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Links 10/19/2024

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Can you think without words? Neuroscientist explains why language isn’t required for deep thinking ZME Science

‘De-Extinction’ Company Says It’s Very, Very Close to a Complete Tasmanian Tiger Genome Gizmodo

US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’ The Guardian

Climate/Environment

Scientists create plastic that degrades 15 times faster than paper in the sea Interesting Engineering

Biotech Breakthrough: Trees Engineered to Replace Fossil Fuels SciTech Daily

Could injecting diamond dust into the atmosphere help cool the planet? Phys.org

It’s Time To Give Up Hope For A Better Climate & Get Heroic Noema

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No place to stay. Helene deepens housing crisis in Western NC. Carolina Public Press

Water

Running dry – US Army base under fire for high water use in drought-stricken Arizona The New Lede

Pandemics

Bone density loss, osteoporosis lesser-known long-term impacts of Covid-19: AIIMS prof  Deccan Herald

FOLLOW-UP: Alasdair Munro’s “Immunity Debt” Fantasy is Back Pandemic Accountability Index

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Avian flu is spreading through Central Valley dairies. Is human-to-human transmission likely? The Fresno Bee. Commentary:

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U.S. boosts passenger screening as Africa grapples with deadly Marburg and mpox outbreaks CBS News

Africa

Over half of African nations spend more on interest rates to creditors than public health: Report Down to Earth

Five Eyes on India

Canada’s Five Eyes partners back probe into Nijjar’s killing Hindustan Times

Air India serial bomb threats: Why is it significant amid Canada tensions? Al Jazeera

Cloud Over Extradition as Report Reveals Delhi Police Arrested Vikash Yadav Weeks After US Called Him Pannun Murder Conspirator The Wire

Japan

Ishiba to test Washington and Asia Warwick Powell’s Substack

China?

China is trying to revive its economy. Is it too little, too late? Channel News Asia

US investigates whether TSMC has really cut ties with Huawei Asia Times

JD.com chickens out to masculinist “boy”cotts The East is Read

Old Blighty

Why aren’t young people working? Funding the Future

Who governs Britain (in 2029)? Wrong Side of History

Who Are the Terrorists? Craig Murray

European Disunion

Norway, Germany put critical underwater infrastructure on NATO agenda The Barents Observer

Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms Time

Italy’s Albania migrant plan hits legal stumbling block Deutsche Welle

Syraqistan

Drone hits Netanyahu’s home as Hezbollah rockets target northern Israel Al Jazeera

Hezbollah Moves from Confusion to Control Lebanon’s Invasion. Elijah J. Magnier

Lebanese PM criticises Iran for ‘shameful interference’ over UN resolution BNE Intellinews

The Death of Shock and Awe is Greatly Exaggerated The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies

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Israel says attack on Iran’s nuclear sites still on the table Iran International

America’s Most Dangerous Bomb May Have Just Seen its First Combat Use in Yemen: GBU-57 Built to Strike Deep Underground Military Watch

Iran Readies New Oil Outlet To Bypass the Strait of Hormuz OilPrice

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Resistance attack hits US occupation base at Syria’s Conoco oil field The Cradle

Why Sisi is shaking up Egypt’s security services Middle East Eye

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‘There is no day after’: What US, Israel want for Gaza after Sinwar’s death Al Jazeera

Sinwar’s killing looks set to boost Netanyahu, the Houdini of Israeli politics NBC News

335,500 Gaza Dead Ignored By Western Mainstream Media: Input To Special Rapporteur Report To Human Rights Council Countercurrents

Trump: Biden is Too Tough on Netanyahu The New Republic

The Madness They Suffer From Hauntologies by Elia Ayoub

New Not-So-Cold War

US expected to pay up to $20bn into G7 loan for Ukraine FT

Zelensky Once More Puts Allies Under Nuclear Shadow Simplicius the Thinker

N. Korea decides to send around 10,000 soldiers to support Russia in Ukraine war: Seoul Yonhap News Agency

Reports of N. Korea sending troops to Russia may prompt Yoon to reconsider its support for Ukraine: US expert The Korea Times. Commentary (1):

(2):

(3):

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Azov Lobby Goes to Brussels Bandera Lobby Blog

The Caribbean

US-backed, Kenya-manned police mission in Haiti is struggling Responsible Statecraft

Complete power outage hits Cuba RT

Terrorist Attack on National Electrical Grid Disrupts 25% of Venezuela’s Power Supply Orinoco Tribune

Biden Administration

Lina Khan vs Planet Fitness BIG by Matt Stoller

2024

Democrats en Déshabillé

Endangered Democrats brag about Trump ties in final stretch Axios

The Political Transformation of Corporate America, 2001-2022 Columbia Law and Economics. Confuses Left with Democrats and assumes it’s corporate America shifting allegiances rather than the Democrats who have shifted, but interesting for the data if not the analysis. Same with this commentary:

The Supremes

Supreme Court hints at sweeping ruling that could gut the Clean Water Act 48 Hills

Abortion

UNDELIVERED: Drug-Sniffing Police Dogs Are Intercepting Abortion Pills in the Mail The Intercept

Our Famously Free Press

UK police raid home, seize devices of EI’s Asa Winstanley Electronic Intifada

Imperial Collapse Watch

Can We Fix American Diplomacy? Inkstick

AI

AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation Science. Authors are from Google DeepMind.

The Pentagon Wants to Use AI to Create Deepfake Internet Users The Intercept

Bye bye, reality. Archedelia

The Bezzle

Tesla Makes ‘Autonomous’ Robot Look Cooler With Sped-Up Video Gizmodo

Class Warfare

The Lucas Plan: When workers showed what could be done with technology Counterfire

Revisiting the Spiritual Violence of BS Jobs Sapiens

Antidote du jour (via):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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215 comments

  1. Antifa

    BABY SHREDDER
    (melody borrowed from Peg  by Steely Dan)

    (On Friday, 10/18, Judge Napolitano showed a brief clip of an unidentified man approaching American and Israeli sales reps at an arms convention in Washington DC, and asking them if they knew where he could find a Baby Shredder. “Do you guys sell Baby Shredding technology? Who has it around here?” The reps were not amused, and booted him out of the place. But here’s the thing—these guys actually DO sell all the weapons that shreds babies in Palestine and Lebanon every day and night, and for good profits, too. Hmmmm . . . if Baby Shredders existed, would the IDF use them? Oh, Hell yes!)

    It’s in our Scripture
    Our ancestors have done it
    They all smashed babies, too
    It’s what we get to do
    We’re gonna raise such a clamor
    Our drone is right above it!
    (Beg!)

    It’s David’s slingshot—
    Our brand new Baby Shredder!
    We’ve made great progress through
    Sniping at children, too
    Revenge for our Diaspora—
    Our brand new Baby Shredder!

    Beg and we will laugh at you!
    Beg and we will laugh at you!
    Gaza protocols (protocols)
    And now you’re bleeding (bleeding)
    Call for help when you get woozy!

    (musical interlude)

    It’s now a fixture
    Our brand new Baby Shredder!
    It takes a three man crew
    The mess gets all on you
    You’ll need a while with the drama
    Our brand new Baby Shredder!

    Beg and we will laugh at you!
    Beg and we will laugh at you!
    Babies are so small (all so small)
    They fuss while weeping (they’re so choosy)
    And we turn ’em into sushi!

    Beg and we will laugh at you!
    Beg and we will laugh at you!
    Don’t give in to schmalz (in to schmalz)
    This work is ballsy (it’s so ballsy)
    It’s like makin’ Arab smoothies!

    Beg and we will laugh at you!
    Beg and we will laugh at you!
    And when Bibi calls (when Bibi calls)
    If he gets greedy (he’s so moody)
    You can tell him we’ve been looting!

    Beg and we will laugh at you!
    Beg and we will laugh at you!
    They’re Neanderthals (Neanderthals)
    They don’t need feeding (starving’s groovy)
    Baby Shredders running smoothly!

  2. The Rev Kev

    “Israel says attack on Iran’s nuclear sites still on the table”

    Iran says that’s cool. That they were about to release a statement saying that an attack on the Negev Nuclear Research Center is also on the table. That video of twenty or thirty ballistic missiles slamming into that Israeli air base? Imaging that that was the Negev Nuclear Research Center. Iran says do not choose poorly.

    1. Mikel

      What if a year or more passes before Israel strikes Iran again?
      They just take another year of bombing civilians and hold their troops back just enough.
      Iran is supposed to wait for the whole year before they could help allies. Right? Israel can bomb and invade where they please and the fake “international community” pretends to be concerned.
      I was just thinking of that very slim and outrageous possiblity.

      1. Neutrino

        Accelerated after his chef drowning?
        Missing that home cooking?
        Or maybe the vanity is catching up and the gray hair is not a good look.
        Too many pols hang around long after their sell-by dates.

    3. NotTimothyGeithner

      He’s 63 and smokes. Also, unlike so many other politicians, he doesn’t look strung out on botox.

      1. Pat

        Catherine Deneuve has a somewhat famous quote that goes after a certain age you have to choose between your face and your butt. Obviously this was before even twenty year olds felt the need for Botox. But Barry apparently chose his butt, he should have kept eating desserts.

        1. barefoot charley

          Catherine Deneuve is exactly right, as always. If you win the battle of the belly bulge ‘after a certain age’, your face goes haggard. It became obvious decades ago that sorry but skinny Bill Clinton went vegan for normal belly vanity, and the trade-off was all over his face.

          1. Useless Eater

            Hell has frozen over. I am speaking up for Bill Clinton. He had heart trouble, specifically a quadruple bypass, and it was after that he became a vegan.

  4. Robert Gray

    > Can you think without words?

    This article addresses a fascinating topic but it completely ignores maybe the best real-world example: human infants. Before they even begin to acquire language there is undeniably something going on in their heads but what? how?

    1. The Rev Kev

      I have a novel by Robert Heinlein and in it he has a main character say something interesting. I have never forgotten it and many years ago typed it out-

      ‘Man lives in a world of ideas. Any phenomenon is so complex that he cannot possibly grasp the whole of it. He abstracts certain characteristics of a given phenomenon as an idea, then represents that idea as a symbol, be it a word or a mathematical sign. Human reaction is almost entirely reaction to symbols, and only negligibly to phenomena. As a matter of fact, it can be demonstrated that the human mind can think only in terms of symbols.

      When we think, we let symbols operate on other symbols in certain, set fashions—rules of logic, or rules of mathematics. If the symbols have been abstracted so that they are structurally similar to the phenomena they stand for, and if the symbol operations are similar in structure and order to the operations of phenomena in the real world, we think sanely. If our logic-mathematics, or our word-symbols, have been poorly chosen, we do not think sanely.’

      You’ll note that language can also be a representation of ideas and would explain how human infants, which you so neatly pointed out, cannot yet use language.

      1. hardscrabble

        RK: Do you remember the title of that novel? (I have several buts it’s been years since I read Heinlein)

        And, of course there are non-verbal thoughts, tho there may be adhoc symbols involved. I, too, agree w RG: Induction is a form of thought (I’d say) and infants use it to learn language. Then there are animals…

        1. The Rev Kev

          @ hardscrabble

          It was his 1940 short story “Blowups Happen” so it would be bundled up with other stories in one of his books.

          2. Felix

            mention of Heinlein triggered my favorite short story by him “They” (and no, it had nothing to do with pronouns). Also from that era, early 40’s I’d say.

      2. JP

        Thoughts do not initiate as words. Thinking reduces thoughts to words. Humans are good at it. They are wired for it.

        1. Jabura Basaidai

          this thread made me think of Jiddu Krishnamurti for some reason – a few quotes from him –

          We carry about with us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that totally is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young. Not to know is the beginning of wisdom.

          The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

          The wall is the idea; the reality, the truth, is on the other side.

          The mind must be empty in order to see clearly.

      3. Adam Eran

        Alfred North Whitehead calls the dominance of symbols “The fallacy of misplaced concreteness” and compares it to going to a restaurant and devouring the paper menu. The Bible calls this “idolatry,” and commands devotion to the genuine article, not a symbol for it.

        Of course, in economic terms, it’s “Midas Disease”–the belief that more stocks, bonds and cash is wealth, not the things they can buy. How much good would they do if we burn up the planet to get more of those symbols of wealth?

      4. JustTheFacts

        That’s Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics. A.E. Van Vogt also followed it. If you’re able to get past the somewhat off-putting 1930’s lingo, it does include some tricks to improve your thinking.

    2. Bugs

      I read something once about this concept that prompted me to think without words. It was:

      “think about taking apart a bicycle”

      and since I’ve done that a few dozen times, it hit me that no words were really needed unless I was just going to talk to myself while doing it.

    3. hemeantwell

      You’re absolutely right, the authors should have considered human infants’ process of language acquisition. Child development researchers, both psychoanalytically-oriented and not, have long argued that before being able to use symbols to communicate about their experience infants establish representations of behavioral sequences. For example, a baby that wants to be fed builds up an understanding of what should follow their squawky expression of discontent.

      This much seems obvious. The interesting questions hinge on how much these systems of behavioral representation persist in relation to a picture of the child in the world that is framed in language. For example, one of the weaknesses, in the view of many, of Lacan’s heavy emphasis on language – “the unconscious is structured like a language” — was that he ignored these behaviorally framed memories, believing that they were subsumed by a language framework. That simply didn’t correspond to experience, both clinical and in everyday life, in which people react to vaguely defined aspects of situations, e.g. the way a room is set up, body postures, etc.

    4. Anonymous 2

      Iain McGilchrist is good on this, though doubtless there will be a lot of other literature relevant.

      The short answer will be the right hemisphere (and doubtless the more primitive parts of the brain).

    5. GramSci

      Of course one can think without words. As I’ve opined here before, even rocks can “think”: cleave a lump of magnetite. Does the rock not sense a a change in its magnetic field? Is that not thought?

      The interesting questions all concern the interactions of thought and language. These can be observed behaviorally or modeled analytically, although the latter requires commensurate models of both thought and language.

      1. Too much

        ” … even rocks can “think”: cleave a lump of magnetite. Does the rock not sense a a change in its magnetic field?”

        Erm, No; it does not. FFS.

        I can kinda-sorta go along with people who talk to their plants — but even vegans have got to eat them (said plants). However, sorry, I have to draw the line at family-blogging rocks. Although … sitting on a mountainside once full of peyote, I did see hundreds of faces peering back at me from the sheer slope on the other side of the valley. Far out, man. :-)

    6. tyaresun

      Language is less solid than we think. There is no signifier and signified, only signifiers of signifiers, says Derrida.

      1. hemeantwell

        My knowledge of these debates has gotten pretty stale, but I think that while Derrida might have indeed said such stuff early on in his career, he later came to be leery of the immaterial idealism that line of thinking reflected. There’s some heft in the standard rejoinder “however I might signify a door, I have to open it to walk through.” We are free to think about a door in all kinds of metaphorically revved-up ways and can arrive at group-based understandings of the door that ignore its usual practical significance, that these can be perfectly satisfactory until someone needs to leave to use the toilet.

        There’s a certain parallel here with political candidates. Rhetorical froth often has nothing to do with the “materially” determined tendencies that become structured into the policies they push.

    7. farmboy

      intuition, a great tool if the quietude can be found to let it bubble, then when a bubble pops, viola, maybe an image, maybe some words, or maybe afeeling you recognize from your experience!

    9. Jeff W

      I agree. There’s this from the article:

      If language isn’t essential for thinking, then why did humans develop it? According to [MIT scientist [Evelina] Fedorenko, language serves as an efficient tool for communication — a kind of “shortcut for telepathy.”

      Even the question strikes me as, well, bizarre. It seems completely obvious that “language serves as an efficient tool for communication” and that inner verbal behavior (what we think of as “thoughts”) developed from that.

      We can communicate that inner verbal behavior to others via language—“Here are the song lyrics I’m thinking of,” for example—but we probably don’t even do that very often. (More often, when we’re writing something, we might do that.) Usually, when we’re engaged in talking with others, we don’t say “what we’re thinking,” we’re not “transmitting our thoughts,” if, by “thoughts” we mean that inner verbal behavior—we’re not engaging in that inner verbal behavior at all—we just speak.

    10. eg

      I can catch a football on the run even though I can’t do the math required underpinning such an action. Perhaps this is analogous?

      1. Jeff W

        Your dog can catch a Frisbee on the run, too, but (presumably) it also can’t do the math that might underpin the action.

        But, in fact, no math is required. You and your dog are moving your bodies and changing your gaze in relation to the object being caught and zeroing in on it. There are a number of theories as to what is going, exactly, but, in any case, it’s known as the “Outfielder Problem.”

        I’m not quite sure it’s analogous but it is an example of unconscious processing that doesn’t involve language. (And, in fact, people can’t accurately describe [PDF] how their gaze changes even after just catching a ball so the behavior really is unconscious.)

    1. Felix

      Absolutely evil, Alan Sutton. Hezboallah kills Israeli troops while they’re eating – crime against humanity by terrorists. IDF burns sleeping children, women and men alive – killing terrorists.
      Killing of Resistance leader who died fighting alongside his soldiers – exultation, a coward who died like a coward.
      I’m not sure what the media wrote about the drone attack against netanyahu’s residence but I know it’s moronic and untruthful. I burst out laughing at it. Good job Hezbollah.

  6. Acacia

    Re: US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’

    One word: Gattaca.

    Adding: aside from Ernest Borgnine appearing as a NASA janitor, the most obvious touch of perverse humor in that film is casting Ethan Hawke as the “generic reject” sibling.

    1. The Rev Kev

      A must see film that. Good on every level. In that film Ernest Borgnine played a character named Caesar who was the head janitor. I wondered if the implication was that you might have a person born into that world with the talents of the original Julius Caesar but if they did not have the right “genes”, then they were all out of luck.

    2. Jabura Basaidai

      RE: US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ –
      important to add that they would be charging wealthy couples – i thought what a great scam and of course it would be for the self-obsessed “wealthy” couples – expect more of this chicanery as AI really stretches its legs – Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, would be a great salesperson –

      1. Joker

        US startup company is screening wealthy couples for IQ.

        P.S. Anna Sorokin got nothing on Elizabeth Holmes.

        1. Jabura Basaidai

          right you are Joker – Lizzy was able to fool the big dogs – but Lizzy is still at Camp Fed and Anna is on Dancing with the Stars – Anna has a certain spunk that makes a good used car salesperson – but dealing with the wealthy Lizzy has one-up on Anna and probably better suited to sell the IQ scam –

    3. Grateful Dude

      IQ is overrated. High IQ doesn’t mean conscience. Too-smart folks can be manipulative, evil, narcissistic, and whacko. And, just greed can do a lot of serious collateral damage. Be careful ordering that special dish, you’ll be stuck with it..

  7. Acacia

    Re: AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation

    JFC these Google bots are naïve.

  8. The Rev Kev

    “Drone hits Netanyahu’s home as Hezbollah rockets target northern Israel”

    ‘Of course, there is no way to verify that or to say for sure that this was an assassination attempt, but that’s how gravely the Israeli security establishment is viewing this incident’

    This must be the same drone that an IDF AH-64 Apache attack helicopter was chasing over Caesarea. But it wasn’t an assassination attempt. It was a message. That even if the war ends he will never know if there will be a drone coming for him in his own home. He will never be safe again – ever.

    2. Smith, M.J.

      The triumphant celebrations by Bibi and Biden over Sinwar’s death are likely to prove embarrassingly premature ejaculations. Biden obviously does not know his Irish history, or else he would recall with dread the famous oration by Patrick Pearse at the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa, the Fenian leader who sparked Irish independence, and whose career parallels Sinwar’s in so many ways:

      “Life springs from death: and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and, while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”

      https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Speech_at_the_Grave_of_O%E2%80%99Donovan_Rossa

      1. The Rev Kev

        I found all the celebrations by western leaders very unseemly if not crass including our own here in Oz. Say what you will about the guy, even when wounded by the explosion of a tank shell, he went down fighting for his cause, giving ‘his last full measure of devotion.’

        1. Smith, M.J.

          Agreed. Pearse’s description of Rossa seems apt here too — an “unconquered and unconquerable man” who was “splendid in the proud manhood of him, splendid in the heroic grace of him, splendid in the strength and clarity and truth of him.”

      3. MicaT

        They are trying to sell the decapitation theory.
        However the actual scholars point out the obvious that Hamas isn’t a person but a movement and idea, which removing the leader won’t change.
        Same for Russia, Iran.

        And it’s kinda similar to the stories about North Korean soldiers being in Ukraine?

        Or going back to Syria, and them using poison gas which derailed the cease fire. Right.

        Keep selling the story you want regardless of how true. The average person will believe it because it’s all they see in the media. And once believed, very hard to undo.

        1. cfraenkel

          They’re trying to sell the decapitation theory to the western public. The public that has grown up listening to ‘great man’ narratives and hyperventilating whether Harris or Trump is sitting in the oval office, as if that made any difference whatsoever. As long as no one pays any attention to the little man behind the curtain. Same thing goes for narratives about USA or the UK or China ‘choosing’ to ‘act’, as if there is a singular main character in the story. All fiction, but a convenient fiction to those who don’t want attention.

          But that’s where the money flows from, so the kayfabe must be reinforced.

          (I’d be curious if the same main character style of narrative is so common in non-western audiences.)

          1. 123

            ‘…as if that made any difference whatsoever.’ Thanks. Very simply put, but I find those few words eminently calming.

  9. mrsyk

    That is a most excellent cat photo featured today. He’s a little wet, but so handsome! Our cats like to play in a trickle of water from the tub tap as well.

  10. Victor Sciamarelli

    >Israel says attack on Iran’s nuclear sites still on the table

    I find it difficult to understand Netanyahu’s confidence, even with US involvement, fighting a war against Iran. There are two fundamental facts: Israel is a small country and Iran has demonstrated it can penetrate Israel’s air defense system.
    If we consider the basics like, water, electricity, fuel, transportation, food, and security, then the question becomes how many targets does Iran need to destroy in order to turn Israel into a miserable country to live in? Imo, for reasons below, it would be roughly 20 targets which is remarkable considering Iran has thousands of drones and missiles.
    Though Israel has access to water via groundwater pumping, it also relies on 5 desalination plants: Hadera, Sorek, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Palmachim.
    Natural gas from Israel’s own offshore gas fields is used to produce its electricity. The main electrical power stations in Israel are: Dalia, Reading, Eshkol, Dorad, and Mishor Power Stations.
    According to OEC World, Israel imports Crude Petroleum primarily from: Azerbaijan ($1.67B), Brazil ($1.07B), Kazakhstan ($777M), and Nigeria ($213M). Israel refines the crude oil for its transportation sector and military. And according to Investigate, “Valero (Energy Corp) is the main supplier of military-grade jet fuel (JP-8) to the Israeli military. Between 2020-2024, the company has sent every other month a JP-8 tanker from its Bill Greehey refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, to Israel.” https://investigate.info/company/valero-energy#:~:text=Valero is the main supplier,Christi, Texas, to Israel.
    Israel has 6 ports: Haifa, Ashdod, Eilat, Tel Aviv, Hadera, and Ashkelon. It’s my understanding only Haifa and Ashdod have oil terminals. The others are small and Eilat is currently inactive.
    I’m not a military expert but of the potential targets listed above: Israel’s desalination plants, electricity power stations, oil refineries, off shore gas platforms, and ports, amount to less than 20 targets. Of course, military bases and airfields are targets, but if the Haifa and Ashdod oil terminals, as well as the refineries are destroyed, fuel for military vehicles will not be available.
    Iran has thousands of missiles and drones and it seems to me the destruction of two dozen important targets will be catastrophic and would be enough to make the country a miserable place to live; daily activities like hospitals and schools are difficult without water and electricity.
    Thus, I don’t know what the Israeli government is counting on to defeat Iran and walk away unscathed.

    1. NotTimothyGeithner

      Israel is an ethnostate. That explains it. The Baltic states are a good comparison. Those nutters think that now the French and Germans have let them into the “white” club they will do what Addie from Germany couldn’t do.

      Math is put aside for faith.

    2. Michaelmas

      Thus, I don’t know what the Israeli government is counting on to defeat Iran and walk away unscathed.

      The US.

      Oh, and God, I guess, jews being the Chosen People. There’s an eschatological element to all this.

      They’re mistaken in both cases — in the case of the US’s military capabilities, stupidly so, as besides the evidence of its stark failures in Afghanistan and Yemen, any consideration of the real world evidence indicates the year is 2024 and not 1990-91 (Gulf One) nor even 2003 (Gulf Two, the Iraq incursion), and US military kit is now inferior, except in the realms of global satellite oversight and nuclear submarine technology, to, forex, Russian kit, especially Russian missiles, EW, and air defense technologyy. Which the Russians, to greater or lesser extent, have been flying into Iran for the last few months.

      This is besides all the other points you rightly make. It’s going to be interesting.

    3. Chris Cosmos

      Netanyahu is confident because he believes in the Jewish God who favors Jews–the chosen people. I don’t get why people are not more focused on Zionist beliefs which fuel Israeli fanaticism. Fanatics (and I’ve know a few and they can be very intelligent and perceptive) develop confidence in the “unseen” world. Israel will prevail because the barbarians and subhumans (all non-Jews) can’t keep up no only with Jewish intelligence but also their link with the most powerful god in the universe. I think Bibi and his gang are true-believers so they minimize the opposition.

      I personally do believe in the “unseen” world since I’ve had direct evidence and experience of it. I do believe Bibi, along with many people, possibly had an experience that re-enforced his faith. I don’t believe Bibi’s God is the same as mine nor do I believe the Lord of the Old Testament is the same as that of the New Testament and many Gnostics believed that the Jewish God was a “demi-urge”–but I believe that the God of Israel has power of some kind even if it turns out to be a kind of material emanation of collective consciousness or a toxic sort of alien, or a Jinn of some kind which, I’ve been told, hang around that sensitive part of the world. We’ll see how things turn out. In other words there is a spiritual dimension for all this.

      1. Harold

        It’s been pointed out that a lot of Zionists reject belief in God. They are Fascism‘s “New men”.

      2. Bugs

        I really don’t think that Netanyahu believes in anything but brute power. God is dead and buried in that miserable place.

    4. Antifa

      Yahweh. They are counting on Yahweh to make an appearance.

      Iran can’t fight the guy who created this planet.

      1. Polar Socialist

        On the other hand, Iran’s very constitution mentions Him in the first sentence, while Israel doesn’t actually have constitution – because they never could agree on one.

        While I’m not a Christian myself, I doubt any righteous God would find Israel’s actions pleasing and make His face shine upon them.

        1. Lefty Godot

          I don’t think the God of the Bible is necessarily supposed to be righteous. He’s arbitrary, violent, and, most importantly, all-powerful. So we have to extol Him as good and wonderful and worthy of worship, because otherwise He can crush and mutilate and destroy us. Any sop He throws us must be treated as a sign of glorious favor and amazing lovingness. Your basic abusive father-figure or tribal strong-man.

          As Mary Midgley said, “The Bible, in spite of its grandeur, contains many things which conflict not just with science, but with morality, with history, with common sense or with each other. If there were a god who had dictated the whole of it, he would certainly not be one we ought to worship.” And she was not at all an enemy of religion as a general phenomenon.

          2. jsn

            Appears we’re laboring at undoing the work of The Axial Age.

            Confucius, Zoroaster, Buda, and Christ are pansy, parvenues of the spirit next to the God of Israel.

            I guess we’ll be finding out soon enough.

        2. Jana

          I’m guessing the Iranian constitution refers to their god, not the God of Israel who is called “I AM”, nor would it refer to Christ, the Redeemer.

          Humans love to direct the Creator into doing their will while God laughs!

          1. Polar Socialist

            According to the Quran, their god is the same one that revealed Torah (or Tawrat), so there’s that. I wasn’t there, so I have to take on faith.

        3. Samuel Conner

          For me, the situation is vaguely reminiscent of the middle of the 1st Century AD, when Judean nationalists were chafing under the oppressive presence of the then regional hegemon, Rome. That turned out poorly for them in the end.

          Psalm 120:7 comes to mind.

      2. Jana

        Eccl 11:5
        Just as you cannot understand the path of the wind or the mystery of a tiny baby growing in its mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the activity of God, who knows all things.

        Let us watch and pray.

    5. Pat

      If I was Iran, my answer would be to send the coordinates of three of Israel’s nuclear sites and any video they have of the largest bunker destroying hits they have had on Israeli to both Israel and the US, and remind them that attacking the wrong country is guaranteed mutually assured destruction. In Israel’s case within twenty minutes of any such attack on Iran. Chernobyl South beach front properties, agricultural products, and tourist destinations just will not sell well.

      1. NotTimothyGeithner

        I suspect sufficient numbers in the Pentagon have explained this.

        The WH has likely pleaded with Iran to let Netanyahu make a strike to save face in exchange for some kind of future concession. It’s just that DC has so little credibility they can’t make those deals. Also, Tehran has struck directly twice in response to murders. The Iranian street won’t tolerate anything less.

        The closest thing we have to a reality based community in DC is likely trying to delay, delay, delay in the hopes Israeli bloodlust is quenched, ignoring 0 is the number Israelis want.

      2. Expat2uruguay

        Perhaps Iran is deterred by the thought of destroying or making uninhabitable and unvisitable holy sites to the Muslim world

        1. Pat

          Probably, but at some point there will be the realization that Israel is determined not only to destroy Iran but that if they are not stopped they will do that to any sites that are not important to the Zionists anyway. (Oh, and that includes Christian ones.) It isn’t just Muslims they wish to eradicate. And yes, I do think that it is not just about their ‘promised land’ but is about eradicating anyone not Jewish or enslaved to the right Jewish people. Since I admitting to
          the dystopian future I see looking at Israeli actions, I believe the famous ‘I said nothing until they came for me…’ poem ends with reformed Jews realizing they are also not ‘chosen’ right after the evangelical Christians. (Who might finally get that enabling Armageddon IS not acceptable to the doctrine of their God and that they are ‘left behind’ in a way.)

    6. Kouros

      US can build some piers to bring all that water, oil, gasoline, and electricity in. Park all the carriers to hook their nuclear plants to the land… Lovely sitting ducks…

  11. KLG

    How can the Axios story about Bob Casey and Tammy Baldwin and Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown (PA, WI, MT, OH) making nice about Donald Trump mean anything other than the accurate polls these pols depend on for life show the Harris/Walz ticket is circling the drain and that by Halloween it may be out of sight? Asking for a friend.

    1. Screwball

      I think you may be right. Following the tea leaves as I have plenty of time to do, I see the MSNBC vote blue no matter who crowd starting to crack a bit. It looks like the polls are shifted to the Trump side and they see it, but don’t want to admit it. They ingest all the good polling numbers and try to convince themselves that everything is OK, but deep down, I think they know they have a problem. I guess the gaslighting only goes so far.

      One guy I know who lives in the Jacksonville, Fla. area said there were some Trumpers setting up a table at a local Publix in the parking lot. He yelled “Trump is a fascist” at them. He said it didn’t accomplish anything, but it was cathartic. This is a highly educated person who is about to flip out over Trump. Like so many others.

      This is what worries me. As discussed in other recent threads, mental health, depression, call it whatever you want, may become a real problem. So many are highly invested in this election – scared shitless you might say – how will they react? I can tell you as having lived with someone who was infected with stage 5 (or worse) TDS, it’s not a pretty sight.

      Stay safe.

      1. jsn

        There are no doubt real trade offs between 20th Century Fascism and 17th Century Oligarchic Feudalism, but it’s not at all clear to me how to choose between them.

        Both ethos are atavistically emergent from our bipartisan techno-feudalist market-state. Neither has a positive vision for a future and both rely on completely delusional heuristics of the present.

        In any case, outside forces are aligning to resist whatever new selfish dissimulation we contrive to preserve for the dwindling few an illusion of a Great America. It feels like 89 and we’re the USSR, except they were better educated and had core humanist values we, by all appearances, have shed over the course of my lifetime.

  12. Carla

    Either I’ve completely lost it, or the news has just gotten too damned bad. I used to spend an hour, minimum, on NC daily Links. This morning, I didn’t click on a single one.

    1. GramSci

      Everything and nothing hangs on Nov. 5. I wait to see if 10% will vote for Jill Stein.

      Only 10% of the neurons in cortex are inhibitory. Those are like the NC community. While everybody else gets excited over left-brain/right-brain buzzwords, only pessimists keep the body politic from collapsing in a grand mal seizure.

    3. GramSci

      Same here, but in my case it’s paralysis in advance of November fifth. I’m waiting to see if Jill Stein polls 10%.

      Only 10% of the neurons in human cortex are inhibitory. While most USians get excited about left-brain/right-brain talking points, we greenish pessimists and critical thinkers stand as the last defense against a grand mal seizure.

    4. cfraenkel

      The InterestingEngineering link on decomposing plastic is at least leaning in a positive direction. We’re not going to escape the Jackpot, but maybe there’s still a hope of Gibson’s ‘science started popping’ to offer a path out the other side.
      (hopefully, without the oligarchs. One can dream)

    5. CanCyn

      I made a friend laugh the other when talking about how easy it is to get through the news. I just scroll the headlines going nope, nope, nope, not gonna read any of it. It is really tough to take. Senseless war, genocide, weather disasters, an election that on many levels matters not …, I know enough to know that I don’t want to know more. My current pursuit of meditation and what I would call secular buddhism or Buddhism light is helping me free my mind from worries over things I cannot control. Trying to focus on local volunteer work and local issues where maybe things can change.

        1. i just don't like the gravy

          More navel-gazing pablum.

          Help me, I am drowning in thinkpieces!

          Everyone seems to love to write about how much action we must take, yet continue to wake up every day and do nothing.

          That sweet crude is just too sweet to change. Maybe when the grocery stores are empty these essayists will do something! Nah, they’ll just write about how it’s a sign that we must finally fight, or something.

            1. CanCyn

              I read it and I mostly agree with IJDLTG. Better storytelling is the answer to galvanizing the comfort loving masses to change their ways and save the planet? Really? I have a friend who says “Technology better save us because behavioural change is never going to happen.” She is right.
              When I say I can’t read most of the news anymore, it has nothing to do with denial. It has taken me a long time to figure out that I am grieving for the planet and humanity. I have accepted that we will not (cannot) right the ship. We’ve ruined paradise. So I have stepped back and am acting locally. Someone here linked to the work of Jem Bendall a while back. He’s worth a search. I think you can take of yourself and others nearby without going into the “fiddling while Rome burns” mode that I see many doing (knowingly or unknowingly).

              1. Kouros

                It is physically and technologically impossible for technology to save humanity while securing a modicum of well being to *+ billion of human beings. Only behavioral changes, in all strata of human societies. The real TINA.

    6. Martin Oline

      It is often the same for me but other times everything seems interesting. At least this source is available and regulars offer up links that are sometimes overlooked or deemed marginal. It seems as if the MSM has followed the example of Hollywood and lowered the level of their product to pap. If there is no film it didn’t happen.

  13. Louis Fyne

    >>>>US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’ The Guardian

    layman’s opinion, as a fan of historical smart people, my opinion is that once you get to true genius levels (99.99+% percentile), those genes start correlating with behavior of what Normies would call autism or spectral disorders.

    then throw in the environmental (see Montessori), diet, and womb-epigenetic aspects….that may affect final IQ.

    just selecting for intelligence genes may turn out like having a car with a 900-horsepower engine, but fragile transmission and balding tires.

    I wonder if all of those biologists are parents….parenting gives you insights into genetics, lol. seriously.

    1. Jabura Basaidai

      ……just selecting for intelligence genes may turn out like having a car with a 900-horsepower engine, but fragile transmission and balding tires…….
      thanks for the laugh, definitely made me chuckle – commented on this above –
      but then i thought maybe you were describing Stephen Hawking –

    2. Kouros

      Studies in smart Ashkenazi Jews also show that intelligence ends up correlated with some forms of brain cancer…

  14. The Rev Kev

    “Hezbollah Moves from Confusion to Control Lebanon’s Invasion”

    Hezbollah’s Operations Room released a statement on 18th saying that they were facing 5 divisions of Israeli soldiers with more than 70,000 troops and hundreds of military vehicles but in the past week alone they have killed 10 soldiers and wounded 150 more. In addition, they have destroyed 9 Merkava main battle tanks and 4 military bulldozers. I find that believable and not the Israeli statement today that they have killed over 2,000 Hezbollah soldiers. Scott Ritter has said that Hezbollah has had nearly 20 years to walk all over that territory to identify ambush sites, fallback positions and has zeroed in mortars and the like on any place that the IDF might seek shelter.

  15. Matthew

    That’s absurd. The prevalence of autism is like 3% max

    “Roughly half of the 38 per cent of young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who aren’t working – I stress that – 38 per cent not working – roughly half of those aren’t working because they have autism or some condition related to it.”

    1. timbers

      Listening to the kids while at work, I am constantly amazed how many of them say they are on this or that prescription mood altering medications and if they should tweek the dosage or try something else and constantly referring to there psychologists doctors telli-consultations or whatever they’re called. (Talking openly about such stuff is cool and acceptable you will hear them say). It’s like the entire young generation is emotionally malady afflicted. No such thing as good hardy human stock anymore that is ridiculously healthy until at least their 30’s, I suppose. I suspect drug profits are a big part of this but it a world I know nothing of but what hear come out kids mouths. It’s alarming depressing and mystifying to me all at once.

      1. amfortas the hippie

        lol.
        that song plays in my head unbidden about a third of the time i go next door to do mom’s critters.
        as for the more general malaise, my sample size is small…but i think its definitely a thing.
        the boys talk about it in their friends, sometimes.
        youngest likens the causation to something akin to a disturbance in the Force.
        no one attempts to put their finger on it, lest the edifice collapse.

        1. Lee

          A disillusioned drop out from college and a white collar future in the late sixties, I found refuge and a modest but adequate income in blue collar work allowing my mind to wander afield, time for lying flat spiced up with the sexual revolution and political activism. Perhaps we live in a time when such a path is no longer open. Sad if true.

    3. GramSci

      I’m surprised that Richard Murphy is surprised. Between fossil fuels and AI, what business needs people anymore? Sure we need roofers, plumbers, and landscapers, but that’s what immigrants are for.

      I wouldn’t call it some form of autism. I’d call it alienation. The “adults in the room” now keep their children like some people keep pets.

      1. Lee

        I wasn’t best pleased when my son rejected college in favor of working in construction and then specializing in the electrician’s trade. Now I am. We live surrounded by techies and PMC types who, when it comes to working with their hands in the three dimensional world of obdurate matter, are pretty much helpless.

      2. Kurtismayfield

        Or the kids see their parents and every adult around them working and just scraping by, and ask themselves “why” when they see idiots on the internet making bank doing stupid human tricks.

    4. Lefty Godot

      Society is reaching a point where fewer and fewer members of the younger generations can fit in, so we diagnose the rigidity of social requirements as a behavioral disorder of the individuals who can’t meet them. Where previously there was some tolerance for the natural variations in people’s personalities. I grew up in the 1950s, in a time often lambasted as the pinnacle of conformity and regimentation, but I think the conformism and groupthink of today are actually far worse, in part because they are so well disguised by loud talk about individualism or diversity. And education in those days, for all its many faults, at least attempted to prepare one for some sort of useful role as a self-supporting adult. Now we seem to be preparing for a life as a perpetual adolescent with shiny toys and flags to wave signaling our tribal designation, and that’s supposed to be sufficient to be rewarded with a salary or other endowment of some sort—completely counter to reality.

      The UK appears to be in the leading stages of Great Depression II, which I expect we will be seeing over here in the US within a few years, so it’s not surprising that the employment problem is showing up there first.

  16. Eclair

    RE: Dairy herds and H5N1 Virus.

    I know more than I really want to know about mega-dairy farms, because my husband’s cousins, on both sides, are multi-generational dairy famers, one in north-western Pennsylvania and one in coastal southern Washington. The latter has recently given up and sold out, because, with a couple of hundred milkers, they just could not complete with the 1,000+ herds that have taken over the industry. The cousin in Pennsylvania soldiers on.

    A couple of years ago, we visited a newly ‘mechanized’ dairy farm just up the road in our corner of New York State. This, we were proudly told, was the ‘future of dairy farming.’ The cows are lodged, from birth, in an enormous shed; no grazing in grassy pastures. They are milked, on demand, by robotic machines, that identify each cow by the markers implanted in them.

    The their bedding and manure (and liquids) are shoveled out into a central concrete passageway, where it is swept by robots, into a channel, from which it is piped to a composting/fermenting/heating facility. The odor is palpable; fresh manure is perfume, compared to this smell, which clogs airways and becomes embedded in clothing. When the manure/bedding/straw mixture is heated and dried into a rough mix, it is piped back into the cow shed, where it is re-used for bedding.

    So, you have 1,000, 5,000, or up to 15,000 cows, all in close confinement for their entire lives after they leave the calf barn, breathing on each other and excreting into their bedding. Then the bedding and excrement is ‘recycled’ and the cows live in the mixture of straw and their own excrement. What could go wrong?

    1. farmboy

      i drive by these in the Yakima Valley. The stench will rip your nostrils! the cull cows go the sale on a weekly basis, bought by brokers who sell to tyson slaughter. How many cull cows going to slaughter already H5N1? Dead cows go to the local landfill, there’s usually a pile of dead chickens and cows waiting to get covered up at the bulk drop off. I’m wearing a mask or maybe I’ll get a respirator before i go again!

      1. Henry Moon Pie

        It’s shocking how different this computer-enhanced industrial farming is from the way my grandfather cared for his little herd of angus. When he was toward the tail-end of his 50 years with the Burlington RR, after he had already driven 10 miles out to the farm to do the chores, he would come home and have his supper.

        If snow came during the night, he would drive the slick, sharp little hills out to the place to bring the cattle into the shed. He didn’t have to worry about how he could ever gather them in the dark. They would be waiting in the lot because they knew he’d be there.

        And yes, he would cull a cow after she had reached a ripe old age, but there would be tears in his eyes. And we enjoyed the meat from the occasional steer that he had butchered rather than sell. But he had a relationship with his animals.

        This industrial stuff makes it easy to imagine a Matrix situation for humans.

  17. Carolinian

    That’s an important Craig Murray on why “the state” cannot be trusted as an arbiter of truth. He talks about how Mandela was declared by Thatcher to be a terrorist and how all of her bureaucratic underlings had to toe the line. Cut to now and here’s Murray’s summer upper

    “Panicked Zionist ‘elites’ who run western states are lashing out in fear at their opponents. As their popular support evaporates in the face of clear evidence of appalling Israeli atrocities, they are resorting to the methods of fascism.”

    One suspects that should Thatcher’s ghost reappear and endorse Kamala she would be “honored.” And Harris supporter Meryl Streep even portrayed Thatcher in a not unsympathetic movie version. For many of our so called thought leaders toeing the line is what it is all about. And when it comes to the public at large, who have ideas of their own, they hate us for our freedom.

    Kirn says he has been traveling with Vance who draws good crowds with a talk that puts heavy emphasis on the importance of free speech. “Freedom” was once a staple of American politics regardless of whether sincerity accompanied it. Now the elites would have us believe all those people came here to become rich. And they did. But they also came here to be free.

    2. The Rev Kev

      Craig Murray was saying how those working for the government had to toe the line and this was in the 80s. I see now that the media have to toe the line and not disagree with the government as well. Here in Oz our government lists Hezbollah as a terrorist organization because the US and Israeli told us to do so. You can be arrested for carrying their flag in public. The result? On the TV news whenever they mention Hezbollah they automatically say the line how ‘many nations, including Australia, regard it as a terrorist organization’. Every. Single. Damn. Time. And as Hezbollah is on the news every night, this is said like some sort of religious rite every single night as well.

      1. Polar Socialist

        I admit English is not my first language, but in a kremnological sense that sentence seem to leave a wide room for interpretation.
        As in “aunt Millie regards that girl as daughter-in-law material” implies that the person making the statement disagrees strongly, and aunt Millie is a few cards short of a deck…

    3. pjay

      I thought Murray’s piece was very powerful. Not only did he provide an effective personal example of how bureaucratic functionaries can rationalize their own actions, but he also shows how much worse things have become since the *Thatcher* years. Today Britain’s acceptable “left” is Starmer. Ours is Harris. Opportunities for actual critique or resistance are closing off quickly. Pretty disheartening.

      1. Aurelien

        I was around at the same time, and in the Cold War it was quite common to have to write letters to the public defending government policies that you personally disagreed with. Indeed, it’s almost the definition of a neutral government machine. A decade later, he would have been writing similar letters to outraged Tory voters protesting that Mandela, the “terrorist” had been received in London with the honours of a head of state and been invited to dinner by the Queen. Support for the ANC (which I and many people I knew shared) was always a minority view in the country and in Parliament, and anti-Mandela hatred continued in the media and the political system for some time thereafter. In Thatcher’s favour, it must be said that the international HQ of the anti-apartheid movement was in London, and Thatcher was furious when the South Africans planted a bomb there and told them to back off. In the late 80s, she quietly agreed to contacts with the ANC starting, as long as they were unofficial and discreet.

        1. Glen

          Luckily when I was doing my duty for God and country during the Cold War, I was a USN technical grunt that was never put in a position like that. But in the USN’s defense, there was not much demand to have to do anything like that.

          Later on, I was in a very, very large aviation company, and it was made clear to us engineering dweebs (by kicking us out of the meetings) that upper management had the answer they wanted to hear, and anything else would be a potential career ending maneuver for those stupid enough to think that sound engineering judgement was more important than management’s bonus. I was kicked out of meetings for providing what was considered common sense engineering judgement. To this day, the Tech Fellows maintain informal courses on how to tell upper management the truth without getting clobbered. Other engineers, perhaps of lesser moral judgement sensed that telling upper management what they wanted to hear would advance their career so after a while upper management could pick and choose the engineers to advance, and always get the answers they wanted.

          Later on, upper management’s dictate to put their bonus (and stock buy backs to get their stock options) ahead of all other considerations resulted in events which have killed people and wrecked the reputation of the company. But they will suffer no ill fate, and have made a pile of cash so still, by their value system, they have done the right thing.

          All things being considered, you have given an example showing that even Thatcher could change her mind, just as Reagan could change his mind, and do things like raise taxes, and make important treaties with the USSR. But I see no such corrective mechanisms in the corporate world. Obama made it clear during the GFC that gross incompetence (or fraud/corruption) would not get a CEO dismissed from running a major bank, that regulation of these megagiants would remain basically non-existent. So if you think government operation does bad things, let me warn you that corporate governance is worse, far, far worse, and that those same corporations have very close ties to the government regulatory apparatus (or maybe called “the deep state”).

    4. Carla

      Combine “The State as arbiter of truth” with Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and you have the perfect description of the various non-profits and Equity Commisions infecting local governments with monetized grievances.

    5. Kouros

      What was chilling in Craig Murray article is the extensive vetting process that he was barely able to pass, with the ultimate test, after getting in, on those response letters concerning South Africa’s apartheid.

      Which shows that personnel is policy and that the wishful thinking expressed in many recent articles on foreign relations, that the US can return to some effective diplomacy.

      Triangulating this with Prof Michael Hudson recollections on how US has started to push the Idea and the policy and the people in the right place that Israel is US’s unsikable carrier at the edge of the Mediterana, place like a knife pointed at the hearts of Arab countries, it is clear that we are not going to have better times coming ahead but more and more higher winds…

  18. Psyched

    RE: It’s Time To Give Up Hope For A Better Climate & Get Heroic

    I am taking seeing this article as a spiritual sign for me since I wrote my senior American History thesis on John Collier and this is the first time I read his name in the thirty plus years since. He was actually kind of a eugenicist but that was the thing at the time. Many people had the thought of interbreeding Native Americans with Europeans to maybe change the culture but Collier wanted to preserve the Native American culture not for its’ own good, but to been curated as a model for other people to follow, a “democracy under glass” if you will. At the time I wrote the paper (late 1980s) I took a dim view of this idea, now my thoughts are the same as his. We need models for how will live, be that Muhammad, Jesus, The Buddha, Native Americans, Indigenous people, etc.

    As I have been traveling the county for the last four years, mostly homeless living in nature, I have seen first hand the drastic changes. The locals I talk to all see the changes, all being amped up in the last few years. I am someone who believes we cannot be certain death is the end of everything, not that I know what after death is like, so I prefer to not take chances and assume that my death will mean I am still experiencing some form of existence.

    But what the example we need to put forward and follow looks like I have no clear idea yet. It seems to look animistic (like Shinto) with the core being that the separation we perceive in the world is just a tool the mind uses to navigate and survive as an individual unit. And also that science is limited as far as solution go and to change the world we need to change peoples spirit. This is not a scientific problem, it is a spiritual one.

    I had a conversation with a friend who was so enamored by the SpaceX catch. I told him it did not impress me because it is very easy to do what we want to do, but very difficult to do what we do not want to do.

    Right now we have to do what we do not want to do.

    There are little and big things I am changing, from some simple hard things like not taking photographs anymore (to me it is an ecological waste; battery, storage, effort) to more difficult things like working to find local people who might share these thought to put pressure on our very small but economically powerful local government. The local government seems to think that building bike lanes will fix the climate (I say we already have bike lanes but there are just to many cars on them).

    It will take not only telling people to not be selfish, we need to be the non-selfishmess and look at our selfishness right in the face and feel the shame we should be feeling. Right now my room still looks like the inside of my van and I plan to keep it that way because I know I do not need more to live.

    I voted for the Green Party this year because I want a clear conscience. War is antithetical to the climate so anyone who is not for people is not a climate activist in my opinion.

    And thank you for the platform to to see this and say all of this.

    2. Harold

      My uncle recommended a book by John Collier to me when I was in high school many decades ago. I remember it very well.

  19. Wukchumni

    Having a swell time in Utah, really stunning sights and things to do-

    When I was growing up, perhaps my biggest fear was quicksand, which played prominently in my nightmares, as it was everywhere according to tv shows & movies, typically the leading cause of death as far as bad guys went, yet I’d never come across any by the time I was all growed up.

    I’m pleased to say that although I’ve yet to see any, the trailhead sign on the Buckskin Gulch trail informed me that yes indeedy there was quicksand occasionally, with the silver lining being that you’d only sink to your waist, no biggie.

    1. Carolinian

      Yes you always had to have a rescuer with a branch (or perhaps Lassie) to help pull you out.

      I too don’t believe I’ve ever encountered quicksand in real life.

    2. IM Doc

      That really was a very prominent trope in 1960s TV. How many times did Gilligan end up in quicksand? And it must have happened on 1 out of 4 episodes of the Ron Ely Tarzan show – either Tarzan or the bad guy…..

      There must have been some kind of cultural zeitgeist present at the time but totally gone today…Maybe it was just a cheap way to get rid of bad guys? In a way, the concept was used to great effect even as late as Star Trek – The Next Generation – they offed a main character, Tasha Yar, in a quicksand like plot device. I am going with the cheap excuse.

      I have hiked, climbed, skied, snowshoed all my life – I have never encountered any quicksand at all…….I have unfortunately encountered tree wells – as in pulling others out. That is the only comparable thing.

      1. skippy

        From a skiing perspective I found tree wells a sort of air quicksand … whoosh … sudden stop … extrication is an art form.

    4. Butch

      When the developers were mowing down the forest on the other side of the island off Riviera Bay in St.Pete, ca 1975, they were finally taking surge ponds and elevated foundations seriously. So the next step after mowing down all the trees, southern yellow pine that never made it to a lumber yard, was to dig a big ass borrow pit to raise the home elevations. After some of our typical Florida deluges, there’s be different mudholes in the bottom of the pit that we easily excitable and over adventurous middle teen idiot boys (mutually inclusive description?) declared were quicksand. Only you had to have someone sit on your shoulders to sink deeper than your waist. If you jumped off the 10′ overhanging bank, you might make it to your chest, but you’d pop back up to your waist like a bobber after the crab stole your bait. If you were just trudging along and stepped In it, slurp, down to your waist. You’d have to crawl out, your shoes gone forever. The next day it’d be glazed over and look solid. Daily experimentation proved different. I concluded that quicksand was another Hollywood myth…

  20. Donald Obama

    I’m having difficulty conveying how much disdain I have for Gary Kasporov and other Russian “liberals” like him. He’s calling for the killing of his own people.

  21. The Rev Kev

    “(5th LD) N. Korea decides to send around 10,000 soldiers to support Russia in Ukraine war: Seoul”

    Yep, this is totally true as it is coming from the South Koreans. And when those 10,000 North Koreans hit the lines, they will have an Iranian division on their left flank and a Chinese Division on their right with a Syrian Division behind them acting as a reserve. Yessiree, totally true and you can take that to the bank.

    As a guess as to what is going on, I would think that there are North Korean troops in far eastern Russia but they are there for training. The North Koreans have not fought a war in 70 years so perhaps there was a deal made where in exchange for military goods, that the Russians would train them up in modern warfare in case they are called to arms. Now that would be a worry for South Korea.

    1. timbers

      The uncut version of War of the Worlds (1950’s original version) actually includes scenes showing the Martians landed in Leningrad first as the Russians where asisting them, in the hope it would extend the Russian Empire. I jest of course.

      1. cfraenkel

        It’s only disinfo when the other side does it.

        This instance may be similar to PolarSocialist’s ‘aunt Millie’, above.

    3. rowlf

      I’m holding out for Iran-backed North Korean troops. There has to be some newsroom that gets their stories crossed.

  22. Carolinian

    Re North Carolina and renters here’s what a lawyer has to say

    “They’re required to provide a premises that is ‘habitable,’ and that includes having water and power,” Bartholomew said. “But if the lack of water is not (the landlords’) fault, the question is whether they can be liable for that breach. It’s a difficult question.”

    It doesn’t seem that difficult to me. The whole point of renting is that you are not on the hook if, say, the building burns down. Lack of habitability lets you off that hook and you shouldn’t have to hire an attorney to make the point.

    1. IMOR

      Warrant of habitability in Cali 40 years back required curative action by landlord before another dime of rent was paid. Nature and cost of repair to leaky or absent roofs, clean water supply, whatever to be taken up by ll, his partners, insurers, municipality, et al.

  23. The Rev Kev

    “Can We Fix American Diplomacy?’

    In a word, no. They are talking in this article about the great work that Antony Blinken is doing as SecState but they are wrong. By mine and other’s estimations, Blinken is probably the worst SecState that the US has ever had. His list of failures goes from Israel to the Ukraine and all around the world the US position is falling lower and lower. Countries are no longer willing to give the US the benefit of a doubt in their actions and it has sidelined itself in the entire Middle east except for Israel and even there that country will show zero gratitude to the US for all it has done. All on Blinken’s watch.

    A major problem is the sort of people that the State Department recruits. So if you hate China and can’t speak the language, you are in. You hate Russia and don’t know much about the place, you are in. Rabid about Iran though you can’t find it on a map? You are in. Expertise is not a requirement to work for the State Department and look at the Ambassadors. Rahm Emanuel is an Ambassador? Really? And if you are a party donations bundler you can get to be an Ambassador. That is how a director for the soapie Bold and the Beautiful got her Ambassadorship. Some Ambassadors act like Viceroys in their assigned country like the US Ambassador to Mexico and Georgia. Maybe they should just burn the whole State Department down and start again.

    1. DJG, Reality Czar

      Rev Kev: Speaking of the ambassador to Lebanon, Lisa Johnson, who just told the Lebanese to prepare for their future without Hezbollah:

      US ambassador to Lebanon [lifted from Wikipedia entry]
      On February 13, 2023, President Joe Biden nominated Johnson to be the next ambassador to Lebanon.[7] Hearings on her nomination were held before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 16, 2023. Her nomination was favorably reported to the Senate floor on June 1, 2023. She was confirmed by the Senate by voice vote on December 14, 2023.[8] She arrived in Lebanon on January 11, 2024.[9] She is awaiting the presentation of her credentials. Johnson speaks French and Portuguese.[2]

      Awaiting the presentation of her credentials and already interfering? How Madeleine Albright-ish. At least she speaks French, although Arabic seems to be beyond her grasp.

      And note the master’s degree from the National War College.

    2. Giovanni Barca

      The ambassador part is nothing new. Look at Lincoln’s appointments in that regard. But the political bag men were supposed to have competent pros working under them.

  24. The Rev Kev

    “Zelensky Once More Puts Allies Under Nuclear Shadow”

    Zelensky is getting desperate. He came out and said let us go into NATO right away so that you can fight the Russians or else we will build a nuke and start WW3 ourselves. No wonder Biden is ghosting him.

  25. Carolinian

    Re new/old plastic “cellulose diacetate”–photography fans know that the film used in our hobby and movie cameras was cellulose triacetate. I’m not sure how biodegradable this is but you could tear it with your fingers. In the early 20th movie and photog industry this was preceded by nitrocellulose made using fibers and nitric acid. Since the powder form was called “gun cotton” it burned and even exploded quite well–biodegradable.

    And btw if the new/old material needs wood pulp we here in SC can suggest a source…..

  26. Mark Gisleson

    Bringing in 100 Labour Zionists to doorknock sounds a lot like King George sending in Hessians to calm the revolt.

    They’ll have to keep these invaders out of sight. It’s one thing to use Spanish-speaking GOTV personnel but if they actually were Mexicans crossing the border to help, there would be a media freak out. This is no different.

    Truly gobsmacked. This decision was made by someone who has no clue what life is like outside their own personal bubble.

    1. hk

      I’ve always considered UK an enemy of United States and this adds another evidence.

      (UK can be a poodle and an enemy at the same time–they are poodles of the anti-American factions who wield undue influence in US, used as a tool in their agenda to subvert United States.)

    2. flora

      That’s my response, too. Let’s see, recruiting UK Labour operatives to set the colonists straight. You know, from the UK where there is no Bill of Rights, where they put Craig Murray in prison for speaking, where they’re putting regular people in jail for long prison terms for what the govt defines as hate speech tweets. Prison time for a tweet. Imagine.

      What imbeciles the current Dem estab are.

      (For more on their intelligence, see the idiocy of her using a SNL mockery character of a catholic school girl to show at the Al Smith dinner, which is a fund raiser for NY’s parochial schools. smh.)

        1. Giovanni Barca

          I heard several ads that reminded people that it was a matter of phblic record as to whether or not one cast a vote, then not so subtly threatened social approbation and ostracism if one did not cast a vote with a subtext of being outed, “doxxed,” I suppose. Menacingly totalitarian.

      3. flora

        adding, (going on too long): Hillary handled the Al Smith Dinner beautifully. She was funny , on point, and delivered good, roasting, comic barbs about her opponent. (Disclaimer, I was a Bernie supporter in 2016.) How could KH both miss the dinner and offer a cringy video in place of attending?

        Highlights: Hillary Clinton at Al Smith charity dinner

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN75cdCGHe4

        1. flora

          For those outside the US, the Al Smith Dinner speech banter includes two parts: comedic roasting barbs of one’s political opponent and comedic self-deprecating remarks. That’s what Hillary’s address to Mr. Bloomberg was, a self-deprecating comedic remark. It’s why everyone laughed. Is that even a thing in UK politics?

    3. Pat

      I have a weakness for King George in Hamilton. I know, but I do. And he was the first thing that came to my mind when I heard. I almost couldn’t pick. “You’ll Be Back” could work. But

      ”What Comes Next”

      Seemed the best analogy for Labour politicians and their failing PM advising American voters how to run their country.

        1. Pat

          He’s great comic relief all seven or so minutes.
          Biden is no George Washington but you could substitute either Harris or Trump for Adams and the his third and final song could be black humor for today.
          I Know Him

    3. curlydan

      She mentions lots of de-humanizers (Hilter, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) yet forgets to mention our modern, daily de-humanizer (both in speech and deathly tactics) in Netanyahu.

      1. Lefty Godot

        I think we’re already in the early stages of Holocaust Inc. (where one particular, terrible, genocidal slaughter was exalted above all the others of similar magnitude and made the source of countless novels, movies, and non-fiction tomes) turning into Atrocity Inc. (where the novels, movies, and non-fiction tomes will glorify brave IDF soldiers bombing hospitals and refugee camps and apartment blocks because Evil Muslims and This Land Is Ours!). Want to bet that the publishing houses and movie studios are already lining up proposals for this?

  29. bobert

    Here’s a show that provides a much more balanced take on near death experiences (NDEs) than the slanted Guardian article provided here a few days back. Two Oxford philosophers discuss both sides of the debate, including veridical accounts from medical professionals. About an hour long:

    Do Near Death Experiences evidence the Afterlife? – Dr Max Baker-Hytch

    In this episode I speak to Dr Max Baker-Hytch, who is a tuition fellow in philosophy at Oxford University. Our discussion centres around his recent paper on the evidence near death experiences (aka NDEs) provide for an afterlife available here: https://www.academia.edu/123701615/Gl…

    In this episode we discuss near death experiences along with some examples, substance dualism and idealism, plus paranormal perception, Bayesian reasoning, and, of course, the afterlife and religion. I hope you enjoy!

    https://youtu.be/Rwk9S2hS6YQ?si=XhgXVkmUZ4urh_zP

  30. Jason Boxman

    From No place to stay. Helene deepens housing crisis in Western NC.

    I explained to (my landlord) that the house is unlivable because we have no running water, no electricity, and no one will be living since we had lost these basic necessities,” a childcare worker who rents a house near UNC Asheville told Carolina Public Press.

    “There is no point in paying rent if all we can do is use the house for storage. What justification is there for charging rent after a natural disaster when you don’t have guaranteed amenities, electricity, water or the job that provides money for this company?”

    His landlord informed him that late fees would be waived, but it wasn’t enough to quell his tenant’s economic fears.

    Well, what would you expect? Housing isn’t a charity in America. We don’t believe in public housing. Housing isn’t considered a right.

    If it’s a small time landlord, this might ruin them. So what’s the solution?

    In the early stages of the ongoing Pandemic, there was federal money for this to save landlords, big and small. I doubt such a thing will be forthcoming here.

    Private provisioning of public goods is an unworkable approach.

  31. Jason Boxman

    The Ghosts of John Tanton (Pro Publica)

    Here’s where Tanton’s personal history becomes essential to understanding America’s recent resurgence of immigrant hate. Even as he built an environmental legacy, Tanton was privately thinking more and more not just about the size of the population but about how to preserve what he described as the distinctiveness of European people. In 1975, he wrote a paper titled “The Case for Passive Eugenics” and would later, in a letter to eugenicist Robert Graham, a millionaire businessman known for starting a sperm bank for geniuses, clarify his goals. “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids?” he asked. “More troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less?”

    Environmentalism, eugenics, nativism, and white supremacy. Fun times. 30 minute read.

    Of course today we COVID we have stochastic eugenics instead. I first came across the word stochastic when documenting how to use the Linux network traffic control interface, with one of the modules having a stochastic option for selecting which flows to throttle. Never thought I’d use that word in any other context. Sigh.

    1. Jason Boxman

      And these people are f**king retarded.

      Charlottesville, Virginia, Spencer tweeted, “Is not population control and reduction the obvious solution to the ravages of climate change?” In his Charlottesville manifesto, he wrote, “We have the potential to become nature’s steward or its destroyer.” When I spoke with Spencer recently, his views had only firmed. “If we bring everyone on the planet into an American lifestyle,” he said, “there first off might not be much planet left, and at the very least, the kind of degradation that might entail would be tremendous and horrifying.”

      The causality runs in the reverse. It stands to reason that American-style capitalism is destroying the planet, and what we need is less capitalism.

      In none of this is there any acknowledgement that capitalist exploitation of the planet might in any way be a cause of Climate, and thus arresting it might be a lever to apply. Instead, it’s zomg teh immigrants!

      This is truly a stupid timeline.

      1. Late Introvert

        The phrase I use to describe this cultural phenomonon is “privileged ass white people”.

  32. juno mas

    RE: Biotech Breakthrough

    Get back to me after the field testing. Without lignin you get no tree trunk/branches that can display more plant leaves to the sun; and use chlorophyl to grow the “tree”.

    With reduced lignin the plants will become more susceptible to chewing/munching insects and likely not persist in a natural environment.

    Get back to me when you can scale this technique to match chemical/oil consumption.

    1. Late Introvert

      I recently read that without white fungi that breakdown that same lignin, the world would be buried in wood. It is very durable stuff given to us by nature.

      I have fond memories of my Junior and Senior High School shop classes. I still have a table and stereo rack that I made back in the 70s of walnut.

    2. CA

      “Trees Engineered to Replace Fossil Fuels”

      High lignin trees and grasses are highly valuable for the environment and after reading this article I have no idea why lowering lignin content to use trees for readily burning fuel might be desirable. The Chinese are rather working on high lignin projects in dozens of poorer countries:

      https://english.news.cn/africa/20240813/0a9670f253d543bf842a8336811faf67/c.html

      August 13, 2024

      In Rwanda, diligent extension contributes to Juncao technology success
      By James Gashumba and Ji Li

      KIGALI — When Agnes Ayinkamiye first encountered Juncao mushroom technology in 2007, she was an agriculture science major just graduated from the University of Rwanda.

      She had yet to fathom how mushrooms could grow indoors.

      “At first, people, including myself, didn’t understand how mushrooms could be grown indoors. Even when they came, observed, and tasted them,” said Ayinkamiye, now manager of Rubirizi Station of Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Board in Kigali, the Rwandan capital.

      Juncao is a hybrid grass and an important multifunctional agricultural resource developed and used for mushroom farming in China. The innovation, invented by Lin Zhanxi from China’s Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University in the 1980s, has benefited more than 100 countries, including Rwanda, allowing smallholder farmers to grow mushrooms from dried, chopped grasses, without cutting down trees and damaging the environment.

      The grasses also help prevent soil erosion, a feature especially important to the mostly hilly Rwanda.

      After months of learning with Chinese experts, Ayinkamiye became one of the first Rwandan trainers to help others master the Juncao technology.

      Some have now turned mushroom growing into a business and their operations are expanding, said Ayinkamiye, 40. She later earned a master’s degree in project management from Mount Kenya University….

    3. juno mas

      So here’s a science description of the impacts of reducing lignin:

      “5. Relationship between Lignin Biosynthesis and Plant Stress Adaptation

      Plant cell wall is the first barrier against external hazards, one of the general reactions of plants under biotic and abiotic stresses is the accumulation of reactive oxygen species, accompanied by an increase in lignin accumulation [19,75,76]. Therefore, lignin metabolism has a certain relevance with plant disease resistance, insect resistance, the tolerance of drought, salt, heat, cold, heavy metals and other stresses [19].“

  33. Es s Ce Tera

    re: Why aren’t young people working? Funding the Future

    I suspect recruitment and talent agencies are reallyreally f*cking things up, which, combined with the employer contempt, is making a serious mess of matching people and talent to roles.

    A bit of anecdata – my entire (tech) career the roles have always come to me, and I’m also top talent in my niche, those in my field know me by name and know what I bring. Now, I’m happy in my current role, but a few years ago a competitor posting intrigued me so I thought I’d check it out.

    The first interview with the org’s talent recruiter – a) established that she didn’t know what she was looking at, was quite clueless that my resume checks all her boxes for the role, b) she suggested I do a “lateral move” to an entirely different role than what I applied for (??!!), c) which was also about two pay grades beneath my current role, so quite a step down.

    Huh, alright, obviously I was dealing with someone of limited ability but that’s ok, I happen to know the VP, did a bit of networking, got a second interview. This time they sat me with someone who had to be brought in from elsewhere, a different org, who admitted they didn’t know what the role entailed exactly and who wasn’t able to answer half my questions. Interesting.

    At this point I did one more interview, this time with the VP and SVP themseves which went a lot better, but the initial experience raised too many red flags and so I decided against.

    Now, just to add some additional context, I’ve had extensive professional interview and resume training – my resumes will always be at the top of the pile (because they’re customized to the role applied for, always), my interviews will always check every box because I’ve been taught, by experts, with extensive camera critique. I’ve also been taught to approach each application as a full time investigation requiring due diligence, research, networking, inside information, etc.

    I’m a heavyweight, an experienced interviewee, but as a hiring manager I’ve also conducted hundreds of interviews, am an experienced interviewer.

    SOOOOO, my conclusion, a recruiting agency or talent shop has to be REALLYREALLYREALLYREALLY bad to look at my resume, completely miss that I’m perfect for the role, that I check ALL of their boxes and then some, am an expert in the field, completely miss that I’m in the top 1% (my name alone would have had the hiring manager scrambing), completely miss that my current title should be a clue that I’m the effing competition, and on top of that to suggest that I apply for an unrelated role two pay grades beneath what I’m currently doing.

    If talent orgs and recruiting agencies are THIS bad then, yep, there is no hope for young people entering the workforce – they are better off starting their own gigs, making their own money, employment in larger orgs is no longer worth it.

    1. Jason Boxman

      Now, just to add some additional context, I’ve had extensive professional interview and resume training – my resumes will always be at the top of the pile (because they’re customized to the role applied for, always), my interviews will always check every box because I’ve been taught, by experts, with extensive camera critique. I’ve also been taught to approach each application as a full time investigation requiring due diligence, research, networking, inside information, etc.

      Neoliberalism as a tax on your time; no job, no food. What a horrible system this is, that you life quite literally depends on your ability to play this game, and play it better than anyone else for any given role. I’ve done my share of interviews as an applicant, and I’ve never much enjoyed it. My favorite question is probably “what interested you in this role”, because the response can never be “I need to eat to survive, thanks”.

      As to people entering tech today, good luck with that. It’s all mass-apply spam, with any open role getting hundreds of resumes within a few moments of posting. If you don’t have any experience, you’re screwed. Going to the right schools with the right internships probably helps a lot, but if you’re entirely self taught, best of luck to you.

      1. Es s Ce Tera

        It’s a tax on your life. You are alive, therefore you owe capitalism everything for your mere existence, capitalism owns you, your face, your eyes, everything you see and hear, the air you breathe, the ground you walk on, the food you eat, the space you’re displacing, is not yours, belongs to others. You are a pod, useful only for your energy, and if you’re not giving up that energy (I almost said “your energy”) you’re a waste. Your job is to be fruitful and to multiply, it is commanded.

        1. Mark Gisleson

          Only thing I ever used my paper cutter for was trimming down 8 1/2×11 resume paper to 8×10.

          The merit disconnect is near absolute. Even in entertainment talent seems secondary to who you know.

          Traditionally when HR steps up its role it means corporate is introducing another deflective layer of bureaucracy to protect them from possible discrimination litigation when the studio announces that all future parts will be played by displaced peoples flown in from Ireland.

        2. Kouros

          Nope, not “the air you breathe”, or not yet. But by god they would love that if it were possible.

    2. Screwball

      I spent 35 years in engineering of 3 large multinational corporations. I read your post as pointing the finger at the hiring process. I couldn’t agree more. Why? This is the result of the system they have created. It’s all about efficiency – think Deming. Administrative tasks are now treated like a manufacturing process (it is a process, but not in the same way).

      The result is a bunch of inept people running our companies. You go along to get along, or you don’t have a job. I never liked the fact I was expected I sit in a conference room full of people and lie through my teeth because I worked for some corporate worm who told me to do so. Or, take the blame for hundreds of thousand dollars worth of scrap that he was responsible for.

      If quality and doing things right were important, I would be working today. Like you, I have a little carve out in what I do. I’m retired because I had no choice. I probably only lasted that long because I was the guy who could fix things. Been out of the business for 6 years. Nobody is going to hire me, even though I could probably make them a bunch of money (I had that chance after I became too old for another company as was laid off). I know what I need for my department and I would sure know how to hire them. They don’t care, it’s a money/power thing. The world of Dilbert and Office Space.

      And then I think of the days when I was a mere puppy in the workplace and one of the old guys took me under their wing and said “hi kid, this is how it all works.” Thank you!

      We’ve lost that. So sad.

      1. spoofs desu

        What you guys are talking about is Bull shit Jobs–see link above under class warfare and watch David Greabers video.

    3. GrimUpNorth

      Inactivity rates for the 18 to 24 age group have been increasing for years. According to the ONS in 1992 it was 22% and in 2015 29%.

  34. none

    There’s a factoid(?) in the news that real wages are now higher than ever, surpassing 1970. What is really going on with this, does anyone know?

    1. Duke of Prunes

      Either someone is lying because the election is in a few weeks and the unwashed need further convincing to not believe their own experiences with the poor state of the economy or someone is using averages to their advantage – a couple Elons will raise the average wages of very large group.

        1. CA

          “Taking cost of living into account…”

          Surely so:

          The data posted are “real,” meaning that cost of living change is always taken in to account. So, since 1972 real earnings have increased by 4.5%. That is a 4.5% increase in real earnings in 52 years.

          2. John Wright

            Do real earnings account for the degradation of USA infrastructure such as roads, bridges and parks?

            And for other expenses that were government subsidized but are no longer?

            As I remember, in 1972, houses required fewer hours to earn, college education did not require a lot of debt to pay for, roads were less crowded, and medical expenses weren’t as prominent in people’s lives.

            Perhaps “real earnings” does not capture the loss of government services that people now need to compensate for?

      2. CA

        “Taking cost of living into account…”

        Surely so. Notice also the relative real earnings gain alongside productivity gain:

        https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1wt0F

        January 15, 2018

        Productivity for all Employees & Real Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, 1972-2018

        (Indexed to 1972)

  35. zach

    I read most of Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, it was a while ago but i recall him opening with “now, we’re not going to reduce this issue to a prescription for a UBI,” then about 3/4 of the way through it seemed like he was heading for exactly that so i didn’t finish it.

    Spoiler alert.

    I started on Debt: The First 5000 Years. That was more engaging but i put it down after about 50 pages because… Youtube and such… but it’s still on my bed table so one of these days.

    I was most pleased by his citation of Adam Smith’s observation about the transactionality of basic communication (cough ahem writtenlanguageistheworldsfirstfiatcurrency ahemcoughlolz).

    I lose steam reading things that affirm my conclusions about the way things work. But still, one of these days.

    1. sporble

      I just finished Graeber and Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” today. Eye-and-mind-opening. Recommended to anyone who might be interested in a “new history of humanity”.
      I greatly enjoyed “Debt”, too. Like “The Dawn of Everything”, it reveals that the things we’ve been taught weren’t always true. And: how those “untruths” have been used over time. (Hint: not always resulting in a benefit to the majority of us.)

    2. Es s Ce Tera

      Some people are unable to read Debt without attributing to Graeber beliefs he does not hold, things he did not say, simply because they can’t get past or beyond capitalism as such, cannot imagine a world without money, assume such a world has always existed since the dawn of time.

      Graeber shows this is not true. Historically, a system of debit and credit was in force for thousands of years and worked quite well even without money.

      Next he deals with where does the concept of owing, of debt, come from, where did it originate, and does it predate money? He concludes it does, comes from our sense of gratitude toward the gods, who we believe own our lives and require our ritual sacrifices to them in order to keep them happy, be kept alive. Graeber walks through the historical evidence of this.

      So debt predates currency, debit and credit predates currency, but when money came along (800 BC, if I recall) it merged with concept of debt, ruined everything to such an extent people ended up owning everything and everyone, so much so that rulers everywhere needed to introduce debt jubilees to keep this in check.

      Which kindasorta solved the problem, jubilee was a sacred religious obligation, until a certain Rabbi Hillel “found” a loophole, made a ruling to the effect that people who owe can opt out of jubilee, yahweh was very much mistaken about this whole jubilee business, didn’t really know what he was talking about. This ended the debt jubilee.

      So, and this is my takeaway, an idea might be to walk things back to a state before money, to pure debit and credit (e.g. just keep a running tab with everyone), or to a state before Hillel messed things up (e.g. bring back debt jubillee), or to uproot and eradicate the concept of debt as one which has inflicted untold damage on the human race (no need even for a running tab, the concept of owing is itself repulsive).

      Does that square with your short reading of Graeber’s Debt? :)

  36. Joe Well

    >>JD.com chickens out to masculinist “boy”cotts The East is Read

    Backlash to one of those comedians who said men supposedly have too much confidence, are mediocre, or whatever.

    Serious question: what can that kind of “discourse” conceivably accomplish? I’ve had to sit through this kind of thing my whole life and don’t see how it has or could make anything better.

    1. Geo

      Corporate brands are always touchy about the spokespersons they have representing them. We see that all the time and what some Pharmaceutical corporation chooses to do doesn’t really matter any more than the Bud Lite or Adidas controversies of late.

      But, the fact that so many men have “feelings of disrespect and a deep sense of betrayal” because some corporation aligned with a female comedian who made a dumb joke about mediocre men is a sign that these men are as fragile as all the idpol groups we always hear are cancelling comedy and free speech.

      As a guy I can laugh at such jokes and not feel it’s an attack on me personally. How would these men handle a female version of Andrew Dice Clay, Patrice O’Neal, or one of my favorites, Bill Hicks? Maybe they need to reflect on why they’re so sensitive and not get all emotional because some comedienne called them mediocre? Until then they are proving her joke accurate.

      2. Joe Well

        I had to Google those names you mentioned, since they are from so long ago I only had heard of Andrew Dice Clay in childhood (btw I would totally boycott any company that made him a spokesperson!).

        One of them died in 1994!

        The time of those men getting a mainstream media platform as opposed to some Youtube channel is (thankfully) in the distant past.

        I am in my 40s, not my 70s. I have heard some variant of men are awful as a flavor of the dominant discourse my entire adult life and before that. All that has served to do is water down the ideal of gender equality and feed into the idea that all feminism is man-hating (even Lady Gaga once said, I’m not a feminist! I love men!).

    2. Kouros

      Actually she was quite very funny. And pretty smart. Watch a couple of her skits, including the alleged one.

      But from the whole story, Chinese men don’t come out looking that well. More left for the rest of us, guys…

      1. Joe Well

        >>Chinese men don’t come out looking that well…

        This kind of thing, of making generalizations about a group of millions of people on the basis of innate characteristics, is something that society was abandoning for decades until it became “progressive” to bring it back. And so now we have moved “progressively” to the point where the ugliest xenophobic or racist stereotypes can be revived in polite company.

        1. Kouros

          You are right of course, when talking of broad strokes generalizations. However, when masses of men engage in boycots and demonizations of a woman for a bit of poke and fun – have you seen her skits? then we do have a problem, don’t we?

          The joke some years ago about a big Pacific NW city was that the characteristics of the median marigeable female was 35 and Chinese…

          Now S Korea is looking at doomsday scenarios with 1.1 natality. Why do you think that is?

  37. Mike Andronico

    Lina Khan vs Planet Fitness

    We found what always works is to call the credit card company, establish a nice rapport with the person answering and then tell them the charges are fraud.

    “We’ve been getting calls from this company, which I think are a scam, and now they have our credit card details. We are not paying this.”

    Use institutions against each other.

  39. kareninca

    I have a 83 y.o. friend who ended up in the hospital about a month ago because his wife spilled some staples and he stepped on them and his foot got infected. He was there for ten days and they ran countless tests, many of them likely unnecessary (I have seen that at that hospital in the past). He was also put on an IV antibiotic. He was then moved to a rehab center about ten days ago, with the IV drip still going. Then suddenly it disappeared. Its disappearance did not correspond to what we understood to be the planned duration of that treatment. I wonder if this is the IV shortage at work.

    He had diarrhea, no doubt due to the antibiotics. No-one, including his concierge doctor, suggested probiotics. I did, he’s taking them; it solved the problem. His concierge doctor remarked to him that his bloodwork level showed low levels of nutrients, and told him to “eat more.” I suggested a multi vitamin and protein drinks (which contain vitamins), and he is now consuming those, and a lot of miserable symptoms are suddenly receding, If I ever thought that a concierge doctor meant better care, this has definitely cured me of that false belief.

  40. CA

    “US investigates whether TSMC has really cut ties with Huawei”

    The point being that the United States has invented and adopted the rule that it can control or end the development of any other country simply by making sure no other country or company in another country can have economic relations with the people who are being sanctioned. This is the measure of global control the US is demanding.

    China will of course prevail. The Chinese who are traveling through space, just as they may wish to travel, can make, and already are making, all the chips necessary for development. The problem and danger being a US, set on controlling the 1.4 billion Chinese along with any number of other people the US simply thinks about controlling.

  42. steppenwolf fetchit

    Here is a posting on reddit called ” pay attention when you vote”. It is about the problems someone had when trying to get a “touchscreen” ballot-casting machine to accept the choices he/she was trying to make.
    ( In the wider scope, it illustrates an inherent problem with touchscreen voting machines. If I lived in a state with this system, I would not vote. I would keep staying registered to vote but I would not vote. Ballot-casting this digitized is automatically and inherently pre-fraudulated. At least I live in an opti-scan state).

    Anyway, here is the link.
    https://www.reddit.com/r/nashville/comments/1g7hd5n/pay_attention_when_you_vote/

  43. Stewart Andreason

    Worked hard out of school, moved up gaining skills, technical certifications, and larger paychecks. Exposed to toxic chemicals at the workplace, lack of safety regulations, and others overlooked. Got neurological damage at 25. Lost my health, lost my job, Spent years trying to reverse the damage and recover. White coat doctors were no help.

    Moved to a rural area here as health improved, trained new horses, ventured out only to have druggies get my horses killed or traumatized. Law enforcement says this is a lawless area, which means they don’t enforce much here. Prosecutor denied both my cases for speeding-car-vs-horse accidents on the road, said it had to be seen by an officer (when it happened) to be prosecuted. Then she killed herself 2 months later. That responding officer who tried to help, moved out of the area.
    Neighbor denies my injuries, openly tries to hurt me more, said so, Another person that doesn’t care.

    The America I grew up believing in, is nowhere to be found.
    Others I know with similar health conditions are ignored by society. If more kids become damaged, or become autistic earlier, the workforce you’re looking for, won’t exist.

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