Looks and Gaming: Who and Why? NBER
The end of menopause: would women be healthier and happier if they menstruated for ever? Guardian (Dr. Kevin). *Sigh* This really underplays HRT as an alternative. HRT has been demonized for increasing cancer risk, but when started either before 60 or within two years of menopause, it reduces all factor mortality. Any increase in cancer incidence is more than offset by improvement in heart health.
Hopes dashed for drug aimed at monkeypox virus spreading in Africa Nature (Micael T)
Philippines reports new mpox case with no history of foreign travel Aljazeera
#COVID-19
Latest scientific research points to long COVID in Australia being a significant and growing problem Bill Mitchell
Climate/Environment
The Huge Profits Investors Have Made on Catastrophe Bonds Are Raising Eyebrows Bloomberg
>The great Australian water grab ABC Australia (Kevin W). I recall a big study back when I was in Oz, between 2002 and 2004, that Australia was exporting a huge amount of its scarce water in its ag exports and not being paid enough for that. So this recognition is coming awfully late.
Surprise, surprise! Article 6 carbon credits face exactly the same problems as voluntary carbon credits REDD Monitor (Micael T)
China?
China to restrict exports of strategic metal antimony Asia Times (Kevin W)
China expands export controls on drones, parts with potential for military use South China Morning Post
China’s state security ministry unveils espionage disguised as wind measurement tower construction Global Times
Data shows China’s latest worsening economic problem: Youth unemployment First Post
California Democrats fear US tech firm ‘death spiral’ with more China curbs Reuters (guurst). From last week, still germane.
European Disunion
This is how school profits are used to buy influence Aftonbladet (Micael T)
Trilaterals over Stockholm Jacob Nordangard (Micael T)
Old Blighty
Final artwork in Banksy animal series removed by London Zoo Guardian (Kevin W)
We can afford what we can do Ann Pettifor (Micael T). Also a class warfare entry.
Poles Apart: The common ground beneath our feet Rachel Donald (Micael T)
Drug supply crisis as half a million patients with ADHD and mental illness face shortages and rationing Independent
Gaza
‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 318: Gazans given new evacuation orders as Netanyahu insists on additional ceasefire conditions Mondoweiss (guurst)
Shay Golden, Channel 14, October 17th 2023:
"We are coming. We are coming to Gaza. We are coming to Lebanon. We will come to Iran… We will annihilate the enemy… If for Gilad Shalit we freed 1,000 terrorists, consider how many of you we are going to kill… Numbers that you… pic.twitter.com/hsc4iAjI7L— B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) August 19, 2024
Hamas rejects Gaza ceasefire deal, blaming Netanyahu for setting new ‘obstacles’ ABC Australia (Kevin W)
End game: What’s Israel’s plan in the occupied West Bank? Al Jazeera (Kevin W)
Exclusive: Egypt agrees to Israeli control of Gaza border in return for Rafah reopening Middle East Eye
Fighting intensifies between Israel and Hezbollah despite diplomatic drive Guardian
Revisionist Zionists dare the U.S. to pull the plug on their Nakba agenda Alastair Crooke (Chuck L). Important. The exposition is a bit baroque, but be sure to read to the end.
As war looms over Lebanon, refugees wonder how they will survive Aljazeera
Scottish government suspends all meetings with Israel Anadolu Agency
New Not-So-Cold War
AN “OPERATION TO ENSURE” THE US WITHDRAWAL FROM UKRAINE BEGAN IN KURSK: CHINA’S CUNNING GAME First Russian (Michael T). I can’t begin to evaluate this but it’s a very different perspective than what we see from either the usual Russia hostiles or Russia friendlies. Those of you who read or listen to Russian sources in Russian, please pipe up.
America’s Shadow War in Ukraine Ken Klipperstein. Confirming what has long been suspected
Germany freezes Ukraine military aid as budget crisis hits at home Telegraph
News of the Nord Stream attack causes the country to boil Nachdenkseiten via machine translation (Micael T)
‘Keep quiet’ Tusk tells Germany over Nord Stream revelations Brussels Signal
Suggestions Poland helped Nord Stream sabotage are groundless, says presidential aide Reuters
What Sanctions? 85% Of Russia’s Oil Finds Buyers In China And India Forbes
Kyiv, in its attempt to invade the Kursk region, used armored vehicles supplied by NATO countries immediately before the attack.
RIA Novosti found out from documents captured by the 810th Marine Brigade of the Russian Army.
The armored vehicle Roshel Senator (model Ford F-559… pic.twitter.com/Naw4enFwjQ
— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) August 18, 2024
Zelensky Buffer Zone: Ukr Kursk Fire Bag, Niu-York Falls, Toretsk Stormed, Pokrovsk Fall Alexander Mercouris, YouTube. We get a nice long shout out at the top over what to make of a Washington Post article claiming Russia and Ukraine had been negotiating to halt the energy war. I published this piece before seeing that Maria Zarakhova had issued a denial that there were any talks about civilian infrastructure. Mercouris read that as qualified. As far as I can tell on a quick search, the electricity system, including the nuclear plants, are in fact privately owned and thus would qualify as civilian. This statement almost amounts to Zarakhova weirdly trying to deny that the previous attacks hit “civilian” assets. Aurelien also noted in comments:
I think much of the confusion arises from the loose use of words, as often. I don’t think there was ever the possibility of a “partial ceasefire agreement” being “signed.” In particular, there would never have been a formal agreement. What might have happened is exploratory talks towards an unwritten understanding about how the war would be conducted in the future. This happens surprisingly often in conflicts and does not necessarily imply any direct contact between the parties. Messages of the nature “if you don’t do X then we won’t do Y” can be passed through intermediaries, as in this case Qatar. But I would have thought that the Russians easing up on energy attacks would be only one part of any “deal,” perhaps in return for something the Russians wanted that we haven’t heard about. In any event, such “deal” would have been conditional, and the Russians could have restarted the attacks at any time. So I don’t think we necessarily have to see this as a sign of Russian weakness.
Putin makes it clear that talks with Kiev are now impossible — Lavrov TASS (guurst)
Elon Musk denies giving Cybertruck to Chechen leader Anadolu Agency
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
The US lays out a road safety plan that will see cars ‘talk’ to each other Endgadget (Kevin W)
Ford’s Shocking New Idea Lets Cars Spy on Others and Send Data to Cops and Insurance Companies Reclaim the Net (Micael T)
The Golden Age of Hackers in Vegas Is Over 404Media (Micael T)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Political Liberalism and Rawlsian Religion Edward Feser (Micael T)
Trump
Shares in Trump’s social media company hit lowest level since going public Financial Times
Trump Targets Biden’s EV Tax Incentives OilPrice
Supreme Court Gives Fani Willis a New Deadline Newsweek (furzy)
Democrat Convention
A mass march for Gaza broke through the security barrier outside the DNC.
Activists say they’re defying attempts by the Democratic Party and Chicago police to suppress protests against the genocide.
BT’s @keipritsker reports pic.twitter.com/psCpc6iCyH
— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) August 20, 2024
As Li points out. “SCt saved the pills, 60% of abortions are pills, it’s hard to take these people seriously.” But everyone in on the action:
Protesters in Chicago who are marching against the DNC chant "F*ck the courts, f*ck the state, you can't make us procreate."
People dressed as abortion pills take part in the march. pic.twitter.com/xwmRAAjW8w
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 19, 2024
The protest fun is already beginning at DNC in chicago.pic.twitter.com/j1okM4dsuu
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) August 19, 2024
Ahead of Democratic convention, anger in Chicago’s ‘Little Palestine’ Daily Mail (Kevin W)
2024
GOP-controlled election board in Georgia passes rule that could further delay certification CNN
Anti-gerrymandering amendment is Issue 1 2024, but the fight is not over Signal Cleveland (Carla R)
Our No Longer Free Press
Meta permanently bans The Cradle in latest attack on free speech The Cradle
Fired by MSNBC for Giving Voice to Iraq War Opposition, Phil Donahue (1935-2024) Was Courage Personified Common Dreams (Kevin W)
AI
AI image of ‘Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’ shows something is seriously wrong 9News (Kevin W)
Real hourly wages, median income, and aggregate payrolls: update for July Angry Bear
The Bezzle
Tesla is testing whether stockholders have the power to overrule a judge Yahoo! Finance (Kevin W). The world is more and more coming to resemble Snow Crash, seee here Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.
A debt strategy that’s seen as unsustainable is getting more popular on Wall Street Fortune
Parents outraged at Snoo after smart bassinet company charges fee to rock crib for crying babies Independent (Kevin W)
Class Warfare
BREAKING: An annual income of at least $200,000 is now needed to afford a typical home in 17 major metro areas in the US.
The most expensive area is San Jose, California where a household would need to make $587,000 per year to afford the average home.
The median home sale… pic.twitter.com/uVH1pDBwKI
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) August 16, 2024
America’s Renter Population Is Growing Three Times Faster Than Its Homeowner Population Amid Rise in Homebuying Costs Business Wire
Operation: Hearth: Making computing more local Libre Network (Micael T)
Antidote du jour. Eric S:
I wanted to submit a picture of our kitty, Skippy, for the antidote du jour. Pictured here contemplating food vs nap, he’s generally referred to in our house as the Chris Hemsworth of kitty cats due to his handsome visage (he even has his own instagram: skippy_sleeps)
A bonus:
Great Photography 😍 pic.twitter.com/zu3eR58RWM
— Rabbit Lovers Community USA (@RabbitLoversUSA) August 19, 2024
A second bonus:
The Black Swan Family 🦢 pic.twitter.com/1BimA69Hks
— why you should have an animal (@shouldhaveanima) August 17, 2024
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
KAMALA’S TIPSY
(melody borrowed from Gypsy by Stephanie Nicks as performed by Fleetwood Mac)
When she laughs you can tell that wine went down
Somebody poured the sauce she loves
Her perfume has that trace of vineyard sours
Kamala’s tipsy—got a buzz
Oh so tipsy—what a buzz
(Doo, Doo, Doo, Doo)
And it all goes down so smooth
She enjoys the love when
She describes how she’ll bring paradise
(Ohh!) Camera lights get so bright
Kamala’s tipsy
Kamala’s tipsy
When she’s tipsy sans restraint
She shouts Freedom! like it’s really here
She’s not sincere—she walks among
Neocons running wild—this world is not enough
They bluff and push and shove
Too rough for us!
In her pantsuit she sways—reads the house
Waves to all the fish in this local dish
Rudimentary soundbites to soothe the crowd
Kamala’s tipsy (Ohh!)
She’s feeling tipsy (Ooh, ohh!)
(Ohh, ohh, ohh)
(Stars and Stripes—to a dunce that looks nice)
(And it all goes down . . . )
(Ooh, ohh, ohh)
And it all goes down so smooth
(Stars and Stripes—to a dunce that looks nice)
(And it all goes down . . . ) (Ohh!)
She’s still spouting bright lies
Bright lies (and it all goes down . . . )
Her bright lies!
(Bright lies—to a dunce they sound nice)
(And it all goes down . . . )
Could Harris be the first woman to day-drink herself to the WH?
‘Lord Bebo
@MyLordBebo
Kyiv, in its attempt to invade the Kursk region, used armored vehicles supplied by NATO countries immediately before the attack.
RIA Novosti found out from documents captured by the 810th Marine Brigade of the Russian Army.’
NATO has been doing this for the past two and a half years. The only difference here is that I suspect that NATO nations are really scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Emptying out their arsenals for this all out attack may just run the tap dry. Germany has already declared that as far as money and weapons for the Ukraine are concerned, they are tapped out and other nations may soon follow. If you soon see NATO tank battalions being converted into mounted cavalry squadrons, you will know why now.
I remember reading (I thought it was here on Links) that Germany moved the spending on weapons for UA from their federal budget to the frozen Russian foreign currency. I couldn’t find the link when I went looking for it yesterday.
The EU which includes Germany still hasn’t been able to touch those frozen Russian funds, no matter how much they drool over them. They have been able to swipe the interest on that Russian money – itself a dubious legal move – and are now using it as a sort of collateral for a $50 billion loan to the Ukraine. Why they would lend that much money to a country that is in virtual default of its debts is another question altogether.
Their problem is that they can’t seem to find anyone who will provide the loan, even with EU ‘guarantees’. Funny that, perhaps no-one thinks its a good deal what with EU economies and Ukraine’s debt rating.
It doth seem it’s all floating on printing of U$D. Here’s an example, although Euro’s are pictured:
https://x.com/Panchenko_X/status/1824389780500541463?t=7CLngpvrYVbDl36LuXCziw&s=19
Gotta “employ” the German and Brit tanks before they break down and no one can fix them! The Abrams are already sitting around waiting repairs.
An observation, seems they used a lot of wheeled armor, like Stryker. That suggests they were “sneaking up” on the K NPP. Wheels much quieter, and when you stick to roads…… you get blown up!
It was a light cavalry charge, into poorly defended territory. Wheeled vehicles driving fast on roads is a way to do it, and what made the initial phase successful. They were ordered to go as far as they can, before Russian send reinforcements. Now they wish they came on foot.
“Came on foot”, that’s good. I think they wish they were within walking distance of Ukraine. Walking home while being droned and shot at sounds worst than an LA traffic jam.
Horses are expensive and require trained personnel that Western armies haven’t had in decades. They might as well start issuing pikes.
>Our No Longer Free Press
Bassem Youssef is apparently banned from Twitter, Michael Tracey interviews Congressman Ro Khanna and the latter spouts one lie after another about Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine (Twitter clip below).
Lies after lies, babies being burned in ovens, 40 beheaded babies, fake rape allegations. All these lies in an age where news is streamed live on my phone 24/7. Inventing reality, as Michael Parenti, pointed out in a book with the same title, is where spectators like myself are being assailed. I’m fortunate that it’s propaganda and not bombs raining down on me. I look outside and it’s calm, people going about their business of getting on with their immediate concerns/life and for the most part, completely disengaged from the wider world of geopolitics.
https://x.com/SystemUpdate_/status/1825575446978637967
Meanwhile in the UK, noted journalist Richard Medhurst landed in Heathrow Airport and was met with 6 police at the aircraft itself where they arrested him under the Terrorism Act, Section 12 because of his reporting. They held him for 24 hours and treated him like a terrorist, screwed around with his attempts to contact family and lawyers and then bounced him after an interview the next day-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYa-cb7MzIo (8:48 mins)
You think that organizations like Reporters Without Borders will speak up for him? No, I don’t think so either.
This was probably how long they needed to do what they needed to his residence (and nearby residences). Richard probably knows what to do.
He lives in Paris, so that would have been unnecessary.
Last night, looking for something else, I ran across Mark Twain’s 1887 speech to the Hartford Monday Evening Club, entitled “Consistency”. In writing about party allegiance, he posits: “What slave is so degraded as the slave who is proud that he is a slave? What is the essential difference between a life-long Democrat and any other kind of life-long slave?”
Allegiance to party, he says, “enables them to foist upon the country officials who no self respecting man would vote for”, as “…convention packers know they are not obliged to put up the fittest man for the office, for they know that the docile party will vote for any forked thing they put up, though it do not even strictly resemble a man”.
The speech is worth reading in full; it is worth being printed on handbills and handed out at the DNC, and being written on the sky over Chicago. In his conclusion, Twain writes: “Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world – and never will!”
The War Prayer, by Mark Twain
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the
war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were
beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers
hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading
spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpouring of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way…
https://www.people.vcu.edu/~toggel/prayer.pdf
a/k/a Ben-Gvir’s Prayer:
“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it–for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that area sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
This is so over-the-top– excellent work/excellent find!
Thanks. I used to consider it “over the top” as well, but my daily X feed from Gaza makes it seem understated by comparison.
There are a whole gamut of “secular religions” that have filled the vacuum given the decline in Western organized religion, family communication, etc.
Party politics is one of many outlets for today’s “white man’s burden,” or to find a sense of identity.
“White man’s burden” gets a new meaning with the new “positive masculinity” bit. (Channeling Taibbi/Kirn from yesterday)
Walter Kirn is a national treasure
Kirn reminds me of all the veterans, teachers and mentors I had 40 plus years ago that would dope slap you for being a momentary dumb-ass but still thought you had potential to do better.
Good to watch him.
Yes! He’s a curmudgeon, but the best kind of curmudgeon.
Do you happen to have a link to this speech? – I have been looking around for 20 minutes – and am unable to find it?
In a speech entitled “Consistency,” delivered on December 2, 1887, to the Hartford Monday Evening Club, Twain stated
“No man remains the same sort of Presbyterian he was at first—the thing is impossible; time and various influences modify his Presbyterianism; it narrows or it broadens, grows deeper or shallower, but does not stand still. In some cases it grows so far beyond itself, upward or downward, that nothing is really left of it but the name, and perhaps an inconsequential rag of the original substance, the bulk being now Baptist or Buddhist or something.” *
* https://kb.osu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/b00419af-1c5b-5115-af81-867f9a8cd7e7/content
Same. I’m eager to read this.
On hormone replacement after menopause:
For the past several years I have had tense conversations with my gynecologist about continuing my prescription for a hormone patch, originally prescribed by another doctor. I love this guy—he’s old and old school—but his wise skepticism about many medical interventions is I think misplaced when it comes to HRT.
I saved the NC-linked paper for my next annual appointment, which was yesterday. I was a bit nervous about how he would react to having a patient tell him he needed to read this bit of medical literature, but he listened to me, asked questions, skimmed the paper, and later remarked to his intern that I was the best kind of advocate for my own health and she needed to read the paper too.
I got my prescription and a renewed respect and gratitude for this doctor.
Thank you, Yves!
Thanks for sharing this! Good for you – and your doc.
If only all doctors – all people? – were willing to be open to new input.
Yes, good share. I’m passing it on to my wife.
German authorities felt compelled to make an example of a 97 (now 99) year old woman. On the other hand, try protesting Gaza — occurring right now and reported in real time — and they’ll come down on top of you like a ton of bricks.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-upholds-ex-nazi-camp-secretary-conviction/a-69986542
Good thing that the janitor at that camp died years ago or else those laws would have been used to go after him as well. The fact that a 97 year-old woman was tried and convicted in a juvenile court was just bizarre in how far the law is being bent to get convictions. Even the New York court system was blushing about this one.
I did not watch any of the DNC convention, but reading the sound bytes, my favorite so far was:
AOC: Harris working ‘tirelessly’ for Gaza ceasefire
That sort of comedy gold doesn’t grow on trees. When did the Congresswoman from NYC get such a great sense of humor?
Antoinette of Color: ‘Let them eat mistake…’
OJ is up in Heaven (or maybe the other place) smiling down on AOC. He knows a thing or two about working tirelessly for justice.
Brilliant! This will enter my mind every time I hear that acronym!
I dipped into the DNC when Joey B was speaking. They did right to schedule him so late. He definitely didn’t get the memo about “joy” and instead had the appearance and demeanor of a very angry wotsit
I had no desire to watch but I figured I would see what my PMC friends said about it to make a determination. They thought it great (except Hochal). Their slobbering over these people is off the charts. Hillary knocked it out of the park, AOC was great, and Biden killed it. Hillary would have made a great president, too bad Putin got Trump elected, so they say.
So that tells me it was a huge cringe event so I’m glad I missed it. They also tell me there is a special speaker on Thursday- Adam Kinzinger. Why not Bill Kristol or even John Bolton? Better yet, maybe Zelensky and/or Bibi?
If Biden killed it, why is he not the candidate any more? Is he Vercingetorix at Caesar/Obama’s triumph, or what Mark Antony might have been if he didn’t kill himself, at Octavian/Obamian’s? (While the man hides behind a gender flipped lookalike puppet?)
AN “OPERATION TO ENSURE” THE US WITHDRAWAL FROM UKRAINE BEGAN IN KURSK: CHINA’S CUNNING GAME
Its the opposite of Mercouris’ often repeated view that China is solidly behind Russia , and refers to articles in Global Times heavily criticizing Ukraine’s move. However I can find no such commentary in the Global Times, but articles with a ‘balanced’ view such as referred to by the Russian article.
This article is from a TV channel owner who also writes about the need to use tactical nukes now to stop WW3.
Perhaps he is being used to show the Kremlin’s displeasure with both their enemies and also so-called ‘strategic allies’.
Mercouris over the last 24 hours modified his position a little by talking about some of the BRICS starting to exert pressure on Russia to ‘negotiate’. Which of course is now off the table after Kursk.
If the whole Kursk situation was known by Russia months ago ( another Mercouris talking point after being tipped off by an unnamed Russian source), its been used to defuse BRICS pressure and create a useful ‘firebag’ of Ukrainian resources.
This supports one of the options already explored by Yves.
Mercouris was also saying that the Chinese are infuriated with the Ukraine after this attack. The Ukraine’s Foreign Minister – Dmytro Kuleba – was in China recently and the Chinese were trying to help wind this war down with negotiations. Now the Chinese realize that the Ukrainians were only stringing them along and the Ukrainians have no intention of either shutting down this war or negotiating in good faith. So probably as far as the BRICS nations and most of the Global majority are concerned, the Ukrainians are on their own.
Re; AN “OPERATION TO ENSURE” THE US WITHDRAWAL FROM UKRAINE BEGAN IN KURSK: CHINA’S CUNNING GAME
The link directs through Google Translate, which will not allow me to open the page (this also happened with another article linked here recently).
Do you have an original or direct link to the article that I can run through Brave or Yandex?
https://spb.tsargrad.tv/articles/v-kurske-nachalas-operacija-obespechenija-vyhoda-ssha-s-ukrainy-hitraja-igra-kitaja_1040612
Thank you for that.
This is an opinion-piece written by one Sergey Latshev, and his other pieces seem just as extreme, provocative, and freakin hilarious!
Here’s an article he wrote about our would-be president, Kamala Harris:
Everyone sees, but they are afraid to formulate: Kamalu Harris exposed neighing
The constant laughter of Kamala Harris inspires horror and fear. We are talking about the diagnosis of a serious illness. At the head of the United States, they want to replace one patient with another, much more dangerous…
https://tsargrad.tv/articles/vidjat-vse-no-bojatsja-sformulirovat-kamalu-harris-razoblachilo-rzhanie_1034056
Within Russian writing that may present as parody or satire, there is often an element of truth. Mr. Latshev seems to be having a grand old time here– he’s romping across his keyboard as excitedly as a kid at the playground!
As far as the original article, it’s clear that he feels that China should pick a side.
I think the article is reflecting more on the distaste the Russian religious-conservative circles have towards China than Kremlin thinking.
It’s basically saying that China staying mostly neutral is the same as stabbing Russia in the back. And that the Chinese end-game must be to keep Russia weak – and divided, since the writer seem to think that most of Ukraine actually is part of Russia. So all this peace nonsense is just to keep Russia from re-uniting and becoming too strong for China to dominate.
I think the main complaint is against the fact that slowly China is adhering to the Western sanctions, while still taking Russian oil and gas, etc…
Which I also found for quite some time unbecoming.
As they say in the old country, one cannot be with the dick in the arse and the soul in heaven… No intention for offense here, is just better than the cake saying…
In Feb 1943 North Africa, the Germans advanced on a crossroads about 20 miles east of Kasserine Pass. The main US armor detachment in the area charged in.
It was a trap, a preset kessel, which had been used on the Brits regularly in the German advance on Egypt. US armor was essentially knocked out ofthe subsequent campaign. Patton’s son in law was captured and remained in German hands for the war!
Whether preplanned or surprise Ukraine now in a kessel about Kursk….
While progress in Donbas is off front pages.
“CHINA’S CUNNING GAME”
Forgive me, but “cunning” is an offensive stereotype for Chinese thinking. This is a knowingly prejudiced passage, and is complete nonsense however offensive. China and Russia are supportive partners, and efforts to end the partnership will be to no avail.
You can really get anoying with your repated complains about being offended by all kinds of things (all China related, for some reason). The text in question doesn’t even say that what got your knickers in a twist, because it is written in Russian. What makes you think that what was written in Russian is “an offensive stereotype for Chinese thinking”? Do you know subtleties of Russian language that got lost in (machine) transalation? Do you even speak Russian?
China, in a way, has been Ukraine’s most important arms supplier to date–cheap Chinese drones have been most important and successful weapons used by Ukraine and I am skeptical that Chinese gov’t has not been able to seriously cut down their supply. There are a lot of double games being played…
“It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic….”
First stumbled on “The War Prayer” during the Vietnam wars. Sadly, it keeps being relevant
Re Der Spiegel’s Next Hitler, readers may laugh at how naïf I was as well as at the inferiority of my education, but I was always taught that what made Nazis bad was that they did genocides. Following modern discourse, it’s obvious that I was misled. Instead, it seems to be some populisty things that made them offensive, since clearly genocide is irrelevent here.
Only a few days ago, Max Blumenthal got roundly criticized by the CIA-left of using the term ‘ZOG’ – Zionist Occupied Government. He was even accused of using Nazi or neo-Nazi language. Yet these same people would never accuse the Democratic party currently underwriting a genocide of being Nazis.
It may take me some time to unlearn my prior lessons and absorb the new wisdom.
Secret Hitler is actually a fun board game,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbGXIDYdtas
Important part of it is that fashists accuse everyone else of being fashist. In order to be successful, the Secret Hitler needs to pretend to be the most liberal of all, and blame all the fashist policies on someone else.
Tony Blair’s NHS dream? Fewer GPs, more chatbots (Politico.eu, no paywall)
Tony Blair proposes closing most local GP surgeries and replacing them with super primary care centers, a leaked report shows.
The former prime minister’s report envisages a radical overhaul of the NHS, calling on the U.K.’s new Labour government to consolidate GP practices, grouping patients based on healthcare needs rather than geography.
“The traditional model of 10 minutes with a doctor to discuss one problem by the time you’re already sick persists in some places, but increasingly practices are adopting a [population health management] approach,” Blair’s report says.
Blair remains close to the Labour Party leadership and has touted artificial intelligence as a silver bullet for ailing public services, government inefficiency and a stagnant economy — messaging echoed by Cabinet ministers since the election.
Blair’s report says that at present, most primary-care networks look after populations of between 30,000 and 50,000, but that NHS England should take steps to increase that figure to 250,000.
“In time the primary-care landscape would change to one with far fewer groups of primary-care practices – and meaningful choice for patients over which group they register with,” the report says.
POLITICO obtained a copy of the report, which was published on Friday apparently by accident, before it was deleted from the Tony Blair Institute’s website. The institute published the report Monday evening after being contacted by POLITICO
The report advocates creating a centralized store of digitized health records that could be used to power “AI doctors” that would interact with citizens through a chatbot.
Blair’s think tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, is backed by tech billionaire Larry Ellison who has pledged a total of $375 million over the years. Ellison’s cloud computing company Oracle is in one of the sectors benefiting from an AI boom and has a commercial interest in digitizing health records….” [article continues]
—-
[BP]Context: There’s currently a review of the NHS underway led by Baron Darzi of Denham who includes these interests:
Evelo Biosciences, Member of the Board of Directors
AbbVie, Member of the Advisory Board
Darzi is called RoboDoc for his love of tech solutions. This article about his appointment to the role contains interesting reaction in the comments section.
Blair’s ideas would seem to fit with this. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary that will oversee the “radical overhaul” is someone I struggle to find polite words for and is most definitely a Blairite technocrat.
I’m sure it will be great! /s
Here’s a direct link to the Blair think-tank Report
Thank you, Ben.
No mention of Darzi’s healthcare investment and consulting firm…
Thank you Colonel
If you have excess time and energy I’d love it if you expanded on that. I have a general idea but that’s all.
Messing with GP’s is a dangerous game. They’re the only health service Britain has got and they are *angry*.
The cleverclogs who wrote the internal market and primary care contracts made a lot of assumptions about GP’s adapting to perform tasks to realise system-wide efficiencies, which do not accrue to GP’s because they are neither contractual nor remunerated.
At a BBQ this weekend, a friend who is senior partner in a large practice revealed the practice is now working to contract. Pre-procedure blood tests? Go to hospital. More than X appointments in the day? Send them to hospital if urgent or the queue if not. And best if all, hitting them where it hurts: electronic data sharing? No!
Yes, it turns out that a large part of the NHS dataflow belongs to the GP’s at practice level and DH and NHS England have no contractual right to it. The GP’s are turning it off. Take that, Blair and Streeting. They’re kicking you in the Palantiri. :-)
Aneurin Bevan famously birthed the NHS by stuffing the GP’s’ mouths with gold, hence the arrangement where each practice is a professional partnership and trades with the NHS under a strict, standard form contract, negotiated tooth and claw every few years. There is literally no way of firing every GP and hiring scab labour like Reagan did to the air traffic controllers. There is nothing in Blair’s reforms for the GP’s. As ever, he assumes everybody is as fungible and greedy as he is.
If I am wrong, the NHS is dead, but I think, ironically, Nye Bevan created a medical local gentry who will fight for the NHS, albeit in their own interest.
Seems that Blair’s plan is to destroy the NHS system by making it totally unworkable and then as a solution to introduce the American healthcare system. And he will be there to make bank with investments in US healthcare corporations as they move into the UK to pick up the pieces.
What a bunch of inhuman ghouls these people are. They don’t need any more dollars or machines to achieve their goal of a humanity-free decisionmaking process — they’re already there.
Not sure why Alastair Crooke says the US is impotent against Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir. I would put my money on the US in this match-up.
yes, I raised my brow at this as well. The US chooses to be impotent, but it isn’t. It just underscores the fact that this is America’s holocaust as well as Israel’s.
US should have cut Israel of from any military supplies in Oct 2023!
Last April approved $11B including a big chunk to refurbish missile defenses.
Now $20B more for supplying genocide!
US is willing accomplice.
The US is run by Zionists. It is not impotent. US leadership is part of the problem.
I am not equating Zionist with Jews here. The largest group of Zionists are Christian.
that gets repeated a lot but it’s like saying that the majority of Republicans, or Tories, aren’t billionnaires but working class. It’s true but it’s also meaningless. Their opinions don’t matter. It only matters insofar that they are not opponents.
Christian Zionists could disappear overnight and US policy in the Middle East wouldn’t change one iota. Same thing for republicans/tories. It would only matter if they switched stances: ie Christian Zionists became staunch anti-Zionists and working class Rs/Tories would become communists.
The US has been ridding real estate of “savages” since before Zionism was a glint in Herzl’s eye.
The pattern is a pious moral pose at the political center used to justify depraved expropriation at the perimeter: our aggressive crimes memory holed, their response “unprovoked”.
Just reverting to type, plus ca change…
Indeed. It puzzled me to see the clip of Saddam Hussein saying the cause of the Iraq war was “Israel” until Alastair gave us this history, including the neocon plan to genocide Iraq and fill it back up with displaced Palestinians. I think Alastair’s analysis about revisionist zionists would be easier to digest if there had been any small mention of Israel’s (therefore US and UK) intense interest in the gas/oil field along the Israeli-Lebanese coast. When that fact is treated as inconsequential it makes politics meaningless. The zionists are useful tools. Perfect patsies. Because they are just like the Ukrainian Nazis – they are religious zealots. And they are held in a suspension of distain by “liberals” even when Biden declares himself to be one. And thus he bridges that liberal rejection, smoothing the way for more political hypocrisy, funding the genocide without the guilt. In fact replacing that natural reaction with political confusion, enough confusion that the US makes the genocide possible. In actual fact.
If you’ve listened to him for any length of time, you’ll understand he’s quite clear that he means this is a political impotence, due to the power of the Israel lobby. He’s also made the point that the Biden admin is much more deferential than usual to it.
He’s talking about the threat to drag the US into a major war with Iran unless they do what Israel wants. If US cuts Israel off, they threaten to use their nukes & bring down the whole enchilada. Hersch & others talked about how Nixon & Kissinger tried to restrain Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Israel’s response was to threaten the use of nukes unless the US sent them weapons. Nixon caved & weapons were sent. A similar scenario is playing out here.
Israel is going further than that. A few days ago their Foreign Minister was meeting with those of the UK and France and was demanding that those countries commit themselves to helping attack Iran-
‘Israel expects France and Britain to publicly clarify to Iran that it is unacceptable for it to attack Israel, and that if Iran attacks, the US-led coalition will join Israel not only in defense but also in an attack against significant targets in Iran.’
https://www.rt.com/news/602709-israel-expects-france-uk-attack-iran/
I would have told the guy to go pound sand as they had created this mess in the first place. He actually wants an Israeli-US-British-French Coalition to go fight Iran on Israel’s behalf. Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to cover it.
So maybe the Kursk invasion by the Ukrainians was in anticipation of a full-on war against Iran by the US and NATO, allowing Israel to attack Lebanon. Keeping Russia occupied protecting its own borders and nuclear power stations – and Chernobyl still within clear memory. Just a thought since nobody can come up with a rational explication for this folly.
You keep Making Shit Up. We have explained repeatedly that NATO is not capable of this, operationally and structurally. Turkiye will never join, for starters, and it has the biggest and best NATO army in theater. The US would risk Turkiye leaving NATO over this and NATO hinges on have Tukiye for its geographic position. NATO is also virtually out of weapons, in case you didn’t notice.
France and Britain (which has a pathetically small army) are acting as individual states. They cannot bind NATO. They did support Israel recently, with the US, in trying to defend Israel from a pre-agreed retaliatory strike by Iran. This was effectively for real war games. Iran hit every air base on the list, meaning even under perfect conditions, the US, Israel, France and England were not able to defend them. Oh, and Western press sources estimate the cost of the ineffective Western defense at $2.3 billion versus attack costs of $80 to $100 million for Iran.
So after that poor performance, their barking at Iran verges on comical.
It’s pure speculation. The reason I don’t rule it out is because I just don’t think we are caught in an Israeli trap. I even think we are fudging not just our innocence but also our incompetence and even pretending that our weapons are old and almost useless. It could be that we are trying to tranquilize Türkiye. How we manage to sucker the Ukrainians is beyond me. But you are right – I should preface myself with this little confession. I also think we have defense capabilities as good as Russia and China. But who wants to have that contest? Clearly, somebody does.
No, our air defenses are markedly inferior to Russia’s. We never invested it in a serious way and rely on piloted aircraft, which are the modern version of the cavalry.
You keep offering opinions before doing even basic homework or evidencing that you’ve even read the extensive commentary in our posts and in comments on these very topics. You even ignore evidence I provided right here, that Iran, not normally considered a first tier military player, bested, the US, Israel, France and the UK under conditions designed to give huge advantage to the Western forces. And you then talk over actual evidence I provided to insist on your belief in American superiority? This is bad faith argumentation.
By repeatedly volunteering mere personal belief, you are admitting to violating our overarching comments rule:
Just to be clear, I definitely agree with you and your analysis. It is extremely good. And I have felt this way about NC for the last 15 years and I do even more today as the situation is so convoluted and occult that about all that is left is good judgement. Which you have in spades. So I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass. Really. It’s the little smirk that flits between Bibi and Blinkie just pisses me off. Rest assured that you are the last person I want to impose my passive aggressiveness on. I’ll just keep my trap shut.
I don’t know Israel first-hand, but Crooke’s presentation of the various lobbies in Israel and their struggles seems familiar enough. Likewise, I think his description of Washington’s “impotence” (effectively, an inability to put enough political pressure on individuals to get what it wants) is not a surprise to anyone who’s ever dealt with the US system. It’s particularly bad in the case of Israel, but in reality, any organised country with a consistent plan, a certain amount of patience and a realistic objective can usually get what it wants out of the US, especially by exploiting the deep divisions and hatreds in Washington itself. If it’s done carefully enough, Washington may never even realise it’s been had, or that what it thinks it’s accomplished will never actually happen. It’s easy to be impressed by the media image of the US as an unstoppable behemoth getting everything it wants, but the reality, with such a dysfunctional political system, is often much more complicated.
Here, I think, Crooke is suggesting that the Israelis (or a faction of them anyway) effectively have the US over a barrel. Any sign of real displeasure with Israel will be met by threats and preparations to attack Iran, and so force US involvement and the end of the world. (Of course for parts of the Israeli and US establishments that would be a good thing, since it would bring about the coming of the Messiah/second coming of Jesus or whatever.) So I don’t think this is about the power of the Israel lobby as such, but the fact that Israel can make threats which the US is powerless to do anything about, because it cannot influence those who are making them.
Good desc, but I think we can go farther than that.
At least in the realm of foreign policy, US has always been schizophrenic, with the crazy adventurists (defined broadly) wielding disproportionate influence. But this was always constrained by unwillingness of most Americans to waste money on such things. So colonial wars in Dominican Republic or Haiti could take place without much problem–because they were cheap. But participation in “big” wars, not easy…until after WW2 created too much military resource that can be used without too overtly bothetung the public at large.
So, American interventionism worldwide has a “third rate” flavor, undertaken with all the forethought that went into them (that is, with too clever by half trickery that doesn’t consider anything more than 5 minutes into the future). They are driven mostly by wacky adventurists of dubious sanity who count on duping the American public, relying on the fact that there’s so much military assets lying around that can be thrown about cheaply. But big conflicts demand resources, and I don’t think that has much shelf life left.
“Big conflicts demand resources.” I think this is the connection.
Judging by two things: how the AFU was managed (as if by a misanthropic economist… or an inquisitive machine), and how Gaza is being depopulated (no words for this), I disagree with the assessment the West will leave well enough alone. These circumstances display marked abandon. Lives are abundant, and we have far more of value to lose than those (tongue in cheek), so we will head for the break, come hell and high water.
Either way, NS2 is kaput and Russians are still dying, meanwhile, Starbucks is having a tough quarter. Reality is, it’s getting harder for the Russians to justify battlefield victories, when they amount to political losses for the enemy. That we have been able to maintain the farce of Ukrainian success as long as we have, is telling of our range of sensitivity to the attrition. You would think there were no wives, mothers or loving children in Ukraine, just Zelensky and the rune bearers.
For those too lazy to do the math, that’s $100/hour. How’s that $7.25/hour looking?
Heard a good line in a movie last night: “Famous people don’t do math.”
‘B.M.
@ireallyhateyou
Shay Golden, Channel 14, October 17th 2023:
“We are coming. We are coming to Gaza. We are coming to Lebanon. We will come to Iran… We will annihilate the enemy… If for Gilad Shalit we freed 1,000 terrorists, consider how many of you we are going to kill… Numbers that you can’t even imagine…”‘
The problem for the Israelis with this genocide is that it is revealing to the whole world what they are all about. How many nations for example devote TV shows where they talk about their right to anal rape. But I came across something today in a Caitlin Johnstone post which really makes me wonder about Israeli society and their “values” so here is the quote-
‘Israel is a deeply sick society, with a deeply sick attitude toward rape. A 2011 poll published by Haaretz found that 61 percent of Israeli men don’t view forced sex with an acquaintance as rape, and that only seven percent believe marital rape is a thing.’
https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/israel-is-rape-2e54740babdf
That is an Israeli poll published in Israeli media so no denying that one. I think that Israel will not be happy until every neighbour of their is a failed nation that they can bomb with impunity.
It turns out that those who wrote this article are not better than those that thougt that Musk gifted the car. Kadyrov never said that he captured it. How does one even capture a brand-new scratch-free electric car in the Russian Steppe, amid constant shelling and kamikaze drone attacks?
…am I the only one that thinks of the Cybertruck as a rolling pyramid scheme?
To some it looks like oldschool Lara Croft, tits up.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1647626-cybertruck
The hand, or software, that rocks the cradle, or bassinet, or Cradle, rules the world.
So many new facets to an old home truth that show the world turning further into a Monty Python sketch.
Musical interlude.
Sorry, I’m here to weigh in on Hormone Replacement Therapy from personal experience. Hard disagree. My mother tried it because she had a hard time with menopause. She got breast cancer in barely a year.
To anyone considering, proceed with EXTREME caution.
The data says otherwise. And you likely have no idea if the MD dosed her properly. The proper way is to start low dose and move up to a former normal level over a period of months. Takes frequent blood tests to do so.
From CancerResearchUK:
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/hormones-and-cancer/does-hormone-replacement-therapy-increase-cancer-risk
If she got cancer after mere months of HRT, it is just as probable that she had an undiagnosed lump already and she was being screened more carefully or often because HRT. Another one of my pet peeves is that mammograms are not very good diagnostic tools. They are very good at detecting slow-moving growths you will die with and bad at detecting fast moving growths you will die of.
I think they had it (hrt) out like candy
I was offered it by my doctor after a Hysterectomy at age 50, I refused and he said “don’t come crawling to me when you break your leg”
I said “no….then I’ll go crawling to an orthopedic doc”
I’m 75 now and my bones are all unbroken
No, there was a period when it was fashionable, prior to the research coming out in the early 2000s highlighting the cancer increase. I was in Australia the time. The US press coverage was *ZOMG AWFUL WE MUST STOP*. In Australia, the doctors are better at stats. The press reaction was, yes, there’s an increase but very low in absolute terms but probably means need to be way more stringent with women who had smoked or had family histories of cancer.
There is an additional theory that the cancer increase comes from non bioidentical HRT. But I have not seen any research on the latter claim.
To overshare, I never had any menopause symptoms. I am on it strictly for the reduction in all cause mortality.
When I ran a biotech company in Alzheimer’s biomarkers and drug re-purposing, the scientific founder (MD, PhD, Oxford) had an strong interest in HRT. Many of the candidate compounds in our re-purposing patent were sex hormones. There are strong signals in some trials that HRT reduces AD risk but these are confounded by no better than placebo in other trials.
The explanation for why HRT actually works in some trials to improve healthy ageing is apparently timing. The lack of good effects and the possibility of bad effects of oestrogen is linked to the time that HRT is started: too late into menopause and apparently the receptors in the desired target cells have disappeared and only receptors with undesirable effects remain. It seemed plausible but we never discussed the detail of what the optimum HRT window was so I cannot provide a link. Probably the earlier the better to maintain normal signalling.
Incidentally, another large family of AD re-purposing candidates was linked to metabolic regulation – rapamycin, which is an age extender in mice, metfirmin, which is an insulin-pathway management drug and the semaglutide family (Ozempic).
Skippy is handsome! He needs a snack and some sweet-talkin’, somebody flag the waiter!
Many thanks for the antidotes, which I regularly send to distressed members of my immediate family.
Skippy deserves all the treats. But then I am thinking he has his humans wrapped around his paw. I know I would be.
Re: AN “OPERATION TO ENSURE” THE US WITHDRAWAL FROM UKRAINE BEGAN IN KURSK
Ok. Deep breath.
First, consider the source. Tsargrad is a deeply right-wing TV channel, that combines deep nationalism, monarchism (!!), and a healthy dose of religious fundamentalism. Plus, it viscerally hates any and all lefties, real or imagined, but the bolsheviks most of all. In other words, if Russia’s main news program simply skews right – replaying Fox News clips and narratives whenever it covers US political issues, for instance – Tsargrad is the coco-bananas-right. It’s obvious even from the very name, “Tsargrad” (“City of Emperors”) was the original Russian name for Constantinople, and then, after Muscovy assumed the mantle of the Byzantine Empire (partly by marrying the daughter of the last Byzantine emperor into the ruling dynasty), for Moscow itself. The other name for the channel is “First Russian”, which is prominently displayed on its website and should be taken in the strictly nationalist sense.
Ditto for the author’s bio, which is long, and laborious, and can be summed up by his reasons for coming to work at Tsargrad – “conservatism and freedom of expression, the ability to speak the truth, clear national and religious values”. These are code words one often sees on the right all over Europe, not just in Russia. Though, at least, the bio does not seem to contain any monarchist dog whistles, so that’s something.
That said. The opening paragraph, I think, gives a hint. It begins by identifying Putin’s recent peace proposal – we keep the four regions, you go neutral, that one – using the same words that Lenin used to describe the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, an “obscene peace”, that Russia was being dragooned into by its ostensible (Chinese) allies. Two sentences later, this peace proposal is labeled a “pyrrhic victory” imposed on Russia by the perfidious Chinese (!), who thus want to throw Russia a bone while maintaining good trading relations with the West. The paragraph ends by asking what “really” motivated the Ukrainians to charge headlong into the Kursk region. This question is neither answered nor even addressed for the entire remainder of the article.
This rest of the piece can be split into two sections. First, China is accused of reacting with insufficient outrage at the Kursk incursion – Brazil is employed as a contrast – which must be (!) because the Chinese would be all too happy to let the conflict end with the Russians getting only the territory that they presently occupy as well as a vague promise (surely to be violated) of Ukraine not “de jure” joining NATO (but de-facto doing just so). The Chinese want this outcome, described as terrible for Russia and wholly insufficient to solve the “Ukraine problem”, because they want to appease the West and keep trading with it for a little while longer. A parallel with Taiwan is drawn several times – if the Americans had been doing there what they had been doing in Ukraine, the author maintains, surely the Chinese military would have settled the question long ago, without any half-measures.
The second part of the piece is an extended warning to China. If Russia’s allies, the author posits, are uninterested in more overtly and substantively supporting Russia’s endeavours – fighting on their (Chinese) behalf against the collective West – then, perhaps, China should not become surprised if in the future, Russia becomes less supportive of Chinese security goals. For example, the possibility of a Russia-US deal under which Russia “gets” Ukraine at the price of “turning its back” on China is mentioned. Alternatively, maybe, just maybe, the Russians can “halve” Ukraine on their own (there is a hyperlink to an earlier piece discussing Russia potentially taking the entire country east of the Dnieper river), without Chinese support, and then pay the Chinese back by not supporting China in its future anti-Western endeavors.
Here, the author does a crossover – quoting the Telegram channel of Dmitri Evstaf’ev, who is a somewhat conspiracy-minded propagandist working directly under Solov’ev on Channel 1, i.e. someone much closer to the Russian political mainstream. [Evstaf’ev presentational style is of the “aw shucks, I’m just asking questions” sort, which works well enough until you start parsing the actual things he says.] Interestingly, the Evstaf’ev quotes have absolutely nothing to do with the author’s (anti-Chinese) thesis – in the first one, Evstaf’ev maintains, that the Kursk incursion happened because Moscow became “lulled into complacency” by Western talk of future peace negotiations (??), basically not believing that the West would allow the Ukrainians to launch this offensive and thus scupper any said future peace talks. Shame on us, Evstaf’ev avers, for being fooled by the perfidious West yet again. In the second quote, Evstaf’ev asserts that the Americans only gambled on such a bold stroke because they realize that whoever becomes President in 2025, Project Ukraine will be very soon abandoned – which, to him, explains why the American media is simultaneously urging the Ukrainians on in the Kursk region while questioning the strategic value of the entire enterprise. This second quote is there the article takes its title from (specifically the “Kursk is the beginning of America’s exit” language), and again, it has nothing to do with the author’s actual main thesis.
I feel I have spent entirely too much time on this. Do not read Tsargrad, it is, for the most part, fairly worthless as a source. I cringe every time Alex Mercouris mentions it on his podcast, though, thankfully, this is fairly infrequent.
thanks for this breakdown.
Thank you so much for this meticulous analysis.
Thanks for this. It did seem pretty loopy but the calibration of mildly nuts v. certifiable is useful.
Nice one! Do you have any insights whether this kind of people/Tsargradniki are many or if they are few but in the right places of power to wield influence?
So a couple of data points.
One – if you look at LDPR votes in the past few Duma elections, they had spent a long-time polling somewhere in the low to mid-teens range. So before 2022, the “nationalist” segment of the voter base could not have been so very large. Monarchists were an even smaller percentage, though no-one seriously tracks that so far as I know.
What makes a difference, however, is the proportion of either nationalists or monarchists in the key stakeholder groups – the economic elite, the military and security services, the bureaucracy, and the political layer (including Putin himself) that facilitates their interactions. Here, I get the subjective impression that we are talking about rather more than a teens-type percentage, not the least due to the state’s more or less deliberate ideological policy of reaching back to the pre-Revolution days for their vision of an “ideal” Russia. So in a vacuum, Tsargrad the TV channel should be fairly marginal – but between the various government and media figures extolling the virtues of the Romanov world, and the economic elites actually cosplaying old style aristocrats…
…put differently, when the surviving scions of the Romanov family had a wedding in Saint Petersburg a little while ago, they got state media coverage (beyond Tsargrad, I mean), there was a state military honour guard, they were married by the head Orthodox church official for the Saint Petersburg area, and Prigozhin of all people catered. Among the common people, subjectively, based on personal conversation and social media interactions, I would say the reaction was often a mix of bemusement and annoyance. But among the rarified strata of high society? I half-suspect there was more than a little nostalgia for the “old ways”. Hence, Tsargrad is a thing, and especially over the past couple of years I would not be at all surprised if its audience share has ticked up a bit.
The economic and certain nepokids political elites should be suspected of being tsargradniki until proven innocent then? These layers of society really want their position to be given by God so that they can freely pee and poo on the normal people as well as not fearing competition from the plebs.
It’s more complicated than that. Konstantin Malofeeyev, who owns the site/channel (it’s basically his ego-boost project) claims the site has a million followers, but actual statistics round that down to about 200,000.
If I had to make a guess, I’d say the average “follower” is a person who has a romantic view of the “good old times” of the Russian Empire, and for multiple reasons wishes those to return. In their mind it’s the time when Russia was strong, families were respected and LGTB not even heard of. Kind of extreme version of the Make Russian Great Again thinking.
A fun fact, the current head editor/director is an Ukrainian, Elena Sharoykina – better know as one of the main anti-GMO activists in Russia.
Kudos for this excellent comment. Good thing you took a deep breath to start.
It’s always amusing to hear western elites criticizing RU media for being under the Kremlin’s tight control, when in reality RU media (especially the Runet) is a surprisingly freewheeling place, Tsargrad being a good example. Direct criticism of Putin and his tightest is verboten (partly why Navalny got into trouble), but otherwise pretty much anything goes. RU state-controlled TV is carefully managed, but hardly more so than BBC, RAI, CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC, etc.
For those interested: a good resource for well-written RU analysis that is generally pro-Kremlin (without being overly boot-licking) is Vzglyad (vz.ru). A good resource for well-written RU analysis that is generally skeptical of anything the Kremlin is doing (without being flagrantly anti-Putin) is Kommersant (kommersant.ru).
@Safety First
Thx very much. I had planned on reading the article but now don’t need to.
Once again the NC readership comes through with a great comment!
Somehow you are skipping the very salient (and only important point of the article) that the Chinese are slowly joining the Western sanctions on Russia. While EU wanted to have the continuation of oil and gas flow from Russia while refusing to pay because of sanctions, China seems to be able to have the cake and eat it…
In my defence, I did lump a number of things into a single paragraph to save on time and space.
That said, here is my personal translation of the passage I think you are referencing:
“[From China] we see the opposite – a widening payments crisis related to products we buy from or through China, caused by American secondary sanctions. It would have been understandable, if only the largest Chinese banks, with multi-billion dollar businesses in the US, complied with these. However, more and more small and medium sized banks, who cannot be seriously harmed by the US, have been joining them – and this in China, where the state is all-powerful! This could indicate hidden pressure by China on Russia to wind down the Special Military Operation without accomplishing its core goals.”
So, one, the author identifies a specific issue – unwillingness of some Chinese banks to process Russian payments. I have no idea what the extent of this problem is, or is not, but given the quality of the source, I would want to see some concrete data before calling it either way. As well, it is difficult to square the words “payments crisis” with official government pronouncements regarding taking the China-Russia trade to $200 billion per year, or all the work being done in the context of BRICS on facilitating more bilateral trade (including via new currency arrangements).
Two, the author uses these assertions to pivot right back into his, shall we say, inventive thesis regarding Chinese intentions. I completely agree that from the Chinese perspective, the old saying about the wise monkey sitting in a tree while two tigers fight it out on the ground below very much applies. And that also means trading with both sides, including selling loads of drone components to Ukraine (something the Russian government has thus far refused to mention or emphasize in public, for self-evident reasons). But, logically, that means that China cannot truly be “joining” Western sanctions against Russia on an aggregate basis, because then it couldn’t keep growing the China-Russia trade.
Frankly, the whole thing more than a little reminds me of the Iran-Iraq War, when everybody and his sister ostensibly had anti-Iranian sanctions in place, and yet somehow, magically, billions of dollars a year worth of military and civilian goods continued to flow from Europe, Asia, even the Soviet Union, not to mention the whole Iran-Contra deal. So again, I feel comfortable in not stressing this particular passage from the article in my original post.
Thanks for getting back at it.
The trade is big indeed, but in terms of finances and payments and currencies, the snippets I read give a bad vibe, i.e. China doesn’t want to provide yuans to Russian entities…
Well, a (too) fast growing trade would cause issues by itself, but since 2022 the two nations also have transited to a world where there are no hard and soft currencies, but toxic and non-toxic currencies.
Can’t really blame the smaller banks hesitating participation until the central banks have figured out the new basics. Apparently (according to Valdai club) there’s still room for about 30-35% percent growth if and when Russia and China find a reliable but flexible way to trade using local currencies.
The animal antidote is incredibly charming. I enjoyed the backpack sized bunny as well!
I think the rabbit photograph is fake, unfortunately. Look at the girl’s toes. Also, there’s just something weird about the room in general, the blanket, and the little girl’s hair.
AI malice in wonderland?
It’s from a prolific social media account about a giant Flemish rabbit and her little human. It’s real. Or a long and sophisticated con!
Haha, nevermind then. You can never be too careful these days. Maybe the toes are just bent and the already-weirdness of the picture (giant rabbit indoors under a blanket looking whimsically out of a sliding-glass door) made me unduly suspicious.
Giant Flemish rabbits can get pretty big.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrE_dj3GsVmdwQAszpXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=giant+flemish+rabbit+image&fr=sfp
And yet the Democrats have no plan to protect us from Bunny Monsters . . .
A quick one on Phil Donahue – over on Russian TV (Channel 1) they are doing fairly extensive tributes to him, of the sort usually reserved for local heroes and such. Remembering him first and foremost for doing the USSR-USA “space bridge” or “telebridge” shows in the 1980s, where American and Soviet audiences got to ask one another questions. [This is the source of the famous “there is no sex in the Soviet Union” trope, although the full quote was more like “we do not have sex, we make love”.] While probably forgotten on the American side of the pond, in the modern Russian (government-approved) historiography of Perestroika, these are viewed as one of the crucial steps in ultimately bringing down the Iron Curtain. I myself am fairly skeptical of this, for a number of reasons, but either way, the Russians are probably eulogizing Phil more than the Americans, which must certainly mean that Phil was a KGB agent of some description.
Nonetheless I am reminded of a John Bunyan quote from ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’-
‘My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who now will be my rewarder.’…. So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.’
Each of the big three American MSM channels gave him a short blurb at the end of the newscast on Monday night. They did not go into why he was abruptly fired and removed from the airwaves – his questioning of the wisdom of the Iraq invasion. In hindsight, he was right, and losing these national voices at a time of critical national decisions represents a massive failure on the part of American press and the supposed freedom of that press. As we are all aware here, it’s happening again.
Let’s be clear – the Donahue Show was not taken off the air because it was unpatriotic. He was cancelled because having an opposition voice to such a “profitable” enterprise as the Iraq war would be awkward.
It doth seem it’s all floating on printing of U$D. Here’s an example, although Euro’s are pictured:
https://x.com/Panchenko_X/status/1824389780500541463?t=7CLngpvrYVbDl36LuXCziw&s=19
The way you gotta look at our burgeoning debt, is $35 Trillion is only a couple digits away from only being in the high Billions…
Got me thinking “What comes after trillions?”
Minions? Bunions? Shrillions?
Quadrillions but don’t say it out loud. Our billionaires are already in a race to be the first trillionaire so no need telling them that there is something further than that.
After trillions comes serious money.
‘I recall a big study back when I was in Oz, between 2002 and 2004, that Australia was exporting a huge amount of its scarce water in its ag exports and not being paid enough for that.’
Know the report that you are talking about and it was from the CSIRO. Their argument was that in every metric ton of grain exported, the majority of that was was water locked up in that grain on a one-way trip out of the country never to return. Wish I had kept a copy as I cannot find it anymore on the net.
https://www.vu.edu.au/about-vu/news-events/news/australia-s-water-footprint-study-shows-agricultural-exports-cost-more-than-they-re-worth
October 10, 2020
Australia’s water footprint study shows agricultural exports cost more than they’re worth
Victoria University research found the country loses about 35,000 gigalitres of freshwater a year in ‘virtual water’.
Victoria University research on Australia’s ‘water footprint’ has found the country loses about 35,000 gigalitres of freshwater a year in ‘virtual water’ embedded in its agricultural exports.
That amount is roughly the equivalent of all Australia’s stored reservoir water.
Dr Muhammad Tariq, one of the report’s researchers, said measuring a country’s water with the relatively new concept of water footprints, is important for developing well-informed national policy.
It is especially vital in Australia, the world’s driest populated continent, and its volatile water resources.
The study * published recently in Applied Sciences, calculates water footprints for several of Australia’s water-intensive agricultural exports, including cotton, rice, sugar cane, and wine grapes…
* https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/18/6156
Re the Black Swan family. Going back to Roman times it was accepted that all swans were white and it became a bit of a philosophical point of argument. But then when the Dutch arrived in Western Australia they discovered that there were flocks of black swans which kinda stuffed things up-
https://www.shawview.com/post/2018/08/24/black-swans-disruption-and-dealing-with-the-unexpected-lessons-from-the-17th-century
But now you have flocks in places like New Zealand, Japan, the UK, the US and China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan
Lavrov also denied rumors of negotiations regarding energy infrastructure.
File Under: The Bezzle
Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis -WSJ [gift-link!]
Russia offers safe haven for people trying to escape Western liberal ideals
https://tass.com/politics/1831019
Putin has decided that Russia is going to be a ‘safe haven’ for people who want to trade liberal Western ways for Russian ‘moral values’
https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-russia-safe-haven-for-people-escaping-western-liberal-ideals-2024-8?op=1
LOL! That is so absurd. Made my morning. Thanks.
Minor point, but it doesn’t matter who own’s the infrastructure. If it conceivably has a dual use, it can be destroyed. See extensive discussion in https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jul/31/2003271432/-1/-1/0/DOD-LAW-OF-WAR-MANUAL-JUNE-2015-UPDATED-JULY%202023.PDF
Thus, the US bombing of a countries power grid is ‘legal’.
Everything US did was legal, because no one got arrested, ever.
I replaced ‘ever’ with ‘see’, then read it in Jimmy Cagney’s gangster voice. Gotsta amuse myself.
Taibbi’s latest. public excerpt:
The DNC’s Sinister Rebrand of “Freedom”
“Freedom from” was right up there with “joy” and “unity” as key themes of last night’s Blue Party Grammy Awards. Unfortunately, it wasn’t funny
https://www.racket.news/p/the-dncs-sinister-rebrand-of-freedom
From the longer article:
Freedom from is as hot a catch-phrase in campaign 2024 as “joy” or “weird.” A lot of these freedoms are either new assertions of authority or efforts to overturn a longstanding emphasis on natural rights, which academics have long argued is flawed. Author George Lakoff’s “Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea” is a seminal moment in this loony history. I read the New York Times excerpt in 2006 and remember thinking it was almost cartoonish in its misread of the Bill of Rights. Lakoff clearly thought the minimum protections laid out in the Constitution could be expanded to a vast list of progressive promises (Broad access to borrowing! Longer life expectancy! More class-action suits!) without fundamentally altering the American system. Why didn’t Lakoff just push to make his promises government policy? Why demand they be added to our intentionally short list of immutable, natural rights? No way this catches on, I thought.
…
In campaign 2024, however, “equality” is disappearing (for reasons that should also raise eyebrows) and a flood of propaganda initiatives is embracing a new blue-party “freedom frame,” under which Democrats are supposedly re-seizing the term from Republicans. Of course liberal groups like the ACLU were once more aggressive guardians of traditional civil liberties than Republicans, or at least as aggressive as libertarian groups like the Cato Institute, but framing the Bill of Rights as GOP territory has been central to the propaganda assault.
Can anybody explain why there is so much consternation over the story that Ukraine was supposedly behind the Nordstream attack?
The story is not new. It’s the exact same one that came out well over a year ago now, but I’ve yet to see anybody mention that fact –
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/03/nord-stream-bombing-yacht-andromeda/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/traces-of-explosives-found-in-yacht-in-nord-stream-sabotage-investigation-diplomats-say
Nobody seemed to care much about it last year, now everyone is suddenly aghast, and pretending they never heard about it previously. My only guess here is that it’s just propaganda used an excuse to eventually cut Zelensky loose, and nobody could bother to come up with a new story.
lyman alpha blob: There are some new “chains of events” that are interesting. They mainly point to a kind of ingrained Anglosphere candy-ass-ery, though.
Let’s see: Newly revealed is that a European intelligence service (the Dutch? is the Netherlands a serious country?) tipped off the CIA and the Germans. The intelligence services then supposedly went to Zelensky, because Zaluzhny, a political rival, was doing the plotting. But that darn Zaluzhny did it anyway.
Meanwhile, Donald Tusk has twiXted that everyone should just shut up. (It’s the Mean-Girls Clique in action.)
Going by the Biden threats to blow it up, by the Polish reaction, and by the fact that a gas pipeline from Norway to Poland was opened the next day, I’d say we have candy-ass-ery by the Brave Intelligence Service of the United States combined with admissions that the Poles were involved.
The U S of A and Poland had the most to gain.
Why Germany has to do something now is that the scandal is out of control in Germany as the passivity gets embarrassing and the economy goes down into the nether zones.
You don’t believe that it was Zaluzhny on his yacht, the Raging Kapusta, accompanied by four Ukrainian women in bikinis on water skis? Come on.
Yes, that’s how I see it – the US threatened to do away with the pipeline on multiple occasions, and later it blew up. I’ll shave with Occam’s razor on this one.
And you made me look up Kapusta, which was the last name of my high school algebra II teacher who used to throw me out of class fairly regularly. He would sputter and gesticulate, but he never made me go anywhere like the principal’s office, so after leaving his classroom I would explore some of the school’s lesser known haunts until the next class. Perhaps he was too full of cabbage soup to give more specific directions.
The bit about spies talking about it among themselves before it even happened isn’t new either. I don’t remember when they dropped this one exactly, but I do remember being it notable since up to that time, they were all pretending they were totally surprised by the explosion. Even when they first wheeled out their story about the yacht, which was right after the Hersh story saying US did it, they were sure they don’t have any idea about who the people on that ship may have been. And then they casually reveal they were tipping off each other months before the explosions about what country is going to do it.
> Revisionist Zionists dare the U.S. to pull the plug on their Nakba agenda
Lloyd Austin is now balls deep supporting Israel with aircraft carriers redeployed, and aircraft (F35s, F22s, F15s) and heavy equipment flown in over the last few weeks. This runs the risk of a ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ scenario making it a lot easier for Iran, Hezbollah & Houthis to get a surprise success just through chance against large numbers. Just hitting something will enough to be a game changer. Iran & Russia likely expect Israel will keep raising the temperature until US becomes fully embedded in the war and the only way to short circuit this will be a surprise setback for US resulting in some form of political paralysis in lead up to the elections. Iran won’t go there with the upcoming retaliation but will likely be triggered with either a preemptive Israel strike or Israel’s counter retaliation. Were in either case, the US (& West) would’ve provided overt support.
In hindsight, did the US Supreme Court inadvertently turn the US into a quasi-parliamentary style system with their overturning of Chevron Defense?
Basically, policy will have to run through Congress for passing into law rather than it being the other way around to avoid judicial review.
The only power left to the Presidency is the choosing of Executive staff as well as Veto power. But Veto’s can be overridden or otherwise avoided entirely with a 2/3 majority.
It’s gonna cause bottlenecks in Congress at least when there’s no super-majority.
From Big Serge on Kursk incursion:
“The AFU is expending carefully husbanded and scarce resources in the pursuit of operationally inconsequential objectives. The exhilaration of taking the fight to Russia and being on the attack again can certainly work wonders for morale and create a spectacle for western backers, but the effect is short lived – like a broke man gambling away his last dollar, all for the momentary thrill of chance.”