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Links 9/10/2024

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Our political equinox will soon end. Whether it ends in light or shadow is our choice. Kansas Reflector (Robin K)

I … Am Herman Melville! Los Angeles Review of Books. Anthony L: “Ray Bradbury, Huston & Moby Dick.”

The Devouring Mind Dublin Review of Books. Anthony L: “Sontag & Steiner.”

Sacred Probabilities — Part I Philip Pilkington (Micael T)

#COVID-19

Pediatricians scale back on COVID shots KFF Health News (Robin K).

Climate/Environment

‘We’re living a Lie’: Astronaut reveals shock realization after viewing Earth from Space International Affairs (Micael T)

The Texas Billionaire Who Has Greenpeace USA on the Verge of Bankruptcy Wall Street Journal (Dr. Kevin)

Extreme weather to strengthen rapidly over next two decades, research suggests PhysOrg

Kuwait Is Awash in Oil Money. But It Can’t Keep the Power On New York Times (Kevin W)

China?

China’s $6.5 Trillion Stock Rout Worsens Economic Peril for Xi Bloomberg

China and SpaceX envision reaching Mars in different ways Asia Times (Kevin W)

South of the Border

Venezuela opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez seeks asylum in Spain amid election fallout RT. Kevin W: “This report says that he left on a Spanish Air Force jet. How on the nose is that?”

Africa

Kenya’s youth demand real democracy Jacobin. Micael T: “Wow! Western Values in practice in Kenya. Are they going to join EU and NATO too?”

European Disuion

Germany’s Lindner rejects Draghi’s common borrowing proposal Politico (Kevin W)

Wolfgang Streeck: “Sahra Wagenknecht is the only one asking the right questions — and offering the right answers” Thomas Fazi (Anthony L). Translation of an interview.

Germany and the EU Abandon Reason Glenn Diesen (Robin K). Video embedded in post.

The minister: “It’s a swamp – needs to be cleaned up” Aftonbladet. Micael T:

This would be comedy gold full of incompetence and non-action action, if it wasn’t for all the destroyed lives. “The interest rate ceiling is lowered from 40 to 20 percentage points in addition the reference rate”. 40% is shocking. 20% is still usury.

“The interest deduction is abolished for all unsecured loans” – one must keep the rich from paying taxes but the poor that need these debts to make ends meet must be punished.

How the public sector is abolishing cash Nachdenkseiten via machine translation (Micael T)

Old Blighty

PM defends ‘tough decision’ over winter fuel cut BBC

Ministers facing pressure from unions over winter fuel payment cut Guardian (Kevin W)

Watching Two Labour Parties Destroy Themselves Steve Keen (Chuck L). Australia’s Labour Party on the same trajectory as the UK’s

Gaza

Zionists Are Calling For More War And May Well Get It Moon of Alabama (Kevin W)

‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 339: Israel winds down West Bank operation, continues blockade Mondoweiss

New school year begins in West Bank as Gaza enters 2nd year without education due to Israeli war Anadolu Agency

‘Psychologically broken,’ 8-year-old Sama loses her hair NBC (ma)

New Not-So-Cold War

US Senator Graham says openly that the US is only interested in raw materials in Ukraine Anti-Spiegel via machine translation (Micael T)

Mapping Ukraine’s Resources Meaning in History (Micael T)

Dumb as they come: Scholz and Pistorius on procurement of new missile defense systems Gilbert Doctorow (Michael T)

Ukrainian politician calls for ban on kids leaving country RT (Kevin W)

Small nations are forced to make historical mistakes Vzglyad (Micael T)

Caucusus

Through whose fault Armenia is losing its statehood and whether its sovereignty can be saved Eastern Angle (Micael T)

Imperial Collapse Watch

What I Got Wrong About “Shock Therapy” Matt Taibbi, DropSite

The Enduring Myth of ‘Isolationism’ Daniel Larison

Kamala

PATRICK LAWRENCE: ‘Vote Joy’ — a Delusion of Nostalgia Consortium News (Chuck L)

Kamala Harris is Baerbock 2.0 Anti-Spiegel via machine translation (Micael T)

Trump

Some additional detail:

Our No Longer Free Press

Foreign election influence campaigns have bark but questionable bite NBC

Woke Watch

Don’t Take Advice From a Habsburg The Dial (Anthony L)

AI

Anyone who says “AI” has already been fooled Jacobin (Micael T)

Elon Musk files new lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman CNN (Bob H)

More Bands Hit With AI-Generated Songs On Streaming Services Metal Injection (Micael T)

Goodbye Tinder, hello Strava: have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks? Guardian (Kevin W)

The Bezzle

EU top court rules Apple must pay €13bn in back taxes Financial Times. We’ve written about Apple’s Ireland tax deal before. It was nuts. It had the effect that Apple had to pay no taxes anywhere in the world.

The QE theory of everything New Statesman (furzy)

Class Warfare

Red lines of the counter-elite Neoliberal Feudalism (Micael T)

What Is to Be Done? Wisdom of Crowds (Robin K). On populism.

Trouble down on the farm Bleeding Heartland (Robin K)

Antidote du jour. A happy family! Tim H: “I offer siblings Gorgeous George (rear) and Sir Munchkin Scruffles (front), resting those weary bones.”

And a bonus (Robin K):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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188 comments

  1. The Rev Kev

    “Kamala Harris is Baerbock 2.0”

    The mind does boggle. The thought that in a few months time that we may very well see Madame President Kamala Harris negotiating with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in a televised session. I’m trying to imagine it but my mind won’t go there. They will both of them drive their handlers nuts.

    1. timbers

      It would be fun to watch a brianiac like William Buckly or Gore Vidal intrview (or try to) the both of them. It might frazzle every ounce of patience they have. As a finale, the both of them could stand up and do 720 degree turns over and over as strob lights are turned and as the they sing Kamalalalalalalala….and play the whole episode on Saturday Night Live (is that still running)?

      1. NotTimothyGeithner

        Years ago, Sports Adjacent Guy, Bill Simmons, questioned when Lorne became the guy he hated. I don’t remember his answer, but it’s a show where politicians come on to get a bump versus fearing being skewered. It was funny when the defeated Bob Dole met Norm MacDonald, but this has become the norm in the show but not for lovers at the time. Kate McKinnon met Hillary multiple times and the target of the humor was dumb dumb Americans. The show fails to punch up.

        “Joy” is such mindless branding. It makes Obama’s “dope” seem credible. They should have Harris stickers just stuck on top of old Obama signs.

        Like the late night shows, it’s boomer clap trap meant to help them get to sleep or to exist to make the Karens feel hip. One of the covers of National Lampoons featured in that Netflix movie featured casual drinking around children as a send up of Noxon voters. The targets of that cover are the sort watching SNL.

        1. Es s Ce Tera

          Joy rather reminds me of something, trying to think what…

          “Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against Winston’s temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O’Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.

          ‘This time it will not hurt,’ he said. ‘Keep your eyes fixed on mine.'”

        2. Carolinian

          I haven’t watched SNL in years so perhaps I shouldn’t comment but even back when I did watch it was obvious that Lorne was now batting for the other team. But then he’s a super rich plutocrat like them.

          And it’s interesting that months after last year’s Barbie craze columnists finally began to admit that it really wasn’t very good. Gerwig’s idea of cutting edge humor: Saturday Night Live in its current guise. You don’t have to be funny. Just pile on lots of the wink wink nudge nudge.

          1. Wukchumni

            Watching SNL is kind of a self inflicted torture we attempt maybe a couple times a year, and wonder what happened to funny?

    2. Michaelmas

      Rev Kev: …in a few months time that we may ….see Madame President Kamala Harris negotiating with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in a televised session. I’m trying to imagine it but my mind won’t go there.

      Idiocracy goes global.

      1. Trees&Trunks

        As opposed to the thesis held in the class warfare movie “Idiocracy”, idiots do not come from below but very much from the top.

  2. Mr. Woo

    Apple tax case
    Not being a a lawyer at all but i remember reading the verdict from the EU General Court and iirc the problem was not that there was a tax deal, but that it was not exclusive to Apple and therefore did not provide them with an unfair advantage. Also the Commission back then seemed to provide absolutely no proof otherwise in the words of the court. Interesting to see the new verdict.

    Also interesting that the EC can force the Irish Government to collect taxes it doesn’t want.

    1. Trees&Trunks

      Another silly symbolic action from EU and the Vestager team.
      Wake me up when they duct tape a plastic tax, market abuse and crappification bag over the legal persons Apple’s and Google’s heads and their faces turn dark-blue.
      €13bn in back-taxes vs. 290bn in net profit 2020-2022 only
      https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-income

      Even more ridiculous level of fines for Google
      https://apnews.com/article/google-european-union-antitrust-shopping-court-a281e4e4722efa816e929a52a9939d86
      1.43bn vs 209 bn in net profit 2020-2022 only
      https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-income

    2. PlutoniumKun

      Ok, some background, because there are a lot of misconceptions flying around.

      In the early 1960’s Ireland was an economic basket case, with massive emigration and an economy stagnating while the rest of Europe boomed. The country had tried mainstream economic orthodoxy in the 1920’s (book balancing, free markets) and it failed. It had tried for 30 years to build up industry behind tariff barriers along with a self-sufficiency policy for 30 years, and that had failed.

      The big problem policy makers had was that it was clear that mainstream development economic theory could not work for Ireland. Ireland essentially operated as a regional economy for the UK due to the necessity to maintain an open market and keep its currency relatively stable relative to sterling. But this made a conventional Japan/Taiwan/Sweden (or take your pick of then fashionable success stories) impossible. Ireland could not operate as a ‘cheap’ economy within Europe as easy of labour movement and a relatively strong currency kept costs high, while it was too small to shut itself off, as the previous three decades had proven. As an economic ‘region’ of the UK, there was no way for it to go through the standard ‘phases’ of development – from agriculture to sweatshops to medium tech to high tech. So a decision was made – skip the middle stages and leap directly to high tech.

      In simple terms, this was to be achieved through three main policies – make capital investment very cheap through allowing companies to write it all off against tax, and maintain a relatively low ‘fixed’ corporate tax to encourage new, fast growing companies to move at least some of their high order operations to Ireland. The third strand of this policy was a fast investment in mid-level tech colleges, designed to provide a small core of highly skilled workers focused directly on the needs of these companies (which were mostly in the then new high growth tech areas, medical tech and pharmaceuticals). In other words, unlike nearly every other country, the development agencies ignored job creation in favour of creating a small number of very high productivity jobs, with the intention that the wealth created would flow downwards and outwards and these would, in the long term, seed new domestic industries. Many companies moved to Ireland on this basis, Apple being one selected by the Irish government as a potential very high growth operation (it has to be said, they chose very astutely).

      This wasn’t the sole reason for Irelands success, but by any reasonable standards it was a spectacularly successful strategy, such that within 3 decades Ireland had gone from being as poor as Greece to overtaking its former colonial master and most EU partners in most measures of wealth. As time went on, the policy was mostly modified and eventually largely phased out, largely due to EU rules. But many deals had long ago been grandfathered in.

      The issue with Apple is pretty straightforward. Apple, along with other companies, recognised that having an Irish base and one of those early sweetheart deals made it very advantageous to focus tax in its Irish subsidiaries – in particularly its intellectual properties. This was, even from the early days, recognised as an issue, but Apple was largely unique in that it had, by accident or design, shifted more of its corporate identity to Ireland than other companies. The deal was still a good one from the Irish perspective, as Apple employs thousands in design and manufacture, although clearly not nearly as much as its tax demands would seem reasonable. Plus, even a low tax on a company like Apple is a gigantic amount of money for a country of 5 million people.

      The problem for the Irish government, is that it sees maintaining its public and private promises to companies that shift some of its identity to Ireland as central to its strategy – which, while modified, still sees many companies, including recently TikTok, shift a lot of operations either to Dublin or to some anonymous industrial estate outside some small town. So for the Irish government, the issue is mostly one of being seen to honour its private promises. Hence its embarrassment at having to pretend that it doesn’t want its $13billion euro (actually more now, as its earning lots of interest in its escrow account).

      My guess is that the government will accept it and then buy a shitload ton of overpriced iPads and give them out to schools. They actually did this before – in the 1980’s, despite the country being nearly bankrupt, colleges were full of gorgeous iMacs, all part of the deal. Personally, I’m looking forward to my iPhone16.

    3. Yves Smith Post author

      The short version is the General Court got it wrong, which is not hard with tax, and that is why it was reversed. Confused juries, and I would also assume judges, tend not to convict.

      Apple most assuredly did have a unique deal with Ireland. I’ve been posting on that for years. From a 2013 post, with emphasis added below:

      For those with less Apple lust or otherwise unwilling to cut the Cupertino giant slack just because it has sleek products and cool stores, a new article by tax maven Lee Sheppard at Forbes gives a layperson-friendly overview of how Apple managed to keep $44 billion of revenues out of the hands of the tax men (I’ve spoken to Sheppard, who has also given me copies of her vastly more technical, paywalled articles at the journal Tax Notes on l’affaire Apple).

      One of the things that readers might not realize that even with the Senate scrutiny, tax pros still have to engage in a bit of guesswork to figure out precisely how Apple arrived at the miraculous result of having foreign sales, which contribute roughly 60% of Apple’s total profit, taxed nowhere. But certain parts are clear.

      Apple has achieved a result that is similar to Google’s parking its intellectual property overseas. The consumer products company has an Irish holding company at the apex of its foreign operations. This company is in Ireland and has no employees or operations. But it is the group finance company. And the money is not in Ireland, but in New York banks and managed by employees in Nevada. So the funds are in the US even though they are domiciled abroad. This company has no residence from a tax perspective and pays taxes nowhere.

      Below that is a principal company, again in Ireland. It houses the contracts with Apple’s Chinese manufacturers, owns the inventory they churn out, and manages the supply chain in Europe and Asia. It has 250 employees but like its parent, it claims tax residence nowhere but did pay taxes to Ireland under a special deal where it paid less than 2% of income, well under Ireland’s already bargain-basement 12.5% statutory rate. This company and another company hold the foreign licenses to Apple’s intellectual property. If you listened to the hearings or read some of the commentary, this is where the “cost sharing” agreements come in. Apple first entered into this cost-sharing agreement in 1980, which is astonishingly early for such aggressive tax planning (the company likely had just begun selling abroad). Cost-sharing rules were more permissive then. Apple has amended the agreement twice, but these agreements are evaluated as of when created, so Apple is effectively grandfathered under the old rules. Note that Sheppard wonders whether the amendments were handled carefully enough for them to deserve that treatment; in her wonky article, she uses words like “brazenness” and in Forbes, depicted Apple’s practices as worse than typical multinational “hokey tax schemes”.

      Even though Tim Cook tried to defend Ireland as more upstanding than using one of the Caribbean tax havens, Sheppard sets the record straight:

      Ireland is a tax haven. The European definition of a tax haven is a country that cuts deals with foreign companies that don’t do any business there.

      She also said that tax professionals who work for big corporations were gobsmacked by Apple’s conduct. It’s one thing for a company that sells oil or makes industrial parts to get edgy in its tax structuring. None of its customers care. By contrast, Starbucks, which had gotten bad press for its tax avoidance in the UK, volunteered to make a significant payment to the government to buy itself some goodwill. And bear in mind that voluntary payment is not a tax and hence not deductible from US taxes. One tax professional told Sheppard that his company made sure to pay tax in every jurisdiction in which it did business to avoid reputational damage. Sheppard writes:

      Apple is playing fast and loose with consumers’ affection for its highly discretionary products, especially in Europe. It is ill-advised for any consumer products company not to pay tax where it sells products. Equally important, Apple’s tax avoidance is also testing the patience of strapped European governments that are looking for ways to get American multinationals to pay tax.

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          You have to thank Lee Sheppard. She is a brilliant tax analyst and manages to make it somewhat understandable. Most regularly lawyers hate tax attorneys because tax is the most difficult speciality and they hate admitting that tax attorneys are on average smarter, and on top of that, you have to turn your brain inside out to think tax, and few normal attorneys have spent the time to have internalized that enough to fake knowing much about tax.

      2. CA

        “Ireland is a tax haven. The European definition of a tax haven is a country that cuts deals with foreign companies that don’t do any business there.”

        Yves Smith and Lee Sheppard have given us a terrific post. Thank you so much.

  3. ChrisFromGA

    More Bands Hit With AI-Generated Songs On Streaming Services

    Oh, look! AI finally found a use case – FRAUD!

    2. Mikel

      All around, it’s the Digital Con Era.
      And that’s the big beef with so many alleged “innovations” these days.
      People are against being rip-offed, conned, and all manner of attempts on the invasion of one’s space.
      Not a damn thing “anti-technology” about any of that.

      1. ChrisFromGA

        AI use cases:

        (1) Copyright infringement
        (2) Fraud
        (3) Enshittification of customer service
        (4) Censorship

  4. Mikel

    What I Got Wrong About “Shock Therapy” – Matt Taibbi, DropSite

    Tragic road for Russia, however, if BRICS works out it is probably so much better for the country than some alleged Marshall-like plan with IMF loans.

  5. .Tom

    Patrick Lawrence “Vote Joy”

    Yesterday the domestic symposium’s topic was the similarities and differences between the stories, belief systems, and charismatic leadership required in the formation of a political movement and those of religious groupings. One thing I noted was that American politics has reached the point where there’s no policy left in its stories at all. It’s all gone. We are to be satisfied with other considerations, principally aesthetic. The radical weirdness of Lambert’s recent detailed analyses is because there’s nothing there to analyze except its functional properties as group think.

    Hence these days you’ll likely make more progress in a dialectical discussion of theology with a true believer than in one of policy with a partisan.

    As Patrick Lawrence shows, the 2024 DNC was a megachurch in ecstatic, rapturous worship and Harris was its Billy Graham.

    When the political cartel refuses the voters’ requests to discuss policy their next question should be, Where then does the policy come from?

    1. upstater

      Lawrence is a must-read…

      One question lingers as I glance again at the Kii Arens poster. What under the sun happened to the American left between its years at the barricades in the service of honorable causes and this, its time of weak-minded gutlessness?

      When did it pass from left to “left”? There is a book in the answer to this, the interior history of several generations, but I will keep this brief.

      One of the remarkable features of the antiwar and anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, along with the principled feminists of those years, was the willingness of so many people to accept the necessity of sacrifice. Sacrifice and risk, I would say.

      Such people understood: If you cannot stand for what you think is right and accept all the consequences attaching to being authentically who you are, your thoughts and being are of no use. You understood the necessity of living beyond the fence posts, having concluded nothing of worth could get done within them if your intent was to work for genuine change.

      The differences between then and now are well explained. But the CT in my mind wonders about the evil science that went into cultivating resignation and despondency long before big tech censorship and manipulation. I have a hard time believing the true left simply aged out and withered away.

      1. Mark Gisleson

        Infiltration and leadership rot. The most shocking thing I learned this year is that many of the AFL-CIO union presidents never did the work of the union members. Increasingly union leadership comes from college educated organizers. Randi Weingarten, for example, headed up the AFT-affiliated United Federation of Teachers and is now Secretary of Education yet does not have a teaching degree and has never taught in a classroom.

        I don’t know if I’m the true left but I do know that when I became active in the ’70s the Democratic party would take anyone who was willing to work and had the talent to contribute at a higher level. When I reactivated in the early ’00s, EVERY FRICKING DOOR WAS SLAMMED IN MY FACE. The only people who would talk to me were outsiders and challengers.

        I believe the takeover of the Democrats began under Carter. Liberals defaulted to letting Ted Kennedy lead and fwiw Ted Kennedy was never a leader, at least not the successful kind. By taking off the late ’80s and all of the ’90s I missed the transition almost entirely.

        The current iteration of the Democratic party is loathesomely self-obsessed. The more our frankenfoods jangle our biology, the more strongly these new “Democrats” embrace the new “minorities” and ignore demands to retest the food additives the USA uses but Europe prohibits.

        But mostly war. The now neocon-reinforced neoliberals running the D party are insanely bloodthirsty. For that alone they should be jettisoned but they’ve insinuated themselves so deeply into the party that it’s time to just say [family blog] it, we might as well blow up the party as reform it.

        I like the idea of realignment a lot. An isolationist GOP with libertarian tendencies is not what I want, but it beats more of the same. Trump-Vance won’t save us but I guarantee their administration would result in our having better choices in 2028.

        1. Carolinian

          Thanks. It’s this professional management class that is leading to the death of competence because those who can’t do, teach, and they are teaching the people who lead companies and our government and perhaps unions without first gaining the necessary hands on experience. Nothing beats experience.

          Worse than a crime, a mistake, should be the motto of our age. The imaginary world our elites have erected is all to distract from their failures in the real world. Yesterday’s Alastair Crooke is important and perhaps his most important because it talks about this death of competence–and the necessary cover up– as the hallmark of our era.

          https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/09/09/enabling-a-brutus-to-slay-the-elon-musk-caesar/

          Those who can’t do, govern–at least in the 21st.

        2. flora

          Thanks for your comment. Don’t get me started about Randi Weingarten. There was practically a revolt of the ATF-affiliated union of teachers in 2016 when she made a “union backed” (ahem) candidate endorsement without ever consulting the membership.

        3. Michael Fiorillo

          Randi Weingarten had a cup of coffee teaching social studies part-time at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn in the mid-‘90’s, while being groomed to take over from Sandra Feldman, who was going to Washington to head the AFT after Albert Shankar’s death.

          As for your main point about labor leader’s unfamiliarity with the shop floor, Shankar (who was a brilliant organizer and won tremendous gains for NYC teachers) and Feldman also spent very, very little time in the classroom. Shanker made his bones in part by driving the Communists out of the union in the 1950’s. Feldman also spent minimal time in the classroom, getting her juice as Shankar’s adjutant in the 1960’s.

          Interestingly – please excuse the Lefty Inside Baseball – and especially in regard to AFL-CIO support for war and imperial misadventures, Albert Shankar started out as a follower of Max Schactman, who led a particularly insular and Machiavellian, if tiny and ineffectual, Trotskyist sect from the ‘30’s through the 60’s. Author/editor Irving Howe started out as a Schactmanite, as did Michael Harrington and others who figured prominently in the era.

          Shactman turned Right in the early 1960’s and Shankar also turned (or remained, depending on your view) increasingly right-wing, especially on foreign policy, and became a rabid supporter of the worst manifestations of Cold War excesses. As a friend and fellow teacher once quipped, it was Albert Shankar who was hanging off that last helicopter leaving the US embassy in Saigon in 1975.

          The Wobblies didn’t call it “AF of Hell” for nothing.

          1. Mark Gisleson

            I appreciate the history. Growing up on a farm in Iowa, unions didn’t exist until I joined one as an adult. Also amazed at how I managed to go sixty years without ever really figuring out why people hated Trots but post-Iraq I now “get it” loud and clear.

            1. Michael Fiorillo

              Yes, that contempt is often well-earned (it certainly was in my experience, viz opposition caucuses in the UFT and the now-defunct International Socialist Organization), but there are exceptions, people and groups who’ve done good and important work over time, focusing first on building the Movement, rather than the Party…

              Maurice Isserman’s “If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left” has an excellent chapter on Schactman, which incidentally portrays many of the pathologies endemic among Trotskyist sects, not least their leaders’/members’ frequent migration to the Right, i.e. James Burnham, Irving Kristol, Schactman…

      2. Henry Moon Pie

        As someone who now largely lives in the 60s musically, I agree that Lawrence’s piece is a must read, and the quote upstater selected is what I would identify as its core.

        I’ll ask a question I asked here a few weeks ago, primarily of those who, like me, came of age in the era of assassinations, Kent State and the Democrats’ Chicago convention. If we could go back in time, knowing what has happened since, would we be willing to join the Weathermen? We saw how wrong things were and were desperate to change them using peaceful means that soon morphed into electoral means with McGovern. Those methods were clearly not up to the task, and now things have grown so much worse that the idea of electorally powered change is laughable (as it was then if we had been more realistic) and the hope of even peaceful change embodied in the mass strike seems almost ridiculous.

        Did we miss our shot, largely because, as Lawrence validly indicts us, the sacrifice of opposing the madness by all possible means would have cost us too much? It’s a question that haunts me as someone who expected to participate in a revolution at 18 but ended up going to law school.

        1. Michael Fiorillo

          Weatherman was a symptom of the collapse of ‘60’s movements – literally, via the splintering and collapse of SDS in 1969 – not a viable response to the increasing militarization of the state’s response to dissent.

          Weatherman was a macho, arrogant and deluded bunch, comprised almost exclusively of upper class, Ivy and Little Ivy grads, who were and continued to be totally alien to working class struggle.

          Named after the famous Bob Dylan line that said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing,” their opponents in the movement at the time said it best when they responded, “You don’t need a rectal thermometer to know who the [glass bowls] are.”

          1. Henry Moon Pie

            So if you could go back to, let’s say June of 1969, and be your younger self, would you do anything different from what you did? Do you think our current situation was inevitable, determined? I’m seriously curious about how people here feel about that thought experiment. I don’t think I could have imagined back then how bad things would be now. We often talked about the ending of the species in the years following Cuba, but this kind of slow death where we tear each other to pieces over water and the last drops of oil while the Earth gets its vengeance on the perpetrators aliks. The tendencies were there: the violence toward the less powerful in this country and abroad; the readiness to censor and the absolute intolerance for any black person to exercise their First or Second Amendment rights; and underlying it all, the growing consumerism that Jackson Browne wrote about in “The Pretender.” Those dangerous tendencies joined up with a worship of technology, oddly allied with a jingoism that’s seemed to increase the weaker the country has become. What a witches’ brew. And we’re further today from overthrowing it than we were back in June of ’69. Was there a better path we missed?

            1. Carla

              Re: 1969: “I don’t think I could have imagined back then how bad things would be now.”

              I think about this a lot. And every time, I wind up here: we were so young. So very, very young.

              I mean that not as an excuse, but more, a lament.

              If a path was apparent, surely we missed it.

            2. Wukchumni

              I would have been more persuasive with mom in letting me go to Woodstock, even though I was only 7 & 1/2.

            3. Michael Fiorillo

              Personally, I’d say the path was set with the replacement of Henry Wallace with Truman as VP in 1944, followed by passage of Taft-Hartley and the purging of radicals from the labor movement in the late forties and early fifties. The country would have been a very different place if Wallace had succeeded Roosevelt and the New Deal/Popular Front forces had prevailed.

              Or do we go back to the lead-up to US entry into WWl, the Creel Committee, Palmer raids and deportations, destruction of the IWW, Espionage and Sedition Acts?

      4. .Tom

        There have now been a few generations that were born into and grew up in an adequately prosperous post-ww2 middle class. The activists of the 60s and 70s either had direct experience of sacrifice and risk or were close to it. By the end of the 80s the libidinous energy of younger people had been detached from political fights and attached to fights with each other for wealth, social status, power, and consumption and their associated aesthetics and philosophy, including Cold War propaganda theories like freedom meaning free market capitalism. The timing varied among the countries but it started in the USA and came to other countries in the process of developing the identity we call The West at different times (western Europe, Japan, S Korea, and the Warsaw Pact countries were yearning for it just couldn’t get their hands on as much of it until the 90s).

        That’s the carrot. Reward the younger generations with material and cultural treats, maybe some wealth and power.

        The stick was and remains all the counter insurgency efforts from the state. There’s lots of interesting history here because much of it was covert. The most poetic I know of is the so-call Spy Cops scandal in the UK. But it seems clear that most states got better at and put more resources into counter insurgency over time. Since Snowden it is more visible. And now the most prominent members of the Democratic Party patriotically declare their opposition to the First Amendment.

      5. .Tom

        Everyone from Dick Cheney to Bernie Sanders has declared for a candidate who explicitly avows no understanding of or interest in policy. Think about that for a minute.

        We appear to have reached the null point in post-capitalist desire.

        1. Carla

          Because I live in Ohio, it matters not at all how I vote for president. And that’s true in most of the country. And BTW, the Donald may “avow” an interest in “policy,” but he doesn’t actually have any, either. Nor does what any candidate “avow” in any way determine what, if anything, he or she is able to do if elected to the office.

          1. .Tom

            I’m in Massachusetts so my vote means nothing either. I agree with you about Trump. We already had a Trump presidency so we have a good idea about what to expect. About the most positive thing I can say about him as that he didn’t start as many wars as either Obama or Biden.

            My point is more about the content of Patrick Lawrence’s excellent article in Consortium News. I lived through all of the 70s and half of the 60s and now we are here, at the historical moment when policy clearly and explicitly just doesn’t matter any more. It’s not on the table. Policy itself has been rejected as a consideration in politics, completely by one side and very nearly by the other. It’s an amazing thing to behold, and not in a good way.

            1. Wukchumni

              In the really hard cases you’re choosing between the disastrous and the catastrophic, and it’s hard to tell someone which one is which.

              John Kenneth Galbraith

    2. Michael Fiorillo

      Regarding Harris as the hastily-appointed Shepherd of the Church of #McResistanceLand, the problem – not the problem, but one among many for her handlers and promoters – is that most people know or sense her schtick to be lame and unworthy of a decent carny or televangelist.

      Trump, with his riffing digressions and Strong Man/Borscht Belt comedian schtick, is bound to be more effective. While #McResistance liberals will happily devour any slop they’re thrown, many of those outside that narcissistic mass circle jerk will find her wanting.

      1. flora

        an aside: considering the height difference between KH and T, I wonder if there will be the usual handshake, (well, it used to be usual), when they meet on stage at the start of tonight’s debate. A small thing, but interesting to me. Body language, etc.

      2. .Tom

        Maybe, maybe, perhaps. I agree that undecided voters probably see Harris as you describe. Otoh 2024 Trump isn’t 2016 Trump. He seems older, less witty, less sharp, and above all it is much, much less plausible that anything meaningful could get better from him in the WH. (Subtracting the Kennedy health thing which is still for me unclear if it could really lead to anything.) So voting Trump seems as much a protest against Harris and the Democrats as visa versa.

        1. Michael Fiorillo

          Yes, his mojo is not what it was, and I suspect he may have soured some MAGA types when he signed off on Johnson’s ok to Ukraine funding, and of course we’re not going to get anything better with him in the White House. That kind of seems to be the point.

          That said, Trump’s diminished chops still exceed the ones Harris never had. That, combined with structural contradictions that undermine Democrat cohesion and purpose, give Trump an advantage. After all, this is what empires in decline look like.

    3. Tom Doak

      My first debate question would be, “How much joy have we brought to Palestine these past 12 months?” But of course, I’m not a moderator.

  6. Zagonostra

    >‘We’re living a Lie’: Astronaut reveals shock realization after viewing Earth from Space International Affairs (Micael T)

    “We keep trying to deal with issues such as global warming, deforestation, biodiversity loss as stand alone issues when in reality they’re just symptoms of the underlying root problem and the problem is, that we don’t see ourselves as planetary.

    No, I’m afraid NASA astronaut Ron Garan is wrong, woefully wrong. The problem is not that we “don’t see ourselves as planetary,” it’s that we don’t see life, all human life as sacred. Palestinians, to the Israelis’ are cattle, to be slaughtered as foretold by Amalek. Ukrainian young men are nothing but geopolitical cannon fodder for the hegemon. Starmer’s cutting of heating oil to freezing pensioners takes a back seat to support for Zionist genocide. And so on and so on…

    Until each human being is seen as holding/carrying within in him/her the spark/potential of divinity and held as sacred, the planet will have to watch out for itself. And, I think it will be fine, even if it’s beautiful blue turns red as the Martian Sky or is enveloped in noxious gas as Venus.

    2. .Tom

      The problem is that we allowed hierarchical power systems to develop in which the most ambitious domineering psychopaths get to exercise the power of life and death over all of biology. We are nothing but statistics to these systems. Just for example, I do not trust them to not exercise the MAD nuclear option rather than accept a new arrangement of strategic power in Europe. It’s the same in the private sector with anything that reduces the rate of return, e.g. reducing consumption, off the table.

      We are doomed to follow these maniacs to hell unless we take their power away by withdrawing consent to be ruled by them. Revolution.

      2. Friendly

        In addition to Herman Daly, you might be interested in Kenneth Boulding who wrote “The economics of the coming spaceship earth” in 1966.

        1. Michael Fiorillo

          Yes, I was heavily influenced as a yout’ by a Daly-edited anthology (entitled “Steady State Economics: The Economics of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth”)) that included Boulding’s famous essay.

          It also included Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” which hasn’t aged as well.

    4. William Beyer

      Bucky Fuller’s “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” came to the same conclusion in 1969. Bucky was the eternal optimist, and continued to sell the concept across the world. Obviously, it didn’t take.

        1. Jabura Basaidai

          and how much of that water is potable and not salt water? that little blue marble gets even smaller –

          1. Wukchumni

            The ‘Large Hot Age’ coming down the pike is 5x in the other direction as the Little Ice Age was, and I expect mucho evaporation, but where does the water go in a closed system such as ours?

            I’m thinking we will have epic rain events on the order of 50 inches at a go, versus the more atypical 20 inch rain bombs in a day that are becoming increasingly normal.

            1. Jabura Basaidai

              interesting and wonder where is most likely to be the dumping ground of this wet largesse? good point though…….

    6. Tom Doak

      I was going to say that astronaut had better be careful, or they’ll send him back up to work out the bugs in the Boeing spacecraft.

      Also I noticed the link to that thread had a .ru tag, so it’s probably just Russian propaganda that sneaked past the Censors. /s

  7. griffen

    Regarding candidate Trump and tariffs…just this morning on CNBC former Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher calls his shot and labels that approach to be inflationary. Fisher chooses his words carefully but he also can be highly consistent in his views on the economy, the machinations at or within the Fed.

    Third world country status, there are a few salient examples the slide has begun or been ongoing as it stands…but I digress. Rural hospitals closing, rampant segments of homeless in large cities, a few extra US billions always to spend for this and also for that on MIC activities.

  8. Mikel

    Anyone who says “AI” has already been fooled – Jacobin

    That’s also been my belief all along.
    And it’s an example of what gives me pause about the direction of the alleged multi-polar world to be.

    1. Mark Gisleson

      Artificial Intelligence is an oxymoron. Computers are tools and tools are only as smart as their users.

      If AI really worked, the people programming it would take all the credit for the great ideas and inventions.

      1. Mikel

        Well, there’s currently some confusion about the distinction between a method distribution and actual creation.

    2. .Tom

      Yes, but, I remain impressed by the degree to which these idiotic systems can imitate and by how people can be taken in by these imitations. This suggests to me that the more critical and developed intellectuals among us who correctly point out the deficiency of LLM sacralize their intelligence over that which passes for the ordinarily human kind in most of every day life.

  9. Zagonostra

    >Venezuela opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez seeks asylum in Spain amid election fallout-RT

    Makes me wonder about Spain. I wonder if the autopsy of John McAfee, who certainly didn’t die by suicide as his Spanish prison jailers reported, was ever published. Spain like Canada and much, if not all of Europe, New Zealand, Australia seem to all part of that big club, at least the elites that control the polity.

    1. Jester

      Venezuela opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez seeks asylum in Spain amid election fallout RT. Kevin W: “This report says that he left on a Spanish Air Force jet. How on the nose is that?”

      Well, it says “Spanish Air Force plane”. Spanish Air Force jet sounds like he flew on F-16 or something. That would really be on the nose. :)

  10. Mikel

    More Bands Hit With AI-Generated Songs On Streaming Services – Metal Injection

    And the next scam from these vile SillyConmen is saying people need to verify they are human on online.
    @%!& – the bots need to labeled as bots. Problem solved.

    1. Late Introvert

      “people need to verify they are human online”

      Notice how it’s people, not consumers. You see how they choose their words carefully.

      What they really mean is universal digital ID. No thanks.

  11. The Rev Kev

    “What I Got Wrong About “Shock Therapy”’

    This whole episode has to be one of the greatest missed opportunities of the past century. They could have gone in, helped modernize Russia, demilitarize it as a measure for peace, integrated it with Europe so that the EU had a solid stream of resources to buy to build themselves up with, made ordinary Russians feel part of the west and over time use it to counter balance the rise of China. Instead what happened was that they took one look at the place and said, ‘Nah, let’s just loot the place for all that they are worth.’ If the US & NATO had not got diverted by the sandboxes of Afghanistan and the Middle east, they might have been able to finish what they started, Instead, a new leader arose who put all this to a stop over many years and by the time attention was turned back to them, Russia was back again and all those ideas about integrating Russia with the west had been burned to the ground.

    1. Mikel

      “…They could have gone in, helped modernize Russia, demilitarize it as a measure for peace, integrated it with Europe so that the EU had a solid stream of resources to buy to build themselves up with, made ordinary Russians feel part of the west and over time use it to counter balance the rise of China…”

      No, “they” could not have. Even if one buys the post-WW II diplomatic glory days of the West narrative, by the 90s, “they” were too far down the neoliberal economics rabbit hole for those dreamy reforms.

      1. The Rev Kev

        True. All too true. And isn’t neoliberalism all about looting the middle and lower classes on behalf of the wealthy after all?

        1. vao

          I have started to think that neoliberalism is actually a mutation of colonialism infecting industrial countries.

          2. Michael Fiorillo

            Provincial New Yorker that I am, I’ve always dated the opening shot of Neoliberalism’s war on the public good as commencing with NYC’s “bankruptcy” (actually closer to a capital strike and banker’s coup) in 1975, which ushered in austerity – hospitals and firehouses closed, thousands of teachers and cops laid off, etc. – for residents of the Core of the Imperium. That it occurred the year it did, when the Empire took a big hit in Vietnam, was a perverse bit of historical symmetry, meter and rhyme…

              1. Wukchumni

                The almighty buck has lost 98.6% of its value since 1971 when measured against something matters, but experts agree that last 1.4% is gonna be a tough get.

                1. Jabura Basaidai

                  my Dad was a gold bug and infected my brother & I – he looked at numismatic value as well as being a hedge but numismatic value not so much the case anymore – at least that’s what i’m told –

                  1. Wukchumni

                    @ these heady numbers as far as spot price goes, a $20 Liberty or Saint is worth over $2400 @ melt value, and they stopped having numismatic value pretty much when old yeller hit a grandido per oz.

    2. The Rev Kev

      And in a bit of serendipity, Security Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu was giving an interview and said-

      ‘If at that point they fast-tracked us into the European Union… I believe we would have lost our sovereignty by today. The resources and natural deposits that our country has would have been largely redistributed and snatched.’

      ‘They’ve made a mistake. They should have gotten us into the EU as soon as possible. And we would be like the EU members: just a command from across the ocean, we would be folding our paws and getting ready to jump through a hoop’

      https://www.rt.com/russia/603754-shoigu-russia-eu-membership/

      Could never have happened of course. If the EU cannot absorb the Ukraine without causing chaos and wrecking their system, then how could they absorb a far greater country in size like Russia?

      1. JMH

        The opportunity could have been grasped. The opportunity should have been grasped. The opportunity would have been grasped if there was any desire by the US/EU/NATOstan/neocons/neoliberal cannibal capitalists to do so. But there was not. At that moment,1992, the gaggle of interests was only “knee deep in the Big Muddy.” The glittering prize before their eyes. The brass ring there to be grasped. Overweening greed won the day. Now, 2024, they are “eyeball deep in the Big Muddy” and the big fools just press on.

        Russia had it back to the wall. It regrouped and rebuilt and reforged its weapons, and I do not mean simply weapons of war, which while important are not the greater part of its arsenal, and will win the war on the battlefield of Ukraine. That is the beginning. It is what happens to the System of the World in the next generation that will set the course, if there is to be a course, for the century to come.

        A large part of the reason for the mess the western world is in is a product of short term thinking, of seeing the world as disconnected series of either/or choices. Time to stop playing checkers and master Chess or Go.

        1. Polar Socialist

          One of the greatest fears in USA in the early 1990’s was that EU and Russia get together. It would have been a powerhouse that could compete with China, not to speak of USA.

          And Russian reformers didn’t really need external looters – Gorba’s perestroika in the late 1980’s had already created most of the future oligarchs, and they then went ahead and looted most of what there was to loot. Bill Browder and his ilk only got the scraps.

        2. Mikel

          While NATO may have been neutralized, a Russia in the EU or Eurozone could now be facing de-industrialization or the country could have been Greece-ified.

        3. Michaelmas

          JMH: The opportunity could have been grasped. The opportunity should have been grasped.

          It could never have been grasped. I remember the era and there were people then– systemically then-notable figures — making the sensible argument you’re presenting now.

          And in opposition there was an immense and absolutely explicit effort made by many figures within the neocon and without the neocon movement to ensure that sensible argument was defeated and the overriding operating principle of US-Western policy was now going to be “We won and they lost! We won and they lost, and now we’re going to enjoy the victor’s spoils and they’re going to suck it up!”

          Explicitly, if you will, the Strong — the US and the West — do what they can, and the Weak — the Russians — would suffer what they must.

  12. Steve H.

    > Trouble down on the farm Bleeding Heartland (Robin K)

    >> While urban sprawl steadily reduces America’s cultivatable acres, deforestation can allow Brazil to add more farmland and enhance the gains it has made in developing its internal transportation infrastructure to match the traditional logistical advantage enjoyed by the U.S.

    This assumes agency will drive deforestation. That’s optimistic:

    > Intense fires burning in several South American countries draped large swaths of smoke across the continent throughout August and early September 2024… NASA’s EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) imager on the DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) satellite captured this view of smoke billowing from the blazes on September 3, 2024.

    1. Late Introvert

      That article infuriated me. Leave it to a former Register reporter to take the side of Big Ag yet again while giving lip service to the Farm Crisis of the 80s. I have a dog in this fight being from Iowa, and my uncle lost my grandfather’s John Deere Implement back in those days (not exactly the best business man). The Register was a decent paper back then and did good reporting IIRC, but I was in my early teens so I didn’t really understand the issues. Ever since Gannett bought the Register it has been a mouthpiece for Big Ag.

      Notice not one mention of the Dead Zone in the Gulf, or how many manure and chemical spills there are every year. Farmers routinely over apply both to the land. He complains there’s no more land but doesn’t mention Iowa has the least public land of any state, or how most farmers plow marginal wet lands, and right up to the edge of creeks and rivers. He complains about the poor farmers but they live in huge houses and drive huge new trucks and control the state legislature that is now banning books. Also all this talk about Iowa Farmers feeding the world, LOL no. They make Diabetes juice (HFCS) and Heart Disease meat, and half of the corn now goes to ethanol, the stupidest thing ever but it sure makes the farmers rich. I say boo f’ing hoo, Iowa farmers, book f’ing hoo.

      Chuck Grassley, also LOL no. They love them some tax cuts, them Iowa Farmers, and lots of government handouts (I do too, for the record).

      1. Michael Fiorillo

        “… half the corn goes to ethanol, the stupidest thing ever…”

        I have to disagree: using food (to the extent that #2 feed corn is food) to produce fuel that is a net energy loser isn’t just stupid, it’s a shandah (a shameful thing).

  13. The Rev Kev

    ‘Jalal #CeasefireNow
    @JalalAK_jojo
    Israeli “police” and “soldiers” provide protection to settlers as they steal goats from Zanuta, Masafter Yatta.’

    In their defence, it’s a lonely lifestyle for those settlers in their hilltop settlements at night…

  15. Milton

    Noticing more instances from “trusted sources” where the term “Covid vaccine” is being replaced by “Covid shot”. I wonder if marketing research has determined this to be less frightening to people and more akin to the flu shot where it can be part of an annual fall regimen.

    3. IM Doc

      A colleague from another state emailed me a few weeks ago a directive from his state health dept to physicians in the state.

      It was all about vaccine hesitancy and the increasingly large number of kids not being vaxxed.

      One of the recommendations was to quit using the word vaccine with any shot when talking to parents. Call them shots instead.

      The authorities have been too smart for their own good.

      Changing definitions of the word vaccine, etc

      But I always come back to the disaster of mandates.

      It was one of the biggest blunders in medical history. This started long before Covid. The Obama years saw the imposition of vax mandates on public schools. The medical ethics professors who pointed out what a problem this would cause were called names and slandered.

      Fast forward 15 years and add on a helping of Covid vax mandates, and now I am reading almost weekly stories of public schools in big blue cities having their enrollments collapse and having to close schools all the while home schools and charter schools and private schools are exploding.

      We fail to learn lessons. Our current meritocracy is so smart that they can ignore lessons that are centuries in the learning.

      1. The Rev Kev

        ‘having to close schools all the while home schools and charter schools and private schools are exploding.’

        Maybe that was the point. To downgrade public education so that it can be privatized as much as possible. You can really cash in with charter and private schools but you can’t so much when they are public schools.

        1. ArcadiaMommy

          The only people cashing in here are the charter school management companies. Most of the in-person charter schools are very dismal looking places. The charters in ritzy neighborhoods look nice and the parents act like there got admitted to every Ivy. They get very uncomfortable when you ask them what the tuition is.

          Catholic school has worked out for my boys. They are doing well academically at boys high school and the sports are top notch for them. Charters and the little private schools don’t have decent sports and I don’t trust their academics. Too many “special” kids and I think it is weird that high school are the same school as kindergartners.

      2. Neutrino

        Moral hazards in pharma, after Ronnie’s Admin pushed the immunity on those willing industry victims. That was one of many self-licking ice cream cones disastrous acts.
        Another was W’s pharma plan where inconvenient numbers were left off by using a 5-year time horizon. Toss in Citizens United and a few other evil policies and the public, what voice is left for them, get nudged every which way but where they’d prefer to go.

    5. Val

      “Vaccine” was the fuzzy euphemism of choice, well regarded and cuddly, a marketable term with an admirable response curve. That conditioned response has apparently now been unintentionally fixed?

      Nice catch there.

      OTOH I protect my sophisticated family with Tony’s Soapy Spike brand transgene synthetic RNA mystery injections. Again and again! Totally safe and affective.

  16. Burritonomics

    Incorrect link alert:

    The New Yorks Times article “Kuwait is awash in oil money” links to a baseball reference page of the 1920 Norfolk Mary James team.

  17. Milton

    Re antidote: is that a prediction the tropical storm Francine will become a cat 2 hurricane before hitting Louisiana?

  18. mrsyk

    Cats are really good at expressing contentment. Gorgeous George and Sir Munchkin Scruffle are making me smile. What a lovely pair of bed hogs.

  19. BillK

    Re: Watching Two Labour Parties Destroy Themselves, Steve Keen
    It may be of bad economics, as Steve Keen suggests, or is it really? The current estimate is that c.4000 UK pensioners might die this winter after stopping the winter fuel grant. But from an “economics” point of view, these pensioners are “useless-eaters”. So, sorry about that, but hard decisions must be taken, etc……
    Rather like releasing COVID-19 infected patients from hospitals into care homes. That got rid of a lot more pensioners.
    The really hard political decisions are to look after all the people, not just the bankers playing with numbers in computers.

    1. Ignacio

      What about the previous link? Starmer saying is doing the “tough job”. Indeed who could have expected that a Labour PM would be doing the hard job for the rentiers. Ah because pensioners are ex-workers i guess. They do not produce. Go die! A government isn’t there to be “populist” but to do the hard job.

      1. Anonymous 2

        The UK pension decision merits a little gloss. The current arrangement pays out lump sums to all pensioners regardless of their financial circumstances. So multi-millionaires get money from the state to help them with their heating bills. This is daft. So change is warranted. The question in practice will be what is done with regard to pensioners who really need the money. The proposal is that it be continued for the poorest but be means-tested but obviously the cut-off point where this happens is crucial. It will be interesting to see whether the Government makes any adjustments to this. They are already pointing out that the state pension is to be increased by more than the rate of inflation as measured by the CPI which will compensate at least to some degree those who may miss out by losing the lump sum.

        As a UK pensioner, who incidentally does not need the money, I would add that much of the poverty in the UK, which is a very serious problem, affects the young rather than the old. Many (but by no means all) pensioners are among the richest in society. But opponents of Labour can have a field day as a result of the inept political handling of this issue by the new Chancellor.

    1. Late Introvert

      Agreed, that was surprising to me that Ray Bradbury was involved with that movie. I’ll need to watch it. I actually read the book and enjoyed most of it, if puzzled at first by all the stuff about whales. I remember it pretty well too, unlike other difficult books I’ve read. I’m looking at you Thomas Pynchon.

  21. Jester

    China and SpaceX envision reaching Mars in different ways Asia Times (Kevin W)

    They envision trains differently, too. Chinese ones are actually working.

      1. Jester

        Yea, Musks empty promises are strictly compartmentalized, and completly unrelated to each other. Hypeloop is developing according to plan, and tickets will be available for pre-sale regardless of the Mars real estate market development. Also, we will have self driving cars next year, pinky swear, and successful color revolution in Venezuela too.

  22. Mike

    RE: Dumb as they come: Scholz and Pistorius on procurement of new missile defense systems Gilbert Doctorow (Michael T)

    I do wish our commentary would not reflect the opinion that these governments were unknowing and just making mistakes. As far as they are concerned, this deliberate policy is not a mistake. To please the Atlanticist hogs, the little piglets have made a conscious decision that seems to promise a future within the umbrella of USA/UK vs. any other. They are placing a bet, and while it may seem a bet against interest, one must ask 1) what interest are we talking about?, and 2)whose interest? This Atlanticist tradition knows no political boundaries, and unites various levels of the corporate and entitled monied class together with no regard for local or national politics, even less regard for the sentiment of citizens and voters. It is dumb for our outcome, but brilliant for theirs, and we cannot forget that. Don’t believe they can be convinced otherwise.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      I think you underestimate how dumb some of these leaders really are. Look at our bench. Janet Yellen? Tony Blinken? These are the two most senior cabinet members! Scholz is dumb. Annelina Baerbock is embarrassingly stupid. That does not mean they are not also co-opted.

      1. John k

        Begging the question, how did they get so high?
        My view is that our oligarchs aren’t selecting for competence but obedience.

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          It winds up being like that but I think the mechanism is a bit different. It’s about having the right credentials and connections. That means being willing to do what it takes to be part of entities that operate a lot like clubs.

    2. Aurelien

      I don’t think this has anything to do with the US, although, as often with Doctorow, when he gets out of his (limited) area of expertise, it’s not really clear what he’s talking about. In this case, “air defence” and “missile defence” are two quite different concepts, and “defence against aerial threats using missiles” is a third. So what is he trying to say?

      Presumably, that western leaderships have been scared s**less by the performance of Russian missiles in Ukraine, and have come to realise that European population centres are now at risk from conventional, highly accurate, high-speed missiles. We have been talking about this on NC for the last couple of years, but the penny has apparently only just dropped with national leaders. Their worry, of course, is that this will be picked up by the media, and the populations of Europe will start demanding, quite reasonably, what their political leadership is going to do about it. After all, no matter how far it may be possible to mend relations with the Russians one day, if a potentially hostile state has the ability to wipe out your population centres with impunity, then that changes the political calculus quite a bit. By contrast, the US faces no such threat.

      Doctorow’s argument, that current western technology cannot counter these missiles so there’s no point in doing anything, is not one that any serious politician in a democratic society could make. In practice, Europe will have no choice but to start investing in anti-missile technology (or rather continue, since there have been plans floating around for such systems for a good twenty years now.) Already Russia has deployed anti-missile technologies much more advanced than ours, as is clear from the difference in interception rates. And they are certainly working on technologies capable of defeat Iskander-type missiles. (In any event, the figures he quotes for missile speeds are probably exaggerated, certainly for the terminal phase.) But behind all this is one valid point: the West has consistently failed to invest in this type of technology for decades, and the Russians are well ahead, both with missiles and potential countermeasures. They thus have a capacity to devastate the cities western Europe with weapons which are genuinely usable. So how do we feel about that? And are we going to do anything about it? The average European politician would unhesitatingly reply “yes.”

      1. PlutoniumKun

        I think a key outcome of the war has been a complete reassessment of the capacity of existing and proposed systems. A whole bunch of existing systems have made the leap from tactical to strategic ranges (although many probably already had those ranges, its just that nobody was saying it out loud). The realisation that not just the Russian, but also Iranian and even semi-state actors like the Houthi can build lots of relatively cheap 1000km+ range missiles and drones completely upends so many assumptions.

        Europe – at least on paper – has one pretty decent anti missile/aircraft system in the Aster, albeit one that costs 2-3 million euro a pop. But its shorter range air defenses like the Iris-T seem to have been a dud in the plains of Ukraine. So they will have to spend a mountain of cash to catch up with Russia, even if that was possible.

        But even Russia has struggled in some respects. It has had amazing success at point defence, but its noticeable that a lot of Ukrainian missiles are getting through when they aren’t attacking well defended areas, which indicates to me that the longer ranged S-300 and S-400 and related systems aren’t all that successful when it comes to area defence. So everyone is potentially vulnerable to some degree.

        The other wild card is that in many way Russia has revealed its capacity far more than it would have wished. There has been a lot of data collection of defence systems in full active mode, while to a large degree the Nato equipment used by Ukraine has been of secondary quality. Although of course Russia is getting invaluable real life testing for all the systems it chooses.

        One thing that intrigues me (and many other defence watchers) is that it looks like the US has abandoned the NGAD, the purported replacement for the F-22 and a lot of other air defence and strike systems. If rumours bouncing around various forums are correct, the strategic planners have concluded that 6th Gen fighters like NGAD don’t have a future. It may be that they’ve concluded that all manned aircraft, including fully stealth ones, can’t survive the modern battlefield, even at a significant distance from the main conflict zone. Or perhaps there is another reason nobody except the defence planners know. But it does seem that we are entering a huge area of uncertainty and change in military planning, which upends a lot of long established assumptions.

        In the meanwhile, the US Navy has screwed up the Constellation class, the fourth big navy contract in a row to be an expensive disaster. There is probably a joke in there somewhere about taking an Italian weapon design and making it even more useless.

        1. XXYY

          The Ukrainian conflict has revealed, in a very stark way, what’s been going on with military technology in various countries over the last three or four decades.

          One of the big reveals has been how poor US military technology has become, and how little value it provides for the dollar. In the US, building weapons has become almost exclusively a for-profit business since the Vietnam War, with the result that new weapons are priced as high as possible and are never tested under realistic conditions during their entire lifetime. We are seeing the results of that, and so are other countries who have historically been buyers of US weapons.

          Another reveal has been how ill chosen the various weapons programs in the US and NATO countries have been. Seems like they have basically assumed that the conditions of World War II still hold on the battlefield, and big ships, expensive heavily armed planes, and extensive use of radio and radar rule the day. Trillions of dollars have been wasted on these assumptions.

          Another reveal has been the emergence of game changing military technologies in other countries, primarily Russia but also elsewhere. Hypersonic missiles, working and effective air defense systems, “swarm” weapons, electronic warfare and jamming systems, and very low cost weapon systems based on consumer technology that can be developed in a few weeks or months have not only provided tremendous military power, but also rendered most US and NATO military systems useless and/or too slow and expensive to build in the needed quantities.

          Needless to say these new technologies have also shown the need for vast changes in military doctrines, changes that are not likely to happen in countries that have outsourced their industrial base and now use their best and brightest to dream up complicated new ways to make and sell debt.

        2. Polar Socialist

          It may be that they’ve concluded that all manned aircraft, including fully stealth ones, can’t survive the modern battlefield, even at a significant distance from the main conflict zone. Or perhaps there is another reason nobody except the defence planners know.

          You probably mean western planners. Even before I ever read Martyanov, I was aware that the Soviet idea of air power was completely different from the NATO thinking. And the reason – to my understanding – was that during the WW2 the Eastern Front never saw an situation with a persistent air superiority.

          It was always one side or the other gaining an upper hand by concentrating it’s forces into a small area of operations. And even then the tempo of the operations unavoidably led to the parity or even loss of the superiority in a relatively short time.

          Thus Soviet Union, or Russia, has assumed total air superiority is not feasible concept in near peer conflict. What they had was a fleet upon fleet of fighter-bombers, all subordinated to commanders of military districts, that is, to infantry.

          And they were not the loitering type (A-10, namely) of ground pounders, but Mig-27 and Su-25, which would fly low and fast, attack on multiple directions at once and be gone before the AA would know they’re above. Today the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aircraft Plant is churning out Su-34s multiple batches per year. A great aircraft, but since it’s the same factory and same air frame as Su-35, Russia can’t really produce both in high quantities.

          Which is why, I guess, there’s now a lot of talk about using Yak-130M as fighter bomber in SMO. It’s ridiculously cheap, yet can carry enough ordnance and has two seats – one for the pilot, one for the weapons officer. Yak managers are also pushing for re-invigorating the Yak-141 VTOL project with new ideas.

          While it’s not expressed directly anywhere, I have a feeling that having consolidated totally on Sukhoi products Russian Air Force is having issues with the maintenance and procurement during a prolonged conflict.

      2. ilsm

        Hypersonic systems never go near 100 km altitude, long range radar cannot characterize early in travel time as they do ballistic missiles.

        New strike technology makes obsolete (many billions $) existing threat warning and attack assessment systems! Add to that the almost instantaneous intercept time imposed.

        Decades and billions to muff mid range air/ missile defense systems like THAAD, and Aegis….

        Digging valued assets in is more feasible. See Hizbolah and Iran.

    3. code_jockey

      I don’t know about you but I found the quote about Putin having to change his course by 360 degrees to be pretty convincing evidence of the person’s stupidity.

  23. The Rev Kev

    “Mapping Ukraine’s Resources”

    In a way, I can understand Lindsay Graham drooling over the mineral wealth of the Ukraine. That is where the fast bucks are. You go in, rip all those minerals out of the ground, and leave behind a toxic wasteland for the natives to deal with and to pay for. And I note that like in most countries, the capital is sitting on one of the most worthless parts of the country. But that map is only telling a narrow slice of that country’s wealth. It is a power house for agriculture as well with most of it in the Russian-speaking areas. And in terms of GDP, I believe that about 90% of the wealth of that country was being generated by the Donbass and associated areas. So as the Ukraine has now lost the Donbass for good, what long-term revenue can they generate in the remaining parts of the country?

    1. Jester

      The remaining parts of the country can generate unlimited ammounts of hate. They just need a way to monetize it better.

    2. skippy

      Watched a good video on the subject which I linked some months ago and don’t have time to dig it up, off to work. Basically Ukraine has some very unique geology in the East that is very old and everything that comes with it.

      That said, whats new about nations looking to back fill GDP with other peoples stuff …. especially the gold stuff throughout history …

  24. .human

    US Senator Graham says openly that the US is only interested in raw materials in Ukraine…

    Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, Sudan, libya, China, Russia…

  25. Di Modica's Dumb Steer

    Not sure what to make of this, since it can only be verified through long-term observation (and since it’s from Reddit, so there’s that), but reading the description of HR slowly lowering salary ranges and removing benefits, I could only say that none of it was surprising in the slightest. Glad that the kids are learning, but maybe they also need to learn to be more militant, for lack of a better word.

    https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1fbhap7/secrets_of_corporate_hr_departments/

  26. The Rev Kev

    “Dumb as they come: Scholz and Pistorius on procurement of new missile defense systems”

    I believe that at the moment, that perhaps 5% of NATO is covered by air defence systems, perhaps less with all the systems that have been sent to the Ukraine. And as this article points out, nothing can stop the latest class of Russian missiles. So I am going to say that this is not Scholz and Pistorius being dumb but some sort of scam where NATO buys these systems while these two clowns get a slice of the pie in their offshore bank accounts as they give out the contracts to those MIC corporations.

    1. scott s.

      “nothing can stop the latest class of Russian missiles”.

      If I were part of the MIC, this is certainly an idea I would want to promote, since I could advertise my “something”.

  27. CA

    https://english.news.cn/20240910/bae6db12ed5f42c286f04a7527e357a4/c.html

    September 10, 2024

    China’s NEV output, sales register stellar growth in first 8 months

    BEIJING — China’s production and sales of new energy vehicles (NEVs) continued to maintain fast growth in the first eight months of this year, with the NEV market share steadily increasing in the domestic market, industry data showed on Tuesday.

    During the period, the production of NEVs reached about 7.01 million units, rising 29 percent year on year, according to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM).

    The sales of NEVs stood at 7.04 million units, growing by 30.9 percent from a year earlier, the data reveals. The market share of NEVs in China reached 37.5 percent in the period.

    In August alone, the production and sales of NEVs hit 1.09 million units and 1.1 million units, respectively, representing an increase of 29.6 percent and 30 percent year on year, according to the CAAM.

    The sales of NEVs in August account for 44.8 percent of the sales of new vehicles in China.

    In the January-August period, some 818,000 units of NEVs were exported, representing a year-on-year increase of 12.6 percent, the data shows.

  28. t

    Everybody is afraid of these environmental groups and the fear that it may look wrong if you fight back with these people,” Warren said in a 2017 TV interview. “But what they did to us is wrong, and they’re gonna pay for it.”

    The “pugnacious” Texas Billionaire is such a liar. Didn’t make it to the end but it doesn’t look like they reported on how long he fought with his lawyers to sue sovereign nations. He does lie about them a lot, and he enjoys slandering the Army Corp of engineers. Stand up fella.

  29. Mikel

    The QE theory of everything – New Statesman

    Many of the points about Japan and the history behind how it ended up in its current state are covered in this documentary. For some visuals to go along with the narrative::
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY&t=665s&ab_channel=IndependentPOV/
    Princes of the Yen | The Hidden Power of Central Banks

    Michael Oswald’s film “Princes of the Yen: Central Banks and the Transformation of the Economy” 『円の支配者』reveals how Japanese society was transformed to suit the agenda and desire of powerful interest groups, and how citizens were kept entirely in the dark about this. Based on the book of the same title by Professor Richard Werner, a visiting researcher at the Bank of Japan during the 90s crash, the stock market dropped by 80% and house prices by up to 84%. The film uncovers the real cause of this extraordinary period in recent Japanese history.

    1. Mikel

      As for the rest of the article in the New Statesman, it ends with:
      “…The wealthy want their free money back, but governments must resist them. “We got hooked on a ­finance-dependent growth model, which has run out of steam,” Mohamed El-Erian told me. “You can’t allow yourself to be held hostage.”

      But that’s exactly what we are seeing right now. It’s disguised in the language that “interest rates must be cut to help the poors”. Laughable with the usory rates for credit for so many that exist no matter how much interest rates are cut for the benefit of billionaires.

      Alleged “AI” productivity forecasts are highly dependent on a return to QE conditions.

  30. t

    Not sure. There are only so many notes. And we have all kinds of studio tools already. Most new genres, going back to crooners like Rudy Vallee, come from innovations in recording. With that and sampling there’s a lot of precedent for mixing. Spotify has all the licenses and although individual artists might have a beef, BMI, for instance probably doesn’t.

    There a tons of AI generator songs on YouTube and I’ve heard exactly three (which were original lyrics) that weren’t tedious.

    I would expect expert analysis- legal, engineering- would be the best place for going after AI … if only the companies currently paying people for expert analysy are the biggest boosters of AI.

    I made monthly effort to use our tool for a process doc yesterday. Added a third to length (word count – it also jacked up format), dropped a key point, added two made-up details. Didn’t bother to send it for review. Using the tried and try method of calling in a chit with a co-worker for a fresh read.

    1. Michaelmas

      t: Most new genres, going back to crooners like Rudy Vallee, come from innovations in recording.

      False, generally. True music innovations are almost entirely innovations in harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, and ways of using the human voice.

      Forex: yes, Parker, Gillespie, and the beboppers established a tradition which resulted in longer, more complicated solos being played on jazz LP 33 rpm records once that technology came to dominate over 45 and 78 rpm discs.

      But: (1) the beboppers were already playing those longer solos in clubs in the early 1940s and (2) the chromatic enclosures and chromatic melodic lines they played, which gave them a greater range of possibilities with which to elaborate on musically and thereby permitted bebop’s longer solos, were themselves enabled by the beboppers’ more complex harmonies (chords) and those had absolutely nothing to do with any changes in technology and quite a lot to do with the beboppers’ interest in Impressionist harmonies.

      t: There are only so many notes.

      Coltrane doesn’t sound like Armstrong, and neither sound like Bach or Palestrina. Even with the twelve-tone scale, there are many things that could be done which most people aren’t doing, even though some of those things might make for quite listenable, interesting music (i.e. not Schoenberg).

    2. flora

      an aside: The Atlantic Magazine let AI generate it’s October cover illustration. As Taibbi and Kirn noted last night on ATW, if the illustration was supposed to “own” T and the GOP it backfired badly. The irreverent comments on twtr-X lampooning it – “looks like a heavy metal band album cover”, “can I get the T-shirt”, etc are very funny. Memes coming soon, no doubt. / ;)

      As Walter Kirn remarked (paraphrasing), “The problem is AI isn’t human. It has no human understanding, what we call understanding. It couldn’t detect how badly it missed the mark its human prompter was probably trying for.” The sort of hilarious thing is, neither could the humans at the Atlantic see how badly it missed the mark. / ha

      1. Randall Flagg

        >The sort of hilarious thing is, neither could the humans at the Atlantic see how badly it missed the mark. / ha

        Tough to see clearly when one is blinded by TDS , or whatever your malady may be

      2. Mark Gisleson

        You see what you’re paid to see. I’d give odds that there was a narcissist with poor taste in charge of that decision making but I’m sure the blame (once they realize they made a mistake) will be shared widely.

    3. Mikel

      It’s not just about the notes…it’s about the space between the notes that gives variety. And there exists a world of harmony and melody outside of Western scales.
      And even those rhythms in melodies can be stacked in unique ways.

      1. michaelmas

        All that too.

        And most of those ‘non-Western’ scales can be played on ‘Western’ instruments when they’re not from Indian quarter-tone music. Plenty of folks like Messaien in classical and Coltrane and others in jazz have done it.

  31. The Rev Kev

    “PM defends ‘tough decision’ over winter fuel cut”

    So when does Starmer start cutting back all the money being sent to the Ukraine? Or cutting the money spent on supporting Ukrainians refugees?

    2. flora

      Tsk. You know the so-called white riots of working class and middle class people in the UK is all due to r*cism. right?

  32. Mikel

    China and SpaceX envision reaching Mars in different ways – Asia Times

    So what about the nuts and bolts of launching machines into space.
    Physiological and supply chain issues come to mind as some of the tougher challenges.

    1. XXYY

      I have been keeping an eye out for the next scam that will take it’s place in the finance industry once the AI bubble collapses.

      Traveling to Mars seems like a good contender. It will take years for all the insurmountable problems to become visible, and finance people no little or nothing about it beyond movies they watched as kids.

      In the meantime, billion and trillion dollar funding rounds can be carried out and carted away.

  33. The Rev Kev

    ‘Eric Yeung 👍🚀🌕
    @KingKong9888
    It is all over the news in Hong Kong now:
    Donald Trump is threatening the entire world that if they do not use the USD as their reserve currency and default international transaction currency, the U.S. will impose 100% tariffs on them. Anyone who thinks the ROW & BRICS+ will just capitulate without a fight is delusional.’

    Looks like Donnie is going to go with mafia tactics. I guess his 4 years in DC was not wasted after all. What happens if China says sorry, we can’t sell you any more rare earths starting tonight as we trade in other currencies. What then? I can’t see all the nations of the world standing for it because if they agree to this one, then who knows what the next demand will be. It is nothing less than a demand that all the nations of the world give up their sovereignty. You better believe that more and more countries will abandon the US for the BRICS.

  34. Tom Stone

    I will once again recommend Whitney Webb’s two volume “One Nation under Blackmail”, I have been following US politics since the Nixon Kennedy debates and have been reading the alternative press since the early days of the “Berkeley Barb”.
    This work explained a lot of things that had puzzled me over the years and her conclusion that the Epstein/Maxwell honeypot was shut down because it was no longer needed makes a lot of sense to me.
    The Five Eyes Nations have total information awareness, the ability to blackmail every Politician outside of China and perhaps Russia and I strongly suspect this is why Switzerland has abandoned Neutrality in a move that makes no sense otherwise.
    It also may be the reason the Nordic Countries have jumped on the train to Hell.

    1. Screwball

      I’m part way through Vol 1. Incredible read. Webb is amazing and documents everything. I think I read she lives in Chili. Probably a good thing.

      1. Screwball

        Valid point. I’m to the point my belief system is “trust no one.” Especially people in power, or with a badge.

  35. hauntologism

    I was expecting a meme of Trump saving a cat (and a duck) from Haitians. There are now dozens of them in widening circulation.

    It is amazing that Putin has time to wage war in the Ukraine, re-arrange the global order, and approve individual memes in an effort to undermine Our Democracy.

    Eat your heart out Lee Atwater.

    1. Screwball

      The Haitian cat thing is a good example of how information gets twisted. I did some searching last night and today. Haitians eating cats seems to be false, and it looks to be a combination of news stories that were twisted together to make a story.

      That said, Haitians and Springfield, Ohio is a story. Maybe not the cat part, but the 10k or so who ended up in a city of 20k. I found articles in their local newspaper that show there are some issues for the people who live there. There are also to be found clips from city council meetings that were kind of testy.

      Now that it has become politicized I’m guessing we will never find out the real truth of what happened, or what is currently happening there. I’m only 2 hrs away and would kind of like to know. Now I don’t know what to believe. Mission accomplished I guess.

  37. TomW

    I don’t know where these figures for Ukraine’s mineral wealth come from, but I imagine they are assuming the stuff is already dug up, processed, and sold at today’s market prices. It requires massive amounts of capital to mine this stuff. As well as labor and also energy.
    Ukraine has iron ore, coal, and oil and gas. None of which are in short supply. The UK is sitting on trillions in coal that will never be dug up, for example. It is a stranded asset.
    Was Ukraine producing and selling minerals for hundreds of billions of dollars ever? Was it ever a mining powerhouse?
    There are fantasy figures. Monetizing the “mineral wealth” is an enormous undertaking, and the net profits could well be underwhelming.
    Meanwhile the West is sending billions to Ukraine.

    1. sarmaT

      Donbass region was a mining powerhouse, and industrial powerhouse too. Local militiamen are tough fighers because they were miners and factory workers before the conflict. That’s why they occasionaly dig tunnels under forified enemy positions and attack them from the back. Donetsk football club is called Shakhter, which means miner. Name of town Ugledar means gift of coal. Soledar means gift of salt, and it has biggest European salt mine under it. Coke plant near Adveevka was turning coal into fuel for metallurgic industry like the one in Mariupol.

      Galicia, on the other hand, has forests and mountains for Banderites to hide in.

      Those are fantasy figures because you can print money as much as you want, but you can’t print natural resources. West is sending freshly minted billions to itself, and some overpriced and underperforming weapons to Ukraine. How’s that for net profits?

  38. Jason Boxman

    So I just had a thought; Another practical reason for liberal Democrats to avoid recognizing that Biden is unfit to serve, not just as the Democrat candidate, but as president, is that Harris couldn’t easily campaign if she’s suddenly president. Theoretically, she’d be doing presidential stuff, but then the country seems to run, for some definition of run, without Biden in a functional state anyway. So maybe she’d campaign full tilt anyway.

    Gotta skip the debate tonight. It’s my final interval training workout week, week 8, and if I get blasted out of my mind tonight I’ll fail tomorrow’s workout. Probably for the best, anyway.

    1. Mo's Bike Shop

      The obvious problem with letting her govern now, is that people would get to see her govern.

      The phrase ‘wet paper bag’ comes to mind.

  39. pjay

    Thank you for posting the clip from Double Down News on Oct. 7. I know this is old news to most NC readers, but it is an excellent example of a clear and concise refutation of a massive propaganda effort. It is a clip I would send to those who are unaware of this information – which would be most people here in the US.

  40. Mikel

    With the number of publicly traded companies in decline, the “privatization of Social Security” must also be a way to socialize the losses of private equity’s bad bets. The search is on for suckers to sell to as you speak.

  41. flora

    re: Sarah Wilkinson.

    Thanks for this update. Glad the sunlight of attention paid has a decent outcome here. I wonder if this was a trial run for the door-stormers to see how much public pushback they’d get. Fortunately, good reporting seems to have mostly shut down this particular assault on freedom of speech.

  42. Roger Blakely

    RE: Red lines of the counter-elite Neoliberal Feudalism

    “What does this liberal friend expect to happen when white Middle America is destitute?”

    “I told my friend: if you want to de-fang the Trump phenomenon, it’s not hard to do – address the underlying issues that have led to Trump and to the Tea Party before him.”

    “But of course this won’t happen.”

  43. Wukchumni

    I don’t want you anymore
    ‘Cause you took my joy
    I don’t want you anymore
    You took my joy

    You took my Joey
    I want him back
    You took my Joey
    I want him back

    I’m gonna go watch in Philly, as I’ll look for my joy
    Go to Philly as I’ll look for my joy
    Maybe on the streets of Philly as I’ll find my joy
    Maybe on the streets of Philly as I’ll find my joy

    I’m gonna go to Kensington Ave and look for my joy
    Go to Kensington Ave and look for my joy
    Maybe on Kensington Ave I’ll find my joy
    Maybe on Kensington Ave I’ll find my joy

    You got no right to take over for my Joey
    I want him back
    You got no right to take over for my Joey
    I want him back

    You took my joy
    I want it back
    You took my joy
    I want it back

    I’m gonna go watch in Philly, as I’ll look for my joy
    Go to Philly as I’ll look for my joy
    Maybe on the streets of Philly as I’ll find my joy
    Maybe on the streets of Philly as I’ll find my joy

    I’m gonna go to Kensington Ave and look for my joy
    Go to Kensington Ave and look for my joy
    Maybe on Kensington Ave I’ll find my joy
    Maybe on Kensington Ave I’ll find my joy

    I don’t want you anymore
    ‘Cause you took my joy
    I don’t want you anymore
    You took my joy

    You took my joy
    I want it back
    You took my joy
    I want it back

    You took my joy
    I want it back
    You took my joy
    I want it back

    I’m gonna go to Philly
    I’m gonna go to Kensington Ave

    Joy, by Lucinda Williams

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c-p-gH2bsM

  44. Maxwell Johnston

    Kudos on today’s links. Really good stuff.

    Nice to see a link to Vzglyad.ru. The description of the rabidly enthusiastic Crimean Tatar reminded me of the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding who was always promoting the universality of the Greek language:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXt0VCPKfQ4

    Taibbi on RU shock therapy was excellent. I had completely forgotten about the events of summer 1993, as I and my wife were both earning USD salaries in Moscow, so we weren’t affected. But her relatives were, and I regret to say that at the time I didn’t fully take their anguish into consideration.

    The Apple-Ireland-EU tax case was bizarre. Much as I love Ireland, the fact is that it has been playing fast and loose with global taxation laws for many years now. It will be fun to see what the Irish government does with its windfall. Like Robert Redford in The Sting, they’ll probably just blow it:

    https://clip.cafe/the-sting-1973/youre-not-gonna-stick-around-your-share/

    On a totally unrelated note, James Howard Kunstler’s site has been down for at least two days now. I don’t always agree with him, but I’ve read several of his books and visiting Clusterf**k Nation is part of my Monday evening news ritual. I hope he’s OK.

  46. BillC

    The link to Thomas Fazi’s post, “Wolfgang Streeck: “Sahra Wagenknecht is the only one asking the right questions — and offering the right answers,” is no longer visible. The original Streeck post, short and worth reading, is here.

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