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Links 7/17/2024

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Yves here. Extra links today due to Trump shooting post-mortems.

* * *

A history of contact’: Geneticists are rewriting the narrative of Neanderthals and other ancient humans ScienceDaily (Kevin W)

New Memristor Device Challenges the Von Neumann Bottleneck With Ionic Innovation SciTech Daily (Chuck L)

Startup Makes Butter Using CO2 and Water New Atlas

Belarus Registers World’s First Patented Lung Cancer Vaccine From Cuba Sputnik (Robin K)

Self-Awareness Might Not Have Evolved to Benefit The Self After All ScienceAlert (Chuck L)

#COVID-19

Climate/Environment

Thousands in Houston still without power amid brutal heatwave after Beryl Guardian

To Protect Against Wildfires, Insurers Try to Change Construction Standards New York Times (Kevin W)

Puerto Rico Files $1 Billion Suit Against Fossil Fuel Companies The Verge. Complaint here.

Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries TechRadar (Kevin W)

California Grid Breezes Through Heat Wave due to Renewables, Batteries This is Not Cool (Paul R)

Broken Vineyard Wind Turbine Scatters Debris Along Nantucket’s South Shore; Wind Farm Operations Shut Down By Feds Nantucket Current (Kevin W)

China?

US Floats Tougher Trade Curbs in Chip Crackdown on China Bloomberg

China EVs still driving for EU’s protected markets Asia Times

Cutting-Edge Technology Could Massively Reduce the Amount of Energy Used For Air Conditioning Wired

China installing the wind / solar equivalent of 5 nuclear power stations a week ABC.net.au (Paul R)

Cyanide killed 6 foreigners in Bangkok hotel, police say DW

Haiti May End Up Foiling US Plans for Kenya Orinoco Tribune (Robin K)

European Disunion

French president accepts premier’s resignation following snap election results Anadolu Agency

German industry has taken a permanent hit, estimated 7% shortfall is half cyclical and half structural International Affairs (Micael T)

Germany’s democratic center is right-wing extremist and militaristic Nachdenkseiten via machine translation Nachdenkseiten via machine translation (Micael T)

Old Blighty

More money and staff – so why isn’t the NHS more productive? BBC

Gaza

‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 283: Israel bombs three Gaza displacement centers, killing hundreds Mondoweiss (guurst)

US considers fresh legal bid questioning ICC jurisdiction over Israel Middle East Eye

New Not-So-Cold War

Biden administration deludes itself by thinking new war not to affect US — Lavrov TASS (guurst)

To war with Kaja Kallas – Brussels’ total break with Moscow (Micael T)

Problems Persist in Ukraine’s New Mobilization Drive Kyiv Post

Big Brother is Watching You Watch

What’s worse than thieves hacking into your bank account? When they steal your phone number, too Associated Press (Kevin W). Maybe this sort of thing will roll back one of my pet peeves, using SMS for 2FA?

Cloudflare Reports Almost 7% of Internet Traffic Is Malicious ZDNet. Seems about right, looking at the volume of phishing e-mails I receive.

Rite Aid Says Breach Exposes Sensitive Details of 2.2 Million Customers ars technica. :-(. I was a Rite Aid customer then, but they would not have any gov’t ID from me. Hope no one here exposed.

Imperial Collapse Watch

Intelligence: The god that failed Asia Times (Kevin W)

Space-Based Warfare: America’s Dominance Challenged Brian Berletic, YouTube

Trump

The Surrender Matt Taibbi. Important

He looks almost teary-eyed starting at 3:30. Li thought he looked like a tired old Scot and a bit shaken:

How Trump Boosted His Latino and Black Support—by Ignoring Party Advice Wall Street Journal

* * *

The general thrust of this tweet is plausible, even if the writer might at times overegg the pudding. Not hard to think the Biden Administration make sure Trump protection was chronically understaffed and therefore at some point a hostile actor could and therefore would breach a predictable gap. In other words, playing a game of odds rather than taking affirmative steps:

Lambert reported on this in Water Cooler, but to make sure you didn’t miss this fact: Three snipers were stationed inside building used in Trump assassination attempt CBS (Li)

Jesse Watters: Don’t buy this excuse from the Secret Service Fox (Li)

Col. Larry Wilkerson: Assassination of Donald Trump -Ukraine Collapsing – Israel Has Lost Hands Down Dialogue Works. Interesting on multiple fronts, but here because opening section is about Secret Service, and Wilkerson has two daughters and friends who worked there, and so has comments from them. Also major antipathy re Vance. Sees him as a Cassius and “energetic to a fault”.

Plastic surgeon reveals $10,000 surgery Donald Trump would have to undergo to fix his bullet-damaged ear Daily Mail (Li)

* * *

Trump echoes Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies in leaked phone call Axios (furzy). Lambert had a story on this call but the headline was about RFK, Jr, and not the Trump vax patter (which Lambert did excerpt but the MSM focus had not yet started)

Vance

Europe fears weakened security ties with US as Donald Trump picks JD Vance Financial Times (Kevin W)

Vance Isn’t Hiding His Hawkishness on Iran Daniel Larison

Trump’s VP Pick Vance Says Iran Needs To Be ‘Punched Hard’ Antiwar.com (Kevin W)

Biden

Believe Your Own Eyes Atlantic (furzy)

Biden Claims He’s Done More for the ‘Palestinian Community’ Than Anyone Else Antiwar.com (Kevin W)

Democrats en déshabillé

Sen. Bob Menendez guilty of taking bribes in cash and gold and acting as Egypt’s foreign agent Associated Press (Kevin W)

Supremes

Biden set to announce support for major Supreme Court reforms Washington Post (furzy)

Our No Longer Free Press

Google Now Defaults To Not Indexing Your Content Vincent Schmalbach . Important. Not being indexed = not existing on the Internet. This is a way that Google can censor all sorts of things while professing innocence.

Interior Ministry bans “Compact” magazine – raids in four federal states Focus. Micael T:

They do not mention that the Compact magazine was banned after thay had shown this interview with Maria Zakharova https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0DAeXDU6Ek8
The German political misleadership is really insane.

Massive press crackdown in Germany: Government bans Compact Magazine in unprecedented move, police search publisher’s home in early morning raid ReMix (Li)

Antitrust

Inside the Mafia of Pharma Pricing Matt Stoller (Dr. Kevin)

Class Warfare

Amazon Enforces New Office Hours Rule Business Insider

Mexican steel workers continue strike in defiance of courts and union WSWS

Antidote du jour. Bob H: “Look what I saw on my way to the 4th – in the big unmowed field on the west side of the North Haven Rd !!”

And a bonus (Chuck L):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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237 comments

  1. Antifa

    TIME TO CALL THE FIGHT
    (melody borrowed from Does Your Chewing Gum Lose It’s Flavor On The Bedpost Overnight?  by Lonnie Donegan, 1961)

    Joe Biden’s crazy crew
    They don’t know what to do
    No donor moolah
    From Miami to Missoula
    They know Joe has to go
    Or they’ll get no more dough
    But every time it’s mentioned—
    ‘Doctor’ Biden shouts out ‘NO!!’

    Auld Joe rattles his saber
    He can barely stand upright
    Half the time he stands there staring
    Like a deer at a headlight
    He has lost his biggest sponsors
    Now they’re getting impolite
    When your man can’t toss the caber
    Ain’t it time to call the fight?

    Jill sticks right by his side
    It’s so undignified
    She leads him by the halter
    And claims he’ll never falter
    This farce is in full swing
    They’re laughing in Beijing
    They laugh at us in Moscow
    And that’s sooo embarrassing

    Auld Joe rattles his saber
    He can barely stand upright
    Half the time he stands there staring
    Like a deer at a headlight
    He has lost his oldest sponsors
    Now they’re getting impolite
    When your man can’t toss the caber
    Ain’t it time to call the fight?

    Joe’s not the favorite son
    His brain has come undone
    If not for his mad spouse
    He’d be back at his own house
    In future we’ll lament
    Joe Biden’s slow descent
    Into a palsied creature
    Not a stately older gent

    If wars are won through Narrative,
    What is the Narrative made of?
    Boom Boom!

    Auld Joe rattles his saber
    He can barely stand upright
    Half the time he stands there staring
    Like a deer at a headlight
    He has lost his oldest sponsors
    Now they’re getting impolite
    When your man can’t toss the caber
    Ain’t it time to call the fight?

    He can barely stand upright . . .
    He won’t read what we wrote him so we get him out of sight
    He goes to bed at 4 PM and sleeps all through the night

    Like a deer at a headlight . . .
    He hasn’t been our President for such a long time
    He lets us start a war any place at any time

    Ain’t it time to call the fight? Yeah!

    1. Stephen V

      Worse than useless. I did a search for ” IRS.GOV FEIN ” and the first result was not IRS website but a private co. Who will be glad to take $300 from you for something IRIS does for free ! I also dumped Duck Duck Go for coming up empty on the simplest stuff. I now use Presearch.com.

      1. VTDigger

        Always good to learn about new search engines. I’ll put in a plug for qwant here as well.

      3. KLG

        FWIW I just searched for a few random snippets of NC posts, including my first, which was published two years ago tomorrow. Nothing in Google. Every one of them came up in presearch.com, usually as the top hit.

        Bye, Google.

  3. The Rev Kev

    ‘Darren J. Beattie 🌐
    @DarrenJBeattie
    The question isn’t just how in the hell that roof 150 yards away from Trump was unguarded
    The question is also how this gunman knew that it was unguarded’

    Simple. He walked by it and looked up. Footage has emerged of how people on the ground from a small distance away can see all of that roof. He only had to swing by that same area to make sure that there was nobody there and he was in business.

    Of course in the latest CYA operation, officials are accusing Iran of being behind this shooting. No, seriously. They are actually saying this. I thought that this was beyond pathetic until another US official swore that if you say the words ‘Thomas Matthew Crooks’ to a Farsi speaker, that in their own language that means ‘Death to America.’ I don’t know about you guys but I’m convinced.

    1. zagonostra

      Interesting how the “lone gun man” is always referred to with three names, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, they kind of stick in your mind. Incompetence or conspiracy? I tend toward the latter, but why a public spectacle? They easily could knock off Trump in a multitude of ways. The only thing I can think of is what people refer to as “The Revelation of the Method.” They, the “inner circle,” want you to know they can get away with it, or maybe they just benefit by drawing attention away from what they don’t want us to focus on, like genocide in Gaza

      1. flora

        foil hat/ a public spectacle that might so shock the nation they could haul out new, draconian “security laws” they have waiting on the shelf? a la Patriot Act and earlier? / foil hat off. / ;)

          1. flora

            foil hat again/ I could be wrong, but I think this is the first rally where attendees were carrying white “You’re Fired” placards prominently displayed behind T. Weird, huh? Heck of a coincidence. Maybe they’ve been displayed before and I missed it. / foil hat off again.

        1. Tom Doak

          They probably weren’t as worried about causing embarrassment to other Sirhan Sirhans.

      3. Tom Doak

        Don’t forget James Earl Ray and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme.

        But I think the three-name thing happens just because we first hear their identities from law enforcement, who use three names so as not to cause trouble for other James Rays.

        1. Wukchumni

          Wonder why I never heard of John Hinckley, Jr. as John Warnock Hinckley, Jr., did the Junior suffice for a 3rd name?

      1. ambrit

        Bidenjuice! Bidenjuice! Bidenjuice!
        There, fixed it for you. Now you’re conjuring up the “More Effective Evil.”

    3. griffen

      It’s like the slow drip of every day news releases being even worse than the admitted facts on the ground from just one day or one week before. Just for a comparison, and only to draw on from my professional experience. I recall the news developments being much this way starting about late September 2008. One involved in financial markets and facing the now real timeline that XYZ bank or XYZ broker dealer is in worse shape..now they are seriously worse… financial losses just kept getting ever worse and looking ever more gloomy.

      Three people on security detail were inside that building? Oh come on, smell the roses. Cya to your early retirement. At a minimum, it is time for Secretary Mayorkas to hit the road.

      1. brian wilder

        both short and long sequences of events tend to be very, very convincing to our narrative-addicted minds

        and, here we have both: the long sequence of Russiagate, multiple impeachments, the lawfare and then this mini-drip-drip of revelations of the amateurish security operation orchestrated by the Secret Service’s B-team.

        Of course, Trump partisans and the reckless media are piling on a bit, giving airtime to some erroneous or made-up details. I still don’t know whether the assassin made that ACT Blue contribution or not. (anyone?) On the other hand, the head of the Secret Service doing pathetic CYA (“sloped roof”) live is stuff no one can unsee.

    4. Carolinian

      I fully believe that “nobody f**ks with a Biden” extends to anyone having the gall to run against him for president and that he would have been happy to Nordstream Trump. After all he’s been trying to put him behind bars as an alternative.

      But inventing explanations for things that seem hard to explain is the essence of any conspiracy theory. It’s way too early to get started on that. Nobody blamed the Secret Service for JFK and thought they were part of some kind of a plot (well maybe some). Incompetence seems like the best call on Butler until proven otherwise.

      The problem is that people who pretend to be shocked by an assassination attempt shrug at the lawfare and Russiagate and other equally outrageous extremes. Their real concern is plausible deniability.It’s not as though our rulers abhor violence.

      1. vidimi

        The most convincing investigation I’ve seen about JFK’s murder was that it was, in fact, an expert marksman SS agent from the car behind that fired the kill shot.

        1. Susan the other

          The Japanese copy of a supposedly undoctored Zapurder film was briefly broadcast on TV at least 20 years ago. How plausible it is that an authentic copy of the Z film was even in existence is highly questionable, but it was immediately shut down. I happened to see it because back then I turned on the news while I cooked dinner and I was dumbfounded that it existed and it was believable. It showed JFK’s limo as it slowed and briefly stopped and the driver, William Greer, SS agent, turned completely around to face the backseat, raised a large handgun and blew off JFK’s head, whereupon Jackie’s jaw dropped, she looked at Greer, then she immediately tried to crawl out of the car, and etc. Apparently the 6 or so SS sharpshooters stationed around Dealy Plaza all missed their mark completely. I’m now under the impression that the SS has very accurate long guns which can even be programmed. There is no question in my mind that the bullet which hit Trump was shot by an expert, not some hapless 20 year old. We all need to get real on that story.

          1. vidimi

            Why else would they suppress this video if it didn’t reveal what actually happened. We need to admit that the coverup is itself conclusive proof of responsibility and not merely something that casts doubt.

    5. bertl

      So the plot was laid when the would-be assasin was christened? An example of the Divine process of forward thinking not quite working out as intended? Or maybe it is just a convenient coincidence that it translates back as Thomas Matthew Fraud (English to Persian, Google translate; Persian to English , Reverso)? It does’t even approach the standard CYA test of credibility, Occam’s razor – unless you really do think Trump’s salvation was a powerful message to US voters of Heaven favouring the election of The Donald, and I’m pretty sure that many will but that belief will based on a much simpler and more direct back story of outright collusion to create an opportunity for your average youthful passing sniper who gets the urge to blow away the Once and Future President.

    6. t

      Here’s a thing we don’t know: how often have Trump and Biden spoken outside with similar failures? Statistically, more likely for Trump because he has more time and energy and does more events.

      And here’s a thing we know we don’t know: how often would-be shooter have been stopped. Seems like Trump would be unable to keep quiet if he knew of anything, but maybe they didn’t tell him.

      Now maybe he’ll spend more time indoors, talking BS with RFK and donors and just echoing back whatever BS they say and pretending he has any knowledge of things like being in a room during a visit to the pediatrician and they come at a baby with a horse sized shot or put seed oils in baby food or whatever…

      1. Screwball

        Biden did a rally in Detroit, MI in the last week or so. I know someone who lives close by. He said there were drones everywhere. Biden’s speech was inside a high school. Trumps was outside – no drones – plenty of roofs.

        A great point by Lambert in WC yesterday – why nobody on the water tower? I went to Goggle maps and did some measuring. The water tower was to Trump’s right, and behind a little bit. It would have been a great view of the entire event, and the building the shooter was on. They would have had a perfect view to the roof of that building – and only 400 feet away.

        Yet, nobody was on the tower, or the roofs. Nobody saw anyone with a ladder or gun. They said he had a backpack, but was the gun in it? Did he have to assemble the gun? That takes time – critical time – time to be spotted.

        They also said he had a transmitter and bombs in his car. Why? To cause a distraction to get away? Now we are getting a bit sophisticated for a 20 year old with no online presence?

        They said they identified him by the gun, but they have not release exactly what kind of gun it was. That shouldn’t be difficult to identify I would think, but there I go, thinking again.

        It’s really hard to keep the tin foil hat off.

    7. Socal Rhino

      That Republican member of the Armed Services Committee speaking on CNN called for a congressional investigation of the assassination attempt, explicitly saying that neither the SS nor the FBI can be entrusted with that task. He also said that at this point, the possibility that egregious security lapses were deliberate needed to be considered. And he fended off multiple attempts by the CNN moderator to get him to walk that back.

      1. Screwball

        called for a congressional investigation

        Color me skeptical. When is the last time a congressional investigation did anything useful, other than create soundbites for the nightly news.

        I guess I’m cynical because I watched too many hearing after the banksters blew up the financial markets in 2009.

        As they said in the X-files – the truth is out there. We’re just not allowed to know.

    8. Washington Woman

      “Simple. He walked by it and looked up.”

      Not simple. He purchased a ladder at home depot the day before and he used that ladder to climb to the roof. This means he planned on using the roof a day earlier.Did he just get lucky, maybe. But…

      I have a (conspiracy) theory. They are not finding any traces of Crooks in the internet. The kid was a nerd and knew computers so my thought is he was using Tails OS (google it) and was probably very active on the dark web forums. They will find nothing on his phone or computers.

      I think it is there he met people who sucked him into doing what he did. I do now think it is highly probable that he was a patsy. Mostly because he bought a ladder the day before, which means he KNEW he would need a ladder, which means he KNEW the roof would not be occupied the next day.

      How could he know that roof would be unguarded? The only think I could come up with was that he was tipped off by someone on the dark web.

      It cracks me up hearing these commentators talk about him “using google”, like everyone is as dumb as they are.

      1. lyman alpha blob

        Hard to tell what’s the real truth in all this, but I read somewhere that he purchased the 5 ft ladder but then didn’t use it and it wasn’t found at the scene. Pictures did show a taller ladder against the building on the day of the shooting, but it wasn’t clear if the shooter brought it or if it was already there.

        Being a local, he could have cased the grounds prior to the event to look for the best vantage point. But that still doesn’t answer how he knew it would be unguarded the day of the event. He was seen wandering around and raising suspicions a half hour or so prior to Trump speaking, but still it seems like an astounding coincidence that he was able to determine it was safe for him to access the roof and get everything prepared to fire those shots just a few minutes into Trump’s speech. Also, in witness videos people are pointing at him on the roof and yelling, and yet he just goes about his business rather than trying to flee or hide.

        Could be he had a death wish and just coincidentally got lucky finding the unguarded rooftop, and that;s why things played out as they did. Others might say there are no coincidences.

        1. .Tom

          Tails and Tor are pretty good in themselves but the fact you’re using them is immediately visible to the NSA. Then they have all sorts of ways to hack you and as Mitnick showed so well in his books they don’t necessarily need to hack your computer to hack you.

    9. Kontrary Kansan

      How was he even able to be in that area–with a gun? (A long rifle’s not that hard to spot?) How did he walk past law enforcement with a gun? How did he transport a ladder to mount the roof? How did he know how big the ladder needed to be? How was he able to lie prone on a hot metal roof?

      Chk out Larry Johnson on The Duran:
      https://www.youtube.com/live/QKebSSkPfUg?si=4PjJ_-K6SI404BcD

  4. zagonostra

    >Trump’s VP Pick Vance Says Iran Needs To Be ‘Punched Hard’ Antiwar.com (Kevin W)

    “Joe Biden has done nothing to help our ally Israel. Joe Biden has made it harder and harder for Israel to win that war. He has prolonged the war to take out Hamas,” Vance said

    I haven’t seen any article that puts a timeline on when Vance was selected. Was he someone foisted on Trump? If so was it right after the assassinations attempt, as some speculate, or was it well in advance. Quotes like the one above, and other bellicose statements on Iran, are depressing. No succor for a war mongering polity intent on death and destruction instead of improving the lives of its citizens.

    1. The Rev Kev

      The Neocons were always determined that Trump’s VP be a fellow Neocon and wanted somebody like Rubio. Trump chose Vance instead which did not make them happy so maybe all this ra-ra talk by Vance is to somewhat sooth them. Of course once in power, Iran may not be such a priority. A lot has changed with Iran since Trump had Soleimani murdered back in 2020. For a start, Iran is now in BRICS so has solid contacts with both Russia and China, neither of who will abandon Iran to an American attack. In addition, Iran is getting more and more Russian equipment and technology which is really ramping up the difficulties of attacking that country. So in the end, Vance may shove Iran on the back-burner for the real target – China.

      1. Carolinian

        Iran also just elected a “reformer” and that may help with a less confrontational relationship–except with Israel of course. But the current Iran hating government in Israel may not last long.

        1. furnace

          At the current rate I’m not so sure about “Israel’s” current government not lasting long; the way things are going the very state itself might teetering on the edge.

      2. pjay

        Read along with the Larison article, this is pretty depressing. Not really a surprise given his previous positions, but depressing given this emphasis right out of the VP blocks. Larison makes a relevant observation with which I agree:

        “The Soleimani assassination is a good test of someone’s foreign policy judgment. Politicians that think that the assassination was a good idea and necessary confirm that they have terrible judgment and shouldn’t be trusted to make good policy decisions. Those that recognize that it was a pointless and reckless escalation even if it didn’t lead to a major war are much more likely to be prudent and wise in other situations as well. Vance has shown us which camp he is in.”

        Maybe I missed it, but has anyone traced Vance’s level or sources of support by the Israel lobby yet?

            1. caucus99percenter

              In Germany, the process that immigrants must go through to become naturalized citizens was recently modified to include just such a solemn declaration.

              Specifically, those applying for citizenship must now attest that they recognize Israel’s “right to exist.” đŸ€Ș

        2. lyman alpha blob

          Massie said recently he was the only GOP member who didn’t have an AIPAC minder assigned to him, so presumably Vance would be one who did.

          But to hear the corporate media tell it, it’s the Russians who interfere in US elections and government.

    2. ilsm

      Vance is in trouble with the “Putin is the devil incarnate” crowd because he sees Ukraine as not in US’ national interests.

      To say “national interests” instead of “Putin bad and WW III needed” is a problem!

      1. jsn

        He’s in the “Iran bad and WWIII needed” school.

        With the diplomatic work Laverov has been occupying himself with, it’s no longer clear an attack on Iran wouldn’t be the opening shot.

        FAFO is official policy now.

        1. ilsm

          I.am for letting Iran be.

          I did fail to remember that some, including JD Vance, view Iran as enemy of both Tel Aviv, and Arabian Peninsula royals.

          An anti Iran pox in the GOP.

          Biden is too close to Tel Aviv to offer a differentiation there.

    3. vidimi

      right on the heels of Netanyahu’s visit to his subjects, we have a strengthening of calls to go to war against Iran. I wonder what it was that he told them, either you support me against Lebanon or go to war against Iran?

    4. Carolinian

      Larison says Vance sounds like Lindsey Graham on Iran but it’s actually Trump who sounds like Graham and Graham who sounds like his old buddy John “bomb bomb bomb Iran” McCain. Vance is probably just sucking up to the new boss.

      In their discussion Kirn tells Taibbi that the neocons made a last minute push for Rubio rather than Vance so perhaps we should be grateful that the bomber right isn’t pulling Trump even further in their direction. Then he’d be making these kinds of statements about China, Iran and Russia. Needless to say that while events in the Middle East are terrible we Americans are most in danger from the push for war with Russia. With Iran and China it’s likely to always be a phony war because bombing Iran would result in Pentagon bases and assets being destroyed and same for China.

      And btw when Trump held an early rally in South Carolina the crowd booed Graham down. Trump may like Lindsey for some odd reason but he loves his base more.

  5. JohnA

    Re Startup Makes Butter Using CO2 and Water

    Whatever the merits or otherwise of this spread, like all innovations and new technology, when it comes to prioritising by TPTB, it will always be used to make guns before butter.

    1. k

      If it turns out to be inedible, it could always be marketed as Gun Butter ( gun grease). Think of the market!

      1. Retired Carpenter

        You might note that 2/3 fl oz of Gunbutterℱ is $21.95. Expensive stuff. I prefer FrogLube as a CLP and Cosmoline of long term storage.

      2. Jeremy Grimm

        Olestra aka. Olean had a few unpleasant side effects like diarrhea. I did not notice any mention of the proportions of left and right isomers in the ‘fats’ Mr. Bill’s artificial ‘butter’.

      1. jefemt

        Unlimited energy with the new Bill Gates Salt Reactor(tm)

        Just don’t pull back the curtain too far, one might discover the seamy Simi Valley incident…

    3. griffen

      Using in the morning to spread on warm toast, and a fresh glass of juice made with their Juicero; surely, such advances are possibly innovative but not really additive I will suggest.

      I’ve always or often wondered about the appeal of avocado toast at $15…if we’re listing items in daily life I would neither own nor even wish to try.

      1. ambrit

        At roughly $1.00 USD per smallish unit, try and find a consistently “smooth and edible” avocado at the local grocers today. If you do find one, do indeed make your own “avocado toast” dish for lunch, brunch, or other ‘sophisticated event.’
        I “grew up” in Miami where you could literally sneak into a neighbours yard and pluck a ripe green spheroid from the bough. Nothing beats fresh.

        1. Wukchumni

          I grew up where the Haas avocado originated and was surrounded by trees, and then somebody figured out that avocados don’t pay property tax, and they cut them down and put in tract homes now worth a cool million clams per.

          We used to have avocado wars, and the only rule of engagement was your projectile had to be on the soft side, and if you hit your adversary just right, the thing would explode on their person and leave a gooey green mess. Like we’d waste good Wonder Bread* toast on them?

          *Wonder Bread builds strong bodies 8 ways

          1. ambrit

            “*Wonder Bread builds strong bodies 8 ways.”
            Doesn’t it also help you run faster and jump higher?

            2. griffen

              In a small family kitchen of the future….Hey kids, time for the daily rations! Now, Johnny you got a sandwich Tuesday, and Jenny gets a sandwich on Wednesday. We have to abide the national leaders routine, and that includes your Mom and your Dad as well.

              Boy isn’t this ration of new, improved Soylent Green so much better, and now with more calories. \sarc

    4. Captain Obvious

      The news should say: “Bill Gates makes something that is not butter”. Now he just have to kill all the cows in order to make people buy it. Well, not all cows. He will keep some for himself, ’cause he surely ain’t going to eat this stuff.

      1. ambrit

        Ah! Now all becomes clear. This is really about reducing ‘bovine flatulence.’ Save the Earth by eating junkfood.
        I knew all along that I was “ahead of the curve.”

        1. Terry Flynn

          Actually more like inventing “I can’t believe it’s not I can’t believe it’s not butter”

          (Sorry not my joke: some famous comedian made that joke years ago about whatever was that year’s “miracle butter substitute”)

    5. MicaT

      Essentially an E fuel.
      Made the same way.
      Co2, hydrogen, electricity
      Just arranged differently

    6. vidimi

      on the one hand, man this sounds cool, revolutionary, even.

      on the other, do I trust anything from Bill Gates?

      1. The Rev Kev

        Certainly not anything medical. Otherwise you might find yourself short of oxygen with the Blue Scream of Death.

    7. .human

      There was no mention of its food value other than calling it a “fat.”

      Another ultra-processed “food” to avoid.

    9. JohnnySacks

      Carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen combine in may ways. One path would be butter, but another could be benzene, toluene, and many other highly toxic molecules.
      Who’s going to make sure that the impurities are removed from the output of whatever insanely complicated reaction used to create butter from CO2 and H2O? Should we stay tuned for FDA ‘acceptable limits’ on toluene, etc. in pseudo-butter?

    10. Jeremy Grimm

      Mr. Bill’s hydrogenated snake oil butter — some say it tastes like real butter but everyone agrees it smells cheesy. Short wait for a surprise with every bite. The more you eat the bigger the surprise.

  6. funemployed

    If I was Trump I definitely wouldn’t get that ear fixed. Might have the surgeon snip off a little extra for show.

        1. Randall Flagg

          C’mon man, Trump was just trying to get his ears pieced the hard way.
          I still can’t imagine where we would be right now if that shooter had been successful.

          1. Wukchumni

            …help me Rwanda

            …we might have been on the verge of being Tutsis & Hutus, but with more effective weaponry

            1. Randall Flagg

              And other than the atomic blasts in Japan, has there been a quicker mass loss of lives in history?

          2. The Rev Kev

            One thing would have been certain. If Trump had been killed, the media would have downplayed it as much as they could and after the funeral, they could not deep-six stories about him fast enough.

      1. The Rev Kev

        If it was a piece of shattered teleprompter, then surgeons would have had to go in and make sure that there were no fragments left in his ear before cleaning up that wound. We have seen no such reports of a surgical procedure like that being carried out. So it was almost certainly a lucky miss by an amateur shooter. But I will let the Life of Brian have the last word here-

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5i1cJIwE7M

        1. Dr. John Carpenter

          This. Even if he was hit by glass from the teleprompter, that wouldn’t have happened if someone wasn’t shooting at him trying to kill him. I have yet to hear anyone explain why it matters.

        2. Captain Obvious

          When bullets are flying, shatterd glass does not matter. Still, they are not equally fatal, because their kinetic energy is not comparable.

      3. Yves Smith Post author

        This appears to be a liberal meme to discredit the idea that Trump barely escaped being killed.

        The bullet that missed him killed someone behind him, FFS. No chatter from the Secret Service worrying about broken glass. They all went to the ground immediately. You’d have cut hands or knees or both if glass had been on the ground near the podium.

        Please do not make comments like this which verge on being nonsensical in the absence of supporting evidence.

      2. Mark Gisleson

        Looking forward to seeing Trump’s edited ear because I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing lots of folks getting ear chops to match.

    4. ex-PFC Chuck

      Orville Freeman, who was Minnesota’s governor in the late 1950s, had been wounded in the face while he was serving as a USMC officer in Bougainville during World War II. Our family friend and neighbor Chris Erickson was a state senator who caucused with the Conservatives (at the time Minnesota did not allow major party affiliation in the Legislature), and he frequently remarked you could always tell whether it was an election year or not by which side of his face Freeman presented to the photographers.

      1. Revenant

        I’m intrigued, which side did he use to get out the vote? There’s no Good in politicians so The Bad or the Ugly? It’s not clear which of moral admiration or physical revulsion has more pull….

        1. ex-PFC Chuck

          In election years he showed the scared side. BTW if it’s not obvious Freeman was a Democrat.

    5. jefemt

      If it was ‘the other guy’ Trump would have already come up with somesuch derisive moniker…
      perhaps “Patches”?

      Allow me…

      BTW– that CBS story about the three ‘snipers’ inside the metal-roofed shed under the sniper is absolutely astounding. We will NEVER know the whole story, and we will be skeptical of any ‘fact finding’, due to our biases and Delusional Cognitive Dissonance (DCD). I say “we”, as even I- the most incredible, exceptional person on the face of the earth other than Donald John Trump- am guilty of a smidge of DCD.
      It’s how we roll.

    1. djrichard

      I got close to one of these guys at Sylvan Heights Birk Park in North Carolina where they have a couple behind fence. I enticed one to feed from my hand. In the process left some nice marks in my hand and also gave a low kind of a growl – imagine their trumpet dialed down to where it’s a low guttaral sound. Sounded like a dinosaur. Anyways, it was very cool!

    2. jefemt

      I was in eastern Montana and happened to catch a flight of several thousands, stretched out over a ten minute period… never ever would have seen or noticed them, other than their call periodically making it to ground. They were WAAAAAY high, only intermittently visible due to glint off wings… migrating on the storm front moving in…
      Unforgettable. Our spaceship earth holds such beauty.

    3. Randy

      Here in Wisconsin we had an outlaw that got busted for shooting Sandhill Cranes along with a bunch of other things that are illegal to shoot. They asked him what they tasted like. His reply was, “like bald eagle”.

      Some “people” in Wisconsin are pushing for a legal hunting season on Sandhill Cranes as well as Mourning Doves.

      Sick family bloggers!!

  8. Benny Profane

    Awful advice telling anybody not to exercise for a few months, unless one has an orthopedic injury. Trump uses the same illogic to justify his sloth, that exercise just “drains energy”, like we have some sort of finite supply to be conserved. But, in case you haven’t noticed, we are a nation of sloths, heading for a miserable old age of diabetes and lazy boys in front of the TV.

    1. The Rev Kev

      It’s all part of the economy of effort approach to medicine-

      Don’t run if you can walk.
      Don’t walk if you can stand still.
      Don’t stand still if you can sit.
      Don’t sit if you can lie down.
      Don’t lie down if you can just go for a snooze.

      It’s all suppose to be very scientific like.

        2. Dr. John Carpenter

          Just cut a hole in your recliner and put a slop bucket under it. You won’t even need to move to have a movement.

    2. Wukchumni

      I believe that every human has a finite amount of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

      Neil Armstrong

      1. Terry Flynn

        Hehe. Whilst we know that ideas along the lines of a fixed number of beats is an old wives’ tale, like many it has a kernel of truth in it. When awaiting the on-call cardiologist to check my ECG* when I had been TWO HOURS in Supraventricular Tachycardia and was the “top priority patient” in the Emergency Department, I got the politest but firmest telling off in my life by the ED consultant.

        “Terry, you’ve been getting these since age 10, you have a PhD in med stats, you work with consultants in multiple specialties and some rather famous clinicians. How the family-blog have you not had this seen to before now? All things considered, you’ve probably made your heart quite a bit older than the rest of you.”

        *The consultant told me he wasn’t gonna give me the “magic potion” (aka adenosine) until the cardiologist OKed it since my ECG was “a bit weird” and if I was not in SVT he might kill me rather than reboot my heart! Plus, I avoid doctors precisely BECAUSE I have worked with so many of them ;-)

          1. Terry Flynn

            My GP laughed when trying to find out possible reasons for latest abdominal issues. She asked if I’d ever had a colonoscopy. I said “Yes”. She asked “Why?” I replied “for ÂŁ500”.

            When doing my PhD us “non-clinically trained peeps” got a lot less funding than the “proper” doctors doing one so when one of them needed a bunch of controls, I and my epidemiology/med stats peers all jumped at the chance for half a grand in return for a colorectal survey!

            1. ilsm

              I am 73.

              I have had 3 colonoscopies, each took a couple of benign things. This is 5 year. I decided no but not overtly, I decline to sign up!

              The delay in possible treatment risk does not excuse the bother of the prep.

              My risk under uncertainty rules have changed.

              I do annual dermatology screen, Irish red hair. Because I like my PA, elst it is no bother to prep.

              1. Terry Flynn

                Yeah risk/benefit decisions by patients are sadly so disparaged by the clinicians. I know someone who, having gone through all the yukky prep for colonoscopy, was told “no, your BP is way too high. You must get your hypertension sorted, then we’ll do it. Go home.”

                This person said “OK, screw you. I’d rather have bowel cancer than do all that again.” I get it. Plus more than one clinician got caught out by me for misrepresenting the benefit of whatever procedure. I refused cardiac catheter ablation initially in 2005 after I was told the risk of “zapping the wrong bit and you needing a pacemaker”. After my “mother of all SVTs” putting me in Emergency Dept I reversed my decision. An Aussie cardiac nurse friend was horrified: in 2005 the procedure was absolutely vetoed in Sydney due to appalling risk/benefit ratio.

                I should have listened. I had it; was in the bottom percentile and it was the single worst experience of my life. And I got abuse from the cardiologist. It failed and subsequent data have shown it is nothing like the “miracle” that it was sold as in 2005 UK. The cardiologists liked their new “toy” and I was a guinea pig. These days I give docs a paper copy of my electronic document with everything I want to say and what is in the peer-reviewed (and *decent*) literature. I make it known that this’ll get uploaded by me too. Funny how the BS level has dropped! /s

                1. ilsm

                  My observation on cancer screening: two types of cancer; one will kill you fast whether you do (in between) screening or else, the other will kill you in 10 years whether you undergo the screening and subsequent abuse or not.

                  JAMA or such pretty much said that rule for men over 70 with respect to prostate “issues”, why I avoid urologists.

                  Thank you for your ideas!

                  1. Terry Flynn

                    One of the guys who invented the PSA test for prostate issues gave a presentation when I was at Bristol. (Back then we had a couple of the top epidemiologists in the world so got a lot of big names to come and present at a “provincial UK city”).

                    The guy admitted he sometimes thought that the PSA test was a dreadful mistake. As you clearly know, most men die WITH prostate cancer, not OF prostate cancer. The sum total of fear/disutility caused to men by diagnosing something they either DO NOT HAVE or HAVE BUT WILL NOT KILL THEM is arguably much greater than the sum total of benefit to those who can have something done.

                    The PROTECT study was a major one co-ordinated from Bristol around the turn of the century. Inevitably I got drawn in to do ancillary stuff. If I have prostate cancer I give zero effs. I can’t say “you should not either” but the media and certain academic institutions have a lot to answer for.

                    1. Terry Flynn

                      PS For the record my relatives/friends no longer bug me regarding whether “this cancer needs more funding”.

                      I acknowledge that “funding ceilings” etc are not as simple as “money”, given MMT & real resources but I still adhere to the principle that certain cancers and other conditions are woefully underfunded given their impact upon humanity because they are “not sexy with a coloured ribbon”.

                      In a fairer world there’d be a whole lot of change which reduced funding for cancers of “sexy parts” towards cancers and infectious diseases/heart diseases which are the “bits we don’t or won’t discuss”. *cough*airborne coronaviruses & flu variants *cough*

        2. Steve H.

          > a fixed number of beats is an old wives’ tale

          Not exactly:

          >> the total numbers of heartbeats and breaths over a lifetime are body-size independent, about, respectively, 1.5 ⋅ 109 beats and 3.6 ⋅ 108 breaths.

          The Mouse-to-elephant Metabolic Curve: Historical Overview

          There is basis in fact, but the usual form is an incorrect extrapolation from cross-species studies. This is akin to when people talk about the Dunbar Limit to the number of relationships humans can have, which was extrapolated from brain-size data across species. It’s useful, but even the general case must be approached by understanding the assumptions. To then take a general case and apply it to a particular case is tricksy at best. Avoid misunderstandings.

          And here’s a Thank You, Terry Flynn. You’ve done work here.

          1. Terry Flynn

            Thanks for the math(s)! I’m glad I hadn’t misremembered that there is *some* link to fact, even if we all get it wrong.

            Plus thanks for the kind words.

      2. The Rev Kev

        I bet that his heart was beating plenty when he was trying to land on the Moon and Buzz Aldin called out that they only had 60 seconds of fuel left.

      5. expr

        I convinced a colleague to exercise by pointing out
        his resting pulse at 72*24 hours was 1768*60 beats per day
        mine 1 hour running at 160 + 23 hours at 50
        is 50*23 + 160 = 1310*60 beats per day

    3. Yves Smith Post author

      That is bullshit.

      You must never have had mono. Not only is walking a few blocks all one can do in a day, but if you were somehow able to jack yourself enough to be able exercise with mono, you would risk damaging your spleen.

      Plenty of other ailments require months of recovery.

      1. Terry Flynn

        Yeah I had mono around 2002 in early days of my postdoc. Because I was in an academic unit that allowed me to do loads of work from home I struggled through, but absolutely no way could I have been going out for more than you mention. By the time I had a GP appt coming up I was on the mend (after about 4 weeks) so I cancelled and life went on.

        Fast forward to 2010 in Sydney with antibody screen. “When did you have mono?” And when I said never they said your blood doesn’t lie and the penny dropped.

        When my Long COVID has been bad I’ve been similarly incapacitated. I’m dreading getting the latest variant cause I’ll be set back yet again and not sure how much more pounding the heart will take. Gentle walks is all I do at present and I frequently relapse.

          1. Benny Profane

            Well, I have also read that less obese nations had less Covid deaths. I’d like to see the figures for Colorado, our skinniest state, but natives only. The virus spread like fire in the early stages at ski resorts, just like in Europe, but that was mostly tourists in both cases. Maybe fifty years ago, if Covid hit, hardly anybody would have died. Maybe there was a similar virus, and it was just ignored. Lord knows that, in 1900, when the average age was lower, and obesity hardly was such an issue, there was a similar virus spreading, and it barely affected anyone.

            My point was, obesity and poor diet and sloth are probably America’s number one health issues, so telling people to avoid exercise is borderline criminal and medical malpractice. There’s another pandemic coming. Stay in shape to fight it off.

      3. t

        Wait! Are you saying rest is critical to recovery?

        Sorry for the snark. The “rest for at least six weeks and you are not out of the woods for at least six months” part of Covid is yet another element that seems to be ignored. Some folks were advising first-timers on this, having “learned the hard way” with their first infection…”

        The routine convos comparing first and subsequent infections is going to break me.

    4. Matteo

      I got COVID for the first time this past december. I managed to avoid it out of an abundance of caution since Dec 2019 when I started hearing rumblings about it and heard oft daughter’s teacher’s niece dying from an illness in Asia. Anyway, I got it bad. Missed 8 weeks of work, hard recovery. The best medical advice I received was my GP telling me to “listen to my body” regarding physical activity. I slowly built up my stamina to take walks by walking in my home, doing gentle stretching etc.

      I’m convinced I avoided long COVID because I prioritized a long convalescence.

    5. Lee

      For those with ME/CFS post-exertional malaise can be the result of too vigorous exercise. It’s a miserable state, referred to as a “crash”, which at times caused me to wonder how could I feel so crappy and not be dying. Over the years I’ve learned the hard way how to pay attention and gauge on a day to day basis just how much energy I can expend without triggering a crash.

    6. Expat2uruguay

      I agree with Benny Profane, it’s absolutely terrible advise to tell someone that they shouldn’t exercise for 6 to 8 weeks after a covid infection.

      I read through the entire X thread and he never gives a source for this. Other people gave sources but they didn’t agree with what he said. And then some of the sources were about when you can exercise with long covid, which I regard as a separate issue from when you can exercise after having mild to moderate covid.

      After reviewing all of the articles that were linked in The X thread here is the one that dealt with when you can return to exercise after a standard covid infection.
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9170595/
      Now maybe there are other articles that back up his claim of no exercise until after 6-8 weeks, and if so I would very much like to see them. There seems to be an implication that if you exercise too soon after a mild to moderate, or asymptomatic, covid infection you can cause your body to develop long covid.

    7. ArvidMartensen

      A problem is that the risk of heart attack and stroke goes way up for a few months after a Covid infection “Short-term mortality (up to 5 weeks postinfection) was significantly higher among COVID-19 group (1623Âą0/10 000)” Fischer, Lancet 2022 and
      “Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease“, Sidik, Nature 2022
      Don’t know about long covid, but there have been anecdotes by the poor sods with long covid to the effect that they thought they were ok a couple of weeks after infection so they went for a run. And that was the last serious exercise they could do.

      But gut instinct and a good sense of humour is worth a thousand research papers and personal stories, amiright?

  9. Mikel

    Haiti May End Up Foiling US Plans for Kenya – Orinoco Tribune

    “…Last Sep. 25, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was in Nairobi to ink a still shrouded security deal with Kenya, making it a key U.S. chess piece in East Africa. The Kenyan police deployment to Haiti and the drafting of Kenya into NATO were only parts of Washington’s larger plan to use Kenya as its regional cop to fight “terrorism” and stop the growing influence of Russia and China across Africa….”

    NATO – the biggest threat to peace in the world – just really grasping for relevancy everywhere one looks.

    1. The Rev Kev

      This is a very good article this. Thing is, I cannot work out if those Kenyan cops going there is going to be a fiasco or just a grift. They will be vastly outnumbered by the armed locals, they can’t speak the language, they had the money promised them for their families cut by 80%, won’t be given life insurance meaning that if they die, their families get zip and finally the senior officers are getting paid more than the junior officers. So I expect those Kenyan cops to just go through the motions and have a live-and-let-live relationship with the militias. They will be asking themselves why they should risk their lives just so their government can suck up to Washington who refuses to send their own troops. It may be that the armed militias will seek to bribe those soldiers and offer them “goodies” to look the other way. But at least in Kenya and Washington, they will be seen to be “doing something.”

      1. Vandemonian

        Will they do that thing that Ukrainian conscripts do: surrender to the other side, and end up being rewarded with some concrete material benefits?

  10. Wukchumni

    I don’t know what to make of it really. surrounded by a largely oak savanna that didn’t drop their leaves until December last year-after the winter of record in the Southern Sierra for 125+ years, perhaps the ground being so saturated with water extended the usual leaf drop by 2 months, and now some of my oak trees are shedding leaves in mid July-surely a defense mechanism against something, and the only something was our recent heat dome where low temps seldom got below the 80’s and highs below 110, a phenomenon, I as a native son of the golden west, have never experienced, nor has anyone else with 6 decades on the books, nor the forest for the trees.

    I’ve been pretty diligent about removing dead limbs on trees, but there are still many i’ve not got around to, and some dead limbs that were 10 feet high have drooped down to 7 or 8 feet in just a fortnight’s time, and they are the weakest link-unaffected by the amount of nourishment a tree gets, so a different issue from the leaf drop-all heat related.

    Oak trees can go dormant and shut down, humans aren’t afforded that luxury.

    It doesn’t take much to throw things out of kilter, and the big heat seems to approximate the difference in temps the Little Ice Age went through, albeit on the other side of the gig.

    All of the present glaciers in the Sierra Nevada were formed in the Little Ice Age, and if you look at historical photos of them from the 1800’s and early 1900’s, all have receded quite a bit, but to have lasted say 500 years as a relic of a time of pretty moderate change in the climate, where the temps were less than 1°C cooler, not 1.5°C warmer.

    There was about 1/20th the current population, and the world was more or less completely disconnected from one another, apparently no internet back then.

    1. Jackienass63

      Where I live in upstate NY the white oak don’t shed their leaves until spring and new leaves are sprouting. Red oak shed right after maples in the fall. There are other oak varieties but not common.

  12. Steve H.

    > New Memristor Device Challenges the Von Neumann Bottleneck With Ionic Innovation SciTech Daily (Chuck L)

    >> Researchers at EPFL have developed a novel nanofluidic memristor, a device that mimics the brain’s efficient ion-based information processing.

    Genuinely amazing. Memristors had dropped out of sight for awhile. At least one attempt to claim the effect wasn’t real, and in truth the technical issues have been large. And the programming differences meaning it would be easier to train up a new generation of programmers, all the rest would immediately be working on legacy systems. But there’s a race, and the winner, wins.

    That nanofluids are the solution is icing on the cake.

    1. caucus99percenter

      I’m eager to see the details of the “non-von”* architectures and programming techniques they are exploring, for processors based on memristors.

      * not based on the Von Neumann computing model

    2. CA

      https://english.news.cn/20231011/295aca91a38f4a88a852d6d420975484/c.html

      October 11, 2023

      Scientists develop fully integrated memristor chip with low energy consumption

      BEIJING — Chinese scientists have developed a fully integrated memristor chip with improved learning ability and low energy cost, according to a study * recently published in the journal Science.

      With artificial intelligence (AI) technology profoundly changing the way of production and life, learning becomes highly important for edge intelligence devices in order to adapt to different application scenarios.

      However, current technologies for training neural networks require moving extensive data between the processor chip and off-chip main memory, which incurs massive energy consumption and hinders the learning process.

      Based on 11 years of research, scientists from Tsinghua University developed a full-system-integrated chip consisting of multiple memristor arrays and all the necessary peripheral circuits to support complete on-chip learning.

      “The chip integrates complete circuit modules to support autonomous learning, and it has successfully demonstrated various learning tasks including motion control, image classification and speech recognition,” said Yao Peng, the co-first author of the study, from the School of Integrated Circuits, Tsinghua University.

      According to the study, the chip can achieve autonomous learning with only about three percent of the energy consumption of the conventional application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) when running the same task…

      * https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade3483

    3. cfraenkel

      That article was so filled with flat out wrong deceptively written BS I don’t know what to get more in a huff over….

      But alternatives to the ‘Von Neumann Bottleneck’ have been available since at least the ’80s. My favorite was non-synchronous designs, since the real reason the buses are a power and radiation issue is they all get slammed to one side or the other at the same time. Get rid of the clock, and your power use disappears, for all practical purposes, as does the RFI. But it had the critical drawback of needing to figure out new programming styles and tooling, and all Intel needed to do was crank up the clock speeds and everyone in the industry printed money, so there was no interest in rocking the boat. Same thing will happen this time around….

      1. Steve H.

        Is it just the Bottleneck, or do you have issues with the memristor itself? I would think the addition of a fourth circuit element to have wider implications than the Bottleneck.

  13. Es s Ce Tera

    re: Climate change/record temps everywhere

    Toronto just had a major power outage lasting over 12 hours. Allegedly caused by was massive flooding due to record rainfall (over 4 inches in a freak rainfall). Apparently, a transmission station was flooded, so apparently we’ve got a single point of failure in our grid. But for one day and night much of the city was without AC.

    Since power outages are a normal and frequent thing in cities everywhere around the world, with these worldwide record temperature increases I was thinking humdrum periodic outages will soon become catastrophic killer events.

    1. The Rev Kev

      That’s rather disconcerting that. Toronto is suppose to have a population of nearly 3 million people but to have a single point of failure in the grid as you say sounds like a lack of planning – or imagination.

      1. ambrit

        Redundancy in hardware is antithetical to “the bottom line.”
        Get with the program consumer!

        1. Wukchumni

          Commercial jets used to come with 4 redundant oxygen systems-which was costly, so they now rely on 1 digital system instead…

          What Would Payne Stewart Do?

    2. Will

      Not as bad as all that. I didn’t know there had been flooding or blackouts till I saw it in the news. Then again, I don’t need to venture out much so not surprising I wasn’t personally impacted other than to marvel at the ferocity of the downpour outside my window.

      As for blackouts, large chunks of the city were without power for several hours because of flooded substations but I believe only one was offline overnight.

      Might be official by now but was believed to be the largest amount of rainfall recorded in a single day in Toronto. However, the bigger problem was that the ground was already saturated from several days of rainfall before yesterday’s deluge and hence the flooding.

      Unfortunately, can expect more of this as the city’s infrastructure is not designed for this amount of precipitation and despite years (decades?) of warnings, not nearly enough has been done to prepare for the new normal.

  15. TomDority

    ABC news last night did a segment with Joe Biden where Joe Biden asks why the news has not fact checked the 28 lies Trump shat out during the debate – fair enough that Trump should be called out.
    Later, and this is funny and really serious and dispiriting to me, The report was on Menendez being guilty of all counts and the half Billion dollars he had stashed at home – Printed on screen was Billion with a B and the reporter said Billion – with a B – and muir said Billion as well —- So I guess fact checking is never done even with such an obvious and easy statement by Muir or the Reporter or the screen test like that was million not billion. So a number that is off by 1000xs is let go – un-fact checked and unrecognized by Muir or anyone else in charge with any actual neurosynaptic activity.
    As for Anchoring in the realm of Finance and Economics – well that anchoring has been ongoing and in combat for supremacy for ever.

    1. griffen

      Well I am sure that the comedy film, Ron Burgundy, was indeed a fictional account but lo these many years later is it really far from the truth. “Don’t put anything on there, Ron will read whatever is on there!”….Fred Willard in fine form…

      Yeah it was stashed everywhere in his residence. But hey now those gold bars aren’t exactly his for keeping; those gold bars belong to the wife! Note to current and future US Congress critters, just follow the tried and true path to riches, and trade stocks and options. ( \sarc )

  16. The Rev Kev

    “To war with Kaja Kallas – Brussels’ total break with Moscow”

    Kaja Kallas may have ideas about having Ursula von der Leyen’s job one day and she may just get it. She is an opportunist that will always get in front of whatever the new narrative is. She tried to make out that she was repressed when the Soviets were in Estonia but it has come out that her family were among the ruling class. She was gung-ho about attacking anything Russian but which did not stop her husband having lucrative dealings with Russian companies which she denied all knowledge of. Now that she has Borell’s job, she dropped her home country of Estonia to make her way to the big time games in Brussels. I’m sure that in the next year or two she will be raging against the Iranians as well as the Chinese as that will be the new coming narrative. She is young and on the hustle.

    1. bertl

      Even allowing for the fact that I’ve never understood the point of Estonia, a hamlet passing for a village, it is a strong reminder of the Nazi roots of the European Project. Was it ever really intended to function as a Common Market so that the member states could prosper through trade with each other, or was the acorn planted to deliberately become a federal state with a taste for genocidal warfare?

      The only dignity the EU can now cling to belongs to Orban, given that the charmingly thick Ă©lite drones of the Fourth Reich seem intent on destroying the creature they, and their Ăšlite drone parents before them, created. When Trump and Vance walk away from Europe, it will collapse into little more than a gaggle of impoverished, scrabble farm countries, most of which will be unable to acquire the cheap energy which made their industries possible, let alone competitive.

      But, in the meantime, let’s just enjoy the entertaining failures of Useless fonda Lyin’ and the spawn of two families committed to two competing versions of totalitarianism as they dance to the grift.

      1. Benny Profane

        If these people have any doubts about the near term future of our support of Ukraine and NATO, the JD Vance VP pick should convince them to change their direction.

    2. CA

      “To war with Kaja Kallas – Brussels’ total break with Moscow”

      The European Union has become an encompassing, unrepresentative, increasingly authoritarian European government. President Macron, for instance, has evidently abandoned having a French foreign policy.

      1. Polar Socialist

        EU is also censoring media (and apparently social media, too), ignoring right to property (if you’re Russian), limiting freedom of speech and, looking at the way Orban/Hungary gets cold shouldered, multiple other freedoms, too.

        Why we elected von der Leyen again is beyond me… /s

        1. bertl

          She’s not been elected yet. There’s a good few hours before the vote, and if the EU Parliament does re-“elect” her and the uber-derango harpie with the spittle flecked chin from the-ever-so-small-it-might-as-well-not-even-be-there hamlet somewhere on the very edge of Russia, at least we can be happy in the knowledge that a Federal Europe will not be around to annoy the neighbours who really matter – along with the Global South – for much longer.

          A quick look at a map of Europe makes it clear which countries will be better off trading with Russia and it’s partners in BRICS, enjoy the benefits offered by the Belt and Road Initiative, and kick themselves free of the ridiculous policies, creepy judicial polices and all the constraints that neo-liberalism which Brussels imposes upon it’s member states. At least I cashed out fo the euro in time. August will soon be coming in and it’s going to be Blackpool or the Isle of Wight for my hols this year. Ah, the choices offered by a free Britain.

          1. caucus99percenter

            Indeed. Folks here think I’m nuts for saying that the U.K. is better off after Brexit. But I seem to recall that the U.K. once fought a big war so as not to have to accept being dictated to by an unelected German.

  17. Terry Flynn

    Re NHS productivity, OK I’ll bite, since health economics technically remains my “home discipline”. Throughout my 20+ year career the question of measuring the productivity of health care systems generally, and the NHS specifically, was seen as an issue for the brave or foolhardy. Andrew Street (these days at LSE) was a great guy who took on the task for many years. The trouble is, so many outcomes of healthcare are difficult/impossible to measure. Who cares if we are doing more joint replacements per GBPmillion if all the additional patients go into “catastrophic decline” – a topic my “top boss” in Bristol in 2009 wanted to investigate. FYI this is the guy who literally wrote the textbook on rheumatology used in UK medicine and who was chucked out of the US (ahem, I mean global) rheumatology professional association for blowing the whistle on Vioxx, only to get their medal of honour when the scandal was properly uncovered. He also was on a certain notorious BA flight that landed in Kuwait, but that’s a whole other interesting anecdote.

    A non-trivial number of elderly people getting joint replacement go rapidly downhill and die within 6 months. Nothing in the pre-operative clinical data predicted who would follow this path and my boss was understandably upset and wanted to use the quality of life instrument I co-developed to attempt to better identify potential people in future.

    Returning to the specifics of the BBC article – “money” and “staff” – the answers are well-known to certain health economists, as well as huge numbers of people who work in systems like the NHS (and I did real “at the coal face work” during the early part of the pandemic when our local hospital lost most of its admin staff in oncology). As the “Manchester school” people pointed out loudly from the mid 1990s to at least 2009 (when I left UK), there is a very stupid system of treatment funding, in that “cost-effective” new treatments get funded for everybody who need them but there are vast numbers of existing, old, cost-ineffective (and often harmful) treatments that should also be being evaluated and discontinued but are continued willy-nilly.

    As the article states, capital spending has been atrocious and it is now that buildings are literally falling down. I did my post-doc work during the 2nd Blair term (when Brown turned on the funding taps) and though a lot of the new builds were funny money (aka PFI), you really noticed how many new NHS and associated buildings went up. Plus my unit got the luxury of 5 year guaranteed funding cycles, allowing us to “do research the old way” rather than scramble to publish or perish.

    Regarding “things on the ground”, I’ll end with an anecdote from my (latest) visit to cardiology on Monday. I am scheduled for a CT scan within a fortnight. They insisted on prescribing three (yes three) tablets of the beta-blocker I am on to push up my dosage on the 3 days in run up to scan, to hopefully push my heart-rate down to 60ish (which is apparently better for scan resolution etc). The clinician had been talking shop with me so knew I had a stash (not “out of date”) of higher dose pills at home, and a pill cutter, so there was no reason for me to be adding to the zoo that is the out-patient pharmacy. FFS. Plus, I said quite openly “if you think that dose will bring me anywhere near 60 bpm, then I’ve a bridge to sell you. You should warn them they’ll be using that short-acting med to lower my pulse on the day”. No. That didn’t work. Because the boxes have to be ticked (checked for those across the pond). Never mind productivity increases. I’m frankly surprised the NHS hasn’t collapsed entirely already.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      On your joint replacement issue, I thought at least on hips it was clearly bifurcated. It’s a safe surgery with high success rates when done electionally (as in a result of pain or otherwise worn out hip joints) v. pretty risky when the result of the hip breaking and precipitating a fall with more damage, or a fall directly breaking the hip. The trauma both directly complicates the procedure and singles out more frail patients.

      1. Terry Flynn

        You’re right that knees are certainly more of a gamble but my boss said it happened with hips too (albeit less frequently) and in what were “safe” elective cases – unfortunately I never got to quiz him in detail and read the literature cause they shut our unit that year and I got head-hunted by Sydney.

        1. Revenant

          I’ll bite too because I was discussing this yesterday with my father-in-law (retired headmaster and maths teacher, who has seen teaching change in rhyming ways).

          There has been an *apparent* increase in NHS staff but seemingly not an effective increase in staff. I would like to see that data as a distribution of staff by average weekly hours worked and then a time series of how that distribution has changed. I am prepared to bet that the increase in staff is only partly driven by the “management explosion”. I would bet a lot if it is a result of the following (and the apparent clinical productivity drop is an artefact):

          – junior doctor training introduced the working time directive and limited hours to 48h/week (c. 2000 in Blair’s first orcsecond term?) I believe junior doctors work overtime but nowhere near the 100+ hours they used to pull a week when on call for two or three days straight. The change in training is a good thing, in terms of reducing fatigue errors and giving work/life balance but training schedules have not fully compensated so many junior doctors have fewer hours behind the wheel…. This is not just my opinion but the view of current senior consultants, clinical professors etc. that I know.

          – at the same time, GP’s negotiated a new contract with the NHS, accepting certain changes and marketisation in return for dropping their on call obligations from the GP contract. A friend negotiated this deal. He played a blinder: with one bound senior GP’s got their weekends back and a whole raft of out-of- hours GP services (founded by doctors then sold to private equity) sprang up on the NHS teat….

          – also around the same time, the number of medical school degrees awarded to women exceeded the number awarded to men. Again, this is a good thing viewed relative to sexism and a neutral thing in terms of the future… except that nobody thought through the implications. Female medics want time off to raise families and flexible working. In our set of parents, there are several doctor-doctor couples and some couples where just the wife is the doctor and only one of the women works full time as an A&E consultant but not the four others (geriatricians, radiologists, general practitioners, psychiatrists) etc. but all of the men do full time hours. This flexibility should be encouraged and invested in, as Scandinavia might, but in the UK there has been no investment. An employee carries a certain establishment cost so each part-time female post is very expensive per front line hour (real central costs of administration, time costs in terms of continuing professional development and recertification, opportunity costs in terms of posts that could be occupied by somebody able to deliver more marginal hours). If we want to support a part-time return-to-work NHS, we need to recognise that one full time doctor probably requires two near-full time doctors to replace them in terms of front line clinical hours.

          Nb: Historically these couples would gave been a male doctor married to a female nurse, who would gave stayed home to bring up the children. Nurses are very valuable but they are cheaper to train and hire and replace than doctors so the move towards female-led doctor populations and the habit of medical endogamy in marriage means that a lot more investment is required to make the new model work. We probably need to be training twice was many female doctors as we are to, if we wish to provide for both female career and family aspirations.

          My bet is that if the data were adjusted for the actual front-line hours (excluding training, administration etc) that we are getting from the NHS GP and hospital doctor staff, we would see that it has gone down while the costs have gone up….

          And, on a related point, the change in academic culture that has come with or brought about female dominance in medicine (it is hard to tell cause and effect) means a lot more female style learning (coursework, open book exams, modular exams and retakes, soft skills training, nurturing) and a lot less male style learning (one-chance written exams and steeplechases; hazing-style training regimes; stress, failure and humiliation). I wouldn’t recommend an exclusive diet of make cramming, bullshitting and all-nighters but equally I would prefer to have a doctor with brusque brilliance and an ability to think and act under pressure. It is notable that the one woman working full time is in a high stress surgical role (A&E consultant) and clearly thrives on it (and her husband is in an emergency service role so they have similar temperaments). There is a real issue in surgical practice of ensuring surgeons have enough hours on rarer procedures and the NHS is concentrating complex care in regional centres to ensure this yet ironically the majority of its doctor workforce is increasingly part-time….

          1. PlutoniumKun

            I had a similar conversation recently with my niece, a neurology resident – a year away from getting consultant, but now on a break for her new baby.

            The switch away from a macho medical culture in hospitals is welcome, but the impacts of a more female dominated medical profession on staffing have been recognised as a problem for a couple of decades. I recall many years ago a GP acquaintance saying mournfully that his wife threatened to divorce him if he filled a vacancy in his practice with a female doctor, because she knew that the result would be that the older male docs like him would end up doing the unsocial hours. But he was struggling to find any good young male GP’s. There was a study a while ago indicating that female doctors were strongly going for those specialities with a 9 to 5 working hours culture, leaving a potential issue with those areas where very long hours and night work were the norm.

            Mind you, one of the least pleasant experiences of my life was lying on a gurney after an accident under local anaesthetic listening to a very angry female surgeon angrily berating her junior doctors while giving me a tracheotomy because of something one did to me (I’ve no idea what). I was told by a nurse later that she was furious that she had been called in during a dinner party. To be fair, she almost certainly saved my life.

            1. Terry Flynn

              This is purely anecdote and for the UK midlands but (if my other comment comes out of mod) I’ve seen awful “macho culture” not disappearing but merely infecting women in certain disciplines where the clinician either has below average levels of patient contact or must be “physically strong” (orthopaedic surgeons remain predominantly male, given that most of their patients are old obese people needing total joint replacement). Of course I’m over-generalising somewhat but I don’t need to still be able to read institutional access medical and health-services-research journals to know my personal experience is true.

              I’ve a huge network of personal friends who keep me in the loop. Bottom line is “men and women can be equally effed up doctors”. Not exactly front page news. But we need to have an informed, calm debate about how medicine is practised before we can move forward. And as I write that, I realise just how utterly naive I sound…..

              PS One hopefully positive nugget I have gained from professional and personal experience over 25 years. Fully qualified hospital pharmacists are often the best people to deal with. They necessarily have the breadth of knowledge of GPs/family physicians but also a LOT of the depth of knowledge of specialty doctors in a wide variety of fields. After all, a bad drug interaction can end their career. It focuses the mind immensely IMO. Both of my last two hospital encounters were resolved by a (female if that matters to you) pharmacist consultant who bashed doctors’ heads together to STFU and sort the eff out.

          2. Terry Flynn

            Couldn’t have put it better myself. Each of your points is one I have encountered professionally and/or personally as a patient.

            Regarding the rebalancing of genders in medicine. Of course this is good. However, you must be prepared to ask questions when the “major” General Practice in my (pretty significant) suburb of Nottingham has 6 Partners, all female; 4 salaried GPs, all female; not even a locum male GP at present (and most of the time). A man who is worried about something like prostate cancer or suchlike and wants a male GP to do an intimate exam simply can’t have a qualified doctor do it. The most senior male is a health-care assistant, not even qualified to feel your abdomen. WTAF?

            The last locum male GP I saw was (IMNSHO) incompetent and, just to really eff me off, said “God bless you” as farewell. Sorry mate, once you bring religion into the consultation are you really gonna wonder when supporters of Reform (LOTS round here) are gonna start stuff on Facebook saying you’re a witch doctor? Yes, if you are inferring things about his ethnicity etc you are not incorrect. Yes, those idiots are racist. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a valid criticism about care. As a gay man I felt VERY uncomfortable with this particular GP. His “attitude” was not even remotely hidden.

            If I had felt more bolshy I would have baited him to enable a complaint. But why bother? When I was a “proper” whistle blower, along with my boss, in Australia, we won but I lost my career. So I don’t do it. Ironically the local hospital initiated a complaint against a junior GP at my General Practice after I ended up in A&E on Boxing day a few years back. The misconduct of the junior GP would have gone unreported by me but a German no-nonsense hospital doctor decided “this guy has been utterly shafted”. The senior partner was clearly royally effed off when she had to tell me (sotto voce of course) that “we have had to let Dr X go”. Yeah. In 1999 when I was part of a team in Bristol teaching medical students someone like Dr X would never have qualified.

            Your point about changes in the hours and contracts of doctors accords perfectly with my clinical peers from my Cambridge days. They now feel “dangerously exposed” in terms of how many cases they see and to what extent they might be very very wrong in diagnoses.

            There is plenty more I could say but I’ll round off with a comment that probably only makes sense to people who’ve read all my comments today on NC about my heart. When I had catheter cardiac ablation I experienced the single worst clinician in my life. People who “know” medicine but not the context I just gave would probably guess “an ex-Public school rugger-playing orthopaedic surgeon”. No, but this Scottish female Specialist Registrar (“consultant-in-waiting”) in cardiology had all the people skills of an orthopod. After 4 hours inducing an SVT (zapping me with increasing electricity) and then scanning for where the “short-circuit was happening” and then injecting me with adenosine to bring me out of SVT, there was the inevitable wait for my pulse to drop below 80 to enable her to laser/cryo ablate the offending muscle. My pulse refused to go below 80 – HELLO, if you had read ANYTHING in my record you’d know I have abnormally fast resting heart-rate. She said “Can’t you just calm down?” If I hadn’t been so utterly exhausted I’d have shouted out “no more than you can….” well suffice to say what I wanted to say would get me a permaban on NC.

            Healthcare culture is effed up in so many ways. Wrong gender balances remain, people maintaining “attitudes” that are absolutely inappropriate. My Cambridge medic friends are all gradually exiting the field. The UK is screwed.

  18. Mikel

    The question isn’t just how in the hell that roof 150 yards away from Trump was unguarded

    The question is also how this gunman knew that it was unguarded

    — Darren J. Beattie 🌐 (@DarrenJBeattie) July 15, 2024

    And what about how the allegedly shy, socially awkward “loner” so confidently walked out in the open with his gun to the building. Almost as if he thought somebody had his back…

    1. Aleric

      And also why wasn’t he carrying his identification? Nervous mistake, or slowing down the tracing of his body to allow others time to get away? What were the ‘explosives’ found in his car, loose fireworks, or a pipe bomb rigged to blow unwary investigators? Had he been following Trump (or other famous people) looking for a security hole, or was this a first time lucky? Lots of unanswered questions.

      1. Benny Profane

        I want to know how they had his DNA and how they used it so fast to I.D.. He was only 20 with no military experience.

        2. cfraenkel

          I heard (second hand, no source) that they traced the gun to his father, then used DNA to *confirm* identity as the father’s son. Slightly different story, a lot more plausible.

    1. The Rev Kev

      This was always going to happen. They have a history of attacking police and soldiers when it suits them as they know that those soldiers and police are probably just secularists. And they can turn quite violent.

      1. Terry Flynn

        You were close to owing me a new keyboard! Now I have hiccups from swallowing water weirdly.

        Bravo.

  20. Craig H.

    Seems about right, looking at the volume of phishing e-mails I receive.

    Whenever I peek in my spam folders things look bad but for me the gmail and protonmail spam filters are almost 100% effective.

    (Cross fingers and knock on wood.)

  22. Ghost in the Machine

    Plastic surgeon reveals $10,000 surgery Donald Trump would have to undergo to fix his bullet-damaged ear Daily Mail (Li)

    He should not get it fixed. Visible reminder

      1. IM Doc

        The other letter of St Paul that has been getting a lot of email time among my deeply Protestant family members ( mind you mostly all New Deal Dems – all in for Trump now) is the following from the letter to the Ephesians – 6:11 ( I added 6:12 in too for the whole paragraph in context)

        (11) Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. (12) For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens.

        Why is 6:11 important – well it is the exact time stamp on the chyrons of the video of the shooting – the exact moment. These people and their culture and their religion are primed to look for “signs” and “symbols” – and there you go. It could not have been better planned if by God himself.

        These are my people. They taught me everything I know about being a human being. I am who I am because of them. I respect them and I love them. I may not see eye to eye with them – but they matter in the world just as much as all the elites. Maybe more so.

        The metropolitan elite can laugh all they want – they can laugh all the way to a Donald Trump landslide. These vast numbers of people in the hinterlands have been slandered, slammed, downgraded and victimized by these PMC types for an entire generation. Their entire communities have been sent overseas. Their populations have been decimated by opiates while the Sackler and PMC types sucked it up in NYC. Sometimes, in life, all you have left is your faith. I know that is very very hard for the intelligentsia to understand – but at this point the intelligentsia are lost in their own navel gazing. Real difficult times have descended on vast swaths of these people. And they are coping with whatever seems to be real. And even I, who was raised in their religious culture, can see where they are coming from. And please mark this one down for the future – they are getting ready — indeed they are far more ready than the big blue city inhabitants can possibly imagine.

        As I said the other day, this whole entire war against Donald Trump for the past almost decade has not really been Biblical to me – it has all the makings of a Greek Tragedy. The hubris of these PMC DNC media people has been overwhelming – and I feel the Chorus is sitting on the side of stage – just about ready to welcome Nemesis to the production.

        God help us all.

        1. flora

          Thank you. I’m reminded of this from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

          Horatio:
          O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

          Hamlet:
          And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
          There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
          Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

              1. flora

                Indeed. See the Italian Renaissance and the Hospital of the Innocents , Ospedale degli Innocenti, architecture.

        2. Tom Doak

          Do you think someone who understands this connection might have altered the time stamp slightly?

          Most of us wouldn’t even notice.

        3. Steve H.

          > just about ready to welcome Nemesis to the production.

          Nemesis came to the tragedies later, particularly with Sophocles. Even the antagonist was an accretion to earlier theater, just the hypokrites and the chorus working through the hamartia, the fatal flaw. And they did it to themselves.

          Here’s a framework for relative optimism:

          : There are no Blue states—only Blue cities.
          : Traditional values versus Secular-rational values
          :: Traditional values emphasize the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values. People who embrace these values also reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.
          :: Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. These societies place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable.

          This is an urban/rural split. Riots don’t happen in cornfields. While there’s always willing knuckleheads, Turchin estimates that non-military social unrest has a mortality rate about that of Covid, so no big deal. (/s but true)

          What the rural areas can do is withdraw from contact. Fallow fields, no food. You still need truckers to keep supply lines going. They don’t even need active measures like burning hay on the highway. Which opens a world of possibilities of not actually killing each other.

          Our situation is not sustainable. It’s not even resilient, which implies a return to a previous state. But there are islands of stability in the midst of chaos. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

          1. flora

            erm, yeah, look at all those “You’re Fired” signs, supposedly addressed to B, a riff on the TV show The Apprentice, though the thin script lettering written to B address is nearly invisible at a distance. I don’t know.

        5. Not Qualified to Comment

          It could not have been better planned if by God himself.

          Seems to me God has never been subtle in His interventions – burning bushes, extinction-event floods, plagues of locusts, the Sun standing still, resurrections, etc. The Devil, tho’…

    2. Mikel

      Makes me think about all the surgeries on mass shooting survivors and the cost over the years.

  23. vidimi

    tis appears to be a record year for flooding. The 711mm in China in 24 hours is insane, but Toronto got it pretty bad as well last night with almost half of that, which is still almost a semester’s worth of rainfall in one day. Blame the remnants of storm Beryl.

    I live between two rivers in France, about 30m from one and 70m from the other so the risk is quite high. Torrential rain runs off mostly into the rivers and we have hundreds of reservoirs upstream to control water volumes, but when the levee breaks, i’ll have no place to stay.

    1. The Rev Kev

      Might be an idea to have a light boat – a “tinny” – by your home if you have not one already. We know people that were foolish enough to build their home in a gully as the wife wanted to hear the water babbling nearby. From their back door, a small kid could have thrown a rock into that tiny river. Then came a flood at night and they had to take to the roof as those raging waters gutted their house underneath them and as they sat there, they had to watch things like containers go roaring past from their upstream neighbours.

    2. Steve H.

      > when the levee breaks, i’ll have no place to stay.

      This place won’t work either. Ten tornadoes, ‘tornadoes everywhere’ during the recent derecho.

  24. Rob

    The video of the owl and the helium filled bubbles triggered me to visualize the owl as the dark matter/energy in the universe causing galaxies to collide and intermingle. Kinda like a square dance caller lol.

  25. MicaT

    While China continues to get all sorts of bad press about energy, they are the leader in renewables by a lonnnng way. 2023 about 220GW of solar. The US did about 30GW.
    Being equivalent to 5 nuclear reactors? No, because those reactors would be running 24X7 vs solar is only working 0-8 hours per day depending on weather and season.
    And FYI that link doesn’t work but I couldn’t find the correct one.

  26. Wukchumni

    If you want to hang out, you’ve gotta take Putin out, Ukraine
    If you want to get down, down on the ground, Ukraine

    Ursula don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie
    Ukraine

    If you got bad news, you want to kick them blues, Ukraine
    When your day is done, and you want to run, Ukraine

    She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie
    Ukraine

    If your day is gone, and you want to ride on, Ukraine
    Don’t forget this fact, you can’t get it back, Ukraine

    She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie
    Ukraine

    She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie
    Ukraine

    Ukraine

  27. flora

    re: Biden set to announce support for major Supreme Court reforms – Washington Post

    Pure kayfab. Three co-equal branches of govt, also the GOP controls the House. / ;)

    2. Tom Doak

      I got a chuckle out of Biden’s team suggesting term limits (DON’T say age limits) for people in high office.

  28. Jeff W

    Self-Awareness Might Not Have Evolved to Benefit The Self After All ScienceAlert

    
consciousness may have evolved to facilitate key social adaptive functions. Rather than helping individuals survive, it evolved to help us broadcast our experienced ideas and feelings into the wider world. And this might benefit the survival and wellbeing of the wider species.

    That doesn’t seem right. Presumably, other animals have consciousness (defined in the article as “embodied subjective awareness”) too, but it’s not all that clear to me how much, say, orangutans, presumably possessing consciousness, leading semi-solitary lives need to “broadcast [their] experienced ideas and feelings into the wider world.” To me, it seems like “facilitat[ing] key social adaptive functions” is more likely spandrel, a byproduct of the evolutionary process, rather than something selected for.

    Then, again, these authors seem a bit confused about what came about as a result of evolution. They say “Intuition
is an automatic, cognitive process that evolved to provide fast trusted explanations and predictions.” No it didn’t.

    We can behave in certain ways and, when we haven’t analyzed the circumstances under which that behavior occurs (or can’t do so), when we can’t give a verbal description of why we’re behaving a certain way, we call that “intuition.” Sure, it’s advantageous from the standpoint of evolution that we can behave quickly in somewhat reliable ways but the fact we can’t say why we’re doing or thinking or feeling a certain way, the hallmark of “intuition,” is an accidental byproduct of evolution—that inability didn’t “evolve to provide” anything.

    1. flora

      Heh. Science Alert assumes Darwin was wrong? Wider species vs individuals? Well, alrighty then. / ;)

  29. Tom Stone

    I’m parked across the street from the main Library in Santa Rosa ( On an income of @ $ 1,300 a month I can’t afford $80 for basic internet) and looking at the turn arrows that were recently painted after the resurfacing of the street.
    They are pointing the wrong way.
    One that should be pointing into a parking lot at points at the Library building, the other should point to the intersection to indicate it is a left turn lane and it is backward and also points at the Library building.
    Covid?

  30. Vicky Cookies

    Updates from the RNC in Milwaukee: Columbus, OH “dialogue officers”, a unit which is the brainchild of social psychologist Clifford Scott, shot and killed a homeless man at an encampment a mile from the security zone yesterday. I was serving as a legal observer during the first (hot) march, and the officers were extremely chummy and jovial; more experienced protesters were not fooled into engaging with them. I had been more concerned by State Police from Indiana and Texas (the Texans arrested a Palestinians woman from CodePink yesterday), though it is sadly unsurprising to me when cops do cop things. Walking through the heavily-policed downtown after hearing the news, it appears that the Columbus unit has been pulled from the streets. Mayor Cavalier Johnson, a right-wing neoliberal Democrat who has said his political hero is Bush the younger, has blood on his hands.

    1. JBird4049

      Isn’t it always that the appearance of doing (pseudo dialogue officers) is more important than (real, trained staff) the doing of it?

  31. Tom Stone

    It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall during one of the Biden Family discussions.
    The gravy train has left the rails and both Bro James and Hunter, “The smartest man I know” facing jail time are part of the trusted inner circle along with “Dr” Jill, all trying to manipulate a man with quickly progressing dementia.
    Any “Conversation” with Genocide Joe will have to start with warm fuzzies along the lines of “Joe, you are AMAZING, the greatest President since Hillary Clinton! ” to avoid a tantrum.
    Where things go from there will largely depend on how his bowels are acting.
    And given Joe’s frailty there’s no guarantee he’ll last until November, let alone January.
    It’s going to be an interesting next few Months since you really “Can’t overestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up” as the Wizard of Kalorama put it.

    1. Michaelmas

      Tom Stone: It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall during one of the Biden Family discussions.

      The comedy keeps giving. The latest from Biden at the NAACP national convention in Las Vegas, Nevada–

      Biden tells NAACP: ‘I know what a Black job is: it’s the vice-president’ of the US:
      President makes comment in convention speech, referring to remarks made by Trump in June debate

      https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/17/biden-naacp-speech-black-jobs

    2. steppenwolf fetchit

      I guess ‘Joe’s ability to fuck things up’ was just fine with the Wizard of Kalorama when it came to Long Knifing Bernie Sanders. ‘Fucking things up’ was a price worth paying to make sure there was no risk allowed of Sanders becoming President.

      We can’t say that Obama hasn’t been . . . ‘consequential’. . . as the self-important neo-conservative innalekshulz like to say.

  32. Jason Boxman

    True enough, SMS for 2FA is garbage. My favorite is companies that now prevent me from using my Google Voice number for this, such as Wells Fargo, because I suppose it isn’t “secure”. But to port attack a GV number, you need to compromise a Google account, which can use real 2FA, and pay a fee to authorize the port. With a carrier number it is much more vulnerable. Email for 2FA is also a better bet, at least again with Gmail, because it sits behind actual 2FA, not SMS 2FA.

    Sigh.

    But companies still ask me — financial companies — my SSN to confirm my identity.

  33. nippersmom

    U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez was convicted of all charges Tuesday in a sweeping corruption trial in which he was accused of accepting bribes of gold and cash from three New Jersey businessmen and acting as an agent for the Egyptian government.
    He should have just stuck to working for Israel like the rest of Congress and no one would have batted an eye.

    1. JohnnySacks

      But AIPAC are the good guys – approved by the proper signatures on paper documents.

      Egypt and Russia skipping over the middlemen? BAD BAD BAD PUNISH PUNISH PUNISH!

      He even gets a speedy trial, indicted Sept 22, 2023 and in under a year convicted on all counts.

    2. steppenwolf fetchit

      What a sad and primitive approach to corruption. Gold bars? Fancy cars? Really? I guess so.

  34. steppenwolf fetchit

    . . . ” The San Jose company, Savor, uses a thermochemical process to create its animal-like fat, which is free of the environmental footprint of both the dairy industry and plant-based alternatives.” . . .

    Mmm-hmm. But I wonder what the environmental impact of that thermochemical process is? Plus the environmental impact of running the level of civilization which will support that thermochemical process?

    By the way, I hope that someone is researching-for-real the claimed net skycarbon resuckdown effect of dairy cattle on pasture integrated into restorative agriculture systems, silvo-culture, silvo-pasture, etc. Because if that effect is as real as practitioners like Gabe Brown think it is, then the proven fact ( if proven) of that effect can be used to beat back the efforts of people like Gates to drive all the people in the world into multi-story hyper-urban stalags and gulags where we will all eat bugs and chemical reaction vessel butter and so forth. And the people like Gates will possess all the re-wilded land surface of the Whole Earth for their own sole and exclusive amusement.

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