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Links 10/16/2024

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Mysterious gooey blobs washed up on Canada beaches baffle experts Guardian

‘Use the force,’ Mickey: Study suggests that ‘Jedi’ rodents remotely move matter using sound to enhance their sense of smell (press release) University of Buffalo

Can We Rein In the Excesses of Financialization Without Crashing the Economy Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds.

‘I lost £165k to fraud in an hour’ – customers say they were let down by Revolut BBC

Climate

Our Atmosphere Transforms Dust From The Sahara Into Minerals That Fuel Life Science Alert

Floods in Sahara could profoundly alter weather forecasts in the future The Watchers

Monsoon havoc exposes West and Central Africa’s rising flood risks Reuters

* * *

Analysis: Ocean temperatures warmed by climate change provided fuel for Hurricane Milton’s extreme rapid intensification Climate Central

The world is heading for doomsday – and humanity for a brush with extinction The Telegraph

Global warming will increase crop yields in Global North, but reduce them in Global South BNE Intellinews

Dashboard Carbon Mappers

Water

Worst drought in century devastates Southern Africa, millions at risk Al Jazeera

China?

How big is ‘big enough’ for China’s stimulus? FT

China’s economic ills are serious but not incurable FT

Xi’s stronger grip on legislature shows lack of checks on power Business Times. Commentary:

And:

Progress on key issues remains slow as ASEAN summit concludes: Analysts Channel News Asia

India

An MIT economist said environmentalism is elite concern. India ‘too poor to be green’ The Print

India boosts high-tech exports to Russia as Western sanctions shift trade flows BNE Intellinews

Syraqistan

Inside Israel’s secret 20-year plan to strike Iran: Advanced weapons unveiled Jerusalem Posts

Hezbollah warns of more rockets unless Israel ends air and ground attacks Al Jazeera

* * *

US tells Israel to improve Gaza humanitarian situation or risk military aid Reuters. Commentary:

Who Is the Ex-Israeli Soldier Serving as Biden’s Lebanon Envoy? Zeteo. Amos Hochstein.

US Muslim group demands action after American’s family reportedly bombed by Israel in Gaza Anadolu Agency

We see no signs of genocide by Israel in Gaza, German spokesman says Anadolu Agency

* * *

Transcript of interview on ‘Dialogue Works,’ 15 October Gilbert Doctorow. The type of drone Hezbollah attacked Haifa with was “not detected by Israel because it is not detectable on radar. It has almost no metal parts. It’s made entirely of composites.”

UK: Anti-Zionist views are ‘worthy of respect’, judge says Middle East Eye

The New Great Game

The European Union intends to warn Georgia that the “Georgian Dream” party is jeopardizing the country’s path to the EU, according to Reuters JAM News

European Disunion

The rooftops of Paris with the zinc craftsmen of the sky France24

Dear Old Blighty

Cheating alleged after men’s world conker champion found with steel chestnut Guardian

Labour accused of ‘power grab’ with vote to boot out hereditary peers in order to ‘parachute in their cronies’ Daily Mail

New Not-So-Cold War

The Impending Betrayal of Ukraine RUSI

Ramstein “victory plan” meeting postponed until after US elections BNE Intellinews

Ukraine Seeks Allied Help Against Hyped Threat Of North Koreans Moon of Alabama

​​Ukraine may be left without electricity imports from EU due to violations Ukrainska Pravda

* * *

SITREP 10/14/24: Russia Tightens Ring on Key Region on Eve of Zelensky “Victory Plan” Unveiling Simplicius, Simplicius the Thinker

Russia Is Clawing Back Land Taken by Ukraine This Summer NYT

* * *

To boost Ukraine’s army, feared patrols hunt for potential conscripts Al Jazeera. Commentary:

Where Are Ukraine’s F-16 Jets? Newsweek

* * *

Nord Stream litigation: Insurers’ assertion is “embarrassing for want of particularity” Bud’s Offshore Energy

Putin’s Children Foreign Affairs. The deck: “Why Younger Russians Are Not Rebelling—and What It Means for the Future.”

Russia Pitches BRICS Payment System Aiming to Break US Dominance Bloomberg. Commentary:

South of the Border

Supporters of Bolivia ex-leader Morales block key roads to protest against his possible arrest France24

Healthcare

Georgia facing numerous crises, but Board of Public Health hasn’t met since May Heartbeat Atlanta

A Cloud of Noxious Chemicals and Lawsuits Is Descending Outside Atlanta Charles Pierce, Esquire

Digital Watch

Lab-grown meat is proving to be a grotesque misadventure The Telegraph

WordPress saga escalates as WP Engine plugin forcibly forked and legal letters fly The Register

The Merchants of Venice—In Code JSTOR Daily

MMT

The Boy Who Cried Wolf About Government Debt (PDF) Levy Economics Institute

The Final Frontier

“Follow the Salt”: A New Strategy for Finding Life on Mars JSTOR Daily

Imperial Collapse Watch

The US just lost a war and nobody noticed Crooked Timber

Facing war in the Middle East and Ukraine, the US looks feeble. But is it just an act? Adam Tooze, Guardian

Class Warfare

Why has your Big Mac become so much more expensive? FT

Poorest countries in worst financial shape since 2006, World Bank says Al Jazeera

The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology Quanta

Antidote du jour (WaldoAgathe):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

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170 comments

  1. Antifa

    OUR PROMISED LAND
    (melody borrowed from Red Right Hand  by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds)

    Watch our daily shock—sortilege abounds, the view is parallax
    In the torture rooms it’s a hecatomb—bodies piled in stacks
    Where the evil eyes of our soul deniers dance with dark desires
    Bringing food whenever someone cracks
    Wear and tear, sacrilege, vicious thrills to the max
    You’re not here to reform or reap what ransom can
    You’re a Judas goat for our Promised Land

    As Arabs lose their farms Brooklyn Jews are the real McCoy
    Let their Allah hear their screams this is work we can all deeply enjoy
    It’s a form of birth control to make our world whole
    Did Goliath handle David’s sling out of the blue?
    Our Mossad surely can diagnose all their voodoo
    We’ll redeem and reclaim from the river to the sand
    We’ll cut anybody’s throat for our Promised Land

    We promise milk and honey—the world to come
    What we’ve done thus far—is a dry run
    Yahweh is our architect—we aim to resurrect
    The path ahead is bloody with bombs and guns
    Ancient echoes of scenarios when the power He is comes
    Our faith is so vast we are all in His hands
    Every Arab acre is our Promised Land

    (musical interlude)

    Two thousand years of our prayers defy your regimes
    We know this will mean warfare that is taken to extremes
    There’s no need to count the dead—death is so routine
    Nobody is mourning who lands in the trough
    Arabs roast, firing squads, man to man, these are non Jews
    Every Arab is a dog, they’ll destroy us if they can
    Our kind is protected in our Promised Land

    1. The Rev Kev

      That’s OK. When I was a kid in the 60s I was reading in the newspaper how the Chinese were marching masses of their people in planned directions around the country to slow the spin of the Earth and how this would change the weather elsewhere.

      I’m sure that it was all mentioned in Mao’s Little Red Book.

      1. Terry Flynn

        In light of “weird Chinese stuff” I found it hilarious that one of the YouTubers I follow drew attention to the fact that in the China-India border dispute, they agreed not to use modern weapons and basically use sticks and stones! The video has been age restricted by YouTube so you’ll need to sign in to view. THIS IS LITERALLY JUST MEN THROWING STONES AT EACH OTHER AND USING STICKS FFS!. But gun use is A-OK for anyone…..

        One cannot but think that maybe NATO should be taking a leaf out of their book and stop risking WW3 and agree that Ukraine and Israel issues should be settled by sticks and stones.

        1. El Slobbo

          I have a better idea: rent a stadium and force the politicians in charge to fight it out directly using large socks filled with bull manure.

      1. neutrino23

        Art Bell (RIP) had a very popular night time talk show on AM radio that frequently featured all sorts of conspiracy theories. He didn’t advocate for these, he did give advocates a chance to talk about them. One frequent topic was HAARP. The idea was that this facility was beaming radio energy into the ionosphere and affecting weather around the world. I suspect that there are still echoes of this idea echoing around the world.

  3. The Rev Kev

    ‘Mark Ames
    @MarkAmesExiled
    Listen to the screams of the draft-age male as he’s dragged to the forced-mobilization van. Ukrainian commanders complain that morale among mobiki is rock-bottom, up to 200,000 soldiers have already deserted. So many US journalists, hacks & pols cheered this wretched war.’

    But wait – it gets better. Right now US officials are demanding that the Ukraine lower the draft age all the way down from 25 to 18. Officials like Lindsey Graham. They argue that ‘when the US fought in Vietnam, people were drafted from the age of 19’ and look how well that turned out-

    https://news.antiwar.com/2024/10/15/us-politicians-are-pressuring-ukraine-to-lower-draft-age-to-18/#gsc.tab=0

    Those US officials, as well as EU officials, really want to make sure that the Ukrainians burn their seed corn and won’t be happy until they do so.

    1. Safety First

      To be fair, the US is simply demanding that Ukraine inflict as much damage on the Russians as possible, including by literally marching cannon fodder into artillery and machine gun fire, before this thing ends. How many lives the proxy loses in the process is immaterial, since in the end, the US will move on to another war in another place, and whatever is left of Ukraine will be someone else’s problem. From that standpoint, encouraging the Ukrainians to sacrifice their 18-year olds today is not much different from most American papers baying for the Ukrainians to throw everyone into suicidal charges against the (outer reaches of the) Surovikin Line last year. And how dare our proxies not gladly sacrifice their lives, all of them, for our strategic objectives…

      Speaking of – rationally, this is a stupid move. Because one, there just aren’t that many 18-25 year olds in Ukraine demographically to begin with, thanks to the Gay Nineties, so throwing them into the fire would push the country from an extant, pre-war demographic crisis into a demographic catastrophe. Two, the bottleneck isn’t so much manpower, it’s equipment and training. A lot of mobilized men are burned up almost immediately because holes in the frontline need plugging, and that’s no way to run a lemonade stand. But even the percentage that is trained up for a few months first, there isn’t enough gear for them. You will notice, for example, that when Macron recently toured the “Anne of Kiev” (used to be “Anne de Russie”, but we can’t have that now, can we) brigade, the thing was organized as a light formation, with no organic tanks or heavy weapons save for a couple of dozen Caesars, and pitiful air defence and EW capabilities. That’s why burning up all those weapons in the Kursk region matters so much, because it’s a highly limited resource.

      So even from the standpoint of US strateegery of trying to damage the Russians until we run out of Ukrainians, it was obvious a year ago or more that the latter should go into deep defensive mode (say, along the Dnieper River) and try to conserve as many men and resources as possible. Instead it’s Rabotino in 2023, Kursk in 2024, and dead Volksturm teenagers in 2025…

      1. Ignacio

        I should be noted that throwing the very few younger would kill any expectation of future Ukrainian (or whatever is called later) recovery. The cohort which is 18-25 yo is half the size of the 30-35 yo according to Wikipedia’s population pyramid. So, US officials want to kill also the long term future perspectives in this region for nothing to be achieved.

        1. Polar Socialist

          There has been news today that about 300,000 Ukrainian kids of age 15 and 16 did not return to their secondary education classes this semester. Apparently they have left the country.

          That’s close to half of the cohort. While the officials have not clarified if it was mostly boys, it’s quite obvious many parents don’t want their progeny to be in the Ukrainian “system” anymore.

          1. Two Steps from Heaven

            Maybe, but if you were a parent in Ukraine, you sure as hell wouldn’t want your daughter to be left there, either, so I am guessing that the split is still reasonably close to 50/50

          2. El Slobbo

            A family friend, formerly a university professor in Ukraine with a full family, now a single mother in Canada with a 15 year old boy (dad died of covid), complained bitterly in July that the local Ukrainian consulate was making it practically impossible to renew her passport, pushing as hard as they could for her to return with her kid.

      1. aporetic

        At least he does a good job offloading the blame:

        – Trump
        – the Europeans
        – US support: too little too late
        – Joe Biden
        – German populists
        – Macron, and the french far left and far right
        – Chinese and Indian banks (for not being trustworthy)
        – the Middle East (perhaps even blame it all on Hamas?)
        – prospective president Kamala Harris for continuing Biden’s indecisiveness

        Did we forget anyone?

        1. Colonel Smithers

          Thank you, both.

          Yes. My employer. We got our bearded wonder clients from Antwerp to visit the European Commission and get Alrosa’s diamonds exempt from sanctions as it would impoverish this community if their main source of stone dried up.

          1. The Rev Kev

            Thank you, Colonel. Of course if Israel did something stupid with the Russians in the Middle east, those bearded ones would find those stones drying up anyway.

        2. NN Cassandra

          What about the think-tankers who assured us the war will be two weeks affair, because West is democracy and has 1000x greater GDP than Russia?

        3. Louis Fyne

          add the weather….this year has been milder and drier than median over there.

          Putler has mastered weather control, too!

        5. BillS

          Predictably, one can see the Dolchstoßlegende being formulated in articles like this to keep the pot boiling over low heat when the main course is a distant memory. I wonder what form the Banderite blowback will take here in Europe in the coming years.

        6. Mikel

          Exactly. Anything but admit that it was another bad idea from a bunch of well-connected mediocrities and grifters.

      3. Keith Howard

        Yes, the US is about to walk away, leaving a big mess for somebody else to live with. How many of the embittered Ukrainian remnant will blame the US is a good question. But my instinct is that the neocons (Nuland, Kagan et al) aren’t too unhappy with the result of the war they incited. Russia has paid a very big price for defending its genuine interests — at least 100K casualties (dead and/or wounded) for starters. And the endgame, as Yves as pointed out, will be complex and fundamentally difficult. It will also be expensive. Thus, a huge expenditure of resources will go for no purpose addressing the shared crises that all humanity now faces. The neocons may be celebrating a pyrrhic victory. Russia must now recognize that the US is its implacable, ruthless, and permanent enemy.

        1. Irrational

          Not sure about that. Those 4 oblasts are rich in resources according to what I have seen over the last 2 years, including on this site.

    2. bertl

      Just the UK’s RUSI directly interfering in an American election so nothing to worry about.

      This is the funniest bit: “The most visible sign of a failure of collective determination to defeat Russia was the decision not to seize Russian financial assets frozen in Western banks, but instead to use them as collateral to raise a much smaller loan. Yes, there would have been a theoretical risk of undermining faith in the Western-dominated financial system, but few countries are yet ready to entrust their savings to Chinese or Indian banks. Furthermore, it would have sent a message to Putin not to invade other countries.”

      But “other” countries will be quite happy to engage in bi-lateral and multi-lateral trade based in trust in each others’ currencies supported by a portfolio of Brics currencies in their central banks, particularly if there are agreements that each country will run neither a surplus nor a deficit in their balance of payments minus fdi capital flows over a period of, say, five years. All very Keynesian, I know, but national policies of managed trade which also benefits trading partners are a lot better than relying on Schrödinger’s $, € or £. It also helps to have a productive working economy which actually creates things and provides physical services which are useful in the real economy

  5. WillyBgood

    The foreign affairs article puts Orwell to shame with the delightful “Involuntary loyalists”. The title may as well be “Russia”s Stockholm syndrome children”.

  6. Terry Flynn

    re MMT and nonsense claims about money/debt, 2 hours ago I wrote a caustic response to one of my hitherto favourite tech YouTube channels after he “strayed way beyond his lane” and fell into practically every hole concerning money printing and the national debt. I was just waiting for the “taxes fund govt spending” canard and barely reached the one minute mark before I was satisfied the guy was either an idiot or someone who under financial pressure was beginning to churn out nonsense from the MSM that is demonstrably false. I also unsubscribed (and said so) since I believe the only way producers get the message is when nobody buys their “goods”. I have also instructed YouTube not to suggest videos from that channel again.

    80%+ of the channels I subscribe to are making pleas in their videos along the lines of “only 5% of viewers subscribe, please subscribe”. Therefore I know unsubbing has a financial penalty (albeit tiny when it’s just one person like me). But I’ve no time for people who repeat nonsense or read from wikipedia.

    I do not care that I’ll lose insights into something that interests me. I have free and paid for subs elsewhere to get the info. Frankly, so many YouTubers these days are just reading a wikipedia page with some funny memes inserted so it’s probably no great loss. The most infamous is a British guy (now living in Czechia) called Simon Whistler. Part of his “schtick” is that he sounds posh but certainly didn’t get an extensive education and boasts that he doesn’t remember basic facts from a past video that he simply read from his editors/writers. That is not what I’d define as productive work from an MMT viewpoint. We could simply get/create an app that does an audiobook version of reading of wikipedia. Some would allege that this “content farming” is grifting. 5-10 YouTubers I followed for years, who produced genuinely new content based on their “real job” have now left. I tend to hold my tongue but I want to shout at them “if you don’t own the platform on which you broadcast then you don’t own the content and you are up the creek”. End-stage capitalism.

    1. Samuel Conner

      Recently in a The Duran interview with Samuel Trapp, in response to a viewer question (@ 1:19:57) about US debt and future entitlement obligations, “the deficit myth” (that monetary sovereigns must obtain funding through taxation or borrowing before they can spend) was on full display. Mercouris occasionally strays into this territory; thankfully this is not a central point in his commentaries, and he is cognizant of the real constraints that are the actual limits on what monetary sovereign governments can do. I wonder if it would be possible to persuade him to interview an MMT principal.

      It’s disappointing to see widespread fallacies repeated by intelligent commentators. It’s as if the entire world has been and is being gaslit. It’s a bit exhausting to be always wondering, when contemplating a piece of information concerning a matter about which one does not have direct knowledge, “is this true?”

      1. Terry Flynn

        Re your last paragraph. Indeed and I feel that the most basic critical thinking – which you’d ironically think would be stimulated by the anthropological stuff that people like Whistler read from a script and which are basically repeating what Graeber et al have said about how goods were traded 1000s of years ago – is being lost.

        When I see a YouTuber repeat something re money that I know to be false, inevitably I have to ask “is any of their previous stuff untrue as well?” That’s how we devolve to “you can have your own truth” territory.

        I am middle of Gen X but sound like the archetypal old man shouting at clouds. However, I believe that whilst Gen Z etc are good at presenting information in novel ways, their dismissal of those of us who spent decades researching to provide that information is pretty awful. An attitude I see over and over again is that “we can take whatever is the dominant paradigm and juice it up to present a nice 10 minute video”. NO. You spend years learning about the paradigm, challenging it, deciding whether it is sufficient or needs refinement/replacement and then putting in the slog to do this. With the exception of the YouTubers I’ve mentioned who really want to disseminate their original work in a novel way, I think these people presenting YT vids have zero value to society. Ironically, Late Stage Capitalistic YouTube is evolving to give them the value they deserve – zero ;-)

      2. Random

        The issue is that a lot of people that want to see the US hegemony end like to cite the debt as a main argument which makes them emotionally attached to it.
        And because most people in that space believe that argument, it becomes very difficult to go against it.

      3. lyman alpha blob

        The Duran guys have had some clunkers when they bring in financial people in the past, but I thought yesterday’s episode with Alex Krainer was quite good. I don’t remember the acronym MMT being used, but that was essentially what they were talking about.

        I’m not familiar with Krainer, and I was only half listening while attending to other tasks so I may have missed something, but what I did hear agrees quite a bit with what we talk about at NC.

  7. Mikel

    Something has been on mind…
    In a country like the USA, with even the most pissant docs considered classified as a matter of national security, why would the number of weapons stockpiled or manufactured in the USA be public knowledge?
    Especially during a time of escalating conflicts..

    1. DJG, Reality Czar

      Mikel: I think that you answered your own question. The classification system in pure nonsense. It is about bureaucratic power rather than protection of legitimate secrets — of which there are fewer than the national-security state lets on.

      It sometimes occurs to me as I read the comments and articles here at Naked Capitalism that a considerable portion of the information, even in the comments section, would be classified by overzealous and fearful U.S. classification technicians (or whatever they call themselves, maybe, “secrecy concierge services”) as secret.

      There are several people commenting with excellent information on numbers of weapons in many countries as well as the capabilities of the weapons. Likewise, when Comatoso Joe and gang blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline, several experts on demolition and deep-sea conditions explained what kinds of equipment would be necessary. (And, no, not a rent-a-yacht from Rostock.)

      Who knows what a secret is these days? Even the handles we use are hardly anonymous.

    2. Samuel Conner

      I suspect that between appropriations bills and financial disclosures of publicly-traded companies that manufacture munitions, it may be possible to guess a great deal.

      The publicly-mooted opinion that approximately 1000 THAAD interceptor missiles have been manufactured since inception of the program ~ two decades ago, by a publicly-traded corporation, is something that might be rooted in real-world data about the production rate, even if nothing more than the memories of workers on the missile assembly line.

      Perhaps this is something that should be clamped down on. It may be that in the wake of the collapse of USSR and prior to peer competition with China, it was reckoned in USG that there were no peer competitors who could make use of such information and there was no need to conceal it from the small nations the US was at the time pushing around.

      1. ilsm

        A munition as complex as a THAAD interceptor missile suggests you buy all your requirement at once. The set up of a line a few years after closing is expensive and risky!

        I suggest the XXXX rounds bought and laid in are planned for a couple of wars, and normal training over YY years. The plan was a new THAAD extended range (I see no such buy, it is too big for the existing TEL) in about 15 years.

        No mildly aware spy agency missed the number of e.g. THAAD missiles built in the production phase!

        The big problem with THAAD, PAC 3, and SM 3 is the few wars are turning out to be exploding! Ukraine and Palestine!

        War reserve stocks become classified in my experience when they are put in a plan that identifies where they will be employed, that is operational security more than industrial security.

        The idea of making more missiles 5 years after end of mass production is frightening; the supply chain of chips alone…….

      2. Mikel

        “financial disclosures of publicly-traded companies”

        With the pressures to always show quarterly growth, these aren’t always the most reliable sources of information.

      3. Wisker

        That’s right SC, except for the odd secret project conventional equipment numbers are mostly public via defense appropriations bills.

        For example, look at page 89 here for THAAD interceptors.

        1. Mikel

          “except for the odd secret project”

          How “odd” are they really? Especially have to wonder when articles like “The CIA Democrats” are popping up.

        2. Rod

          Once again, the commentariat at N.C. shows its ‘Top Shelf’ breadth and depth.
          11 this year and 12 next year if I saw correctly.
          Pricey also.
          Thanks for insight on our War Tax Dollars

  8. Cassandra

    From Foreign Affairs:
    At the beginning of Putin’s rule, when today’s 20- and 30-year-olds were still at a tender age, Russia was benefiting from strong economic growth—a result of the market economy built in the 1990s and high energy prices in the early years of this century. Thus they grew up in a more comfortable era of booming markets, new means of communication, open borders, and consumerism.

    Right. Everyone knows how wonderful the post-Soviet market economy was for the Russian public. No wonder they long for the heady days under Yeltsin! Such a shame that Russian youth are not free to express their views like the Occupy protesters or the anti-genocide groups at American colleges!

    1. ChrisFromGA

      I mean, who doesn’t want life expectancy to drop into the mid-50s? Getting past 50 is overrated. Hope I die before I get old – Pete Townshend.

      1. mrsyk

        I mean, who doesn’t want life expectancy to drop into the mid-50s? I’m guessing Pete Townshend for one, heh heh.

        1. ChrisFromGA

          me neither … i wasn’t young enough to be at Woodstock when Pete and the boys played it, but I was already a toddler so I no longer aspire to kick the bucket at 30.

    2. SocalJimObjects

      From Wikipedia:

      Between 2000 and 2004, Putin set about the reconstruction of the impoverished condition of the country, apparently winning a power-struggle with the Russian oligarchs, reaching a ‘grand bargain’ with them.

      Foreign Affairs lost the plot a long time ago, nowadays I don’t even bother reading anything from them.

    3. pjay

      What makes this even more despicable is that this guy was a Russian “journalist” who actually witnessed the events of the 1990s and can write drivel like this. As Maxwell Johnston notes in a comment below, he is the epitome of a pro-Western, “market”-loving, Navalny-supporting “liberal” of the kind that are well-rewarded by the West. Judging by his bio line in this article, he’s currently helping the Finns as they join the rules-based democratic NATO world and see the light regarding the Evil Dictator Putin.

    4. eg

      Yeah, I read that particular passage with incredulity — the whole article is a mess of distortions, motivated reasoning and wishcasting. Utter dreck.

  9. The Rev Kev

    Don’t ask me why but when I scrolled down to that cat in today’s Antidote du jour, it had a look as if it was saying ‘Justify your existence!’

    1. Terry Flynn

      Our cat shows that exact look at 6am daily to guilt trip one of us to feed her.

      Then she eats a tiny portion (often just the jelly stuff in the wet food) and makes an almighty fuss to be let out (she won’t catch the damn rats alas). My mother thinks she is mad. However, having watched too many cat videos on YouTube I have concluded that our cat is rather intelligent and insufficently stimulated – she’s a tuxedo cat and (apparently) whilst they are not up there with Siamese cats in the IQ stakes, they can be very smart and therefore cause trouble if you ignore them.

      For instance, our cat interacts with the TV when I broadcast cat videos from YouTube to it.

      1. Lena

        My kitty was very smart and vocal, as tortoiseshell cats usually are. She loved to watch nature programs on PBS. The ones with birds or squirrels were especially enthralling to her. She would be entranced and make excited little meows while watching.

        I miss her so much.

        1. Laughingsong

          Our previous cat (silver tabby and white) loved to watch nature programs with big cats. He was especially fond of cheetahs (liked the sounds they made) and…. Wait for it …. Snow leopards.

        2. Felix

          I’m so sorry for the loss of your cat, Lena. I lost my calico Dulce last month, she was almost 19. I miss her very much as well.

          1. Lena

            Thank you, Felix. I’m very sorry about your Dulce. Calicos and tortoiseshells are special girls, aren’t they? (Don’t tell any other cats that.) Take care.

      2. harrybothered

        “Then she eats a tiny portion (often just the jelly stuff in the wet food)”

        I got around that tendency in one of my dearly departed furballs by pouring in a little hot water to melt the jelly and then thoroughly mixing it up.

      3. Don

        Your cat waits until 6am to guilt trip one of you feed her? God, you are fortunate (see Monty Python 4 Yorkshiremen sketch). Our 20-year-old, a sweet but still the boss and very loud Bengal makes us do whatever he wants us to do, whenever he wants it done. Stat!

        This includes yowling at us, say, in the middle of the night, when he wants a bathroom tap turned on so he can drink from it (he prefers this over any of his several bowls of fresh water). But… but, what is remarkable, in a species not known for such concerns, is that when he has had his fill, he yowls until one of us drags their tired butt out of bed again, to turn off the tap.

    2. MFB

      Or, in other words, “Feed me!”

      By the way, that Crooked Timber post is unfortunately distorted by the fact that its author uses the failure of the US Navy to defeat the Yemenis to justify his belief that navies are obsolete. I tried to point out that there were other factors involved (Crooked Timber is riddled with Zionists so the author wisely insisted that nobody talk Middle Eastern politics) but got slapped down as an uninformed bigot.

      Earlier on the same author explained that it was impossible for China to attack Taiwan because an obsolete Russian cruiser got sunk in the Black Sea. I think Trump Derangement Syndrome is prone to metastasis.

      1. alfred venison

        Someone at his site around 2020 suggested the author peruse Oliver Sacks for background on Russia/ Ukraine (history is *not* his strong suit), he replied : “If you look back far enough you can find an excuse for anything”. The obvious response to which is of course : “If you don’t look back far enough, your boss for example can say anything he wants about the present”, but I’d had enough and let it pass. I put him on a par with Tisdall of The Guardian, superficial analysis and large outrage vocabulary (“Putin is a thug”, “obsolete tanks”, “conscript army”, “more Nazis in the Kremlin than Ukraine”(!)). It was around that time I gave up talking about Russia/ Ukraine or International Relations generally with anyone.

        NC is such a welcome refuge in these times when glib superficiality are celebrated & rewarded, here I know I’m not alone and I’m not wrong. Thanks for listening, had to get that off my chest. -cheers, a.v.

    3. Lena

      To me, today’s Antidote du jour cat looks like it is on the alert. It senses danger. Cats are perceptive that way. The seen and the unseen, cats know them well.

  11. Zagonostra

    >US tells Israel to improve Gaza humanitarian situation or risk military aid Reuters. Commentary:

    The letter is the clearest ultimatum yet to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government since the Gaza conflict began, raising the prospect of a shift in Washington’s support for Israe

    I listened to Brian Berletic analysis yesterday and he departs from Reuter’s characterization as well as most of the regular analyst on Judge Napolitano’s podcast. Berlectic view is that what is happening in Palestine is a manifestation of U.S. interest akin to Ukraine. It’s not the Jewish lobby that is wagging the dog/U.S. Rather it’s the U.S. using/sacrificing Israel for its wider interest in the region. It is the U.S. that is hankering for a war with Iran, even though they know Israel would suffer massively, similar to Ukraine.

    The recent calls, like the one here from Reuters, painting Netanyahu as the crazy man and the U.S. as the more reasonable partner in genocide, trying to rein in the former is challenged by Berletic and is causing me some pause and rethinking. Several recent articles I read try and untangle who is really in charge/responsible for the disaster in the ME, Paul Craig Roberts recently wrote an article saying its both, as have others. This is a complicated issue and an important one, because if you can’t identify where the snake’s head is, it’s unlikely you will be successful in killing it.

    https://youtu.be/yfY5C__A6Ao?si=B7cj29WiuCMAo-Wv

    1. Alice X

      Fool me once, shame on you W

      Biden and his handlers are Zionists through and through (for whatever reason). He just trots this stuff out to maybe grab a few gullible voters on their merry way to the polls. He has to make one phone call, which he won’t do. Stop arming Israel, now and forever more.

    2. Emma

      You may find this Justin Podur video interesting, at 28:30.

      https://youtu.be/wP9f0NwzOMY?si=HcD_5qHQaaugVvBB

      I agree with him that Israeli elite and the current formation of American elite are so entwined that they are actually the same. I would further argue that given the Arab fiefdoms’ drift towards BRICS, that of the West loses Israel, they lose West Asia and gets pushed back to the Western fringes of Eurasia (until Russian gas and Chinese supply chain eventually nudge that population to rejoin the “World Island”. I think the West will fight to its last man in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, to keep its Zionist Ulster going.

    3. Felix

      Zagonostra re: some pause and rethinking – respectfully, join the club. I “joined up” awhile back. It makes sense to me. the tail akin to the tail of a yapping satanic chihuahua attached to the mastiff in Sandlot.

      Alastair Cooke has some interesting thoughts on it at Strategic Culture.

    4. eg

      I think part of the problem in trying to determine which part of the US/Israeli Pushmi-pullyu is driving the bus is that the US is riven with competing factions along with “division of powers” architecture which further complicates their machinations.

  12. Steve H.

    > Use the force,’ Mickey: Study suggests that ‘Jedi’ rodents remotely move matter using sound to enhance their sense of smell (press release) University of Buffalo

    We’ve had a glass sliding door on the back porch for the last year and in practising for my dotage I’ve done a lot of observing. I can see birds emitting when I can’t hear them by their power-stroke with the tail. Both birds and the chipmunks can differentiate when the glass door is open via sonic vibrations. So too the bugs that come in, they rapidly figure out it’s a closed space (or zip to the open door).

    So rats pushing molecules sonically is fully feasible. Or as we call them around here, Sumatran Long-tailed Hamsters.

    (Humans are capable of echolocation as well.)

    1. Adam Eran

      Ray Charles reportedly wore hard-soled shoes so he could echo locate. Of course most of us don’t have Ray’s ears…

  13. VTDigger

    Environmentalism as an elite hobby.
    Yes finally!
    Screeching and preening while doing the opposite. The public can do nothing about 1.5c or whatever the experts are yammering on about.
    The people who can know exactly what they are doing. I grant they too may be powerless to stop the machine now…

  14. The Rev Kev

    “Who Is the Ex-Israeli Soldier Serving as Biden’s Lebanon Envoy?”

    ‘Hochstein, McGurk and other top U.S. national security officials are describing Israel’s Lebanon operations as a history-defining moment — one that will reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.’

    I’m sure that as predictions go, this will rate alongside when the Oracles at Delphi told King Croesus when he consulted them that if he launched an invasion, that he would destroy a great empire. And they were right. Just not the empire that Croesus was thinking of.

      1. The Rev Kev

        Hmm. Using Israeli intel to target Brits in their own country? Paid for by the UK government? Sounds legit. If we got one here you can be sure that our neutered media would never, ever mention them. That would be antisemitic that. (eye roll)

  15. mrsyk

    Global warming will increase crop yields in Global North, but reduce them in Global South. Hmmm, I am having my doubts about meaningfully increased yields anywhere, while it’s easy to imagine the decreases.

    2. Socal Rhino

      Sounded plausible until that town in British Columbia burst into flames from the heat, a year or so back.

    3. Mark Gisleson

      Drought reached my field this year, worst bean yield in years but that’s OK because prices have NOT gone up despite crop losses in the SE from Helene.

      I have been amazed at how resilient prices are in the face of bad weather, yet they always manage to go up once most farmers have sold their crop.

  16. Colonel Smithers

    Thank you, Lambert.

    With regard to the Middle East Eye report about Bristol professor David Miller, readers may be interested to read that one of the politicians mobilised by the zionist lobby to bring him down is none other than former Green MP Caroline Lucas.

    One of Lucas’ friends, also an academic and acquaintance of mine, is now under investigation by his employer for anti-semitism, commenting on genocide in Palestine online.

    I’m glad that you have linked to Kathleen Tyson’s tweet about a potential BRICS payment system. I know and have worked with her. She’s one of the good guys and good company, too. Kathleen has been working with one of the BRICS on its payment system and potential link to a BRICS one.

  17. DJG, Reality Czar

    Mysterious gooey Canadian beach debris (Guardian):

    Residents and marine scientists unable to identify pale masses, as myriad theories are blown out of the water
    My first inclination is that the blobs are evidence of the misuse of the word “theory,” just a bunch of floating opinions, sort of like Rachel Maddow, now littering the beaches of Newfoundland and Labrador. You see what happens when you don’t use words correctly?

    But one must speculate. The texture is described as that of the dough of toutons, which are a local delicacy that is fried dough. So it is like a Native American fry-bread or “pizza fritta,” little pan-fried cakes of dough that my mother’s godmother used to make from scraps of dough left over after assembling the pizzas.

    Hmmm. I realize that COVID has done a job on noses, but did no one notice a scent? They look a bit like the Greek treat, saganaki, so do they smell like cheese? Or are they yeasty like toutons? It seems to me that scent may determine what they are.

    Because of global warming, it is possible that something well below the surface has reached a melting point. Does it then re-solidify on it way to the surface?

    Is it time for Michael Shellenberger to panic and do some videos about Unidentified Floating Objects? What if it turns out that they are intergalactic snack foods? Someone should consult the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and determine if they are Vogon cheeseballs. And if they are Vogon chip-and-dip leftovers, we should get jittery, knowing what the Vogons might do to Earth…

    1. The Rev Kev

      We better check to see if there are any papers on display in the office at Alpha Centauri only a few light years away. After all, it’s our own fault if we don’t pay attention to local affairs. You’ll have to excuse me now. I’m just off to grab my towel.

  18. mrsyk

    Mysterious gooey blobs…
    “ They are slimy on the outside, firm and spongy on the inside and surprisingly combustible.”
    Well alright then.

    2. griffen

      My mind veers into Caddyshack territory and the inimitable Carl Spackler..”great gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts….au Revoir, Gopher…”

  20. The Rev Kev

    “The European Union intends to warn Georgia that the “Georgian Dream” party is jeopardizing the country’s path to the EU, according to Reuters”

    They say that as if it was a bad thing. The EU right now has become more of a suicide pact where member states no longer have sovereignty, have to pay money in but can be denied money if Brussels does not like them and is evolving into a monarchy with Queen Ursula the First already enthroned. Give another 10 years and there may not even be an EU as that institution seems determined to destroy Europe so that a small clique in Brussels can achieve supreme power. Georgia would do better looking east for its future.

    1. Ignacio

      You beat me commenting in similar fashion. Georgia, on the East shores of the Black Sea shares borders with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia and Turkey. The closest EU Capital City, Sophia is at about 1600km from Tbilisi and Brussels at about 3.000Km. IMO, has little to gain about EU membership and a lot to loose with impoverished relations with its immediate neighbours. The article refers to Reuters as source and more specifically to some David McAllister who is German with Scottish origin and belongs to the CDU. From the EuroParliament website you get a glimpse on his obsessions: Russia and China. One can gather that if in the next elections in Georgia the pro-EU options do not win, well, we will call it electoral fraud.

    1. Revenant

      Yes, it is.

      As I mentioned a few days ago, I have been receiving VC spam mail to invest in the current Open.AI round. I have NEVER seen this.

      Now I have received the same for investment in Crusoe.ai Series D round ($500m+). Again, nobody needs me in that round if it is going to fly ergo it is a turkey.

    2. i just don't like the gravy

      I wouldn’t count on it. There is too much excess capital in the system sloshing about. Plus, as Ed Zitron wrote in an article some weeks back, AI is “good enough” and significantly cheaper than human labor.

      The slop ain’t going away!

  22. Judith

    Han Kang of South Korea awarded Nobel in Literature.

    “But the Nobels are always political statements, situated in the political moment, and across a backdrop of live-streamed genocide and daily atrocity, it’s unthinkable that that Palestinian genocide could have been far from their minds or ignored in their deliberations.

    The awarding of the Nobel to Han Kang is that oblique acknowledgment. Of the short and long lists, she is the only contemporary writer dedicated to witnessing and inscribing the horrors of historical atrocity and mass slaughter perpetrated by the imperial colonial powers and their quislings. “

    https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/15/han-kangs-nobel-prize-is-a-cry-for-palestine/

    1. CA

      https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/10/arts/nobel-prize-literature.html

      October 10, 2024

      Han Kang Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature *
      The South Korean author, best known for “The Vegetarian,” is the first writer from her country to receive the prestigious award.
      By Alex Marshall and Alexandra Alter

      Han Kang, the South Korean author best known for her surreal, subversive novel “The Vegetarian,” ** was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday — the first writer from her country to receive the award.

      Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which organizes the prize, said at a news conference in Stockholm that Han was receiving the honor for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

      “The Vegetarian,” published in Korea in 2007, won the 2016 International Booker Prize after it was translated into English. It centers on a depressed housewife who shocks her family when she stops eating meat; later, she stops eating altogether and yearns to turn into a tree that can live off sunlight alone. Porochista Khakpour, in a review of “The Vegetarian” for The New York Times, said that Han “has been rightfully celebrated as a visionary in South Korea.” …

      * https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/11/world/asia/han-kang-nobel-south-korea.html

      ** https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/books/review/the-vegetarian-by-han-kang.html

    2. hk

      As someone who is still connected to matters Korean (despite claiming not to be one any more), I felt very odd about the general commentary that came out after Han won the Nobel Lit.

      She (and many of her analogues–I count the “Ask a Korean” guy as a less articulate version thereof.) struck me as a peddler of a peculiar view of Korea that makes Western elites comfortable in their worldview. The “horrorws of historical atrocity” that they write about are often wildly exaggerated: I have many relatives who went through the eras and their view basically is that “that’s not the way I remember it.” (And this is consistent with my experience as a historian-adjacent academic who did spend doing a good bit of research into the actual documented history, as opposed to the narratives.) Either the atrocities didn’t quite happen (or, at least, the really bad ones were rare enough that most people did not have firsthand experience with them), or did take palce, were indeed horrible, but not the way they get described later ((basically, the bad guys were everywhere, on all sides.). The kind of depiction of the previous “unenlightented” eras in Korea are exaggerated parodies that serve the agendas of the people in the present era, fed by partial and distroted “evidence.” (Doesn’t mean that the previous eras were not “unenlightened,” just that they were more complicated than they are depicted nowadays.)

      People like Han were “subversive” a few decades ago, when the official narrative was designed to whitewash the complexity of the situations and put the blame entirely on the “other guys.” Now, the situation has turned around in the opposite direction, “the other guys” have become the mainstream and are comfortable where they are (At least their “elites” are, or, should I say, the PMC members of this generation are–they are the ones who went to college, became professionals, and live comfortable lives now.). So the formerly “subversive” narratives are now mainstream and serve their interests, much the way the older propaganda did. Except, of course, Han is not really old enough to know the complexity of the old reality, so she just weaves the modern version of the official mythical narrative much more skillfully than others. But this is colored with the biases of the current PMC in Korea, who want to feel comfortable with their own morality. I tend to think this is an eloquent expression of the Korean version of the TDS, where the “Trump” is the entire edifice of the older generation of myths (that the previous “less enlightened” regimes have built up). It may be justified up to a point (in the sense that the older myths were also full of falsehood), but it is also woven from self-serving falsehoods of their own.

      After the movie “Parasite” became a big hit some years ago, there was a review that I read somewhere that described the movie as a variant of social criticism that has enough truth to be biting, but ultimately makes the PMC feel morally comfortable where they are (I can’t remember wher I read it). I think this is a point that applies to Han’s novels (I found them, tbh, a bit insufferable–as, I suppose, you’d be able to guess by now.) A lot of Korean pop culture that masquerade as social and political criticism falls into that category, I think. They create giants out of windmills, or, at least, out of just tallish statues. They tilt at them as if they are tilting at something “real” without actually appreciating where the “real” problems are. But this is just my opinion and I hardly pretend to be someone neutral (after all, there is a good reason why I insist that I’m not a Korean any more.)

  23. ddt

    Lambert and NC tech team. The tweets/Xs you embed are not showing up as tweets/Xs, just text. Just letting you know.

    1. Terry Flynn

      I thnk this is a browser issue. I see them on mobile devices but my Linux Firefox with all the extensions makes them text only. Plus IIRC it was noted that the ability to embed tweets elsewhere would be restricted when Musk took over. But the techies here probably have the ultimate answer.

    2. Alice X

      They work for me. I’m on a Mac, system 10.12.6 with Firefox 115.16.1esr (extended support for my old OS).

      1. t

        They work for me on an android phone. Have to change to nitter.poast.org to read them, or sometimes to just copy the username into nitter to see if I can find it. X long ago stop wasting servers on rendering mobile content for non-subscribers.

        1. mary jensen

          They work for me. I’m on PC Windows 10 Pro Firefox…
          I also use Adblock Plus.
          I’d sometimes like to read comments etc there but I refuse to join X

    4. upstater

      Ad blocker? They appear as texts w/links on my tablet with a blocker, but view as a graphic tweet on my phone w/o ad blocker

      1. Terry Flynn

        Yep ditto. I endure ads etc when watching using the tablet in bed – though my aggressive war against ads means I get very few and all are skippable after 5 secs.

        Otherwise I get a glorious experience using my laptop, which has undoubtedly helped the algorithm decide I’m not worth advertising to. Hell, they might still erroneously think I’m female (which I knew from the early days when you could check what google thought you to be). No, tampons really aren’t my thing…..

  24. lyman alpha blob

    RE: The world is heading for doomsday – and humanity for a brush with extinction

    Well the Tories have their knickers in a twist today with this one. This –

    “If anything, we have the opposite problem to the one Ehrlich predicted. Rather than overpopulation, the world appears to be running out of people.”

    – is very hard to take seriously in a world with a still growing population and all the concomitant problems that result from it.

    The crux of the issue appears to be that there are fewer people being born in the UK which will make it harder for debts to be repaid eventually, which will presumably lead to some bankers having to unload yachts on the cheap. The horror, the horror…

    Charles Hugh Smith gets it right in his link today. Not everything needs to be about money –

    “In the moral universe, the question is: “what is the right thing to do now for future generations?” The self-evident answer is to deflate the financialization bubble, defang its predatory tools, and take the lumps now rather than dump the ever-expanding destructive consequences on the next generation. This can be viewed as our civic / moral duty. “

    1. JMH

      Charles Hugh Smith has it right, but would that not interfere with increasing shareholder value and ever rising end of year bonuses? Side bar: Private equity is buying up mobile home parks. What happens when all has been bought up … except people?

  25. The Rev Kev

    “Inside Israel’s secret 20-year plan to strike Iran: Advanced weapons unveiled’

    Wait. So the Israelis are saying that their plan is to use “wonder weapons” to win?

    1. Zagonostra

      Might be that those “wonder weapons” are a transgression of all norms/conventions of war as articulated in the Geneva Conventions, which Israel has signed, at least parts of it (given penchant for legalism over spirit/morality of the Geneva Convention it doesn’t mean much).

      Could those “wonder weapons” be biochemical in nature, some kind of unexpected “dirty trick” like pagers exploding, or maybe they are following in the footsteps of Nakam the Jewish terrorist/avengers, (depends on POV) who tried kill Germans during WWII by poisoning their water supply.

      https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-11-08/ty-article-magazine/.premium/an-eye-for-an-eye-jews-who-sought-to-kill-germans-in-revenge-for-the-holocaust/0000017f-e0d4-d38f-a57f-e6d6c9b30000

    2. t

      Invisible planes? A Lasso of Truth seems like an inconvenient thing to have around. But maybe this refers to the old Wonder Bra. They are still shooting social media with attractive woman in fitted uniforms.

    3. Ben Panga

      So many curious new military hardware these days…

      https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/09/07/dozens-more-drone-incursions-over-us-nuclear-power-plants-revealed/

      “A new cache of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) reveals how 24 nuclear sites suffered at least 57 drone incursions from 2015 to 2019…

      …the overwhelming majority, 49 of them, were ‘Closed Unresolved.’ This indicates that for 85% of the cases the NRC has no idea who the perpetrators are or what they intended, and has given up on finding them”

  26. Revenant

    Yes, the AI bubble is popping (sorry this should be beneath SocialJimObjects but I screwed up the reply and it has appeared at the end of the thread)

    As I mentioned a few days ago, I have been receiving VC spam mail to invest in the current Open.AI round. I have NEVER seen this.

    Now I have received the same for investment in Crusoe.ai Series D round ($500m+). Again, nobody needs me in that round if it is going to fly ergo it is a turkey.

    1. ChrisFromGA

      NVDA possible double-top around $140 (needs confirmation)

      If the darling of the mo-mo chasers fails at this resistance, and then breaks below $100, perhaps we can say that the Fat Lady may not be singing on the AI bubble, but she’s warming up her vocal cords and hydrating for a big performance.

      I’m still wary of the old adage that irrational markets can stay that way longer than one can stay solvent.

    2. Alice X

      If your comment goes wrong but it shows an edit button, click it, cut out the comment leaving an empty window and save it. You will then get a prompt that your comment cannot be empty and will be removed. You can then re-place it. It also works if you mean to edit a comment but don’t have enough remaining time.

  27. Pat

    I could be wrong, but I think that there is still going to be a bit of a shake up in the senior support for the Democrats. In case they haven’t heard already, their Medicare Pt D insurance premiums are going up, their Medicare pt D deductibles are going up. Whether their Medicare pt B deductible is staying the same or rising is still to be seen.
    Most should have gotten the bad news from their insurance companies by now. But as open enrollment started yesterday most will not have had time to assess their options until now. Well unless they go through a insurance broker. The thing is that anything that was changed that actually was good by the Biden admin’s plan that made it through will not be easily seen and possibly understood. Ending the donut hole, good, not easy to explain. Regulating insulin, good although too little and way too late. Most are just seeing what little increase they were just promised as a COLA to their SS benefits eaten away just by Pt D. (As someone with a placeholder policy just so I meet the requirement to have one, the almost 300% increase* for the same bottom of the barrel policy …well let’s just the COLA increase wasn’t even an appetizer for the hungry insurance company.)
    It may be a very stark reminder that inflation is not over at just the right time.

    And for me it is also a reminder of how often our Congressional leaders have eaten away at Medicare, privatizing aspects of it since they cannot quite get the full privatization done. (Medicare should cover most drugs outright and they should be able to both negotiate drug prices AND import drugs if the American companies don’t play nice, there should not have to be a mandated separate private drug insurance plan.)

    *My increase is the outlier, others are closer to 20% a month in my area. But that still will eat the COLA increase.

    1. Jack

      I suggest Part D users call their pharmacy to ask retail prices for their meds, then determine the Part D price and compare. When I did so, I found that, totaling tiers, prices, and premiums, Part D was often more expensive than retail. As to the penalty, calling the SS office, I was told I’d have to pay about 40 cents a month more, should I need Part D later.

      1. Pat

        My friend is seriously considering tat as an option, as he has already run the numbers. I will contact SS to find out the penalty for both of us.

        Thanks.

    2. Chris Cosmos

      Things have changed radically in my lifetime. The prosperity, happiness, and health of Americans is no longer a relevant policy issue for politicians or any other people in positions of authority, with obvious individual exceptions but, as we used to say in government, “no good deed goes unpunished” so applying game theory brings you to reality and the future.

      Most Americans, still, have no idea about how other countries handle health-care–by “no idea” I mean no idea. Nor do they know the US is the only developed country not to offer some kind of universal system (sorry but Obamacare is, and has always been, largely bullsh*t). Medicare covers very little so you have to have private insurance to cover a lot of routine stuff or pay out of pocket, or just avoid doctors. The very weird thing is that most Americans simply don’t care and passively accept the fact we spend over trillion on defense (actually offense) and “security.”

    3. Screwball

      Related; I was talking to a buddy last night. He is on blood thinners, as I assume many are. He said his usual purchase (I can’t remember the name or amount) will go from 80 bucks to 400. That will eat all of our SS raise and then some.

      We are falling farther into the hole and all they do is feed us more BS.

      1. Terry Flynn

        In the UK they’re playing games too, but it’s more about “availability issues”.

        The powers that be have an obvious agenda to destroy the anti-depressant of last resort along with a bunch of other drugs. These are NOT expensive to produce – ironically the USA produces them at lowest cost. It is as if they want to penalise people who could be helped but financially hurt people who could be squeezed; whoever rules the USA has Keir Starmer in their pocket…..

  28. Revenant

    “​​Ukraine may be left without electricity imports from EU due to violations Ukrainska Pravda”

    This is a hugely important story. This is how Zelensky is forced to the table with Moscow. The Russians blew up his turbines from the East and the Europeans are going to cut the wires from the West.

    The EU is a steel bureacracy in a velvet glove (with red-tape trim). This is how they roll.

    Remember Nordstream 2? Not brought into service because of incomplete formalities in the licensing procedure! That was the European way of denying access to the Russians. The Americans only blew the shit out of it to put it beyond the reach of the Europeans, should they change their mind about being vassals.

    So, the Ukraine will have the rug pulled out under it not by NATO refusing to send weapons or by keeping back troops. The NATO kabuki play will continue. Instead, the Ukraine will be told politely and bloodlessly by Brussels that its affairs are not in order and it cannot have any electricity until it stops being a corrupt basketcase of a country. Which will never happen.

    In fact, I suspect there is a multi-step process where first they are required to sell the electricity network to Western interests and then they are still denied access because reasons and then they make peace with Russia and the Westerns turn the lights back on at a high price paid to the West.

    Indeed, I also think this how Azov will be compelled to go along with the peace settlement. If they don’t behave, they will be left raging in the darkness – with an angry population bearing torches to light their lives.

    1. Chris Cosmos

      Interesting take on the article mentioned. Do you really think the EU will allow Ukrainians to freeze just to keep the bureaucratic wheels going? Can Queen Ursula overrule these rules? BTW, I don’t think Azov will agree to anything unless they get their cut–they are Nazis and will just seize whatever they can from what is left of Ukraine’s energy–their joy comes from violating human decency as an end in itself, or so it seems to me from my reading of the Nazi mentality back in the day.

      1. Revenant

        Look what they did to Greece in the Euro crisis. They won’t hesitate to throw Z and Azov under a bus.

        They will explain politely that EU norms, rule of law require hard choices and to preserve EU market stability etc. they have to require the same things of the Ukraine as any other member or would-be member and that they are confident the Ukraine will eventually comply etc. etc.

        The only thing that might stay their hand is the possibility of mass Ukrainian emigration. But that is why Frontex has been building a fence on the Polish border for years. Plus if there was a refugee crisis, I bet Poland and Romania and possibly Hungary would immediately send troops into the adjacent Ukrainian border region for “stabilisation and humanitarian relief”, sealing the border and gaining a bargaining chip over Ukrainian territory. UNPROFOR is still in Kosovo after thirty years….

        The Ukraine will first be broken and then broken up with fine words and noble sentiments of the rule of law and universal human rights, all the way.

  29. pjay

    – ‘US Muslim group demands action after American’s family reportedly bombed by Israel in Gaza’ – Anadolu Agency

    I’ve lost track of how many stories about the Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin I’ve seen on the news since he was killed. The last one was Monday night on NBC Nightly News. Immediately after a very brief report on the latest Israeli bombing of the tent encampment at the Gaza hospital – with none of the gory details we’ve been reading about here – NBC “balanced” the story with yet another five minute segment featuring Goldberg-Polin’s anguished parents. I’m not questioning the parents’ legitimate anguish and despair, but of course that was not the reason for yet another emotionally manipulative account of this particular individual victim.

    I’m sure we will be seeing a bunch of stories about this Palestinian family with American ties in the news real soon.

  30. Kurtismayfield

    RE: Chinese government flowchart.

    I would love to see a US flowchart with links to the political donators attached to every politician. It would be a giant plate of spaghetti.

    1. The Rev Kev

      You could do it as a simple chart. You would have a list of Congress critters running down the left side of the chart and across the top you would have the individual donors like AIPAC, Boeing, etc. Then you would put a mark in each intersection of a Congress critter and a donor. It would likely be a very long chart but the interesting bit would be when you stood back a fair distance and squinted your eyes to see any patterns. You could experiment too by putting, for example, the Black Caucus members together to see if there were any noteworthy donors out of the norm. Don’t know if anybody has tried it as these days all such info is seen through only a small computer monitor which might not show the big picture.

        1. Screwball

          prostitutes do not deserve to be lumped in with Congresspeople

          No doubt, they provide a useful service. I’m not sure there is anything useful about the latter.

  31. bertl

    “We see no signs of genocide by Israel in Gaza, German spokesman says”

    Of course thet don’t. They never even noticed the black smoke rising fron the towers of the camps. It must be a processing problem lying deep in the German genetic structure.

  32. Maxwell Johnston

    “Putin’s Children” — Foreign Affairs

    The author misses the most obvious reason young Russians are not rebelling against their government: because modern Russia, whatever its flaws, offers them a high quality of life (at least in the big cities) and a good possibility of earning a high income in a fulfilling profession. Many young Russians have travelled to the West and have seen with their own eyes that things there are perhaps not quite as rosy as the marketing brochures depict. Moscow and St Pete (and plenty of the larger provincial cities) don’t look bad at all by comparison: in fact, they are quite attractive.

    Kolesnikov is an old guard card-carrying Russian liberal: he worships at the altar of Gorby and Yeltsin, has published biographies of both Chubais and Gaidar, and holds Navalny in high esteem. He has not lived in Russia for many years, and I think that he is out of touch with the younger generation (aka the future of Russia).

    Death and taxes aside, there are few sure things in this life. But I hereby propose a sure thing: Putin’s successor will be far more nationalist and anti-western than Putin himself was, and far less interested in anything that the collective west has to offer Russia. Western pundits who long for Putin’s demise will be sorely disappointed when they eventually get what they have wished for.

    1. Laughingsong

      Yep, funny how far some concrete material benefits can go. Wouldn’t it be nice if one day the TPTB actually decided to notice that and figure out that they too could receive that level of loyalty.

      Alas, their paychecks depend on not seeing it.

  33. The Rev Kev

    “We see no signs of genocide by Israel in Gaza, German spokesman says”

    Looks like the German government is going with the Sergeant Schultz ploy-

    ‘I see nothing, I hear nothing. Nothing!’

    1. Ignacio

      She is Goebblesian. Isn’t she? Should be Minister of Propaganda. Her values are wasted in Foreign Affairs.

    2. jsn

      Scholz, not Schultz!

      “No Zyclon B, no genocide!, We’ve been trying to move the stuff but no one’s buying. If the ICC continues to misrepresent Zionist actions as genocide without the use of Zyclon B, we’ll sue for IP infringement at the WTO”

        1. The Rev Kev

          I would normally but the sound has disappeared from my old computer and I am trying to work out how to bring it back. So can’t listen to clips before giving links to them on it. So thanks for your link.

  34. TomDority

    Decoding Chinese Politics —
    Maybe instead of pointing at Chinese Politics – or making references to China this-or-that.
    One might in parallel….. Decode American Politics, best diagram of America’s Political-Legal system, How big is big enough for America’s Stimulus, America’s economic ills are serious but not incurable, American economic parasites stronger grip on legislature shows lack of checks on power….. Etc. Etc.

  35. zach

    The Impending Betrayal of Ukraine from RUSI links to an Economist article.

    It’s also a good read, many giggles contained within.

  36. The Rev Kev

    “US tells Israel to improve Gaza humanitarian situation or risk military aid”

    ‘Israel told to take specific actions within 30 days’

    Thirty days? That puts it past the Presidential elections of course. By then Palestinian belly-buttons will be slapping against their backbones. But more to the point, nothing major can happen in government between Election day and Inauguration day so the Israelis would still have a free hand to starve the Palestinians for several weeks more. So this is just the Democrats once again fobbing of any action and running cover for Israel to continue to murder civilians.

    1. Two Steps from Heaven

      Maybe (likely, even).

      It could also be a way to calm down Iran a bit.

      You may notice that there has been a bit more criticism in the mainstream news about Israel over the last few days. I take this to mean that the USG is unhappy about something or other–not enough to change course, but just to shoot a warning across the bow. The last time I saw this was when Israel assassinated the World Central Kitchen workers in April

      1. Yves Smith

        It’s that burning sleeping alive, which is on video and circulating around the world, has seemed to horrify those who might have been dulled to Israel’s brutality. It is being described as an analogue to the iconic Vietnam War photo of a naked naplamed girl running, crying, towards the photographer.

    1. flora

      One para from the full article:

      Not only does this constant questioning about “balance” chip away at UC’s academic freedom policy by creating an atmosphere of panic around controversial issues; it communicates to students the message that one can have free speech while also policing discomfort or “harm.” It’s no accident a majority of college students in a Knight Center/Ipsos survey this summer served up a bizarre polling contradiction, with a majority saying hate speech should be illegal, while an impossible 74% also said the First Amendment does not go too far. This is almost certainly a result of being raised in an environment that treats adult students as kids, and no longer stresses training in difficult ideas. They can drink the hard stuff, but they can’t read it.

      1. Chris Cosmos

        What is very interesting to me is that the values that were broadcast to us in the 50s and 60s when I grew up with was that everyone thought our “freedoms” like the First Amendment were critical to our identity as Americans. While there was always plenty of “hate speech” around but many of us did on the left and right did not want it banned (for the most part). Values today are all about being “safe”, passive, and weak which is particularly harmful to young men.

        So when seeing the sort of things young people are about it seems they are reading themselves for a fully Orwellian world except with entertainment.

  39. lyman alpha blob

    ISIS-K sighting!

    As per usual, the breathless reporting cites unnamed spooks who claim they thwarted an election day terror plot although the alleged perp doesn’t seem to have actually done anything, just “planned to” –

    “Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, was arrested by the FBI last week in Oklahoma and is accused of planning to purchase two AK-47 rifles, 10 magazines and ammunition, and carry out a mass shooting attack on Election Day targeting large groups of people, according to court documents and Tawhedi’s alleged statements to the FBI after his arrest.”

    Given the number of fake plots the Feebs have “thwarted” over the years, it hard to take this stuff seriously. Especially given the likelihood that ISIS is a US creation – they seem to get their hands on US weapons pretty often somehow.

    Time to come up with ISIS-Q or ISIS-Z, maybe even ISIS-€ for a little variety. That would make the propaganda a little more interesting at least.

    1. ChrisFromGA

      I wonder how long they had to groom him on online chats and dark web haunts.

      Entrapment is the FBI’s specialty.

  40. Chris Cosmos

    What is very interesting to me is that the values that were broadcast to us in the 50s and 60s when I grew up with was that everyone thought our “freedoms” like the First Amendment were critical to our identity as Americans. While there was always plenty of “hate speech” around but many of us did on the left and right did not want it banned (for the most part). Values today are all about being “safe”, passive, and weak which is particularly harmful to young men.

    So when seeing the sort of things young people are about it seems they are reading themselves for a fully Orwellian world except with entertainment.

  41. anahuna

    Chris, I’m not really qualified to speak about the values of young men (wrong age, wrong gender), but I recall watching my grandson’s absorption in video games. What they seemed to offer was a test of skill translated through the manipulation of technology. Now that we have daily evidence of the omnipotence of technology in our war-gamed world — who can outrun or out-maneuver a drone?– aren’t we all hard-put to discover a sphere of action outside of it?

    I don’t know exactly where passivity is being recommended as a virtue. Maybe it’s more a consequence of living under surveillance?

    As for the first amendment, the politically aware certainly understood its importance. I’m not sure the general public knew or much cared. What shocks us who remember the 60’s — as so often noted in the comments — is the way that so many of our fellow leftists have turned into cowering supporters of the campaign against “disinformation.’

  42. Irrational

    FT on price of Mickey D: The basic question seems to be “why is it so expensive when inflation has come down”? Classic conflation of price level versus rate of change. Astonishing.

  43. JustTheFacts

    Gilbert Doctorow’s claim that Hezbollah’s drone was made of composites and therefore has a low radar profile makes me wonder whether that is why the US is sending THAAD to Israel. IIRC, the French claimed an advance in radar using many frequencies and Fourier analysis to detect stealth planes. Perhaps THAAD can also use multiple frequencies in the 8-10 Ghz range to do the same. Anyone know? It would make more sense to use it as a better radar than expecting it to shoot down thousands of Iranian missiles with its 48 interceptors.

    1. Polar Socialist

      I believe the AN/TPY-2 radar of the THAAD system is optimized to detect ballistics missiles from a long distance with a sufficient accuracy (angular and distance resolution) to control a hit-to-kill missile all the way to the target. The 8-10 GHz band is actually so short wave that even rain can attenuate it – so it’s also one of the frequencies that a surface material can absorb.

      AN/TPY-2 is extremely powerful for a mobile radar to overcome this and it can narrow it’s beam electronically – more power to the target means stronger reflection. It comes with both a generator unit and a cooling unit on separate vehicles.

      The radars that can “see stealth” are the longer wave band, 1-2 GHz air surveillance radars and 0.5-1 GHz early-warning radars. Due to the physics they can’t be precise enough to be used as fire-control radar.

      The latest development reported has been Chinese connecting their surveillance radar receivers by a low-latency network into a one huge, passive, multistatic sensor system than can observe any stealthy object. In short, one radar transmits, a dozen distributed antennas receive the echo and since stealth is always optimized for a certain angle, the signal processing computer can detect pretty much anything with high precision.

        1. Late Introvert

          Yes indeed. This comment fits into earlier ones about detailed info here on NC that is both in the public domain but not well known. Good show.

        1. Late Introvert

          Well, I got washed out by Calculus 2 but I went to a bad high school and was high at it too. It was all for the best, I was not meant to be an Engineer. Maybe amateur audio engineer.

      2. BillS

        Yes , FFT is ubiquitous and nothing special. Detection methods rely heavily on multiple beam sweeps and constant false alarm rate filters to extract targets from clutter, noise and interference. Prior knowledge of the expected targets can be incorporated into the filtering algorithms to improve detection rate. (This is usually the “secret sauce” of these systems.)

        1. Polar Socialist

          FFT indeed is nothing special, but FFT in radars became possible only in the 1970’s with the semiconductor technology. Even if it’s fast FT, in modern radars we’re talking about processing 1 – 10 billion pulses per second, at least on three dimensions (distance, angle, doppler) for multiple targets. For real-time information.

          And as you said, probably even more dimensions today to get the attitude or “fingerprint” info of the target, too. That’s why radar industry always states the number of targets their radar can track simultaneously.

          1. BillS

            Radar pulse repetition rate is usually of the order of kHz with pulse durations of 100nsec to 100s of usec, depending on desired doppler/range resolution. The pulse durations and repetition rates are limited by the transmit/receive duplex switching times of the radar system (usually of the order of usecs).

            Chirp, frequency hopping and direct spread spectrum continuous wave provide a convenient means for simultaneous Doppler and range processing while providing some protection against detection, countermeasures by your adversary. These rely heavily on banks of correlators. These continuous wave systems usually require multistatic configurations, i.e. transmitters and receivers are not co-located. (This is useful from a military POV – antiradiation missiles will home in on the non-co-located transmitter and not your valuable receiving station.)

            For those who are interested, a brief history of radar signal processing methods can be found here.

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