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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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48 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!

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  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”.

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    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.

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      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!

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    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?

      Reply ↓
      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!

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  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?

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    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.

      Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
      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.

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        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.

          Reply ↓
          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.

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          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.

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        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.

          Reply ↓
          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.

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            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.

              Reply ↓
              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?

                Reply ↓
          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.

            Reply ↓
            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?

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    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.

      Reply ↓
      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.

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    3. 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.

      Reply ↓
  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

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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?

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
  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.

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  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.

    Reply ↓
    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

      Reply ↓
      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?

        Reply ↓
  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.

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  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…)

    Reply ↓
  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

    Reply ↓
  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.»

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓

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