‘A true miracle’: 7-year-old boy survives 5 days in lion-infested game park in Zimbabwe USA Today
The Year of the Wolves Montana Free Press
Plants and trees are able to predict volcano eruptions Earth.com
How Would Fearmongers and Doomers Invest in The Stock Market? The Sentinel Intelligence
Why “Foaming” The Runway Is No Longer Commonly Used In Aviation AV Geekery
Climate/Environment
Colossal winter storm unleashing snow, ice from Plains to mid-Atlantic Accuweather
Pandemics
Ex-FDA chief says Biden ‘mishandling’ bird flu, urges swift action from Trump The Hill
Several Illinois hospitals requiring masks as respiratory infections climb NBC Chicago
Africa
The Koreas
Washington’s (not so) strong man in Seoul is defying arrest Drop Site News
Japan
Uh…McDonalds Japan just posted an ad in Jindaimoji神代文字
For those of you playing at home this is a script made up in the 18th century in an attempt to prove ancient Japanese had a writing form before they adopted Chinese. https://t.co/1t66K4pXsX— eric ゑリｯ久 (@shinobu_books) January 3, 2025
China?
China’s central bank vows to use multiple monetary policy tools, cut RRR, interest rates at appropriate time Global Times
Chinese Sixth Generation Fighters Poised to Cut Pentagon Demand For F-35s: Lockheed Martin Stock Drops After New Jets’ Unveiling Military Watch
China’s Paper Boat Navy: A Colossus At Risk Of Capsizing – Analysis Eurasia Review
Spinning a tune: Chinese scientist names new spider species after Jay Chou songs Channel News Asia
Old Blighty
Britain’s Collapse and Ireland’s Future Eriugena Review
The UK’s Strategic Shift: Entering External Association with the United States Modern Diplomacy
Syraqistan
Biden administration said prepping $8 billion arms package for Israel, including heavy bombs The Times of Israel. Commentary:
Antony Blinken has a stronger emotional response to the wine list than he does to genocide pic.twitter.com/8EtjwqZo54
— Tim Barker (@_TimBarker) January 4, 2025
***
U.S. Reportedly Setting Up New Base In Northern Syria The Warzone
Pentagon vehemently denies reports of new US base in Syria’s Kobani Al Arabiya
***
Handshake-gate in Syria Politico. The deck: Syria’s de facto leader extended a hand to France’s foreign minister, but not to Germany’s Baerbock. Women’s rights were a focus of the trip. Meanwhile:
CONFIRMED:
Syria’s Interim Justice Minister Shadi Al-Waisi, is seen sentencing/overseeing death penalty of women for adultery/prostitution, as a part of Al Nusra Front’s application of Sharia law back in January 2015 in areas the front controlled in Idlib.
– The first video was… pic.twitter.com/00R36qXt8g
— Rami Jarrah (@RamiJarrah) January 4, 2025
***
China helping Houthis obtain weapons for unmolested Red Sea passage i24
Critical and opportune: Time to take the Houthis out of the equation Jewish News Syndicate
New Not-So-Cold War
US Prepares New War, MSM: Biden Admin Debates Iran Strike; Russia Takes Ukraine Lithium Alexander Mercouris (video). Discusses the possibility that the US will strike will Iran before it signs strategic partnership with Russia.
Russia intercepts eight US-supplied ATACMS missiles — MOD RT
Drones attack Russia’s largest commercial seaport overnight – Russian media Ukrainska Pravda
The Interview: Antony Blinken Insists He and Biden Made the Right Calls New York Times
‼️🇺🇸🇺🇦 Blinken admits to NYT the US armed Ukraine long before the SMO
“We made sure that … starting in September (2021 – ed.) and then again in December, to stealthily deliver a large number of weapons to Ukraine to make sure that they have everything they need to defend
–>👇 pic.twitter.com/IlD5fU3a8g— David Roth-Lindberg (@RothLindberg) January 4, 2025
Ukraine Can Expect Further US Aid Offers Before Biden Leaves Office, White House Says RFE/RL
German opposition supports deployment of German peacekeepers in Ukraine Ukrainska Pravda. The CDU, which is expected to lead next government following Feb. election.
Which Way Ukrainian Hooligan? Bandera Lobby Blog
European Disunion
Ursula von der Leyen has ‘severe’ pneumonia Politico
The Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer resigns after talks on forming a government collapsed Euronews
Germany ‘entering longest economic slump since WW2’ Brussels Signal
German police state to be expanded following the auto attack in Magdeburg WSWS
Ten years after the Paris attacks, France lives in a ‘permanent state of emergency’ Middle East Eye
The Caucasus
Georgian businesses and employees to carry out nationwide strike demanding new elections The Kyiv Independent
South of the Border
Two People Claim to Be President of Venezuela – Will US Militarily Intervene? Venezuelanalysis
Argentina’s far-right libertarian President Javier Milei is trying to push through anti-worker labor reform that will increase the work day to 12 hours, with no overtime.
It will also allow companies to pay workers partially with tickets (not real money) that can only be used at… pic.twitter.com/q3Ou56MGMO
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 5, 2025
***
China Donates 70 Tons of Equipment to Cuba To Restore Its Electric System Orinoco Tribune
Honduras will be declared a country free of illiteracy in 2025, thanks to Cuba’s “Yo, sí puedo” program. @XiomaraCastroZ pic.twitter.com/SBfHcvlBlt
— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) January 2, 2025
Spook Country
The FBI Account of the Las Vegas Bomber Story Does Not Make Sense Larry Johnson, Sonar21
Is your car spying on you? What it means that Tesla shared data in the Las Vegas explosion AP
Musk is definitely doing surveillance capitalism and working hand in glove with intel agencies. https://t.co/oBHYW4V263
— ecosocialist musician (@EcosocialistM) January 4, 2025
Gaslit Nation Matt Taibbi, Racket News
AI
Emotional infiltration Internal exile
Imperial Collapse Watch
The dangers of ‘victory’ Pearls & Irritations
Biden Administration
Hillary Clinton, George Soros and 17 others honored with Presidential Medal of Freedom at White House ceremony NBC News. Commentary:
Biden gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jose Andres, who has appeared in photos with Trump’s would-be assassin Ryan Routh.
He also gave one to a Soros.
They are just doing it out in the open now, and nobody is being much bothered by it. https://t.co/oXwXgnCKkn pic.twitter.com/sFo0w8szAP
— Olga Bazova (@OlgaBazova) January 5, 2025
Trump Transition
US capital in ‘heightened threat environment’ after New Year’s Day attacks VOA
The cheerleading for expanding private prisons and biometrics among the so-called “dissident” right on this site is unnerving.
If you think this expansion of the police state is just going to be for “illegal immigrants”, you’ve ignored the last 40+ years of American history. https://t.co/npuzstmWSM
— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) January 3, 2025
Kamala & Walz
Harris to oversee electoral count, restoring norm that Trump shattered WaPo
Gov. Walz proposes stiffer penalties, using AI to fight fraud in Minnesota programs Minnesota Reformer
Healthcare?
Concerns Continue Over Private Equity’s Reach Into Healthcare MedPage Today
Drugmakers plan price hikes for 250+ medications in 2025: Reuters Becker’s Hospital Review
Mental Illness Prophesies Society’s Spiritual Sickness Mad in America
Police State Watch
Ohio Puts Police Bodycam Footage Behind a Paywall The Intercept
Antitrust
The Rise of the French Fry Cartel Jacobin
What’s Coming on the Anti-Monopoly Front in 2025? BIG by Matt Stoller
Class Warfare
Amazon worker – struck and shot in New Orleans terror attack – initially denied time off The Register
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“Why “Foaming” The Runway Is No Longer Commonly Used In Aviation”
On the other hand, ‘foaming the runway’ is till a technique available to the banking and mortgage industry so that banks do not not suffer needlessly for the stuff ups they make through unbridled greed according to ex-US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
Happy Twelfth Night to All!
May Befana inspire you to deeds of Joy and Mischief.
Viva La Befana.
Tomorrow, Epiphany, 6 January, turns out to be another of those holidays that has mixed together so many strains. The last of the Second Yule, Twelfth Night. The manifestation of a divinity — and there is a reason why Jesus had to have an Epiphany if he was to appeal to the world of the Greeks. Some say that the Epiphany is also the anniversary of Jesus’ miracle of wine at the wedding at Cana — his miraculous debut as an avatar of Dionysos, eh.
And the light is gradually returning.
Off to see a show here in the Chocolate City about Cleopatra. Heck, it turns out that Cleopatra isn’t “really black.” Whoda thunkit? U.S. racial categories are absurdities.
Aspettando La Befana…
In Ireland it is Nollaig na mBan, the first woke holiday
As for Cleopatra, are we talking about the historical figure, or about Shakespeare’s character?
Tawny: a brownish orange to light brown color.
If only Christian or pagan “manifestations of divinity” were held sacred and honored. Unfortunately, the public space that is but a whirlwind of digital 0’s and 1’s would rather have you pay attention to something else. A great line from an unpublished song summed it up with: “the digital devils and the analog angels are fighting for your soul.”
In New Orleans, traditionally celebrated with a party featuring the “king” cake and marking the beginning of carnival season, but these days king cakes have tended to be more associated with Mardi Gras day itself.
we do similar here, Rosca de Reyes. circular sweet bread with a toy baby baked into it. Whoever gets the “baby Jesus” gets to/has to provide tamales for all Feb 2nd Candelaria Day.
apologies if this comes up twice, I posted several minutes ago but it seems to have disappeared.
we have Rosca de Reyes here, kings bread symbolizing los tres magos, the three wise men. Circular bread with sweets on it symbolizing the crowns they wore. Hella good if you like pan dulce. toy baby baked in, whoever gets it is obligated to provide tamales for everyone Feb 2nd, Candelaria day.
Britain’s Collapse and Ireland’s Future – Eriugena Review
“The OBR is projecting that the economy will need 350,000 new immigrants every year to just keep the labor force growing. This reflects the fact that Britain has not had a fertility rate above replacement for half a century. On top of an economic and military crisis, Britain is facing down a massive demographic crisis. Farage and other populists will face a choice of either labor shortages or three and a half million new immigrants every decade.”
Wait…I keep hearing globalists also talk about tech ridding employers from the need of more workers.
Can’t keep the BS straight?
I thought the Replacement Theory was tin foil hat ter stuff? Turns out another “conspiracy” is real. Whoulda thought, eh?
Whoulda thought that gettin’ a taste of your own medicine would require copefoil hats?
“Great Replacement Theory” is the conspiratorial idea that “elites” (usually specified further with some kind of “leftist” designation) are intentionally allowing or even facilitating the replacement of the white population by non-white immigrants in order to “genocide” the white population, and this is often given a further spin that these elites have engineered a low birthrate among the white population or they’re trying to create a base for socialism.
It isn’t the idea that immigrants may be required to keep the labor force growing, which has been an explicit justification for immigration in many Western countries. “Great Replacement Theory,” like many right-wing conspiracies, takes elements of fact and stitches them together into a paranoid fantasy. The conspiratorial aspect is from the assignment of “white genocide” or “communism” as motives to these elites collectively, which is made easier by the indefiniteness of the label.
I don’t know if it’s intentional, but I see too much of this political “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” when right-wingers are pretending to have dismissed a right-wing view before in order to act as if something validates that view.
I mean, when you read stuff like this, can you blame them?
Questions Surround Disney’s Past Use of H-1B Visas in Replacing Domestic Workforce
You don’t have to convince me Disney wants cheap, exploitable labor. It’s the attributed motives that make the conspiracy a conspiracy.
I see no difference.
At this point you need 2 incomes to support a family. This is because although productivity increased since the 1970s, that increase has gone to the ruling classes. The result is that people are having fewer children, leading to all sorts of ruling class arguments that we need immigrants to grow the “labor force”. The same ruling class is applying 2 tier justice in Europe (punishment for speaking about the unspeakable, but letting people off for doing the unspeakable in the name of “community relations”) and replacing meritocracy by DEI in the US. But don’t you dare notice the pattern.
When it quacks like a duck, it is a duck, and however much you call it nasty names, people will eventually notice. It would be nice if they react by attacking the cause (the ruling class) rather than its other victims, but that occurs rarely, which is why the ruling class’ behavior is particularly despicable.
Why isn’t that more easily explained by the economic drive to increase profits by reducing the cost of labor? In both cases, the motive for increasing the pool of workers is clear without any further gloss.
If you want to talk about two-tier justice in Europe, you could just as easily point to the hypocrisy of “Fortress Europe,” and how families that were displaced because of the Western intervention in Libya (and its aftereffects) have been placed into detention centers or refugee camps when trying to cross into Europe, if they don’t just die in the attempt. There’s not much justice in that.
When did meritocracy ever exist in the US? “DEI” in the form of affirmative action programs have existed in some form since the 60s, and before (and after) that women and minorities were frequently discriminated against, regardless of merit. Also, between legacy admissions at elite universities, inherited wealth, and nepotism, it’s impossible to believe a meritocracy would exist if you abolished DEI programs. I don’t care for DEI programs, but it’s more because of how ineffective they are, even at the level of what they say they’re trying to address.
Hard to know what the thinking is within London, but I think the desire to keep immigration up has less to do with having a growing labour force, more to do with keeping nominal growth rates steady in order to make sure domestic debt is manageable (or at least, put off the inevitable crash as far away in the future as possible). I suspect the nightmare scenario in the economic corridors of power in London is a combination of bank failures from domestic debt defaults along with a rapid decline in sterling setting off capital flight. The UK has had a relatively healthy (compared to the rest of Europe) overall GNP growth rate, it just looks bad when you break it down per person. Although this year they are in the unpleasant territory of having a growing population with a stagnant growth rate.
Incidentally, it’s important I think to look at the perspective of the source, Eriugena. It appears to be run from Notre Dame in the US, with its contributors largely social conservatives from Ireland and the UK – kind of the equivalent of Pat Buchanan paleoconservatives in the US. As always in Irish politics, there is a ‘split’ on the ‘national question’, so like every other shade of politics from left to right or libertarian to authoritarian there is a divide between nationalists and internationalists or anglophiles. So while the overall politics of that journal would seem in line with Farage, it represents the more nationalistic strain of Irish conservativism, hence they would not consider him a friend or ally.
Like much of Irish political philosophy, you’ll find a weird mix of internationalist, European, US and Latin American (via Spanish anarchism and Hispano-conservativism) influences. I’d characterise the Eriugena contributors (which includes a former NC contributor, Philip Pilkington), as anarcho-paleo-catholic-nationalist-conservatives. Or something like that.
Hi, PK. Not Irish here so only qualified to give a British outsider’s take but, having spent a lot of time online in fringe Irish politics thanks to Kneecap, that blog was astonishing!
Apparently Britain may collapse (hmm, wishful thinking and Ireland has been following the same dirty money financialised tax haven policies last time I looked…), which presents a threat of a wounded US-dependent Faragiste Albion and therefore… Ireland should get its US dependence in first, with an appeal to US trad-Gael Catholic revanchists!
I read a few more articles from the blog in case I was missing something but the more I read, the less sane it got.
Yup, that fringy conservative stuff always floats somewhere between insight and craziness. I really liked Pilkington’s articles for NC (when I understood them, some were way over my head), but he has recently gone all in on some fringe social conservatism.
The article does somewhat touch on an ‘unspoken’ part of Irish politics though, the informal links with Britain. For half a century or more, there was always an unspoken assumption in Ireland that the UK was the sensible if unpopular neighbour who would act as an escape valve for the unemployed, for abortions, naughty books, divorce, or anything else they didn’t want to deal with at home. This has significantly broken down, but the establishment is at something of a loss with what to replace it with, especially since they don’t want to be seen to side with the Shinners and their implied soft-EU isolationism.
Have you listend to Pilkington’s Multipolarity podcast? The fringe social conservatism you talk about is what “normies” see themselves as. And they are normies because statistically they are in majority and thus represent the norm…
I haven’t. Is there an episode you can recommend that represents the best of it?
I am under no illusions what normies think compared to the political class. But that Irish political article smelt of Pat Buchanan, whereas Nigel Farage is where the UK is today.
Like the rest of NC, my politics are cheerfully heterodox. I would vote for Kneecap if they were a political party (PK, have you seen the film yet??). But they are not and therefore I would vote for Reform. Breaking open the Tory-Labour mono-party and the disastrous neoliberal immigration and austerity consensus is more important to me than trying to achieve socialism and MMT in one election.
The problem is that Farage is a City Boy and some of Reform are BNP-adjacent so the looting and racism and anti-welfarism may get worse but at least it would be out in the open and might call forth a opposite pole of a political party.
And Reform is sound on Ukraine (peace with Russia, spend the money domestically) and EU (break it up, take back control) and banksters (stop paying interest on overnight reserves) even if possibly for the wrong reasons!
Hard to know if there is any actual thinking going on at all. The idea that an island nation like Britain that cannot even feed itself now needs to keep importing foreigners in order to keep the GeeeDeeePeee going up is so outright deranged, I’m not sure what to even call it. A population ponzi scheme?
It’s rather amusing to me (in a dark way) that these idiots never, ever, ever consider anything except their precious GDP, a measurement that is younger than some of the old duffers alive today. GDP is the modern day Western equivalent of Easter Island’s Moai statues, the idol that we will burn down everything else for. The future will have a Jared Diamond type writer (Chinese perhaps?), surveying the wasteland that remains of Britain and marveling at how it all went south so fast, a fitting example of all the bad policies you Definitely Don’t Want to Emulate.
But, but, the entire West was convinced for 50 years that keeping fertility rate at only the replacement rate – 2 children or less per family – was the right thing to do. / ;)
At the same time, they came to the conclusion that rising productivity was not be shared at all.
Is your car spying on you? What it means that Tesla shared data in the Las Vegas explosion – AP
And especially don’t sync a phone to a rental.
Or if one can afford an EV, they probably could afford a burner phone that they don’t use for anything personal. If syncing becomes required.
Looking at the video below that one… definitely get a Skynet / Terminator film series vibe just from that clip. I’ll assume the axiom that if by example for myself, just finding this out from an AP column then it’s already too late…They ( major auto manufacturers ) will do so because they can do so.
“They” (I can’t imagine who) have made it very difficult to avoid surveillance via an auto. If anyone hears of any tricks or hacks to limit tracking, let us know. One can’t buy a fairly new car without it.
The only real way to be sure is to physically disconnect the antenna system that snitches on you, or disable the module perhaps (assuming modern vehicles still have it as a separate module, also might cause all sorts of other vehicle issues). I know on some older GM vehicles with OnStar, the system had its own separate module with cellular communication and GPS capability, as well as a separate cellular antenna that was for the OnStar system.
This is the Factory Service Manual description for a 2007 Chevy Equinox OnStar system for example:
And the description of the antenna system:
I haven’t really worked on more modern vehicles all that much but you can expect the systems to have become vastly more complex, integrated and snitchy. I suspect though that the antenna system is still the best way to ‘disable’ these things.
pre-2000
maybe someone will start refurbishing old cars/ trucks from the chassis on up, so you can get a “new” car….that’s as dumb as they used to be.
I want one.
I don’t think you can really get around many/if any of these new technologies because their function seems to rely on the feedback loops from the computer/brains. Your sensors anyway.
Was the strange thing not that EM had been saying fully autonomonus cars were just around the corner for 10 years or so?
Maybe it was just a prototype that escaped.
I find both public and private sector’s insatiable appetite for individual data horrific.
They would make the Stasi blush.
I have a hard time getting too exercised about cars spying on us when phones are already spying on far more people for far more hours every single day.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the reindustrialization talk in the US about trying to reshore the rare earth and other minerals that are processed in China. Note the emphasis I give on processing, as that is the bottleneck. We do have reserves of these metals in the Western world.
To give a bit of background, I used to work for the past couple of years in industrial minerals mining, but was laid off shortly before the holidays. While that doesn’t make me an expert at rare earth mining, you won’t find very many people in the West who have worked directly in this field because the Chinese market share is close to a monopoly.
I am far more pessimistic than most. The company I worked at is owned by private equity and they are very averse, like all financialized companies in the West to 2 things – spending on capital and spending on labor. It was a battle to get more capital spent.
If there is to be reshoring, it would require a lot of capital and process engineering because of the lack of Western experience. The West would see huge amounts of inflation – simply because these would be new minerals to the Western mining and processing fields, where building up the competence would take years.
There would be substantial inflation in the West, because the West would not be able to match the Chinese in cost and because the Western companies would resort to greedlfation. In practice, Western companies may simply take the taxpayer subsidies and use it for shareholder buybacks or dividend recapitalization.
Other barriers exist – we have a shortage of people in the field of mining and the field is not attractive to young people. I can’t imagine the neoliberals being willing to pay workers more to attract talent. Many intermediary equipment are also imported from China. Actually, for any real industrialization, there would have to be a huge increase in electric generation, as the Western elites want 3 things – reindustrialization, AIs / data centers, and EVs. The list is far larger.
https://www.mining.com/web/mining-industry-dogged-by-retirements-and-lack-of-new-recruits/
I don’t know if we could do it. We have shortages of workers with the specific skills, and an elite that is “short term greedy” (namely not wiling to pay workers well nor invest enough in capital). With the failures of major infrastructure projects like the California High Speed Rail, the state of icons like Boeing and Intel (both of which, although in manufacturing, are still capital intensive), the other barriers I’ve listed, and our elites having no experience in competently doing industrial policy, I’m not optimistic.
I don’t think that it is so much a matter of being optimistic but being realistic. I fully agree with your reasoning and the lack of will among US corporations to do this the right way. After all, if US corporations are unwilling to make cheap, reliable, plentiful weapons for the US military which is of a vital national interest because they are too fixated on extortionate profits, then why would they be able to process rare earths at a reasonably profitable margin when they would instead seek to game the whole thing out for maximum profits through government subsidies. It is their nature.
Yep – US companies focus on profit over all else. The shareholders and executives are greedy rent seekers. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that the rich in the West have no morality. They have no sense of responsibility to the workers and to society. They are only fighting for this now because they are in danger of losing their hegemony, not because they care about the plight of workers.
I also don’t think that MMT will solve this issue – I think that the mix of special skilled workers and elite competence. Typically the idea of MMT is that expanding the supply of money into productive industry, so long as there are no other bottlenecks (full employment is often cited as an example, deficits in that case can cause inflation in that case due to lack of workers).
Mining is characterized by unstable job security (ex; frequent layoffs) and is dictated by the location of natural resources, which are usually far away from the cities where most people would like to live close to (either in the cities or surrounding suburbs). For that to be attractive, the pay would have to reflect that to attract people, something neoliberals don’t want to do. For that reason, it’s not the total worker count across the whole economy, but rather the number of people who have the specialized skills.
I think there may be another bottleneck – elite competence. Our elite in the West clearly don’t have a good understanding of how to build up an industry. Witness how they handle the CHIPS act or other subsidies. Even those supposed to build up industry, like the subsidies for Green industry, are a failure.
I suspect we will see the mining and processing equal of this:
https://www.energy-storage.news/setback-for-europes-battery-ambitions-as-northvolt-files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy-protection/
The Western elite can’t even get military spending right, despite the fact that their hegemony depends on them winning against Russia and China. Note the inability to get enough artillery shells or the inability to respond effectively to the development of Russian hypersonic missiles. Recently, China just tested a new “sixth generation” series of fighter aircraft, and I doubt the US elite will be able to catch up.
Overall, I think you are right – perhaps I should say, my analysis was realistic. That may be how the US faces a USSR-like collapse, self-destruction from elite greed.
Thanks for the comments. Perhaps the sum up would be that Trump/MAGA is just another distraction from the real problem which is not the Chinese or the Mexicans but our own decadent elites. It is they who are uninterested in getting their hands dirty with manufacturing or mining when they can more easily become or stay wealthy by pushing numbers around on computers. If manufacturing does revive here it will probably have to be foreign companies coming in and doing it. And many are doing it already.
We have become the United States of Affluenza among those with the power and capital to actually influence events. The rest of us are just along for the ride.
Saying American Capitalists are greedier than ever, isn’t much of an explanation. Greed is basically a constant, like the other six deadly sins. In my humble opinion. Teenagers, on the other hand, have gotten continual worse for the last couple of thousand years.
I’m suggesting that we have a wealth problem more than a greed problem. Those “born on third base” are more concerned with maintaining their status than acquiring a new one. That latter group are the ones who build factories and industries. Whereas the entrenched first group are the ones calling the shots and causing our social stagnation.
These are gross generalizations of course but I believe that there is indeed a universal psychological dimension that has to be accounted for.
Of course they’re greedy, they were greedy during the 40’s – 50’s as well. The difference was the Depression + FDR capped their expectations for how much was acceptable to skim off the top, but now they dealt Congress in on the looting & the sky’s the limit.
MMT could be part of a corrective, but only if it comes with a conviction that whatever gets pumped into the bottom has to get pulled back out from the top.
As a forty plus year engineer in large scale manufacturing, I’m going to second Altandmain’s observations. Greed, and the resulting mis-management has gotten much, much worse. It has always been there (as in, we need to make money), but it’s now at burn the corporation down for quarterly return levels. Greed drives all decisions at all levels of management. It’s been astonishing to watch, but managers now seem to routinely make decisions that they know will blow up in a couple years, but do it anyways.
Same here. I call it penny smart – dollar stupid.
After 30+ years with multi-national corps I am amazed they can make anything.
I guess it is the returns they get via the legal bribery…. I mean lobbying expenditures. The resulting tax breaks, graft, kickbacks, contracts, corporate welfare….. I mean new income streams; seem to make up for greed fueled stupidity on the job.
” If manufacturing does revive here it will probably have to be foreign companies coming in and doing it. And many are doing it already.”
So that explains why the North Stream Pipeline was broken, so the Germans would come to the US to rebuild our industries.
As the scorpion said to the frog, “it is my nature.”
A question: I’ve done enough research to be dangerous. My understanding is that the Doctrine of shareholder supremacy might be policy and habit, but that it is not a matter of Law as some have said recently. Is this correct?
My AI reports:
«The Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) Supreme Court decision further solidified the legal status of corporations. The court ruled that once a corporate charter was made, the corporation’s constitution was subject to “no other control on the part of the Crown than what is expressly or implicitly reserved by the charter itself.” This decision provided corporations with a significant degree of legal independence from state legislatures, although it played out differently for public corporations like municipalities.»
When people use “AI” they are supporting it and justifying it. Normalization = Capitulation.
That was truth-in-advertising. For issues of substance, please see my reply to Yves.
DO NOT USE AI. This is the third legal-related question someone asked of AI and the answer was dead wrong.
It also rots your brain.
Do not misinform readers. That case has ZERO precedential value. The very fact that it references “the Crown” shows its irrelevance.
We have been posting from the inception of this site that the shareholder primacy theory was made up by economists (specifically by Milton Friedman in an internally inconsistent NYT op-ed).
Legally, equity is a residual claim. It goes last, not first.
Dear Yves,
I’m sorry. I presumed irony would be more readily detected on this site. I should (a) have put a winky face on my headline ;-), and (b) linked to the Wikipedia entry, as the Brave AI did.
I was curious about Stephen V’s question about “shareholder supremacy’s” legal basis. IANAL, but for 12 years I was a senior research consultant to a major U.S. and European legal publisher, and I believe I have read more Supreme Court caselaw than most law students. So I was surprised when the Brave AI held forth unbidden at the top of my ‘U.S. constitution law shareholder supremacy’* query with an essay on Dartmouth v Woodward, a case I had never heard of from the Marshall court, and never in the context of ‘shareholder supremacy’.
The Brave AI does give References at the end of its ‘term papers’, and a quick peek confirmed that Wikipedia considers Dartmouth to be a “landmark case”. A quick read of the Wikipedia syllabus convinced me that Dartmouth could be relevant and worth a quick comment.
IANAL, so I didn’t burden my comment with another junior law review comment on a famous landmark case. Instead I left the case as a suggestion, inviting Stephen V or some or one of the many lawyers in the commentariat to further reply as appropriate. These were not the replies I expected.
I credited AI (1) because it can sometimes find surprising novel relationships (e.g., new protein folds), (2) because one ought to give the devil his due, and (3) to warn Stephen V et al that the relationship to his query might be tangential.
Since I am now summoned to defend my tentative comment, I would argue more forcefully that Dartmouth is of enormous historical and precedential importance, especially insofar as it acknowledges the precedence of Common Law contracts (Dartmouth’s corporate charter, granted under colonial law), over the authority of subsequent, even elected, legislatures.
As a result, but for some federal carve-outs, like the SEC, “shareholder rights and duties” seem to have been left, via the Tenth Amendment, in contractual pettifoggery, with no overarching “Legal Authority”; the very absence of authority** that allowed Friedman to elevate “shareholder supremacy” to his pantheon.
Finally, allow me to attempt, once again, to assert that I do not endorse “AI”. Even though the NSA ca 1989 offered to fund my entire laboratory and all my grad students if I would work with them at the nascent intersection of AI and neural networks, I declined because the enterprise was (a) idiotic, and (b) given the actors, likely immoral. I did not anticipate protein folding nor Dartmouth v Woodward, so now I qualify (a) a tiny bit, but I am now certain in my assessment of (b).
* probably not the exact words of my query.
** although Marshall did clarify that ‘shareholders have no duties’, so, by extension, Dartmouth might even be considered the legal basis for Yves’ refrain that “equity is a residual claim”.
I am sorry but I must and will continue to come down hard on ANYONE who tried to dignify the idea that companies are permitted to serve shareholder interests over those of other claimants. You may understand Supreme Court cases very well but it appears you do not understand the corporate creditor/claimant issues well enough to conceptualize the matter properly. So not only did you consult AI on a legal matter, where previous queries to AI on legal rights with respect to investment matters have been garbage, but you didn’t frame the query properly. This is not about the rights of the entity v. the state, which is what Dartmouth is about. This is about the rights of the various claimants, such as lenders, tax authorities, landlords, regulators, employees, and yes shareholders, v.each other the corporation. So Dartmouth, while it may be important, is not germane.
You did not and are still not asking the right question. So to put it bluntly, your line of inquiry is garbage in, garbage out.
Thanks Yves.
I was just going to point out that “the Crown” seemed a bit odd. We use it here as we have a monarch but in the USA?
It’s more like a long-standing fashion trend like most modern economics is these days. Not so much a doctrine as a magical belief that does not even have a nodding acquaintance with economic reality.
“I can’t imagine the neoliberals being willing to pay workers more to attract talent.”
See:
Ben Norton
@BenjaminNorton
Argentina’s far-right libertarian President Javier Milei is trying to push through anti-worker labor reform that will increase the work day to 12 hours, with no overtime.
It will also allow companies to pay workers partially with tickets (not real money) that can only be used at supermarkets or specific designated businesses.
The anti-worker reform is euphemistically called the “Law on Promotion of Investment and Employment”.
Is he trying to bring back company stores? Is there a bit or moralizing going on here in that he wants those workers to use those tickets to spend only at ‘supermarkets or specific designated businesses’ and does not maybe want them to spend it on drinking and gambling? Can those workers pay their taxes and their utility bills with those tickets if too much of their pay is in those tickets? Will there be a black market in the sale of those tickets? I don’t suppose that those workers have ever heard of work-to-rule but Milei is idiot enough to try to bring in digital currency so that he can totally control what people spend their money on.
Bringing back the company store model, that’s progress, lol. What’s next, a proliferation of “chain-gangs”? Back to the future we go.
Sharecropper on a plantation kind of shit.
The 12 hour day sounds great, especially if it’s combined with a 6-day week! /sarc
Experimentation starting back in Germany in the 1880’s, in the UK during WWI, and going on from there show no increase in productivity over a 5-day, 40 hour week in manufacturing industries.
My suspicion is that in some knowledge based activities and industries a 40 hour work-week is excessive if the worker is actually working, nose to the grindstone for those 40 hours.
Yeah, nothing drives home how bad things have gotten like helping make the sausage. I had a very similar trajectory (worked a few years in a certain industry before making a career switch), and man-oh-man, do I have some stories. Let’s just say I won’t be surprised if my grandchildren never see a civilian aircraft that isn’t built by COMAC.
Regarding rare earth minerals, good observations. Before we quit trading with China, I would hope someone thinks ahead further than lunch. So, investing in a capital intensive commodity business? What could go wrong? Everything, so only the scent of windfall profits would get it done.
It might seem impossible, but in fact, the US has done exactly that over the last 15 years. Invested trillions building out a capital intensive commodity industry. Namely tight oil or fracking or what you want to call it. They did it dreaming of $150bbl oil. The reason we don’t have $150 bbl oil is because they increased US domestic production by 4,000,000 bbl/day. 20 years ago, the web site, “The Oil Barrel” was a dystopian website about the inevitability of crushing oil shortages. Now, of course, oil abundance is a curse and not the preferred solution.
I would hope that before totally demonizing China we think about the pain we would be bringing on ourselves.
since 1976, and it was really supercharged from 1993 0nwards, we have been throwing money and power at the wealthy and markets, waiting for that elusive market miracle to kick in, it just won’t for some unknown reason beyond the comprehension abilities of the towering intellectual mental midgets running the west.
that elusive market miracle never appeared, not because it was pure idiocy, but because we never learned how to code.
next step is punishment, greece has done it, 12 hour workday means even less jobs, less consumption, now argentina is doing a pinochet redo.
next stop with the rest of the west, a pinochet redo with a police state, prison labor, forced labor, the gutting of the bill of rights, they need that to keep the pipeline going, and the elusive market miracle will come in with a bang.
they might even get some old rickety machinery going in some factory with no windows left churning something out, who knows what it will be, with no innovation left, no productivity and hardly any consumption, it will be viewed as a market miracle.
GDP will have gone up, never mind it almost all goes to a few, and the towering intellectual midgets will tell russia and china, better go back to the rules based order, or else.
meanwhile china and their over production so called problem, was really a scenario caused by the market miracle towering intellectual midgets in the west.
and the forced protectionism on russia, will bear the same fruit. societies with citizens growing taller, living longer, with the ability to service their debts, save, consume, and vacation with high innovation and productivity churning out technology that will make them masters of the world.
only thing left after that for the towering intellectual mental midgets, is to pray to ayn rand, milton freidman, and hayek for guidance, that will mean the bomb.
The Dangers of Victory. from Pearls and Irritations.
To quote:
‘[A]s the diplomatic and military historian Gabriel Kolko wrote, all vainglorious and limitless ambitions to rule the world are doomed to failure, regardless of the state. Those who seek to control or determine the destiny of humanity are in for surprises and disappointment.’
The Oracle at Delphi wasn’t extinguished.
I also like the “quote attributed to Norman Finkelstein after Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan suggests, ‘if you ever feel useless, remember it took 20 years, trillions of dollars and 4 US Presidents to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.’ The West’s overwhelming military superiority in Afghanistan was no match for the Taliban’s superior political organization.”
I have heard conservatives holding forth on “Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan” as if it could have, somehow, been done with better end results.
In my view, I was encouraged that Biden did something wise by exiting Afghanistan.
Then I watched him pivot to Ukraine.
If a foreign country spends 20 years “nation building” and the result of the effort collapses in short order, one should question if the effort was effective in any way.
None other than George W. Bush said “we don’t do nation building” and Joe Biden proved his point.
The Iraq/Afghanistan effort estimated cost is around 8.8 trillion USD, about $26000 per USA citizen.
If we assume a percentage of Americans, maybe 10%, financially benefited from this expenditure, the cost of Iraq/Afghanistan would be around $30000 per person for those USA citizens who did not benefit.
And a lot of foreign citizens lost their lives, were permanently injured and had their property destroyed.
There are no wise men or women in USA leadership positions.
I have heard conservatives holding forth on “Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan” as if it could have, somehow, been done with better end results.
I suspect it could have been done with a bit better results but I really do not blame the Biden régime. As I think I have said here before, the Pentagon, back in Trump’s time, had been told to prepare for a withdrawal and neotiations with the Taliban were going on in Qatar. The Pentagon appears to have completely discounted any possibility of a withdrawal; well it still had troops in Syria.
I suppose one could blame the Biden people for being so naive that they thought the Pentagon was minimally competent.
Yes, but only “failure” if by that you mean perpetual.
Vainglorious and limitless ambitions are but motives that have always driven men. At times in history they had their moment in the sun even eventually if their hubris and greed makes them meet their nemesis and demise.
“Critical and opportune: Time to take the Houthis out of the equation”
I think that the Jewish News Syndicate are tripping balls here with this article. Yemen is at the extreme range of Israeli operational ability which is why they have been getting the US and the UK to bomb Yemen for them. And when the Israelis do bomb, it is the usual terror tactics that they use and not military ones. If they think that they can eliminate the Yemen threat which would cause Saudi Arabia to go into a pact with Israel, that is just delusional. The Saudis, along with the Collective West, spent years fighting them until they realized that it was hopeless and so made peace with them. And for four of those years Trump was President so made no difference. So what makes Israel think that they can take them out from more than 1,500 miles away? Are they already drawing up a list of Yemen hospitals, errr, Ansar Allah command posts? And noting the location of Ansar Allah barracks, otherwise known as apartment buildings? Hubris thy name is Israel.
My worry would be that the major Western powers have for all intents and purposes greenlighted genocide in Gaza, so what’s to stop them doing the same in Yemen ? The counterargument is that Saudi Arabia already tried a bombing campaign and blockade without success but, let’s face it, that campaign will pale in comparison to what the Israelis would be prepared to do if they were given a free hand and US cooperation in aerial refueling and munition replenishment.
Let’s not forget that Osama bin Laden was a Yemeni. There’s more where he came from.
Wikipedia says that he was born in Saudi Arabia
The bin Laden clan is of Yemeni origin. The founder of the construction conglomerate (OBL’s grandfather, I think) was born in what is now Yemen.
He was. IIRC, his father or grandfather was from Yemen and was a close friend and supporter of Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud.
in total agreement regarding the Western powers adding Yemen to the genocide, OnceWere. One significant reason holding it back could be the Houthi drone and missile capability. I recall a drone attack a couple years back that took down a Saudi processing facility for a period of time. I believe the US claimed the Patriot defense of the facilities was pointed in the wrong direction. Taking Saudi oil facilities off the board in case of escalated Western terror attacks is a real possibility.
They are about 30 mil Yemenis and compared to their culture, Hamas and Hezbollah are just boy scouts. You get your name at birth there in the sound of AK 47 automatic fire… Much hardier and poorer than what a Gazan used to be before Oct 7 (now, of course, they are like kings of the old compared to beleaguered Gazans).
How much it costs to drop a bomb on Yemen? How much is for Yemen to missile Tel Aviv? Or to missile any ship going to Israel?
And doesn’t Yemen already have food security problems?
Exactly. The Saudis, in 2017, announced their intention to blockade Yemen but didn’t in the end have the will to carry that policy to its natural genocidal conclusion in the face of international criticism. Who could doubt now that, given enough Western diplomatic cover, that the Israelis will absolutely have the will to do so ?
In a weird way, while you’re right about how shamelessly far the Israelis and its allies are willing to go, Saudia might actually act as a brake on that. It’s not necessarily out of sympathy either, but I wouldn’t discount the real fear Saudia has of being overrun by the Yemenis if pressure for a mass migration builds.
That isn’t just a pie-in-the-sky possibility either. I think it’s something that doesn’t have as much recognition in the West, largely because people associate Arabs so strongly with Islam, but many of the tribal aspects of Arab society trace back to earlier migrations. The general trend has always been for the toughest tribes in the South to start a cascade of migrations northward, and I expect the Saudi government is very aware of that.
Yemen will likely acquire a few of those mobile Oreshnik’s soon enough. Israeli leaders will soon experience the fate of Hassan Nasrallah.
‘A true miracle’: 7-year-old boy survives 5 days in lion-infested game park in Zimbabwe – USA Today
The wierd part: The boy sounds like he had too much sense to get lost by casually wandering off into a place warned about.
The key bit was where it said ‘A search for the boy was hindered by heavy rainfall that obscured many of his footprints.’ What’s the bet that those heavy rains were hiding his scent from the local predators and made him difficult to locate by them. wherever he went, those heavy rains would wash away his scent.
Probably so. But from the survival skills described, he may have known that too.
Have lions in game parks become wary of human scent? A quick search says “most lions will flee” in response to human scent. (This is not, however, an hypothesis I’d be willing to test personally.)
> Emotional infiltration Internal exile
>> The user is meant to be liberated from having aims and experience only fulfillment after fulfillment, as though the feeling of fulfillment didn’t require any preceding experience of lack. Perhaps this is fulfillingness’ first finale.
I’m sure we’re supposed to rip apart the propoganda of Jewish News Syndicate. Rather like shooting fish in that there barrel.
I’m sure that’s the reason NC threw this at its readers. Those who oppose Trump oppose Netanyahu. Surely NC opposes Trump?
To be clear, I’m not sure it’s necessary to repeat Israeli hasbara here, is it? Do we really need to debate propoganda’s value in this context? If so, allow me to observe that this article equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism; which is the foundation upon which true genocidaires build their testament to history.
Thanks for the shrug.
No, “opposing Trump” is what Democrats do. Lotta noise and ineffective schemes with an eye to fundraising and the appearance of Doing Something.
> No, “opposing Trump” is what Democrats do.
Your response is what I meant by “the shrug”.
I notice you can’t reply to the ethical basis of my crtiticism, only the bait at the end of the hook.
I’m certaionly not naive about this site’s ontos, its symbolic presentation as “fearless”. It’s nice the reality in such detailed resolution. I don’t visit NC for news, I visit for opinions, so I’m happy to see my editorial judgement of NC endorsed by your reply.
Your framing that we should take political action is bogus. We explicitly say this site engages in commentary and its mission is promote critical thinking.
Pray tell, when have YOU risked your business to buck mainstream views? People like you regularly press others to take risks they would never engage in. But here “fighting Trump” is entirely mainstream and might even get me invited again to the right cocktail parties. But you bizarrely depict lemming-like PMC herd following as brave.
After what the Democrats did to Sanders, who polled consistently better than Trump (and Clinton and Biden), I have little tolerance for those who sit in judgement of us for rejecting lame Team Dem messaging and try to frame them as occupying a moral high ground. After the Biden support of genocide? After Team Biden participating in the breakup of the Istanbul peace talks, which would have ended the Russian incursion into Ukraine and left Ukraine whole? We are up to a million+ Ukrainians dead and wounded and perhaps 400,000 Russians dead and wounded, and out-migration to the degree that if Ukraine survives, it will be a massive failed state.
And how much fundraising have the Democrats done on unserious positions when they were only marginally better than the Rs? The multi-decade failure to protect abortion rights? The hand waving about climate change as Obama was all in for fracking, which had now been revealed to be as bad as coal in terms of climate impacts?
I trust you will find your happiness on the Internet, elsewhere.
It’s important to know and understand what Israeli and Zionist propaganda is saying and doing, what people believe, are being induced to believe, why and how, and especially considering Zionist propaganda is a key reason for the current ongoing genocide. Here we see the Zionists expressing intent or desire to genocide the Houthis. I would say that’s important to know and be aware of.
Just as its important to understand and be aware of propaganda anywhere. So I appreciate it’s inclusion here.
Of course you do. Such sardonic reading is whay there’s no change in the tactic of Genocide.
From the other side of the planet, Trump doesn’t look a lot different from Biden – two actors following the same script. There may some differences in performance, but the aims and outcomes won’t change much. As George Galloway once put it: “Two cheeks of the same arse.”
Not entirely. There are some variations, but largely it is mostly just like a change of icing on the cake. Or more accurately some of our oligarchs make out better with one cheek, while others are favored by the other cheek.
The rest of us just hope the infighting between factions slow down the assault on us.
US Prepares New War, MSM: Biden Admin Debates Iran Strike; Russia Takes Ukraine Lithium – Alexander Mercouris (video). “Discusses the possibility that the US will strike will Iran before it signs strategic partnership with Russia.”
I’m prepared to take the heat, but I have to ask: Over time, I wonder if Iran’s strategic partnership with Russia will work out better than the one Russia had with Syria?
I think it’s a very different form of partnership, not least because Russia and Iran have significant areas of dispute, in particular over Armenia and access to the Caspian. In historical terms, the Persians have always seen themselves as the dominant regional power, with Russia as the expansionist power to the north that needed keeping a close eye on. Plus of course they are both competing for oil and gas markets. So any alliance is very much one of convenience and having mutual enemies.
The dynamics of these alliances always look very different depending on which capital city you happen to be living in. Russia would not want Iran to fall into chaos or have some sort of imposed pro-Western leadership. But I doubt they’d lose too much sleep over it either, it is not a direct threat. I doubt either if Iran would care either way if Russia were to weaken and suffer defeat, there would be a range of impacts, not all either positive or negative. In the short term, it would be a tactical loss, but not a strategic one.
Iran always has to balance its wider interests with all its neighbours and near neighbours, and they are a spectacularly diverse (and generally warlike) bunch. It’s a huge mistake to think that Iran is obsessed with the US and Israel and so somehow has to cosy up to Russia and China (its only when viewed from Europe and the US that this seems to be the case). It is just as concerned with goings on in the Gulf States, KSA, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the broad swathe of countries from Iraq around to Turkmenistan, not to mention domestic border issues such as with the Kurds or Baltistanis.
“It is just as concerned with goings on in the Gulf States, KSA, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the broad swathe of countries from Iraq around to Turkmenistan, not to mention domestic border issues such as with the Kurds or Baltistanis.”
But so are the USA and Israel. Well, the USA is a busy body with sticky fingers reaching into everything…
Certainly the Saudi’s, other Gulf Arabs, Iraqs, Azerbaijani, Pakistanis and Afghans have done a pretty good job in recent years in either driving out, buying out, ignoring, or manipulating the US for their own ends.
Iran/Persia has been dealing with its neighbours for long before the US or Israel existed. They know full well this is just a tactical blip in the great long game of Central Asian geopolitics.
This is a puzzling comment to me. Certainly Iran has to deal with its neighbors, and with its own internal complexities. And I don’t disagree with your original comment about the possible ambiguities in the Iran-Russia relationship. But US/Israel as a “tactical blip”? Are you kidding?? Iran has long been a major target of US neocon and Israeli strategy for reshaping the Middle East. So far this strategy has been very successful in destroying intransigent governments and manipulating pre-existing sectarian conflicts to keep these failed states balkanized. Do you interpret contemporary Iraq as an example of “driving the US out”? Quite the contrary. It is now a failed and fragmented state: mission accomplished! As is Lebanon. As is Syria. Next target: Iran. The Iranians would be fools not to be focused on this threat. As far as the Gulf states go, their military and intelligence capabilities are completely intertwined with those of the US. Of course *all* parties are using each other and try to manipulate one another for their own perceived interests. This goes for Turkey, Azerbaijan (as Conor’s post today nicely illustrates), and all the various ethnic and paramilitary factions in the region. The US has stumbled and experienced all kinds of blowback numerous times. But as with our actions in Ukraine, there is a strategic advantage if your interests can be served by maintaining division, fragmentation, and conflict without requiring “conquest.”
I don’t doubt Iran’s concerns with its internal divisions or regional neighbors at all. But I can almost guarantee that the current Iranian government does not view US/Israeli interests as a mere “blip” in this mess.
Does the historical pattern of geopolitcal power-balancing still apply in this modern world where every evidence suggests countries of strategic interest have only two options : submit to US diktat or resist never-ending regime change attempts ? The traditional Iranian strategic interest might be to work against Russia’s total dominance of the Caspian, but if both the Iranians and the Russians come to the conclusion that there is no accommodation that the US will accept short of total submission then I’d argue the relationship could easily solidify into something much more than mutual convenience.
I don’t believe that’s the way anyone in the Middle East sees it at all. From their perspective, the US is a very distant, if very rich and very unpredictable actor in the region. Of course the US blunders around, but has in reality not changed things much – the only country that comes even remotely close to the definition of a vassal is Jordan. The traditional tribal groups still dominate the Gulf, and the US conspicuously failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has little to no influence in Pakistan.
People need to rid themselves of the notion that everything that happens in those regions stems from the US and its relationship to China and Russia. I doubt they actually devote that much time to thinking about the US. They’ve been scheming and warring against each other for millennia, and are always happy to pull the US or Russia or France into a quarrel when it suits them. Only for brief periods, such as when the European powers briefly held sway when the Ottoman Empire waned, did that overall dynamic change. There is no reason to think the next decade, or century will be any different.
“US is a very distant”
For the past 20+ years the US has not been very distant but actually extremely close to Iran. I bet CIA had set up many listening bases both in Iraq and Afghanistan (never mind Turkyie), just accros the border with Iran…
“…Of course the US blunders around, but has in reality not changed things much…”
“People need to rid themselves of the notion that everything that happens in those regions stems from the US and its relationship to China and Russia. I doubt they actually devote that much time to thinking about the US. They’ve been scheming and warring against each other for millennia…”
I won’t repeat my own comment above, but I am frankly stunned by this comment. Not only does it minimize the role of the US and Israel in contributing to the recent chaos in the Middle East, but it falls back on the old “the barbarians have been doing this for millennia” trope! And once again, the US did not “fail” in Iraq; we accomplished our goal, which indeed was a return to the good old days of the “tribes” “scheming and warring against each other.” This did require destroying modern secular states in the process, but hey…
I don’t believe that’s the way anyone in the Middle East sees it at all. From their perspective, the US is a very distant, if very rich and very unpredictable actor in the region.
I find that rather difficult to believe. Saudi Arabia has been something of a US protectorate since just after WWII. I am sure many older people in the region remember the USA strongly supporting Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War followed by the Gulf War to retake Kuwait and then the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.
A lot of people were there, and may even have lost relatives in those conflicts. I am sure that most Iraqis do not regard the USA as distant. They have not been able to get US troops out of their country.
I’d not be surprised if they remember the Somalia fiasco: Lots of Somali work or worked in the Gulf States and the USA still seems to be bombing people there.
Bahrain is unlikely to regard the USA as distant since Manama is the home port of the US Fifth Fleet.
And every person in West Asia and the rest of the Arab world knows that the USA is the main supporter of the Palestinian genocide.
In many countries of the region you cannot go for a walk without tripping over a Yankee.
Maybe, but if Iran wouldn’t be sanctioned by the US (partly prodded by Israel), the resources that Iran could marshall against any threat from neighbours would in the end keep it more relaxed. As well as straightening its economy and providing relief to its population.
if iran lost, and was occupied or had a western controlled government forced onto them, than access to the caspian with western warships patrolling almost the whole caspian, would be a disaster.
the landlocked stans would no longer need to use russia’s volga canal to have access to the oceans, they would just run a rail line to a iranian port with not only the blessings of the free traders, they will build it for them.
even losing one country around, or in the caspian basin would be a disaster for russia and the west knows it.
I saw that article and it begs for a paraphrase of an old joke:
So, sure, let’s throw Iran and Taiwan on the BBQ. Let’s get crazy. Who cares about the needs of citizens? I look forward to the nuclear tan we’ll all see now that our foreign policy has been successfully Trump proofed. God save the NeoCons and all that rot…
Germans have a word for that, Zumwalt.
Almost everything he’s saying re China’s navy could easily be said re the US or UK navies.
I especially liked: “… the U.S. Navy and its QUAD allies like the Indian Navy have amassed decades of operational experience, from combating piracy off the Horn of Africa to high-stakes missions in contested waters….” — This is an absurd statement. The US navy is struggling to handle the Houthis, and even the USN itself admits that its current activities in the Red Sea are the most intense action it’s seen since 1945.
My sense is that this is an Indian analyst who really dislikes China. And oddly enough, I needed to use a VPN to access this site from Russia. BRICS solidarity has its limits.
“My sense is that this is an Indian analyst who really dislikes China…”
Here we find that the Chinese who are floating about space, who have been to the dark side of the Moon, the Chinese who are by far the world’s largest shipbuilders, the largest robot-makers, have mastered stealth materials, have mastered electronic catapults and mastered advanced ship and aircraft engines, the Chinese who make and mass produce what they are here using domestically, these Chinese we find are incapable of sailing.
The passage you refer to continues with:
“Combat in modern maritime warfare demands quick decision-making, flexible tactics, and the ability to adapt under fire.”
The only Western navy with that operational experience under modern combat conditions requiring quick reaction and adaptation of tactics was the British navy during the Falklands war: fighting off the Argentinian surface fleet (including an all big-gun cruiser and an aircraft carrier — although the last one carefully remained far from the battlefield), submarine fleet, and airforce (and its many missiles), while carrying out landings under fire.
That was 43 years ago, and therefore none of the men involved are in active duty any longer. Hence this whole experience is no longer experience, but history. It might have found its way in field manuals and the like, but there is not a single veteran on a British ship who, when the time comes, will instinctively recognize a particular situation he experienced in the past and react appropriately without hesitation.
The navy of the USA has no such experience (i.e. did absolutely nothing comparable in the last 40 — at most — years), and comparable history dates back to 1945 (whose lessons, under radically different technical, logistical, and strategic conditions are by now largely obsolete).
And regarding this:
“While the PLAN boasts over 234 warships, many vessels suffer from design flaws, reliability issues, and rushed production schedules.”
Design flaws? See the two LCS, the Zumwalt destroyer. Reliability issues? See the Ford aircraft carrier, the Virginia class submarines. Rushed production schedules? None, that we must admit. On the contrary. Just look at what is happening with the new Constellation frigate.
“The only Western navy with that operational experience…”
Interesting and helpful example of what naval capability and experience can mean.
Russians talked the same way about the Japanes navy in 1900…
US Navy studies Alfred Thayer Mahan, as did the Japanese (before Tsushima) up to and including WW II.
US still studies Mahan, and continues to war game Operation Orange, applying Mahan against China ILO Japan.
If the US Navy can keep from running into merchant ships and keep the runabouts away from the hulls……..
PLAN likely has studied Mahan, Yamamoto, Nimitz, and King……….
Would the PLAN stop at the Marianas or grab the Marshalls and how would US come back?
I wonder if the author reads Mahan?
re: Whitney Webb twt.
Thanks for the link. Catherine Austin Fitts remarked on a recent Usawatchdog show that she thinks T has assembled the largest group of private sector billionaires ever for a pres cabinet. Her comment: this is the perfect setup for plunder capitalism. Plunder of the public purse.
Although, the Dems have been doing a good job of plundering the public purse. One example from Jimmy Dore Show, utube, ~34+ minutes.
BILLIONS To Fix Homelessness – Where Did It All Go??? w/ Keith McHenry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPmCVi-Y0V4
It’s PPP from the covid era, on steroids?
Plundering Privateer Politicians!
Montana is loaded with ’em- per capita, it would make even Musk blush… Gianforte, Daines, Zinke, Sheehy
Presidential medal of freedom…to Bono, seriously? And come on of course giving an award of such high distinction to esteemed donor George Soros…why wouldn’t you after all? \sarc
Just a bit further to add, this very recent election set the precedence of having Dick Cheney and daughter Liz Cheney endorsing the Democratic candidate for US President. So this is dogs and cats getting along, or lions with lambs…After the spate of pardons or commutations handed out during December, I’ll add my favored quote from Fight Club.
“I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise…”
Had the same reaction that you did. Bono? Soros? Really? I saw Hillary got one of them too but at least old Joe resisted the temptation to sniff her hair will putting that medal on.
Wouldn’t Joe be more likely to sniff the hair of one of Hillary’s grandchildren? She’s quite a bit older than his usual target.
They’re not even hiding their duplicity and corruption. They’re laughing at us. And we take it and take it. Stockholm syndrome cubed.
Just saw an image of Biden giving Soros his medal-
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1875722946570023123
“an award of such high distinction.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-medal-of-freedom-medal-of-honor/
They cheapen and ruin everything. Filth. Only capable of turning gold to dross.
What an offense to the medal of Freedom – which one did Trump hand out to Rush?
Anyway, F-ing genocide supporting, sales front man and (junk)arms merchant to the world.. handing out medal of freedom awards to his supporting cast….Instead, they should be receiving warrants from The Hague.
Grifters wanna be grand grifters wallowing in the crime grime- suppose Trump wants to be the bigliest of em all – he’s so jealous – although he got chops already
Something said in the 1920’s
“He isn’t really a big time crook unless you must let him alone to prevent the loss of public confidence.”
Gosh, they all are just trying to prevent the loss of public confidence and, why not?- it’s so important to them….more than serving the public interest, they are protecting their projected image.
Makes me sick to think about how damaging these stooges are to human progress – guess they want to
I could not find an entry for Rush Limbaugh on this posting below, but all I can humbly add to the discussion is that these awards seem rather odd and uneven in just who is being honored. I don’t mind so much the great athlete being an occasional recipient…But will concede it’s a low bar that we’re ( the collective we ) attempting to hurdle. Curious to see that a few non Americans chime in with their thoughts above as well…
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/medaloffreedom/
The UK’s Strategic Shift: Entering External Association with the United States
Does this mean the UK will stop being a vassal and become a colony? Is it the whole UK, or just England? Isn’t the US going to take over Canada, make its provinces counties of the 51st state–along with Greenland? What’ll that do to the Stars and Stripes with an odd number of stars? Now, that’s altogether too hard!
In order to avoid Stars and Stripes conundrum, US will annex countries only in batches of appropriate size. Trump has already tasked Musk with creating dedicated AI datacenter required to figure the math. Must replied: “I need a nuclear reaction to generate 1.21 jigawatts of electricity.”
The US flag had 49 stars from 01/03/1959 when Alaska became a state, until 08/21/1959 when Hawaii became a state. An Ohio high school student Bob Heft submitted the design for the 50-state flag. Designs for a 51-star flag have been proposed in discussions about statehood for DC or Puerto Rico.
https://www.fox6now.com/news/us-flag-history-rejected-designs-americas-50-star-flag
https://storycorps.org/stories/bob-heft/
Sounds like leave-work-early day to me.
POETS day – “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
‘eric ゑリｯ久
@shinobu_books
Jan 3
Uh…McDonalds Japan just posted an ad in Jindaimoji神代文字
For those of you playing at home this is a script made up in the 18th century in an attempt to prove ancient Japanese had a writing form before they adopted Chinese.’
This must have been the script they used to rule China with when they were exporting all their Japanese culture to the Chinese barbarians. Come to think of it, the Germans were trying to encourage the use of their own script back in the early 20th century which they called Sütterlin script. But at least they never made any extravagant claims about it-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
Much as I loath McD’s, they are very good sometimes at subtle marketing. Someone in their office used an obscure interest in old scripts to get a bit of social media presence. No doubt they hired a raft of consultants to make sure they hadn’t written something rude.
But Eric’s point about its origin is somewhat peculiar – the Japanese never had an issue with using Chinese characters or a need to invent a hypothetical alternative, as they already had one. If they really didn’t like Chinese characters, they would have moved over to Hiragana/katagana, which is a Japanese syllabic dating back to around the 8th Century AD. It was the cultural prestige attached to kanji which resulted in the bizarre mix of multiple writing systems found in modern Japanese.
The Koreans and Vietnamese sensibly ditched Chinese characters as soon as they found a good phonetic alternative, much, no doubt, to the relief of generations of Korean and Vietnamese school kids.
For Japanese nationalists, who view the Japanese as the master race, the fact that the Japanese had for many years used a script invented by the Chinese was extremely inconvenient. Therefore, it was necessary to create the myth that the ancient Japanese used a script invented by themselves.
If such a tale existed, that has to be extremely fringe even in Japan–i’d never heard of anything like that even from Japanese historians, although I did hear some Korean lunatics claiming something similar about ancient Korea–but they belong to the degree of lunacy on par with aliens building the pyramids and everyone knows it.
The more widely subcribed to national myths are those that chalk up the “founding” of the first semi-mythical Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese states to suspiciously early dates, on par with Xia Dynasty of China, itself semi-legendary/semi-mythical. But no one “really” takes them all that seriously (I would liken them to a lot of Creationists in US–I can tell you with certainty that while Creationists may “believe” in their stories, most of them won’t put their lives on it, or even their exam scores. “Believe” is a social, not “factual” thing.)
I’m not sure there was such a thing as a ‘Japanese nationalist’ in the 18th Century when the jindai mojo script was (allegedly) developed, at least not in the way we think of it.
If anything, it was the exalted place kanji (and by extension, Chinese scholarship) had in Japanese culture that prevented kana from replacing it, as hangul did in Korea. Kana would have been known to have been very ancient, even in the 18th century (when various kana written novels such as the Pillow Book were widely read), so if they had an issue with it, they could have just pretended kana was older.
From the little I know of the issue, my understanding is that scholars largely think it was invented/forged to back up some obscure internal arguments between shinto factions about who had the most ancient lineage.
Whether they count as “nationalists” or not is debatable, but the kokugaku authors, some of whom were prominent in 18th century, did believe that the Japanese were an exceptional people whose healthy and honest ancient traditions were sadly effaced by an artificial and phony Chinese civilisation. I’ve never heard of jindai mojo before, but it seems to fit well into their tradition of anti-Chinese criticism and searching for “more natural” pre-Chinese Japanese cultural elements.
Interesting – obviously the Japanese of the Edo and before and after were not exactly famous for their respect for other cultures, but my understanding was that, at least within the higher scholarly levels, a sort of exemption given for specific aspects of Chinese culture, in particular those aspects that could enhance the prestige of those who controlled it (and of course in that time, only a scholarly elite could read).
I came across references to jindai moji some years ago – I have a weak spot for obscure scripts. I’ve always been fascinated by the stubborn refusal of the Japanese to abandon kanji for the perfectly functional hiragana and katakana. The explanation I’ve always been told was the belief that the limited range of phonemes in Japanese meant that something ‘extra’ was required to distinguish all the similar sounding words in Japanese, but this never made much sense to me. All they needed was a few strokes or dots to indicate pitch (e.g the difference between ‘hana’ as ‘nose’ or ‘flower’, and hiragana would do a perfectly good job of covering the entire language. This is pretty much what the Vietnamese did with Roman lettering to make it suitable for a tonal language.
The reason I’m sceptical about the ‘racism’ explanation for jindai moji is that if someone felt the need to claim that the Japanese had writing before importing kanji, all they had to do was claim that kana was older. Since hiragana dates back to at least the 8th Century AD, that’s not a particular stretch, particularly as nearly all early literature in Japan was in hiragana, not kanji.
A few years ago I did try to find out more about jindai moji, but there seems to be very little written about it. Since some prominent scholar proclaimed it to be a forgery back in the 1950’s, it seems to have been largely forgotten and fallen out of favour as a subject for serious research. I’m not even sure that it has been definitively proven to have been forged – various forms of writing have been invented independently in random places over the millennia. The Ogham Script of Ireland, for example, pretty much popped up out of nowhere around the 5th century AD, and then disappeared just as quickly.
Maybe McDonalds has done us a favour by restoring interest in it.
You’re not wrong, reverence for Chinese culture was the mainstream of Edo period Japan, especially as regards intellectuals. However, the same period gave rise to influential minority counter-currents, including kokugaku, which was vehemently anti-Chinese precisely because the majority of intellectuals was extremely Sinophilic (and therefore, in the kokugaku authors’ view, devalued Japan’s native traditions). It was a little like the dynamic that gave rise to the Slavophiles and similar intellectual counter-currents in Russia. It may also have had to do with the fact that literacy increasingly spread beyond a small scholarly elite at that very time. This meant there was more appetite for iconoclasm among less elite writers and readers. Nothing could be more iconoclastic than taking swings at Chinese civilisation. That this undermined the authority of better-established scholars was a welcome bonus.
Fascinating. I did not know about the early history of kokugaku movement at all–although I knew a bit about the Slavophile movement! The ideas, as far as I can gather–there seems to be very little in English on the topic, especially not recent–seem awfully subversive for the Tokugawa period.
Having checked, though, it seems that the debate over the authenticity of jindai moji had raged within kokugaku circles through much of the Edo period. Which is unsurprising, as most kokugaku scholars were keenly interested in the history of Japanese language. If Wikipedia is to be trusted (obviously more digging would be needed to make sure, but it’s a start…), most of them didn’t buy it as real, though Hirata Atsutane (a prominent, but particularly extreme and fanciful member of the movement) eventually accepted it.
I read elsewhere that Motonori Norinaga was content to hold up the superiority of kana as an authentic and less cumbersome Japanese script (in line with your suggestion!), while Kamo no Mabuchi thought writing was itself was the product of the corrupt “Chinese mind”, unnecessary under the conditions of primitive virtue. People who thought like that obviously had no need for an(other) ancient Japanese script. But the idea of an older script had its “nationalist”/”proto-nationalist” appeal to others in that ideological niche. I also saw a mention of Atsutane’s ideological successors suggesting that kana was derived from jindai moji, which suggests a motive for such interest: it’s even better if there is an even older continuous tradition of Japanese writing, perhaps predating Chinese (that is certainly fanciful, but maybe not moreso than some of the other extreme kokugaku claims like the intrinsic superiority of Japanese rice).
And now the debate is back indeed.
Many thanks for those insights, very interesting.
That said, even my Chinese friends think Japanese rice is tastier. .
I had a conversation last week with a female colleague who had been absent from work for two weeks with pneumonia. She said the doctors told her there had been an ‘odd’ rise in pneumonia cases recently in people who would not normally be vulnerable (i.e. healthy non-smokers).
Even if you didn’t ask – it’s the Russians.
Doing what?
I don’t know. But I do know it’s the Russians.
“Mysterious pneumonia cases,” all right. Fear not. I’m certain that the boffins at Porton Down are on the case!
That blasted Bing has switched up the queue of “names” in the reply space.
Maybe the Cyber Oligarchs are trying to reduce the population by stress induced “terminal events.”
In case anyone’s interested, the pseudo ancient Japanese characters in that McDonald’s ad come out to read
しようかつも
さむらいまつく
The first line can be read in different ways but loosely paraphrasing the two lines together would probably be something like “shall we try the Samurai Mac?”
Now for something completely different: Due Dissidence guys name their “Hacks of the Year”. Thomas Friedman takes first place. No surprise. Watch just the first 6+ minutes of their longer video, the 6 minutes devoted to T.Friedman. It’s hilarious.
Calling Out The BIGGEST HACKS of 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUd_x1psCIA
‘Kawsachun News
@KawsachunNews
Jan 2
Honduras will be declared a country free of illiteracy in 2025, thanks to Cuba’s “Yo, sí puedo” program. @XiomaraCastroZ’
And that is how it goes these days. Cuba gives help with a literacy program to Honduras, the US offers to build another military base there.
US Prepares New War, MSM: Biden Admin Debates Iran Strike; Russia Takes Ukraine Lithium Alexander Mercouris (video). Discusses the possibility that the US will strike will Iran before it signs strategic partnership with Russia
Why should US hurry before the the strategic partnership btwn Russia & Iran is signed? Russia has completely normalized consequence free direct attacks upon herself resulting in deaths of her people. Therefore, she certainly is not to be feared regarding US attacks on Iran or any of her allies. What IS to be factored in, is Trump’s innogeration because then Team Biden loses the option of starting a war himself with Iran. Regarding China giving Houthis weapons, that article reads like Western fake news (“diplomatic sources”) who’s purpose is to portray China as an aggressor. On the other hand, China helping Cuba rebuild its electric grid looks real.
I think you’re asking exactly the right question, and from the standpoint of sane people, it answers itself. The actual signing is almost definitely Russia and Iran just doing the pro-forma diplomatic theater; actual actions, especially related to a strategic threat like the US, have already been in motion for years.
Unfortunately though, US policy is largely decided by the elites’ need for things like self-soothing. So from that standpoint, the Biden administration could very well be planning something. It is possible, not that he would admit it, that Trump 2.0 recognizes his Iran policy last time around was a train-wreck and he’s floating a grand bargain. If so, I don’t think any of us here believe the “collective Biden” isn’t petty enough to try sabotaging that.
It’s also possible the thinking in the White House is even more delusional, and that somehow, attacking Iran will cause everyone in Russia and Iran to cynically abort the agreement. It sounds stupid, but that seems to be the logic behind all the terrorist attacks on Russia, that somehow it will make the Russians angry at Putin instead of the actual people launching the attacks. More generally, it vibes with the overall spirit of “resistance is futile” / TINA I’ve realized permeates most American propaganda nowadays. It’s like they’re still trying to make “shock and awe” a thing, only they don’t even have the production budget to scare most people, so they just hope to get a critical mass of people with no backbone freaking out on social media.
Thanks for all the links filed under “Healthcare.”
About ‘Handshake gate’:
Not sure why Europeans are surprised about what happened. It is considered legal and ok to do exactly what was done in Syria also in Europe:
https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/sverige/fel-att-neka-jobb-till-muslimsk-man-som-vagrar-ta-kvinnor-i-hand/
If it is ok to refuse to shake hands in Europe, and the court-case appears to say it is ok, then why is there any expectations that handshakes won’t be refused also outside of Europe?
Hey, I (male) had a Saudi woman in Canada decline to shake my hand. I should have gone to the media.
re: Blinken secret arms shipments 2021
just on David Roth-Lindberg – is DRL aware that the only parties deceived by this so awesome trick (I am soooo impressed, Tony) were no one but the US and EU public? He must be aware that RU knew this. He must know that Blinken knew. He must know that the RUs knew that Blinken knew that the RUs knew.
So again Blinken basically admits lies of the highest order (nah we didn’t provoke cause we do the stuff in secret) but with what purpose? Who is the real target here? DRL. None other. And I bet he doesn’t get it.
Re “How antacid for the ocean could cool the Earth”
In using the ocean to inhale CO2 via alkalinity titration, the generation of potential mineral alkalinity (the antacid) must not in and of itself produce more CO2 (via fossil fuel burning) than will be consumed. For example, to use the weathering and dissolution of silicates (either in terrestrial soils or as sediments introduced to the marine environment) to generate bicarbonate alkalinity requires comminuted materials having sufficiently large specific surface area available for reaction, as the chemical kinetics of these reactions are relatively slow. Powdering silicates is energy intensive: does that process (plus transport, distribution, etc.) produce more CO2 than the net reaction can take up? This, to me, is the key calculation.
That is a great point. It’s like plopping a sugar cube into your coffee vs granulated sugar.
I remember Simon Michaux talking about the energy intensity of processing on some podcast recently. I imagine they expect to accomplish it via nuclear or some other harebrained scheme.
The article also mentions that this would have to be scaled up a crazy amount to actually meaningfully reduce CO2 concentration. Scaling your startup in meatspace is much harder when you can’t rely on AWS to do it for you, lol!
Then there’s methane, which based on my limited understanding of chemistry cannot be absorbed by the oceans in this way, and so requires SAI/SRM techniques anyway.
https://insurancenewsnet.com/innarticle/disability-claims-skyrocket-raising-new-puzzle-alongside-excess-mortality
Disability claims skyrocket, raising new puzzle alongside ‘excess mortality’
Post-pandemic, eh?
There’s a lot of stuff about C19 still coming out. An apparently Dem document maker at the start of this project ,where he tried to find some answers, became neither a Dem nor a Rep by the time he finished the documentary, and has nothing good to say about either party. This from utube, ~1hr, 42+ minutes. Tucker. (I know).
Jenner Furst: Secret Chinese Biotech Programs, and the Documentary That Could Put Dr. Fauci in Jail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCn0OYE1Z8E
I disagree with some stuff. The details on the federal health bureaucracies are interesting.
“Baffling.” “Puzzling.” In other words, ’tis a mystery.
Lambert, you will be sorely missed.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1vcDW
January 4, 2020
Labor Force men and women with a disability, * 2020-2024
* Age 16 to 64
(Indexed to 2020)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=17ENT
January 4, 2020
Labor Force men and women with a disability, * 2010-2024
* Age 16 to 64
(Indexed to 2010)
re: The FBI Account of the Las Vegas Bomber Story Does Not Make Sense – Larry Johnson
I’m thinking the story about Sam Shoemate receiving an email supposedly from someone fleeing for his life and aware he’s being digitally tracked is a bit too convenient. I think most NC readers know if you want to not be digitally tracked you don’t rent – rent – a vehicle, all of them are digitally tracked by the rental agency to begin with, you especially don’t rent the most recognized vehicle in the US ; you don’t use a cell phone or send and read emails, those are all digitally tracked; and you don’t say where you’re headed. The fellow who supposedly sent said emails to a former intelligence officer, Shoemate aka “Shoe”, had to know this. Danny Davis’s video points these things out.
Re: Sam Shoemate. “Sam Shoemate is an intelligence officer and Chief Warrant Officer 2 (US Army, Retired). On December 31st, Sam received an email allegedly from Matthew Livelsberger….”
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/155-sam-shoemate-cybertruck-bomber-matt-livelsbergers/id1492492083
So, Shoemate, aka “Shoe”, is an Intelligence officer. oh kay.
/ ;)
adding: Gaslit Nation indeed
NOte also that Teslas record continuously – there is a visual, telemetry, and sound recording of Ravelsberger’s entire jaunt. I suppose that was part of his design? There should even be a recording of his putative suicide by hand cannon.
The whole thing screams OP!
I seem to remember that in the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, the character “Shoe” is used to manipulate the public into believing a fake war hero is real.
Antidote du Jour – hell of tail. Scrolling down the page it looked like a giant worm from Dune.
Too close to a wide angle lens.
There was one deserving person that Biden gave a Medal to – Jane Goodall.
https://x.com/domdyer70/status/1875659449060487508
If only the Biden Interior Department and USDA had had a scintilla of the awe and respect for animals and nature that Jane Goodall has had. Instead. For example, refer back to the great article you posted on Wolf reintroduction in the links, and the words of Suzanne Asha Stone:
“I wish we would have stopped [reintroduction], given what has happened to Idaho wolves. Idaho is the worst place in the world to be a wolf. We have bounties on even pups in the den. They’re being killed 365 days of the year. They’re using aerial gunning, snaring, trapping”.
The Biden Interior Department US Fish and Wildlife service never uttered a word about the barbaric Wyoming Wolf Torture. Haaland failed to re-list Wolves and sided with the livestock industry in litigation as Wolf persecution reaches ever worse extremes of cruelty. The Biden USFWS listing of Wolverine (only after lawsuits made it inevitable) – is hollow – as it exempts “restoration projects” which is what the Forest Service calls just about every logging project these days. A new Biden Park Service rule fails to protect Bear cubs and Wolf pups from “denning” killing in Alaska. Biden BLM under Stone-Manning has sacrificed vast areas of the Mojave intact and biodiverse Desert Tortoise habitats to industrial solar sprawl Hell – rather than siting projects on degraded areas. Now the new BLM Solar EIS sets the stage for an immense solar industry public land grab harming an immense number of species- relegating 31 million acre of public to a sacrifice allocation. BLM’s new Sage-grouse plan (still to be finalized) is a jumbled mess, worse than the 2015 plans for the declining birds. And I haven’t even mentioned yet the disastrous inaction and cover ups of Biden’s USDA under Ag. lobbyist Tom Vilsack in dealing with Avian Flu that’s now spreading wildly in the wild – killing everything from Snow Geese to Mountain Lions.
Whoever is running the “Biden Administration” are so far down the crapola of evil sinkhole perhaps they are subconsciously sabotaging themselves. Self-hatred is a strange world to inhabit. They project it onto us and call it good. They serve the father of all lies. They are beneath contempt.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/science/chimpanzees-goodall.html
October 24, 2017
Wild and Captive Chimpanzees Share Personality Traits With Humans
By KAREN WEINTRAUB
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jane Goodall started attributing personalities to the chimpanzees she followed in Gombe National Park in what is now Tanzania. In her descriptions, some were more playful or aggressive, affectionate or nurturing.
Many scientists at the time were horrified, she recalled. Considered an amateur — she didn’t yet have her Ph.D. — they contended she was inventing personality traits for animals.
Dr. Goodall, now 83, said in a phone interview on Monday from her home in England that scientists thought “I was guilty of the worst kind of anthropomorphism.”
But time has borne out her insights. Chimpanzees in the wild have personalities similar to those in captivity, and both strongly overlap with traits that are familiar in humans, a new study * published in Scientific Data confirms…
* https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2017146
I don’t see any news about the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, or how many qualified for the generous $700 in relief.
Every where else I look things are coming apart at the seams and those who are “In Charge” have no brakes or reverse gear, they are quite openly calling for more repression and I don’t see any limit to what they will do to keep the rabble in line.
Which will work until it doesn’t, spectacularly.
2025 promises to be very interesting indeed.
Help coming from fellow citizens. twtr.
NEW: About 60 Amish community members from central Pennsylvania build 12 tiny homes in Boone, North Carolina in just two days.
https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1874127277333618911
One of my favorite quotes from Catherine Austin Fitts is “Know your sheriff”.
Remember when Trump had his own hit man? Oh…
On the Run, a Hit Man Gives One Last Confession
(bold mine)
And meanwhile liberals were whining the entire time that Trump was a dangerous fascist or something. And given their performance since Trump’s election, it seems that liberal Democrat elects and consultants are in fact not stupid, but do think liberal Democrat voters are stupid. Fun times!
There was a person that was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom who deserved it more than any other, in my opinion – Fannie Lou Hamer. Her contributions to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s are not as well recognized as they should be. She didn’t have the sweet words and trained oratorical skills of some of the others, but she was a fountain of energy for the cause, and it cost her dearly. She was jailed without cause brutally beaten, resulting in injuries that contributed to her death many years later. She gave a protest speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention that was prevented from being broadcast in prime time by a “scheduled” address to a group of governors by LBJ. She was a leader of the MIssissippi Freedom Democratic Party that challenged the seating of the official MIssissippi delegation at that convention as being non-representative of the total population of the state.
https://mississippitoday.org/2025/01/04/fannie-lou-hamer-receives-presidential-medal-of-freedom/
It took Dixiecrat Joe a long time to get around to awarding this.
It’s too little, too late, Joe, but she did deserve tthe medal.
“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” – F.L. Hamer
https://www.biography.com/activists/fannie-lou-hamer
“The lobby is working overtime” w/ John Mearsheimer
12/17/24 1:29:57
From his email:
From Telesur, on the West Bank:
Documentary on Israeli Occupation Crimes is Up for an Oscar
So with H5N1 on the prowl, it is worth noting that perhaps the day of backyard chickens for eggs, or having a small farm with a milk cow, is quickly becoming an untenable situation. How credibly can individuals protect themselves and their animals? Will it be worth it to have hens or cows going forward? Even ignoring the Pandemic implications, if the useful life of a cow in particular is now much less, if it ends up dead, is this kind of thing even viable anymore? So much for self sufficiency in eggs and milk.
What a dumpster fire letting this get out of control is; although with wild bird spread, we’re screwed anyway; can’t really control that, can you?
Anxiously watching our four hens. These wintry days they only come out of the coop for food and drink. I purposely don’t keep a bird feeder out there.
Since servicemen and women with mental health issues like ptsd and suicidal thoughts are in the news, I’ll just throw this out here. From Joe Rogan podcast #2251, a few days ago. I start the show at the 17 minute mark, watching until around the ~30 minute mark makes the point, imo. Why aren’t more clinical trials being done on this? (rhetorical question.)
Joe Rogan Experience #2251 – Rick Perry & W. Bryan Hubbard
https://youtu.be/pcCKDDa3MzY?t=1074
Here’s a link to the Stanford Medical study from last Jan. 5th, 2024.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/01/ibogaine-ptsd.html
I used to work at an Ibogaine treatment center (for trauma not addiction). Amazing stuff. We ran month-long programs as one needs love, care, and support integrating after taking Ibo.
For me, and many others, very deep complex trauma was healed.
I’m a passionate believer in Ibogaine, yet dubious that a commercial version will have the same benefits. Iboga alone is not a cure; you also need the safe loving support.
Another note: ibogaine is fairly dangerous and people have been known to die after taking it (normally due to heart/liver issues). Don’t take it without thorough research and the support of an expert.
To my knowledge we were the first center doing “Ibo for trauma” back in 2005. At that time the other centers were all for opiate addiction. I’m happy the science is catching up with us spiritual hippies.
Yes. Near the end of the Rogan episode Mr. Hubbard makes the point emphatically, don’t try ibogaine at home. Do not order it off the internet. Don’t make guesses about its use. It must be done in a medically competent setting with doctors who know how to prescribe it, what to watch for, and nurses doing careful monitoring during the treatments and providing patient support.
This is good advice. Even more than medical support, you need practitioners who understand trauma, understand altered states, and can stay grounded in the weird energetic field that arises.
I worry that introducing a corporate profit motive and medicalized model is dangerous. Most centers offering Ibogaine already do not have the level or length of emotional support.
From Monday 12/30 – the news roundup was particularly grim.
Breaking news and analysis on day 451 of Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Flood | The Electronic Intifada Podcast
Washington’s (not so) strong man in Seoul is defying arrest
This is a worthwhile post with lots of historical background.
Following the impeachment vote, citizens standing in the bitter cold in front of the National Assembly to protest Yoon erupted in cheers, chanting for the dissolution of his People Power Party for its overwhelming opposition to the motion.
“My voice was hoarse from chanting slogans, but I couldn’t stop,” said Jinseon Yu, a 32-year-old protester. “We were happy, of course. But the number—96 votes, including objections, abstentions, and invalid ballots—kept haunting me. It made me question, again and again: Who do these representatives actually serve? Why aren’t they afraid of us, the people?”
I have to yet see a modern political themed S Korean TV drama as rich and complex as the steps taken by Yoon to consolidate its power as a dictator of S Korea (basically doing a Zelenskyi but with only a faked attack on S Korea from N Korea and a Romania election cancellation – to boost his party’s minority status in the S Korean parliament).
It’s not his party. He was the right hand man to the “Leftist” president who likely seized power only quasi-legally through lawfare (in fact, he was the chief lawfare guy). He defected just before the election only because he lost the power struggle among the leftists-which makes the fight especially personal, while, at the same time, not many people on the right will be sad tp see him hauled off to jail (in fact, many will rejoice.)
So a total sell out, eh?!
The worst kind of villanious archetype of Korean TV dramas.
I can’t find a single element of his life story that suggests that he ever had any “leftist” political views. He was the Korean equivalent of attorney-general under a bog-standard centre-left neoliberal administration. It’s like arguing that Merrick Garland is a “leftist” based solely on his being appointed by noted “leftist” Joe Biden. That being said, I can see why many on the Korean right might not have any particular personal affection for the man, a party leader who made his career through the public prosecutor’s offices as a nominal independent and only joined the opposition conservative party a few months before he ran for president. It probably takes Donald Trump levels of charisma to really make the party faithful take to a Johnny-come-lately carpet-bagger like that.
“Leftist” in the sense of which side he belonged to. Believe me. You’ll NEVER find an actual leftist or rightist in Korea (North or South.). The two coalitions are pretty much the same policywise and much (most? all?) of the fight is over political one-upmanship and settling grudges–and Yoon has offended a lot of people on both sides (and he also has way less charisma than Keir Stamer and is more arrogant than Jake Sullivan–ie NOBODY likes him, except for the fact that the opposition party’s front man (the one who beat Yoon in their power struggle) is a highly corrupt and reprehensible figure himself.)
Covert Action Magazine
How the Human Rights Industry Manufactures Consent for “Regime Change”
By John Perry
January 2, 2025
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/01/02/how-the-human-rights-industry-manufactures-consent-for-regime-change/