Videos Show That Leeches Can Jump in Pursuit of Blood NYT
Goldman signals end of an era in private equity with a big hire Bloomberg
Is the era of the mega private equity deal over? FT
Exclusive: Andreessen Horowitz plans to launch a private equity fund, documents show Fortune
Climate
Bill Gates says not to worry about AI gobbling up energy, tech will adapt The Register. The deck: “So that’s fine then.”
Major IT Platforms Want Power from Nuclear Plants, but They Don’t Want to Build Them Neutron Bytes
Water
Hoping for a miracle to save the Ogallala Aquifer? Prepare for the new Dust Bowl. Kansas Reflector
Syndemics
Stop Mask Bans Letter Campaign đŁ Anti-mask was always a dark money campaign. Teams Human. Commentary:
“Oh you were in a car accident? That’s too bad. I was in a car accident, actually I had three confirmed accidents. They were all mild for me though, cause you know I take vitamin D and exercise regularly. No, I’m not wearing a seat belt, I have to live my life.”
— The Yeti of Kananaskis (@kananaskinyeti) June 30, 2024
Tour de France teams on edge as Covid-19 rears its ugly head MSN (MV).
CDC Advises Updated COVID Vaccine for Everyone Over 6 Months of Age US News
Two chickens test positive for bird flu at San Francisco live bird market CBS
China?
China’s Xi Jinping lauds relevance of ‘Panchsheel’ to end world conflicts Business Standard
* * * China calls on scientists of all nations to study lunar samples, but notes obstacle with the US AP
Commentary: China’s mission to the moon is rocking geopolitic Channel News Asia
* * * The China-Russia âAxis’ Is Overhyped The Diplomat
China cracks down on hate speech against Japan Pekingnology
âLike Kennedys and Bushes’: Indonesia president-elect Prabowo’s family business empire draws parallels, concerns Channel News Asia
lndia
Analysis: Delhi airport roof collapse highlights Modi’s infrastructure challenges Channel News Asia
Syraqistan
Harrison Mann on Escalation in the Middle East Forever Wars
Three Israeli Army Reservists Explain Why They Refuse to Continue Serving in Gaza Haaretz
* * * Israel Is Officially Annexing the West Bank Foreign Policy
A Message From the West Bank: âWe Are Coming to Horrible Days’ Nicholas Kristof, NYT
* * * Battles rage in north Gaza as Palestinian fighters ambush Israeli troops Al Jazeera
European Disunion
French Far Right Holds Strong Lead Ahead of Vote: What to Watch Bloomberg
New Not-So-Cold War
Drones attack Novolipetsk Metallurgical Plant in Russia’s Lipetsk Ukrainska Pravda
Motorcycles and Mayhem in Ukraine’s East NYT
Putin says Russia may resume global deployment of intermediate range missiles Reuters
IMF releases updated agreement with Ukraine: most funding conditions are met Ukrainska Pravda
How Russian Elites Made Peace With the War Foreign Affairs
Global Elections
Iranian presidential election heads to runoff amid low turnout BNE Intellinews
ANC’s crushing electoral defeat MR Online
2024
Biden campaign says debate âdid not change the horse race’ The Hill. Musical interlude. Commentary:
Reality check: @JoeBiden is the nominee of the Democratic Party, nominated by voters in primaries across the country. Unless the @POTUS, himself, decides to quit–which he won't–that issue is settled.
The discussion that is going on now was timely a year ago, when few wanted to⊗ David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) June 29, 2024
Biden assures donors he can still win election BBC. Meanwhile:
Biden campaign email with advice to supporters on how to talk to “your panicked aunt, your MAGA uncle, or some self-important Podcasters” following the debate: pic.twitter.com/WHkuTZWJFS
— Will Steakin (@wsteaks) June 29, 2024
Calls for Biden’s Withdrawal Are a Sign of a Healthy Democratic Party The Atlantic. Commentary:
What I still don’t understand is why so many Democrats are upset with Joe Biden for not stepping down, vs at themselves and the DNC that put him there. Not his fault that YOU selected him against other options (Same goes for R’s and Trump, but most R’s okay with their pick). đ€·đœââïž pic.twitter.com/aCSFmeLuEI
— Jerome Adams (@JeromeAdamsMD) June 29, 2024
Biden lacked oomph, but the transcript tells a different tale The Hill
The Supremes
Supreme Court strikes down Chevron, curtailing power of federal agencies and Justices rule for Jan. 6 defendant SCOTUSblog
What SCOTUS just did to broadband, the right to repair, the environment, and more The Verge
Conservatives Took Another Big Step to Consolidate Power in the Supreme Court NYT
Digital Watch
ChatGPT wrongly insists Trump-Biden CNN debate had 1 to 2-minute delay The Register
‘Skeleton Key’ attack unlocks the worst of AI, says Microsoft The Register. The deck: “Simple jailbreak prompt can bypass safety guardrails on major models.”
Gemini’s data-analyzing abilities aren’t as good as Google claims TechCrunch
Who won the presidential debate: X or Threads? TechCrunch
The Greatest Social Media Site Is Craigslist (Yes, Craigslist) Slate
Healthcare
The maddening saga of how an Alzheimer’s âcabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure for decades STAT
CEO in Major Health-Advertising Fraud Gets 7.5-Year Prison Sentence WSJ
Walgreens Plans Major U.S. Store Closures; Shares Tumble WSJ
Assange
The Assange saga is over. What have we learned? The Hill. What did we learn?
Like Julian Assange, I Know How It Feels to Be Prosecuted for Acts of Journalism James Risen, The Intercept
Zeitgeist Watch
Not the only vortex just now:
Extremely detailed view of Saturn's North Polar Vortex captured by Cassini. [NI]
đž NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill pic.twitter.com/JiwFikqIkq
— Curiosity (@MAstronomers) June 29, 2024
Why You Have To Walk So Much Inside New Airport Terminals View from the Wing
Class Warfare
Hayek, the Accidental Freudian Corey Robin, The New Yorker. Well worth a read.
An American scientist says the perfect cup of tea involves salt and lemon NBC
The Case for Bad Coffee Serious Eats
Antidote du jour (Softeis – CityAM):
See yesterdayâs Links and Antidote du Jour here
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“IMF releases updated agreement with Ukraine: most funding conditions are met”
Funny that. Until not that long ago, the IMF would refuse to lend money to a country at war because that would make them a poor risk to pay back that money. But then last year the IMF changed their practices after 80years because hey, it is the Ukraine that we are talking about. So last year for the first time they gave money to a country in the middle of the war but I am sure that they will be good for that money. If you can’t trust Zelensky, who can you trust?
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/25/1166059867/the-imfs-15-6-billion-loan-to-ukraine-will-be-its-first-to-a-country-at-war.
Back in 2015, Ukraine defaulted on a loan to Russia, which would have made it ineligible for further loans. But then IMF said that the Russian loans were different and didn’t count.
The only risk for IMF is BRICS making their own IMF with blackjack and hookers.
Just like that IMF loan to Yeltsin’s Russia in 1996 that helped fix the election for Yeltsin. Or the US$50 billion to Argentina that broke all of the internal IMF rules and helped fund the elite capital flight. The IMF has always been an instrument of US Imperial power.
Interesting anecdata point on this. I have friends vacationing in Mexico and they’re telling me the locals around Riviera Maya are complaining about all the cheap Ukrainians coming over as tourists.
Wonder if they plan to overstay their visas….
We have a lot of Russians here (Thailand is a long-standing destination) and the numbers picked up during the period when the ruble was super strong (with an uptick in property buys) and allegedly also conscription-dodgers, although that may have been exaggerated (the Russian expats here skew to the Putin-hostile). But I have not heard of any reports of Ukrainians here when this is a long-standing bargain holiday spot (if you get cheap flights).
“The tragic reason my daughter” — the tragedy for this child is that she has a mother who took her to a Taylor Swift concert. The overwhelmed kid shut down. Seems like a healthy response to me.
yes, the kid was 6 years old!
sad lack of judgment by parent — and editor
Absolutely. I find it kind of sick that a parent would take a 6-year-old to an event like that, especially with the expectation that it will be a magical life-long memory for the kid. It’s really all for the parent. Ugh.
Lol. My mom took me to see Jaws when it was first released in 1975. I was five years old. She took me out of pre-school early so that we could see the early matinee. I must have jumped a foot out of the chair when Jaws popped up from the bottom of the screen. For my 7th birthday, my dad took me on my first rollersoaster, The Great American Scream Machine. I was so terrified, I slipped underneath the waistbar and crawled into the footwell for the entire duration of the ride. It’s a wonder I didn’t die.
My mom took me to see my first concert, Kiss, at the age of nine. That was actually an amazing event that I still have the ticket to and vividly remember 41 years later. Unfortunately, people aren’t required to get a license before becoming a parent. It’s considered a human right to raise a child instead of an earned privilege. Strangely, you have to attend at least four years of university, and pass police background checks, in order to teach that same child for one year of their life. Humanity’s hypocrisy never ceases to confound me.
But, after five years of chronic drug abuse and ten years of therapy, I can confidently say I turned out just fine ;)
Check out this from comments on that article in the Independent:
“Poor air quality – something highly likely at a Taylor Swift concert due to the number of people & how crowds dilute fresh air with their CO2- will very likely have contributed. High CO2 can lead to difficulty concentrating, brain fog & falling asleep amongst other things! Concert venues really should upgrade their audience area to air quality safety standards & make sure there’s decent HEPA air purification systems which 15+ air changes per hour installed. It helps reduce spread of airborne illness as well–the Post Swift ‘Flu’ (Covid!) certainly is widely reported amongst fans on social media as well.
As an aside— For UK voters, do note that only Lib Dems & Greens manifestos mention bringing in Clean Air regulations and laws that might normalise air filtration in public buildings and venues.”
I was in London recently when the tubes were full of parents bringing their daughters to the Swift concert. I’m only mildly puzzled, not entirely sure why Swift appeals to this demographic, but I think it was 2014 when the same phenomenon was brought on by the Miley Cyrus concert and the world was in the throes of a teenage tongue wagging twerking phase.
This one probably depends a little on the child for me. I can think of some for whom it would all have been too much, and others who would have loved the experience. It was an outdoor football stadium, so arguably not much different from going to a football game except for the noise level (I would definitely have brought hearing protection – the article doesn’t say whether the mother did that).
I wouldn’t call the outcome tragic, though. Everything is hit or miss at that age, and it sounds like things just didn’t work out this time. Time for a life lesson on coping when things don’t go quite the way you planned. Catastrophizing it for them like the mother seems to be doing is not going to help.
The hangover from that debate is a mean one.
Opening with leeches into three tales of private equity. Is it my birthday?
“Opening with leeches into three tales of private equity.”
This is actually Keir Starmer’s plan to save the NHS
LOL, perhaps we can get another episode of Blackadder then?
Paging Dr. Leech!
Made my day
Yes. One of the funniest one-liners I’ve seen in a long time. Thanks Ben!
Here is a thought that I had today. The whole problem for the Democrats is that they chose a person to run for President who was already displaying signs of dementia back in 2020 and have now boxed themselves into trying to let him have a run for another four years – even though he is patently unfit already. This was only possible by have the entire Democrat establishment, the media and many of their supporters gaslighting the country for the past four years. Thinking of England’s King George III, what if one day there is a President – Democrat or Republican – who is certifiable insane in office. Will they too be protected so that they can stay in office with the entire country being once again gas lit by the political establishment and the media? Richard Nixon does not count for his paranoia because as it turned it, he really did have enemies out to get him.
Reminds me of the vatican. The democrats have to wait for their pope to die! A cult they are.
Perfect counter to deplorables’ satan.
If it’s beige smoke coming out of the chimney on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, does that mean Kamala is President?
No, it means Hunter is at the WH this weekend.
papa habet testicles?
Depending on whom you believe Benedict volunteered, or was informed.
I’m sticking with covid induced dementia running amok in the political class.
This long preceded covid.
But long covid could lead to a short funeral procession for many of our leaders.
It’s the press that has been falling down on the job resulting in all the rushed calls for Biden’s resignation. From here on out he will be a walking talking rebuke to their dereliction.
Not that they care too much what the public thinks but it’s bad for their “dies in darkness” branding.
After the industrial-scale gaslighting, Axelrod’s victim blamingâyou voters shoulda thought of that before you nominated “knows right from wrong”âą Joe in the primariesâis especially endearing.
If you’ve seen the Netflix series “PainKiller,” it’s the same “strategy” the sacklers settled on to defend themselves against charges of pushing oxycontin–blame the addicts.
It was concerted and deliberate, and it worked for awhile.
It is being claimed currently in the corporate press that joe didn’t lose much “support” from that performance so…the “voters” have spoken.
Right? It was barely a week ago that we were being told any evidence of Joe’s decline was a deepfake.
The 25th amendment is a viable tool for solving the Dems Gordian knot problem âJoe wonât goâ.
As president yes, as nominee, no.
Yeah, he’s a jerk. The democrats were so invested in closing off any options besides Joe that they killed the primary in Florida and had all kinds of weird consequences because that greatly affected turnout. So you had some Republican candidates for mayor win office because the Democrat voters didn’t turn out. And they have the audacity to suggest We The People are responsible for this situation?
Yeah, like the primaries in Florida? New Hampshire?
I think most commentators are missing the point.
Biden is the IDEAL president BECAUSE he has dementia. The ideal is for the CIA, NSC and other key agencies also to be headed with Alzheimers individuals.
That means that they can’t testify to what happens because they honestly can’t remember.
More important, it means that control is in the hands of their operators, via Blinken and Sullivan. That bypasses the election neatly, putting control in the hands of the Dark State and the donor class.
It doesn’t have to be Alzheimers individuals but only people that are of a weak nature and are preferably corrupt. People who will fold in the face of each countries deep state. That is why there are leaders like Macron, Scholz, Sunak, von der Leyen, Yoon Suk Yeol, etc. What they do not want is strong leaders like F. D. Roosevelt who would chart their own course and put the long term interest of their country first.
This.
Only problem is, while the approach described can consolidate power among insiders, it seems to lock itself in a destructive predatory cycle, not only of others but of itself. The rope to hang them, as it were. This system, this process, is able to spin narratives (and financial assets) out of thin air and compel compliance via force, seduction, and fraud, but grows frail, incoherent, and detached from the material bases from which its power arose.
Biden “represents” the system that fashioned him, not as an elected official but as an illustration of its decadence. He’s a stumbling, stammering allegory. An American golem.
The wealthy elites have been funding the elections of their preferred candidates for decades with the preference being malleable, obedient, and probably a bit stupid. Puppets essentially. Now that we all need competent government, we canât have it.
Been there, done that. See Reagan, Ronald.
Besides, it’s unnecessarily complex. Simply send the figureheads to a Taylor Swift concert. No memory, no problem.
Unfortunately, I believe you may be onto something.
The original Star Trek TV show had an episode with this plot line. Bad guys keep the completely incapacitated president in place, only seen on view screens, only heard through spokesmen, and never in public, because it secretly keeps the bad guys in control of the country. Roddenberry was ahead of his time.
That’s exactly the reference that I’ve been thinking of as well. “Patterns of Force” from Season 2. I was just showing it to my spouse the other day.
A planet ruled by a Nazi party that was set up by John Gill, a Federation official who tried to deploy the “efficient government” of National Socialism to reign in anarchy, but without the eugenics and genocide. It didn’t work out. Then the aliens drug up the exhausted and nearly dead Gill and use him to deliver propaganda messages to support genocide and war with a neighboring planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_Force_%28Star_Trek%3A_The_Original_Series%29?wprov=sfla1
Right after the debate, I also thought of making a TOS John Gill comment here (but didn’t, figuring it might be too nerdy lol).
It was pretty eerie, seeing how Biden was just obviously out of it, visibly on drugs, and meanwhile the full-on gaslighting continues.
@Michael Hudson: It is beyond maddening that citizens of this country are not more concerned, or at least curious, about this.
The country is being run by “national security professionals,” obviously not the “president,” and look what they’re doing–relentless antagonism toward nuclear-armed Russia (and China and Islam in the Middle East) as well as silently watching an invasion of millions of unknown illegals over the southern border, who are then seeded (strategically???) throughout the country.
At any other time in this country’s history, “national security” alarms would be screeching and people would be panicking. But not now for some reason.
At the end of a long interview from a few days ago (start around 1:55), Tucker Carlson and Matt Taibbi discussed this “puzzling” state of affairs. Both admit to having given up trying to figure out the “angle” in terms of the motivation of these security staters. Both see a “messianic” or “spiritual” quality to their inexplicable “governance” that is much “darker” than mere “politics.”
As Taibbi notes, if it was just about Trump, they could put up another candidate, “throw the working class a bone,” and get rid of him. There seems to be more than that at play right now. As chilling as that notion is, I find myself in complete agreement.
I also found the end of that interview compelling and disturbing
Everyone needs to watch that
It is a set of interlocking networks, some of which include security agencies, indeed…
Zephyr Teachout – Corruption in America From Benjamin Franklins Snuff Box to Citizens United
China and Russia, as systems with strong popular support of a powerful executive represent the marriage between “tyranny” and “demos”, while in the UK you have the marriage between “tyranny” and “oligarchy”.
In the US, “oligarchy” has for quite some time decided to run on its own, the little break with bones thrown to “demos” between FDR time and Regan, after which the only thing hoi polloi got was demagoguery. Now it has reached such a level of degeneracy and created a thoroughly anomied population that is beyond redemption. It will only get worst before it might start to turn the corner.
“Biden is the IDEAL president BECAUSE he has dementia. The ideal is for the CIA, NSC and other key agencies also to be headed with Alzheimers individuals….
..That bypasses the election neatly, putting control in the hands of the Dark State and the donor class.”
Sovereign nations/states with representatives responsive to the needs of their populations (and not mainly fundraising entities) have the ability to check corporate power.
Wherever in the world, including the USA, that can be disrupted is the process.
Another thought is that they want the surveillance state to do day to day governing of the USA and then further denigrate the electoral system to the point where people accept some supranational fascist government presiding over budgets and spending.
Sometimes, such as right now, gaslighting is too kind a euphemism for lying
So, Joe’s not running the show. Who is? Who are they? I would truly like to see some names. We can assume that they are totally on board with Ukraine, are quite comfortable with murdering thousands of Palestinians, have a dark hand in the security/censorship industry…surely they should be easy to identify since they are in the White House. So why haven’t they been revealed?
Sullivan and Blinken. It’s pretty obvious.
Somebody linked the Taibbi & Kirn post debate show. They try to answer that exact question (“who is in charge?”) from 1:08:56. Kirn says it’s Obama and he’s heard about foreign heads of state saying they deal with Obama-world people directly.
https://www.youtube.com/live/duuQ3OxZihQ?si=ksl6G4YIKYtS4D_B
Given on-going events in the Middle East, and his invite to speak before Congress, a case can be made that Netanyahu is our real president, and that Israel is not just an “aircraft carrier”, but the 51st state.
Just do a roll call on Congress and youâll have a pretty good list of suspects.
Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon and other advisors are the ones pulling the strings. They aren’t household names and that is no accident. Also, members of his cabinet who wield a lot of power, like Antony Blinken.
My dear ladies and gentlemen, I recommend to you all the book “A Man Called Intepid”, by William Stevenson (1976). It is very enlightening, and published before they knew they should keep their mouths shut.
It was prominently visible on Daniel Ellsberg’s bookcase behind him during a fairly late interview, but alas, I cannot locate it. If anyone knows which it was, could they pls post?
I just watched a clip of Nancy Pelosi on CNN talking to Dana Bash and told her a bunch of experts said Trump has dementia.
You really can’t make this stuff up. Maybe’s Nancy’s been not paying attention because she’s too busy with stock picking.
OTOH, this guy has these observations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-qYWH-4K1o
In most any kind of professional environment everyone has someone they are answerable to, a one up who creates a form of performance improvement plan or sets expectations and takes action when criteria not met. The problem is the President of the US, once elected, is answerable to nobody, just does what they want, and even if answerable the structure of government makes it difficult to even keep promises, so meeting key measurables is not expected. And in US culture politicians aren’t held to any kind of account for performance anyway, are expected to be dishonest and lie, wouldn’t be elected if they didn’t – perhaps almost the only trait Americans admire? So dementia doesn’t even matter. In a different world where a US president is not emperor, royalty, where title is contingent on performance and outcome, where politicians were expected to keep promises, where promises had some hope of being kept, and where dishonesty and assholery weren’t a key desired trait, the dementia issue would play out differently?
Ah, George III.
Walter Savage Landor wrote beautifully:
George the First was always reckoned
Vile, but viler George the Second.
And what mortal ever heard
Any good of George the Third,
But when from earth the Fourth descended
God be praised the Georges ended.
“…..that issue is settled.
The discussion that is going on now was timely a year ago, when few wanted to⊔
Are we finally allowed to say/use the word “discussion” again?
It has been nothing but….”conversation, conversations” for the last ten dystopian years.
If “discussions” is back, it could be significant? oh my…….
I’m glad to see the Dem estab blaming the voters for B this year, and not their own primary election machinations. Figures. (I hear there are independents running who tried to run in the Dem primary first. / ;)
Jerome Adams for president!
Old white people, heads still stuck in the sand. i remember watching Kennedy get elected and was so proud of our nation. Today’s whit(i)es are the children of those Americans. Spaceman to arms dealers, children squandering their parent’s legacy. They seem to live in fear. No dreams. The geek victory over the hippies. Loved Gates’s idea the AI’s will figure it out. My question is for who, all the people or some of the people? Culture’s thousands of years old or the two-century upstarts…
Your, um, concern is noteworthy.
Hmmm… I would say this “person” has an ax to grind. However, this is the Glorious New Century where old tech like axes, pitchforks, and guillotines have been relegated to the museums. Funny how one suddenly runs into an example of one of the tenets of the Alchemist’s Creed: Everything old is new again.
By his avatar handle, I’m guessing the commenter is an English Elected Official.
heh, indeed. Thanks.
Uh, JFK’s proud victory was courtesy of Joe’s money and Chicago’s Daley machine. Maybe dreams are the problem. We are not a shining city on a hill.
Courtesy of my library I’m reading Turley’s new book on free speech and his theme is that the first amendment was being violated almost as soon as it passed with subsequent violators including revered figures like Lincoln.
The glass half full version of this is that periods of repression are followed by periods of reform because “consent of the governed” has always remained a factor. Turns out thought control is hard. Our diversity may be our strength rather than weakness as long as the elites don’t pull a Dr.Strangelove and end it all.
Don’t forget the Texas graves with magic doors which opened automatically every election day so that at least some of the silent majority could perform their civic duty. All very Burkean.
It is NEVER for ALL of the people
Biden campaign says debate âdid not change the horse raceâ The Hill.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nice juxtaposition with the antidote…
In horse racing there are various classes of races, and you’ll sometimes see a top caliber thoroughbred (typically a gelding) that can’t compete at a high level, so they drop down to claiming races (every horse in a claimer is for sale-the lowest ranks that ply their trade @ the ‘oval office’) and the term ‘past class’ signifies their new role @ the track.
Joe’s been a claimer for some time now, always up for sale.
He better not break a leg or else they will have to put him down like any other broken-down nag.
I can picture another tacky campaign merch gimmick a la the Brandon’s Dark Water :
Biden Glue (on a bottle of old timey glue)
I’m just not sure which of the two campaigns would do it first. They are both vacuous enough.
I caught a brief video replay from the Daily Show, Stewart was playing some clips from the debate and Joe’s facial reactions while Trump was speaking. If you are losing Stewart in this aftermath that speaks volumes. Added, Joe now makes prior analogies I had made to fictional William Le Petomayne seem appropriate.
Onward Joe! Dr. Jill be riding her man, until the bitter end. Rhetorically of course.
Joe & Jill Went up the hill
To seek the treasure
Joe looked worse for wear
And Jill said, there’s no problem there.
Speaking of Dr. Jill….
From Due Dissidence guys, utube, ~14 minutes. The first 5-6 minutes are enough.
Jill Biden DESPERATELY Spins Debate DEBACLE in PITIFUL Display
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTujaFm72EY
US has an aged, dementia patient “with the keys” to 5000 thermo-nuclear weapons!
Egregious contempt for life on the planet!
Buy an EV!
Don’t worry, aides say he is fully engaged from 10 AM to 4 PM. Better get the memo out to all enemies foreign and domestic to please schedule hostilities accordingly.
Heâs even admitted he was up for sale. Problem is at this point, glue factory!
He also did that at the beginning of his career. At a speech he said that when he first became a Senator, he went to the big guys and said that he wanted to sell out. They laughed at him and told him to come back in a few years when he could offer more – which he did. I literally saw the video of this years ago on one of Jimmy Dore’s videos.
I have many analogies with horseshit to describe the entire state of affairs.
But this is a family blog…
re:I have many analogies with horseshit to describe the entire state of affairs.
One should not dignify these folks or their “state of affairs” by invoking “horse hockey”. Well-aged, composted horse manure is a very useful substance; it is somewhat better than cow manure.
Yahoo had a repost of an article from somewhere where insiders, some anonymous some not, reported on the useless conference call that the Biden campaign had with donors and delegates on Saturday. Unsurprisingly it was apparently one sided, no questions, and upbeat about going forward. The term one person used was âgaslightingâ. They were were being told to ignore the debate and go out and fundraise. The fact that this report exists shows this isnât going to happen, some perhaps many are not doing that.
Anecdotally being on the Biden Harris email list is interesting for the talking points and levels of desperation. The last month the urgency and frequency of the requests have increased noticeably. It went from 2 or three a day to upwards of six and seven. And Trumps big donors overwhelming the grass root small donor based Biden fundraising. (Speaking of lying that whopper repeated often should disqualify anyone in the campaign calling Trump a liar ever again.) I think the failure of Trumpâs conviction to knock him out and that he is still raising so much has been a gut wrenching shock to them.
But, but, but, stuttered the unindicted war criminal, he has thirty three criminal convictions!
It is kind of wild to me that they are so anxious to ensure that Trump cannot have immunity for the things he did while in office. As the empire CFITs* its’ way to into irrelevance and the backbiting begins, such policies might come in handy for all of them.
*Controlled Flight Into Terrain.
I started seeing a ginormous number of Biden fundraiser vids on YouTube bout 10 days ago, with Obama, Biden, and recently Harris making the pitches. Most did not even deign to give a reason to vote for Biden or did so only very late. Note my viewing fare consists almost entirely of anti-globalist shows like the Duran boys, Judge Nap, and Nima of Dialogue Works. As in they seem to be blanketing the innertubes if they are hitting viewers of shows not ideologically aligned with Team Dem.
I get dozens of emails from Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Kamala Harris, Julia Roberts, etc. every day asking for money
Delete, delete, delete…
What, no George Clooney or Elton John?
I get endless Dem party texts since I donated to Bernie 8 years ago.
Sounds like the DNC outsourced their funds raising campaign to a Nigerian Financial Sales Organization.
“Help us restore Joe to glory. When he reascends the Princely Chair of State he will remember all of you faithful who contributed to his Glorious Restoration. Your contributions will be returned ten fold. The funds are sitting there! Help us open the floodgates of sequestered wealth! Send wire transfer or cryptos to “Help Prince Joe Fund” Lagos, Nigeria.
Yves,
I also pretty much only look at those shows. Thought it odd too. But they have been really turning it up, with the fund raising. I start hitting skip as soon as I see any of these 4 faces! Next they will be running Hillary begging us to give him money. Just sad.
I close them as soon as I’m able to while muttering
“I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”
Heck, I’d piss on them even if they weren’t on fire.
I’ve seen the same. Usually I’m watching political videos from the Duran, Napolitano, etc. and the ads I get tend to skew toward the conservative, demonstrating once again that these algos really aren’t that bright. But just recently they’re pushing Biden ads at me from watching the same videos. Also proving one more time the algos are dumber than a bag of hammers.
No ads at all yet for the “pox of all your houses” crowd.
I watch vids on Chrome (on one monitor) but never search for anything on it, I paste links from Firefox (where I do DDG searches and everything else) on the other monitor. Most of my vids are radicals on mainly Palestine or Ukraine etc, or astrophysics (yup, I’m nerdy, Dr. Becky et al). I get Biden appeals on the former and wait for it, evangelical appeals on the latter. In the Chrome vids, which I usually watch at length, I get automatic segues to similar content. I’m an on one or two Mac OS behind the last to be current for either. I was receiving tons of Dems $ text appeals but have been stopping all of them (I gave some money to Sanders way back, a sucker is born everyday).
I have had similar experiences with the ads. I wonder, why in the world would they be targeting me? It occurs that ad placement is done by AI or something similar. And I think we just discovered that AI cant tell humor or satire from reality. Maybe Duran watchers, or Dore watchers are targeted because AI thinks that the mocking of the establishment is the same as supporting the establishment?
Seeing the same.
So glad I went commercial free YouTube Premium.
As someone elsewhere put it; “If YouTube made their subscription price something reasonable, like Five bucks, I’d pay. But what they want today? Nope.”
So glad I use FreeTube and see no YT ads any more.
Last year, they were really pushing pro Ukr ads, and after October, pro Isr ads, along with some crazy conservative pol ads, at least to me (some of these running for an hour or more–when I couldn’t hit the skip button, because I was playing the vids in the background while doing stuff I couldn’t stop). I thought that very strange, given the obvious proclivity in the other direction of these shows. I wonder if they were deliberately pushing ads I couldn’t stand so that I might go “premium” or whatever they call the ad free version.
It’s not his fault YOU selected him.
That’s the sign of a healthy dem party!
The gaslighting amongst these sorry, shuffling wards is a fright.
Maybe the genocidal criminal syndicate running this death cult has maxed out the psychological operations but probably not.
“The term one person used was âgaslightingâ. They were were being told to ignore the debate and go out and fundraise.”
They could cause an energy crisis with the amount of gaslighting it’s going to take.
Having recently read again about the Profumo Affair the quote of Mandy Rice-Davies comes to mind, “Well he would, wouldn’t he?”
And five years from now when people confront him because all those AI server farms have wrecked the electrical grid and water supplies have run short to feed those server farms, Bill will rub the back of his neck, say ‘I guess that I was wrong’, turn to climb aboard his private jet, and then fly back to his Medina mansion.
Donât forget counting his money as one of the worldâs largest landowners he has significant water rights he will be profiting from. Why one might have thought he saw it comingâŠ
It gets better. The needs for those data centers will be greatest near population centers. Many population centers are near the coasts. In places like Singapore, the time from opening a coastal data center, to some data centers having a catastrophic loss due to corrosion and other equipment issues is less than 4 months.
Do you have a link for that? I would be interested.
Parable of Biblical proportions…Bill Gates would kick the poor off his land but then double down to make sure pay homage and their meager sum of alms to enjoy clean water. Otherwise they just deal with the pollution in their drinking water much like those citizens have had to do across the country. Flint, Jackson, West Virginia, Fayetteville ( NC ).
Bezos, Gates, the Zuck…but a few of the flaming assholes of a uniquely American capitalist reward incentives and plunder. Exceptional country.
Griffen, you can count Mr. Tesla in there too.now promoting over population as the answer to all our problems. Canât we just send these four dicks for a ride in bezos phallic space ship?
It’s more than just the four, but it’s a start. I’d prefer or suggest using a Boeing Starliner if we are sure, like very certain, we want to see them riding high into flight. Solves a few issues at once, a test of the Boeing flight program being worthy of NASA or not.
I’d throw Peter Thiel into the mix for good measure. Every flight into space needs a chief medical or science officer, so a friendly android named David ( or Ash ) should be a good match to this group. \sarc
I know I’m late to this, but why would anyone listen to him? What he says is hopeful nonsense unless you think the laws of physics and electrical engineering have been repealed.
The Case for Bad Coffee Serious Eats
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I learned to enjoy bad coffee in the Backcountry, and truth be said there is a magical transformation of all foodstuffs and beverages when you’re on a backpack trip, hell… saltines taste like a crusty baguette if you didn’t know better.
You don’t really want to have much prep time, and Trader Joe’s has these wonderful packets that have instant coffee, sugar and creamer in them, you merely have to tear off the top and you’re in business.
Another favorite is a teaspoon of Nescafe Clasico with Abuelita instant Mexican hot chocolate, a white trash mocha that tastes pretty good,
there is a magical transformation of all foodstuffs and beverages when youâre on a backpack trip A very real and wonderful thing in my experiences. Not sure “bad” coffee exists, at least when compared to “no” coffee.
âNot sure âbadâ coffee exists, at least when compared to ânoâ coffeeâ
My hero!
Wukchumni: The article by Pandolfi about bad coffee, in my not-so-humble opinion, is an article about a kind of Proust’s madeleine.
Anyone like me who grew up in the Great Lakes States knows that black coffee in a diner or informal restaurant or from the percolator of one’s godmother is always something grand. Black coffee at the funeral parlor is a sign of mourning.
Strangely, I was once on a United flight and the cabin attendant said that she could tell us Great Lakes peeps because we always drank coffee black.
Pandolfi seems to have had a lot of rules. He didn’t seem to get that a plain espresso coffee in Italy serves the same function: A chance to relax, some chats with one’s friend, a few minutes with the newspaper or to take notes. There are no “hours” about cappuccino–not that I’ve seen. It’s just that Italians think of cappuccino or caffellatte as too much milk for later in the day.
Exotic beans are exotic beans: The problem at a place like Starbucks is that they invariably brew a bad cup of coffee. They should call in Mrs. Olson for a consultation.
And because I used to smoke Camel un-filtered cigarettes (the cigarettes of the gods), a black coffee and a cig were a regular epiphany.
And because I used to smoke Camel un-filtered cigarettes (the cigarettes of the gods), a black coffee and a cig were a regular epiphany. Ditto. What a pleasure.
I second that ditto.
I as well. I might add that when the store was out of Camel straights
I would buy Pall Mall kings, also unfiltered, the chosen smoke of Kurt
Vonnegut- himself something of a literary god.
Pretty sure there are more than just four of us in this forum who turned our fingers orange smoking unfiltered Camels while drinking black coffee. Modern day Red Bull guzzlers would be impressed by the one-two punch of nicotine + caffeine.
The coffee did get better but the cigarettes got worse.
Here in the North American Deep South we had, and probably still do, a cigarette brand called Picayunes. They were the closest thing in America to strong French cigarettes. One an hour would keep the buzz going. After a pack of Picayunes, a Chesterfield or Lucky Strike was weak tea.
Ahhhhh! The times of ignorance, youth, and bliss…
Hey, somebody pass the red M&Ms.
I used to smoke unfiltered Camels while on vacation in the US (and I am not a smoker, apart from the occasional cigar) on the premise that everything else was more hazardous in your country, so when in Rome âŠ
Cigarettes of the gods!?!? Lucky Strike would like a word with you!
I quit over a decade ago myself, but for some reason I’m really feeling like having a taste test over a cup of coffee right about now. I’d throw one more into the mix, but a search finds that the ironically named SantĂ© cigarettes I used to sample on trips to Greece are no more.
lyman alpha blob. Ha!
I was at a CCCP concert (look ’em up on YTube) the other night, and someone at the picnic table asked if I was bothered by her cigarette. Italian etiquette. My response:
I quit thirty-five years ago. I used to smoke like a Greek.
Your genome is calling out to you.
SantĂ©? Years ago, on visits to Italy, I used to smoke MS, “Monopoli dello Stato,” cigarettes. What could be more romantic and socialistic? And they were damn cheap.
Some quitters become disgusted with the smell of smoking after they stop, but not me. When smokers ask if I’m bothered, my reply is usually something like, “Not at all, and if you’d care to send a big cloud over my way I’d be appreciative.”
I will now stop commenting before I’m tempted to go out and buy a pack.
That’s true for me for whatever brand of wonderful Virginian tobacky the brits smoke, I don’t know why it smells so heavenly. But it’s not likely to be true for the Balkan cigs or Turkish blends I used to smoke which could clear a room even of smokers and which, I fear, may have hastened the anti-smoking laws.
LS/MFT
“Call for Philip Morris!”
We were a Chesterfields family when it came to unfiltered cigs.
Gauloises replaced the unfiltered Camels when I was about 25 half a century ago
The problem with Starbucks isnât so much the brewing as the roasting. Starbucks is the flavor of bitter charcoal because they burn their beans to a crisp. Dark roasts are an easy way to produce a consistent flavor profile from cheap beans bought from various sources in massive quantities. I used to think of dark roasts as the sophisticated, strong choice. These days Iâve learned I prefer the light to medium range, and most dark roasts taste like charcoal and flat, bitter chalk to me. I recommend getting into roasting if youâre so inclined. Green beans are $5-9/lb, and a popper style roaster can be had pretty cheap at Sweet Mariaâs or elsewhere.
Yep Starbucks burns their beans, it’s pretty awful.
We are very lucky in that we live near friends who for years have run a boutique coffee roasting company, and they know how to do it right. They partner with farmers in central America and so get the beans from the source (and there is less exploitation). My favorite is a blend of dark and lighter roasts.
Decades ago, I spent 6 weeks filling in for an employee at Starbucksâ warehouse and roasting plant in South Seattle. The usually harsh smell of the roastery as one drove by on I-5 was not always pleasant, but inside the plant itself the odor was fresh, rich, and welcoming. I recall an enjoyable visit (maybe there was more than one) with Dave Olsen, the companyâs then buyer of all things bean. He and I had a few things in common (even excluding coffee), but unfortunately for me one thing which I do not have in common with him is that he eventually made a nice dollar. But, I am glad for him, given that he is truly a fine human bean.
Finally an explanation of why Starbucks taste so bad black. One is almost forced to contaminate it with everything they have to offer to kill the taste. Also, dumping out half and replacing it with hot water does a pretty good job of making the black coffee drinkable. Disclaimer: I haven’t been in a Starbucks in years so taste may have improved.
Starbuck’s espresso is vile.
Funny that you mentioned the Great Lakes coffee – I was unaware of the connection, but I know the best cup of coffee I ever drank was as a 17 year old, at a truck stop on Lake Eerie called The Green Shingle Inn. My dad was an over-the-road driver and I was with him for a summer. We were on a very long haul from El Paso to somewhere in Vermont and he was fudging the log book (back when they were analogue) to make the miles. We stopped at the Green Shingle for a little sleep and when we got up and went in for breakfast, the waitress brought us one of those old fashioned steel and black plastic carafes to the table to share. It. Was. Incredible. I probably didn’t drink it black. I might have. It wouldn’t have mattered. The taste and the sense of well being after 2.5 days of straight driving to that point was unforgettable.
Hunger and thirst – the best seasonings.
Best recommendation for instant coffee out in the wilds is to bring a microwave – the gradual temperature rise avoids bitterness and leaves a crema on top. Once you’ve found a power point, just slide the machine out of your rucksack and wait for the ding.
Camels–
Those, along with Lucky Strikes, were the kind of cigarettes smoked by people who raised tobacco.
And of long tradition:
John Prine, “Grandpa Was a Carpenter“
I had the great pleasure of seeing him perform, opening for the cowboy junkies. The bonus was going to a pub for drinks after, and by happenstance he and his band were there, putting one on. That was a fun night.
That piece isnât really about coffee at all â itâs about relationships and community.
I learned to make campfire coffee when backpacking. Just carry the coffee grounds and a bit of salt and you’re in business. Can be made in any size container, even in a metal Sierra Cup. It’s very good coffee, too. Steaming hot coffee first thing on a chilling morning.
When going through Italy, I broke down and brought a cheap Italian coffee pot which I used for years afterwards in spite of the size and weight in my pack-
https://www.wired.com/2014/08/bialetti-moka-express/
Never regretted it.
I use the updated stainless steel moka pot now even though screwing and unscrewing it 3x a day for my 3 cups of coffee is keeping my injured thumb very upset…. despite religiously wearing a thumb brace when doing so. So I am literally suffering for my coffee!
I have a coffee grinder and found a really really nice Thai dark roast…I will make a special trip to the store that carries it and stock up.
OK, I am going to have a go at this problem. Maybe you can get a local to make a wooden block with the shape of the bottom of that coffee pot carved out of the center. You make your coffee and then put that pot into that wooden block. The shape means that it cannot twist so then you only have to use your good hand to screw the top off of it. As the saying goes – it it sounds stupid but works, then it is not stupid.
Aaaw…..Did any one tell you that problem-solving is male nurturing?
It’s a guy thing. It’s what we do. :)
Yves,
Thank you – that caused a loud
barking laugh here. It’s funny
because it’s true.
J
A clamp or a vice might work, too. Attached to the counter.
There is some great coffee to be found in Thailand.
When the power went out recently for more than 48 hours following a major storm, I made coffee with Maxwell House instant and hot water from the tap.
I am Midwestern. We deal with it.
Here is a life-hack I used when I was camping around Europe. Get yourself a cheap Esbit stove-
https://www.armyandoutdoors.com.au/products/german-esbit-folding-stove
Inside it rest something like a cleaned out sardine tin, fill it with methylated spirits, put a thin-base pot on top of that stove and then light the spirits with a match. Pretty soon that water is hot enough to make a decent coffee with. Hot coffee is not a matter of life and death – it is more important than that.
Sometimes we take a Kelly Kettle with us on backpack trips, as all we’re doing is boiling water pretty much, and you only need to gather a small amount of little sticks & twigs and you’re in business.
I love that Pandolfi, who I gather is from Ohio, mentions Frisch’s Big Boy chain of restaurants. Some of my favorite childhood memories are of eating lunch at Frisch’s with my mother after we had shopped on the downtown square of a Saturday morning. A Frisch’s hamburger, order of onion rings, soft drink and my mom’s company. No fancy meal can ever match that.
The coffee grounds are problematic as everything we take into the backcountry, we also bring out and they are a mess.
To do it right though, you need egg shells, which magically push the grounds down into the bottom of the pot. Nobody I know brings eggs on a backpack trip, though.
Hey, yous dissing my coffee? Them’s fight’n words. / ;)
I was going to make a sarcastic comment but remembered in time that “good” coffee is worth fighting over.
I empty my coffee grounds into the fire pit, in the hope that the next camper will incinerate them. Is this wrong?
We rarely have a campfire in the wilderness (none are allowed anywhere in the Mineral King backcountry, or above a certain altitude in the rest of Sequoia NP) so that wouldn’t be an option usually, but a moot point as we’d never take ground coffee with us unless it was an overnight trip and I brought a percolator or French press.
I suppose coffee grounds would burn, never tried it though.
Sorry to tell you, but some quite well known coffee ‘brands’ supply pre-burned grounds.
Pop them in the pot and savour the aroma of “Supply House Coffee.” (True story, but I would bring my own small carton of milk to the supply house counter during the morning daily parts buy, and leave it next to the coffee machine after I had dosed myself with the “Notorious Beveridge.” Eventually, it becomes a Round Robbin of generous addicts.
My last backpacking trip was a 5-day tour of alpine lakes in the Trinity wilderness in N. CA (as a 60th bday present), guided and outfitted by my son who has worked for the forest/fire service all his life. He carried the food and heavier gear and cooked for out party of three — eggs, mushroom omelets no less! He had them in a little hard plastic egg box. What a treat!
> Hayek, the Accidental Freudian Corey Robin, The New Yorker. Well worth a read.
> An American scientist says the perfect cup of tea involves salt and lemon NBC
> The Case for Bad Coffee Serious Eats
This is the greatest juxtaposition series in the history of Naked Capitalism. Hayek can’t get steak (Lenerl) and substitutes Spam (Hella), doesn’t like the taste, but finds he is trapped in the bonds of his decision. He throws away personal and professional relationships and causes a scandal to get back that piece of steak. But in the end it’s his abandoned kids who take care of him
.
Pandolfi had a relationship with coffee and the people who also loved coffee. Ted was his von_Mises, inculcating him to the ways of bad coffee and ‘the wisdom of the Republican party.’ He threw away the evidence of his senses and accepted the Spam, altering his conception of the experience so that the experience of the concrete materiel of coffee is not what is important about the coffee. He dumped his French Press like Hayek dumped his wife and Pinochet dumped his rivals. But yet his prose longs for it like elvesongs for Tol EressĂ«a.
Mind you, I like a cup of ‘bad’ coffee, there’s something about a greasy spoon that is very grounding. Peter’s Broasted Chicken was an important part of my collegiate experience. But morning and evening Coffee is the basis of our marriage as well as our food pyramid. I will not have it slandered.
I didn’t reat the middle article, wtf an American talking about a cup of tea…
Anyway, here’s the Theme Song for Hayek and bad coffee.
One culinary item that can be superb in the wilderness is tea. Before long trips on the Continental Divide Trail I always laid in a supply of the best oolong I could obtain, as well as top quality black tea from Darjeeling and Ceylon. (Loose tea, of course. A tiny strainer can easily nest in the cookset.) The quality of the water makes the difference, but one must boil it in a stainless steel pot. Tea made with water boiled in aluminum is unrecognizable. Several cups of good hot tea at the end of the hiking day are wonderfully restorative.
Appalled at how lopsided NC is on the topic of caffeinated beverages.
The tea recipe is stupid. Do not add salt to tea to remove bitterness (honey does that better), simply brew the tea properly.
There’s been a big change in tea brewing habits in this century and it’s now an established fact that more tea brewed for less time produces a significantly better pot of tea. Bitterness comes from oversteeping and is easily avoided. Weak tea and bad coffee stem mostly from bad ingredients and bad brewing but tea emerges as the winner here because properly made tea can be resteeped and enjoyed more than once. You can’t rebrew coffee, it’s a one and done beverage.
On the coffee side, I just recently tried honey with coffee and am now a huge fan. Never liked sweetening my coffee but honey surprised me, almost like a cup of nondairy “Vietnamese” coffee.
“significantly better pot of tea” is subjective. I am British and prefer my tea lightly stewed – a strong bag (of coarse tasting black tea from only certain brands) brewed for 5 minutes. I accept that I am a barbarian.
Also for coffee-heads who travel (or have sore thumbs) an aeropress is invaluable. I’m kinda coffee snobby and have used it almost exclusively for about 10 years.
Oregano is for savages!
i like my coffee and tea bitter and oversteeped. i need to start hunting for even more bitter blends. i like it. wakes me up.
I can tolerate bad coffee but IMO chemical-ish powdered creamer can never substitute for the milk that makes bad coffee tolerable–sugar too of course.
And it’s not just the coffee. One of the attractions of roughing it is the discovery that you can manage without all the luxuries of home. For example if you are tired enough you can sleep almost anywhere.
Of course another attraction for most of us is that after a few days you don’t have to do it any more.
“Cremate”, we call that stuff.
powdered non-dairy creamer fugettaboutit and oat-soy-almond-etc milk – just doesn’t cut it – and H5N1 isn’t 86’d from pasteurization – waddayagunnado? – guess i’ll take my chances with organic 1/2&1/2 –
Thanks for the white trash mocha recipe. Our habit is to get the water going before leaving the down, have our coffee and hike for at least an hour. Then stop and make breakfast.
If the guy likes bad coffee so much, maybe he should go work for Starbucks.
For the caffeine addicted, like me, it’s important to be able to tolerate the bad coffee, because sometimes the good isn’t available. Thus I don’t get too hifalutin with what I regularly drink at home, lest I become spoiled. Be that as it may, on a recent road trip I had some gas station coffee that was so awful I was compelled to pour it out. Which hadn’t happened in decades, if ever.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Cuban or Turkish coffee which I often hear described as the worst (and that worst is also why people like it). The key difference between the two is the pot, with Turkish essentially being a small open pot and the grinds being poured into the drinking cup, the Cuban using the typical Italian moka pot (described by Rev Kev below) which filters the grinds. The Cuban coffee is made with a thick sugar paste but the Turkish needs sweetening by the drinker.
Also, every Aussie I’ve ever met has remarked on how bad the coffee is regardless where, so much so that I almost want to visit Australia for the sole purpose of seeing what they’re talking about, but I’m told it’s basically Italian, Americano or such, which makes it seem likely Aussies might be drinking something similar to the Cuban stuff?
After WW2 we had a lot of people from Italy come out here to Oz to live and one of the many things that they brought was their styes of coffee. Really good stuff and I like a good cappuccino myself. Corporate US coffee like Starbucks came out to Oz and went nowhere because it could not compare.
I do not understand this comment. I lived in Sydney for 2 years in the early 2000s. Starbucks started opening stores around then. They bombed because Australians had (mainly) been drinking good Italian coffee and rejected Starbucks as burnt dishwater. The folks in the US were shocked that any market would deem their brew to be inferior. This was well reported in the Aussie press at the time, with amusement at Starbucks’ arrogance.
it’s a sad state of affairs when starbucks swill is the best coffee you can get in japan. for a coffee mad country, what’s on offer here is usually terrible sour tasking muck.
Re TheRegister article on Mr Gates and power consumption/, over the past year, Mr. Gates is making a play from being the richest person in the world to becoming the most powerful person in the world. The difference between the two is:
One of the secondary effects of consolidating power generation away from fossil fuels is that all energy that the world needs to manufacture goods, power the infrastructure that supplies food, water, and medicine, and allows people to travel, communicate, and (largely, if cashless) transfer funds, can all be redirected or denied by the authority that governs the electrical power grid. The winners and losers can be determined by a literal flip of a switch.
If there is one concept that Mr. Gates understands, it is monopoly. He is not the only person or group that sees the prize that comes with controlling the electrical grid, moving cashless, and regulating away alternatives. He is just the most visible. If that wasn’t enough, the electricity hungry AI industry is now making a play to monopolize much of labor under the banner of “AI safety:.
For the noble cause of “saving the planet”, the price that will be put before us will be to succumb to some yet unknown benevolent authority that will have existential control over every person.
Food for thought.
I believe Gates said that for every dollar he gives for philanthropy, he gets $20 back.
That’s is the best definition of oligarch philanthropy I’ve seen.
That explains everything you need to know about Bill’s philanthropy. And of course, when you are an oligarch you can buy as much power as you want (of the wielding kind). Minions everywhere know the value of a dollar/euro/pound/yen for services rendered in secret.
âLike Kennedys and Bushesâ: Indonesia president-elect Prabowoâs family business empire draws parallels, concerns
How the hell did this get through Singapore Government’s famous censorship? I guess the new Prime Minister in Singapore is seeking a repeat of the following: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34355825? TLDR: don’t go to Singapore this October or next October unless you plan to cough … a lot.
>Thomas Massie
There are several TwitterX videos questioning the timing of Thomas Massie’s interview with Tucker Carlson and the death of his wife that have me concerned. What the truth is I can’t determine. I can’t help but feel though that we are living in dark times, you can see the jostling for power and control playing out on your screens and read the lies upon lies spewed out day after day.
Hopefully there is an intrepid independent journalist out that is willing to dig deeper than yesterday’s headlines to find the truth and that it is no more than that bad things happen to good people now and then, otherwise we have reached a new evil.
Just read earlier today how Thomas Massie’s wife has passed away. She wasn’t old either. He has known her since high school which is something-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13580681/rep-thomas-massie-wife-rhonda-died.html
He was 18, she 16 so a wee bit of statutory you know what, before he finally roped her in.
Not that uncommon. Being a family historian I have hundreds of birth, death and marriage certificates which shows me a pattern. That typically, men married women that were two or three years younger than themselves. I find this a constant thing in my records and though I do not know why, nonetheless this is what I am seeing. The surprise here is that Massie and his wife were dating when in high school and stayed together all that time with not a divorce in sight.
Two things: I’m pretty sure Rhonda was older
than him. And two, I’m also pretty sure a mere
two year difference at that age is OK as far as
the state of Kentucky is concerned. Kentucky
had a sort-of-reasonable bracketed age thing
in the statues.
J
———————————————————
This news is actually really weird for me; I
did a double take on reading the story online,
because I actually knew her, way back when.
I don’t recall ever meeting him, but was
surprised upon reading this story that he
turned out to be the Politician Thomas Massie.
Really? When I was a high school sophomore aged at 16 my boyfriend then was a high school senior and aged at 18. Sorry. Your “statutory” insinuation doesn’t track for this age bracket. imo.
This country is schizoid when it comes to adolescent relationships. In some venues your boyfriend could’ve been arrested and then made to wear a tracking anklet and forced to register as a sex offender wherever he moved. In other venues he would’ve been able to marry a 14 year old with few issues. A lot of this comes out of reaction to the 1960s, the most sexist decade in history, when men were encouraged to think they could/should get it from any female they laid their eyes on, and literature and movies had plenty of cheerleaders for that attitude. After the mid-1970s, radical feminists and fundamentalist Christians started forging a tentative alliance against this one-sided “sexual liberation”, and we wound up with cultural aberrations like the “Satanic panic” as a result (which was initially spurred by a handful of 100% fake “tell all” stories of young girls who had been defiled by Satanic, drug-crazed hippies). Now that has devolved into QAnon style conspiracy stories and a lot of worrying about “child trafficking”, where a child is anyone up through age 17 years and 364 days. But that same child can be sold makeup and pole dancing accessories down to kindergarten age because profits. We can’t seem to look at what’s going on in a sane way, between prudish religious authorities, deranged “cultural studies” academics, guilt-tripped 2+ job parenting units, profit-seeking corporations, and politicians loking for a crusade to bolster their flabby ratings.
She was 51 years old. That is really pretty young for dying.
No reason given for his wife’s death.
Masse made said much on Carlson about every GOP Congressional member having an AIPAC handler, except him. He assumed the Dem pols also had handlers. He said more. He stepped on a lot of toes but with good humor and intellect.
But also, there’s a lot of unexpected deaths in young, apparently healthy people in these last 2-3 years. So there’s that. I’m very sorry for his and his family’s loss.
In my circles, first question is always “did she get the jab?”
I am puzzled by the article “The maddening saga of how an Alzheimerâs âcabalâ thwarted progress toward a cure for decades”.
While its description of a research community almost in its entirety refusing to consider alternative explanations for Alzheimer’s disease is thorough and interesting, it fails to realize that this was more than the consequence of conceptual blinkers set in the early investigative phases of the field.
From the article:
“Despite being described as a âcabal,â the amyloid camp was neither organized nor nefarious. Those who championed the amyloid hypothesis truly believed it, and thought that focusing money and attention on it rather than competing ideas was the surest way to an effective drug.”
But the “amyloid camp” did comprise very influential leaders whose deliberately nefarious activities led plenty of other researchers astray. Such prominent Alzheimer researchers as Marc Tessier-Lavigne or Sylvain LesnĂ© (stauch proponents of the amyloid hypothesis) had to retract several papers (and lose their positions) because of problems ranging from extremely sloppy laboratory practices to outright falsification of data and experimental results.
Or perhaps those fraudsters were pushed to fabricate wondrous research results because it was impossible to make a brilliant career outside the “amyloid dogma”?
In any case, the decades-old perversion of medical research by careerism, venture capitalism, big pharma, and funding agencies obsessed with rapidly applicable research results and less on long-term investigations has been discussed quite a lot on this site. I am a bit disappointed that STAT does not address the issue more frontally.
I ran an Alzheimer’s biotech company in the 2000’s. There was definitely a cabal.
Or, more precisely, there was a scientific peer review and key opinion leader circle jerk, not necessarily dedicated to keeping new entrants out but definitely committed to ensuring that their labs got the grants and their papers got published. These people could cut off the oxygen to any well intentioned efforts to widen the research, simply by signalling opposition in committees to set conference agendas, award grants or review pitch decks for VC’s as scientific advisers.
We went to a great deal of trouble to find open minded luminaries as scientific advisory board members who would help us overcome this chilling effect because their own names were so well respected but it still wasn’t enough….
This goes even deeper to the human propensity to stick with a theory even though the evidence screams otherwise.
The doctor in Australia who proved what caused ulcers had a dickens of a time getting anybody to believe his theory and so took extreme action and infected himself with helicobacter.
Nobody likes to admit to being wrong. And especially when being wrong trashes a whole system of beliefs / professional knowledge that you have earned your crust by for years.
I suspected that there is more than natural obstinacy, and that there are actually malicious schemes behind that cabal. The reason: the sheer amount of fraud by prominent Alzheimer researchers — for fame and profit.
I already mentioned LesnĂ© and Tessier-Lavigne, and I just stumbled on yer another case of fraud by Hoau-Yan Wang — of course linked to start-up funding and all that.
Contrarily to what the article states, the cabal seems to be indeed nefarious.
Calls for Bidenâs Withdrawal Are a Sign of a Healthy Democratic Party
Healthy? That The Atlantic felt they had to launch this headline into the digital abyss says otherwise.
Yes. The tap dancing around the issue is coming faster and more elaborate than usual. / ;)
Hold up. Is Jerome Adams telling me that the people chose Biden to be the nominee? …not his fault that YOU selected him against other options…. (emphasis original). This might be the most dishonest statement I’ve read yet today.
The Democrat party did force him on the public this time around, doing everything they could to keep other names off the primary ballots, cancelling primaries in some states, etc. But he wouldn’t have been the nominee at all if people had voted for Bernie instead of letting Obama get away with his Knight of the Long Knives plot that boosted SlowJoe from a distant 5th place.
That tweet brought to mind HL Mencken’s quip –
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
And regarding the other tweet above Adams’, I swear if one more TDS-infected Democrat midwit feels the need to tell me that Trump is “lying”… well, they might not be tasting my knuckles for week, although the temptation to sock someone is strong, but they are really going to get an earful!
everything they could to keep other names off the primary ballots
thus “our democracy”…
2016 bernie was a major threat to that, 2020 bernie…I think he knew the game was up by then
Respect the ginormous $$$ that went into crafting the meme! It’s equivalent to the schoolyard bully who punches a kid in the face, then asks, “Why did you punch yourself in the face if you didn’t want a punch in the face?”
This immediately following the unison chant, to the creaky wheeze of the mighty Wurlitzer, that good ol’ Joe tells the truth, knows right from wrong, can do the job. Every phrase of which is a big ol’ lie.
Which is strange because Obama told us so. Paradox!
Thus the now enormous tap dancing by the DNC and the MSM.
Their efforts at tap dancing around their self-created problem can never match the Nicholas Brothers tap dancing in the movie Stormy Weather, no matter how hard they try. People know the difference between the ersatz and the genuine. / my 2 cents.
A link that explains my metaphor to the genius dancers Nicholas Brothers most famous dance scene in the movies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoMbeDhG9fU
And, well, lest anyone think the above link is somehow racially inspired, no, not at all. See Andrew Davis conducting the Proms Palace choir, orchestra and symphony. Genius is genius. And all that.
adding: what regard or fielty does the new, so-self-proclaimed great and good have toward us so-called “lower” classes? Inquiring minds would like to know. / heh
> “Healthy”
perhaps in the sense that “graft versus host disease” is evidence of a functioning immune system.
re: the case for bad coffee,
me thinks that “alertness” is a commodity more than a luxury.
But I question whether the author would consider “Great Value” brand instant coffee to be that great a value. But it does wake one up.
https://inciweb.wildfire.gov/incident-information/casnf-basin-fire
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All the other wildfires north of us started by lightning last week are on their way to being quelled, but this is the worrying one-now at 10,000 acres with 0% containment, heading into a pretty hellish week+ of 105-110 degrees temps on the valley floor and in the Sierra foothills.
I’ve never seen the grasses grow so high as this year, and fire goes to a height of 2.5x the highest point, so the ignition sequence lasts much longer, allowing for a 10 foot high flame to do its worst.
That’s why I never build a campfire outside of designated areas when backpacking. I use a tiny Svea camping stove bought years ago before prices went to the moon. (Yes, you can make campfire coffee on a little portable stove.)
Not sure what species you are dealing with in central CA, but I have never seen cheatgrass as tall as it is in MT this his year. It seems like itâs almost a foot higher than in a normal year. And itâs curing fast.
A nice blanket of that in the sagebrush understory turns a slow-moving patchy fire into a wall of fire that burns for miles in a day.
I was weed whacking early this morning, and a stately oak tree had a fair amount of new dead low limbs that were consorting with cured grasses, its almost as if Mother Nature planned for something to happen to clear it out, but I showed ’em with copious r.p.m.’s who is boss and cleared the grasses and cut out the dead branches, disaster averted.
‘each system is..what you are getting today’
Absurd brainwashing to justify a managed farce and facade.
Where are the current American statesmen?
The modern GOP shouldn’t exist. Thanks Obama, so they aren’t going to produce accidental “statesmen” not even a McCain type anymore.
Team Blue has gone so far to the right it might produce a James Baker type. But then you consider the Clinton presidency on candidate recruitment and Bill’s hiring of yes men, the people who should be statesmen simply didn’t join Team Blue in the 90’s. Then they still stay in that narrow right wing operating area.
Take Mark Warner. He has some talent and can be great at retail politics, but the right wing structure of the country let’s him just be a completely dull right winger. If the environment was more competitive, he might offer substantive ideas. He was an okay Virginia governor, a job made easy by federal spending.
Newsome is discussed as credible because he’s rich and I guess dated an Eric Trump girlfriend. And…
Hrs not forced to be serious because there is no competition. He vetoes things that would make him credible outside the Morning Joe cast.
About the rich part:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/24/newsom-children-marin-county-schools-00164789
He’s certainly done a lot with California. / ;)
This chart is funny if one thinks the country is regressing to an old European aristocracy form of government. Or even if one doesn’t think that. Last tier, “Gettys informally adopt Gavin.” That’s funny. / ;)
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/gavin-newsoms-keeping-it-all-in-the-family/
Flipping through some morning coverage yesterday and stopped a short while on CNN ( yes I know ). Michael Smerconish is about the only talking head on that station I can listen to in smaller doses. He was suggesting the Democratic Party had a deep bench and went through the usual suspects including the above CA governor.
But the host also included our illustrious Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg? Seriously and yeah okay but whatevs. Not a serious person for the highest office, but that’s just me.
There is a reason Biden was the guy Obama had to ultimately back. The Democratic Party is just made up of fictional candidates from The West Wing but with less substance.
Obama the grifter backed him because he’d do his bidding.
It’s now Monty Python all the time with these guys. / ;)
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
â Oscar Wilde
“Motorcycles and Mayhem in Ukraineâs East”
Steve McQueen – eat your heart out. Seems that the Russians are trying out new, innovative tactics to see what works and what doesn’t. Maybe western militaries should try experimenting with those as well and see what is worth keeping. In spite of the massive changes to warfare brought about by drones, I read one US officer complaining that they are only doing minimal training with them at home. The New York Times tries to put a good spin on this war but it does not matter. The Ukrainians are losing up to 2,000 people each and every day. You do the numbers and you find out that the Ukrainians are losing more troops a month that the US lost in Vietnam in all the years that they were there. Doesn’t stop some politicians in Washington demanding that the Ukrainians keep on fighting to “the last Ukrainian” though.
> losing more troops a month that the US lost in Vietnam
and it has ~10% of US population. Even if the UAF are not completely depleted in the near future, it’s hard to see how the civilian population (and, given the limited time for training of new recruits, one might reckon that the newly mobilized troops are basically “armed civilians”) will continue to put up with this. I suspect that the collapse will precede the US election, which might be another reason to swap out JRB, whose fingerprints are all over the calamity.
Simplicius talks about all this in his latest post. Zelensky is not optimistic.
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-62924-bidens-unraveling-sets?utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
A simple submission for a tune regarding our current state of well, less denial today than Thursday morning but likely still a retrenched denial of our sitting President being able to “finish this job” in a potential second term.
Original tune from Nine Inch Nails. Head like a hole.
God money, we do anything for you
God money, just tell us what you want us to
God money, nail the MAGA folks against the wall
God money, we want everything we take it all
No you can’t take it
No you can’t take this away from me
No you can’t take it
No You can’t take it
No you can’t take this away from me
Head like a donut hole,
Black is my soul
I’m gonna die before I give up control
Head like a hole
Dark is my soul
I’d rather die than give you control
Bow down before the one you serve
We’re gonna dish out to those who deserve
Bow down before the one you serve
You’re gonna get what I think you deserve
Drats, well that went up and I expected a momentary window to add the video clip. Trent Reznor has some real bite to his lyrics and song writing.
https://youtu.be/ao-Sahfy7Hg?si=Ei-uSZBdqobGG5N3
The edit button comes and goes for me.
Good work and nice to have some new lyrics for the Great Clown World sing-a-long. I wish we could all set up a virtual bar and do some KlownWorld Karaoke!
Thanks, I find my efforts to do so and make a meager contribution to the sing along for all songbook quite on the side of simplified down. There are quite a few here more equipped and capable, who can really make some worthy turn of phrasing.
Contrary to the wisdom of Yoda, some of us are simply trying (!)
“How Russian Elites Made Peace With the War”
I have a different interpretation. The Elites will always vote with their money, right? Well those Russian elites quickly discovered that shifting their wealth to the west after the start of the war contained a high risk of it being stolen by the west itself. The suspension of banking services between the west and Russia came to a grinding halt making it more difficult to do so. But then they made a discovery. The Russian economy was doing great and by investing their money into ventures at home, they were earning good money. If they had invested their money into western countries their investments would have looked very sad indeed. And with the Russian economy growing more rapidly than predicted, they are quite happy to keep their money at home and to support the government’s policies, including the war.
Does Russia have an MIC? Yet? Maybe soon?
About since 1508, when the Royal Russia Arsenal was founded in Moscow. While the arms industry in Russia made a few individuals very rich, it has always been more or less under the control of the state.
When you may need to arm a million men in a short time, you just can’t leave that to the industrialist, you need to have 3-4 huge state factories with dormant capacity and production lines optimized for fast and cheap production.
A thought I had re: the election. What if a sizable portion of the democratic electorate could be swayed that the only way to beat Trump would be to jump ship and vote for the least of three evils, RFK. Could a campaign be built around that idea?
I have even conservative friends who like him as well as independent former Dems.
Seems reasonable albeit, that is no criteria these days.
They would have to count the write-in votes and the history of vote counting in this century suggests that write-ins are simply not counted and that this is done deliberately by both halves of the duopoly.
I tried to encourage Cornel West’s team to give up on ballot access and to publicly push for write-ins under the theory that if West tracked in the polls but disappeared in the results, it would give him standing to sue to force the write-ins to be counted. Crickets.
I love write-in voting. It broke my heart in 2013 to realize there was no fricking way to get write-in results from any Secy of State office nationwide. They simply do not care and no longer make any effort to count them.
Unh… RFK v. bad on Israel/Gaza. Total dealbreaker in this household.
Our household, too.
All the serious issues in the world that meed solving, and these greedy, power hungry handlers think there is one second to spare for this sick, criminal puppet show. And thet have been operating with that logic for the entire adminstration.
A bunch of delusional, billionaire handmaidens playing Weekend at Bernies in DC for going on four years.
Dr. Jerome Adams, quoting Edwards Deming.
Damn, Adams is the real deal. I suppose he is a tad too conservative to be the Green VP. And it looks as if he has tenure at Purdue, which he likely wants to keep.
I’ll still vote for Jill Stein.
Hmmm. Still thinking VP timber:
–Susan Sarandon, just to watch liberals have a meltdown.
–Medea Benjamin, to watch everyone to the right of Paul Krugman have a meltdown.
–Bullwinkle J. Moose, of Frostbite Falls, for sentimental reasons.
The Greatest Social Media Site Is Craigslist (Yes, Craigslist) Slate
“…The team is relatively lean, as the company considers functions like sales and marketing superfluous. This strategy has allowed Craigslist to stay extremely profitable throughout the years without implementing sophisticated recommendation algorithms or inundating the webpage with third-party advertisements. Its runaway success threatens decades-old industry gospels of growth, disruption, and innovation, and might force tech evangelists to admit they donât fully understand what people want…”
Something I always suspected was possible.
Another 1995 website still going strong without ads and technical updates is verdant.net
More useful information to resist consumerism and debt than any other.
See especially
http://verdant.net/building_ideas.htm
It inspired us to build our new home by hand.
Bought a house, a truck and most of my furniture through Craigslist. The rest came from Habitat. It all worked out just fine. Their site is KISS.
“Battles rage in north Gaza as Palestinian fighters ambush Israeli troops”
The Israelis supposedly cleaned out the north about six months ago. We are now into the ninth month of the war and the Israelis are still trying to do it? Good luck fighting Hezbollah then.
– ‘Biden lacked oomph, but the transcript tells a different tale’ – The Hill
It is entertaining to read this attempt at spin. The author takes all the talking points that they had poured into Biden’s brain but that he was too feeble to get out coherently, and then writes them all out coherently. There you go! See, Biden actually won the debate. Just read… well, not the actual transcript, but the author’s *translation* of the transcript – which is basically a compilation of all the anti-Trump talking points of the last several years.
The author’s bio is pretty funny too:
“James D. Zirin, author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New Yorkâs Southern District…”
Alrighty then. He clearly has the skillset to understand Trump’s danger to mom, apple pie, and democracy.
Now I know why Garland’s DoJ released transcripts but not the tapes of B’s interviews with Special Counsel Hur. / ;)
From Turley:
Robert Hur Emerges as the Clear Winner in the Presidential Debate
https://jonathanturley.org/2024/06/28/robert-hur-emerges-as-the-clear-winner-in-the-presidential-debate/
https://www.middletownpress.com/politics/article/ct-gov-ned-lamont-covid-19543557.php
Gov. Lamont has tested positive for COVID, his office announced, but symptoms are mild
Not his first time.
LA mayor has COVID.
And then Ashish Jha recently wrote that for most people, COVID is an “annoyance.”
https://x.com/ashishkjha/status/1806394941557674402
Makes you wonder how bad things really are.
Lifelong disability certainly will be an annoyance when you realize that Jha isn’t paying your rent when you can’t. The docket at The Hague ought to be full.
“China calls on scientists of all nations to study lunar samples, but notes obstacle with the US”
So maybe they should get rid of the Wolf Amendment. The whole idea behind that amendment was to keep China out of space and NASA even banned Chinese journalists being present for launches of the Space Shuttle. They even tried to stop Chinese scientist attending space conferences and it is why a Chinese ship cannot dock with the ISS as NASA refuses to give the tech specs for making a connection possible. All during the Obama years of course. Not that many years from now the ISS will likely be brought back down to fall into the ocean. But as that happens, there is also likely to be a Chinese space station still in orbit.
I’m fairly certain that the tech specs for the docking ports are available online, as I have a fuzzy memory of reading them. If they aren’t, well the Russians obviously have them.
I think the Chinese should slip a chunk of oil shale into a sample and them send it to the USA.
“State Department announces plan to establish worlds first Lunar Embassy.”
Joe and Jill went up the hill
to fetch a re-fied mortgage
Joe fell down and broke his crown
and Jill came must’ring her dotage.
Up Joe got and home did trot
as fast as he could caper
Went to bed to mend his head
with psyops and newspaper.
Jill came in and she did grin
to see his new disaster
The Party vex’d screamed “25th!”
and they did live happy ever after.
ICYMI yesterday:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13547165/amp/Joe-Jill-Biden-Wilmington-Delaware-home-refinance-mortgage.html
Good riff. That’s sofa change on the re-fi scandal. Just to let you see what amateur grifters the Bidens are when compared to the Clintons.
I think nancy pelosi is in the running for top grifter.
I figure she’s aiming to fund her family tree for the next seven generations…
Is there a german word for surreptitiously absconding with the wealth of a nation?
“Major IT Platforms Want Power from Nuclear Plants, but They Donât Want to Build Them”
Well, duh. The “big IT platforms like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon” are all information-technology companies, and the largest things they physically build are cell phones and tablet computers. They have no experience building power generation equipment of any kind, much less full nuclear power stations, and there’s no reason to expect them to be any good at it. Jennifer Granholm’s expectation that tech companies that “pull clean power from the grid, they should bring the power with them” is VERY strange.
If you want to build nuclear power stations, I would recommend hiring Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP) and/or Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO). They managed to build South Korea’s large nuclear fleet for less than $2500/kW, about one-sixth the $15000/kW that Georgia Power spent on the two new Vogtle reactors in the US.
And why are we letting the big IT platforms make grid decisions for us anyway?
A few months ago on the Georgia morning NPR news it was reported that Georgia Power needed to produce more power to support green manufacturing and data farms.
Armenian Radio comes to the US.
I’m amused with the words “green” and “farms”. NPR up my way is unabashed narrative told in bed time story voice peppered with political correctness. I listen from time to time to hear the tone. I’ve yet to listen in since the debate. Gotta go for a drive.
Totally agree. I like to listen to what they don’t say and how they tip-toe around facts. (I also would tune into the Sean Hannity show on my way home from work just to listen to Jamie Dupree wipe the floor with Hannity).
I got NPR’s number years ago when I was a union member during labor actions.
Because theyâre richer than Croesus and thatâs how oligarchies work.
…and server farms, mega-campuses and headquarters, warehouses, distribution and shipping centers…
Yet they continue to lobby for their free ride.
Big Tech is lobbying so hard because right now there is a market mechanism to penalize energy hogs…the “capacity charge” ..essentially how big of a pipe that a data center needs at peak consumption in the summer from the grid.
And since data center demand is literally fully inelastic and coincides with the work day, Big Tech wants a free ride from someone cuz that “capacity charge” can’t be avoided
Re: In praise of bad coffee
I really enjoyed this article. I tried at one time to be some kind of coffee sommelier – I loved an espresso from the local downtown roastery. I loved searching for rare beans, fancy roasts, etc.. But a few years ago, after being gifted with beans from a roastery in Knoxville and utterly hating the brew despite being told it was âThe Best Coffee EVAHâ by a friend whose taste I generally trust, I started rethinking what I appreciate about coffee. COVID hit the price of coffee like whoa and now a whole bean purchase is a rare treat. I like a local roasterâs Dark is Dark roast but it is a birthday gift or Christmas treat, or an atta-boy to myself for something I went over the top to do.
Every morning now, I brew up a pot of Folgers French Roast. It doesnât make me say WOW, it doesnât need to, and thatâs not even what I want anymore. I want the caffeine, I want the ritual, I want the comfort. Itâs not coffee I need to mull over notes and regions. It starts my morning nice and calm at 0445 and it doesnât make me wince to buy it when I can get it on sale for less than $10 for a big can. The only thing that makes my Folgerâs habit âbadâ is snobbery (classism) and I am over all of that nonsense.
Rania Khalek had on Columbia Professor Joseph Massad who offers some very interesting historical interpretations of Western views on Zionism and Arab state reactions to the founding of the state called Israel. I’m going to have to pursue some of his writings, but for now the video will have to abide. I found it very worthwhile.
Strip Away the Lies: Israelâs Naked Colonialism Nears Its End, w/ Prof. Joseph Massad
Look to
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/why-academic-scholarship-israel-palestine-threatens-western-elites
June 18, 2024
Why academic scholarship on Israel and Palestine threatens western elites
By Joseph Massad
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/cyprus-zionist-colonisation-military-base-war-gaza
June 26, 2024
Cyprus: From early Zionist colony to military base for Israel’s war on Gaza
By Joseph Massad
Thank you!
Looking back through the last few days…just gotta say gosh golly and “Gee Wally” the crew doing the daily rounds for the Links and the culling of the herd in moderating comments are doing a bang up job. So much thanks and surely the coming holiday week brings some needed rest!
As for replacement of Biden and what to be done with our VP Madame Harris, is it a sinister or highly cynical idea to think or suggest she gets the Carrie White winning the prom treatment ?!? From the original film at least…that just didn’t end as planned once the pig’s blood was dropped onto her and her prom date, poor Tommy.
Mrs. White. “They’re all gonna laugh at you”
Yes, many thanks to the NC stalwarts who are bringing us so much useful information and for equally great comments.
re: Hayek, the Accidental Freudian Corey Robin, The New Yorker. Well worth a read.
I’ve long suspected that Jordan Peterson’s diatribes against the E in DEI are plagiarized from Hayek. While he does openly acknowledge a heavy influence and agrees with Hayek on a wide array of topics, he never directly attributes specific ideas to him. My theory is he moved out of academia out of fear someone was bound to point this out.
As I was reading this (very good) piece, Hayek’s influence on Peterson was back of mind, and the similarities are striking. The contortions, also a distinctly Petersonian style, to preserve both individualism and freedom while at the same time conceding (advocating?) manifest elite control over individual freedom. Kind of like Peterson’s lobsters?
Viewed in this light it’s difficult not to find some of the observations amusing. “Like a socialist who cannot abide the working class.” “Hayekâs is an economy in which a few can act, with all the power of nature, while the rest of us are acted upon.” “To the contrary: after a personal meeting with Pinochet, the philosopher told reporters that he had explained to the tyrant that âunlimited democracy does not work.â
Petersen loves the Paretto distribution. Albeit he would collapse in facing arguments concerning society and communities and how for millenia people have kept in check those 20% upity ones that wanted to rake all the benefits, by hook or by crook, with some heroics thrown in.
And the “debate” between Zizek and Petersen was the biggest intellectual let-down ever, on the par of Biden vs Trum debate, because they are both croocks and sell-outs.
Peterson as an academic was a psychologist, not a philosopher, so if he read Hayek it wouldnât have been directly related to his academic field.
Hayek is just another aristocrat pining for the Empire of his youth (in this case Austriaâs) with their characteristic horror of the demos. He embodies John Kenneth Galbraithâs quote, âThe modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.â
– ‘Like Julian Assange, I Know How It Feels to Be Prosecuted for Acts of Journalism’ – James Risen, The Intercept
Yes, Risen was a hero back then when he was reporting on the NSA and CIA during the Bush administration and fought to protect his sources. He made up for it later, though, by going all-in on Russiagate and passing on CIA propaganda like this:
“Democrats, meanwhile, learned to hate Assange for what he did in 2016. Knowingly or not, he served as a go-between for Russian intelligence. Moscow hacked the emails of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and then turned them over to Assange, who published the emails and related Democratic Party documents on WikiLeaks, while also doling them out to reporters for mainstream news organizations during the 2016 presidential campaign, damaging the Clinton campaign and helping Donald Trump.”
“As if all of that wasnât enough, many others grew to hate him for evading sexual assault charges in Sweden…”
Risen is on my very long list of investigative journalists whom I used to admire but now recognize as mainly stenographers who are only as good as their sources. I may be wrong, but don’t think anyone threatened to throw him in prison for not revealing the sources for his Russiagate stories.
https://x.com/davidsirota/status/1807266548463149474
David Sirota
@davidsirota
·
11h
Joe Biden apparently sent out a campaign fundraising email tonight proudly contrasting his poll numbers with those of *squints at screen* his own vice president and his Secretary of TransportationâŠBiden is literally campaigning against HIS OWN PEOPLE
https://x.com/ShaneGoldmacher/status/1807252295572226519
Since it’s a Sunday I’ll share a few thoughts about the promises of Organized Religion, Islam in this case.
When a Muslim dies as a martyr in a Jihad he goes to paradise and gets 72 Virgins.
72 teenage girls.
How any cliques can 72 Teenage Girls form in a week?
In a Month?
Women who live together tend to synchronize their menstrual cycles, which means 72 teenage girls with PMS at the same time every month.
Earplugs and plenty of good Scots whiskey would help, but I don’t think those are on the menu.
I think you had a head start on the whiskey?
Ok… that was very sexist… and very, very funny. Thanks. / ;)
I looked around for the age of the virgins, and found this:
“The virgins of paradise “they will be of one age, thirty-three years old,” according to Ibn Kathir, (as reported by Ad-Dahhak aka Ibn Abi Asim) based on his interpretation of the word Atrab (Arabic: ŰŁÙŰȘÙ۱ÙۧۚÙۧ) in Q. 56:37).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houri#:~:text=and%20Islamic%20commentaries.-,Houri%2C%20age,56%3A37).
So young ladies, not teenagers.
No doubt someone in the west read “virgins” and projected their own proclivities and inclinations.
– ‘The Assange saga is over. What have we learned?’ – The Hill.
Arrgghh! Yet another two-faced, “damning with faint praise” reaction to the Assange decision. Like the Risen piece, this author also pushes propaganda:
“On the other hand, it was Assange who decided to release classified information without redaction â publishing the names of Afghan informants and other U.S. intelligence sources, potentially putting lives at risk. The decision was condemned by WikiLeaksâs media partners. The U.S. government has claimed that people have âdisappearedâ as a result of the information which was leaked.”
This bulls**t has been debunked numerous times. Assange actually worked very hard to redact such information. Later in the article the author even quotes James Clapper – James f**king Clapper! – saying that “there was concern but I donât recall direct proof that assets in Afghanistan and Iraq supporting or helping the U.S. were exposed.â Which is correct; there was none.
I always thought it was the video that really got to them — the one where they are killing some reporters and some children in a van got in the way.
RE: The Assange saga is over
This article is repugnant. “There is a weird, messy kind of balance” in the fact that Assange’s journalism prompted “a political reckoning” for the US government? Who writes like that? Somebody who is slithering around every moral and logical lesson of the story, that’s who.
The title is wrong. It is not over, not for the Assange family. He now lives every moment under direst scrutiny. His life and liberty are contingent on his continued anonymous silence.
It is not over. As many of you know, Wikileaks has already removed huge sections of its archive, as a condition of Assange’s release. Perhaps they survive elsewhere in whole or in part. Make no mistake: there is a campaign underway to eliminate every last trace of Wikileaks’ work.
I encourage you to save important digital historical records, and transfer them away from where the internet touches them. In a few years, the sources we take for granted will be gone.
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty certain that all of the digitized wikileaks material is still online somewhere.
Breakfast musing on America, the collapsing society. It’s been what, 5 years, and we don’t have any FDA approved nasal sprays for an ongoing Pandemic. We sure got Biogen’s ineffective and dangerous Alzheimer’s (I can’t spell, I admit, I looked it up) drug approved, though, in record time, over the advisory counsel’s objections! And modified-RNA shots with less than transparent data!
Meanwhile, the liberal Democrat Party cooked the primary to ensure that the candidate with obvious cognitive decline issues, is guaranteed to win the nomination. A cooked process! While the other candidate might also be considered old, the Republicans did have a real primary process, and a majority of Republican primary voters did pick this guy. Not so for the Democrat Party, with the least democratic process you can imagine.
And maybe the DNC actually picks a different candidate now in a backroom somewhere. Who knows.
What a failed state!
Meanwhile, hasn’t Biden had COVID twice now? Despite all the “protocols” that they put in place back in the day? We know it can worsen cognitive decline, given SARS2 infects and damages the brain. Was Biden functionally okay when he ran in 2020? Claims were swirling at the time that he was impaired even then, but the debate has been the first real smoking gun.
I’m thinking that many people, after witnessing Biden’s stiffness, mumbling and impression of a deer-in-the-headlights, are now thinking this is not choice between Trump and Biden but rather Trump and Kamala. How many people think Biden could actually finish another 4 year term?
This term looks shaky.
I’m thinking of this as a match between Harris and whoever is Trump’s VP candidate. I’m willing to bite if it’s Gabbard or Vance. If anyone else, but especially if one of the neocons, then pox on them all.
State Farm General is seeking to dramatically increase residential insurance rates for millions of Californians, a move that would deepen the stateâs ongoing crisis over housing coverage.
In two filings with the stateâs Department of Insurance on Thursday signaling financial trouble for the insurance giant, State Farm disclosed it is seeking a 30% rate increase for homeowners, a 36% increase for condo owners and a 52% increase for renters.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-06-28/state-farm-insurance-rate-increase
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there-but you’ll pay through the nose.
And if you try to switch to a better deal with different insurance companies youâll find their rates are nearly the same. Iâve checked 7 different companies and they all ended up being within a few dollars of each other. Not saying there is collusion or anything âŠ
My sister down in Tijuana-adjacent was shocked by the increase in home insurance by her carrier, so she went shopping and discovered nobody would insure her, so she meekly accept defeat and kept on keeping on with Plan A.
From CEO in Major Health-Advertising Fraud Gets 7.5-Year Prison Sentence
LOL, so he went to jail because he robbed rich people. I’m glad we cleared that up.
This is a good one at Novara Media:
This Is How Propaganda Actually Works | Ash Sarkar meets Matt Kennard
Matt Kennard is at Declassified UK.
Re the article on the Ogallala and Kansas–the Arkansas River may be bone dry in western Kansas but I recently camped beside it in Arkansas (Lake Dardanelle) and watched as barge traffic glided by on the way to the Mississippi.Those who reproduce Wesley Powell’s path are acutely aware of the rain divide that happens after crossing the 100th meridian (where Oklahoma gives way to the Texas panhandle) The linked article links another article that says the dividing line is moviing east.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/11/the-100th-meridian-where-the-great-plains-used-to-begin-now-moving-east/
If we do have another 1930s Dust Bowl then prevailing winds leave little doubt who will be getting the dust. The first time even NY city was affected. Given all the problems in CA this time we Easterners may be getting the refugees as well.
Simplicius has thoughts on the debate and what it means re Ukraine
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-62924-bidens-unraveling-sets
It’s like that 1976 “Network” film….people are mad, they’re not going to take it any longer.
problem is….everyone disagrees on what the source of the rot is, which is a boon to neoliberals and neocons.
I thought this Simplicius piece was good on the debate and, as usual, provided a useful overview of the current situation in Ukraine. But I see no evidence that “a wave of patriotic political figures” will have any effect whatsoever on US/NATO policy. Trump’s public comments on foreign policy, e.g. his few pitiful statements during the debate, demonstrate either cluelessness or a macho “tough guy” stance that would be easily manipulated by his generals, intelligence sources, or anyone who calls him a wimp. This was on full display during his first administration and if anything he seems to be playing to the right-wing even more this time. And beyond a few isolated libertarians in the Republican party, there are *no* political figures with any influence who would challenge the War Machine. Who are these “populists” who are challenging the neocons?
What this means for me is that the only way anything positive will happen in Ukraine is if there are enough “realists” left within the military and intelligence communities to convince decision-makers to back off. Are there? It seems like the ideologues are in control. Even if Trump wanted to change course from our neolib/neocon foreign policy disasters, who would he appoint to key administrative positions? I’m sure there are some mid-level government officials and some majors or colonels in the military that might agree, but who is Trump going to appoint as Secretary of State, or Defense, or National Security advisor, or CIA head, etc.? And with Congress completely bought and paid for, I have a hard time seeing any path to a more rational policy even if that was actually Trump’s goal. And I’m not sure it would be.
And I haven’t even started on Trump’s positions regarding Israel and Evil Iran. But that’s enough pessimism for now. I would be happy if someone can give me some reasons to be more optimistic.
Helmer says after the debate some in Russia say Trump will be worse for them than Biden
https://johnhelmer.net/what-russians-didnt-miss-biden-beat-trump-in-the-spinach-debate/
But I think anything Trump says must be chalked up to mere rhetoric until he is president and announces a policy and maybe not even then. He is a blowhard.
In any case before he theoretically should take office in January both the Ukraine and Israel situations might be quite different. In my view nothing can be more unpredictable and dangerous than the actions of Biden and his crew although last week’s events may have cowed them somewhat. And Biden continued Trump on Iran and Blinken is just as devoted to Israel.
There’s also the point that both parties are a lot more militant than the public and, as Taibbi says to Carlson, Trump does care what the public thinks. It’s his ego food.
I’ll give you a few reasons to … expect something different. Not necessarily to be optimistic about, but certainly to expect that what is now … won’t be what we’re seeing in a few short years.
That “difference” certainly won’t, in the short run, be what the West currently expects, or what it wants.
I postulate that we are in the last innings of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
Some of you remember PNAC; it’s the philosophical and strategic underpinnings of the last 25 years of U.S. foreign and military policy. In short, the Project’s mission is to control the world’s resources for the benefit of the West’s top-tier social order players by squashing all resistance.
A perfectly massive set of resources were allocated to PNAC; most of our military budget, and most of the U.S.’ political standing in the world, hundreds of thousands of “little people”‘s lives, and the viability of many countries in the mid-East (Iraq, Syria, Libya and to a lesser extent Iran), Afghanistan, and recently Ukraine. Those countries we wrecked.
A good bit of the E.U.’s economic viability was also sacrificed.
In addition to wrecking other countries, the U.S. itself was wrecked as a culture and very damaged as a productive society / economy. We bet almost everything we had available on the PNAC.
And it didn’t work. PNAC has demonstrably, dramatically and irrevocably failed.
We created two massive, well-managed, well-resourced adversaries (China and Russia), and most of the as-yet-unwrecked countries despise and fear us, and are actively attempting to distance themselves from the U.S., and associate themselves with the countries that are leading the way forward, and away from the U.S.
In addition to controlling the resources of the world, the secondary (and maybe, given the key players, the primary) goal of PNAC was to perfect Israel’s control of Palestine, and thereby facilitate the realization of long-standing religious goals of the Zionists.
We are now arrived at the last defensive line of PNAC: the mid-East war for Israel: this is the ultimate prize, and represents the one thing PNAC can’t lose and still survive. That battle has arrived, and for PNAC, it’s now or never.
There are many people within the U.S. that are becoming aware of just how much we’re betting our future on the judgement of the NeoCons and the Zionists.
Many of those same people are well aware that PNAC is a failed project, and the failure of a mid-East war on behalf of Israel is going to cost the U.S. what’s left of our international standing.
How much more will we bet?
Will we continue to permit an ideologically-obsessed few to dictate (and destroy) our future? Netanyahu and the NeoCons / Zionists believe that their control of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. information channels is sufficient to compel the U.S. to bet the rest of our futures on their mythos.
But is it enough, really? How deep is our national commitment to PNAC and Israel? Is there any re-assessment occurring?
I believe that there is, and quite a bit of it. Certainly the Military and Intelligence services are quite aware of the hole we’re in. They’ve seen first-hand the failures, and they know what it’s cost the U.S. . They know full-well. Many citizens deeply resent the sacrifice of our collective future on behalf of the Oligarchical and Zionist dreams.
What’s been missing up to this point is the communication of that trepidation – the concerns of many of our best-informed citizens to the public, and the by-passing of the NeoCon / Zionist gatekeepers installed in Congress and the media.
That communication is starting to happen. I don’t think it’ll get enough traction to avoid the U.S. being drawn fully into the Israel wars, and the defeat of the U.S. and Israel in that war.
I do think that such defeat, and I think it’s likely to occur in a few short years, will be the point the PNAC / Zionist facade breaks.
The U.S. is in the thrall of a multi-decade marketing and narrative-control program, and a very good bit of that carefully-constructed narrative has demonstrably failed, and will fail faster and more in the next several months.
What we saw in the Trump-Biden debate (the undeniable reality of our situation) will occur at a much broader scale.
We are coming to the end of the PNAC, and to the visible, inescapable demolition of several U.S. (e.g. apex-social-order players) delusions.
We – not just we U.S. citizens, but China, Russia, and all the rest of the world – worry that the facing-up will precipitate great calamity, originating from here in the U.S.
Sometimes cutting the lamprey off your back … kills the host.
There’s not much we (U.S. citizens) can do about that now; we abdicated control, and acted without courage these past few decades. Now we take the consequences, and I hope we’re fortunate.
The good news is that major change has arrived. It’s here, and in a few short years, we’ll be starting anew.
French Election exit poll.
đłïžđ«đ· Election #legislatives2024 : 1er tour
Les estimations Ă 20H (France entiĂšre)
RN et alliés : 34,2%
NFP : 29,1%
Majo. Présid. : 21,5%
LR et DVD : 10%
ReconquĂȘte : 0,6%
interesting….looks like RN beat expectations?
It’s about what was predicted. The latest (21h30 CET) projections are:
RN 33,5
NFP 28,1
MP 20,7
LR/DVD 9
But this tells us very little about the results of the second round next Sunday, nor of course about the final tally of seats, which could be dramatically different from the percentages of the vote today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/world/europe/france-elections.html
June 30, 2024
French Far Right Scores Big in a First Round of Voting, Polling Suggests
A surprise decision by President Emmanuel Macron to hold a snap election appears to have backfired badly, giving the National Rally a decisive victory, early returns showed.
By Roger Cohen
The National Rally party won a crushing victory in the first round of voting for the French National Assembly, according to early projections, bringing its long-taboo brand of nationalist and anti-immigrant politics to the threshold of power for the first time.
Pollster projections, which are normally reliable and are based on preliminary results, suggested the party would take about 34 percent of the vote, far ahead of President Emmanuel Macronâs centrist Renaissance party and its allies, which got about 21 percent.
The scores, in a two-round election that will be completed with a runoff on July 7 between the leading parties in each constituency, do not provide a reliable projection of the number of parliamentary seats each party will secure. But the National Rally now looks very likely to be the largest force in the lower house, although not necessarily with an absolute majority…
Voters solidified around the 3 choices. The next round will be mostly between left and right, with a few centrists having snuck in where they got over 12.5% and a 3 way race will happen. There are also jurisdictions with pure centrist / left races and centrist / right races. I’m not going to make a prediction just yet because I don’t have a feeling for it. I’ll be in the Pas de Calais for the next week to relax and back to vote on Sunday. Imho the Macronists did better than expected.
The IRBM need will probably be filled relatively quickly by restarting production of RS 26 Rubezh that was stopped after much US complaining. Road mobile, solid fuel, 5,500 km range and capable of carrying Avangard. I have seen hints that the facility they were made in was re-purposed to Avangard production though. They will settle European hash without wasting Sarmats or Yars.
Pattern of Brain Damage Is Pervasive in Navy SEALs Who Died by Suicide NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/us/navy-seals-brain-damage-suicide.html
June 30, 2024
Pattern of Brain Damage Is Pervasive in Navy SEALs Who Died by Suicide
A military lab found distinctive damage from repeated blast exposure in every brain it tested, but Navy SEAL leaders were kept in the dark about the pattern.
By Dave Philipps
Photographs by Kenny Holston
David Metcalfâs last act in life was an attempt to send a message â that years as a Navy SEAL had left his brain so damaged that he could barely recognize himself.
He died by suicide in his garage in North Carolina in 2019, after nearly 20 years in the Navy. But just before he died, he arranged a stack of books about brain injury by his side, and taped a note to the door that read, in part, âGaps in memory, failing recognition, mood swings, headaches, impulsiveness, fatigue, anxiety, and paranoia were not who I was, but have become who I am. Each is worsening.â
Then he shot himself in the heart, preserving his brain to be analyzed by a state-of-the-art Defense Department laboratory in Maryland.
The lab found an unusual pattern of damage seen only in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves.
The vast majority of blast exposure for Navy SEALs comes from firing their own weapons, not from enemy action. The damage pattern suggested that years of training intended to make SEALs exceptional was leaving some barely able to function…
That is “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy” and it was very common among the survivors of the trenches in WW!.
My Grandfather Fuller almost certainly among them.
So saddening, then and here and now, but here and now we have the results of trying to create mythical soldiers for no rational reason. Imagine not being able to honor your own soldiers. The NYTimes has written about the abuse of Seals several times before. Such pain.
We are family
I got Dr. Jill & Hunter with me
We are family
Get up everybody and sing Joe’s praises
We are family
I got Dr. Jill & Hunter with me
We are family
Get up everybody and sing Joe’s praises
Everyone can see weâre together
As we talk on by
{And} And we flock just like birds of a feather
I wonât tell no lie
{All} All of the people around us they say
“Can they be that close?”
Just let me state for the record
Weâre givinâ patriarchy a family dose
We are family (Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, yâall)
I got the spirit of Beau with me (Uh-huh, uh-huh)
We are family
Get up everybody and sing (Sing it to me)
We are family
I got mixed up with thee
We are family
Get up everybody and sing Joe’s praises
Livinâ life is fun and weâve just begun
To get our share of this worldâs delights
(High) High hopes we have for the future
And our goalâs in sight
{We} No, we donât get depressed
Hereâs what we call our golden rule
Have faith in you and the things you do
You wonât go wrong, oh, no
Joe is our family jewel
We are family (Hey, hey, sing it to me)
I got all my alibis with me (Get up, get up, get up and sing it to me)
We are family (Oh, I can hear ya, yaâll)
Get up everybody and sing (Ooh)
We are family (Have faith in you and the things you do, hey, hey, ey)
I got all my advisors with me (Oh, hey, hey, hey)
We are family (Get up, get up, yâall)
Get up everybody and sing (Oh, hey, hey, hey)
Thanks Wuk, the Biden’s are going top stay the course and guarantee Harris will be the first female president…
Unless, as Yves suggested, there is a problem with Joe’s meds before the Convention, or a slip and fall.
I come to bury a Caesar salad, not graze it…
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2024/06/30/the-iconic-caesar-salad-turns-100-do-you-know-its-local-origin-story/
Right now I know (or know indirectly) the following people with covid:
A young guy here in CA who caught it last month; he is in his 30s; he’s still exhausted and he just managed to infect his stroke-ridden mother.
A co-religionist of mine here in CA in his 70s who caught it from a couple of other of my coreligionists (also in their 70s) who have it; it is the second time in three months that he has had it.
A woman in her 60s who volunteers where I do here in CA; she got it from her husband.
A friend’s doctor here in CA; second time in three months for him, too.
A co-religionist in Ohio just caught it; a co-religionist in Australia caught it a couple of weeks ago, and a co-religionist and her family in New Zealand caught it about three weeks ago.
All of these people love the covid vax and have had the usual number of shots.
The local wastewater is not so high but that is clearly not telling all the story, since I don’t have a big social circle and this is a lot of people. If you don’t want to catch covid this is a good time to be extra careful.
This is all depressing but I find the two cases in three months a particularly disturbing data point.
Check this one — Biden’s family blames advisors, CNN moderators and… the makeup staff. That’s a new one.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/30/biden-camp-david-family-debate-00165970
Politico so make of it what you will. But forget the blame cannons, this is more like blame orbital bombardment at this point.
If it wasn’t for that mascara-ist, Joe wins the debate in a romp!
Shame on them for not fixing up Joe’s drugged-out bulging eyeballs.
They worked hard to conceal his impairment, but at first blush it was clear his campaign was on shaky foundation. No matter how primed he was for the debate the gloss of his presidency has come off.
&etc…
You get the feeling that Joe can’t quit, as if there were significant dirt on him that would be revealed were he to resign, and the piling on would be somewhat epic.
Nixon didn’t blame his makeup staff in 1960!
That’s what you get for putting lipsticks on a pig. If anything, they should be blaming their pharma guys, like they could have given Joe some kind of mRNA injection that would temporarily reverse his brain deterioration.
That polar view of Saturn is pretty incredible, though some on X/Twitler are saying it’s false(?) color mapping from near infrared.
The Supremes (the only other usage of said word is a pizza with say 9 toppings) have decided that it is open season on re-education camps housing the homeless spread all over these not so united states, with prosecution of said outdoor enthusiasts likely, should they stay the course.
Homeless are essentially our untouchables, write ’em a ticket or throw ’em in jail and you’re just wasting time & money, it isn’t as if they are gonna pay or change their ways after a stint in the calaboose.
So after this new aegis fails and they are still very much around us, what becomes of them?
FEMA camps do come to mind… we just need to translate “Arbeit Macht Frei” into modern-day PMC-speak.
Or an AI-enabled version of Pynchon’s “oven state”. Silicon Valley enters the chat.
Or maybe it could be like WorryFreeâą from Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You.
NYT: “Biden’s Family Tells Him to Keep Fighting as They Huddle at Camp David” (by Katie Rogers and Peter Baker, June 30)
(Sorry, I am not able to do the link)
From the article: “One of the strongest voices imploring Mr. Biden to resist pressure to drop out was his son Hunter Biden, whom the president has long leaned on for advice” (!!!)
Gee, one wonders why it would be so very important for Dear Hunter to keep Dad in office? It’s a mystery! And that Joey relies on said son for advice is truly alarming. Could it be that Dear Hunter, even more than Dr. Jill, is fighting to prevent Joey from dropping out?
Here’s a link to the NYT piece you reference
https://archive.ph/shBLs
Thank you!
Or as Tucker Carlson describes Dr. Jill’s enthusiasm to keep Dementia Joe in the race:
“His grasping horrible wife, who poses as a doctor, was pushing this, so that she can go to state dinners.”
Ouch !
Not putting the bankers in prison and prosecuting torturers have been long standing massive negatives of the Obama administration, but I am now going to include not prosecuting Biden and Clinton in there. Sure we know it was because Obama wanted a direct line to suck on the oligarch teat forever, but when measuring the things that make you one of the worst Presidents of the past century and a half you have to include things that would have been done if they were really about upholding the Constitution and supporting the people and not about securing your rice bowl.
Prelim reports on the CNBC channel. Democrats are recircling their wagons behind the Biden election convoy. Fundraising success over the weekend attributed to small dollar grass roots donors. Nothing is changing and we are behind Dear Leader.
And importantly to add, committed to the bit Reid Hoffman authored a missive about why changing course at this stage is not the move to make. So, behold our Emperor Continues to Wear New and Wonderful Clothes. Behold the Great Man! 2024 is for now, a race between Trump and VP Harris.
Team Blue. Pass more Kool Aid! \sarc