Axolotls have incredible regeneration powers, yet they’re critically endangered Earth.com
World’s Oldest Person Dies in Japan at 116 The Japan News
Carbon in our bodies likely left galaxy and came back on cosmic ‘conveyer belt’ Phys.org
Soaring demand for weight-loss drugs could change food spending Supermarket News
A Great Lakes ‘Pompeii’? Lake Huron’s depths hold secrets of human history Bridge Michigan
Climate/Environment
Vermont Sued for New Law Requiring Big Oil to Pay for Climate Damage Common Dreams
As congestion pricing launches, New Yorkers say they’re eager for better, safer subways Gothamist
Major winter storm bears down on America’s midsection, as millions face snow, ice or heavy rain CNN
History of Snow Rollers: Forgotten Heroes of Winter Travel Morning Ag Clips
Pandemics
Is HMPV another Covid-19-like scare in China? What we know so far Business Standard
Disability claims skyrocket, raising new puzzle alongside ‘excess mortality’ Insurance News (antidlc)
India
Graffiti in ancient Tamil Nadu sites similar to Indus Valley civilization signs: Study The Times of India
China?
China-US ties may improve if Trump goodwill signals ‘manifest in tangible actions’ South China Morning Post. How we like those odds?
China Seeks to Bolster Ports and Aviation Hubs in Western Regions Reuters
China flexes lithium dominance with plans for tech-export curbs Bloomberg
Samsung could become NVIDIA and Qualcomm’s new 2nm chip partner amid price hikes at TSMC gagadget. Commentary:
That’s one interpretation. The other is that Taiwan is going to be gradually returned to China because its strategic value is far less than often claimed due to new types of military technology. 🇺🇸🇹🇼 https://t.co/vQfdiAJ1NJ
— Philip Pilkington (@philippilk) January 5, 2025
O Canada
Trudeau expected to announce exit as party leader before national caucus meeting Wednesday The Globe and Mail
Why be a doormat? Canadian Dimension
Fuelling Genocide: Trudeau’s Bloody Record On Gaza The Maple
If Trudeau resigns, it’s to stop the non-confidence vote, and an interim leader will come in, maybe Freeland, and the Liberals will hold on to power until the election on October 27th, 2025.
About 80 MP’s pensions count on it.
Reminds me of 1993 Kim Campbell when Mulroney left. https://t.co/4bAsVqQP8P
— Jason Lavigne (@JasonLavigneAB) January 6, 2025
“Black Ribbon Day” and “Double Genocide” in Canada (2022) Red Sails. In case you need to get reacquainted with Freehand, as well as what unites liberals and conservatives in Canada.
Dying a “Good” Death: Disability and the Assisted Suicide Debate Disability Visibility Project
Old Blighty
What ‘Say Nothing’ Says About Northern Ireland, Violence and Peace New Lines Magazine
Musk, Starmer and the crisis of British politics Counterfire
European Disunion
Germany defunds 2 Israeli human rights groups Deutsche Welle
US to impose ‘full sanctions’ on Serbia’s oil sector in January: Serbian president Anadolu Agency. Killing what’s left of German auto industry, which has large manufacturing presence in Serbia?
A stray dog is the first to cross the Romanian-Hungarian border after Romania’s official entry into the Schengen Area, December 2024. pic.twitter.com/1Rj1BvWtUx
— Future Adam Curtis B-Roll (@adamcurtisbroll) January 3, 2025
Syraqistan
Suspected al-Qaeda member taken off Turkey’s ‘wanted list’ after appointment as general in Syria Turkish Minute
The dream of a free Middle East is coming true The Telegraph
The Head of the Snake? News Forensics
Iran to Operationalise Russian Su-35 Fighters By Year’s End – Reports Military Watch
Can True Promise III reshape Iran’s geopolitical fate? The Cradle
***
Breaking: Israeli prosecutor says state has no rape cases against Palestinians from 7/10 raid The Skwawkbox. Commentary:
Remember how Israel posted multiple videos of brutalized Palestinian detainees “confessing” to r*pe on 10/7?
And Sheryl Sandberg included those “confessions” in her documentary?
And the White House screened and promoted the “documentary”?
And the New York Times reported they… https://t.co/5sc2bpK3AF
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 5, 2025
Against Guilty History David Frum, The Atlantic. The deck: “Settler-colonial should be a description, not an insult.”
Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza. WaPo
“We’ve all gained from Israel’s experience” Globes. General Sir Nick Carter, former UK Chief of the Defence Staff.
7th October 2023: a splendid LIHOP GeoPolitiQ
Africa
Citizens for hire Geeska
New Not-So-Cold War
SITREP 1/5/25: Ukraine Launches Final Bargaining-Chip Offensive in Kursk Simplicius
French Mirage and Ukrainian Reality Let Me Tell You…
Transcript for Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Ukraine, War, Peace, Putin, Trump, NATO, and Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #456
🚨 LEX FRIDMAN: “Next time you come visit me in Texas, me, you, and Joe Rogan will go get some good Texas barbecue together.”
ZELENSKYY: “Who will pay?” 😂 pic.twitter.com/g8luthXEkN— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) January 5, 2025
B-a-a-a-a-d Banks
Switzerland: Credit Suisse Withholds Information About Nazi Leaders’ Bank Accounts Pluralia
Spook Country
What’s Really Going on With the Matt Livelsberger Saga? Larry Johnson, Sonar21
If a “former” CIA contractor with an inexplicably massive media platform has an “intelligence officer” on his show to scare you to death of Iranian MANPADS shooting American planes out of the sky, you should assume the gov’t is thinking about shooting planes down and blaming Iran https://t.co/XLC8sKx3gX
— Connor Freeman (@FreemansMind96) January 5, 2025
Orleans Parish ADA dies by suicide in DA office WDSU. Sexual Assault Kit Initiative division.
1/6
Biden: Jan. 6 reminds us that democracy ‘is never guaranteed’ The Hill
Pelosi says violence of Jan. 6 Capitol attack ‘didn’t end that day’ The Hill
Trump Transition
With Gaza war and Trump’s return, Silicon Valley embraces a military renaissance +972 Magazine
Total farce. https://t.co/cJXDYkInMn
— ecosocialist musician (@EcosocialistM) January 6, 2025
Democrats en déshabillé
Chuck Schumer blames Democratic losses on “average working families who didn’t realize how much we had done and how much we care for them.” pic.twitter.com/mAI9wijKij
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) January 5, 2025
Antitrust
Monopoly Round-Up: Big Ag vs Make America Healthy Again BIG by Matt Stoller
Imperial Collapse Watch
Collapsing Empire: RIP ‘Overt Operations’ Global Delinquents
***
U.S. Department of Defense Sounds Alarm Bells About China’s Growing Presence in Arctic gCaptain
Here comes Yakutia, Russia’s newest nuclear icebreaker The Barents Observer
U.S. Coast Guard Starts Construction of First New Heavy Icebreaker in 50 Years High North News
Why the U.S. Can’t Build Icebreaking Ships Construction Physics. From September, still germane.
AI
The government can’t ensure artificial intelligence is safe. This man says he can. Politico. The deck: Brian Anderson is ready to shape the future of AI in health care — if Donald Trump will let him.
Got cash for the AI babysitter? Becker’s Hospital Review
Healthcare?
Major Depressive Disorder and Driving Behavior Among Older Adults JAMA Network
ADHD diagnoses are surging among older Americans New York Times
Why a ‘Third Life’ Is the Answer to America’s Loneliness Epidemic Time
Class Warfare
How the H-1B System Undercuts American Workers Compact
Biden signs bill to increase Social Security benefits for millions of public workers CNBC
How Rural Post Offices Sustain Community Barn Raiser
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“Switzerland: Credit Suisse Withholds Information About Nazi Leaders’ Bank Accounts – Pluralia”
They say that a government should never hold an inquiry unless they know exactly what such an inquiry will find out. I think that such may be the case with those old Nazi bank accounts. Prescott Bush, father of President George Bush was trading with the Nazis well into 1942 even though Germany was at war with the US at the time which makes him guilty of treason, not that he was ever charged. I bet his name appears on those Nazi bank accounts but what other names might appear there as well? Do they really want to find out?
Somehow, despite no new mines opened up in the cantons during the war, Switzerland ended up with a whole bunch of all that glitters after WW2, and how to clean it up?
Before 1975 it was legal to own gold coins dated before 1933 from any country in the USA-but nothing dated after 1933, so the Swiss had the Austrian mint strike coins of old designs dated 1908 to 1915 with Franz Josef on them, and off to the USA they went.
No way they could have had Nazi gold for content as they were made way before Adolf was a thing.
See how easy that was…
I did not know that, but of course they did, lol.
Right – The danger of such inquiries is usually not so much the actual point of the question but all the people who will be firmly linked with each other, links that raise other questions.
“What other names” is what we’re not supposed to know.
Windsor some names, loser some names.
From a quick skim of the story this looks like a rerun of the 90s scam that wound up forcing Swiss Banks to pay around a billion dollars in “compensation” to Jewish groups (mostly their lawyers actually) in spite of a years’-long independent investigation that showed that they’d taken all reasonable steps to trace the original owners of the stolen wealth and return it where possible. If you aren’t familiar with Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry, he has a good account of the story. I suspect this is all about diverting attention from Gaza.
Thank you and well said, Aurelien.
I’m also aware from regular secondments to the Swiss Bankers’ Association, 2008 – 12. It wasn’t just the lawyers, but the leading lights in these groups.
Thanks. So, both extortion and diversion while fundraising, for Greater Israel. Heh heh heh, a grifter’s delight.
.
Ah, but a certain Theocratic Movement has a mossad full of frighteners to make sure that those in the know keep schtum.
I knew Maria Altmann personally and I recall that her suit against the Swiss bankers’ billion dollar set aside was the rare exception, where they honored a well-documented claim. Immediately after the war, the Swiss had used bank secrecy to block the same claim, so this was exactly a case of Swiss wrongdoing. Few other families were able to marshal good documentation 50 years after the original beneficiaries lost their lives.
It ought to be acknowledged that the Swiss were hanging onto ill-gotten gains.
Re: Musk, Starmer and the crisis of British politics
We have therefore a first-class political crisis in Britain: the far right waiting in the wings, a catastrophically failing Labour government, and no sign that it can be pushed to the left unless those outside parliament force that to happen
Whither The British Left though?
—-
Musk’s ranting and his algorithm boosted echo chamber has finally got me to deactivate Twitter. As a survivor of extensive abuse as a child, it affects me to see such coarse, insincere and brutal propaganda being churned out. The kids involved are just an expedient football to the insane New Right machine. It makes me very sad and quite angry.
A sidenote: after watching Farage kiss the arses of Trump and Musk for years, a wry smile arose when Musk said Farage “doesn’t have what it takes to be Reform Leader”.
—
Musk and Tommy Robinson are “friends” of Netanyahu. Starmer has done his damnedest to be a good friend and genocide enabler, yet still they try to destabilise him. I wonder why.
—
Long-(or even medium-)term, Musk has got to crash out, right? He’ll go too far and find out he isn’t actually the most powerful force in the world. Can we call him “Idiocracy Icarus”?
Somebody should remind Musk that his title is Mr. Musk and not President Musk. He is demanding that Nigel Farage take in Zionist thug Tommy Robinson into the Reform party. Is he smoking the wacky tobaccy again? Robinson is a front for the ultra hard-core English nationalists and if he and his ilk were allowed into the Reform party would not only take it over but render it unelectable in the next UK elections meaning that voters would be left with a choice between Tories and Labour once more. Maybe Musk should put his wallet where his mouth is and bankroll Robinson himself or maybe he is just trying to do the British establishment a solid by trying to scuttle the Reform party for them.
Or maybe he’s just a reactionary idiot who acts without thinking?
I don’t see any 5d chess here. Just a very rich man with a very loud mouthpiece trying to boost the hard right (see too his AFD endorsement).
Delusions of grandeur or too much ketamine…
Agreed, the man seems to exist in the ether. Sort of a malicious Bertie Wooster type.
The UK is in a kind of permanent state of crisis which has been going on for some time. The Labor and Tory governments we’ve seen are hopelessly corrupt and incompetent beyond anything we see in the USA, for example. But blaming “extremists” or whatever you call them, i.e., those who want the country to be ruled honestly instead of the ridiculous woke ideologies. I’ve heard, for example, that there is a “fifteen minutes” rule that allows homeless, illegal, drug addicted people to be seen at emergency centers before normal citizens who have to wait many hours before being seen is ridiculous on one level on another there is something deeper which I won’t go into.
The point is that whatever the idiocy and corruption of official UK policies is the fact the citizenry is pretty idiotic as George Carlin noticed in his critique of American politics–maybe, he said, something is wrong here other than the politicians–and I agree. Our crisis in the West is cultural more than political. Musk and Farage are NOT the problem they are trying to find a solution that isn’t biz as usual–maybe they can shake up the culture a little so the citizenry can wake up and think even just a little.
Could be a too clever by an order of magnitude play like HRC pushing Trump in 2016, as some way to push it back to one of the two establishment parties.
> Somebody should remind Musk that his title is Mr. Musk and not President Musk.
Susie Wiles, blessed by Trump, shut Musk (and Vivek) when the H1B vitriol got out of control (and the precious pair were getting beaten on the merits).
But Musks gotta talk politics now. He’s got the bug. To the UK it is (and there’s probably some grand immigration-driven winger international front, too, to be fair).
The only person that could convince President Musk that he is not really President is his current head butler Mr. Trump. And Mr. Trump will only do that if he is embarrassed and humiliated beyond tolerance.
And the best way to drive Mr. Trump to that extreme level of reaction is to keep referring to President Musk millions of times, everywhen, everywhere, meme after meme after meme.
Also, for the Democrat officeholders to refuse to negotiate with the Republican officeholders or with head butler Trump unless President Musk is right there in the room. And keep up that refusal until head butler Trump decides to fire DOGE and take his Presidency back.
If Musk can help send Herr Starmer packing, then good for Musk.
Reverse the names and it would be equally valid.
An enemy of my enemy is a friend?
It could just be another enemy.
Putting your faith in billionaires is a short cut to fascism.
Anyone that doesn’t know that is a sad dreamer.
Was thinking that if Musk were a Chinese squillionaire, he’d be cooling his heels incommunicado somewhere. Perhaps a better model of governance?
I doubt he’d be at the head of a so-called Presidential Advisory Comm that appears to be, maybe, nothing more than a lobbying group with a standing appointment and no oversight or regulations whatsoever.
Wasn’t Musk “cooling his heels incommunicado somewhere” where Starmer was hoping to go with a Harris administration ( see here )? Between Musk having the ear of President Trump and Starmer sending British Labor Party personnel to interfere in our elections (see here), I’m not sure Starmer is persona grata with the incoming adminiistration. Not to mention Starmer’s adminstration threating Americans using their free speech in America ( see here). Frankly, an American prosecutor should be charging that police commissioner with threating to obstruct Constitutional Rights under the color (or ‘colour’ if you prefer) of his authority.
The upshot is, Musk is in the right here and Starmer is a scumbag who belongs in prison.
Might be worth mentioning if he were a lone voice in the wilderness. He is not. And his reasons are, as always, entirely self serving BS.
Might as well get on board with Trump because I, too, sometimes enjoy McDonald’s. As do zillions of others.
“Musk is in the right”
definitely. Farage is even too mild for someone as spicy as Musk.
We’ll see the crash of Mr Musk and it will be schadenfreude galore, I’m sure of that. It can’t last.
Starmer’s just a straw man. They needed to flush out the Corbynists and they did their job.
Exactly.
Starmer sucks. Musk would suck even more.
Would it be Tommy Robinson for Home Secretary?
Christ!
What if mischevious trolls in Britain were to start asking millions of times . . . ” Why does Musk want to be King Elon the First of Britain? Why can’t he be satisfied with being President of the United States?”
Make photoshopped meme-images of George Washington with a Musk-face in the center of the facial-region, and put the Royal Crown on top of the image’s head.
Thank you for today’s antidote! Axolotl are just too cute!
Top-10 Antidote du jour and link! Axolotls have been a model in developmental biology for more than 100 years. They are also the cutest animal in existence. They must be saved! The University of Kentucky maintains the Ambystoma Genetic Stock Center, so there is hope. But it would be a lot better to save them in their native habitat.
Axolotls are cute, but they are awfully closely related to this:
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/cannibalistic-morph-barred-tiger-salamander-closeup
In case anyone needs an anti-antidote.
Who’s feeling the love today from Chuck Schumer? Let’s see a show of hands!
Good to see that you are still online. I was thinking of you when I saw reports of the severe winter hitting the US right now. It looks brutal and one cop was sliding down a road on his shoes to demonstrate what the roads were like.
Good morning, and It’s cold here! Doesn’t seem to get in the way of the cats routine, as they are in and out and begging for treats in both directions. Can’t complain, they were hogging the bed and keeping us warm last night. Twelve degrees F on the thermometer outside the door.
Cold & Cats sparks a memory of my lovely (now deceased) tuxedo stray Gumbo.
He first appeared at my door in Cincinnati on Xmas Eve 2022 which was in the midst of a really brutal cold spell. He was skinny as anything, wild-eyed and shivering. I have no idea how he’d survived in the cold, but he was extremely keen to move in with me.
He never lost the part-feral street cat aspect of his personality which I respected and related to.
A great friend and snuggle buddy who I miss greatly.
(Raises coffee) Gumbo. That’s a good cat name.
Full disclosure: My cat-loving neighbour was sure it was a female so he was first called Katalina, until a visit to the vet corrected me.
Heh heh, One of our three, and featured antidote The Dude, turns out Dude is a female, the name stuck, and here we are.
Gorgeous fluffipaws. Love the F-you look.
Happy looking Dude!
I came home from an overseas trip to find my wife and kids had brought in two kittens. I was told that both the ginger and ginger/white tabbys were female.
After settling in from travel and having lived in rural areas with farms and stables, as well as missing the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals campaign to get animals to cover up, I noted that maybe the initial given names may need revising.
SINA: Buck Henry!!!
Thank you, Ben, for taking good care of Gumbo. My little rescue kitty was considered feral at some point and her ear was clipped. She’s about two years old.
Since I got her a couple of months ago, I have been spoiling her like crazy. She deserves spoiling. I think this is her first winter indoors, safe from the elements.
She woke me up at 5am this morning to let me know it was time for breakfast. Since then, she has had pets, wand toy games, more pets and then snacks. Now she is taking a nap in a warm bed, a happy little cat.
Lena, you’re a pro! I imagine your Yelp review is starred.
Thanks, Rev. It’s bad. The snow is still coming down heavily and there is ice. At least the power hasn’t gone out. Everything is closed. No one is supposed to be on the roads except in an emergency. I hope people heed that warning.
I am warm indoors with the cat and a book (heh, an Icelandic mystery entitled “The Darkness Knows”). Friends went grocery shopping for me on Saturday evening before the storm started so I have supplies.
SoCal is on the verge of burning, man.
They’ve received about bupkis in their May to December rain relationship, and 60 to 100 mph winds are coming…
While in our corner of the North Coast mountains we’ve already received 60 inches and counting. From the Bay Area north it’s an even more different state than usual.
For global weirding fans: the abiding truth of California weather patterns, as Mike Davis documented, is that there is no pattern (though we’re gradually getting dryer). That said, the last 3 early winters have been as soggy as the olden days, and then some. For we whose winter happiness is micro-hydro-powered, it’s great. Yet we know every wet winter may be the last, unless or until it isn’t. (And we haven’t had a horrible burn in 3 years.)
Sorry, the best I can raise is one finger for old Chuckie.
This.
Yea, they care. Ask NC (as brought up below), East Palestine, Maui, veterans, homeless, and all of us for that matter. They took away the $30 bucks for internet under the Affordable Connectivity Act which was part of some bill. That was really nice for us retirees on fixed income. But no, we can’t have nice things like that for too long. Because they care….
I don’t know if that clip is from the same interview, but I saw clips of one the other day where Chucky was still saying Biden was always sharp as a tack. I also saw a clip of Pelosi, who sounded about half gassed, telling someone it was Trumps fault her husband got hit in the head with a hammer. We have watched McConnell freeze up how many times?
Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell are only 3, but they are poster children for what is wrong with our politics. All three should be in the retirement pasture even though I would prefer a jail cell.
Throw Mike Johnson in there, and you have your ‘Gang of Four’ … four crooks who belong in a jail cell, not anywhere near the reigns of power.
Without a doubt, and we could add even more. Many more.
Light a vigil candle to Saint Luigi.
It’s unfortunate that both TwitterX and Ytube have disabled the dislike counter, otherwise the “show of hands” would telegraph to the world how the proles loath their overlords. I’m curious who those 3.3K likes are, can there really be that many unlike-minded, people out there?
One thing we here in the North American Deep South learn from the cradle is that you can conjure up a lynch mob at the drop of a tweet. There are always ‘faithful ones’ to do the hard jobs in managing the society. It’s one of the drawbacks of “Diversity.”
Stay safe. Avoid crowded chat rooms. Who knows what brain eating memes you could catch.
Chuck and the Democrats had a great chance to show their warm feelings to average working families when Hurricane Helene hit South Carolina back in September but even with a looming Presidential election they just could not be bothered. They were too busy in DC getting more billions sent to the Ukraine instead. South Carolina? Where’s that?
Helene impacted much more of the country than just South Carolina. Here’s a reminder of what Biden and the Dems ignored:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/01/weather/hurricane-helene-path-of-destruction-climate-dg/index.html
What you say is exactly true. But I think that for many people, South Carolina became the poster child for Democrat neglect, even more so than Florida.
Thanks for the shout out but it was actually North Carolina that got the worst of it victim wise. Here in SC we mostly mourn for our lost trees.
Removal of the remains of these continues and may be over by the end of the month. Many of the fallen oaks in a nearby State Park will never be removed.
This is from a quick search. The first items that popped up were for NC, but there are surely similar situations in other states that are also not due entirely to “Biden and the Dems” ignoring the needs of the public.
(emphasis added)
12/18/2024
“Congress to vote on disaster relief package months after Helene devastated Western NC
After months of waiting, Congress released a bill Tuesday night that offered a glimmer of hope to Western North Carolinians that disaster relief might be coming. House Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled a continuing resolution, intended to keep the government funded through March 14, that includes more than $100 billion in disaster relief funding.
…
If the resolution passes the House and Senate and is signed by the president, it will be the first disaster relief package passed since 2022.”
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article297286739.html
01/01/2025
“Three months after Tropical Storm Helene hit Western North Carolina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has approved $288 million in recovery assistance to more than 142,000 household and individuals, the agency said in a Dec. 27 release. An additional $307 million in public assistance funding has been approved so far to support community recovery, FEMA said.
…
The announcement comes after Congress approved a bipartisan spending bill that will deliver another $29 billion to FEMA’s relief fund, which provides individual assistance to disaster survivors and reimburses states and municipalities for debris removal and other post-disaster response.”
https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2025/01/01/nearly-600-million-approved-to-aid-nc-helene-recovery-fema-says/77267443007/
$600mm down(maybe), $52.4b to go. Tropical Storm Helene caused $53 billion in damage, early report says. Here’s what we know.
Biden owns Helene just as Bush owns Katrina. I’m hopeful that some of the large sums displayed in the links you provided come to fruition, past (bipartisan) performance says most of it will be directed towards those less needy.
Perhaps they’ll send the funds to the Clinton Foundation so they can distribute it appropriately to those most in need. I heard Chelsea’s husband’s hedge fund was a little short lately.
“…Chelsea’s husband’s hedge fund was a little short lately.”
I hope that doesn’t develop into a bad case of the bank runs.
nodoughvirus?
sad…
One Flu Over the Sterile Cuckoos Nest?
Lol.
No doubt there’s never enough money, and it’s never equitably distributed or administered without corruption, etc.; and administrations, to some degree, own what happens during their tenure. All of that is bi-partisan.
Here’s a state-by-state list of disaster assistance FEMA said they had “approved” as of 10/09/2024 and national flood insurance funds they say had been “paid” as of 11/27/2024.
https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20241009/federal-assistance-hurricane-helene-exceeds-344-million-fema-expands-dual
https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20241127/hurricane-helene-flood-insurance-payments-surpasses-1-billion
Thank you, I will read these.
To be fair and even minded, when it comes to disaster relief and funding for FEMA directed efforts at recovery and rebuilding the Republicans are often more tight fisted with their US focused efforts. So it’s equal behavior from the political leaders. I’m in South Carolina and I can tell you without doubt that portions of western NC were nothing short of dismantled or destroyed from their existence by flood waters.
Florida is so bad an insurance risk…it’s like all those homes and developments of the past 40 plus years were built on a giant sand bar instead of a sea level equivalent paradise…
…and who can forget Lindsay Graham’s pivot to Israel when an interviewer asked him about hurricane relief in his own state?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w77X-hY73T0
“Who’s feeling the love today…”
From you, all; which is lovely.
When he clenches his hands into little fists to emphasize his devotion to us, that’s when I really felt cared for.
Yeah, that body language and clenched jaw and squinting glare over his reading glasses said it all. / ;)
I heard you stand with Ukraine, Chuck. They could use some skilled cannoneers, even of the “Blame” variety. Whatever are you still doing in DC?
Ha! Chucky does still have his acolytes though. A buddy keeps trying to feed me the same Democrat line that people just didn’t appreciate all the good things they did for us mopes, like the infrastructure bill. I replied that fixing potholes was pretty much the very least any government could do, and I still see all the people sleeping in tents on the side of those roads JoePavement is fixing, or might someday, or not.
This morning I was forwarded the news of how Joe “fixed” social security as further evidence of Democrat magnanimity. While not nothing, it is just a tweak around the edges rather than the much needed overhaul that would really improve people’s lives. Point out the ongoing genocide and the TDS afflicted will twist themselves into a pretzel to handwave even that away.
Political parties resemble cults more and more every day.
Wait, is this the “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin” Chuck Schumer? Or maybe there are two senators with the same name?
“Or maybe there are two senators with the same name?”
Chuck has mastered the Art of Politics American Style. One Politico, Two Faces.
Talk is cheap, Chuck.
a charlatan preaching to the converted
Unfortunately NY is so captured there won’t be much of a challenge from other Dems, but I think it will be interesting to see if TDS continues it hold on metropolitan NYers. Largely because I think the Dems lost a lot of people throughout the state over the last few years. Republicans could make a decent run at Senator Chuck. Trump’s margins here were far closer than they should have been and Gillibrand’s Republican opponent broke 40% of the vote. The city is their only real backstop left and they even lost ground here.
Chuck is scared, and all he has is the current Democratic playbook – fear mongering and blaming the (insert reason of the day in the blank) voters.
>As congestion pricing launches, New Yorkers say they’re eager for better, safer subways Gothamist
The subway system was awful when I was growing up in the ’70s,” he said as he got off a train at Grand Central Terminal. “It was like the Warriors. Graffiti all over the place.”
“I think the subway system is better than it’s ever been,” Archer added.
Meanwhile, China has unveiled the CR450 high-speed train prototype in Beijing, capable of reaching 450 km/h in tests and operating at 400 km/h, making it the fastest in the world. I’m sure that “congestion pricing” will bring highspeed rail to the U.S. very soon.
https://youtu.be/9l6YDtG48bc?si=haB9IXcZgz28tIMV
Forget comparisons to better run systems in other countries, the third world nature of our public transport is now being thrust upon those who could ignore it previously. And it is going to backfire.
I somehow started reading a Twitter feed from someone who loves posting.the FDNY scanner calls, just the first calls.
I don’t know if they are safer or just a target, but in less than a week there have been three person on tracks EMS calls, Oh and there was enough detail in one that you knew the person was hit. Beyond the horror of the event itself, you have to remember that this will screw up subways on the line(s) affected for hours.
Right now the MTA is already over stretched during the several hours that constitute rush hour. Over stuffed buses and subways, not to mention the stations, ,are not going to fly. Multiple businesses are already adding the congestion fee to the cost of servicing the zone. There are groups which are urging their members to not even consider residing or taking jobs in the zone, and to actively look elsewhere. And that doesn’t even take into account the battle for parking that is going to happen in the area above 60th street.
Now some trusting idiots might but nobody with half a brain buys this is to improve the system, it is all about the revenue stream eliminating the need for state and local subsidies to the MTA budget. And it won’t really work.
it’s all about the revenue stream, Hochul at the helm, new rents to be extracted. She seems to be winning her war with Mayor Adams at the moment. They both would like to develop lower Manhattan into a theme park, just as long as they don’t have to work with each other.
Can you imagine it if the New York subway system or London tube stations looked like this?
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/31/moscows-metro-stations-in-pictures
No, I can’t either.
Remember the fairly recent John Stewart bit where he was trying to counter the Moscow subway image by telling us that the difference between our “urinal-caked chaotic” subways and those of Russia were the “price of freedom?”
(see starting at 11:35 — the whole point of the longer routine was to score points on Tucker Carlson after his visit to Russia to interview Putin):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM2h3KnWAWY
What Stewart was really saying is that no matter how good the Moscow system is our system is American and therefore better. Stewart is an idiot show-biz personality and a clown not a serious person in any sense. “Freedom” is a ridiculous term in the USA–we are less concerned with some things and more concerned with other things. We have the freedom to enjoy a stunning level of corruption because we value hustling and competition above the public good. This is why Russia can fight the US proxy war on less than a tenth of what the US spends on War and produce more weapons. Why is this? I think we all know. BTW, the US media is no longer allowed to track Pentagon corruption which is waaaay beyond what it was when the media occasionally reported on the subject.
There were times when freedom/democracy was given as the reason why things are better in the West. Now apparently freedom is bane of functional state. The logical solution is to end (the remaining bits of) democracy and ban people from complaining about things on the internet. Then the elites, unburdened by what has been, will finally make the trains run on time again!
Sometime in Spring 1983 I traveled through NYC by rail on to Long Island, in USAF uniform. I took a subway ride from Grand Central to Penn……
A couple of Guardian Angels stayed close to me!
As long as the airlines have Washington’s ear, high speed trains will not happen.
Are the people who make trains and the people who have defense contracts two entirely separate circles on a Venn diagram?
Siemans certainly overlaps. IMO, it’s automakers and big oil in the way of a functioning national passenger rail system. Big passenger air is done, stick a fork in it. Who want’s to get false-flagged on their once-a-year vacation?
Virtually all North American railroads are privately owned, consequently they block expansion of decent passenger service outside of the Acela corridor (there are a few minor exceptions). So airlines might lobby against passenger trains, railroads lobby AND litigate against passenger trains.
Companies that build passenger equipment in the US are all foreign owned (eg, Siemens, Stadler, Hitachi, Alstom) and rather small operations.
On the whole, Americans don’t like public transportation no matter who owns it. American want to feel independent in their cars, no matter how bad traffic is. That’s just the culture. Those of us who have lived in other countries have a different view although that might be different in Europe now that crime has increased and immigration has made it more dangerous for women travelling alone or so people tell me.
It’s even worse than that!!!
I am now living in a secondary SE Asian city, which = no public transport, but some cheap private transport on a few of the biggest streets (open busses with benches facing each other, you can signal to get off at corners) and app-hailed cabs. There are some metered street cabs but too few to make NYC style street hails a viable option (save in one tony neighborhood they prowl).
Driving here is nervous-breakdown-inducing due to motorbikes and too few lights, which means cars from sidestreets regularly force their way into and across bigger streets.
Yet nearly all expats own cars. It’s unlikely to be much of a time saver since even though you can walk from your flat or house to your parking spot, parking is often difficult or in a parking lot that requires a walk to the entrance. It could make sense if you like to go to the country or live in a semi-rural area, or take drives too long for a cab. None of those apply to me so the cabs work great. Plus I hate owning a car. They require minding and I have no time for that.
But par for your point, I had an American argue with me vigorously today that I needed to get a car, basically for the convenience, for the same reasons you argued (when I find cars inconvenient due to my limited use v. the fixed cost + maintenance time sink). As if I had ever complained about the cabs here, save they can be hard to get in high season so you need to go out and about during the quieter parts of the day. She then proceeded to bitch and moan about how dirty and smelly taxis are, which I have never found to be an issue with the app-hailed cars. So you can imagine how she’d be with public transportation.
Wow, no public transportation? I love the public transportation here, it’s almost always available. My house is particularly well suited.
This also means I walk quite a bit, to and from bus stops, but fortunately the streets are quite safe. And even if someone does mug you, they very rarely hurt anybody.
I’m really excited that this year I will celebrate 10 years of not owning a car. It all started because my car was total in a crash and Nationwide told me I was not covered because I failed to check a box. I paid for high coverage for many years so I was absolutely outraged. So I swore never to buy car insurance again, which of course meant not owning a car. I agree with Yves that it’s just too expensive, particularly since I always get ripped off when I buy a car, when I sell a car, and when I service a car. And apparently when I buy auto insurance as well!!
“Routine depression screening and tailored interventions are essential for enhancing driving safety and maintaining independence among older adults with MDD.”
Makes it sound that those Insurance Companies are going to use the on-board monitoring apps (safe driver discounts) to push for tailored interventions or demand routine depression screening – If you don’t submit…your rates go up!!! as an adjunct, insurance does also cover medications that have good profit incentives for both the maker and the insurer… so their is that extra incentive to push for covered services/products with government chip-ins.
Should make Homeland Security information sharing a good commodity for pre-emptive defense against home-grown terrorism and proactive police activities. sarc
Yves, have you experienced the joy of taking a motorbike taxi in Bangkok? Genuinely a great pleasure of mine. They come in Grab and hail-on-street flavours.
When I saw how the pandemic was being handled, it further reduced my desire to be dependent on public transportation.
This is a big issue, which is why I’m looking to purchase the air tamer that Lambert spoke of in yesterday’s water cooler. That should help me out a lot. But at least I’m able to open the windows on the bus and manage the ventilation myself.
There are places where Americans like public transportation just fine. Chicago has a pretty okay passenger rail transport system, for example.
I used to visit friends living in a perfectly suburban house and yard in a functional suburb of Chicago which was technically and officially a whole separate city. He went to work in the City by train, as did lots of other respectable middle class people. As far as I know, the respectable middle class people who still live there still take those trains.
America used to have rail-borne mass transit all over America. It was carefully ripped up and destroyed in cities , towns and villages all over America by a three-member conspiracy of Standard Oil of New Jersey, Firestone Tire and Rubber, and General Motors; acting through front companies like so-called “National City Lines”.
American culture was molded away from mass transit and toward cars everywhere over several decades. American culture could be molded back in many places over the next several decades if it were approached as a cultural and social-civil engineering re-molding project.
Rebuild out from where it is currently accepted and successful and rebuild out from whatever other places it can be restarted and made successful again.
I did the there and back on I-5 a few weeks back and the stretch between LA and south san francisco was a torture of semis, a large number with a five letter acronym on the trailer indicating amazon logistics completely clogging the thoroughfare, one going 60 being passed by another going 61 in a most annoying leapfrog fashion which I attributed to just in time deliveries going from long beach to some fulfillment center south of sf, only to be reloaded and sent back to the southland, and the drivers were imo basically poorly trained ubers for trucks…. gone are the days of the convoy, just a bunch of individual shlubs being electronically prodded to get there asap….trains would be far more sensible but like the postal service, slightly slower…but the armies of analogous amazon drivers shlubbing around sunday deliveries (because planning ahead is too hard for amazaddicts and buffy and biff need some asian crafts or tp and can’t be bothered to go to the store) need their trucks filled up too…I don’t like to imagine the usa run by bezos, unravelling a giant tangle of yarn daily…but I’ll probably find out…
After traveling over many western states (nine in all) this summer and fall it does seem like the amount of semis on the interstate freeways has gone up considerably over time. I-40 seemed to be nothing but one long line of semis. I off hand figured it was Port of Long Beach cargo going east, but that was just a guess, and did little to explain the long line of semis heading towards LA.
It would seem improving the lot of truck drivers would be a good starting point for Making America Great Again since truck driving use be a pretty solid middle class life, but it looks like elite plans are to further crapify what has already become a rough life:
Biden Just Gave a Final Middle Finger to the Working Class on the Way Out
https://www.newsweek.com/biden-just-gave-final-middle-finger-working-class-way-out-opinion-2003589
Maybe it will become OK to lean in hard on companies that use H-2B visas to crapify America since there is now a debate about H-1B visas.
Plus, I agree that it would be much smarter to get as much of this freight back onto the railroads as possible, but that would require busting the American Class 1 railroads out of the PSR maximum profitability and move towards a maximum capability. It has been pointed out here that the railroads use to be able to provide shipping which it is no longer capable of doing. One could argue that this too is required to Make America Great Again since using railroads to maximize any re-shoring efforts is almost a no brainer for manufacturing business that are trying to grow.
That is something a New Deal America Party could run on, among other things.
MANDA. Make America New Deal Again. MANDA.
Put it in white letters on a red had.
the bus companies lobby against passenger trains too. my personal nemesis is peter pan busses, which has been lobbying to prevent good east-west rail in massachusetts. it always makes me sad to inform international students that no, you cannot take the train to boston. you have to take 2 public busses to reach another station, then get on a peter pan bus. technically they run trains to boston, but it’s part of the lake shore limited, which runs from chicago to boston and is always late. i took it to visit my sister once and it was four hours late. we almost missed the T, which stops running at midnight which crushes any chance of boston having a good nightlife scene.
i’m lucky enough to be on decent bus routes both at my parent’s house and school, but it still takes 3x as long to commute by bus than by car. i’ll bike when i can, but some roads are really dangerous, and in the wintertime the roads can get so bad it isn’t even an option.
Goooooood Mooooooorning Fiatnam!
Operation Linebacker was the latest emphasis in the aftermath of Operation Rolling Blunder proving ineffective against Fiatnamese rebels armed with invisible weaponry in the guise of Bitcoin, which everybody agreed was above reproach and beyond the barrier of what passes for do re mi, bubbly.
Lol, missed your silver tongue this last week. Champagne jam may have been the sparkle in my whine in ’24, but that bottle of Krug, man it doesn’t age well. Drink up.
Spent about 6 hours a day in the human soup @ Saline hot springs, lots of interesting conversations, none better than a 28 year old Rivian driver suffering from bouts of range anxiety, and in love with Bitcoin, oh let me count the ways.
I really need to finish building the sauna in the back yard. Sadly, I don’t speak Bitcoin.
He was such a true believer, and of course I played the devil’s advocate, acting as if I was in too deep just like him.
The Numismatrix never fails to amuse me…
>“We’ve all gained from Israel’s experience” Globe
“The democratization of information and the rapid development of technology is allowing state and non-state actors to acquire new tools and tactics to undermine our way of life, and that means we are at war.”
Ah yes, roll out the “our way of life” trope. What does that mean? Bombing women and children huddled in tents, immiserating your own population, focusing on “rabid development of technology” to allow for further militarization of the every expanding police state, as opposed to building high-speed rails and providing affordable healthcare?
Rather than “gain” I would say stain. The “Collective West” has been stained by its genocidal support for Israel, “Israel’s experience” is that of conducting/perpetuating human suffering.
“Why America is stuck with an elevator crisis”
This article could be symbolic of the types of problems that America will be facing in the years to come. Elevators are vital and you can’t have a skyscraper without elevators much less high-rise buildings and you are talking about one million elevators here. But the problem is that the technicians who service them are aging out, spare parts are not to be had but must be custom built and most importantly nobody is really thinking about this problem but it is being handled in a piece-meal fashion as problems rise here and there. So what I am saying is that this sort of problem is happening with lots of old technology right across the country and will only get worse as time goes by. You can’t fix this sort of problem by developing an app.
Can I interest you in a fleet of hallucinating AI robot technicians?
There is a lesson here. Something about an invisible hand. Perhaps the needs of high-rise building occupants are invisible to said hand.
Off topic, a bit. Does that invisible hand have an invisible finger saluting Schumer? (See Dr. John Carpenter, above ⬆️)
I’ll connect a dot here. The aging elevators story made me think of our beloved edifice wrecks, as Wukchumni cleverly calls them. This sounds like one more reason that these older office towers are going to end up abandoned. On top of impossible to refinance mortgages and rock-bottom occupancy, it’s now hard to get a guy to inspect or fix the elevators. One more maintenance cost deferred for the inevitable sucker who buys them at Crazy Eddie prices.
Towering financial infernos sadly have little going for them other than the idea that Wall*Street is doing their darnest to act as if there isn’t any Danger Will Robinson going on, lost in space as it were.
The latest game of Wall Street is to pretend that those old towers don’t exist, and just redirect everyone’s attention to the latest and greatest LEED-certified, silver-plated new kid on the block. Complete with a gym, a tiki bar, and free massages. And new elevators, which won’t have to be inspected for at least a year … can kicked!
Yes, “edifice wrecks”, for which I will forever be grateful of its coinage, proudly sponsored by Millennium Partners.
As a shallow person, made me think of Colson Whitehead and The Intuitionist. And all my fun chats with elevator techs who have a lot of stories.
That book was a terrific read. Seems I’ll need to be reading that article now.
You two beat me to it.
Neoliberalism is built on wealth extraction, not on maintenance costs. / ;)
When the elevators finally stop, it will be lonely at the top.
We need a new NatGeo series: America After Democracy.
The elevator crisis is just the fact that, private monetary capital in pursuit of profit maximization, cannot be bothered with expenses for real capital investment and maintenance. Just look at the deferral in infrastructure maintenance for things like roads, bridges, ports, grids etal.
Having been in the construction related fields for some 45yrs?? (don’t know if age has made me wiser or a wise ass but) it is amazing how much more efficient it is to maintain, upgrade and adapt physical capital on an ongoing basis instead of waiting for the capital to collapse from neglect, fictitious capital extraction and deferral…….. I mean to say that a building owner gets to take a depreciation expense whether, they actually apply money to fixing the elevator or not. So why should they fix it when they get the benefit in cash. Also, I may be mistaken, they get to sell this property at whatever they can – like to a co-joined business – who then get to re-set and cycle the depreciation expense again. – Sort of like money laundering where the dirty-heavy-fixed-physical-capital is put into the financialized-machine-agitation-washer and at the cycle end you have clean cash – totally free from fixed-physical restraints of place and, the messy business of paying labor, industry and community a fair share for putting the physical capital in the first place – a bonus is that you ditch long-tail liabilities and saddle the labor, industry and community with all those costs and expenses…..that is, if you are a highly respected and shrewd business man
Perfect picture of an axolotl! A beloved Pokémon and important to Olmec/Mayan iconography, as they loan their “flame eyebrows” to many idols. Water connects the worlds, as does the “cute” baby-like salamander. The Olmec were aware of fetal development in all species, including humans.
Is HMPV another Covid-19-like scare in China?, Anecdote, but almost everybody we know has or is is recovering from one flu or another. We had three separate source covid outbursts, total five cases over the holidays. Additionally, a number of us have been bedridden by an unknown bug, many negative covid tests, could be multiple maladies. WooHoo! 2025, here we come!
I read that Time magazine article about a ‘Third Life’. Geez, talk about out of touch with reality. Who in their right mind would want to get together with groups of people to socialize now with all the viruses running wild? I understand people get lonely but be smart, too. Get a cat!
Interesting, that burning need to socialize. Many members of my family are bit by that bug. I sympathize with the younger generations. Their future’s so bright it’s cancerous. Myself, I’m quite satisfied with the company of cats.
I beg to differ about that article – the Sense of Belonging is a very important aspect of our species sociability. We see that with the TDS mind set, along with the sense of well-being I get from reading this blog.
There are many ways we can get the Sense of Belonging. In these times being outdoors is one way to meet and not “share” our bugs.
On Saturday afternoon I went to an Open Mic gathering of Peoples Park supporters. (You know the one, where UC Berk walled of the community free speech park with double stacked shipping containers and security guards.)
We met at the closed book store on Telegraph Ave where the Chess Club has been meeting since the campers were kicked out of the park. While it was a small group, I could see that it provided a place where Food Not Bombs could provide food and people could join in community. The Chess Club meets there every day. This was a special Open Mic day.
It provided that Sense of Belonging that we all need. For me this article has hit on the spot where our Society is Failing. (Thanks for this blog to give me that sense also.)
to me it feels very, ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’ like what’s worse, the health impacts of pandemics or loneliness?
This is an interesting data point:
North American rail traffic has yet to rebound to pre-pandemic levels
CSX was up 0.6%, but…
This is during the best economy ever and reshoring manufacturing. PSR is having its toll. And railroads are pricing is above inflation. The customers, public and environment suffers while executives and Wall Street rake in record profits as they shrink. The rot is endemic and everywhere.
>US House speaker vows to dismantle ‘deep state’ – RT
“We’ve made a lot of campaign promises. And we’re going to be dismantling the deep state all along the way
Doublespeak and doublethink have both reached new heights, Dissembling the truth and debasing language have never been more evident. I need to revisit Peter Dale Scott and his analytical formulation of “Parapolitics” and “Shadow Government.”
https://www.rt.com/news/610484-johnson-vows-to-eliminate-deep/
Presented without comment … well, minimal comment. I guess “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” would be appropriate?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/catastrophic-impact-trump-aide-worries-about-serious-error-that-could-tank-new-term/ar-AA1x0uu1?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=2b4bfe516ec84407da0303e945d8a990&ei=11
Note: I also suspect that Swampy Johnson’s definition of “the deep state” differs substantially from ours.
(Quote from link above)
Disability claims skyrocket, raising new puzzle alongside ‘excess mortality’ Insurance News, Alright, Covid may not be specifically in the headline, but is singled out as the main suspect. Industry journals can be good at keeping the narrative at arms length. Mental health is also noted as surging, thanks to the author for saying it out loud. This paragraph caught my eye.Finally, the transition to remote work has led to a rise in ergonomic injuries such as back pain and repetitive strain injuries due to poorly designed home office setups. While remote work reduced some risks, it increased sedentary behavior and musculoskeletal issues, heal h(sic) experts say. That didn’t occur to me.
Re lack of exercise and WFH. Before my sister retired she got all of her exercise walking from home to bus stop, bus to subway and subway to office and reverse going home. Almost 60 mins of walking, 5 days per week. She has struggled with fitness ever since she retired. So, while I hadn’t thought of it before, WFH sedentariness makes sense as a problem.
Too much time indoors in front of screens is affecting the kids too. Not totally a COVID problem but exacerbated by homeschool in front of a screen. https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/myopia-children-shortsightedness-prevalence-outdoor-indoor-1.7399141
YouTube has many exercise vids for at home exercise that require no equipment, including chair exercises that are deceptive (ie, you do get your heart rate up and they work your abs and back, which ought to reduce those back pain issues.
Remeber years ago when special exercise steps were sold? That, plus pet rocks, is evidence that PT Barnum was lacking in wrongness.
At some time we should work up a list of absurd Americana. Something to do while waiting for the next shoe to drop.
If I’m representative, I would argue a lot of the disability claims are also to do with people in desk jobs putting in significantly more work compared to pre-pandemic.
Post-pandemic, I’ve been going directly from one virtual meeting to another, non-stop, with no walking, standing or bathroom break in between. My workload has effectively increased, there is no social interaction between meetings, no visiting desks, no restaurants, no coffee shops, simply no downtime at all.
On top of that I’m also working well past working hours and work has blended into home life, I’m not leaving an office, a physical and mental boundary, and going incommunicado. In meetings it has been customary to see family walking past, children, and while I do love that we’re getting a sense of others being human which I think brings us closer, it’s hard not to notice a work/life boundary or separation has disappeared.
Post-pandemic even without covid I immediately felt the impact, my back was killing me. Unlike most, I was able to afford the costly ergonomic adjustments to my home office and it helped, but my neck (and my bladder) tell me I have still have too much time in front of the monitors.
A good friend of mine, on learning I spend most of my week at home, said “oh so you do all the cooking now?” You can’t imagine how incredibly insulting that was but clearly there is a casual belief people who work from home are not working, which likely adds to the mental health mix.
I’m seeing this new work paradigm as well. Zoom doom. “Who has time to do any actual work?” a common theme.
The snow roller article was really intriguing! I’m sure I saw one of those things on my uncle’s farm when I was a kid. Here’s an article with some pictures that makes it come more to life:
https://mwvvibe.com/white-mountain-snow-rollers/
Seems like a great alternative to plowing where you’re on gravel roads.
That is a pretty specialized piece of equipment that is only used a few months of the year. I wonder if small communities pitched together with building supplies, timber, workmen, etc. to share the costs of building these things so that all would benefit when it was put to use. They look pretty cool-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shdLKr7nsw0 (3:29 mins)
The State of Wisconsin used to have snow on the ground approx. 5 months a year, Nov-March, so there was a lot of investment in winter-only equipment. I guess those days are gone now :(
Seems like a great alternative to plowing where you’re on gravel roads. Until mud season that is. I “groom” my 90+ yard gravel/ledge drive, packing down the snow by shovel rather than roller. I probably could use a hobby.
Thanks for the link. I grew up on the eastern flank of the White Mountains, and I love a little nostalgia with my coffee. Cheers!
For rolled/packed snow to be effective it needs to stay cold. With the freeze melt cycles we experience these days, the packed snow would turn to slush then ice – not good for driving or walking. My family moved to a small town in northern Ontario when I was a teen and they just kind of scraped the snow and left a layer to be packed down by use. It wasn’t slippery, just like driving on a dirt road. A bonus was no brown, ugly snow banks. But they can’t do that anymore because of the thaw/freeze problem. So now they plough, sand and ‘salt’ to get to bare roads.
Thanks! Saved me some searching!
Snow rollers! Here’s some more info from my Vermont relatives – back in the days of sleighs, covered bridges of course had no snow accumulate under the roof. SO, people would “snow the bridge” – put a layer of snow inside the bridge so sleighs would slide easily. Also – back in the day – landowners were responsible to roll the roads abutting their property. This concept survives in many places where homeowners are responsible to clear the sidewalks in front of their house.
Different times! IN my fantasy of a post-energy feast future, we return to a genteel, hard-working, 17th century lifestyle, perhaps with internet! Jingle bells, jingle bells, coming along a rolled road and a snowed bridge!
“Iran to Operationalise Russian Su-35 Fighters By Year’s End – Reports”
If Israel is going to get the US to attack Iran, they had better get a move along. Russia and Iran are due to sign some sort of military pact before Trump gets in and pretty soon Iran will be getting a major upgrade to it’s defence establishment. When the Israelis and the US attacked Iran a few months ago, it proved to be a bust. Pretty soon it will be pointless. And maybe some of those Su-35 fighter pilots won’t be Iranian either.
re: Winter storm.
Yep. Yesterday was a whiteout blizzard most of the day. Bitterly cold temps. Snow coming down over a layer of frozen rain, aka ice, that came down late Saturday night. 10-12 inches of snow came down yesterday. Nothing was moving yesterday. Looking out this morning, the cars parked outside look like giant marshmallows on wheels. The snow plows are out. That’s about all that’s moving this morning. Schools, libraries, public meetings, etc. are all cancelled/closed today. Dangerous windchill temps.
“French Mirage and Ukrainian Reality”
Do the French really want to send Mirage 2000 fighter jets to Ukraine? The Russians just shot down another Ukrainian Mig-29 a day or so ago. Shooting down Mirage 2000 fighter jets won’t do anything for French foreign sales of those jets.
“A Great Lakes ‘Pompeii’? Lake Huron’s depths hold secrets of human history”
This is a fascinating article and it sounds like they have come across a treasure trove of information not to be found anywhere else. Thanks for including it in Links.
Someone’s * is puckered today, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Seems Shifty Schiff is grasping at straws looking for excuses to deny Kash Patel’s confirmation. Apparently he’s afraid of how Patel would deal with some people’s proclivity for murdering their fellow citizens – https://www.yahoo.com/news/sen-adam-schiff-says-orleans-180326222.html Someone should remind Shifty that this attack and many others actually occurred on KeystoneJoe’s watch.
I wonder what really has him so concerned?!!?
I expect Biden to give him a pardon, along with Liz and half the country. Of course they didn’t do anything wrong. /s
It would be sweet justice to see shifty Schiff get whatever they can pin on him. It’s hard to do, but he appalls me more than just about any of them. The day this creep isn’t in congress will be a better day for America.
Sadly, so many see him as a great hero for what he did on the Jan 6th committee. Yea, that famous day that will live in infamy, and how Schiff and the dems eventually saved democracy by impeaching orange Hitler.
And here we are 4 years later – the anniversary of the coup (according to them) Jan 6 – Teflon Don is back. How’d that work our Schiffy?
Aye Caesar, Teflon Don is back, but not inaugurated yet.
I really cannot put any skullduggery past our “Hidden Hands” today. As the truism states, what “they” did to other countries, such as assassinations, coups, destabilizations, etc. will be ‘brought home’ to the Homeland.
Get ready for “extreme” measures in the Defense of Freedom (TM.)
Takes me back:
“Extremity in the defense of Liberty is no vice.”
What I like about Goldwater in hindsight is that he hated Reagan.
Goldwater was a “true” conservative. Reagan was an early model of Politico that would eventually end up manifesting as Zelensky. Actor as Leader.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/53wY8NVtPHM1lrJ11SCGFYC/the-moral-majority
Goldwater had principles. Very alien concept in U.S. politics these days.
Zelensky did say, when compared to Trump, that he thought of himself as someone more like Reagan. I suppose that was an obvious analogy because of their acting careers, but the similarities go beyond those.
Re Trudeau and genocide.
I guess it can always get worse.
https://www.conservative.ca/statement-from-conservative-leader-pierre-poilievre-on-the-first-anniversary-of-the-october-7th-attacks/?utm_content=National/news/page/2/
yup
out of frying pan into fire, sigh
There was no mention on the article about the legal defense the Canadian mounted on behalf of Israel, interveening at ICJ this year on the issue of the legality of Israel’s occupation and actions on the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. The defense was just handed to the pannel of Justices and not provided on camera for public record, to show the true face of Canada to the world. At least Hungary had the balls to do it publicly…
Of course, ICJ found Israel’s occupation and actions illegal.
RE: Collapsing Empire: RIP ‘Overt Operations’
Important, and the headline doesn’t highlight the main point of the article, which is this –
“In recent months, a remarkable development in the Empire’s decline has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The National Endowment for Democracy’s grant database has been removed from the web. Until recently, a searchable interface allowed visitors to view detailed records of Washington-funded NGOs, civil society groups, and media projects in particular countries – covering most of the world – the sums involved, and entities responsible for delivering these initiatives. This resource has now inexplicably vanished, and with it, enormous amounts of incontrovertible, self-incriminating evidence of destructive US skullduggery abroad.”
I’m sure Bezos with his CIA contracts and the rest of the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” crew will be all over this any time now.
Wowsers.
NGOs, civil society groups, and media projects could also scrub their connections to NED from the web.
In that article, the link to archive data on Georgia lists 20 NED-funded NGOs operating there in 2021. The Western funded NGO/CSO sector is by itself a sizeable thing in this small country with 3,7 million inhabitants but yet the Georgian populace tends to distrust the NGOs because many work on issues different to those that matter to them. It is interesting to note this mismatch between the supposed intentions of many of the NGOs (ya know, strong democracy and all that crap) and the real interests/needs of most of the populace, then see how elections do not necessarily go in the directions intended by the West. We obtain, how do we call it? Autocratic turns? The political intentions of those NGO become clear when they act as revolving doors for politicians winning and loosing elections. This article by Anatole Lieven offers quite a good view on this in its section 3.
The sounds so much like the domestic US “nonprofit sector”. They just exported the model.
Nonprofits/think tanks do act as holding pens for temporarily retired politicians and even patronage machines. And they tend to focus on trendy, anything-but-economic issues like “extremism” or some concept of minority rights that doesn’t include the rights to shelter, food, education, healthcare, a safe workplace and a fulfilling job.
Re: Spook Country…Preparing us for war with Iran? Preparing us for another domestic event to assure compliance and control?
A few months back “America’s Astronomer”: Neal Degrasse Tyson got on X to tell us that we don’t have to fear the use of Nukes anymore, that the new generation of (I guess tactical) nukes are much safer. As if! He was thoroughly castigated in comments but I thought at the time “ah, preparing us for that contingency.”
Probably being paranoid, eh?
I have never liked Tyson, but that commentary was a new low in the career of a bottom dwelling “Consent Creator.”
Being paranoid is a survival characteristic in the Neoliberal Dispensation.
Tyson often comes across as a Reactionary. That indicates that he at the least does understand Newtonian Physics.
That’s ‘Neal DeGrease’ as we like to call him. / ;)
re: Orleans Parish ADA dies by suicide in DA office – WDSU. Sexual Assault Kit Initiative division.
What is that division’s task?
The Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) Unit is responsible for implementing the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, a nationwide effort to submit and test previously unsubmitted sexual assault kits (SAKs).
https://orleansda.com/sexual-assault-kit-initiative/
Oh. “Suicide” you say.
The way things are going I’ll need to recalibrate my Epstein Scale of Suspicious Deaths (calling back to a comment from last April)
I still remember the death of Dr David Kelly the British weapons inspector and source of the “The Iraq dossier is sexed-up” story. The man with the most ability to undercut Blair and Bush’s proposed war who “conveniently killed himself while alone on a walk”. There was no inquest into the death. An inquiry by the UK government found there was nothing to see here.
I’m wary of making definitive statements about anything. Like a poker player I try to think in probabilities or how confident I am of my conclusion.
We can never be 100% sure Kelly (or Barnett, or even Epstein) was murdered – I think they sit on a scale of “confidence that person was murdered and it was covered up”. I might call it The Epstein Scale :)
At one end of the scale would be Epstein who I think most of us are fairly confident was murdered.
Kelly would be high on the scale for me, but below Epstein.
In the middle would be James Le Mesurier the White Helmets founder who “fell off a balcony” and Labour leader John Smith who also “died on a walk” paving the way for Blair to be PM.
Lower down would Princess Di
New additions welcome!!
‘James Le Mesurier the White Helmets founder who “fell off a balcony” ‘
I think that he fell to his death from his ground floor window. Totally not suspicious.
Indeed
The most striking find in the investigation is that Le Mesurier exited the window of his house to climb up a lean-to roof and apparently walked 10 meters, before falling to his death. His body hit the wall of a historic covered bazaar just four meters from his house. He apparently aimed to reach the opposite building, something a scared man pursued by someone would do, not something suicidal people are usually inclined to do.
BP: elsewhere in the article it gives 7m as the fall height.
Totally how a military man would commit suicide!
Where on the scale is Seth Rich?
Everybody has their own subjective scale I think.
I know less detail about the Rich case, so personally I do not have it as high as eg Dr David Kelly as I’m less confident in my suspicion.
Where would you have it jobs?
re: Serbia
I suspect sanctions are aimed at cutting off the flow of Russian gas from Turkey to Hungary and Central Europe. Serbian oil company (51% Gazprom owned) owns the pipeline that transports gas from Turkey, this will make it difficult to collect transit fees from international customers. So Hungary will have to find creative ways of paying for gas transit lest it’s supply is cut off. Since the other 49% of the company is government owned, I suspect they will come up with something like payments being remitted to a different government entity and then offset in some way.
Impact within Serbia will be minimal, they have their internal payment system that is not part of international payment flows. It also has a government owned postal bank that can process any payments that other foreign owned banks might refuse. So its pretty well insulated against economic sanctions, mostly a legacy of government being corrupt and basically one large money laundering operation.
Healthcare links. Found myself shaking my head negatively at all the links. For example: Time magazine’s article about increase lonliness has this:
” These days, the role of coffee shops and bars, libraries and community centers, civic clubs and houses of worship, have faded as the creep of work and domestic obligation in American life have become all but inescapable. According to the 2021 Census Bureau’s Time Use Survey, Americans were already spending significantly less time with friends before the pandemic rearranged life entirely. Our collective isolation has only metastasized since then. In 2024, a staggering 17% of Americans claimed to have zero friends, up from 1% in 1990, around when Oldenburg was first urging caution.”
The pandemic rearranged? No, govt policies and mandates rearranged, to no health or social benefit. / my 2 cents
The other 2 articles are, imo, equally disingenuous. More drugs!
RE: What “Say Nothing” Says About Northern Ireland, Violence, and Peace.
Other than, what a mess? I happened to watch “Kneecap” last night (Netflix), a film based on the true story of an Irish-speaking hip-hop group from Northern Ireland (or, as they would call it, the north of Ireland.). Its background is settler-colonialism (a Bad Thing, David Frum, even after 400 or 500 years) and the importance of reviving the banned and dying language of the occupied if they are to reject their overlords.
The film made me ruminate on occupiers and the occupied, on the importance of language in unifying a tribe/nation (remember the push to revive Hebrew as a spoken language to unite the new Israeli state?) and, conversely on the necessity of an occupying power and its settler/colonists, to wipe out the indigenous language. And, what becomes of the descendants of the settlers, who feel it has become their land?
Myself a descendent of indigenous Irish who, faced with the prospect of starving to death or immigration, chose the latter, I had no concept of Ireland being a settler-colonial state. My mother idolized British royalty. I was immersed in the narrative of the IRA being a bunch of malcontent terrorists who should be wiped out by the doughty British army.
Maybe history is an unending series of militant groups wading into other territories and wiping out/ subjugating the indigenous inhabitants: Europeans on the American continents. Europeans (and that includes Zionists) in West Asia and Africa. And then getting royally pissed when the downtrodden rise up. And screaming that The Russians and The Chinese want to conquer the world. That’s life.
Or maybe we should all learn to stay at home, wherever that may be. Redecorate. Upgrade. Plant a garden.
These certainly are interesting times and likely to get much more interesting as the year progresses.
Larry Johnson made a good point about Livelsberger allegedly blowing his brains out with a .50 Desert Eagle, that’s a serious hunting cartridge and I wouldn’t expect there to be much left of his head if that is what he used.
He’s have less Brains left than Anthony Blinken, as hard as that is to believe.
I think it was Yves who recently highlighted the fact that a shocking number of suicides by self-inflicted gunshot to the head fail to do the job, meaning they survive the attempt and suffer all the gruesome and debilitating consequences thereof.
Perhaps Livelsberger, being acquainted with headshots and those that survive them, decided that he would not risk becoming one such unfortunate. A .50 caliber bullet pointblank to the head would ensure the deed got done.
I think that rigging the car to blow up following his head shot already guaranteed that. But it would guarantee he didn’t live through that nightmare.
Still don’t believe it was suicide. I figure he was already dead before the car got to its eventual resting place.
As a calpers retiree, I imagine this will benefit me, however I have concerns:
The bill will get rid of the WEP (Windfall Elimination Provision) which "reduces Social Security benefits for individuals who receive pension or disability benefits from employment where Social Security payroll taxes were not withheld."
It seems like the WEP made a lot of sense: when you don't pay payroll taxes into social security then you will have a reduction in benefits.
Who does canceling the WEP benefit? Well, people like me but I can't imagine that Joe gives a hoot about us. Obviously it's to bankrupt social security faster, yes? Probably that's why it's filed under class warfare.
But people like you, that is, relatively affluent retirees, vote in Democratic primaries at a really disproportionate rate.
If it works out like a similar move made in my state’s pension system years ago worked out here’s how I think it will go. (My state’s state employee pension system did not include public school teachers, who had their own pension system not connected to the state employees’ system. The state’s Public School Teachers pension ran into significant financial difficulty at one point and asked to be grandfathered into the state employee retoirement system, which they had not paid into. The request was granted, because we can’t abandon teachers.)
Here’s how it worked out. The state pension system now had to account for many more retirees without much more funding. State retirees who had been paying in saw smaller or no COLA’s for years, teachers pension retirees got more than they would have received if the Teachers Pension had essentially failed. It’s an actuarial problem.
I read in the MSM that this year’s SS cost-of-living increase will be 2.5% for 2025. Better than nothing, but not exactly keeping up with inflation. I can imagine eliminating the WEP provision will be paid for with lower cost-of-living increases for many years. I could be wrong.
Oh, and yes, the pension change did put the state employees retirement system on shaky financial ground for many years, where before the change the state system was financially robust.
‘ It seems like the WEP made a lot of sense: when you don’t pay payroll taxes into social security then you will have a reduction in benefits.’
Huh? But your benefit is still determined by contributions. I am a dual US/Canadian citizen. I have twenty years of contribution to US Social Security and 23 years contribution to the Canada Pension Plan. Because Canadian employers were paying to CPP rather than US social security, I have the good fortune to have my US social security benefit halved. The WEP has never made sense. If it is to be eliminated, if not the best thing since sliced bread, it’s still a new year’s wish come true.
See this link
https://www.johnsonlegacy.ca/knowledge-centre/2024/12/24/repeal-of-the-windfall-elimination-provision#:~:text=Understanding%20the%20Windfall%20Elimination%20Provision%20(WEP)&text=It%20potentially%20reduced%20the%20amount,CPP%2FQPP%20benefit%20from%20Canada
This Rob Urie post on the ideological origin story of DOGE – and a lot of other things – is magisterial.
https://roburie.substack.com/p/doge-nations-arent-corporations-and
It will be interesting to see how much damage Bird ‘Flu will do to the economy in Sonoma County, both dairy and poultry are a big deal here.
Pot and Plonk are the other big players in Ag, add tourism and that’s the local economy.
I wonder how safe softboiled or “Over easy” eggs really are…
The comment was made above of companies being more profitable as freight transportation shrinks.
This hit home to me as it was something I feel is going on in our industry. As retail stores close wholesale
prices are climbing. It should be the opposite. Wholesalers should be price/quality competing to get a larger
share of a shrinking pie. They aren’t. Instead they are cutting work staff, crappifying everything they can while
raising prices.
About the ‘ Splendid Little Lihop’ article . . . another reason for the Netanyahu establishment to LIHOP the Hamas attack is that the Israelis living closest to the border with Gaza across which the operation was launched were mostly members of various kibbutzes and as such were part of the population base of the residual left remaining in Israel. Getting them all killed or removed and destroying their kibuttzes would degrade and attrit what fading oppositional power they might still have against the Netanyahu establishment.
So HIHOPing the Hamas attack would get Netanyahu’s political-demographic targets and opponents killed which suits him just fine, just as getting Rabin killed several decades ago suited Netanyahu just fine at the time.
Getting the music festival goers killed too was pure gravy, given that the Netanyahu establishment considers them to be oppositional liberals as well . . . the sort of people who read Haaretz. So why not get their numbers reduced? And maybe even get the survivors psychologically Likudified? Which seems to have happened given what Yves Smith writes about most of the Jewisraelis supporting the goals and methods of the anti-Gaza war.
The only way the residual Left could achieve a Lesser Israel and a Lesser Palestine leaving eachother alone would be if the residual Left could exterminate enough of the Netanyahu establishment and its demographic base to where the residual Left could re-take-over the country. And that seems like political science fantasy to me.
Eclair, I think you are first below the line here to watch Kneecap, despite my banging the drum! I really thought plutoniumkun might get there first. :-)
That review of Say Nothing is weird and obsessed with narratives of radicalisation, which is centrist dog-whistling for people demanding change that the existing order denies. The author has the strangest CV: Cambridge NatSci turned history of Science PhD turned computer science researcher into Middle East radicalism networks – and now a fully paid up NGO-complex member. I gave a lot of touch points with her early life (NatSci, CompSci dept) and I find the trajectory baffling! What is it with Ireland at the moment, nothing on NC and then two bad takes come along at once!
The real review is, what did you think of Kneecap as a film (rather than what it made you think of)? I would love to hear what an Irish American made of it, especially if you too think the rest of the commentariat need to meet Kneecap in their lives!
I think Kneecap the band are REALLY important. They are the sort of signifier or augury that NC ought to emphasise and follow. Let me explain why (not setting homework! I am doing my bit reporting as a groundling!).
They are political rappers in Irish and English (and the music is wildly syncretic trad-rave-punk-hip hop, nothing like US gangster rap, no repetitive glocks or homophobia or misogyny) and they are uncompromisingly republican and Irish nationalist. Yet they also insist that the common identity of the working class Irish trumps any sectarian affiliation and can only be served by a socialist decolonisation of Ireland, from the “Brits” and the “West Brits” (established political parties of Republic of Ireland). They are firmly on the sides of Palestine against Israeli genocide (and actually do work for a West Bank charity one member’s brother co-founded) and of refugee asylum in Ireland.
They are wildly popular, beyond all reason for a band making alt-Left music in a language with only 80k global speakers. They even have Oscar nominations for their film! They should scare the old order witless because they represent another vision of the future, the yin to Nigel Farage’s Reform yang.
Everybody here should be rooting for Kneecap on at least one element of their manifesto. They are also lovely, smart, sound people. Follow their twitter and Instagram feeds and find out for yourselves!
https://nitter.poast.org/KNEECAPCEOL
https://www.instagram.com/kneecap32/
For my part, discovering Kneecap has completely changed my Establishment British viewpoint on Irish nationalism. This is partly empathy with the lads and their music and partly “seeing” Irish, I.e. seeing it for the first time as a living language rather than the revivalist’s museum piece of bogs and turf fires. Letting the dodo out of the cage, as the film puts it.
However, the biggest contributor to my Damascene conversion was discovering Móglaí’s father was a cultural dissident (rather than an IRA member per the film). Gearóid Ó Cairealláin was born in 1950’s Catholic Belfast, discovered Irish at school and spent his life on a polymathic punk crusade to create a parallel self-sufficient Irish-speaking life in Unionist northern Ireland. No mean feat, starting in the Troubles and continuing from a wheelchair after a massive stroke in the 2000’s. He didn’t do it singlehanded and pioneers had started a Gaeltacht in Shaw’s Road when he was a baby but his fingerprints are in the cement of every Irish-speaking institution in the north of Ireland
He founded and published a daily Irish language newspaper, started an Irish language theatre company Aislimg Ghéar, an Irish language radio station (using an old IRA transmitter from the Republic), Irish language television (before RoI founded TG4) and an Irish Language cultural centre the Cultúrlann MacAdam, where all of the above could take place and, on top of all this, where he and other parents also set up an Irish language secondary school for their children without state funding because the Unionists refused to provide one in Northern Ireland. The school is now the state funded Coláiste Feirste and the largest Irish language school in the north.
Seeing the work of GÓC has shown me that the Irish nationalist cause is capable of creation rather than destruction – which is all the BBC ever showed me. I’ve also read more about how the parallel political movement for nationalist civil rights was stillborn because of the Unionist and British atrocities – again, something never taught in the UK, just as I had no idea the Unionists gerrymandered the voting system with a property qualification and a business vote so some businessmen landlords could have eleven votes and a Catholic family of eight in rented accommodation had none….
This is a long-winded post but Kneecap, and the Ceasefire Baby generation they come from, are a really important non-zero sum phenomenon in a zero-sum world. They are a lens on colonialist exploitation, on post-colonial reconciliation, on working class solidarity and on the West Belfast Gaeltacht punk ethos of Ná hAbair É, Déan É! don’t say it, do it! They’re also gents and good craic!
One last Kneecap word. Gearóid Ó Cairealláin died this Christmas, the night before Kneecap played a sold out 9000-seat Belfast stadium, the biggest Irish language music gig in history. They played the gig, for him. It was everything he would have wanted. Watch this video, his own retrospective, and see what a real freedom fighter, of the pen and the tongue, not the ballot box or the Armalite, looks like.
https://www.instagram.com/moglaibap/reel/DEDMKpkChNd/
Thank you, Revenant. For your acknowledgment and for providing the background on Kneecap and their impact. I am not really competent to do film or music reviews, however. I stick to my strengths.
I had no advance information on “Kneecap;” no idea that it was based on actual events. I almost stopped watching after the first few minutes, then became drawn in by the power of the film. And, it reminded me of a day, over ten years ago, at a gathering on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota (located in one of the poorest counties in the US,) when I first felt the power of rap, as a medium for the dispossessed.
A young Lakota man, from the nearby Rosebud Reservation, gave a performance, an emotional evocation of his experience as a reviled ‘Indian,’ raised in a country that had been stolen from his ancestors. He was followed by a Lakota elder, a story-teller, who recounted one of the many creation stories. In Lakota and in English. He then cautioned us not to write it down, because the stories were a living, changing organism, and putting the words on paper, took the life from them.
So, apologies, Revenant, there I go again, talking about what the film reminded me of, rather than giving a ‘review.’ But is that not what good literature and film and music do? Open up new ways of seeing the world and relationships and people and inequities and how they all connect? And knocking down the models that exist in our minds and raising up new, better ones.
Sorry to be late with this – I did see Kneecap and loved it!
I went with a hip hop loving friend, from Vietnam, recently made an Irish citizen. To say she was utterly baffled is an understatement. I spent an hour vainly trying to explain the overall background and context. I think she may have second thoughts about that citizenship….
You are quite right that Kneecap are genuinely important. They are part of a strain of radicalism in Northern Ireland politics that mixes nationalism and socialism in a way which is baffling to both the establishment north and south of the border, but also socialists from elsewhere. Attempts to create a political movement around it from the 1970’s onwards never got traction (I’m typing this quite close to a pub which was known as their HQ, and in which there were several shootings in the 70’s and 80’s due to various faction fallouts). Due to having the best music (Christy Moore and Planxty, for example), they held a cultural place stronger than their actual political strength, always behind the more conservative elements of Sinn Fein and the Stickies (the orthodox leftists).
Musk, Starmer and the crisis in British politics is also another bad take.
Musk can be odious but that doesn’t make him wrong. There has been a refusal to hold criminality to account in the UK, especially sex crimes. Savile. The boys’ homes in Northern Ireland and paedophiles on both sides (Adam’s brother, for one). The Church of England (and, what was not discussed in Archbishop Welby’s recent resignation, the Alpha course evangelical prosperity sect that has seized control of the Church, with which he travels).
And, now, it turns out, urban Pakistani networks preying on white children in care. But Labour refuses to acknowledge this latter phenomenon, despite identical facts in multiple towns, nor radical Wahhabism and political corruption because of (1) the Muslim block vote and (2) they want to damn the Tories as prejudiced and nuance is thus impossible. And Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions for many of these….
As a result, the very public revulsion over these “scandals” is ceding the territory to Reform and making the traditional parties look like liars who take the public for fools (scandals in quotes because the real scandal is the political consensus against any national enquiry in favour of being pretending surprised each time it happens and claiming it is a one-off result of local bad apples).
There is a similar scandal brewing / being ginned up over the extent of cousin marriage and how the NHS is covering up the frequency of genetic illness in these communities, both of which are part of the larger phenomenon of FBD (father’s brother’ daughter) kinship practices in Middle Eastern and South Asian societies and how radically different this is from industrial Europe which abandoned these practices in the Middle Ages.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with different ways and mores but, if there’s nothing wrong, then a civil society needs to be able to discuss these practice’s and their private and societal consequences in public without accusations of Islamophobia. The abuse of power in these communities does not stop at young white girls in care but includes forced marriage, marital rape, dispossession, genetic illness, vote fraud, radicalisation etc.
Shouting that Elon Musk is a bigot, there’s nothing to see here and voters shouldn’t listen to him is the stupidest of ostrich-like takes, given the hay Reform and the alt right are making.
As is Labour’s “this is fine” insistence while the UK economy burns to the ground, the wheels come off forty years of privatised public goods (water, rail, road, health, electricity) and Gaza is razed because of their lickspittle abasement to US foreign policy, Israel and their donor class.
No wonder Starmer is doomed. Two Tier Kier….
re: Why America is stuck with an elevator crisis
I read a similiar headline 25 years ago. Only difference the place in question then was Buenos Aires. Not the US.
The story then was that the beautiful yet life-threatening Argentinian elevators were a smybol of a severe economic crisis.
Er…