Gorilla Mother Constantly Reminding Children To Slouch The Onion
Climate
Temperature rise ‘unprecedented in the instrumental record’ Climate & Capitalism
‘Godfathers of climate chaos’: UN chief urges global fossil-fuel advertising ban Guardian
Giant viruses found on Greenland ice sheet Science Daily
Water
Holy Waters: The Sea Field & Stream
“Sharing is important”: Elementary students dive into Colorado water issues in pen pal program Colorado Sun
Wanted: Disaster Resilience in Tokyo’s Water Infrastructure Nippon.com
Syndemics
Birx says US making ‘same mistakes’ with bird flu as COVID-19 The Hill
WHO: Fatal H5N2 Infection In Mexico City Avian Flu Diary
Huge amounts of bird-flu virus found in raw milk of infected cows Nature
* * * New Report Underscores the Seriousness of Long Covid NYT
‘I was shocked’: Ontario to cancel widely praised wastewater surveillance program Ottawa Citizen
* * *
China?
China’s Energy Intensity and Carbon Intensity Targets Are All But Unachievable The Diplomat
How to Respond to China’s Tactics in the South China Sea RAND
India
Billionaire-Friendly Modi Humbled by Indians Who Make $4 a Day Bloomberg
Commentary: With Modi failing to secure landslide victory, India returns to default of coalition government Channel News Asia
Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir The New Inquiry
Syraqistan
Netanyahu prolonging Gaza war for political aims: US President Biden Business Standard
Biden: ‘I don’t think’ Netanyahu is playing politics with war in Gaza Anadolu Agency
* * * Did The Houthis Hit The USS Eisenhower May 31st? Ian Welsh
* * * Israel Secretly Targeted American Lawmakers With Gaza War Influence Campaign Haaretz
After publishing an article critical of Israel, Columbia Law Review’s website is shut down by board AP
* * * ‘Elections’ organized by PKK/YPG in northeast Syria are ‘malicious, dangerous’: Association Anadolu Agency
European Disunion
Dear Old Blighty
Rishi Sunak puts Jamie Dimon and Eric Schmidt forward for UK honours FT
Nigel Farage Gets Milkshake Thrown In His Face As He Launches Election Campaign Huffpo. Commentary:
Let's talk about how to get milkshake stains out of a suit. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/b0Vl1vkO1P
— derek guy (@dieworkwear) June 4, 2024
New Not-So-Cold War
Putin warns West over Ukraine armaments, nuclear arsenal in news conference Al Jazeera
Lavrov’s Deputy: ‘The West wants to repeat the Maidan scenario in Georgia’ JAM News
The sequence of destruction in any Russian response to NATO-directed attacks on its heartland GIlbert Doctorow
* * * Ukrainian power company to implement emergency outages in 12 oblasts Ukrainska Pravda
‘Putin’s Davos’ recovers to pre-war levels, but representation from the West has all but disappeared BNE Intellinews
How Brics chair Russia will deepen cooperation in expanded bloc South China Morning Post
The US Empire Isn’t A Government That Runs Nonstop Wars, It’s A Nonstop War That Runs A Government Caitlin Johnstone
War, the dark fleet and energy geopolitics all part of the debate at Posidonia Splash 247
2024
The best argument to lock up Trump: Merchan must protect the judiciary Jennifer Rubin, WaPo (Furzy Mouse).
Antitrust
US antitrust enforcer says ‘urgent’ scrutiny needed over Big Tech’s control of AI FT
The Bezzle
Researchers plan to retract landmark Alzheimer’s paper containing doctored images Science. See KLG, August 31, 2022.
Digital Watch
To solve AI’s energy crisis, ‘rethink the entire stack from electrons to algorithms,’ says Stanford prof The Register
AI’s Insatiable Data-Center Demand Makes Crypto Miners Targets Bloomberg
* * * OpenAI Insiders Warn of a ‘Reckless’ Race for Dominance NYT
Alice in Wonderland: Simple Tasks Showing Complete Reasoning Breakdown in State-Of-the-Art Large Language Models (preprint) arXiv. “Often, models seemed to rely on attempting to execute various basic arithmetical operations on the numbers mentioned in the problem to arrive to a final answer. The probability to get a correct response was thus influenced by how likely executing few arbitrary simple calculations, like additions or multiplications that included numbers presented in the problem text, might also accidentally result in a correct answer, although the way of arriving there had nothing to do with correct reasoning.”
Stanford University team apologises over claims they copied Chinese project for AI model South China Morning Post
* * * Instagram confirms test of ‘unskippable’ ads TechCrunch
Spook Country
Johnson quietly makes controversial picks to House Intel panel Politico
Police State Watch
Housing
Colorado’s growing approach to solving chronic homelessness: Permanent housing with few rules Colorado Sun
FBI raid on real estate company linked to Harlan Crow’s RealPage rental price fixing Daily Kos
Chinese official dies ‘after being stabbed over housing dispute’ South China Morning Post
Class Warfare
Teamsters and Amazon Labor Union Announce Affiliation, Member Vote Still Ahead Labor Notes
Why put up with the grief that writing a blog guarantees I’ll get? Funding the Future
Uneasy on the Ear: An Interview with Lola De La Mata The Quietus
Antidote du jour (David Menke):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
163 comments
Comments are closed.
WE WANT IT GONE
(melody borrowed from Caissons Go Rolling Along by Edmund L. Gruber, 1908)
When AIPAC says attack all of Congress has their back
They don’t care if it’s right or it’s wrong
‘They’re such swell clientele! Ship more bombs to Israel!’
Or you won’t serve in Congress for long!
Israel will be bombing Gaza by the sea
Worse than we bombed the Viet Cong
With a ‘lawn to mow’ genocide by Grandpa Joe
While the UN gets jollied along
The Israelis have lied Palestine is occupied
While their soldiers kill children and Moms
All the Arabs who’ve died eighty years of genocide
It’s a problem you can’t solve with bombs
Now we finally see warrants from the ICC
Warrants that cannot be withdrawn
When they catch Bibi in the Hague is where he’ll be
While the whole world is cheering them on
Palestine will be free from the river to the sea
There will be no more ‘mowing the lawn’
We will march in the streets and our universities
Till the Zionist hoodlums are gone
Boycott and Divest put Israelis to the test
Remove all support — this can’t go on
As you can guess we want sanctions from the West
And we want this apartheid state gone
When AIPAC says attack all of Congress has their back
They don’t care if it’s right or it’s wrong
‘They’re such swell clientele ship more bombs to Israel!’
Or you won’t serve in Congress for long!
Israel will be bombing Gaza by the sea
Worse than we bombed the Viet Cong
With a ‘lawn to mow’ genocide by Grandpa Joe
While the UN gets jollied along
We want this apartheid state gone!
We want this apartheid state gone!
Excellent…below came to mind when eyes read “Israelis Lied”
Israel lies, Palestinians die, Congress is occupied, People are preoccupied…
My first thought is that selling the real estate is valuable and also it takes out competition.
From AlJazeera, another opinion about Mexico’s recent elections:
Mexico’s election: A victory for organised crime
Under Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidency, organised crime will likely be calling the shots.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/6/3/mexicos-election-a-victory-for-organised-crime
Organized crime, transnational corporations… What’s the difference?
Also, who has fallen further? The Guardian or Aljazeera?
At the bottom.
“The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.”
And the author is alleging that AMLO and his protege have done little to curtail the cartels who are really running much of the country. True?
What do you suggest the central government should do? The cartels are powerful and must be dealt with by appreciating that power. They are part of the political landscape and cannot be wished away by Americans who have no respect for peace. The cartels are meeting a consumer need particularly in the US and are bringing in money to help the Mexican economy. Are they that much worse than those that slaughter millions like the US power elite do whenever they can?
I’m not suggesting anything other than a question as to whether the article is making a legitimate point. Of course the cartels didn’t start with AMLO–nobody is saying that.
It’s a turf war between Moderna/Pfitzer and the Mexican Cartels: it’s IP pharmacology vs commons pharmacology. (Which is why we’ve made the commons version illegal)
It’s pretty amusing that the corporate press has latched onto the unrealistic expectation that AMLO would somehow be able to “curtail the cartels,” when his neoliberal predecessors were unable to, even when they were business associates. It’s nothing but an transparently feeble attempt to paint a historically popular president as a failure.
I don’t suppose that your username comes from a certain Victoria beer commercial?
Also you hit the nail right on the head , the corporate press coverage of AMLO has been equal parts hilarious and disturbing. The trump comparisons were especially unhinged.
I suppose that username comes from a certain dragon slayer.
My parents actually came up with it.
If I rely on the mainstream news for information, every leftist leader in the Americas is either corrupt or a dictator. Or both. I can’t think of a recent case where any alternative was proposed (in the old days, just calling them a “Communist” was sufficient).
If I had a choice, I would much rather have a Huey Long than a Herbert Hoover, or a James Michael Curley than a John Collins or Kevin White. Somebody that does something positive for my non-elite social class and stands up to the elite is welcome to have a bit of corruption. The other type of politician, championing the interests of the elite class, will always have laws passed to make their own corrupt-seeming behaviors perfectly legal anyway.
>>>If I had a choice, I would much rather have a Huey Long than a Herbert Hoover, or a James Michael Curley than a John Collins or Kevin White.
Exactly, and Biden still owes me six hundred dollars. If politicians were corrupt for our benefit, not for their fellow elites, while not essentially telling us all to go die then they might get more votes.
Who needs ‘corruption’ when you can be an exceptional stock picker like Nancy Pelosi?
https://x.com/PelosiTracker_/status/1795848224353522013
…while the United States prefers to categorically blame Mexico’s violence on drug cartels and end the discussion there, the truth of the matter is that the US itself plays an outsize role in maintaining the violent landscape south of the border. .
Need more reporting/stories on what, if any, and I suspect there was one, role the U.S. elites played in the election south of the border.
And although the nexus between “organized crime” and “transnational corporations” have historical antecedents, I’d like to know the influence of other actors, especially state actors, on this particular election.
Drugs go north, guns go south?
In fairness, guns and money. (Lawyers? /s)
I had not considered the perspective of equating the cartel’s drug manufacturing and distribution business model with the MIC’s more directly death-dealing products business. But there are obvious parallels. And variance: the MIC is a part of the ruling elite and the cartels, though a ruling elite, seem to be separate from the so-called legitimate businesses in Mexico and elsewhere.
Maybe I’ll see what Caitlin Johnstone has to say.
“Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States”
Porfirio Díaz
IIRC, the United States has overthrown every single government south of the Rio Grande multiple times with possibly Guyana and Costa Rica being the only exceptions to the “multiple” part.
That fact makes this strong supporter for closing the border not critical of the people either already here or trying to be. Too many people are just fleeing the countries that the United States’ politically and economically crippled for the sake of the American Oligarchy and corporations like the United Fruit Company, which is where the term “banana republic” comes from.
Highly recommend Ramin Mazaheri’s Substack post from 6/4 on the Mexican election ( https://open.substack.com/pub/raminmazaheri/p/in-mexico-the-west-faces-its-biggest?r=1ot60&utm_medium=ios ) . The landslide extended to state and local elections giving the Morena Party and the policies put in motion by AMLO an unprecedented vote of confidence. In a comment I left there I ’spitballed’ that mebbe the cartels would do well to join up with the government – much in the way that VV Putin brought the oligarchs to the table as partners in a patriotic rebuilding of the Russian Federation- “if you can’t beat ’em, join ‘em” (or “make them an offer they can’t refuse”).
As long as there is demand…
However, where AMLO and, above all, the incoming Sheinbaum government could stop being the target of biased criticism is in the economic sphere. Michael Roberts gives a very good breakdown of this.
Lots of great AI + datacenter + energy consumption content today and I can’t help but wonder if this is a feature and not a bug as they say. AI/GenAI/LLMs are interesting tech and can do neat party tricks but its clear now that this is just a funnel of VC money into a giant ponzi scheme (yes, obviously). But more to the point of the articles today, this is also a giant funnel of cash into the tech monopolies and thus the energy sector.
I’m thinking in terms of things like foreign (or military) aid, all the money that isn’t skimmed off the top by the ponzi scheme flows right back to the usual suspects. OpenAI/Anthropic/etc get giant rounds of funding and promptly spend most of it on cloud monopoly datacenter opex which then eventually flows back to the energy sector, etc. So VC investors are just speculating while “laundering” the funds back to the usual suspects and keeping the money safely in the system.
You’d be amazed how much cloud costs bleed these startups operating income, I’ve seen firsthand how these VC darlings dump millions a month into AWS/Azure. More amazingly I’ve seen senior leadership shrug off a serious look at the spend and not seem to care much about optimization.
As long as the moolah keeps flowing, you have to get up and dance.
Financial musical chairs?
not sure ‘how clear’ AI is any more a ponzi than any other technology that our government is involved with associated with the MIC – what facts do you bring to the table with specificity to back up this assertion – don’t dispute your assumption just curious – personally have no interest or skin in this other than reading some of the links about it and thinking it’s a lawyer’s wet dream, so other than that, cannot make any all encompassing assumptions but did notice the FT link and would only add this one i ran across from Mr Snowden in Bloomberg –
https://archive.ph/c78D6
Yeah, so it began with Microsoft’s $1B “investment” in OpenAI in 2019. Kudos, now OpenAI can solve all the worlds problems! Hmm, but reading the fine print about the funding, its “roughly half in the form of Azure credits” which just means funneling that $$ back into MSFT opex which most likely isn’t much of a high margin business because most of that will get spent on hardware, heating, and cooling.
That just sounds like business as usual right? Sure, but consider how much money (and energy) is getting spent on regurgitating stolen content through these LLMs, its burning money to create a solution looking for a problem.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/23/microsoft-invests-billions-more-dollars-in-openai-extends-partnership/
More recently, OpenAI wants to build a “massive supercomputer” with the clever name “Stargate” for an estimated cost of “up to $100 billion”. The biggest concern is how to suck more energy out of the system to feed this beast (link below) but will probably take a good chunk of that $100B and funnel it into some environmentally toxic solution.
Also in the link below, Amazon “paid $650 million for Cumulus Data’s nuclear-powered data center facilities in Pennsylvania”, not necessarily for their AI efforts but the money definitely flows into the energy sector.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/01/microsoft_openai_5gw_dc/
Admittedly, I don’t have a smoking gun for the lawyers :)
Good morning JB, how are the dogs and fruit grove? I’m curious on the “obviously clear” as well, mainly because I’m vigorously nodding along. The weave suggests that Keith is correct in his certainty. Where’s the burden of proof fall when the pattern is this distinct?
hey mrsyk just came in from weeding my poppies – after three plantings seem to have it right and a nice patch of poppies popping – alliterative weakness – dealing peach leaf curl organically, need to apply in morning before it gets hot – The Reliance & Bailey peach seem to be not affected and the Reliance is producing well with lots of fruits set, not so much on the Red Havens, and the Bosc pears are coming in too and a few apples – visualizing winter pruning already – i agree with Keith too, intuitively, just like a bit more composition in my quiver to the obviously correct assumption – and deer……………beautiful plague of critters to challenge me – AI just seems like jangling keys and not paying attention to who’s jangling – thank you Keith for the info – without going too deep because i just i don’t understand how it’s helpful – exploitable yes, but helpful, no – sure there are narratives and warnings of these narratives but in scheme of things it’s only a distraction – thankfully good comments here – grass is dry, back out to mow it – check back later
Our peach tree, after spending the last two years growing instead of fruiting, is having a banner year to date, knock on wood. Never had leaf curl, no advice there. Planted a dawn redwood in the drainage off the spring this year, just to maintain my air of being on the edge of sanity.
Cheers Jabura! I also have deer woes so have to plant appropriately :(
Keith someone suggested a device that has solar charger that i picked up a few weeks ago and seems to work fine and don’t have to cage my trees from the deer – called Broox – was using a desiccated porcine/bovine blood product called Plantskyd that required reconstituting with cold water and spraying but worked and if rain free for a few days it will hold up to rain – mrsyk i’ve noticed that apple trees will hold back one year then bounty the next – our conservation district has a tree & plant sale Spring & Fall that i volunteer at – have planted spruce trees on the borders, deer don’t eat spruce – have Norway, Black and beautiful Colorado Blue spruces planted – daughter did raised beds this year and we fenced them in – also have cherry trees but minimal fruit so far and when they do produce we’ll with have to net them to keep out the birds – trying to get some hazlenut bushes going, some folks call them filberts and it will be war with the squirrels when they start to produce to see who gets to eat them – always something to distract from watching crap circle the drain – saw a mink the other day roaming along the bank of the creek that runs through the property – at UM Matthai Botanical Gardens, which occupies big acreage and has good stream running through it, has noticed beaver activity which is kinda cool for being around Ann Arbor –
Peach leaf curl is best handled with an application of copper sulfate in winter when dormant.
thanks Gregorio – was warned to be very judicious in applications of copper since it can gather in the soil and uptake into the fruit – was given advice by the folks at the CSA down the road – it’s my ‘nuclear’ option – in the meantime been using an OMRI listed fungicide made up of rosemary oil, clove oil and peppermint oil – was also suggested to apply before emergence of leaves in Spring – didn’t get on it as soon as i should but using it when it showed up and now and seems to have arrested it and keep grass cut low and spray grass of the orchard too –
It’s difficult if not impossible to prove a Ponzi scheme a priori. Ponzis are revealed, not forecasted.
I’m sure Madoff’s fund was “solvent” in 2004.
However, AI stocks have some Ponzi-like properties, IMO. They are pulling in money through new entrants, who are relying on promises that appear to be fraudulent, like gazillions of TW of power magically appearing over the next 5 years, the climate not going wild on a feedback loop and killing off a boatload of their customers, and every single enterprise including Aunt Polly’s knitting service going balls-deep in on AI.
How could AI influence gambling online, one wonders?
AI gambling. I prefer to do my gambling the old fashioned way; at the Stock Exchange.
Interesting point about conversion of the bubble money sloshing into AI into energy infrastructure. It reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s “What kind of bubble is AI” that looked at the infrastructure legacy of various bubbles.
And tech has been suffering since.
” ‘Putin’s Davos’ recovers to pre-war levels, but representation from the West has all but disappeared”
How to say this. Nobody cares. China is at SPIEF in force and even the Taliban showed up with a delegation. I’m pretty sure that those western corporations would have loved to turn up to make a lot of deals but am pretty sure also that their governments said no. On the TV news there was some sour grapes about how China was there in place of the west as well as all those Global Majority countries. So here I guess that it is a case of the dogs are barking but the caravan is moving on.
Full quote:
“representation from the West has all but disappeared, even Scott Ritter was a no show”
Aha! But he will-
‘Former US Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter will take part in a discussion panel hosted by RT at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on Friday. He will join the event online after being barred by US authorities from traveling to Russia.
The RT session will be held under the title ‘The Empire of Evil: Has The West Successfully Demonized Russia?’ and will feature several guests, including former aide to US President Joe Biden Tara Reade, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria Karin Kneissl and great nephew of Otto von Bismarck, Alexander von Bismarck.’
https://www.rt.com/russia/598859-scott-ritter-spief-rt-panel/
Hard to keep a good Marine down.
An Army soldier would respond by reminding you that there are no good marines, there being a sibling rivalry between the two branches. All in jest, of course. And good on Ritter.
…and whose fault is that? ;)
April 15, 2024
G7 counted for 30.1% of world GDP in purchasing-power-parity terms in 2023
BRICS+ counted for 36.9% of world GDP (PPP) in 2023
BRICS+ GDP (PPP) was 22.6% greater than that of G7 in 2023
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/April/weo-report?a=1&c=119,&s=PPPGDP,PPPSH,&sy=2000&ey=2023&ssm=0&scsm=1&scc=0&ssd=1&ssc=0&sic=0&sort=country&ds=.&br=1
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/April/weo-report?c=223,924,532,534,546,922,199,&s=PPPGDP,PPPSH,&sy=2007&ey=2023&ssm=0&scsm=1&scc=0&ssd=1&ssc=0&sic=0&sort=country&ds=.&br=1
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1798698296988577880
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
That’s quite a number: Hungary attracted 44.1% of all Chinese investments in Europe in 2023, more than the “big three” (Germany, France, UK) combined.
Say what you will about Viktor Orban’s approach, he delivers for Hungary…
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GPZCkZGaEAAEivG?format=jpg&name=small
8:47 AM · Jun 6, 2024
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1oCtr
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for Germany, France, Poland and Hungary, 2000-2022
(Percent change)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1oCtG
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for Germany, France, Poland and Hungary, 2000-2022
(Percent change)
re: Alice in Wonderland: Simple Tasks Showing Complete Reasoning Breakdown in State-Of-the-Art Large Language
Therein lies a clue. To misquote Blaise Pascal:
The human reasoning has its reasons of which its reason knows nothing of.
Shorter: the eye cannot see itself, or something like that…. / ;)
‘Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.’ – Robert A. Heinlein
So, artificial intelligence is artificial rationalization? hmmm. that could work as a description. / ;)
Perhaps it’s all just another square hole into which Silicon Valley loves to pound round pegs. Think self driving taxis.
I was thinking of a round hole and square pegs, as a circle is impossible to draw digitally, considering Pi. But then, maybe that’s just me. ;-)
My morning coffee was running low. I’ll get it right next time.
I could have refined my thought. But either way, they’ll pound on it & they’ll market it. :-/
More like humans see intelligence in stochastic parroting, like we see faces in clouds…
Reminds me of the “Street light effect”
https://axispraxis.wordpress.com/2016/03/24/the-streetlight-effect-a-metaphor-for-knowledge-and-ignorance/
“…which its reason knows nothing of”
(1) These LLMs don’t have “nerves going to the right places”—they don’t have a meta-level that allows them to “know” how they arrive at the right answer. (Actually, people don’t either but they at least have covert verbal behavior, if they don’t have anendophasia, that they can report on. LLMs don’t have even that.)
(2) These LLMs are not designed to reason. They’re designed to emulate the verbal behavior that is associated with reasoning, which isn’t the same thing. That works a lot of the time but, as the article indicates, it breaks down in some instances that most people would find trivially easy to figure out.
You wonder what what somebody put in the NYT”s coffee this morning to make them publish this: Inside the Base Where Israel Has Detained Thousands of Gazans https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-detention-base.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
Grasping for a shred of cred? / ;)
Looking to avoid the sorry fate of their fellows at the Washington Post
One has to give the readers credit where it is due.
“Did The Houthis Hit The USS Eisenhower May 31st?”
The Yemenis hit something causing the Eisenhower to exit, stage left. But what about that carrier’s security screen? Carriers don’t operate by themselves but have a screen of ships to protect them so did a missile or drone get by them? I guess that the purpose of that carrier group was to intercept anything heading to Israel but staying close enough to launch air strikes on Yemen when they can. Big mistake. Probably it would be best for a carrier to operate at a large distance from the enemy but I believe that the range of an F-35 today, for example, is less than half of what a fighter could operate back in the 70s because progress. And that means that carriers these days have to move in a lot closer to their targets which then makes them vulnerable to missiles and drones.
The most likely explanation is that the Houthis launched their attacks, and while there were no (or few) hits, the carrier and its group simply expended (at great fiscal expense) their reserves of defensive ammunition and were forced to withdraw under operational rules (the only remaining means the Pentagon likely has to overrule White House orders to deploy ships hither and tither). A French naval deployment was likewise forced to withdraw earlier this year. They were not able to stop or answer Houthi attacks and remaining was pointless.
The Eisenhower is most likely unscathed.
But the larger consequence is that the ship, and all ones like it in modern navies, have been proven ineffective in their present form against cheap, “home grown” drones and missiles which are now within the reach of even 3rd world countries. The military bedrocks of post-war global powers have in their turn been “disrupted” by tech developments. If there aren’t 100+ engineers in western countries working full time on an answer to this problem, the Occident is going to end up like the Ottoman Empire.
Perhaps the real point is that whether the ship was hit or not our military is not going to tell us the truth. Or at least that’s the alllegation. It seems hard to believe that such a thing could really be kept under wraps for very long.
The surviving sailors aboard the USS Liberty were threatened with court martial and time in Leavenworth if they dared talked about the Israeli attack on them which was back in ’67. And that also included any personnel that was picking up the radio traffic from that day in other stations. Covering up on the vulnerability of carriers is even more vital as not only does it threaten national security but it also threatens the Navy budget for building more Ford-call aircraft carriers.
and the surviving sailors from the USS Liberty were banned forever from attending American Legion events – disgusting to dishonor these men –
https://israelpalestinenews.org/uss-liberty-vets-banned-forever-american-legion-national-conference/
USS Liberty:
How Israel Cucked the United States
thanks for the link Ms X – you may like to watch “The Day Israel Attacked America” by film-maker Richard Belfield
https://rumble.com/v2r27kr-documentary-the-day-israel-attacked-america.html
Thanks, I’ll watch.
John Helmer’s interview with Gorrila Radio (used to broadcast from University of Victoria, but likely CSIS told them to stop and desist) ends with a nice song about USS Liberty:
https://gradio.substack.com/p/gorilla-radio-with-chris-cook-john-283?r=2f9hbi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
To your point it’s hard to believe that information on a hit or not hasn’t snuck out via a social media post or a phone call home from a sailor.
But I am clueless to how hard a lockdown on phones and social media the military has in place. Just a thought…
I’m guessing that from the evidence of Russian strikes on Ukrainian troop concentrations ‘guided’ by intercepted cell phone transmissions by said troops, the militaries of many nations have put the development of communications ‘security’ methods as high priority items.
This has had a multiplier effect concerning “security” of many sorts, internal and external.
As has been said many times, in this world there are two kinds of naval vessels:
(1) Submarines
(2) Targets.
It’s a physics and manpower problem. Going back to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2002, it was noted the population was very young and that the resistance forces regardless of what they called themselves would be unending.
The only real strategy is to not tick off 90% of a population.
Now we are in a spot where locally produced missiles can match the range of air bases. The planes can’t just stay in the air and solve a problem. There are too many, and the planes may not have runways.
Even before WW2, most navies knew they were vulnerable to air attacks.
But once out of sight from shore, one would need a sizable air force and/or carriers to make use of that. And that meant putting trained personell at risk.
Improvements in drone range and loiter time has changed that massively.
And in the gulf of Aden and Red Sea there is little chance to really hide in the first place. Fish in a barrel, as the saying goes.
I think you have outlined the way the Yemeni sanctions will win a war of attrition against western fleets.
In confined seas such as around the Arabian Peninsula aircraft carriers need land based combat air patrols, the carriers can not generate enough aircraft to defend themselves, and Aegis is notan assurance!
F-35 carries 16000 pounds of jet fuel, drawn from the carriers limited tankage. Yes, its unrefueled range is an issue. Putting F-35’s in the air is dependent on luck and spare parts.
US Navy is running a lot of ships and aircraft that need a liot of “support”.
“Probably it would be best for a carrier to operate at a large distance from the enemy but I believe that the range of an F-35 today, for example, is less than half of what a fighter could operate back in the 70s because progress. ”
Interesting, but CV Wing 3 has 4 squadrons of F/A-18E and F.
re: After publishing an article critical of Israel, Columbia Law Review’s website is shut down by board AP
I remember when my uni wanted to shut down the student paper because someone published an opinion piece in support of gay rights and gay marriage.
We need to learn to separate powers from the process. Separate church from state, separate corporation from state, separate money and power from information…
The yahoo news story on Nigel Farage getting milkshaked has an even better photo than the tweet. The expression on the face of the young woman doing the tossing is not to be missed.
You mean this one?
https://au.news.yahoo.com/nigel-farage-gets-milkshake-thrown-140154430.html
When I saw that image earlier today, she struck me as smug.
It’s the satisfaction in the very moment she’s stepped off the cliff, she’s relinquished control, she’s realizing a direct hit, a tiny but symbolic blow executed to perfection.
I imagine it could help Farage’s poll numbers. / ;)
I’ve already spotted tin-foily stuff on Twitter claiming this was a “false flag” op by Farage’s own people to get sympathy, given that the normally “Pro-Farage” people of Clacton have this time round appeared very unimpressed by him parachuting in and indeed boasting that he couldn’t answer any of the questions about key Clacton institutions/places etc.
Personally I find the false flag claim more appealing on the simple grounds that what average person on the street can gain access to a working McDonald’s milkshake machine these days? ;)
Heh. I was thinking of the way T’s legal troubles have boosted his poll numbers. The legal troubles are real and not false flags.
There’s no false flag to attacks meant to humiliate the victim. I’ve never heard of anyone expressing sympathy for a milkshake attackee, in fact just the opposite with eliminationist rage being the common response among defenders of the splattered.
That’s why they’re using milkshakes. Anything that would actually harm the recipient would be assault with a deadly weapon. If you’re a judge, how long would you sentence a previously law-abiding citizen to prison for in this case?
Milkshakes are asymmetrical PR warfare and they work. The proper Blobbian response would be to take out a leader whose usefulness had expired by using a fake milkshake cup to throw real acid. That would be a false flag attack to create a climate in which ‘milkshake’ assailants could be violently intercepted. “Well, it was only a milkshake this time, but we all know what could have happened.”
Bovine intervention?
Please note the before impact and after of Nigel’s hair. It’s truly amazing. There should be a meme about this. I hereby dub this hairstyle “The Smoothie” for it’s slicked-back coiffure, the Farage aspect of being creamed and anointed.
You hope for Nigel’s sake it was vanilla, imagine if it’d had been mocha colored?
“Gorilla Mother Constantly Reminding Children To Slouch”
‘At press time, Grunt was seen scaring the children with a tale of their relative who always stood up straight and eventually got stuck like that.’
And that is how Cro-Magnon man came about, children. But we don’t talk about that branch of the family.
I haven’t scanned the Onion’s site lately, but this one on the front page is a gem:
https://www.theonion.com/other-things-nikki-haley-wrote-on-israeli-missiles-1851512731
Gawd, that creepy smile of hers.
She and Annalena Baerbock seemed to have come from a matched set.
Even better is the one under it:
https://www.theonion.com/senate-passes-emergency-border-funding-to-prevent-femal-1851516387
re: How to Respond to China’s Tactics in the South China Sea – RAND
Thanks for the link. Good article, important topic, mostly ignored by the US MSM.
What has US to do with Philippines’ “sovereignty and territorial integrity at sea”?
“Territorial* integrity at sea”. Is an oxymoron termed to sell another trillion bucks in aircraft carriers!
The law of the sea is “the biggest guns…..”
*terra is latin for land!
It’s clear you have much homework to do. I won’t do it for you. / ;)
You could try and justify us “defending aquatic territory” 7000 miles from Washington.
Fighting communism.
[ What has US to do with Philippines’ “sovereignty and territorial integrity at sea”? ]
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1798527626581262518
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
I remember when I was in highschool I used to wonder how we could have been so stupid to have been dragged into 2 world wars.
Now I know…
And I also know the coming one will be the most stupid yet, because by far the most easily avoidable.
By the way I wonder how it’ll be called by historians. “World War 3” sounds a bit repetitive. “World war of independence from US imperialism” is probably more accurate, although a bit long, and of course the naming will depend on who the victors will ultimately be…
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/theater-defense-war-asia-europe-middle-east
A Three-Theater Defense Strategy
How America Can Prepare for War in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East
9:29 PM · Jun 5, 2024
By the way I wonder how it’ll be called by historians.
The Last Human War. Assuming cockroaches write histories.
What has US to do with Philippines’ “sovereignty and territorial integrity at sea”?
[ The point has come to creating rationales and finding ways to contain and undermine Chinese development. This may be madness, but has been expressly and increasingly pushed by America since the Wolf Amendment of April 2011 when NASA was stopped from working on space exploration and development with China. ]
This recent interview with Ken Hammond, starting around 24 minutes in, covers quite a bit on American activities on the ‘Indo-Pacific’ during the last century.
I knew that American occupation of the Philippines was brutal, but I had no idea that one in seven Filipinos was killed in the process. Goes a long way to explaining why the Philippines is not a normal country today.
https://youtu.be/OAywhc4C2tc?si=UECzeiCgFn1IISLH
When we look at the very really dysfunctions in many global south countries, we really need to remember that many saw multiple rounds of genocide and mass killing that amount to double digit percentage of their population (often the most progressive and idealistic portion). That sort of thing can really mess a place up for generations. Especially when westerners continuously utilize compradors to divide the local population for further exploitation.
I knew that American occupation of the Philippines was brutal, but I had no idea that one in seven Filipinos was killed in the process. Goes a long way to explaining why the Philippines is not a normal country today…
[ Really incisive comment all through. ]
And when they do report on it, they tend to focus on China as the sole sinner, even though the PRC came late to this game and it’s claims are no more (and no less) absurd than those of others in the region. One hates to use wikipedia, but this part of their summation is in line with longer, more academic pieces I’ve seen.
In 2013, the PRC began island building in the Spratly Islands and the Paracel Islands region.[11] During a US Senate hearing in May 2015, then US Assistant Secretary of Defence, David Shear reported that in the Spratly Islands, Vietnam had established 48 outposts, the Philippines had eight, China had eight, Malaysia had five, and Taiwan had one. Shear also noted that from 2009 to 2014, Vietnam was the most active claimant in terms of both upgrading outposts and reclaiming land, with approximately 60 acres reclaimed.[12][13] According to Reuters, island building in the South China Sea, primarily by Vietnam and the Philippines, had been going on for decades. And Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines have all deployed military forces on some of their islands, but Vietnam has not stationed any troops on its floating artificial islands. While China had been late to the island-building game, its efforts had been on an unprecedented scale; from 2014 to 2016, it had constructed more new island surface than all other nations have constructed throughout history and (unlike the other claimants) had placed military equipment, at least for a brief period, on one of its artificial islands by 2016.[14] Also, a 2019 report from VOA that compared China and Vietnam’s island building campaign in the South China Sea stated that the reason why Vietnam had been subject to little international criticism or support was because of the slower speed and widely perceived defensive nature of its island-building project.[15]
I appreciate the way those two headlines about Biden and Netanyahu cancel each other out.
There are just so many lies out there, so much BS and horrible propaganda combined with straight up incompetent reporting. Hamas rejected the fraudulent Biden proposal that he lied about (it was never signed off on by Israel) yet they keep yammering away as if it isn’t deader than a Dodo bird:
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel-at-war/artc-report-hamas-rejects-israeli-ceasefire-proposal-citing-differences-with-u-s-offer
Link to KLG’s piece on Alzheimers is broken. Here it is.
Thanks.
Why put up with the grief that writing a blog guarantees I’ll get?, the author might get a bit less grief if his/her headline’s were a bit less obtuse.
Re Why put up with the grief that writing a blog guarantees I’ll get? Funding the Future
The blogger, Richard Murphy is an accountant who knows his stuff when it comes to taxation and economics. But he should stay in his lane with regard to international politics. He has long since drunk the kool aid served up by western mainstream media, that Russia is evil and Nato are the good guys. Most of his commentators tend to take the same line, often referring to Putin as Putler or similar. I once posted that the picture was more complex and pre dates 2022 but that was deleted by moderators. Never bothered since.
Thank you, John.
Unfortunate, but true. You’re not the first.
There’s more today, possible appeasement of Putin by Starmer.
Scheidel’s “The Bloodstained Leveller” (Aeon) is 7 years old. In any event, his analysis is incomplete (whether or not purposely so is an open question) since he begins his historical scan well after the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations.
Readers interested in the cyclical andurarum/deror proclamations of personal (as opposed to commercial debts, which remained in place) debt cancellations by the palace/temple complexes of the Bronze Age are encouraged to read Michael Hudson’s works on near East antiquity and their implications for debt-based finance and political economy.
“The sequence of destruction in any Russian response to NATO-directed attacks on its heartland”
Unmentioned in that article was another way that Russia can fight back against the west directly attacking Russia proper. I read a high official – and it may have even been Putin himself – saying that Russia could provide technical help and arms for those fighting western powers where they live. So of those 800 US bases scattered around the world, how many of them are in places where they want those bases gone? If this sounds unlikely, don’t forget how the west provided equipment and technical help so Jihadist groups could use drones to attack those Russian bases in Syria only a few years ago. Russia would be simply taking a page out of the western playbook.
That is a good point. And it would end up assisting other Russian goals too. The current US thinking seems to be we can ramp up production and achieve 1/3 of what Russia currently has, in order to supply European and Ukrainian agents with what they need. But if Russia uses its surplus to aid the Houthis, and other pirates, and the Syrians, and the Lebanese, African paramilitary groups, and Iran… the Russians can support several wars simultaneously. We can’t. Why aren’t we figuring out how to step away from this situation now?!?!?!
Better missiles to Houthis via Iran? Maybe even upgrade Syria’s air defenses against Israeli raids or provide the means to counter? They are allies and the Syrians do get pummeled quite a bit and often. Haven’t seen them actually ever respond. Although both would go counter to Putin’s admiration for Israel.
Russian weapons in Okinawa!
The late Chalmers Johnson wrote about how unhappy the Okinawan people are with the American bases there in his book Blowback (2000) and the other two books in that series. Things have only grown worse. Russians like to get value for money spent. I think they would not have to send expensive weapons, just fund one determined youthful organizer with a small continuing budget for quality posters and handbills and maybe some legal support, since the Japanese government is so vigilant about dissent on Okinawa. American actions in Gaza and Ukraine have made Americans odious in the eyes of the young. If the Okinawan peace movement was revived, it could send the Americans packing in a few years. Johnson predicted with what I thought was eccentric verve, that if the American bases were thrown off Okinawa, the worldwide system of American bases would collapse (humor: there would no longer be enough military golf courses to sustain the system).
According to Medvedev, this happened yesterday.
Today Medvedev said they have already started to do exactly that, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.
I am thinking a spell in the nearby Pyrenees or a cheap flight to Lanzarote is looking good.
I appreciate Caitlin Johnston’s article explaining that the US is not a country but is instead three different forever wars in a trench coat. I don’t think that concept will land on anyone with importance, because they are today, completely unironically, talking about the Ukraine conflict and Israeli conflict and Chinese conflict in the context of D-Day.
Somehow, in their minds, they think a conflict which involved the US actually being attacked and our allies actually being threatened by forces that actually wanted to destroy our industrial production and way of life, equates to repeatedly poking Russia on behalf of a government that has killed off any chance of free elections, free press, freedom of religion, or free life for its citizens. And, oh, by the way, happens to be led by a coked out little man whose mandate to govern expired several weeks ago. There’s also the small matter of all the Naughtzis in Ukraine that we’re arguing we need to support in Ukraine. Or the will of the people they want to suppress in China. Or the helpless refugees we’re helping to exterminate in Gaza. Somehow, the US and global elite find common cause in the current situation and what resulted in D-Day. I worry that the events of World War II are far enough away that most will just accept it, rather than stop and think for a minute how insane this all is. After the success of “because Markets” it appears “because Russia” will do wonders for the brand.
And the Russians won’t be attending any Allied celebrations for D-Day! How is that missed by our press? As if Operation Overlord would have meant anything without Operation Bagration coming right behind it…
At Consortium News:
The D-Day of the Eastern Front
******
The Nazis had 80% of their forces in the East. Operation Bagration destroyed nearly as many as were fielded in total in the West. It was their largest defeat of the war. Today, it is barely mentioned by the West.
Ontario shutting down wastewater surveillance–
What we don’t know can’t hurt us, right?
I guess ignorance is bliss.
If Ontario had not shut down that wastewater surveillance program, then pretty soon it would start to show the rising flu pandemic spread into that province. Then Ontario would actually have to do something about it. Better to just chop the program. Like you say, ignorance is bliss.
“Instagram confirms test of ‘unskippable’ ads’
If you think that that move is pretty scummy, wait until Big Zuck rigs it so that you cannot post anything to Facebook without watching an ad first. You know it’s coming.
Birx says US making ‘same mistakes’ with bird flu as COVID-19 Ugh Sell by date references 2020. I wonder who is paying for her lobbying efforts? Big Pharma so we can innoculate millions of cows with mrna? I am impatiently waiting for people like her to pass go and collect 200 into another dimension.
Gooooooooooood Moooooooorning Fiatnam!
Operation Overloan had been set into motion utilizing the funnies monies in order to fool all of the people most of the time and so far so good.
The platoon was assembled in lending ships for disembarkation on financial shores across the ocean in order to facilitate a fiat invasion, while golden parachutists lingered over the channel, each laden with large amounts of Benjamins in which to influence commerce once they landed a deal.
Roger that. Do I enter my location coordinates for receipt here?
You know what I hate?
When your chute gets tangled in the Bretton Woods…
Thanks, I needed that laugh in a bad way.
“Election 2024 as told in lover’s quarrels”
The silly adorkable tone of that whole piece made me shake my head. The chattering class really are just adult children.
Someone told me long ago
There’s no calm before the storm
I know, it’s been comin’ for some time
When it’s over so they say
It’ll rain 155mm shells
I know, shinin’ down like water
I wanna know
Have you ever seen refrain?
I wanna know
Have you ever seen refrain
Comin’ down on Gaza today?
Yesterday and days before
Bibi is cold and Joe is ironclad
I know, been that way for all my time
‘Til forever, up on it goes
Through the circle, fast and slow
I know it can’t stop, I wonder
I wanna know
Have you ever seen refrain?
I wanna know
Have you ever seen refrain
Comin’ down on Gaza today?
Yeah
I wanna know
Have you ever seen refrain?
I wanna know
Have you ever seen refrain
Comin’ down on Gaza today?
Have You Ever Seen The Rain, by CCR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO28lB1uwp4
Willie and the Poor Boys, my older brother’s first record.
Damn, I looked this up and I was right not to trust my leaky memory. That song’s off the lp Pendulum.
JAM News article on Georgia foreign agents law.
JAM News (apparently headquartered in Tbilisi) is an NGO to which the law applies.
From their about page:
“JAMnews is a project of Go Group. It was founded with the assistance from the UK Conflict, Stability and Security Fund in 2016. Its major donor today is the European Endowment for Democracy. In the past, it has been supported by: the Confidence Building Early Response Mechanism (COBERM), Free Press Unlimited (FPU), The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), The Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation (BST), and others.”
Move along, nothing to see here.
I would say that their poor attempt at mental gymnastics is worth a read (the part below the news).
They openly admit that EU and US have been “strengthening civil society” for decades, but that’s not the best part.
The project to open a free children’s dental clinic is being suspended. Why? Because helping those kids can’t be done if there is a register registering that those kids are being helped.
Not to mention those poor animals. No kittie in Georgia would take a morsel from someone working for an organization registered in a register of organization.
They are protesting because of the children, and kittens.
re: Stanford University team apologises over claims they copied Chinese project for AI model – South China Morning Post
oooh, so a US uni reverse engineered a Chinese product? why am I chuckling? / ;)
Unsurprisingly, given the source, JAM News’s description of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act is almost entirely wrong.
For a less ridiculous take, I recommend this:
https://www.fara.us/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwvIWzBhAlEiwAHHWgvU-WdW1sERsko7G8_pJgFfR4GFeCu6mry6JBZqVCShqXsf8ogE1SqhoCN4oQAvD_BwE
So a single counter point to yesterday’s eye doctor thread, I know someone that has a coworker who’s son recently needed glasses. The reason given, an allergy leading to glasses. His eyes would turn red, apparently normal with the glasses.
Who knows. There have been reports of kids’ vision changing due to COVID. The eye doctor I saw yesterday maybe doesn’t see kids? I don’t know.
Stay safe out there!
https://x.com/Grummz/status/1798407048927056025
Photoshop is SPYING on you now.
This is nuts. @Photoshop has new terms that require you allow them to view everything you create, and reserves the right to deactivate your @Adobe software if you make stuff they don’t like. Of course they say “for legal purposes” but we all know it is to feed their machine AI and keep you from making wrong-think.
Thanks. I’m running older versions of PS installed from disks that I own and a license key, no subscription required. Guess I won’t be upgrading. / ;)
There’s a learning curve, but you might want to consider GIMP over the longer run.
Po Jennifer Rubin, next she should interview Bill Barr to find out why he buried that Hunter Laptop Story, or only about a thousand other stories about how the judicial system is corrupt and subject to manipulation by anyone in power.
Try exercising that Freedom of the Press that prior generations revered, going back to the founding of the country.
A.J. Liebling
Considering the news about Adobe, I think freedom of the press will soon be limited to those who own a linotype machine.
From 2013
Ex-Washington Post ombudsman: ‘Fire Jennifer Rubin’
“She doesn’t travel within a hundred miles of Post standards,” Pexton argues. “She parrots and peddles every silly right-wing theory to come down the pike in transparent attempts to get Web hits. Her analysis of the conservative movement, which is a worthwhile and important beat that the Post should treat more seriously on its national pages, is shallow and predictable. Her columns, at best, are political pornography; they get a quick but sure rise out of the right, but you feel bad afterward.”
https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/08/ex-washington-post-ombudsman-fire-jennifer-rubin-170603
Note, he suggests she doesn’t meet Post standards within 100 miles;
In the intervening almost 11 years after this was written, perhaps the Post partially followed Pexton’s advice by simply lowering their standards, elevating Rubin to standard.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/6/3/mexicos-election-a-victory-for-organised-crime
June 3, 2024
Mexico’s election: A victory for organised crime
Under Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidency, organised crime will likely be calling the shots.
By Belén Fernández
[ The column is entirely prejudiced, shockingly false and malicious; designed to ruin the newly elected president of Mexico and to ruin Mexico as such. ]
Qatar owns Al Jazeera and is the location of the biggest US base in West Asia.
“Qatar owns Al Jazeera and is the location of the biggest US base in West Asia.”
The persistent way in which Latin American governments that tend to be somewhat socialist in inclination are attacked by US aligned interests is stunning. The accomplishment of Mexico’s López Obrador was in the increase in security of poorer urban and rural families. These families were not about to forget AMLO, though much needs to be done through the country especially from soft and hard infrastructure to continued work on economic security matters.
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1798139721727832448
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
When Stanford AI researchers steal Chinese IP…. A team of 3 Stanford researchers has apologized for stealing the open-source code of Chinese scientists and claiming they’d developed a “new” AI model.
https://scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3265377/stanford-university-team-apologises-over-claims-they-copied-chinese-project-ai-model *
Most interesting is how the Chinese proved it was their model: they had customized it to identify rare bamboo slips from the Warring States Period (about 475-221 BC) that were owned by Tsinghua university and not publicly available. And sure enough the Stanford model showed the same recognition ability… The most Chinese way ever of protecting IP
* Stanford team apologises over claims they copied Chinese project for AI model
7:48 PM · Jun 4, 2024
No mention in the article as exactly what code was “open source” nor any mention of what license it was published under, so making claims of “stealing” seems unsupported by the provided evidence. I did go to Hugging Face and they link to a Github project “MiniCPM-Llama3-V-2_5” which links to a repo here: MiniCPM-V where it indicates the code is licensed under Apache 2.0 license, so for example “2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.”
Of course this says nothing about claims in academic literature; I leave that for others but I think the author of the “stealing” comment needs to provide the basis for it.
From: Researchers plan to retract landmark Alzheimer’s paper containing doctored images
That’s pretty ominous, isn’t it?
And as I recall, this paper is hugely impactful, leading to decades of fruitless research. Academia, as we all known, is quite broken.
It does make you question what other drugs and treatments are entirely backed by none other than thin air and Photoshop?
In order to fix that, thin air use will be taxed and Photoshop will spy on all users.
Hmmm….
First, “Instagram confirms test of ‘unskippable’ ads.”
Second, “Photoshop is SPYING on you now.”
This looks very much like classical Capitalism at work.
An “Enclosure of the intellectual commons.”
I am glad we don’t do social media. Fighting YouTube over their insanely intrusive ad regime is bad enough. (Thanks to all who sent me helpful comments about circumventing that monstrosity after an earlier comment.)
“You will have no thoughts of your own, and you will be happy.”
From New Report Underscores the Seriousness of Long Covid
(bold mine)
That seems like an extraordinary number, doesn’t it? Granted not everyone that has long-COVID has completely debilitating symptoms. It’s not unclear why it’s risen this year; SARS2 continues to circulate. People continue to get infected. Most people are living like it’s 2019. What kind of outcome would you expect? I guess there was hope that the worst of long-COVID was over, and people would increasingly not get it, because everyone that was likely to get it, had been disabled.
But we know from other studies this is not the case, and that anyone can get long-COVID; Indeed, it is only a matter of time, at 1-3 infections annually.
Hilarious this isn’t out of NIH, which ate a billion dollars and produced nothing on long-COVID; People should go to jail at NIH and affiliated institutions that took money. Serious federal jail time. The scale of graft is epic.
“Sharing is important”: Elementary students dive into Colorado water issues in pen pal program Colorado Sun
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
…is Benedict Donald scheduled to be housed @ ADX Florence?
Glad to see Bloomberg is catching on to the importance of this story. Tomorrow’s lead:
re: Johnson makes controversial picks to house panel
“.’ Reminds me of the pro-Hamas student protesters who study an issue for five whole minutes and think they have all the answers,” said one GOP member of the Intelligence Committee, granted anonymity to speak candidly.” Just curious, is studying an issue for 5 minutes and having all the answers, worse than having AIPAC provide talking points to our congress critters?
Settler colonialism is not complicated to understand You could explain the concept to 7 year olds in two minutes and most of them will get it.
If only we were ruled by a random selection of 7 year olds.
> FBI raid on real estate company linked to Harlan Crow’s RealPage rental price fixing Daily Kos
As Robert Crandall said when he was CEO of American Airlines, “My pricing is held hostage by my stupidest competitor”. Looks like Harlan Crow and RealPage figured out how to solve that: price-fixing-as-a-service.
The Duran does some good theorizing about what the leaders of Ukraine, the US, and Russia might be thinking about the near future.
https://youtu.be/_cQdsxmFxas?
>Putin warns West over Ukraine armaments, nuclear arsenal in news conference
Putin knows West is in a very economically fragile state with way too much debt, sector imbalances (esp. financialization & healthcare) and inefficient (high cost & overly complex) industrial base. As I’ve said before, West is like someone who’s knifed themselves in a fight. Russia just needs to keep the pressure up so West slowly bleeds to death but not to the point where West lashes out in desperation and potentially inflicts a serious wound on Russia. This is what Reagan did to the old USSR and what Putin is now doing to the West. Except Soviet’s cash dependence was on oil revenues as opposed to debt raising for the West.
Which means Putin & Russia will take their time in slowly cooking the goose. Any escalation will come from the West as they lash out in desperation – but Russia will step back as much as possible and only respond when needed to keep West bleeding economically & geopolitically off balance.
Same goes for China & Taiwan. Proximate risk is Middle East.
re: China’s Energy Intensity and Carbon Intensity Targets Are All But Unachievable, by TheDiplomat
In the title:
“targets all but unachievable”
Before the last paragraph:
“most of its 2025 climate targets within reach”
“China’s clean energy boom in the past two years, particularly in solar power, has put most of its 2025 climate targets within reach despite falling severely behind earlier. If the rapid pace of low-carbon power generation additions continues and electricity demand growth returns to pre-pandemic rates, China’s CO2 emissions could fall this year and stabilize, potentially achieving the 4-6 percent reduction needed to meet the CO2 intensity target by 2025. Given the sharp increase in solar and wind installations in 2023, the non-fossil energy share target also appears achievable.
https://thediplomat.com/2024/06/chinas-energy-intensity-and-carbon-intensity-targets-are-all-but-unachievable/
Why Is the RSS Distancing Itself From the BJP?
BJP and RSS leaders are going to great lengths to send out the message that the RSS is a cultural organization and uninvolved in the BJP’s political activity.
By Sudha Ramachandran
May 31, 2024
https://thediplomat.com/2024/05/why-is-the-rss-distancing-itself-from-the-bjp/
Here is the dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. Karaganov was a close associate of Yevgeny Primakov, and has been Presidential Advisor to both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. He is considered close to Putin and Sergey Lavrov. Karaganov has been a member of the Trilateral Commission since 1998, and served on the International Advisory Board of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has also been Deputy Director of the Institute of Europe at the USSR….
https://youtu.be/ens6hTc94is
. The guy has a pretty thick accent, but fortunately the transcript is pretty clear…
This is from the public description of the video, 1:44:42 seconds:
I posted this already over at the 2:00 p.m. water cooler, but then it occurred to me that this topic is more suited for the daily links post than the water cooler post. I never thought about it before, this segregation of subject matter….