Teeny tardigrades can survive space and lethal radiation. Scientists may finally know how Space.com
Salamanders are surprisingly abundant in US northeastern forests, research finds Phys.org
What Chickens Know: On Bonding with Birds and the Language of Hens Literary Hub
Climate
COP29 chief exec filmed promoting fossil fuel deals BBC
Climate Initiatives Fare Well Across the Country Despite National Political Climate Inside Climate Mews
Sustainable Building Effort Reaches New Heights with Wooden Skyscrapers JSTOR Daily
93 still missing after severe floods in Spain The Watchers
Syndemics
MMWR: Serologic Evidence of Recent Infection with HPAI A(H5) Virus Among Dairy Workers Avian Flu Diary
China?
China unveils $1.4tn package to shore up economy FT
* * * Trump’s comeback no surprise for China – and this time Beijing is prepared South China Morning Post
China in ‘intensive’ consultations with EU on EV price commitments CGTN
No winners in trade wars, says Chinese envoy, as US confrontation looms Channel News Asia
* * * China Unveils New Missile Defence System With Staggering 3000 Kilometre Range: What is the HQ-19’s Role? Military Watch
The English Paradox: Four Decades of Life and Language in Japan TokyoDev
Myanmar
Famine Imminent in Myanmar’s Rakhine State as Economy Collapses, UN Says The Diplomat
The Koreas
S.Korea fires ballistic missile after Pyongyang’s missile launches Anadolu Agency
South Korea’s ‘4B’ Movement Goes Viral in US After Trump Elected 404 Media
India
Africa
Oil discoveries fuel battle for strategic island off West Africa S&P Global
Syraqistan
Israeli hooligans provoke clashes in Amsterdam after chanting anti-Palestinian slogans Middle East Eye. The deck: “Travelling fans verbally abuse locals and tear down Palestine flags before fights break out with Dutch youth.”
* * * Trump’s victory throws diplomatic bombshell into Israel’s multi-front war – analysis Jerusalem Post
Trump Will Work to End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Erasing Palestinian Aspirations Haaretz
* * * How close is the Israeli army to collapse? Asa Winstanley, Palestine is Still the Issue
Easy-fit prosthetics offer hope to thousands of Gaza amputees BBC
European Disunion
EU leaders gauge impact of Trump’s return at Budapest ECP summit BNE Intellinews
New Not-So-Cold War
Ukraine Now Faces a Nuclear Decision Foreign Policy
“NATO or Nukes”: Why Ukraine’s nuclear revival refuses to die Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
* * * Ukraine loses ground to Russia as Trump win leaves future U.S. support in doubt PBS
Western leader blurts out what was once taboo on Ukraine Responsible Statecraft
* * * US to back Ukraine’s talks with Russia if Zelenskyy is ready Ukrainska Pravda
Trump 2.0 is good news for Putin, bad news for Zelenskiy Ben Aris, Radio Moskva
Russia’s Putin says ready for dialogue with ‘courageous’ Trump Al Jazeera
Europe already ‘Trump proofing’ Ukraine war aid Responsible Statecraft
South of the Border
What Is Homelander Doing in Venezuela? Venezuelanalysis
Trump Transition
“Six ways from Sunday”?
Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the Deep State.
1. “Immediately reissue my 2020 executive order, restoring the President's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats.”
2. “Clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus.”
3. “Totally reform… pic.twitter.com/Xhg297uWCe
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 8, 2024
* * * Trump’s Return Is an Abominable Ambush for the Fed John Authers, Bloomberg
Can Trump Fire the Fed Chair? Some Legal Realism Credit Slips
* * * Who is Susie Wiles? Trump’s new chief of staff and ‘work wife’ is grandma who has grown men quaking Daily Mail
Calling all nat sec wonks: These are the transition positions you should be paying attention to Politico
Robert Kennedy Jr’s influence over Donald Trump sparks Big Pharma alarm FT
* * * Can the Next President Change U.S. Foreign Policy? War on the Rocks
Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: Trump Returns! Empire in Decline! (video) Dialog Works, YouTube
* * * How would Trump’s promise of mass deportations of migrants work? BBC
Trump says there’s ‘no price tag’ for his mass deportation plan NBC
Dem governor issues stark warning to Trump: ‘You come for my people, you come through me’ FOX. Pritzker.
2024 Post Mortem
Thirty years later, the answer emerge History Unfolding
Milestones n+1a
How 5 key demographic groups voted in 2024: AP VoteCast AP
* * * ‘BlueAnon’ conspiracy theorists spread viral voter fraud claims after Trump victory France24
4D Chess: Democrats Admit Trump Actually Won In 2020 And Is Now Unable To Serve Third Term Babylon Bee
* * * I Wonder Daring Fireball
Harvard Professors Cancel Classes as Students Feel Blue After Trump Win Harvard Crimson. Musical interlude.
Biden Administration
No One Is Running America Now Indi.ca
Digital Watch
New Device Generates Electricity From Moisture in the Air (press release) SUNY Binghamton
Police Freak Out at iPhones Mysteriously Rebooting Themselves, Locking Cops Out 404 Media
Thanks, Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6% The Register
Class Warfare
New York Times Tech Strikers Sing ‘No Scabs’ and Call a Wordle Boycott Labor Notes
Antidote du jour (Marek Szczepanek):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
212 comments
Comments are closed.
“US to back Ukraine’s talks with Russia if Zelenskyy is ready”
Sounds like the Biden White House is already throwing the Ukraine under a bus. The problem here is that not only will Zelensky refuse to meet with Putin but he has put it into the Ukrainian Constitution that it is illegal to negotiate with Russia so long as Putin is President. And even if he did, the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists will kill him if he tries. But you can’t really negotiate with the guy. He was supposed to sign some military agreement with Hungary a day or so ago but refused to sign it at the last moment because the Hungarians would not add a section saying that they will push for the Ukraine to go into NATO. No sparkly ponies for Zelensky.
what a family blogging waste of lives and destruction of an entire society for nothing!
This deserves a special circle of Hades.
They died for Dow Jones and the MIC. Greater love hath no man than to lay down their life for the economy.
> This deserves a special circle of Hades.
Indeed …
Tenth under construction!
Yes fellow Chris, I heard Halliburton won the contract for that…
LOL
Ha!
Isn’t this the latest of many “negotiate you!” episodes knowing that Zelensky is negotiation incapable? Goes beyond hypocrisy.
From the ever reliable Mr. Bertrand:
Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) posted at 9:57 AM on Wed, Nov 06, 2024:
There’s a growing awareness in Europe that Trump’s election dramatically changes the status quo, but in characteristic European fashion they seem to draw the exact wrong conclusions about it. This post 👇 by Raphael Glucksmann – the poster child of atlantist liberal
(https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1854191463074320707?t=hFdQGxxZIyCs3cp-knFuHw&s=03)
Oh man, the very “socialist” Glucksmann feels abandoned and heading to a Czechoslovakia moment by the great powers, but worse, compounded with the far right menace. How saaad! Someone please rescue this poor ultra-progressive warmonger from his nightmares.
The question is that these individuals realise that the populace has indeed reasons to be unhappy. They have two options: change course dramatically or cancel democracy for the better of us.
They really love the Munich agreement argument so much they will throw it around even if it doesn’t make any sense. Czechoslovakia was nation of ~15M surrounded by antagonists and played on by great powers, so there really wasn’t space for maneuver. Maybe Mr. Glucksmann could explain why EU, which is approximately equal to US+Russia and certainly isn’t surrounded by them, is in the same position. Especially how we got to the point that US can dictate EU, and EU just have to take it the same way as Czechoslovakia when Germany/Italy/France/UK/Poland joined forces?
Glucksmann should float down from the heights of superstructural horrors, with all the angst generated by “fundamental value conflicts,” and consider the possibility of a restored path, based on broadly compatible interests, to a capitalist utopia of a Euromarket that integrated Russia, which as best as I can tell was Russia’s goal. Let’s have a revival of a bracing faith in capitalist internationalism! Why not a “Finlandization” of Europe, not just Ukraine, a new Concert of nations giving the middle finger to the US? (not sure how sarcastic I’m being here)
Bertrand’s rant is good and worth a read, as usual. He wrote well on something that’s been bothering me for a while:
Later he mentions Israel and Palestine from a self-interest point of view but there’s more to it. The West, as a coherent entity, is falling apart for a number of reasons and one of them is because its true values (as opposed to the hypocritical piousness Glucksmann offers) are so rapidly being revealed.
Ahhhhh, Glucksmann! Couldn’t they find Bernard-Henri Levy for a lucid analysis? (I believe he is still alive, non?)
Re: Harvard cancels classes b/c students are sad
Serious question for any Ivy Leaguers out there, are non-stem classes at Harvard/Princeton/Yale etc demanding? Is it actually hard work?
Is it possible to fail?
Far from the Ivy League, but academically sound for the 21st century, in my orbit the Office of Student Affairs is “counseling” students who are “disheartened” by Tuesday’s result.
one has to make an effort to fail to fail. STEM = a constant workload. History 102? you can take a personal day and not skip a beat.
Honestly (looking back as a grown arse adult), it’s rather insulting that 20 y.o. apprentice mechanic has to show up at the auto dealership at 6:00AM to change oil for the next 7 hours irrespective of his feelings, but losing an election = mental health crisis at fancy pants edu.
>>>non-stem classes at Harvard/Princeton/Yale etc demanding?
High school was harder—-in that 4/5 AP classes a day, homework every f____ing night, + extra-curriculars, class starts at 7:30AM, plus you want to be a normal kid.
Usually 4 classes max in college and if you’re savvy you have a range of classes in difficulty so that you aren’t crushed at any given time. With the caveat of this all depends on your math, writing and reading skills from high school.
If you have a good math-writing-reading foundation and college is easy. If not, it can be a quagmire.
I am very, very concerned about the future of non-STEM, paleo liberal arts in college. Lots of social media videos of kids who film other kids behavior during class….lots of use of ChatGPT and (IMO) too much use of take home exams.
Exams need to be in-class, using only pen and paper. But that takes time, effort, and money (teaching assistant staff).
Wait until those robo-baristas take away yet another, uh, career path.
robo baristas, lol! Here’s a artist’s rendering of going back to the future, (wonder where I can buy one of those levitating briefcases) heh heh. Imagine walking into a coffee shop and finding it to be a room full of vending machines. I guess it’s cool because I won’t have to talk to anyone? And what of all those poetry majors trying to make rent?
In my time, in a former socialist country, most of the exams were in the form of presentations, answers to questions drawn from a jar… One would go in the good clothes…
Sure it’s possible to fail there.
That said, the very hardest part of the Ivy League is getting in.
Many, many years ago this striving middle class nobody from a small town in Ohio was offered admission to Harvard, Princeton, and MIT.
The Harvard admission package included a small certificate suitable for framing. This made me laugh.
After visiting all three schools I decided on MIT. The Harvard students struck me as more self absorbed than scholarly, and while I was impressed by the rigor at Princeton, I wasn’t a fan of gothic architecture and wanted a more urban environment.
I said at the time that I would frame and hang the Harvard admission certificate next to my MIT diploma although I never followed through on either. My diploma is in a drawer somewhere and I have no idea what happened to the admission certificate.
Took German I with the ugrads here at the D, and many STEM grad courses. The College is on the quarter system so you have to keep up, generally can’t take a day off. However, some students seem to have plenty of time for partying, yelling, and screaming at all hours of the night on random weeknights, so their workload must not be too bad. I figure if I had gotten into ugrad here back in the day and been a liberal arts major, I’d have been able to cruise. My former dept chair sent out an email Wednesday talking about taking time for a cup of tea and community building during these turbulent times and that connected communities are more resilient. I haven’t seen anything about any classes being cancelled as a result of the election results, but there’s a palpable sense of shock on campus, at work, and in town, like they’ve just been slugged in the head by a massive punch they hadn’t seen coming.
And most of the election signs are still up in yards.
Students React to Election Results
Funny. Here in my PMC neighborhood (some of them college professors) the Harris signs are mostly gone. Trump’s too but some shy Trump voters have been putting up more yard signs. One has the picture of him raising his fist after being shot.
Putin no less has just praised Trump because of that moment. It has always been fashionable to look down on politicians but surely having political instincts and wanting to be all things to all people is better than having no political sense at all. Democracy = feedback.
Here’s hoping that the public and what Trump calls their “common sense” will make things a little better at least, not worse.
There’s one house I drive by regularly that replaced their Harris – Waltz sign with a Trump sign. I had a hearty chuckle at first, but in retrospect it is thoroughly depressing..
One of those Carville-Matalin affaires, no doubt …
I hadn’t thought of that. Somebody has to wash the dishes.
Took STEM classes at a State Uni and at an Ivy, didn’t see a difference.
Nor should there be, really. All UG science courses will cover the same topics, often use same textbooks, and most profs aren’t good teachers (It’s not necessarily a bad thing–several former colleagues and I talked fairly seriously about how actors doing the “teaching” might not be a bad thing in large classes. Having profs who actually know what they are doing is useful if the students are both engaged and interacting–not likely in today’s environment for many reasons.
The real difference between top schools and not so top schools is that of the average student. Even then, there are enough interesting, interested, talented, and/or motivated students even at crappy colleges….
PS. There SHOULD be more differences in humanities and soc sci classes, since, in principle, top tier schools, theoretically, would assign “better” reading materials instead of mere textbooks (a friend whose first job was at Princeton got a lot of grief over assigning a “textbook”–but that was a few decades ago.) In practice, though, this doesn’t seem to do much…and I don’t know how things are nowadays.
Maybe at the Ivys, but there sure was a difference at engineering schools. I chickened out of taking Thermo at RPI, as it was one of the notorious “filtering” classes; took it over summer school at UCLA instead, figuring who needs thermo to work on computers. Both schools used the same textbook. You know how textbooks have the problems at the end of the chapter in a range of difficulties, easy to super hard? At RPI, the assigned problems ranged from the middle to the bottom. At UCLA, the problems were all from the easy third, and most of the other kids struggled. The tests were a joke, more or less ‘did you read the book?’ level. No complaints from me! But pretending that there (was) no difference is definitely not the case.
At Caltech, Phys 12 was QM for UG physics majors; Phys 2 was for everyone else (and 12 was the main reason I didn’t become a physicist). The material was taught differently, but I maintain that the substance was the same (whichever way you cut it, it was still QM), and the truth is that the prof who taught 12 was absolutely dreadful at teaching. The challenge came from the fact that you had a different cohort of students, who approached the matter differently and had a higher expectation for themselves.
I don’t think I ever did a problem set out of textbook (every problem set was custom made, for each course, although sometimes, there were references to problems in the texts.). Maybe there is a difference, after all….
Harvard males might have more reason to be sad. I have a feeling I know where the “4B Movement” is most likely to take hold in the US. A curse on you Trump, and your partner in patriarchy Putin as well!
“Harvard Professors Cancel Classes as Students Feel Blue After Trump Win”
This generation must be made of sterner stuff than the one that faced Trump’s first win back in 2016. How can I tell? Because there is no mention of groups coming together for support and colouring-in books being issued with puppies and kittens being brought in to help those students cope. Even as I write this mini-bit of history, it sounds like something out of the Babylon Bee but it actually happened.
Not yet, at least / )
According to the article, Harvard physics professor Jennifer E. Hoffman has made her office available to students as “a space to process the election.” She also “stress-baked several pans of lemon bars to share.”
This is impressive. I never even got a stale Milky Way bar from any of my professors. I attended a lowly flyover state university where we were expected to show up for class during inconvenient stuff like ice storms and tornado warnings. I guess you get what you pay for.
When I was in architecture school (public university) one of design professors frequently brought us snacks in the middle of the night when we were pulling all-nighters in studio. This was in the early/mid 80s.
In engineering school (University of Cal campus) during the Vietnam war, we would get people telling the faculty there was “a bomb in the engineering building”.
It happened so frequently that when someone rushed into one class and informed the instructor, he told us of the “bomb threat” but said “let’s finish up” as the lecture is almost done.
We stayed another 10 minutes and left at the scheduled time.
No bomb went off.
Different times, did have protesters tear gassed by Gov Reagan and he shutdown the campus once.
IMO, the social woke-ism of the past 10 years (politically corrected films, TV, video games, speech codes at school, etc) has created a silent majority of solidly conservative kids/under-25s.
We’ll see if this is the case over the next 15 years. Once again elements of “left-of-center” are shaping up to be the worst enemy of the other elements of “left-of-center”
I watched a video yesterday of a panel at MSNBC and I think that it was Morning Joe that was saying how students at higher education are terrified of being cancelled. That his own daughter won’t put her hand up in case some social justice warrior takes what she was saying the wrong way and then bam, she gets cancelled. And just to drive the point home he said that over the past four years he has had many dinners with Democrat parents who were saying the same thing about their own kid’s experiences in higher education. I can see a lot of kids gravitating to conservative circles who aren’t so prone to do this form of censorship.
Backlash of The Other. We will see the pendulam swing to the other Other, at some point, if we haven’t self-extirpated?
Here is a nice long 1.3 hour video that goes to the roots of the white nationalist christian movement taking over bumphuc flyover Montana. I guess it wasnt entirely covid and Yellowstone/ John Dutton… Stanford, Hoover, PERC, Oh My!
I’m sickened, and alarmed. Lot of We They ing. Lotta how did WE let this happen? Microcosm of the new Murika?
https://youtu.be/3okrutTR2l8
The Last Redoubt
https://montanafreepress.org/2021/11/24/selling-the-american-redoubt-in-montana/
Under the Banner of Heaven
(agree to disagree)….
what “the Left” fails to understand about “the Right” is that the Right has become secular too. Yes, Christians are a plurality in the GOP….but this idea of an ultra-nationalist Christian right that is an existential threat is a bogeyman created as a rhetorical device to get your eyeballs and your cash.
agree to disagree
There is an extreme cult like bit of Christian Nationalism bit in the American Right, just like there is an extreme cult
likebit in the Neoliberal Wokeist in the putative American Left. The former has the potential to as damaging as the latter currently is, but for now, it is not. To say that they are an existential threat right this very moment would be part of a effort for those eyeballs and cash.I believe the American Nation as a whole is far more economically socialist than either the Christian Nationalists or the American Woke are as well still socially more classically liberal.
Watch the video, listen to the language. Might be illuminating. Maybe I need different kool aid? And check out all the cool property in NW Montana and the Idaho panhandle!
Can you imagine the bile the kid of Joe Scarborough would spew? Or rank stupidity?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Scarborough
My hunch is he’s more worried about being called out for out and out lies than anything. He’s a 94 Republican deemed too right wing by Newt Gingrich.
https://www.politico.com/story/2012/01/the-newt-i-know-072084
He’s still seething about Newt backing a “moderate woman.”
I’ve seen it in my own two teens (17F and 15M). My young lady is all in on “woke culture” (though thankfully trying to get in to STEM to become a mechanical engineer, so at least I got that going for me) and my son is faaaaarr more conservative then any of the conservative boys I knew when I was his age in the late 1980s. I really believe it is a reaction to all of this “woke” culture.
My friends and I went through a reactionary trad-catholic phase to bait the (lovely, really) liberal happy-clappy religious studies teacher. The course was taught as lectures in lunch time as a way of obtaining a tenth exam certificate so it was a more casual affair
We were a bunch of atheist post-Church of England white boys with a couple of recusant Catholics but we would doggedly argue the reactionary lime of every Papal Council (Trent, Nicea etc), Vatican II etc and when we studied Orthodox liturgy held it up as the one true faith.
If the stakes were this low and we struck a pose, imagine how today’s teens may feel?
Damages from DNC/MSM slanderous propaganda about the lying, evil and vile president elect!
Dearly beloved had a meltdown last night, partially fired by chardonnay, about how terrible it is she cannot enjoy the first woman president and how children may not be able to have abortions. War? I did my best counseling since I was a second lieutenant!
This is the calm before the storm. The previous Trump term was awful enough. Each morning you wake up to check the news to see what fresh hell awaited us. Supply chain disruptions. Empty store shelves. This time will be worse. JD Vance is Peter Thiel’s lickspittle and will push his agenda hard. Trump will restart his grift. Anyone who gives him a few million dollars will get what they want. Elon Musk will get some sort of position and, as a result, will be able to unload all the stock he wishes tax free. I’m guessing two years or less till the recession hits hard.
my school was offering movie nights and group therapy spaces. also ‘calm down crafts’ in the libraries which they normally only offer during finals week.
Correct link for “Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: Trump Returns! Empire in Decline!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7iGPm0vloA
Fixed, thanks!
Yes, and that is some jaw-drop conversation between Hudson/Wolff. I don’t think I’ve seen Wolff this animated/dismayed about the future.
>South Korea’s ‘4B’ Movement Goes Viral in US After Trump Elected 404 Media
Limited at it is, I have to say that my anecdotal experience confirms below with respect to celibacy, although not in all cases, so therefore not necessarily universal, but generally accurate. I have to disagree on the “threat” part, again, generally speaking. And as far as “less to gain,” that would be situational distinct from relationship to relationship, if this “gain” is financial in nature.
women are really good at celibacy, because you guys are actually a threat to us. We have a lot less to gain from you.
The Westernization of the 4B movement was universally derided on 4Chan when the meme popped up on Wed/Thurs (surprise, surprise). One comment which garnered a lot of “lulz” (to use their language) was: So women who weren’t (family blogging) me before aren’t (family blogging) me now?
I noticed one section which said-
‘The vow of celibacy starts now,” another person posted. “They no longer get access to us until they can prove they’re capable of caring about our basic rights, health, and safety. The ‘good men’ failed us by letting the bad men proliferate. They all have to be punished in a way they can understand. American men need to fix their fellow men. Let them suck the poison out of each other. We have the power to shun them.’
Quite an entitled position if I do say so myself with this attitude of using sex as a reward for submission to another person’s demands. And here they are demanding that they be their brother’s keepers to get ‘access’. But for years there has been a backlash and that is men quitting the dating scene because of all the baggage. I come across YouTube videos talking about this but if you don’t believe me, go to Google and type in the following words and see for yourself what comes back-
men quitting dating
Only Fans pages suffer oversupply in wake of 4B splash?
In other news, Wall Clock apps ticking louder.
From that imaginary young generation webosphere. /s
I was thinkin’ along the same lines … the smart gals will use the upcoming supply shortage to drive pr0n prices higher, and content creators will profit.
Angry men hating women are soooo hot.
Dear 4Bers,
I am being nice.
Buh bye!
A problem is that swearing to hate all men for the crimes of some itself becomes a hate crime. As the magical revenge wave builds, another will be that for many women this also requires hating that part of yourself that the 4B Oath struggles to squash. What a rich soil for depression and anxiety! Hope there’s adequate space on those university counseling center waiting lists.
Joy will keep us together
(Written by Neal Sedaka, as performed by the Captain and Tenille)
Joy, joy will keep us together
Think of me babe whenever
Some sweet-talkin’ boy comes along
Singin’ Trump songs
Don’t mess around you’ve just gotta be strong
Just stop! Cause I really love you
Stop! I’ve been thinkin’ of you
Look in my heart and let joy … keep us chaste together …
You! (you-doo-doop) You belong to me now
He ain’t gonna set you free now
When those boys start coming around
Talkin’ you down
Hear with your heart and avoid those Trump clowns
Just stop! Cause I really love you
Stop! I’ve been thinkin’ of you
Look in my heart and let joy … keep us chaste together … whatever
Young and beautiful but someday you’ll orgasm again
When the others turn you off … who’ll word-salad you on?
I will, I will, I will … I will
Be there to giggle forever
Joy will keep us together
I said it before, and I’ll say it again
While others pretend .. I needed your vote and I’ll need you again
Just stop! Cause I really love you
Stop! I’ll be right there on “the View”
Look in my heart and let joy … keep us chaste together … whatever
I will, I will, I will, I will …
Da-da-da-dah
Da-da-da-dah
Da-da-da-dah
You better stop
Cause I really love you
Stop, I’ve been thinkin’ of you
Look in my heart and let joy keep us together … whatever
I will, I will, I will, I will
Da-da-da-dah
Da-da-da-dah
Da-da-da-dah
Orangeman is back!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSMf0NRilEM
Kim Jong Un should sponsor that movement, secretly.
The ladies should put on a production of Lysistrata.
But is it on Netflix so they can watch it first to see what it is all about?
Tx.
We can watch Chi-Raq on Prime Video. I should do that. I remember enjoying it. Dunno about other film/tv adaptations.
Political lesbianism? Owning the patriarchy by …..becoming nuns?
I have a bi friend that says he is done dating women. Anecdotally, a two way street. Regrettable.
The 4Bs. Well here it is, the first shot in the war against Trump by the Democrats and their Three Letter Agency boys. Of course they would have wargamed a Trump win, with lots of subsequent plans to sabotage him for the next however long it is before he isn’t there any more.
You can always pick these ops because they spring from the earth fully formed just before an election the Dems/TLAs might lose, or just after they lose an election.
The other way to pick these ops is that they pretty much vanish after a little while into nothingness. Real movements do not operate like that, they have continuity.
Like, we had the pink pussy hats the last time Trump won. ‘Grassroots’ movement that came out of nowehere and then disappeared. Just like the ‘Me Too’ crowd. And the BLM crowd. And QAnon.
Now we have the 4B’s. Perhaps, just perhaps, the No Such Agency crowd Plan A has its own definition of 4B which is Block (Trump), and Bollix, Bamboozle and Betray (voters)
It’s kind of frightening these women think this is a “win” for them.
* Requiring celibacy before marriage is exactly what the authoritarian right wingers of my youth used to push.
* Women stop being able to have children earlier than men… so men can wait them out… by which point their value as a mate will have collapsed.
* The only women that will end up reproducing will be conservative. These 4b women will eliminate themselves from the gene-pool.
* Conservative men will probably be happy that the dating market is simpler.
* Democrat men will end up competing for the conservative women, and some will end up changing their views, reducing the number of “allies” the 4b women will have.
I guess there’s not much thinking going on, just a lot of emoting.
What’s really frightening is splitting people into “Conservative” and “Democrat”.
If you mean they don’t marry each other, that is true.
If you mean you don’t like the terminology I used, please provide better terms.
If you wish people didn’t split into tribes, I agree, but people do.
(Sorry I’m not sure how to interpret your comment).
Western leader blurts out what was once taboo on Ukraine. Responsible Statecraft
So, “Findlandization” is Scholz’s idea. But now Scholz is the lamest of the lame ducks of Europe given the coalition rupture. September end of legislature elections might come ahead to March 2025. And the most likely winners, Merz’s CDU don’t look interested on that.
>> The [the left-populist Sahra Wagenknecht party ] BSW, which at 9% currently, far outperforms in the national polls the liberal FDP (which would not clear the 5% threshold if elections were held today) and runs neck and neck with the declining Greens (around 10%) emerges as a viable alternative for coalition-building with both the CDU and SPD
hemeantwell named Wagenknecht in the lively discussion about Bernie Sanders yesterday.
Force 10 from Navarone.
What is the ante for Russia talking to the US aggressors?
No cease fire
Stop all sanctions
Return the stolen deposits, with earnings
Restitution for Nord Stream 2 damages and lost revenue.
Immediate halt of Kiev aid.
Evacuate all west techs.
Stop all use of military GPS, US satellite surveillance, AWACS, P-8 flight
Then talk.
Fascinating proposal from Mr. Yglesias! I suppose we should start betting on his cancelation.
I doubt that he’s going to be cancelled. Colour me unsurprised that a PMC opinion leader’s response to an electoral shellacking is to run the idea of marching even further to the right up the flagpole. I suspect he’ll have company and plenty of cover to do so.
You could be right. I wonder why it seems all the pundits are willing to accept any theory for why Kamala lost instead of the electorate’s material interests? Kamala wasn’t a good candidate but I don’t think even a good candidate would have won in the face of generational high inflation and price surges in essential goods and services.
Not all donors are craven. As for the msm, they didn’t report on material changes due to policy decisions.
They need to offer an explanation which amounts to something other than “We were too busy trying to get Taylor Swift tickets to mention these things.”
The eyeballs can swiftly turn. After 2014, one donor told Pelosi that a lot of money didn’t go to the boys and girls club to achieve nothing. Pelosi said just wait for Hillary. Then it was Russia.
Jaimie Harris is ranting. He knows that if he doesn’t stem the perception he’s a doofus he won’t get lobbying jobs because he has no real value.
I listened to eight term Rep Richard Neal (D, western MA), being interviewed on NPR yesterday. When asked about “lessons learned” and “moving forward”, his reply, in a one word parsing, was “messaging”.
So, no lessons learned then.
It’s always messaging but never the message.
Somewhere, consultants are gearing up to roll out Messaging 2,000,000.0.
Where there is a grift, there is a way. Those beach houses aren’t gonna buy themselves!
I wonder why it seems all the pundits are willing to accept any theory for why Kamala lost instead of the electorate’s material interests ?
These days the income growth by quintile resulting from a dollar of economic growth is something like 0c/0c/10c/30c/60c. So even Yglesias’ first principal for the commonsense Democrat that “Economic self-interest for the working class includes robust economic growth” is absolutely not true. Economic growth just makes the majority of people fall even further behind in a relative sense. How can the piss-weak nibbling around the edges that pundits call sensible economic policy deal with that reality ? Better to totally ignore it.
I think any candidate could have won for the Democrats, if that candidate had been willing to run as “neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump.” Same for the Republicans. There was a solid majority who just wanted to move on, as evidenced by the brief Coconut Mania before Harris defined herself.
It took unique anti-talent for Harris to come up with the idea of running as “Joe Biden in a skirt trying to appeal to Trump supporters,” thereby driving away absolutely everyone who wanted any type of change.
Dude has always been That Guy. A midwid republican. Not sure why anyone bothers with him. He’s wrong about most and ugly all of the time. Not subtle either.
https://marchingunderbanners.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/matthew_yglesias_punisher_small.jpg
I’ll just say it and sound like a Grinch since everyone else who also sees it are self-censoring themselves cuz critiquing Kamala = “incel” hatred of women…..Kamala was an **awful** retail politician. (Senators make awful pounding-the-pavement politicians, JFK and Obama were the exception that proves the rule, IMO)
(having never met her or seen her in person) on tv, she came across as unserious, ignorant, and evasive.
If generic wet noodle Democrat was the nominee (Newsom) who was free to throw stones at the White House and cultural woke-ism, Democrats probably still might have still lost….but (arguably) it would not have been a generational disaster with Democrats salvaging some parts of Congress.
You’re 100% right, she is a terrible politician. Her biggest problem is that she has no authenticity, a completely fake candidate. Everything about Kamala is one giant PR job, there isn’t a single thing genuine about her which is why her campaign was so desperate to control and micromanage every single public appearance. That’s also why whenever she is caught having to think on her feet it comes out as word salad.
Someone on twitter (and I regret not saving it because you can’t find anything on that goddawful site) collected video of some of Kamala Harris’s public speeches and appearances and juxtaposed them together, and it was striking how copy-pasted they look. Everything was scripted right down to her feigned ‘surprise’ gestures, ‘ohh wows’, hand and eye movements, etc. All fake.
Trump on the other hand is probably the most ‘genuine’ politician you can find today, his rallies are half ad-libbed seemingly, no problem shooting the breeze with Rogan for 3 hours, etc.
>Ukraine Now Faces a Nuclear Decision Foreign Policy
FP, the magazine that just keeps on giving…crazy ships that is…I guess following on yesterday’s article that “Even Donald Trump Can’t Afford to Lose the Ukraine War” this is the logical next step.
Under a new Trump administration, Ukraine’s government can’t avoid considering a nuclear weapon.
I was thinking the same thing. FP has really been giving the crazies who are growing desperate a forum lately. Who is this guy?
“Casey Michel is head of the Human Rights Foundation’s Combating Kleptocracy Program and author of American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History.”
Don’t be fooled by his book title. His focus is on how *foreign* kleptocrats are able to undermine democracy and manipulate policy in the US. Guess which foreign country poses the greatest danger? Most NC readers won’t be fooled by the name of the “Human Rights Foundation” either. It is a typical hybrid warfare front group founded by a right-wing Venezuelan opposition activist and currently chaired by Yulia Navalnaya (Navalny’s widow) – a position formerly held by Garry Kasparov.
I can’t think of better credentials for those who would advocate giving the Bomb to a failed proxy state dominated by neo-Nazis. Thanks to Foreign Policy for keeping hope alive.
On the same subject, I have to register my great disappointment at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for publishing such blatant obscurantist propaganda in the article posted above. You see, of course Zelinsky’s nuclear weapons ploy is a rational attempt to force a *real* solution: NATO membership! Only NATO membership can protect Ukraine from brutal Russian aggression, as it has protected Europe all these years.
For readers who might ask whether NATO might have something to do with the *cause* of Ukraine’s woes, or what Russia’s response might be to such a proposal, well sorry. It is such a cliche now I hesitate to even mention that the author, Mariana Budjeryn, is a Ukrainian who grew up in Lviv and ended up at Harvard’s Kennedy School. I’m sure she is sincere. And who can argue with her academic “expertise”?
Thanks to The Bulletin for giving us the “sane” alternative to the Bomb.
Non proliferation except with exceptions
War in East Europe is tempting the thermo nuclear monster.
For everyone before 2008.
West are lead by the craven!
Fortunately, as several times during the Cold War, saner heads reside in Russia
>Trump 2.0 is good news for Putin, bad news for Zelenskiy Ben Aris, Radio Moskva
Maybe it is “good news” for for the mainly of young men in their youths whose bodies won’t be used as canon fodder for the fat-cats/oligarchs whose plunder and perfidy know no limit. And if “trump is not good news for Europe,” maybe it should grow a spin and chart its own future instead of being led like a poodle by the AngloAmerican hegemeon.
Trump is not good news for Europe as just his tariff policy is also aimed at Europe, not just China. The EU is already in a major crisis after the report from former Italian Prime Minister and ex-European Central Bank boss Mario Draghi highlighted it is no long competitive.
Suggesting Biden was better news for Europe?
Joe Biden, that is, the guy who promised to end Nord Stream a few months before it was “mysteriously” bombed.
“EU leaders gauge impact of Trump’s return at Budapest ECP summit”
Right now the EU has an opportunity. Victor Orban has the six-month Presidency of the European Council and if there is one leader that has Trump’s ear, it is Orban. The EU are currently gathered at the Budapest ECP summit so they could go to Orban and ask him if he could negotiate on their behalf with Trump for a smooth transition of relations between the US and the EU. Will they do it? Of course not. They would rather make threats against Trump and saying that the EU can go it alone. Meanwhile I expect Trump to have excellent relations with Hungary’s Orban and Slovakia’s Fico going forward.
>No One Is Running America Now Indi.ca
The question on everyone (with a scintilla of curiosity) has been wondered about. The author, I think, is correct in saying that “No ‘one’ is President now” but would quickly amend that “one” is operative word. The oligarchs have been controlling, or at least disproportionately influencing, the Presidency/Monarch/head of State, since time immemorial, as it always has and will probably always continue to do so. The more pertinent question, to my mind, is whether the plight of the proles and masses will be improved or further immiserated.
So who’s actually running America? Who the fuck knows. Some shadowy cabal of political consultants and the even darker money behind them. Who’s commander in chief? Who gives a shit? A Raytheon board member is Defence Secretary, the military industrial complex has completely corrupted civilian governance. This has been America’s state of affairs for at least three months, though it seems to have been Weekend At Bernie’s for years, walking Biden’s propped up corpse around, signing documents and sniffing hair…
America public life is increasingly just a reality TV show controlled by invisible producers, funded by giant corporations who profit no matter what. It does not matter who’s President. No ‘one’ is President now.
In other news, will Lyft and Uber service to Kalorama taper off?
Re 2024 Post Mortem, I was pleased to hear both Krystal (of Breaking Points) and Aaron Bastani (over in England at Novara Media) independently state that the roots of Trump’s victory go back to the the (dis?)organizing cabal atop the Democratic Party’s chicanery in 2016 to keep Bernie off the ticket by any means necessary along with all subsequent machinations to suborn their own primary process in the most anti-democratic ways to avoid giving the membership a choice, culminating in Kamala’s outright coronation.
Their (not sure who “they are? Corpo-Dems? The Clintons? Obama?) fear of giving the people any say finally caught up to them, and in the end the people just left them. Couldn’t happen to nicer people, really …
Blind-spot Harris
Sung to the tune of, “Sunspot baby” by Bob Seger
Melody
She packed up her bags and she took off down the road
She left me here stranded with the bills she owed
She gave me a false address
She left the party in a mess
Blind-spot Harris, she sure had us way out-guessed
She left me here stranded like a Donkey in the yard
She charged up a fortune on the DNC credit card
She used my credit and Joe’s name
Man, that was real unkind
Blind-spot Harris
She sure had a real good time
I checked in with Oprah
I looked on “The view”
The closest I came was an old pantsuit
I checked the Obamas, they said she was gone
I can’t understand how she did me so wrong!
Because she packed up her bags and she took off down the road
She said she was going to visit Michelle O
She used the Oval Office and Joe’s name
Man, that was real unkind
Blind-spot Harris, she sure had a joyful time
(She sure did!)
[Guitar break]
I checked in with Oprah
I looked on “The View”
The closest I came was an old pantsuit
I checked the Obamas, they said she was gone
I can’t understand how she did us so wrong!
But she packed up her act and she took off down the road
She left me here stranded with the bills she owed
She used my address and my name
And put my credit to shame
Blindspot Kammy
Sure had a joyful time
Oh, Blind-splot Harris
She sure had a real good time
Yeah, Blind-spot Harris
I’m gonna catch up sometime
Sometime, oh
Gonna track you down, oh
Brethren and sistren, first the bad news, then the good news.
I have been following Naked Capitalism Links in the a.m. and Water Cooler in the p.m. There have been no mentions of Hillary Clinton. Even at YuToob, I find no videos of the presidentess-in-waiting.
Here is my surmise: Hillary has retreated to her mausoleum to drench herself in the blood of young Ukrainian men to rejuvenate. Surely you don’t expect her to go away.
So long as there are opportunities for looting and name-calling Hillary and her allegedly serial allegedly rapist husband (who is the source of her political base — how romantic!) will be back. They have destroyed everything that they have touched, but there is still more to ruin (!).
When? And will it be to announce “discovery” of Russian interference in the elections? And to deny Israeli and UK interference?
The good news. I got the e-blast from Rhyd Wildermuth, the gay, druid publisher, born in southeast Ohio (Appalachia), now resident of Luxembourg. An excellent summing up from a leftist viewpoint:
https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2024/11/7/on-no-longer-buying-what-theyre-selling
In politics, Wildermuth is very much a materialist. It’s the economy.
In religion, he’s a pagan. He seems to be pretty good at the tarot. (I’m fussy about my tarot readers, though.)
And he has been linked to before at Naked Capitalism, so I’m not sending you out into the woo-woo-sphere.
from the beginning of the post:
> Democracy has died, and a demonic force has begun to animate its rotting corpse. That’s certainly what we’re told, anyway, and perhaps it’s true. But if so, it likely died long before this most recent election.
That the institutions of “our democracy” have become so fragile that they can be ended by a specific individual suggests that it failed a long time ago. The demos does not rule (and arguably never has). It is and has been oligarchy all the way back.
Republic, what a concept. Future generations may wonder about the resilience and self-healing of republics after viral outbreaks of sociopathogens in Chappaqua, UWS, the Vineyard, Cambridge, New Haven and other bastions of good-think.
I’d never heard of him. Straight talk, no words wasted. Given the geographically similar background, do you think we could graft him onto J.D Vance?
Thanks, Tarot and all!
This paragraph was a good catch by Wildermuth:
Harris and the DNC refused to listen to what people actually wanted, thinking — like all capitalists — that the right publicity and advertising would suffice to convince people to buy what they were selling. They failed to understand that some of us actually believe the things we say we do and that we refuse to betray our deepest values no matter how much we’re threatened.
Good obs. At the risk of sounding too academicky, this has always been the centrl problem in teaching about elections/voting. The challenge was that you had to get the students to believe a number of things that, they apparently have trouble reconciling.
1) Voters are, in general, pretty underinformed and don’t have time to get to the bottom of many/most things. (The more blunt version is “voters are pretty dumb,” even blunter version is that “you are pretty dumb as voters.” Too many people say the blunt version. I think I got a lot of flak for saying the blunter version when I was teaching.)
2) That voters don’t know doesn’t mean they can be manipulated. Quite the contrary, they know that they don’t know and are willing to trust what other people say IF they earned their trust, but, at the same time, are also aware that all manner of people (especially politicians) are trying to sell them things and swindle them into doing things they don’t want to do. They are very clever at sniffing out bovine s**t.
Point 2 is especially hard to sell, especially since how to earn people’s trust doesn’t come in a textbook–and I have no idea what the answer is myself, other than, “well, it depends.” All too often, Point 1 is thought to mean 1) the people gotta be more “ejacated” 2) you can just mould people whatever way you like by messing with information. Both of which, of course, are explicitly rejected by point #2, which, as noted, provides no “good answer” (of a textbook variety.) What’s more is that the attempt at earning people’s trust is not what politicians do much any more (well, actually, adhering to ideological talking points is exactly this in a modern form, for certain audiences, but those who buy into the message don’t realize this.) So you wind up talking about old timey politicians going to gatherings, shaking hands, and such things–except students have no idea what I’m talking about. :S
I was listening an interview on CBC today with some analyst from Vox on how influencers influence… And the belief there is that people are like lemmings and one only need to capture the right influencers, and then all will fall into place. Having looked into many survey responses myself – the free comments sections are the best, one realizes that people really are not like lammings and are annimated by so many different things… So many Duncan Idahos there carrying the “wild” genes that would not be domesticated.
Thanks for the excellent link. Druid or not, Wildermuth’s is the single best summation I’ve read explaining Kamala’s demise.
Yesterday I visited Rome (a faraway train ride from bucolic northern Tuscany) for a bureaucratic matter (lots of beggars and homeless and litter in Rome, quite a change since my last visit in 2018, but I digress…..), dropped into a Feltrinelli bookstore and picked up a copy of Emmanuel Todd’s “The Defeat of the West”….. recently published in italiano as “La Sconfitta Dell’Occidente”, so I will plow through it in my faulty Italian. Nice to see that the book was displayed up front near the bookstore entrance (with piles of extra books at hand!) as a new release/bestseller. It seems that Italians sense that the world is-a-changing, and they will not be left completely behind. Whatever their faults, the Italians are survivors; and their food and wine and climate is absolutely tip-top.
Kamala’s demise. I think that, on the contrary, she has been very lucky. Now she has an opportunity to be a human being and not the gigantic POS she would have turned to be if elected. One day she will probably realise how lucky she was.
What is an anarcho-pagan doing in Luxembourg? It combines the worst aspects of Belgium and Switzerland and can be travelled in a day. Finance types who locate brassplate entities there dread dealing with it, the whole country is a scam. It only exists because of an iron deposit that the French and Germans refused to allow the other to envassal and so permitted an independent grand duchy.
Luxembourg exists, albeit greatly diminished from the time when it provided 3 emperors of the “Holy Roman Empire”. Why? Because the Luxembourgers were/are adept at negotiating and building alliances, but indeed the Germans and/or French could have rolled in more times than they did and ended it.
re: Sustainable Building Effort Reaches New Heights with Wooden Skyscrapers JSTOR Daily
This is great but isn’t there a potential downside not mentioned – namely wiping out forests? At one point Europe and the Middle East were covered with vast, dense forests but we cut it all down for heating, housing and shipbuilding, and now modern day arks. Surely starting a new trend of building tall buildings or skyscrapers with timber isn’t going to do much good for the forests unless we manage that?
Not an architect here, but I believe the wood that is used for these projects is a lot of small pieces glued together with special epoxy. That’s how they get long beams. So it’s not entirely correct to say these are timber structures, as they use petroleum product as well.
Bamboo, used for scaffolding and other applications to this day in Shanghai and points beyond. A grass, or weed, depending on one’s point of view, and versatile.
They should build skyscrapers out of straw.
It was a good article, nice overview of the pros and cons, well written.
As for wiping out forests, it just depends on volume. It would be good to have some figures to get some sense of the relative scales involved (eg: if 100% of high rise construction in US switched to mass timber, the number of trees required to be felled goes up by X)%.
The industry has some slack due to the collapse of pulp/paper demand, so maybe some substitution can occur.
I feel confident that it is a better use of the forests than mulching them and shipping them off to Europe to be greenwashed as low carbon pellet power, that is for sure.
Nope. Good forest management practices of the old European school would allow for that. Don’t invite a Canadian forester though. It can be mayde sustainable as long as politics and maximum profit with disregard for natural environment is allowed to win.
The article discusses the issue of deforestation. The wood used in making engineered timber is ‘softwood’ (pine, fir, etc.) Those forests are mostly in the northern hemisphere. So there isn’t an endless supply of.
What isn’t discussed is ‘trussed’ member construction. It doesn’t have the ‘charing’ characteristics that improve the fire characteristics of timber construction, but uses much less wood.
No One Is Running America Now, by Indi Samarajiva.
He’s at it again. Read the whole article.
Great, stylish summing up near the end: “Their Presidents have been a series of bad Reagan impersonators since 1980: nerd Reagan, Reagan with a saxophone, dumb Reagan, black Reagan, Make America Reagan Again, Reagan’s embalmed corpse, Make America Reagan Again, Again. Everything is a reboot, from their cinema to their politics.”
Correct, insofar as Jimmy Carter was the last decent human being we’ve had (though I would put in a vote for Barack Obama, as a person, though his policies stank.)
But then again, I suppose I missed the point … the person may change, but the policies never do.
Uh… Barack Obama… Mr. “Yup, we tortured some folks, but we must look forward”… a “decent human being”…?
We all sin.
I believe Obama lost his way there, and Mr. Ashcroft and Dick Cheney were in fact the true architects of said policy. One of many disappointments that Obama did not have the intestinal fortitude to repudiate such evil.
Juxtapose Obama’s two year trifecta mandate to what Trump will execute in his precious two years.
Time capsule future article fodder.
I suspect that the results will be breathtakingly different.
Pretty sure I am not ready for any of it, especially thos pesky unanticipated knock- on unintended consequences. My mantra of No Lives Matter might rise to the fore.
If Obama had the moral clarity to renounce the Cheney’s and Ashcroft’s during his term, maybe we would not have had the idiotic spectacle of Harris accepting Liz Cheney as her BFF. Bad leadership rolls downhill.
Obama knew what he wasn’t doing, and still didn’t do it. He is a Constitutional lawyer, for cripes sake. Ashcroft and Cheney turned the 5th, 6th, and 4th amendment into toilet paper.
Jose Padilla, anyone?
Oh yeah. “His heart is in the right place.” That’s what the Obots typically said. Spare me.
They say that he has a hidden knife pouch sown into his right jacket sleeve so when he puts his arm around you, it is easier to stab you in the back. Just ask Biden. ;)
Obama was about Obama. There was nothing else. Closing Gitmo or dealing with torture would mean he might have to miss a sit down with Andy Katz to hem and haw and then pick the favorite over a division 2 school.
He always chose the path of least resistance as president.
This.
I just don’t get putting him into the same bucket as Dick Cheney. Obama’s sin was weakness and selfishness. Cheney was the devil incarnate. Shrub is Beelzebub’s cousin because he brought him back into power after being lost in the neocon wilderness after the Gulf War.
Oh, no. Obama was really bad. He was just better at keeping up appearances.
His failure to back even mild reforms after the financial crisis and back a second massive stealth bank bailout after the crisis (the foreclosure crisis exposed a chain of title crisis that meant meteor-killing-the-dinosaurs level liability for banks) produced further increases in inequality that led among other things to Trump. If the Obama admin has forced writedowns on banks, allowed housing prices to correct/stay corrected (as opposed to have the Fed engage in protracted ZIRP to goose housing prices to save the financiers, which had the effect of goosing all financial assets) we would be in COMPLETELY different place now. Start with more affordable housing.
Obama was VASTLY more destructive than Cheney. I could go on….
You got me, that’s a persuasive argument. Maybe time has healed my own anger about his lack of any enforcement against the big banks and lack of prosecutions. Thanks for that reminder.
I tend to view Obama as negligent vs intentionally bad/evil, but given the white hot fury my words provoked, I can tell I touched a nerve with some folks. best wishes
Obama was VASTLY more destructive than Cheney. I could go on….
You are definitely correct, and you are just focusing on the economics–the other stuff (e.g. civil rights) was even worse. But as President, Obama also had the ability to be more destructive. I don’t think that a President Cheney would have acted any better than Obama on any front, although he may have been unable to be as effective in pushing his agenda
I agree with everything you say about Obama, but I cannot agree that Obama was vastly more destructive than Cheney. Depends on what one means by “destructive.” I’ve said before that based on the sheer level of chaos, destruction, and human suffering unleashed on the world, Dick Cheney may well be the most evil human being living on earth today. While there were many architects, no one was more responsible than Cheney for carrying out the global neocon project, nor for using 9/11 as an excuse to expand radically the national security state here in the US. Obama simply continued this project once in office, even occasionally slowing it down a tiny bit (as in Syria) though mostly keeping it going. Even his response to the financial crisis seemed like an extension to what was begun under Bush.
Again, I don’t disagree at all about Obama. It’s just that I see the Bush-Cheney regime as fundamental in determining the trajectory of 21st century US history. Obama was just a safe lackey promising “hope and change” while keeping the project going.
I think I might be a bad person. I wish Cheney a long life (thirty years or so) attached to machines.
Don’t forget that Dick Cheney was “merely” the Vice President. He never possessed Constitutional presidential powers. Blaming all the evil of the Bush Lite administration on Dick Cheney absolves many others who were complicit in the evil doing. Condoleeza Rice, the wanna be NFL Commissioner, deserves a special mention as she continues her high profile life with nary any accountability for her actions.
I’m not sure if this is directed at me, but I’m definitely not blaming *all* the evil on Cheney, nor absolving any of the others who were complicit. Many architects, as I say. But I think it is pretty easy to argue that Cheney was the driving force behind these policies in the Bush administration, with buddy Rumsfeld a close second. That he was “merely” the VP means nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLsZlrZIFwU
Why Wall Street Is Buying So Many U.S. Homes
1,592,972 views Feb 21, 2023 #CNBC
Some Washington D.C. lawmakers want to limit Wall Street’s role in the housing market. In recent years, a small but mighty group of corporations bought hundreds of thousands of homes in sunbelt-region suburbs. These homes are traditionally a crucial investment for American families. But rising home prices are shutting would-be homebuyers out of the market. Meanwhile, financial groups are profiting from rising rents while their subsidiaries build small amounts of new standalone homes in the U.S.
Since the early 2010s, Tricon Residential, Progress Residential, American Homes 4 Rent, Invitation Homes have each bought thousands of homes. They’ve also added to the housing supply in some cases with built-for-rent communities.Some of these companies are financed by private equity firms like Blackstone and investment managers like Pretium Partners.
“It’s almost a captive market” said Jordan Ash, director of Labor-Jobs and Housing at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. “They’ve been very explicit about how people are shut out of the homebuying market and are going to be perpetual renters.”
These calls come after fierce housing inflation hit many Sun Belt states, including Texas, Florida and Georgia, according to the National Association of Realtors.
By 2030, the institutions may hold some 7.6 million homes, or more than 40% of all single-family rentals on the market, according to the 2022 forecast by MetLife Investment Management.
Watch the video above to learn about the rise and future of corporate landlords in the United States.
I’ve offered wondered if those people advertising on light posts and fences that they will buy homes for cash are just front persons for the Big Boys.
Thanks once again for your reminders, Yves. I have no background in finance, but I was sitting downstairs in a cafe in a building where I happened to be working that day when Geithner first appeared. Giant TV screen tuned to CNN. I watched his callow, naive expressions, listened to his voice, and groaned inwardly, “Obama, you blew it.”
And so it proved to be. Not that he seems inclined to acknowledge it.
Best defense is that he decided getting America to elect a black man was an accomplishment. Doing anything as president was too hard and having completed his moon shot, that was that.
But then Biden and the Netflix deal or whatever which were all entirely unnecessary and he could have been off building houses and community gardens.
and he could have been off building houses and community gardens.
He’s about Obama. He wouldn’t do this unless there was a clear goal in mind such as the next office. He moved on to being a celebrity. Its all he really wanted. I actually think the Harris campaign saw this and tried to model it, hence the focus on celebrity endorsements.
Obama disinvited David Axelrod from his birthday party because he needed to control the guest list.
I think that at his core Obama is just a run of the mill grifter. Look how quickly he amassed a huge fortune after leaving the White House. He also would rather not be partially of African ancestry unless it benefits him personally. He gravitates toward wealthy and powerful white people and lives among them. His disdain for ordinary black people is quite obvious.
sorry, here is the root of torture,
bill clinton was the god father of american torturers, that’s why bush and cheney go free
https://listverse.com/2014/02/05/10-reasons-bill-clinton-was-secretly-a-terrible-president/
“Extraordinary rendition” is when shady government operatives stuff a bag over your head and fly you off to some foreign country where they can legally torture you. It sounds like something Alex Jones might dream up in a paranoid frenzy, but it’s a well-documented phenomenon under both Bush, Jr. and Obama—and Bill Clinton was the guy who started it all.
Clinton and Gore signed off on the first rendition back in the ’90s, despite being aware that it breached international law. Until recently, rendered people frequently wound up in the prison cells of places like Mubarak’s Egypt or Gaddafi’s Libya, where they were tortured with electric shocks, rape, beatings, and even crucifixion.
It can sometimes go hideously wrong: In 2003, the CIA snatched a terrorist off the streets and beat, tortured, and sodomized him, only to discover they’d accidentally grabbed the wrong man. The victim just happened to share a name with a wanted criminal. His suffering came care of the Clinton/Gore dream team.”
I’m a broken record today, but… I don’t disagree with anything you say about Clinton. But he hardly represents the “root” of torture by the US. The use of CIA sponsored torture and death squads in Iraq was sometimes referred to as the “Salvador” option for a reason. The use of the same in Latin America was modeled on Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. And so on. I actually see Clinton more like Obama – a lackey who was selected and sponsored by the powers that be and went along with them for his own self-interest rather than some mastermind originator of it all. Both were well-rewarded and reaped the benefits later.
Once again, not to absolve Clinton at all. But getting the history right is an important step.
agreed, we have always had this problem lurking out of sight, however, it was codified into law by clinton and gore.
you can’t go after those who have done it out in the open for all to see, because they are merely exercising their ability to do so under the law.
so if we are outraged at the results of what clinton and gore did, yet place the blame on bush, kinda seems like applying a band aid over a gun shot wound.
I am happy that he aged at warp speed during those 8 years. Hope he’ll never recover.
Barack Obama is reprehensible human being and a complete narcissist. There is nothing decent about him. If he is a Christian hell awaits Obama.
That last sentence (about endless reboots) leads to something that has been on my mind the last couple of days: Are U.S. cultural institutions and academia going to shake themselves out of their torpor, clichés, stagnation, and repetitiveness? Or are we in for another ten or so years of Hamilton, Rebecca Solnit, MFA-mass-produced novels, and the many variations of puritanism?
& poetry with
lotsa
ampersands, of
course
How 5 key demographic groups voted in 2024: AP VoteCast
The Onion got there earlier this week:
George Clooney is getting a lot of flak because of his part in getting old Joe to step down-
https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/george-clooney-cops-backlash-as-fans-recall-his-bold-joe-biden-demand-ahead-of-donald-trumps-win/news-story/4ef0fd48ecee9cb10d46d04304a27688
I hate to defend Clooney, but what exactly was the choice? A Weekend at Bernies campaign?
Just observing that Old Joe is still the President of the USA, theoretically the Leader of the Free World. I’d feel a lot more charitable if Clooney had got Biden to step down from that job… four years ago.
Trump and the deep state: It would be fantastic if he could deliver this.
I wonder if he will get aced by some three letter crew and their vast network?
I don’t know if that, or Biden pulling a last minute Immune President Supreme Being maneuver would be more incendiary.
Agreed, an overall surprisingly decent list of things to get done. The last one stands out in a ‘one of these things is not like the others’ way.
Deliver what? Destroying some of the bureaucracy that makes shuffling the players more difficult and leaves budget and paper trails on some of their dirty work so that Trump can fire and hire goons at will with zero oversite and nothing, not even careerism and institutional politics, to limit what his hired goons do?
He would become the greatest president in my lifetime.
All in all not a bad list. Number 5 though? Hmm. No amount of qualifiers is going to make going after whistleblowers ok.
i’m skeptical of this. i think moreso, he’ll use ‘rooting out the deep state’ as an excuse to unseat people contrary to his agenda. and not end up unseating the actual deep state. you can say you’re going to root out the deep state all you want, but the deep state has very deep roots.
re: Dialog Works. Thanks for the link.
“Israeli hooligans provoke clashes in Amsterdam after chanting anti-Palestinian slogans”
A lot of these football hooligans are thugs in many countries and in fact some ultra-nationalist Ukrainian formations started off from football club hooligans. And looking at images of those Israelis, probably the majority are/were serving IDF members. So it looks like they acted like they were still in Israel and getting stuck into any Palestinians that they could find – or maybe just Arabs. The locals did not take kindly to that and kicked their ***es. For a change, these thugs could not rely on their rifles nor call in the air force for a tactical strike so they were in a fair fight and it showed.
In Israel they went ballistic. Netanyahu ordered two planeloads of medical and rescue teams to go retrieve those ‘innocent Israelis’ though the IDF ended up scrubbing that mission. They were shouting about pogroms in 2024 Europe and demanding that the other side be severely punished for fighting with those Israelis. No doubt the Netherlands authorities will side with Israel against their own citizens and you wonder how much CTV footage will be shown in court showing who started it.
Did they really think that killing off a people group wouldn’t have repercussions for them?
Remember that old Police song, Synchronicity 2? “Many miles away, something crawls through the slime … at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake”
Love that song. Always feel relevant!
No, no you’ve got it all wrong.
Per the Guardian headline “Police in Amsterdam arrest more than 60 people after attacks on Israeli football fans.” The actual article does drop the odd hint that these fans may not be completely blameless.
Then the Guardian asks me to donate to support their independent journalism.
The Dutch government and media are twisting themselves into pretzels to offer a pro-Zionist slant to the events in Amsterdam.
Canadian Radio sings the same tunes…
It has become unlistenable.
Maccabi Tel Aviv have a reputation as the club for ultra nationalists in Israel (Maccabi Haifa is the club generally favoured by Arab-Israelis in Tel Aviv). Ironically enough, the MTA ultras have historically had good relations with some Ajax Ultras, who, for obscure historical reasons, have been linked with Zionist far right groups.
One source I read this morning suggested that the fighting was not between the football fans, but between MTA Ultras who unwisely started fights with the Moroccan community in Amsterdam, and seem to have come off worse.
re: Dem governor issues stark warning to Trump: ‘You come for my people, you come through me’ FOX. Pritzker.
That the funniest headline I’ve read today. / ha.
D’Oh. That,,, is a really unfortunate image.
I think he may have been referring to Vance’s statement that the “50 intelligence operatives” who participated in the Hunter Biden laptop election interference scheme would be held accountable and stripped of clearances. Obviously he didn’t mean his shallow state.
ah. That makes sense. I thought he was comparing himself to Chicago’s da Bears football defensive player William Perry, aka ‘the Refrigerator’. Nobody gets past the Refrigerator. / ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Perry_(American_football)
I think that is precisely what Ray Dalio predicted–in this Time article which I think was posted on NC?
The Coming Great Conflict
https://time.com/6991271/civil-war-conflict-ray-dalio/
“….it appears to me that we are probably headed toward an existential battle of the hard right against the hard left in which you will have to pick a side and fight for it, or keep your head down, or flee.
By flee, I think that will mostly be from one state to another and we will see increased emphasis on state rights rather than the central government being dominant. A clash between state governments and a fractured central government appears likely, which I would regard as a type of civil war even if not violent.”
I can’t guess if Dalio is correct, but I did think Pritzker’s quote popping up was interesting. California and some other states may feel the same way.
It’s not clear to me, what the mechanism would be though, for a state to resist the federal government–say if Trump began sweeping arrests of people in Illinois for immigration, say….how does Pritzker stop them? The National Guard? State police? Seems a bit unlikley?
Who is “hard left” in the USA? Which states are they active in? And how did I miss this?
Yes, I had a chuckle about that too. I don’t know who Dalio had in mind to play the “hard left” role. There are some young people in England and in the US who are taking direct action against Israeli weapons manufacturers, their banks and advertising companies. Some of these young people are in jail. They sabotaged some factories successfully. Sorry I can’t find a link at the moment.
Maybe it’s a Canadian lack of imagination thing, but I can’t get my head around people who are not on the margins referencing the Democratic Party (the lunatic fringe right in Canada refers to the Liberal Party of Canada as hard left, but they think that taxation is communist, so that’s different) as “hard left”.
Is this some weird Twilight Zone distortion of the Overton window?
Maybe Dalio imagines someone like Bernie as the “hard left”? Bernie is a milque toast FDR Democrat, he only raises the hopes of “progressives” because he is the only FDR Democrat left……
How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny (via Counterpunch)
David G and David W in their work: The Dawn of everything: A new history for humanity delve in much more detail, which is extremely interesting on how centralization of power was fought against in the Americas…
Israeli hooligans provoke clash in Amsterdam …. vs Zero Hedge reprinting from Jerusalem Post …. me thinks there is a lesson here so Western MSM can correct us on what really happened.
“The leader of the Netherlands’ largest political party has described the country as “the Gaza of Europe” after a wave of violence broke out in Amsterdam in the early hours of Friday morning, targeting Jews. “Harrowing video footage from the scene shows Jewish individuals being beaten, thrown into canals, and even run over by mobs of Muslim men. In one instance, an attacker can be heard shouting, “That’s for Palestine, motherfucker,” while repeatedly kicking a motionless man. Some Jewish visitors sought refuge in nearby buildings as crowds attempted to force their way inside, according to reports from The Jerusalem Post.”
ZH is no better than other MSM tilted coverage. I always assume the opposite.
Their gold and silver bugs too
BFD https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(24)01280-4
That is the sort of thing that will end this mess. I hope it becomes available soon!
Europe already ‘Trump proofing’ Ukraine war aid – Responsible Statecraft
“But the EU has been working hard to ensure that Zelenskyy can take the risk, underwritten with European money. Although what they have created is catastrophically ill-thought through.
The European Union loan itself — up to a maximumof €35 billion (around $38 billion) — is so high precisely because of the uncertainty about whether the U.S. would match the funding of other G7 nations. This is Trump-proofing in action. In essence, even if Trump doesn’t agree to the proposed $20 billion U.S. contribution made by Biden, Europe is prepared to cover the cost of another year of devastating war.”
There’s no polite way to say it: these people are stupid AF.
I don’t recall a Trump administration trying to stop European countries from spending more of their own money on anything related to military spending.
Official: Mr. Preaident, the Europeans are throwing their money down the shitter.
Trump: You can’t fix stupid. Next…
I must say I don’t know what the real plan is, but it’s quite possible EU is taking Russian money and borrowing it to Ukraine for them to buy European weapons. As with the US money, probably only a fraction end sup in Ukraine.
Actually, I hear VdL is pretty good at organizing deals like this, where other people’s money just disappears to corporate swamp.
The EU seems to be content to throw down the gauntlet on the assumption that President Putin’s government is quite willing to allow the EU to waste more Russian lives unnecessarily without executing a series of devastating responses to bring the whole sad, sorry, imperialist project to an end.
President Trump will, I imagine, leave the Europeans to reflect on reflect on the consequences of hubris, and signal to his electorate and the rest of the world that the US is just one of several superpowers in a world of nation states, each of which will be able to enjoy a long period dedicated to manage trade and the social, economic, cultural and political development of it’s people.
Oh, so the Ukrainians will burn that money this coming winter to heat themselves? Roll them in tight cilinders and shoot with them?
Here’s an interesting perspective regarding the Election, although I do not know if it is correct:
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Nov08-2.html
A.L in Toronto, ON, Canada, writes: As a computer engineer, it is not lost on me that this is the first presidential election that has been fully impacted by autonomous artificially intelligent bots. This certainly isn’t the first election we’ve had systems at the helm, but one of the first where much of the information people have read on the election was likely generated by a GPT. I personally believe this is the reason for the massive Democratic loss, that there is no one reason: every single voter had a reason perfectly tailored for them, based on the context of their lives. I believe this is yet another moralistic position liberals must wrestle with, as the Republicans are clearly and without a doubt using this tooling to their great benefit. Every single voter was bombarded with content specifically generated for their brains. If Obama was elected with Twitter, Trump with re-elected with ChatGPT.
Just throw it in the “FWIW” category.
Interesting. At a gut level I disagree vigorously. IF ChatGPT played a role, it was only one of many contributors to a human team’s decision-making process.
This take taps directly into the Red State bias. Yearning for a simpler world doesn’t make people simple. You need a very informed grasp of nuance to psy-op country folk. AI is nowhere near close to being able to do that. As a tool I’m sure ChatGPT was helpful. [pats ChatGPT on the head, you’re a good AI yes you are]
How does he know Republicans are using it while Democrats don’t? If you think you can write into ChatGPT “Vote Trump” and it then turns people into zombies who will do so, then it should be equally easy to write “Vote Harris” and pronto – she wins. Or is it that both win…?
Or perhaps the problem is with the premise that all it takes is to know enough personal info about someone, and it is then possible to reliably construct tweet or two that makes that person suddenly dance to your tune even on such controversial subject like voting Harris vs. Trump.
How does he know *anyone* is using it effectively?? He doesn’t. It’s just chicken little ‘here’s this new thing that wasn’t here before, it must be at fault.’ This is more of the ‘targeted advertising’ thinking, just hoover up any and all personal info and they’ll buy our c**p. Meanwhile, go out and buy a car, and then get inundated with new car ads. Or buy a baby outfit for a niece’s baby shower and drown in ads for pregnancy tests. Wake me up when any of it actually works instead of just making a bonfire with VC money. GIGO, as it ever was.
Wake me up when any of it actually works instead of just making a bonfire with VC money.
Well, I guess one of my key questions is how would you ever know whether it is being done, and even if you knew that somebody was doing it, how would you know that it is working
How would we ever know if we were all just plugged into Matrix? Anyway, if the Illuminati have such superpowers and all they do with it is to produce this campaign spectacle ending with Trump’s second term, then they must be bored to hell. And also probably have the colony on Mars stocked and ready.
OK, I understand what you are saying, but if we want to go to that level, we might as well just agree that we don’t know anything and drink the hemlock now.
Reading History Unfolding’s long but compelling take on US political cycles I did not expect to see myself. I’ve always credited my penchant for disruption as a tool for getting people to see past the status quo as the result not of my being a Boomer but because I aligned with Abbie Hoffman’s freaks when I came of age. Now David Kaiser tells me that strategically I’m just like Trump. [insert animated GIF of Munch’s The Scream here]
I will concede that I have been known to weave at times (it is a great writing strategy but never go full Grandfather’s Ram) however David Kaiser’s blog post held up a mirror I didn’t enjoy looking into. Freaks were special but now I see that all along I’ve been cyclically manipulated, just another one of History’s bitches.
Getting older and learning more about yourself is, in my opinion, why old folks gravitate to sour foods. It may be time to give black licorice another shot.
He doesn’t mention the Vietnam War crisis, except to mention “violent student radicals.” This guy is a historian? I remember journalist James Reston calling it the most serious political crisis since the Civil War.
So was LBJ’s metastasization of the security and surveillance apparatus to put down the antiwar movement an achievement in Kaiser’s eyes, and not an “attack on established principles?” You know, like freedom of speech?
How about those CIA journalists in the US media — what an achievement by the Greatest Generation.
If he only sees the tactical disruptions of the antiwar movement then as an extrusion of generational politics, instead of a considered attempt to disrupt a political system that deliberately blocked stopping the war or media discussion of it, then no wonder he was shocked, when he “realized how far the alienation of the American people from its bipartisan ruling elite had gone.” It only took him until 2016 to wake up!
Where has this guy been? Has he been in our country long? Maybe he should read some history.
Btw, if you know of a good article or book on the introduction of CIA journos in the media, I’d be curious to hear.
This is one of the standard accounts by Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone.
I have spent much of this evening going down the Kaiser rabbit hole. He has been blogging about this very subject for twenty years, so not everything is fully illuminated in the current post.
Thanks to our hosts for linking the History Unfolding post even though it deals with historical cycles and demographic generations.
On deportations, as usual no one mentions simply shutting down illegal employers. If we put employers in jail, the deportation problem will resolve itself.
Of course this will lead to significant inflation, since American capitalists are dependent on indentured servitude in a variety of sectors.
Trump’s smash-some-heads approach is merely going to be a debacle and fail on its own terms.
Mandate E-Verify everywhere except individual proprietorships with fewer than 10 employees. Put a 50% tax on wire-transfers to Latin America. De-bank any employer who breaks the law.
(I realize that this still allows cash transactions but by definition those are one-offs and not really hurting anyone. Bitcoin is another possible route for evasion, but there are high barriers to paying a regular salary in bitcoin. Again, for one-offs, it will probably work.)
Problem solved!
Or just do the EU thing and pay Mexico to deal with the migrants. 1300 miles is a long way if the Federales are looking for you.
Heck, if the López Obrador-Sheinbaum reforms go trough, people may be willing to stop in Mexico voluntarily. Maybe US should support those instead of all the shenanigans it is doing.
From Thirty years later, the answer emerges
Man, warmongers all. He gets the analysis correct, but is still nuts.
Desperate to get into a hot war with yet another country. And this war benefits everyday American in what way, exactly?
Or perhaps it is because of the contempt the American people have for intellectuals like you?
So this guy is high as a kite.
The draft forced people to serve and die in an imperial war, without purpose or benefit to the American people. But then this guy is hard for getting into war with Iran, so no surprise.
LOL, but it’s okay to war against Iran? Because you think it serves the greater good, I guess?
The outline of the new administration’s ideas in the Near East are starting to take shape. It looks like an effort to start a civil war in Lebanon by getting the Lebanese state to stab Hezbollah in the back, They have been flying equipment and people into Lebanon for the last year getting ready for this. They are hoping no doubt that this will collapse the war front and get them to the Litani, they won’t go home this time.
I am also getting the impression that the supiness of the Arab countries so far is encouraging them to prepare for a bombing campaign against Iran using actual US forces. Even they are not delusional enough to deploy scarce operational ground forces apart from Specialist formations.
I missed his reference to the draft, thanks. So he clearly knows what happened during the Vietnam War, but treats it a a dangerous epiphenomenon, not to be mentioned. Might disturb the peasants.
Right. The three letter agencies have “identified” Iranian controlled Lee Oswalds and Sirhan Sirhans for “revenge” assassination attempts four years on from the cause just as Trump wins the Presidency is a narrative straight out of the Skripal writing team. Brilliant. Subtle. And totally believable. Right. Got it.
A week or so ago the Rev mentioned he once owned a Martini rifle in .222, the history of that action goes “Peabody, Peabody-Martini,Martini- Henry ( Henry Rifling ), Madsen Machine Gun.
There’s a GIF of the Madsen at C&R Arsenal and it is my favorite of all the early light machine guns because it really shouldn’t work but they work well enough that some were in service until the early 21st Century.
Dear American neighbours,
May I offer this interpretation of your current, uh, drama, as offered by U of Toronto philosopher Joseph Heath, who concludes:
In recent years, I have begun to think of Americans as the drama queens of the Western world. In the recent election, given a choice between boring, business-as-usual politics, and dramatic, polarizing politics, they clearly chose drama (whether they also chose violence remains to be seen). The most revealing moment in the campaign, for me, came just after the first attempted assassination of Donald Trump, when he rose from the ground, still somewhat disoriented, and yelled “fight, fight, fight!” (prompting Logan Paul to describe the scene as “the most badass thing I’ve ever seen in my life”). What I remember, on the other hand, was thinking to myself, “fight for what?” This was, of course, to miss the point, in a typically Canadian way – to imagine that fighting must have some external goal or purpose. The idea that it could be an end in itself, a source of direct gratification, is not one that came naturally to me. So again, it took me a while to see that Trump’s fist-pumping exhortation to fight had no external objective or referent. It was a perfectly self-contained statement of what he was offering the American people: “fight, fight, fight!”
Brings to mind the old Tom Lehrer song “Fight Fiercely Harvard”…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27PSHASlGUU
Prof. Heath seems to have never viewed WWE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkghtyxZ6rc (2:26)
Prof. Heath seems to have never viewed George Carlin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77dDZOwt20E
So we’re heading down to see my wife’s folks, and I was wondering if anybody has a recommendation for a good dumb phone. They currently have a smart phone, but my father-in-law refuses to use it, and my mother-in-law – well, let’s just say both are out of the age range where learning how to use the latest gadget or have the latest phone has any charm at all.
Anything that is a flip phone with big buttons, solid phone, does text and maybe email. That’s it.
TIA!
The phones you seek are often advertised on TV as well as in a variety of magazines. It should be easy for you to find a phone that works for your wife’s parents.
The phones with big numbers lock you into their service and it is fairly expensive. A friend gave me one years ago and I quickly stopped using it.
The folks at Tello.com can supply a simple flip phone and after the phone cost ($60-70?) the monthly service is about $9. Data costs extra, about a buck a month per gig. I get no data and sometimes get text messages of “unable to download” from people. Don’t know if they emojis or what. I think they may be E-mail capable but don’t really know. They have fancier android phones also but I believe the flip phone style might be enough for them. More drop proof.
One thing is that some assembly is required. The SIM card has to be ‘snapped’ out of a larger plastic sheet and inserted under the battery so you may have to assemble it and mail or give it to them.
new war propaganda just dropped
https://youtu.be/sUdV97ImDXU?si=1buaNK7stb1C0PXO
well.. not “new”