Bumblebee population increases 116 times over in ‘remarkable’ Scotland rewilding project The Scotsman
World Beekeeping Awards axe honey prize due to fraud BBC
All Life on Earth Today Descended From a Single Cell. Meet LUCA. Quanta
Digestive contents and food webs record the advent of dinosaur supremacy Nature
The Dogs of Chernobyl Are Experiencing Rapid Evolution, Study Suggests Popular Mechanics
Climate
What to know about the plastic pollution crisis as treaty talks conclude in South Korea AP
Water
After the Klamath River dams came down, salmon came back High Country News
Syndemics
Persistence of spike protein at the skull-meninges-brain axis may contribute to the neurological sequelae of COVID-19 Cell. From the Highlights: “SARS-CoV-2 spike protein persists in the skull-meninges-brain axis in COVID-19 patients. Spike protein is sufficient to induce brain pathological and behavioral changes in mice.”
A Personal Pre-Pandemic Plan Avian Flu Diary
China?
Chinese county grapples with how to lure and reward workers for difficult, low-level jobs South China Morning Post
This is very interesting, and I think a world first: a local government in China has just sold its sky, literally.
This is the government of Pingyin County, Jinan, Shandong Province who sold for 924 million yuan (approximately $130 million) a 30-year concession to operate and… pic.twitter.com/BKUN6JY0Fe
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) November 30, 2024
China permits full foreign ownership of hospitals in key cities CGTN
Kelly Grieco on Indo-Pacific Reactions to Trump’s Reelection The Diplomat
Philippines politics is often mad. It just got crazier Channel News Asia
Syraqistan
Syrian rebels’ advance breaks war’s fragile stalemate FT. Commentary:
whereas nearly all BBC broadcasts, mainstream media articles on Hamas and Hezbollah include canned reminders up top that they have been designated terrorist organizations by their governments.
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) November 30, 2024
And:
Just so everyone is clear, the sum total dispositional difference between HTS and ISIS is that HTS fighters are allowed to player soccer.
Otherwise, they are in *complete* agreement on building a Caliphate, enslaving apostates, beheading women, etc.
— Mike DiMino (@mpdimino) November 30, 2024
Syria: Deadly strikes hit Aleppo as rebels seize airport, push towards Hama Middle East Eye
Syrian army withdraws troops from Aleppo to prepare counteroffensive Politico
* * * Israel’s Cease-fire With Lebanon and the Breakdown of the ‘Unity of Fronts’ Won’t End Gaza War Haaretz
Lebanon’s Unbalanced Ceasefire Teeters on the Brink Craig Murray
* * * Iran brings thousands of centrifuges online, defying International Atomic Energy Agency resolution S&P Global
The New Great Game
Georgia’s president will not step down until ‘illegitimate’ election rerun Al Jazeera
US suspends strategic partnership with Georgia Ukrainska Pravda
European Disunion
Notre-Dame: How Europe’s great cathedrals owe much to Muslim craftsmen Middle East Eye
Czech city wants to hire Ukrainians to police due to “problems in diaspora” Ukrainska Pravda
New Not-So-Cold War
Zelensky suggests NATO membership could halt ‘hot phase’ of war The Hill
Zelenskyy agrees to record podcast with American interviewer Lex Fridman Ukrainska Pravda
Zelenskyy’s diplomatic play for Trump Politico
Russian Intel. Elaborates on Western Plans to ‘Freeze’ the Ukrainian Frontlines with NATO Troop Deployments: Preparing For a Second War Military Watch
* * * Russia, Targeting Ukraine’s Grid, Moves to Cut Off Its Nuclear Plants NYT
NATO warships surround Chinese ship suspected of sabotaging undersea internet cables — ship allegedly dragged anchor 100 miles Tom’s Hardware
Desertion threatens to starve Ukraine’s forces at a crucial time in its war with Russia AP
* * * How Biden Made a Mess of Ukraine The Atlantic
Nord Stream: hide-and-seek deep under the Baltic sea Le Monde Diplomatique. No paywall.
Moving Toward Defense as a Service War on the Rocks
Trump Transition
Trump and Republicans in Congress eye an ambitious 100-day agenda, starting with tax cuts AP
The best-case scenario for Trump’s second term Noah Smith, Noahpinion
What is net worth of Trump’s Cabinet? The staggering wealth of his nominees revealed Daily Mail
* * * Trump picks hardline ‘deep state’ critic Kash Patel as new FBI head FT. Commentary:
As @IgnatiusPost put it, when it comes to unearthing “serious abuses” by the FBI’s Russiagate team, Kash Patel “hit pay dirt”: pic.twitter.com/6uXJw1X0Lb
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) December 1, 2024
Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years NYT. “The Times obtained a copy of the email from another person with ties to the Hegseth family.”
Tulsi smears are an American tradition. They shouldn’t be. Responsible Statecraft
Trump nominates Florida sheriff Chad Chronister to lead the DEA FOX
Trump threatens 100% tariff on BRICS nations in case of dollar replacement Anadolu Agency
Homelessness
The Invisible Man Esquire
Antitrust
Monopsony Power and Poverty: The Consequences of Walmart Supercenter Openings Institute of Labor Economics
Digital Watch
Record-breaking diamond storage can save data for millions of years New Scientist
The Final Frontier
What would happen day by day if aliens made contact with earth, according to ex-NASA expert Daily Mail
Zeitgeist Watch
MPs who backed assisted dying bill say concerns remain BBC
Words matter: ‘enduring intolerable suffering’ and the provider-side peril of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada Journal of Medical Ethics. Commentary:
"Expressions of pleasure from providers are also a reminder that the psychological impact on providers from involvement in MAiD is an outstanding question.'" https://t.co/rSIJ4WipvD
— Trudo Lemmens (@TrudoLemmens) March 5, 2024
AI-Powered ‘Death Clock’ Promises a More Exact Prediction of the Day You’ll Die Bloomberg
* * * How Humor Takes the Edge off Hard Times Scientific American
Imperial Collapse Watch
Dilemmas Dissident Voice
Thanksgiving Post-Game Festivities
Is turkey the main reason you’re tired after a Thanksgiving meal? Colorado Sun
The collards mystery Yasha Levine, The Weaponized Immigrant
I spent 30 years as a therapist to killers – and no one is born evil BBC
America’s Most Common Dreams—and Why You’re Having Them Newsweek
Antidote du jour (Dr.Haus):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
‘Mark Ames
@MarkAmesExiled
whereas nearly all BBC broadcasts, mainstream media articles on Hamas and Hezbollah include canned reminders up top that they have been designated terrorist organizations by their governments.’
He’s right you know. I have mentioned before how on Aussie TV it is not possible to say Hezbollah without saying that several countries recognize them as a terrorist organization, including Australia. And yet on the news tonight they gave the full names and titles of those Jihadist groups and called them “rebels” as if they were something out of Star Wars. No mention how they are re-branded al Qaeda. They actually had interviews with three of them saying that they were from Aleppo and were there to liberate their city. The 77th Brigade musty be working overtime and the White House said that they were not involved in these attacks – which means that they are involved in these attacks.
If you are an adult who does not realise by now that MSM is straight-up propaganda, you must have an intellectual disability. Seriously, how are people not seeing this?
I can’t figure out who’s funding these “rebels” against the Assad government?
I’m presuming it’s the US?
Also supplying the weapons and Ukrainian drone operators as well. For over two years there has been talk of corruption in the Ukraine because of weapons going missing but I guess that the CIA was siphoning off a boat load of them on the side to be stored in warehouses so that they can be used in places like Syria by Jihadists.
Here’s a link to a PBS Frontline interview of the leader of HTS.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/abu-mohammad-al-jolani-interview-hayat-tahrir-al-sham-syria-al-qaeda/
We once labeled him a terrorist in Iraq, but now he’s our terrorist :(
This playbook didn’t work so well in Afghanistan but, hey…let’s give it another go.
The Gulf despots funnel it through Turkey. One thing they can’t afford are the existence of Arab governments that actually fight for their own people and stand up to the West. Those must be destroyed at all costs.
USA, Israel, Turkey, and some others.
Israel strikes me as the country equivalent of the guy who will invite you to dinner and then stick you with the restaurant bill, which includes five bottles of highly expensive bordeaux, four of which he took home with him, and for burning down most of the dining room.
Other than some medical care for ISIS fighters, has Israel ever paid any other country for anything? It seems like it’s always the Americans or EU or the Gulf Arabs who end up with the bill.
I’m pretty sure they charged CIA for whatever they did for ISIS.
My Israel pet metaphor is that Israel is like your loudmouth short friend who starts a fight at the bar and then hides under a table while all his friends have to duke it out.
And maybe Turkey too?
WIth respect, throwing around terms like “intellectual disability” isn’t helpful. I interact with lots of people close to me who, for various reasons, have neither the time nor ability to read stuff on topics like MMT and “GB News/SKY news/BBC news” provide the background to their daily lives.
These are often people with larger propensities to vote, like my elderly mum. She rattled off some nonsense the other day about the “online petition for a general election” here in UK, influenced by GB News. Her best friend signed it. I laughed out loud and quoted two or three reasons why that exercise is a nonsense (including the people impersonating MPs) and saying “if your friend has any of her online stuff hacked, I’m not going to be very surprised”.
Mum does respond to “things on the ground” – hence why I’m on record here as to how quickly she turned on the newly elected Labour MP for our constituency – a man my Dad and I refused to vote for……because we read sites likes this. Beyond the occasional jibe at a family member who is annoying me, I’m done with the kind of comments you made. They don’t help. My parents have no post-age-16 education but Dad is very clever and partly through running a business that gives him access to senior EU people and bedtime reading of Mosler’s book, he’s pretty informed. None of my other family members have done this – many for good reasons regarding how hard their lives are. I’m not throwing stones anymore. I’m getting a reputation for not-engaging anymore but I’m tending to follow that old maxim “if you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all”. I’m done with arguing. Plus it is funnier to find a posting by a “Starmer-stan”, on X, and repost it on BlueSky, tagging him so if that site does become the “big thing” then his first mention will be all the stuff I quoted w.r.t. things based on mathematical identity relationships…..not political nonsense. Call it “self-trolling”.
People who ignore an obvious ongoing genocide perpetrated by their governments because they’re too lazy and set in their ways don’t deserve respect or attention of others.
Do what you have to do to survive and manage the situation, but you don’t need to make excuses for their vast moral deficiency.
Gotta remember the effect of propaganda disguised as news fed to people on a daily basis over a lifetime. It’s insidious. I know people whom you would think would see through what is going on in the Ukraine but no, they have swallowed the government pronouncements hook, line and sinker.
They have swallowed it, because it tells them that they are on the right side of history. They don’t want to make an effort, just to find out that they are the bad guys.
This argument contradicts fundamental human behavior. How many people do you think will volunteer to do extra labor for an uncertain future reward? That approach is just as bad as those who shout “Read the room!” and “Do the work!” when people bring up class issues instead of blaming racial bias for everything.
The US is a blind elephant, trampling over everything smaller in its path. It will continue charging through the world until it hits something that stops it. What that is right now I can’t imagine. I think the most likely result is we are lead off a cliff and the abrupt stop at the end is what limits our rampage. The rest of us citizens are just along for the ride.
Thinking of your own kind as the good guys is the fundamental human behavior. It’s basic tribalism. Race has nothing to do with it (and I have no idea why you are mentioning it).
P.S. Way too many are willing to volunteer to do extra labor if an uncertain future reward sounds good. Just look at Ukrainians, and all the others dreaming the American Dream. It would have taken them much less effort not to fight war against Russia and accept that they have effed up (but it goes against basic idea that they are the good guys).
Perhaps you didn’t understand what I wrote. I mentioned the racial comparison as an example of similar logic. You are asserting that people don’t want to make the effort because they will discover they are the bad guys. What I said was that approach does not follow fundamental human behavior. The premise of doing this work is you might achieve some small benefit in the future. Humans as a group don’t work that way. Offering an uncertain future reward is the worst way to motivate people.
As for your example of the Ukrainians, I think you have significantly misunderstood the past three years. The Ukrainians were told this was a sure thing. They were given lots of weapons. They were going to crush the rebels within their borders and maybe even bloody Russia’s nose too. It did not turn out that way. Now they have to fight an existential battle.
Perhaps you didn’t understand what I wrote, or your premise is just wrong. Numerous people are motivated by uncertain rewards, and outright lies, because people are dumb and like to be told sweet little lies about being special. Just look at US elections. Millions of motivated people there, willing to do all kinds of nasty stuff, just because red vs blue tribe thing. Saying that the other guy/gal is literally Hitler/Communist is all that was needed in order to motivate them. Their Pavlovian reflex is triggered in an instant, and makes family members fight each other, and close friends stop being that. What’s the benefit of losing family members and friends?
If offering an uncertain future reward were the worst way to motivate people, there would be no religions.
P.S. I am from Eastern Europe. The “Ukrainian tribe thing” is not from past years, but centuries. I think you have significantly misunderstood the past all years. How many times would you have to go to war against Russia before deciding to give it a pass this turn?
Propaganda makes it easy for people to excuse their moral deficiencies but the information is there even in the MSM. They chose not to see because it’s more comfortable. Because acknowledging it requires acknowledging uncomfortable facts about the system they live under and their complicity in it.
Unlike the Germans in WWII who might reasonably argue that they didn’t know, these people know deep down. The fact that they’re nice to neighbors, pick up after their dog, loves their grandkids, and think they’re “good people” doesn’t change that.
This is how I see it. My son used to be my favorite person in the world, so smart!!! But now I don’t even want to talk to him anymore, he buys it all without wanting to think about it. And he’s a teacher of high schoolers, with a degree in history!!
I’m so glad I left the US if I would have stayed I would have gone mad.
Yes. The last fifteen years have been an endless parade of seeing smart, articulate, and seemingly highly sympathetic people, whose judgements I once valued above my own, fall for every MSM lie thrown their way. Worshipping Obama, #metoo without due process, Bernie Bro, #TrustScience, Putin is a…, 40 beheaded babies
They’re all highly successful and “high functioning” people unlike me. So the system rewards for that. Hopefully they’ll stop when the system stops, but I admit that I will never truly trust any of them again.
if lying, advertising, and propaganda never worked, no one would ever use them.
i said that many decades ago to a friend who was a feverish believer in free market, free trade economics.
he looked back at me in complete bewilderment.
Worse than that. I just got in an argument with a guy who is convinced Hamas raped women and burned babies on Oct. 7. Would not hear otherwise. Then went on that UNRWA was in bed with Hamas.
Do they have access to the counterarguments? I’ve been in a similar boat to Mr. Flynn, and there are rough seas to navigate.
On the one hand, you can look at the character of the MSM presentation and tell that it appeals to strong emotion, namely fear, and secondarily avarice.
On the other, we can look at examples like Mr. Flynn’s father and see if we can spot the differences in the structure of their lives which inclines them towards more respectable sources.
I don’t have great confidence in the idea that I’d be much different from your bog-standard Harris-voting, Maddow-repeating liberal if I had less free time.
Well, there was a time when I watched hours and hours of MSNBC. (I really liked the Joy Reid of back then, horrors!, but Chris Hayes was my favorite.) even then I couldn’t stand Rachel Maddow, she just spews such stupid stuff and full of emotion/rage. Walter Kirn was describing her shtick as hypnosis
Access to the counter arguments? When sites like NC are listed on PropOrNot? When politics is a verboten subject at work and in public? When argument and debate are frowned upon? A lot of people do not know where to look and do not have the capability to assess what they’re shown. So they assume all of it is BS and tune out. Being well versed in any of this doesn’t pay the bills and might get you debanked.
The flipside of this of course is that when the Democrats cried “Hitler!” for 8 years straight people stopped paying attention.
Thank you for understanding. I sense we’re both in “troubled waters” but have difficulties in navigating life regarding family. I appreciate it when someone recognises the “family issues” rather than making horrid comments.
>Do they have access to the counterarguments?
Exactly. The crimes of the M$M are, in my view:
1. Mis/Dis-Information
2. Omission
Propaganda as a two edged sword.
Friday AG linked to an interview/debate with Aaron Maté/Katie Halper and Simon Shuster of Time Mag.
I watched for awhile and immediately found myself decrypting Shuster’s portrayal. I didn’t carry on for long.
I think people who have no control or influence over the situation, and are in an environment saturated with propaganda, are owed some grace. Our government has decided the citizens have no say, and are owed no information, about what it does in our name. How can I be angry at people living in this condition? They are not pulling the trigger. They are not buying the bullets. They have zero influence over those who do.
Exactly. Congress votes with its donors. Both parties support genocide. What’s a person to do, if one is even aware of what’s actually happening in the world? You can’t stop it, although you can make your life uncomfortable by trying if you hit upon any success at it. Look at Tulsi getting on the no-fly list for speaking out against some part of US empire.
That said, I’m much less charitable in regards to Liberal Democrat voters all up in NY Times and MSNBC every day. The Democrat base, not Democrat voters picking between two evils. People, when told there’s a genocide, are too incurious or vicious to reflect upon the matter.
Thanks, Terry. I have been trying for a few years to take a slightly different approach: I’m done with confronting but not with arguing.
I’m not on social media, except for these comments here and a couple of specialist music discussion forums, so that leaves face-to-face. I assume that, like most of us, the goal is to avoid the true a-holes and engage with decent people. The interesting thing then is to find the decency in the people I appear to disagree with, if there is any and disengage if not. I especially enjoy this because it feels subversive to me. TPTB encourage maximal political strife on cultural topics so as to keep us from connecting on populist matters. When a commie like me can find something to agree when talking with a BlueAnon or 5G-cellular-covid advocate it feels like I’m sticking it to The Man.
To A-F-S: compassion and empathy can be useful. There are those I won’t waste my time on but I prefer to have at least some evidence before writing anyone off.
This is what I aim for too.
I’m curious if you ever go back to these people a month later and see if they really changed their minds. I find they snap back to factory reset at the earliest opportunity.
It takes moral character to recognize that the cozy mental picture one builds up about everything is completely wrong and that “we’re the baddies”. Very few people do it unless compelled by outside events, and then they were on the right side all along.
Those that I deal with casually either I don’t see again or if I do not much changes. It’s not my job to reform their thinking all and it’s not possible. For me the main thing is to demonstrate that I can be open and interested despite being in some politically opposite position, i.e. to present a counterexample to mainstream prejudice. Some people do remember that and it counts for something.
Really influencing people takes a lot of time and patience. Decades of insidious background indoctrination from the all-pervasive environmental bias is hard to counter. But I count three people as successes. Or maybe they would have found their own way to the same without me. Idk.
Last year a 71 year old skier in the Dartful Codgers related to me that he heard the Russian people were on the verge of revolt because Putin was so disliked by the populace…
I asked him what Biden’s approval rating was among the citizenry, and he said around 45%… and then I told him that Putin’s approval rating among Russians was about 80%, and inquired as to what country was more on the verge of revolt?
Thank you. And converting 3 is frankly an amazing track record in my estimation! I’ve never had any success in converting anyone with a pre-existing opinion on anything (be it gardening or travel destinations). It could be me but I’m told that I can be quite persuasive. No amount of experience or facts that I muster will dissuade the person desperate to go to Rome in August.
I think that’s why social media is so dangerous to them. It allows for people with large followerships to slowly grind down conventional wisdom
I don’t aim to “convert” anyone. I’m not a church. / heh
That said, I’ve found myself in deep but a civil disagreement with some lifelong friends over politics. I respect their views. I hope they respect mine. If they ask why I’m so whatever about an issue I quietly explain. But, the thing always in the back of my mind is this: I could be wrong in my assessments about the topic and their reasoning. They also could be wrong. We could both be wrong. It’s not worth bullying an old friend over.
What’s the old saying? We are too soon old and too late smart.
And so some of my old friends and some of my family members and I have reached a détente on a few issues. Sometimes that’s the best outcome that can be hoped for on hot button issues. A private diplomacy. / my 2 cents
It also highlights a big danger arising out of the historically recent deconstruction of the extended family. Nuclear families have extremely truncated “intuitional memories.” This is a great impediment to social cohesion.
It reminds me of the observation that no army wants old men in the combat sphere. Such oldsters have seen more than enough to personally avoid danger. The same could be said of societies. The older men and women are the institutional memory that increases the societies’ chances of thriving and surviving.
Stay safe.
You do you, madame. But I prefer not to be blindly forgiving of people who pretend like a genocide is not happening or is cheering it on. It doesn’t mean I treat them badly or dehumanizes them, but it is absolutely a massive moral failing in my book. And for friends or social commentators to follow, it absolutely matters how I spend my time.
“Surtout, pas trop de zele.”
-Talleyrand
Zeal would be doxing or telling their kids that mommy and daddy are genocide supporters. I’m just no longer engaging with these too too flawed people.
If genocide isn’t a redline, then nothing could be. Their lack of redline may be my redline.
You’re welcome. Unfortunately I won’t get posted. The idea of “inverse TDS” doesn’t compute here really because you must be part of a group with certain views.
I am learning that a fair number of my boomer friends do not use a computer at home now that they are retired. All of them assure me that they can do whatever they need to do online with their phones.
Seems to me it would be a hassle to visit a site like NC on the phone. Even if viewing the site were tolerable, participating in comments would be awkward. So, to the extent that others in my age cohort only get their news from television and see no need to check what they hear against online sources, I can see how that would make them easier to bamboozle.
I’m using NC on the phone right now, it is a totally fine mobile experience.
I recommend giving it a try!
No problem at all navigating NC on my Pixel.
I have to side with those who feel genocide is a red line here. Of course there are people literally struggling to put food on the table and survival fills their day. Most americans aren’t in that situation tho. People don’t need a deep understanding of a conflict and its history to grasp what is right and wrong. CNN spouts the same garbage on every TV in every household, not just for those who buy the propoganda. Nobody who follows this blog got here thru some sort of special access. It and so many other sources are freely available to anyone seeking truth. we have free Wifi here throughout Oakland.
Migrant workers overwhelmingly lead hard lives. I learned long ago that contrary to how americans view them, undocumented people from Mexico and Central America understand the world better than USians do. just for the hell of it for several months I’ve made a point of occasionally mentioning Palestine then shaking my head with Mexicano laborers and elders with grandkids. All know what’s going on in Gaza. americans have no excuses for not being informed.
Bingo. I had that coversation with someone my same age, my former dentist. He was still MSM brain washed. He could not comprehend that USA not Russia started the war in Ukraine. For example he had no ability to register the fact that extremists in Ukraine had been killing Russians since 2014. Because if they had, he would have learned about it from MSM also his friend in Japan agrees.
” …. you must have an intellectual disability.”
Sigh (to quote Yves). As humans, we have different brains, different ways of seeing the world, different ways of coping with ‘reality.’
I was that annoying child who could not understand why my teachers and priest were commanding me to not associate with ‘non-Catholic’ children, because we, as Catholics, were the only people who had the ‘true’ faith, who believed the right doctrines, who would ‘be saved.’ I simply could not accept that people I saw as ‘good’ could be condemned to hell for all eternity.
And, now I am an annoying old person who believes that Russia has valid security concerns about US missiles on its borders, and that Palestinians should really not be forced from the land they have inhabited for centuries.
Yet I cannot believe that my friends, my neighbors, my family members have an ‘intellectual disability.’ It seems to be something inherent in my brain that makes me suspicious of leaders, news programs, ‘influencers,’ who tell me that those ‘others’ are ‘bad people.’
Perhaps we are all on a journey to ‘enlightenment,’ just at different points on the journey.
If they can’t recognize the most obvious and cruel genocide ever and still supports Israel, then they have a long way to go to anything like enlightenment.
Sure, don’t be like them and dehumanize them like they do with others. But don’t whitewash their monstrous moral deformity either.
Oh, the irony of your comment. / ;)
The dilemma of ‘reasonableness.’
That sounds like my early life in the Catholic school system, when the priest said only catholics go to heaven, I asked my Mum why my Granny wouldn’t go to heaven….and I said if she wasn’t going then I wasn’t going either.When I was 15 I started dating a non Catholic boy which was a sin….so I stopped going to confession and then stopped going to church, and them married him ,
57th wedding anniversary this year.
My family and friends avoid all political discussions now to keep the peace…very difficult coming from a rebel(who started early)
And I also agree that I cannot understand folk who cannot see what is right in front of them
I remember a religion class at the Catholic High school. The class segued into a student discussion of how it made sense to baptize a new born, to remove original sin, and then to kill the baby so it would go straight to heaven with no possibility of going to hell or limbo.
The Christian Brother teaching the class ended the student discussion with a frustrated statement “you’re all a bunch of heathens”.
That was a long time ago, but It remains one of my memories of Catholic High School.
Maybe saying ‘intellectual inability’ would be more palatable than ‘intellectual disability,’ but then, it would mean something somewhat different. Does is really matter?
I know several persons who believe everything that the media machine on television feeds them. I would attribute it to the fact as long as I’ve known these people, they always listen to and obey authority figures at all times. Be they the boss at work. The school teacher or principle. They were always of a mind to do as they were told.
In a way, I think you’re right. I’m just recalling how more than one holocaust survivor has observed and written that those hit hardest were the Nazi ideologues sent to the camps for various reasons. They simply could not bring themselves to believe they were in a death camp, that this place they were in existed and they were in it, that their own ideology created this horror and they were caught up in it, it was such a terrible truth that they completely lost it, broke psychologically.
Of course, part of that was probably the horror they were going to be gassed alongside Jews, these people they had built such a passionate hatred for, had diminished to the status of vermin, insects, non-human. This is always the first clue – when you’re diminishing the value and humanity of anyone, you’re wrong.
How do people with good hearts and intentions, even so-called Christians, caught up in the evil of their hate, simply not realize they’re the ones crucifying Christ? “Truly I tell you, just as you did to one of the least of my family, you did it to me.” — Matthew 25:40
It is difficult for people to discern reality for events far away from them, speaking different languages, and in different cultures so the MSM has been able to much more easily paint whatever story they desire.
But when those same techniques are used for national news or local news, the MSM falls apart. And the more the MSM leans in and tries to “make the news”, the more people begin to doubt ALL of the MSM including the endless wars. So the recent national elections were a serious blow to the MSM. We’ll have to see how that plays out, but anything that gets a large portions of the citizens to decide they have to “think for themselves” is a good thing.
You are target of a wide spread diverse psyop!
Take your attention away from the image that the EU part of NATO is going to do to legacy Ukraine SSR what Churchill and Truman did to the west’s 3 sectors of Germany in 1945.
With 100,000 NATO “peacekeepers”, armed and backed to the teeth!
Where the 100000 and supports come from is …. keep looking at rebels from Wahabbistan (aka deep state USA) freeing Aleppo!
Well, the report about 100,000 troops comes from the SVR, which is an intelligence agency, and as people say, intelligence agencies lie all the time. So it’s probably a fake.
To the extent that it might be based on something, it’s probably a requirements study, ether by NATO or by one of its members, of what the theoretical requirement might be for a force to carry out that task. But since NATO doesn’t have 100,000 troops to deploy to Ukraine, the question is moot anyway.
I agree!
What good would 100000 be without a huge amount of US air cover? Which would run into basing, and logistics problems as well as intense challenges from RF.
While the RF would likely respond aggressively.
Yes, even Alex Christoforou remarked that the SVR’s record is not so hot, unlike the MoD, which is generally pretty truthful about what it does say (just don’t expect complete truths).
Although NATO may not have 100k troops, I wonder if consideration is being given to offering immigrants and refugees citizenship (or an expedited track there) in exchange for serving in a special peacekeeping force. This seems to me politically/legally impractical, not to mention issues with integration (cultural/language barriers — unless they predominantly originated in the Ukraine) and willingness, but such obstacles never seem to prevent the West from giving it the old college try.
It goes without saying that Russia would never agree to this anyway. But could it offer the possibility of building a force which is presented as a specific peacekeeping contingent which then gets converted when the pk mission doesn’t materialize? That seems a far stretch, but once again…
The idea in Europe is to send in military contingents from their forces into the Ukraine, let them be attacked by the Russians who have promised to attack any foreign formations in the Ukraine, and then run off to Washington to demand that American troops be sent into the Ukraine to save them. This idea is as asinine as it is dangerous but with the Biden White House, they may just go for it. After all, Biden still has seven more weeks in office to cause all sorts of chaos around the world.
The MSM–once a seeming corner of sanity in our culture of hucksters and cheesy politicians–have become horrible. Of course believers in the repetition of history could point to the yellow press of the late 19th century Gilded Age which was also dominated by the super rich. Orson Welles made a movie about it and many call it the greatest movie ever made. Whether that is true it certainly was one of the most important subjects for H’wood to tackle.
Meanwhile today’s press lords like to blame the web for their decline–failing to confess that they did it to themselves.
Soviet citizens never believed what their mainstream media printed-but we came from a different tack in that much of what our press once published was largely true, so we’re sucker fish for their carping, which tends to go along party fishing lines, typically employing a 250 pound test line.
Once again, everything is completely opposite yet similar in both of our empires end games.
The last era of “yellow journalism” was in the late 19th century. Yellow journalism played a significant role in shaping public opinion and, at times, influenced major events, such as the Spanish-American War.
Not a lot of folks are still around who remember that (as in, zero.) Once the generation that experienced muckraking and yellow journalism died off, there was no more institutional memory.
I’d argue that we’re in a new age of yellow journalism, but we probably need to coin a new term. The age of Twitter fakes? Fake news and weaponization of it has taken over.
Hence the joke, which I’m sure has appeared here before:
An American and a Russian find themselves seated next to each other on a flight from Moscow to New York. The American asks “What brings you to America?” The Russian replies, “I want to learn how to make propaganda the way the U.S. does.” The American replies “What propaganda?”
The Russian says “Exactly!”
@ChrisFromGA — I think the Age of Virtual Reality kinda says it all.
I wonder what the “Age of Virtual Reality” would be in different jurisdictions.
I don’t think that it is true that North American MSM used to be more truthful about what was really going on in the world: A good example is almost total obfuscation and distortion about what was happening in Korea post WW2 and up into the 80’s. BTW, saw a pretty good Korean film, titled 12:12 (title may not be complete and punctuation may not be correct) on my most recent flight to Mexico. I recommend it.
Carolinian, the MSM certainly sounded relatively sane in the past, certainly compared to the high velocity, 24 hour entertainment-news cycles of today. But they were quite competent at hewing to the ‘dominant narrative.’
The 1953 news (it was not ‘MSM’ at that point) painted Iran’s Mosaddegh as evil and curtsied before the US-installed Shah and his Empress, while pretty much ignoring the US interference in South America (well, Monroe Doctrine and all!)
And, no word on how US forces bombed North Korea and its hydroelectric dams during the Korean ‘war.’
The assassination of Lumumba (1961) was downplayed, or presented as the necessary elimination of a rowdy Communist.
Building of US bases, US continued occupation of Japan, bupkis. Or presented as necessary to ‘fight Communism.’
CIA overthrow of Allende in 1973? Gotta keep these Communists, even if ‘democratically elected,’ from ruining the world.
Plus, on the home front, the narrative of doughty pilgrims and pioneers versus the savage redskins was pushed on us from childhood.
And, I read voraciously: Life, Time, Newsweek, New Republic, Nation, Atlantic, Scientific American. Plus the evening news. Obviously, I was reading the ‘wrong stuff.’
That is the key to propaganda. Childhood. My mother watched soaps, my father tuned in to the news all the time, and there were numerous newspapers and womens magazines in the house. At the time there were spreads about the lovely, charming, wonderful wife of the Shah of Persia. I had no reason to disbelieve this, she looked pretty good to my young eyes.
Most kids trust their parents and so this is all wallpaper to their life and not questioned.
And then the teachers generally keep to the dominant narrative as well, whether it be secular or religious. So kids growing up have no reason to question the status quo.
Unless you are brought up in a family that has an activist or inquiring culture, you just take what you are told as fact. At least until you are a teen. That is the first opportunity that kids in ordinary households have to read and question. Some do, a lot don’t.
Imo, people brought up on the ‘we are good and doing our best for you, while they are evil’ news only really start to disbelieve this when personal experience of being screwed over by the organisations they trusted comes into their life. eg Catholic kids abused by priests, being part of an ethnic group suddenly demonised by your previous friends, being robbed blind by the health system, having your house taken from you for a pittance for a new freeway.
All radicalising things.
I’ve started thinking that perhaps Trump being uniquely awful led to more pedestrian news sources to be comfortable raving as if they’re FOX talking heads without even a pretense of reporting. Just going on and on about thuggery, or rising crime, or whatever with the bother of examples or context.
Could just be click bait culture and lower standards.
Assad did nothing wrong (by historical US standards, the US has supported much worse governments), except pursue a foreign policy against Israeli and Saudi interests
It’s important not to sanctify foreign leaders just because the West doesn’t like them. Assad was, and is, an extremely nasty piece of work, and the behaviour of his regime at home and in Lebanon has been terrible. Speak to a few Syrian exiles, and you’ll be in no hurry to move there from the US. There are no Good Guys here, I’m afraid.
I could say that you are an extremely nasty piece of work, but that would be ad hominem, so I won’t. There are no Good Guys there in The West, I’m afraid.
“Assad was, and is, an extremely nasty piece of work, and the behaviour of his regime at home and in Lebanon has been terrible.”
How do you define “extremely nasty” and “terrible behaviour” in this context? I’m aware of the brutality of the Syrian Mukhabarat, the ruthlessness of Assad’s father in his battles with Sunni salafists, Syrian intrigue and assassinations in Lebanon, etc. I have no doubt that there are Syrian exiles with legitimate horror stories, as there are always legitimate horror stories and innocent victims in these contexts. But I would not rely on such exiles to provide a “fair and balanced” perspective. Your terminology suggests the “demon-Assad” characterization that has been fed to us constantly in the West – the Assad of tens of thousands of torture victims piled up like cords of firewood; the Assad that would “gas his own people” without hesitation even when it served no strategic purpose just because he was that evil, etc. Much of this is debunked propaganda. I would certainly not “sanctify” Assad, or any foreign leader for that matter. There are certainly no “good guys” here. If I or my family were victims of the Syrian secret police or even casualties of the Syrian Arab Army I’d likely demonize Assad as well. But in the larger context of the region, in my opinion he is most definitely one of the “lesser evils.” That is unless you actually believe the destruction of Syria by the US and its allies is for “humanitarian” reasons.
The whole point of my comment is that we should neither demonise nor sanctify world leaders, but recognise them for what they are. Assad is not a demon, but being disliked by the West doesn’t make him a saint either. I’m not sure why it’s so hard for people to get their heads round this relatively simple point, but I think it has a lot to do with overreaction to the western tendency to seek the moral high ground, and automatically demonise its enemies. If you (a) are critical of western policy in the Middle East and (b) Assad is vilified beyond his deserts because the West is Always Right, then the temptation (not always resisted) is going to be to find excuses for him just because he’s an enemy of the West. You then assume, I think, that anyone who is critical of Assad must therefore be an uncomplicated cheerleader for western actions in Syria, which I very definitely am not. This is not a case where extreme positions are helpful, and it should be possible to recognise that everything is shades of grey. Let’s not overdo it.
My comment was sparked by what appeared to be an equation of Syria with the United States. I’m not particularly keen to live in either, but if I had to choose I think the answer is obvious enough.
You, sir, strike me as a person who fears not being misunderstood :)
It’s hard to keep so many things straight. Yes, Syria isn’t great. Yes, Assad is a bad actor. Yes, Assad has done bad things. Yes, the people who are currently fighting his regime as US aligned agents aren’t good. No, there is no evidence that Assad gassed his own people. No, that doesn’t mean people accusing various US pols who are anti-war of being Assad toadies and useful idiots for Russia are correct.
Is there any evidence that pre-war Syria was a particularly bad place? If you’re practicing or suspected of practicing sedition as a Kurds or an Israeli agent, things will go badly for you, but is there any evidence that it was a bad place for the majority of its people? If I was forced to pick a place to live in West Asia in 2007, it seems like possibly the best option in the region.
Well, Syria was experiencing a pretty awful drought between 2006 and 2010. So for at least that reason I would not have suggested it as a good place to be. Syria had just ended its military occupation of parts of Lebanon in 2005 too, so it wasn’t a good place in 2007. Unless you’re into starving in a hot dry place with lots of surly soldiers coming back home.
But is it worse than most places in West Asia with their own state repression and economic problems? And bad harvests were affecting their economy and prices, but not causing starvation amongst the population until the Arab Spring wars started.
“Assad is not a demon, but being disliked by the West doesn’t make him a saint either” not equivalent with “Assad was, and is, an extremely nasty piece of work”
Would you characterize Boris Johnson as a nasty piece of work?
If in response to someone else saying “Boris Johnson did nothing wrong by US standards”, then yeah, that’d be a fair reply.
What’s with this particular thread picking on Aurelian’s plea to not knee jerk this into a black vs white discussion out of context? Are you all in twitter withdrawal or something? I expected better from this crowd.
“Assad was, and is, an extremely nasty piece of work…”
This was the comment made. In effect, justifying the destruction of Syria. Readers need not be demeaned for temperately criticizing such a comment.
Saying a political leader is a piece of work is not the same as justifying the destruction of that leader’s nation, ‘in effect’ or otherwise.
Reminds me of the tone and language policing in undergrad. If you’re not consistently virtue signalling or if you go against the grain in any way, you are ‘in effect’ an ableist white supremacist. 🤣
It would be one thing if Aurelien did this once or twice or provided strong evidence to back up his assertions. Instead he traffics in vague insinuations that always tilts against the anti-Western side. He doesn’t back it up with links or specific instances that would allow others to assess his assertions, but creates this vague sense that “they” are the baddies. This is how consent is manufactured.
And “Assad did nothing wrong” was the prior comment. I can’t even figure out what that was in support of, in that it was in reply to an original comment about censorship in Aus.
My point was that there seems to be a contingent here that is taking this discussion as a personal affront or something, and/or have it out for Aurelian, who has been a long time contributer here, and who I certainly find provides a valuable point of view.
Because Aurelien habitually makes these all encompassing comments towards the enemies of the American empire, makes vague noises about how it’s all so complicated and anyone who points that that actually Putin, Xi, Nasrallah, Ansarallah, etc. have their peoples united behind them and have clearly started objectives, is somehow the imperialist.
Specifically in this case, what was stated was that Assad was not particularly guilty by the standards of the West. Rather than providing specific counter examples, Aurelien again goes into vague orientalist tropes about the inscrutable oriental despot and their alleged victims, and completely blots out the reason why Syria is under attack by Western supported Turkic Jihadis, which has nothing to do with how nice or not nice he is to certain members of the Syrian emigre community.
Nobody says Assad is a saint and that he should be supported on those grounds. Assad and the legitimate government of Syria is the only thing standing between the Western backed Salafist headchoppers that your “Syrian exiles” who are likely receiving money directly from Western governments and NGOs, support. The majority of those in Syria support him and now that the tribal leaders and even the Kurds are fighting with the Syrian government, there’s no genuine support in the native Syrian population for these imported Turkic headchoppers who never attack Zionists or US forces in the region, only other Muslims.
Syria was not targeted for what Assad allegedly did to his own people. It was targeted because it backed Palestinian resistance, provided a warm water port to Russia, and is part of Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman ambitions. Both-siding the reality of what destroyed a previously prosperous and very moderate by Arab state standard country is…well, I don’t want to be accused of using ad hominems.
I’ve been listening to Richard Medhurst, Kevork Almassian, and Laith Maruth, three Syrians who very much support the Syrian government against the Western backed headchoppers Salafist proxies. They go into great detail about their position and have suffered significant state repression as a result.
Who are the “Syrian exiles” that you speak to and who writes their paychecks?
I have noted a definite pattern in your commentary in the past year. Every place where there’s a conflict between uppity natives and their previous or current European “master”, it’s immediately clear that you’ll throw in some jabs about how complicated things supposedly are and how uncivilized and unreasonably the locals are behaving. And see there are *reasonable* people *from* there who think very differently and boy oh boy they’ll regret it in the end.
How’s that working out in the Sahel?
Yes, Aurelien’s Orientalism is becoming a bit obvious.
It’s not Orientalism. He also considers Slavs to be lesser humans that can not be civilized, and must be balkanized and colonized for their own good. No near-east far-east discrimination there. Everyone is extremely nasty piece of work, except his own exceptional blue-blooded with-arms-soaked-in-regular-bllod kind.
Western Europeans consider anyone previously occupied by the Mongols or Ottomans to be suspect Orientals. Maybe even further west:
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=0e0f723135e259a1&q=german+hun+wwi+poster&udm=2&fbs=AEQNm0DmfTgc7tU04ONiC4SZ2zg3RT2rNGFt-PO6C2cWvmZVUg8CrsXqKTato6BkjlXJ9NeEH4kb3BRANN-itCYAhId-PZ29tcIXhkCvpD0UDJpLKQJTSvc-1_G8ml-zRACeOFvj4pHiyAeqPivUUcb3hhWQ1t7uqb8nYkCIEXZ60r3pSU3R_LJlq8vqPb2_TaHpcX-ugiUM3LO9pusIXOOFSzCXA9b7k3Gv6GWw4fGxt5yj_LZ5RRw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiJy9Szm4eKAxWqhIkEHSDeBi8QtKgLegQIExAB&biw=412&bih=760&dpr=2.63
BTW – every culture has words for “reasonable people” who work with outside invaders to subvert their society and sell out their own people.
الخائن
漢奸
Traitor
предатель
Quisling
“every culture has words for “reasonable people” who work with outside invaders to subvert their society and sell out their own people.”
Comprador
Servant of foreign power
Sellout
Democrat
Republican
etc.
SDP
CDU
Erdogan
Al Sisi
Greens ( probably including American Greens if they get within sniffing distance of power)
…
That was insulting.
I posted it to social media since I have Japanese and Chinese friends.
I doubt Nakedcapitalism wants that kind of stuff associated with it.
I await an apology for that DISGUSTING stuff.
I can’t tell if you’re serious. If you are, you’re saying that it’s insulting to say that every culture I’m aware of has a word for traitor? For real?
Considering other posts, maybe he thinks that Aurelian is damsel in distress, and is acting (overly) protective.
Comprador elites
https://africasacountry.com/2023/09/nothing-good-comes-of-france
September 22, 2023
Nothing good comes of France
By Mbaye Bashir Lo
France is not a new problem for Africa. Since the 19th century, it has stood in the way of the continent’s self-determination.
Nearly half of the African Union’s 54 member states are former French colonies. In 20 countries south of the Sahara the French language and France’s economic interests still dominate. An unsettling fact emerges when examining the economic landscape: none of the 10 largest African economies are French-speaking. Yet, six of the poorest 10 nations on the continent are predominantly Francophone. Eleven out of the 14 countries that use the currencies of the CFA franc, * which France backs, are listed among the least developed by the United Nations.
France is indeed a problem for Africa. This is not new; the “French concern” also preoccupied many 19th-century West African leaders. France initially enriched itself through four centuries of involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. As this trade in African subjects waned in the early 19th century, the French empire builders embarked on a new era of colonial conquests in Africa. They assumed a prominent role in organizing the West Africa Conference, commonly called the Berlin Conference, which effectively led to the partitioning of African territories among various European powers.
* Coopération Financière en Afrique centrale
Mbaye Bashir Lo is associate professor of the practice of Asian and Middle Eastern studies and international comparative studies at Duke University.
Well stated, Emma.
Speak to a few Cuban or Venezuelan exiles, and they will tell you that their government is run by satan and that the US is heaven on earth.
You might get a clearer picture talking to Syrians who remain in their home country. But that would require you to take a page out of Craig Murray’s book, and go there.
Speak to a few Russian exiles, and they will tell you that Putin himself sent their gay hamsters to Gulag, and dogs to China.
Most of them seems to have moved to Israel since the start of the SMO.
Yeah well, exiles are exiles. and exiles from wherever to the USA tend to view the USA favourably for obvious reasons — at least until they don’t.
In this town, and really throughout central Mexico, there are a great many Mexican returnees, who were once economic exiles in the US, or the children of economic exiles to the US.
Some, naively but understandably, thought they would be living in a movie or TV sitcom, and became disillusioned; others had a plan and were willing to endure until they could return in better circumstances. And then, San Francisco or L.A. or Philadelphia ain’t what they used to be. Regardless, they are content to be back, and to be raising their families here.
For anyone wishing to get a massive history of the Syrian conflict until now with receipts, Kit Klarenberg and Alex Rubenstein just posted a massive compilation. Very information dense heady stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/live/D233Js9RN8Y?si=nhRlLh6WIKf0c_SV
When I first saw the news of the offensive a few days ago in NY Times, I just assumed it must be a US-sponsored terrorist group that we’ve been arming all this time. Kind of hilarious and sad to be correct.
I see it as another distraction from the real story: the genocide.
Or a distraction from, and a part of, the real story.
Sadly it may not be. To the sociopaths at the top (and this includes Xi and Putin, who must put aside the suffering of the comparative few with the geopolitical implications of action/inaction. The genocide and even the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is a comparative sideshow of a people who have the sympathies of many, but only the firm support of the Ansarallah.
Israel needs to destroy Hezbollah but it has no ability to do so. It was trying to start a civil war in Lebanon but it looks like nobody, not even the Falangists, are biting. So it’s going back to choking Hezbollah by wreaking Syria if the Jihadis take over Aleppo, or further Russian involvement in defense of Syria that might directly draw in Americans before Trump comes in, then no peace in Ukraine…profit.
people write about how the deaths of thousands and millions are the price paid for freedom from the colonists. Vietnam and Algeria et al, it goes on and on. I hate hearing what must be done to shake off the talons of the colonists, but it’s true and unlike previous centuries the whole world knows and still (other than Ansarallah) nobody acts. Nothing can be done but wait for geopolitical realities to sort themselves out and possibly allow Palestine to join Vietnam and Algeria et al. We can do civil disobedience and bds to ease our own pain, stand with local Palestinian to ease their own suffering. Maybe Creator will see those of us who at least care as having hearts light as a feather. Mitakuye oyasin
War as service! War on rocks “insiders”.
They give a decent idea of JCIDS, etc, then go around with getting war by advisory and assistance services (A&AS)!
I was an A&AS after qualifying for my GS pension…..
A&AS is a quick way to “hire” civilians (retirees and ex military) when the “management” engineers won’t give you slots!
A&AS billing is activity reports! One of the reasons DoD cannot stand an audit,.
Good thing those auditors don’t call in fraud investigators!
War as a service is good as A&AS as manpower to buy F-35’s!
Wow, that’s a lot of letters :-)
Immediately after retiring, I took an A&AS job supporting an Army outfit, had to learn a new language of different alphabet soups.
I was working on a Rosetta stone when I got a job back with the AF.
Acronyms!
“What would happen day by day if aliens made contact with earth, according to ex-NASA expert”
I hope that some of those experts also consider the Dark forest hypothesis as it cannot be lightly dismissed-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
Otherwise we may get a visit from aliens but not one that we would be hoping for-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5H4yK_tiGI&rco=1 (4:11 mins)
Aliens: ‘Lead me to your takers…’
Aliens: ‘Obey us or we will destroy your White House, your Senate, your House and your Supreme Court!’
Americans: ‘We think that you do not have the guts to do that and are too scared to even try!’
Waiting for the Aliens a wonderful song.
If you want to talk to aliens, chase eclipses https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/240086
The author who wrote The Dark Forest explored the concept in The Three-Body Problem trilogy. Well written and memorable.
I prefer Stanislaw Lem’s take on this topic. Not only do aliens NOT want to communicate, we wouldn’t understand them at all.
> I spent 30 years as a therapist to killers – and no one is born evil BBC
>> Radical empathy: preventing violence
>> who had all killed family members while mentally unwell
Charles Whitman: brain tumor. My spiritual mentor Gayle’s husband, who shot their two adult kids and then himself: brain tumor. The legless landlord of the slumhouse on the corner who kept renting to families with kids who would display themselves on the front porch: brain tumor.
All the radical empathy in the world don’t cover for brain tumors; or brain damage; or the fact that the most complex system in the universe is not uniform under each skull.
Another note: she’s studying predators inside the cage. Critters behave different in the wild. She could be right about 99% of the cases, but I see no criteria of differentiation. Oh wait
>> And while there is a minority of people whose minds can’t be changed – who will always be a risk – by paying attention to distorted narratives in the majority of cases, we can find ways to change those violent minds for good.
Distorted narratives. Y’know, I’m not really mad at the author, between the Upton Criteria, and her assuming the only psychopaths she has met are the ones who’ve been credentialed so. Anyway, here’s another distorted narrative:
How the Dominant Business Paradigm Turns Nice People into Psychopaths
I read through this article and appreciated Dr. Adshead’s empathy for her patients. I think this issue is complicated by the fact that violent offenders have a variety of problems. There is a difference between violence in the setting of extreme rage or psychosis and routine sexual sadomasochistic torture and murder (like Ted Bundy). The potential to harm people in the future is one thing that psychiatrists like her are expected to assess. There are extenuating circumstances for many people in prison which explain why they do what they do. Unfortunately, one of the best predictors of future violence is past violence and there is a need to protect society. As I recall Jack Abbott didn’t do well after release and murdered again (In the Belly of the Beast author with cowriter Normal Mailer).
Brain damage is a real issue and hard to recognize and treat.
I think it is dangerous to lump everyone together as one “type” which is why doctors like her get paid well to do these assessments. It’s complicated.
I agree with everything you’ve written here, and with her call for compassion. But,
>> The psychopaths I’ve encountered in my career have been neither exceptionally bright nor socially able, nor at all charming.
calls me to question her assessments. Taking the label as the thing. Biasing her sample.
Truth, I may be over-reactive on this. I’ve worked in prisons, and lockdown psychiatric units. The level of authority and control attracts some antisocially disordered personalities as employees. And not all of them get fired.
It’s only n=1, but as I recall In Cold Blood, Capote found Perry Smith to be bright, if uneducated.
A friend of mine, Suzanna Andrews, did a Vanity Fair story on Sante Kimes, the first person in New York State with her son, to be convicted of murder when the body had not been found. I am sorry, this woman was evil. She came from a seriously bad home, ran away, prostituted herself, somehow married a rich man (socially prominent in his area, they entertained well). She was convicted of slavery. Kept her Mexican maids in rooms that locked from the outside. IIRC beat them too.
After her prison term, she somehow with her son (WHO SHE SLEPT WITH) started grifting. As I recall, some financial scams as in with checks and/or credit cards. They’d meet a mark, get close to them, and work out how to scam them on the fly.
The article details the NYC murder. Sante was also a suspect in a LA insurance scam related murder, I recall she was convicted of that too.
Suzanna interviewed her several times in prison. Found her an extremely manipulative, remorseless sociopath, excuses for everything, and she had done profiles on many many top Wall Street people (like Mike Milken, Larry Fink, others more prominent in the day than now). She signed a book contract but didn’t complete it because it became too damaging to channel Sante.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2000/03/sante-kimes-mother-murderer-criminal-mastermind
My take is that around 4-5% of humans can be classified as sociopaths or psychopaths. Clinical definitions of these vary and there is some overlap. Another personal opinion is that Homo sapiens are a cooperative species. In other cooperative species, if a socio/psychopath exhibits behavior that is harmful to the whole, they are ostracized, excluded, sometimes left to die alone. Darwin. But if a culture rewards such unhuman behavior by elevating them to positions of power in government or business (not Darwin!), well, then, we are in a mess.
This, I believe, is why Graeber thought “civilization” was a wrong turn.
A lot of the discussion today is about the fine grained judgements civilization’s resulting complexity imposes on a morality impulse that predates it by something like a hundred thousand years.
Supersociality becomes a cost when systemic evolution exceeds our perceptual sphere, and the digital revolution entering its first existential crisis is raising the judgmental stakes for everyone. Accommodations built on five hundred years of bloodshed are coming undone all over the place, and ones institutional place among all the failing, flailing or otherwise feckless institutions one grew up with can’t help but shape perceptions and hot takes in an increasingly heated world.
Like other commenters above, in this context I’ll take what accord I can find with all the grace I can muster where I find it.
I think there is a higher percentage of humans that are prone to preying on or inflicting cruelty on others, if you include those who may or may not be sociopaths or psychopaths by a strict definition but have similar “dark” traits (uncontrollable anger, malignant narcissism, habitual lying, reflexive aggressiveness, etc.), maybe 6-8% as a conservative guess. And the unfortunate flip side is that the percentage of people with “saintly” traits that will always keep them from abusing someone else, even when they’re being cajoled or bullied to do so, is only about half that. Most people are in the middle and capable of doing whatever the herd is doing, so that imbalance has a tendency toward biasing for the emergence of evil behaviors.
This is a direct result of perverse institutional incentives that reward antisocial behavior.
Institutions we’re now stuck with at least as long as it takes us to climb down from our dependence on their productive capacity and erstwhile and occasional distributive efficiency.
Social efficiency in the sense of sustaining society, not the antisocial economic sense.
Reading the piece I wondered what is the story with people who enjoy indulging in petty cruelty at work, widespread sexual harassment, or the guy on Fox News business segment explaining that the Chinese manufacturer fent to cause death and chaos in America.
“Teeing off” of the Yasha Levine post on Collards, I recently encountered, when searching for information about drought-tolerant vegetables, a group of Brassica I had never previously heard of: “Tree Collards,” which are perennial in a pretty wide range of USDA zones.
Here’s a brief description, and here is a source of seeds, cuttings ad plants. I hope to try these in 2025, though I may be obliged to grow them in containers set well above ground until they are tall enough to be out of reach of groundhogs, which have forced me to move all my leafy veg to chest-height benches. The Horticulture Magazine article advises to prefer Purple-colored varieties for their superior flavor.
I have noticed that Cabbage butterflies seem to not lay eggs on my purple kale; perhaps purple Collards would be similarly unappealing to them.
For several years I was borderline obsessed with getting tree collards to overwinter in a no-till plot in a community garden in Vancouver, BC. I got them to survive for several years, only to lose them during a really cold snap a few years ago.
Frankly, they were tough and stringy, and the theoretical advantages of their being perennial did not make up for the shade they cast (some were about two metres tall) over a small garden plot. I don’t think they out-produced annual collard or kale per square metre. If you live in a slightly warmer climate, can try all the varieties of tree collards to find more palatable ones (I didn’t have the purple variety you mentioned), and have enough space that their shade doesn’t matter, then they might make sense. They were sure impressive at their full height!
Having grown masses of them for years, I find that the most palatable of the collards and kale to be the Red Russian and Lacinato kale varieties.
buying a set of World Book Encyclopedias 2023 edition. It’s a preAI snapshot of accepted information that will not be available in the future, everything will be tinged by AI, tweaked, customized, bastardized, compromised. the internet will be a house of mirrors, edited, airbrushed, localized to the individual. covid gov’t response is the pattern, handwaving away climate change, genocide, oligarchy. politician trump pulling back the curtain on our sensibilities, our shared reality, it’s like pulling the skin off a burn
Joe Rogan and Marc Andreesen interview, utube, 8 minute clip, about political orientation of various AI. It’s a real sound/visual clip with an annoying background mashup. Ignore the background junk. / ;)
The Ethics of AI Sensorship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEUMFKIrqjs
an aside: Andreesen made a big deal about drone flyers in the US needing a pilots license. Here’s the FAA rule set for that, if anyone is interested.
https://www.faa.gov/uas/commercial_operators/become_a_drone_pilot
For some history, the new rules came out during the O admin because of an incident.
https://apnews.com/general-news-363db112424b43dbb338239ad88b9185
I looked into buying a drone a couple of years ago. Thought it might be a way to make some extra money, and fun at the same time. You do need a license to go commercial. I did the work so I could pass the test but then the rules kept changing and the small time drone pilot seemed to be much more unattractive. More rules and regulations and too complicated.
I don’t think they want amateurs with drones with cameras snooping around the countryside. Snooping is for the spooks and LEOs, not Joe Six Pack with a $1k DJI drone looking at your gutters or the crop damage down by the overflowed creek.
lol, look at kids books pre-1990. times have changed.
“PreAI snapshot of accepted information” meaning manually tweaked, customized, bastardized, compromised.
In other words, ‘civilization’. Shoulders of giants and all that.
The difference is the old way was done through many, competing human hands, mostly with good intentions.
Western accepted version of history, and the whole western accepted non-STEM stuff, tend to not be written by giants, but intellectual midgets that consider themselves better that everyone else. The Empire of Lies is built on, well, lots of lies. Wikipedia is crap-filled by competing human hands, mostly with good intentions (or so they say).
What’s your point? That AI driven ‘answers’ are better? (being the starting point of this discussion). Are you saying that accepting Google’s hallucination tainted results is more better than Wiki?
90+% of wiki’s content is superb, just avoid the controversial stuff. There’s an argument that the tainted stuff is a good way to teach the reader not to trust anything on faith…
And beyond complaining that Western history is written by midgets, where’s your solution? Are we to accept your favorite version instead? And if not, how would you find an alternate version in the first place? Other than, you know, in books, which again, is where this conversation started.
My point is that something being human hand writen is not a guarantee of it not being utter nosense. People in the Communist block have never trusted the news, though it was human written.
Those that needed Google’s hallucination to understand that something ain’t right, shouldn’t even bother. They could as well eat the bugs, or accept that men are women, or think that some god chose them.
Solution is a pinch of salt on everyting. AI is just a tool. You don’t blame a hammer, or a gun, but people wielding them in a bad way.
In our group of 16 @ Saline hot springs this week was a friend who is retired from JPL and quite an AI enthusiast, who calls his tart with quite a posh English accent that inhabits his smartphone: Gloria Page-Tate, who is quite chatty and always has an answer for everything, a know-it-all’s know it all.
He has practically surrendered to her charms, and I watched her bang out 3 songs in regards to Dusty the Adventure Dog, with only minimal details given as input. I don’t think G P-T can relate to sarcasm-so my day job is safe for the time being,
I think I have you beat.
About 10 years ago, I was walking out of my local library and noticed a big huge dumpster full of books. These were all “expired” – books they had decided no one was reading and they needed the shelf space. And unbelievably, there in the dumpster was a complete edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica – the 11th edition – if the copyright date is correct, they are more than 110 years old. I dug everyone of them out, and two of them had really been damaged by the abuse of being dumpstered. I took them to an antiquarian book shop in the area – and paid to have those two restored. I was also informed how much they were worth – and unbelievably, the proceeds from that sale could have netted the library enough in its budget to buy hundreds/thousands of new books.
I do find it deeply disturbing that librarians would be so ignorant to throw this stuff away. But they did. I always stopped by that dumpster for years – and found all kinds of treasures. Right before we moved, my library dumpster dive yielded this book. I had no idea what I had at the time – a well-used paperback that I dug out because I live for SF short stories. But look at the current price on Amazon – and think how many new books could have been purchased if they had just sold that used online. I wrote a long letter to the city councilman who wrote me back that the library’s manner of disposal was being done by the law. Please do not bother them again, etc.
And they wonder why DOGE has gained any traction at all? I understand needing to cycle through books no one is reading anymore – but could they not run them all through Alibris or ABE just once?
Just to let you know, that you dumpster dive has dramatically increased my estimation of you.
Our local libraries have book sales rather than tossing, so I think this phemomenon might be local to you.
And in any case, it’s not just books, I’m sure you know a huge volume of food is tossed or destroyed while still good – food which could easily be redirected to those who need it. Food Not Bombs has been active in trying to redirect.
Here in Hawaii the public/school libraries are run by the state. There is a “Friends of Library” org that holds an annual book sale in Honolulu. Runs about 10 days. Most materials are donated, but some are de-accessioned. A good way to find long out-of-print stuff.
Alas, Hurricane Katrina did away with most of my “valuable old book” collection. Which collection included some 1700s era French books published in a monastery no less. Those tomes were rescued from a dumpster outside of an old Catholic Church building in New Orleans that was being “upgraded.” I have personally seen “get ‘er done” style foremen tell the cleanup crew to throw everything out, everything. Don’t be bothering Mr. Bigshot with trifles, like two hundred years old books.
I too have “dumpster dived” in the local Library disposal unit. One time, I was accosted by the local police and informed that everything in the dumpster was legally the property of the garbage collection company and that if caught doing “the dive” again I would be charged with trespass and theft. I then asked the two if they ever thought about how stupid such laws were. Both answered that they were not paid to think.
Stay safe.
We have a 12th edition (1965).
I think half of the ‘why’ is there is a balance between commercial copyright concerns vs support for libraries. Witness the IA’s current difficulties from lending out ebooks. Fundraising book sales are one thing, but an ongoing, on demand storefront for their back catalogue would no doubt generate similar pushback from the corps.
The other half is librarians have enough on their hands without managing an e-commerce storefront. And with back catalogue items, inventory management gets painful. Where are you going to store the piles of books? Think of the stereotypical used book store and multiply by a hundred. Even if they gave the books away for free, they’d still need to cull 99% of them. These are after all the books that no one wanted to check out.
After serving in World War II, everyone got one of those historical service books, including my grandfather. That copy had the cover disintegrating, after so many years, and I was happy to find a place I could mail it to in WA where someone expertly put on a new, leather cover. Some books are definitely worth having restoration work done. It was affordable, too.
Hey Doc,
As a fellow book-lover, I feel your pain at the dumpster. But having some professional experience working at a large library, maybe I can shed some light? We filled dumpsters with books at my library too, and what I learned is that modern librarians do this thing called “collections maintenance” or “weeding” where they periodically go through the collection and get rid of old books. There are several reasons why they do this — damaged books; moldy books; books judged to be obsolete or outdated; low quality books; duplicate books; or books that nobody ever checked out. — Getting rid of the Encyclopedia Brittanica 11th ed. seems like they took the weeding too far! — but they may have considered it obsolete or a duplicate (if they had a later edition). Your SF book sounds like it was discarded because it was old and worn out — pretty common for leisure fiction after some years of heavy use.
As to your question, “why don’t they sell these books on Abe for a profit?” — that’s more complicated than it seems! Many libraries do have annual book sales or little shelves with for-sale items. They usually do not charge full value for any of these titles. This is because there is already an existing eco-system of the used book trade. In that eco-system, library sales are pretty much at the very bottom of pricing — they are getting rid of books for $1-2 each, and they rely on people coming in and buying large amounts. Most libraries don’t have the staff and space to conduct the online sales, book storage, customer service and inventory management that you need to do to get full retail price on a book — that’s for the people on the next level of the eco-system, the used bookstores, vintage booksellers, and so on. Another factor in library pricing is that ex-library books (discards) are often rejected by used booksellers because they are stamped, marked or otherwise unfit for resale.
In sum — yes, it’s always painful to see a dumpster full of what seems like perfectly good books. At the same time, things are not always quite as bad as they seem. Maybe your library needs some help organizing a used book sale? Meanwhile — happy dumpster diving!
Good response. Just a couple of things to add from my own experience… In my library career, whenever I was involved in a used book sale, part of the prep was checking to see if anything being sold might have some value in used book land. It was time consuming and I wouldn’t be surprised that many libraries don’t have the staff or volunteers who could do the work. Generally however, the markings – stamps, labels, tape etc. that libraries use de-value any books thought to be valuable by used book collectors. Also, in the several library systems in which I worked, we did our best to find used book sellers to take our sale leftovers or recycle them. Garbage was truly a last and sad resort.
Good response. From the other side, I was the technical buyer at Booksellers Row used books back in the day. The ecosystem would push a semi of not-yet-on-the-shelves books at us occasionally. The amount of worseless garbage was amazing. Computer code with glaring syntax errors, that would drive someone trying to learn insane.
There was a multistory building in the back filled with bags of books, mostly mass market paperbacks. Didn’t need to heat them in Chicago winter. But vigilance against letting a mildewed book in was absolute. We’d reject an entire batch if we found one. Unless it was Bob’s section. Those got cleaned up and kept for supervised viewing.
I have been told the value for that particular printing comes from its treatment / examination of the ‘new’ kind of protestant theology that had developed in the late 20th century. I had a used book store at one time and a librarian acquaintance was chatting about the new library in the western suburbs. (They had sent me a query about running their coffee shop.) She had visited and said they had the coffee shop, play areas, ‘graphic’ novels, music CDs, movie DVDs, and “they even have some books.” Databases have done the most damage to the inventories of libraries. If it hasn’t been checked out in three years or some subjective time period it gets tossed.
Farewell, Edward Gibbon. / ;)
Around the Northern Calif town I reside in are a number of Free Libraries (small outside sheds) in local front yards. They have signs such as “take a book, leave a book”.
The Amtrak station in Oakland,CA had, the last time I was there, a bookshelf that is stocked by Friends of the Oakland Public library.
Books have possibilities for avoiding the dumpster.
They are probably affiliated with the Little Free Library movement. It was founded several decades ago in Hudson WI by a man who put the first one up in his front yard. Hudson is an exurb of the Twin Cities of Minnesota.
In Germany which is a land of books throwing books away, getting rid of libraries of people who have died has become if not a sport so a regular issue to solve.
Nobody wants them.
Absurdly enough it has in recent years become more difficult to get copies of older titles.
One reason is the insane push to make the educational system digital and the economic crisis has weakend the willingness and skill to engage into literature.
If they don´t change this entire system I see some dramatic changes.
I warned a publisher 15 years ago of this. She sort of smiled at me.
Well here we are, more and more of Germany´s major publishers disappear.
In how far the quality of writing is not necessarily increasing is a different matter, also of personal taste, as I read non-fiction.
Most librarians have degrees in Library Science, not literature, science etc. So yes I’ve often wondered whether librarians value books in the same way readers do. No offense to they who are providing us with a valuable service.
And apparently the current approach to the book warehousing problem (as they see it) is to buy editions that nobody would want to rescue, printed on tissue thin paper and built to fall apart after the new release has become a year or two old.
But I’m not totally unsympathetic. When I finish a book I am done with it although I wouldn’t mind having a digital copy sitting on my computer for future reference. The technology of reading has changed and those giant coffee table art books–heavy as a brick because they are printed on clay coated paper–might be better replaced with a feather weight digital version that doesn’t strain the joints of we the getting up there.
The main thing is that the libraries keep the books coming, whatever the format. And if that format is digital then they have no excuse to discard anything.
You would think so but do you remember the story of that library (a school library I think) that used a novel approach to what books they kept. Every book from before 2013 I think it was was removed so only modern books remained. Encyclopedias – gone. Classics – gone. Reference books – gone. Bye, bye Harry Potter too as an example. If the format for that library was to have digital books, I am certain that one day every work published before that year would also just be deleted. Come to think of it, such a library could “lease” digital books for say ten years. When that ten years is up, that digital book self-deletes.
I believe that is sort of what they do now. Some of the ebooks I have checked out in the past have now disappeared. On the other hand others that were among their first ebooks are still available. There are now book “contracts” with varying legal status and one big advantage to paper books is that they are forever assuming the library doesn’t throw them in the dumpster.
So my stated ideal is not what is happening but at least we are getting a steady supply of newly published books–‘e’ or not.
IM Doc is talking about The Year’s Best Science Fiction, First Annual Collection for 1984, edited by the late, great Gardner Dozois —
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?195293
This anthology and the year after’s, for 1985, were vintage years for SF, with the likes of William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Gene Wolfe, Vernor Vinge, James Tiptree/Alice Sheldon, George R. R. Martin, Bruce Sterling, many other great writers, making their initial impact or at the height of their powers.
I have this one stashed in storage with my stuff in the US.
Trump threatens 100% tariff on BRICS nations in case of dollar replacement Anadolu Agency
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh, they’re a BRICS house
Almighty-mighty buck, just lettin’ it all play out
They’re a BRICS house
That precious is stacked and that’s a fact
Ain’t holding nothing back
Ow, they’re a BRICS house
Well put-together, everybody knows
This is how the story goes
China knows she got everything
That an economy needs to get demand, yeah, yeah
How can she lose with the stuff we use
100 percent tariff, no twenty-four karat, dirty tricks-oh what a winning hand
‘Cause, they’re a BRICS house
Almighty-mighty buck, just lettin’ it all play out
They’re a BRICS house
That precious is stacked and that’s a fact
Ain’t holding nothing back
Ow, they’re a BRICS house
Yeah, they’re the one, the only one, that can supply Amazon
The clothes they make, their mercantile ways
Make an old man like Trump wish for younger days, yeah, yeah
They know how to build and know how to please
Sure enough to knock a formerly strong economy to it’s knees
‘Cause, they’re a BRICS house
Almighty-mighty buck, just lettin’ it all play out
They’re a BRICS house
That precious is stacked and that’s a fact
Ain’t holding nothing back
Shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down now
BRICS house
Yeah, they’re mighty mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out
They’re a BRICS house
Yeah, they’re the one, the only one, that can supply Amazon, yeah
Shake it down, shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down, shake it, shake it
Shake it down, shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down, shake it down now
Shake it down, shake it down, shake it
Ow, a BRICS house
Brickhouse, by The Commodores
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhPu6GEoad8
Wuk for the win.
“Georgia’s president will not step down until ‘illegitimate’ election rerun”
The solution is not hard. Next month when a new Georgian President is selected, you send round a coupla Parliamentary security people to remove the trespasser from the Presidential office, set her a** down outside the building along with a cardboard box containing all her personal items and then walk back inside the building.
Meanwhile they are trying to go full Maidan in those protests and there has been the use of Molotov cocktails already. The Georgian government has learned from the Ukrainian Maidan and are not letting the protestors build a permanent encampment so that the NGOs can go in and build a supplied fortification out of it.
“Learned from the Ukrainian Maidan…” well perhaps Madame President will be dragged in a public building and set on fire as the public watches…”learned from the Maidan.” It would be a pity if she never got the opportunity to benefit from that cushy job she knows she will get when she departs, at say the National Endowment for Democracy, where she can put on a happy face for pre-terrorist NGO funded groups targeting the next country not obeying USA commands.
And shoot her ashes from a cannon facing westeard.
She should move to Ukraine and become the governor of Odesa Oblast, as per tradition.
I assume Russia also learned from the 2014 ukr coup and would prefer to avoid a Georgian copy. So west ngo’s are competing with at least russian advice? And Russian economic commitments? Frankly, I’d also rather we weren’t involved in another war with a nuclear power.
Maybe former ussr satellites shouldn’t allow eu expats that have little intention of returning to live/work from voting in their elections.
If I remember correctly, French ambassador in Niger also refused to leave his office and go back to France. He held on firmly to that decision, until he ran out of croissants.
Re: The Invisible Man
«Nothing good comes of fear, only destruction, and America has become a society of fear, much of that fear cultivated to divide and control.»
Today’s must-read, IMHO.
Yes, agreed. Lots of homeless in our area. Not sure of the exact percentage but more than 50% of homeless have had (or have) a traumatic brain injury – obtained either before or during homelessness.
Yes it is very good. Since the subject used to be an employed journalist there is an unavoidable empathy which many stories on homeless people have omitted.
This is a reply to ChrisfromGA.
Twitter would be too modern. I blame Ted Turner and the rise of infotainment. The news as such as it was simply became an outfit dedicated to maintaining consumer eyeballs.
Ted Koppel and Nightlime are out there, but the transmogrifcation of monsters and clowns on TV being beamed into the house on a constant basis turned them into regular characters rather than what they are. Everything decays from there. FoxNews and Rush were too cartoonishly evil to be the drivers of events. Rush was an outsider who clearly wanted to be a.celebrity presenter and Fox was just a response to the market place CNN developed.
Something went awry in the 1990s. I used to listen to Rush a lot, being more conservative during my 20s. He had many valid criticisms of the mainstream press. Of course, he became a cartoon character.
If there ever was a golden age for the press, it may have been the 1950s up until around 1980 (when cable TV really got going. Also the time of Ted Koppel and NIghtline, perhaps the last gasp of the golden era.)
I’m thinking it was Entertainment Tonight combined with Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous that set us on our rickety course.
They covered up plenty. They were just more persuasive back when the lies and omissions were harder to debunk and delivered by sober voiced WASPs.
I remember when everyone was aghast because USA Today was dumbing the news down for low-information readers. Compared to cable news shows, USA Today is Foreign Policy Quarterly with sidebars from The Economist.
True, but isn’t it ironic how Fox has become, to an extent, a reliable source of “news”. The world – at least in the USA – is being flipped. Liberal is called right wing and right wing is becoming progressive. What’s the Beatles song, You Know My Name?
The Rolling Stones helped when they said:
Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.
…
What’s puzzlin’ you is the nature of my game.
Been a long time, but I always kind of liked Koppel. I think he was the one who said something along the lines of; news was once a lost leader, then they found out they could make money with it, and it all changed. Something along those lines. He always seemed to ask the good questions, but like I said, it’s been a long time and I might be remembering wrong.
It sure has. As mentioned above, it’s all propaganda now.
CNN didn’t come along until the ’80s and at first did play the news straight. Turner had wanted to buy CBS and admired the high reputation of its news division.
Meanwhile concern about infotainment already existed in the mid 70s as seen in Lumet’s Network and the comic musings of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It was the top Sunday night ratings of Sixty Minutes in the 70s that started the ball rolling toward TV news as profit maker. The removal of Nixon had put the news business at the top of its always wavering reputation and Nixon foe and therefore news personality Dan Rather was chosen to replace Cronkite instead of the more dour and straightforward Roger Mudd.
So the decline of the MSM has been going on for some time and fits the “power corrupts” cliche that affects all institutions. One could argue that Watergate was paradoxically the worst thing that ever happened to the news biz. They’ve never gotten over their newly acquired sense of importance. The salaries made by people like Maddow seem astonishing given what a shill she is.
Now everything has a business model.
How did the world survive for millennia without that? /s
“Trump threatens 100% tariff on BRICS nations in case of dollar replacement”
‘We require a commitment from these Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty US Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful US Economy’
So is Trump demanding a treaty or something? Russia and Iran have just finished de-dollarizing their payments to each other. Will Trump demand that they use US dollars to do business with each other again – and then forbid it’s use to punish them? And if he puts 100% tariffs on Russia, does that include titanium as well which would have a severe effect on aircraft construction for a start. Will he eventually put tariffs on China because they are trading with Russia in their own currencies? China could halt exports of key products to the US to remind Trump that he needs them more than China needs him. More and more Trump and the Cabinet that he has recruited reminds me of a circus, along with the clowns. Will he even realize that it is no longer 2018 anymore when he was President last. A lot has changed since then. As I said in a comment way back in 2018, Trump never grew into the job of President and he was exactly the same as he was in 2016 and never changed in those four years. This will not end well.
That Trump threat might do more to focus other nations that this is one of the best reasons for many/most nations to want to de-dollarize ASAP, than Trump realizes.
> And if he puts 100% tariffs on Russia, does that include titanium as well which would have a severe effect on aircraft construction for a start.
If Titanium were to be exempted from punitive tariffs, it would be just deserts for RF to impose a high tariff on exports of Titanium that are not purchased with the new BRICS currency.
Two can play that game.
Trump is just playing 3D chess the best he can, like a pidgeon.
Thanks for this. The similarity in the profile and his birdlike tongue help the image which will entertain me all day.
You win the internet today.
I really want Trump to carry through with the tariff threats. It’ll be a real world acting out of The Foundation versus Korell.
All tariffs boost inflation of what is taxed. Inflation sunk the dems recently. Trump won’t run again, but Vance has hopes. Just sayin’.
Here’s Yanis Varoufakis discussing this somewhere in China. Very interesting discussion of history followed by recommendations going forward:
How China Can Win the Cold War with the U.S., Here are Four Suggestions | Yanis Varoufakis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BsAa_94dao
This was prior to Trump’s 100% tariffs statement, but much of the discussion is around the dollar payment hegemony, and how China has threatened it.
re: “Russian Intel. Elaborates on Western Plans to ‘Freeze’ the Ukrainian Frontlines with NATO Troop Deployments: Preparing For a Second War Military Watch”
I read this on MW a couple of hours ago. BUT: it has no source cited as the RU Intelligence Service goes.
So, is this another invention? The RUs would not say anything about such a grave matter in public (!) if they cannot 100% prove.
Is MW magazine instead abusing the name of the RU Intel. to spread the Western call for war?
Interesting PR idea.
Gooooooooooood Mooooooooorning Fiatnam!
Tariffist attacks were expected on our position, so the platoon deployed set & forget paymore bonds around the perimeter in an effort to keep up with inflationary measures when things blew up real good on the home front back in the world.
>Czech city wants to hire Ukrainians to police due to “problems in diaspora”
Will they be called Schumas?
Kind of find it ironic that this is more likely to become true before we see any evidence of the “overseas Chinese police stations”
Re: The Dogs of Chernobyl Are Experiencing Rapid Evolution, Study Suggests Popular Mechanics
Oooh, I can’t wait for the movie – “50-foot monster dogs eat Kiev”. I await with bated breath…
I found the article lacking on substance – what kind of genetic changes were found in Chernobyl dogs? No information at all…….
Amazing that mammals and birds are reproducing in a radioactive environment – with viable offspring. But perhaps there are other effects – higher cancer rates, eg?
The Chernobyl Diaries is a horror movie about American safari-tourists entering the fall-out zone 30 years after the event. I don’t recommend it. The movie, that is.
“Lebanon’s Unbalanced Ceasefire Teeters on the Brink”
‘This is why the day before the ceasefire, the Israelis flew in a platoon of special forces for a few seconds of photo opportunity on the Litani River, so they could claim their armed forces had reached to there.’
He did? That is what he did back in 2006 during the war back then. Dumped a load of IDF soldier on the Litani River to make a statement or something. It was tough luck to be one of those IDF soldiers dumped behind enemy lines until they could be pulled out.
If Murray is correct, then it looks like Israel won this round. Hizbollah has tacitly endorsed the separation of the war in Lebanon from the onslaught in Gaza and it has refrained from responding to daily Israeli violations. This signals that the cost of responding is too high. They may be forced to respond sometime in the future, but right now it looks like Israel’s escalations have paid off. For the time being they have won themselves a freehand. Or so it appears. It would seem that Johnson, Ritter, Crooke and others who argued that Hizbollah was a formidable force that would seal Israel’s doom may have oberestimated their capacities, or underestimated Israel’s. Of course, things could change. But right now, it looks like Israel is the clear winner.
They couldn’t take the Beirut bombing. Hard to win, or even survive, with no AA against modern bombers. Imo israel was dumb to fight on the ground in either Gaza or Lebanon.
I’ve wondered if Russia might provide AA def to Lebanon and/or let Syria use what they’ve got.
Though imo putin seems to be fond of israel, or at least of 2 minds.
Turkey seems clearly on israel’s side. Palestinians picked a tough neighborhood.
Israel won because Hezbollah decided to nobly refrain from targeting civilians while Israel did the opposite. Simple as that.
Whether or not you agree with Hezbollah’s choice, the outcome was inevitable. When one side is willing to be unspeakably brutal and the other commits to fighting in a gentlemanly manner, the brutal one will always win.
This same pattern has played out in all of the genocides committed by Europeans and Americans in their various colonial conquests, from the Opium Wars to India to Africa to Vietnam to Mosul. Unspeakable brutality on the part of the Europeans has always “beaten” the more dignified and honourable tactics of the “natives,” the “brutes.”
People think the Europeans/Americans came to dominate the world because they were “advanced.” Hardly. Instead they came to dominate only because they were capable of extreme degrees of violence, brutality and inhumanity.
I did not write/post the above comment, so it would appear that two of us are using the same pseudonym. To avoid confusion, I am more than willing to change mine.
No, please continue as Don. Sorry about that. I didn’t know.
Data on a diamond. That’s interesting. Might be useful for short term – 40 years or less – storage in case of disasters. But, 100 years from now, even 50 years from now will there still be devices in use that can ‘read’ the data?
Punch card readers? reel-to-reel tape readers? 8-inch floppy disk readers? Plus the software necessary to read the contents of same? You get the idea.
Just as likely: we’ll be able to read the data but will have advanced to the point where none of the data is of any interest save historical.
What could anyone have put into a time capsule in 1924 that would be of any interest today? The latest advances in post-phrenological medical science? Epstein’s grandfather’s diary? The latest data on the use of electro-magnetism in making the perfect martini?
Actually, this is the mission of archivists: you never know whether and how some information will be used or prove useful in the future, so you record it “just in case”. Since they cannot physically keep everything, they have to ponder many questions and face a number of dilemmas. Same issue with museum administrators: they have to collect a wide range of artifacts representing all current artistic trends — you never know if what is successful today will be disparaged later, and whether what was decried as trash will be considered a genuine artistic step forward decades later.
Information about past (non-)achievements is useful as such for historical studies. Sometimes, it serves much more important purposes. To give a concrete example: a whole community has been perusing naval log books from past centuries to help determine the values for crucial parameters in climate models. You really never know.
I’ve been wondering lately about this kind thing, simply because maybe the historical record or technical information might be useful to whatever civilization might emerge after the climate debacle unfolds and eliminates human civilization, such as it is.
Maybe we just need to send some kind of message to the future that burning carbon = bad. Seriously.
I thought maybe we could etch stuff into rocks. I’d call them “Math Rocks”, and they’d have all of our mathematical knowledge etched into them. I guess there would be a lot.
But I think about Math Rocks occasionally when I can’t sleep. Yes, it has been a long Pandemic.
I remember reading an article when they talked about burying all the nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. They were wondering how to make permanent markers to warn people of the danger, even if it was in the distant future and civilization had changed/vanished.
Almost every form of stored information requires some larger environment to make sense of it. Whether it’s a written language that requires someone to understand it, or a technical encoding that requires specialized equipment to read it, most such data stores have a rather short lifetime. It does seem to be getting worse since the advent of magnetic and (later) digital storage, since the rate of technological change has become extremely fast. Thinking back over the progression of audio and video recording technologies in just the last century makes this extremely vivid.
IMO one of the best archival techniques was black and white photographs using a silver-based chemistry. They don’t require any reader other than human eyes, and they seem to be stable for a century or more. It certainly common to find such photographs in an attic or crawl space that are still perfectly usable and immediately entertaining. I can’t think of anything for archiving audio that doesn’t require some kind of apparatus for playback, an apparatus that is frequently no longer available.
This issue occasionally comes up as a practical problem. Leaving markers and warnings for future human civilizations on Earth (for example surrounding a radioactive dump site), sending messages on spacecraft to far away aliens, and so on. The futility quickly becomes apparent in these types of projects.
Technically, punch cards were a poor example, since they’re human readable…
You know, for when you tripped and spilled the tray on the floor. ; )
Or, when your dad brings some home, and your 5-6 year old brain wonders if you can make some new holes in them (there’s a pattern, obviously!). It turns out you can, but you shouldn’t. Lets say my first attempt at data engineering raised a lot of emotions.
When punched cards were in such a widespread use that they served as payment slips (printed information=human-readable part, holes=corresponding computer-readable format), techno-luddites suggested enlarging the holes or adding some random ones as a way to throw a spanner in the works of the emerging computerized society.
Feel you. All I remember is a visual of a lot of cards on the floor, and some yelling.
Sounds like someone watched the campy film Zardoz for the first time.
The Tabernacle is a central entity in the 1974 science fiction film Zardoz, directed by John Boorman. It is an artificial intelligence that oversees and governs the immortal Eternals, who live in a utopian community called the Vortex. The Tabernacle is a massive, crystal-like structure that serves as a repository of knowledge, a mediator of conflicts, and a regulator of the Eternals’ lives.
In some ways one of the few great SF movies in terms of its fearless — or nutso, take your pick! — ideation about class-based human speciation into Eternals, Brutals, Exterminators, and Apathetics, till it jumps the shark about two-thirds of the way through, right at the point when Sean Connery as the Brutal Zed says ‘Stay within my aura.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz#Plot
Military Watch, 100,000 NATO troops in Ukraine because “peace.” Because every Western leader knows all you have to do is have meeting or discussion, and it will be so…just wait until they realize Trump USA probably will cut NATO loose and not fund 100,000 troops and its all up to Europe……”Most recently in mid-November the French paper Le Monde reported that France and the United Kingdom had “reactivated” discussions on troop deployments to Ukraine. The United States has notably been less committed than many of its more hawkish European allies to escalating the conflict with ground force deployments, and has similarly consistently been more reluctant that European states to provide new kinds of armaments to the country.”
If Trump wants to end the war in 24 hours, all he has to do is withdraw from NATO ASAP.
Will no one think of the
childrenhookers in Brusselschildren?That explains a lot about EU and NATO behavior.
And terminate immediately that tidal wave of USA dollars Biden is shoveling towards Ukraine at warp speed, with “GRIFT” stamped on them in big red letters. Now…if only we knew why inflation persists higher than it’s supposed to…it’s a mystery.
There are many inexpensive HEPA filters you can now buy for yourself these days and several DIY videos to build your own. (had a link to one saved somewhere… if I can find it I will post it here)
If you are thinking about winter flu season (or anything worse than the flu) buying one is a good idea.
HEPA filters also have a less known but equally important benefit, they reduce/remove household and workplace odors. This is the feature I use to defend keeping them out and running because no one questions it. People can justify odor removal much much easier than disease prevention. (Fun fact, the odor reduction/removal aspect is how so many HEPA filters ended up in classrooms in my county with zero political turmoil.)
Multi-lingual downloadable instructions. Fun for the whole family!
Thank you
Zelenskyyyy asks Joe Rogan for a date, but takes whatever he can get.
Will one of the ‘conditions’ be that the interview be staged, in person, in America? [Then, Zelensky finds that he cannot afford air fare home.]
“Zelensky suggests NATO membership could halt ‘hot phase’ of war”
I see that Zelensky is as big a strategic genius as Annalena Baerbock is a mathematician. It’s a simple plan-
-A freeze is put in place which means that the Russians lose already.
-Ukraine does not recognize taken lands as Russian.
-The Ukraine goes into NATO, even though they cannot qualify for it as they have disputed borders.
-NATO builds a fourth (or is it the fifth?) Ukrainian army and sends them all the military equipment that they can.
-The Ukraine attacks Russia again but this time with NATO boots on the ground as they are in NATO.
-You have a shooting war that breaks out between Russia and NATO.
-A small nuke is used ending in a general exchange which includes China’s nukes.
-People around the world bend down, grab their knees, then kiss their a** goodbye.
Sounds like a plan to me.
Then we all start playing “Fallout 4 Real” on a tabletop version.
This whole war is about RU insisting at the start that Ukr not become part of NATO. How is Z’s offer not a “let me (and NATO) win and then we can talk peace” dodge? Who put Z up to this? Enquiring minds….
You must know by now that in “The Narrative” NATO expansion and Ukrainian membership have nothing at all to do with this war – it just came out of the blue after Vlad the Fascist woke up one morning and decided to recreate Soviet Union.
So, all they have left is to keep pretending it’s true and play accordingly. Otherwise people might start to think this is actually NATO’s war on Russia, and that could be the very end of the “liberal democracy” and “our values” (read: NATO and EU).
Jefferson Davis to Lincoln, circa December, 1864:. We’ll (pretend) to abolish slavery and let you have KY, MO, and WV (while continuing to claim them as part of Confederacy). Now, let us have French and British troops along the Potomac to guarantee our independence.
(Or, what things would have been like if 1864 were like 2024).
I spoke to the leaders of a longtime Tahoe nonprofit called BEAR League that teaches humans how to live in bear country without endangering the animals or themselves. Their warnings involve taking some care with garbage and leftovers, and avoiding general cluelessness. “Only leave windows open if you are right there in that room so you can furiously yell at the bear if he tries to come in,” the organization posted on Facebook in July, not long before I arrived. Someone replied, “It’s crazy how many people don’t get this! I kinda feel like there should be a required class in ‘coexisting with bears’ before being allowed to rent or buy a house in Tahoe!!” It might be time to require Realtors to disclose bear activity near a property the way that California, South Dakota, and Alaska require homeowners who are selling to disclose certain on-site deaths. “Some of the real-estate agents don’t want to do that,” one bear advocate told me. “They don’t want buyers to find out there’s bears, and back out of the sale.”
https://milled.com/the-new-yorker/lake-tahoes-bear-boom-VC_A852WQWtk0dNk
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We had a black bear invasion here in Tiny Town in the fall of 2015 during our epic 5 year drought. The acorn harvest in higher climes had failed and our oak trees were loaded for bear, so to speak.
We always have a few bruins around town, but this was different in that about 125 of them rather all of the sudden showed up for a meal, and lucky for us we had the kind of food they were used to, so attacks on trash cans were minimal. When they had their fill, back into the wilderness they went with the exception of around a dozen of them that were killed on the road-obviously not hep to what a 3,000 pound jalopy going 40 mph can do. We still have a few garbage bears here and there, but break-ins don’t occur as they do in Tahoe.
A Lake Tahoe bear on the other hand at the same time was also starving and there aren’t any acorns @ 6,000+ feet, so their only alternative was human food.
When I lived in Lake Tahoe in the mid 1980’s, bears weren’t a problem whatsoever-I don’t remember any issues, but now its pretty common to have an electric fence around the outside of your house there, as once they got their paws on our edibles they weren’t going back to grubs, nosireee Bob.
“Expressions of pleasure from providers are also a reminder that the psychological impact on providers from involvement in MAiD is an outstanding question.'”
Modern day Eichmanns and Mengeles…
“a local government in China has just sold its sky, literally.
This is the government of Pingyin County, Jinan, Shandong Province who sold for 924 million yuan (approximately $130 million) a 30-year concession to operate and…”
This sent my exhausted mind reeling. Imagine Communist China recognizing air, light, and view as a valid part of the ‘bundle of sticks’ that constitute property? And determining exactly who owns that bundle, in this case, a local governing entity. And the value of that airspace.
Might be a way for the Russia and Ukraine to glean additional sources of revenue fund the war!
Send bills out for the use of their airspace for all the aerial activity. (To whom, and likelihood of payment, that’s another story, but one could bolster the receivables on the balance sheet. )
Fergoshsakes, don’t let western capitalist nations get a hold of the notion! Musk, Gates, and Bezos must be quaking in their golden Trump Chuck Taylors!
Imagine taxing Elon Musk and Starlink for his use of lower-earth-orbit. Bill the precise amount he bills the D o D, and each subscriber nation do the same. See and raise the Chinese approach—have him also start paying royalties out to Citizens of the World.
There’s a notion for backdoor nationalizing and creation of Utilities.
Pretty sure I read decades ago of an airport that leased the skies near them so that developers would not build tall buildings that would create dangerous conditions with take-offs and landings.
RE: Kash Patel
If ever there was a time for a “Whoo boy!” this has got to be it.
You gotta wonder if Trump did this on a Saturday so he could set the Sunday show hosts’ hair on collective fire and it worked.
So far jake sullivan seems to be the “administration’s” point person for comment. He’s going with the “norm” that an fbi director is appointed for a 10-year term and wray is a Trump appointee. As if sully has been so busy effin’ up that he’s never seen The Apprentice and heard Trump’s signature “You’re fired!”
Too bad, so sad. Happy holidays, O Little Town of Washington….
MSNBC hosts are described as “apoplectic”. I’m enjoying this. / ;)
MSNBC Panel Gets Apoplectic Over Kash Patel’s Nomination to Lead FBI: It’s Like if You Crossed ‘Alex Jones With J. Edgar Hoover’
https://apnews.com/general-news-363db112424b43dbb338239ad88b9185
I know as far as i’m concerned, that I’ll be more circumspect in regards to commenting on the strong curry smell in the lobby, when staying at dive motels.
The link goes to a story about a drone crashing into the White Housse.
Oops. sorry. Here’s the correct link.
MSNBC Panel Gets Apoplectic Over Kash Patel’s Nomination to Lead FBI: It’s Like if You Crossed ‘Alex Jones With J. Edgar Hoover’
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/msnbc-panel-gets-apoplectic-over-kash-patels-nomination-to-lead-fbi-its-like-if-you-crossed-alex-jones-with-j-edgar-hoover/
A test run of the DNC planned false flag “liquidation” of The Great Orange Satan?
I miss that stuff bc I don’t watch msm, but I’m happy to hear about it.
Frankly, I was hoping he stops ukr war and goes after deep, still hopeful though I’m worried about ukr.
I rarely watch but there are certain days I will go to MSDNC to see the reactions. The presence of Peter Strzok as a commentator, one of the only people to ever be fired from the federal government for performance, is amazing. That alone should disqualify him from ever appearing in the media as some kind of expert. They went one better today and had an obviously worried Mary McCord on about Kash Patel. She is worried that ‘lawfare’ cannons are about to be trained on her. Time to lawyer up!
re: Nordstream 2
Just woooow.
“Steven Aftergood, who led the Federation of American Scientists’ research programme on covert US government operations from 1991 to 2021, calls the dissemination of false narratives to mask an operation an ‘established practice in military operations and intelligence activities, where it is often known as “cover and deception””
What a unique revelation!
Is this really true? Did the CIA lie to us?
No.Way.
p.s. Dear Mr. Aftergood, with papers like the WaPo and so-called investigative journalists as Holger Stark and Co. you don´t need cover and deception. They are so delusional and incompetent. They manage the work for the CIA.
And author Scheidler who is an investigative reporter as much as I am seems to forget that Hersh – this is for starters – conveys one source but has several in reality.
LMD asking Scheidler to do this piece shows you how useless that outlet has become too.
CV Scheidler (I know his stuff from BERLINER ZEITUNG. He is your typical fig leaf author)
https://fabianscheidler.com/about-the-author/
p.p.s. But what is the worst – many decent journalists in Germany actually bought into the possibility of the Andromeda participating in the operation.
How Humor Takes the Edge off Hard Times Scientific American
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Humbly Report, sir
I come from a background of absurdist humor laced with irony, as it was all we could do after the Habsburgs lorded over us for 300 years after nabbing the silver medal @ the battle of White Mountain. It is best served pitch black if possible.
Humor is what you make of it, and its always been a coping device for yours truly, Slav to a fashion.
The Good Soldier Schweik is currently on my bedside table, as I’m re-reading it for the umpteenth time as the nights approach subzero up here in the Tuscan hills. One of my favorite books, and along with Catch-22 it’s on my short list of great wartime literature. I read snippets every night at bedtime. Last night I reached the part (one of my favorites) when Schweik steals the colonel’s dog and gifts it to his lieutenant. I know what’s about to happen next, but I’m looking forward to re-reading it anyway.
Schweik is/was approved literature in USSR/RU and his persona is well known. There are still at least two bar/resturants named after Schweik (Швейк) in downtown Moscow.
I got suckered into a bogus U Kalicha in Prague in the 90’s, although it did have beer from Velké Popovice, but no bird droppings on the emperor’s portrait on the wall.
Maybe it wasn’t 6 PM after the war yet?
re: Nordstream 2
Just woooow.
“Steven Aftergood, who led the Federation of American Scientists’ research programme on covert US government operations from 1991 to 2021, calls the dissemination of false narratives to mask an operation an ‘established practice in military operations and intelligence activities, where it is often known as “cover and deception””
What a unique revelation!
Is this really true? Did the CIA lie to us?
No.Way.
p.s. Dear Mr. Aftergood, with papers like the WaPo and so-called investigative journalists as Holger Stark and Co. you don´t need cover and deception. They are so delusional and incompetent. They manage the work for the CIA.
And author Scheidler who is an investigative reporter as much as I am seems to forget that Hersh – this is for starters – conveys one source but has several in reality.
LMD asking Scheidler to do this piece shows you how useless that outlet has become too.
CV of Fabian Scheidler writing the piece (I know his stuff from BERLINER ZEITUNG. He is your typical fig leaf author)
https://fabianscheidler.com/about-the-author/
Not intended to insult Scheidler. But investigations of this sort need money, which German papers don´t have any more, and decades of experience. Hersh has been around the deep state for 50 years. Otherwise they wouldn´t trust him. You cannot report and investigate this area of the state by just dropping in from the outside. It´s more like documentary films done for many years.
Investigative reporting is one of the most arduous and necessitates real experience and professionalism. By that it´s old-style labour. You cant sit at home at a computer do it. You gotta go out and get your hands dirty.
p.p.s. But what is the worst – many decent journalists in Germany actually bought into the possibility of the Andromeda actively participating in the action to blow-up the pipeline.
IMO, Scheidler’s piece aptly comes up to set a critique to the lengthy narration that Der Spiegel published a few days ago. That story was, supposedly, the definitive explanation on the sabotages so the average German can blame it to some fringe Ukrainians who are conveniently unavailable for questioning. The article is too long but given the levels of disinformation and misinformation, it provides with a few ideas which IMO are worth keeping in mind. The most important is that the US, Sweden, Poland, Germany (etc) don’t want you or me to have any clue.
It is not about money, it is about willingness.
– forgive the length of my rant, it´s not for lack of respect! –
Call me unprofessional and I accept it, but after myriads of lies piled upon lies and swallowed and then spit out by our highly paid senior editors with ZEIT, SZ, TAZ, FAZ, Tagesschau etc. I have lost patience.
Regarding the 0% likelihood that a “Andromeda” sailing-boat did all this or even was “only” participating in the act in the real world I find it an irresponsible waste of resources by press staff to do repeated investigative reporting and dwelve into this maze of deception once more.
Unless any of Hersh´s sources will blow the whistle the case remains cold. And we have to just accept that.
Noam Chomsky once wisely said that he sees no logic in spending valuable time with speculations on the JFK assassination case if we have no way to really prove or disprove certain theories. It diverts us from what matters most.
Compare the amount of time used on this Andromeda and all of what I personally identify as 100% US disinfo, with the amount of work by the same media to e.g. investigate the “real” Bucha, or the evidence behind the ICC charges against Putin, or UKR war crimes in the war area – nothing has been reported on any of those.
We have by now reached a level of structural insanity where it is the most normal thing to cry “Russia” when a German DHL airplane crashes in Eastern Europe.
So I find the Andromeda reporting, still happening, totally out of proportion.
In that you are correct argueing that it is about willingness, i.e. ideological entrenchment by the media.
Scheidler´s text – whether or not he sums up the various pieces honestly – by simply publishing this already known status quo of the case he furthers the war of diverting the public from what is really going on.
For every new piece on NS2 one piece about Bucha or the US secret bases in UKR is not being published.
On the one hand – how often have we read about Nordstream (without leading to anything) by now?
On the other – how often have we heard about that German doctor who served the Ukrainians and reported about their war crimes?
How often about that Czech gentleman who has been convicted of crimes as a mercenary with the AFU and who spoke about Bucha crimes by AFU-affiliated forces?
p.s. Money: It is of high relevance if one addresses the structural causes for the shortcomings of the German media and their demise.
You can only do any of the Hersh-like work if you have a culture of decent investigative reporting where people like him have a chance to “grow” (Hersh of course only a stand-in for many other names). Because for every 1 story 10 turn out to be incorrect. But that´s part of the art. And that costs a lot of money.
Which btw was the main reason why Scahill or Greenwald agreed to do THE INTERCEPT – Omidyar is filthy rich and he guaranteed lavish funding.
Remember what happened with the NSU-scandal. Initially none of the ZEIT/SZ-like luminaries such as Mascolo and his musketeers from WDR state TV aka “investigative consortium” were on that story. It was a tiny unknown research group underfunded that broke the case.
I unfortunately back then did not keep that one seminal interview with the director of that group either conducted by FREITAG or TAZ, when he said – `we had and have no money. We did the work when everybody was laughing at us or ignoring us until the legacy media accepted the truth.´
And took over leaving them nothing.
Same is true for the Cum-Ex case directed against chancellor Scholz which could possibly bring him down. But to crack that case you need – money and resources and the backing of senior staff.
All those things which are generously wasted on the “wrong” case, but in a way that it is opportune for the system.
Scheidler is a tiny cog in this. Honest, well-meaning, but a cog nonetheless.
Bear in mind that with all these noises what they apparently want to avoid, at any rate, is that a single Government or governmental institution, or a group of governments, can be blamed, brought to a court, or be held responsible of a sabotage like this. No, no, impossible. This is one of the things that Schleider’s article transpires. So, the US blames it to Zaluzhny + collaborators (never Zelensky), or Germany to a group of fringes. So, you have a myriad of lies, but do not blame Schleider. You and me and others loosing patience is exactly one of the objectives. Make of it something banal that doesn’t merit any further question. It just happened, as if spontaneously, nothing to see here, move along please.
My mother used to call this defense: ‘A big boy did it and ran away.’
Mikel
November 30, 2024 at 9:49 am
Probably working on something like bullets that need software updates. $AA$ weapon$.
Moving Toward Defense as a Service – War on the Rocks
“…The way forward must be to adapt the requirements process itself by changing the product it generates into something that is responsive to changing conditions. Rather than describing solutions to problems, the requirements process should describe desired end states. Using the air-to-air drone example above, rather than specifying an aerial drone type capable of targeting another aerial drone type over a specific distance carrying a specific payload, and utilizing specific sensors, the requirement should be for an outcome. In this case, the outcome could be the ability to clear friendly airspace of adversarial drones. These more general requirements can then be awarded to prime contractors who can both serve as direct performers or subcontract mixing and matching thousands of possible solutions. Essentially, this moves from a product-focused model toward a more service-based model, which allows for capabilities that can be adjusted and updated as needed — much like software updates — rather than fixed products that take years to develop. A service-based approach allows for the continuous improvement of capabilities, enabling the military to respond to changing conditions quickly.
Product capabilities delivered as a service may seem like a new idea to some, but the model is one that goes in and out of favor in government contracting. For example, during the Global War on Terror, Predator drones were operated by General Atomics contractors. More recently, the U.S. Coast Guard awarded Shield AI almost $200 million on an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract to provide surveillance and reconnaissance as a service, for which the company will use its V-BAT platform. And Metrea, which describes itself as providing “effects as a service,” has “as a service” contract with U.S. Naval Air Systems Command that has it conducting aerial refueling operations for aircraft from multiple U.S. services as well as allies…”
It actually sounds like they’re asking for a Concept of Operations to be established for the new weapon systems procured. Not a bad idea, to be honest.
Then they, of course, go and turn that into an enormous grift machine.
Yes it’s all good. Here’s the Statement of Work: “Defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. No other requirements needed.
RE: “Persistence of spike protein at the skull-meninges-brain axis…”
I have not read the full paper referenced — which leaves the possibility I missed some further refinements to the information in the abstract and introduction. I am mystified by these statements in what I did read:
“Vaccination reduced but did not eliminate spike protein accumulation after infection in mice.”
“mRNA vaccines reduce, but do not eliminate, the spike burden”
“We further demonstrated that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine reduced spike protein levels in the brain and brain borders of mice infected with the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.”
If the mRNA vaccines place mRNA that results in host cells manufacturing and releasing spike proteins into the host blood stream, how do the vaccines reduce the “spike burden”? Did the researchers include study of the “spike burden” in patients who had been vaccinated with mRNA vaccines but have not been infected with the flu?
Thank you.
The “vaccine” “worked” by hijacking a person’s own cell infrastructure to PRODUCE the spike protein and release it into the bloodstream.
Should be enough said.
Thank you.
The “vaccine” “worked” by hijacking a person’s own cell infrastructure to PRODUCE the spike protein and release it into the bloodstream.
Should be enough said.
The vaccines reduce the spike burden… AFTER COVID INFECTION. Of course, vaccines also produce Spike protein though the authors argue that the exposure is limited to the point of vaccination and the Spike is not freed in the circulatory system these proteins are kept within, well, in the plasma membrane, of the cells where the nanoparticles enter after vaccination. — I haven’t read the article and have some quibbles about this given some reactions observed with many patients.
As you can imagine, the anti-vaxers are having a field day with this. What an ongoing debacle these experimental shots are.
Don’t the mRNA vaccines produce only the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein, not the entire spike? Doesn’t this finding refer to the entire spike?
Reading the commenting policies suggests links to a paywalled articles is not a violation.
The Atlantic article by a professor of strategic studies is at:
https://archive.is/qtvRb
and argues that Russia is so weak that if Biden had only given long-range missiles years ago, Ukraine would have won. There is an amazing lack of understanding of Russian history, not to mention a delusional understanding of the actual war. It is worth a one-minute skim to see where Gorka’s brain is.
Unclear to me why propaganda is being paywalled. Couldn’t The Atlantic have gotten some three letter agency to pay the open access costs?
>”Couldn’t The Atlantic have gotten some three letter agency to pay the open access costs?”
👍
Involuntary satire!
First paragraph:
“Joe Biden filled his administration with geniuses: Rhodes scholars; Ivy League graduates; people with extensive global experience; a national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whom the president has described as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.” The president himself has been immersed in foreign policy for half a century. Yet despite all of those impressive résumés, the Biden administration has badly mishandled the war in Ukraine, not only hampering a beleaguered ally’s ability to fend off a Russian invasion but also throwing away a remarkable chance to improve America’s global standing and democratic powers’ position in the world.”
“The Best and the Brightest”. Thank god they are only once in a generation though.
I recieved a notice that my Medicare part D premium has been increased yesterday.
By 80%.
THIS IS A DUPLICATE I recieved a notice that my Medicare part D premium has been increased yesterday.
By 80%.
Heavens! Added together that comes to a 160% increase! Sneaky way for them to ‘hide’ such a massive boost in fees ‘in plain sight.’ (Yes, it is snark.)
Please gentle citizenry…
Don’t fall for common inflation highfalutinism, we @ Club Fed are always aiming for 2%, tops.
Yikes!
On second thought, I apologize for making light of what must be a real burden to you. I remembered too late that you have some serious late life medical issues. This brings up the questions natural to an examination of why “the System” should raise the entry costs just as one needs the resources the most.
Stupid, Evil, and or Both.
I have the impression the drug ‘insurance’ vendors, AND supplemental insurance vendors, make a practice of low-balling the entry into their plans and then raise the rates exorbitantly the end of the the first year and each year thereafter. Moving from one plan to another every year is enough hassle I will probably stick with my present drug plan for one more year even though it went from a few dollars per month to a few tens of dollars per month. I will be looking for new plans for the next round of government supported rapacity. If Trump’s plans for tariffs on China pan out, we may not need to worry about drug plans after next year. Maybe a trip to Canada will be my plan for obtaining medications after next year and I will move from low ball plan to low ball plan as they come up on the Medicare website to avoid a plan the government would force on me otherwise … unless they automatically force me onto the current low ball plan assuming there still are low ball plans similar to those at present.
re: Nord Stream: hide-and-seek deep under the Baltic sea Le Monde Diplomatique.
It’s interesting to me that the investigations and reporting around this essentially ignore or dismiss one of the key tenets of criminal investigation – establishing means, motive and opportunity, and also chase the most convoluted and unlikely explanations via the Andromeda theory, Occam’s razor nowhere to be found.
First, it’s obviously sabotage, this is key, so motive plays a significant role. The US has the strongest motive of any state, including Ukraine, and Biden has publicly made the threat to blow up the pipeline.
So if we’re tracking means, motive, opportunity and clues on an Excel spreadsheet, the US gets the highest score for motive.
Secondly, the means are highly technical which should simplify this equation – there are complexities involved ranging from the explosives (military grade or no? what amount and shaped charge needed against heavily fortified pipeline?), to the trigger for the detonation (remote detonation? timer? underwater signal?), to the complexities of underwater detonation, to the knowledge needed for placement, to the skillset of diving to 80m to place the explosives.
The means sorts of questions answer themselves, the simplest explanation is submarine dive team placing the explosives. The simplest explanation is military grade explosives.
And Hersh named the American dive team which specifically trained for precisely this sort of operation, another means.
Therefore on our spreadsheet the US via submarine placement gets the highest weight or score for means.
Other key questions in the article are why 80m? Why not around the more obvious 40m sections of the pipeline? That’s only a problem if you’re trying to make sense of the Andromeda, not a problem if you’re operating from the premise it was a sub, since a large sub prefers depth and as a bonus has decompression chambers.
Also, if Baltops is cover, that takes up wide space, needs to be a bit further away from things.
And why 75km distance between some charges? This would be a super puzzling impossiblity if you’re married to the Andromeda idea, not to the sub idea, not to the Baltops idea.
As for opportunity, recall Baltops 22 took place right on top off the explosion sites. Again, the sub theory gets more score.
Why a sailboat? And why not clean the boat after, why leave traces of explosives all over it? Unanswered and puzzing questions indeed, unless the Andromeda is a diversion.
And, not mentioned, whatever happened to the unexploded ordnance? Sergei Lavrov was the source for that, shortly after the explosion he said Russia had intel there was unexploded ordnance, a claim that has not been denied by anyone, which is interesting in itself.
I like this bit in particular because what if Russians simply fabricated the story in order to see who panicked and rushed to the scene? Was it Hersh whose source said there was panic in the WH over the unexploded ordnance, that military assets had rushed to the scene to retrieve it? The behaviour of the players in response to Lavrov’s tidbit would be informative. Maybe in time.
If true, on the other hand, and there was unexploded ordnance, this adds another technical, who had the capability, means and opportunity to retrieve it quickly before the Germans, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes got to the site, and again, the sub theory fits, gets higher score. A sub with dive team could be on standby in the area as contingency in case precisely 8 explosions were not detected.
Or did the Germans, Danes, etc., actually successfully recover such unexploded ordnance, and thus have key evidence which hasn’t yet been revealed? This creates another avenue, given it could be the Americans, Russians, Israel, British, Poland or Ukrainians, what is the motive for investigators to keep this evidence hidden? That’s going to be a whole other spreadsheet though.
Thanks for this analysis!
Then there is the counterfactual argument. If a president and his staff makes repeated threats of certain consequences under certain conditions, then fails to carry out those threats, the entire credibility (ha ha) of the US foreign policy apparatus would be gravely undermined. How could the US have not done this, unless someone else beat them to it?
“How could the US have not done this, unless someone else beat them to it?”
Or did it for them.
Which brings up the question of who had the requisite equipment and deployment vessels.
I remember reading that the depths the pipelines were at required sophisticated dive equipment which could not be easily deployed from a sailboat, if at all.
The evidence, such as it is points to State actors.
https://x.com/BrianJBerletic/status/1863138395339587771
🇺🇸🇸🇾 Washington’s absurd statement regarding its own terrorist blitzkrieg in Syria…
– admits a designated terrorist organization is overrunning Syrian towns and cities;
– blames the Syrian government for not engaging with terrorists;
– feels the need to “deny” being behind the terrorists despite years of evidence proving otherwise;
– has done nothing and will do nothing to help Syria defend against terrorists it is “not” behind;
You can read the full statement here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/11/30/statement-by-nsc-spokesperson-sean-savett-on-syria/
The best-case scenario for Trump’s second term
So much wrong with this article. For ex: “If Russia insists on continuing the war, Trump could threaten to surge aid to Ukraine.” What kind of aid would this be I wonder that could make any difference? As I understand it from multiple sources, like the Duran, just about everything has been given already.
Is optimism about Trump warranted (which is implied by a best-case scenario)? As Yves recently noted, “It has been repeatedly documented that pessimists are much better at accurately estimating the likelihood of bad events occurring than optimists.” What is the worst-case scenario?
The worst case is Biden allows a nuclear exchange before inauguration.
I guess that could be true under any President. Now do Trump. Just for the record he doesn’t put much stock in arms control. He pulled out of the INF treaty.
Moon links this highly technical description of the new Russian missile.
https://bmanalysis.substack.com/p/oreshnik-enters-the-chat-i
May be interesting given the many comments on yesterday’s post.
Black Mountain Analysis – linked days ago.
Take this with a big dose of skepticism – could easily be a fake, AI generated, etc.
Hoisted from a MoA comment – allegedly a picture of the crater at the Dnipo plant (may it rest in pieces.)
https://news-pravda.com/img/20241126/f2592efb9df22737cf21143b9221c395_o.jpg
looks fake to me, guy is dressed like a tourist and not a construction worker. crater walls are too steep, and there’s no subsidence anywhere, this was a multi-story underground factory, no crater lip, and the inset crater at the bottom doesn’t look right.
It’s the most blunderful time of the year
With nukes jingle belling
And everyone telling you a lame duck’s end is near
It’s the most blunderful time of the year
It’s the hap-happenstance season of all
With those radiation greetings and town haul meetings
When nukes come to call
It’s the hap-happenstance season of all
There’ll be kilotons for hosting
Humans for toasting
And ushering out of the show
There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Hiroshima & Nagasaki long, long ago
It’s the most blunderful time of the year
There’ll be much missile toe-to-toeing
And parts will be glowing
When loved ones are near
It’s the most blunderful time of the year
There’ll be kilotons for hosting
Humans for toasting
And ushering out of the show
There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Hiroshima & Nagasaki long, long ago
It’s the most blunderful time of the year
There’ll be much missile toe-to-toeing
And parts will be glowing
When loved ones are near
It’s the most blunderful time
Yes the most blunderful time
Oh the most blunderful time
Of the year
Musical accompaniment:
Andy Williams Version
Fakin’ Cease-fire business
Sung to the tune of, “Takin’ care of business” by Bachmann-Turner Overdrive
Verse 1:
You get up every morning to the Empire’s warnin’
Take the war machine into the city
There’s a drone up above, and people pushin’ people shovin’
And Miss Lindsay she tries to look pretty
And if your train’s on time you can waterboard some guy
And start your slavin’ job to get your pay
If you ever get annoyed just remember you’re a goy
Who loves to work for Bibi all day
[Chorus]
And we’ve been
Fakin’ ceasefire business
Every day
Fakin’ ceasefire business
Every way
Fakin’ ceasefire business – Gaza’s mine!
Fakin’ ceasefire business
Workin’ for the tribe, workout!
It’s as easy as fishin’ you can be a mortician
If you can torture folks brown or yellow
Take a second-hand boxcar, chances are you’ll go far
If you hang out with the rules-based order fellows
People see you having fun, just a killin’ in the sun
You tell them that you like it this way
With the weapons you’ve deployed, a cease-fire you’ll avoid
You love to work for Bibi all day
[Chorus]
[Guitar riffs]
Fake a cease-fire!
It’s good for business
Fire away! Every day!
[Repeat verse 1]
You get up every morning to the Empire’s warnin’
Take the war machine into the city
There’s a drone up above, and people pushin’ people shovin’
And Miss Lindsay she tries to look pretty
And if your train’s on time you can waterboard some guy
And start your slavin’ job to get your pay
If you ever get annoyed just remember you’re a goy
I love to waterboard ’em all day
[Chorus]
[Break]
Fakin’ ceasefire business
Fakin’ ceasefire business
Fakin’ ceasefire business
Fakin ceasefire business
Fakin’ ceasefire business – every day
Fakin’ ceasefire business – every way
Fakin’ ceasefire business – Gaza’s mine
Fakin’ ceasefire business – Tony’s workin’ for the Tribe!
Almost forgot the melody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO9XahvB9V0
re: France government crisis
German daily JUNGE WELT reporting from France that Parliament intends a vote of no-confidence against
Michel Barnier on Wednesday.
Jointly by Insoumis and RN.
Furthermore:
“Colleagues at Le Parisien – a newspaper owned by Macron’s favourite Bernard Arnault, who rose to become one of the world’s richest capitalists with his luxury group LVMH – take the story a little further: Macron himself recently admitted to confidants that the government would fall “soon and earlier than expected”. Whether he would then resign as head of state or even have to step down is currently a question being discussed throughout the country, and one that could be answered on Wednesday. What is certain so far is that for both the left and Le Pen’s camp, which includes a large part of the bourgeois right, the fall of the government is only the first step on the way to bringing about “the end of Macronie”.
I don’t think that is a possibility because who would it be. The 4th Republic “fell” because keeping Algeria was absurd qnd DeGalle was there. There is no one of sufficient stature to cut the Gordian knot. Macron can resign, but he isn’t a prime minister. Despite his relative popularity, these are still “light and transient” reasons, so there is no need for anything extraordinary.
https://rumble.com/v5uxisb-there-are-multiple-foreign-hands-at-play-including-trkiye-us-and-ukraine-ke.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
There are multiple foreign hands at play, including Türkiye, US and Ukraine – Kevork Amassian (10:23)
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/43117
Ukrainian Trained, Turkish Sponsored Syrian Rebels Lead Assault on Aleppo
The current push against Syrian government forces in Aleppo has been conducted by a disparate opposition groups whose only connection seems to be a hatred of the Assad regime and its Russian backers.
If a captured group of Jihadists are to be believed, paid for in Turkish currency with Turkish officers help leading them. And you have the backing of the US, Israel and apparently France. Putin has been trying to negotiate some sort of settlement between Syria and Turkiye but it looks like Erdogan has been planning this attack for a long time so those negotiations were merely another Minsk 2. I’m always wary of Putin and how he reacts. It’s like that old saying – ‘Beware the vengeance of a patient man.’
Biden pardons his son Hunter despite previous pledges not to
https://apnews.com/article/biden-son-hunter-charges-pardon-pledge-24fhttps://apnews.com/article/biden-son-hunter-charges-pardon-pledge-24f3007c2d2f467fa48e21bbc72625253007c2d2f467fa48e21bbc7262525
The Big Guy has spoken or written or maybe signed off on (I’m not sure about the process).
In all fairness to Biden, it is his son. Nepo-pardon is not an unknown item. Plus, there is the element of self-preservation involved. Who knows what “inconvenient truths” could come out in legal discovery and a few rough cross examinations. I also wouldn’t be surprised if an errant ATACMS missile went astray and hit the Burisma communications files storage facility.
The rules-based order strikes again!
Per the NYT, Joe Biden has just pardoned his son.
I can’t read the piece since my subscription is on hold.
It’s all over the net now. Goes back to Jan 1, 2014. Funny, Hunter started at Burisma in April the same year.
The grifting family gets away with it. I honestly hope Trump’s AG or FBI nuke these people from orbit. Pelosi’s insider trading too. And Clinton’s betrayal of national security for her own personal convenience of running her own email server while running State.
America is truly an openly corrupt banana Republic. And my Twitter feed is useless, just billionaire Musk running his mouth nonstop rather than running his 13 companies.
If my father had been as kind as genocide Joe, I too may have done things differently not unlike his son Hunter: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/joe-biden-pardons-son-hunter-gun-tax-charges-1.7398369
Alas, my dad was neither kindly nor POTUS, even though he did have a propensity for cheating and violating his word.
Old Joe didn’t pardon his son because he was a loving dad. He did it because Hunter had all the receipts for all those crooked deals that both of them did together in places like the Ukraine and China, especially the receipts for 10% for the Big Guy. If Hunter went down, then so would old Joe which is why the pardon.
The only thing I am surprised about is the lack of follow up on the odds of it happening from the bookmakers and biggest pool winners reports.
Any dismay or aghastitude we see in coming days will be in lieu of ignoring it and about as real as the shock at discovering that the internal polling never had Harris beating Trump. There was no if for this, only when once Trump won.