Wrinkles reveal whether elephants are left- or right-trunked, study finds Guardian (Dr. Kevin)
Keynes in Dublin Dublin Review of Books (Anthony L)
Everything Is Out of Water: Should a philosopher have sayings? The Point (Anthony L)
Why painting (still) matters New Statesman (Anthony L)
Needles in Haystacks: The Lostwave Story Chris Dalla Riva (Anthony L)
Climate/Environment
Percent of global ocean with September sea surface temperatures (SSTs) of at least 30C (86F). It's as if something has changed. 🤔 pic.twitter.com/jW1XIztkBN
— Brian Brettschneider (@Climatologist49) October 7, 2024
Climate warning as world’s rivers dry up at fastest rate for 30 years Guardian
Is Arctic methane stoking the climate crisis? Julian Cribb
Greek honey production plummets due to climate change ekathamerini. No baklava?
Britons Urged To Dig Out Unwanted Electricals To Tackle Copper Shortage Guardian
China?
States sue TikTok, saying its addictive features hook children Washington Post
Chinese Stocks Tumble Most Since 2020 on Stimulus Skepticism Bloomberg
Foxconn building Nvidia superchip facility in Mexico, executives say Reuters
China demands schoolteachers hand in their passports Financial Post (Dr. Kevin)
European Disunion
US Navy is said to have been at the scene shortly before Nord Stream was destroyed, Danish newspaper reports Weltwoche via machine translation (Micael T)
New record: More pensioners than ever before are dependent on social assistance NOZ via machine translation (Micael T)
How the European Union passed a brave new law to protect our planet’s forests, only to realise that it is a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare that nobody wants Eugyppius (Micael T)
Old Blighty
Russian spies plan ‘mayhem’ on British streets, warns MI5 chief Financial Times
Israel v. The Resistance
"Daddy, what were you doing when the Gaza Genocide was being carried out?" pic.twitter.com/5ZsUZNKSjZ
— PALESTINE ONLINE 🇵🇸 (@OnlinePalEng) October 8, 2024
Investigating war crimes in Gaza I Al Jazeera Investigations YouTube (furzy)
A Year of Slaughter and Starvation Daniel Larison
GAZA AFTER A YEAR OF WAR Seymour Hersh
Northern Gaza is being emptied under the threat of annihilation. 400,000 Palestinians are being forced South towards an overcrowded “safe area” that hosts 1 million displaced people in tents without services, an area 10% of Gaza which Israel has systematically bombed for months. https://t.co/TPzgzTGCAj
— Nicola Perugini (@PeruginiNic) October 9, 2024
* * * Israel’s Netanyahu warns Lebanon could face destruction ‘like Gaza’ Aljazeera. So now it’s official policy as opposed to an extrapolation from behavior.
For Doubters – Hizbullah Reports That It Is Back Moon of Alabama
Hezbollah says Israel using UN troops as ‘human shields’ in south Lebanon The Cradle (Kevin W)
* * * Col. Larry Wilkerson: Israel on the Brink of Devastation in War Against Iran and Hezbollah! Dialogue Works, YouTube. Includes important discussion of US and Iran hostilities over the Strait of Hormuz
Iranian ‘Ahmad Chalabis’ Are Helping Israel Plan Bombing of Iran Antiwar.com (Micael T)
Israel looking at $66bn war bill as economic woes deepen The Cradle (Kevin W)
After a year of war, Israel’s unity is shaken and it’s bleeding support RT
Scott Ritter: Israel’s Total Defeat Against Iran and Hezbollah Imminent? Dialogue Works, YouTube. Ritter discusses again how the nuclear test claim idea is unlikely (he still repeats the 10 mile below surface which seems to be wrong, but he has solid information on IAEA inspections and how hard it would be to get around them. Ritter explains that it would not require much testing to deliver a nuclear bomb with a “gun device” as opposed to a missile. See starting at 28:50 for the “gun device”/
New Not-So-Cold War
The Ukrainian Armed Forces are like mushrooms; The Russian army is harvesting Marat Khairullin
The War’s Pivotal Impasse Crystallizes as Russia Cements Negotiation Terms Simplicius (Kevin W). I was too indirect in my post on Lavrov’s interview in Newsweek restating Putin’s terms from June 14. Lavrov made clear he was reaffirming Putin’s position. It’s actually remarkable that Russia is merely sticking to its guns given Kursk. We linked to Anadolu Agency’s write up at the time to show that not only was everything that Lavrov enumerated in the typically long Putin speech, but that Anadolu Agency had then recapped the very same points Lavrov set forth again.
Zelensky cancels November ‘peace summit’ RT (Kevin W)
Ex-NATO Chief Stoltenberg Could Have Prevented Ukraine Conflict, But Fueled It Instead Sputnik
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Smart TVs Are Like ‘a Digital Trojan Horse’ in People’s Homes ars technica. I have always assumed that.
Imperial Collapse Watch
Finally pic.twitter.com/oASTK3vQuZ
— Philip Proudfoot 🇱🇧🇵🇸 (@PhilipProudfoot) October 8, 2024
Trump
Book Raises Unverified Claims About Trump’s Ties to Putin New York Times (Kevin W)
Kamala
Kamala Harris Struggling to Break Through With Working Class, Democrats Fear Wall Street Journal
Harris’s Biden-esque ‘hiding in the basement’ campaign has Dems worried Just the News. Well, after that 60 Minutes interview, hiding looks to be her best option.
Kamala yesterday accused Gov. DeSantis of "playing political games" with the incoming hurricane in Florida.
Today, Biden said that DeSantis "has been cooperative" and is "doing a great job."
The West Wing appears to be on two completely different wave lengths. pic.twitter.com/Ik5EsgBFJ2
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 8, 2024
Kamala’s True Grit: Harris Embraces a Gun Vilified During the Biden-Harris Administration Jonathan Turley. See also IM Doc in comments to Links yesterday on Glocks.
2024
The Problems With Polls New York Review of Books
Trump and Harris are sharply divided on science, but share common ground on US technology policy The Conversation (Kevin W)
Milton
Millions in Florida told to leave as Biden makes Hurricane Milton ‘life or death’ warning BBC. Where do they go? Sleep in their cars in Walmart parking lots in safer places?
Why experts are so scared of Hurricane Milton The Hill
Timelapse flying by Hurricane Milton about 2 hours ago.
1/6400 sec exposure, 14mm, ISO 500, 0.5 sec interval, 30fps pic.twitter.com/p5wBlC95mx
— Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) October 8, 2024
Helene Aftermath
‘The worst I have ever seen’: Disinformation chaos hammers FEMA Politico. Desperate and disgraceful new excuse for censorship. What matters for citizens is if FEMA is getting relief in to afflicted areas. Supposedly false Team R noisemaking about performance will not affect the delivery of aid. What it could hurt is FEMA’s reputation and Kamala’s odds of a win.
Contrast this scapegoating with a report from KLG that Lambert ran yesterday:
My sources have no reason to lie. Perhaps some exaggeration but it all seems too likely to me.
FEMA is a charlie foxtrot, whatever its apologists and administrators say. Almost every person who applies for the $750 is denied. For example, if you have insurance, no $750 because your benevolent insurance company will pay. Yeah, but for many, only after being dragged kicking and screaming to cut the check. An assistant rents her house in rural Georgia. Her losses are real but because she is a renter, no $200 to replace the farm produce and meat lost in her freezer due to a week without electricity. That’s all she asked for. $200B or whatever for Ukraine but no $200 for her. Some areas still do not know when power will be restored. Compared to the mountains of North Carolina, these are the fortunate. This is the message the people are getting…It is likely to get worse when Milton slams into Tampa-St. Pete Wednesday night. Sustained winds back up to 150 mph with 24 hours to go. This can be a killer.
Fact-checking falsehoods about FEMA funding and Hurricane Helene NPR (furzy). Note this claim:
As of Sunday, FEMA says it has provided more than $137 million in assistance to six states in the southeast, including 7,000 federal personnel, nearly 15 million meals, 14 million liters of water, 157 generators and more than half a million tarps.
$137 million is couch lint relative to the scale of this disaster. Lambert also points out he’d expect to see stories about FEMA relief arriving by now, and he has seen nothing on his large set of feeds. Not that we can prove a negative or near negative, but….
Hurricane Helene is America’s Chernobyl moment Unherd (Anthony L)
I assume this sort of thing is also what the wannbe censors are upset about. But this piece does quote FEMA documents and uses one of their videos: Survival of the Wokest Lau Vegys
Watchdog found $7B in untapped FEMA funds — even though DHS Secretary Mayorkas said none available for future disasters New York Post
US lawmakers dig into FCC’s $900M Starlink snub in wake of Hurricane Helene The Register
Our No Longer Free Press
The Think Tank Campaigning to Censor Satire Reclaim the Net (Micael T)
Never Forget Mark Wauk (Micael T)
Antitrust
Epic Triumphs as Judge Orders Google to Open the Android Gates Reclaim the Net (Micael T)
Class Warfare
Automation is Called “Productivity Growth” Dean Baker, Counterpunch
Cognizant Discriminated Against Non-Indian Workers, US Jury Says Bloomberg
Antidote du jour (via):
And a bonus (Robin K):
They definitely thought that its one of them 😂 pic.twitter.com/zz4F1K0kTJ
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) October 6, 2024
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Hurricane Milton
Elderly folk still love to retire
Somewhere they won’t need any furnace or fire
The Florida clime
Gets ’em every time
They know nought of a hurricane’s ire
Hurricane Milton is now Cat Three
Leave now to save all your family
Head to states further north
Don’t come back here henceforth:
This state is becoming debris
Monster storm surges will drown Sarasota
Those who stay put will have their anecdota
Of flood tides and mudslides
Riptides and boat rides
Those who leave will stay in Minnesota
Milton will savage the Sunshine State
What’s dry right now will saturate
The Gulf is so warm
It is cause for alarm
How we gonna rehabilitate?
My talking head weather forecaster
Says Florida’s due for disaster
A Cat Three, by golly
Hitting here at full volley
Them hurricanes get here much faster!
My palm trees, my manicured lawn,
My house, and garage will be gone
Milton’s coming ashore
Right through my front door
A climate change phenomenon
Look at that SeaSurface Temp graph curve stomping on the accelerator. Holy shit. That would be abrupt catastrophic climate change at the door. I just saw a headline stating that 5mm Floridians are under evacuation orders. Where exactly are they going, and will they be staying long? I can feel the paradigm shifting in real time.
Some (sad) news on EU bonds – taxpayer beware.
https://open.substack.com/pub/fackel/p/eu-commission-to-issue-sovereign?r=ljswa&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I believe that the EU was set up not to be able to issue EuroBonds as the whole idea was anathema to members like Germany but one was set up to deal with the first years of the pandemic anyway. Looks like they want to make it permanent with EU taxpayers underpinning all those bonds so that they are on the hook for these debts. I don’t think that the purpose is to raise bonds to lend money to the Ukraine as that country is swirling around the drain. Therefore the purpose of setting this up is to probably bailout the EU’s big banks when they have their collapse and the first candidate that comes to mind is Deutsche Bank.
In fact, the last time Eurobonds were touted as a policy idea was back in the day when Europe has a slow-rolling bank crisis, from the GFC to about 2014.
All of the sudden, Brexit not looking so bad anymore.
Still time for Hungary to get out?
This post is incoherent. The EU will be repoing bonds that exist, of the various EU states. A repo is NOT AT ALL issuing bonds or securities. It is trading and financing of existing securities positions.
A repo is a sale with agreement to repurchase. So say a sovereign wealth fund has a German government bond. But it needs some short term cash. It is typically cheaper, rather than to sell the bond to “sell” the bond via a repo and buy it back later (set time, mainly overnight to 90 days). The difference between the sales and repurchase price is the interest equivalent.
You need to be a financial institution with a money markets desk to do this. Since when does the Commission begin to have the balance sheet to do this? Yes, the Commission no doubt gets monies before it has to spend them and must have a treasury, but the LinkedIn of the Head of the EU Treasury is not consistent with trading ops being at all important:
And
Head of Unit – Treasury Management
Her background is all payments processing and accounting.
https://be.linkedin.com/in/marta-legutko-b794a06
‘Trump War Room
@TrumpWarRoom
Kamala yesterday accused Gov. DeSantis of “playing political games” with the incoming hurricane in Florida.
Today, Biden said that DeSantis “has been cooperative” and is “doing a great job.”
The West Wing appears to be on two completely different wave lengths.’
If old Joe meant to say that DeSantis was doin’ a heckuva job, then that particular circle gets squared real fast-
https://politicaldictionary.com/words/heck-of-a-job/
Let’s talk about decades of experience with dementia patients.
I am not referring to the ones that are already totally gone. I am referring to those who are still walking and talking and can interact to some degree. The very first thing that often goes is “the filter”.
Associated with that loss, is often a very common thing that myself and so many families have had to deal with over the years. If you slight them or shaft them in any way, the resulting blowback, wrath, vengeance, whatever is often for the ages.
In just the past few weeks – we have had Biden donning MAGA hats, if you read the excerpts of the upcoming Woodward book – he absolutely lambastes the Obamas, half his cabinet, Merrick Garland, etc. It sounds pretty bad. He has gone on the national airwaves and praised to the heavens GOP governors in the immediate aftermath of Kamala trying to denigrate them. Just yesterday, he scheduled an extremely rare press conference at the exact time Kamala was on The View – on her comeback interview trail.
This is all starting to appear to me to be not coincidental at all. I have seen this same pattern so many times in my life. You shaft a certain type of dementia patient – and you are going to pay.
I would just remind everyone about Tony Soprano’s mother, Livia, and her reaction to being put in a nursing home. Classic. Good stories in the human experience are written by people who understand human behavior.
On the IZ economy, I thought this interviewee had a unique perspective: he argues that a collapse of the economy will bring about needed political change. Well worth a listen beyond my trivialization. He calls himself a “political – economist ” and moonlights disrupting arms shipments.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ly7qO9fGYZA&pp=ygUhZWxlY3Ryb25pYyBpbnRpZmFkYSAic2hpciBoZXZlciAi
What the Harris campaign even thinks it is doing at this point is beyond me. The Glock posing is one thing, the business speeches that sound like Reaganite boilerplate about cutting red tape and reducing the burden of unspecified regulations are another. If the “thinking” is to peel off some 2nd amendment and crackpot libertarian votes from Trump, that’s not going to happen.
It occurred to me that except for abortion she would sound like a candidate in a pre-Trump Republican primary. Perhaps this is a side effect of not having had to take positions to get through Democratic primaries? In any case it’s demonstrably ineffective.
If the northwest Philly office a few blocks from me is any indication, the ground game is pretty lame. They’re across the street from the co-op I shop at and a couple of my neighbors wanted yard signs, so I strolled in to pick up a couple for them. For any other campaign I’ve seen this is about a 2 minute task.
No shortage of signs, but when they finally got to me after about a half hour (I got to watch as they floundered dealing with various other simple issues), it turned out that if you wanted a yard sign you needed to become a Harris volunteer, commit to a certain amount of work and provide your phone# and email. No thanks, folks.
My guess is that when election day dawns there’ll still be a giant stack of signage sitting in that office.
This ship seems even more adrift than was the good ship Clinton before it hit the iceberg.
Clinton campaign people. It’s 3rd way nonsense all the way through. The mid level aparatiks on Hillary 08 are high level now and originally were inspired by Bill Clinton. Everything is being done via the prism of a The West Wing episode.
Your sign anecdote is what popular campaigns do. My guess is they are trying to goose numbers to show donors, are trying to project confidence for what they can get, or simply can’t reason out the causal relationship with signs and enthusiasm.
I recall reading right after the 2016 election, an account of Bill Clinton at a campaign rally in Detroit a few days earlier. “This doesn’t feel like victory.” There was never any chance at all that I’d vote for someone with so little strength of character as Kamala Harris. But the current environment feels very familiar to me — the gaslighting, the contempt for the voters, etc. The biggest difference is that the media is even more in the tank this time.
I’d like to second Stephen V’s recommendation, political economist Shir Hever interviewed by Electronic Intifada on the erosion of the Israeli economy as the war drags on. His overall impression — based on a mix of polls, emigration data, anecdotes, etc — is of a collapse in morale: roughly 15% of Israeli Jews believe Gott ist mit Uns so it’s in the bag, and the rest not only feel the Zionist project is in tatters but also that, in the words of one “well, the whole world hates us, and maybe they should.” There’s an interesting/appalling dovetail between the certainty of divine endorsement, gimcrack military improvisation, and the nihilistic brutality of a pillaging mob.
>Foxconn building Nvidia superchip facility in Mexico, executives say Reute
We’re building the largest GB200 production facility on the planet,” said Benjamin Ting, Foxconn senior vice president for the cloud enterprise solutions business group.
So we are spending billions to protect Taiwan from China so that the former can build factories in Mexico, yup that makes sense; especially after the fiasco of Trump getting a commitment from Foxconn to invest in a Wisconsin factory.
The news has become a twisted sick joke, the only satisfaction is the rare moment where someone tells the emperor he has no clothes, e.g., when Liam Cosgrove tells Matt Miller that “People are sick of the bullshit in here.”
https://www.reuters.com/business/foxconn-sharply-scales-back-wisconsin-investment-2021-04-20/
Of the three strategic goals in the Ukraine proxy war: 1. arms sales; 2. regime change Russia and make it beg the West for help, like in the Yeltsin years; 3. force loyal vassals to stop trading with Russia; (these being the MIC, neocon, and realist theories respectively) the last is the most interesting. The realists may have counted on a fair likelihood of failure of goal 2 (neocons always get it wrong, anyway) and destruction of Ukraine in the conflict and that it wouldn’t matter in changing who their client states do business with. And it will continue to work for years to come even as US politics backs away from goal 2.
So, hypothetically, let’s assume that the realists similarly count on a fair likelihood of failure to regime change China and bring it to heal and of destruction of the proxy, be it Taiwan or Philippines or both. If, as I argue, the realists’ goal of war is to force loyal vassals to significantly reduce trade with China, USA should get ready to supply what those vassals need.
They can’t. They shut down all those factories years and decades ago and either shipped the machinery to China or sold it for scrap. And the workforce all got the boot and told to get lost.
True story here. They have been using a lot of Stinger missiles in the war in the Ukraine but Raytheon stopped making them twenty years ago. So Raytheon had to call these old boys out or retirement who were in their 70s and pay them bucket loads of money to teach the new workforce how to build them-
https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/06/raytheon-calls-retirees-help-restart-stinger-missile-production/388067/
But that idea will not scale up and the US is simply unable to replace what China makes. It is simply not possible.
My sis and her better half were high up wheels in the ‘Estes Rocket Factory’ in Tucson, and kind of similar to us fighting $10k drones with million $ missiles, we can’t keep up with their cheaper, easier to reproduce NextGen goods. The imbalance is startling.
It’d be as if one store sold Hershey’s chocolate bars for $1.50, but the one down the street wanted $150.00 for waxy sugary goodness where the only thing they didn’t cheap out on in production was the almond slivers, because they couldn’t find a substitute.
He’s been retired for awhile but still keeps his nose in the tent, and at Xmas last year he thought there was a 12-18 month delay on delivery of new armaments here, chips being the culprit.
That is what TPP was. It’s just Obama and others instead of promoting US autarky capable of supplying those countries he focused on cutting labor and environmental regulations and payoffs to the super rich. As an electoral matter, Obama spent years kicking the coalition that elected him, and now Democrats are paying. Part of Trump’s appeal is from Trump following on the widespread anti-China rhetoric from the DC establishment without promising to ship jobs overseas and telling people to learn to code.
With consumer goods available on demand, I think the foreign policy establishment “realists” can’t conceive how the long term decline fits into their plans.
Kamala – I’m developing a sense of how Kamala and MSM is marketing her to voters. If it were a TV campaign commercial, it might go like this ******** Hi fellow Americans. You have an important decision to make this November. I’m probably the the first Policy Free candidate you have had a chance to vote for. That’s because I don’t believe in policy. I believe in values, the kind of values you and I grew up with and learned about in life. Like growing up with your neighbors that were proud of their lawns. I’ve always believed in the same values we all share, and that’s why I don’t believe in policies and don’t have any. America is interested in values…not policy. I need your help. Please join with me to help fight for values for Americans. VOICE OVER as camera pulls away – “Kamala Harris – The Values Choice. The Policy Free Choice.”
Kamala is the Tabula Rasa candidate. Generally a person as free of thought or supportable beliefs as the blank book on Kamala thought for sale at Walmart. Her policies are what her benefactors decide but can’t reveal to us. There is no support from us for her except for those who buy into the image making, the joy of political joy. Except for one policy, war, all the time deeper and more spending. War against Iran. Israel first.
More likely Kamala is the Seinfeld candidate.
Interviewer: “Mr Seinfeld, what was your show about. I mean REALLY about?” Seinfeld: “Nothing. It wasn’t about anything.:
This is precicely what makes Kamala Harris the perfect candidate to be President of the United States of America.
Perhaps market her as a prescription drug…
Feeling anxiety over knowing too much about an aspirant for the highest office in the land?
Ask your doctor about Xdjoy*
* side effects too numerous to mention, you’ll just have to wait and see what happens
The Democrats have done an enormous amount of policy work, for the Republicans.
They have been too busy making up imaginary policies the R’s will commit to instead of making policies the D’s will do.
There was a big policy released yesterday concerning Medicare. Coverage to include hearing aids and eyeglasses. Also big proposals for long term in home care. Bernie has been asking for these for years.
There also have been housing policies. Please tell me what the other side has proposed in these areas?
Believing a politician’s promise four weeks out from an election? I dunno. A lot of people remember how old Joe reneged on that $600 promise that he made and that was on virtually day one of becoming President. Was there any mention of any of that stuff being funded?
Oh, a shiny new policy! Based on something Sanders and the great masses have wanted for years. Rolled out less than a month before The Most Important Election Evah. From the party that fell all over itself to get the endorsement of Dick Cheney and 700 spooks.
Joe Biden still owes me $600. Anyone who believes this “policy proposal” is sincere…deserves exactly what they get.
>Trump and Harris are sharply divided on science, but share common ground on US technology policy The Conversation (Kevin W)
On technology policy, Biden and Harris share more with Trump than they let on.
That’s because terms like “Trump and Harris” are categories of the mind. They are fictions, they have no basis in the world of reality. They “share more” because they are servitors’ of empire. A “conversation” that starts with “Trump and Harris” is doomed from the beginning, authors should ask cui bono? But that’s not the tack of the article, it is instead intended to show what a knuckle dragging creature Trump is:
Trump’s dismissal of and at times outright contempt for scientific consensus is well documented. From “Sharpiegate,” when he mapped his own projected path for Hurricane Dorian, to pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, World Health Organization and the Iran nuclear deal, Trump has demonstrated an unwillingness to accept any advice, let alone from scientists.
> Everything Is Out of Water: Should a philosopher have sayings? The Point (Anthony L)
A lovely essay. Betteridge Law violation.
Most of my best ideas are somebody else’s. ‘What is easy, is easy to know; what is simple, is easy to follow.’ If I explain like I’m five, that is easy to understand, shorter words but more ambiguity. Polya: many a proverb can be matched with another proverb giving exactly opposite advice, and there is a great of latitude of interpretation.
Today is three-tens-and-six years since Janet and I got together. Much of our communication could seem repetitive, applying the same words contextually. Many are pop culture references. Best thing for everyone, I’m right there with ya. These shared references build social cohesion.
A good saying has depth. ‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us’. Look at the tense, the subject-object relations. No dangerous words like ‘you’ or ‘they’.
Ambiguity increases when translating sayings:
> The underdog of the Delphic sayings is: Give a pledge and trouble is at hand.
‘Pledge’ is the author’s translation of ἐγγύα (first declension pledge, surety, security). My philosophical framework tends toward epistemological uncertainty, and my translation is:
Don’t be so sure.
My take on that Delphic saying is “Any guarantee will be promptly called on”.
I file that one under “moral hazard.”
>Smart TVs Are Like ‘a Digital Trojan Horse’ in People’s Homes – ars technica
That’s ok, as long as it doesn’t explode and kill me and those in vicinity. After all who really cares that streaming service providers, have developed a “surveillance system” that has “long undermined privacy and consumer protection” at least I can get my fix of Netflix and have something to talk about at the proverbial water cooler.
“Britons urged to dig out unwanted electricals to tackle copper shortage’
Not to worry. The Brits are already on the job-
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/copper-thieves-leave-700-homes-and-businesses-without-connectivity-in-county-tyrone-northern-ireland/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/29/copper-cable-theft-causes-days-rail-delays-every-year/
On the “disappointing” Chinese confetti money/stimulus:
Why is confetti money different in China vs. the US? It still floats in the air like magic, and you still need a wheelbarrow to harvest it.
I guess that Chinese confetti money isn’t structured to serve the grift-based economy. Key quote:
So confetti money that helps the little people = BAD
Confetti money that jacks up corporate profits (particularly, foreign investors) = GOOD
Glad we have that straightened out, Bloomberg!
Aeon and the witches – I find it unfortunate that this guy is harping on about Clinton and the Pizzagate as an example of wrongly held ideas of witches since 1) Hillary is personally responsible for death and misery in at least Yugoslavia and Libya, so that evil inflicted by her is real (at least in Libya and Yugoslavia and. 2) the Clintons relationship to the suicided Jeffrey Epstein says that the underlying paedophilia-stuff was real enought. The pizza parlour could very well have been a spin just to make sure that the Clintons paedophilia would be passed to the tinfoil territory.
Also, he doesn’t mention the Catholic Church and their demonology which very much includes witches that were killed to the left and right. For the demonology, please, read Malleus Maleficarum.
We are down south in Pinellas for the summer (foolishly bought a place a few miles inland), so we had to high tail it out of there Monday.
The i75 corridor was gridlocked in many places by visual inspection and gmaps delay reports, fortunately we were able to re-route around.
Several gas stations passed visually inspected with NO GAS signs.
Local social media reported people on i75 running out of gas after sitting for 12+ hours. Keep in mind this was on Monday.
Most houses were not boarded up in our neighborhood when we left, but people seemed to be having a lighbulb moment. In general people seemed just not concerned as of Monday. This is an area that hasn’t seen a storm in 100 years, so I think it just isn’t real for the people who have lived here for 20+ years.
Because the place has been untouched all these years there are huuuuge live oaks everywhere. Those bad boys are all going to come down. There are also huuuuge piles of household goods everywhere from Helene in front of the houses that are a mile or so further towards the coast than us.
Sure we boarded up but what’s that going to do against 2,000 lbs of live oak? I imagine all we will come back to is 4 walls and a debris pile.
I can’t imagine anyone will survive the tree limb & ikea furniture cuisinart that Milton is going to generate. Back to VT it is!
> 2,000 lbs of live oak?
Vast underestimate. We had a ninety foot sycamore brought down, newfangled crane thingy, two pieces of the main trunk were 6,000 apiece, and we left a longer segment standing.
My buddy from Tucson was in Cedar Rapids 4 years ago at his brothers house when the Midwest Derecho hit, sporting 126 mph gusts at the highest speed.
A mighty oak crushed his year old Ford F-150 in the driveway, and he related that a place that had prided itself on its beautiful oak savanna, now had a much lessened one, trees were down everywhere, some disassembly required.
>Book Raises Unverified Claims About Trump’s Ties to Putin.
Does it matter if it’s unverified?
You KNOW that the MSM and Team Blue are going to run with it. Likely Woodward will get some National Book Award if not Pulitzers to the NYT for reporting on it.
Will there be reports of a soggy mattress in Woodward’s book?
Bob Woodward… hmm, sounds vaguely familiar. Oh yeah, now I remember. He led our intrepid Free Press in a Crusade for Truth that helped us get rid of a dictatorial President. The System worked; Thomas Jefferson would have been proud! I remember there was a movie about it. Robert Redford played Woodward – a brave hero *and* a good looking guy.
I wonder who his Deep Throat was for this revelation? The timing was certainly fortunate.
In basketball terms, we’ve entered garbage time.
About Government responses to disasters.
I have a great deal of experience in disaster relief,please forgive me for not going in to detail about that in a short post.
Just three points:
The amount of capital and labor needed to prepare for even relatively minor disruptive events makes it impossible to fit in to everyday budgets.This is true from the town level through to the national government.
FEMA or the equivalent agency in another country does not have truck loads of goods and labor to distribute it sitting around waiting for something to happen. Agencies like this at best are given authority to send local logistic resources from areas not effected by the disaster. This takes a lot of persuasion and time as local authorities usually would rather husband their resources instead of sending them away. This means stuff and people have to come from a long way away.
It is always the local people working together that do all of the heavy lifting. “Get along like a house on fire” is a phrase with great meaning in these situations. Everyone expecting outside help that doesn’t come is actually a great way to build local societal cohesion.
Sorry, but what you say sounds like that the government will not really be there to have your back when a disaster hits and that you are on your own. The people of East Palestine, Maui and South Carolina may be able to share their experiences here. So how come the government can throw away $60 billion to the Ukraine in one hit and $23 billion to Israel but they just can’t work out how to have a stockpile of vital goods for distribution in each State in case of a disaster? They could be placed in a military base for security and if it was an Air Force base, there would be transport planes that could pick them up and deliver them whether by landing at a local airport or dropping them out the back with a parachute rigged to them. The military does stuff like this all the time. It’s not that all this can’t be done but it seems that there is a lack of political will to make it happen. And with the increased frequency of disasters in the US, it is not like that they will gather dust and never be used.
Such a different response to wildfires on a Federal level.
When the KNP Fire started here in early September of 2021, the Caldor Fire had been going for a week and was threatening to take out South Lake Tahoe, so it was a get every firefighting capability onto it pronto, a high value asset in peril!
As a result we didn’t have much initially to fight the 88k blaze as the cupboard had been laid bare, but then the Southeast Federal firefighting team (I think there are 6 of these across the USA) shows up with lots of Mississippi & Alabama accents in tow and takes over the job, having driven through the night with all their equipment from a fire in Oregon they’d been working on.
And never, ever is brought up the cost to fight these fires, it isn’t as if NPS hit up Congress for $60 million for the recent Coffee Pot Fire here, the money more or less magically appears, as far as I can tell.
If the money is there, private companies have capacity to step-up. I used to work for an airline catering company that switched production to ready-made-meals to distribute to people after a recent hurricane. The problem is the niggardly purse strings of federal agencies. Billions for war, pennies for citizens in need.
Things I did not see in that post: National Guard, Corps of Engineers or emergency coordination with places like WalMart warehouses. The logistics are there, it is the will to use them that is lacking. It is laudable that local residents can build temporary bridges out of trailers*, but that is not what residents of disaster zones are paying taxes to do.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb02M4voDxA
For an article on a speech made in 1933, its surprisingly relevant to todays economic disputes.
As I was repeatedly told as an economics undergrad in Ireland in the 1980’s, Keynesianism (and pretty much any classical or neoclassical economics theory) didn’t work in either theory or reality when applied to small open economies. Its interesting to see that Keynes himself seems to have agreed. Small open economies (which accounts for most of the countries in the world) need to see themselves in regional terms, and focus on economic policies that push up local productivity, and ‘free trade’ only works if you see it as a war you have to win, even if at the expense of some of your own domestic sectors. This is a lesson hard earned by most of the Tiger economies, and indeed Ireland learned it after a few decades of terrible failure. As Michael Pettis has pointed out in his writing, ‘free trade’ is actually a trade policy. You cannot avoid trade policy, and for economists to pretend that there is some sort of neutral stance on it is fundamentally incorrect. Plus of course, when you hand over your currency to Central Bankers rather than elected representatives, you don’t gain better decisions, you lose democracy.
That was some WH presser, lemme tellya!
Laid bare on the floor from a sitting position in a little over a minute flat, and the only response the authorized talking head could muster, was that it was a speech and there are other places in Humordor for such things.
What a moment for everyone else in that room who hasn’t asked such questions.
That’s Liam Cosgrove for the Grayzone asking Matt Miller about nuclear war and US//Israeli genocide under the “Imperial Collapse Watch” heading. Good for him. But what I also see is Miller saying “Hahaha, I have unlimited impunity and zero accountability backing me up so shut up.” The point of all this is that Cosgrove/Grayzone applies some pressure to the others in the room.
It really was an emperor wears no clothes moment with millions of views as of this morning.
Whether WH reporters have the moral conscious to feel the pressure to follow suit, on that, I’m very doubtful, though would very much like to be wrong.
I’m sure the reporters for our national media would *like* to follow up on Consgrove’s observations, but there are much more important stories to cover – like the fact that one of our Presidential candidates has been regularly conspiring with PUTIN! Maybe they can get to that genocide stuff later.
Here’s hoping that the increasing frequency of disasters motivates some changes in responses. How about a simple documented game plan for what will be done on Day 1, Day 2, … of any disaster? How about appointing an individual for each event with accountability for relief efforts and communication? Planning for use of drones to survey damage, a helicopter fleet for getting supplies to areas isolated by damaged roads? Warehouses of basic essentials like water? Daily press conferences focused on discussion of how relief efforts are doing vs. plan. “Lessons learned” meetings to review what worked well and what didn’t.
Maybe Walmart or Amazon could weigh in on logistics plans, say with the US Army (remember Operation Lightspeed?)
“Smart TVs are like “a digital Trojan Horse” in people’s homes’
Been watching this development since reading an article back in 2012 called “Is Your New HDTV Watching You?” and it was as creepy as. It described how as you watched TV, it would be watching & filming you and sending it to Samsung servers along with recorded audio. And it used facial recognition as well so it could identify each and every person. Hopefully not while you were getting frisky with your partner on the lounge. Since then most people seem to be fine with this happening and giving up all privacy in their own homes but after reading that article 12 years ago, I have made sure that any TV we had never had access to our internet.
The Grauniad article on recycling copper cables. Anything to do with Russia or China perhaps? I do know South America produces a lot of copper as well. In any case are they offering any compensation? As a person who has many “audiophile” 99.999% oxygen free copper cables laying around I can inform the Guardian that their dude is a bit overly optimistic about consumer cables. OTH they might accidentally encourage people to strip out (loot) the wiring in unoccupied older homes.