The Strange Story of the Algorithm Meant to Solve Life, the Universe and Everything Scientific American
Climate
Double Blue Ocean Event 2025? Arctic News
How satellite data has proven climate change is a climate crisis Space.com
Study documents extinction of 610 bird species, including those from Hawaii Star Advertiser
Nobody loves Biden’s Western Solar Plan. But it’s what we’ve got LA Times
The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture Science. “Fungus-ant agriculture originated ~66 million years ago when the end-of-Cretaceous asteroid impact temporarily interrupted photosynthesis, causing global mass extinctions but favoring the proliferation of fungi.”
Hurricane Helene
‘The Death Toll Is Going to Be Tremendous’ The Atlantic
The shocking numbers behind Hurricane Helene’s path of destruction AP
I live in the County over from the BioLab fire that started because of the hurricane. Stephanie Ⓥoltolin, ThreadReader
Report from the field (KLG):
I drove cross country yesterday, a week after Hurricane Helene, on GA19 between Lumber City and Dublin. About 50 miles through utter devastation. No power; the traffic signals were dark and every intersection was a 4-way stop. Power and phone lines down. At least 20% of houses had major damage from wind or falling trees. In places all the trees were leaning at a 45-degree angle from the 60-90 mph wind. One pecan grove was completely flattened, which happened to many similar farms; pecans are a major cash crop for many in rural Georgia. Cotton crop will not be harvested. Soybeans looked just as damaged. In one place several large trucks were resting on their sides. Makeshift clotheslines on front porches. Some stores open on a cash basis only. Gas pumps powered by generators where they are available.
At least a half-dozen country church steeples on the ground. Two photographs attached. That is a downed utility pole in front of the brick Beulah Baptist Church. I stepped carefully around the wires on the ground Multiply by 1000 to get the full effect. It was impossible to stop in the worst places to take a picture because the shoulders of the road were covered in branches and logs that had been removed from the road. My favorite dogtrot house on this route was completely intact with, its cypress siding and new metal roof.
The Trump signs had been replaced. I have heard that FEMA is basically absent and that the state of Georgia is not much better. After previous storms the Georgia National Guard was out in force the next day. They must have been on another road. I counted utility maintenance trucks from at least 15 companies around the Southeastern United States. Those linemen are local heroes. Otherwise these very rural people have been mostly ignored, or so it seems.
Syndemics
DR Congo begins mpox vaccination campaign in bid to curb outbreak France24
China?
Chip war: China claims breakthrough in silicon photonics that could clear technical hurdle South China Morning Post
China set to fully control Portugal’s power grid amid Europe’s inertia Euractiv
Africa
Mercenary Politics: Algeria’s Response to Wagner in Mali RUSI
Quiboloy’s arrest – when self-proclaimed ‘Son of God’ plays politics Channel News Asia
Syraqistan
Israel pounds Lebanon in fierce wave of strikes FT
Israeli raids in Lebanon displace a quarter of the country’s population PBS
Moment huge explosion shakes Beirut BBC
* * * France’s Macron calls for a halt to arms sales to Israel, then does a U-turn Middle East Eye
Israel Targets French Gas Stations in Lebanon Amid Tensions with Macron FES News. Big if true.
* * * How Netanyahu is ‘running rings’ around Biden FT
Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel ProPublica
US official says Israel has not guaranteed it would not strike Iran’s nuclear facilities Anadolu Agency
* * * How Iran Built Up a Russian Air Defence Network: What Are Its Strengths and Limitations Today? Military Watch
* * * As war and religion rages, Israel’s secular elite contemplate a ‘silent departure’ Guardian
Health sector has a vital role in advocating for peace in Gaza and the Middle East Croakey
European Disunion
Why Europe’s leadership wants war Al Jazeera
National Lockstep? New Left Review. Belgium.
New Not-So-Cold War
Ukraine, Nato membership and the West Germany model FT
J.D. Vance’s Point of Departure for Peace in Ukraine The American Conservative
Ukraine left in security limbo with Zelensky U.S. trip results unclear WaPo
* * * SITREP 10/5/24: Post-Ugledar Landscape Unfurls into Dark Ukrainian Future Simplicius, Simplicius the Thinker
Russians attack warehouses and lorries in Odesa – photo Ukrainska Pravda
* * * Oligarchs from Putin’s entourage acquire land in occupied Crimea for large-scale construction projects Ukrainska Pravda
Ukraine seizes US$6 million in cash, jewellery from official accused of helping draft dodgers South China Morning Post
Largest Cypriot bank has closed about 20,000 Russian accounts since 2022 Ukrainska Pravda
* * * Notes on Ukraine in the Long Crisis Some Communist Study Group
Biden Administration
Joe Biden, Temporary King The American Conservative
After a day of legal whiplash, Biden’s student loan cancellation plan is put back on hold PBS
2024
Trump returns to failed assassination bid site, vows to fight ‘enemy within’ France24
The swing state battles that will win the US election FT
The Law of Presidential Retribution Bob Bauer, Lawfare
Clinton Legacy
Digital Watch
Why WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has gone ‘nuclear’ against tech investing giant Silver Lake CNBC
Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’ The Verge
Assange
A Very Peculiar Triumph Craig Murray
The Final Frontier
Centaur, an icy body in space, is shooting multiple jets of hot gas. What’s going on? WION
The 420
An undulating thrill Aeon
Class Warfare
‘They’re just mad’: Boeing strikers prepare for long haul FT
A National Movement to Organize Amazon Takes Off Labor Notes
Here’s How Loper Bright is Stripping Away Workers’ Rights On Labor
How to win a Nobel prize (2024) and Majority of mathematicians hail from just 24 scientific ‘families’ Nature (2016)
Identities, Partly Relational Concepts 3 Quarks Daily
Antidote du jour (Tony Hisgett):
Bonus antidote:
— trailcam (@Trail_Cams) October 5, 2024
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
252 comments
Comments are closed.
“France’s Macron calls for a halt to arms sales to Israel, then does a U-turn”
That’s just Macron being Macron. He flips and flops on his positions from day to day and it seems that the only thing that Macron is invested in is Macron himself. As a leader his opinions can be dismissed.
What about as an individual, not a leader?
I see him as a somewhat tragic figure in the sense that he comes so close to showing actual leadership but then he shrinks.
Like the French troops he was going to send to Ukraine- milk carton time.
On Israel if Macron stuck to his initial position he might find that courage begets more courage. Maybe not Germany but other EU countries like the Dutch or the Spaniards would rise up, too.
But no. We live in such a terrible time.
Mathematics notoriety: the serious mathematicians I worked with in academia were far more interested in their Erdős number – the mathematical equivalent of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, except the “key person” is a genius and not an actor who now sells mobile phone contracts every family blogging 30 seconds on UK TV/YouTube.
The Wikipedia article as of this date gives a good summary of this brilliant mathematician and why some people in this field boast about how low their number is. I have a value of 3, which apparently is the median value for winners of the top prize in mathematics, the Fields medal. I’m not going to boast – I got lucky by getting to work with one of the gods of Mathematical Psychology between around 2003 and 2017. The guy was one Anthony A J Marley (who collaborated with one of the collaborators of Erdős and thus got an Erdős score of 2 (Erdős himself of course provides the zero on the scale).
PS an anecdote you may or may not be interested in on the subject of mathematics “that did stuff”: Tony’s PhD supervisor (and 50 year collaborator) was Duncan Luce, who was part of a cohort of highly skilled mathematicians who directly or indirectly did gruntwork for the Manhatten Project.
When the USA came scouting for “the next generation” of super-mathmos to the UK in the 1960s, Tony, who turned down a scholarship to Oxbridge in favour of getting his BSc from Birmingham (because “I wouldn’t have fit in, being a farmer’s son”), got rapidly hoovered up to UPenn and ultimately the top west coast places when the head of the British Civil Service in Whitehall told him privately “go with the yanks….we can’t do anything for you in this country”.
Tony had brilliant anecdotes, one a little bit rude about a certain winner of the “Nobel” Prize in Economics that makes me laugh to this day. RIP Tony.
If understand this correctly I would have a 2? I lived with a cal Berkeley professor who worked on the manhatten project at the same time as Erdos.
Unfortunately it is only on peer-reviewed publications. So unless you CO-AUTHORED a paper with someone who CO-AUTHORED a paper with Erdős you are not a 2. Sorry.
The Manhatten thing is also entirely different from Erdős. The Manhatten stuff I referred to was just an interesting(?) side note on the application of mathematics. Tony’s supervisor was part of teams that did the legwork that made sure of stuff like whether the Enola Gay could physically (in theory) escape the blast given their equations on bomb yield etc….
Used to be a 2. in the early 70’s (just after PhD)I ended up sharing a dorm room at an AMS summer meeting with Frank Harary He asked what my thesis was about. It proved there are only finitely many distinct X’s which have property Y.
He asked what integers can occur as the number of X’s. I conjectured that any integer could occur and described a set of examples
He said something on the order of: there is an obscure journal nagging me for a paper, write this up and I will send it in. I did and have a joint paper with Harary
maybe they decided it was not peer reviewed or some such because I am not on the list now
I confess I’ve never done a serious search for a fully interactive site where you enter your name and it gives you your number. After talking with Tony I just found the “main” site that lists all authors with a number up to and including 2: due to the passage of time it requires little or no maintenance these days (most people with a 2 score are over 100 years old or dead and there’s just a sprinking of younger “2s”) and there are only a hundred or so people with a score of 2.
So I double checked Tony was listed there. Then I knew I’m a 3. However, the fact it wasn’t updated much might explain some people falling down the cracks like you. It’d be a shame if you can’t officially quote being a 2. It’s quite an honour, albeit obscure one!
Have you published with the individual? That’s the requirement. I almost got an Erdos number myself, but never got around to finishing the paper with the person who had… :(
I do have a median Kevin Bacon number! Fun little theatrical excursion for this egghead.
Just checked some numbers… Heh heh heh
My Bacon # is 3 and my Erdos # is 6.
Bacon-Erdos number 9. Cool Beans.
I have a paper with a 3 so I’m a 4. No idea what my Bacon is.
Much thanks to our own KLG for the reporting on the ground there in Georgia. Where I am, here in South Carolina has been impacted so tremendously, so it’s been more simple to focus on where I know as well as who I know. Something is not right, at all, with the scenario there in Georgia being described.
Hoo, then I read up on the BioLabs factory issues, haven’t been that way in a long while but remember Conyers is situated on I-20. It’s like a double down on apocalyptic scenes for these southern states. Don’t breathe the air and don’t believe the government, possibly?
Some of the tree blowdowns are astonishing. You can have a group of large trees lying like a pile of sticks. It all seems to depend on terrain and how much wind block.
The tropical trees in Florida have evolved to handle this sort of thing. Ours haven’t.
Locally to Spartanburg I went on a short walk on one of the local hiking trails. I could see damage and yes a few large trees had been felled, hard to determine on this one where the water flow has occurred. It’s pretty basic downhill into a somewhat small collection pond.
Hard to call it a trail when it’s paved but is what it is.
I second that – thank you much.
-$100 million in federal funds released for North Carolina to rebuild roads, bridges
That will buy maybe four or five bridges??
Meanwhile, BidenHarris are shoveling tranches of billions at Ukraine. Up to what 150 billion so far? Then 650 million handed to foreigners walking into our country?
Another 100 billion for Israel?
The revolution won’t be televised, it’s happening in the seething rage of Americans.
Guillotines will be considered humane when this shit comes down.
Last Monday morning in Atlanta was nasty. Coming up to the perimeter from the south there was a haze over Atlanta from a temperature inversion that kept the fumes from the BioLabs facility on the ground. The chlorine smell was very strong, irritated the eyes and was hard to breathe. Going inside a building there was still an odor. By about 930am the fumes had shifted north. Schools kept students indoors.
Keep in mind south Atlanta is 35 miles west of the incident.
Hoo boy, Tropical Store Milton is strengthening in the Gulf of Mexico. Major hurricane threat to West Florida. Will FEMA even have enough money on hand to deal with this one?
On the bright side, maybe all those FEMA personnel will abandon that hotel that they booked out for themselves thus freeing it up for locals made homeless by the destruction of their homes in that hurricane
I saw the thread discussing FEMA yesterday, and missed it in time to make a worthwhile comment, so I will share some info that some may find informing, given the current narratives being found on twitter.
I am currently involved with the disaster response at the county leadership level from hurricane Debby in northern Appalachia. The scale is not comparable to Helene, of course, but I have been involved with FEMA and other federal, state, and local agencies.
Spoiler- I do not believe the claims being made about FEMA. FEMA does not actually direct disaster response. This is done at the state and county level. FEMA has some resources it can bring to bear immediately if a state declares a disaster (this is the $750 payment people receive) and they can provide funding to hire contractors for emergency shelters (tents) and for hotels. Once a federal disaster is declared a clock starts for them (this is why fed disasters sometimes take a while to be declared- a preliminary inventory of damage must be made so that FEMA and other agencies can marshal funding, personnel, and other resources). Once the declaration is made, FEMA is mandated to take certain actions so many hours, days, etc from the time of the declaration.
When Debby hit my county, the damage, although significantly less than the damage Helene caused, was unprecedented. FEMA sent a team of six people to my county- six. I have no doubt that FEMA sent more people to the counties damaged by Helene due to the scale, but I do not believe for a minute that they sent an army of people to order everyone around- that is not what they do. FEMA will tour the area with local leadership (state and county emergency coordinators, state DOT people, municipal and township supervisors- along with reps from other agencies that can potentially provide assistance. They call this a “tiger team” this is how I was asked to participate in the response here- I work for one such agency and I have a pretty serious civil engineering/project management background), and after the tour if they are anecdotally convinced they can hit the targets they need to document to provide aid, FEMA then explains how to aggregate and inventory damage costs. State, county, and local managers, as well as private property owners then report damage estimates, and FEMA totals these up. Separately, both public and private property cost estimates are tallied up, and once they cross a threshold on both a county and state per capita basis, FEMA claims can move forward. Once this threshold is crossed, people can then submit claims for financial payouts from FEMA and FEMA determines eligibility and amounts. Sometimes FEMA facilitates estimates, but they mainly utilize contractors for this. This is what FEMA does. FEMA does not order people around, or forbid them from doing work. FEMA is not regulatory. If people are being told not to do certain things, these orders are coming from state and local agencies (with the only likely exception I can think of being aircraft). State agencies regulate waterways, and tend to be very touchy about driving heavy equipment into streams, and for most lay people, the process for gaining permission to do this is poorly understood. In my county there are likely less than a dozen people that understand this process (myself being one), and everyone else operates on rumor and ignorance. In the case of my state- these regulatory agencies put out the word that they knew it was an emergency, and to do what needed to be done, but to still begin the approval process even if it was after the fact so that they could keep track of work performed and potential effects (Very few people have a grasp of watershed hydraulics). Even in this permissive environment- rumors circulated that people were getting in trouble for doing work (this did NOT and has not occurred). I do not know how things work in the Carolinas, but I know how they work in PA and NY, so I mention this to give people something of an understanding of how rules that are normally quite rigid are in all likelihood completely suspended by regulatory agencies down there. I seriously doubt people are being prevented by anyone from helping their communities (with the exception of air traffic- I can see that). I can also see agencies preventing OUTSIDE volunteers lacking proper equipment, credentials, or verifiable disaster experience from entering areas that are already in crisis- sanitation and housing likely being the biggest concerns behind this. No way in hell are they preventing people who are already in those communities from helping one another. There is also probably some concern (legitimate or not) about scammers soaking up donations- this would be why the people in charge are trying to steer donations to verified entities that are actually equipped to distribute it.
You can complain that FEMA is under-resourced, or that it’s criteria for payments are deeply inadequate and flawed, but that is the fault of congress and whatever presidential admin signed the legislation under which FEMA operates into law, along with the relevant funding appropriations. My experience with FEMA personnel was that as individuals they deeply cared about everyone in the community undergoing crisis, and they worked very diligently to provide whatever help the could within the rules under which they are mandated to operate. Nor were they AT ALL territorial. If they knew of any other groups or agencies providing aid under any circumstance, they freely shared whatever information they had.
Now- as to what I have seen on twitter, I would say that some of this is due to a lack of communication infrastructure in the region- nature abhors a vacuum, and the rumor mill is turning (we experienced this in my area also). It also appears that someone is behind a concentrated social media campaign, because of you look at the accounts sharing this narrative (FEMA is doing whatever terrible thing) they are disproportionately large accounts- many with hundreds of thousands of followers. It looks to me like someone organized these accounts in order to discredit FEMA. As to why, I do not know, but I would suspect to discredit the current administration (as if they needed further discrediting), or possibly to shift more disaster response into the private sector. I don’t know.
I will say that this is going to have a very negative effect upon the people affected by this disaster. This narrative will prevent people from reporting damage to, and later making claims for assistance to FEMA and other agencies due to distrust. We already had problems here- the government is ALWAYS going to provide less funding than is needed, so it is extremely important for people to catalog and report ALL damage to push the appropriation for a particular disaster event as high as possible, and in my area, many people did report because “the family they know down the street had it far worse”- Such sentiments are understandable, but they are actively harmful to that family down the street. There is no requirement that a person reporting damage must then follow up with filing a claim. So, in addition to this issue, which I have no doubt they are also seeing down there, the problem is now going to be compounded by distrust.
Again- the resources are going to be grossly inadequate, but they are better than nothing, and this narrative is going to make things worse for everyone down there. I have no doubt that there are isolated incidents of local officials (whether due to exhaustion or just being a$$holes) exceeding their authority, that are likely being highly publicized, but I absolutely refused to believe this is widespread. The event we just experienced caused cooperation and goodwill in my county unlike anything I have ever seen or experienced, which is very different than what I would have expected (due to past media indoctrination, no doubt). Anyway, this post got incredibly long, so I will shut up now. I hope people find it informative, to some degree.
Thanks for this, it’s very clarifying. There is so much flak out there it’s hard to know what to believe. I can definitely believe someone(s) is using the catastrophe to sow distrust for political ends.
Thanks. Nothing like having in the field experience to balance against rumors and agenda-driven reporting.
Something to add that always needs to be noted is this – when it comes to disaster aid wealthy areas will always get more aid than will poor areas. The majority of people living in the southern Appalachians are not at all wealthy, so the aid they will get will certainly be far less than people living in places such as the Oakland hills, Malibu, Lake Tahoe, and the Outer Banks. It’s politics. Them that already has gets.
Great comment, thank you. Your common sense is needed on TikTok. Scrolling through a lot of TikTok content on Hurricane Helene, I couldn’t help but notice how quick some were to politicize the tragedy. The idea that such political commentary might be coordinated is interesting and certainly possible; on the other hand, we are in the final weeks before the election, so maybe that’s where a lot of people’s minds are anyway.
Thanks! This is very helpful!
Meshes with similar statements I read from a smart guy I was following on his blog, that worked for a federal agency and provided a comparison btw federal agencies and state and county peers, which he contented where a bit parochical and captured by local interest, whatever that entails…
As someone who is a disaster volunteer (in a minor role) with an agency that works with FEMA, and who has taken several FEMA training courses*, this fits. FEMA does not have a law enforcement function, and is not in the business of ordering people around, unlike other agencies of their Department. (They may have had Auxiliary Police back in the Cold War, but that was back when what was FEMA was the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, and even then, they did not exercise day-to-day control.)
I can think there may be some sheriff’s and other local officials who may not want help for reasons of corruption or ideology. I also know there are people who are more than willing to lie if necessary to embarrass the administration. (Of course, in some cases, they don’t have to lie. And in some cases, they could tell the truth to embarrass the administration, but since they agree with what they are doing, they won’t.)
* One thing FEMA does try and force is use of the Incident Management System. It originated during fires out in California, and is basically a code/system for units from various organizations, capacities, and locations to be able to work together. It is less field training or what to do in the event of X disaster than how to organize. For example, you have an incident commander who directs operations, and you have command staff, who work with him. The Operations Section handles the response. The Planning Section handles the information on the incident itself. The Logistics Section deals with the materials needed, from food to firefighting gear to aviation fuel, while the Finance/Administration Section handles the cost.
There are laws requiring that the response use ICS standards to receive Federal funding, which is why I say people are “forced” to use it.
If you have ever read Scott Ritter’s “Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement”, he does go into a brief discussion of the Incident Command System, and uses it as a positive example for how to run things.
Many of the courses are free and can be taken online. (Some do cost small amounts, and must be taken in person.)
The wikipedia article has some examples of how it’s used.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_Command_System
That sort of organizational complexity simply does not fit with how most people’s brains work. So these organizations attract people who can remember a bunch of acronyms and are good at filling out forms, but alienate people who are strictly good at and willing to do direct service if something happens. I am seeing this in the local prep group I volunteer with; we are given a zillion acronyms but if something actually happens it will be a free for all since no-one can cope with moronic acronyms and paperwork.
My fellow volunteer for my area is in her late 70s and can’t consistently remember the number of our area (and that matters). She just wrote up a terribly written questionnaire for residents, and I could revise it, but instead I am going to leave it in its terrible state, so that people will know what a lame arrangement they are dealing with.
This is inconsistent with what I remember from Katrina. In that case FEMA officials were hiring trucks full of ice, buying trucks full of bottled water, hiring mobile homes for emergency shelter, opening kitchens, directly managing rescue efforts. Was I misinformed, or did I just misunderstand what I was reading, or has FEMA been changed?
But then this is the “bystander problem,” right? People in general believe that if there is a real disaster, like this one, the Feds will come in and help right away. But you’re saying that isn’t true (and from the anecdotes, it is not true). Everyone would be much better off if people were told the truth directly and firmly, which is that we are on our own, with our neighbors and relatives and churches in the first days after a disaster, with some help from a necessarily extremely limited number of state and county workers.
I am part of a volunteer emergency prep group in my neighborhood, and we have been told just that – that we will be on our own in the first days after a disaster. Don’t count on FEMA or anyone else. I appreciated the honesty and it has helped me in my preparations. From what you are saying FEMA’s role does not at all match the public perception of FEMA’s role, and FEMA should rectify that so that people can prepare. Although actually I think most rural people already know that no-one from the federal government is coming to help in a relevant time frame.
No disagreement. I’m a prepper of the leftwing variety, and people should always be ready to act to assist their community, both collectively and as an individual, and we ARE on our own in the beginning, and increasingly in the long term as well. That said, FEMA and other agencies to provide financial, and in some cases (mainly for public infrastructure) engineering assistance as well. It will not make people whole, but something is better than nothing, and people should not be discouraged from asking for whatever they can get (and yes, I know that the asking process is problematic). There are some lifts that we cannot do as a community (and that is mainly the fault of the capitalist system, but for now, that is what we are stuck with) and people should pull resources from wherever they can find them, including FEMA, etc.
Regardless- my point with the post was to dispel the BS that people were saying about FEMAs authoritarian actions, not to convince anyone that FEMA is going to bring about kumbaya good times.
What you are describing may be a correct description of what FEMA actually does, but it does not match what FEMA says on its website:
“What We Do
Through our Logistics Management Directorate, we deliver critical commodities and manufactured housing units following disasters. There are eight distribution centers in the United States and OCONUS strategically located to provide rapid support.
Through our Recovery Directorate, we provide assistance to communities overwhelmed by acts of terrorism, natural disasters or other emergencies.
Through our Response Directorate, we provide the core, coordinated federal operational response capability needed to save and sustain lives, minimize suffering and protect property in a timely and effective manner in communities that become overwhelmed by natural disasters, acts of terrorism or other emergencies.
Through our Field Operations Directorate, we ensure the operational readiness of FEMA’s incident workforce and coordinate the federal interagency for recovery to achieve timely, effective and integrated field operations that support the whole community across all mission areas.”
(https://www.fema.gov/about/offices/response-recovery)
Anyone reading their website, and looking at the assistance they are providing in NC, would say that they were liars, and causing people to be in a worse position due to reasonably relying on their lies.
Thanks!
I remember in July 1992, the company put us, new arrivals, up in a Residence Inn for a couple of months in Arcadia , a North Eastern rich suburb of Los Angeles. Many of the guests I met at the complimentary Happy Hour were FEMA workers. They were there to provide assistance post the riots after the Rodney King beating cops acquittal.
Even as a newcomer i wondered why they were staying here instead of downtown at least.
Available lodging downtown at that time was SRO or very luxurious, neither were available to govt workers.
(I was a Federal disaster assistance worker for Rodney King Riots)
Arcadia is prosperous middle class, far from “rich”.
Makes you wish they sought to promote the general welfare, instead of promoting the military-industrial complex!
And it looks like Russia and Iran are trying the Reagan strategy of bankrupting their opponents with increased military spending, as disasters plague the homeland. What goes around comes around.
Ventusky rainfall projection Wednesday at 11 am.
Congress hasn’t appropriated funds for FEMA disaster relief for FY 2025.
“Congress passed a three-month stopgap last week to prevent government funding from lapsing ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline to avert a shutdown. Notably missing from the bipartisan agreement, which was passed a day before Helene made landfall in Florida, was billions of dollars in additional funding for FEMA’s disaster relief fund (DRF).
Appropriators said the deal instead allows for the agency to use the fund’s resources faster for disaster response for the duration of the stopgap, allowing FEMA access to draw from roughly $20 billion starting Oct. 1. But funding negotiators on both sides have acknowledged the need for more resources in the months ahead.“
https://thehill.com/business/budget/4910588-hurricane-helene-congress-disaster-funding/
Helene sounded very much as a high society hobnober, seldom spending time with lessers, and Milton has the feel of a nearsided accountant who doesn’t get out much.
I propose we have the right to rename these hurricanes as it becomes evident what bad arses they are.
Helene becomes Xena Destruction and the jury is still out regarding Milton.
Fittingly, sbe punches down. Typical PMC.
“How to win a Nobel prize”
So I was reading this article when it reminded me in it that there are no posthumous Noble Prizes which is a great shame. Maybe what they should do is have an unofficial Nobel Prize that can only be awarded posthumously to recognize those scientists who through ill luck never lived long enough to receive an award. Some people will protest that this would be only a made up prize but so what? The “Nobel Prize” in economics is only a made up prize by a Swedish bank and people don’t have a problem with that. This being the case, I would like to nominate Rosalind Franklin as a nominee who tragically died at 37 of ovarian cancer but who would in the course of events have been awarded a regualr Nobel Prize-
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/rosalind-franklin-a-crucial-contribution-6538012/
The slightly rude joke endemic in the math psych community is that one winner of the “Economics” *ahem* Nobel ALLEGEDLY only got it because his co-author died before they could award it to HIM.
I leave it to the reader to work out who I am referring to. Hint, what he got the prize for is not what he became “famous for to the average person in the street”. (And what he is famous for was recently shown to be utter rubbish via a link on this very site.)
Plus the theory that got the prize has been comprehensively debunked by multiple independent groups of researchers across mathematics and the social sciences. So, yes, Rev Kev, they totally should be giving the prize to people posthumously.
Perhaps there should be a retractions committee to rededicate the Nobel prizes from the wrong people to the right people?
The rules would be that once you are dead, the prize remains hours only while your work lives; if your work dies, the prize goes to him whose work killed it, whether or not they are alive. That wouldn’t save Rosalind Franklin but it would change a lot if Economics prizes. :-)
Thinking about it, I cannot name any obviously wrong physics or chemistry prizes but scepticism suggests there must be some. Medicine I cannot name any either but I am convinced a priori there are some.
The peace prize is always awarded in irony so there’s no point starting.
Yeah the “Economics” and Peace prizes are indeed a barrel of laughs.
There are fewer than 5 winners of the “Economics Nobel” that I think deserve recognition.
Here’s a Nobel oopsie for Medicine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Fibiger
There are others, I’m pretty sure.
you just made an excellent argument for revoking the prize posthumously
perhaps akin to scientific publications withdrawing previously published work or newspapers publishing retractions.
of course, I am still waiting on Wikipedia to work out how to regulate edits of rubbish . . .
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-two-friends-who-changed-how-we-think-about-how-we-think
???
“I leave it to the reader to work out who I am referring to…”
Forgive me, but assigning readers homework mysteries is unfair and self-defeating.
Amos Tversky. Well known in econ/psych/cog sci circles, but probably not known outside academia.
> So I was reading this article when it reminded me in it that there are no posthumous Noble Prizes which is a great shame.
Well, the Noble prize in engineering is limited to people 35 years and younger, which means they are likely to be alive.
China set to fully control Portugal’s power grid amid Europe’s inertia Euractiv
So, Euractiv is tearing it’s hair out on the news that China has invested heavily on the Portuguese grid which in turn was favoured by lack of European investments and the austerity drive in the EU. Good to know.
With the economy of the EU heading down, the EU may not have the surplus funds to invest in such projects as all they want to do is invest in the MIC instead. And, taking a guess here, I would suppose that Portugal might be a good investment as you never really hear of them doing crazy stuff. Wikipedia says ‘In 2018 electricity was generated by 23% hydroelectricity, 26% natural gas, 22% wind, 20% coal, 5% biomass, 2% solar and 2% oil.’ so it sounds like they have not put all their energy eggs in the one basket-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Portugal
With the economy of the EU heading down, the EU may not have the surplus funds to invest in such projects as all they want to do is invest in the MIC instead:
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/April/weo-report?c=223,924,132,134,534,536,158,186,112,111,&s=NID_NGDP,NGSD_NGDP,&sy=1980&ey=2023&ssm=0&scsm=1&scc=0&ssd=1&ssc=0&sic=0&sort=country&ds=.&br=1
April 15, 2024
Total Investment as a percent of GDP, 2023
China ( 42.1)
European Union ( 23.2)
United States ( 21.3)
China invests more than twice the portion of GDP that either Spain or Portugal invest, and a result is a far more advanced Chinese energy grid. The point is that Spain and Portugal should be especially open to Chinese energy infrastructure investment, but such Chinese investment will be fought by the United States and NATO:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1va5a
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for Spain and Portugal, 1977-2023
(Indexed to 1977)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1va65
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China, Spain and Portugal, 1977-2023
(Indexed to 1977)
The funny thing is that it was the EU that forced Portugal to privatise its grid and they were quite happy with it being Chinese owned before.
Also, that’s from 2018.
That’s it. Because privatization & austerity as per the link i left above. The hen-house is becoming more noisy with the day.
HandsOffUhuru.org/letters is conducting a campaign for letters to the judge requesting leniency for the 3 Uhuru leaders that were simultaneously convicted and acquitted of being Russian agents. I encourage those of you who have been following this Kafkaesque case to write on their behalf. The website has sample letters and bios to flesh out your letters. Letters submitted directly through the link by October 15 will be submitted first to the defense attorneys for vetting.
I found this bizarre DOJ press release helpful, although it is emphasized that these letters are strictly for the purpose of requesting leniency in sentencing; comments on the verdict itself, which will be appealed, are irrelevant as the verdict is now beyond this judge’s control.
Just a personal note on my nearly year-long experience with cancer treatment. On Tuesday, I’m slated to have what should be my last of four surgeries that I’ve received in an attempt to control the three independent tumors in me that were discovered first by colonoscopy, then by the PSA prostate test, and finally the CT and PET scans along with a blood test for normetanephrine that uncovered the pheochromocytoma removed along with my right adrenal in July.
This surgery will take out what remains of my rear end and re-adjust the colostomy that was done last December. The adrenalectomy was more dangerous because the tumor raises blood pressure, especially during a surgical procedure. (BP reached a high of 233/111 and a low of 76/36 in that surgery.) But this rectal surgery will be hard to recover from. Infection is a big issue, and the pre-surgery preparation, with exercise, special diet, flushing out, strong antibiotics, is daunting and anxiety-inducing. It will require many hours on the table, five to seven days in the hospital, and weeks of recovering at home.
The good news is that all this should buy me an amount of time that’s not insignificant to me. Yet another CT scan was done 10 days ago that pronounced, “No evidence of new metastatic disease.” When I’m finished with this, I’ll still be under treatment to control the prostate cancer which entails an injection every three months and four pills a day to achieve chemical castration. That should be good for 2-3 years before the prostate cancer learns to grown without testosterone, and I’ll take that. All this is bonus after my “three score and ten.”
It’s been quite a year, with the last six months seeing both my spouse and me in the ER minutes away from death. I’ve been impressed by the expertise, skill and technical capabilities of the doctors I’ve had while at times being appalled by the bureaucracy and philosophy underlying the medical industry. None of this treatment would have happened without LBJ’s good old Medicare, and I’m grateful for that, even though I was not a fan of Lyndon. An improved, completed version of Medicare for everyone, especially children, would be the humane and civilized thing for this country to implement, but it’s obvious we’re moving away from that. Before long, I wonder if such sophisticated medical treatment will be available to anyone outside the rich. Already, it’s not available as a practical matter in places like those hit hardest by Hellene with the closure of hospitals in rural areas. I’m aware of my privilege living in a city that’s a major medical center.
I’ve appreciated the support I’ve received from the commentariat here. The kind words have meant a lot. Our country is learning the hard way that it’s impossible to get by on just individual grit and determination. It takes a community, and this one has been an important source of support for me in many ways. We have to hang together, etc. Be careful out there.
im cooking today.
i’ll light that fire in your honor, HMP.
Thinking of you, mate.
My bout with cancer at the other end two years ago was difficult but nothing compared to yours. I do use my radiation mask to scare medical students, though. All of us are sending healing energy to you! You are not alone, HMP!
You’re a very brave man to be able to deal with this and maintain. I wish you the best possible outcome and good luck for the surgery. Have you in my prayers and will think of you while watching the games today.
Now THIS is what industrial society should be for. Modern medicine is indistinguishable from alchemy to the layperson.
Keep on truckin’ Henry :)
A spot of good news then. You may very well have “the legs” to see how this season finale wraps up.
Esteemed Henry Moon Pie: All the best to you as you go under the knife again. Much praise to you for your steadfastness and willingness to remain clear-eyed about your situation. Regards to your family.
And I see here in your comment why you have influenced my thinking (there’s always a selfish angle, eh): Your second-to-last paragraph is about compassion, about sharing the benefits, about the commonweal. To be an adult means going from our own individual and peculiar circumstances to address the needs of the whole world.
From the Metta Sutra:
May all beings be at ease!
Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.
Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.
Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings;
Radiating kindness over the entire world:
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill-will.
Solidarity, from the Undisclosed Region.
Stay strong, HMP! We’ll eagerly await your return and our thuoghts will be with you over the coming trying weeks.
Hang in there HMP! When you are back home and recovered, treat yourself to a Moon Pie and an RC Cola (if those things are still around and available so far north). Your comments are among my favorites and I hope to see them for many years to come.
My goodness, thats a tough one. Very best wishes to you, hope it all goes well.
HMP, for your entertainment and continuing a thread from a ways back. One of my favorite short scenes from Firesign Theater when I was a kid.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes”
“No, we are here with you”
“Oh, I see what you mean, ah, no”
“Yes, how many are we?”
“Here? ehh, three”
“You don’t want to count the elevator boy?”
“Yeah”
“Three or four?”
“Ffffour”
“But of course there is your family”
“But, but there not traveling with me”
“Where?”
“Where I’m going”
“But you’re here! Ahhh, how many?”
“Four, with, with the elevator boy”
“Ahhh, he is in your family”
“No, here”
“And here we are…”
A big part of why this amused pre-adolescent me was that this was very similar to many conversations with adults at the time.
Your words and your presence here have given all of us so much.
Keeping you present, gratefully.
“None of this treatment would have happened without LBJ’s good old Medicare…”
Please know that you are being thought about. As for Medicare, that was socially monumental and in need of support and expansion.
My wishes to you for the best outcome, Henry. You sound like an amazingly strong person.
HMP, sending you my very best wishes for successful surgery and an uncomplicated recovery. I will be looking forward to hearing from you whenever you feel like posting!
May you have a speedy recovery from your surgery, and my best to you and your family.
Chiming in and all along with others…best wishes. It really does take a village of care givers, expert medical advice and practitioners, and of course that sturdy level of survival instinct to push back, to fight the evils of any manner of cancer.
The dreaded affliction of cancer runs in the genetic material on my father’s side of my family. I don’t exactly know your fight in particular but fighting is a key determinant, just my opinion.
Oh HMP, am sending you best wishes. I hope everything goes smoothly. Will keep you in my thoughts!
Godspeed to the best possible outcome! I and I am sure many others are pinging and imploring the Universe…
Huge Strong Hug!!
Keep on keeping on HMP!
Your courage and wisdom continue to inspire. Thank you for sharing your experience so thoughtfully.
Yikes! All the very best HMP.
Good luck and “bon courage” as they say where I live (Quebec).
Warmest regards and best wishes for a successful outcome. I deeply appreciate the contributions you’ve made to the comments here, have learned much from you. That and you have the best handle on this site!
Thinking of you
Best Wishes to you and your besties Henry
I’ll hit a long, lean note, and let it float – for you today.
Keep getting better and better. Moon River
I cannot add anything apart from the comments you have received except my personal support. Wish you the best with the next surgery!
Godspeed your recovery HMP, wishing you all the best.
Best wishes, HMP!
HMP, it is kind and generous of you to share your experience here. Thank you. Doesn’t it seem like a million years ago that we, and quite a few others, met up with Yves in Cleveland? And it was only 2019…
As someone who also has battled with rectal cancer I can only offer my strong wishes of a good outcome. Smooth sailing dear friend!
I echo the beautiful sentiments expressed by others here. All the best HMP!
Thank you, Henry.
“The Way never does anything,
and everything gets done.
If those is power could hold to the Way,
the ten-thousand things
would look after themselves.
If even so they tried to act,
I’d quiet them with the nameless,
the natural.
In the unnamed, in the unshapen,
is not wanting.
In not wanting is stillness.
In stillness all under heaven rests.”
– Rendition by Ursula K. Le Guin, 2009, Chapter 37
Sending you good thoughts! Hope all goes well!!
Be strong and live long.
Best Wishes!
We are all on your side.
One of the many benefits of reading NC is the opportunity to hear of others wrestling with health issues and, often, questions of mortality. It gives me perspective. Thanks for sharing your story and best thoughts coming your way.
Take care, Henry, and I hope everything goes well on Tuesday.
Best wishes from a fellow three-score-and-ten survivor.
I am now 32 months post-diagnosis for non-resectable (I.e. inoperable) pancreatic cancer. Like you, I am privileged to live near one of the largest cancer treatment and research centers in the world, where I’ve undergone seven months of chemo, six weeks of daily radiation, and three experimental clinical trials. Without them, I would have long since been pushing up the daisies, rung down the final curtain, and joined the choir invisible.
But even more important, as you say, is the support from family, friends, and community—even (and especially) remote communities like NC, full of critically intelligent, intellectually honest, and humane voices, able to articulate their views with good humor and lived experience. Without this daily double dose of sanity, especially during the unremitting horrors of the last 12 months, it would have been easy to yield to the moral despair to which we are driven by our poisonous daily newsfeeds.
Poetry is essential to survival too, although I can’t explain why. Auden comes close in his tribute to W. B. Yeats:
“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.”
https://poets.org/poem/memory-w-b-yeats
I’ll be pulling for you on Tuesday.
Thanks for taking the time to share your travails so candidly. One way or another, we’re all heading for the shipwreck of old age. The USA’s refusal to adopt a comprehensive national health care system a la Medicare For All baffles me (as do many other things about the USA….); certainly in the two countries where I live (Italy and Russia), the very idea of being billed megadollars for an ambulance ride (or some such other medical billing monstrosity that seems to happen daily in the USA) is simply ludicrous.
I wish you all the best.
What all the commenters above and before me said, HMP!
May the Benevolent Spirits of the Cosmos assemble, guard, and guide you through.
Many thanks for all the kind and encouraging comments. Some brought a laugh, others a tear, all delivered a confirmation of what I said about this community and its members in the original comment. I’ll carry these thoughts into Tuesday feeling stronger and more optimistic not just about my outcome but about this troubled world as well.
I don’t know what to say but, look forward to your comments later this week.
Take care.
Huge hugs Henry! May I hold your hand (virtually)?
Sending my best thoughts to you, Henry. And That my mom who had her colon cancer come back in her liver lived another 40 years and in pretty good health.
HMP, wishing you an uneventful operation, a speedy recovery and a happy long life thereafter.
Life is precious. I am so very glad that you are receiving such good care.
Warmest wishes for good and speedy healing.
Mr. Henry MP, I’ve been meaning to ask you about your NC name, Henry Moon Pie, because the Moon Pie is so important to us here in Mobile (though invented in Chattanooga). So I’ll tell you now, from Mardi Gras to New Years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Pie#In_Mobile,_Alabama
You’re important here Mr. Henry, I’m thinking of you.
Hang in there, HMP!
Sending many good thoughts your way, Henry Moon Pie. And a lot of admiration as well. You have handled a clearly difficult, frustrating and frightening situation with grace and fortitude. May the rest of your journey meet and surpass your best expectations.
ZOMG, this sounds all so difficult! And yet you’ve gotten through all these hurdles and sound like you have been able to maintain a positive outlook. Best wishes!
Re: Hillary
She’s come full circle since her early days of railing against minority and artists owned labels under the guise of protecting children from naughty words.
I’m so old I remember Tipper Gore.
I’m so old I remember Betty Ford before she came “out” of the bottle.
I wonder what malady a “Hillary Clinton Clinic” would treat?
Putin Derangement Syndrome? I’m sure that he is at the top of her Excel Enemies List.
Listening disabilities like being bloody tone-deaf.
Inability to see white stains?
Or dodgy real estate?
ALLEGEDLY…since Have I Got News For You is back for new season.
Narcissism.
Whatever kind of clinic it is, it will need a very large reflecting pool.
The “Hilary Clinton Tax Evasion Clinic”. Best place to treat those pesky IRS audits.
The Two Minute TDS treatment is proved to be safe and effective. Start your plan today, our call center is fully staffed and there for you. No more Trump! \sarc
one can wish that she goes quietly away, and with haste, but a narcissist loves their own reflection after all, am I right?
Now she wants to censor social media in the same way that Twitter was not that long ago with the spooks having a corner office in Twitter HQ and a direct feed coming from the White House. And her justification? ‘Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3D8670smTI (30 secs)
Yeah, when she warns about “losing total control” it’s all about the children. It takes a village of social media moderators. Fire ’em up!
I’m a pretty extreme free speech advocate, but if I was advocating censorship of some kind I’d be inclined toward preventing Hillary from publishing yet another book.
I may be a minority in this thinking among non Republicans but re: student loan forgiveness. Aren’t they going about it all wrong? Instead of forgiving loans, why doesn’t the government reduce the cost of university tuition (ala many other civilized countries in the world)?
It seems so backwards to me but then so does just about everything that this country is doing in recent years.
If they did that, the whole rickety edifice would fall apart and the obedient ones paying off the insanely overpriced tuition would immediately stop payment. Finance will never allow anyone to get at those accrued fees and interest. Das ist verboten.
If they reduce tuition they won’t be able to use loan forgiveness as a future cudgel to beat the electorate. If they forgive instead, they can dangle the forgiveness carrot in the future for a new generation of proles.
See also abortion, among a myriad other topics.
I must agree. The (unfulfilled) promise of student debt forgiveness benefits the blue political class with its fundraising clout and sheepdog effect.
I agree with you.
And what isn’t included is what about going forward? If the interest rates and penalties are not greatly reduced the same thing will happen again. Which means they are not addressing a root cause of the issue.
I have not clue if Biden\Harris and team really wanted to cancel the debt or not, leaning no.
I read somewhere they shouldn’t have tried to cancel but restructure. Like all the money paid going to principal instead of interest. Makes sense me.
But too late, nothings going to happen.
All they have to do is allow student loan debt to be discharged in BK. This is not a hard problem to solve.
Or, they could set limits on prices that institutions are allowed to charge for education and still receive grants and be approved for federal loans. I have no doubt whatever system is proposed will be immediately game-ified by the administrative class. But we could at least say something like, you don’t get to have students qualify for Pell grants, or federal back loans unless tuition is commensurate with wages in area so kids could work a summer job to pay for yearly tuition. Ditto for federal research grants from any of the agencies (NSF, NIH, etc.). We could use our bargaining power as a country here too. We just choose not to.
We sort of glossed over the fact that “state level funding” has been decreasing for awhile now and it used to be the funding source for universities. The university system was designed for cost growth in the absence of that “state level funding” so what you see today is the university system working as intended.
As to why states no longer contribute as much to the university system well… most of them are not as prosperous as they once were and many enter a recession (or just getting out of one) in any given year.
My guess is brick and mortar universities will become a finishing school for the ultra wealthy only (so hardly any will remain) while the rest go to community College and finish with online degrees. Assuming there still is even a reason (a white collar job) to even go through higher education instead of taking on blue collar training/work.
I am of a mind that the simplest solution is to allow Student debt and loans to be classified as eligible for discharge via bankruptcy. Granted, that would put Biden on the spot- he helped remove it from eligibility as a Senator.
It would put Congress on the spot, the spotlight on their collective hands-out for contributions to their nest -feathering activities.
It would pot the Banks on the spot for their being bankers.
Funny that Trump, a beneficiary of both sides of the coin, private for profit Uni, and relief from multiple Bankruptcies himself, hasn’t picked up the elegant solution.
BK is no picnic, but at least a person can bootstrap via a cash balance sheet until the credit has is healed.
I say, “Let ‘er buck!”
Poors can’t afford college but the best and brightest poors can get scholarships.
If you lower tuition so that anyone with grades can attend, it would reveal that hardly anyone attending overcrowded inner city schools can get into college while almost every suburban student would pass the entrance exams.
The neos have won. Entire generations of poors have been undereducated, making sure that only the elite’s kids know how to read a spreadsheet. Or so the elites hope. The truth is they went overboard and overprepped their elite children into massive neuroses and extreme displacement behavior. I have yet to hear of any poor kids demanding gender reassignment surgery.
Even when neos win, they lose.
Yup. We need to improve k-12 education across the board, period. However, what exactly “improvement” would mean is questionable: the likes of Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken doubtlessly got “good” education in their youth, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone with actual promise.
re: “We need to improve k-12 education across the board, period.”
Unfortunately “what constitutes improvement” is the controversial part. Perhaps they might bring back shop classes and link w/ community colleges which teach a reasonable trade.
BTW, most Carpenters Unions have free pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs. Most have a hard time attracting qualified applicants. The eligibility rules are simple:
Be at least 17 years of age at time of enrollment
Have original and valid photo identification
Have a High School Diploma or GED
Be physically able to work
Be legally eligible to work in the U.S.
Pass a drug test
Somehow most do not qualify or quit…
That would be the kind of improvement in education that I would wish on people whom I like!
Can USian 17 or 18 year olds compete in the carpentry market with immigrants willing to work for $6/hr and no benefits? Should they?
GramSci,
What would you have your “USian 17 or 18 year olds” do instead? Most are not interested in our apprenticeship programs despite all kinds of incentives.
Retired Carpenter
BTW, when was the last time you hired a competent carpenter/cabinetmaker?
How many blue collar kids have wound up with student loans and no degree? Or kids of any class who weren’t tempermentally suited for college or who had runs if bad luck, mental illnesses, etc? It’s not just a subsidy for the rich. The pressure to attend college is immense and for young people to sign themselves over to devt immiseration of any kind seems kinda predatory.
And that’s why the rich need to keep hold of all of the money, theirs and ours.
It ain’t cheap treating their kids in private clinics for depression, drugs and derangement.
And it ain’t cheap buying their lazy, entitled kids big houses and big weddings and do-nothing jobs.
The poor just don’t know how tough it can be, being rich. They should think before they judge /s
or how about allowing bankruptcy?
The complexities and unequal protections in the spaghetti thrown at the wall by biden seem meant to cause them to be nullified by the court.
Of course the bezos billionaire buddies list needs a safe place to stash their cash, as does calpers et al and all of that insurance payment money that gets sent to the dragons lair…
https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/10810711-higher-education-inquirer/5619162-student-loan-asset-backed-securities-soylent-green-of-us-higher-education
For edification only, the real details are a neccesarily tightly kept secret…
Then Unis would have to put an Amazon move on its mid level administrators (14K slated for redundancy…).
State governments could do that with their State universities if they reversed several decades of State disinvestment and aggressive de-funding of their State universities. But they could only do that if a massive majority of the citizens of those States decided to elect officeholders devoted to restoring the missing taxes which used to exist decades ago before the Great Tax Revolt, and spend some of those taxes on supporting State universities as they used to do.
The other part of restoring State university tuition costs partway back to their lower levels would be to “rif” ( reduction in force) vast quantities of Administrators and the people who are paid to serve them.
That Simplicius post contains a deeply damning speculation on the utter mismanagement of the US stockpile of substation transformers for the purported benefit of Ukraine. I don’t doubt the truth of that speculation after Lindsey Graham’s performance on Fox News where he suggested Helene victims in his state of SC were more concerned about Israel’s “defense” than their own well-being.
It’s gobsmacking we are lead by people who think that Americans can and should sacrifice their basic welfare for the benefit making war on the perceived and designated “enemies” of the empire.
I pray and hope people are waking up to the reality that many in the US government, whether intentionally or not, have chosen to put the interests of foreign governments and the transnational capitalists ahead of the well-being of themselves, their families, their neighbors and their fellow countrymen.
“Or if you’re the Remnant, wouldn’t you try to get the US to fight your battles for you to send the signal to the bond holders of your debt that the plan is still working and soon, very soon, Russia will collapse and we’ll have all the collateral and rebuilding contracts and cash flow you could ever desire to pay back those measly couple hundred billion in loans. There are tens of trillions on the table in a winning scenario.”
https://tomluongo.me/2024/10/03/the-roots-of-the-uk-implosion-and-why-war-is-inevitable/
– ‘The Law of Presidential Retribution’ – Bob Bauer, Lawfare
“Trump continues to threaten that, if elected once more to the presidency, he will launch investigations and prosecutions of his political enemies…”
What?? Why, any politician or government entity that would “launch investigations and prosecutions” against their “political enemies” should immediately be declared New Hitlers and be exiled to some small island in the Caribbean.
Written by Obama’s former White House Counsel – in *Lawfare*! This wins my chutzpah award of the day! Not that I would put it past Trump or the Republicans either, but good god!
The more illegal sh*t a government gets up to in office, the harder and dirtier they fight to keep the opposition out of office. That holds all over the world.
By that metric, Trump could spend his whole term in office just wading through what Biden/Harris have left behind.
Although I expect that if Trump survives to take office, then the whirring and pinging of Dem paper shredding and disk deletions and cloud scrubbing and a few unforeseen “accidents” of ex-personnel will be heard from outer space.
That short essay about Ukraine and Russia in the context of what they call the long capitalist crisis, while it didn’t really seem to be saying anything very original, nevertheless was very refreshing just because it looked at the conflict from various materialist perspectives and wasn’t delivering shallow partisan material.
yeah. a bit dated, but you dont really hear that kind of depth in many places anymore.
and, of course, any time i read about putin;s import substitution and drive to autarky, my ears perk up.
i wasnt really aware of that development until a year or so before the war…i had been pursuing the same thing here(Think Like a State) for years and years, but without much in the way of theory or examples…it just made sense from my perspective(so i reinvented the wheel).
Was “short essay” sarcasm? I read the Notes on Ukraine in the Long Crisis post if that is what you and it was twice as long as it was intelligible and half as intelligible as it was inconsistent.
It was an interesting essay but full of Marxist jargon of the worst sort and in the space of one paragraph, it complained that small peasant farms held back Russian productivity and that Russia then dispossessed its agrarian proletariat to improve productivity. There were several other moments of mental gymnastics.
It seemed like a rather bitter Jeremiad against modern Russia for not being something the USSR wasn’t either. The People’s Front of Judea versus the Judean People’s Front.
Having said that, the grand historical sweep was interesting, even if presented with sleight of hand. I had never considered Russia had a “wheat problem” before and I am still wondering about that but, equally, I am certain Russia had warm water ports BEFORE the USSR because she used to own Crimea! Also, theUraine has tumbled down the GDP ranks because the economy has been looted. The essay blames Russia for its oligarchs, not Washington, but does not credit it with bringing them to heel, and says nothing of the Ukraine’s greedier ones.
It was an odd essay all round but makes you think and I don’t remember see that publication linked before so it would be interesting to see its future takes, even if they are all refracted through early 20th doctrinal disputes!
I read it and went…whew!
I won’t read it again, but I think most of it was building up to this part:
“If anything, this helps to demonstrate that, in conditions of the long downturn in accumulation, as capital’s systemic reproduction has been decoupled from the reproduction of labor-power,[170] the struggle against capital can only take the form of a struggle against the reproduction of the proletarian condition—in other words, the self-abolition of the proletariat.[171] This seems to present a limit preventing the various iterations of nationalist populism from breaking out into widespread insurrection.[172]’
However, I have the feeling that this verbosity won’t be at the forefront of any revolution.
Yes, that paragraph managed to say something but – unsurprisingly given the author’s violent struggle with the English language – I think the same point was made rather more eloquently and hopefully in the quote with which the essay finished.
“Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its ‘military’ dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”. The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.”[180]
yeah,lol
one becomes adept at mentally skipping over a lot of the jargon and shibboleths in actual leftyspeak.
like a straussian approach to actually existing marxism/anarchism.
them people like to divide and fail to conquer, and agree less than xtians on whether or not the sky is blue.
sigh.
Re AP The Shocking Numbers
“According to AccuWeather, Helene dumped a shocking 42 trillion gallons of rainfall on the Southeast.
That’s enough water to fill Lake Tahoe once, the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, and enough water to flow over Niagara Falls for almost two years.”
Even beyond the cost in lives and private property the cost to governments for fixing this is going to be tremendous. Will an economic storm follow the physical? And if not how many hurricanes will it take?
Its interesting to note the response to the hurricane that demolished Haiti back in the day, Carolinian. Bill and Jeb on the beach, all hands on deck et al, national MSM media attention – yet – at the end of the day it was all about getting the sweat shops producing Pro Sports garment/merch industry up and running again … billions of dollars thingy ….
So when I use that observation in response too Helene, I have too ponder what nationally important industry/economic factor these rural areas have to elite investors or Wall St and the response too it ….
An indicator will be how quickly the Black Mountain ‘facility’ takes to get back in production. Compare that with the amount of time it takes to get the IV fluids production facility mentioned in comments yesterday back up and running. As clear a measure of elite priorities I cannot imagine.
As with covid I thought thinning the herd of useless eaters and eugenics like strengthening the species was policy.
The Empire negotiating with itself again. They’ll never learn that nobody believes them anymore.
The Empire negotiating with itself is the sound of dogs barking as the caravan moves on …
There’s also a rumor going around online that Iran conducted an underground nuclear test.
This post purports to have an Armenian seismograph that shows a nuke test signature, with examples of other seismograph recordings of recent nuke tests (Pakistan, NK) with a very similar graph. The epicenter is located in an area, a desert, without major fault lines in Iran.
https://x.com/warinsights4you/status/1842916038997934474
I don’t think there will be any official confirmation forthcoming, but I expect more seismographic recordings will filter online to add more circumstantial evidence that in fact this is case
Im not sure why Iran is even bothering. Nuclear annihilation of the Middle East seems baked in at this point. Besides, Can’t they just rent a nuke from Macron?
I would think Israel selling one to Macron, to then lease to Iran, would be a more tax-advantaged finagle
From Thomas Fazi’s substack:
https://www.thomasfazi.com/p/should-russia-give-iran-nuclear-weapons
A post by Andrea Zhok.
I understand the logic but it seems not in Russia’s interest and iirc Iran has a fatwa against having the bomb.
“How Iran Built Up a Russian Air Defence Network: What Are Its Strengths and Limitations Today?”
An odd article this. Perhaps it should have been titled ‘How Iran Built Up a Russian Air Defence Network: What Were Its Strengths and Limitations?’ It is well know that Russia has flown all sorts of defensive gear to Iran like S-400 anti-air systems as well as high-tech radar systems. The Iranian Air Defence network is now a very different animal and if Israel wants to lob a coupla missiles at Iran like they did several months ago, that has gotten much more problematic. And it is not like relations are good between Putin and Netanyahu. The other day Netanyahu tried to call Putin but Putin refused to take his call. So perhaps that was what that attack was about on those warehouses near the Syrian base the other day. Just Netanyahu being petulant.
In his most recent appearance with Judge Napolitano, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson stated that he heard from reliable sources that the “Russians have put a number of pilots in Iran and the airframes will follow” and their instructions are “to oppose any Israeli airstrike on Iran”. Starts at the 2:00 mark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_7prnElVTY
Russians have provided Iran with Yak-130 trainers, which are kinds unique in the sense that they can be programmed to behave like any big Russian fighter. They don’t have the power or the acceleration, naturally, but the haptic (controls) and visual (MFD & HUD) feedback will otherwise be the same as.
This is supposed to significantly speed up the pilot training programs, so Iran can probably man the Su-35s if and when they start to arrive.
Anyway, as for the air-defense, Iran is quite capable of producing it’s own missiles, as we already know. They have copied and reverse-engineered US, Chinese and Russian missiles, and for abut a decade they have produced indigenous missiles.
What’s much more important is that for a decade they have also been producing Fakour-systems, which basically is a tactical air-defense sensor information fusion station. It collects real-time information from all possible sensor systems and turns that into a coherent (it’s supposed to to be able to resolve conflicting data) tactical situation map.
One part that feeds data to Fakour is Rasool, a communication system that gets data from Iranian Matla ul-Fajr VHF radars. MuF is basically an Iranian improved version of Soviet P-18 (which was able to track the F-117 Nighthawk over Yugoslavia during the Kosovo war). Improved means a relatively modern 3D radar that has a horizontal range of about 480 km. Early warning stuff.
What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that Iran is supposed to have a layered, networked, mostly domestic air-defense system. What Russia may or may not provide right now adds mostly quantity, not quality.
Martyanov on Dima strongly disputes the claim that a Russian airbase was struck. He called it a Ukrainian propaganda effort to distract from the losses in Ukraine.
It must feel good for Russians to not have to bend under the US pressures on to whom they should sell their wares…
Israelis will say anything, Putin didn’t refuse that call, he was washing his hair.
Quoting BetteDavis lines now?
Vance is the one with the Bette Davis Eyes.
I laughed out loud and startled the cat!
Oh dear, and I thought it was Martin Luther, as in
PAGE : Come with me, the Bishop wants to talk to you about those faeces you nailed to his door !
LUTHER : Tell him I’m washing my hair.
Here I Stand corrected.
“The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture”
A lot more fascinating than the title makes out. So just after the dinosaurs were wiped out and fungus was one of the things still growing, a group of intrepid ants found that they could farm fungus which gave their colonies a way to survive these times. That is something that I would never have thought about. Most people have probably heard of fungus-ant agriculture but here is an explanation of how this came about.
We sci-fi nerds run into curious factoids like this all the time. I went down several biological science rabbit holes while reading Aiden Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time” series. Lots of interesting stuff w/r/t to the symbiotic relationship between ants and beetles as well.
aye. one of my favorite things to think about when wandering around the farm…and to hold forth on to newbies to ecology, etc.
we’ve got the big red harvester ants, here…maybe 1/8″ long…with the soldiers a lil bigger.
hurt like the dickens when they sting or bite…but youve gotta really aggravate them for them to attack a human.(Rule#2: dont be a dick)
one huge colony at mom’s…at least 6 entrances, covering her whole homestead lot, maybe acre and a half of ant city.
and another, larger, one over here under my place.
3, maybe even 4 acres.
biggest negative impact on my doins is that they steal the grass seed i broadcast…but that rent is negligible given the soil services they provide.
often i’ll put out a lil pile by one of their doorways so they leave the rest alone.
since i killed off the fireants, some 19 years ago(beauvaria bassiana, injected directly into the mounds), the harvesters have really flourished…and ive noticed that there are no more aphids above ground,lol…they kidnap/rustle them, carry them into underground dairy chambers(with luminescent fungi on the ceiling, no less) and feed them various grass clippings, and milk them for their honeydew.
truly amazing.
https://boatingnz.co.nz/2024/10/nz-navy-ship-hmnzs-manawanui-sinks-off-samoa-after-fire-and-grounding/
NZ Navy Ship HMNZS Manawanui Sinks off Samoa After Fire and Grounding
A routine mission in the Pacific turned into a disaster for the Royal New Zealand Navy this weekend, as the multi-purpose vessel HMNZS Manawanui caught fire and sank off the coast of Samoa. The ship ran aground while conducting a reef survey near the southern coast of Upolu, and by the following day, it was engulfed in flames and heavily listing before sinking.
= = = = =
https://www.nzdf.mil.nz/media-centre/news/yorkshire-woman-takes-command-of-royal-new-zealand-navy-ship/
Yorkshire woman takes command of Royal New Zealand Navy Ship
Harrogate-born Yvonne Gray trained as a teacher and once hoped to open her own restaurant. Instead she said she found her perfect niche as a naval officer, first in the Royal Navy and now in the Pacific with the Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN).
How Netanyahu is ‘running rings’ around Biden FT
From the pink paper. So, now it’s official…the tail is wagging the dog. Luce rarely writes ‘The Big Read.’ He typically confines himself to the editorial page and boosts all thing Atlantic. Interesting how this fits in with what we could call ‘The Gilbert Doctorow Controversy.’
It’s Doctorow’s thesis that Bibi is the ‘Cat’s Paw’ to the neo-con faction of the Deep State. Entirely plausible when you consider that Biden needs help tying his shoes, and nothing he says is really of any consequence…an important point that is apparently of so little consequence to Luce that it entirely escapes his attention. So, the official line is that the brilliant Bibi has made the befuddled Biden his sock puppet. This fits in nicely with the three card monte played by Blinken et. al…happy to see chaos reign.
At any rate, this is a fun debate that Doctorow has begun. In support of his argument there are the various donkeys endlessly chasing their individual carrots: the interminable cease-fire talks that are only days or hours from agreement; the endless stream of weapons to the Zionists from American arsenals; the vehement opposition to the endless “settlement” of the West Bank; blanket legacy media ignorance of Israeli genocide (the taboo word; widespread US institutional crackdown on anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian supporters; and who can forget the hoary two-state solution trope. Perhaps the best metaphor for this scammy activity is the Gaza humanitarian pier debacle. What did I miss?
Thanks Gilbert for getting the ball rolling.
Oh, I forgot. If it’s this “official”…it’s gotta be bogus!
Quite. Don’t believe anything till it’s denied.
Seriously.
I have to say, that “running circles’ headline evoked a few different editorial page-style political cartoons in my mind’s eye… Shufflin’ Joe, and speedy toddler Bibi with a devilish Dennis the Menace countenance and a roadrunner poof of fleet footed dust, for one…
This is from a very conservative cartoonist but I think it’s the best pure politics cartoon I’ve seen in this new century:
https://x.com/FoxfordComics/status/1842222459522875548
SPOILER:
If you don’t have access to X, it’s a two-panel cartoon. A couple with a small baby are stranded on the roof of their house and cheer as they see a military helicopter approaching them. Then the helicopter lets out several Haitian refugees to share the roof with the stranded Carolinians.
Bashing the American government for both abandoning Americans and their designated replacements? The average person, even if they are anti-immigrant, can see just how used and abused the newly imported immigrants are as well as the local American citizens as the goal is to replace an already vulnerable native population with even more vulnerable and more easily exploitable, imported semi-enslaved labor.
I’m increasingly concerned about the dead duck phase between nov.5 and jan 20
I’ve always thought that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have a responsibility to declare themselves in charge during the transition period between a visibly corrupt administration and a reform administration.
Normally you can count on the media getting very loud when lame duck shenannigans are pulled but for sure that’s no longer the case.
How do we tell the difference? They all look corrupt to me.
Alternatively, or perhaps complimentarily, is this blog great post from Indrajit Samarajiva: https://indi.ca/how-israel-is-used-to-divide-and-conquer-the-middle-east/
I’ve been playing close attention to Indi of late. He seems to have his finger on the pulse of empire.
I don’t think Doctorrow is alone here. Brian Berletic and Bernhard at MoA are, for example, insistent that Israel is merely a toolbto advance US agenda.
I think, personally, all the talk of who’s “controlling” whom is a bit silly. Tbh, I don’t think hardly anyone is doing “controlling,” but there are simply a series of moves and countermoves by different political actors, which, in some cases, are “sympathetic” (as in “sympathetic vibration,” that is, US and Israel have “harmonic likeness,” due to the kind of forces that drive politics in both.) There are “material” dimensions: Israel does help advance certain aspects of US agenda (at least as advocated by some people in high places.) But Israel charges a high price for the services it renders abd cheats whenever it can afford to.) All the “inside help” that Israel has in US keeps them gainfully employed, so to speak, despite all the problems. I suppose Israel is like the CEO’s (US elites) wayward son who does just enough work, in addition to being the CEO’s son, while causing problems that you can’t fire.
The comments are interesting:
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/10/06/more-on-tails-wagging-dogs-and-vice-versa
Yes, they are, thanks. If anybody plans to read them, Doctorow says he us going to delete them (or a substantial part) because unusually he got into a back and forth with a commentator and says that does not fit with his site aesthetic. Which seems odd and makes me question whether he likes the sound of his own voice too much. He has always seemed a good listener but perhaps that is subordinated to analysing and opining and, at the end of that process, there’s no room for more listening?
“As war and religion rages, Israel’s secular elite contemplate a ‘silent departure’’
Looks like that secular elite have woken up to the fact that the the religious ultra-nationalists want to run the country now and we have see how well they have been running it the past year. And in such a set up, anything that the secular population want will be de-prioritized over the wants and needs of the ultra-Orthodox. Doesn’t help when it will be the secular population that will be expected to pay for it all. This is not a country with a prosperous future so no wonder that so many of them are bailing.
Weirdly, secular Israeli’s (presumably mostly still Zionist) and the Ultra-Orthodox can make common cause on many matters because the ultras have no desire to fight for Israel. They are interested in God, not territory or terror.
The group that has taken over with the growth of Likud are the mizrahi Jews: the Levantine Jewish population that was sidelined by the secular, Socialist European immigrants, mainly Ashkenazim, after WW2 and that keeps alive the earlier colonialist ideals of Jabotinsky and terror tactics of Irgun from the days of the Palestine Mandate.
From the Guardian article: “After Hamas-led militants killed 1200 people, most of them civilians…” Sounds as if someone is still spouting the original Israeli claims.
…
Or, admitting obliquely that Hamas and IDF used to have the same funding source….
Pfui. I see it all the time. Most web sites refer to the “attack on October 7 which killed 1200 people.” They (unthinkingly?) commit hasbara. Even though the story has been thoroughly debunked, they carelessly repeat the lie. Few (if any) of the 1200 were killed by Hamas, almost all were killed by the IDF.
An undulating thrill….
_________________
I’ve mentioned this before that I was quite fortunate to have somebody else stand in for my cautionary cocaine tale of woe circa 1981.
He was a sharp numismatist a decade older than me that had made bank on Nelson Bunker Hunt’s silver bubble in 1979-80, and had a quarter million in the bank, a beautiful wife, a thriving business and a Ferrari like Magnum PI.
18 months later everything had exited through his nostrils, and he was driving a Pinto with mag wheels, kind of a cocaine Cinderella story of sorts.
What happened to his wife?
She left him about 10 months in.
One time I was in the coin store and he left in a huff, and she pleaded with me not to look out into the parking lot, as he would peel out if I did.
tried powder twice, crack(!) once…all 3 times rather 4 or 5 sheets to the wind.
didnt do a damned thing to me.
simplest explanation: overly cut with baking soda, or whatever.
tinfoil explanation: some genetic thing.
anyhoo…didnt hurt my feelings after the fact.
and now the intended effect can be more reliably obtained with a 1/4 viagra.
(yes, there were nekkid folks involved…and..ahem..Mr Johnson wasnt cooperating)
Ever see the movie ‘Blow’ Amfortas. So good coke was around late 70s and during the 80s, so when you tried it is relative to its effect. On that note living in Manhattan Bch in the early 80s and hanging out with flash people the stuff was good. Seen untouched 8 balls of hard pink/purple crystal, furthermore just wiping some powder on the gums could make your hole head go numb. People had little coke grinders like miniature coffee grinders, some 3 stage to get the powder that fine.
Your note on cut is correct. Every time product moves from one to other its cut, so its about how many in the logistics chain before the user gets it and its quality, yet price stays about the same. BTW cut back in the day was baby laxative and other such silly things as it had the right texture and look and cheap.
I knew the players back in the day from Florida to Calif. Interesting to see how that all worked of for some, reminiscent to the prohibition era and some became Kennedy’s and others not …
I hate being hard of hearing, I was sure they told me “Things will be different when the adults are in charge”, not “Things will be different when the dolts are in charge”.
Thank you for the Atlantic link. I found this quote from the interview with ex-FEMA head William “Brock” Long relevant:
I think that the only effective response to the certain disasters that loom in our near future must be local and of our design and planning. Not to minimize the role of federal responses, but the very size and structure of the USG (FEMA et al.) mean that they will be MIA when the SHTF. And currently the pathetically incestuous nature of our federal government all but guarantees this.
The power of local community was brought home to me during Hurricane Harvey in Houston, and the response by ordinary citizen volunteers, restaurant people, local chefs, food trucks, etc. that ferried free meals to flooded neighborhoods without power. Granted, the advantage south Texas has is that it’s flat and at least navigable by boat when flooded. But this rapid response could never have been administered by the federal government.
In the US we have to face the fact that our central government will not be there for us when real help is needed. Decades of neoliberal policy and legislation have guaranteed this outcome. Reversible? Sure, but only after radical transformation of our political structure. We have to rely on each other, our neighbors, with whom share much more than narrowly defined, media-sculpted political views. Only community integrity — not FEMA, not Elon — will save us. And we have to accept that catastrophic events are in store for all of us — our refusal to do anything significant re AGW make this a certainty. But you needn’t be a prepper to be prepared.
but it helps if you have at least a couple of prepper/seed savers/old knowledge enthusiasts among you.
and those villages need to be up and running before any disaster occurs.
not turn-key friendly, at all.
they must be cultivated like a garden…soil building, companion planting, interplanting, cover cropping and plenty of manure both tolerated and enjoyed(manure, perhaps, equals that old knowledge and ideas)
Hi Amfortas,
I was trying to be alliteratively clever in that last sentence, and it probably came out all wrong. We def need people with deep and old knowledge :-). My major points were planning, cooperation, collaboration.
i’m with you in Rockland.
my point is…start building such parallel systems/connections now.
takes work…and forbearance.
for differences…most engineered, it turns out.
and a lot a patience.
almost holy levels of patience…till folks come around on their own.
Plato’s Cave is useful in the thinkin about it.
begin at your doorstep/in yer yard.
grow things and give them away to neighbors.
ask for nothing in return.
if i can do it, you can.
im poor as dirt,lol.
my dirt, however, is not poor.
i grow more than i can possibly eat…because of actions and decisions i made long ago….so thats another aspect:Statius:”he plants his trees for a race yet to come…”
+++
Nice ref to the cognitive trap of ignorance.
Outstanding fall colors in Mineral King, the Aspens & Cottonwoods are putting on quite the show, with the Aspens approximating a newly lit match.
Wow, $100 million in federal funds for Helene!
Our nothingburger wildfire here-the Coffee Pot Fire, is over $60 million in cost now, nobody was hurt, nobody’s domicile harmed.
Hurricanes don’t fall into the Fire Industrial Complex, I suppose.
I saw a tweet from anthony blinken about 157 billion buck$ going to Lebanon. The responses from hurricane ravaged places are blistering. I suspect he never sees them, but I can wish…
I think it was $157M (or $25 per Lebanese) from what I heard although the Lebanese would no doubt welcome the extra zeroes.
A report from the north-west corner of Pennsylvania, a ‘swing-state’ in the November election.
It’s Trump country here, on the banks of the Allegheny River, where the annual Walleye and Bass Fishing Tournament to honor the memory of a local Fish and Game Warden, was held yesterday. Prizes were awarded and all the fish returned to the river by 5 PM. Then everyone retired up the hill to the tiny start-up craft brewery, run by the game warden’s son and his wife. Basically, it’s a large garage, with a pastoral view of the River, and picnic tables set out on the driveway, and two old guys, a guitarist and singer, on the porch, plying us with low-key music.
I drove down from Chautauqua County, New York, with friends who know the brewmaster; we skipped the fishing and came, bearing covered dishes, for the potluck and the opening of kegs of four new brews. Plus some fresh-pressed local apple cider.
On the drive south, along winding, hilly back roads, we passed an impressive display of Trump signage. A group of four neighboring houses had coordinated their efforts, and their tractors, riding mowers and logging equipment, to mount an spectacular display of Trump advertising … not simple ‘yard-signs’ but enormous banners and flags. Quite impressive, in the midst of a heavily forested area.
I had interesting conversations with a two hobby distillers, and mentioned that I was growing two small plots of Bloody Butcher corn, which led to them telling me of a small Pennsylvania distillery that uses Bloody Butcher as the basis for their whisky and bourbon. They referred to this, and other craft distilleries in the area, as making ‘pre-prohibition’ type liquor. Which, they said, meant the distillers sought out heirloom corn and wheat varieties for their mashes. Apparently, Penn State houses a seed bank, which provided the Bloody Butcher heirloom corn when these distilleries started their businesses.
One of the hobby distillers, a big, bald-headed guy, a retired State Trooper, turned out to be a cook and food canner. We talked cooking down extra juicy heirloom tomatoes and pickling Hungarian Hot peppers, then segued into his passion for sausage making every fall. He described his method for making bone broth, involving browning beef bones slathered in tomato paste and onions, then simmering overnight: 32 quarts canned this year. I will be heading down to the local, family-run slaughter house to buy an assortment of bones.
Only one person openly announced his political leanings: an older guy, my vintage, wearing an amazingly detailed Trump cap, and clutching a bottle of a New York craft distillery beer. (This group does not hold with Bud Lite or even the local Yuengling.) He told me I looked ‘really intelligent’ and he would like to get to know me, his wife having recently passed.
The people at the gathering are not ‘tech bros,’ or members of the PMC. In the 2020 election, 70% of the voters in Warren County, chose Trump. The county is rural; its major city and towns all having seen better days. The county’s population would have declined but for the increase in Amish population, with their large families, moving in. And who knows, maybe the people last night represented the 30% who voted ‘blue.’ Well, probably not the guy in the Trump cap.
But I heard people who are integrated into their local communities and the environment, who want the River kept clean and unpolluted so the walleye can thrive. Who are saying ‘no’ to corporate hybrid and GMO seeds, and searching out tastier heirloom seed types, which, BTW, can be saved and shared. Who shop at the local farmers’ market and support their neighbors who are reviving orchards with old apple varieties. Who shop with a butcher who sells local meats. Who know how to fish and hunt, who can brew beer and distill liquor, who can run a small business, who have friends who can weld and fabricate stainless steel, who can cook from scratch and preserve food. And sing and play the guitar.
Thanks for the report. I’ve been in PA quite a few times over the years. Mostly rural areas and my experience is just like yours. Those people are not the dumb hicks from the sticks like my PMC friends think they are. Wonderful people just living their lives the way they want to. And I’m guessing many, feel the same way about one particular item; just leave us the hell alone. They will be fine.
Given what I saw on Twitter yesterday at the Trump rally, I don’t see PA going blue.
Eclair: Thanks for the report.
When you mention use of Bloody Butcher corn, you mean that they are making bourbon / corn whiskey, right? It doesn’t sound as if they favor rye whiskey — or are some of the local craft brewers trying rye, too? (I favor rye.)
What you describe sounds like what I experienced over many years in small towns throughout southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. I am not sure why the MBA-adjacent think that they will be captured and used for human sacrifices if they venture into Galena, Illinois.
And romance is in the air!
To quote the billet-doux: “He told me I looked ‘really intelligent’ and he would like to get to know me, his wife having recently passed.”
Somehow, flirting hasn’t reached the level of art form in the U S of A. Well, at least he didn’t call you a fetching heifer.
Do not fear, DJG! Small distillers in Pennsylvania, especially around the Monongahela River, which flows into the Allegheny and becomes the Ohio River, the site of the Whiskey Rebellion (suppressed by George Washington) in 1794, are making rye whiskeys.
Different artisanal distillers are trying out various heirloom legacy corns to make whiskey from. Here is an article about a distiller helping to find and revive an almost extinct type of corn called Jimmy Red in order to get enough of it to begin making whiskey from it.
” How an Award-Winning Distillery Helped Saved a Grain From Near Extinction”
” At the start of the 2000s, only two ears of corn remained.”
Here is the link,
https://www.foodandwine.com/jimmy-red-corn-whiskey-extinction-8721096
Thanks for the link to the Jimmy Red corn article, steppenwolf fetch.
So regarding: I live in the County over from the BioLab fire that started because of the hurricane.
Why can’t they just drop sand on it? There’s got to be more ways to put out a chemical fire than just letting it burn. For example:
Assuming that’s accurate. I can’t believe fire departments don’t train on electrical and chemical fires. There must be some reason this isn’t being handled, I wonder if dollar signs are attached to that reason.
From Israel pounds Lebanon in fierce wave of strikes
Do American politicians still fall for this? Almost a year in, and overwhelming evidence that Israel will strike medical facilities at will. Why would anyone believe that Hizbollah would be dumb enough to use these facilities when it is abundantly apparent that doing so doesn’t work as a “shield” against attack? Now Israel is just trolling us.
Meanwhile casual indifference to US-sponsored genocide by Democrat elite continues.
Hizb’ullah is a social-religious organization that provides various social services. I imagine Israelis will justify openly attacking hospitals since doctors are Hizb’ullah or are funded/supported by them. Ludicrous stuff, of course, but Israeli officials have been openly claiming that Palestinians are Hamas and Lebanese are Hizb’ullah (which may not be too far from the truth now, given how the Israelis have behaved for decades…).
What’s happening with WordPress came up elsewhere in 2019, with Amazon: In 2019, multiple open source companies changed course—is it the right move?
On the other hand, what you have is not considered Open Source:
The Only Patriotic Choice for President, NY Times editorial board
Quite explicitly, if you don’t vote for Harris, you are not an American patriot. Good to know, thanks. Millions of Americans are therefore unpatriotic at best. Too much wrongthink going on, I guess.
And it opens with Trump! She’s so worthy a candidate, they open with a diatribe about Trump! Talk about TDS.
I know the polls are close but I have witnessed more Trump signs than Harris recently here in NW Ohio. From my travels and talking to people, they are overwhelmingly for Trump. Most I talk to think Harris is a phony, and an empty headed one at that.
I honestly don’t think they are voting for a candidate. Most say they are really not a fan of Trump, but they are sick and tired of the wars, the border, the non policies, and policies they don’t like. And of course, now, the reaction to the hurricane.
The phrase I hear the most; I’m not a Trump fan but these people need to go. I would be shocked if Harris carried Ohio. Brown might be in trouble too, although he is leading slightly at the moment.
Between unhappy Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in Michigan and unhappy Appalachian people throughout Appalachia ( who will expect that they would have gotten the very same treatment as West North Carolina is getting if the storm would have focused on them instead), Trump’s victory looks more likely than before.
Now . . . if Trump wins, the US will keep supporting Israel and in fact try to expand the Gazacide to West Bank and South Lebanon. And FEMA will stay just as defunded and anti-supported as today. But at least the National Level Democrats will be punished.
The only actual good development that could come out of all this would be if West Virginia were to rename itself Appalachia and begin recruiting Appalachina counties in bordering states to join the new state of Appalachia.
Their new state motto could be: Welcome To Appalachia. America’s Tibet.
I doubt liberal Democrats can be humbled, even amidst an electoral debacle. If anything, they’ll double down on outreach to “moderate” Republicans. Those in and around this administration and those in Congress will simply hop back into the private sector to continue the looting.
Frankly speaking, if it continues to poke a bear which can devour it, Israel may be beyond help, even from its fellow war criminals in the good ol’ USA. Yes, we are the baddies.
And Israel has no right to exist.
I think, on balance, the forever wars and blame for all the bad stuff from Helene (recovery will by definition be slow and the us govt ie biden and harris will get the blame no matter what), when linked with rage at the PMC condescension of all things Trump and Maga, is going to give Trump a big electoral win.
Will there be Chinese actors and actresses wearing “Free Appalachia” slogans?
PS. It just did occur to me that that did actually happen vefore, when West Virginia seceded from the Confederacy. Think what you will if the Appalachians do that again…
This is a beautiful thing. I don’t know if NC has a unique capability to collect and publish citizen journalism and eyewitness reporting like this, but perhaps it’s worth thinking about. Could simply be a dedicated pinned page where people know to post comments and ideas. Or maybe a more sophisticated facility.
May seem somewhat off mission for this site, but with the collapse of the MSM we need to find new paradigms for the citizenry to find out what’s happening in their society in fairly real time, and to leverage the knowledge and ideas of locals. (Recall that during the BP oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the feds put up a website just to gather ideas from the population at large for what to do about it. I have always thought this was an arrangement that should be widely copied; we need all hands on deck given the crises that are going on now.)
Maybe this is an accidental discovery like penicillin that NC can go on to exploit.
https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/
“How a near-monopoly gained control of most of the nation’s electronic medical records, to the detriment of medical practice and doctor morale.”
Paging I M Doc – Is this the company you have to deal with?
He posted a few days ago about what kind of a debacle Epic Systems is. Forget the day, but within the past 7 days under Links or maybe Water Cooler.
Every doctor in America has to deal with one of 3 companies – Epic, Cerner, or eClinical Works.
They are all equally hideous. They are all abominations to the practice of medicine – and have destroyed it. Not sure it will ever come back the way it was. Epic by far and away is the biggest.
EClinicalWorks – is actually another interesting story that gets little attention – it is fully owned and operated by a corporation in India. Everything entered on your patient chart in that system goes right to India. What could possibly go wrong?
The other 2 – Epic and Cerner – are all very involved in the cloud – like AWS. Your information is traveling all over the web and being stored in cloud servers that any of their employees can access at the blink of an eye. I have heard in conferences that 10-15% of the nation’s cloud usage and internet bandwidth is taken up by these systems. Just a few weeks ago – I heard that we are going to “Need” to start building nuclear reactors or restarting old ones to pull this off – the energy demands are so great….
This hypocrisy is all being brought to you by the same crowd that brought you “The China Syndrome” a generation ago. It would be stunning if it was not so tragic.
Back in the day on NC Lambert and YS deconstructed the whole E-medical records agenda, IM Doc.
All the well worn economic tropes of efficiencies and lower price for the consumer[tm] because investors/MBAs could make informed decisions. So basically all hard won medical science has and is going out the window so some can make packet and fulfill their potential via wealth.
Oracle acquired Cerner in July 2022. Oracle’s probably the second largest cloud provider with OCI: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Talk about a self-licking ice cream cone! Probably paid with cloud credits (like MS’s licensure of OpenAI).
–CitizenGuy
I work with PEPFAR programs internationally and there is a lot of funding and work done to advance the use of health information systems for case records,
Epidemiological data and patient tracking, data based decision making etc. from everything I see the use of electronic medical records in the HIV response has been really helpful across many countries. What would your response be if these companies were nationalized and merged into one integrated system? Or is the cost benefit just not there given how much provider time has to go into managing these systems rather than patients?
How are medical records accessible by “any of heir employees”? Doesn’t HIPAA provide privacy for medical records? Aren’t the penalties for failing to so fairly severe?
Open.ai alert. The wheels are going to fall off, I think.
I’ve mentioned in posts that I run venture funds as general partner. At the moment I am “resting”, as the thesps say, between funds and my most recent fund was no biggie (~$100m peak AUM, about a third of that now after realisations and failures). I am based in Europe so I am not a Silicon Valley Big Swinging Dick. I haven’t made big money from VC either (salary, bonus, carry payout in low six figures) so I am not in family office territory or even wealth manager territory and I am certainly not a fund LP or even liquid enough to do angel investing. In short, as far as the Valley insiders go, I am strictly the hired help and retail money!
Nevertheless, I have received two emails on the sane day today from different entities inviting me to participate in the current Open.ai round. Minimum ticket $10k. Company valuation $150 billion! (So the minimum investment buy a fifteen millionth of a percent of the business, wow, great upside.). No management fees and no carry but a 10% arrangement fee.
If any company valued at $150bn is raising money and the fundraising process results in cold-calling intermediaries soliciting $10k cheques from the little people, the raise is clearly screwed. I have never seen this kind of email. Even if the raise is a disaster, the news would be very tightly held among the current investors and the big ticket investors it is being shopped around.
So, I think the comments at various blogs about Nvidia etc telling them to take a hike may be true and it makes you wonder where they will get the money. Sovereign wealth funds, hedge fund tourists and Softbank are the usual suspects. :-)
You might be interested if you don’t already know.
“Russia’s freezing of European Union bank assets signals a new stage in the ongoing financial conflict with the West. With billions of euros immobilized and Western banks unable to leave, this move raises concerns about the effectiveness of sanctions and the potential fallout for the U.S.”
It was only a few days ago that the Russians froze the funds of US banks JP Morgan and Mellon-
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/russian-court-freezes-funds-us-banks-jp-morgan-mellon-2024-10-02/
Its going to be interesting to how this works out wrt financial FX and Capital markets, not to mention industrial based nations vs financial ones.
When Quakers say that it is the locals that are providing the help, and the government is absent, they are not trying to make a political point. It is just reality. This was shared by my local meeting today:
(Celo is a mostly Quaker Community started by Arthur Morgan as a land trust in 1937. It is along the South Toe River in Yancey County.)
from one of the many go fund mes:
“Yancey County and its South Toe Valley (where Celo is) is one of the hardest hit areas with absolute devastation. This area experienced the eye of the storm and the most massive dumping of rain, at 26-30 inches of rain within only 4 hours. The South Toe river rose 27 feet and hundreds upon hundreds of homes along the river and creeks are completely gone- full homes floating down the river, sometimes with people inside of them screaming for help. There is still no power, no cell signal, and no clean drinking water and the valley has largely been isolated from outside aid due to major roads and bridges out getting destroyed. Estimates on power being restored is 3-5 more weeks. And there is sewage mud everywhere and mold is becoming a growing issue. Until three days ago the only way resources could come in or people rescued out was by helicopter or treacherous long hikes over steep terrain full of piles of hundreds of fallen trees, landslides, fragments of what used to be roads, thick mud and debris. THE GOOD NEWS: Now that locals have managed to clear a single lane road out toward Burnsville for 4 wheel drive vehicles to bring in emergency supplies to Celo! THE GOOD and BAD NEWS: Of the homes that are flooded but salvageable neighbors are coming together to help completely gut them, removing drywall and insulation so that they can dry out as much as possible, but at this point mold in people’s flooded homes and elsewhere is becoming a major health hazard alongside the raw sewage.
More than anything, people need urgent relief aid now, and this money will help them while they wait for assistance from Red Cross/FEMA. Due to this area being so rural and accessibility more challenging, the aid efforts from county, state, and national agencies are falling short compared to aid for large cities like Asheville, or even the nearest small town to Celo- Burnsville. So it is the locals of Celo who need direct aid the most from caring people versus agencies, to support funds to directly acquire and run in supplies that they specifically need on a daily basis from here on out.”
Contacting the local Friends meeting to see if they could transport materials. Informing them of a local relief effort organizing supplies to take up to NC by air and land. (The one I helped at yesterday.)
I may not drive, and may have commitments that won’t let me go help, but I can help connect people.
https://www.postandcourier.com/hurricanewire/downtown-greenville-airport-helicopter-helene-wnc/article_9bc05958-8049-11ef-a6b5-777cc9451d0d.html
Thank you very, very much.
We may have passed peak obesity
Because drugs!
What’s gonna happen when people are on these for life? This smells of premature triumphalism.
Not seeing the beauty in this? It’s sick, actually.
so mom’s 2 year old brand new deep freeze died.
she’s got a commercial version(that can be worked on) on the way.
we pulled the old one out, and brought it to the bar, so i can do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc8jMU9-RFc
been wanting to do this for decades.
never considered freezers that dont work.
i have 2 more hither and yon.(i dont throw things away immediately,lol)
ill hafta look, but they(the earthworms) might do something to mitigate the persistent herbicides, so i can grow tomatoes again.
if so, ive got enough worm food for forty of those,lol.
At our place we use broken freezers to store horse feed in such as mill run & pony pellets as it keeps them dry and keeps rats and mice out because of the seals.
must never rain,lol…need flashing around the lid to keep water out.
unless theres a consistent lee side.
we have several “gangboxes”, from my grandads old semiindustrial sheet metal shop.
built by them, used to ferry tools around to jobsites.
totally rainproof.
with these, ill just need to keep them damp, but not drown them.
im agog at how much wormfood i generate.
like the bano barrels.
would worms do that?
of course they would.
no victorian hangups about humanure with those gals.
prolly dont hafta buy any worms, either…as they are rampant…in every pot and raised bed, and really pretty much anywhere i use a shovel on my side of the place.
“lift a stone, and you will find me…”
We keep those freezers on the back verandah under the shelter of the metal roof so the weather never gets to them. It’s a practical solution and our dogs have indicated that they are willing to tolerate their presence. Occasionally they will even hop on one of them to get a better view into our kitchen.
Oh dear, and I thought it was Martin Luther, as in
PAGE : Come with me, the Bishop wants to talk to you about those faeces you nailed to his door !
LUTHER : Tell him I’m washing my hair.
Here I Stand corrected.
A couple of tweets by Branko Marcetic.
Which reveal a huge problem:
He thinks he is smart. Well he is not.
Lets be honest: This is irony for 6-year olds.
And unfortunately nor does Almut Rochowanski seem to see beyond the obvious with such a praise:
“A lifetime (century?) of delusions and gaslighting in three elegant tweets”:
(seriously now?)
https://nitter.poast.org/BrankoMilan/status/1842678338797580505#m
by Branko Milanovic
Oct 5
“The fall of Communism means that liberal democracy and peace are guaranteed”
“After the operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraq and Israel will like two democracies agree and will bring peace to the Middle East”
“Globalization will improve the international division of labor & raise the living standard of the middle clases”
Oct 5
“The problem of economic crises has been solved by modern macroeconomics”
“Being concerned about inequality is the most pernicious way to undermine economic science”
“Authoritarian regimes cannot innovate”
“Free flows of capital between countries will increase the growth rate”
Oct 5
“It does not matter how privatization is done. Even if cronies at first get the companies, they will eventually sell it to real entrepreneurs”
“Free social media will expose the falsehood of dictators and autocrats. Uncensored media is the weapon of democracy”
Please edit.
(Mistake is in the first sentence.)
It´s Branko Milanovic NOT Marcetic!
Sorry…
(my shitty keyboard)
Yes, that paragraph managed to say something but – unsurprisingly given the author’s violent struggle with the English language – I think the same point was made rather more eloquently and hopefully in the quote with which the essay finished.
“Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its ‘military’ dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”. The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.”[180]
“The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.”
Not having read Mao myself this is a very important point.
Question is does it withstand scrutiny.
I am asking because the idea of (militant) revolution by now has been totally given up by the (Western) left. It has actually become totally discredited. Because it is believed to lead to “slaughter”.
I am also really not sure if it is justified or even correct to – as I believe (or am I misreading?!) Michael Hudson does in the post above – equate Trotskyite bottom to top revolution with the fascist concepts of Neo-Cons.
I think that could be a serious mix-up or misunderstanding.
Hudson:
“And if you look at the neo-cons, they had a virtual religion. I met many at the Hudson Institute; some of them, or their fathers, were Trotskyists. And they picked up Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution. That is, an unfolding revolution – what Trotsky said began in Soviet Russia was going to spread to other countries, Germany and the others. But the neo-cons adopted this and said, “No, the permanent revolution is the American Empire – it’s going to expand and expand and nothing can stop us for the entire world.”