I thought I was done with parenthood. But the tortoises had other plans Guardian
Syndemics
Long COVID Clinical Evaluation, Research and Impact on Society: A Global Expert Consensus (preprint) The Lancet. From the Abstract: “Following acute COVID-19, the risk of developing symptoms that last beyond the initial illness, is estimated to be 15% per individual per infection… This reinforces the need for translational research and large-scale treatment trials. Research on organ or body damage and Long COVID and vaccines were also areas where it was difficult to find a high level of consensus, but those statements that did reach consensus are significant.”
Ports around the world start screening crews for mpox Splash 247
Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past (symposium) Stanford University
China?
The inside story of the secret backchannel between the US and China FT
China, Philippines clash in South China Sea despite efforts to rebuild trust Channel News Asia
* * * China property: Shanghai’s luxury homes sell out as developers target the super-rich South China Morning Post. Commentary:
A woman made staff at a Louis Vuitton outlet in China count 600,000 yuan in cash, which took staff two hours, before cancelling the purchase and leaving, as revenge over being treated dismissively by staff during a previous visit to the store. pic.twitter.com/NFx8wcm2A0
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) August 24, 2024
China provides subsidies to boost home appliance trade-ins Xinhua
* * * Big Tech in China doubles AI spending despite US restrictions FT
China in Central America: Just a Mirage The Diplomat
No U.S. Navy Aircraft Carriers Deployed In The Pacific Naval News
Myanmar
China to hold 3-day live-fire military drills near Myanmar border South China Morning Post
‘A global monster’: Myanmar-based cyber scams widen the net Frontier Myanmar
Africa
Morocco’s strategy on the Western Sahara has paid off Deutsche Welle. Meanwhile:
All of a sudden, the Sahara desert is a very wet place with heavy rain and storms over the next 2-weeks. pic.twitter.com/HLlGVqMmSe
— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) August 25, 2024
Syraqistan
Israel’s Preemptive Strike in Lebanon Leaves It Sinking in the Same Strategic Mud Haaretz
UN, peacekeeping mission call on Israel, Hezbollah to cease fire amid cross-border escalation Anadolu Agency
Israel and Hezbollah exchange heaviest cross-border fire in months before pulling back PBS
10 foreign airlines cancel flights to Israel amid cross-border escalation with Hezbollah Anadolu Agency
Diseases spread in Gaza as sewage contaminates camps and coast BBC
New Not-So-Cold War
Russia launches huge missile and drone attack on Ukraine FT
Is the Kursk incursion a major strategic blunder? BNE Intellinews
Russian Engels military airfield where strategic bombers are based attacked by UAVs – photo, video Ukrainska Pravda
* * * Zelensky’s Invasion of Russia Sends a Message to Moscow—and Washington WSJ
Ukraine keeps crossing Russia’s red lines. Putin keeps blinking. WaPo
* * * Zelenskyy convenes major meeting focusing on traitors Ukrainska Pravda
Zelenskyy: I’m all for diplomacy, but not at the expense of 30% of our territories Ukrainska Pravda
* * * US cracks down on Russia’s LNG dark fleet Splash 247
NATO’s Arctic Strategy Is an Overreaction The American Conservative
South of the Border
Mexico In Flux New Left Review
Biden Adminstration
Top defence contractors set to rake in record cash after orders soar FT
Biden Administration Blocks Two Private Sector Enrollment Sites From ACA Marketplace KFF Health News
2024
How Democrats Make Republicans: RFK Should Be A Wake Up Call for the Party Jonathan Turley
Celebrating at the DNC in a Time of Genocide The Nation
Vance says Trump would veto federal abortion ban The Hill
Justices allow Arizona to enforce proof-of-citizenship law for 2024 voter registration SCOTUSblog
Spook Country
Telegram says arrested CEO Durov has ‘nothing to hide’ BBC
Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app? A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering
Vindman says Musk should be ‘nervous’ after Telegram CEO was arrested: ‘Free speech absolutists weirdos’ FOX. Commentary:
While Durov holds French citizenship, is arrested for violating French law, this has broader implications for other social media, including Twitter. There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be… https://t.co/GyPMquKtKV
— Alexander S. Vindman ❎ (@AVindman) August 25, 2024
Antitrust
Monopoly Round-Up: Kroger-Albertsons Trial Starts Tomorrow Matt Stoller, BIG
Google Has Been Convicted of Monopolization. Will It Matter? Jacobin. Commentary (August 5):
Destroying relevant evidence is a major red flag & comes with severe consequences.
In the Google Play Store case, Judge Donato called it "a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice."
An adverse instruction in that case led to a unanimous finding of liability. pic.twitter.com/FEJgMtzGfX
— Lee Hepner (@LeeHepner) August 5, 2024
Boeing
Digital Watch
Housing
A New York City Office-to-Residential Conversion Wave Builds Commercial Observer
Healthcare
Drug Development Failure: how GLP-1 development was abandoned in 1990 (preprint; PDF) Jeffrey S. Flier, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. “GLP-1–related therapeutics are now established as an immense success, how and why these early efforts to develop the class were prematurely terminated should be of interest to historians, entrepreneurs, drug hunters, and clinicians.”
Gunz
Federal judge tosses Kansas machine gun possession case on Second Amendment grounds Kansas City
Guillotine Watch
Class Warfare
Canada Labor Board Orders End to Railway Work Stoppage US News
Australians get ‘right to disconnect’ after hours BBC
Do Anarchists Dream of Emancipated Sheep? The Anarchist Library
Finding love: Study reveals where love lives in the brain (press release) Aalto University
Cloudbusting Alan Neale, When We Are Real
Why is the world so binary? Funding the Future
Antidote du jour (Daiju Azuma):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
When reading the article it becomes clear that Russia dominates the Arctic Circle, and that China profits from that situation. And it is the US that is doing the ‘competing’.
Makes for interesting reading (not). One also comes away with the idea that the conflict between China and Taiwan is related to the Arctic.
I did comment this article already yesterday, but I’ll use this opportunity to add that Russia is about half of the Arctic Circle.
Even the ~8% USA has was bought from Russia. The biggest US population center north of Arctic Circle is Utqiagvik of ~5,000 people (mostly Inuit, city accessible only by air) while Russia’s biggest is Murmansk with 300,000 citizens (4 universities and a naval academy).
I guess they don’t have any maps at Fox. There’s no competition in the Arctic.
Despite ‘belonging’ to Denmark, Greenland has long since been an Arctic military base for the US. I would expect the US to count Greenland as part of its Arctic coastline.
Say, so you remember how back in 2019 Trump as President made an offer to buy Greenland off the Danes? It would have been the biggest land purchase since the Louisiana Purchase, not that the people there would be allowed to become American citizens. If he becomes President again, perhaps he will make Denmark an offer for Greenland that they won’t be able to refuse-
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49367792
I wish I’d kept the link but I watched a short documentary on Greenland native communities (it was probably on Curiosity Stream or Nebula before I cancelled them showboaters or YT) – they showed absolutely no affinity with the USA at all and indeed people from the native communities who’d gone off to get a “Western education”, got disgusted, and come back to energise local communities in terms of keeping local languages etc, seemed to be achieving great success.
I very much doubt locals in Greenland have ANY amount in mind that they’d accept to become the next USA Imperial vassal.
Greenland’s own broadcasting service, based in Nuuk, the capital — one needs be conversant in Kalaallit (Greenlandic) or Danish to get much out of it, though:
https://knr.gl/en
If the US wants to dominate the Arctic Circle, then they are going to need a small fleet of Polar-class icebreakers. And last I heard, the US has only one or two operational – and they were built back in the 70s. A few years ago I read that they were loath to send them too far north in case one broke down and they might need the Russians to go rescue them with one of their ice-breakers. There is a third ice-breaker but it is 25 years old and is rated as only a medium ice-breaker. I also heard that moves to build more ice-breakers just never make it out of Congress-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar-class_icebreaker
No sex appeal. The jingoists at the DNC wouldn’t use ice breakers as propaganda. We have an artisan military ship building industry, so the costs would require yard reworks versus civilian yards capable of being repurchased. The Senators from Washington may want it, but the Senators from states without yards want more subs. The Senators without skin in the game can still take a ride on a sub. Lindsay Graham would love it.
US is competing from home.
Re: Is the Kursk Incursion a Major Strategic Blunder?
I’m afraid this article makes a major error:
“taking the fight into the Russian Goliath’s homeland for the first time since the Nazi invasion of 1939.”
I find it hard to take a article seriously that places Operation Barbarossa in 1939 instead of June, 1941. Everyone and his dog fancies themselved as a military analyst these days. So much horse manure.
The title should also be “Kursk invasion is a Major Blunder”. There’s nothing Strategic about it. As far as Telegram can be trusted, it’s mostly about the internal strife in the Ukrainian high command.
The Failure of the Kursk invasion sets up Ukraine for a catabolic collapse, perhaps before Election Day. We don’t know, of course, what the timing will be, that’s up to Mother Nature.
A few hamlets in the Kursk hinterlands is not the Russian homeland.
the Poles taking an equivalent chunk of Kaliningrad would be an existential issue
very, very embarassing, and evidence that Putin is not playing 4-D chess; but rather making lemonade from lemons.
“Exclusive | Boeing employees ‘humiliated’ that upstart rival SpaceX will rescue astronauts stuck in space: ‘It’s shameful’ ”
Just wait until they return to Earth next February. On a ship with a big ‘SpaceX’ on the side, and then they get put into Tesla trucks to drive to the conference room and in that room there would be a huge sign behind those astronauts saying “SpaceX – Bringing Them Home” with Elon Musk sitting between those two astronauts. I very much dislike Musk but I must admit that he has been getting better results with his SpaceX than Boeing has with its Starliner. Boeing got about twice the money from the US government, is about four years late on its delivery, and SpaceX has had half a dozen successful flights while Boeing only has this fiasco on the board.
World is binary thing interests me on so many levels. As some know, I’m Brit by birth but have also gained Australian citizenship after years working in a key job there (but now reside back in blighty). One thing that struck me was that the ranked choice voting system (alternative vote) used in Aus really hasn’t solved the binary problem inherent in First Past The Post (FPTP) at all. People essentially still end up (via the first or back-up choice) plumping for Labor or the Liberal-National Coalition.
I know that the referendum in UK to change to Aussie system (which happened during my time in Sydney) failed spectacularly. I’ve come to the conclusion that this was right (albeit for entirely wrong reasons given the awful campaign). It doesn’t solve the problem. However, there are other solutions out there; ones that don’t move to “large close-to-fully-proportional-representation constituencies” which many “Anglo-Saxon” countries seem resistant to. They don’t get discussed outside these kind of blogs.
I make this kind of warning because I hate the expression “fair votes”. A corollary of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem is that no voting system can deliver on all the key outcomes typically agreed to be desirable under a modern democratic industrialised society. You must sacrifice one of your outcomes. If you do citizens’ juries etc to decide what you are willing to compromise on, then the “right” form of voting can be identified immediately. These waffly calls for proportional representation are not helpful. There’s PR and there’s PR. Don’t put the cart before the horse – find out what an individual country like the UK is willing to compromise on, then the form of PR that is best will be obvious.
PS I don’t want to break rules and set homework but does anyone have immediate insights/suspicions about how substack algorithm works? I’ve had strange boosts to certain things that I can’t explain by (for instance) a NC link or a share by a follower. I’m not bothered, just curious, particularly since the “boosted” posts have been related to some recent articles like the binary world one! Just makes me curious.
> no voting system can deliver on all the key outcomes typically agreed to be desirable under a modern democratic industrialised society.
It would require significant change at the level of The Constitution to implement something like this in US, but I wonder whether there is an argument to be made for (for lack of better term) “fractional representation”, in which there are multiple legislators elected from each constituency, with each assigned a fractional vote in the legislature proportional to his vote share in the election. The administrative details would be messy, but it seems to me that this would allow one to have proportional representation even without large constituencies. In US, this would allow small parties like the Greens to influence legislation at national level as it might be necessary to recruit them to obtain legislative majorities.
Yeah that’s the out of the box thinking that is required. I’d merely add that it might be beneficial also to have constituency/area vetoes: I don’t massively dislike the (pretty undemocratic) US Senate and I think that some sort of “lock” should have been in place in the UK so that in “key” constitutional changes (like BREXIT) there must be some bar to be jumped in each of the constituent countries to enable fundamental legislation.
The UK has “counting regions” which have no real statistical basis but do correspond to generally agreed “areas” (“West Midlands”, “East Midlands”, “South-West”) etc. These are used for ease of aggregation when we are dumb and implement a referendum. However, in many cases they do actually reflect local differences in preferences and I wonder if a reformed Second chamber might be like the US Senate but based on these regions. Just spitballing.
The scale of the US, any large country is best suited for a mixed proportional system. Two houses are necessary.
One would be straight forward. The other would be super districts. Everyone would get 5 open spots or so to vote for based on regional maps. They would be staggered elections. Instead of “Virginia” or Maryland delegations, there would be Chesapeake Bay delegations. This would be hardest to draw, but we do it every ten years anyway. Besides being legislators, they would be pushed into being lobbyists, not necessarily bad, fir their region unlike Senators who are protected from being replaced.
Nix the president and super-sized the states except Cali and Texas.
Yeah totally on board with mixed proportional system.
As I have just spitballed elsewhere in the thread, one of the two houses should not attempt to be proportional in the sense that we know it in various European countries but should be a “common sense handbrake” on populism that might arise in the “more democratic” house. Of course there are infinite ways of doing this and deciding which house has the “more proportional” aspects but the more I look at the USA, the more I think that “it has the right idea, it is just that the Founding Fathers couldn’t have envisaged how people might INTERACT with the voting systems under late-stage capitalism and lead to the profound oddities we now see”. I bored people before about how survey designers don’t realise how respondents interact with the survey and game the system.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It’s the single seat constituencies that will always force a two party system, no matter the method you use to select the only winner in each constituency.
Too lazy to find out by myself, but I wonder if there is any “anglo-saxon” country with a proportional representation and thus coalition politics with compromise and continuum?
Both of them would probably protest against the description as “anglo-saxon”, but if we consider the english speaking world and political culture, I think Scotland and Ireland might be the examples you are looking for.
Scotland has a pretty proportional system with both direct election and proportional seats added to get a proportional result (similar to the German election system). Though SNP has dominated by getting close to 50% so they have not needed to do much coalition building.
Ireland with its single transferable vote in multi (3-5) member constituencies is probably the best example, it regularly creates coalitions, though it is not strict proportional.
I think the irish system should be interesting for other english speaking countries. It has the direct representation, but yields much lower barriers for new parties. It also has the interesting effect of rewarding being not that polarising, because then you can easier pick up transfer votes.
My own observation here about the Aussie voting system. I note over the decades how the Parliament – the lower house – tends to have one party or the other with the numbers to dominate. But then there is the matter of the upper house – the Senate. It seems to be instinctive for people to vote for some minor parties and not so much the two main stream parties. So people will vote for the Greens, One Nation and other minor parties. The reason is that any sitting government in power may pass legislation because they have the numbers in Parliament but to get it passed in the Senate, they have to get the minor parties onboard. Naturally this drives the two main parties nuts which suits us just fine.
Yeah I always thought the Aussie Senate was a MUCH better solution to the “total power” thing than the reform of the lower house (ditching FPTP for AV).
I continue to think that some reform of the House of Lords that (perhaps) keeps it slightly undemocratic but which makes it a council of the regions (100 Senators elected via PR) plus (say 50?) unelected but key figures who are top of their field (so replacing the bishops with certain Members of the Royal Society and some “applied” organisations etc) might be ideal.
You might have to be careful there. By recruiting ‘unelected but key figures who are top of their field’ it may lead to the reformed House of Lords being dominated by the professional managerial class who would have little sympathy or understanding of the bulk of the UK’s 69 million people. Just a thought.
Yeah my mentor from academia as a Senator of the UK? *Shudder* (Anyway if I were in charge I’d make it a constitutional law that no member of either house should have citizenship of any other country other than the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – I remember the fuss in Aus when all those MPs were revealed to be Brits not Aussies lol).
Clearly there would need to be some serious thought about what “scientific/artistic/applied/other” top positions would gain you a Senate position and what checks and balances would be needed to ensure they provide “much needed intellectual input but no vested interest shenanigans” but I’d hope we could think of something – anything is frankly better than the status quo!
Slavery drowned out everything, but the US had indirectly elected Senators for a time, selected by state legislatures. Former state Speakers aren’t likely to be president, and as former speakers, they would know the difficulties of governing, making them less likely to grandstand or oppose the House for attention.
It would be interesting to look at the antebellum US Senate without slavery for guidance.
In theory, they would be less likely to speak, being old and needing to attend to less stable constituencies. The direct election of Senators was criticized during its adoption as promoting demagogues who would invoke popular passions with limited means of removing them.
The Italian senate has a few senators for life. Presidents automatically become senator for life after office (thus neatly solving any problems of after office life), and presidents can also appoint a few senators for life.
>Telegram says arrested CEO Durov has ‘nothing to hide’ BBC
In the UK, the app was scrutinised for hosting far-right channels that were instrumental in organising the violent disorder in English cities earlier this month
That’s not the reason why according to many TweetX I read yesterday. Rather, it was on the behest of Isreal that Havel Dukov was arrested by French authorities.
Anti-Israel hackers have published extensive amounts of classified data as Israel continues its struggle to contain leaks, Turkey-based Anadolu Agency reported, citing the Israeli daily Haaretz.
I don’t know the what the veracity for the reason, I do know that my TwitterX feed was ablaze with stories, including Elon Musk chiming in and garnering millions of views. It’s probably because my interest include media censorship.
On thing the arrest did was to inform people like myself, who uses Telegram platform for his family chat, who Havel Dukov is. I did not know Tucker Carlson interviewed him recently. A fascinating interview and a fascinating person, this Dukov. His brother apparently is some kind of mathematical genius, if you haven’t seen the interview, it’s worth watching. Anyway, thanks to his arrest, I’ve learned much about the owner of Telegram, and and I plan to explore the platform even more now. The country from which the U.S. emerged kept Assange rotting in jail for years and now the country of Liberté, égalité, fraternité has arrested someone who seem to be holding to his principles of freedom of speech…go figure.
https://www.business-standard.com/external-affairs-defence-security/news/anti-israel-hackers-published-extensive-amount-of-classified-data-report-124082500575_1.html
For those aware of the BBC UK vs BBC world divergence, I just noted that when I hover over the link it is bbc.com but when clicking it redirects to bbc.co.uk if you are in UK with a confirmed link to BBC iPlayer (and thus definitely a BBC Licence fee payer) and the very brief appearance of the BBC.com version which does not look identical to the bbc.co.uk version.
Thank you Sir Keir for confirming that we do indeed have UK Pravda. /sarc
Pavel Durov.
Not Havel. That’s a Czech last name, not ever a Russian first name.
correct link for “Do Anarchists Dream of Emancipated Sheep?”
https://www.anarchistfederation.net/aragorn-eloff-do-anarchists-dream-of-emancipated-sheep/
re consensus on Long Covid. I sigh reading this because this week we have the whole extended family supposedly on holiday in a thankfully drier sunnier part of the UK that has escaped that storm that was remnant of the tropical storm/hurricane that hit North America a few days ago.
Due to a variety of factors that I won’t bore you with, I have to return to Nottingham to see the dermatologist one day in the middle of our week away. Otherwise they’ll discharge me. Irony is that I’ll probably get no new treatment but this is important purely because this is the only specialty out of 3-4 that has BLATANTLY observable sequelae of COVID (scalp issues).
My only chance of the NHS not fobbing me off is keeping on the list with the one specialty that has acknowledged this is “Long Covid”, even when they’ll probably do nothing and I lose a day of my holiday. Comparing notes with sibling has been real eye opener – exact same weird sequelae, although mine much more severe. But the NHS around here are desperate to discharge you without mention of Long Covid – meaning I have to ensure that “obvious physical” stuff is logged every 6 months.
Re Vindman says Musk should be ‘nervous’ after Telegram CEO was arrested:
Interestingly enough in these times of information censorship by omission in mainstream media, the Fox news article makes literally no mention of the fact that Vindman is of Ukrainian extraction and vehemently hostile to all things Russian.
Vindman is nuts. I follow him on Twitter just for his unhinged rants. The guy is a certifiable nut job on the level of Olbermann, Rob Reiner, and the like. Yesterday he was hawking tee shirts that said “Veteran’s for Harris.”
I sure wouldn’t want to be in the military under these crazy people. I would prefer to stay a living veteran instead of a dead one.
I think his twin brother is running for some office. Warmongers unite! I hope he loses by a landslide.
>Finding love: Study reveals where love lives in the brain (press release) Aalto University
Not only can understanding the neural mechanisms of love help guide philosophical discussions about the nature of love, consciousness, and human connection, but also, the researchers hope that their work will enhance mental health interventions in conditions like attachment disorders, depression or relationship issues.
Sure, just like O’Brien’s intervention was successful in his “work to enhance” Winston Smith’s love of Big Brother.
“Do Anarchists Dream of Emancipated Sheep?” links to a Naked Capitalism article from 2012, titled “O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay! A Jobs Story”
Correct link included above.
Would like to know whether I should go ahead and get an mRNA booster or wait for the Novavax. There are partisans of Novavax online but it is hard to gauge whether it will actually be better.
We do not give medical advice. However, KFF Health News is suggesting to wait until closer to get a booster regardless.
Don’t miss “Cloudbusting.” It discusses some of the philosophical and historical background behind both Ecomodernism and gender switching along with the role being played by members of the Pritztker family in both.
“Russian Engels military airfield where strategic bombers are based attacked by UAVs – photo, video”
That is amazing that article, especially since the Ukrainians themselves are publishing it. They are actually showing one of their own drones deliberately target a civilian high-rise building in order to kill and injure civilians. And unlike the Israelis, they are not even pretending that they actually hit a Russian “command-post”. They are showing a war crime that they are committing and it is not the first video that I have seen of a Ukrainian drone select a civilian building to then hit it. They could have hit a military target but like Al-Qaeda from before 2001, they were more wrapped up in hitting “symbolic” buildings.
It is all about PR – that Russia was unable to stop a drone attack. Most military targets are well-defended and relatively secure, yet it would be impossible to defend every civilian potential target due to finite resources. And western media lap it up, another bloody nose for impotent Putin etc.
Did not those western media see the connection between a drone hitting a civilian high-rise and a jet-liners hitting civilian buildings in New York city? Watching that video today, it was the first thing that popped into my mind.
re: How Democrats make Republicans:… – Turley
apropos to his point, here’s Bret Weinstein on twtr-X:
Bret Weinstein Reacts to RFK Jr & Trump Joining Forces: ‘This is Absolutely Monumental’
“This was not a simple endorsement of Trump. This was an endorsement of retaking the White House and using that position to restore the Republic to its proper course…I think the modern Democratic Party is an existential threat to the republic. And although I am a Democrat, I’ve been a Democrat my whole life. The party that I see in front of me today is literally the inverse of the party I signed up for….”
https://x.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1827297934251024560