How Multitasking Drains Your Brain MIT Press
Calfornia Burning
Space satellites track astonishing expansion of deadly California wildfires FOX. The video:
In maps: Thousands of acres on fire in LA BBC
* * * Monstrous wildfires blanket Southern California with smoky air, threatening the health of millions AP. Commentary:
CDC And WHO Issue Urgent Warning To People In Areas Of Wildfires To Wash Hands To Avoid Inhaling Toxic Wildfire Smoke pic.twitter.com/DAevS5lxr3
— The Vertlartnic (@TheVertlartnic) January 8, 2025
* * * It’s not really the right time for nasty California fires. What are the factors that changed that? AP
On the Water Supply controversy:
After millions of views spreading lies about the Palisades firefighters lacking water because of regulations, the boring truth comes late like usual and wont be shared. Here it is:
1 – Reservoirs and water tanks were at normal levels and completely full before the fire.
2 – All… pic.twitter.com/DmSaTQJuiB
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) January 9, 2025
“Lead your life” :
we live in fucking hell pic.twitter.com/LdrgwsqVT6
— kelsey mckinney (@mckinneykelsey) January 9, 2025
Climate
Catastrophes cost the world $320bn in 2024, reinsurer reports FT
How Big Oil Hindered The Fight Against L.A.’s Wildfires Lever News
Water
How datacenters use water – and why kicking the habit is nearly impossible The Register
Syraqistan
Japanese crime boss admits to conspiring to sell nuclear material to Iran Al Jazeera
Dealing with Trump, Israel, and Hamas: The path to peace in the Middle East European Council on Foreign Relations
No Israeli Hostage Deal Will Be Signed Until All Sides Agree on How to Control Gaza Haaretz
New York Times rejects Quaker ad for calling Israel’s actions “genocide” American Friends Service Committee
The Koreas
S.Korean police track impeached President Yoon’s location with new warrant Anadolu Agency
North Korea says it tested hypersonic intermediate range missile aimed at remote Pacific targets AP
China?
China’s CPI up 0.2 pct in 2024 Xinhua. Commentary:
3/4
For 2024 as a whole, CPI inflation came in at a very meager 0.2%, the same as it was last year and the lowest since 2009. For all the stimulus and the surge in debt during the year, in other words, China has been unable to revive inflation.— Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis) January 9, 2025
New discoveries raise China’s lithium reserves to second largest in the world South China Morning Post
China Discovers Vast Copper Deposit on Tibetan Plateau WION
As Trump talks up trade war with China, fears rise for rare earths supply Al Jazeera
Huge cement-dust cloud blankets streets in China after silo rupture South China Morning Post
China, hMPV, and the `Fog of Flu’ Avian Flu Diary
European Disunion
Slovakia’s PM says he visited Putin because of Ukraine’s refusal to continue gas transit Ukrainska Pravda
Hungary threatens to block Ukraine’s EU accession over suspension of Russian energy transit Ukrainska Pravda
Dear Old Blighty
Musk examines how to oust Starmer as UK prime minister before next election FT
New Not-So-Cold War
Trump Is Facing a Catastrophic Defeat in Ukraine Robert Kagan, The Atlantic
A User’s Guide to ‘Who Lost Ukraine?’ Foreign Policy
Trump says he sympathizes with Russia’s opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine Reuters
How Suicide Drones Transformed the Front Lines in Ukraine NYT
Putin’s Booming War Economy Poised for Soft, Bumpy Landing Bloomberg
South of the Border
Venezuelan president says FBI official among ‘mercenaries’ arrested for plotting attacks Anadolu Agency
Three Ukrainians are among seven alleged mercenaries arrested in Venezuela, leader Maduro says Ukrainska Pravda
Biden Administration
US Justice Department accuses six major landlords of scheming to keep rents high AP
Trump Transition
Trump, the ‘America First’ candidate, has a new preoccupation: Imperialism AP
Foreign Leaders Lambast Trump Over His Expansionist Policies Foreign Policy. As opposed to genocide and a proxy war with a nuclear power?
Blinken says Trump’s push for US to take control of Greenland is ‘not going to happen‘ AP
Antitrust
FTC Chair Khan hopes Amazon, Facebook won’t get ‘sweetheart deal’ from Trump in antitrust cases CNBC. Commentary:
My god the reconnection of Americans to their own power in this economy has been just amazing–people feel and see the problem but our tongues were cut out by 30 years of sidelining antimonopoly and antitrust, the core tools for addressing power, to the purview of technocrats. https://t.co/qQsp6zIiDE
— Zephyr Teachout (@ZephyrTeachout) January 8, 2025
Digital Watch
Apple Intelligence summaries might get warning labels. That’s not enough. Six Colors. And–
Jason Snell: ‘Apple Intelligence Summaries Might Get Warning Labels. That’s Not Enough.’ Daring Fireball
Groves of Academe
As a Berkeley professor, I see the impact H-1B visas and AI have on students’ job opportunities FOX
The Final Frontier
Why the space community should care about Arctic geopolitics Space News
Our Famously Free Press
Wikileaks has just put all its files online. It’s all there! Defend Democracy Press
Healthcare
People living near airports face increased heart attack risk: Study Anadolu Agency
Industry groups sue over Biden ban on medical debt in credit reports Al Jazeera
Gunz
Study: More Americans Buying Firearms To Defend Selves From Toddlers Who Found Their Gun (video) The Onion
Democrats en déshabillé
Class Warfare
Two powerful labor groups combining ahead of the Trump administration Axios
Sanders doubles down on attacks on Musk over H-1B visas: ‘Dead wrong’ The Hill
US east coast strike averted Splash 247
Forced Labor in Global Supply Chains RAND
The fight over robots threatening American jobs FT
Free Cash, Mergers, and Capital Spillage Monthly Review
Antidote du jour (Yathin S Krishnappa):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Antidote… I try not to anthropomorphize, but I love the hint of contented smile.
What’s so ironic, asked the yoga practitioners?
My shoulders relaxed just looking at him. I really wish I could stretch like a cat.
A cat is a cat is a cat no mater what the size-
https://cats.com/physiological-and-psychological-reasons-for-your-cats-stretching-behavior
OTOH. . . animals do experience pleasure, and there’s no lack of evidence for the fact. Peter Wohlleben’s ‘The Inner LIfe of Animals’ shows clearly that animals also experience love, grief, and compassion, though those are–of course–our ways of characterizing feeling. Recommended.
I sure wish I had a fraction of his flexibility.
where’s his tail?
“It’s not really the right time for nasty California fires. What are the factors that changed that?”
I’ll say. The penny just dropped with me earlier that America is in the middle of winter right now and fires like this are supposed to be in the middle of summer, not now. A few minutes ago I saw an image of a house with it’s roof ablaze but it still had it’s Christmas lights up and a Christmas wreath on the front door. What the hell? In previous years when it was winter here in Oz, we would send volunteer firefighters to North America to help out with the summer fires there. But fires this time of year? Not possible now. I wonder what summer will be like this year in North America as far as fires are concerned. I would be wary.
I am crossing fingers to see the worst of the fire is over in LA.- But indeed, fire season in winter? I don’t think so but there has been a bad combination of factors that allowed this to happen. Whether a worse combination might occur in any summer is something to worry about. One thing i have noted is that the fires are now being given names “Sunset”, “Eaton” etc like hurricanes and storms. Giving it a name might facilitate information sharing among fire fighters and i guess it might be useful in future legal paperwork. Insurers will probably insert clauses like “not insured against special conditions that are given names”.
I saw the light a decade ago around this time of year when I noticed smoke in the far distance in the higher climes of the Golden Trout Wilderness at 7,000 feet where there should have been many feet of snow, but instead there was the Soda Fire which consumed around 1,400 acres in friggin’ January!
The new normal isn’t that new if you were paying attention.
Wary I am, for what it’s worth. No rain is no rain, seasons be damned.
The fires in places like California don’t quite happen in the middle of summer, that is when vegetation is still relatively fresh.
Fire season in such regions really starts at the end of the summer and then continues until the first rains.
But yes, by early January it should have been the peak of the rainy season, i.e. absolutely no conditions for firestorms.
All of this misses the bigger issue though, which is suburbia.
If you insist on building single-family homes out of wood, and surrounded by trees and shrubs, well, then you are extremely vulnerable to precisely this kind of event.
Have you ever seen a city in former Eastern Bloc burn like this? OK, they don’t have such droughts and heat in most of that region, fair enough. But in some places (e.g. Central Asia) they do. So do Greece and Turkey, and Greece and Turkey do have regular forest fires too. But the cities never burn. Why? Because the cities are all commie blocks in the former Eastern Bloc, and something quite similar in Greece/Turkey — multistory buildings of pre-fab concrete, and there is just nothing to burn or even catch fire there. So the moment the fire gets to a city, it immediately encounters a massive fire break.
While in the US it just finds more fuel to burn through.
It looks like this time the worst in LA will be avoided, “the worst” being everything burning down all the way to the city center, but if/when that happens, you will see how the city center will be the fire break. Because it has those characteristics (tall buildings, concrete and glass, nothing to burn).
But leafy suburbia built out of wood adjacent to mountains covered in chaparral in one of the most fire prone regions of the word? That is just total insanity…
Yes, wood houses downwind of canyons full of chaparral is a recipe for disaster. The key element is the windspeed (90MPH): it blows embers far an wide. Many of those homes in Altadena are far from the chaparral! Once the fire is out of the canyon and into the subdivision homes, it is the houses and landscape plants (palm trees) that provide the flaming embers that perpetuate the destruction.
The video of the man attempting to extinguish the fire in the palm tree is frustrating to see. Palms have an apical meristem and a fire in the crown kills the tree. Better to chop it down and then extinguish the flames; removing the tree as a fire source to the house below it.
Block after block of wooden houses close together. An overhead view shows the trees still leafed and green but houses all gone. Cold dry air like a blow torch. No one was prepared because it never happened before except in Lahaina.
One thing for sure, it will upscale the complexion of the homeless encampments around town.
Saw the first loss estimate of around 20 some billion. I doubt that covers the clean up.
It burned here a few years ago and neither myself or the 100’s of fire fighters on site were worried about the toxicity of the smoke. But that was a forest fire. Houses burning have got to have some really toxic components. The clean up is going to be nasty and what landfill is big enough to hold it all.
File under (dystopian) AI:
“…it looks like humans still have the thermal advantage of thinking and doing for a few thousand calories a day – but we may not be able to think and act quick enough to keep up with the billions of humanoid robots that Nvidia and its partners are dreaming up in our future. Or rather, their version of our future. And no one who has children and raises them through college would argue that they are inexpensive. It takes a lot of time – call it 18 years at a minimum but it is really more like 23 years to even 25 years these days – and a lot of money – maybe between $300,000 and $500,000 – to end up with an adult human being that can be productive and self-sufficient.
And while no one will come out and say it directly, this is the economics that AI and its robotics packaging is going to disrupt in the coming years.”
https://www.nextplatform.com/2025/01/07/the-future-is-the-one-we-generate/
I have three kids that I love and care about and not three “adult human being that can be productive and self-sufficient”.
They are also independent of a power supply.
Agreed. Aurelien has a nice long form blog that ties in nicely to this -> https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-long-run
“After all, it was not so long ago that popular culture in the West actually emphasised the longer term. The middle class preached the virtues of “saving for the future” and fustigated both the aristocracy and the working class for their allegedly frivolous behaviour with money. The family firm across generations, the long-term savings scheme, 99-year leases on property, the trees planted for grandchildren, even the construction of buildings intended to last more than a generation or two, all indicated a belief in an essentially stable society where investment today would bring benefits later. In my youth, children were told to get “qualifications” which might lead them to a ”good job,” an argument which would seem incomprehensible today. Whilst this could produce stultifying conformity (the man who spent his entire working life in the same office) it also demonstrated a confidence that made planning and investment for the future seem natural. The years spent qualifying as a doctor could lead to a long and valuable career as a family physician and pillar of the local community, when there were still local communities. The kind of progression lived by CP Snow’s hero Lewis Eliot in the Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels (1940-70), from bright grammar school boy through the Law, Academia and Government, reflected what was actually possible at the time (and indeed reproduced elements of Snow’s own life). Even today, many parents begin savings plans for their children to mature when they are adults, in the hope that there will be something to spend the money on, or indeed that there will still be money.”
…and yet most people – especially women – throughout the ages do successfully get through their kids early life despite kids getting into everything all the time. This article on multi-tasking did mention babies and toddlers, but again not a word about how a child is a second full-time job. (I’ve been annoyed and grumpy about the gendered take on “multi-tasking” for years. Checking your phone every two minutes is bad, and I suppose it’s more of a chore if you wall the earth blithely assuming your import self should not be interrupted.)
Try multitasking on activities that are not routine, practiced before, etc, etc, etc…
The end game here is robots taking control of the grid and the mining infrastructure, then being able to regenerate and power themselves independtly of humans.
The question is whether humans will be able to switch it all off before that happens
Naked Capitalism is a news source that I have found very useful for many years. Twitter/x is a sewer. Is there any chance that Naked Capitalism could avoid use of Twitter/x?
Unfortunately, a lot of stuff only appears on Twitter. Thus the choice is to ignore that large portion, or continue using Twitter.
I would be interested to learn of a non-twitter website on which one can view tweets. I know there used to be services like Nitter, but they seem to be no more.
Nitter.poast.org is the remaining working Nitter instance that I am aware of. If you want to read http://www.x.com/yadayada then instead use nitter.poast.org/yadayada
Twitter is no more a sewer than the newsprint or television. Real people publish real points of view (or make real bots to amplify potential points of view). C’est la vie, in every sense.
I skim three “traditional” media sites regularly (BBC, Guardian, Telegraph) plus the anarchic FTAlphaville blog microsite at the FT. Most of my time is spent reading NC and its links and the twitter sites I have discovered through it. Without twitter, I would lose half my daily reading. And I say that as somebody who has never had a twitter account and thought it insufferable in its “heyday”. I increasingly read a lot of reddit subs, which are still filled with humans rather than bots as far as I can tell.
Thanks – that nitter link re-opens a regular commenter I’d neglected since twitter required sign-in.
There is also xcancel.com. And here is list of mores sites with some info on their availability.
Twtr is a platform. Of course it is. If your business depends…. etc. / ;)
Whitney Webb on Dore Show with Due Dissidence hosts. utube, ~4+ minutes.
THIS Is How To PUSH BACK Against The Deep State! w/ Whitney Webb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgFiksWA-6c
It’s a filthy job. I can’t speak for Lambert but that sewer has many turds that float to the top and our worthy of our attention. Imagine curating that on a daily basis! It’s why I’m here.
Crap and cream both rise to the top!
I appreciate NC’s xitter curation. Our family has been monitoring the fires as our daughter and grandkids have been evacuated from two different locations. You’re right, Twitter is a cesspool where nuggets can be found but only after wading through all the nut jobs, misinformed well-wishers, and crass opportunists.
The Privacy Badger browser extension blocks Twitter/X links automatically.
There is the option to click through to Twitter/X if you really, really want to.
> Is there any chance that Naked Capitalism could avoid use of Twitter/x?
Nope. There’s no better source for breaking news, for starters.
Yep. That’s where Joe’s resignation was posted and I saw it minutes after.
I think that there is a section of the US Constitution where it says that if a sitting President is resigning, that he has to do so through an announcement on Twitter.
The sewer analogy can be applied to our esteemed legacy media as well. And I would argue that the difference in the respective depths of the cesspools isn’t as great as many might think. Just look regularly at the opinion pages and comment sections of the NYT, WP, WSJ, etc. Then there’s the stink emanating from the regular acts of journalistic omission. See today’s link to the NYT rejecting an ad citing the Israel’s ongoing genocide on the Palestinians, for example.
This is the reality we live in. Best to face it squarely using your critical thinking skills.
Depending on your viewpoint, the NYT comments section is also a cesspool – https://www.racket.news/p/the-new-york-times-comments-section
But I still want to know what’s being said on the NYT despite the authoritarian anti-free speech tendencies of some of its staff and readers, and despite it being largely a propaganda outlet at this point, and am glad NC highlights NYT articles on a regular basis.
I don’t have a twitter/x account or any social media account. Maybe if you do, the atmosphere is different, but to me the quality of the tweets NC chooses to highlight hasn’t changed.
Also, someone at NC pointed out that you can type the word “cancel” after the “x” on twitter/x links and it will take you to another mirror website so you don’t have to give twitter/x itself the clicks if you’d prefer not to.
It’s always to your advantage to see what the other side is thinking or doing. And, if we are ever try to build a coalition against the 1%, we need to be able to talk to the other side.
Since It’s been unthrottled I’ve come to love X. It’s the only platform I can curate my own TL, a mix of history, art, architecture, news, and target right center and left viewpoints.
Twtr posts are clearly marked as such.* Maybe … just … don’t … look?
Not to mention that a boatload of great antidotes are pulled off Twtr….
*though now I’m going to worry that any Lambert replacement will decide to start rickrolling us with Twtr links…. ;-)
I’ve been here for years as well and learned lots of things, one among them is that our hosts very much know what they are doing, so have faith!
>New York Times rejects Quaker ad for calling Israel’s actions “genocide” American Friends Service Committee
“The refusal of The New York Times to run paid digital ads that call for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza is an outrageous attempt to sidestep the truth,” said Joyce Ajlouny, General Secretary for AFSC.
Side stepping the truth, or rather curating it on behalf of the status quo power structure is what NYT has been doing for as long as I can remember. In times past, when I was a much younger lad, purchasing the Sunday edition of the paper, with it’s splendid book review section, and paging through the paper while having breakfast was a delight. Now? Buying a copy or reading digital version has lost all appeal for me, it would make me feel “tainted” if I were to support the paper in anyway.
Maple Leaf, why can’t you be through?
Oh, Maple Leaf, why can’t you be through?
Trudeau’s done doing the things he used to do
As Trump was motivatin’ towards Capital Hill
He saw the Maple Leaf in a coup d’heel
A Prime Minister a rollin’ with an empty load
Nothin’ will replace him, we’re told
The great white north being -25
Province to province, standing side to side
Maple Leaf, why can’t you be through?
Oh Maple Leaf, why can’t you be through?
We have a 51st star on old glory just waiting for you
Justin time delivery over after half a score
Chrystia got hot and bothered wouldn’t do no more
It done got cloudy, that he’d remain
Justin tooted his horn in Mar-a-Lago refrain
Blowback blowing all over Ottawa hood
I know it wasn’t doing him any good
Maple Leaf, why can’t you be through?
Oh, Maple Leaf, why can’t you be through?
You’d enjoy our health care specially designed for the likes of you
The rhetoric cooled down, the PM went down
And thats when I heard Donald’s expansionist sound
Canada sittin’ like a toady to take
Gonna rectify our War of 1812 mistake
Canada lookin’ like our up over thrill
Once Donald gets inaugurated on Capital Hill
Maple Leaf, why can’t you be through?
Oh, Maple Leaf, why can’t you be through?
You’d love being part of us, not you
You know what Canada needs right now? A wall. A great big beautiful wall-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS-4y7YAulM (52 secs)
I’m pulling for our neighbors to the North to find their fighting spirit. Blow the bridges over the Niagara, St. Lawrence, and Detroit rivers. Start putting in Dragon’s teeth along the borderlands of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.
Maybe even win a Stanley Cup?
I must admit you had me until the last line…
“Japanese crime boss admits to conspiring to sell nuclear material to Iran”
Yeah, nah! Not buying this steaming pile of dung. Did Japanese spooks offer this guy a deal that he could not refuse for this confession? Did Sullivan think of this idea originally? Maybe Blinken? I’m sure that Netanyahu will pick up this story to say that Iran is about to get nukes. But he has been making the same claim since the 90s so he can go grab himself a nice hot mug of STFU.
Rev, the idea that the US would cook up a fake yellowcake story in a random poor country just to justify war in the Middle East is patently absurd.
/s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries
I suppose it was yellow cake.
heh.
Yep.
A powdery yellow substance that Ebisawa’s co-conspirators showed to undercover agents was later determined in a laboratory analysis to contain detectable quantities of uranium, thorium and plutonium, the Justice Department said.
Which, IIRC, was served well past its pull date. Stale, dry, mold around the edges, it tasted “off”. I’m sure this time is different….
“In response to Ebisawa’s repeated inquiries, the undercover agent agreed to help Ebisawa broker the sale of the nuclear materials to an associate who was posing as an Iranian general, prosecutors said.”
So in other words Iran was entirely uninvolved, the deal being merely with someone posing as an Iranian. Not the conclusion that the average idiot is likely to draw if they only read the headline and the first couple of paragraphs. Obvious and deliberate journalistic malfeasance on the part of al-jazeera.
The al-Jazeera piece tells us this guy was advertising that he had thorium and uranium five years ago, which is alarming, and what ‘alarmists’ have warned about for a long time, namely that the combination of the sheer amount of dangerous material around and the unstable nature of some of the nuclear armed states made it inevitable that non-state actors would get their hands on it.
The Guardian’s coverage of this yesterday studiously avoided mentioning to whom the Yakuza leader thought he was selling the material. It emerges that he thought he was selling to an Iranian general and an associate, both of whom were played by DEA agents. In no conceivable way could this be interpreted, or spun to show that the Iranian state did anything here.
>Trump Is Facing a Catastrophic Defeat in Ukraine Robert Kagan, The Atlantic
Trump must now choose between accepting a humiliating strategic defeat on the global stage and immediately redoubling American support for Ukraine while there’s still time….
Shortly after the invasion was launched, as Russian forces were still driving on Ukraine, Putin could have agreed to a Ukrainian offer to cede territory to Russia…
Yes, the Russian economy is suffering. Yes, Russian losses at the front remain staggeringly high…
If the war were going to drag on for another two years or more, these problems might eventually force Putin to seek some kind of truce, perhaps even the kind of agreement…
Putin doesn’t care who the president of the United States is. His goal for more than two decades has been to weaken the U.S. and break its global hegemony…
There is so much to unpack skimming through Victoria Nuland husband’s article. My main take-away is that a Ukraine peace deal with Russia will be interpreted as a Trump failure and that a minumum of 2 more years of bloodshed is what Kagan is advocating. As to the characterization of the conflict it reeks of falsites, at least when compared with the sources of information I’ve been following since February of ’22.
Blaming it on Trump, what can be considered a gigantic mistake of the Neocon in Chief is…, well…, gross.
Don’t blame it on the Biden
Don’t blame it on the Kagans
Don’t blame it on the hubris
Blame it on the Boogieman
I just can’t, I just can’t
I just can’t control my Fleet
Kagan: “Vladimir Putin has no interest in a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukraine intact as a sovereign nation.”
Mr. Nuland knows Putin’s mind: propaganda!
Mr. Kagan’s definition of “sovereign” Kievan territory boundaries based on Stalin’s conquest is one with the absolute prerogative to host IRBM.’s with large H bomb warheads aimed at Moscow, ~4 minutes away!
Trump is going to be blamed for US losing its launch sites 300 miles from Moscow and a colony.
Blame Trump; the empire must prevail!
PS I did not far past the quote!
The “who lost [country X]” is an old anti-USSR anti-commie charge in the US for political gain going back to the 1950′
s. The neocons are nothing if not consistent. / ;)
And yet, in the stock market cutting one’s losses is a well understood and accepted strategy for not going broke. odd.
Kagan has zero clue of US voters. How should he. So it doesn’t matter what he thinks.
They won’t care if Trump ends this war.
However I still don’t think he will be able to; if not based on his own misconception then thanks to Kagan’s own guard who won’t accept RUs demands ever.
If Neocons took away one faulty lesson in Syria, “overextending RU” works. But how do you overextend RU if you allow RU have peace at its borders? When the time is ripe Pentagon and friends will explain this to him – “Mr. President if you wish to MAGA you will need to hold BRICS down” – how is he going to achieve that?
NATO’s public statements on rearming Europe, conscriptions, new hypersonics, Eurofighter 2.0 plans, anti-missile defense – all of that is planned for a time 8+ years from now.
NATO’s hijacking of public opinion in Europe was as well a long-term project and worked out impressively well.
Same goes for the US Ukraine incursion.
By the time NATO’s plans bear fruit Trump is possibly dead and whoever in the WH. One should keep in mind, US fairy tale strategy a la NSC operates in 30 year cycles and more. NSC-68 which I have mentioned repeatedly is one such example. It was written in 1949 and yet is still valid today, while its´ authors are all dead.
This Trump show is only for 4 years. 4 years in US geopolitic think is nothing.
Only problem for him and the US elite – RU is planning in 50 years cycles. And I assume some Americans have understood this now. The ear of underestimating RU are over. Whether they admit it publicly or not.
Voters are not driving this train. The Blob is.
I am not completely sure (I did read to the end) but despite the very long denigration of Putin and Russia along with the big concession that Ukraine is losing, I can see this piece as Kagan rallying his neocon buds.
I recall reading following the latest infusion of billions that the Biden-cons were prolonging the war in Ukraine precisely so that Trump would take the fall for, um, losing it.
Kagan rallies don’t seem include that immortal phrase:
Here’s your rifle.
Those jobs are for the little people, like paying taxes.
Robert Kagan is the neocon’s and the Lobby’s mouthpiece, imo, and has been for years. Victoria Nuland, of “F*k the EU, Yatt’s is our man” fame, is his wife; a DC power couple. Ukr was largely a neocon project from the start, imo, with a lot of Wall St and City firms in the mix for Ukr plunder.
I bet Kagan doesn’t think much of Jeffry Sachs. / ;) (My posting this twtr isn’t a brief for T. )
Netanyahu “is STILL trying to get us to fight Iran to this day”
“He’s gotten us into endless wars and because of the power of all of this in the U.S. politics, he’s gotten his way”
https://x.com/KAGdrogo/status/1876785571949113639
an aside: for a brief history of US neocons begin with Irving Kristol .
I would not be surprised if the neocons did take Assad’s departure as a lesson that “overextending” works. But on top of sanctions, the US was also illegally occupying Syria’s oil and wheat fields, diverting food and revenue.
I’d like to see them try that with Russia.
Neocon dream: Syria is the first domino
Delusions are cheap.
Some can be very expensive.
We are living 1984.
We may be living in 1984. Kagan is living in a universe of his own devising. It must be comforting to him to be in a position to make s–t up.
From 20 January 2025 Ukraine will be DJT’s headache. He is not responsible for the clusterf— created by Winken, Blinken and Sullivan.
I love the shameless framing. *Trump* is facing defeat? Wut? LOL. Maybe Trump’s fragile ego will make him turf these losers out once and for all if they insist on pinning the blame on him.
Also, Kagan’s doing the meme, must be getting desperate over there:
“just one more year bro, i promise bro just one more year and it’ll fix everything bro. bro. just one more year. please bro just one more. one more year and we can fix this whole problem bro. bro cmon please just this one more year i promise bro”
Kagan is mad that Trump negotiated the Afghanistan withdrawal to occur in 2021 and Biden got the blame for the loss, so he’s trying to return the favor.
Of course it doesn’t occur to these clowns to note that if they hadn’t put their thumbs on the scale against Trump for the 2020 election, Trump may have won, would have had to deal with the Afghan withdrawal himself, and we’d be rid of him by now.
And of course we could have also had President Bernie for two terms and no Trump at all had it not been for the meddling neocons.
Imo they much prefer trump to Bernie. Trump bad, but Bernie existential to many oligarchs.
Mirabile dictu: Kagan admits that Putin might not be interested in negotiating. It’s the first time I see a card-carrying member of The Blob say this out loud. Which tells me that Project UKR is drawing to a close and the finger pointing is about to begin in earnest. The Blob is getting ready to blame not-yet-president Trump for losing UKR. Getting their retaliation in first, so to speak.
The self denial is unreal. Between a neocon policy that seal clubbing every small nation you don’t like is the proper way to maintain relations, and American CEOs and Wall St de-industrializing and financializing your industries, institutions, and infrastructure to maximize their own profit, they have wrecked an empire they did not create, and do not know how to maintain.
Maybe the Federal government can send a bill for $8 trillion to cover all the stupid wars that have made America less safe to the Kagens to make them just shut up and go away. Everything they have pushed since the 90’s has failed and backfired on America in spectacular fashion.
>Japanese crime boss admits to conspiring to sell nuclear material to Iran
How/why is there weapons grade plutonium in Myanmar?
Myanmar borders China so it opens the way later on to accuse China of supplying nuclear materials to Iran. No wonder Putin calls us the Empire of Lies.
Or it is just one more product, like any other part of the belt initiative. Don’t be too quick to dismiss. A Mideast nuclear Iranian war is distracting enough to cross the South China Sea into Taiwan, which may last a few weeks.
The reports are ambiguous, but it seems that the Yakuza ‘boss’ claimed that it was weapons grade plutonium, but the actual materials seized were yellowcake, which is an intermediate stage of processed uranium (around 1% pure uranium and so useless for fuel or weapons).
The indictment does say: ‘With the assistance of Thai authorities, the Nuclear Samples were seized and subsequently transferred to the custody of U.S. law enforcement. A nuclear forensic laboratory in the U.S. examined the Nuclear Samples and determined that both samples contain detectable quantities of uranium, thorium, and plutonium. In particular, the laboratory determined that the isotope composition of the plutonium found in the Nuclear Samples is weapons-grade, meaning that the plutonium, if produced in sufficient quantities, would be suitable for use in a nuclear weapon.’
This seems pretty ambiguous. Very tiny amounts of plutonium can be detected in uranium ore, so its possible that they are just hyping this up into ‘weapons grade’, which is theoretically true, but it would be in such tiny quantities as to be useless.
There were strong rumours going back 10-15 years ago that the Myanmar regime was starting a nuclear weapons program, but it was never confirmed. There do seem to have been some attempts at uranium mining and low level processing, possibly as part of rare earth processing. So its possible some of that material was floating around since that time. Its a long, long way though from anything useable as a weapon, even a dirty bomb.
I’m very sceptical that the guy is a real Yakuza ‘boss’. They stay well away from any direct involvement in deals like these. Most likely a mid level flunky who went way above his station and got taken in by a sting operation, or just some low level shady businessman who got out of his depth.
He is a foolish and pathetic man who dreamed of becoming a millionaire and was framed by the DEA.
https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/national/20220722-OYT1T50150/2/ (machine translation)
Like the rest of Qatari funded media, Al Jeezra has fully unmasked itself on Syria/Iran as the CNN of Arabic media.
I am fascinated that people thought otherwise, but then again people thought that CNN was telling some truth back in the day.
Antidote du jour
I wish it were symbolic of the strength of American people waking up from its long slumber to devour evil oppressors…one can dream.
Whatever happened to this guy:
The ruling class lied that he was antisemitic.
devour themselves
re: How Multitasking Drains Your Brain MIT Press
It’s odd, early on in my career the whole loss of productivity and time due to context switching while multitasking was a Big Deal (TM) but then I guess everyone just forgot about it.
It wasn’t about multi tasking, it was about being distracted by a screen. Multitasking is what mothers do, cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner simultaneously while keeping an eye on the toddler in the next room and watching the clock because the entire family has to get out of the house at different times. Or what nurses do monitoring iv’s while administering medications and noting multiple condition changes. The article was out of touch with reality.
Quelle surprise.
My own take is that there’s a difference between multitasking and being committed to/absorbed in a task with a number of components. A mother managing and running a household is really doing one thing, with a lot of components. Same with a nurse coping with IVs, meds and hourly TPRs. But add in a couple of off-topic interruptions and the polished routine starts to fall apart.
I think the key is how much focus is required for each task. Making breakfast is a skill, but it’s a well practiced skill, so can be performed with only a bit of focus while also paying attention elsewhere. Perfect example is driving to work ever day – how many times do you get home and can’t remember each turn you made. If you’re doing something unfamiliar, on the other hand, an email or a simple ‘hello’ is enough to lose your place….
The term ***multi-tasking*** is a business marketing[tm] phrase deployed in a – survival of the fittest – meme, during the period of getting one person to do, what two people used too, some decades ago IMO. Around the period of the Day Timer Book drive to make people more “Efficient” at work and life.
The actual neurological term is “Task Switching” – the brain has to stop from doing one thing and then reformat to do the next thing, it never does two things at the same time e.g. there is a lag time between the two.
But hay … so much of our social lexicon these days is gifted Bernays speak, by which to format our minds – too the perspective our betters/elites desire. You can almost track the diminished of social good with its increasing introduction.
Let me clarify. Early in my TECH career, there was a big fuss about loss of productivity and time due to context switching and multitasking especially for software developers and coders.
We had measured the time on task for those focused on one task for an extended duration, compared to someone focused on the same task but also being interrupted by emails. Quite a few studies conducted in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, if I recall, said it takes 2-10 minutes for someone to re-orient to an interrupted task or to re-orient after distraction. Re-orientation was lost time, therefore costly to an organization.
This was in the early days when emails were new(ish) to many companies. Emails were considered distracting.
Nowadays emails are considered work, iphones are distracting.
“Musk examines how to oust Starmer as UK prime minister before next election’
It’s all fun and games for the UK government going around the world and trying to regime change governments that do not hew to the Collective West’s demands but it is no fun when a billionaire and his President buddy tries to do the same to the UK government itself.
Musk is just saying the ‘quiet’ part out loud.
“Hey! I’m a billionaire oligarch and I pull the strings. Dance puppets, dance!”
Time to start calling Saint Elon, “The Yellow Jester.”
“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” – Elon Musk 2020
Dept. of Modest Proposals —
When they got sick of Crassus, the richest man in imperial Rome, they poured molten gold down his throat. In that spirit, I suggest it’s time for Vauxhall Cross (SIS/MI6) to earn its money and do a hit on Musk — at least, it would be if Starmer had the testicular fortitude to order it.
It’d be a lesson for all the oligarchs and Starmer could claim it was for defense of the realm, and King and Country, and all that.
When the Persian, who were holding Crassus captive after the battle of Carrhae, got bored of him… you mean.
Context helps, otherwise people might think that Romans, getting bored of their uber rich plutocrat, committed the deed…
Speaking of triumvirs….
When the Egyptians murdered Pompey, Caesar went to war with them and installed his own candidate (Cleopatra, incidentally) as the new pharaoh. Vassals don’t get to dis their overlords, even if they are on the outs at home–and Musk is no Pompey.
Looking at the polls, it looks like Reform UK is picking up the discontent voters. Guess Musk wants them in.
For those that doesn’t remember, that is basically UKIP. Despit not having any MPs, it was boosted by BBC inviting them to party debates in the last election. In contrast Galloway’s Worker’s Party, that did hold a seat, was not.
An aside. I tried following the link and got a rather funny paywall message:
(my bold)
Does this mean I get to define the monthly price?
(I block what I can of javascripts etc, so I guess they set the price according to some algorithm that was blocked.)
I block everything. Most pages don’t load until I start selectively unblocking. Even US Gov sites have scroogle trackers.
Trump Is Facing a Catastrophic Defeat in Ukraine, by Mr. Vicky Nuland himself, is absolutely hilarious and shameless. The earnest insincerity of these people really is incredible, and I’m a political consultant!
Funny how he hasn’t even assumed orifice, yet they are already priming the narrative …
Perhaps it’s an illustration or application of the principle that one should “never let a crisis go to waste”.
Just thinking about Trump and his options, one good one would be to announce about 20 mins after the inauguration that an audit of the Pentagon is starting. Then, a few weeks later, have a press conference and come out with a shocked face saying that the bezzling and stealing was much, much worse than even he suspected. Followed by a 90-day freeze on any further equipment or weapons sent to Zelensky while the forensic accountants do their thing.
This would properly blame-shift back to Biden.
Brilliant! Hoist them on their own petards.
Mr. Vicky Nuland and the neocons still ardently believe in the 120-year-old British Empire’s Mackinder pivot of history idea, imo.
Lee Fang – preview only
LA Officials Warned of Extreme Fire Risk Days Before Mayor Skipped Town
The U.S. Forest Service, National Weather Service, others warned over a week ago that fires would strike Los Angeles on Tuesday. They were right.
https://www.leefang.com/p/la-officials-warned-of-extreme-fire
It was pretty obvious to yours truly that shit was gonna go down, but to miss the inauguration of a 2 bit leader in Africa could have had repercussions for the City of Angels.
What an opportunity for reconstruction though, eh? The LA mayor could use some nicer digs, so I humbly suggest she start planning for a new mayoral residence in the rubble, something palatial with a fitting name, IDK, something like “Golden House” would work. Commission a giant 100′ statue of herself while she’s at it. In bronze, put it right next door.
A good make-work scheme for all those artists around LA, no?
A statue of the mayor playing a fiddle, perhaps?
Fires.
The best site I’ve found for covering any fire. This guy is a professional and great. Staggering amount of info and knowledge. He might have newer video up by now.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OjE9xVU4eUA
In brief, it’s impossible to stop a fire fueled by such strong winds and more frequent weather events.
For example take the Berkeley/oakland fire from 20 yrs ago, definitely not in the dry south.
Or take the fire from a few yrs ago in British Columbia town that the day after it hit 120+ burned to the ground.
This year it’s been super wet in far north California and southern Oregon. And a few years ago Brookings Oregon almost burned to the ground, it’s literally on the ocean.
Once the fire starts, the houses become the fuel, not the wildlands. Because it’s been inexpensive to build with wood etc and not plan for extreme fires. those times are over.
It’s extremely sad for all.
Not the new normal, it’s now just normal.
I’m not sure in this instance that were the fire hydraunts working, it would have made any difference, but for around a grandido you could have 30,000 gallons of water at your beck and call if you have a swimming pool.
A 50 foot 2 inch intake hose combined with a gas powered pump and a 100 foot 1 & 1/2 inch hose with nozzle, will give you an effective range of several hundred feet of firefighting potential at 195 gallons per minute, or about 2 and a half hours of water at your disposal.
Zeke from the lookout covers that.
Could you stand and fight a fire even if you had the water and the generator and the skills and the safety equipment in the face of all of the houses around you on fire with 60 mph winds blowing the heat and flames directly at you from literally right next to you?
In short no unless your house was built to withstand fire and the water was just added protection, not the primary protection.
IE concrete or some other non flammable material, coupled with metal shutters over the windows, no eves, metal or tile roof, and no landscaping and then water suppression might save your house.
In the Santa Rosa fires of some years ago, many stucco commercial buildings that were isolated burned because of roofs having debris that caught on fire from the flying embers.
Fire design is a pretty well understood concept at this point, but it adds cost and complexity and limits design and requires maintenance. Who knew?
Most fires don’t come equipped with 60 mph winds, and if you trained a bit beforehand you’d be quite competent to defend your home in an ‘ordinary fire’.
A few years ago during a fire in Santa Barbara, I watched a video of a homeowner trying to defend his property by using a bucket to get water out of his pool. Yeah, like thats gonna do anything.
I imagine the mental duress under the circumstances might contribute to less than rational decision making. One reason to have a written plan in place that can be referred to if disaster calls.
I’m the token non-San Diegan in the Dartful Codgers, and sadly their baptism by fire is coming today and tomorrow with 60 to 80 mph winds in Tijuana-adjacent.
We ski half a day today and everybody drives back to SD tonight, the timing not being all that great.
A collective “stay safe” to you and yours.
Yes, planing is of course good. An interesting fact was discovered after study of the large “Paradise” fire about 2 or so years ago. Many houses burned due to embers being sucked into a house’s attic via convection. The roof is the hottest and highest point, the burning embers get sucked into the attic via soffit vents, the insulation and other exposed beams catch fire ……
So, in planning, perhaps somehow close the soffit vents on your house. No embers can be sucked in.
Latest fire update from Lookout.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4IvFMi_5VUs
News is improving across all fire locations.
My city, Santa Barbara, has presciently prescribed that ALL new housing shall be designed and built to extreme fire standards–no matter where the building is located. What is happening in Palisades/Altadena happened here in 2017 with Painted Cave fire. Over 400+ homes destroyed.
The fire department recognized that wind driven fire is unstoppable by the local fire agencies.
Baby’s first Beretta
Does it matter if your bundle of joy can’t really support it’s head?
Never too early to get them armed and dangerous, and go ahead and load a clip and leave it in the bassinet, there’s no danger really as they don’t have enough index finger pressure to do any harm, in theory.
“old enough to shit, old enough to shoot!”
Baby’s primed to go off at the drop of a Glock.
…tick of the Glock?
A Vietnam era quote from a questioned door-gunner-
Reporter: ‘How can you shoot women and children?’
Door-gunner: ‘Easy. You just don’t lead them so much.’
Some color, search query; life expectancy of a vietnam door gunner
Search return:
two weeks
Over 10% of Vietnam casualties were helicopter crew members, and most of those were the door gunners that protected the helicopter, its crew, and its transports, from their exposed position. The average lifespan of a door gunner on a Huey in Vietnam was just two weeks.
It’s still wild to me that within view of my window is Da Nang Airport, which during the war was the main USAF base. If you didn’t know the history you wouldn’t guess it, unlike in neighbouring Cambodia where the conflicts are more recent and the wounds closer to the surface.
These days Da Nang is a (relatively) prosperous and happy city. Currently the city is getting prettied up for the Tet holiday. Flags, lights, flowers everywhere.
That story of rebirth, or recovery is inspiring.
I’m hoping that story has legs. Cheers.
There’s a couple of things one must consider re the door gunner issue. First I’ve seen estimates as low as 5 minutes for the life expectancy of a door gunner in VietNam. No one has shown the calculations that gave rise to these allegations and I take them all with a grain of salt. Also, casualties and KIA are not the same thing. In VietNam less than 20 percent of casualties were KIA. That means roughly 1,200 total. Was it a dangerous job? No doubt it was but this is a situation where, like Adlai Stevenson once said: These are the conclusions on which I base my facts. In ’68 when I was there, they would come around to us infantrymen and ask for volunteers for door gunners and many would raise their hands. In order to qualify one had to agree to extend there tour in VN for one month. The reason the idea was appealing is that we, in the field, had to sleep on the ground in groups of three where each slept 2 hours at a time with 1 hour on guard. The Huey guys (we called them Slicks) got a hot meal, a bed and a full nights sleep every night. I had a number of buddies including family who were crew chiefs (and thus one of the door gunners) and none were even injured. I do not intend to denigrate the service of door gunners but the truth is we all believed that death came to us randomly and no one was really safe there.
Someone we knew back in the day was a Cobra pilot in Nam and slept in his ‘hootch’ with a quarter inch thick plate of steel under his mattress. He said that occasionally, the Little Brown Brothers would stroll through the base at night and roll a few grenades into the hootches and under the beds of the GIs. He had several buddies wounded that way.
He’s the one who occasionally flew air cover for the Air America DC-3s flying on up to the Golden Triangle on CIA “Supply Runs.”
When I started working at a major US airline in the mid 1980s a large majority of the aircraft mechanics I worked with had been crew chiefs in the US Army or Marines. The rest were Air Force or Navy.
Thank you. Yes, I remembered the “stat” from my youth, door gunners were revered for their courage in my circle. I’m having a chuckle over AI turning urban legend to fact.
That sounds like a wild overstatement. I was a teenager paying close attention to Vietnam war news at the time. I recall zero mention over years of coverage of the war of devastating mortality among door gunners.
Get some!
The Japanese mobster purportedly selling nuclear material to Iran story is more evidence that Al Jeezra is just another Western controlled propaganda outlet. No Iranian were involved but you’d never know that from the headline.
In the story itself “In response to Ebisawa’s repeated inquiries, the undercover agent agreed to help Ebisawa broker the sale of the nuclear materials to an associate who was posing as an Iranian general, prosecutors said.”
I clicked through because I knew the Iranians already had very advanced nuclear capabilities and had zero reason to source anything from Japan. And they still don’t but you’d never know that from surface level perusing of Qatari funded media.
I would go even further.
Japanese prosecutions are inherently suspect. 99% conviction rate, the result of beating while incarcerated leading to the signing of confessions.
Good observation. When heard of these great results in convictions a few years back, I knew then the police were heavy handed, to say the least. Japanese are interesting people. I spent a summer there before the economic downturn in the late 80’s.
“How datacenters use water – and why kicking the habit is nearly impossible”
I think that it is only a matter of time until some municipalities restrict the amount of water going to private homes in order to divert it to some of those datacentres. Or maybe they will start charging higher rates for water for private homes while at the same time lower rates to datacentres to encourage more of them to set up there.
About those hydrants having no water pressure…….
LA is reportedly missing a few hundred hydrants due to metal recyclers. That is the updated scheme after the shorter manhole cover recycling episode in the news a few decades back. Those covers were heavy and did not fetch much so the perps moved on. Street capitalism, ever changing.
I have the impression that in industrial processes, “waste” heat is actually economically valuable. Processes are designed in ways that use heat generated in exothermic parts of the process to provide thermal energy that is needed in endothermic parts of the process. I’ve read that in some commodity chemical processes, the economic value of this recycled heat is comparable to the net profit generated by the entire process.
Am I dreaming, or is this datacenter waste heat potentially economically valuable? Could it be piped to neighboring communities for home heating or greenhouse heating in winter, for example?
We do not seem to be at that stage. The couple of recently sited data centers I know about are located far from anything else that could use the heat.
At least in the (admittedly small) data centers I’ve worked in during my career, including the one I work in now, we recirculate a set amount of water through a cooling tower. I am positive about this because one of the pumps went out recently and before we adjusted the other two pumps, Facilities told me that we temporarily had to use city water which of course would cost us money we don’t normally have to pay because of recirculation.
“Venezuelan president says FBI official among ‘mercenaries’ arrested for plotting attacks”
So the Biden White House, after noting the humiliating & embarrassing mercenary invasion of Venezuela back in 2020 when Trump was President, decides that they can do better before their time in the White House runs out-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gideon_(2020)
And if it too turns out to be a cluster****, well, that will be for Trump to deal with when he is sworn in.
The West may have given up playing checkers on the global geostrategic chessboard and is now playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.
Hungry Hungry Hippos is generous. I was thinking Candy Land Bingo.
I’ve been before but here goes – Prediction: Trump will offer giving all of Ukraine to Russia in return for support USA getting Greenland and Panama canal.
Trump says he sympathizes with Russia’s opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine Reuters /// and Trump says he sympathisizes with Putin not wanting Ukraine in NATO. ****** Can you feel the love from Europe over this?
“A User’s Guide to ‘Who Lost Ukraine?’ ”
My eyes started to glaze over when this Harvard professor said-
‘Argument #1: It was a mistake for Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons’
The Ukraine never had nukes. Those were Soviet nukes of the military that were stationed on Ukrainian territory. When the USSR collapsed, those nukes went back to Russia where they belonged. The Ukrainians did not have the personnel or the codes to ever fire those nukes. Period. If this Harvard professor does not know this, either they are ignorant or they are being disingenuous. Not a good look either way.
… “this professor” is a “they”? Is that a trans metaphor or just bad grammar? I’m confused.
“They” can be used as a gender neutral third person singular, which makes sense in cases where the gender of the person are unknown.
I disagree. “They” is a third person singular and plural pronoun.
English doth evolve, wouldst thou not agree?
And much as it pains me, “they” is working its way into replacing “he” as the preferred pronoun when the sex of the person is unknown.
It’s what was done before 18th century English dilettantes tried to put Latin grammar on a Germanic language.
Ironic thing: late 20th century SK feminists forced female pronouns into a langiahe that lacked gendered pronouns at all. I wonder what they’ll come up with when the new trend hits their sjores. (The formerly genderless third person singular is now the male pronoun.)
Northerners in the U.K. typically use “us” to refer to oneself. Why might that be?
Walt Whitman’s phrase, “I contain multitudes” comes to mind but I doubt that has anything to do with the usage cited.
One can prefer “they” for a pronoun whether one is trans or not, the one has nothing to do with the other.
And one can prefer “they” even if the sex is known.
Ones gender can be a preference, as can whether anyone knows your preference.
It’s because a Harvard professor counts for more than one ordinary professor…
“A User’s Guide to ‘Who Lost Ukraine?’ ”
As Princeton and NYU Russian scholar Stephen Cohen long sought to explain, Ukraine and Georgia were lost as the United States pushed NATO expansion and NATO weapons to the borders of Russia, even while simply cancelling arms control treaties with Russia. Georgia was even pushed to launch a sneak attack on Russian border peacekeepers on the opening night of the Olympics in 2008:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/opinion/a-russia-scholars-views.html
A Russia Scholar’s Views
[ “this professor” is a “they”? ]
Rev Kev is superb; always superb. Appreciation is necessary.
Well, except the Ukr only did that because they were “guaranteed” dual sovereignty protection by both the US and the new RU. Without that guarantee, worth the paper it was written on by the US, the Ukr would not have relinquished control of the nukes.
See the the Budapest Memorandum.
“The memoranda, signed in Patria Hall at the Budapest Convention Center with U.S. Ambassador Donald M. Blinken amongst others in attendance,[3] prohibited Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, “except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” As a result of other agreements and the memorandum, between 1993 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.”
Another Blinken? Anyway….
Keeping in mind the Budapest Memorandum came before the Minsk agreements. The Minsk agreements, which Germany’s Merkel and France’s Hollande later admitted were never what the West claimed, were only meant to give Ukr time to rearm. That was the plan all along. Budapest and Minsk were smoke screens to cover NATO’s other plans.
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was signed on December 5, 1994. By July 1997, President Clinton was asking the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to join NATO…
I’d just like to point out that you cannot lose something you do not own.
Ukraine could never use these weapons. They were ICBMs pointed at the West, and would have required orders from Moscow to be launched. The Ukrainians could not retarget them, so of course there was no purpose in even threatening to launch them. All this was well understood at the time. The issue was not whether Ukraine could ever use them, but what price it could extract for being reasonable and cooperative about their removal. In the end they got what they essentially wanted–a security guarantee from the new Russia, and that was probably the maximum that was on offer. I’ve heard this argument from time to time since 2022, but usually on podcasts by people who manifestly have no idea what they are talking about. I would have expected better from a Harvard professor. I suppose it’s just about conceivable that Kiev could have held out for better terms, but it’s hard to imagine what they might have been.They’d already made themselves unpopular enough with all sides.
Let’s us suppose that the US breaks into its 50 states now becoming “nations”. If all those storing nukes would be able to keep them (and use them), wouldn’t it be some kind of extreme nuclear proliferation? So, apart from these guys not being rigorous they seem to be favourable to nuke proliferation. At least proliferation by the “correct” regimes, which in turn cannot be guaranteed to stay in the “correct” side in any given future time.
Whatever happened to [Jeremy Corbyn]?
Almost immediately after Jeremy Corbyn was broadly elected to be the leader of British Labour, the past leadership of Labour led by Tony Blair began to savagely attack Corbyn. Every economic adviser to Labour resigned. The British press began to attack Corbyn as a Russian Communist, to the extent of the state news media BBC faking a reddened photograph of Corbyn in Russian dress standing outside the Kremlin.
British press attacks on Corbyn spread to Australia, Canada, the United States and Israel. Former President Bill Clinton launched an attack on Corbyn.
Then, attacks on Corbyn turned from radical economics to anti-Semitism. Suddenly, led by the media of Rupert Murdoch, media from Britain to Israel to the United States began concerted attacks on Corbyn as anti-Semitic. The attacks were so fierce as to demean Corbyn for dining with Jews on Passover. The Jews were not considered religious enough by the media.
Eventually, Corbyn was expelled from British Labour, though remaining admired enough to be easily re-elected to Parliament as an Independent.
The Jews were not considered religious enough by the media.
Because it had nothing to do with Jews, as people. It was weaponising the liberal antipathy against historical pogroms and the Holocaust contained in the term “antisemitism”, and redefining it to mean any criticism of the state of Israel. Of course proponents insisted on having their cake and eating it. Any criticism of Israel is an attack on all Jews everywhere, but you can’t blame the Jews of NY, Toronto or London for the ongoing genocide, oh no that’s offsides. Jewish protesters can march through campus fully armed, that’s just free speech, but pro-Palestinian protesters get expelled for shouting slogans, that’s antisemitic.
Not that any of this is surprising, what’s noteworthy is that the obvious two-faced nature of the situation passes by completely unnoticed by the population.
Hard not to chortle over the Wapo/Bezos story and the panicky cries of those getting a dose of their own medicine. Will NC in fact outlast the onetime promoter of “PropOrNot”? And do we care? (We do not.)
But it’s always useful to take a tour of the vast sense of entitlement and victimhood among the PMC, fourth estate division. So welcome to the precariat former masters of the news universe. You may even develop a bit more empathy.
From How Suicide Drones Transformed the Front Lines in Ukraine
The NY Times couldn’t resist including some death porn as well, with 4 photos ostensibly of Russian soldiers in the instants before killed by drones.
What does “suicide drone” even mean, considering drones are unmanned machines? Is that like a “suicide cannonball”? Did an AI program write this and confuse WWII Japanese Kamikaze pilots with unmanned drones because both airplanes and drones fly? / ;)
They mean the drone itself is the weapon, as opposed to the original class of drones that carried other weapons, like missiles, dropping grenades, or just firing a gun. The drone itself returns to base to be rearmed to fly another mission. These ‘suicide drones’ are basically remotely piloted missiles, if you want to be pedantic, but they look and work just like the other drones, only just one time.
Suicide implies a self-determination which a machine does not and cannot have. Yes, I will be pedantic on this point. / ;)
“Kamikaze drone” is more common term (and more appropriate, and better sounding, IMHO), though “suicide drone” is also widely used. It means that they are going on one way trip, though they could theoretically come back and live another day (unlike the cannonball). The name is recent, though the concept is anything but new. What we nowdays call land kamikaze drone, ze Germans used to call “light charge carrier”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_tracked_mine
When my Ex had her homeowners insurance cancelled last year the only quote she was able to get was $40,000 per year for a mid century modern home on 3.5 acres in rural Sebastopol.
By installing a new metal roof and clearing out trees and shrubs she was able to reduce that to $21,000 per year.
The fires in SoCal were entirely predictable, and it is going to get a lot worse.
Marin County hasn’t had a major fire since 1928 and it was the epicenter for sudden Oak death syndrome, it’s only a matter of time…
just passing through to recommend the 3-part al-jazeera series on the sixties in the arab world
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/al-jazeera-world/2022/8/3/the-sixties-in-the-arab-world-politics
lots of great film clips, each episode –this first one devoted to politics—is 45 minutes or so. looking forward to watching the next episode on sixties arab popular culture
I have an idea for a Trump CoIntelPro meme that will drive the Neocons crazy.
Have Trump, once in office, broadcast a “Fireside Chat” from behind the desk in the Oval Office. Proclaim the winding down of the Ukraine Adventure. Point to a sign on the desk, cribbing from Truman.
“The Bucks Stop Here.”
Trump: “That’s right folks. The bucks stop here, right in our country, where they belong.”
Ask the viewers to phone, cable, and email their Representatives demanding that the Pentagon and Intelligence services budgets be slashed. Then establish a White House team to foster primary challenges to Congresspeople who do not cooperate.
It’s time to play hardball.
Just so you know, I’m not sure what this article is talking about, I was excited for a moment & went to look to grab a copy of everything that supposedly just got released. I am in the process of grabbing all of it now to run a duplicates check file-by-file, but while waiting I’m looking through it & I don’t see anything that hadn’t been available for years at this point.
It will take me the rest of the day at least, & probably all of tomorrow, until the duplicates analysis is completed & if previously unreleased files are actually there I will come back & correct this comment… or at least write another one as a reply saying there are new files. But, if there isn’t a comment by at least January 12, 2024 then there are definitely no new files.