A Mysterious Noise in The Ocean Sounds Like Leviathans Talking Science Alert (Chuck L)
Mathematical modeling reveals the explosive secret of the squirting cucumber PhysOrg. Chuck L: “IgNobel Prize candidate?”
‘99% of people don’t know deodorant can kill’ BBC (Robin K)
Video: UW-led research links wildfire smoke exposure with increased dementia risk UW News (Paul R)
A Huge Design Flaw in CPR Dummies Could Have Deadly Consequences Science Alert (Chuck L)
#COVID-19/Pandemics
H5N1 UPDATE
The President of the California Poultry Federation is concerned about the speed highly pathogenic avian influenza is spreading in his state.
“If it doesn’t slow its pace in the next month, we’re in serious trouble.” pic.twitter.com/jV8v5fs7X2
— Outbreak Updates (@outbreakupdates) November 24, 2024
Climate/Environment
At least five dead amid ‘devastating’ flooding as Storm Bert batters UK Guardian (Kevin W)
‘It’s not drought – it’s looting’: the Spanish villages where people are forced to buy back their own drinking water Guardian (Kevin W)
Southern African Nations Hit by Worst Power Outage in Years Bloomberg
It’s the most futuristic train in history: The world rejects it because of who made him EcoNews (Kevin W)
China?
Chinese military disguised as fishing boats? Philippine defence chief raises concerns South China Morning Post
Apple faces ‘difficult’ process to launch its own AI in China Financial Times
Koreas
South of the Border
Biden has confirmed the designation of Nicaragua as a "national security threat" to the US into 2025. It's a country of 7m people, with a GDP equivalent to that of a mid-size US city. It has one of the lowest defence expenditures in Latin America. https://t.co/tz8KGAUTFJ
— John Perry 🇳🇮 (@johnperry21) November 24, 2024
Uruguay’s left returns to presidency as government vows friendly transition Reuters (Robin K). Perhaps Expat2Uruguay can weigh in, but I recall from past discussions that Uruguay tends to go from center right to center left governments, as in there are political changes, but not all that great.
European Disunion
Possible Europe-US trade war could push euro into parity with the dollar Guardian
Germany’s Looming Existential Crisis Luxuo
German steel giant ThyssenKrupp to slash 11,000 jobs DW (Kevin W)
Romania election stunner: Unexpected hard-right candidate surges in presidential vote Politico (Kevin W)
Reformist leader rallies Romanians to beat back surging pro-Russia hard right Politico (Kevin W)
Old Blighty
Insolvency experts drafted in to fight university cash crunch Telegraph
Financial Crisis Looms Over UK Social Care Sector Pinnacle Gazetter
Israel v. The Resistance
EXPOSED: The UK military sent a disturbing message to every media editor.
"Don't publish ANY information about UK special forces in Gaza."
But the truth leaked and now Netanyahu is on the run from the ICC.
Here's what they were desperately trying to hide (it will shock you): pic.twitter.com/F9SMSr8qZV
— The Muslim Vote (@themuslimvoteuk) November 23, 2024
Tel Aviv and Haifa today. Nearly 4 million Israeli settlers were forced into the bunkers. Israeli media reported direct hits in multiple northern settlements and electricity blackouts. Hezbollah warned you. If you bomb Beirut they will bomb Tel Aviv. Get used to this scene pic.twitter.com/s02KYCGB5H
— Hadi (@HadiNasrallah) November 24, 2024
Hezbollah fires ‘340 missiles’ at Israel, hits Ashdod naval base, Tel Aviv Al Jazeera (Kevin W)
Israeli snipers ‘shoot Palestinians for sport’ The Cradle. Norman Finkelstein has discussed this repeatedly.
Hezbollah Launches ‘Largest Attack Yet’ Against Israel + Iran Preparing Its Retaliation Rachel Bevins, YouTube
Israeli airstrikes intensify in Lebanon amid rumors of imminent ceasefire agreement Arab News
Israeli Cabinet set to vote on Lebanon cease-fire deal Anadolu Agency
Four Gentlemen Tour the Bekaa Valley Craig Murray (Anthony L)
Washington Post Calls For Selective (Non-)Prosecution Of War Crimes Moon of Alabama (Kevin W)
New Not-So-Cold War
Medvedev:
“American politicians and journalists are seriously discussing the implications of transferring nuclear weapons to Kiev. It seems my grim joke about the mad, senile Biden deciding to exit life dramatically, taking a significant portion of humanity with him, is turning… pic.twitter.com/o08A8jDXpY
— Zlatti71 (@Zlatti_71) November 26, 2024
Discussions over sending European troops to Ukraine reignited Le Monde. Hoo boy.
NATO admiral urges businesses to prepare for ‘wartime scenario’ RT
Britain’s Kursk Invasion Backfires Kit Klarenberg (Kevin W)
Threat of world war is ‘serious and real’ Poland says as Putin steps up threats against West Independent
Europe Can’t Make Ukraine Enough Weapons—So It’s Paying Kyiv to Do It Wall Street Journal. As if Russia can’t destroy production facilities….although that does mean there will be even less of a functioning Ukraine economy when the war finally ends.
Propaganda 101 x 1000000: “Ukraine Will Win” Mike Hampton. Some goodies in this piece.
Imperial Collapse Watch
Who Takes International Law Seriously? Daniel Larison
Trump 2.0
Trump Pentagon pick attacks UN and Nato and urges US to ignore Geneva conventions Guardian (Kevin W). Hegseth is at least as vulnerable to sexual misconduct allegations as Gaetz. If he’s not pressured on this front, it confirms the power of the MIC (as in there are plenty of hawks, so it’s not as if Hegseth is not replaceable, but the point is not to dust Trump up when he has put forward a hawk)
Trump’s Cabinet Picks Aren’t Looking Good For Peace In Ukraine Caitlin Johnstone (Kevin W)
Trump and GOP eye new limits on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Washington Post
Trump to kick trans soldiers out of army – Times RT
Congress’s Jan. 6 Investigation Looks Less and Less Credible Jonathan Turley
2024 Aftermath
In deep blue Minneapolis, many Somali voters withheld support for Harris MPR News (Chuck L)
Abortion
Texas Lawmakers Push for New Exceptions to State’s Strict Abortion Ban After the Deaths of Two Women ProPublica
Our No Longer Free Press
Social media age ban inquiry flooded with 15,000 submissions after Elon Musk weighs in ABC Australia (Anthony L)
Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has suffered a serious stroke, a post on his X account says Associated Press
The Bezzle
Political practitioners poorly predict which messages persuade the public PNAS. Paul R: “They are as clueless as laypeople. Maybe their focus group testing helps weed out the duds. Article is paywalled and abstract doesn’t mention that.” Moi: BWAHAHA!
How Morgan Stanley Courted Dodgy Customers to Build a Wealth-Management Empire Wall Street Journal
The Promise of Duolingo The Dial (Anthony L). BTW this is very similar to the sort of fluency I achieved with French (big reason was my first high school teacher avoided spoken practice because he did not want us picking up his French Canadian accent). I could read at a very high level, including difficult poetry but could barely speak. However, I did have a pretty good accent and a big vocabulary, so the French were not annoyed at my attempts.
Scammers Are Stealing Billions From Americans’ Bank Accounts. Here’s What You Need to Know. Consumer Reports (Robin K)
Class Warfare
Amazon workers in 20 countries to protest or strike on Black Friday Guardian
Six-Figure Job Market Faces ‘White-Collar Recession’ As LinkedIn Reports 26% Drop In Engineering Roles Beinziga (ma)
Antidote du jour (via):
And a bonus. As much as this is funny, I do feel sorry for the gaslighted cats:
When you call your cat through surveillance for the first time pic.twitter.com/XPv4Pr0Tup
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) November 23, 2024
And a second bonus (Li). Moar cats!
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Yonatan
(melody borrowed from Marianne by Terry Gilkyson and The Easy Riders, 1957)
(The personal damage done to IDF soldiers by their holy wars is for life. Missing limbs and shattered minds. Long after Israel fails as a nation, each of them, and each of their families, will have to live with what they’ve done.)
All this past year, Yonatan
You’ve been killing people for our Promised Land
Every time you’re home you’re a different man
What about the life that we had planned?
Yonatan O Yonatan, militarily
Your brigade’s been shot to shit in Gaza by the sea
Keep your helmet on your dome, and hang back more or less
Stay alive some way somehow in all that mess (that’s the test!)
All this past year, Yonatan
You’ve been killing people for our Promised Land
Every time you’re home you’re a different man
What about the life that we had planned?
Is it blood that you adore? I’ve seen the scenes you tweet!
When two thousand pounders land and level a whole street!
Once we were in love but you’ve become a vicious man
I don’t recognize my Yonatan (don’t touch me!)
All this past year, Yonatan
You’ve been killing people for our Promised Land
Every time you’re home you’re a different man
What about the life that we had planned?
When you’re home you scream at night from horrors that you saw
When I try to talk to you, you clam up and withdraw (phooey!)
We buried both your brothers, once the coffin lids were shut
You were drunk as can be—it all came up! (clean it up now!)
All this past year, Yonatan
You’ve been killing people for our Promised Land
Every time you’re home you’re a different man
Where is the life that we had planned?
“Israeli Cabinet set to vote on Lebanon cease-fire deal”
I would not be surprised if this deal was voted down on in the Cabinet. There are the hard-liners that are saying that the war in Lebanon is a golden chance to totally destroy Hezbollah and must be taken. Bombing civilian neighbourhoods and murdering first responders must appeal to them as victory but obviously they never got the memo from the IDF saying that trying to invade southern Lebanon is like walking into a buzz saw and they have the body bags to prove it.
‘It’s not drought – it’s looting’: the Spanish villages where people are forced to buy back their own drinking water , Coming to a theater near you.
The lede, “Spain is increasingly either parched or flooded – and one group is profiting from these extremes: the water-grabbing multinational companies forcing angry citizens to pay for it in bottles”. I’d wager not many people were even aware that the rights to their water had been sold away.
I’ve read about the same happening in the US where local authorities sell fresh water sources to water bottling corporations for pennies on the dollar and then later their communities end up short of water sources for themselves. Here is an article from five years ago talking about this problem-
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/the-fight-over-water-how-nestle-dries-up-us-creeks-to-sell-water-in-plastic-bottles
Good point. Remember Poland Springs (Maine)? Google “Poland Springs” Maine water wars for fun.
Did you ever hear the statement by that Nestle CEO that water is not a human right but should be privatized? He reversed himself afterwards but that statement was already out there. Fortunately Google search is doing their part to hide this by bringing up repeated statements how this guy is now claiming that water is a human right but the internet never forgets.
Good times. Thanks.
And his chocolate isn’t that good either, with only about a zillion alternatives from companies that aren’t disgusting.
More, This isn’t just a Spanish issue – across the world, from Uruguay to Mexico, Canada to the UK, many have begun to question whether private corporations should be allowed to siphon off a vital public resource, then sell it back to citizens as bottled water. This, “many have begun”, really irritates me. A very cursory search of the Guardian for articles on corporations buying water rights and public opposition goes back at least to reporting on Bechtel pursuing public water rights in Bolivia from 2006. Are the editors there not familiar with their own body of work, or are they carefully managing crisis perception, or did this turn into a real issue because it’s happening in Western Europe now, not just in Latin American and African countries.
re: Ultranationalist candidate scores stunning first-round win in Romania election Politico
Opens with this line:
And then, midway:
It’s 2024, almost 2025. If Georgescu was saying stuff in 2022, he can’t have come from nowhere, right?
uhmm, i think it meant that he was scoring low in the polls and he surged on first place above the known parties (PSD, AUR, PNL, USR) unexpectedly. we romanians did know about him, he was just not payed attention to
The Promise of Duolingo. I’ve been learning Mandarin Chinese for many years now, and not just through an app, I’ve been doing one on one lessons with native teachers on italki for the last 3 4 years. I wouldn’t say that everything has been in vain, because I now live in Taiwan and can speak with the locals on just about any topic ….. but only on a very superficial level. My reading/listening skills are quite a little bit better, since I can read/watch just about any newspaper/drama content and understand up to 70% of what’s written/spoken. Granted, I only take lessons once every week or every two weeks, but my sense is that it’s very hard to gain native proficiency in any language unless you are really talented or you HAVE to use it nearly everyday to accomplish something substantial like perhaps working or studying abroad (I work for a US based company so English is the default language).
I mean it’s not really surprising since English is my second language, but I had really thought that having studied another language would confer some advantages when it comes to acquiring additional languages, and perhaps that’s true if the languages are from the same family, but to this day I still find Mandarin Chinese to be very difficult. The huge number of idioms that you have to know and the somewhat dynamic nature of the language makes it really hard to grasp, throw in a couple of ancient Tang Dynasty poetry, and you’ll wonder if you’ve learnt anything at all.
For what it’s worth, it might be worth your while to have Chinese radio playing in your home, either through your radio or through your computer. Not music stations of course but ones where you have Chinese talking. It does not matter if you understand it or not but in the background your brain will be processing the words, the grammar, the idioms and the sounds and becoming familiar with them. Long term you will probably be surprised how much it helps you and I did the same for improving my German when in Europe.
“For what it’s worth, it might be worth your while to have Chinese radio playing in your home…”
[ Really useful advice, no matter the language, but ask after a clear speech suggestion. ]
Like GramSci says below, a picture sometimes is worth a thousand words. Try foreign language films maybe.
I completely agree. I’ve been studying Portuguese and finding talk radio and news stations via https://radio.garden/ has been an invaluable resource.
Whenever I am working, I would often have Chinese music playing in the background and that does help although some songs are merely poems in disguise and those are very difficult to discern. I also frequently watch Chinese shows on Netflix and in general I don’t have a problem following along the plot unless there’s a ton of technical terms involved in which case my eyes would just glaze over.
Good idea. I found that listening to call-in radio shows and shortwave broadcasts were very helpful, with different regional accents, idioms and speaking rates.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words and even fMRIs can be useful. When one learns a language in a toy world like Duolingo or a classroom, one only uses a small part of one’s brain, rather like Fig. 1.
In the wild, language learning has broader contextual support, as in Fig. 3.
I was always intrigued by language learning, and out of curiosity took two years of Chinese in university, but I was poor and contemptuous of wealth. I was at the head of my class the first year, but over the summer all of my classmates traveled to Taiwan. I never learned much Chinese.
I believe it was PlutonumKun who pointed out Automatic Language Growth, where you can become fluent, including with a native accent, if you stick with it. You watch skits and just try to work out the drift of the gist. You do NOT try to learn words or phrases.
https://algworld.com/
But it takes an hour a day and 700 hours total to get to toddler level. It really is learning like children learn. The inventor maintains adults are at no disadvantage v. kids in language learning. But adults lack patience and want short cuts.
re: Trump to kick trans soldiers out of army – Times
And next to go, women and gays/bisexuals? Which would be 500,000 or 25% of the US military.
I don’t think this will happen, though, without overturning the 14th amendment and the Civil Rights Act. So maybe that’s what’s next?
Please do your homework. First, Obama used only an executive order (as in reversible by later executive order) to make trans a protected category only with respect to Federal civilian employment and employment by Federal contractors.
https://subscriptlaw.com/transgender-rights/
The Supreme Court has already avoided blocking a ban on openly trans soldiers serving:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/22/politics/scotus-transgender-ban/index.html
Biden reversed the earlier Trump ban:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/25/transgender-military-ban-biden-repeal-trump-rule
Admittedly Trump’s current plans sound more sweeping so I am not sure how far he will get.
What is it with cats and Christmas trees? Are they following their own cat version of Order 66? Some cats have yet to receive the word-
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2223438861051612&id=632163130179201&set=a.651556044906576
If I were a cat, I could see how I would think a Christmas tree was a ginormous present for me. Climbing! Hiding! Nesting! Dangle-y bits to bat! Shiny toys! Knocking things on the floor! Getting human attention!
To a cat, a Christmas tree is it’s Christmas present. It’s the least that us stupid hoomins can do for our feline overlords.
Our lot cannot wait for the annual awesomeness of the Christmas tree. Be sure to secure your tree up high lest you hear “timber!” in the wee hours.
Washington Post Calls For Selective (Non-)Prosecution Of War Crimes, MoA, pay close attention to these quotes b highlighted, as they are exactly the same as from serial criminal Alan Dershowitz’s opinion piece hilariously titled “I’m Putting Together a Legal Dream Team to Defend Israel”, this published in the Journal yesterday.
Israel is not a member of the ICC, and the warrants will have limited practical effect, except possibly preventing Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant from traveling to countries which have pledged to enforce it
the arrest orders undermine the ICC’s credibility and give credence to accusations of hypocrisy and selective prosecution. The ICC is putting the elected leaders of a democratic country with its own independent judiciary in the same category as dictators and authoritarians who kill with impunity.
The ICC is supposed to become involved when countries have no means or mechanisms to investigate themselves. That is not the case in Israel.
This stuff is above my pay grade, yet it seems to me a farfetched defense.
Israel is not a signatory to the ICC so may be immune in Israel itself however – and this is a pretty big however – the ICC does have jurisdiction in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. And that is where all those atrocities and crimes against humanity are being committed. So Netanyahu’s Wikipedia entry should now include the phrase ‘indicted war criminal’ on his page. It will stick to his name now like s*** to a blanket.
PNAS link headline is best savored out loud. You can practically hear the writer invoking that inner Porky Pig!