How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis World Development Perspectives. From September 2024, still germane.
Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries Guardian
The world is moving on to trade without the US FT
California Burning
Making Sense of the Giant Fire that Could Set Back Energy Storage Inside Climate News
Syndemics
Osterholm Podcast: The Potential Environmental (Airborne) Spread of H5N1 Avian Flu Diary. Osterholm: “… the very real possibility that the H5N1 virus may be carried by contaminated `dust’ from poultry farms, infecting other nearby farms, animals, and potentially even humans….” Well worth a read.
Scotland in bird flu lockdown as prevention zone established The National
* * * Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is now America’s largest in recorded history Bloomberg
* * * Amyloid-forming potential of Betacoronavirus including SARS-CoV-2 Cell. From the Abstract: “The findings of this study imply the high potential of some Betacorona viruses, including the Wild type of SARS-CoV-2 and some variants, such as Gamma and Delta, to develop prion-like sequence which can act as a regulator for viral infections.”
* * * Alberta’s COVID-19 pandemic response : Alberta COVID-19 Pandemic Data Review Task Force : final report Alberta Government. Commentary:
Holy s**t! The anti-vax Alberta task force also included John Conly 😳 pic.twitter.com/No5F2cbs1Y
— Bean & Sprout's Mom (@beansprouts_mom) January 25, 2025
China?
What China Got Right About Big Tech Foreign Policy. The deck: “Unlike Trump, Xi understood that a new class of business titans could hijack his country’s political system.”
‘Very important step’: Chinese scientists turn E coli into a photosynthetic life form South China Morning Post
China urges prudence over plenty in rural projects as local debt clouds linger South China Morning Post
Myanmar
Ex-U.S. Envoy Reflects on Trump’s Likely Myanmar Policy The Irrawaddy
Syraqistan
‘Thank you to Al-Qassam Brigades for the good treatment’: Released Israeli soldiers says to Hamas’ armed wing fighetrs Anadolu Agency
With the ceasefire in Gaza comes a gruesome challenge: Counting and collecting the dead AP
Gaza checkpoint contractor is shell company of ‘generational wealth management’ firm The Grayzone
* * * Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon to continue beyond 60 days, Netanyahu announces L’Orient Today
Israel to Extend Military Presence in Lebanon With Trump Administration’s Blessing Foreign Policy
* * * Trump lifts Biden’s hold on 2,000-pound bombs to Israel Axios
Trump wants Jordan and Egypt to accept more Palestinian refugees and floats plan to ‘clean out’ Gaza AP
* * * The Settler Couple Running a Network of Israeli Communities Across Europe, Funded by Israel Haaretz
Iran War Hawks Getting Wrecked In Trump Personnel Fight Ryan Grim, DropSite News
Dear Old Blighty
Gaza protest: How Starmer and the Met have joined forces to quash all dissent Middle East Eye
New Not-So-Cold War
Reality hits home: “Ukraine is running out of Ukrainians,” US Secretary of State Solidarity
Why is Ukraine struggling to mobilise its citizens to fight? Al Jazeera
When the symbols of Ukrainian resistance fade Al Jazeera
* * * Vladimir Putin calls Donald Trump ‘clever’ and suggests talks, including over Ukraine EuroNews
Putin ready to talk to Trump, Kyiv says no talks without Ukraine, Europe France24
* * * NATO chief: Cost of Russian victory in Ukraine would be ‘trillions not billions’ Atlantic Council
Trump Administration
Trump’s Q&A on Air Force One goes from the plane’s color scheme to the fate of TikTok and Canada and He’s emboldened, he’s organized and he’s still Trump: Takeaways from the president’s opening days AP
Trump’s ‘ice maiden’ chief of staff launches brutal takedown of Elon Musk as she REFUSES to give him a West Wing office and issues stark warning over being ‘co-president’ Daily Mail. Susie Wiles. “Wiles, a 67-year-old veteran of GOP politics, saw her first victory on Trump’s first day in office when he confirmed Musk would not have a desk in the West Wing. The chief administrator of DOGE must also report to Wiles, a sign of her control over the White House.”
* * * How Pete Hegseth’s nomination came back from “90% dead” Axios. Commentary:
I don't think the media or the DC intelligentsia realize that to a lot of us veterans, the fact that Pete Hegseth developed a drinking problem after coming home from the GWOT, and then BEAT said drinking problem, is a huge PLUS in our minds and is in no way a negative.
We all…
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) January 25, 2025
Trump fires independent inspectors general in Friday night purge Politico. But:
IGs telling Trump, “No.”
This is how you resist. pic.twitter.com/TAVJtMoJyl
— ⚖️🪴🇺🇦🌈🇮🇱🇵🇸 (@rogertansey) January 25, 2025
‘I am terrified’: Workers describe the dark mood inside federal agencies Politico
Antitrust
The first days of Boss Politics Antitrust Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic
Did a Private Equity Fire Truck Roll-Up Worsen the L.A. Fires? Matt Stoller, BIG
Immigration
ICE Raids Are an Escalation of Our Long-Simmering De Facto Cold Civil War Daring Fireball. Yes, and sanctuary cities are a “nullification” of which John C. Calhoun would be proud.
Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship would overturn more than a century of precedent AP
Digital Watch
How small Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley FT
OpenAI vs. DeepSeek: A Comparative Analysis of Capital Expenditure (CapEx) Investing Medium. Commentary:
China’s #DeepSeek could represent the biggest threat to US equity markets as the company seems to have built a groundbreaking AI model at an extremely low price and w/o having access to cutting-edge chips, calling into question the utility of the hundreds of billions worth of… pic.twitter.com/wMVyczpRgT
— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) January 24, 2025
Tech leaders respond to the rapid rise of DeepSeek VentureBeat. Commentary:
Will explain what I think is happening with Sam Altman's trousers. Hopefully this thread will help you understand what to look for when shopping for pants. 🧵 https://t.co/pZNqXpCE1o
— derek guy (@dieworkwear) January 25, 2025
Lambert here: I hope Altman loses his pants. And his shirt.
* * * Google Search Now Requires JavaScript Michael Tsai
Democrats en déshabillé
‘Give us a little time’: Democrats search for a guiding principle against Trump Semafor
Carville’s advice to fellow Dems on Trump: ‘Let him punch himself out’ The Hill
The Final Frontier
Guillotine Watch
A Start-Up Claimed Its Device Could Cure Cancer. Then Patients Began Dying. NYT
Mailboxes, used cars and other things making life hell in Asheville FOX
We Only Have Ourselves: The How-Tos and DOs and DON’Ts of Mutual Aid Kim Kelly, Literary Hub
Antidote du jour (Diego Delso):
Bonus antidote, “The cats who came in from the cold”:
I put a whole bunch of blankets on the couch outside and made him a little tent. You can just see him peeking out.
I hope he is warm enough.
Everyone say Hi Bruiser! pic.twitter.com/fl5ZO7kkgh
— Jennifer 🟥🔴🧙♀️🦉🐈⬛ 🦖 (@babybeginner) January 24, 2025
A long thread with many cats. Double bonus antidote:
— Ramin Nasibov (@RaminNasibov) January 22, 2025
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Working link for “NATO chief: Cost of Russian victory in Ukraine would be ‘trillions not billions’ ” article at-
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/nato-chief-cost-of-russian-victory-in-ukraine-would-be-trillions-not-billions/
Mark Rutte wanting NATO countries to spend those billions now by taking that money from pensions, healthcare, schools, etc. because everybody knows that Putin is going to drive for Lisbon after the Ukraine. Lisbon I tell you.
Thanks, fixed.
Take hundredths of billions for a war, lose it, ask for trillions more. I don’t think we need Putin to bomb EU cities to stone age, Mark will do the job just fine.
“credibility is very costly!
NATO “credibility”, or NATO could become an independent of DC, defensive alliance, not a tool of US’ neocon/PNAC/MIC cabal.
Why stop Putin at Lwow, when he could be over extended and crushed in the Fulda Gap, on the cheap.
No, no, no. Don’t wanna do that. I say let Putin go all the way to Brussels – the HQ of both the EU and NATO – and demolish the place. And I bet that you would find that people in all the EU villages and towns and cities in all the EU countries along the way would be helpfully pointing the way to Brussels and offering free gas & beer to the Russian tank columns.
I love Brussels, the real city that existed before the EU wrecked it. So I hope they only go after the ugly buildings in Ixelles (esp the Commission) and the English quarter, where they all seem to live.
Conrad’s description of it in The Heart of Darkness is evergreen — whited sepulchres …
Agree
Europe would be better off w/o UE/NATO, and U.S. meddling
Russia buys itself army for ~100B a year, including the world’s biggest nuke arsenal. Bud armies are for losers, NATO is going to spend trillions on credibility! These clowns really care only for their feelings about their own importance.
“NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has warned alliance members that if the Russian invasion of Ukraine is allowed to succeed, the cost of reestablishing NATO’s international credibility would be measured in the trillions of dollars.”
Alternatively, dismantling NATO altogether would eliminate any need to spend billions/trillions to reestablish its already flimsy international credibility.
NATO needs an enemy to justify its existence. If not Russia, some other country would have to suffice.
I love the ‘if the Russian invasion is allowed to succeed’, as though NATO were some kind of overindulgent parent that does not draw the line at exercising their parental authority.
NATO credibility is somewhere between Joe Isuzu and Wile E. Coyote saying he’s finally gonna catch that Roadrunner.
As I’ve written elsewhere, an effectively disarmed NATO, which is what we’re rapidly heading for, including a United States which has little or no capability to intervene in a large-scale, modern high-technology conflict, is going to be at a massive political disadvantage compared to Russia. In this sense, it hardly matters whether “NATO” exists as an entity or not; rather, the correlation of military, political and economic power will be massively in Russia’s favour, because of NATO’s own stupidity in provoking and vilifying a country which, had it but realised, had a massive conventional land/air superiority. But it’s too late now.
Think of the relationship between the US and the countries of Central America, and you will have some idea of the political relationship between Russia and Europe in ten years time. Whilst it’s always uncomfortable living next to a military superpower (ask Mexico or Canada) a better relationship could have been worked out with Russia if we had begun twenty years ago. But the mixture of racialism and ideological hatred that has characterised European dealings with Russia over the last generation made that impossible, and now we are seeing the consequences.
Rutte is right, in the sense that to restore any kind of political balance between Europe and Russia, or at least to get Russia to take Europe seriously, would require the complete rebuilding of the defence capabilities of European states, the reintroduction of conscription and the fielding of massive armies. This is not going to happen and, because the political terms of trade between countries depend, to some degree, on relative military power, Russia will be the dominant political force in Europe. But it’s tooo late to stop that now.
NATO’s defeat in the Ukraine may have larger implications. Remember what Boris Johnson said not that long ago? That a defeat in the Ukraine would be the end of Western Hegemony.
“Remember what Boris Johnson said not that long ago? That a defeat in the Ukraine would be the end of Western Hegemony.”
These students turned lunatics were being taught on the Eton playing fields that they must forever be burning down the Summer Palace.
Forgive me, Lord Elgin.
Western elites destroyed their own hegemony decades ago. What the West needs now is non-delusional elites.
Does the West really need elites? Can we afford them? I have a strong feeling that we could get along just fine without them.
Good point. How’s this:
What the West needs is non-delusional elected officials that represent the people, not the super wealthy elite
donorsowners.Exactly!
A world without elites? A world without a powerful super class? Has that ever existed before? Are we being naive? Isn’t that communism? Not that I’m against communism, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon to the West
No, the best the West can hope for is a return to something like the New Deal under FDR where the extremely wealthy exist, but have much less political power. Even then FDR was called a “traitor” to his class which was the very wealthy. But it’s more that he made just enough reforms to save capitalism from it’s worst principles (which neoliberals embrace as Friedman “profit uber all free markets”.)
I suppose one can argue that China’s mixture of communism and free markets/capitalism has been more successful than American neoliberal capitalism, but I am not in a position to judge that being just a lowly engineer rather than an all seeing, all powerful economist like Larry Summers (other than to point out as an engineer that their achievements in science/technology/infrastructure are extremely impressive), but I think the American economy is doing what it has been re-purposed to do, make a couple of billionaires and tens of millions of poor people no matter who is elected to office.
Not much in the social lineages from Grecoroman, through Christendom, to Imperial Europe. But there’s a lot more history than that and there are plenty of examples of stable complex societies that were relatively egalitarian that we can learn from.
I no longer have much confidence in elections. How do we eradicate professional politicians? Anyone with the ambition to be a political leader is unsuitable for the job. Sortition.
Hear, hear!
Language is used by those who have power to control how we see the world. And the elites, who control our media and influence our governments, are fine with that word to describe themselves.
If you look at a thesaurus, “elites” are ‘high class persons’, also referred to as choice, cream, gentility, pride, quality, nobility. What’s not to love about being called an ‘elite’.
So, are the Bidens ‘elites’? Are the Trumps ‘elites’? Is Bezos an ‘elite’? Musk? Thiel? Altman? Starmer? Gates?
Don’t these people take and hoard the wealth of the world using any means including wars and genocides, and use their money power to put in place laws to make them richer and richer and richer? Don’t these people ruin the land and seas and societies for profit?
Can’t we think of a more accurate word to describe who they are? Looters? Raiders? Marauders? Pillagers? Psychopaths? Ransackers?
Change starts with small things.
“Think of the relationship between the US and the countries of Central America, and you will have some idea of the political relationship between Russia and Europe in ten years time…”
Then Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, are the same as Germany, France and the United Kingdom; with 2 of the Central American states having nuclear weapons?
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/October/weo-report?c=223,924,132,134,532,534,536,158,546,922,112,111,&s=PPPGDP,PPPSH,&sy=2000&ey=2024&ssm=0&scsm=1&scc=0&ssd=1&ssc=0&sic=0&sort=country&ds=.&br=1
October 15, 2024
GDP, 2024
Russia ( 6,909)
Germany ( 6,017)
France ( 4,359)
United Kingdom ( 4,282)
Italy ( 3,598)
No comparison can be pushed too far, obviously, but yes, in a decade I’d expect Bulgaria and Rumania, not to mention Northern Macedonia and Albania, to have a relationship with Russia comparable with that of Nicaragua and Guatemala with the US. Frankly, it would be in their interest to do so. Britain and France will retain more independence so long as long as they keep their nuclear forces, but those forces have strictly national purposes–P5 status and absolute last-ditch national survival. Anyway, without serious conventional forces, with neither of them really have, the two countries will have substantially less influence in the future.
“Britain and France … without serious conventional forces, with neither of them really have, the two countries will have substantially less influence in the future.”
Now I understand. I have not taken this realistically and now will do so.
Thank you for the argument, which I needed.
“No comparison can be pushed too far…”
Understood, then why not think to the European Union, with the UK, and ask whether the organization can function effectively as a defense alliance. The Euro Area with the UK would do.
The EU or EA is fairly culturally related and almost the size of the US. Why not think through a foreign policy and defense structure for the EU or EA with the UK? Leaving the EU was a ridiculous mistake for the UK, but that can be reversed, and the whole importantly strengthened.
China wants only a partnership and Russia is simply about survival which was a problem that was forced on Russia soon after 1992. Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” is essentially a Russian and French work. There is no reason to think of Russia aggressively.
Am I merely being naive?
The problem with the EU is the EU. Most of the people in the member states would be perfectly happy with the Single Market. People are less than comfortable with the EU as a putative state and the ultimate arbiter of the sovereignty of the member states. This has always been the objection in the UK and it is the most significant objection in many countries suffering from the dazzling political and economic ineptitude of the EU Commission, Parliament and their attendant web of Agencies, not to mention the problem the Euro has created for almost every European economy, particularly those of France, Germany and Italy.
And Europeans are culturally related insfar that, after killing each other for the previous couple of millenia, they decided that trade might be the one factor which could bring about international peace, although intra-national peace does seem to be breaking down under the weight of an institution that, in a very loose paraphrase of St Basil the Great, is quite unlike anything found in nature which will growing when it reaches its natural limit, whilst the EU devotes its energies to continuing growth, and it has continued to grow, and grow, and grow until it is now close to collapse because its foundations can no longer take the strain of such a diverse range of economies, cultures, national institutions and the least competent political élite in living memory.
The war in the Ukraine has been the weathercock on the steeple which, hopefully, will bring the entire edifice down along with NATO, another institution which has long departed from its basic purpose and has also become little more than a gaudy display of pomposity and self-destructive energy.
Looking at the soviet period, 10 years after WWII, one could argue that as long as the eastern countries in the soviet “block” where in no way threatening the security of USSR with outside alliances, they were quite free of doing their internal politics as they saw fit. One can compare the array of approaches with agriculture in said countries. Poland’s agriculture relyied up to 80% on the private farmers, and Romania had co-operativized all agricultural lands in the lower elevation regions. Also, in Romania, about 4 mil hectars of forests were nationalized. Hungary was somewhere between Romania and Poland.
So on and so forth. USSR in fact supported the economies of eastern block, not something that the US will ever do. So I don’t think that the comparison is apt in any way, shape or form, given the expectation that Russia will keep its form, and will act totally opposite to what US has been doing and intends to do…
But wasn’t Germany increasingly an economic partner of Russia and not living in fear? Wasn’t this why Nuland said “F the EU”? Even now Putin says he wants to be “partners” with his neighbors and even the US. Most of the articles I read say the UK elites and MI-6 are the ones who are bonkers on Russia and are deeply and not so secretly involved in the Ukraine conflict.
Just asking.
That was my impression, too. Russia was being integrated into Europe: the strong economic ties with Germany, Nordstream being a joint venture, (until US sabotaged it) France selling helicopter carriers to Russia (until US nixed it) Russians living in southern Spain just like other Europeans, not to mention populations in Eastern Europe left over from the Soviet era. I think the US saw itself losing economic power in Europe and that was one of the drivers for the Maidan coup and the current mess.
“But wasn’t Germany increasingly an economic partner of Russia…”
Evidently the answer is, no. Germany was trading with Russia, but German policy was the expansion of NATO and NATO missiles to Russian borders and using Georgia and Ukraine as direct threats to Russia. I find this astonishing, but Angela Merkel was evidently an antagonist to Russia.
The US has had a century or two to exploit the resources of Central America, but there’s still much to be taken. Europe, in contrast, has little to offer Russia, and at the pace of deindustrialization, will have nothing for Russia to exploit but a dwindling market. Perhaps Haiti is a better analogy for f-ed out old Europe. Lavrov noted that Europe will have to be punished.
It seems that the center of gravity for NATO will swing towards the undemilitarized Türkiye, which will have to convince Trump to follow precedent and abandon the Kurds.
The United States and France are the reason why Haiti is such a mess as their government and economy was and still is being destroyed for the American and French economic benefit. That and for the American’s need to not have a truly successful black slave rebellion that results in a stable, prosperous, and peaceful country. Cuba is a similar story.
While there are real problems with both Russia and China, they do not seem to be a need to brutally exploit to actual death others as the United States elites seem to have with Central and South America being additional examples.
I think that Rutte misses the point miserably. If the West wants to be taken seriously, to start with the West should have to re-think all its priorities and the ways things are done. The West is inept and believes this is all about money spending on some weapon or the other. To start with, re-think strategic goals and the means to reach those goals. If the goal was regime change and subordination of Russia it should be removed from the list and substituted with something that can be achieved. To rebuild defence capabilities, before talking about expenditures, he should be defining which capabilities would be needed first. But no. First comes money and capabilities follow magically even in the absence of specific goals. Because markets.
Agree with this insight from A. I do, however, imagine Russia will be happy to ramp its military back down in a few years. The US could always dominate little states around it because it had a massive expeditionary force to project power globally. It is still plenty big enough to bully little* guys, though not Russia or China.
I get the impression Russia would rather not field a massive army indefinitely as it got stuck with in Soviet times. I think it will go back to building strategic deterrents–even if they are conventional ones like Oreshnik, Geran, etc.
* Actually medium guys–like Europe–are under the greatest threat in that are utterly dependent on vulnerable civilian infrastructure. Determined little guys like the Houthis are harder to intimidate.
No, the US has an army of only about 470,000 and nearly 800 bases. It has only (per IIRC Chas Freeman) about 70,000 troops max it could send. It most assuredly cannot send a big expeditionary force anywhere.
I had meant to do an analysis of these figures some time, but it’s worth pointing out now that the US has about 175,000 military personnel stationed abroad. That amounts to an average of 219 military personnel per base if there are really 800 “bases.” However, in Bahrein, in Rammstein in Germany, in Yokohama and Okinawa in Japan, in South Korea, and in Qatar, there are tens of thousands of personnel. Indeed, if you’ve ever been to a US military base abroad, you know they are enormous. It’s a fair bet that the largest ten bases in the world contain a total of about 100,000 troops, which means that the other 790 would have fewer than a hundred personnel each: not even an infantry company. Hum.
More generally, power projection is not really the issue here. Living next to, or near to, a major military power when you are not one affects the way you see the world. That’s what the Russians are aiming for, not crude displays of force.
Some of these bases are tiny: literally offices with a handful of people–maybe a couple if peope in uniform and some contractors. Then there are big bases with thousands of people (but a lot of the people on these bases are still civilian contractors or even local military and civilian personnel–a large chunk of “US military” in SK have always been SK personnel on loan to US (KATUSA, or Korean Augmentees to US Army), for example.
The “bases” metric isn’t really useful to measure combat power. Many “bases” are really intel / comms outposts which have value in supporting command, but don’t provide combat power. If you look at where actual combat forces are stationed abroad, in many cases the force is spread across numerous “bases” (troop barracks over here, logistics hubs over there, medical somewhere else, training ranges at another location) to reduce the footprint in any one “base”.
Aurelien: Indeed, if you’ve ever been to a US military base abroad, you know they are enormous.
I have been on quite a number of them, though it was back during Gulf War One.
Some were enormous indeed, having their own Macdonalds franchises and cinemas, like little MidWestern towns set down in foreign countries.
There were service people on them who’d never left the confines of the base in the years they’d been stationed there. After all, the country outside was full of furriners.
One USAF base in central Spain, Zaragoza, had ten miles of runway with planes taking off for and returning from the Sandbox every thirty seconds or so. While I was there a squadron of Russian Federation fighters turned up to co-train with NATO. Opportunity squandered!
Alternatively, there’d be a US Navy place on some island like Crete with twenty people on it and some of them would have drunk a sixpack of beer by noon.
The Navy and Army bases struck me as being staffed by human spuds, to a greater lesser or degree. The people on the USAF bases were generally a higher level of human being, on the other hand.
Ah, I see Zaragoza has been returned to the Spanish ….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaragoza_Air_Base
‘Between 1958 and 1992, Zaragoza Air Base was used by the United States Air Force, courtesy of the Pact of Madrid.
In 1992, Malcolm Harvey robbed and murdered two Zaragoza women while serving at the air base.
To give you some idea of the size —
…Zaragoza was also used as an emergency landing site for the United States’s Space Shuttle.
And US armed forces are having difficulty getting recruits not just due to the health and fitness issues, but you have to be pretty dim to want to join any western armed service nowadays and not realize that you are fodder for the elite not your country.
This has always been the case. Mercenaries are more honest…a days work for a days pay, and politics be damned.
The US military is relatively enormous despite caveats of being down 50% from cold war peaks, technical obsolescence, etc. It has the biggest air force and navy in the world by a long distance, precisely for reasons of global power projection. Almost every other military is smaller by an order of magnitude.
Of course it could bully Lebanon, Venezuela, Iran, Denmark, etc if it ever got it into its head to do so. We’re not talking about big land invasions on the fly because no one has that capability just sitting around since 1991.
Of course it could bully … Iran ….
The US military cannot bully Iran.
…if it ever got it into its head to do so.
Pfft. Hitting Iran has been in the heads of all the neocons and AIPAC-sponsored Washington pols in this administration, the last one, and all of them back to Reagan probably.
They haven’t done it because they can’t. The best-case scenario is what happened during the last joint Israeli-US mission back in — what?– October ’24, when the Russian radar locked on and targeted the Israeli F-35s before they got over Iran’s borders.
Iran is two and a half times the size of Ukraine and its missiles and heavy ordnance are 500 feet underground, below the desert or under mountains. If the US launches a whole bunch of cruise missiles or even nukes at Iran, the whole region ceases to exist in Iranian reprisals, with tiny Israel gone first.
That the US has effectively disarmed itself despite shovelling trillions upon trillions of dollars to the armaments industry is a clear indication of how much corruption is present.
Money is needed to fight a war, but a war can’t be fought with money.
Not only land/air superiority, but the skill and desire to defend their border/interests (Donetsk). Putin and the Stavka are far superior in talent and professionalism than Nato/the West. They don’t gloat. When Putin says Oreshnik can turn hardened HQ’s to ‘dust’ he meant it.
Trillions spent by Nato to confront Russia is futile. Europe is now simply a tourist trap.
Davos is where the PMC goes and spreads PMC stupidity in loud voice .
This week we had Sánchez saying basically that to preserve democracy free speech has to be killed. He, of course, didn’t say it so openly but it was just what anyone could conclude from his words. Today we have, oh, so brilliant Rutte trying to win the contest on PMC stupidity with an argument that wins the day. We must win the war with what we have now because, if not, we will have to spend trillions to be able to win it later on the basis of real warfare superiority that we currently do not have. The magic is in credibility. We win, our credibility is saved, and we do not need to spend untold amounts to regain credibility. So, win the war “on the cheap”, as if any of the current Western warfare could be considered cheap, is better than having to spend lots and lots of money in the future on even more expensive hardware to restore lost credibility. I don’t know whether, during his speech, he delivered ideas on how to do so. Yet, the interesting thing is that Russia is showing to have much better capabilities in this war with a fraction of Western military expenditures. With the stupidity these individuals are showing, restoring any lost credibility is tall order indeed.
Imo in first Cold War nato was never expected to be able to defeat ussr armies, the real counter threat was the nuke umbrella. Nato cred climbed wrt Russia in Russia’s lost 90’s as the west looted Russia with the aid of Russia’s new oligarchs. Somehow the west didn’t realize it all changed under putin, Russia still considered just a ‘gas station with nukes’. Nato ex turkey was limited to an Air Force until they trained a huge army in Ukraine, but that’s pretty much demolished now. And nato air forces can’t overcome Russia defenses, so imo there’s nothing eu could ever do to stop Russia from driving to Lisbon except, of course, for the same nuke umbrella that existed post ww2.
Actually, imo even in the 90’s the Russians would have quickly re-constituted themselves if there’d been an actual invasion, just as they did do in ww2 when hitler revoked their non-aggression pact because of his desperation for their oil. And the Ukraine army didn’t exist then.
Yea, it sounds crazy, but Boris and Natasha are dangerous individuals. Maybe we need to The Moose.
“How much growth is required” + “50% drop in GDP”
Nice juxtaposition of two articles about the future. The funny thing is that the latter Guardian piece still clings to “decarbonization,” i.e. electric cars, while avoiding the taboo “degrowth” even though the real point of the article is that degrowth is inevitable.
Jason Hickel, co-author of the first piece, is one of the people working on how to preserve, even increase, quality of life while shrinking GDP in the rich countries. He’s worth a read/listen.
We can have controlled degrowth that protects the vulnerable or we can “let the market decide” right down to the point of collapse.
We have changed the Earth. Now the Earth is going to change us, our children and our grandchildren.
The problem is that all financial assets tend to be priced on the basis of future earnings. Share prices on the discounted to the present day flow of future earnings that investors believe a company will produce. Debt instruments on the debtors future earnings required to pay off the interest and principal.
Degrowth removes much of those future earnings, creating a crash in equity and debt instruments, leading to an unplanned degrowth (i.e. a recession/depression). The financial system will need to be rewired and shrunken considerably before that. Its why the rich hate the thought of degrowth, as it would vaporize much of their wealth.
Also, unless things change dramatically, today’s rich will dictate how this “degrowth” will be carried out. It will most assuredly involve degrowth for the poor and weak, alleged “undesirables” and growth for the rich. We are already seeing signs of it now. I get extremely nervous when ppl talk too excitedly about degrowth: it’s giving eugenicists ideas.
>It will most assuredly involve degrowth for the poor and weak, alleged “undesirables” and growth for the rich. We are already seeing signs of it now.
Hmm, sounds like you are thinking of the Purge movie series, in which the US, in an exercise to save itself economically, once a year for 12 hours, allows everyone to purge for themselves. Blessed be the New Founding Fathers and all that . All crime is legal,(except of course the killing of government officials at or above a certain level), all services, police, fire, emergency etc., are also suspended. Naturally the poor get it the worst.
Funny how we always put the collapse out 50 years from now. I doubt we have half that much time.
The concept of leaving a better world for our children and grandchildren appears to have taken permanent leave.
ChrisFromGA: …we always put the collapse out 50 years from now. I doubt we have half that much time.
The Jackpot is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
Right. Capitalism itself is the enemy of the environment and neither one of our current parties are willing to give it up.
And of course the public at large are a big part of this. Jimmy Carter gave his austerity talk and lost to “what me worry” Ronnie. The bubble continues under Trump.
Degrowth will surely come, but it won’t be on our terms.
If degrowth is not chosen, it will be imposed. Nature bats last …
‘⚖️🪴🇺🇦🌈🇮🇱🇵🇸
@rogertansey
IGs telling Trump, “No.”
This is how you resist.’
That’s exactly the way that you do it. Trump may spray out all these executive orders and the like but he still has to follow the law. If he tries to fight those Inspector Generals in court it will take several months at the very least to go through the system. If he had been smart, he should have just given them their 30 day notice and that would have been that. Instead he goes for pure theater and expect people to be too cowed to resist him much less fight him. It’s what he does.
I’ve read that most of these IGs are Trump appointees from his first term!?
I remember he wasn’t prepared and made a lot of bad appointments in 2017. The article I read (sorry, forget from where) said that the IG firings are ideologically a mixed bag, not seemingly targeted other than as housecleaning from Trump’s first go-around.
I’m keeping my powder dry. Trump’s clearly better prepared this time and is using a multilayered strategy that includes ‘chaff’ to distract his critics. His use of CIA numbers on Russian casualties smells like a set up, for example. Tulsi gets confirmed, Trump gets the real numbers and makes a stink about it, then changes policy. I could be wrong but it sure looks like a plan from where I’m sitting.
Or trump could issue another meme(shit) coin and make a real fist full of dollars.
I’ve read that most of these IGs are Trump appointees from his first term!?
Hmmmm, well if that’s true, it just shows why the dems lost. They were all talk and no action (contra Trump specifically). Isn’t de Joy still in charge of the Post Office, for example?. Dems, all talk and no action, in fact, lies as opposed to talk. Trump is the same but at least takes action.
He is. Dems consider talk as action.
Getting his facts so seriously wrong makes him look like an idiot. Not sure that counts as a plan.
Death and taxes are the tired trope ( only two things are certain about life, mean to add ) but a possible close 3rd or 4th entry might well feature Federal employment as a right that can be defended or collectively bargained in a broader context. This isn’t the Apprentice after all (!). My understanding may be simple and not well stated but there are protections in place to prevent mass firings.
I tend to think the functions performed by many department IG positions are worthwhile even if they may tend to the performative when tracking down wasteful expenses or fraudulent activity. I wouldn’t label their role as an outside audit function but it’s darn close to what I understand about the roles.
Several months? Unless the cases are thrown out in the preliminary motions stage (extremely unlikely), we are talking years.
re: Space Advertising
The prospect of looking up at the night sky and seeing a corporate logo is one of the most depressing things I’ve heard of and that’s saying something these days.
In Robert Heinlein’s story “The Man Who Sold The Moon”, a billionaire used the possibility of using the Moon as a billboard by using a rocket to scatter black dust on the surface in patterns in order to raise money to go to the moon itself. He took this offer to the two major drink corporations with the suggestion that they by the rights and then tell the public they did so to keep the moon free of advertising. And this book was published back in 1950 so the idea has been around for some time to have advertising in space. Woe to the CEO that has this done though. Hey, does Luigi have a brother or something? Just asking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon
And there’s Isaac Asimov’s story ‘Buy Jupiter’ from 1958.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Jupiter
‘Government officials of the Terrestrial Federation negotiate to sell the planet Jupiter to an energy-based alien race … Eventually, the aliens reveal that they wish to suspend letters in Jupiter’s atmosphere as an advertising slogan (i.e. Jupiter is to be used as an advertising billboard), to be seen by passing spacecraft.
‘The main Earth negotiator reveals to his colleagues that he has outsmarted the aliens, who clearly are not experienced hagglers, having neglected the other gas giant. So when rival beings come to do business, Saturn, with its fancy rings, can be sold for an even higher price. ‘
Humans should be barred from spreading our malignancy into the universe.
Says who?
Humans are also good, and are capable of great achievements. Caging humanity on this planet condemns it to extinction, only a question of when.
Wishing that on humanity would seem to me to be the malignancy here.
That’s complicated by the observation that our attempts to colonize space are themselves likely to generate existential threats, rather than being a solution to such threats. See Daniel Deudny, Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2020).
A life lived in fear is a life half-lived.
One of my favorite lines from the movie Strictly Ballroom.
One can live in fear of what may happen, but it is inevitable that the future will happen. In my view that includes humanity learning to put the energy and resources of the Solar system to use for humanity’s benefit. (Doesn’t mean it will necessarily be U.S. that does it; we could sit it out) Will there be bad actors in all of that? Yes, that seems to be an inevitable aspect of humanity. But should we forego the good that could be achieved because there might be bad things?
I’d rather we have more good things.
Yep, I vote we spread humans and Covid and flu and botulism and norovirus and rats and mice and cane toads and varroa mite throughout the Universe!!
And that the Universe spreads its little answers to our viruses and pests here.
Yeehaa!!
Value is cancer and is best limited to this rock until it burns itself out.
Straight out of PK Dick’s varying novels and works of fiction, which for seemingly the worse are more predictive of where society is heading. I read Ubik in the past year or so, and that was after I had completed The Peripheral by Gibson in or during 2022.
Sadly for those of us here in the US…those works by the aforementioned authors may indeed prove truer and realer than anything else that’s been contrived by Hollywood. Aka, flying cars and a flying taxi driver portrayal by Willis in the Fifth Element…
The Weyland-Yutani corporation…. building better worlds for the final thought.
re:Trump’s ‘ice maiden’ chief of staff launches brutal takedown of Elon Musk as she REFUSES to give him a West Wing office and issues stark warning over being ‘co-president’ – Daily Mail.
Considering that Musk’s companies are military contractors living on defense contracts, how could Musk get an office in the WH and not the CEOs of Raytheon and Northrop Grumman ? / ;)
Perhaps a perfect example of the subtle difference between grift and graft? Kabuki with Con$equence.
Kansas TB, holy family blog, back to the future we go. No masks, no masks, gotta see that smile……
Dumb All Over. Zappa
Hi Bruiser!
As Thomas Frank once asked, ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas?’ Kansas was also the point of origin for the Great Flu Pandemic back in 1918 – Haskell County to be accurate. And now over a hundred years later it is the site of the largest tuberculosis outbreak in US history.
Not just Kansas. From the article, There are a few other states that currently have large outbreaks that are also ongoing.”
Gawd, you think of tuberculosis outbreaks and you think of the 19th and early 20th century, not the 21st century. Didn’t think that I would live long enough to see a return of things like tuberculosis, measles and a host of other preventable diseases and viruses. All we need now is a return of smallpox.
Go long leeches
Lol, welcome back.
great Zappa choice – thank you – he has so many albums it’s easy to miss some – am a big fan, have may albums and seen/heard him perform a few times – will look for a vinyl of “You Are What You Is” –
A property developer, a health insurance firm, or chain of hospitals with a somewhat more long-term perspective may start scouring mountain resorts for old, disused sanatoriums, buy them cheap, and refurbish them to the latest standards.
With all those respiratory diseases (tuberculosis, covid, RSV, influenza…) wrecking havoc on mankind, we might soon see the return of mass prescriptions to handle long covid or tuberculosis in the old-fashioned way — rest in a health clinic in the mountains.
, i.e. private equity.
But those guys might decide to keep a facility or two for themselves, just in case it gets serious.
There is plenty of evidence that sunlight is good for you if you are sick. and of course nothing wrong wit fresh air.
Here is a Dr discussing a sunlight treatment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXfOtQkHlig&t=1323s
This made me recall Thomas Mann.
yes Mann, also Scarred Hearts, devastating film set
in a Romanian sanatorium by Radu Jude based on Max Becher novel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarred_Hearts
These TB outbreaks are just the beginning, the consequences of letting a novel virus that damages the immune system run wild will take some time to play out.
Coming to a City near you, soon.
Here we go again.
Ivermectin, anyone?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3553693/
>>>All we need now is a return of smallpox.
Well, there are all those burials in the tundra that are being defrosted by the warming climate. As I recall, smallpox remnants from the victims can last for really long time, which is why there is always a panic when old samples are found in freezers, bodies, letters, books, clothes… it is a small possibility that gets smaller as the samples get older, but real enough.
I’m old enough to have been vaccinated for smallpox. Just how effective would it still be?
Gee, wonder who brought these maladies back to our shores?
Hmm, as one person said, ’tis a mystery.
When the US had a functioning public health system, 20 + years ago, they thought they were on the road to eradicating TB if they had the right strategies in place https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/10.1164/rccm.2508001
Homelessness and crowded prisons and undocumented immigration have increased since then, and they are vectors for spreading TB – https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7045824/
The TB outbreak seems to be mainly in the Kansas City metro area (Wyandotte and Johnson Counties).
The disease is NOT terribly contagious, but relies on people being in face-to-face contact for long periods of time. Having a weakened immune system makes one more susceptible, of course.
Early detection (well, that horse left the stable a couple of decades back) helps control the disease: measures like mass tuberculin testing in schools and work sites (conducted through the 1950’s and early ’60’s) helped reveal sources of infection early on.
The Topeka Capital-Journal on-line writes: “We still have a couple of fairly large employers that are involved that we’re working with on this,” Goss said. “So we do expect to find more, … ”
Biggest employers in the area: University of Kansas Med Center/Hospital, Public School system, Amazon Fulfillment Center, UPS, Associated Wholesale Grocers (warehouse/distribution center?).
I have no inside information on the Kansas situation. However, I find it completely unsurprising. I have however, repeatedly, had to deal with illegal immigrants in my own area who have either latent TB or active TB with actual pulmonary cavitary lesions. Often, many of the patients are discovered when screening is done of all the family members of an already identified patient. I have had two situations where the spouse and kids are all positive. Thankfully, we have meds that can take care of this. It is extremely labor intensive, often requiring months to complete. The onus of immense work on the public health dept of all the surveillance required is just overwhelming an already broken system. These patients must submit to what is called DOT – direct observational therapy. They have to take the pills right in front of workers from the health dept. If they miss or do not, then the constables get involved. This again is just overwhelming.
These immigrants are not criminals. They are families here cleaning people’s homes and taking care of their yards. In other words, modern serfs. The hypocrisy from the PMC on this issue is just too much for me to bear.
These infected individuals are in your Wal-Mart – grocery stores, and everywhere else you can imagine. They are spreading the wealth everywhere. Fortunately, the transmission of TB is a very different thing than viruses – in an immunocompetent host – it takes lots of transmission encounters to really take. The same cannot be said of the immunocompromised and or stressed. Immigrants, who are not eating well, often living in the street or homeless shelters, or 20 in a one bedroom apt, who are not taking care of their health in any way are particularly susceptible.
This is a very bad problem. This was directly caused by the negligence of the Biden Administration for it was with them that the screening at the border completely stopped. Please do not whine at me otherwise – I have been an MD for far too long and I know how things changed precisely in 2021. They have been what I would call criminally negligent in this regard and their health authorities have done nothing but suppress any and all information about it. Just as in this example – amazing how ONE WEEK AFTER THE BIDEN FIASCO HAS BEEN GIVEN AN ENEMA – the word starts leaking out. Expect much more to come. Just wait till they get to HIV, syphilis, and multi-drug resistant gonorrhea.
I am looking for AOC and her performative bullshit to arrive in El Paso at any time – crying like a baby in her Gucci clothes. Please note everyone – where has she been the past 4 years as things have become exponentially worse at the border for these migrants and where acts of severe negligence with regard to the public health and welfare have been done. The problems at the border, the abuse and neglect of the kids has just exploded under Biden and WHERE HAS SHE BEEN? I think I remember reading there are 350000 kids missing right now. It is a national humiliation and tragedy all brought to you by the Biden Administration.
Dems, when you see life-long Dems like me abandoning the party and voting for Trump – and then watching as in his first week he has been savaged by Dems for starting to do something about the grave problems caused by your profound criminal negligence – when you see his approval numbers starting to go up – please just go look in the mirror. But more importantly – your entire policy in this area is a complete and utter – and now as we are seeing – a very dangerous failure – please just go stand in the corner and shut up. As a physician and public health officer, I am sworn to protect the public health. I would never dream I would be talking like this – but there are times when nice words no longer matter – a 2×4 needs to start swinging.
Just pray really hard that nobody winds up with multi or extremely drug resistant strains, which make treating plain old TB seem like child’s play.
Too Late!
Anybody who has read tales of the waves of immigrants arriving to Elis Island recall that all the immigrants were subjected to a health examination, and many were turned away. As a nation, have we forgotten about that sort of elementary precaution?
U.S. Immigrant Visa Medical Examination
What kinds of medical tests are included in a U.S. Immigrant Visa Medical Examination?
A U.S. immigrant visa medical examination typically includes a physical examination, an assessment of a chest X-ray to screen for tuberculosis, and laboratory tests to screen for certain conditions such as syphilis and HIV. Depending on the country of origin, additional tests may be required, including screening for hepatitis B and C, typhoid, and other infectious diseases. Vaccination records may also be reviewed to ensure that the applicant has received all recommended immunizations.
This may be what is on the books – I can assure you that absolutely none of this has been done with any kind of consistency the past 4 years. How many of the throngs of people on our border the past 4 years have been doing the actual work to be here on a “visa”?
We have heard all kinds of stuff this week about “selective law enforcement” aimed at the Trump Admin. This is just negated by the fact that the media have said nothing about this issue – an issue that is actually very important and its neglect is very dangerous.
Prior to 2021, there was an occasional issue we would see in medicine. Innumerable times as a physician I had encounters with immigrant patients who had had their TB or AIDS or whatever found at the border and were being followed appropriately. I am perfectly OK with that as long as they are not criminals and are taking things seriously. The vast majority of them did behave correctly – they were thanking their lucky stars they were here and bending over backwards. Then Biden came along – and now it is as if nothing at all is being done on the border. And I mean nothing.
The officials during the past 4 years were however like zealots in making sure that the immigrants actually following the rules – the “legal” immigrants – were screened for all of these diseases and forced to take COVID vaccines against their will. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
Despite all the murderous insanity of the past decade, I am still resistant to the theory of the Jackpot, that “they” are trying to murder much if not most of humanity, but then I read about the foolishness of not testing and treating all immigrants, and my resistance declines.
Infectious diseases do not care about politics. Their only purpose, if you can give them ones, is to infect, reproduce, and spread to as many people as possible. We’re ruled by homicidal or suicidal morons. Perhaps, they are both homicidal and suicidal morons.
LOL!
Long live Zappa!!!
re: A Start-Up Claimed Its Device Could Cure Cancer. Then Patients Began Dying.- NYT
Did nobody learn nuttin’ from the Elizazbeth Holmes Theranos debacle? Theranos, ExThera Medical, whatever. / sheesh
And I gotta add: the FDA approved the Theranos device. From 2015.
Controversial multibillion-dollar health startup Theranos just got a huge seal of approval from the US government
https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-gets-fda-approval-2015-7?op=1
From the article:
The FDA’s decision is about more than just this one test, the company says. It “provides independent validation of Theranos’ patented finger stick and … blood testing technology and the groundbreaking Theranos System upon which the [herpes] test is run,” Theranos noted in its release.
Sure, they did learn. That’s why they were operating outside US borders…
(that also could be interpreted as knowing they were doing something dodgy.)
Unbelievably, this device actually had very good numbers a few years ago in very sick COVID patients. It was very small cohort sizes – but it clearly seemed to have a benefit and further investigation was definitely warranted. But alas, Pfizer et all were in charge of the FDA.
For cancer and metastatic cells, well, that is a whole other ball park.
I know I keep saying this over and over again. When the FDA actually was in the business of public health, the cancer trials were heavily supervised by IRBs. And absolutely devices and treatments like this had real trials that were done with caring people making sure the subjects were OK. I would guess over the years, the failure rate was more than 95%. But all was done to protect the subjects at all costs. Now, it is just the wild wild west. These companies are doing all kinds of unmonitored research in the Caribbean, Croatia, the Philippines etc. And who cares about the subjects? No one, that is who. If the subject is lucky enough to have a PCP who knows something about research, they could help. But that is a distinct minority. In the past 12 months, I remember 4 of these kinds of trials where the patients had been recruited and were headed to foreign countries to get the research treatment. In our old regime of IRBs – there was a document called an “informed consent”. Every single plus and every single minus and every single side effect was laid out in the often 30-50 page documents. Not only that a nurse from the IRB sat down with every subject – and painstakingly went over the entire 50 pages before the patient ever started.
How many of the 4 patients in the foreign trials even had the most basic item called an “informed consent” document? How many had had the investigators or a monitoring body even say BOO to them about pluses and minuses? The answer is precisely ZERO.
Please take care of yourselves. No one else is going to. After the horrors of WW2, our grandparents have handed us quite a system of safety for patients and subjects. It has been slowly but surely diminished over the past decade or so since Obamacare – but just absolutely dismantled by the Biden Administration and the health officials they selected. Listening to these same people bray on about Nazis is quite amusing until you realize how many people are being hurt.
Events are moving fast – the fake ceasefire in Gaza looks to be falling apart:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-cease-fire.html
I had Thursday on my bingo card so I missed by a few days.
Heckuva job, Blinken!
That was to be expected. Is anybody pushing back? Even Trump´s superenvoy who was to be in charge of enforcing it?
Look at the bright side, we’ll never have to suffer fools such as Antony anymore, replaced by bright & shiny new fools.
As our former lamented commentator FF used to say: What ya gonna do about it?
>Look at the bright side, we’ll never have to suffer fools such as Antony anymore, replaced by bright & shiny new fools.
My guess is Antony and his class of clowns will still be on the talk show circuit, heading up the think tanks, and writing op eds.
But yes, at least they won’t be in power for the moment.
> Democrats search for a guiding principle against Trump
Dear Democratic Leadership,
Want a guiding principle? Here’s a clue. Go make a list of all the democrats that won their local and state level elections in 2024. Ask them how they did it. Then do that.
As in all large organizations, failure starts at the top. Start listening to the successful people at the bottom, not the Nancy Pelosis of the world.
That they have no guiding principle – beyond taking in donors’ money – is the problem. / ;)
The donors are the real problem.
Get rid of the grifters, and who’s going to take their place? more grifters. Take away the excess money sloshing around, and no more payola.
A purge is necessary. The Team Blue courtiers class largely shares their values with Republican courtiers having joined with the rise of Bill Clinton. It’s not a case of listening as much as DEI branded Republicans running the party. Look at their Twitter personalities such as Noah Sith and Matty Yglesias. They are one homeless person asking for a buck away from going full “law and order.”
Democrats going “what happened” after a genocide is a mix of willful ignorance and the important understanding the courtier class wants in on Gaza real estate as much as Trump.
Noah Sith — that’s a keeper!
Jimmy Carville giving out pointers and advice to his Democratic party constituents and as well others not aligned with the 2nd term of Trump. Yes please accept this wily Cajun fire breathing act and his varying soliloquy rantings about the Republican party. Hey here’s a thought for winning the mid terms in 2026…just maybe, concede that many Americans were right after all on the cost of living and daily or monthly US economics, as opposed to those who write for a living at the NY Times or New Republic…
Okay a dozen eggs is gonna just “magically” not be lower in the first week, and neither is the cost for a gallon of gas….FFS. I put Carville in the same camp as a Paul Begala from CNN. Hard to hear or listen to without a quick hit on the mute button.
Is Begala still on CNN? / ;)
CNN Job Cuts Are A Painful Reminder Of Where TV News Is Heading
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2025/01/23/cnn-cuts-a-painful-reminder-where-tv-news-is-heading/
It’s their own fault. They should have stuck to reporting the news instead of going into creative fiction. But we already have soapies for that.
I forget where I heard this, perhaps here, but according to some the “fire-breathing Cajun” Carville is a schtick. I think it was a family member of his who noted that the accent was a development that happened in his adult years. Sorry I can’t source this.
“Iran War Hawks Getting Wrecked In Trump Personnel Fight” ****** Yesterday on Napolitano, he asked Larry Johnson to speculate what might the pending release of intelligence regarding JFK death might reveal. This is pure guess work, but Johnson noted President Kennedy was working to split the CIA “into a thousand prices” and also had threatened to designate the Zionist lobby (later changing its name AIPAC) as a foreign agent. I’ll stop there.
Thanks for the Hoople in the snow memory Lambert!
[Scroll down]
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/02/links-21312.html
Hoople! Lol, that’s a dangerous cat. My lot have been recreating that scene since last weekend when we got some real snow. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Those were the dayz …what a wild trip its been
“How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis”
Degrowth. That’s how much.
“Growth” is a concept that only benefits squillionaires these days.
I haven’t had a chance to read the article yet but I am curious if the author define the “good life” and how it compares with Plato, Aristotle, Epicureans, and the Stoics. What a “need” is to one person is not one for another.
I think regardless of how you define it, a “good life” would not include adding another zero to Musk’s or Bezos’ bank account.
Correct.
Breaking up the billionaires is job one.
No pun intended.
“Trump wants Jordan and Egypt to accept more Palestinian refugees and floats plan to ‘clean out’ Gaza’
Trump once again shooting off his mouth without putting his brain into gear by repeating Israeli talking points. So he wants to move over two million people so that he can get into some great real estate deals. Yeah, nah. Not going to work as both Jordan and Egypt have outright rejected doing so. Any Palestinian refugee going to Jordan would know that the government was working hand in glove with the Israelis and would seek to eventually topple that government. And Egypt knows that those Gazans politically oppose the government in Egypt and so would destabilize that country. I got an idea. Bring them to America. No, seriously. Bring them to America and station them along the southern border. If there is one group of people in the world that have lots of experience with borders it is the Gazans so they would make great border guards there. Sounds like a plan to me.
When I browsed that headline, I immediately thought of the Moderators here,
“Yeah, and I want a Pony…”
Trump is exhausting. I wonder if Elon starting taking more Ketamine once he entered the orbit and gravitational pull of The Great Orange Orb(tm)
Mrs Bugs remarked that Musk looked like he was coming up on acid during the inauguration. Then he did the old Sieg Heil. I frankly wouldn’t put it past him. Hell, I might even have been tempted (the dropping acid part, not the giving Nazi salutes part). Fear and loathing.
Seems Trump really did make such a comment on his plane so he’s in line with the Blinken policy of the last administration on this. Since AP doesn’t like Trump perhaps they will now highlight the things they used to ignore?
Of course the bigger picture–more so than an offhand remark–is that the Gazans are not being bombed at the moment and that seems to be totally due to Trump.
It’s early days.
Gilbert Doctorow weighs in on the Trump/Gaza remarks.
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2025/01/26/the-silver-lining-in-trumps-election-that-is-turning-to-dross/
Of course those of us in the wait and see camp may have to agree with this if Trump (like his possible model Reagan) is a walking set of made up beliefs and bogus factoids. Reagan adjusted though–somewhat–and Trump may too as he settles in.
President Trump is, after all, a real estate guy. It must pain him to see prime waterfront property going to waste, and he wants to find a solution.
I am by no means endorsing the solution that seems so obvious to him.
Maybe Witcoff is surveying the sight.
It’s not a “Trump” plan or idle mouth-off. It’s a word for word State Department policy plan from Oct/Nov 2023.
The plan to move the population in Gaza out to ME countries was leaked over a year ago. The only change is its explicit articulation by the sitting president.
Nothing has changed. US/Israeli policy is still geared to full scale ethnic cleansing.
It may have been a State Department policy but it was actually taken from the Israelis themselves aka the Settlers. But as always, he Israelis wanted all the Arab nations and Uncle Sucker to pay for it all.
I see Cory Doctorow, loyal Democrat, is pushing the surveillance pricing boogie man including this laugher
“Uber pioneered this when they started increasing the cost of cab rides for riders whose phone batteries were about to die. But other companies took it way further: McDonald’s is co-owner of a company called Plexure that sells companies the ability to charge you more for your normal order at the drive-through if you’ve just been paid”
Yes there’s Uber, and does Obama’s campaign manager and buddy David Plouffe still work there?
And yes there’s Kahn but even in that instance one might well question whether the runway foamers on the Dem side are strictly about principle whereas Trump is all transactional. Going after big tech has also allowed the Bidenistas to pressure them to do more censorship under the name of “misinformation.” But then Doctorow is probably for that. And of course there’s nothing transactional about Biden pardoning his influence peddling family on the way out the door. Doctorow’s party line arguments seem shaky at best.
In what way is that a “laugher”? Just because Obama’s buddy works there? That makes it ok?
Hard to believe anyone who’s actually read Cory could possibly take away the notion that he’d be in favor of more censorship.
The notion that McDonalds would look up your credit card or maybe your license plate to decide what to charge you for a hamburger is a laugher but this is what Doctorow says they might do. He then turns to Uber as the only and very well known example of “surveillance pricing.”
This blog we are reading has been telling us for years what the real problems are and in my opinion they are not worries over Facebook or who controls the advertising market. For these more superficial outrages people do have choices, i.e. don’t eat at McDonalds, use Uber, hang out on Facebook. And of course McDonald’s knows that which is why they would never do what he suggests.
My concern is that our so called left is going to slide back into their TDS comfort zone and pretend the last four years weren’t a giant, deadly disaster. They need to keep their eye on the ball and failure to do so is what has given us Trump v.2.
Carolinian: He then turns to Uber as the only and very well known example of “surveillance pricing.”
It’s definitely not the only example. I’ve been seeing it in supermarkets for at least 10 months.
I see prices for specific items going up and then back down over 3-7 days or so. Forex, there’s a merlot I buy from one small branch of a supermarket chain that I see go up after I buy it there for a week. So then I buy it at another branch, return to the first place a week later, and it’s gone back down again and I buy it there. And so on. It’s a game I play at this point.
Now this is London, in the UK. It’s a smaller country and the cashless checkout readers and networks here work a lot faster and more reliably than those I see when I’m back in the US. But if they can get it working here, they can probably get it working in the US.
Doctorow is many things. An apologist for the Democratic Party, he is sooooo not.
Any examples? The article linked today seemed like an apology for the Democratic party. Since Doctorow is branching out from pure computer chat has he denounced the Gaza genocide? I’d say that compared to the negatives, the positives of the Biden admin were quite trivial. So Google may have to divest Chrome or pay a few billion in fines. Is that really a telling blow?
Some of us who used to be big fans saw thinking outside the box as Doctorow’s thing. These days denouncing Trump is so not outside the box. The outsider now seems to me to be very much the insider and his slogan heavy arguments are verging on Tom Friedman territory. As always IMHO.
Maybe you are not thinking this through. CD is trying to teach people about privacy, repair eyc. Not politics. If he starts weighing in on Gaza etc, all that happens is that he turns off some of his audience.
Doctorow blogged for years on BoingBoing so I think I have a pretty good read on where he is coming from. And I’m certainly not trying to censor him.
My complaint is that he now is in the realm of politics and before he wasn’t. Just to repeat, IMO.
“What to make of a president whose final address warned the American public of an out-of-control oligarchy, but whose final executive order was a giant giveaway to the biggest AI companies – and their oligarch owners?
And what to make of a president who oversaw a genocide in Gaza, fronting for an Israeli regime that made a fool of him at every turn, laughed at his “red lines,” and demanded (and received) fresh shipments of arms even as they campaigned for Trump?
This had nothing to do with sound electoral politics. The vast majority of Americans supported a cease-fire in Gaza, and have done virtually since the beginning of the bombings. Harris – who reportedly agreed not to criticize Biden’s record as a condition of Biden stepping aside – made it clear that she would ignore voters’ horror at the mass killing. Voters responded by staying home in droves: 19 million 2020 Biden voters simply refused to cast a ballot in 2024”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/18/ragbag/
I am arguing the data center build out might be unstable. Too many people acting in their own interests, but not considering what other people are doing.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/race-ai-infrastructure-500-billion-investment-boom-cycle-king-smith-iau8e/?trackingId=ZWP%2FUBAwSJX0Ykz1osBGOQ%3D%3D
Always interested to hear what the NC Commentators have to say.
At the risk of being repetitive, Catherine Austin Fitts has a good take on this, imo.
The US has been desperate to not lose to the Chinese in the advancement of AI for military reasons. Forget the “we’re doing this to improve people’s lives” sales pitch to justify the huge investment. That’s window dressing. Building out huge data centers is necessary for improving AI. (Or was until DeepSeek.) Better AI is necessary for all the digital controls “they” (the big banks and the BIS) want to create in the forms of digital IDs, CBDCs, 15-minute cities, digital passports, etc. Imagine the data centers and AI you’d need to create individual, programmable, CBDCs for every person, for just one example.
So the investment in Stargate is a two-fer: beat China in the military AI potential area, increase domestic data centers for surveillance and control, what Fitts called ‘the control grid.’
I don’t know if she’s right. It makes sense to me.
adding: Here’s Oracle’s Larry Ellison on twtr-X. Gee, this makes me feel so much safer…. / ;)
Oracle’s Larry Ellison says “citizens will be on their best behavior” with an AI surveillance system
https://x.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1882042989184430332
Huh. That was fast. Ellison sounds like Xi.
Except for the part where we give everything to the zillionaire apartheid crew.
Larry Ellison wanting the US to change it’s motto from ‘In God We Trust’ to ‘We Are Watching You.’
Thanks for the link to your article. Very interesting explanation.
– ‘What China Got Right About Big Tech’ – Foreign Policy. The deck: “Unlike Trump, Xi understood that a new class of business titans could hijack his country’s political system.”
Yeah, the hijacking of our political system by “business titans” started with *Trump*!
There is a lot of truth in this article though, given that it appears in FP. Of course the slap-down of Ma (and other billionaires) is personalized to Xi, who is apparently a petty tyrant who “brooks no rivals in public attention and adulation.” But then the author says this:
“In bringing this new class of business titans to heel, China’s leaders made a carefully considered strategic decision about the direction of their country’s political economy. In effect, they were saying that Beijing would never grant a dominant role to the extraordinarily lucrative and freewheeling private technology sector.”
And not just the tech sector. As top officials in the US and other representatives of the “rules based” economic order had been saying openly since the 1990s, the assumption was that once China was allowed in, the dynamics of global capitalism would force it to open up and allow “democracy” to develop – meaning the type of political system like ours in which billionaires rule. At some point we began to realize that was not going to happen. Oops!
re: “Yeah, the hijacking of our political system by “business titans” started with *Trump*!”
Heh. How long will take the MSM to lose its TDS tic. / ;)
Goodness knows Reagan and Clinton had nothing to do with this ‘hijacking’.
If it’s in the headline (or ‘above the fold’), the words chosen are driven by CTR. So to answer your question, the MSM will ride the TDS horse as long as that’s what the audience is clicking on. Not disagreeing, just pointing out that headlines are more or less divorced from reality.
‘As top officials in the US and other representatives of the “rules based” economic order had been saying openly since the 1990s, the assumption was that once China was allowed in, the dynamics of global capitalism would force it to open up and allow “democracy” to develop – meaning the type of political system like ours in which billionaires rule. At some point we began to realize that was not going to happen.’
Really important observation. This was precisely the theme of “The End of History.” The meanness that developed when it came to be understood that China might actually be socialist and successful is stunning. Even intellectual socialists are unable to forgive China for actually being socialist.
The meanness that developed when it came to be understood that China might actually be socialist and successful is stunning.
Pretty much.
I was around some of the Silicon Valley people promoting this view publicly — and indeed Everybody Who Was Anybody back then was promoting it — and I used to ask some of them (1) why wouldn’t the Chinese have their own priors — aims aligned with their own histories and real beliefs — and (2) why would they want to just be the US’s lackeys and factory hands, anyway?
It didn’t register. As for why they all believed it, something I heard from an older Chinese VC sums it up. He’d been around in the 1980s when Americans had first begun coming over and he said: “We had never met people so greedy and so naive.”
He was being polite when he used the word ‘naive.’
Supposing, just supposing, the US focus on confronting China is not a strategic fight but actually America’s billionaires want to free their Chinese billionaire brethren from the cruelty of communism so that they can all get together and loot China for all it is worth?
“The world is moving on to trade without the US’
Well yeah, I can understand that. With Trump America, you are trading with a country that only thinks in terms of zero-sum games and not win-win deals. And in those zero-sum games, US corporations know that they will not be on the losing end. That is what New York courts are for. Then there is the worry that Trump might sanction your country and maybe putting tariffs on your goods causing chaos to your supply chain. Silicon Valley corporations may love chaos but I bet that most real businesses favour predictability first and foremost. And for those BRICS countries, Trump is threatening them just for being in BRICS and demanding that manufacturers of the world move their facilities to the US – or else. And I am not even going into other things such as having major corporate officers from competing nations being arrested and placed under house arrest for years. It’s all too much like the crazy ex-girlfriend meme.
Just curious, did you read the article or are your comments in a more general term based off of the headline in your own prior knowledge?
Regarding his remark ‘That is what New York courts are for,’ cases like the one these four S. American countries responded to —
Four South American Countries File Amicus Briefs Urging US Court to Overturn $16.1B Ruling Against Argentina
https://www.law.com/international-edition/2024/03/05/four-south-american-countries-file-amicus-briefs-urging-us-court-to-overturn-16-1b-ruling-against-argentina/
These cases often haven’t turned out that way. Some history —
The obscure legal system that lets corporations sue countries
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/10/obscure-legal-system-lets-corportations-sue-states-ttip-icsid
‘Luis Parada’s office is just four blocks from the White House, in the heart of K Street, Washington’s lobbying row – a stretch of steel and glass buildings once dubbed the “road to riches”, when influence-peddling became an American growth industry. Parada, a soft-spoken 55-year-old from El Salvador, is one of a handful of lawyers in the world who specialise in defending sovereign states against lawsuits lodged by multinational corporations. He is the lawyer for the defence in an obscure but increasingly powerful field of international law – where foreign investors can sue governments in a network of tribunals for billions of dollars.
‘Fifteen years ago, Parada’s work was a minor niche even within the legal business. But since 2000, hundreds of foreign investors have sued more than half of the world’s countries, claiming damages for a wide range of government actions that they say have threatened their profits….’
ISDS is a hideous contempt of sovereignty and the actions described in the links you provide are a disgusting example of why –
when reading the law.com link i stopped when i read this –
“U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska of the Southern District of New York ordered Argentina, already grappling with severe economic struggles, to pay that huge sum in September, delivering a handsome reward for litigation funder Burford Capital Limited, which helped finance the case.”
the name Loretta Preska rang a bell –
this is from Steven Donzinger’s substack –
“Judge Kaplan also violated local court rules by appointing another friend, Judge Loretta Preska, to preside over my contempt trial when criminal cases are supposed to be assigned by random lot. It was no coincidence that Preska is a major leader of the pro-corporate Federalist Society leader which is funded in part by Chevron and Chevron’s law firm firm Gibson Dunn.”
https://stevendonziger.substack.com/p/the-us-supreme-court-just-legalized
it is well worth a full read –
i am at a loss to be anything remotely polite and non-profane in the extreme to comment about what is called justice anymore – if i believed in heaven and hell or even karma it might quell the rising rage reading, but i believe in neither –
‘Thank you to Al-Qassam Brigades for the good treatment’: Released Israeli soldiers says to Hamas’ armed wing fighetrs – Anadolu Agency
I’m going to predict that these soldiers won’t be giving extensive interviews anytime soon – unless one of them suddenly remembers being sexually assaulted by a Hamas guard after being “deprogrammed” by Israeli officials.
If you follow the Harretz link above to the home page there is an interview with the released soldiers.
“Hunger, Bombings and Confinement: Reports Emerge of IDF Soldiers’ Testimonies From Hamas Captivity”
(I have a difficult time posting links)
The writers try their best to paint the Hamas prison guards as causing “immense fear” among the captives by such actions as making them clean the toilets, moving them from place to place, shielding them from isreali bombs, not feeding them enough, etc, etc…
Re: Sam Altman’s pants
Those are Fearless Leader pants from The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
I think that they call them Jodhpurs. Army generals are always supposed to be on horseback.
Yep. Altman was wearing the black dress version. / ;)
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e3/13/44/e3134498c5865c1809431142118330dd.jpg
Yes those pantaloons need some AIlteration.
Maybe a re-education camp. Those trousers are wrong.
Every time I see Sam Altman referred to the first thing that pops into my mind is open AI whistlblower Suchir Balaji murder and who had motive.
Derek Guy on Those Pants :-
https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1883004142152716326?t=g9u5e7-JhXJ_IUKwNpanLg&s=19
(thanks to Mr Strether I now follow The Guy)
Aren’t they just cargo pants? Very popular with techies (like me and Sam Altman) as you can put your phone in one side pocket and your screwdrivers in the other with no danger of sitting on them.
Benito Mussolini wannabe pants?
Re Asheville and Helene–here in my town we still have downed wood waiting to be picked up although it’s now more bits and pieces than wood everywhere and along every road. And in some of our nature places it’s likely that the downed trees will never be removed. Instead they chainsaw a path for existing trails through the trunks.
SC didn’t get it the way NC did but we won’t easily forget Helene.
President was in Pavlovegas at the same time as yours truly, I wonder if he availed himself to the plethora of lawyers held to the highest standard on billboards all over town.
If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the economy of sin city was based on everybody suing one another, which brings me back to the first word in this here missive.
Most of the billboards in my town promote legal representation. Perhaps they see roads as where the customers are. The litigious Trump on the other hand probably has all his lawyers on speed dial. Now he has en entire Justice Department to do his bidding. Just like Joe.
They do tend to be everywhere these days, just on the other side of Barstow was a cluster of 4 billboards which I initially thought were all lawyers getting high on their own supply, as one of them read…
‘Peggy Sue’s
Diner’
Which turned out to be an eatery-not a legal statement.
The mysterious ‘Sweet James’ billboard barrister was one of the troika up top.
re: Why is Ukraine struggling to mobilise its citizens to fight? Al Jazeera
And:
The observation of this piece is interesting, if there’s a weak or nonexistent social contract in a given country, if the government doesn’t really do anything for the people anyway, is mostly absent, then citizens will be unmotivated to sacrifice their lives for the so-called government’s cause. I think that’s a not insignificant observation which could be applied to other scenarios.
Ukrainians know that it is only the poor fighting this war with inadequate training and corrupt officers. And their lives are being squandered in pointless battles of no significance. Poroshenko’s son recently was found guilty of draft dodging – and fined $605 though I doubt that he had to report for duty as he is still overseas hiding in luxury-
https://www.rt.com/russia/611152-ukraine-former-president-son-fine/
If you get wounded you are just as likely to have your organs yanked out for cash and profit rather than being treated for your wounds. And if you die, your officers may not report your death so that they can continue to collect your pay while your family gets zip as you are still on the books. Can’t understand why they are not fighting for their country however.
How could the rebuilding of Pacif Palisades be anything other than a messy divorce?
Everybody there has too many assets and too little patience…
The Daily Mail link says that a lot of them–contra the Prez–can’t afford to rebuild and therefore those that do will be living in a mess for some time.
But did you notice that the major informant for that article was a real estate agent whose major pitch was “Deregulate Everything”!
Yes, RE agent is likely looking for land sales, since home sales are a long way off. It will take time (5-10 years) but Palisades will rebuild. Maybe to only 70% of previous density, but California coastal property with a view is supremely valuable. The Coastal Commission review has been suspended for rebuilds. Same for LA City review. (I imagine their is a stipulation that existing foundation footprint is maintained and latest Fire Code standards are implemented.)
My recommendation for smaller lot owners (as a group) is to consider creating an off-site modular construction facility that can begin a design/build process now and have modular housing units ready for relocation onto cleared lots in 12-18 months. Re-using the existing infrastucture: roads, utilities, etc. will save money. Landscape plants will take 5-10 years to appear mature (trees longer). Without a doubt a long process, but Coffey Park (Tubbs fire-2017) and Paradise, CA are viable examples. People with time and money will want to return. Others won’t.
On the price of Fire Apparatus:
Its not just fire trucks, ANY vocational upfit truck has shot up in price and has a looong waiting list. Refuse, Snow Plow, Vaccum etc etc.
It will be interesting to see in the report on the aftermath of the LA Fire how much of the down equipment was backordered parts vs technician vacancies. Heavy Equipment/Truck techs are very much in demand.
Just as an aside apparently there’s some controversy as to whether those trucks were really out of service as some of them did end up being used. The fire chief made her remarks to defend not pre placing trucks when the wind warnings went out.
“Its not just fire trucks, ANY vocational upfit truck has shot up in price…”
I know nothing about truck specifics, but there is a revolution in truck construction in China. Trucks for every purpose are electric and intelligent. An aspect of electric construction is evidently much improving reliability.
Also, about fire-fighting, drone development has increased significantly and an entire new class of slow flying tanker-rescue planes have been developed. The Internet of Things is being increasingly used for monitoring…
The point is, knowing what has been developed elsewhere must be helpful.
We are just starting to see the 1st EV refuse trucks and fire apparatus in N America.
Some of the BYD muni buses on the west coast of the US have a checkered reputation so far.
Small to Medium drone copters for fire suppression and fuels management show lots of promise. Heck a 2-ton roomba doing brush control would be the Huckleberry for mpst of WUI fire prone Cali.
“We are just starting to see the 1st EV refuse trucks and fire apparatus in N America…”
Interesting; this will offer another domestic benchmark for developing and maintaining the vehicles. Research support will be critical. I will pay attention from here.
Thank you.
CA: I know nothing about truck specifics, but there is a revolution in truck construction in China.
I’m in London currently and BYD is delivering 100 of those electric double-decker London buses, which are big suckers —
BYD’s Global Premiere: All-New Double Deck Bus with Blade Battery Chassis, Customized for UK Market
https://www.bydeurope.com/article/464
London has 1,397 battery electric buses already. Not anything new here. But BYD’s models recharge from nothing to 100 % in two hours, have superior performance and are priced competitively. (They ain’t none of them cheap, coming in at around £400,000, which is $508,000 or half-a mil.)
In general, the UK isn’t putting tariffs or sanctions on Chinese EVs as they’ve no auto manufacturing left to protect, except of high-end models that won’t be effected by Chinese competition. So there are dozens of BYD dealerships here.
I occasionally take a look at “Oaklandside” an alternative Oakland news source.
They recently had a post about an Oakland Homicide Detective named Tran who has plausibly been accused of framing two people for Murder.
That post mentioned his pay for the prior year, including overtime.
$427,000 and change including @$105,000 in overtime.
Compare that to the pay of Schoolteachers to see what our Society’s priorities are.
On this AI stuff, I think Gingerballs has it:
Lengthly “tweet”.
If you’re on the Twitter, whole thing is worth a read.
This is the largest con so far in history.
I agree.
You are wise!
LLMs are skilled at mimicry. They are by definition a con. They mimic intelligence but are completely stupid.
They are not useful. They reduce productivity. They are error-prone.
Building a better or faster or more efficient LLM does not change its fundamental nature of being a totally idiotic mimic.
I trained and hang around a group of grumpy old maintenance people who get sent out to fix chronic problems. Let me know when someone develops an LLM program that can read between the lines of human generated reports and spot omissions and/or false statements better than these people can.
LLM’ing human generated and inputted data is like pearl diving in a manure pit. Good luck.
Trump’s blatant big-honkin’ tip jar . . . Here is an article about it, on Hamilton Nolan’s ” How Things Work” website. It is titled ” The Land of Greater Fools: America as a Big Con ” and I found it on Ian Welsh’s weekly re-presentation of Tony Wikrent’s ‘Week-end-wrap — political economy ” feature.
Here is the link to it.
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-land-of-greater-fools
Funny little video titled: “It’s still a kitty, what could go wrong?”, of a man petting his bobcat kitten while the dog is looking quietly terrified of it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1iag4o1/its_still_a_kitty_what_could_go_wrong/
Its really funny. Hopefully someone sees it before the host takes it down.
Here’s one from the LateStageCapitalism subreddit about Saint Luigi.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1ia15qh/were_being_manipulated/
Liberals: just can’t help themselves!
‘Help us Lin-Manuel Miranda. You’re our only hope.’
Today Colombia refused to let a military plane with deportees land. Colombian President Petro said the refusal was because the use of a military plan meant they were being treated like criminals.
Petro arranged for a presidential plane to pick up the deportees in Honduras and transport them to Colombia with dignity.
Right wing media reported that this meant he had “caved.”
Trump posted on his social media platform that he was putting a 25% tariff on Colombian imports that would increase to 50% in a week.
Petro said he ordered tariffs raised on US imports to 25%, then changed it to 50%.
Petro has now issued a lengthy statement with references to Colombian and world history and 100 Years of Solitude “Colombia now stops looking north, looks at the world…”
Thread:
(Includes a link to the full Petro statement in Spanish. The statement has a translate button.)
“Colombia has accepted hundreds of deportation flights in the past years. It rejected two flights using military planes, but agreed to continue taking flights using normal ICE planes.
https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3lgo3zwpmok2y
No tariffs for now. Trump says Colombia met all US demands. Columbian government says they’ve resolved the impasse and 2 Columbian officials will travel to DC for further talks.
Link below has link to Colombian government statement, but I haven’t found a full translation, just some comments about what it said.
https://bsky.app/profile/qjurecic.bsky.social/post/3lgozgp4ms22d
Apparently Columbia sent the Presidential jet to pick up their people.
https://theconversation.com/knowing-less-about-ai-makes-people-more-open-to-having-it-in-their-lives-new-research-247372?utm_source=pocket-newtab-android
Don’t know if this has been shared yet, but it’s pretty telling. Thing is, “AI” is a marketing term, and what’s being marketed these days isn’t even real AI as it was envisioned in the past. There is a place for LLMs and other machine learning-style models in technology, but not in the way it’s been proposed by companies like OpenAI and Facebook. By the far the most useful LLM and ML models I’ve seen, for instance, have been locally trained on smaller data sets to do specific things, not general purpose. And they work best as assistive technology to human labor, not as replacements for it. But “this technology will allow workers to do better work and make their jobs easier” is a lot less thrilling to the bourgeois than “you can fire all your expensive workers and replace them with the cloud.”
Every interaction I’ve had with these big LLMs has been deeply disappointing and further made me feel as if my fellow citizens can no longer distinguish spectacle from reality. These are plagiarism machines, and very poor ones at that. It was really clear to me when the video generators like Sora or Dream Machine started coming out. If you ask them to generate a truly novel scene (the kind of thing an actual filmmaker would want to see, and not just a regurgitation of existing images) the generators fail miserably.
I think the best characterization of LLMs is that they are bullshit generators, in the technical, Harry Frankfurt, sense of that term, as explained in a fairly recent paper ChatGPT is bullshit (no paywall).
The thing that keeps me awake at night is the thought that this technology is being used to generate commercial computer code.
I’ve played around with some of the AIs pictures generation to create some memes for friends and coworkers.
I do agree that it feels like the Plage-o-tron 3000 in terms of heavy drawing from the source material.
I wonder if LLMs could be used to identify propaganda and narrative campaigns? Now that could be useful. ;)
To expand on the concept, isn’t AI/LLM’s specialty pattern identification? In the past propaganda and
narratives were sent out from somewhere. Wouldn’t AI/LLM be a good tool to locate the sources?
Nope springs eternal, but long suffering Bulls fans wouldn’t have it any other way
Here is a funny new word for the Tesla car, presented on a little item called: ” He’s Führious ” on the
MurderedByWords subreddit. Here is the link ( till someone takes it down).
https://www.reddit.com/r/MurderedByWords/comments/1iaw9pt/hes_f%C3%BChrious/
And in unrelated news, the EU may soon be banning a Russian song-
‘A viral song by two Russian schoolgirls, which recently made it into Billboard’s top ten dance hits, has been branded a “Russian trope” used for spreading propaganda on social media by a member of the European Parliament for the Volt Germany party, Nela Riehl.
“’Sigma Boy’ is a viral Russian trope used on social media, which communicates patriarchal and pro-Russian worldviews,” Riehl claimed, addressing the parliament. She went on to explain that the song is popular with teenagers and is “only one example of Russian infiltration of popular discourse through social media.”’
https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/611661-children-song-russian-propaganda/
The two girls are 11 and 12 years-old so are obviously Putin puppets (eye-roll).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAhxXbLetk (2:14 mins)