:
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/free-julian-assange?utm_source=freeassange.org&utm_medium=widget&utm_content=pledge&utm_campaign=Free%20Julian%20Assange
Hard to bury a vampire or a murder on the loose at Camp Crystal Lake. Much like those campy Friday the 13th movies, Jason just can not die nor will he ever die.
It really is too bad that RFK’s thinking on Israel is so odious. He is certainly right about Assange and maybe even Snowden would feel comfortable coming home under an RFK presidency?
If RFK Jr is all in on Israel and Biden’s reasoning (unsinkable aircraft carrier nonsense), then I suspect Snowden sees more of the same, just one who wants to seduce Assange versus drone him.
“The [Assange] guilty plea is of course coerced in the extreme and nobody should take it seriously. It gives a chance to claim hollow victory to the odious Biden regime, at the cost of a terrible precedent in law classifying journalism in espionage. But the precedent is only in a court of first instance so is not binding.”
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/#:~:text=The%20guilty%20plea,is%20not%20binding.
Thanks for that link.
There was never any trial, and there were jurisdictional issues that were never addressed. So, yeah, there is no legal effect but the practical effect on journalists is chilling.
The message from Washington is that they have jurisdiction over every journalist in the world and if they desire, will grab them and try them under American law. Somebody pointed out that what Assange was accused of is what the NYT, the WEaPo, WSJ, Cnn, etc. do every single day of the year – access and use classified material
As a former diplomat, I don’t see how Murray can seriously believe that this is about “classifying journalism as espionage.” If in his career he had made a copy of a secret government document, passed it to another Embassy, which had passed it to its own government which then arranged for it to be leaked by a trusted journalist, well, he would have been committing a crime. Indeed, there is no country in the world where he would not have committed a crime. He might have argued that there were extenuating circumstances (as people do) or that there was a public interest defence, but the fact of the crime would not be in dispute. Assange ran an organisation whose precise purpose was to encourage people to commit these crimes, and to publicise the results. That’s what the charge he pleaded guilty to said. He was, if you like, a broker or a fence. Whatever we think of his motives –whatever he thought of his motives (and more than once he claimed to be a political actor “stopping wars,”)–doesn’t and can’t alter these simple facts.
Now there are very legitimate criticisms about jurisdiction, about the way that Assange was treated and held in prison for so long etc. But we are dangerously close here to a kind of absolute moral and legal relativism, where what matters is not what was done, but the identity and motives of the perpetrator. In effect, it’s being argued that some things were not crimes because the motives of the alleged criminal were pure. Thus, a Russian officer opposed to his government who leaked information about forthcoming operations in Ukraine to a western diplomat who passed them to the western media, and who was subsequently arrested, would no doubt be treated as a martyr by much of the western political and media class. But either you have objective standards or you don’t, and I can’t see that defenders of Assange are doing themselves any favours by making such an extreme argument as this.
As Yes Minister pointed out, that’s another of those irregular verbs, isn’t it? I give confidential press briefings; you leak; he’s being charged under section 2A of the Official Secrets Act.
Or has also been said, the ship of State is the only ship that leaks from the top.
I often appreciate your attention to the technical, including this morning reading your latest essay. Here, though, I think it misses the point, by the standards you’ve set: “what was done” was exposing criminality, as in the famous video of soldiers gunning down civilians and journalists. The state whose secrets were exposed was, and is, itself acting crimnally; I don’t think we’d be engaging in moral relativism to say that violating laws meant to repress dissent and protect criminals would be a crime in any meaningful, value-laden sense of the word.
This would be the “public interest” or “greater good” defence I was talking about. The problem is that, whilst it might apply in one case, it can’t by definition be a general defence. Otherwise, anyone would have the right to leak anything about anyone to anyone if they believed that somewhere in it might be evidence of a crime or ill-doing. You can only go from the general to the particular in a case like this (OK, it was a crime but I think in this case there’s a pubic interest defence).
The U.S. Espionage Act allows no defense of for the public good. It is strictly black and white. It is pernicious. And misapplied with Assange.
You are obfuscating and missing the point that Assange is a journalist subjected to torture by your former employer His Majesty’s Govt, while the Guardian editors and other media moguls who published these materials got off scott free. It’s disappointing as you usually write with admirable clarity.
I have read only a few of his comments here, and he defended NATO/NGO actions in Yugoslav region (that he was a part of, as I understand), and French neocolonialism (that he might or might not have been a part of, as a former diplomat). To me, he looks like a part of the swamp trying to play the Jeffrey Sachs gambit.
I’m with Cookie. In a democracy, diplomats have a right to keep their “opinions” and their drafts secret, but not after those are expressed in mortal action.
We have a first amendment in America and a tradition of freedom of expression and freedom of the press as established by NY Times v. Sullivan and other judicial rulings that have expanded the rights of the press. Whether Assange as a non-citizen enjoys those rights is an open question that never was tested in a fair trial.
Did The NY Times run a criminal operation when they published Daniel Ellsbergs Pentagon papers?
Ellsberg was charged with espionage too, but acquitted in part because the government used illegal tactics such as illegal evidence gathering. Note similar behavior by the British and US governments against Assange ( holding him on bogus rape charges, detaining him without a lawyer to speak with, cruel and unusual punishment.)
Anything Assange did wrong is outweighed seven times seventy times by the evil perpetrators in the UK, Swedish and American governments.
The evil acts done by those governments and exposed by Assange were the actual cause of the affair, such as droning journalists in Iraq. Presumably the US government made a cold calculation that having those acts retold at trial wasn’t worth the continuing prosecution of Assange.
“Your crime is bigger than my crime” is not a defence in any legal system I’m aware of. Whatever his motives, Assange was engaged in inciting people to break the laws of their own country and passing the result to the media. A journalist who cultivated government sources in an attempt to get them to hand over sensitive information (say about Trump’s financial affairs) to publish in the media might or might not be charged with espionage, depending on the judicial system of the country concerned, but that’s a very long way from this case, which is only peripherally concerned with journalism. The equivalent would be the mass theft of credit-card details justified by the fact that one of the exposed records demonstrated that a Minister in a government had been engaged in criminal activity. I don’t see why people can’t just take the position that Assange certainly broke a number of laws in a number of countries, and must have known that, but that this does not justify his atrocious treatment. There’s no need to turn him into a saint.
What about laws made by criminals?
By this light, all whistleblowers become criminals, and on a par with the criminality of governments performing crimes like mowing down civilians and journalists?
You’re likely stating the law correctly as it stands, I get that. But I have a lot of trouble respecting such laws.
Much of what Wikileaks revealed had no business being classified, they weren’t state secrets to protect national security, they were to protect the government from embarrassment and criticism.
So okay, Assange didn’t do the right thing, but he did do the necessary thing. No amount of legal analysis and parsing will change that for me.
Nice play with words there, but then every journalist could be charged with such “incitement”. The leaker can be charged by the state (and claim protection under whistle blower laws if they exist), a journalist in publishing information supplied to him is doing his job – at least if we believe in any version of a free press.
The straw manning is also working overtime for you, no one is saying that Assange is a saint what they are saying is that he was wrongly and perniciously prosecuted and imprisoned for doing his job as a journalist.
Note as well that journalists are supposed to play an adversarial role with the governments they investigate and report on. A free press is a check and balance on abuses of government that our founders rightly saw as inevitable.
As an adversary, the press has to be given leeway to do things that the government won’t like.
Aurelian, in your reply to ChrisfromGA, you seem to have ignored his question about the Ellsberg case, so I’ll repeat it:
“Did The NY Times run a criminal operation when they published Daniel Ellsbergs Pentagon papers?”
It is spelled Aurelien. If he searches your’s won’t show.
I am not sure about the facts/evidence that Assange has encouraged and provided help in stealing classified information. If I remember correctly Manning refused to say anything about that, so given the long history of US gov of lying, stealing, cheating, and killing, I am inclined to believe that the charges were made up. After all, Pompeo had a big hand in orchestrating all that.
The people who actually leaked the documents were punished for their crimes. Publishing those documents, however, is journalism.
Bingo!
By ‘objective’ standards, what Julian Assange did was a crime; what Snowden did was a crime; what Daniel Ellsberg did was a crime; what Eugene Debs did was a crime. But who defined their acts as crimes? The government that defined these crimes is the same government that elaborated laws as tools for prosecuting individuals who disclose information or make arguments like Eugene Debs that are damaging to those in power in the government that made these laws.
I believe the Populace has an absolute right to know what their government is doing in their name. However, I also believe that some information must be protected for the security of the nation. I do not believe that that protection should be extended to cover any and all information that might be embarrassing or damaging to those currently in power in the government. As a former minion working for the MIC I saw and worked with a lot of classified information that presented no danger to the security of the nation, although its disclosure could have endangered the incumbent contractor’s hold on the contract when it came up for a re-compete. I also saw information that might embarrass some government agency or disclose the inanity of some big contractor’s approach to solving a problem. By any objective standard the government and those in power have fashioned the classification into a tool for protecting the government and those in power but only incidentally protecting the security of the nation.
Craig Murray’s rhetorical though not especially ‘objective’ statement that Assange’s case presents a terrible precedent in law classifying journalism as espionage might be improved were it stated slightly differently: Assange’s case presents a terrible de facto precedent classifying journalism as espionage and a crime against the State.
Thousands of laws define crime and recommend punishments but those laws too often bear little or no relation to Justice. The u.s. government and states have defined enough laws to fill our prisons with a portion of the population number one in world. The current highly selective enforcement of laws all too clearly discloses their true purpose and intent which often run contrary to the Common Good and the manifest will of the Populace.
My understanding is that “making a copy of a secret government document” is the illegal part. Receiving a purportedly secret government document and publicizing it has been considered legitimate journalism in the U.S. Thus, the NY Times and Washington Post routinely publish reports of classified info.
What am I missing here?
You are missing the part that laws of US (or any other country, for that matter) do not apply to the whole World. Can a USA court issue a warrant for an arrest of Putin for “making a copy of a secret (US) government document”, or misgendering someone, or whatever? I bet it can, because most of the courts are of the kangaroo variety.
The idea that US could/should just arrest anyone anywhere on the planet is just insane. That is the real crime here, that goes unpunished repeatedly, because might makes right. Legal/mental gymnastics is just there to confuse the masses. Same as it ever was.
>>>>Goldwater said Nixon was the most shameless liar he ever met
And Goldwater was a paragon of virtue who should be believed unconditionally? Yes, Nixon stupidly destroyed his presidency over Watergate. He also had savvy political instincts that often ran counter to the bipartisan DC Establishment of his time and today.
Nixon actually delivered w/the EPA and the Clean Water Act. Did Obama do anything equally momentus with regards to the environment? (even though he had a Dem. Congress in 09-11) …I don’t think so, but I honestly can’t remember.
Surprised Glenn got that take wrong.
While I love tormenting #McResistance family, friends and acquaintances with the line that Nixon was the last liberal President, let’s face it: that progressive legislation – EPA, OSHA, Clean Air and Water Acts, proposal for a basic income, etc. – wasgrudging concessions to the the mass political movements of the time (or, more accurately, the time just before they were implemented, since the Movement was in rapid decline at that point) which terrified the ruling elites of the time.
I make the same argument about Nixon as our last liberal President. Watching the reactions of my fellow PMC peeps is always a treat. Now, it may be true that he did EPA, OSHA, Clean Air and Clean Water Acts because he didn’t care about much besides foreign policy, he did them. And each of them changed the coastal environment of my youth in immediately tangible ways.
This was the same era where a river actually caught fire because of pollution-
https://cenv.wwu.edu/speaker-series/tuckerman
And not for the first time either.
Or, as Randy Newman’s ode to the Cuyahoga River put it:
” ‘Cuz the Lord can make you tumble.
And the Lord can make you turn,
And the Lord can make you overflow,
But the Lord can’t make you burn!
Burn on big river, burn on!”
An awful lot of what Nixon accomplished via the EPA and Clean Water Act, was on account of a young environmental lawyer who was quite the outdoorsman & backpacker, but better known for also being one of the architects of the Watergate break-in.
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19990216&slug=2944577
Here’s a picture of him and others about to set off on the High Sierra Trail in Sequoia NP in 1941…
http://peterstekel.com/Wolverton/HistoryPages/beginnings.html
I was very into hating Nixon but my final take has come around to the belief that Watergate was a CIA sting and the more you know about Bob Woodward, John Dean and other “good guys,” the more obvious it becomes that we all got rope-a-doped on that one.
Nixon wasn’t blobby enough, too easily impressed by fine wines and big yachts but those folks saw him as flawed by his standing up for little guys. Letting Nixon finish his second term might have left us better off. OK, I’m in dreamland now but Nixon didn’t like Kissinger and in his last two years could have selectively leaked Vietnam documents ensuring Kissinger was given full credit for the escalations and peace talk backstabbings (while Nixon sagely sat and listened Obama-like before saying, OK, if you insist…we’ll bomb Cambodia/Serbia/Libya…)
I can’t think of a scenario where Nixon does not resign or get removed and then does not go on to have a more positive impact on our policies. Had he knowingly survived a CIA coup, I think he would have been a force to rein in Langley. Assuming he never again flew in small planes.
Nixon was encouraged in politics at the beginning of his career by CIA honcho Allen Dulles, according to David Talbot in “The Devil’s Chessboard”. Nixon’s presidency was indeed later torpedoed by the CIA as part of the Watergate affair, in my understanding. What the spooks giveth, they can also take away.
As long as you are talking about Barry Goldwater, don’t forget one of his Goldwater Girls – Hillary.
Politics in 1968, 1972, etc. was just as nasty, divisive, and backstabbing as today.
It’s just that back then everyone had the sense to proverbially “not say the quiet part out loud”
The Clean Water Act passed in 1972 over Nixon’s veto.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/veto-the-federal-water-pollution-control-act-amendments-1972
Similar to cat or dog years, a year in Fresno seems to last almost a decade…
…and to have the Police Chief violate the 9th Commandment in Godzone!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fresno Police Chief Juan F. “Paco” Balderrama has resigned following an investigation into an alleged affair with an officer’s wife.
“It is with a heavy heart and mixed feelings that we announce today the resignation of Fresno Police Department Chief Balderrama from the city of Fresno,” said Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer at a news conference at City Hall at 11 a.m. Tuesday.
City Manager Georgeanne White said Balderrama handed in his resignation letter Tuesday morning. His resignation is effective July 25, and he would not receive a severance package, officials said.
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article289523104.html
The Chief of Police in a tawdry affair
While her husband was writing a ticket somewhere
Some motel suite
In the Fresno heat
The talk of the town are this pair
…would that be an extra-marital affair or an extra-martial affair?
The church folk in Fresno are rattled
To learn their Police Chief has straddled
An officer’s bride
Which this town can’t abide
High time this Police Chief skedaddled
From a week ago before he got the ax…
Getting cuckolded by your boss is a popular theme in Japanese adult movies. I don’t think there’s a specific word or term for it but balderrama would be my nominee. It has a solid if not refluxively indignant quality to it.
…it takes Balderrama to apply for the job of being chief of police somewhere else while you are the subject of an under the covers investigation
Antifa, you have saved me more than once! :-)
Well, both are full contact sports.
Greco-Romance wrestling?
Speaker Johnson: ‘No one expects that Joe Biden will be on cocaine’ at debate
Well, now we’ve got that cleared up!
Post-debate potential statements from Speaker Johnson…
‘No one expects that Joe Biden will beat up his wife at Camp David’
It might be the first clever utterance out of Judas Mike’s mouth.
No one expects Joe Biden to be on cocaine … his chief weapon is surprise!
He’s Clark Kent of sorts, who lacking phone booth to switch into proper costume of Überevangmensch, prefers to do it seamlessly right in the open.
Surprise and cocaine! Wait, that’s two weapons…
I don’t know, coked up Joe versus coked up Don could be one heluva show! Although I’d prefer a full cage match.
Please, this masters debate is scheduled for endless rounds of Shirley Temples & Roy Rogers between aspiring teetotalitarian candidates.
Pay-per-view stuff either way.
Sounds like a good suggestion. Circa 1980s wrestling entertainers…I’ll submit that Trump’s appeal may align better as a Dusty Rhodes, the American Dream! 1980s wrestling was the peak of my interest in the televised matches. Or Hulk Hogan and his fan base.
Randy “Macho Man” Savage versus Ric Flair. Woo ! Oh yeah ! Woo !
My first thought on reading this was the Monty Python skit: No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Our chief weapon is surprise! Surprise, and fear. And ruthless efficiency! And almost fanatical dedication to the Pope!
My preference would be the – Confuse a Cat – skit …
Just so long as old Joe does not make this the wrong week to give up sniffing glue-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmW-ScmGRMA (49 secs)
I’ve never tried cocaine, and confidently can predict I never will…
That said, i’m in my 20’s and a high school friend and his dog and I go for a walk at a park in LA, and we’re out for an hour or something, and we go back to his circa 1970 Plymouth parked at the end of a cul de sac and get in the car, when we hear a loudspeaker yell out, put your hands on the dashboard!
And then a policeman and policewoman emerge and the first thing the gent sez is ‘how much dope have you been smoking?!’ and that day we were clean as a whistle thankfully, so I wasn’t too worried, but then they made us go put our hands on the police cruiser hood as they searched the car (yeah, this would never fly today, I’d put the kabosh to it in a hurry by not acquiescing to a search) and it went from this is kinda comical, to what if the copper plants something in your car!?
Like I mentioned we were clean as a Mormon missionary on a bike and it was getting a little darker out, and in one last flurry to probably impress his partner, he shined a flashlight in my orbits and exclaimed that ‘You have cocaine eyes!’
As we were let off on our own recognizance…
My favorite youthful run-in with the po-po was at 17, riding around with friends, getting pulled over by a zealous cop who thought those long-haired kids looked suspicious.
He hustled us out of the car and spent 30 minutes doing a full search of the interior, and then started full searches of us. Unlike your clean Mormon-like azz, I had 30 hits of windowpane LSD in my wallet, tucked between my driver’s license and SS card. He went through everyone else’s wallet, then started in on mine. But as I was contemplating what life would soon be like, doing 10-20 years in the State Pen, halfway through my wallet search, out of nowhere some Divine Guardian Angel intervened – just as he was getting to my driver’s license, he finally hit his boredom point, and ended his quest. Gave me back my wallet and told us all to get out of his sight.
I was 5’7″, 130 pounds, and good-looking. As my friend said, after we got back in the car and I told them that I had the acid in my wallet – “Damn, you in prison? They’d have taped Miss January to your back and traded you around for cigarettes.”
I still have a ponytail and for the record long-haired freaks always look suspicious.
Summer sales job during first stab at college and I was broke so I left the bar early and went back to the motel we were staying at and the local sheriff was waiting for us to return. Didn’t wait for me to park, he stopped my vehicle and was leaning on the window in my face wanting to know if I’d just sold a set of pots and pans to his under the age of purchase agreement consent daughter. Mindful of the speed in my wallet (why I was broke) I ratted out the whole sales group, told daddy sheriff which bar they were at, which salesperson done it.
#noregrets
I have my “freak flag” ponytail now, but I didn’t back when one of my scarier encounters with law enforcement took place. On Thanksgiving weekend, a college friend and I traveled with our girlfriends to NYC. We were hosted by one of my friend’s “clients” (he dealt) and the client’s girlfriend. The girlfriend had an apartment in the Village where we stayed, and after a nearly inedible dinner, we were headed to the ballet. We split up with my girlfriend and I taking a cab with the “client,” whose drug of choice was coke and whose father resided in Sing Sing. The “client” instructed the cabbie to hurry because we were late, and the cabbie really took it to heart, driving 50 and 60 down one of the major avenues in Manhattan. All of the sudden, the beat-up old Chevy behind us sprouted a flashing red light on the dash board, and the speeding cabbie pulled over. Out of the beater popped a plainclothes cop wearing a rain coat that would have made Columbo look well dressed. First, I’m wondering if this is really a cop, but he flashed a real enough looking badge. Then I’m thinking, here we are sitting in the back seat with this guy who probably is carrying when he asks me if I’m carrying. Turned out the cop was only interested in the too-eager-to-please cab driver.
Dear Hunter on the other hand…
Hey, did they ever get to the bottom of who’s stash was found in the White House anyway?
Afroman is looking into it.
Thx, that was hilarious.
Thank you thank you for the Afroman. It’s hard to completely give up on humanity after watching that.
OMG, thank you for that. My life just improved.
>Saipan
Julian Assange landing in Saipan, which is is an unincorporated territory and commonwealth of the United States consisting of 14 islands in the northwestern Pacific Ocean made me wonder about what the Pledge of Allegiance means when it says “one nation under God” or the preamble to the Constitution when it refers to forming a more “perfect Union.” How does the legal framework, the Constitution, view “empire” or is it just silent on the subject…curious.
The U.S. has five permanently inhabited territories: Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands in the North Pacific Ocean, and American Samoa in the South Pacific Ocean.[note 5] American Samoa is in the Southern Hemisphere, while the other four are in the Northern Hemisphere.[27] In 2020, their combined population was about 3.62 million,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territories_of_the_United_States
>How does the legal framework, the Constitution, view “empire” or is it just silent on the subject…curious.
See the “Insular Cases”.
Thanks, very helpful
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-insular-cases-run-amok
“Kenya shocked as protests over finance bill turn deadly in Nairobi”
Kenya just got suckered. the only reason that they voted in these tax hikes was because the IMF was pushing them to do so. They could have gone to Washington and said ‘Look. You still want those 1,000 police officers of ours to go to Haiti, then tell the IMF to back off.’ and it would have happened. But it looks like they didn’t.
I will say one thing. Kenyan police do not have a good reputation and here they killed five people and wounded thirty more when they opened fire on that crowd. They had better not try that in Haiti as the people there are armed as well and will not worry about shooting back at foreign police who cannot even speak the language. Otherwise those Kenyan cops will experience their own “Blackhawk Down”-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arZCCrnjDtA (2:06 mins)
What do I know-never having been there, but my sister and her son were pretty sketched out being in Nairobi for 4 days last summer, it was the kind of place where my sis was repeatedly told not to hold her phone out in public-lest it be stolen, we don’t get that a lot here.
She said the city had this bad feel to it, couldn’t wait to be outta there.
When I was there I noticed all the residences with high walls topped by razor wire, and the stops on way to hotels to allow search of the bus and look for bombs underneath.
Yeah, I actually have a friend who just traveled with a group to Kenya. Texted them yesterday. They left for another African country just as it started to escalate, so I’m going to get a first hand account when they return to the USA.
Re Wukchumni, @ 8:36
Your sister was told right: my son’s phone was stolen from out of his hands while he was riding in a taxi in Nairobi 4 years ago
It was pretty safe to walk around during daytime outside of the slum that makes up 40% of the population. A few nice places to walk around in but not many. Lots of places with razor wire on top of walls.
The main draw for foreign tourists is the various wildlife reserves around the countryside and even in he city, including the giraffe manor: “have breakfast with a giraffe”!
foreign police who cannot even speak the language
I was ntinking about this and came to the conclusios that US relations with La Francophonie in Africa did not encourage the sending of police units from those countries,.
This just in:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/26/world/africa/kenya-protests-taxes.html/
In Surprise Move, Kenya’s President Rejects Tax Bill That Prompted Deadly Protests
“Listening keenly to the people of Kenya who have said loudly that they want nothing to do with this finance bill, I concede, and therefore, I will not sign the 2024 finance bill, and it shall subsequently be withdrawn,” Mr. Ruto said in an address to the country.
Nearly two dozen people were killed and over 300 others injured in the demonstrations that turned violent in Kenya as protesters speaking out against the bill’s tax increases clashed with the police on Tuesday, human rights groups said. That death toll makes it one of the bloodiest days in the country’s recent history.
Wonder if the overflowing manure pits will aid in spreading bird flu to waterfowl and mammals in the area
I like when they call them lagoons, gives it a Gilligan’s Island feel.
Nixon vetoed the Clean Water Act. His veto was overridden:
The morning after Nixon’s veto, Muskie reiterated the comments he’d made when the Senate had first passed the Act. “Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make life possible on this planet? Can we afford life itself?”
“Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our Nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them,” Muskie said.
Only two hours after the president vetoed the Act, the Senate voted 52-12 to override, with 17 of the votes in favor coming from Republicans.
The House followed, voting 247 to 23 to override — more than ten to one — with 96 of the yes votes from Republicans.
New to me. Thank you!
I recall Nixon “Hard Hat” stickers pasted on the vertical receiving plane of urinals…
Regarding “Panel Stacking” and JPA Ioannidis, here is Professor Ioannidis’s PubMed page this morning. He has two more papers since the panel stacking thing was listed on June 17th. Apparently 2022 was a bad year for him, with only 44 papers in the biomedical literature. In 2018 he had 89. Last year 75. 2024 is a another slow year, with only 32 through June 26th. His current total is 1,302. Francis Crick published about 55 papers in his career, which began after WWII when he was in his late 30’s. Professor Ioannidis has come up here before. Given this “productivity” I cannot see how anyone pays much attention to him. But YMMV.
So being highly published means you are not worthy of attention?
I must be misunderstanding you. He has been cited 562,000 times.
re: How a Texas Factory Is Emerging as a Key Ammo Supplier for the U.S., Ukraine
reading the comments section on the wsj and everyone is saying ‘we have an attitude problem, people say we cant ramp up production but we absolutely can’ and i agree from a resource standpoint. but all the big companies have an oligopoly over the defense industry, and defense company boards and military officers are downright incestuous. plus, like everything else, the defense industry is overfinancialized and focused on the shareholders and not national security.
i have to wonder if defense startups would be a feasible way to fill the production void. i would imagine there are many legal restrictions on weapons production, and the main companies would definitely attempt to shut down or absorb any startups. but in order for the us to actually produce any weaponry, there needs to be a massive shift in our defense industry, and i have little faith in the government to take the necessary steps.
but more presciently, war is bad, peace is good, and in my heart i somewhat want the us to be humbled on the global stage because we are both evil and doing a bad job, and even more so i want to limit casualties and environmental destruction and ramping up defense production seems counterintuitive to that.
Did anyone notice if that article actually said that the plant was producing real shells? It was written as if it is but this seems to suggest, god willing and the creeks don’t rise, is should be producing something by the fall.
Simplest way to see: shell aka 155mm or 105mm is a steel body, explosives, and a fuse.
They are most commonly assembled in a government owned contractor operated plant.
These can make a lot of shells if they have the supply chain, laborers, and robots. It is fairly dangerous so labor is less robots more.
The supply chain and robot/capital are restriction to fast increase in output.
Missiles are much more complex, but supply chain and capital are same challenges.
These people really are stupid. Quickly expand? It’s been over two years. There won’t be any Ukrainian men left by the time this stuff comes online. Wowzers.
Apparently the newest Chinese shell factory ( can’t find the Russian link now because search that works is anti-democratic ) is capable of 15,000 155mm shells a day. So it is possible to do with a different political economy.
Went to the post office the other day and they pleaded with me to buy stamps, and there is a new Forever stamp (why no Forever houses, cars, appliances, et al?) with Ansel Adams photos on each stamp, sign me up for a couple sheets.
So, I get talking to the clerk and ask why USPS hasn’t done Cryptostamps yet?
I explain how it works, you buy a virtual Cryptostamp for 68 Cents, and a decade later its worth $4,325.21 on the open market.
You’d swear you could see tiny lightbulbs going off in his eyes as he rubbed his palms up and down in rapt anticipation.
I don’t suppose that you also mentioned to that poor sucker that through inflation, that $4,325.21 in ten years time will be only worth 34 Cents in today’s money. You should have told him to go and buy 300 in Canadian dollars instead-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBc-Cfodv10 (51 secs)
I’m personally not worried about the $34.7 trillion debt we owe to everybody and their mother, it’s only 3 digits away from only owing in the billions.
Are you suggesting that we will have new dollar, like new turkish lira (YTL)?
The abbr. for it is NUSD. It sounds nasty.
“US military contractors may be allowed to go to Ukraine”
Somehow the thought of US military contractors going to the Ukraine to service and repair equipment when they will not have power for their tools does not sounds so likely. But when you remember that ‘US military contractors’ is also a term for mercs, then that is something that I can believe.
Unless each merc is flying a combat ready fighter jet, hard to see what the point would be unless we’re now using everyone as cannon fodder in the belief that Russia will run out of ammunition any day now and then we’ve got ’em!
Clever actually. Russia threw millions of lives at Hitler to win WWII, we can do at least as much to stop Putin.
/sarc
re: Mastercard (and Visa)
Shop local. Pay cash whenever possible. That’s good for your privacy, good for the local businesses that don’t have to pay that swipe fee on your transaction, and good for chipping away at the CC industry’s power. Every little bit helps. / ;)
Here’s what I worry about: They are going to try to bribe merchants somehow. A lot of the smaller ones are already struggling and may look favorably on any kind of subsidy.
They’re already doing that. A small local shop I’ve used for years a few years ago said, “No checks or cash, cc only.” I’ve known the owners a long time and I said, “I understand the ‘no check’ thing, lots of bad checks floated in this town. But, you won’t take my cash?” They made a special exception for me that one time and told me they had an agreement with ApplePay or some such to only accept credit cards for some consideration. So no cash or checks. It’s their business.
With the fascist entanglement of the corporations and government here, the thought crosses my mind of how war could aide them in the implementation of more dystopia.
Sweden’s cashless society is ripe for the pickings by digital thieves.
Ditching paper money has made Sweden a haven for online scams
https://www.straitstimes.com/business/ditching-paper-money-has-made-sweden-a-haven-for-online-scams
The cc companies could argue that’s why they need all your bio-info identifiers. Um no. As Taibbi argued in another context, when the financial guys screw up this badly, the last thing we should do is give them even more power to ,uh, ‘fix’ the problems they’ve already caused. / ;)
Here in Hawaii a restaurant I patronize put a $20 minimum on credit card transactions, and the car repair shop now has a 3% fee for them. So local businesses appear to be encouraging cash.
Thanks. Very glad to hear this.
Likewise 2.5% for renewing car registration online or using CC at satellite city hall or kiosk
“Mastercard To Expand Digital Biometric ID and “Behavioral Biometrics” Reclaim the Net
“…And that’s how a podcast host recently described the “experience” to Mastercard Executive President of Identity Products and Innovation Dennis Gamiello to confirm. “It could be a hand scanner, face scanner, whatever. And then you are authorized,” the host went on, and Gamiello fully agreed that’s how it’s going to work.
Mastercard’s executives are saying that people’s behavioral biometrics will be used – but of course – simply to enhance their “experience” and, the perceived convenience….
.
And there’s that phrase that pops up when platforms and sites are invading every aspect of one’s privacy and space: “enhance your experience.” BS!
I know this: There should never be a requirement that one give up biometric data to a business. Period.
Silly and dangerous.
ah, “convenience” that spies on you: the digital cheese in the digital trap. / ;)
This is mainly about how differently they are going to be charging each individual for the same BS.
Clowns aren’t trying to improve products or make them last longer. Rentiers.
I want the “convenience” and “experience” of these assholes leaving me alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo&ab_channel=RickBeato/
The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse
Rick Beato with an interesting take on how convenience affects experience in ways that people don’t realize what they’ve lost.
It’s a post from yesterday and what he discusses has implications outside of music.
Yikes! But a very good explanation of why most new stuff you hear sounds like it was done in someone’s bedroom using a circa 1985 casio organ.
And I appreciate his confirmation that spotify is in fact making up fake “artists” using AI, something I’ve suspected for a while. If I hear a new band I like, I’ve taken to looking for a video of them performing live to make sure there are human beings behind it. Or course that can probably be faked pretty well now too…
Recent scifi writer who won a major award admitted she got ‘help’ from AI writing the book. It’s gotten so bad that I pretty much don’t trust anything artistic produced after 2020. I’ll continue to keep the used bookstores in business for as long as I can.
No problem with people using algorithms to help them find a source or resource.
People have just totally confused algorithms with being the source and resource.
Giving up my name and email address can be enough to give hives, figuratively. The new Mastercard initiative is enough to have me ready to submit my Mastercard to extreme prejudice by a thousand cuts with my scissors.
Mostly everyting.
‘Israel’s high court orders the army to draft ultra-Orthodox men, rattling Netanyahu’s government’
Those Ultra-orthodox want nothing to do with the army. One said the other day that he had nothing to do with the founding of Israel so the present war was not his problem. I’ve got an idea. Tell them that OK, they do not have to serve in the army. But at the same time they are not entitled to a single Shekel from the State. As far as Israel is concerned, they can go fund themselves. Maybe they can set up GoFundme pages for their Settlements and if they want to have a whole slew of kids, then maybe they can ask Jewish communities around the world to kick in money to do their duty for the faith. I’m sure that AIPAC would be good for a coupla million.
They have to make it fun for the new conscripts in the Jheri-Curl division. Maybe supply them with mostly black camo fatigues and a bowler that doubles a helmet.
Re: Denver gave people experiencing homelessness $1,000 a month. A year later, nearly half of participants had housing.
The neoliberal framing is so disheartening. These poor folks were actually living on the street with nowhere to go and now they sleep inside, in their own homes. It’s a moral victory.
yep, conditioning everyone to think that if it had NOT saved$ then it was not a good thing to do
For what it’s worth, that “”Why Are You So Negative?” Good Question. Here’s the Answer: Real Life” post is actually a good one and echoes a lot of the points made here. Worth sitting down with a hot coffee to read it over slowly.
On a related note – Optimism Linked to Poor Decision-Making and Lower Cognitive Skills
The stock market says otherwise.
Good catch. Here is a good bit:
“What I write about are solutions, but to write about solutions first requires making realistic assessments of the problems. That we respond to difficult problems by feeling they’re negative and depressing is understandable. But we have a choice: do we follow the elite Romans in placing our faith in the comforting idea that difficult adaptations made in the past will magically manifest now without us having to do anything? Or do we set aside our emotions and reluctance and start doing the hard work of dealing with polycrisis?”
A gutless Supreme Court Majority refused to address the underlying legal issues in Murthy v. Missouri.
https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1805990633510727701
This is going to be misreported by the press as some sort of victory for the Biden admin, when it isn’t, really. It is another can-kick special from the marsupial six (including Coney, Kavanaugh, and Roberts) who lack the courage to address the First Amendment issues of allowing government officials to coerce social media companies into removing content from their platforms.
Fortunately, RFK Jr. can now proceed to trial with his case, and he is a real person who was harmed not merely an AG trying to stand up for the rights of others. They’ll have to deal with him and not punt. If I were the trial judge I’d issue a preliminary injunction on the likelihood of success on the merits, but we’ll have to see how that plays out. If I get the time to deep dive into the ruling I’ll post a less angry follow up.
(See Kennedy v. Biden, US 5th district Court on hold but now a live case, again.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNa5ZTz-58&ab_channel=TheDuran/
Trying to sow division in Dagestan
They are having a short discussion about all of the recent terror attacks as the battle in Ukraine continues.
It caught my eye because this is what I said months ago about what the USA and associates believe is their A game while everybody was delving into finer details about what weapons did what and who had what weapons.
In re Nixon’s supposed virtues: I make it a point not to retroactively praise anyone who tried very hard to kill me. I was 18 in 1968, and felt then (and still maintain) that draft eligibility for non-deferred youth in order to sustain a brutal and unjustified foreign war qualified Nixon in that regard.
Kishida’s days are numbered.
@RinNishimura : ‘Ex-PM Suga continues his criticism of the PM, this time stating in an interview with magazine Hanada that Kishida should have taken responsibility and dished out disciplinary measures on himself akin to what was imposed on other party factions.’
https://x.com/RinNishimura/status/1805860106606985340
@RinNishimura : ‘Mainichi with the exclusive that Digital Minister Kono had his first dinner meeting with VP Aso, his faction boss, since May 21 and reportedly informed him of his desire to run for the LDP presidency in September. First “official” candidacy.’
https://x.com/RinNishimura/status/1805967171790737510
Sadly, there are plenty of other Jiminto rotating villains to take his place.
Many are Moonie-enabled, as well.
Would love to see a debate between Ionnidis and Gorski.
“Climate doomism disregards the science” Mann. First paragraph he writes “the absence or poor representation of importance processes in the models leads to a systematic underestimate of the rate and magnitude of the changes”
Which threw me for a loop. A little later he quoted himself, a response to a tweet “Actually, the warming of the planet is very much in line with early climate model predictions. Some impacts, such as ice sheet melt and sea level rise, and the slowdown of the ocean ‘conveyor belt’ are exceeding those predictions.””
Later “a pathway to 1.5°C (2.7°F) requires there be no new fossil fuel infrastructure” but “A handful of fossil fuel companies — including ExxonMobil and Gazprom (Russian state fossil fuel company) — are planning for new projects that will produce about 200 billion barrels of oil and gas”
The solution “Holding policymakers, opinion leaders, and corporations accountable is essential”. Because “It is only our elected policymakers who are in a position to do that (change policies).
I might suggest some of the doomers understand the science very well. The pessimism perhaps instead comes from a reasonable lack of trust in our policymakers, opinion leaders and corporations”.
Jimmy Dore, utube, ~16+ minutes.
Boston Ships Migrants To EXPENSIVE Hotels!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8hMHJPy5bY
Boost commercial Real Estate finances, undermine US wages, etc. What a deal. Not. / ;)
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, noting the “problem” of how expensive labor is. uh huh. (can’t have a stock price fall due to higher labor costs goodness knows. heh.)
From iAllegedly Dan on utube, ~19+ minutes.
Are You Ready for AI and Bad Service?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcA4Zh943rY
Michael Mann and Doomism. As the saying goes, if wishes were horses beggars would ride.
His first mistake is in his sentence “it’s a matter of how bad we’re willing to let it get”. We? I had no idea I had a say in this. Oh wait, voters are powerless according to research. So I am reduced to wishing, along with Michael.
# So let’s all wish that the MIC suddenly sees that they have been wrong and instead of killing people with weapons from factories using gas and coal, they put all their money into climate action.
# And let’s all wish that even though we are on a warming trajectory that looks very much like a speeding freight train with no-one at the controls, that suddenly Tom Cruise will drop in from his helicopter and disappear all the CH4 and CO2 that is already in the oceans and the air.
# And lets all wish that the microbes that are the engines of food production and oxygen will never be impacted by temperatures like 50 degrees C and over.
# And lets all wish that at least some of the species going extinct are not supporting some functions that are crucial to our survival
# And lets all wish that although there is a physical temperature/humidity point above which we die, that Musk or some other hero will implant chips so that we can laugh at these temperatures, hey ho.
Perhaps a better title for his piece is Climate Optimism Ignores Reality.
> What we got wrong about depression and its treatment
To me this ties perfectly with the TV series Mr. Robot. The problem Mr. Robot/Elliot is trying to solve is how to make the world a better place. He’s literally trying to hack the operating system of the world. And he’s the very embodiment of depression: it’s what propels him. If you think about it, it’s not all that different than what we on this blog are trying to do: hack the world to improve it. And what everybody without power is trying to do on forums and comment threads everywhere.
But there’s a huge difference. Mr. Robot/Elliot has powerful hacking skills. And he pulls it off – he “saves” the world. Ahh, that magic of fiction. The rest of us … well we’re just hacks too, much less powerful hacks. Even so, has a lot of relevance because the metaphor is ultimately about getting past the demons. To quote from one of the episodes from season one which plays out in the finale, “We all must deal with them alone. The best we can hope for… the only silver lining in all of this… is that when we break through, we find a few familiar faces waiting on the other side.” Highly highly recommend this series.