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Links 9/18/2024

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Do you see blue or green? This viral test plays with color perception Guardian (Kevin W)

How odd Christian beliefs about sex shape the world Economist (Dr. Kevin)

Gigantic Wave in Pacific Ocean Was The Most Extreme ‘Rogue Wave’ on Record ScienceAlert

We need to start telling women how pregnancy changes their brain New Scientist (Dr. Kevin)

#COVID-19

Climate/Environment

Central Europe braces for further flooding ‘apocalypse’ as death toll rises Reuters

India’s milk industry struggles as the climate changes Dialogue Earth

Poor harvest leaves UK bakers dependent on wheat imports to meet demand Bakery Info

China?

Chinese Refineries Go Bankrupt Amid Plummeting Margins OilPrice

Down Under

Former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans says Australia won’t have sovereignty over Aukus submarines Guardian (Kevin W)

European Disunion

Macron’s Impeachment Clears First Hurdle in Left-Dominated National Assembly Sputnik

Unusually, roughly half, and it’s the first half, of Politico’s EU morning newsletter is devoted to a single topic, admittedly with lots of supporting examples. Major header: DRIVING THE DAY: BUYER’S REMORSE over the re-election of Queen von der Leyen. Some bits:

VON DER LEYEN’S VISION CONFRONTS REALITY: “The whole College is committed to competitiveness!” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared as she presented her new team on Tuesday. But now that their actual responsibilities are becoming more clear, we’re left asking: competitiveness, or competition — with each other?

Team Ursula: At first, von der Leyen seemed to come up with a magic solution to the jigsaw puzzle: a (relatively) balanced Commission devoted to both climate and industry, with enough snazzy executive VP slots to satisfy Pedro Sánchez and his stung Socialists; goodies for capitals that ditched their dude nominees; and a team of people she generally liked and trusted.

Or is it “Queen Ursula’s” court? But now that they’ve read the fine print — i.e. the so-called mission letters laying out the actual jobs attached to each title — capitals are starting to feel buyer’s remorse. A picture emerges of a relatively weak slate of commissioners, with overlapping portfolios that make it hard for any individual to wield major influence. (POLITICO’s Lucia Mackenzie made this organigram for you.)…..

PARIS PARANOID ABOUT BAIT AND SWITCH:…..

Not just Paris: Von der Leyen appeared to reward Romania for swapping out its male nominee by giving Roxana Mînzatu, a former minister of European funds and a first-term MEP, the title of executive VP for people, skills and preparedness. That has a lot of Socialist buzzwords, but in reality, Mînzatu’s mandate is mushy and her only exclusive report is Malta’s Glenn Micallef…..

ALIENATING ANOTHER KEY CONSTITUENCY: Parliament wrote new rules this cycle to try to force von der Leyen to clue lawmakers in first about the new Commission. She rebelled on Tuesday morning, describing the structure of the new Commission to top MEPs, but demurring on names. She then walked into the press briefing room and delivered a PowerPoint with each commissioner-designate’s photo and proposed title.

Apoplectic: It was an “illustration of her contempt for our Parliament,” Left leader Manon Aubry fumed to Eddy Wax, and we heard similar complaints from people on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Von der Leyen’s team said she was just trying to avoid leaks and chaos.

The Truth About Matthew Perry European Conservative (Micael T)

HUNGER STRIKE AT THE SWEDISH CASINO COMPANY IN GEORGIA – THEN THE EMBASSY PAYS TRIBUTE TO THE COMPANY Proletaren via machine translation (Micael T)

US/EU $50B Rus Asset Ukr Loan Plan Fails; Ukr Officers Flee Vuhledar; Rus Encircles Ukr Troops Kursk Alexander Mercours, YouTube. Mecrousi gives Conor a very detailed shout-out over his Draghi economic plan post.

Gaza

Hundreds of Hezbollah members reportedly injured by exploding pagers BBC

September 17, 2024 – Hezbollah vows retaliation against Israel for deadly pager explosions CNN. Confirms that Israel was behind the attack.

New Details in Hezbollah Pager Attack Point to Supply-Chain Breach by Israel Wall Street Journal. Sadly WSJ is now blocking archiving. Similar: Israel’s Mossad planted explosives in 5,000 pagers imported by Lebanon’s Hezbollah: sources South China Morning Post

Lebanese health minister holding presser on pager attacks across Arab country on Tuesday PressTV. This was live just before 6 AM EDT. If that link takes you to a fresher live video (this appears to be the PressTV live feed), try clicking through from this tweet.

Hezbollah vows retaliation after blaming Israel for pager blasts Aljazeera

Slashdot is concerned, linked to another Snowden tweet:

Exploding pagers join long history of killer communications devices Financial Times

Israel’s Threat To Wage War On Hizbullah Is Getting More Serious Moon of Alabama (Kevin W)

Closing hatches before rains founder the Western Vessel Alastair Crooke (Chuck L)
To the Israeli Soldier Who Murdered Aysenur Ezgi Eygi Chris Hedges (Dr. Kevin)

New Not-So-Cold War

Please note I have seen videos of explosions in Ukraine before that produced nuke blast looking clouds. Please do not get out over your skis, or evidence.

What do we know about the Ukrainian attack in Russia’s Tver region? AlArabiya. Looks like the Russians were relying on the facility being sufficiently hardened v. attack, which was not the case. so they did not move all this ammo out of long-range strike range, as they did (per Lloyd Austin) with planes. So corruption when the facility was built = not meeting specs?

NATO’s Destruction of Ukraine Under the Guise of “Helping” Glenn Diesen (Robin K)

Information and disinformation Gilbert Doctorow (guurst). On RT and Ritter.

Syraqistan

Hundreds of ‘Ukrainian experts’ training Syria-based extremists in drone warfare: Report The Cradle (Kevin W)

Second Trump Assassination Attempt

Harris condemns Trump’s rhetoric, says voters should make sure he ‘can’t have that microphone again’ Associated Press (Kevin W). Wowsers.

Age of Rage: 26 Million Americans Believe Political Violence is Justified Jonathan Turley

CNN Worries That Trump Assassination Attempts Are HELPING Him Politically Modernity

Kamala

Kamala Safe And In Stable Condition After Attempted Interview Babylon Bee

Our No Longer Free Press

Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority Daedalus (Anthony L)

Meta Platforms and YouTube ban RT worldwide WSWS

RT editor-in-chief proclaimed ‘expert troller’ RT. Kevin W: “Key line – ‘Christiane Amanpour interviewed her ex-husband about our perfidy and called me an ‘expert troller’.’”

Scenes From The Literary Blacklist Persuasion (Micael T)

Woke Watch

Unexceptional Sex Philosophers’ Magazine (Anthony L)

10 Delta passengers receive medical attention following emergency landing in Salt Lake City CBS (Kevin W). WTF with Delta’s maintenance?

Mr. Market Gets What He Wants. Note rate cut story is a big banner headline at the Wall Street Journal, not the pager terrorism.

The Fed’s biggest interest rate call in years happens Wednesday. Here’s what to expect CNBC

AI

China wants red flags on all AI-generated content posted online The Register

Google Will Begin Labeling AI-Generated Images In Search Digital Trends

Ellison Declares Oracle ‘All In’ On AI Mass Surveillance The Register

Class Warfare

Boeing not taking strike talks seriously, union says Hurriyet

Antidote du jour:

A bonus (Chuck L):

A second bonus (Robin K):

And a third bonus (Robin K):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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174 comments

  1. Antifa

    LOVE OF WAR
    (melody borrowed from 76 Trombones  from The Music Man, by Robert Reiniger Meredith Wilson)

    An ode to the American martial spirit running so rampant around the world this morning.

    Here comes a mix of drones hauling hand grenades
    Dropping now and again to hit some poor man
    Everyone knows I s’pose we’ll all die and decompose—those
    Shahed drones have the upper hand!

    When we turn on our phones that’s when all the bombers come
    They will make julienne croquettes of your spine
    Every man under vows proceeds as a man of deeds
    On these morns when courage is enshrined!

    We have often caught ’em happily out in the dunes
    Slumbering, lumbering waking to the day
    Maybe some historians will find those ruins
    Our platoon came like a bird of prey!

    We do all our careful planning by topography
    Wondering, blundering—not how we make war!
    Data sets from cyber spies makes us prefer before sunrise
    When we plan on kicking in their door!

    We fly the skull and bones in restraint of trade
    Every man here is parched but still volunteers
    With a clear sense of right and wrong and a marching song
    Though we wish we had more bandoliers!

    Each of us made our bones at the breaking point
    Now we march out again—forget foul or fair
    Each will die in a state of grace with a smile on his face
    As we maraud, maraud, maraud—maraud ending up nowhere!

  2. Terry Flynn

    Blue vs green. You know I’m really glad NC puts out links to things it doesn’t support as well as things it does endorse (so as to generate discussion).

    Anybody who understands the logit or probit function will have spotted the huge flaws in this study already. If and only if the level of consistency in the green/blue answers of EVERY respondent is EXACTLY the same then they can quote the percentiles. Otherwise it’s a big nothing burger. I’ve said elsewhere that I just knew the Guardian would highlight this garbage. Plus I’ve avoided the really obvious issue of colour blinded people. You don’t even need to get to that.

    Same reference as I’ve given before (multiple times) and which helped justify why McFadden got the “Nobel”. 1985 paper on specification error in probit models. To paraphrase someone in a comedy series I watched “sometimes I even bore myself”.

    1. The Rev Kev

      I looked at it and saw that it was not one colour but was a greenish tinge at the top which became a blueish tinge by the time you got to the bottom. In other words it was a trick image put out by the Guardian for clicks and likes.

      1. Terry Flynn

        Yeah you can’t do this stuff outside a controlled environment. And I only ever fed back a respondent’s score or their percentile in the population if an ethics committee had failed to find any reason why it might distress a respondent. The latter might seem trivial in this context but you’d be surprised what can get respondents upset.

        But the fundamental issue is you simply can’t do this at all unless you have repeat observations from an individual. Otherwise the intra individual variance is undefined and you literally have infinite number of solutions. I was 65% blue when I did it right after it was published. Betcha I can honestly get a vastly different score using same device right now. But I have better things to do with my time!

        1. Dermot O Connor

          Computer monitors need to be professional calibrated for this to have any validity. I tried it on two different monitors and got two very different results.

          1. cfraenkel

            It’s much worse than that, you’ll get different results using the same monitor at different times of day, or in rooms with different paint on the wall.

            1. Terry Flynn

              That is what random utility theory accepts and indeed USES in quantifying stuff.

              Sadly these jokers can’t read a mathematical psychology paper to save their lives….. or even the rather watered down version some economists like McFadden wrote (which got him a pseudo Nobel).

          2. Terry Flynn

            Yep. I have published in kosher journals about response times and to what extent they correlate with actual “utility” and real life decisions.. plus have been adjacent to groups who used eye tracking stuff to correlate aforementioned utility as demonstrated via real world decisions…..

            TL;DR this study is bollocks and is clickbait.

    2. vao

      If and only if the level of consistency in the green/blue answers of EVERY respondent is EXACTLY the same then they can quote the percentiles.

      Not knowing anything about logit and probit models, but is this some principle similar to requiring homoscedasticity across the observed effect (Y variable) for the various values of the cause variable (X) to ensure that a regression line actually corresponds to the MLE?

      1. Terry Flynn

        Good call but it’s actually something much more serious. In my day the Stata manuals in the technical section of all limited dependent variable models (logit/probit etc) warned that the “betas” from estimated regression were not the true beta – in this case the point on the latent spectrum which differentiated blue from green. The beta is right there in the likelihood function and is clearly the mean multiplied by the standard deviation.

        So without a second set of data you can’t “break the mean variance confound”. Ergo only people working in discrete choice modelling or n-of1 trials etc who naturally get the respondent to do the task 2+ times can possibly do what this nonsense research group purport to do.

        Incidentally it also explains why key opinion polls got elections wrong….but I’ve discussed that elsewhere!

    3. skippy

      Wish I had the time before work to find a YT video of a Uni Prof explaining to his students QLED/OLED TVs don’t have billions of colours …. only three … because the brain evolved that way lol …

      Same goes for refresh rates, beyond a certain point its meaningless to the eyes. Not even going to talk about screen time depth perception et al in generational terms lol …

      1. Terry Flynn

        Thanks. This topic makes me empathise with Yves when someone on here makes a stupid comment that forces her to a quote yet again something from her book and which should be accepted wisdom.

        FFS the stats argument I make and the “engineering” argument you do were proved literally decades ago. But we have to keep repeating them.

        1. skippy

          Gosh mate … the years and reams of orthodox white papers I’ve read, discern the ideology/ego hiding behind all the bad maths and physics via numerical symbology – phew~~~~

          Get to the point its all intuitive, debate proponents, trap them, poof they move the whole debate to another Universe like it never happened – rinse and replete …

          At least I found these old homes to work on for some dosh and joy … better late than never thingy …

  3. timber

    New Details in Hezbollah Pager Attack Point to Supply-Chain Breach by Israel Wall Street Journal. Sadly WSJ is now blocking archiving ******* why does my brain when seeing reports of the pager explosions immediately recall Conor’s article on a total digitized identity? Is it saying to me “these are the same types of people we’re supposed to turn over total controll of our cash and identity to in a digital world?” Or is dementia finally catching up to me?

    1. Kristiina

      Yes, useful reminder this! And might help folks think twice about using these gadgets. And makes one wonder how all those surprising deaths and assassinations recently in arab countries have actually been executed. A new wunderwaffe for all the loonies and grudge-bearers and other murderously inclined.

  4. The Rev Kev

    “Hezbollah blames Israel after pager explosions kill nine and injure thousands in Lebanon”

    Been a lot of people crediting Mossad with this op but I am thinking that it was actually Netanyahu pulling a pr stunt. Consider. If Israel was going to invade Lebanon once again, that is the time when you would do this. It would disrupt not only Hezbollah command and control but especially communications and would really help the IDF in their invasion. Instead, Israel has done nothing. That dog is not barking. So what I am saying is that Netanyahu was briefed on this op and for whatever political reason, decided to order it carried out even though Israel was not going to invade Lebanon. So now Hezbollah has time to adapt and replace casualties and modify their communications. But it was stupid of Hezbollah to trust western communications devices and not randomly check a few devices in each consignment. There are, however, massive considerations coming out of this attack. I believe that they were Motorola devices that were used. If you own a Motorola pager in the Middle east, you could not get rid of it fast enough. Maybe not just the Middle east either but these pagers can now be seen as a potential threat throughout the whole world. Tough luck if you are a pager manufacturer.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      See the tweets above. “Motorola pager” while technically accurate sets up inaccurate assmptions. Motorola designed and licensed it. The Taiwanese manufacturer takes vigorous exception to what happened and is suing Israel. Looks like Mossad somehow intercepted the shipment and planted the explosives and and presumably also modified the software/firmware.

      1. The Rev Kev

        I have been wondering about this so-called shipment interception. Some security expert was on the news saying it wasn’t hard to use a screwdriver to undo the back to insert the explosive but I am ready to call bs on this. There were at least 2,800 pagers involved and perhaps up to 5,000 all told. I can’t picture a room with a coupla guys with screwdrivers and explosives doing this all. What I think happened was that Israel set up there own production line in a secure base in Israel itself. From whatever source, they got the parts and components of these pagers and I am assuming they built their own software for those devices. In other words they were purpose-built as I do not think that pagers would have a lot of spare room in them. When they were ready to go, this shipment was then substituted for the real one and everything was ready to go. However this was a one-trick pony and not many organizations will fall for this ever again. Israel has now inflicted maybe 2,800 casualties on Lebanon and not just Hezbollah. So now Hezbollah will seek to cause and equal mass casualty event on the Israelis.

        1. ChrisFromGA

          Remember Microsoft and other hardware manufacturers working on a “Trusted” PC that would not boot if any component had been tampered with?

          Intel also did a lot of work with Mt. Wilson and attestation that the firmware/OS had not been tampered with.

          I briefly worked with such technology about 10 years ago, but my impression is that it never got much traction in the marketplace.

          1. The Rev Kev

            Maybe the security services made sure that that initiative never went anywhere. Wouldn’t be the first time that they have done stuff like that. Such as the time they had the computing world adopt a wonky algorithm for encryption purposes so that they could crack it – but which meant that many others could crack it as well.

          2. griffen

            Between this news and that far reaching Crowdstrike outage from just a few short weeks ago, the tinfoil hat is coming back on ….might need a series of these hats.

            Since this is such a stupid timeline we’re living in, I first saw this story as a headline from the Babylon Bee ( fwiw…I just skipped past it not knowing the context ). My fault for going under a rock to watch “Silence of the Lambs” again last evening.

            1. Art_DogCT

              Good griffen, not just a series. For further protection, layer the foil with copper mesh. I’d start with two layers of foil/copper, adding additional layers as conditions require. You can express your creativity through your choice of the headwear structure (like adding spikes or horns, geometric shapes, etc.) and whatever surface embellishments you’re inspired to add. The fashion potential is unlimited! #LayeredProtectionFTW!

              1. griffen

                I’m going to channel a personal favorite character from a classic 80s horror sci fi movie…. Aliens.

                Pvt. Hudson. “that’s it man, game over… where’s all the pretty shit now man?”

        2. mrsyk

          One question would be “How much space is required for 20g of PETN and the trigger needed to make it go off?”. My algos aren’t giving me much here.

          1. The Rev Kev

            20g is about two-thirds of an ounce so is not much. If those pagers used Lithium batteries, there is a theory that they could have been set up to go into a thermal runaway condition which would trigger that explosive. Guess that we will have to wait for a definitive answer. But if you owned a pager, you would be looking at it suspiciously right now.

            1. mrsyk

              But if you owned a pager, you would be looking at it suspiciously right now. Through binoculars, thank you.

            2. .Tom

              I find the battery theory hard to accept without a lab demonstration, for reasons lots of people more expert than me have already given. For one thing, if that can explain what happened then we are nearly all at risk of pants on fire by remote control.

              1. Neutrino

                I’m inclined to suspect a modified software component that was used in what seemed to be a simultaneous trigger event. After Stuxnet, why not?

                1. .Tom

                  It’s certainly feasible to hack devices’ software to make them do things under remote control by an enemy/terrorist agent. The possible things depends on the hardware capabilities of the device. I tend to believe that serious/deadly explosions is not one of the things you can do with the hardware capabilities of standard consumer communications devices.

                  Pagers that were built or modified to be RC bombs (i.e. they had a nonstandard hardware capability) were in the pockets of all these targets. The story about how they got there needs some telling.

          2. Stev_Rev

            20g of PETN is about 12 cc. They probably used only 1-2 g. For comparison, an M-80 contains 3g of black powder, which is enough to take your fingers off. PETN has about twice the energy density of black powder.

            1. mrsyk

              Thanks. According to the Pelham tweet 20 grams were used. That would be about 3/4 of a cubic inch. Am I wrong thinking that’s a lot of space inside a mobile electronic device?

              1. Polar Socialist

                Magnier says 1-3 grams, with some steel balls to increase lethality. Many of the wounded are apparently doctors, paramedics and civil workers who may or may not have been part of the social infrastructure Hezbollah is running in Lebanon.

                He says Hezbollah intel already knows who, what, when and how (but he is also has an article to sell).

          3. Grumpy Engineer

            PETN has a density of 1.77 g/cm^3, which implies 11.3 cm^3 (0.69 cubic inches) for a 20g mass. It is also classified as a “secondary explosive”, which means that it’s typically triggered by a high-energy electric spark or adjacent explosion of a nearby “primary explosive” (which can be detonated more easily with a low-energy spark or heated wire). I don’t know how Mossad managed to trigger PETN with overheating lithium batteries. Perhaps it was accompanied by a small mass of primary explosive.

            The Wikipedia page for PETN has a lot of relevant links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentaerythritol_tetranitrate

        3. CanCyn

          Have to agree that it seems more likely that the explosives were planted in the factory. It is pretty easy to spot packaging that has been opened and closed. In these days of online purchases and bricks and mortar returns, I check packaging very carefully to ensure it hasn’t been opened and re-sealed before I buy, esp. anything electronic or digital.
          Hezbollah probably went to low-tech pagers specifically to avoid phone tracking and hacking.

          1. Yves Smith Post author

            That is apparently not correct. Lots of stories now as to how Mossad intercepted the shipment and modified the pagers. Seems to be a extra lithium chip.

      3. Balan Aroxdale

        The Taiwanese manufacturer takes vigorous exception to what happened and is suing Israel.

        This could be the opening of a new chapter in Chinese/Western industrial relations. Chinese companies may now become particularly wary of outsourcing/onshoring to the US/EU, especially for products destined for the global south. Even as a part of the supply chain. No-one wants their consumer products to come with tacit disclaimers about being at-will mass military assets for third party state actors. The reputational stink of this will carry far I think. Phones, computers, cars; suddenly Russian and Chinese brands don’t seem as sketchy by comparison.

        So much for “reindutrialisation”

        2. The Rev Kev

          ‘The pagers of all doctors and nurses were targeted.’

          If there is one thing the past year has shown is that the Israelis have a manic lust to kill any sort of medical personnel and aid workers. The American hospital story nails the fact that the US knew weeks ago what was about to happen and their involvement.

        3. Es s Ce Tera

          If the pagers used by medical personnel went off as well, in what sense can we say it was Hezbollah that was targeted? This means pagers going to Lebanon were targeted. This means it was even more indiscriminate than first supposed.

    2. .Tom

      The devices need to be developed and tested and then manufactured. This is non-trivial bomb making. Successfully controlling remote detonation is one thing but concealing it in the pocket of hundreds or thousands of your enemies is another. That’s sophisticated. Then a vendor that appears legitimate and trustworthy to the Lebanese buyers needs to be persuaded to sell them? or could the vendor have been unaware? All of this is not simple to arrange technically or legally. What would you have to offer the boss of a pager vendor to get them to go along? It would require money and legal immunity. Can Israel arrange all of this on their own?

      Hence I’m wondering if this terrorist attack wasn’t a joint US/Israel project.

      1. The Rev Kev

        Began to wonder that myself simply due to the fact that these were not Israeli pagers that Hezbollah purchased but western ones. So maybe the Israelis were given the design schematics, the technical data and everything else that they needed. And because Israel has a very good technological capacity, they were able to design, test and manufacture these devices like you say. The US immediately denied all involvement at the White House which I took to mean that they were all over it. As they say, never believe anything until it has been officially denied.

        1. .Tom

          Pagers are old and relatively simple tech compared to now. I’m sure you can reverse engineer them. But Israel may well have got their hands on the HW/SW designs/code one way or another.

          So one possible scenario is that Israel (and/or one of its friends) bought a load of the same pager model, modded them into pocket bombs, repackaged them and then later intercepted one or more shipments.

          Given the curiosity and seriousness of western media and governments into the NS sabotage, I rather suspect there will be no clear answers.

        2. Procopius

          Rev Kev, I don’t think Hezbollah purchased them. I think a lot of Lebanese people did, including at least one ten year old girl. Apparently hundreds of Hezbollah fighters did, but so did thousands of civilians. Apparently. Including lots of doctors and nurses. The Israelis don’t mind if they kill or maim other Arab people or Iranians or anybody, as long as they kill one or two actual enemies. Or not.

      2. Balan Aroxdale

        The Taiwanese manufacturer takes vigorous exception to what happened and is suing Israel.

        It depends on your definition of sophisticated. Thousands of devices have exploded. I’m skeptical that all or even the majority of these were owned by Hezbollah members. Far easier to simply intercept any large shipment of pagers into Lebanon and/or Syria and wait until enough are off the shelves.
        I am especially skeptical of reports that Hezbollah placed a single large order. The organization doesn’t exactly have a credit card number.

    3. Set your e-cig to "vibrate"

      Before a deployment, one is going to wait and see exactly how injured the opposition is, listen to their leaders moan, listen to their soldiers moan, watch everyone limp around… But from here, with minimal loss of life, it looks like Israel pacified the paramilitary man-children who have been blind-firing rockets into Israel for the past 11 months. And prevented a war with grace and élan.

      Don’t cross the Israelis. This used to be well-understood, even by well-fed guys that lounge around in robes all day. Religious “scholars”. You know, the dim ones that broadcast to their boys to go buy conspicuous pagers.

      Also… Israel is perfectly capable of buying the pagers first and selling to Hezbollah, themselves.

      1. cfraenkel

        “Prevented a war???” That’s some impressive pretzel logic. The pagers would have had to explode somewhat farther south to have influenced the drums for war.

      3. bertl

        Silly, silly boy. It is the catalyst which will speed the end of an ethno-theocratic Jewish “homeland” in Palestine and I have no doubt that BRICS members will give a sympathetic hearing to representations from Hezbollah and Hamas at side meetings at the incongruity of housing a devoutly genocidal, terrorist state in the Levant incapable of getting along with, not only it’s neighbours, but also it’s allies.

        Israel is a paper tiger obsessed with killing and maiming Palestinian and Lebanese children and, rather than pacify “the paramilitry man-children”, the result will be the deliberate targeting of Israeli towns and cities and not just military bases and warehouses, and we will see Israel empty itself of Zionists who can pop back to their homes in North London, Brooklyn and Miami, return to Russia where they will find steady employment and enjoy the fruits of Russian success, or be summarily disposed of by miitary tribunals for war crimes and crimes against humanity thus contributing to housung price stability in both the UK, the US and Russia.

      4. Es s Ce Tera

        “Don’t cross the Israelis” is an example of manchild thinking. Reflects a sense of entitlement, a need to assert dominance, reliance on intimidation and threats, inability to handle conflict in a mature or constructive way, inability or unwillingness to engage in healthy, grown-up sorts of relationships. It’s as mature as getting into a drunken bar fight cuz someone looked at you funny, “crossed” you.

    4. John Steinbach

      My thought was that the “clock is ticking” on the beefed up U.S. military. presence in the ME following the political assassinations. Israel needs a war quickly. I suspect there will be a escalation of Israeli provocations until Hezbollah and or Iran are forced to react, this precipitating the regional war Bibi so desperately needs.

      1. bert

        Which would also encourage Russia to speed up and intensify the SMO in the Ukraine and start to bare it’s teeth to NATO, another feckless paper tiger, particularly after the Tver region attack which is unlikely to be the work of solely Ukrainian personnel using Ukrainian satellite intelligence, if you get my drift…

        As I live in the country most likely to have performed this act, and reasonably close to one of the top three targets for retaliation, I am obviously hopeful that the missile, if lobbed in my vicinity, is not armed with a nuclear warhead, low yield or no.

    5. Balan Aroxdale

      Maybe not just the Middle east either but these pagers can now be seen as a potential threat throughout the whole world. Tough luck if you are a pager manufacturer.

      This will apply now to every device. Especially devices “within reach” of Israeli state security. Western electronics brands could be in for a very bad Christmas season.

      1. mary jensen

        “Western electronics brands could be in for a very bad Christmas season.”

        Well I, for one, certainly hope so. Quit buying all this cheap useless shit in bulk for the so-called holidays and when your fat kids complain tell them it’s Israel’s fault.

  5. GM

    “The US reported an average 1500 COVID-19 deaths a week for 2023 – comparable to fentanyl or firearm deaths.”

    Of course that’s the reported.

    The real number is a lot higher, but at this point nobody has a clue what it is because even excess mortality analysis is compromised as we move further and further away in time from the pre-pandemic baseline

    1. Jason Boxman

      This is inevitably gonna show up in labor market tightness or composition, but we won’t know how much is COVID related. I wonder for how long the US will be able to “immigration” its way out of this deficit. The LLM craze likely plays a role as well in worker replacement, with concomitant loss of service/product quality.

  7. Zagonostra

    >Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority Daedalus (Anthony L)

    Although ruling elites throughout history have always aimed to inculcate moral and political beliefs in their subject populations conducive to their own continued rule, it has also been true, especially in the world after the scientific revolution, that the interests of ruling elites often depended on a correct understanding of the causal order of nature…

    The internet has upended this state of affairs: it is the epistemological catastrophe of our time…

    Never let a catastrophe go to waste.

    1. pjay

      Here are some more relevant quotes:

      “Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe; that is, it depends on the existence of recognized meta-epistemic authorities…”

      “Consider one of the most important newspapers in the United States, The New York Times, which, despite certain obvious ideological biases (in favor of America, in favor of capitalism), has served as a fairly good mediator of epistemic authority with respect to many topics… Recognition of genuine epistemic authority cannot exist in a population absent epistemic mediators like The New York Times.”

      Anyone who could make this statement with a straight face does not deserve to have his “authoritative” statements on “meta-epistemic authority” taken seriously.

      When I saw this was from Daedalus I knew exactly what the argument would be, and I knew exactly the kinds of negative examples that would be cited. The utter obliviousness of this defense of academic “expertise” is just mind-blowing, especially with regard to history or social science. The very fact that he uses “Holocaust deniers” as his example illustrates his own propaganda tactics. Anne Applebaum, Michael McFaul, and Timothy Snyder are all “experts” on Russia and its history in Eastern Europe. So let’s make them our “epistemic authorities” through which we “filter” out all the disinformation and propaganda about Ukraine. After all, as the author states in the last paragraph, our “regulators” must also be “epistemic authorities.” Who decides who *these* folks will be?

      History and social science are very obvious challenges to this author’s bulls**t with which I am very familiar after a previous life in academia. But even his “hard science” examples are problematic (his comments on vaccines were infuriating to me, using as they did the same “Holocaust denier” strategy to smear all critics). What is *truly* enlightening is to expose the particular interests, ideologies, and “epistemic” and institutional biases behind *all* claims to “epistemic authority.” This is absolutely *not* a denial of empirical facts or the possibility of objective knowledge. But it is a warning about “expert” apologists like this guy.

    2. anahuna

      I find it interesting that one of the author’s examples is the failure to respect scientific authorities in regard to Covid vaccines. He writes, “Ignorant, gullible, or disturbed people come to believe that the vaccine is dangerous, rather than helpful; these people then forgo vaccination, and some fall ill and some die, infecting others along the way.” If he were writing about smallpox or measles, I would be more likely to credit his opinion, but he specifically references the Covid vaccines. As we know, in large part thanks to this site, “becoming infected and infecting others” occurs despite these vaccines.

      That makes me just ignorant, gullible, or disturbed, I guess. Part of the human condition.

    3. Cat Burglar

      Who will keep a lid on the lid keepers?

      Regulating internet speech should be simple, like preventing airliners from crashing themselves, or getting hospitals to adopt measures to prevent airborne pathogens from spreading.

  8. Watt4Bob

    I hope the following is not too far off thread;

    I just got done watching the John Mearsheimer/Jeffery Sachs panel discussion, and find myself mystified by the fact that neither Mearsheimer, nor Sachs mentions the USA’s most obvious motivation for its belligerent foreign policy, the rapacious greed of its financial sector.

    Mearsheimer states that the problem is our “liberal” philosophy which leads us to believe that turning the rest of the world into “Liberal Democracies” just like us is a righteous cause, and Sachs says we’re intolerant of any peer competition.

    Neither man mentions the fact that it’s very clear IMHO, that our country’s foreign policy is driven by the financial interests of our elites?

    It seems to me that it takes a great deal of effort to ignore greed as the central driver of the tensions threatening our destruction.

    For instance, The way I think about Victoria Nuland’s hatred of Russia, is that it is a convenient for those who profit from war, and those who hope to profit from a future neoliberal take over of the Russian economy.

    IOW, if there is interest income to be had anywhere in the world, Wall $treet intends to collect it, and woe to anyone who gets in the way.

    Am I missing something?

    1. Cassandra

      Am I missing something?

      Just the trillions of dollars to be made by annexing the mineral resources around the world. And perhaps a dollop of psychopathic sadism.

    3. Lee

      “It seems to me that it takes a great deal of effort to ignore greed as the central driver of the tensions threatening our destruction.”

      Considering the sponsors, it’s hardly surprising that the g word while unspoken was, shall we say, an implicit given? Otherwise, I thought it was a worthwhile watch even if it left me feeling that our foreign policy elites are out of their phking minds, and quite dangerously so, and that I cannot imagine a nonviolent force that can alter the course they have set us upon.

      OTOH, perhaps the neocons will prevail while avoiding civilizational collapse or human extinction, and we can all settle down and enjoy the benefits of being fat, dumb, and happy citizens of the global hegemon⸮

    4. Safety First

      You have hit upon a very important point.

      Basically, a long time ago, the US decided to get any and all trace of Marxist thought out of its academia. By the way, Mearsheimer himself has said that back when he’d gone to school, there had been three foreign policy schools of thought in the US – Marxism, Neorealism, and Liberal Institutionalism, or whatever it’s called these days. Well, Marxism just had to be eradicated, for obvious Cold War-related reasons.

      Now, Marxist analysis, whether of politics, policy or history, usually starts with economics. Economics is the “basis” (foundation of the house), politics are the “superstructure” (walls and roof). So when analyzing the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a marxist would say – well of course, this is about the US wanting to take Iraq’s oil, and then use military bases in Iraq to dominate the other nearby oil-producing countries. [Which is more or less what Dick Cheney had said on the telly back then also.] In other words, the cause was first and foremost economic.

      The other, remaining, “legitimate” schools of thought, meanwhile, such as Neorealism, from the very beginning (even before Marxism was finally vanquished at US universities) were set up to be as un-Marxist as humanly possible. One result of this is that in multiple US disciplines, not just PoliSci, as a rule the economic area of human activity does not exist, or is simply assumed away. It is a huge and very deliberate blind spot, and that means when Neorealism has to explain why states go to war, it has only two choices: security, which sometimes is a legitimate thing, but sometimes isn’t (Iraq); and “these people are crazy coco-bananas fanatics”, i.e. “liberal internationalists”. This second explanation is especially attractive, since it attacks Neorealism’s only real remaining competitor in academia, which Mearsheimer has now re-labelled Liberal Internationalism, but to me it’s just the same stupid Democratic Peace Theory all over again. [“Democracies never go to war with one another, so if we turn every country in the world into a democracy, there will be world peace.” Pay no attention to the US bombing of Serbia in 1999…which is literally the moment when they were trying to teach DPT to me at university.]

      In other words, when Mearsheimer has to explain the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he physically cannot, if he wants to stay a neorealist and not slide down the slippery slope towards Marxism, acknowledge that we came there for the oil. And we surely didn’t come there for security. So what’s left? Liberal Internationalism, we wanted to make Iraq a democracy because blah-blah-blah-religious-fanaticism-blah-blah. Also, the Israeli Lobby, and this is a huge weakness in Mearsheimer’s Israeli Lobby book from 2007 – he literally has spends pages upon pages arguing, that we went into Iraq primarily because Israel told us so to do. I am not suggesting that Israel wasn’t happy about the invasion, but come on.

      So that’s the deal with Mearsheimer. We want to destroy Russia because great-power-competition, or liberal-idiocy, or security, but never because we want to loot the place. [In reality, of course, it’s a bit column A, a bit of column B.] Since the economic dimension does not exist.

      Sachs is in a slightly different position, because he is an economist…I would argue, of the stupid school of economic thought (Neoclassicism), but whatever. However, I think, based on his interviews that I’d listened to, that every time he tries to explain political actions or international relations, he slips into the same “we cannot start the analysis with Economics because it’s marxist heresy” mode, albeit to a lesser degree than Mearsheimer.

      And I would stress, not every single war is due to the economic dimension, exclusively or at all. Vietnam, for example. Or, I distinctly recall Russian would-be marxists like Kagarlitsky (who is really more of a liberal than a marxist) trying to explain Russia going into Ukraine as “our oligarchs want to grab Ukraine’s resources”, which, no, that to me was a simple nuclear security issue (cannot have American missiles in Kharkov, just like Americans cannot abide Russian missiles in Cuba), with having to protect the two Donbass regions as the cherry on top. So there are blind spots to go around, I suppose.

    5. Vicky Cookies

      Look where they were both educated. It takes a studied ignorance to miss what you pointed out, and they both studied hard. They both passed, for years, decades, through a system which filters out dissident thought, including the thought that our ruling class are a bunch of malicious, childishly selfish a-holes, and that this has explanatory power when it comes to matters of high policy.

    6. Bazarov

      Mearsheimer and Sachs are bourgeois intellectuals so they ascribe fundamental causes to ideas and perhaps individual elites or cliques and the like. Their emphasis is broadly cultural. The bourgeois framework for international affairs is “geopolitics”.

      In fact, world affairs aren’t driven by geopolitics. They’re driven by class conflict, which is a byproduct of the capitalist system of production (for profit). “Liberal democracy,” liberalism itself, arises from the capitalist system of production, which selects for and generates ideas that reify market relations (merchants in the marketplace being subject to the same rules–weights and measures, etc.–gives rise to belief in equality under the law, for example).

      Capitalism also manifests imperialism and imperial conflict and all sorts of other irrationalities. I’ve come to believe that world affairs are mostly chaotic, as are national governments, reflecting the antiquated capitalist “anarchy of production.” Any seeming coherence manifests from capitalism’s objective consequences, namely the reproduction of certain classes of people and certain political economies throughout the world. These classes and political economies, having the same origins, of course behave similarly.

    7. matt

      Mearsheimer and Sachs and a lot of their colleagues never talk about these things from an economic angle. It used to bother me a lot that there was such a gaping hole in their reporting. Now I am numb to it.

      1. .Tom

        Anyone who really understands economics the way for example Hudson does and many NC readers do (tip jar is over there ↗) is fire-walled from the company Mearsheimer and Sachs keep. Academic and professional economists on the other hand can be relied on to act within the status quo. They have Disiplined Minds (Jeff Schmidt).

    8. lyman alpha blob

      The philosophy is just there to justify the greed, which is why all wars are started. There are some who get off on the “philosophical” power aspects even when they aren’t cut in on large portions of the spoils – I think Nuland would be a prime example of this. The lack of mentioning the profit motive is probably just a result of the way the conversation went – I’d imagine both are highly aware of it, but I could be wrong.

      Back in the day, the West (Greece) invaded the East (Troy) for pillage and profit, but of course they said it was to save Helen from the barbarians. Just like today when we start wars to “help” the women of Afghanistan for example, when the real goal is to loot. Same as it ever was.

    9. .Tom

      Am I missing something?

      Not really.

      As a matter of routine pedantry, however, I quibble with the use of the word “financial” in a “driven by the financial interests of our elites”. It’s not just about finances. It’s about power.

      Money/credit are important dimensions of power (among others) in the social/legal systems that dominate much of the world today. Imo, money/credit is far too easily convertible into coercive power and vice versa. Financial instruments priced in currencies seem not to be trusted as a store of power by the squillionaires, if their elaborate hedging behavior is any guide. And the luxury bolt holes with multiply redundant go plans and defense systems suggest they don’t believe the numbers on computers that represent their supposed wealth will in future be reliably convertible into privilege to take resources.

  9. Captain Obvious

    Do you see blue or green? This viral test plays with color perception Guardian (Kevin W)

    No it doesn’t. It plays on forced binary choice. It shows me turquoise, and asks me to choose between blue and green. I see it as neither blue or green, but I had to choose one of the two, because there was no third option. Others may percieve it differently, and vote for obvious lesser evil.

    1. t

      Teal, turquoise, cyan, aquamarine… asking me for blue or green is like asking me for thumbs up or thumbs down with no options for the best and meh, and kill it fire.

  10. Carolinian

    Exploding pagers, repeat assassination attempts, hundreds of thousands of dead in Ukraine, threats of war against Russia and China, Covid back, weather extreme and unpredictable, senile president.

    That return to normality Biden promised us sure is normal.

    Of course the Repubs have more than a paw in the above weirdness but it does seem like the Dems have taken chaos to a new level while blaming it all on their opponents.

    1. ChrisFromGA

      Just to keep things fair, let’s add GOP weirdness accounting:

      +House Majority Leader who is barely identifiable in a police lineup
      +Senate Minority Leader appears to have completely disappeared; a search of Kentucky nursing homes may be in order
      +No campaign message whatsoever

      1. Carolinian

        Well yes you could say it’s Situation Normal All F*cked Up (snafu). Those of us old enough to remember LBJ thought he was definitely weird. He liked to humiliate underlings by going to the bathrooom with the door open.

        But there is a peculiarly rancid sanctimony to the current Dems who like to cloak themselves in a meritocracy that lacks merit. Now Hillary is talking about jailing Americans who disagree with her.

        https://jonathanturley.org/2024/09/18/a-better-deterrence-hillary-clinton-calls-for-the-arrest-of-americans-spreading-disinformation/

        The only merit the elites have these days is skill at climbing the greasy pole of upper class respectability. Universities are a big part of this and their ever increasing fees (and ongoing legacy admissions) serve to keep out the peasants or at least those not willing to play ball. Surely what is reallly needed would be revolutionaries rather than meritocrats but where to find them?

    3. midtownwageslave

      What better time to expand a global, existential, conflict than just before the upcoming US elections?

      The road to hell is paved with censorship, baggy blues, and exploding pagers.

      Speaking of which, looks like the push to set up military bases in the south are going well:

      https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ecuadors-noboa-seeks-constitutional-change-allow-foreign-military-bases-country-2024-09-16/

      More:
      https://galapagueana.darwinfoundation.org/en/activities/acti002c.html

    4. griffen

      We got bread* and circuses, so entertainment to fill the void is available. Understood that not every single American male is watching college or professional football, and not every single American female is now watching the NFL weekly since Taylor (!) omg is going to Chiefs games either…There is that movie sequel to Joker upcoming soon, and in November we get the Sir Ridley Scott fever dream sequel to Gladiator. Note to Mr Scott, I was very entertained by the one Gladiator film!

      *Eggs, milk, bread, beer, soda is all up due to inflation but it’s Trump’s fault for every illness of capitalism and the supply chain crunch of several years ago. The orange man is such a menace! \sarc

      I am unsure if Wuk is lurking near a keyboard today, so I will supply my supportive shout out for the Buffalo Bills!

      1. Carolinian

        Gladiator one is among my favorites so I’ll have to contradict myself and say that sometimes it is about the director. Ridley doesn’t always film the best material but his visuals are iconic.

  11. The Rev Kev

    ‘According to wastewater, the U.S. would be reporting over 9.1 MILLION new Covid cases each week if we were testing & reporting data.
    Since we’re not, we’re told there’s only around 150,000 new cases each week.
    We can be certain the deaths are a dramatic undercount too.’

    By my calculations, that means that it would only take about 37 weeks – about nine months – to infect every man, woman and child in the United States. It takes a special sort of mindset to ignore being in the middle of a Pandemic and pretending that it is all over.

  12. caucus99percenter

    (Frowns, looks quizzically at box of pagers, then at box of polio vaccines being sent to Gaza; then at box of pagers again, then at box of polio vaccines…)

      1. pjay

        As does mine. Blast them to pieces, destroy all hospitals and other infrastructure, deny almost all medical treatment, starve them to death… and then allow polio vaccinations?? I would certainly hope the chain of custody was air-tight. But even then, Israel has proven its abilities in this sort of endeavor many times.

        1. JTMcPhee

          Blast them to pieces, destroy all hospitals and other infrastructure, deny almost all medical treatment, starve them to death…

          Dang, for a minute there I thought that might be the start of a righteous rant about what ought to be visited upon the Land of Likunikia… but then we can’t be saying stuff like that, even under our breaths…

  13. Neutrino

    Sherman sure is sure of himself. What a charmer, a true believer. And he is one of the anointed 535 to lead the Republic. His constituents must be proud. /s

  14. GramSci

    Re: Meta and YouTube | WSWS

    Read to the end and

    «Speaking to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on Monday, former first lady and Democratic Party nominee for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton, called for the criminal prosecution of Americans who speak publicly against the US-NATO war with Russia in Ukraine.»

    1. The Rev Kev

      This from the women who – with Robby Mook – invented Russiagate out of whole-cloth to explain how they lost an unlosable election to a carnival barker. Maybe she should be criminally prosecuted for spreading misinformation that has endangered the security of the country by getting it into a confrontation with a nuclear superpower. I’m sure that she would not only want to throw Scott Ritter into prison but Tulsi Gabbard as well. For sure both those two are on the Clinton’s infamous enemy Excel sheets.

      1. ChrisFromGA

        The Founding Fathers understood the dangers of restriction on speech and gave us the First Amendment. While the right to free speech here is not absolute, and the study of freedom of expression requires a lot of in-depth work that is too long for a simple blog post, the limits are exceptions and generally restricted to “yelling fire in a crowded theater” scenarios that requires actual physical harm to others as a result of the speech as a pre-condition. Mere words, not actions, are generally protected.

        Defamatory speech carries with it the risk of civil lawsuits, as Orangeman found out, but note the term civil. Criminal prosecution of speech is practically unheard of in the US, for good reason. It invites the harshest slap-down possible by the Federal Courts.

        HRC is unfit to live in the US. The best thing we could do is to educate our younger folks on the First Amendment and freedom of expression so that when she dies she’ll be seen as a sort of tragic extremist figure, like David Duke.

        1. JBird4049

          “HRC is unfit to live in the US. The best thing we could do is to educate our younger folks on the First Amendment and freedom of expression so that when she dies she’ll be seen as a sort of tragic extremist figure, like David Duke.”

          I believe she is far more popular than David Duke ever was. When she dies, she might get the Elvis Presley treatment. Hopefully, it will not be a tomb like Vladimir Lenin’s

          1. ChrisFromGA

            Well, I’m an optimist. Hopefully, HRC lives another 25 years, long enough for public opinion to swing against her.

            If Tricky Dick could be rehabilitated, then HRC can be de-habilitated.

      2. nippersmom

        I really wish people would stop giving that harridan a platform. It’s not good for my blood pressure or my digestion. I’m not interested in hearing another word out of H. Clinton unless it’s in front of a tribunal in The Hague.

        1. Carolinian

          Thank you. Ken Silverstein wrote the definitive piece on Hills and said her defining characteristic is her mediocrity. She, on the other hand, thinks she’s some kind of genius.

          Her whole career is a series of bumbles from the Whitewater mess in Arkansas to the failed Clinton admin health care reform to “we came, we saw, he died.” As Groucho said, whatever she’s for I’m against it.

      3. neutrino23

        It was the Republican controlled senate committee that documented much of the Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Just sayin’.

        1. The Rev Kev

          Wasn’t it on the order of about $16,000 worth and that it came from some click-bait factory? That Russian interference? How strong is American democracy if you can influence it with pocket change?

    2. Kurtismayfield

      This would never, ever pass muster with the Supreme court. I may be a cynic, but I doubt they would come out against the first amendment.

      1. Cassandra

        Actually, HRC is making progress in her understanding of civil rights. The last time someone told too much truth, her response was, “Can’t we just drone him?”

      2. JTMcPhee

        You are totally dreaming if you think the S.Ct will be any kind of !st Am bulwark. The only 1st Am rights they have vigorously recognized, supported and “created” out of artful Strict Construction are the “rights” (actually appropriated powers) of “corporate persons” to speak freely, with dollar$ as fightin’ words and vote$.

    3. CA

      “Hillary Clinton, called for the criminal prosecution of Americans who speak publicly against the US-NATO war with Russia in Ukraine.”

      This is the Hillary Clinton who made the Democratic Party a home for ferocious neoconservatives. This is “Hillary the Hawk.”

      https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/opinion/sunday/are-neocons-getting-ready-to-ally-with-hillary-clinton.html

      July 5, 2014

      The Next Act of the Neocons
      Are Neocons Getting Ready to Ally With Hillary Clinton?

      http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html

      April 23, 2016

      How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk
      Throughout her career she has displayed instincts on foreign policy that are more aggressive than those of President Obama — and most Democrats.

    5. flora

      Aaron Mate` on twtr-X:

      To make her argument against free speech, she invokes the Russiagate scam that itself was the product of her campaign’s own propaganda. Speaking of which, the case that she invokes here — Mueller charging some Russians for social media activity — led to Mueller dropping the case after the Russian company showed up to fight the case in court.”

      https://x.com/aaronjmate/status/1835886288995586318

  15. pjay

    – ‘NATO’s Destruction of Ukraine Under the Guise of “Helping”’ – Glenn Diesen (Robin K)

    Thank you for posting this. I keep a special file for detailed overview articles I can send to friends or family who want real information about the history of these conflicts that they cannot get from the mainstream media. This is a good one, not surprisingly since it is Glenn Diesen.

    1. Colonel Smithers

      Thank you.

      You will note former British diplomat Sir Roderic Lyne mentioned.

      He and I worked together at HSBC in Russia and at London HQ in the mid noughties.

      His successor in Moscow, Tony Brenton, expresses similar views. Lyne’s predecessor, Andrew Wood, is less convinced.

      As you may expect, Wood is sometimes on air. Brenton is no longer on air. Lyne is never on, but still works in the City and may prefer it that way.

      1. Colonel Smithers

        I should have added that Niall Ferguson is correct as his think tank, the Henry Jackson Society, promotes such lunacy. I have met some wacko jackos in London.

        1. pjay

          Thanks. It is interesting, and depressing, how those capable of at least understanding Russian concerns have been silenced and replaced by those who aren’t, or who pretend not to, like our own William Burns.

          The Henry Jackson Society! I often mention Henry “Scoop” Jackson to those who think neocons in the Democratic Party are something new.

    2. Aurelien

      Well, subject to a lot of qualifications. The author has discovered that nations and institutions invariably present a situation in a way that favours them, and he’s shocked. But his own article effectively does the same, albeit from the other perspective. If you want a concise summary of the Case for the Prosecution, this will do, but it isn’t, and I don’t think it would claim to be, an objective account.

      1. pjay

        Certainly not “objective” in the sense of “both sides, impartially presented.” But since we have had the mainstream narrative plastered all over our mainstream media for a long time now, and since many in the West (and most in the US) know nothing about this history, I think there is much more need for this version.

        I would be interested to hear some of the qualifications to which you refer. It’s not that I don’t think there are any. I realize that Russia was not just sitting back and doing nothing during this period, and I certainly know that there are many Ukrainians who would have a different perspective. But noting the claims and sources in Diesen’s account, most of which are well-established, I don’t think it possible to argue that his account and the usual mainstream narrative are in any way “equivalent” in terms of objectivity.

      2. chris#5

        I thought it was an excellent and well referenced article. I am interested in what would be the opposing account, with references – do you know of one?

  16. Dr. John Carpenter

    Harris condemns Trump’s rhetoric, but has she condemned either of the assassination attempts on him? Has Biden? I know ultimately it’s all “thoughts and prayers” and meaningless, but they are the VP and Pres respectively and she is also in this race. This just seems like the kind of thing that one in either of those positions at least makes an empty gesture about, or it would be in a country where such an event is outside the norms.

      1. The Rev Kev

        Are you sure that that was written by Kamala Harris and not AI Kamala Harris? It’s a pretty bland statement that could have been written by an AI.

        1. mrsyk

          Lol, agreed, but does it matter? It’s posted as hers on her twitter account. Here (UTube, pbs news hour) you can see this quote spoken, “…there’s no place for political violence in this country…”, notice the word “political” has been added.

      2. MRLost

        A lot of Americans will assure you that violence as a potential aspect of politics is why we have a 2nd amendment.

  17. CA

    https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1836290270243229940

    Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand

    Quite rare to see such a question asked in the New York Times: “What happens if China stops trying to save the world?”

    https://nytimes.com/2024/09/16/opinion/china-solar-climate.html

    Penned by David Wallace-Wells, the article argues – rightly – that “the energy transition is, at present, to a large degree, a Chinese project”.

    The statistics speak for themselves, for instance, “nearly two-thirds of all big solar and wind plants being built globally this year are in China”. In other words, this means that China is installing TWICE more solar and wind plants than all the rest of the world, COMBINED!

    Same with EVs: “in 2023, 8.1 million electric vehicles were sold in China, compared to 5.6 million everywhere else in the world”, COMBINED, again.

    And worryingly, as the article details, this is being increasingly demonized. China used to be “the longtime climate villain”, with people complaining until recently (and some even, amazingly, still do!) that China was “slow-walking its decarbonization”. Now that it’s clear the exact contrary is happening, that it’s “leaving the rest of the world in the dust” when it comes to decarbonization, you’re seeing narratives such as “overcapacity” appear as well as sanctions and tariffs pop up against China’s green industry. In fact, as the author writes, the US is “trying to set China aside from the global energy transition, by engaging in a green-tech trade war”.

    A sad but characteristic example of the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” principle all too often applied on China…

    So the question asked by the article is fair: “What happens if China stops trying to save the world?”, since the US – and increasingly Europe – are obviously setting things up to disincentivize China to do so… A perfect case of “be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it”…

    Now, my personal opinion is that China won’t back off from this. Turning the country into an “ecological civilization” as the Chinese government calls it is too important and prominent a goal to be abandoned, and it benefits China in plenty of ways, such as making it less reliant on imports for its energy. But all this really illustrates the immense amount of cynicism, short-termism and shamelessness at play in the way the West does geopolitics: even when China does something so obviously good for the world, because they do it, it needs to be curtailed.

    2:24 AM · Sep 18, 2024

    1. Detroit Dan

      Thanks for that CA. I’m sharing elsewhere as this makes the important point that the new Cold War is a giant step in the wrong direction on the most important issues.

    2. heresy101

      China has enough solar and wind to provide electricity for all its 1.4 billion citizens and is using high voltage DC transmission lines and batteries to deliver it to major population areas. There isn’t enough for its industries yet, but it sounds like it is getting there. The Oilprice article on declining gas refining indicates that they are on the cusp of that change becoming real. EVs keep the air clean and avoid importing oil and gas that pollute the air.

    3. JTMcPhee

      Here in the US, we’ve had states with temporarily enlightened governments that have tried to reduce the destruction of the global commons (as it affects their little polities, but with general effects in mind.) In. The face of any small success of that sort, like downwind states suing upwind states and polluters to halt rapacious air pollution from tall stacks designed to attack the air of downwinders, the process of regulatory capture is of course immediately unlimbered by the powers that be, its Chamber of Commerce Assault Battalions tear down the walls of common sense and delegitimization the precautionary principle, root and branch. And the Supreme Law of the Land of course finds lots of devious and specious means to assist the attack.

      China does a solid for the world, albeit in large part out of self-interest, but how much of the rest of the world, busy getting and spending, gives a sh!t about what’s in the air or choking the waterways or poisoning the food chains? The rest of us are not about to thank China for reducing the net physical and chemical attacks by Wealth on the rest of us, now are we?

    4. John k

      The caveat is their coal imports and consumption. As noted elsewhere the largest resource transported in Russia railroads is coal. Hopefully that’s in decline, but they have built a lot of coal fired plants.

  18. diptherio

    Kodsi spills a lot of pixels, along with plenty of other people, hand wringing about what makes one a woman, but strangely (or not) doesn’t spend any time at all considering what makes one a man. These folks are obviously very concerned with the existence and acceptance of trans women, but don’t seem to care about (or even be aware of) trans men – who, coincidentally I know more of than trans women. It is a little odd, isn’t it, that the men writing about these things are exclusively concerned with the definition of womanhood?

    And forgive me for being insufficiently philosophical, but I thought we already had reached a perfectly acceptable answer to all this years ago, which was to make clear the distinction between “sex” and “gender,” the former referring to the shape of your plumbing, and the latter referring to social presentation and role playing. Sex is about your genitals, gender is about your clothes and hair style, basically. It made a lot of intuitive and practical sense. I don’t know what happened to that understanding of things, but I think we’ve moved backward since then, as everyone seems to want to make sex and gender the same thing again (so as better to argue with each other, I suppose).

    2. Rory

      yeah! and you’ll find that even the most ardent trans supporters readily acknowledge that difference. In fact, that’s why they bother with the ‘trans’ prefix at all. Conflating the two seems to mostly be on the culturally conservative side, which also tried to play this game with the definition of marriage. As a linguistics professor, I scoff.

    3. Yves Smith Post author

      Did you read the piece carefully? This is the “He didn’t write about penguins” fallacy. The point of departure was a seminal essay in philosophy that discussed women, not men. Sadly this is in the tradition of wondering whether women have souls.

  20. Kouros

    “I was in your sights traveling from northern Albania into Kosovo with 600 fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army, each insurgent carrying an extra AK-47 to hand off to a comrade.” Chris Hedge

    What was Chris doing there, joining an invasion in internationally recognized Yugoslavian territory? The sniper in that case was just defending his/her country’s borders…

    Also, I didn’t see Chris travelling to Donbas between 2014 and 2022, and see people being sniped at there…

      1. sixpacksongs

        Jeez, Hedges has been cited on this site many times. Former NYT reporter, covered US-supported civil wars in Central America, covered Bosnia (stuck in Sarajevo for months), covered the Kosovo war, Middle East correspondent, under fire multiple times, then fired from NYT for giving a commencement address against the Iraq War. Blacklisted by corporate media. Most famous book is War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, argue that war seduces entire societies, creating fictions that the public believes and relies on to continue to support conflicts. Extremely anti-war. This piece is obviously not pro-sniper or pro-Israel and what is the point about Donbass?

        1. pjay

          Yes. Hedges is one of the most sincere anti-war voices around, and I believe he has a lot of integrity. He writes from his own experiences among those suffering from war. But this very fact sometimes clouds his objectivity. In my opinion, this is especially the case whenever he writes about Yugoslavia. Because he was basically embedded with Muslim forces and people during the conflicts in both Bosnia and Kosovo, he basically reported the war from their perspective. His reporting was very biased against the Serbs, emphasizing atrocities carried out by them (and uncritically accepting some that were not), while omitting similar atrocities by the other side. He was very critical of the US/NATO bombing of Serbia. But the dark side of the KLA, its ties to the CIA and some of the Mujahideen from Afghanistan, and in general the much larger geopolitical context of the Yugoslavian tragedy gets short shrift in his focus on the suffering of specific victims which he witnessed. This is very effective emotionally, but it can sometimes undermine a more objective understanding of events.

        2. Lazar

          Jeez, sorry to rock your boat. I’m sure your exceptional bubble won’t be burst by some random guy on the Internet.

          I see how he got things “covered” by reading the introduction part of this article, just like Kouros did. I was unlucky enough to live trough all the Yugoslav horrors and can smell related BS from very far away, and this guy stinks all the way to New York. Being NYT reporter isn’t anything to be proud of, quite the contrary. “Journalists” like that were instrumental in causing all the death and suffering, in the name of “democracy” and “peace” and “other values”. I guess now he wants to switch sides, and play the victim, without admitting any wrongdoing. I guess USians need some international reporter and distinguished journalist to tell them that war/snipers/Israel are bad, because they just could not figure that out by themselves. But, hey, what do I know about wars, and peace, and “journalists”.

          1. Daniil Adamov

            I get the impression that he’s just genuinely very attached to certain hero-rebel narratives, and perhaps assumes the same of his actual, non-rhetorical audience. He seems sincere, for better or worse.

            1. Lazar

              Yep, he looks sincere. That makes him more effective as a tool. A useful idiot that believes in his “cause” can easily manipulate armies of less useful ones. I bet he could sell lots of bridges in Mostar.

              P.S. German “journalist” Julian Röpcke was very attached to Syrian moderate jihadist hero-rebel narrative (local branch of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and related groups), and got himself nickname Jihadi Julian. Now he is in the “Slava Ukrani” team. He may not really love these guys that he supports, but his hate towards Russians and everyone/everything Russian related is as sincere as it gets.

          2. CA

            “Hedges has been cited on this site many times…”

            Possibly I was completely wrong, but I read the posted link which seemed to confuse a couple of readers. I sought to explain how the linked essay was written, simply to be helpful.

            The Hedges link seemed to be written in the style of a well known Rolling Stones song, “Sympathy for the Devil.” Forgive me, if I was wrong. I was only trying to be helpful to readers and respectful to Hedges who is a Pulitzer Prize winner and Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism winner.

            The ironic lyrics for the Rolling Stones song I was reminded of are here and below:

            https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-sympathy-for-the-devil-lyrics

            1. Lazar

              For max ammount of respect one needs to get a proper Nobel Peace Prize, like Kissinger, or Obama, or those people organizing coloured revolutions around the World. Oscar gets a lot of street cred too. /s

    2. CA

      “What was Chris doing there, joining an invasion…?”

      Evidently the essay was not understood. The author is writing in the fiercely ironic style of a well known Rolling Stones song called “Sympathy for the Devil.”

      Please allow me to introduce myself
      I’m a man of wealth and taste
      I’ve been around for a long, long year
      Stole many a man’s soul and faith
      And I was ’round when Jesus Christ
      Had his moment of doubt and pain
      Made damn sure that Pilate
      Washed his hands and sealed his fate

      Pleased to meet you
      Hope you guess my name
      But what’s puzzling you
      Is the nature of my game

      Stuck around St. Petersburg
      When I saw it was a time for a change
      Killed the Czar and his ministers
      Anastasia screamed in vain
      I rode a tank, held a general’s rank
      When the Blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank …

    1. Bugs

      “Many entities within the pro-Russian ecosystem advanced the video and its claims,” said Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.

      what in the world is a “pro-Russian ecosystem” and why is Microsoft

      (lol, snorts, I actually know these people, they’re idiots)

      considered a credible organization to report on news items concerning Ms Harris?

  22. griffen

    Federal Reserve interest rate decision…the question is no longer when or whether they finally ease up but now it’s to what extent…. hearing more talk this week on 0.50% and the rationale behind that possible choice makes sense. Sh*t ain’t going so great in some households, but don’t tell that to Paul Krugman or Noah Smith either.

    I humbly submit a parody of the interest rate setting process and policy decisions…courtesy of perhaps the most humorous of all the South Park episodes…for anyone familiar it’s the episode where young Stan is wishing to simply return his Dad’s Margaritaville mixer…

    https://youtu.be/wz-PtEJEaqY?si=2y9ZcZ9RR-HF4mva

    1. Screwball

      Liz Warren sent a letter to Powell trying to get 75bps. A sitting US Senator trying to influence the Fed. Sounds like election interference attempt to me. But I’m probably just fed up with pols in general, the Fed itself, and the entire $hit show known as DC. I’m also quite full of anything out of Liz Warren as well.

      I don’t think the rate cut amount will matter in the long run. Look what the market has done for the last X years – up up and up – no matter the circumstances, the economy, the interest rate, or the evil inept people running it all.

      What matters will be 1) what will be the pin 2) and when said pin pricks the everything bubble.

  23. The Rev Kev

    “Gigantic Wave in Pacific Ocean Was The Most Extreme ‘Rogue Wave’ on Record”

    ‘For centuries, rogue waves were considered nothing but nautical folklore. It wasn’t until 1995 that myth became fact. On the first day of the new year, a nearly 26-meter-high wave (85 feet) suddenly struck an oil-drilling platform roughly 160 kilometers (100 miles) off the coast of Norway.’

    As a kid we were told that we live in a Scientific Age but we don’t really and this article shows why. There have been plenty of historical accounts of rogue waves in history but as there was not a scientist there, they called them liars. They also had no intention to investigate these reports. Same with ball lightning. People who saw them were called liars until the proof got too much. You could write a book on this subject but you wonder what has not gone investigated because the consensus is that it could not be true. This is relevant because we see a consensus that was reached that Covid is not airborne and the way to deal with it is herd immunity. These sort of non-scientific consensuses will kill you, man.

  24. mrsyk

    How odd Christian beliefs about sex shape the world, a fun read, doesn’t really answer the question how. I was struck by what wasn’t discussed, how sexual reproduction repudiates “man above nature”.

  25. Bugs

    “The Truth About Matthew Perry” European Conservative

    Hoo boy, well that was a heck of a dose of reactionary claptrap that I haven’t see the likes of since the days of the creepy homophobic scold Cal Thomas on the op-ed page. Did this guy ever follow “Friends” at all? There were um, a bunch of marriages on that show and 3 of them pretty happily ever after stuff. And the scare quotes on same sex ‘marriage’. Some people just have no appreciation of the diversity of human experience or even empathy for others omg. I’m now waiting for his column on the benefits to European morals of the Spanish Inquisition and why we should um, do it again.

    1. mrsyk

      I couldn’t finish it. I will add this. I knew Matt a long time ago. We weren’t really friends, but often our paths crossed. He was a good guy. I’m not sure he would want his face on this author’s banner

    2. begob

      “More than any previous sitcom, Friends normalized this hookup culture.”
      He never watched Seinfeld? Jerry had more dates than Joey had fried stuff ‘n cheese. Mind you, Friends did nick plenty of plot points from Larry David.

    3. Polar Socialist

      Can’t say if European morals benefited of the Spanish Inquisition, being exposed as what they are today, but the judicial systems in the Continental Europe are still carrying on the proud traditions of the Inquisition. Some even claim that certain overreaches of the Catholic Inquisition in gaining evidence led directly to establishments of rights for the detainees.

  26. zach

    One last loose end.

    Should Mr. Trump find himself incapable of disavowing fully the less savory members of his political base, then I challenge he not known for his capacity for deep reflection, to consider all the dimensions of that peculiar German observation, Arbeit macht frei.

    1. kareninca

      ” then I challenge he not known for his capacity for deep reflection”

      I’m not sure what you are asserting.

      1. zach

        Just asserting a media narrative. Like i admitted previously, I don’t know him personally.

        Thank you for the response.

      2. John Anthony La Pietra

        I’m guessing these quoted words might have this intended, slightly re-cast meaning:

        “. . . then I challenge him, [though he is] not known for his capacity for deep reflection, . . .”

  27. Laura in So Cal

    “On pregnancy brain” I guess since the author is a woman, I can’t accuse her of being condescending to women, but…anyone who has been pregnant knows this. The terms “pregnancy brain” and “mom brain” have been around for a long time. They were in common usage 20 years ago when I was going thru it. Basically, for several years, my whole being was intensely focused on my kid. Everything else was secondary. My sense of smell and my hearing were magnified. I don’t know who they make those baby monitors for because I could hear my kid squeak thru 2 closed doors.

    It gradually faded although I still feel the sound of a baby crying as a call to action.

    The tone of the article just rubbed me the wrong way in the implication that we need scientific validation to know that something is real.

    1. ArvidMartensen

      Yes, some scientists have taken upon themselves the cloak of high priests of knowledge.

      But in reality they bathe in the glow of being special when they are being glorified by some money-chasing psychopath to emphasise an industry’s case for special treatment. Right now a good example is the ‘EV cars will save the planet’ crowd.

      Perhaps scientists whose heads are expanding should have a look at how many scientific findings can’t be reproduced. Just for a dose of humility.

    2. kareninca

      I am female and I had no idea that this was the case, probably because I decided to skip reproducing, as have a lot of women I know. So I found it to be an interesting article. If I had had to guess I would have guessed that there were such changes, but seeing it laid out was useful.

  28. B24S

    Blue vs Green. I might seem late to this party, but I’ve been here awhile…

    We have an old Italian car that has its original pastel green paint, named after the color of the water off the Italian riviera, Verde Alassio. Interestingly, the color is just about what’s being discussed, at the boundary between green and blue, so this is something I’ve paid a lot of attention to (I tested out at hue 170/171, on the greener side of life, at least on this screen).

    It’s the only one in that color to retain the original paint. Depending on the sun, clouds, sky, grass, pavement, nearby structures, etc., the perceived color varies, and can look more green, more blue, or even a bit more grey. As well, it seems a very difficult color to match; every attempt to match it on other (restored) cars has failed, in particular “computerized” color matching.

    For those who care-
    https://www.conceptcarz.com/profile/6033,9672/1955-lancia-aurelia.aspx#google_vignette

    1. Bugs

      Oooh I love Lancias and this is a very beautiful spider. It’s funny that in Italian you sort of hesitate between “lo spider” and “la spider” because of the grammar rule.

  29. The Rev Kev

    The Labour government here in Oz is so much like American Democrats-

    ‘Foreign Minister Penny Wong has expressed regret that Australia was unable to vote for a United Nations resolution calling on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza within a year, saying the nation’s diplomats had tried and failed to redraft the motion to make it less contentious. Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations insisted that, despite the country’s abstention, it is only a matter of time until Australia recognises an independent Palestinian state.’

    https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/we-wanted-to-vote-yes-australia-expresses-regret-over-un-palestine-vote-20240918-p5kbnj.html

    Always “fighting” but never getting anything done.

  30. MarkT

    Re the banning of RT

    I am old enough to remember the USSR using jammers on hf/shortwave to block its citizens from hearing western broadcasts.

    My, how the tables have turned.

    Maybe there is still a future for shortwave. China broadcasts in English. The bands are clear compared with the 80s. And western countries have dismantled most of their transmitter sites.

    1. sarmaT

      Except that those western broadcasts were made as a part of an effort to destabilize and destroy USSR, which succeeded eventually. Radio Free Europe is still operating with similar destructive goals. RT is not.

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