Dear patient readers,
Due to all the Biden stories, you got an extra big serving of Links.
Researchers Make Breakthrough in Study of Mysterious 2000-Year-Old Computer Found in Shipwreck Futurism (Kevin W)
Earth’s core has slowed so much it’s moving backward, scientists confirm. Here’s what it could mean CNN (Kevin W)
The Misplaced Incentives in Academic Publishing Undark
Ghosting isn’t as cold-hearted as it seems, say psychologists — but people still hate it ZME Science (Dr. Kevin)
#COVID-19
The US Primary-Care System Can’t Withstand the Next Pandemic Bloomberg. A Bloomberg editorial. Lambert also featured in Water Cooler but deserves prominent play.
Russian experts sound alarm over post-Covid health issue RT (Anthony L)
New study links COVID-19 to lasting neuropsychiatric issues, highlights vaccination benefits News-Medical (Paul R)
Climate/Environment
The Great Oil Shortage: Are We Ready for the Next Crisis? Deep Dive
We don’t see a pathway’ to coal phaseout, says US utility Financial Times
Swiss government will allow financial institutions to self-regulate greenwashing Green Central Banking
13,000 evacuated as Northern California’s Thompson Fire burns SFGate
China?
‘Made in China’ resonating more deeply at home Asia Times (Kevin W)
EU brushes aside risk of China trade war over electric vehicle tariffs Guardian
Why Chinese banks are now vanishing. The state is struggling to deal with troubled institutions Economist
Sport US federal investigation into Chinese swimmers’ doping cases subpoeanas World Aquatics’ executive director to testify ABC Australia (Kevin W)
Koreas
‘This is very serious’: Tensions spike in the buffer zone between North and South Korea Independent
Japan
Japan declares victory in ‘war’ on floppy disks BBC (Kevin W)
Africa
Kenya’s mass protests expose African fury with IMF Financial Times
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is grappling with a severe food crisis exacerbated by two formidable challenges: rampant insecurity and devastating floods Business Day Nigeria
European Disunion
European central bankers have warned that risks including trade tensions and high government debt are piling up for the region’s economy Financial Times
Old Blighty
Richard Seymour, Majority Without a Mandate New Left Review (Anthony L)
Consequences of the British Election Ian Welsh (Micael T)
Councils Locked Out of Funding Signal Crisis for UK After Vote Bloomberg
The Dreadful Continuity of British Foreign Policy Daniel Larison
Starmer’s role in Assange’s persecution Thomas Fazi
Gaza
Israel’s starvation policy in Gaza is forcing people to eat tree leaves Mondoweiss
Yemen’s hypersonic missiles: A West Asian military revolution The Cradle
Yemen’s Houthis ramp up Red Sea attacks Middle East Eye. From mid-week, still germane.
Mossad-led negotiating team returns to Israel after talks on Hamas offer in Doha Times of Israel
Saudi FM calls for sanctions on Israeli officials amid Gaza war Arab News
New Not-So-Cold War
Answers to Russian media questions President of Russia (guurst)
Vladimir Putin: “The issue of creating a legal framework for international security and strategic stability is still on our to-do list” International Affairs (Micael T)
Viktor Orbán meets Vladimir Putin despite EU outcry Financial Times
Putin: Ceasefire ‘Impossible’ Until Peace Talks With Ukraine Begin Sputnik (Kevin W). Russia has made clear it will not stop prosecuting the war even if talks are on, see Istanbul in March-April 2022.
Much-vaunted Patriots can’t even defend themselves TASS. This was reported by Alexander Mercouris, that Russian forces claimed to have successfully intercepted 4 Patriots. This is an indirect confirmation. That’s before getting to the fact that Russia has also been destroying the batteries.
The editorial board of the @FT calls for special treatment for the restructuring of Ukrainian bonds by private creditors, asserting that ‘this is not like any other sovereign restructuring’. They argue that ‘the country cannot be distracted by a lengthy bankruptcy deal’ and must… pic.twitter.com/wFrR2Mgps7
— Karina Patrício (@KPatricio_) July 5, 2024
Ukraine To Be Warned It’s ‘Too Corrupt’ For NATO – Telegraph RT
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Europol Says Mobile Roaming Tech Making Its Job Too Hard The Register
Scotland biometrics commish wants ICO to look into cops use of cloud Biometric Update
Imperial Collapse Watch
He got $30K to leave the military when it needed to downsize. Now the government wants that money back.NBC. Paul R: “This is disgusting.”
The centre-right is dying a slow death. It is an epochal change for politics across the West. Eugyppius. Micael T: “Wake me up when the Ukraine-conflict, the China-confrontation, fairer distribution of wealth is happening. Until then it is just change of package with the same content.”
As Biden slips toward the edge, NATO holds its collective breath Washington Post
Immigration
Are Mass Deportations Possible? The Case Of The Dominican Republic Joseph Jordan
Trump
Biden
Masks Have a Higher Approval Rating than Joe Biden OK Doomer (Dr. Kevin)
You can stick a fork in him:
NEW: President Biden goes on incredibly confusing rant, calls himself the first black woman to serve with a black president.
He also called himself the “first president that got elected statewide in the state of Delaware, when I was a kid.”
“By the way, I'm proud to be the, as… pic.twitter.com/VMNtVe85Pz
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 4, 2024
‘In denial’: Democrats livid that Biden is digging in Politico
Biden defends health, insists he will beat Trump in high-stakes interview The Hill
The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden New York Magazine. Help me. An effort to depict the press as snookered. Yes, the insiders were keeping Biden in tissue paper. Even so 1. that should have been noticed and 2. he was having plenty of bad moments in public despite that.
Joe Biden Interview With ProPublica: Full and Unedited ProPublica. Robin K: “This interview was 9 mos ago. Differences of Biden then to Biden now seem to show how remarkably swift his decline has been.”
Biden tells Democratic governors he needs more sleep and plans to stop scheduling events after 8 p.m. CNN (Kevin W). More admissions against interest.
There’s a Name for the Trap Biden Faces New York Times
Biden Must Resign Atlantic (furzy). When you have lost the Atlantic…
The French Election Is a Warning for Biden The American Conservative
It’s Time For The Biden Campaign To Embrace AI HuffPo. BC: “A HuffPo op-ed calling for Biden to be replaced by an AI avatar – for ‘democracy’”.
2024
Whether It’s Biden or Someone Else, Gaza Remains Top Priority for “Uncommitted” Voters Intercept
INTERVIEW: Kamala Harris is so stupid she thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus George Galloway. ZOMG, the headline justifies a watch!
Gunz
Vending machines selling bullets at grocery stores (Carla R)
AI
I have to say AI's ideas for camping are quite unorthodox, to put it mildly. pic.twitter.com/O6g90QvlyV
— Tomasz Oryński (@TOrynski) July 3, 2024
Google Paper: AI Potentially Breaking Reality Is a Feature Not a Bug 404media
Brazil blocks Meta from using social media posts to train AI BBC (Kevin W)
The Bezzle
The Shareholder Supremacy Edward Zitron
Air travel is getting worse. That’s what passengers are telling the US government Associated Press. Kevin W: “Related story Delta flight diverted to JFK after passengers were served spoiled food CNN”. I had multiple absolutely awful domestic trips in the 12 months before I left the US, monster delays and cancellations.
Guillotine Watch
Class Warfare
Here’s Why the Young No Longer Believe in the American Dream Crisis Investing (Micael T)
The average American feels they need to earn over $180K to live comfortably, survey shows USA Today (Kevin W)
Antidote du jour (Tracie H):
And a bonus (dk):
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) July 4, 2024
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
294 comments
Comments are closed.
Earth core slowdown
Working link:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/07/05/science/earth-inner-core-rotation-slowdown-cycle-scn
That explains those funny noises at night…
“Vending machines selling bullets at grocery stores”
Small update – The Grocery store in Alabama has removed its ammo vending machine after the legality of the machine was questioned during a pre-council meeting and the fact that ammo wasn’t really selling-
https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/grocery-store-in-alabama-removes-ammo-vending-machine-ammunition-guns-weapons-firearms-tuscaloosa-american-rounds-pell-city-grant-majors-ceo-fresh-value-360-facial-recognition-security-measures
Maybe they can replace it with a poker machine. After proving your identity, you can play it and instead of getting coins in the metal tray, you get bullets instead with smaller wins coughing up only .22 caliber rounds.
It’s the perfect headline to end the week of July 4th celebration and freedom. Mom, apple pie and ammunition…what an exceptional country, a thousand points of light. Begs a question though, what happens to all those old not in use vending machines for cigarettes? I remember those as a young kid, the ones with the old pull handles to make a selection.
Keep on rocking in the free world….
I remember those too. There was an article (but not I’m remembering where) about an artist who had repurposed one of those vending machines to dispense small cigarette pack-sized artworks. Sounded like a lot of fun.
Well, hey, the British didn’t leave the budding US because apple pie. / ;)
Also, more currently, .22 cal is the right size for very small game like rabbits etc.
About 10 or so years ago, worked an office job in the Dallas area for a financial institution. Coworker was a UK born but now naturalized American citizen ( not cheap or easy to do, so I have heard ). He’d married and become “one of us”…
The joke on July 4th used to be that well, we were done with you Yankees anyway. My reply was usually…what the heck was happening by 1812 ?!? It was largely a fun and highly not serious at all exchange.
Ha! What the heck was happened by 1812? Dolly Madison might have a word. / ;)
Well, His Majesties Marines assisted Mz. Madison in the “remodeling” of the White House.
My historic recall of events not being ideal in this skirmish, I consulted with the experts and averted any aid or assistance from AI or chatgpt, as it were.
More nuance than I remembered.
https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/major-events/war-of-1812-overview/
“The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching; & will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, & the final expulsion of England from the American continent.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1812. Some marching it turned out to be.
I still believe in a post-Jackpot world that .22 ammo will be one of the most valuable small trade ‘currencies’.
Not to mention having a tube-fed tack-driving bolt action Marlin or Remington .22…..
Remember when .22 ammo was scarce during Oldbummers first term? The federal 500 pack went from $9 to $29, IF you could find them…
jefemt: I still believe in a post-Jackpot world that .22 ammo will be one of the most valuable small trade ‘currencies’.
Why do you believe that in a post-Jackpot world there’d be a humanly breathable atmosphere?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
I suppose my conjecting about post-jackpot— its a theory of ecology…. there generally are a few critters than somehow survive things, I imagine that a few humans will somehow slip along in the margins.
That’s where species seem to make a go of things- the margins. And, its the odds are good, as the goods are odd— 8 billions, some human in a remote part of some south-of- the -equator realm might make it. I’m downwind of Hanford, and near several hundred Nuke silos, and near a poised -for- an- every -200,000 year cataclysmic volcano, so I’m thinking It ain’t me, babe…
“Say can I have some of your purple berries?
Yes I’ve been eating them, for 6 or 7 weeks now, haven’t been sick yet,
Probably keep us both alive….”
Wooden Ships CSNY
No mention of a .22 in the song.
Lookout, mama there’s a white boat coming up the river…
I’d agree with that, and keep in mind that most gun owners have barely ever fired their weapons and bought too much ammo initially, as it happened.
You need a few things to be a currency, and scarcity is important-you can’t just make bullets out of thin air, and fungibility is inherent in every cartridge, it isn’t as if brand X .22 won’t work.
During WW2 my dad told me that cigarettes were the ad hoc currency in occupied Prague, but then again everybody smoked like chimneys back then.
In Metro game/novel series, bullets are used as currency in a post-apocalyptic world.
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/metros-bullets-make-a-better-currency/
In prisons, it’s cigarettes or ramen noodles.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/26/491236253/ramen-noodles-are-now-the-prison-currency-of-choice
Them’s tradin’ bullets, not shootin’ bullets.
sez you. heh.
adding: scarcity, or what was it then called – supply line or supply chain disruption – might have a financial effect. Right.
I really think that type of world will be culturally based and will only characterize portions of the US and Mexico. Other parts of the world less so.
We are a consumer society without parallel. No need will go unfulfilled (for long).
This vending machine really satisfies a need. Now when some yahoo drinks his last beer and then runs out of ammo while shooting at highway signs he can just pull into a quickie-mart and stock up on both.
I also see this machine having great appeal in gang infested venues throughout the country. Now rather than having to buy ammo miscreants can just drive into a store, literally, at zero dark thirty, loop a chain around the ammo machine and drag it out to their pickup. Now they’ll have plenty of different calibers for their inventory of various stolen weapons.
Too bad it’ll be awhile before this revolutionary product penetrates namby-pamby California. Though Calis will probably be able to cross over into Nevada and use one while in Las Vegas. Just say’in.
Hey, can you imagine firefighters turning up to fight a fire in a grocery story – only to be informed that it has one of those ammo vending machines inside?
Now if a good guy with a gun-sans ammo, but with a roll of Quarters and a ‘gunball machine’, had only been in a Fordyce grocery store…
We had another mass shooting last week in Arkansas where 4 were killed and 11 injured in a community twice the size of Tiny Town here, population-wise.
I’ve noticed that these mass murders are no longer paraded around by the not so forthright estate as they used to, it’s more of an article you’d see on the bottom fold of the front page, if that.
Airgap, may I say that your comment that “no need [for our consumer society] will go unfulfilled” is entirely wrong, imo. We are not really a “vending machine society” as you would have it. imo. Though the neoliberal “market uber alles” might think it is. / ;)
“We are a consumer society without parallel. No need will go unfulfilled (for long).”
Unless it is a prescription medication. ADD drugs have been in very short supply for years now; same with some cancer drugs.
In Minneapolis, we now have vending machines that give out free doses of Narcan.
Much more useful than a vending machine that dispenses ammo but still just as sad.
Re air travel getting worse. The following seems unbelievable but this happened to a sister of a good friend of mine so I believe the tale. Sorry, not sure which airline this was. Flying from Europe home to Vegas, she and her husband had a stopover in London with just enough time to make their connecting flight. As they got to the gate the last passengers were just heading down to the plane. They were told that were too late to check in and that their seats had already been given away and that they’d have to wait until the next day for a flight. They objected as clearly they weren’t late and they needed to be home. Then they were told that the flight was overbooked so they’d actually been bumped, not because they were late. They continued to object. They fly first class and offered to sit in regular as they really needed to get home. They were then allowed to board, they split up, she went to first class and her husband to economy. As they were taxi-ing to the runway, husband noticed empty seats! He counted 9 empty seats! WTF? What on earth was really going on?
I have friends in PEI. He flew Air Canada to BC to visit a sick friend – Charlottetown to Vancouver with a stopover in Toronto. There were inexplicable delays going out and return, both of which involved overnights in Toronto. He missed an event in Vancouver and a day of work because of the delays.
It’s Time For The Biden Campaign To Embrace AI HuffPo. BC: “A HuffPo op-ed calling for Biden to be replaced by an AI avatar – for ‘democracy’”.
The HuffPo = The SillyConHo.
Miami to Kansas City. 4 gate changes 30 minutes to boarding.
I recently made a round trip from New Orleans to Portland and back using the cheap flights on Spirit. Paid like 160$ for the flight. No bags, just a backpack stuffed to the brim. There was one layover in Vegas going towards and two layovers coming back in Vegas and Houston.
Multiple gate changes there and back but luckily the gates were right next to each other so it’d be like Gate change from A20 to A18 with maybe a 15 minute delay.
One of the flights going to Portland from Vegas had to be delayed slightly because the plane had maintenance issues. Also it seemed a lot of the ticket people were busting their ass and doing the work of 2/3 people.
As Blitzkrieg wrote yesterday Biden a la El Cid substituting the horse with “AI”. The HuffPo = The Onion without fun.
But in reply – actually related to your post :) – I’m nervous about an upcoming trip. I’m breaking my no layover rule to avoid flying on a Boeing.
Mikel – yesterday you wrote:
Do you have a link? I would like it for a friend who believed the official propaganda (I never did).
Thanks in advance. :-)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/us/politics/us-bases-alert-level-russia.htm
The statement in the article is: “Throughout the war, U.S. officials have assessed that President Vladimir V. Putin is loath to expand the war beyond Ukraine’s borders.”
Remarkable, after all the US and European talking heads claiming Russia wants to invade Europe and having European countries signing up for NATO, US officials have managed the Ukrainian “Operation” believing Russia does not want to expand the war beyond Ukrainian borders.
Thanks! But link doesn’t work.
Trailing “l” missing after htm.
Sorry
I found this one:
Alert Level Raised at U.S. Bases in Europe Over Russian Threats
It says: Throughout the war, U.S. officials have assessed that President Vladimir V. Putin is loath to expand the war beyond Ukraine’s borders.
I don’t know if that is the same one?
Alice: yes, that is the quote that’s been doing the rounds
That was a quote from links that day that I posted to comment on. I can’t open X on my phone due to enhanced tracking protection. So I just posted that part from NC links:
“This week the NY Times just casually dropped that the official U.S. intelligence assessment has always been that Putin didn’t want to expand the Ukraine conflict beyond Ukraine. But in public, Biden and other U.S officials have been pushing a domino theory that if we negotiated..”pic.twitter.com/ccX5tbLYkk
— Marcus Stanley (@MarcusMStanley) July 4, 2024
Thank you! I missed the tweet, in which the author misstates the phrase actually used in the NYT. Marcus Stanley wrote: official U.S. intelligence assessment, while the NYT piece only says US officials, not necessarily the same thing.
Mom-in-law came over to visit us in Europe last year. United “forgot” to book the Europe-internal leg. Swiss graciously agreed to fly her one flight later, but of course bags stayed in Zurich. Spent hours on the phone to avoid the same happening on the return with United seriously suggesting that she pay to change her return, because they were unable to confirm the first leg in Europe. We finally did manage to confirm this flight, but of course bags were lost again for several days.
Offered compensation never arrived, United customer service consistently rude and insulting. Never again.
As a long time loather of air travel I remember when we used to make fun of airline names, treating them like acronyms. My favorite:
Alitalia – A Long Interminable Trip And Luggage Is Absent
I had it as “Airplane Lands In Tokyo, All Luggage In Amsterdam”.
SABENA was also quite good: Such A Bloody Experience, Never Again.
And QANTAS: Quite A Nice Trip — Any Survivors?
Nope, the best is BWIA – British West Indies Airlines – “But Will It Arrive?”
If you ever flew BWIA, you know that this is the question….
Thank you.
How about LIAT? Late, if at all.
Given how scarce land is on the small Caribbean Islands, there is not really a way to dispose of crashed and totaled planes. Hence if the crash occurred around the airport, they would just drag the wreckage to a side of the runway and leave it there. It always was a thrill coming in for a landing and counting the wrecks… Gave a whole new meaning to the word “gauntlet” ;^)
Dunno if still true but Aeromexico = Aero Maybe
BOAC, the predecessor of British Airways, was: Better On A Camel.
The Dutch language version for SABENA – Sex Aan Boord En Niets Anders
As part of my own personal 5-Year-Plan of flying once every 5 years since 9/11, I was kinda stressed about going par avian with the rise in Covid in congested places like aluminum tubing with wings attached and a horrible airport in Denver that conspires with you to despise it, but I persevered.
Had a Bombardier on the way out the dreaded 737 Max coming home, and you know how they say most air accidents happen when you’re within a thousand miles of home, I kept obsessing over that in hopes that my worry wart face would cause Covid to be somebody else’s huckleberry a few rows ahead of yours truly.
Turns out that you can’t bring a cast iron horseshoe on a plane, but I had my lucky rabbit’s foot and 4 leaf clover, which I think saved the day.
If I was flying on a Boeing 737 MAX, I would want to take my lucky parachute. I wonder if it would fit in an overhead locker?
They asked if I was ok with the exit row, and I told the flight attendant, sure… what’s the rush if this Boeing 737 Max nose-dives into ground.
Do like the fighter pilots do; sit on it. An extra thick cushion for the flight.
Oh, and we all know where you stow your life preserver; Davy Jones Locker.
Husband coming home from Spain had paid extra for a specific seat ( legroom!) on Iberia airlines when he booked 6 months ago. The flight was taken over by Level. He went to check in at the airport hours before his flight and was told that his seat wasn’t available and the flight was full so he would take the seat they gave him or have to be rebooked on a flight the next day. This was a 12 hour non-stop and the seat they gave him wasn’t close to equivalent. My husband was livid the whole flight.
After several phone calls, Iberia has agreed to refund him the extra $115 he paid for original seat selection, but we’ll see if it really happens.
Are there any transatlantic liners left?
One: Queen Mary 2
I’m Canadian and refuse to fly Air Canada, partly because service is notoriously atrocious, has always been, but mainly because when the pandemic first grounded all airlines they kept the funds from passengers booked flights, never returned any of it, took millions from the Government of Canada on the negotiated promise of returning passengers funds, then instead of returning funds as agreed gave passengers credits instead. I won’t reward with my custom any airline which treats passengers with such utter contempt.
And Delta is also on my No Fly List for similar reasons, the way they treat passengers is the worst I’ve ever experienced, they’ve got a thing they do where they rapidly escalate to making a scene with “SIR” or “MA’AM” if they don’t get IMMEDIATE compliance to some menial request, their stance with passengers is openly adversarial.
Lufthansa used to be at the top of my favs but, bizarrely, they’ve removed the ability to choose seats in advance and this has resulted in chaos and uncertainty – you never know until the last minute if you’re even going to get a seat, so I’m going to have to downgrade the experence. British Airways gets top marks for courteousness and amazingly competent service, I have dietary requirements and they never fail to get it right (the secret is every flight attendant has an app on their iphones).
“(the secret is every flight attendant has an app on their iphones)”
Sorry, I don’t get it.
As the flight attendant comes to each seat, they have an app in front of them which they are scrolling and which has your name, needs, dietary requirements, etc. So serving becomes a very smooth operation.
Thanks. I haven’t flown in a few years so wasn’t aware of the tech advances enhancing flight attendants’ work flow.
Scare Canada is one to avoid at all costs. I had to take the spouse to MIL’s funeral last fall. First, they jerked me out of the bereavement discount, missed our connection and lost the luggage. I have been sending my students to conferences instead of myself… Flying is to be avoided. Staying home is the true luxury these days.
Heathrow has a proprietary system of cut-off times to be allowed through security and boarding. It initially sounded like the heroes of your story fell victim to this, with the time elsosed between disembarkation and flight connections being too long. But this would result in them being held at flight connection, not at the gate, if I understand the flow correctly.
It is possible that they made it through flight connections in time but they were somehow missing as checked in from the passenger manifest at the gate. This could explain the attempt to prevent them boarding and the subsequent backtrack to the coverup excuse of “it’s overbooked” when the gate staff realised they should have boarded them and the further retreat to allowing them to board. Their details cannot gave gone missing earlier between the legs / airlines or they would not have been boarded at all.
It is also possible that the catering stock was screwed up and there were not enough first class meals. It would not be normal BA practice to refuse boarding, though, they would just offer Avios in compensation.
I wonder how many first class seats were free….
Was this with BA or a US carrier? My guess is a US carrier because BA First Class is uncommonly expensive!
“Biden Must Resign” Atlantic (furzy). When you have lost the Atlantic…
Indeed. They are calling BS on the campaign fund reasoning for keeping the current symbol in office:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/embarrassing-biden-harris-rationalizations/678893/
“…The Stetson University law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy told me that the Democratic National Committee could get all of the Biden-Harris cash and dispense it as the organization sees fit for use on behalf of another candidate. The Federal Election Commission is clear, she explained, that “a candidate’s authorized committee may transfer unlimited campaign funds to a party committee or organization.”
In other words: If the Democrats field a different ticket, the only way the new presidential nominee enters the race with “zero dollars in their bank account” would be if Biden wanted that to happen. The substitute candidate could ultimately have use of not only the Biden campaign’s cash but also its offices, computers, cellphones, and other campaign infrastructure, which would be treated as in-kind contributions. (The torrential downpour of donations sure to drop on any Democrat challenging Trump makes the campaign-finance argument doubly empty.)…”
In theory they would also need to get Biden to release his delegates although apparently this requirement isn’t an absolute rule. They can vote differently if they feel they were deceived (by for example him actually being senile).
Turley says it’s time for the 25th amendment and the cabinet is obligated by their oath to the US to act. But obviously the best solution for the Dems would be for Biden to voluntarily quit. He seems to like money so perhaps they should just give him a lot to quit.
yes. just offer Jill a provost/chancellor position at Penn, and Big Guy a seat on the board of Big Tech, Inc.
this ain’t quantum physics. for all the fretting among mega-donors, the path is obvious and easily solvable.
The hagiography is obvious..Joes seered the country back to normalcy, fought the good fight, blah, blah. And Trump or kamala will have the hot potato in 2025 -29 when all these structural problems in the US boil
unless Jill is legit. a clinical narcissist, psyhcopath
I’m still not clear how this works. If it’s the blob, deep state, or TPTB that are actually in charge, then they would just say “you’re done, JB, don’t let the door hit you (or vice versa) on the way out.”
Unless they defer to Jill Biden, or the existing setup is to their liking, or they’re not in charge.
The election is November. The next President takes office in January. Plenty of time for the Deep State. (Many still think Oswald was a lone assassin.)
If he runs, Biden will take the down ballot fare with him.
‘Hinderburg’?
He’ll be like James Cagny being on top of the world-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtKgodRMd0s
Is there any, even the slightest amount of self examination going on amongst all these pundits, talking heads, and twitter jockeys who were whole hog enthusiastic about uncle Joe two weeks ago and are now calling for him to step aside?
No doubt the whole lot of them have come to the sudden realization that they embraced Biden in the same way that Japanese soldiers embraced hand grenades on Iwo Jima-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2NeCiP8b8 (3:21 mins)
It’s not so much that all those pundits, talking heads, and twitter jockeys convinced themselves that all was well with old Joe all this time but that they then turned around and tried to gaslight the whole country to their viewpoint. That is unforgivable that.
They official media, we have to understand, is not in the business of seeking the truth but to navigate a good career-path. They were told to hate Trump for eight-years and that got them steady money. Now everything changed–the official media has been called “pack-journalists” and are as bad as the Communist Party operatives that when the “line” changed in Moscow they turned on a dime. Yesterday the Germans are friends today the Germans are mortal enemies.
Also note that official journalists are never held to account for being wrong, in fact, they are usually promoted whereas those who see any situation clearly are usually drummed out of the media landscape like Pulitzer-Prize winners Hedges and Hersh. Anyone who believes anything presstitutes say is a fool unless its carefully checked.
What do you mean, mrsyk? We have always been at war with Eastasia!
when I read the book, i never thought I would see it i real life.
And in a time when almost everyone was a literal supercomputer in their pocket and access to the sum of human knowledge (and near infinite cat pix and porn)
but here we are
Our little supercomputers aid in this process tremendously. We can all be herded into our respective information bubbles that keep us divided while the Powers that Be work hard to control the information presented to us. The infinite porn and cat pix help too.
Louis, almost everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, but the Ministry of Truth has been hard at work on the information that is available on it. From my personal experience, it has become increasingly difficult to access “inconvenient” information over the last decade, even when I know what to look for. It would be impossible for someone who didn’t see it before it got memory-holed.
Hey! Don’t knock cat pix!!!
They make it easier to live through the current weirdness!
That dog in the bonus Antidote du jour was pretty good too.
The “At your feet or at your throat” dynamic is particularly strong in media; turning your “analysis” on a dime without acknowledgement, let alone reflection and introspection, seems to be part of the job description. “Educated fools, from uneducated schools,” as the great Curtis Mayfield wrote…
Follow-up question: if Biden had one of his increasingly rare good performances at the debate, where would we be? I think we all know the answer to that.
This article lays out the REAL problem with a biden “candidacy,” and it has nothing to do with campaign cash or “delegates”–an eventual harris presidency, most likely sooner rather than later.
Calling attention to this obvious biden bait-and-switch allows Trump to “run against” a “candidate” even less popular than biden, and to characterize her “inevitable” administration in whatever horrible way he wants.
If I were Trump, I’d consider ignoring the biden corpse, and start running hard against one of the least popular, most vacuos and unaccomplished politicians evah–kamala “I can imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been” harris.
> one of the least popular, most vacuos and unaccomplished politicians evah
That describes Trump in 2016.
For all people keep saying she started out on her knees, she keeps ending up on top. In mixed martial arts, that is an indication of great ability.
Like Trump, at this point we don’t really know what that ability is.
But it’s not an accident that she is poised to be the first female President of the United States. Underestimating Trump had consequences.
It’s easy to forget that Harris was the original 2020 choice of many high-rollers in the Democrat Establishment, in particular the Clinton faction, so she must have had some appeal to them. But the primaries demonstrated that she had no appeal for most voters as she was one of the first candidates ousted. That she was then inserted as VP anyway also says something about her elite backing – and about how much the opinion of the rest of us matters.
I agree that she is an unknown quantity, but I don’t see her as having any identifiable agenda of her own. She is valued by those who believe they can shape her administration. I seriously doubt that they will get that chance.
She was the best funded candidate, imo bank money. She withdrew just before the ca primary to avoid humiliation. Didn’t win a single vote. Imo she would be a dem disaster. Maybe picked for vp because bank money? A clean sweep probably best, find another black for veep, Midwest if possible. -ritzier likely best bet, they gotta do well in swings.
What’s this ‘bank money’ nonsense. She was a Black female ready to assuage a pocket of voters in 2020.
Not only is she unqualified to be VP, she was unqualified to be the California AG and voted into a (retiring Boxer) senate seat by a Blue state that prefers ‘appearance before accomplishment’.
Watch her speak contemporaneously and see for yourself. She is DEI personified.
Failing upward in a unique career path, obviously not applicable to most professions. Competence and or a successful track as a state AG or a junior US Senator is merely a secondary consideration…that is my own jaundiced view of our VP Madame Harris.
It is uniquely descriptive of the modern Democrats playbook. A neophyte small timer like Pete Buttigieg surprisingly “wins” an early state caucus in 2020 and within the next year earns a Cabinet appointment as Transportation Secretary. And so forth, Secretary Pete forms the deep bench of talented risers in the Democratic party..
Scenario:
Genocide Joe steps down to spend more time with family, Harris falls up to be President, dems nominate someone, anyone else to be on the November ballot.
Dems could even sweeten the pot for Harris: you get to be President only if you stay off the ballot. The empty suit getting an empty office.
But this is politics, not mixed martial arts. If anything it’s like a street brawl. There are no rules.
She was a poison pill, and maybe protection against Sanders supporters, nothing else.
> She was a poison pill, and maybe protection against Sanders supporters, nothing else.
1) Poison pill/insurance policy for sure
2) Woman of Color (Indian, then black) and the pool suitable candidates there is smaller than you would think
But
3) Top Democrats must have seen something in her, because as a junior Senator she was placed on the Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees. (I don’t say that what they saw in her was good, you understand.)
4) As CA AG, she didn’t prosecute Mnuchin (that’s a uniparty plus).
I agree that events will outweigh personality-based hot takes in the next few months. I have never been a Harris fan, but if she successfully deploys the 25th Amendment to remove Genocide Joe, she will have solved a major crisis by legitimate means, and she will have demonstrated more backbone than the rest of the District of Columbia combined.
I think many voters will give her credit for that.
They have started running against Harris.
The other day Lambert posted this:
Four straight minutes of “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” It’s incredible. I had no idea she used it this much. pic.twitter.com/TClfC1EyH6
— John Cooper (@thejcoop) June 29, 2024
(I have made it my rule never to cite to DNC or RNC “research,” but I’m breaking it this one time. I assume they’re not faking it because they don’t have to.)
It’s true, it’s true, the Senate has made it clear
The climate in DC isn’t perfect all the year
A law was made a distant moon ago here
July and August can be too hot
As for now there’s a 4 year limit to the Kamala show
in Camelot
Senate is forbidden after December
And exits not having done a lot
By order, her Senate term lingered through January 2021 for Kamala
Kamala: Camelot?
I know it sounds a bit bizarre
But for Kamala: Camelot
That’s how conditions are
Her Senate reign fell after inauguration
After November third, when her second coming loomed
In short, there’s simply not a more veep so groomed
For happily ever after in than here for Kamala
Kamala: Camelot
I know it gives a person pause
But in Camelot: Kamala?
Those are the legal laws
The show may soon be thrust upon her spot
But if Joe were to disappear, an answer must appear
In short, there’s simply not a more opportunistic slot
For happily ever after in than here in Casa Blanca Kamala
“I can imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been” harris – and you have seen it!
Opposition research. And then there was the report of Trump on the golf course with his son where he talked about Harris being the Dem’s nominee.
Of course they can do whatever they want with the money, and pick whoever they like as a candidate, primaries and voters be damned.
The Sanders campaign took the Democrat party to court and the court ruled they could pick their candidates however they wanted, even if it meant breaking their own rules to squash someone like Bernie.
The trick here is to delay the inevitable. Most have already forgotten the rigged 2024 primaries which limited other candidates and flat out cancelled the elections in some states. Sounds pretty authoritarian to me! That made sure voters wouldn’t pick some schmuck unapproved by the elites. With that accomplished, the party will now shove some candidate of their choice down voters’ throats, but not until the polls for SlowJoe get a little worse and they ratchet up the fear another couple notches. That will get half the voters practically begging for this next authoritarian move.
All done in the name of “saving our democracy from authoritarianism”, of course.
Correction: it was a class action filed by Bernie Sanders donors NOT the Sanders campaign. The Sanders campaign was apparently fine with it.
Thank you for that clarification.
Trump laying low, seems pretty rational for a change; being guided by better instincts on his 3rd tour de force, perhaps? Elsewhere, Biden was visiting Madison, WI, yesterday which appears to be an odd choice? My understanding is the university town is a largely enclave of Team Blue supporters. Well that is better than the 2016 strategy, which I recall was for Hillary to avoid the state in full.
Man this next 4 to 5 months are really gonna be a grind.
Somebody must have told Trump that quote from Napoleon – ‘Never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake.’ But it must be hard for him to keep his mouth shut as he loves nothing more than to go on a stage and make all sorts of flaming attacks against his enemies.
If you look at it another way, this is so obvious and such an easy target that even Trump is letting it crash and burn on its own.
There’s also a lot of pretty old voters. Stay away from the geriatric jokes.
I think there’s a good reason Trump is laying low – his minders are probably cognizant of the fact that Trump himself shows signs of dementia, is practically incoherent. This is how Biden won the last election, by seeming more rational, intelligent and coherent than Trump. So whatever becomes of Biden is in the cards for Trump as well.
Biden won this last election primarily by Not Being Trump,while campaigning in limited circumstances due mostly to 2020 being the nexus for a Global Pandemic. Biden is a creature of American politics. And to add, anyone with a functional brain can make an assessment as to the proper fit to be our next fearless leader.
Nice one, now please pull the other leg. Trump was also deemed acceptably fit to sit for a few court cases thus far. Let’s push Joe Biden through that and we’ll see how he performs.
I find neither man to be honorable, each one appears to my jaundiced eyes highly amoral; neither one is an attractive candidate. But the notion of Joe Biden as a great leader and let’s ignore or deny any skeletons from his closet a stretch of my own imagination. As with such notions and thoughts, others mileage might vary.
“So whatever becomes of Biden is in the cards for Trump as well.”
This sounds like wishful thinking to me.
griffen: On the other hand, it may be that Trump’s entourage took him to Mars Cheese Castle, and Trump has been busy for several days stocking up on cheddar cheeses in the shape of the map of Wisconsin.
As long as the United States is focusing its neocon ideology on Russia, China, and Iran, the World Is a dangerous place. I think that Uruguay is actually one of the safest places to be right now. I posted this a couple of weeks ago, but it was late in the day so I thought I would repost it today for people who might be interested but didn’t see it:
Still, it must have made you nervous when General Laura Richardson came to visit Uruguay back in February. When she talks about the resources that South American countries have, she has a bad tendency to drool which is not an attractive look on her-
https://www.southcom.mil/MEDIA/NEWS-ARTICLES/Article/3672333/strengthening-the-us-uruguay-security-partnership-gen-richardson-meets-with-sen/
Of course it did! Thanks for the write-up it’s quite comprehensive and more information than I was able to find at the time. I do worry that when the US is forced to pull back from its hegemony, that it will concentrate it’s evil methods on the resources of the Continental Americas. But for now, I do feel relatively very safe and secure here
What’s the status of health care in Uruguay? If one has a pension to live on, they are likely older adults.
you can say the same about many post-industrial, small-mid-sized in the Rust Belt….particularly those anchored around some type of college/uni with legacy institutions like a Carnegie library and park district
And you don’t have to travel 12 hours or get a long-term visa….just be willing to tolerant snow, lol
Well, I’ve never lived in those places so I can’t really compare them.
People often say that Uruguay is similar to the US from 30 or 40 years ago. Perhaps they say the same thing about the midwest, I don’t know.
But the overall effect of living in Uruguay should not be compared to living in a deindustrialized small town in the Rust belt of the United states. This country invests in its people and its infrastructure, unlike the United States. We have a participatory budget concept for maintaining public spaces in our neighborhoods. We get to vote on where the money is spent. Elections are conducted using hand counted hand marked ballots. There is no hatred of people in other political parties, people who choose to wear masks or people who interpret love and gender differently. They truly don’t care what you do as long as you’re not bothering them personally. They’re very civilized like that! Just some of the subtle but important differences that I can think of off the top of my head…
Your country of residence is on my short list. I am just shy of qualifying for the pension requirements. Maybe marrying a local might work.
What a pity! I suppose if you married a local then you would have more income. I wish you the best!
Uruguayan accent and wording can be difficult if one knows other Spanish. Not having been living there, but with a few contacts, and an interest on Uruguay-made films, my feeling is that all you say spells truth.
I notice the monthly living expenses are quite beyond what I could pay. Was that correct? I remember ex-pats in California uniformly telling me that the price of food was a bargain in the U.S. and perhaps those expenses reflect that cost.
Yes, Uruguay has the highest cost of living of all of the countries in South America. When I came here I thought the restaurant prices were generally in line with what I had paid in California. But I don’t know about now with all of the inflation in the US, I haven’t been back in the States since 2021.
An Uruguayan friend tells me mournfully that the only things Uruguay produces are cows and soccer players. Ducks. ;^) He is a crazy soccer player.
Can you please address healthcare in Uruguay, Expat? Thank you.
There is a free healthcare system in Uruguay, but the care has many delays. There are also Private health care associations, that act as insurance companies I suppose, where you pay monthly amount and then co-pays as you go along. You also have to pay an initial amount in line with your age when you join the system. I pay $80 a month for my association and my co-pays are around $10 for a prescription and around $15 for an appointment.
I had breast cancer in 2018 and I had surgery at no cost, then 6 months of chemotherapy followed by 6 weeks of radiation with just the co-pays. The total cost was around $400 over the eight months of treatment, excluding the monthly payment. There’s not a problem with medical debt here as there is in the United States.
I appreciate your reply. We are currently considering whether to get out of Dodge. Your information is helpful.
I know that Yves considered Uruguay when she was looking to leave the US but ended up choosing Malaysia.
Thailand.
I was actually very serious about Malaysia and even booked travel there (and by virtue of a very unusual set of circumstances was able to get out of the ticket). But they changed the visa rules bigly, increasing annual income requirement by over 4x so that you have to have over $100K each and every year.
If one is happy where one is, then all can be well.
“I can’t help thinkin’ I’m just a day away
from where I wanna be.”
“Bright Baby Blues,” Jackson Browne
;)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1pPcO
January 15, 2018
Life Expectancy at Birth for Mexico, Uruguay and Paraguay, 2007-2022
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1pPcU
January 30, 2018
Infant Mortality Rate for Mexico, Uruguay and Paraguay, 2007-2022
Remember when you ran Bernie away
And the DNC got on their knees and begged you
To lead because otherwise the country would go berserk?
WELL
You left Trump behind anyhow and
Then the days got worse and worse
And now I see you’ve gone completely
Out of your mind
AND
They´re coming to take you away
Haha, they´re coming to take you away
Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha
To the funny farm
Where life is beautiful all the time
And you’ll be happy to see
Those nice young men
In their clean white coats
And they´re coming to take you AWAY
HA HAAAA
You thought it was a joke
and so you LAUGHED, YOU LAUGHED!
When I had said that losing your mind
Would make Warner flip his lid
RIGHT?
They´re coming to take you away
Haha, they´re coming to take you away
Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha
To the happy home with trees and flowers
And chirping birds and Hasbara story weavers
Who sit and smile and
Twiddle their thumbs and toes
And they´re coming to take you away
HAHAAAAAAAAA
You cooked the books
You cleaned out Gaza
And this is how you pay the country back
For all your kind unselfish loving deeds
HUH?
Well, you just wait
They´ll find you yet
And when they do, they´ll put you in
the AIPAC old persons home, you mental nut
AND
They’re coming to take you away, Ha-ha
They’re coming to take you away, Ho-ho
Hee-hee-haa-haa
To the funny farm
Where life is beautiful all the time
And you’ll be happy to see those
Nice young men in their clean white coats and
They’re coming to take you away, ha-ha!
To the happy home
With trees and flowers and chirping birds
And Hasbara story weavers who sit and smile
And twiddle their thumbs and toes
And they’re coming to take you away, ha-hahaha…
To the funny farm
Where life is beautiful all the time
And you’ll be happy to see…..
Offbeat rhythm requires the original Ha-Haaa!
Funny how this song has been on my mind. I can remember hearing it over the tinny Blue Bird bus radio system on the way to school, thinking “..how appropriate…” I figured you’d put up a version eventually, thanks.
My God, I can hear it. Arghhhhhhh!
Best…H
@Japan declares victory on war on floppy disks
Actually, here is the article from the Minister’s website .
He has an initiative called “Roadmap for Reviewing Analog Regulations Based on Digital Principles” (my translation, not official), where he is reviewing several thousand rules, which include rules on submitting data. To me this sounds like a normally operating Ministry, whereas the article made it sound goofy, “declaring war”.
And this: “Many Japan businesses still require official documents to be endorsed using carved personal stamps called hanko”.
This coming from a journalist who lives in a country where many American businesses still require hand-written paper documents called “checks”, which must be endorsed with “signatures”, written using plastic sticks filled with ink, called “pens”.
Japan and also China do still require documents to be stamped – they very often will not pay invoices without a stamp and I’ve done it hundreds of times for invoices to those countries. These days though I often use a digital stamp and fake digital signature and nobody seems to mind.
Sort of like how with all the digital check processing, nobody really checks the signature on checks anymore either. I have seen checks processed by machines cashed with no signatures on them, and when my company receives checks directly that are accidentally unsigned, I often just add a vague scrawl to the signature line and have never had a problem.
Progress!
“How Did Silicon Valley Turn into a Creepy Cult?” Ted Gioia
Indeed. It’s time for the scales to fall from people’s eyes about these dangerous phonies.
This is why RFKjr has no chance of being elected.
His highest bidder, biggest donor, vice president choice,
Nicole Shanahan fits Gioia’s analysis.
“she worked as a paralegal and then as a patent specialist at the defensive patent aggregator RPX Corp.[2][3] She was a fellow at Stanford Law School’s CodeX, Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.[4][5][6]
Shanahan married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2018; they separated in 2021 and divorced in 2023.[7][8][9] She reportedly has a net worth over $1 billion, primarily as a result of her marriage to Brin.[10] In 2019 she established a private foundation, Bia-Echo, that promotes research to lengthen the human reproductive lifespan.[11][12]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Shanahan
If he replaces her, RFK gets my vote.
Otherwise it’s wasted because most Americans are not going to vote for ticket that includes her.
The editorial board of the
@FT
calls for special treatment for the restructuring of Ukrainian bonds by private creditors, asserting that ‘this is not like any other sovereign restructuring’.
ha hahaha, good luck with that. And exactly what can Ukraine offer its bond holders in exchange? Little sweet nothings. Ukraine’s best path is to stare down bondholders, and seek around a 40% debt reduction, commensurate with market expectations (ft). I’m guessing that means Ukraine bonds are pricing at around 60 cents on the dollar. Sell.
Note the author of the tweet is not promoting the ft‘s view.
No doubt those calls for ‘special treatment’ are coming from those very same bond holders. Have zero sympathy for them to tell you the truth. No doubt the idea was to do to the Ukraine what was done to Russia back in the 90s and just pump all wealth out out of that country after paying off the local oligarchs to help them. The fact that there was active fighting on the eastern front since 2014 with outbreaks into major battles should have been a warning sign to them that perhaps all may not be well. But apparently greed trumps due diligence and they invested anyway. If Russia takes most of that country, you think that they will honour all those investments and the like by those bond holders?
An event of default would make quite clear that Ukraine is a charity case as far as any future “aid” is concerned.
Rev Kev: But apparently greed trumps due diligence and they invested anyway.
Let’s be clear. They did their due diligence. That’s why the US-West is there.
US senator says Ukraine is ‘gold mine’ with $12 trillion of minerals ‘we can’t afford to lose’
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/06/13/ukraine-12-trillion-minerals-west-china-russia/
A prominent US lawmaker has referred to Ukraine as a “gold mine”, insisting the West must maintain access to the trillions of dollars worth of critical minerals located in the country. “They’re sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals in Ukraine”, said Senator Lindsey Graham.“They could be the richest country in all of Europe. I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China”, he added.
Arguably, Graham is correct from the viewpoint of longterm US hegemony. (Don’t laugh; you may know it’s effectively gone, but hardcore US imperialists don’t accept that.)
The above re. Ukraine, by the way, doesn’t even get into the fact that it’s also an agricultural breadbasket comparable to US-Canada
Graham Cracker is rehashing the reason to hang out in Afghanistan, with all their mineral wealth we glimpsed from the window of a C-130 leaving Kabul one last time…
Good catch that. Several years ago there was a flurry of stories about how Afghanistan was sitting on trillions of dollars of minerals with the unspoken subtext saying that we have to stay fighting in Afghanistan to get a chance to grab those minerals. Looks like they just recycled the same story but substituting the Ukraine for Afghanistan.
95% of the barbarous relic underfoot in Cali is still there, and you could say the same thing about us, with our $10-12 trillion worth.
Maybe it is a breadbasket comparable to the US-Canada but for how many years into the future will they be cleaning up unexploded ordinance? I seem to recall that was/still is a hazard in Vietnam/Cambodia.etc.
They are still clearing France along the Great War’s frontlines with some of it being effectively permanently uninhabitable. The American Civil War had some issues into the 1960s.
Then there is wherever major battles happened and especially where aerial bombing campaigns in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy occurred. Gradually, the dangers have become almost, but not quite, nonexistent, but it only took over fifty years.
Wars do not start or end when people say they do. They really continue long after the fighting has stopped, and in places like France, they will continue lifetimes after the original participants have died.
It won’t be much of a breadbasket after being salted by the depleted uranium munitions the USA and the UK have been sending.
And there are many asteroids worth trillions of dollars out there between Mars and Jupiter, and if somebody will try to take them, Uncle Sam will get very upset…
I don’t think we can discount the potential role Covid has played in Biden’s decline. There is research showing especially bad brain effects for older adults. Here is Nate Bear with a view on Twitter:
https://x.com/NateB_Panic/status/1806636160061702314
And a thread by Lady Chuan about her recent experience with the medical director of a neurology group, presumably in the US:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808479237273276667.html
Yes, Trump also had Covid, but he is not looking that great either and his extemporaneous rambles seem to be ramblier. And of course Covid affects each person differently, depending on a host of factors. Trump also received monoclonal antibodies, while Biden got Paxlovid for both original and rebound, if I recall. Monoclonal seemed (to me) to be more effective at that time.
> Lady Chuan
>>I asked why does he says destroyed and not damaged. He stated that when something is damaged, there is an awareness that it has existed. When something is destroyed,, there is no awareness. This is why people can walk around like Covid doesn’t exist.
> The Great Uncomformity
>> “Why there’s nothing instead of something. Or how. How nothing replaced something.”
This is not the Existential Crisis I was looking for.
Had the unfortunate opportunity to observe Close Family suffer from lewey body dementia for years (RIP). And let me tell you, after the first time CF caught covid, they could no longer walk unassisted, could no longer communicate (In any form), basically turned into a house plant. Terrible way to go out, but for Biden a much deserved one.
I also had this experience with a very close family member. That Biden might suffer from Lewy body dementia has occurred to me for a while. It is related to Parkinson’s, and sufferers often have Parkinson’s-like physical symptoms such as the stiff gate Biden has exhibited for some time. Also, although every case is different, LBD can often lead to a faster decline than with other forms of dementia. My family member went from functional to delusional and even dangerous in a very short period of time. Something to keep in mind as well.
The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. I would bet that the cocktail they pump into him for his Joe and the Juice performances like the state of the union results in a permanent decline each time.
It is well known that the AD and PD brain is exquisitely vulnerable to neuronal damage from chemical coshes like Largactil and I would expect uppers to have similar properties.
From the Lady Chuan post. Stage 3 Parkinson’s in young people, and in people who didn’t “build up” to it:
“I asked him what made these patients different from those patients that he would see in the years before Covid. 3/13
He shared that normally when he would see a patient there would be a long medical history of symptoms and some “decline” before a referral to him to reach a diagnosis. Now patients are already at advance stages of their disease without any symptomatic medical history. 4/13
He is also seeing much younger patients which he identified to be in their 20s with stage 3 Parkinson’s which is noticeable to people around them. 5/13
I asked if he has witnessed any improvement in these patients after introducing them to a tailored treatment plan. He abruptly interrupted and shook his head (no) and said that the focus is to stop the progression of the disease and if that also means improvement, then good-6/13 ”
That is scary stuff.
WaPo letting it all hang out
Yes that future that we all have been enjoying over the course of my lifetime has been oh so very safe. Idiots.
And it was the party that picked Truman, not Roosevelt, so they don’t even get that right.. Once re-elected FDR only met with Truman once before his death which shows how much FDR thought of him. Eleanor wasn’t a fan either.
Our press is now a propaganda shop which explains the current Biden mess. Why wouldn’t they lie about Biden’s condition when they lie about everything? Of course some corners of the MSM are better than others but surely the WaPo is one of the worst. As their own editor recently told them, nobody is reading you anymore. In that sense the NYT has won their longstanding competition.
What gets me is that all during his decline, from all accounts, FDR was mentally alert and functional. “Creepy” Joe, on the other hand….
I find it highly propagandistic that the WaPo choses to contrast, and thus associate in the readers subconscious, FDR and Biden. “See. Fearless Leader Joe is just like former Fearless Leader Frank! All Hail Fearless Leader!”
It would be funny if it wasn’t so effective.
Judging by the HuffPo piece on creating an AI Biden, some are ready to go full on Big Brother, who was also an ambiguous character and likely an avatar. I tried to find a whiff of satire in that article and came up empty – the person, or perhaps AI, who wrote it is fine with using 1984 as an instruction manual.
I suspect that article may have been an AI self promotion because much like how AI doesn’t understand how campfires work, whoever the author was doesn’t understand what words mean –
“The stakes of the 2024 presidential election cannot be overstated. With Donald Trump promising to act as a dictator “on day one,” it is not hyperbolic to say the future of American democracy hangs in the balance.”
Well when you deliberately take quotes out of context to create a strawman argument to maximize the fear, I’d say that was pretty much the definition of ‘hyperbolic’.
Written by an ex-Hillary aide
It’s David Ignatius, so we are getting the Court history here as he passes along the concerns of anonymous “national security officials” about Biden. They’re still trying to work out how “the Biden deception” will go down in the history books. It’s very entertaining watching their efforts.
Roosevelt was over in the mideast cutting deals with Saudi Arabia to give us oil primacy over the rest of the world just weeks before he died. He was planning for the postwar order already at that point. And Truman was pressed on him, not his choice so much as a bad decision he made by going along with what the pressure groups wanted. Any comparison between him, even up to the day before he died, and Genocide Joe is just plain obscene. But what else can one expect from the Washington Post?
> President Biden goes on incredibly confusing rant, calls himself the first black woman to serve with a black president.
This feels a bit like the debate, in which I had to think creatively to imagine what underlying concrete realities were being referred to (by both speakers).
In this case, it’s not hard to imagine — the speaker is conjoining the fact that he served as VP in the administration of the first black president and deserves credit for selecting a black woman to be VP when he ran for president.
There is, admittedly, the not inconsequential matter of self-identification within this conjunction, but that is easily explained by the supposition that lately he’s been listening too much to the Beatles — “I am you and you are me and we are all together.” Why might this song be on his mind? Perhaps he’s still pleased with having “beat[en] the socialist” during the “Night of Long Knives”, to which the song proleptically refers with its reference to “stupid bloody Tuesday”. But it’s not clear to me who JRB thinks is the Eggman.
Back in 2020 Joe still had his wits about him. He picked the VP most qualified to protect him against being Kennedied or Nixoned.
I’m waiting for him to blurt out: “Twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.”
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqjhHVUzl8o&ab_channel=ThingsICantFindOtherwise
I just commented below. The audio seems chopped together to me.
Listen with headphones.
I also thought that, having listened before reading your comment. That or a curiously bad mic.
Perhaps the AI that made the fire in the tent photo is now doing radio interviews?
No edit button, but this is “the full interview” on the radio station’s website https://wurdradio.com/joe-biden-wurd-interview-andrea-lawful-sanders/
The tweet is a chop job on the interview. The weird statements are there, but dispersed over a very LONG 14+ minutes.
Full disclosure: it’s the longest amount of time I’ve ever spent listening to Biden.
Eggman is the Easter Bunny, giant and invisible and always at Biden’s side.
The Walrus is or course John Bolton, and if Biden’s corpse can be dragged over the finish line, he will surely be given a position as NatSec advisor or SecDef due to his tremendous skills at Trump hating and also never having seen a war he didn’t want to hump.
Well, I’m fine with giant invisible rabbits. “Harvey” is my favorite Jimmy Stewart movie; way better than e.g. “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
Russian athlets started getting doping charges few years before the war kicked off. I guess it’s Chinese turn now.
“Starmer’s role in Assange’s persecution”
‘As head of the UK Crown Prosecution Service, the newly elected British PM Keir Starmer played a key role in setting in motion the infernal legal machinery that crushed Assange for 14 years’
If you stop to think about it, was this piece of skullduggery what got him the seal of approval from the British and US security establishments and enabled him to go into a political career with a fast track to his present Prime Ministership? He proved that he was a ‘team player’ who was prepared to break laws to ‘get results.’ I note that when he stepped down as Director of Public Prosecutions, he was given ‘honorary degrees from several universities, and he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB)’ and a little over a year later went into Parliament. Nice pay-off that.
Rev Kev: If you stop to think about it, was this piece of skullduggery what got him (Starmer) the seal of approval from the British and US security establishments and enabled him to go into a political career with a fast track to his present Prime Ministership
Exactly correct. And to that should be added his ruthlessness in rooting out Corbynism once he gained power in Labour.
The question I have: is why would Starmer ever join Labour in the first place if all he wanted was simply power as an end in itself? He could have simply joined the Conservatives at that stage, when their brand was still ascendant, if that was all he wanted.
It seems like Starmer wanted and wants power to achieve something. What? He may simply be typical neoliberal scum, as Ian Welsh today proposes. He may be something else. Atypical neoliberal scum? Maybe. We don’t yet actually know.
Maybe Starmer’s function within Labour is to ensure that a figure like Jeremy Corbyn never again rises to power in the party.
Impeccable timing; foresight.
This is precisely what I’ve been afraid of. We’ve now got a “government of change” fully committed to strengthening the status quo and fiddling around the edges if it can bring the private sector in to perform some, most or all the fundamental functions of a modern government. Starmer’s only known personal ideological commitment, apart from an obscure form of Atlanticism common in the darker reaches of the Deep State, seems to be to Israel, presumably because of his wife and children, but that might well be just another promise that he finds as easy to break as every political promise he has ever made.
Starmer has appointed a “technocratic”, ie, faceless and politically weak, government enabling the Tories to re-group under Farage’s flag without breaking sweat and, at some point over the next few years, they will do what the rest of Europe is doing and lead a successful revolt against a government of gormless technocrats led by an authoritarian without any political nous. And win. All very Lampedusa, but not part of the Atlanticists’ plan – although I’m sure that President Trump will help it along.
Starmer’s already stabbed too many of the people who aligned with him to hold the Labour party together and brought some of his unelected buddies into government in their place – after receiving fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in both 2017 and 2019. This is a Labour party which has reverted to type, failing to learn any lesson from the experience of others or, indeed, from it’s/our own past.
There are some sparks of light, though.
Starmer is one of nature’s authoritarians and internal dissension seems likely to develop reasonably quickly as, on past form, large majorities are difficult to manage and dissenters will have the Labour Whip removed, enabling them to sit alongside Jeremy Corbyn, create an alternative programme to Labour and join with other parties in support of some form of proportional representation.
I’m told by current and former Labour activists the metro mayors are also uncomfortable with Starmer’s suspension of Jamie Driscoll and preventing him from standing for re-election as the Labour candidate for Mayor of the North East earlier this year, and are eager to cut back the centralisation of power in the Labour Party. The Labour metro mayors will become power players against government policies and will make moves to change Labour’s constitution and reduce the PLP Leader’s power, and increase the powers of the regions. They will work comfortably with MPs who have had the Whip suspended, and several already lean toward proportional representation as a way of breaking the logjam of Westminster politics which has lasted since the end of the Second War.
Still, the next five years, like the previous forty-five years, will continue to be bloody grim oop Nawth.
It was followed by his stint in the Trilateral Commission, whilst he was in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet , at the same time certain colleagues in Commission made no secret of their desire to stop Corbyn get to PM.
His ‘team’ has never been in doubt.
I think your time line is slightly out. When Starmer was selected as the candidate for Holborn following his persecution of Julian Assange, it was put to me by a Labour colleague, who was knowledgeable about such matters, that if you are a barrister with, or aspiring to, “connections”, the best field of practice since the seventies for someone who passes as working class and has an Oxford degree in law, has been human rights law coupled with some well-publicised contact building pro bono work.
It doesn’t hurt to have your in-law’s family in Israel either
Thank you for pointing to the Jerusalem Post, Ben: “Lady Starmer’s steadfast commitment to her faith and cultural traditions, as well as her involvement in combating antisemitism, emphasizes the unique role she will play.” Interesting quote given Starmer’s abilities as a barrister specialising in criminal law and human rights law to size up a person’s key weak points which can repetitively be used against them and undermine their confidence, making it impossible for them to continue a normal personal, social and political life.
A seemingly endless barrage of accusations of anti-semitism against Jeremy Corbyn appeared to be utterly ludicrous at first because JC has defined his personal life, as well as his political life, in terms of his hatred of any form of racism and religious or social bigotry and it was – then – almost impossible to argue against something that you are not on the grounds that a group you support are oppressed by oppressors who subsequently, and utterly foolishly, claim the political and moral sanctuary of the Shoah to commit their own genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. No, we must not forget about the vicious, murderous criminality of the settler colonies whose members are beating and maiming and killing and stealing the land of the West Bank Palestinians.
I cannot see Israel surviving but I can see thousands, maybe tens of thousands, or even more, being tried, and punished for the crimes they have committed during the Gaza genocide or have been complicit in. I can see that many country, particularly in the region, will be more than willing to take criminals back to their countries of origin to complete whatever sentences military justice delivered by regional actors, sees fit.
The term anti-semitism has become a little like the accusations of now empty buzzword “fascist” and “Stalinist” we threw around at the Man or our fellow students of a slightly different political stripe than we were in the sixties. Other buzzwords which are rapidly becoming meaningless and more commonly used by ordinary people are “Putin’s puppet” (which rougthly means, “piss off, wanker”), or climate denialist, anti-vaxxer, anti and soon, sure enough, we will get “dementia denier” (that one will be a good pre-election sell in playgrounds around the world). Words and concepts soon lose their deeper meaning if they are used too often, and that is how you lose the wider recognition of another people’s history.
Seems like solid take to me:
“The reason so many Democratic leaders and pundits seem so bewildered about the Biden Disaster is because when one has no concrete principles other than worshiping power, and it becomes unclear where power is or going to be, one quickly becomes incoherent and confused.”
https://x.com/davidsirota/status/1809413735045357895
Seems pretty solid to me as well. I wonder how those big time donors felt when they told Biden that they wanted him to step down – but then he turned around and said that he was staying in the race. Four years ago they had the power to impose old Joe and Kamala on Americans but right now they are just chopped liver. They must be very confused and unsettled at this sudden loss of power.
In the latest (v funny) Kirn and Taibbi podcast, Kirn described them as “between orders” right now.
I also liked his idea that we are “between big lies, and that means you can see the apparatus”
13,000 evacuated as Northern California’s Thompson Fire burns SFGate
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Can’t decide if my sentence is purgatory or hades, and its early in the heat dome of silence game, and what’s weird about this one is nighttime temps aren’t going down appreciably, and we are close to the longest days of the year, allowing for everything to be not only completely dried out, but bone dry after a couple of weeks nearing 110 every day in this here convection oven.
Fires are breaking out all over the state and seeing there isn’t any clouds, lightning ain’t the culprit this go round, but the hand of man.
The next 5 months promises to be incendiary~
There’s speculation that Death Valley may hit the highest recorded temperature record in a few days. The record is currently 134. Supposedly Phoenix was 117 yesterday. Three more degrees and they have to close the airport.
I read it was the highest reliably recorded temperature ever.
124 in Palm Springs yesterday.
It is not even July. We are in for it, aren’t we?
…in more ways than one.
We hit 118F yesterday. With perfect timing, the very tiny leak in my old AC unit got alot bigger causing all the R-22 to disappear the day BEFORE. I have a new unit on order, but the HVAC guys won’t be able to get it and install until late next week. It is supposed to cool here and get to normal 100F temps by Monday.
Fires like real estate are location, location,
location. A vehicle fire started a brush fire less than 2 miles from my house yesterday. No 911 calls were necessary since it started right across the street from a fire station. They knocked it down in 2 hours and held it to <100 acres. We had at least 2 air tankers, 5 different helicopters and because this is in an area with lots of power line roads, lots of engines and boots on the ground. No wind which was fortunate.
About a decade ago during our torrid summer, a car’s muffler was spewing spot fires all along Hwy 198 in Tiny Town in maybe a dozen spots, unbeknownst to the driver no doubt, who anonymously went on their merry way up into the NP, spreading sparks.
Stay cool or better yet get a motel room, that’s quite something…
118 is my personal all-time high temp in Cali and I was driving and opened the window and stuck my arm out, and wow is that hot!
118F (ca. 48C), that’s hot!
My hottest was 43C (109F) in Patna, Northern India 45 odd years ago. No AC there, just ceiling fans if you were lucky. I still remember waiting the required 20 minutes for my chlorine tablet to make my large glass of water safe to drink while the sweat dripping off me accumulated into a puddle on the floor. Outside everyone was standing in the shade with few walking around except me.
It’s all about the dry heat here, and if you wanted to make Californians disappear, why stick them in a humid hot climate and we wilt like lettuce left out basking in the sun, there’d be clumps of clothing and shoes where we once stood until evaporation really kicked in.
Houston was tough on me, but nothing like Humordor, hells kitchen as it were, on the Potomac.
Hong Kong getting an honorable mention. I’d get so hot and bothered in HK, that i’d hail a red Toyota taxi where the cabbie opens the back door for you and into a welcoming air conditioned cocoon you went-an icebox on wheels.
I’d say to the cabbie, drive around for $20HK please and bring me back here.
I visited my sister in Austin once. It was winter, but warmish (80F) and Of course much more humid than I was used to. I could “feel” the water in the air and on my skin. My sister said it took her a couple of years to acclimate.
The HK taxi blast chiller experience is brilliant. If you are hot and bothered on a pub crawl, a quick trip in aircon bliss revives.
Slightly warmer but equally refreshing, crossing the harbour on a ferry in the motion breeze.
Some parts like Sheung Wan still have lowrise cement walkup apartment buildings with no zircon, as they were designed to be. It”s sticky!
Wuk, find a fire-safe storage unit and put irreplaceable/non-essential stuff in it for this fire season. Practice safe exits to the valley below.
Juno, that’s a great idea…
As always, I dread the summer STR crowd-300 dwellings strong, and all it takes is Bob & Betty Bitchin’ and their fetching kids Trevor & Truly, to decide to make S’mores over an open fire in the backyard of their 3 day cruise-a 3 day cruise to really mess with our dark skies appeal by lighting everything up with a wildfire.
In our defense, we typically don’t get big winds here, and all of the fires in Tiny Town have been beaten down promptly the past 20 years, but the only thing sure about luck is that it will change.
I have some experience with California fire season. Summer home in the Plumas NF and living in the foothills (chaparral) of Santa Barbara. I have neighbors who lived through Florida hurricanes in their youth, they are stunned at the absolute destruction of Cali wildfire— nothing but ash and charred stone.
Stay safe.
‘Tomasz Oryński
@TOrynski
I have to say AI’s ideas for camping are quite unorthodox, to put it mildly.’
At least that AI didn’t place that fire on top of her head. There is that. Doesn’t help to know that our society is racing to embed AI in all our computers, browsers and whatever else they can find. That is not a confidence builder that. It’s basically beta version software.
You gotta love AI camping, the hottie wearing makeup and the Coleman roasting over a roaring fire~
I spend a fair amount of time hanging out with Mother Nature, and her domain will be least affected by our artificial tomfoolery, no?
As long as you are in a place that has no signal. Of course having a hottie come along helps.
It used to be in Sequoia NP that the motel rooms had no tv’s, they really wanted you to be there for the forest for the trees, and then about 20 years ago they gave in and put tv’s in every room.
A year ago they wired up the Giant Forest and now you can be 8th in line to get a selfie of yourself and the Sherman Tree and let the world know you were there-just a few seconds before… ah, progress
Re Silicon Valley/creepy cults–there was a story yesterday about a Phoenix cop pulling over a Waymo car for driving against traffic on a divided highway. When he approached the driver’s side the window rolled down and there was no one there.
Google said confusing construction barriers forced the car briefly into the oncoming lane. But there is an air of unreality about all that futurism being imagined by people who may have only a tenuous grasp of the present. One time Valley worker Mike Judge hit this squarely with HBO’s Silicon Valley. The show was a bit uneven and is now gone but Larry David, an embarrassed shill for Bankman-Fried, continues at the channel as he has for many years. Satire it seems has a limited life while toilet jokes carry on forever (I do believe this is David’s declared final season).
The police can see it now: the bank robbery (or other crime) with the decoy get away car….
… or the self-driving car with the bomb in it. Please Mr. Waymo car, drive my bomb to city hall and park right in front. Thanks mucho.
NEW: President Biden goes on incredibly confusing rant, calls himself the first black woman to serve with a black president.
He also called himself the “first president that got elected statewide in the state of Delaware, when I was a kid.”
“By the way, I’m proud to be the, as… pic.twitter.com/VMNtVe85Pz
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 4, 2024
When was this interview? I put the headphones on for this. Yes, Biden’s issues are real, but this audio doesn’t strike me as being quite right. It sounds chopped together.
If I’m wrong, is there other verification of the validity of this audio?
it’s real. Just search: Biden interview philadelphia WURD
The interview is real. The damning parts are in there, but the tweet is a chop job on the interview.
It strings all the damning parts together.
And that was a long 14 plus minutes to get through.
The account I read said last night he told ABC that he won’t take or need a cognitive exam because he is “running the world” and that is his exam.
I’d say that statement alone means he flunked.
The interview is up on YouTube. His words were something like “I take a cognitive exam every day”, referring to the duties of his Office.
IIRC, during the debate, DJT slyly offered to take a cognitive exam if JRB also takes one. Presumably DJT thinks that even if he does not perform well in such an exam, JRB will be worse. I think we can expect this challenge to become a recurring theme during the campaign.
“Look, I have a cognitive test every single day,” Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, referring to the tasks he faces daily in a rigorous job. “Every day, I have that test. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world.”
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/06/biden-tv-interview-bad-episode-in-debate-but-im-running-the-world/
Let me add a word…
“Look, I have a cognitive test every single day,” Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, referring to the tasks he faces daily in a rigorous job. “Every day, I have that test. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world wars.”
Four More Wars!
Other ABC interview news.
However if Biden is running the world he can just tell a couple of justices to retire and they will do it.
https://jonathanturley.org/2024/07/06/the-grim-reaper-biden-declares-two-justices-will-be-gone-in-four-years/
Joe Lauria has words on “I’m runnng the world”
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/06/biden-im-running-the-world/
One other thought re running the world–With Biden admitting that he’s a “sundowner” after 8 pm then presumably he leaves a postit note of the nuclear codes with the cleaning lady before he hits the hay. Walter Kirn made this point the other day. Our “adversaries,” as the neocons like to call them, are undoubtedly synchronizing their watches.
Of course if the whole thing is shadowplay then nothing to worry about.
He thinks he’s a Caesar Augustus…reality he is more emperor Nero…the world is on fire and his die-hard support and closest aides, enablers and family alike help to make sure he stays true to his brand.
I’d marvel at my age what it takes to run this country and be able to stay mostly on point. Joe does it all and catches a nap in the afternoons, and needs more sleep after 8pm most evenings.
He seems to be stringing ideas together — truncating the sentences, which obscures the logical relationships among the mentioned facts. He was one of the youngest people ever to be elected to US Senate (“statewide office, when I was a kid”) and is the only Delaware statewide office-holder to be elected President.
That’s also how I interpret the first part of the quote (“first black woman, etc, etc.“); it’s an overly abbreviated list of accomplishments, somewhat scrambled in terms of the logical or temporal relationships.
This strikes me as somewhat reminiscent of DJT’s rhetorical style, but DJT is much smoother in his delivery.
It’s work, but with effort one can form hypotheses about the intended meaning. Thankfully the man (actually, both of them) has assistants for things like negotiating international treaties.
Your hypotheses make sense.
This is the result of drilling talking points into Joe Broken. He parrots them back in fragments, he is so anxious to remember them that meaning be damned!.
Trump does this as a sthick. Lambert analyzed a 2016 rally v. a recent one and Trump’s style is the same. He probably cultivated this as a some sort of deliberately cognitively muddling sales style, like barker talk meets neurolinguistic programming. Not saying it is a winner but it does seem to work with some.
I…am the Eggman
$4 for 18
Coo coo cachoo
Something extraordinary has happened in Yemen.
Out of seemingly nowhere, at minimum, Sana’a has amassed enough engineers(engine, aerospace, electrical, material, radio, etc), chemists, machinists, mechanics, and programmers to support a major ballistic missile, and military robotics program. Enough to see off an entire US carrier fleet. This is a poverty stricken subregion of a country in civil war, closed off, sanctioned, and under seige and attack for over 10 years. Yet they have bested the best Nato can throw at them.
I believe that the key is Yemen’s growing population, especially its young, internet connected and vastly more educated and informed population. One simply cannot support these kinds of programs without sufficient “nerds” to solve and maintain the various specialized problems and solutions required. 20 years ago, likely this would have been a fantasy for Yemen or any other un-industrialized, poorer country. Today? Today I think the old “third world” has closed the “nerd gap”. I think there is a whole generation of not just educated or trained, but deeply saturated nerds, products of a lifetime of sustained and indulged interest in a topic, now made accessible and cheap and ubiquitous internet connections and even cheaper and more powerful computing power. And bottling them at home with sanctions and airport closures only makes them stronger!
There may be other elements in play in Sana’a’s case, but I think this is likely to be a global phenomena. The “nerd gap” worldwide is closing rapidly, and countries not even on the present geopolitical radar now have within their reach technologies obsoleting those of advanced industrialized nations. One may argue that 1st world countries naturally have nerds too, but perhaps another aspect of this problem is that ours spend their lives playing stock market video games, or designing tracking software for shopping apps. Locked out of such extravagances, nerds in the 3rd world can find more interesting hobbies.
If only they had incentives to apply their abilities to peaceful purposes.
That is an amazing development. Are they getting assistance from Russia and Iran? Russia has a long history of very good SAM systems going back to when SA-75’s shot down the U-2.
America, being the richest nation ever in the world has a slightly difference emphasis. A Patriot SAM systems is without doubt, the most expensive such missile system in the world. It’s true performance has been a bit of a mystery since it was deployed over seas in the ’91 Gulf War, and as we’re learning in Ukraine, it’s actual performance is nowhere near it’s reputation.
As to your analysis why America’s nerd performance is lacking, I tend to agree. There is not much money to be made as an engineer working as an engineer in America. (The new engineers where I work cannot afford homes, can barely afford apartments.) All the best talent graduating in engineer has gone to Wall St and Silly Con Valley for decades now.
If you can’t love’m… you gotta Hatem-2.
Sorry;(
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1809503980500001058
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
This is a must-read opinion piece by Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán, no matter what you think of the man:
https://newsweek.com/orban-point-nato-peace-not-endless-war-opinion-1915287 *
He argues that “today, instead of peace, the agenda of NATO is the pursuit of war.”
He writes that “ever more voices within NATO are making the case for the necessity—or even inevitability—of military confrontation with the world’s other geopolitical power centers. This perception of inevitable confrontation functions like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more that NATO’s leaders believe conflict to be inevitable, the greater will be their role in precipitating it….
“NATO fulfills its purpose when it wins peace, not war. If it chooses conflict instead of cooperation, and war instead of peace, it will be committing suicide.”
That’s the case not only with regards to Ukraine but also China, with, for instance, the head of NATO Jens Stoltenberg recently declaring that “China is instigating the biggest conflict in Europe since WWII,” and all the efforts to expand NATO globally in Asia.
I passionately agree with Orban that NATO is on an extremely dangerous path: it is a fundamental law of nature that every action invites a reaction. The more expansionist and aggressive NATO is as opposed to being committed to defense and peace, the more you’ll see a response on the side of those whose interests it threatens. And, bit by bit, you find yourself in bloc confrontation and in a new global conflict…
It’s basic common sense that even young children understand: in fact earlier today my own 8-year old daughter was telling me, “I’ll be nice with my sister because it’ll then be much easier for her to be nice with me”. Same basic concept: if you go looking for enemies you typically find them, and vice versa… And that’s the fundamental danger behind military alliances: every organization’s primary objective is its own survival and to remain as relevant as possible.
You need extremely principled statesmanship to rein in military alliances so that they don’t inflate threats or go create new ones to remain relevant. And extremely principled statesmanship is exactly what’s lacking in the West right now, except for some rare rational figures like Orban.
* Orbán: The Point of NATO Is Peace, Not Endless War
4:25 AM · Jul 6, 2024
Valuable link, CA.
Orban seems quite moderate and sensible. All populist (or popular) sentiment in Europe is being labeled as ‘right wing’. They can’t tolerate it because it is popular in other European countries.
NATO could have just declared victory and moved on. But the US finds it intolerable, and when it seemed costless to expand, it couldn’t help itself.
A political leader Hungary and indeed for Europe:
https://x.com/Kanthan2030/status/1809518964680323311
S.L. Kanthan @Kanthan2030
“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder”
— Arnold Toynbee, British historian and philosopher.
Quoted by Hungarian PM Orban, while talking about how NATO should pursue peace and not wars.
5:25 AM · Jul 6, 2024
Perhaps the concept of “peace” is one of the things that has been destroyed by the neurological sequelae of COVID.
The desire for and profits from war long preceded Covid. The Ukraine war started in 2014 or earlier.
The war on terror began in 2001, but west’s colonizing wars have been around at least since the Greeks were in the biz.
Samuel Conner and Rev Kev:
I posted the especially important remarks by Viktor Orban, which should soon appear.
Orban at this time is a visionary advocate for peace and equitable development in Europe, which is why concerted efforts are being made in Europe and America to undermine and replace him as Hungary’s prime minister.
https://www.newsweek.com/orban-point-nato-peace-not-endless-war-opinion-1915287
yes. well worth a read.
funny how all these “authoritarians” sound so much saner than our “democracy defenders”.
He doesn’t really get NATO, or why there’s a war raging in Europe, then…
“Viktor Orbán meets Vladimir Putin despite EU outcry”
Orbán was not able to get Putin to agree to a ceasefire or anything but he at least did open a line of communication between Russia and the EU and I think that Putin himself was saying this. What I did find remarkable was that the entirety of the EU leadership denounced Orbán and were outraged that he could actually talk to a dictator and an aggressor and similar names. In other words, with the present EU and NATO leadership – or do I repeat myself? – they have absolutely zero intent to shutting down this war. They will expect the Ukrainians to keep on fighting and dying in a lost cause and sending billions their way to keep it going. They want this war to go on forever, even if it sends them broke.
“Why Chinese banks are now vanishing. The state is struggling to deal with troubled institutions”: Economist
This is incorrect and deceptive, as is almost every passage on China written in the Economist.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1pOZz
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China and United Kingdom, 1977-2023
(Indexed to 1977)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1pOZu
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China and United Kingdom, 1977-2023
(Percent change)
I encountered a German tourist and his family at the park on the 4th. We had a nice conversation. I asked about the political situation in Europe and Germany. He didn’t mention the War as being an issue. I think he was close to being in the PMC circle, being that he was a lawyer and his wife being a judge. They did a fair amount of travel in Russia and he had the take away of Putin being a dictator. His son is was listening to the conversation and I asked him if was planning to go to University. Yes, and studying finance.
Nice folks, status quo.
Definitely PMC – learnt absolutely nothing in spite of having visited Russia.
“Far-right France risks paralyzing EU’s Green Deal”
I find the French political scene fascinating right now in that the entire French political establishment, the media and parties in the center and the supposed left are pulling out all stops to defeat Le Penn with warnings about France descending into a civil war and all sorts of economic chaos. I was watching the “left” speaking after the announcement of the election and it seemed that they spent zero time attacking Macron but were devoting their time instead on attacking Le Penn’s party. Did anybody else notice how in that article, Marine Le Pen’s name was never mentioned at all?
Starmer’s role on behalf of his handlers in Corbyn’s demise is being replicated in a no holds barred attempt to stop Le Pen. France doing a ‘De Gaulle’ on NATO is causing the Empire and its EU minions to do what it always does at a time like this ‘interfere in another country’s democratic process’.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/food-cooking/driscolls-strawberry-sweetest-batch-raspberry-blueberry-3b41e082?mod=WTRN_pos1&cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_168&cx_artPos=0
I dont know how to de-paywall it.
“WATSONVILLE, Calif.—The strawberries of America’s future are as rich and juicy as the story of how they came to be.
They look resplendent. They taste like candy and fruit punch. They’re just firm enough to hold their shape when you bite into one and soft enough that it will melt in your mouth. They’re also related to a blueberry halfway across the world that was nearly lost to history. …. ”
‘
Magic has happened
https://archive.ph/rXlUi
“How Did Silicon Valley Turn into a Creepy Cult?”
I’d say the rot really began in the 90s when they turned into “libertarians”. This woman was at one of their parties where they were decrying the fact that they were expected to pay taxes without considering the fact that they used a public road to get to the place, drank out of water taps that came from tax-payer funded organizations and a whole range of other services too. They wanted all these services but also wanted other people to pay for it for them. Rules were for everybody else. And as they got richer, they isolated themselves more from the rest of society to lead their own privileged lives and now they are getting it in their heads that their wealth entitles them to say how the rest of society lives – the same society that they cut themselves off from.
Joe’s brain is firing on 3 cylinders, the timing is off and he has a blown head gasket.
Watching the disintegration of what was once a viciously corrupt racist warmonger is as scary as it is amusing.
And it is amusing to those of us who have despised the man for half a Century, the fact that he is taking what’s left of the Democratic party down with him is icing on the cake.
Apologies if this story made it around yesterday, but quite apparently in SC not everyone gets the proper memorandum on the handling and care in fireworks.
https://www.counton2.com/news/local-news/dorchester-county-news/man-dies-from-fireworks-accident-dcso/
I ordered a ‘head hibachi’ so as to be able to Benihana it upstairs, but this story has soured me on the prospect.
Fly on the wall dept:
We’ll never know what the real story is in regards to the Biden Bunch and their discussion of things going forward, but we can guess thanks to a confederate on the inside…
Commander: Listen Joe. if you give up this gig, they’ll put me to sleep for sure, i’ve bitten at least 21 confirmed.
Joe: Ok, i’ll stay in the hunt.
Reading a recent MoA commentary on the election in UK, the thought occurs that the Labour party ought to rebrand itself “Capital”.
Lol!
Obama truly is the worst president in modern history, and most here are familiar with his record, and then that record gives us Trump, and to stop Sanders, The Wizard gives us Biden.
I can’t of any recent president that has done more damage to America. W. Bush?
Bill Clinton. Definitely Bill Clinton. Every financial mess that you see as well as the expansion of NATO happened because of laws that he passed on his watch.
My Olympic Saga. so far:
When I made the pent-up-athlon team my realization of harnessing emotions, energies & sundry agents within that simply would not bend, had me on the edge of my seat on a Boeing to Paris, where I’m pretty sure I caught this hacking cough from, not that in any way it should lessen my performance at the games, my emotions being held in check.
We are so sorry sir to inform you that your ‘check’ has been declined due to lack of fun.
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avoiding that sort of thing falls under “avoiding Imperial entanglements”…a la Obi Wan to Han Solo in that bar on Mos Eisley
Several train cars carrying hazardous material are on fire after derailing in North Dakota
More photos: https://x.com/Zinkfarms/status/1809197179715608766
Somebody on this very site used to post a regular “train derailment tracker”.
I vaguely remember railway
accidentsincidentsevents occurring almost daily, which makes me think that paradoxically the USA have been relatively lucky so far: with all those reports about cars laden with dangerous cargo ending up derailed, it is a bit surprising that catastrophes like Lake Megantic and East Palestine are not taking place on a monthly or weekly basis.Farage, and a Canadian model for the future of U.K. conservatives?
Pre- and post-election takes:
The ghosts of Canada’s 1993 Conservative wipeout hang over Britain’s election campaign
The chickens come home to roost in Britain, cause for both schadenfreude and concern
I find it both alarming and typical of USian strategic thinking that the entire spotlight on Biden, every single bit of it, is completely focused on now through November instead of November 2024 through January of 2029 where it ought to be. There’s a greater chance that H5N1 bird flu will result in the dawn of bovine aviation than Biden making it through a second term.
US culture has nearly no track record of or appreciation for strategic thinking and this whole episode is the epitome.
I continue to be amazed at how many people consider this a serious proposal ensuring Democratic victory in November.
Anyone who is around in 2020 will recall what a horrific candidate Harris was. In fact, she was polling fifth in her own State of California during the Democratic primaries, leading her to drop out of the race early on. I don’t think anyone believes she has the skills to run a highly visible and expensive campaign, and to come right down to it, few people like her or believe in her. She’s had four years as vice president to showcase herself before the country, with little or nothing to show for it.
Also, I have to say, being a black woman lawyer and a politician from California is probably not the best place to be in when running against Donald Trump in 2024. He seemed to have a pretty easy time steamrolling Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Clinton was coming from a much stronger position and had been preparing for the race for over a decade. Credit where credit is due, and there may have been a time when being a woman, a POC, or an LGBT+ gave you a leg up in certain parts of US politics, but I think most American voters see the country being faced by much more serious problems now like climate change, COVID, World War III, inequality and starvation, and other apocalyptic issues and no longer see identity politics at the top of the list at the moment.
I realize there are certain pragmatic advantages for running the vice president versus someone completely outside the Democratic ticket, but as far as electability is concerned running Harris rather than Biden is just jumping from the frying pan to the fire.
All true but, I don’t think you are identifying the problem correctly. The problem (for Dems and their propagandists) isn’t losing the election. The problem is being exposed as having lied about Biden’s condition for a long time.
Therefore the solution doesn’t need to win the election. The solution just needs Biden to go away.
Harris fixes the problem 100%.
The problem is being exposed as having lied about Biden’s condition for a long time.
The ‘splaining will probably resemble a cat trying to bury a turd in the middle of a linoleum floor in a kitchen.
The problem will still be there.
Covid and RSV MRNA vaccines have durability problems relative to protein based vaccines. This is discussed at minute 3 and later on at minute 18 in the June 29 episode of Dr. Daniel Griffin’s Clinical Update. Griffin observes that the rapid development of vaccines using the MRNA platform is well and good but current evidence suggests that the development of longer lasting protein based vaccines may prove better in the long run. As is so often the case, more studies are needed.
Heh. The Publix pharmacist just told me she doesn’t recommend Novavax. I just shrugged and said she’s wrong. Can’t take anyone seriously that isn’t wearing a respirator in 2024 in healthcare.
Berenson–a Walter Reed Parkinson’s specialist has been visiting the White House clinic over the past year. No suggestion or evidence he was seeing the president personally.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/very-urgent-a-parkinsons-disease
What people can observe with their own eyes and ears is all the evidence needed. No smoking gun necessary in this case.
Berenson’s source for the story is the NYPost
https://nypost.com/2024/07/06/us-news/president-bidens-physician-met-with-parkinsons-disease-specialist-in-white-house/
A question for our French and France domiciled commenters. What is the effect on the second round voting tomorrow of the mass withdrawal of candidates from contention? I read over here that it is bad news for Le Pen. True?
All candidates who fail to score less than 12,5% of the registered voters have to withdraw anyway. This year there has been an attempt by the Front Populaire and the Macronists to coordinate candidacies where they have both qualified to avoid splitting the anti-Le Pen vote. This will probably cost the RN a few seats they might otherwise have gained, but they were never going to have a working majority anyway. Much depends on whether in practice the electorate follow the orders of their leaders to vote for somebody else than their first choice, and that’s not guaranteed by any means. They are just as likely to stay at home.
Thank you. Can the RN then cobble together a “United Front” government? I have read that Le Pen has ruled that out, but, she is not a dictator within her party, is she? Otherwise, how does France run itself? This is beginning to look like what the pre-WW-1 period of French politics reads as having been. At least back then, France had some ‘real’ Socialists in contention.
What curious days we live in. In England, anti-social Labour wins big and in France a pro-social Right makes strides.
I would be very cautious about qualifying the RN/FN as a “pro-social Right”.
Point taken. However, I would question the definition of “social.” Here, I take it to be Nationalist, not Internationalist in essence.
Alexander Mercouris was saying the other day that the policies of Le Penn’s party would be very familiar to Charles de Gaulle.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/world/europe/france-left-new-popular-front.html
July 5, 2024
Left-Wing New Popular Front Scored Big in France’s Vote. Who Are Its Members?
Parties on the left were so fractious, they broke up their alliance months ago, but the possibility of a government controlled by the far right drew them back together.
By Catherine Porter
The night President Emmanuel Macron announced a snap election for France’s National Assembly last month, two words began to buzz around the internet and the media: Popular Front.
It was a reference to the left-wing alliance formed in the 1930s to resist rising fascism in Europe and at home. Now, a group of France’s main left-wing parties have banded together to fight what they see as a new danger: Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, which is closer to taking power than ever before.
That left-wing alliance called itself the New Popular Front.
“For the first time since the Vichy regime, the extreme right could prevail again in France,” the Socialist leader Olivier Faure recently told a large crowd, referencing the French government during World War II that collaborated with the Nazi occupiers…
Whatever happened to the Popular Front?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA
This is somewhat interesting–Labour and the Trident. It says Labour has always been onboard with nukes going back to Atlee, and that it was alll about national “status” rather than utility–as even Blair has admitted.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/06/keir-starmers-red-button/
Development of nuclear weapons began in the UK during the War, of course, and was continued after the War by the new Labour government. It’s always been a consensus issue. There is a powerful political status argument which the UK shares with all other nuclear powers, and in the past nuclear weapons have given the UK more influence with the US and in NATO than would otherwise have been the case. By this point, as well, the UK has had nuclear weapons for so long that giving them up would be politically unthinkable. But there’s also a string atavistic memory of being left alone in 1940 and never allowing that to happen again — a feeling shared by the French, incidentally.
It sounds like from the article it is more the UK making itself dependent on the US than vice versa. Trident is an American missile as was Polaris before it. The submarines (I think there is only one operational) are however made in Britain.
I read a book by someone who served on one of these during Thatcher. With the Cold War already fading he thought it was a bit strange.
And the main point of the article is that maintaining this capability is frightfully expensive.
Oh yes, the arrangement has always been very one-sided: the US has given far more to the UK than vice versa. The submarines are British made, although they use a US PWR design. There are four, and normally one is on patrol in peacetime. One is usually in refit but the others are available in an emergency. The warheads and guidance systems are made in the UK.
Yes, it is terribly expensive, at least to replace the submarines, but it’s been a national priority (as it is with the French for a long time now.)
. . . ” In May 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that coronavirus was no longer a global health emergency. ” . . .
No longer a global health emergency, eh? No . . . its just a global health fact now. So, mission accomplished, eh? yeah . . .
WHO to the people of Earth: ” You can live with it or you can die from it. We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the WHO.” ( with apologies to Ernestine of the Phone Company . . . )
About that article ” The Great Oil Shortage: Are We Ready for the Next Crisis?” . . . I notice that the author, Mr. Sadler, is described as being ” Senior Research Fellow in the Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation ” . Ah yes, the Heritage Foundation. It would be both cynical and ad hominem for me to say that Mr. Sadler is shilling for Big Oil. I think he sincerely believes what he writes and advocates. The Heritage Foundation likes the way he thinks because he thinks the way they like. If there were no Heritage Foundation he would still think the same thing, but he might not have as big a megaphone platform.
When I read down to the end of the article, I find 6 detailed recommendations about what we should do to counter the threat of the “next oil shock”. They are a well though out wish list by Big and Little Oil to make Oil a permanent part of the American energy portfolio for decades to come. I wonder if they are clevely hidden somewhere within the 900+ pages of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Manifesto.
And even if they aren’t, they are a devoutly wished-for and worked-for agenda-list of the Oil Industry going forward regardless.
Assuming the US government becomes thoroughly and utterly recaptured by the Oil Industry, what can wannabe “global dewarmers” do to lower their own use of oil in the teeth of a determined Oil Industry Government conspiracy to make them use as much oil as possible? Can they down-use oil so effectively as to weaken the Oil Industry’s revenue streams enough to weaken its power? Could a hundred million wannabe-global-dewarming individual persons within the US deconsume so much oil in their hundred million personal lives that they could genuinely and effectively undermine the PetroGovernment conspiracy to force them to use more and more oil?
Such an effort would have to be thought of as a Civil Culture War and would have to be waged as such.
And such a Civil Culture War would have to be waged against people thought of as ” not the usual suspects”.
For example, the only way to stop people like Taylor Swift from using their private jets is to boycott all their shows so massively and totally and thoroughly that she and her band are driven all the way out of the Live Performance Concert business. No more Live Concerts, no more need for Taylor Swift to use her private jet. Are the Taylor Swift fans all ready to give up Taylor Swift concerts so totally and so long as to ground Taylor Swift’s private jet and keep it grounded for lack of business?)
It wouldn’t matter because so much oil/energy can be used in wars and in data centers.
. . . “If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race,” Biden said. “The Lord Almighty’s not coming down.” . . .
Well, the Lord Almighty doesn’t have to come down His own Self. He can send the Angel of Heart Attack, or the Angel of Stroke, or the Angel of Slip-and-Fall, or . . . or . . . or . . .
As if Genocide Joe wasn’t hip to the idea of the 2nd coming of someone who certainly considers himself to be the Lord Almighty…
Nah, I am reminded of this: Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 16:18
Really, it fits almost the entire Western class of elites.
>Labour win
Will be interesting to see whether honeymoon gets past the mortgage resets coming up.
Re. Pulminary fibrosis
This is what killed a close family member of mine. He had survived his second Covid infection (delta, ugh) and was in the hospital slowly improving. The hospital had scheduled his release but mere hours after having that discussion he appeared to have suffered an embolism. Scans revealed he hadn’t, and instead was suffering from pulmonary fibrosis from which there was no recovering. It was an awful way to go. He stated alive long enough for family to visit one last time, roughly 19 hours, during which his O2 levels were ~50%.
The point of my story is that it happened incredibly fast. There were probably symptoms but they were masked by similar post-covid symptoms. Stay safe and alert everyone.
I am very, very sorry about your family member. I had no idea that fibrosis could progress quickly like that.
People are now taking enzymes such as nattokinase and serrapeptase for pulmonary fibrosis, and there are trials behind doing that: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8624573/. I take them because they also may help with cardiac calcification; another condition that regular medicine has no treatment for (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9441630/). Also these enzymes may break down the spike protein (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9458005/). Of course one needs to check with one’s doctor before taking them.
I also take nattokinase, along with high dose niacin, to preclude and, hopefully, dissolve some of the plaque already in my system.
Unfortunately, my Medica is beholden to a mid-sized hospital clinic conglomerate and is ‘advised’ against prescribing certain “medications” and especially supplements. So, my regimen is viewed by her as a self-administered experiment with a N=1. She can officially say that she advised me against the course of action.
There are doctors, and there are Doctors. And sometimes we are lucky to find one somewhere in the middle.
Stay safe.
Well, I didn’t actually ask my doctor. I wrote that since of course people should.
You get enough K2, right?? K2 is extremely important for making sure bone forms in the right places (that is, not in your arteries). Natto contains K2, but nattokinase doesn’t, so even if you take nattokinase you need to get K2 separately. I can’t take K2 in supplement form since it raises my blood pressure (it affects some people that way). So I eat two pasture raised eggs a day for the K2. Natto itself would be nice but it is overpriced and a pain to find in stores. You can make it at home if you are into that sort of project and have the counter space.
Thanks for the info. I do take a D3 K2 combined supplement.
I am told that natto is “an acquired taste.” I enjoy vegemite and similar, so, I can at least give it a try.
Trying to figure out the synergies and contra indications of my hypertension meds and supplements gets me sometimes feeling like an old fashioned Alchemist. Where oh where is that Philosophers Stone when you need it?
Be safe always.
I can’t take most supplements since the filler in them raises my blood pressure. Specifically magnesium stearate; it is in most pills. It took me absolutely forever to figure that out, since the stuff is considered to be inert and totally safe and I could find nothing on the topic. But once I made sure nothing I took had magnesium stearate in it, my blood pressure went back to its natural very low level. I wonder if this might be common but not realized.
Natto is very tasty. I just don’t want to drive twelve miles in dense traffic to buy it.
It’s meant to be mixed with mustard or something else. It is an acquired taste but not too bad. The appearance is what puts people off.
Curious Short North American Deep South Zeitgeist Report.
The mail was very late today, as in, usually delivered around noon, today after 6PM.
I caught the mail carrier at the box and joked, “Rough day today?”
He looked at me, visibly tired out, and replied, “Oh yes. Seven out of thirty-one carriers called out sick this morning. Covid is back with a vengeance.”
“What about the part timers?” I asked.
He answered, “They are already covering open routes. I’m doing my second full route today.”
“OH. I’ll let you alone then. Good luck.” I watched him drive off down the road and suddenly realized that the engine on the mail truck was sounding like it had a bad valve. It was tapping like a sewing machine.
Everyone and everything in the Postal Service seems to be in a process of being ground down.
G-d help America. No one else is.
A number of friends have fallen sick as of late, the pandemic isn’t over till it says its over.
In God We Trust to cover all debts, public & private…
Funny thing in that said motto wasn’t on our currency and was only added in 1957 to ward off them there Commie atheists back in the USSR~
Indeed, this G-d of which you speak seems quite arcane. I am reminded of the pyramid with the eye atop it placed on the One Dollar bill in 1935, said pyramid being from the Great Seal of the United States, adopted back in 1782.
Alas, we thus cannot accuse the Free Masons of being G-dless Commies.
A more truthful sign of American Exceptionalism would be the placement of the U.S. Treasury building on the reverse of the Ten Dollar bill. On the front of said bill, who else but that great Progressive Champion, Alexander Hamilton!
Isn’t there a statute of limitations problem on the government going after the disabled veterans’s separation bonus?
I had a family member who worked in a state government unemployment system. In general if a recipient was overpaid (even through government error) they were required to pay the money back, period, no matter how much time had elapsed. I suppose there could have been exceptions, but my family member never heard of any.
Found a fun little thread about central banking, Japan, Soros, etc
Here
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/06/joe-biden-neurologist-doctor-meeting
About a Parkinson’s specialist who has visited the White House 8 times since last August. Probably just a coincidence /s
I find it weird that the WH think “I haven’t had a cognitive test ever” is a good defence against “this man needs a cognitive test”