Chaos continues with Ohio teachers’ pension fund as second advisor quits Cleveland.com (JH).
Timing ‘Trump Trades’ With an Eye on GOP Platform John Authers, Bloomberg
Phases In The Life-cycle Of An Equity Order codonomics
Climate
Climate crisis is making days longer, study finds Guardian
Europe headed for mini-ice age as AMOC tipping point approaches – paper BNE Intelliinews
Mexico’s planned glyphosate ban helped show how agroecology can lead the way forward The Conversation
Artist punches holes in UN climate report six hours a day for Dutch installation Guardian
Syndemics
Opinion: Prevailing myths about public health hinder advancements that could help Coloradans Colorado Sun
Book Review – The Ecology of Collective Behavior The Inquistive Biologist
China?
China’s population crisis demands ‘dynamic monitoring’ of households, more support: adviser South China Morning Post Commentary:
5/5
If China can transfer roughly half a percent of GDP every year to households, the Chinese economy will continue to grow, more slowly but far more sustainably, and the improvement in household income will more than exceed the decline in working population.— Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis) July 16, 2024
Xi Jinping’s Great Economic Rewiring Is Cushioning China’s Slowdown Bloomberg. Commentary:
6/6
China's manufacturing and technology push has been formidably successful, but it has come at the expense of domestic demand. The idea that former can resolve the latter shows why we need to think about economies systemically, and not incrementally.— Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis) July 16, 2024
Japan’s Hands-Off “Hidden Culture” of Stillness Nippon.com
India
US ambassador berates India following Modi’s Moscow visit BNE Intellinews. “[T]here is ‘no such thing as strategic autonomy.'”
Officer among 4 Indian soldiers killed in overnight gunfight in Kashmir Anadolu Agency
Hundreds of students in Bangladesh injured in protests over gov’t job quotas Anadolu Agency
Syraqistan
Gaza: Palestinian with Down syndrome ‘left to die’ by Israeli soldiers after combat dog attack Middle East Eye
Israel seeks to rewrite the laws of war Al Jazeera
Yemen’s Houthis target 3 ships in Red, Mediterranean Seas Anadolu Agency
European Disunion
Europe Is Not Ready for Trump Foreign Policy
France’s left-wing parties struggling to form govt, says leader of Socialists France24
Dear Old Blighty
Will Immigrant Workers in Britain Win Europe’s First Amazon Union? Labor Notes
New Not-So-Cold War
Zelenskyy on performance of Ukraine’s commander-in-chief and Russia’s breakthrough in Kharkiv Oblast: we will deal with details later Ukrainska Pravda
Ukraine War Day #872: Zelensky Not Irreplaceable – Part III Awful Avalance. Part I and Part II.
* * * Donald Trump has ‘well-founded plans’ for Russia-Ukraine peace talks, Viktor Orbán claims FT
The American State–Media Complex Is Escalating the Ukraine War The American Conservative
Pentagon explains why US does not allow Ukraine to strike Russian territory with ATACMS Ukrainska Pravda
* * * NATO and the deadly strategy of neoconservatism Jeffrey Sachs, Pearls and Irritations
Biden Administration
The FDA Just Quietly Gutted Protections for Human Subjects in Research Newsweek
2024
Assassination and Trump’s Mentality Craig Murray
Trump assassination attempt: Fraternal Order of Police blasts Secret Service ‘failure’ FOX
The Trump Assassination Attempt: A Serious Audited Investigation is Urgently Needed Stephen Bryen, Weapons and Strategy
* * * Recap: Trump makes first public appearance at RNC The Hill
Bandaged Trump gets rapturous welcome two days after assassination attempt BBC
Republican convention aims for unity — but keeps some of the old red meat NBC
* * * How J.D. Vance got here Politico
Five Faith Facts About Trump’s VP Pick, J.D. Vance The Roys Report
J. D. Vance Changes the Subject n+1. From 2023, still germane.
* * *
We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority ProPublica
Antitrust
Inside the Mafia of Pharma Pricing Matt Stoller, BIG. The deck: “4% of all the money in America flows through a few mafia-like health care conglomerates. The FTC just released a ground-breaking report on how they operate. And it is gearing up to sue.”
The Supremes
Major Questions Avoidance and Anti-Avoidance (PDF), Daniel J. Hemel SSRN. From the Abtract: “This essay is the first to name the phenomenon of major questions avoidance and to develop a taxonomy of avoidance tactics. It identifies four broad categories of major questions avoidance: “splitting” a single rule into a series of smaller rules; “lumping” together regulations under different statutory authorities to achieve a common, far-reaching objective; “glossing” over a major rule in technocratic language that downplays its economic and political significance; and “bypassing” the rulemaking process via guidance documents, administrative adjudications, and enforcement actions. Agencies appear to be deploying various major-questions-avoidance tactics already—openly in some cases and subtly in others.”
Realignment and Legitimacy
America’s Coming Age of Instability Foreign Affairs
This Is a Test for America Yascha Mounk
Digital Watch
ChatGPT Doesn’t Trust Chargers Fans: Guardrail Sensitivity in Context (PDF) arXiv. From the Abstract: “Guardrails are also sycophantic, refusing to comply with requests for a political position the user is likely to disagree with. We find that certain identity groups and seemingly innocuous information, e.g., sports fandom, can elicit changes in guardrail sensitivity similar to direct statements of political ideology.”
New App Connects Users Too Tired To Get Out Of Bed With Gig Worker Who Will Turn Off Their Lights The Onion. From 2023, still germane.
The graying open source community needs fresh blood The Register
Sports Desk
Gunz
Is America’s gun fixation backfiring on its pushers? Al Jazeera. Commentary:
The belief that the US is a high gun ownership society because of a high guns/capita # is wrong. Actual ownership has fallen for decades and is close to all-time lows (they ticked up slightly under Trump). What has changed is gun owners now buy 5, 10, 20+ guns instead of 1-2. https://t.co/96eY43W0Xw pic.twitter.com/g7EWgGkW6g
— Quantіan2 (@quantian1) July 15, 2024
Imperial Collapse Watch
US Navy pilots come home after months of shooting down Houthi missiles and drones AP. “[M]ost of the sailors, including him, weren’t used to being fired on.”
Class Warfare
Inside a UPS warehouse that prioritizes super-fast shipping Marketplace
Mangled fingers, no time off: Why the women who make Samsung’s semiconductors are striking Hank Yoreh
‘Sensational’ Proof Delivers New Insights Into Prime Numbers Quanta
“I Told Three Big Lies That Changed My Life” The Honest Broker
Antidote du jour (National Park Service):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
251 comments
Comments are closed.
Fist in the air with a determined stare
Our flag waving above his wild hair
Blood on his cheek
In a heroic streak—
A moment Trump just had to share
Many people have aimed to get Donald’s ear
Especially in this election year
Young Thomas Crooks
Enters history books
As the man who got ever so near
Any guy can get hold of a gun
To make his vote a permanent one
He will gain such fame
Such an immortal name
That his Dad might be proud of his son
Any candidate or nominee
Can get shot—that’s the reality
We let the NRA
Arrange things this way
Selling us what they call Liberty
On a bright sunny Saturday
A gunman came out to play
One bullet quite clearly
Nearly cost Trump quite dearly
‘Twas the luck of the draw you might say
“luck of the draw” indeed. Of all the theories and hot takes, this may be the only one that matters.
A particularly brilliant riff on an early Johnny Cash song!, Antifa
Tiabbi and Kirn live streaming from the RNC convention yesterday evening. They’ll be there all week, folks. utube. ~ 1hr, 15 minutes +
America This Week Livestream from RNC Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTSfKOcBGIw
Something Walter Kirn said reminded me that then Pres Herbert Hoover is reported to have said to aids when he looked out from the WH and saw US Army troops burning out the Bonus Marchers encampment: “This has just cost me the election.”
Fear and Loathing in … Milwaukee?? I hope someone’s going to provide us with regional “only fans” traffic numbers.
I feel positive that suds city is glad to not be the metropolis that made bier famous.
“US ambassador berates India following Modi’s Moscow visit”
Yeah, this US Ambassador is an example of why American diplomacy sucks. It is either an offer of very small carrots or the threat of very big sticks. This Ambassador is basically saying that you are either with us or against us echoing George Bush’s sentiments. Washington tried to get India to reschedule the meeting between Modi and Putin as it was happening at the same time as the Washington NATO Summit but India refused. But when that image came out of Modi and Putin giving each other a bear hug, Washington flipped it’s wig-
https://www.rt.com/news/600904-modi-putin-bad-optics/
I’m not convinced that America’s “diplomats” are engaged in communication with foreign state representatives at all. How much of this is just US courtiers talking amongst themselves?
The US seems to have completely forgotten what diplomacy is.
They could have had a quiet word behind closed doors, saying they weren’t happy about the situation and what could they do to change things. Maybe offer India something.
I think it’s time they wrote a book entitled ‘How to lose friends and alienate people’.
Europe headed for mini-ice age as AMOC tipping point approaches – paper BNE Intelliinews
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yo! Europe, let’s kick it
Ice age, ice age baby
Ice age, ice age baby
Alright stop, collaborate and listen
Ice age is back with brand new cold convection
Something grabs a hold of land tightly
Flow like a frozen wave daily and nightly
Will it ever stop? Yo!, I don’t know
Turn off the soil and on ice what can you grow?
To the extreme, it’ll rock the AMOC like a vandal
Light up a stage and wax a tipping point like a candle
Dance, go rush to the money that go boom
I’m killing your brain like a poisonous nuclear mushroom
Deadly, when I play a climate zugzwang melody
Anything less than the best is a felony
Love it or leave it, you better gangway
You better hit bull’s eye, the atmosphere don’t play
If there was a problem, Yo!, I’ll solve it
Check out the free freezers while the ice floes hit
Ice, ice baby
Vanilla colored Ice, ice baby
Vanilla colored Ice, ice baby
Vanilla colored Ice, ice baby
Vanilla
Now that the climate change party is jumping
When the frozen kicked in, with all that oil pumping
Quick to the point, to the point, no faking
Chill out the continent, a destiny of our making
Burning them out, if you ain’t quick and nimble
I go crazy when I hear there goes their status symbol
And hi-lo temps with a souped up tempo
I’m on a roll, it’s time to go Han Solo
Yo mankind, let’s get out of here
Word to your mother
Ice, ice baby, too cold
Ice, ice baby, too cold, too cold
Ice, ice baby, too cold, too cold
Ice, ice baby, too cold, too cold
Ice Ice Baby, by Vanilla Ice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOQtzxPnoY0
We seem to be having our own mini-ice age at the moment here in Oz-
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/15/australia-weather-forecast-cold-snap-nsw-qld-vic-blizzard-winds
It’s bloody freezing down here and that biting cold wind does not help either.
I haven’t read the link yet, but that ice age will be planetary if what I remember from college is accurate. Regardless, it will be very interesting weather wise for everyone.
Nope, an AMOC shutdown will rearrange the overall planetary heat imbalance with the North Atlantic getting a lot colder and the middle and southern latitudes getting hotter. Very bad news for the US east cost, as the Gulf Stream will backup causing sea level rise on that coast. Also, bad news for Antarctica in the medium term.
So higher ocean levels and greater ocean heat – a great combination for massively destructive hurricanes for the southern US and the Caribbean. Also, the cold/hot area of intermixing will cause severe storms in the North Atlantic.
“This eventually shut down the overturning circulation, causing temperatures to rise in the southern hemisphere, but plummet in Europe. For instance, in the model, London cools by 10°C (18°F) on average and Bergen in Norway by 15°C (27°F). Other consequences include local sea level rises in places such the US East Coast.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2416631-atlantic-current-shutdown-is-a-real-danger-suggests-simulation/
You’re right there Reverend. The last few days we had a hard frost (minus 2 to minus 4) every day for a week. Business as usual for many of you in the Northern hemisphere, but very unusual for us.
If you travel due South from the under down under, the next land mass you get to is Antarctica. Travel East and you’ll find New Zealand, followed by Argentina. Keep going in a straight line and you get to…the under down under. It’s not for nothing that they call the southern Indian Ocean the “Roaring Forties”. We’re pretty exposed.
Aren’t you in the middle of winter there?
Yep. And about three weeks ago we had the shortest day of the year. Right now it is as cold as a well-digger’s butt and it has been dropping to below freezing nearby at night.
As a Canadian I find Australian complaints about winter amusing.
I was in Europe for several years and was out in the cold when it was minus 20 Celsius. But you can get used to it. This cold snap is funneling the cold from the Antarctic which is no joke. I can only imagine what it would be like for Canadians to be hit with the sort of weather that they get in northern Queensland during high summer along with the humidity. But as the old saying goes, climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
Camus used to say that the coldest he felt was during the Algerian winters, on the coast. Cold and wet/humid. Gets fast to the bone and never lets you go…
Camus was right. I can attest that sub zero temperatures are hardship in Edmonton, but the same sub zero temperature in Toronto is unbearable (for me); its the lake.
As a Canadian in Australia since ’77, I would find Canadian complaints about “hot summers” (i.e. in the +30°s) amusing, if it weren’t for the fires.
Isn’t it winter season Down Under? It should be cold.
Since we were discussing here recently, I just wanted to note that I saw my first monarch butterfly of the season yesterday afternoon in my neighborhood in Maine. Just one and not a whole flock of them, but still encouraging!
Nice. Will be on the lookout while walking the dog today.
Earlier this summer I noticed a black and blue swallowtail in my yard diligently doing something on a pile of scat. Whenever some flies would approach, it fiercely beat its wings to chase them away. It remained there for over an hour. Foraging, it turned out, for nutrients not found in nectar. The behavior is called mud puddling.
https://thewildlife.blog/2018/08/18/mud-puddling-the-dirty-truth-about-butterflies/
I have had a few in my backyard..I have about 4 -5 milkweeds that got out of control.
I am in Canada…the most southern point
Milkweeds and monarchs doing okay in Montreal. I have eggs on mine.
A few years ago I went for lunch and a blueberry muffin at Basin Point in South Harpswell…a couple of stone throws from where Yves used to hang out. It was probably October near Memorial Day when everything and almost everybody begins hibernation. Flocks of Monarchs kept bobbing on west towards Chebeague and Falmouth. What an afternoon. I have never seen anything like it before or since.
Here on the south coast of NE I have seen acres of butterfly bushes but not a single monarch. It may be time to get into a milkweed support group.
Around Austin there are a number of limestone sink holes where caves have collapsed, the best known being Hamilton’s Pool.
There’s a similar one privately owned that was held by a consortium including a journalist I knew when I was in architecture school. In 1985 at the start of spring break IIRC and after several all-nighters leading up to mid-term reviews, several friends and I headed out for a swim, already warm at the end of March.
To get to the 100’ diameter pool in a 170’ grotto with massive limestone cantilevers two thirds of the way around, one had to enter through the pools outflow which had collapsed the downstream third of the now extinct cavern.
The path followed the water to a point where you had to enter a twenty foot passage of tunnel through the ancient rubble. Emerging on the other side into the delta of the grotto lush with stands of cypress and scrub oak, against a saturated blue sky, the trees were covered and air was full of vibrant, shimmering clouds of Monarchs.
One of the best moments of my life!
Antidote:
I’ll never forget my mountain lion encounter on the deck of the Silver City Resort in Mineral King almost 4 years ago to the day @ 4:20 in the morning…
There is no electricity in MK aside from the resort, and they have a wi-fi connection too, and waking up early is what I do…
In the dark I traipsed over to the front deck and there are a couple of rocking chairs on the left hand side and back then, there was a 5 foot wide Lodgepole sticking out of the deck (since expired and cut down-yet another bark beetle victim) with a cut-out accommodating it, which hid me away from sight…
The deck has ambient lights that barely give off any brightness, and I heard an animal on the other side of the tree and really didn’t give it any thought as the resort has a couple of house dogs who rule the roost, along with a little house cat in the guise of a mountain moggie, no biggie.
Then not 5 feet from me, a yearling mountain lion about 30% larger than a fully grown German Shepherd poked it’s head around said tree and looked at me, as I was sitting on the rocking chair peering at my open laptop @ NC, no doubt.
It did a ‘oh, one of those’ kinda looks at me and turned around to leave and I don’t know why, but I stood up to watch it go and witnessed the most sensuous saunter ever, with it’s tail completely erect where it didn’t move an iota as it made it’s way across the deck, where a 2nd yearling the same size was hanging out 25 more feet away.
I never felt any danger, nor did I think until afterwards, how I could have used the laptop as an ad hoc Claymore, slicing my adversary to pieces, well-at least ward it off.
It had taken me 58 years to see a cougar in the Sierra Nevada, and I hit the daily double.
Hmmm. Ever considered the number of times that cougars may have been watching you in the Sierra Nevada – but you never actually saw them because they were too well hidden? But they certainly look like beautiful animals.
Similar to JP, you come across mountain lion tracks and spoor fairly often, last time we walked up to Oriole Lake, saw both tracks and very identifiable poop d’jour in a few locations…
They’re primarily nocturnal, no different than my hair’m who want out at night to go on the prowl, bringing home the bacon, as it were.
We all walk in the daytime (over the years we’ve gotten many a 10 PM start on a backpack trip and walked 3 or 4 miles to our first campsite) pretty much, so never the twain shall meet, usually.
My buddy is a Giant Sequoia tree collector, and I met him in 2017 and he wanted to know how to get to the Diamond, AD, Dean & Arm Trees, which are all in steep off-trail locations that require hours of walking to get to, and I took him on his appointed rounds, and the next day he wanted to walk the Partadise Trail, which goes through part of the Atwell Grove, and i’d walked it a few days before, and begged off of going, and later that day he comes back with the perfect mountain lion encounter that occurred around noon, where near the top of the grove, there was a cougar right on the trail 100 feet ahead of him, and he took this photo:
https://sequoiaquest.com/animals.html
Upon his return he told me of what went down, I was so green with envy, it was like a bad dream, missing out.
You shouldn’t be. Yes, it is a great photo but think about this. if you had been with him, the pace with him may have been a bit faster or a bit slower as both of you synced up your own individual walking speeds. Either way you would have both missed that extremely narrow window where that cat was right there.
True that, it’s all timing…
My buddy Lorenzo was on trail crew in Sequoia NP for 21 years before seeing his first mountain lion, and that is about 4 to 5 months a year of essentially camping out in the deep wilderness.
Saw my first SE MN wildcat a few weeks back. It looked like the Bigfoot version of a cat with stramgely long legs, dark gray fur bristling in every direction and a weirdly small feline head. I don’t think that’s what wildcats look like, but given the reputation wildcats have, I’m thinking there may be some dogcats/catdogs out there.
great link to trees Wuk…….thx
He and his wife have a great hobby, they’re now up to the 100 largest Giant Sequoias, after initially wanting to see the top 40.
If anything, finding trees #41 through #100 is much more difficult than the top 40 hits, as there are a lot of sizable trees in the 75 or so groves scattered on all on the western slopes.
We found a Brobdingnagian in the Atwell Grove that had an enormous sized base width of close to 30 feet wide, and had been burned somewhat eons ago on the backside when a log on fire rolled into it, so getting precise measurements are difficult, but he’s got a few grand worth of digital measuring tools at his disposal, so after an hour of measurements and writing everything down, he goes home and spends another 30 minutes deciphering everything.
The tree we found was the 87th largest, and completely unheralded as far as anybody knows.
Oh what an experience. This may be the memory I most envy of yours, so far.
Thanks for sharing.
I met a cougar once in Venezuela. We crossed sights for a while and It then went to the forest behind not in a hurry.
Used to lay in wait at Orange Julius @ the Puente Hills Mall, catty-corner from the Wild Pair, where you often saw cougars emerging with new footwear in hand.
I met a cougar once when I was younger. She was a very attractive woman, I was too young and stupid to understand the situation…
In Spain, when hoy apply cougar to women, It is intended for mature ones and expert man hunters. The same in English i guess?
Yes, it seems so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar_(slang)
They mostly avoid humans except, it seems, a human riding a bicycle looks a lot like a juicy deer.
Only ran into one in the outback. Felt pretty exposed but she just sauntered off. Got to look closely at an adult that had been depredated by fish and game but was frozen solid with eyes open. You couldn’t open that freezer door with out jumping back. That thing was solid muscle killing machine.
They often hunt in pairs and I have seen parallel tracks separated by 15 meters. I have also heard it said, the one you see is not the one that will get you. I have also seen solitary tracks in the snow near our house. Their very distinctive tracks are a definitive ID. They make a lot of noise when they mate. You can hear them for a good mile.
Runners also look like an easy meal, although typically on the lean side…
A couple years ago at the resort, one of the employees was a black guy who was an amazing athlete. Every morning he’d run up to MK Valley and back before starting work. Its basically 4 miles up and 4 miles down, impressive.
…you’d never catch me running in the Sierra, prey tell
I used to love trail running but that was almost 60 years ago in my cross country days. No back pack, No heavy shoes.
Never saw a feline. In fact never see any wildlife much bigger then a rodent above 7000 feet. In the summer the bears are all down at 3000 feet enjoying my neighbor’s fruit trees.
They don’t necessarily avoid humans- they avoid being seen by us.
A funny story that more than one team has. Group 1 stays in camp monitoring trackers. Group 2 goes out to survey. When Group 2 returns, Tracker data shows although they saw nothing, they were being followed much of the time.
This summer upper on Vance doesn’t sound very encouraging. He opposes Ukraine but supports an aggressive US foreign policy everywhere else.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-vance/
In short his views are very like Trump himself. Still, might Trump/Vance at least disentangle us from the NATO beast? Other than on Israel Trump’s previous FP was mostly unfocused animosity whereas the empire builders at NATO have always had a terrible plan with the, er, bullseye centered on Russia.
And add Vance to RFK jr. as an Israel supporter.That other third rail–Social Security–was about votes. The Israel third rail is probably about money.Taking the money out of politics would be the greatest reform but USA, USA has always been about money. Making it otherwise could be an “existential crisis.”
With all seriousness…The bible-thumping and ineffectual Pence is going to be missed.
Hail to the Chief!
I stand by my statement. Wait and see…
Mike Pence had fun once, and then regretted it the rest of his life.
OK Doomer on his replacement, she agrees with you.
> He matters.
“Earlier this year, Musk and Thiel held “a secret billionaire dinner party” in Hollywood. Guests included Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury”
What a cute collection of societally destructive [family blog]s in attendance
Not quite the lowest of the low. Think if Bolton and Pompeo were there. In North Dakotaa they would say “ufta nay”.
There’s a lot of things to criticize about Vance (Zionism, zionism, zionism – not in the article) and while some of them are in the article (protégé of Thiel, see zionism), a lot of the article is not it.
Criticisms on COVID:
mask mandates – fair enough. Overwhelming evidence that masks work, pollution issue needs to be resolved, but common sense to have them in a health emergency.
vaccine mandates – I’m with Vance here. It is pretty clear that the mRNA vaccines were not about stopping COVID and came with considerable risk.
Big Pharma investing – ok
Puritanism – fair enough, but then she links opposition to mask and vaccine mandates and banning of pornography to passing vindictive laws.
Overall, he just seems like a run-of-the-mill, shitty US politician, no better, no worse than Kamala Harris.
From what I have been reading, he is a China Hawk as is Trump. But if they want to go after China next year, then they are going to have to cut loose the Ukraine as it is now nothing more than a dead albatross hung around their necks. If Trump & Vance gets in, then count on confrontation with China on next year’s bingo card.
Yep, very valid criticism, also not in the article.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/15/mr-maga-goes-to-washington-00147054
from march.he’s more nuanced that almost all of the msm say…
i find a lot to like…like undoing the “rules based intl order”…but i see a lot of negatives, too…the zionism, especially.
however…so far in my digging, at least…the positives outweigh the negatives.
and his negatives are far less those that of just about anyone at that level that i can think of.
of course i would have preferred that our change agents were of the Actual Left..but maybe this will hafta do.
ill dig more…especially into his association with Thiel…is it a transactional thing? or does he agree with thiel on any of the crazy stuff(thiel’s court philosopher, moldbug, has been a worry of mine for a long time)
i could do without the overt piety, too, of course…but this is amurka, after all.
i get the same talk and worse whenever i go to town(“have a blessed day”)
even more than yesterday, i think we could do a lot worse, given where we’re at.
I dunno. Vance is already winning friends and influencing people in the UK —
Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance says UK is ‘Islamist under Labour’
https://news.sky.com/video/donald-trumps-running-mate-jd-vance-says-uk-is-islamist-under-labour-1317856
He comes across like Mike Pompeo 2.0, only stupider and more arrogant.
Just a few hours ago I would have scoffed at that statement, as being just too far out there. But after seeing just a few clips of J.D. Vance I’m beginning to see how that might be the case.
Also, while it’s not nice to make a thing about someone’s appearance like this, there’s something about J.D. Vance’s eyes that just creeps me out something fierce. (It’s hard to put the finger on exactly what, but it’s there.)
He comes across like Mike Pompeo 2.0, only stupider and more arrogant.
I would have thought that impossible. It’s amazing the pool that prospective US presidents can draw from.
Found this link under the comments in Craig Murray’s blog: ttps://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-45/politics/j-d-vance-changes-the-subject-2/ . I’m not at all psyched about this guy.
Yes, we could do a lot worse. However, he has such a different trajectory from another hillbilly.
There is a big difference between his hilbilly elegy and Joe Bageant’s “Dear Hunting with Jesus – Dispatches from America’s Class War”. If you have not heard of Joe Bageant is likely because he is not a sellout, and because he actually sees the true nature of the “matrix” and the structures at play. JD, even if he sees them, is more of “and how can this help me?”. Could be the GOP “Obama” type of candidate…
“…China next year…”
One step at a time. Let’s bank ending the Ukraine war first. Then worry about China. By then, then the problem may have taken care of itself.
His sudden transformation from never-Trumper to Trump sucker-upper seems like pure cynical careerism on his part.
Vance too soft on NATO!
The democrats’ adoration of NATO (defends our democracy aka MIC contributions), which broke the Yalta conferences to rearm Europe against Stalin, is irreverent to liberal thought.
Moving NATO up to Kursk is offensive and tightens the nuclear tripwires.
Offensive NATO is procreating the hundreds of years of internecine wars which George Washington warned about: unproductive (except to MIC) foreign entanglement!
What was Ukraine before Lenin and Stalin?
Besides Vance is younger than all my kids!
Honestly I don’t know anything about Vance and didn’t read his book. Some have been arguing that Trump needed a Veep who is even more of a Trump as impeachment insurance if not life insurance.
But whatever his views Vance can’t be worse than Biden and the people around him. In today’s Craig Murray he speculates that last weekend may have been a deep state shot across the bow (the neglect, not the shooter). Personally I don’t think the deep state is that deep. Why are they so obsessed with Ukraine anyway? Tis a mystery. Up to now I’ve assumed it’s about Biden thinking Putin is Corn Pop. Or maybe NATO is just a hammer to which everything looks like a nail named Corn Pop. At any rate it doesn’t seem very deep or even very intelligent.
A good friend of mine, now deceased, sent Hillbilly Elogy to his 40ish daughter several years ago.
She posted a memory last night on Facebook.
First I thought of book ever.
I saw where Vance like Obama does not see US interests effected by Ukraine.
Why the Biden democrats so hard over on zero valid interest in Kiev?
Putin is bad continues the 2016 Russia collusion narrative.
MIC profits.
Neocon agenda.
Maybe what some in Kiev have on family business ties with White House,
Maybe tough guy creds tilt with Armageddon. Aka real tough guys beard the bear.
In sum I am astounded that progressive TDS goes to open end war, killing Ukraine and Russian people.
Don’t really follow your logic. The cold war and proxy wars with Russia significantly predate Trump and was never Biden’s main focus before becoming POTUS. It was Bush II who thought war was a great way to unify the electorate. War is a top down business slot machine rigged to pay. It gets politicians elected from any party in a defence manufacturing district. The corruption isn’t emanating from the white house, it is endemic to the system. Russia is a convenient advisary.
As to his book, he’s a giant liar, or at least an epic bullshitter. He isn’t a hillbilly, by even the loosest possible definition. He grew up middle-class on the opposite side of Ohio to anything Appalachian. He has relatives in the hollar that he would occasionally visit for weddings and such. That’s it. He had a relatively hard life (but not that hard. His mother was an RN; no where near as poor as he pretends) with various familial problems, joined the military, then got into a law school. He pretends he pulled himself up by his bootstraps from a dirt poor background, and that because of his vague connection to coal country he gets to claim he’s a hillbilly, and that because he fixed himself, everyone else from ‘his’ background can do the same. It’s all extremely stolen valor, to be honest.
Wonderful summary of the urban hillbilly myth as told by J D Vance. Real hillbilly beginnings belong to real people like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. This guy is the blank mind with a story to try to fool the masses that he’s just a regular guy, ready, willing and able to spout any ideology that pays him the most, so long as gets elected in the first place. Macron in France was just a Rothschilds “consultant” privatizing government property like municipal airports, until he got the call to act as if he knew what he was talking about Fooled the French and made President first try.
I see Vance is well-read, ahem. Having not the first clue how pro-Israel the British Labour Party is and how they got rid of previous leader Corbyn as an “antisemite” in the most nasty way, genius J D Vance has accused Starmer of being pro-Muslim !
You cannot get any more dumbcluck American opportunist than that. Can you? Knows absolutely nothing about anything but will parrot BS for cash. So who fed him the fake Starmer/Labour story?Another genius, one supposes. Nigel Farage sewing nonsense would be a contender.
I don’t think the deep state, “is that deep” either.
for me “deep state” means the political class dwellers who perennially find new jobs in government, academia, and corporations. These fools always land green side up… no matter the depth of their stupidity. competence is not a criteria for entrance to the deep state. Just the ability to live on BS alone. and connections.
The USSR was a huge mistake that fvcked Russia over so much, shattered it to pieces and its consequences are felt to this day. Had Russia developed in a natural way, eastern europe wouldn’t have been handled on a plate in the 1990s empoverished for American imperialism, nor would they have fuel for scaremonger/russophobia shouting “gulags ! Statsi ! KGB repression ! etc…” I keep my opinion the USSR was the worst mistake russia made.
Had Russia ‘developed in a natural way’, it wouldn’t have developed much at all. It would still be an incredibly backward peasant society. The Bolsheviks dragged it into modernity; that the Russian Federation is anything at all is entirely a legacy of Lenin and his cohort, no matter how much Putin may hate them. Ditto for all of Eastern Europe, and the more they repudiate their Soviet legacy, the more degraded they’ll become.
Ah, precious modernity and development. Certainly worth killing all those incredibly backwards peasants for.
Black book of communism nonsense, where you ascribe every death in a system to that system, free of conrext or circumstances, and inflate the numbers along the way. If we’re going to play that game, how many millions of Irish and Indians did the British murder? So much for the superiorty of the free market.
And yes, Russia post-Bolshevik is objectively better than under the Tsars, by several orders of magnitude.
Lol ! So how did america became the world’s largest economy ? How did Japan became the biggest tech player in the 80s and second largest economy in the 90s ? was it Socialism ?, bolsheviks ? None. The Russian people won ww2 due to the sacrifice of 26 million lives, not due to Stalin much less the soviet party, the ussr reached 2 largest economy due to the hard work of its people (3 most populous at the time) and its natural resources.
Central planning in all cases.
Yes, the economic development of Japan and America is not the free market bedtime story many believe. Japan excelled at mobilising fiat money (look up Shimomuran economics, which was first developed in the Jaoanse occupation of Korea and Manchuria’s and then use to resurrect postwar Japan). The USA practised tariff barriers, import substitution and intellectual property theft. The legacy of US contempt for copyright is the reason for the quirky “this book not for resale in USA or Canada” seen in so many British editions
C’mmon now. In early 1900s, Russia had the highest levels of growth out there and Germans were defecating in their pants that Russia could build a bigger, better military and logistic system then what they had.
And the peasant communities were not that backward. There was a sophysticated life there and their organizational types were the templates for the soviets. Which was the first thing the commies got away with when in full control.
The problem with USSR, as with the Czarist empire or Austro-Hungarian onefor that matter, was the fact that it was multinational, with certain intrinsic hierarchies. Territories with not insignifficant populations, impossible to overwhelm, and with their own sense of history, culture, language, values.
Mm. While I’m generally inclined to agree, Russophobic narratives have been around before the Soviet Union. Previously it was pogroms and the knout (both real and both wildly exaggerated abroad; just like the crimes of the Communists, in fact). And of course the Testament of Peter the Great and related conspiracy theories, apparently accepted by Karl Marx among others.
As for it being a mistake “Russia made”, I’d note that most of Russia voted for the SRs. God knows how the SRs would have actually done if they had managed to hold on, though, or if anyone else had seized power instead of the Bolsheviks. I think it would’ve been hard for most of the other contenders to cause as much willful human and societal damage, but we don’t really know what would’ve been “natural”.
Having the west welcome the Bolsheviks into power by launching invasions into the newly-formed Soviet Republic didn’t help matters. Gee, why so paranoid Ivan!
It’s strange to talk about the USSR being a mistake “Russia” made as if the country had this sort of dispossessed agency (also what does natural mean in such context? Such a loaded term). Obviously it was a class war (agreeing or not with the Bolshevik aims notwithstanding) which meant the technocratic-worker party won the war, and to a degree represented many people’s interests—obviously lots of people were not represented by it, but it sure seems like it was more popular than the previous government, since “nobility” isn’t a very wide base by definition. Those choices meant in the end radical industrialization (like few, if any, other places ever managed to do) in a staggeringly short amount of time and at great sacrifices, and which meant having the industrial capacity to face Germany at its most genocidal moment. I have a hard time imagining (given Tsarist incompetence demonstrated in WW1) the Russian Empire faring much better than the USSR in such a situation.
Yes, Russia was known to be a truly prosperous and forward thinking nation when ruled by Tsars. Ordinary Russians lived in a way that was envied by its European neighbors.
And I think India also developed in a natural way over the past few hundred years.
They were truly great after the British graciously bowed out, having set the Indians on a path of wealth and prosperity.
But I do recall at school being told how we should send money to the starving Indians. A few decades ago.
Is it really Russia which developed the USSR? Only in the sense that it was the Czars ( not Russia as a whole) who pushed their Czarist Empire forward into ever fresher territory. And it was the Leninists who took it over and turned it into the USSR.
The N+1 on Vance was such an ad-hominen attack piece I could only get a few paragraphs in.
I am sick to death of this lunacy.
Once I looked forward to when the ‘liberal’ thinkers would have the numbers to rule, but no more. It has turned into ‘say hello to the new boss, just like the old boss’.
But seems much worse under the new liberals and their handmaidens. Smug, entitled, no bastardry off limits. Cannot believe that there is a new political movement, which I will call neogenocide.
Apparently the media approves of neogenocide so it must be ok.
I’m prepared to give him some leeway for his domestic economic policy preferences as outlined by American Compass (Oren Cass)
https://americancompass.org/
Chaos continues with Ohio teachers’ pension fund as second advisor quits, Looks like a reform minded board wants to eliminate fund advisors and invest in index funds. Seems like a reasonable idea to me. But nobody likes it when their rice bowl gets busted.
Money quote (heh heh), Eliminating bonuses could slash the income for STRS staff by half, which in turn could cause talented people to leave, he warned. If too many people leave, there won’t be anyone to actually make money for the teachers. “talented” is doing some work here. Seems like a job for AI to me.
“Make money for teachers?” … like investing in “edifice wrecks” (Office CMBS?)
Buying the malarkey from Jamie Dimon that cloud computing and WFH are just a “fad?”
Somebody needed to step on their air hose.
> “I Told Three Big Lies That Changed My Life” The Honest Broker
Funny story about The Chicago Academy of the Arts. My first wife attended in the early 1990’s. She and her mother raised hell about an acting teacher who was using required personal journals to target victims to have sex with. This was a high school, remember. The school’s response was to kick her out mid-way through the year. Though they did award her a diploma, so she got that going for her.
More funny story. The perp didn’t last long there afterwards, though. Lost track of him til he turned up at the University of the town we moved to. (By that time she and I were divorced, young love gets complicated.) I was in a show and a couple of girls were in his class, I asked ‘Is he still f cking his students’ and got wide eyes dropped jaw look between them and ‘Yes.’ But hey, consenting adults and whatnot.
More funny story. I was offered a role in a semi-pro play he was directing. He really was a good director, which was why he was so sticky. Asked the ex, she said ‘Take the money.’
He gone to the Big Easy now, out of the playpens. Putatively for drinking on the job. Can’t have that now.
The Academy is under new management. I hope they’re not so venal, the place was a sanctuary. I really mean that.
“Trump assassination attempt: Fraternal Order of Police blasts Secret Service ‘failure'”
In all fairness to those US Secret Service snipers, it may have been that they were not sure if the guy on that other roof was local law enforcement and if it was a uniform that he was wearing. We may have to wait for the results of the investigation but I am going to guess that those snipers were trying to get confirmation if that guy was part of law enforcement that was tasked with that area’s security or not when the guy opened fire removing all doubt.
Why would LE put a sniper in a place that could shoot the object? You put snipers to cover those places.
In any event, someone would have put the sniper there, in a plan that a SAIC would control real time!
DHS needs to answer questions!
Old military adage: “No plan survives the first shot!!” Then the excuses come out.
There’s no way that would not of been coordinated earlier. Some dude in fatigues or a half-way decent ‘uniform’ would be dead meat pretty quickly if spotted.
I was thinking along these lines too.
All security should have been in communication with each other. There should have been agents on those roofs and the other snipers knew they were there. Or, if they were not on those roofs, nobody else should be either. They should have guarded from below so nobody could get on. If the snipers behind Trump saw anyone – anyone – on that roof they take them out immediately.
This was an epic failure – someone should be fired.
Epic failure or epic plan, gone awry?
Gotta go with the latter until proven otherwise.
My older brother was a Navy Seal and he has friends who are snipers. They were telling him that the guys with the scopes on the roof could not see the target until he came over the ridge of the roof to shoot. They did not feel the snipers were missing anything. The people who saw him on the ground had an unobstructed view. So, no one really had a shot at him until he started shooting, and then it was over really quickly.
But one thing they were all questioning is why they did not get Trump off the stage.
That makes sense, but I’m not convinced. The snipers who took out Crooks should have known by that time there was a guy on the roof. He had been spotted minutes before according to witnesses.
They were already pointing their guns in his direction. He would have had to clear the top of the roof line to see Trump, take aim, and then shoot. As soon as his head came above the roof line he should have been visible to the SS sniper team. At that point they should taken him out.
I don’t know how many shots he got off before getting one himself, but sounds like quite a few. That should never had happened as he had to be exposed at that time, and could be taken out. Granted, maybe the SS sniper team had to take a little time to aim back and get him. So it was like a game of peek-a-boo between the shooter and the SS sniper team. They are not suppose to lose that battle – and to a 20 year old kid who is probably quite nervous.
Color me skeptical. Plausible, but I’m not sure I buy it. Consider the information is still quite volatile, and lacking. For example;
I think it was the NY Post that ran an article about what he did in the 24 hours before the shooting. He went to the shooting range for one. Practice? Perhaps. The article also stated he bought a 5 foot ladder at a Lowe’s or Home Depot (can’t remember). In a picture I saw, there was a ladder on the side of the building. Other articles stated witnesses saw people in that area. Nothing seemed to happen. How can a guy carry a ladder (and gun?) to the side of the building and not be noticed?
In one picture you could see a ladder up against the building, but it looked taller than 5 foot. So these stories do not match quite like they should. Regardless, where were the SS around these buildings? Or whoever was suppose to secure them.
I don’t remember if it was a statement from the FBI, or the SS, but one said they didn’t want to put people on that roof because of the angle of the roof (implied too steep). Yet the snipers who took him out were on a roof with a higher pitch than the one he was on. Doesn’t add up.
Another interesting tid-bit; he had a transmitter on his person and bombs in his car. This sounds like a potential distraction to give him a way to escape. I think that was in one of the NY Post articles as well. I’ll leave my tin foil hat off and quit about that, but odd, for a 20 year old? Are we talking a phone triggering an explosive in his car? Where did he learn how to do that? Remember, he was suppose to have little to no online footprint. Strange…
As we start putting the pieces together we come up with more questions and not enough answers. We’ve watched this movie. We we probably never know the real truth.
IMO, still an epic failure by the SS no matter how you slice it.
That is a very good question.
1. incompetence. 1b. incompetent SS planner did not assign the biggest qualified linebacker-sized men on the detail who could manhandle a >200 lbs, >6ft protectee (trump) in an emergency
You can clearly hear that the hot mic picked up the female Secret Service agent say, “what are we doing?” after the agents dogpiled Trump.
Since the agents could not physically much such a big man without his acquiescence,, the agents had to wait until Trump was willing to leave.
Thus giving Trump the opportunity to reflexively signal his defiance/fistbump/rally-cry.
“Competence crisis” ironically gives Trump the White House?
I’d suggest that any attempt to get Trump off any stage when drinking in the adulation of his adoring fans would be met with the response, “Over my dead body”!
@ Screwball:
Get Trump off stage — at what point exactly? Seeing as the gov snipers didn’t see him until he made the summit of the roof. And the obvious non-coordination of SS and LEOs, I repeat, when was someone supposed to get Trump off stage? And who would give the order to the stage crew. Pretty easy to say he should have been removed, but that’s it, easy to say.
And, no criticism of not including everything implied, but one story you missed was that a local law enforcement officer used the ladder, and got on the roof. Crooks heard/saw him, pointed his weapon at the LEO, who retreated back on the ladder. Crooks then quickly turmed around and got off his shots, was quickly spotted and shot by the official government snipers. Of all the shots on the audio, only three or four were from Crooks IMO, the remainder from the official snipers, they sound different, but who knows? Should be easy as hell to know this if you’re the official investigator. So far, not a peep.
The other story was thar there were three Secret Service officers in the very building on whose roof Crooks was! Or three LEOs, depends on who’s telling the story. Drinking coffee. Well, of course …. they sure were out of the loop.
And the ladder, some say it was part of the building, with a security feature as is common for such items to prevent idiots from cavorting on the roof. Should be easy enough to check if the ladder is attached to the building? Have we been so informed? Or advised of te negative? Of course not!
Yes, another edition of the Great American Obfuscation is well underway and at a fast pace. Soon it’ll be a gallop, given past performances. Like the murders of JFK and RFK, and the complete cock-up surrounding 9/11, America specializes in not being organized well enough to get to the bottom of anything important. Might gore an important ox — only Nixon was caught. The US generally fails at unambiguously explaining what happened in cases like this. It’s either a national trait, or an inability to properly organize and coordinate various bureaucratic entities into a whole, or … you fill in the blank.
“The friend of my friends friend says…”
got it. all good then
I had thought that too, but yesterday I saw another video of people who had filmed the shooter on the roof for nearly a minute, with others trying to point him out to the authorities all the while. The Secret Service must have been in radio contact with local law enforcement and it shouldn’t have taken that long to call the local cops, ask if they had any men on roofs, and then open fire when the answer came back ‘no’. Also, I saw other reports that the shooter was seen suspiciously wandering around on the ground over half an hour before the shooting. No video evidence of that latter claim though.
Regardless, they all should have known ahead of time exactly where federal and local law enforcement would be placed.
Probably arguing over who was in charge. Because what’s more important?
But now Trump has named his human shield so its all good.
I literally blame neoliberalism. No one refuses to have open lines of communication like the neolibs. Knowledge is power and not to be shared with subordinates. Where normal instincts would have most people shouting FIRE!, neolibs instead quick call their broker so they can profit from a hot tip.
Whoever they called had to call someone else who maybe had to make yet another phone call.
Not how security works. Everything they touch, breaks.
I agree, and it’s largely been a bipartisan uniparty effort for the past 40+ years, imo.
That describes various bosses I had over the years. None of them were neolibs. They were all die hard conservative sociopaths looking out for #1.
The latest is that there were local cops inside the building. They saw the shooter out the window looking at the building and he was carrying a gun owner type rangefinder. Then a few minutes later he came back with a backpack and headed toward the back of the building. They called this in and that must be when the cop climbed up, saw him, and dropped to the ground just before the shooter opened fire.
None of this conflicts with the idea that he was a random nut who drove down to the rally to see if he could shoot Trump and lo and behold he could. It may well be that the short time he was on the roof helped him to accomplish his task.
Larry Johnson has more including the extra possibility that those cops being inside the building may have helped create confusion about who was standing on top of the building.
https://sonar21.com/more-assassination-news-and-trump-names-j-d-vance-as-veep-candidate/
Based on her employment history, the director of the secret service can never be fired unless she shots somebody on the 5th avenue at high noon.
Who wants a NYT bestseller titled “Observations from the Naval Observatory” with a subtitle “Someone Who F***s with Bidens” be published?
Winant’s n plus one article on Vance should be a sticky here. One of the best examples of inspired and justified contempt I’ve seen. Thanks, lambert.
n+1:
What is wrong with wanting to get the neocons (with Biden’s sacred NATO) running US into permanent war “debaathisized”?
It’s certainly an example of “contempt.” But as a profile of Vance it’s best seen as an excellent example of a liberal (or “left”) academic using the full force of his intellectual and verbal powers to paint an incredibly vicious “Trump-derangement” style portrait of a fascist Hitler-in-waiting to scare the s**t out of whoever spends the time reading this screed – most likely those with views already similar to the author.
I’m not saying a number of his criticisms scattered throughout the article are not valid. But the author is doing something else here. He is evoking all the mechanisms of psychological provocation that we have been witnessing for six years in the most deranged examples of TDS. He takes all of the various criticisms of Vance from a liberal or left perspective and twists them into a portrait of pure calculating Evil. This is a tour-de-force preview of both the “factual” and the emotional narrative that you will be seeing from the MSNBC crowd for the next several months.
If you want a pretty good critical overview of Vance, the Politico article above is acceptable. The Larison article from Responsible Statecraft linked by Carolina above is even better and much more informative about the issues I think are important. But this piece? One of the best examples of one-sided liberal derangement I’ve seen. It gives no credence whatsoever to anything Vance claims about his own views, no understanding to why Vance might be popular, even as a symbol of something, and of course no recognition whatsoever of the problems with our current Establishment.
My brother, who I’m sure knows even less about Vance than I do, is already calling him a Nazi–probably from watching Maddow.
Perhaps the TDS are going to make Vance the Hitler in waiting since such rhetoric re Trump is now an oopsie. Somebody’s gotta be the Hitler.
Who knows, maybe they’ll get their wish at this rate. Probably not with Vance though.
Yep, n+1 is like the kid in the playground shouting rude words at another kid he doesnt like.
On second thoughts, I don’t think n+1 even has that much intellectual content.
I suggest reading in tandem the Roys Report Five Faith Facts and Gabriel Winant’s Vance Changes the Subject.
First, as a (bad) cradle Catholic, who knows that Saint Joseph is the Father of God, if there is a god, and who lives near the Basilica di Gran Madre di Dio, the Great Mother of God, I’m skeptical of a few things: I am always leery of politicians, like Newt Gingrich, who are adult converts to Catholicism. Too often, they are seeking “answers” and authoritarianism, in the form of admonitions from the egregious Viganò and Opus Dei. As the young’uns say, it’s “cringe.”
They are likely to be shocked by Catholicism-as-Hinduism (note the references in the Roys story). Catholicism is chockablock with saints, miracles, wondrous icons, holy springs, whatever it takes. You want paintings made by angels? We’ve got ‘em.
So: We’ll see what Vance’s Catholicism means. We’ll see if his Catholicism is in line with Catholic social teaching, given that Catholicism favors unionization of workers. (Well, maybe not U.S. Catholicism… which gobbled up Calvinism to punish the laity.)
Second: Gabriel Winant. Winant is good on class analysis, but it is a struggle to get through all of Winant’s psychobabble. Psychobabble is now a true impediment in the thinking of U.S. liberals as well as in how they want to discuss political matters.
I don’t care that you feel impelled to diagnose Trump as a “narcissist.” Sheesh, Americans trading charges of “narcissism,” now that’s rich.
To wit, from Winant: ” He is the senator from the unconscious, a voice in Washington for unprocessed trauma, psychic repression, and the monstrous outlets such potent forces can find.”
Sure. And I am the tsar of all the Russias and a Jungian archetype.
Would white liberals please try winning elections and governing? Is that too much to ask?
Tony Blair, Mike Pompeo, Newt Gingrich, JD Vance.
Not all Catholics are equal, but that is some revealing company.
I’d add Richard John Neuhaus to that list. Neuhaus graduated from the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod seminary in St. Louis and acquired a Ph.D from the University of Chicago Divinity School. After leaving the Missouri Synod for the Evangelical Church in America, he became a Roman Catholic and edit of First Things, a periodical that may well serve as a guide for Vance.
Martin Marty and yours truly followed that same Concordia, St. Louis, U. of C. Div School route but did not end up right-wing Catholics.
I use small “c” catholics when referring to evangelical, jesus with a rifle, wing nuts.
Pompeo is not Catholic. He’s Presbyterian. And a hardcore evangelical:
https://www.christianpost.com/news/from-sunday-school-to-secretary-of-state-pompeos-faith-journey.html
Mike P graduated number 1 in his class at West Point 1986, but he’s pretty far out there otherwise. The Bible, Jesus, The Rapture, The End Times….. you name it. It will be interesting to see if The Donald re-hires him in 2025.
thanks. I had assumed he was of Italian stock and, hence, Catholic
Don’t forget Joseph Biden.
…it is a struggle to get through all of Winant’s psychobabble…”
No shit. My head is splitting from having attempted to comprehend all of it beyond that the guy really, REALLY doesn’t like Vance.
It seems that a lot of the coming criticism of Vance will involve his book. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Vance’s life story and he’s entitled to draw whatever conclusions he wants from it. Five’ll get you ten that Winant was not reared in some holler in Kentucky or Rust Belt mill town.
Once Winant, mercifully, drops the annoying pretentiousness, he gets to what I suspect is the meat of the matter:
“monstrous sociopath”??? Hyperbole much?
To paraphrase George Carlin: This is our club. Where do you get off tryin’ to get in it?
About Vance’s book. I found this interesting tidbit when reading his Wikipedia entry-
‘After graduating from Ohio State, Vance attended Yale Law School. During his first year, his professor Amy Chua, author of the 2011 book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, persuaded him to write his memoir.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Vance#Early_life_and_education
Small world.
I happened to be married to a Tiger Mother. I see her interact with my children every day.
The book is a very accurate description of their world view. We in the West may not like it – or may have issues with it – but so far, with my own kids, it has been a gift.
Thanks for the link, Reverend. I believe this may be the point where Vance went to the darkside:
So, after graduating with a JD from Yale, he clerked for a judge and put in maybe 2 years actually practicing law, before likely realizing that was too much work. Then making the jump to serve the Big Money.
God money, I’ll do anything for you
God money, just tell me what you want me to
God money, nail me up against the wall
God money, don’t want everything he wants it all
No, you can’t take it
No, you can’t take it
No, you can’t take that away from me
No, you can’t take it
No, you can’t take it
No, you can’t take that away from me
Head like a hole
Black as your soul
I’d rather die than give you control
Head like a hole
Black as your soul
I’d rather die than give you control
Bow down before the one you serve
You’re going to get what you deserve
Bow down before the one you serve
You’re going to get what you deserve
Nine Inch Nails, “Head like a Hole”
Tbf, that’s kinda par for the course for Yale Law: relatively few of their grads wind up as full time lawyers for long. I know a few other people who graduated there roughly the same time who wound up in Big Tech (not as lawyers). Apparently, that was pretty fashionable at that time.
May be par for the course, but it shows he’s corruptible.
If Trump picked J.C. instead of J.D., He would be crucified second time around just because Führer selected him as his running mate.
Exactly my reaction (although I am probably projecting a bit much). “How dare you don’t conform to my stereotype about how “people like you” ought to be thinking (if you want to be part of our club)” is the attitude that I often ran into. There’s a military history paper (it was a master’s thesis by a history student–it’s not deep, but it is a novel topic) about Allied intelligence failure about Japanese airpower before World War 2 (https://prism.ucalgary.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/630ea3f2-5119-4ff3-834c-249e72998731/content): the short version of the argument is that Allies made up for the sparseness of good information aobut Japan’s air capabilities in the era by making stuff up based on their prejudices, using such sophistry like “national character,” and justify their existing beliefs that turned out to be totally off base. This seems to be the recourse taken by many today when encoutered by something that they can’t make sense of.
I would say that there are few reasons to be hopeful about and skeptical about Vance, but I think the former outweighs the latter. There’s no question that he comes from a background that provides unique insights to both the elites and deplorables. He does come from the background (Appalachia, USMC enlisted) that gives him an understanding of the latter better than any smug outsider. He has succeeded in elite environments where he has, at least, been able to negotiate the surrounding effectively (Yale Law, VC). That puts him at a good starting point to work with both, even if not everyone in both camps will like him. To the former, he could very easily be seen as a traitor to his background by some, or even many (that he comes from the background, rather than a real outsider, might strengthen this view–again, I think this is not uncommon). To the latter (as I think I see in Winant’s piece), he’s not really one of “them” and that he doesn’t buy into their worldview is an affront. (Personally, I have some sympathy for the former view, but to the latter, none at all.) He is the person best placed to build a right coalition and God knows we need a person like that. While not perfect, Vance is the person that gives us the most reason to be hopeful about. (Plus, he became a fast friend with Chris Arnade and, notwithstanding Arnade’s extreme tendency to waffle, I think he’s a good litmust test for the people with the right kind of worldview–someone who sees the world correctly, with compassion and without the smug belief that he knows “the answer” even if he has proclivity to say everything is wrong and nothing is going to work–I do hope that Vance is not such a waffler, though.)
The monster talk is what jumped out to me as well. It’d be nice if he substantiated it with any proof of monstrosity besides failing to have the correct political views and supporting Trump. That’s not enough to make someone a monstrous sociopath in my book, even though there are valid reasons to be skeptical of Vance.
I get the allergy to #McResistance hysteria and aghastitude, but for me the Thiel connection suggests that Vance is a snake in the grass.
Vance’s time with Thiel sounds like a finishing school – and a chance to earn a nice grubstake – for grooming political brokers to serve our feudal Lords.
No thanks: just because Uncle Joe and the Democrats are weak and their supporters delusional doesn’t make Trump and Vance any more appealing.
That’d be pretty high on my list of concerns about him if I were an American, yes. Also, national conservatism is a very mixed bag at best even if implemented sincerely (i.e. with actual efforts to protect the nation’s industry and workers); and his political shifting makes me doubt his sincerity. But that article did not make a good case against him.
There is a vicious wealth war going on in the US, and the rich are sh*t scared that the great bulk of the rough sleepers and ex-blue-collar workers are going to rise up with pitchforks.
That’s what they see in Trump, a wealthy class traitor. And if there is one thing that the rich hates, it’s a class/wealth traitor.
Are we sure the rich see Trump as a class-traitor? After the massive tax cuts he won for them? After the de-regulationism he tried to win for them and which he will try harder-better to win for them if elected? The rich would have to be awfully ungrateful to their benefactor Trump.
I suspect Trump’s “populism” is mostly bullshit to con the marks who believe in him. As many serious rich people who are giving the Trump campaign serious money, starting with Musk, I doubt the “rich” as a class hate Trump. Maybe some “liberal pretensions” rich don’t like his style ( which I believe I remember Tom Wolfe referring to as ” hog-stomping baroque”.)
It is a common misconception that those most prone to confirmation bias and impervious to facts that challenge their preexisting beliefs are relatively uneducated “deplorable” types. But research actually shows the opposite. Higher educational levels are actually correlated with one’s resistance to disconfirming facts. This is because those with more education have often learned how to collect facts and construct arguments with which to defend their strongly held beliefs.
Winant’s article is a perfect illustration of this. He takes a collection of facts about Vance’s life story, expressed political beliefs, and associations and spins them in the most negatively possible way. He omits all facts about Vance’s life that might provide an alternative interpretation. But then he does something else. He uses the skills in sophistry possessed by most high-level academics to create a portrait of the most vicious, sociopathic, calculating fascist imaginable. What’s more, I think he probably actually believes this incredible picture of the Next Hitler.
As I said in an earlier comment, there are a number of things about Vance’s life and expressed political positions that can be legitimately questioned. But this is not legitimate criticism. This is derangement-incitement for the true believers.
I thought all three pieces were, at best, examples of almost uniquely vapid satire, or, more likely, simply unhinged. As someone without any real skin in the game other than to get my country out of NATO and to keep it as far as possible from the creaking institutions of the EU, I came away with a rather favourable impression of Senator Vance. And I can’t imagine either young Vance or President Trump as “China hawks” in the Biden sense. They seem to regard China more as an economic adversary, ie, a competitor, rather than an enemy.
China intends to rely less on exports and build up it’s internal consumer markets, and the US needs to re-build it’s manufacturing sectors and repair, renew and develop it’s physical, intellectual and moral infrastructure to increase it’s competitiveness. It seems to me that there is a coincidence of interests in which each will be able to live amicably enough with the other and prosper – and to give the US the opportunity to leave behind the chaos and stupidity of the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden uniparty legacy.
Apart from that, I can’t help wondering what brand of beard trimmer JD Vance uses…
Thomas Sowell, in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals, discusses Southern Honor Culture at length. It’s obvious that it is dysfunctional in contemporary America.
Winnant is having none of it. The problem can’t be cultural, which to him is somehow ‘blaming the victim’. Vance wrote Elegy at a young age…30 ish, and can, imo be forgiven if he is a bit weak in distinguishing the useful grittiness from the dysfunctional explosive violence. But his descriptions seemed basically honest and thoughtful. And his personal success stemmed from the fact that culture isn’t immutable, and he replaced a good deal of the worst of it during his experience in the Marine Corps. And while his personal story is an illustration of his general thesis, the fact that some immigrant cultures find it straightforward to advance economically and other cultures find it maddeningly difficult strongly support the cultural argument.
Winnant is enraged that his rather conventional beliefs regarding social activism have been so fruitless. I admit I found his blather regarding the topic to be too off-putting to take seriously.
As a Democrat, I used to depend on people like Molly Ivins who could accurately and humorously introduce these political creatures to the world with one article. So, now that we have no such brain power that is not a cult member on the Dem side, I went to dailykos to see if I could find anything about this man.
This Winant article and two others appear to be what is on offer.
The political ideas and actions of Mr. Vance in these articles was completely subsumed by large amounts of identity politics and psychobabble. Absolutely nothing substantive in any way shape or form. I am not any more informed about his political stance than before – but I think I know something about his Catholicism. And that subject I could care less about.
So, I have to depend on what I have seen and read with my own two eyes. I did read his book years ago – and I can assure you – those are my people – and the patients I have taken care of for years. He nailed it right on – it is a very accurate depiction of the plight of kids growing up in that world. And anyone who tells you otherwise has a completely different agenda – the truth not being on their list. Most of the writers who spew on about this book – are exactly the jackasses that Ann Richards so eloquently put down a generation ago – “They can’t help it – they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth.”
I see that he actually SHOWED UP ON THE PICKET LINES for the railroad workers – unlike Mayor Pete who is too busy being a gay father because we have to check that identity box – – and Biden – because who knows.
Because the oppo research on the Dem side is so horrendous these days – I am just going to have to keep my eyes open and listen to what he says.
It is just the times we are in – This is no longer the Dem party of Molly Ivins and Ann Richards.
Hard to tell from down here, but I am getting a whiff of isolationism from the Trump/Vance ticket.
wiff? not scent, perfume, fragrance, breeze?
Yeah, the name Dorothy Day probably means nothing to him…himself going to Yale and all. Anyway here is an op.ed. by him in the pink paper from Feb…JD Vance: Europe must stand on its own two feet on defence.
Political humor has been murdered. I think deliberately because a good humorist can point out the faults of others when nobody else can, like the jester with the king.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTjAcIIUvqM&ab_channel=DialogueWorks/
Col. Larry Wilkerson: Assassination of Donald Trump -Ukraine Collapsing – Israel Has Lost Hands Down
The part that is relevant to this discussion:
From 9:40 to 12:00, Wilkerson gives his current thoughts on Vance.
Just a random, non-lefty viewpoint I came across this morning. Make of it what you will…
Ran across that earlier myself. Wilkerson is definitely no quivering liberal and the fact that he was a bit worried about Xtian nationalism taking hold did give me pause. I do think there is a bit more invoking Jesus going on right now than normal due to the assassination attempt which has many on edge. We’ll see if that calms down if people can keep their weapons holstered, a big ask in Yosemite Sam Nation.
Yeah, as a life-long Catholic of dubious adherence I endorse the observation that it’s a big, and I mean REALLY BIG! tent that’s Hindu-like not only in its proliferation of objects of veneration but also a rainbow coalition of what is chosen as foreground over background. Also yes that in my experience adult converts tend to the murkier right wing recesses of said tent, often out of a reaction to something they found lacking in the spiritual life on offer in their own upbringing.
That last bit is why I felt comfortable sending my own children to parochial schools and having them grow up “in the church” — better to give them something to rebel against and reject than cast them adrift in life without any experience of a faith life whatsoever.
From dovish dove Norman Solomon on the Biden disaster:
“(…)
That situation was laid out with chilling candor in a detailed New York Times piece by longtime Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and has advised dozens of governors and senators. The article makes for grim reading: “President Biden has spent much of 2024 with a more challenging path to winning a second presidential term in November than Donald Trump. But for reasons that have become glaringly obvious, that path has all but vanished.”
Biden “not only faces losing battleground states he won in 2020,” Sosnik wrote, “he is also at risk of losing traditional Democratic states like Minnesota and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama carried. If current trends continue, Mr. Trump could rack up one of the most decisive presidential victories since 2008.”
(…)”
see:
“The Imperative to Reduce the Chances of a Trump Victory”
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-imperative-to-reduce-the-chances-of-a-trump-victory/
If I were a leftist in the US what would I be doing?
Does Solomon think about what another 4 years of Biden would look like? What it would do to the party base?
What if he were replaced by Hillary “I´ll be back” Clinton?
“Four! more! years!” with her?
So, yes, outlook is grim.
But what is worse is the lack of audacity to upset the Democratic Party and start a true alternative.
And the lack of expertise is astounding. Since economic facts will force a Democratic POTUS do what a Republican would do anyway domestically (dismantle unions even more, scale back court rulings of the Civil Rights era, push fossile fuels.) Sooner or later even the few”liberal” bastions would be destroyed by the “Liberals” themselves.
The left (or call it whatever you want) needs a plan. Because right now they have none, zero, zilch.
And what many in the media seem to not get: You don´t create foundation of long-term power by shutting down demonstrations or giving loud speeches. It´s about introducing countless laws, changing the structure of courts, and legislatures, freeing capital, suppressing workers´ rights. Things taking place in the “shadows”. Doing “boring” stuff. But boring stuff changes the structures of a country.
p.s. as a European Trump appears the lesser evil, if Craig Murray´s assessment would turn out to be correct that Trump has beef neither with RU nor CHINA.
It’s amazing to watch TDS turn into BDS.
Seemingly smart intelligent people completely ignoring Biden’s increasing rapid decline.
I’m not sure which is worse. The middle of the road cowardly Dems who won’t say one way or the other or the other cowardly Dems who say Joe is the nominee and so we must support him. Like Bernie and AOC.
if you look at bill clintons record, barack obama’s record, and joe bidens record, they are almost identical, all three regimes are loaded with the same people.
and in a total of 20 years in office between the three, can anyone name one universal concrete material benefit that americans got under their 20 years of terror.
they have turned america into a debt riddled, fascist police state. a impoverished nation that has to rely on foreign imports, just to keep the lights on, let alone anything else.
at constant war to keep the money flowing into the coffers of the free booters.
it does not matter about bidens condition, because the thought process of all three was and is, criminally incompetent.
the results are the same.
they made trump look good. trump won’t nor can stop the slide. 1993 was the year america ended.
Right around the time of NAFTA. Humm…
IMO, and I lived through it, NAFTA was a life changing event for many. I had the best job I ever had at that time. I worked for a fortune 100 company (division of it). I lost the job in 1997 because our entire division were moved to Mexico. A once thriving manufacturing plant of 5000 people became a warehouse. Today it is a mostly empty tomb and blight on the neighborhood.
Kinda sums up America. Some get the goldmine, some get the shaft.
Most get the shaft.
As a practical matter there is no left in the USA just as there is no left in the UK. The left was crippled in the COINTELPRO era which includes the assassinations of RFK and MLK. Many in the movement retreated to the universities and simmered in the juices of post-modernist nonsense and transformed the left into an obsession with identity politics which is, to me, the direct opposite of what leftism is, i.e., a class-struggle. Those of us who were sensitive to class struggle became marginalized and are now shifting to the radical libertarian right–at least in my case. Why? Because I now see the government as representing only the interests of the oligarchs. Social democracy, as a movement, has no purchase either culturally or politically. We have no place anywhere near the Democratic Party which is much more pro-ruling class, pro-war/imperialism than the Republican Party.
The right is now the real left. Their constituency is now the working class against the upper-middle class professionals (the old Eisenhower Republicans) and the only place you’ll see anti-oligarch sympathies. My old enemies the FBI, the CIA (and all the rest of the Deep State) are darlings of the “left” i.e., the Democratic Party. We all know this thus the only place for old-line pro-working class leftists is either with the Greens, RFK, or Trump’s Republican Party (very different from the old RP).
If you listened to the speech by Sean O’Brien last night you’ll see a new possible direction for Trump’s remade party. It was pure “red meat” for an old leftist like me. I think unions are essential to any decent future for the USA and he articulated many of my own long-standing political views.
The right has the right idea to decentralize and decouple this country from the globalist/imperial agenda.
In a Thai temple, decades ago, a coin-operated Buddhist fortune-telling machine dispensed a piece of paper that read “You are searching for a great treasure but you are digging in the wrong spot”.
Worth every baht.
There is a left the USA and the UK (and Canada…), but it is not manifested in an electoral party, and the media does pretty good job of convincing its members that they are alone in their views.
I came here thinking O’Briens powerful speech (he called out the Chamber of Commerce in from on the RNC!) would be in the links. Glad to see it mentioned.
“Elites have no party, elites have no nation.”
I think you have experienced Piketty’s Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017) in action:
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2019MaxPo.pdf
I joined a political organization called Class Unity a year or two ago.
We are aiming to create a Workers Party that vies for political power for the working class and direct economic benefits.*
I find myself as the Membership Committee Chair vetting applicants as well as setting up locals across the US.
It’s mostly people from r/stupidpol.
I find myself exporting alot of ideas from NC and it seems to be holding. Class Politics not Identity Politics.
Anyways
We are somewhat amateurs at this but seeing as the DSA ain’t doing shit…
*H/T Lambert
What if such organizations were to think about possibly inventing a ” Lower Class Majority Party”?
To join a party with a name like that, people would first have to admit to themselves that they were Lower Class. If enough people admitted that, and joined such a Party, they might turn it into a majority party by force of numbers.
The lack of planning always gobsmacks me. Easily over half the jawboning done in back rooms of the old Democratic party focused on “but what if that goes sour?” We gamed out very plan to the nth degree, had back up plans for our back up plans.
Life was also easier because no one talked to the media. Nowadays who doesn’t talk to the media? No communications discipline, no deep thinking allowed: it’s amazing the Democrats still exist as a party after decades of gross mismanagement all of which stems from an authoritarian internal climate where no one is allowed to disagree with their “betters.”
“America’s Coming Age of Instability”
Could only make it about half way down when I gave up. The TDS was far too strong with these two authors who could not see that many of the accusation that they made about Trump could just as well apply to Biden. So I looked up these two authors-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Levitsky
https://politics.utoronto.ca/faculty/profile/95/
Thing is, people in their position should be by definition capable of being even handed and analytical. Not these two apparently and I do not know what they will do if Trump wins in November. Freak out probably.
Yeah, this piece was notoriously one-eyed — zero acknowledgment that in a two party system democracy systemic failure requires mendacity on both sides.
They really did give the game away when the only person cited was Robert Kagan. The “OMG we are turning into Ukraine!” line should have given them pause for thought, if nothing else hadn’t already done that, but that would have been too much to expect. Their bugaboos are far too deeply entrenched for them to see that they are the authors of their own problems.
RE: Musk “Iron Man” suit: my response would be “You first, Elon.” Can you imagine all the potential for Tesla’s famous quality to strike? Wasn’t there something like this in a Simpsons episode?
Tony Stark vs Tony Soprano?
Tony Stark and Batman may as well be a type of Tony Soprano.
All that brilliant technology and they somehow never get around to dedication to fighting white collar crime, with all the devastation it leaves.
That gives me an idea….what would a batman that fights white collar crime look like?
In Europe, he’d be VATman.
It would just be Bruce Wayne – as traitor to his class.
Maybe we can get Park Chan Wook to direct ;-)
I smell another Best Picture Oscar!
The Musk-suit is actually a Musk-submarine left over from not saving those kids trapped in a cave. Since it no longer has to be airtight, it’s upgraded with an additional opening for hand to wave or fist-pump (depending on occasion).
Idk about that gun ownership graph. NC on 2023-06-03 linked a propublica article https://www.propublica.org/article/ryan-busse-explains-roots-of-us-gun-violence that talked about a lot of new gun ownership starting 2007, due to the NRA stirring shit about Obama. It gave big numbers. I would have expected to see a spike in the graph because of that, but I don’t.
I understand there are now direct flights from flyover to India where many gun fanciers with oodles of armament are undergoing radical surgery so their Vishnu may come true, and they can use them all at once.
I can see a sort of logic at work here. For decades people have been buying bigger and bigger vehicles and some of the newer ones look like you need a small ladder to climb in to. Somebody noted that this is the reason why so many people have their cars parked outside their homes nowadays – the cars are far too big to fit into their garages. The hoods of some cars is bigger than people. You even have monster size EV cars as well. It’s all about mine is bigger than yours.
So consider. You can’t do this with guns. You can’t have the guns also get bigger and heavier or else people would not be able to lift them up to fire them. But what people can do is buy more of them so that they can boast about the armoury that they have. So it is now my gun collection is bigger than yours. And just check out the length of my barrel. But maybe some of those guns never get fired. If they do, then they just become second-hand guns.
I know a few hand cannon types with far more firepower than is necessary, and they prefer that you call it ‘their collection’ which makes it sound as harmless as Hummel figurines, collect ’em all!
Having been in the collector business, they’re a weird mob-the ones really, really into it, going from a fascination to an infatuation.
‘they’re a weird mob’
I saw what you did there. But speaking of second hand guns earlier-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJHadAPNAo4 (1:15 mins)
Guns and cars in the USA have deep symbolic value. Symbols are much more powerful than many in the intelligentsia believe. Religion is powerful for the same reasons–reason and science are waaaay over estimated as sources that give us meaning. But sometimes these symbols go beyond meaning and come into play. Had Trump been assassinated by the State (which I believe was the most likely possibility) guns would have come into play and a serious civil war would have erupted not just among the people in flyover country but I believe individual states would have rebelled as well and new power-arrangements would have gradually emerged that was not Washington-centric.
It does corroborate what a local Maine police officer told me a few years ago. He used to work in California and said CA has nothing on Maine in terms of guns. You might see people with a handgun or two in CA, but in Maine he would go into people’s homes and see massive arsenals. And that police anecdote corroborates what I’ve seen myself. Buddy of mine is a hunting guide by profession and when he had to move a few years ago, it took a couple trips with the SUV to get all his guns from one place to another.
I think your Maine police officer never saw rural CA. In nam they would have what were called mad minutes. Everyone on the parameter would fire as many rounds as they could squeeze off for a minute. That’s what it sounds like here on the weekends.
…how many gunshots a week do you hear in your neck of the woods?
10-15 a week here fairly consistently, all on private property.
We are 12 miles from town. I am surrounded by shooters on private property. It varies a lot on the private properties. Some days a lot, others less. But on adjacent public land on any given day 10 to 15 shots a minute. I have even heard full automatic. I was with my neighbor who is a deputy. He said that’s illegal and laughed. I can tell if it is someone tying their new bump stock or some kid seeing how fast he can pull the trigger. There is a spot now called the Blue Ridge shooting range where the old CCC camp used to be. The ground there is covered with spent cartridges.
I also question that graph. source is “NORC: General Social Survey” but I don’t know what that is, and don’t know what they’re methodology was.
Anecdotally, here in TX you would probably be surprised who you see buying guns if you go to a sporting goods store: often frumpy housewives, of various racial and ethnic groups! And that’s on top of the groups you KNOW are packing… good old boys in pickups, angry vets, weird loners, gangbangers, etc. Gun sales went through the roof during the early pandemic, esp. after the George Floyd protests started. It was hard to even buy a gun b/c manufacturers couldn’t keep up. And then ammunition became scarce as well.
I know TX Is not America as a whole, but the same mentality spurring gun purchases here is extolled in media across the country, and would be very surprised to learn gun ownership is going down, Not UP.
The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago was a pioneering opinion-management shop in service to WWI if I remember right, and one of the largest today. Manufactures background batter for Berneys sauce. It’s especially known for a vast longitudinal study asking the same questions for generations now, tracking long-term evolutions of opinions and status in America.
When the USDA realized farmers were lying in their ag reports because their figures were used by Chicago speculators to game crop prices and screw farmers, NORC got the contract to poll farmers on how to make honest victims of them again. That’s an example from my own education, many long years ago.
Why is Steve Keen not at the Leeds MMT Conference?
I intended to send this in as a link suggestion yesterday but life interfered.
Classic Monty Python vids were quickly posted on Twitter once this blew up like this one
If you can’t laugh you’d cry.
Its sad really – it all seems to involve big egos and the narcissism of small differences. Keen and Mitchell are both very original and high quality thinkers, but they both seem to have little tolerance for people who don’t agree with them.
While I’m very pro MMT, there are lots of issues at the fringes (including the trade one which seems to be the source of the dispute) which is pretty much over my head. Rational people should be able to present their arguments and let others make their decisions.
Especially in thinking rational people should be able to communicate and perhaps even synthesize a construct that both can accept and which could likely allow both to advance in the direction they deem important.
Steve Keen was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church of MMT?
Now it begins: banning and raiding an opposition media house and seizing its assets, by government ministry executive decision without a court proceeding. Just in time for three upcoming state elections in eastern Germany — and as trial balloon for a similar impending ban of the only genuine German parliamentary opposition party, the AfD?
https://apnews.com/article/germany-far-right-magazine-compact-banned-c284d76eb1a83f7c651299606d31337a
On COVID…
The Tour de France, its been a great race, reinstated masking requirements over the weekend. The peloton is struggling with the illness, they are trying to limit infections, trying to do all the right things (if the can). What is really interesting, of course, is there is no outcry about infringements on rights and all that nonsense.
I’m not sure if they really understand contagion. A friend who follows it told me a rider who tested positive but was asymptomatic was allowed to continue to ride. Now that is essentially the current CDC guideline so I can’t rag on them too much, but if true it throws a big hole in their protection strategy.
I’ve read that at least one rider insisted on staying in the Tour despite a positive test and he wasn’t stopped, which is a pity. Apart from the threat to others, it very dangerous for his own health.
Its interesting that I heard no stories from the Euros of players falling ill or mystery drop-outs (although something must account for Kane looking like he was running through sludge). I don’t know if they still retain isolation protocols, but it does seem that there was plenty of mixing going on at camps.
Curious about the inclusion of the simplified equity order flow outline, without context.
Like you, I was puzzled by the presence of the link describing simplified equity order flow outline. However, looking at some of the other writings on the blog I was struck by just how much u.s. software development seems to have moved to India. The author of the blog is an ‘Agile’ consultant, which is scary. I had hoped only u.s. management bought into that line of baloney.
A lot of investment software development moved offshore years ago.
An anecdote: my former big custodian employer relies on a legacy investment record keeping engine. I had a client project that required me to dig into some really core code: the calculation of fixed income accruals involving some tricky day count scenarios. I managed to get ahold of the last person in the organization who understood the process of interest to me. He helped me even though he was not supposed to (support had been moved to India) but told me it was a one-off and he wouldn’t take any questions in the future. He’s retired now, as am I. Funny enough, the same project required input from Bloomberg, and after some back and forth, they put me in touch with their expert…in Moscow.
The best argument I have against this emerging multiple shooter hypothesis is the fact that Trump wasn’t hit any worse than he was. Moreover, if the whole thing was staged as a fake failed attempt to lionize Trump (I’m just covering all hypothetical possibilities here) then there is certainly no need for multiple shooters. Seems like you would only need multiple shooters if it was a serious, “legitimate” attempt.
Multiple shooters or no, the unsecured rooftop remains the glaring, unexplainable issue, from which one must consider the possibility, or even probability, that the USSS was in on the plot. It is a failure so basic, fundamental, and massive that I would be inclined to say innocent explanations are unacceptable.
I’m going with the Gassy Knoll theory, in that young Thomas’s aim was disturbed by an ill-advised release from the nether regions…
Rumor going around that Trump’s body armor succeeded on a hit right thorax, only seen once.
Also an acquaintance believes up to 13 shots could be heard.
There was a picture on social media of a hole in Trump’s jacket but it was a close-up shot and no further mention was made of it.
Trump may have been hit more than once with the second bullet stopped by body armor.
IF I were advising Trump, I’d hush up that second bullet hole until all the neolib theorists had taken their run at dismissing this assassination attempt.
Trump may not be any smarter than he was last time, but someone who knows what they’re doing has his ear and he’s listening.
Alex Christoforou was noting that if you become an assassin, then people will often take care to remember your middle name as well ergo John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and now Thomas Matthew Crooks.
I do wonder what that is about? Is the purpose to narrow down the number of people who will unfortunately be sharing the same name as an assassin (or would-be assassin)?
We all learn that complete name yell when we’ve been caught as a child doing something wrong. “Billy Ray Bob”, you get in here right this minute!
It is kinda odd how the media sometimes includes a guy’s middle name. Not just presidential assassins, but also sometimes serial killers (John Wayne Gacy).
I remember the U2 pilot shot down over the USSR too (Gary Francis Powers). Wonder why?
There was at least one song that used his full name, maybe that’s why?
If you believe in evidence plus the knowledge that the State did kill JFK, RFK, MLK for which evidence is beyond overwhelming, then it fits a pattern that the State would kill someone who is a direct threat to the three-letter agencies. John Kennedy was ready to dissolve the CIA and he wasn’t alone in that desire as Harry Truman indicated in his famous letter to the WaPo in December of 1963. There is some evidence that the SS was involved in the JFK assassination, just sayin’. The incompetence argument in the Trump assassination attempt is weak but it is possible that it was merely a matter of the Biden administration to make sure they gathered losers to work Trump rallies. I see no evidence that the shooter was anything but a damaged (by high-school, that great American institution that acts as a long initiation ritual that leaves sometimes horrible scars on sensitive people) human being. To those of us schooled by research into CIA operations like Project Artichoke and MKUltra. To think these projects stopped after the Church Committee hearings is naive.
Putting on my tinfoil hat, this near-miss could have been an intentional warning by any number of players (did this shooter really miss at that range?). The poor schmuck with the gun may have thought he’d be protected afterward but, of course, that’s not how it works. Trump and everyone around him now know how easy it is to take them out it they try upsetting the real powers that be. Even if Trump is elected I suspect that we’re now assured of four more years of business as usual.
Biz as usual is not in the cards. First, there will be a shift in Ukraine policy towards forcing the EU to foot more of the bill, at minimum, at maximum there will be a negotiated settlement of some kind. Second, I suspect the three-letter agencies (who are the main enemy of the American people) will be somewhat purged at least as much as is politically possible. These agencies who hate populism or any kind will have to moderate their policies. With Vance as VP they are unlikely to try and kill Trump so he has more safety than most Presidents.
If Trump and Vance are elected, Vance should work on getting a ” undisclosed secure location” as fast as possible.
an aside: B finally (!) grants Secret Service protection to RFK jr.
Biden orders security for Kennedy
RFK Jr. has finally been granted Secret Service protection after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump
https://swentr.site/news/601123-kennedy-secret-service-protection/
Accidentally on purpose
From “Illuminatus!” re. the JFK murder:
“This Is a Test for America: Yascha Mounk
“It has now been about 48 hours since Thomas Matthew Crooks, a socially isolated 20-year-old, attempted to assassinate Donald Trump…”
48 hours…it’s been decided he was “socially isolated.”
Problem is determining people’s level of “isolation” by social media presence and by interviewing people sure to try to put as much distance between themselves and another member of their community. How socially isolated would he have been if he’d saved a busload of school children from a burning crash?
Just spitballin’….
Are socially isolated people the photogenic types who would wind up in Blackrock commercials? One would think a “loner” might want to avoid that.
I don’t believe it had even been 24 hours before they declared he had acted alone. Whenever, it was quick
Good point. If he hadn’t done the crazy of shooting at Trump, his lack of presence/involvement on social media would be considered a sign of sanity in my book.
He was 20 years old, which means that since the age of 11, when Trump first ran for POTUS in 2015, he’d been bombarded with “Trump is evil, a Russian spy, a fascist and racist… a very bad man” (and I’m not suggesting he’s a good man, but…). Yeah sure, Crooks was from a conservative family, registered republican, etc but that does not in any way mean he was pro-Trump, who totally upended the traditional conservatives in the GOP. Never-Trumpers were everywhere.
I was 11 when MLK was assassinated and the years and events that followed (RFK, Hampton, Wallace, McCarthy, McGovern, Nixon, Kent State et al) jarred me into political consciousness that was already founded in my Liberal/Democratic upbringing and which included an unhealthy “hatred” for conservatives. And over the subsequent years, as the Democrats transformed into Republicans, I felt more and more isolated. Now, as an adult, I can ‘t tolerate social media anymore and the public displays of cultish attachment by many friends and family to the feckless/corrupt Democrats. At the same time, I don’t want to kill anyone.
Crooks’ formative years may well have inclined him to an irrational hatred for his intended victim despite his conservative upbringing. At 20 he was still essentially adolescent and Joe Biden is precisely the type of “conservative” he might have admired.
I could be wrong…
Socially isolated or not, how did the younger Crooks get access to the elders AR rifle? There is word that young Crook practiced shooting with the rifle in the days before the assassination attempt. Was the elder Crook present? Did the rifle go into lock-up after that practice session?
Haven’t heard much about an interrogation of the elder Crooks.
I think that what we are seeing here is the frustration of the media being unable to get a handle on this 20 year old kid. They call him “socially isolated’ but is that really because he did not have social media accounts? Is that being socially isolated? I am sure that all those reporters have social media accounts coming out the wazoo and don’t understand people who do not have them. If he was older then they would have gleefully talked about previous arrests for drug use or speeding or whatever. Buy that kid was too young to build up a record so again nada for the media. There has been no word on any manifest and for all we know, he destroyed his computer so that there would be nothing to be gone over forensically. An obvious name for the press for him would be the “BlackRock Kid’ as he appeared in an ad by them but there is no way the media would ever go there.
This may be unfair, but I read/watch a fair number of mysteries and…
cherchez la femme?
And speaking of cougars, at about his age I was wrangled into an EST “party” at which there was one with quite the predatory nature…
zhou vil sign ze papers!
I’m like, no, I’ll pee whenever I want to, thanks…
More “suicide by cop” IMHO.
“This Is A Test for America” Please. There are no “tests” for America. As Yoda said, there is only do. There is success and there is failure, there are no dry runs. The case in point is a failure. One of many. And becoming more and more frequent in more and more ways. Cloaking this in words like “test” obfuscates the truth and the meaning.
I’m sorry, I cannot stomach another Honest Broker screed about bootstraps.
The man is totally full of it.
Right, you just started hanging out in classes uninvited at a private school and now you are a millionaire.
Please. Just be honest.
You lucked into an amazing social network and got a sweet consulting gig. That’s it. And that’s ok! Don’t make up stories to justify your wealth. Don’t pretend it’s a reproducible strategy.
Who is he trying to convince?
“France’s left-wing parties struggling to form govt, says leader of Socialists”
Entirely predictable. The article says out loud the problem when it states it is ‘a hastily assembled alliance ranging from socialists and Greens to the communist party and the hard-left, eurosceptic Unbowed France (LFI).’ The only thing that that lot agree about is stopping Le Pen but now that they have done that – for the moment – they are like the dog that caught the car. There is nothing left to unite them anymore and Macron is already trying to split them up by saying that they should ditch the LFI. It’s going to be a three-ring circus in the French parliament going forward and they will have Le Pen just sitting there, watching them.
Not mentioned in the story is that over the weekend, the remaining parties in the NFP (Communists, Greens, LFI) pretty much agreed on a candidate: Huguette Bello is an experienced politician who runs La Réunion, one of France’s overseas Departments, and has a good record in deftly manoeuvring in a multiracial environment. She would have been the first non-white French Prime Minister. But the Socialists wouldn’t accept her because, wait for it … she was lukewarm on the cause of homosexual marriage a decade ago. Of course it may also be because Faure wants to be PM and will reject anyone else. Meanwhile, we have a government which is continuing in office as a caretaker regime, and can’t be voted out of office, because …it’s already resigned. You couldn’t make it up.
I want to see Pettis’ source of data per his statement on the Japanese household income growth and expenditure. According to the statistics bureau of Japan, the last 10 years have been brutal, https://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/kakei/156n.htm, and I am willing to bet the 20 years before that were no better.
I can’t find a link to statistics from before and after the 1990 crash at the moment, but from memory Pettis is broadly correct. Household income and spending growth remained fairly steady before and after the 1990’s crash – largely due to government efforts to shield regular households from the direct effects of the property and investment market collapse. The ‘Crash’ was one of private investment. It was after the mid 1990’s when households began to suffer as longer term impacts on the labour market and the destruction of household property wealth started to take hold. You could argue that the ‘real’ impact on Japanese consumers of the 1980’s boom and bust is only now being seen as the Yen declines.
I gotta admit it makes me feel old now to realise we are nearly 35 years away from that crash, I can remember being fascinated with it at the time as a recent econ grad. For years I’d been reading about how Japan was going to take over the world, then suddenly… poof..
Since 1992, 32 years, real per capita GDP in Japan has increased by a mere 25.9%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qgOv
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China and Japan, 1992-2023
(Indexed to 1992)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qgOX
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China and Japan, 2007-2023
(Indexed to 2007)
“The negative impacts of hotter, drier climates have not gone away. But in most arid lands the CO2 fertilization effect is proving powerful.” https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-dioxide-climate-change
Thanks for that link. Now that is an unexpected side effect of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere. I wonder how many farming regions are noticing this happening.
The extra CO2 uptake by faster-growing plants is moderating the build-up of the gas in the atmosphere, says Keenan. “It’s not stopping climate change by any means, but it is helping us slow it down.” nice map halfway through the article, US all beneficial, Ukraine, southern Russia no, poor wheat crops there right now. Eastern Brazil, corn, soy not benefiting.
Interesting article – it reminds us of just how little we know about arid regions. A couple of decades ago I was involved peripherally in studies on hydrogeology and water balance in deserts in northern China and it was striking how little water availability had to do with vegetation cover. The interactions of land use (especially grazing) and the timing of precipitation events seemed to be very important but proved very difficult to model. A lot of desert areas had a surprising amount of water, but past deforestation or overgrazing had stripped so much organic matter and minerals from the soils that vegetation recovery would be almost impossible without large scale human intervention, and it wasn’t always clear this would be useful. China does a lot of large scale afforestation in arid areas north of Beijing, but it tends to be very poorly planned, so its not always clear if its making things better or worse.
That said, I’d expect a very large scale impact in growth to be visible in tree rings – i.e. if more CO2 was really driving more growth, you’d expect to see larger rings after industrialisation. I’m not aware of any observations on this. In my amateur science study of local tree rings (I never pass up the chance to look at a sawn off log in a forest), it seems that here in my corner of the world there has been increasing seasonal variability in growth, mostly, I think due to an increase in either very dry or very wet mid-Spring weather. One huge potential impact though is on peat – upland peats are huge stores of CO2 and methane, and they don’t like consistent drought – or for that matter, too much rainfall either. Visual evidence indicates breakdowns all over the northern hemisphere.
“China does a lot of large scale afforestation in arid areas north of Beijing, but it tends to be very poorly planned, so its not always clear if its making things better or worse…”
Yes, if anything at all is clear it is that the Chinese plan poorly. Especially poor planning when considering the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on water conservancy and greening just in the last decade:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-04-05/Beijing-Hangzhou-Grand-Canal-refilled-with-water-1iKve2XKoHS/index.html
April 5, 2023
Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal refilled with water
All dried-out sections of the ancient Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, a long waterway connecting the northern and southern parts of China, have been replenished.
From March 1 to April 4, about 191.21 million cubic meters of water have been directed to the canal’s northern part, accounting for 41.1 percent of the planned water replenishment amount.
By the end of May this year, China’s Ministry of Water Resources plans to divert even more water to the canal, the longest and oldest man-made waterway in the world, aiming to improve the ecological environment along the canal and preserve the Grand Canal culture.
With a history of more than 2,500 years, the Grand Canal, connecting Beijing and Hangzhou in east China’s Zhejiang Province, served as a significant transportation artery in ancient China. The canal was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in China in 2014…
A few years ago I read that wasn’t happening. I guess better data now. Better than nothing news in a pretty bleak news era.
From The graying open source community needs fresh blood
Certainly a real issue, but the solution is to pay people as a public trust to work on Open Source software; This is another tragedy of the commons.
And nowhere does this appear in the story; Instead it’s about finding ways to increase interest in toiling away on Open Source, for free, I guess. Which is silly. Given the scope of what this stuff runs, think OpenSSL, or Apache Web Server, national governments should bankroll this.
FreeBSD contributor here.
I agree completely and I would add that every corporation that relies on open source software for free should be redirecting some of their profits back to financially support these projects and developers (yeah, I know).
If you’ve used WhatsApp, NetFlix, have a Sony Playstation 3, Sony Playstation 4 or any Apple product, you’ve used FreeBSD (once described as the largest operating system you’ve never heard of).
My code, as well as every other contributor’s code is BSD licensed so we’ll never see a dime from our work.
If you wander over to the FreeBSD Foundation‘s list of corporate donors, the paltry amounts given by the corporations listed are truly shameful. Netflix had a gross profit of over $12 billion in 2021 but gave the foundation somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000.
Apologies for unfairly picking on Netflix — after more digging, it turns out they contribute a lot of code back to the project. Hopefully the others do as well but it doesn’t look that way and my basic point still stands.
“US Navy pilots come home after months of shooting down Houthi missiles and drones”
‘Cmdr. Benjamin Orloff, a Navy pilot, told reporters in Virginia Beach on Friday that most of the sailors, including him, weren’t used to being fired on given the nation’s previous military engagements in recent decades.’
Oh yeah, the times they are a changin’. Wonder how he will react if he is in the same skies as Russian or Chinese fighter pilots. They’re no slouches either and it seems that both the Democrats and Republicans think that it is a great idea to push them. They know pushing them works because they have seen both Top Gun films.
Oh for the days when you could let off a hellfire missile at the bad boys secretly disguised as a wedding, I got your matrimony papers right here!…and then catch a 2-drink minimum 10 pm show in Vegas~
https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1812912344118534478
🇷🇺🇺🇦‼️🚨 “Who dies first is fa**ot”
— Russian stormtroopers around Chasov Yar
Ides of July dept:
I’ve got tanned leaves all over my driveway this morning after having blown it clear yesterday with an air-blower, and oak trees normally drop their leaves in October, so we’re 3 months early.
I take it the local upstanding citizenry didn’t very much like the heat wave, but wait there’s more!
We hit 99 tomorrow for the first sub 100 degree mark in a fortnight, and then its back to the races, nearly hitting 110 again in another week of way too hot.
Jack Black Cancels Tenacious D Tour and ‘All Future Creative Plans’ After Kyle Gass’ Remark on Trump Assassination Attempt: ‘I Was Blindsided by What Was Said’
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/jack-black-cancels-tenacious-d-124531039.html
My respect for Jack Black just went up a notch. He took a concrete action at personal expense to stand up for basic decency.
YUGE Tenacious D fan here ever since I saw them live 20 years ago. Jack Black did seem to be drinking the kool aid of lib dem punch so it’s wonderful to see that he’s still a man of the people. He too was greatly affected by The Trump Assassination Attempt and seems to abhor violence.
KG had every right to say what he said – 1st Amendment- but every one in the world knows now you’re a YUGE douche.
I read a thread on twitter that it was insurance that made him cancel. Allegedly, venues started getting threats for platforming him and insurance costs skyrocketed. Seems at least plausible.
He is sorry that he expected to get away with it, and did not get the memo from Karine Jean-Pierre that Trump is temporarily not Hitler, because the gig was in the Land Down Under. He thought everything was fine until he saw people fuming on the Internetz, and had to go in damage control mode in order to avoid being fully canceled. I guess he left his spine on stage. I have more respect for Rod Stewart because he stood his ground, and repeated his Zelensky-worship-on-stage nonsense.
P.S. Apologies of celebrities that messed up have become a real cultural phenomenon of itself. Youtubers are even review apologies of other Youtubers, and rating them. It’s funny how bad most ot them are. On the other hand, they don’t need to be good if people are actually buying this Black crap.
“ChatGPT Doesn’t Trust Chargers Fans: Guardrail Sensitivity in Context” (PDF) arXiv
Just shows why corporations are hyped up about it and not worried about the biases. The biases ARE THE POINT.
A lot of today’s comments concern the u.s. presidential election. Given the major party offerings for President and Vice President both Democrat and Republican, short of a miraculous third party win, I think as Bender might say: “We’re bone!”
RE: “Inside the Mafia of Pharma Pricing”, Matt Stoller
The current state of the Pharma business that Stoller describes in this link is full of such blatant and extremely harmful criminal conspiracies as to inspire wonderment at the kind of ‘enforcement’ the u.s. government is pursuing. A couple of today’s links describe future unrest in the u.s. hoi polloi — chiefly related to politics and the recent assassination attempt on Trump. I believe the bigger future unrest will be a response to the horrific exploitation and economic ruin pressing upon the Populace.
It’s oligopolistic rent seeking on steroids.
I agree with this statement by Craig Murray:
If you were to put Donald Trump and Joe Biden into an entirely random yoga class in Oklahoma, neither Trump nor Biden would be the person in that yoga class best suited to be President of the United States.
. . . ” Mexico’s planned glyphosate ban helped show how agroecology can lead the way forward ” . . .
For those interested in the academic discipline of agroecology, as well as some of the interesting and applicationizable wisdom, knowledge and information gained from it, two names come immediately to mind.
Miguel Altieri . . . . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Altieri
Here is one of quite a few books by Professor Altieri.
https://www.routledge.com/Agroecology-The-Science-Of-Sustainable-Agriculture-Second-Edition/Altieri/p/book/9780813317182
and Stephen Gliessman . . . . https://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/stephen-r-gliessman-alfred-e-heller-professor-of-agroecology-uc-santa-cruz
Here is an article he wrote called Transforming food systems with agroecology.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21683565.2015.1130765
And if you just want names of lots of agroecology books, here is a bunch of images of agroecology books, for people who might want to find something and begin reading.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrFOuyWBpdmb5ABNPZXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=agroecology+books+image&fr=sfp