Readers, the fundraiser for Lambert’s very nearly gold retirement watch + all Lambert’s Water Cooler work done in 2024 is still ongoing. The goal is 400 donors; so far, we have 132 232 324, or 33% 58% 81% of goal. Any amount helps! If you can give a little, give a little. If you can give a lot, give a lot! Thank you all so much, and it looks we should finish up at some point today. Thank you all so much. It means a lot. –lambert
Beaver releases into wild to be allowed in England for first time in centuries Guardian. See NC on beavers here, here, here, and here.
US regulator flags concerns with State Street and Apollo private credit ETF FT
Investors have more choice — but are the new offers any good? FT
The commitment to collaborate Aeon
Climate
Scientists have a new explanation for the last two years of record heat WaPo
Revealing how fungi build planet-altering ‘road’ networks Nature
Syndemics
On measles outbreak, the Trump administration’s messaging strikes some as off-key STAT
Interim Estimates of 2024–2025 COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Among Adults Aged ≥18 Years — VISION and IVY Networks, September 2024–January 2025 Morbidity and Mortality Report, CDC. From the Abstract: “Vaccine effectiveness (VE) of 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine was 33% against COVID-19–associated emergency department (ED) or urgent care (UC) visits among adults aged ≥18 years and 45%–46% against hospitalizations among immunocompetent adults aged ≥65 years, compared with not receiving a 2024–2025 vaccine dose. VE against hospitalizations in immunocompromised adults aged ≥65 years was 40%.”
China?
China leads global effort with int’l standard for elderly-care robots CGTN
Your best friend has abandoned you: inside China’s latest EU charm offensive South China Morning Post
Syraqistan
IDF carried out Hannibal Directive, new ‘Sword of Damocles’ operation on October 7 Jerusalem Post
Israeli army’s 7 Oct probe further confirms implementation of Hannibal Directive The Cradle
Israel army probe reveals ‘complete failure’ in preventing October 7 attack Al Jazeera
* * * Netanyahu only ever saw the hostages as his path back to genocide Middle East Eye
* * * Israel’s refusal to withdraw from this narrow strip of desert could threaten the Gaza ceasefire AP
Israel’s Peace With Egypt Is Starting to Crack Foreign Policy
Make Israel Biblical Again: How Trump’s GOP Is Accelerating Israel’s West Bank land grab Haaretz
Dear Old Blighty
Payday from hell as several UK banks report major outages The Register
New Not-So-Cold War
* * * Roiled By Desertions And Scandal, Can Ukraine’s French-Trained 155th Brigade Redeem Itself? Radio Free Europe
* * * Zelensky’s Absurd Minerals Deal, Putin: EU Sabotaging Peace; Starmer’s 2nd Attempt To Trap US In War (video) Alexander Mercouris, YouTube. Mercouris expresses his incredulity at the “peculiar” text of the “most extraordinary” mineral deal.
Mapping Ukraine’s rare earth and critical minerals Al Jazeera
* * * Can Trump Force Ukraine to Accept a Peace Deal? Foreign Policy
Ukraine’s worst nightmare becomes real Ben Aris, Radio Moskva
Europe couldn’t replace the US in Ukraine, even if it wanted to The Telegraph
How Big Is Russia’s Appetite for Upheaval? Foreign Affairs
Africa
Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud Rest of World
Trump Administration
Why investors should be worrying about Trump and impoundment Gillian Tett, FT. Important.
DOGE is now dramatically raising the potential for a government shutdown Politico
Senate Republicans say House budget won’t fly with them Politico
Republicans Gamble on a Regressive Economic Agenda NYT
* * * Hyped release of ‘Epstein Files’ sparks anger and disappointment on right NBC. Epstein (1):
Guys, you probably shouldnt just copy and paste the talking points. The lack of self respect is off the charts. Their ideology is monetization. pic.twitter.com/1Nl9qikttU
— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) February 27, 2025
Epstein (2):
The GOP House Judiciary Committee account, which is controlled by Chairman Jim Jordan, posted a Rickroll instead of Epstein files and now supporters are annoyed and angry. pic.twitter.com/8h51VNqDrv
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) February 27, 2025
* * * Hundreds of weather forecasters fired in latest wave of DOGE cuts AP
The Firefighting Fire Sale Lever News
Judge orders rescission of OPM memos directing agencies to fire probationary employees The Hill
Judge finds mass firings of federal probationary workers were likely unlawful AP
* * * FAA targeting Verizon contract in favor of Musk’s Starlink, sources say WaPo. Commentary:
🚨 Employees of Musk’s SpaceX now have email addresses at the FAA, which regulates it. FAA is eyeing Starlink for a major contract previously awarded to Verizon that Musk has criticized. Multiple senior FAA officials have refused to sign paperwork authorizing the switch
— Faiz Siddiqui (@faizsays) February 27, 2025
* * * Was 40-year-old Trump recruited by the KGB? Alexander Motyl, The Hill
Digital Watch
Google’s New Private Tax Lever News
Supply Chain
The US Has Never Imported So Much Food Bloomberg. Handy chart:
American food monopolies are killing our ability to feed ourselves. We are now a massive net food importer. pic.twitter.com/ctzT6ksKAt
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 27, 2025
The Final Frontier
Katy Perry, Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez headed to space on Blue Origin mission TechCrunch
He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal. Quanta
Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind London Review of Books
Antidote du jour (Bernard DUPONT):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
207 comments
Comments are closed.
Just curious, not a criticism, but is there a reason for all the lions in the Antidote du Jour? It’s been a long series! Thanks!
It’s all in honour of Ursula von der Lion of course.
Going out on a limb here, more cat than dog peeps in the Commentariat?
For those who came in late, I think the Rev might be referring to Rose Ladson .
You mean Ursula von der Lyin’? I hear she’s a real bear to be around.
Meet Aslan.
Lambert the sheepish lion?
The Lion Sleeps Tonight, by the Tokens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQlByoPdG6c
One more guess… “The Mask of Anarchy” by P.B. Shelley
‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.’
An exhortation to NC readers!
Brian Eno: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight -Wimoweh-” (But will V. Zelensky?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JNgmGyH6kA&ab_channel=Dave%27sDustyOldVinyl
I bought my 45 rpm of this back in ? 1979 at a little London record shop and someone stole it from me in Seattle some 3 years later… I still growl about it. Wouldn’t you?
I apologize for a double post but after Eno’s Wimoweh my computer’s youtube autoplay went directly to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-uPkGlTnxw&ab_channel=Plainviews
Preparing the readers?
March comes in like a lion… foreshadowing of a newsy month.
And out like a kangaroo?
It’s a concerted propaganda effort financed by the British We Hate Tigers Society, in order to make lions look like the kings of cats.
It’s “The Lion in Winter”.
Lambert is a cultured sort of fellow. He will be missed.
The most valuable English coin of the 19th century is probably the 1839 Una & the Lion 5 Pound. It’s a beautiful design with Queen Victoria walking a lion…
When Nippon was in it’s bubble days in the 80’s, this rare coin was headed in one direction only-that is to Japan where there was feverish demand for a coin that shows up once a year or less and was worth a lot.
This one time an English coin dealer friend had bought 2 of them and thought he was gonna cut a fat cow in the far east, but the fever for a then very expensive coin had cooled off completely, leaving it to the devices of the then moribund UK marketplace or other worldwide demand, which could no way compete with the Japanese
Perplexed, he asked a Japanese coin dealer about the lack of demand?
Said Nippon numsimatist explained that everybody’s wife at a rather exclusive golf club all had one now, and they’d been wearing them in necklaces-which is not something you want to do with a $40k coin.
Keeping up with the Jinguushi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Una_and_the_Lion
Wukchumni, how times have changed. For your pleasure (1973):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56781833@N06/16257979525
Grrrrrrrr…..
I think it was a reference to the end of Shelley’s poem –
‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many–they are few.’
>Israel army probe reveals ‘complete failure’ in preventing October 7 attack Al Jazeera
The Israeli army has acknowledged its “complete failure” to prevent the October 7 attack by Hamas, admitting that it had, for years, underestimated the Palestinian group’s capabilities.
Whether it was a “failure” depends on what the intent/motive was/is…more than 1 story has been floated that Israel “stood down” and let the attack proceed. Whether true or not, I can’t know for sure, but even Col. Douglas MacGregor and other Judge Napolitano guest have made allusions to Oct 7th being used as a pretext for launching a “greater Israel” offensive.
Another complete failure is any coverage of this by western mainstream media.
Still waiting for coverage in my country.
An article I read said that this report was only 19 pages long which beggars belief. And that senior personnel had no responsibility for this total failure. And that it was really, really hard for the IDF to distinguish between Hamas soldiers and Israelis in their attacks. So this report is just a whitewash printed out on the back of a table napkin.
To me it sounds like a classic case of “forgiveness” vs. permission.
Or a classic case of “the ends justify the means.”
See links on the Hannibal Directive invocation.
And since the kibbutzes attacked by Hamas are centers of ” left-wing people” in the Israeli political context,
the Smotrich ben Gvir (netanyahu) government probably saw this as an opportunity to get a bunch of left wing Israelis killed and even more of them dispirited so as to lower further their influence in Israeli politics and society.
“Exclusive | Your best friend has abandoned you: inside China’s latest EU charm offensive”
It’s never going to work you know. The people of the EU would be thinking that this is a great idea and would be a road to prosperity that would be stable and not the chaos of a Trump Presidency. But the leaders of the EU such as Ursula will be saying that maybe if they doubled down on sanctions on China, threaten them over human rights or whatever and get countries like India to sanction them as well, that maybe the US will look kindly on their efforts and bring them back into the club with all forgiven. Then it will be just like old times – and let the money flow again.
Yeah. It’s more like “your sugar daddy has dumped you.”
>How Big Is Russia’s Appetite for Upheaval? Foreign Affairs
….Russia will almost certainly step up its disinformation campaigns and acts of sabotage (such as cyberattacks and vandalism of infrastructure) in Europe, sensing in the United States’ apparent desire to retreat from the continent an opportunity to further erode NATO cohesion.
You can count on FA to invert the truth in almost all its articles. Appetite for upheaval? That is the AngloAmerican playbook. Does anyone need to be reminded of Operation Gladio?
I actually find it either amusing or nauseating – depending on my mood – how those very people are calling for hate-speech and anti-disinfo legislation who are most invested into spreading hate and lies.
You seriously cannot read these outlets without screaming.
Norman Finkelstein put it well in his almost 4-hour interview recently – he is ANGRY every single day to a point where it becomes physical. I know how he feels.
p.s. And since Finkelstein is a humorous person he illustrates this with an anecdote about Noam Chomsky: Chomsky was having issues with his teeth clenching all the time. The doctors were looking for the reason until Chomsky´s late wife found the cause – he was reading the NYT every morning.
Me, too. I broke four teeth doing that and had to have four crowns put in. Then I broke one of the crowns and had to get a new one. Now I wear a night guard to keep me from clenching and grinding. I chew up the night guards about once every six months. My insurance has stopped paying for replacements.
Inversion and projection are two big arrows in the media quiver. FA isn’t alone in their approach.
What happened to the olden days when deciphering articles was easier.
Example: start at the bottom of an NYT article and find the lede or ledette around paragraph 8 or 9.
re: NYT
yes!
exactly
p.s. In Germany they´re gullible towards US papers of record like little children. And when you ´re trying to tell people it´s all smoke, mirrors and lies they don´t understand it. And this is true even for journalists of alternative media. In fact I get the impression younger ones are less mature and more prone to falling for that fakery. Point in case: Nordstream Ukraine Aurora bullshit story.
edit: argh…. “case in point”
sorry
This passage is perplexing:
The base at Tartus has been there since the 1970s. I thought that was fairly common knowledge among anyone who knows anything about Syria. Made me stop reading the rest of it.
It’s such a full-of-(family blog) straight ahead establishment POV rag. I can hardly get through an article.
I for one am stunned at the complacency of Wall Street in the face of what’s happening. With virtually every risk to the downside, with the Fed for now effectively sidelined, with the explosion of private credit, acting as though there is minimal risk in the system and the party can continue is, to me, nuts.
I can only assume that they have learned the lesson that they will get bailed out again, and that these crisis are actually NPV positive events and that power and money will be transferred to them (again). Will MAGA let that happen?
Complacent? They are drumming their fingers, waiting!?
On another front, the possible DOGE checks.. within three or four weeks that money- if it happens, will inure right back into the pockets of the Circle of Sycophants(tm) Trumpeters.
Trump is a S L I C C
If I am offered a DOGE check, I will refuse or decline it. If they force it upon me, I will have it set in a block of clear transparent plastic resin.
What with trillions speculated in crypto, maybe a black hole-like “investment” vehicle just isn’t that big of a concern? I’m only being half sarcastic.
Complacency in the markets, “What, Me Worry?”
Speculating that the big boys and insiders are selling everything that isn’t nailed down and setting their shorts up.
And yes, it seems like the mantra is: Bailouts are Us for TPTB running the government so
“Will MAGA let that happen?”
Do mean Trump’s true and immovable base, the Lumpen Bourgeoisie of small business owners and those with similar mindset, or the mostly white working class that’s puts him over the top but is capable of shifting (as it did in 2020, when Trump’s vote among white working class males declined)?
If it’s the former, it’s a little late in the game to be asking: they’re chumps, and while the most cunning of them will prosper, most will be fleeced like everybody else, except they’ll like it, all the way to the end. As long as they can punch down and be distracted, they’re with Trump.
As for the working class, particularly the white working class, that’s the big question, with a more pivotal and less certain outcome.
A New Deal Party, if there was such a thing, might appeal to the White working class. And the Black working class too. And maybe even the working classes of Other colors.
Gooooooood Mooooooooorning Fiatnam!
We were on a stint stateside in Malaise-a, the civilians we came across too dazed looking at their screens to actually do anything except caterwaul occasionally to others of their ilk online, where was the energy of early 1970’s protests, one wondered?
You don’t need a fired weatherman to know which way the wind blows…
In the 1970s we not only had protests, but we had an armed opposition. Unfortunately groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground consisted of knuckleheads who should have joined the local repertory theater company as an alternate way of cosplaying political revolutionary.
But that doesn’t say an armed opposition might not still be helpful. Sometimes you have to lose a few serious battles (Blair Mountain, anyone?) in order to win the war. A concept that has consistently eluded our peaceful Democrats in all their “fighting for” us.
>>>A concept that has consistently eluded our peaceful Democrats in all their “fighting for” us.
No, it hasn’t. Those Judas goats are cosplaying.
Broad-based militant resistance is one thing, “armed resistance” by idiots, adventurists, killers and informer-penetrated groupuscules is something else.
The SLA were not just murderous idiots – they assassinated the first Black school Superintendent of a major city over a policy proposal that he in fact opposed – they were almost certainly penetrated by the cops, since, Donald DeFreeze (“General Field Commander Cinque”) was a known LAPD informant.
Weather Underground was composed of arrogant Ivy League adventurists, hated and disowned by most remnants of SDS – they were an offshoot after the disastrous factional convention of 1969 – and the rest of Left of the time. They were such geniuses that they and comrades from the Black Liberation Army staged a (doubly fatal) bank robbery in a suburb known as a bedroom community for NYC cops.
Groups like the Weather Underground and the SLA were the radioactive Afterlife of the ‘60’s Left, cautionary tales to be learned from, not emulated.
10,000 armed coal miners, sounds a bit like Donbass militiamen thingy we got a decade ago.
“On measles outbreak, the Trump administration’s messaging strikes some as off-key”
‘In his brief answer, Kennedy seemed to downplay the outbreak, saying it was “not unusual,” and apparently misstated how many people have died. (It’s one, according to Texas officials, not two, as Kennedy said.) He also did not take the opportunity to emphasize the importance of vaccination in protecting individuals and corralling the outbreak.’
After eliminating measles back in 2000, it looks like this disease is going to come roaring back with a vengeance in the US thanks to Kennedy being wonky on such a simple vaccination as a solution. Read up on what he did for Samoa which helped lead to the deaths of over 80 people from measles not long ago and then him turning around and saying that it had nothing to do with him-
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rfk-jr-samoa-measles-vaccine-crisis-rcna187787
If you have kids or grand-kids, then for the love of Mike get them their measles vaccinations. Over the next four years it is going to be bad but going by past performance, Kennedy will walk away and say that it was not him at fault.
I disagree with this: “it looks like this disease is going to come roaring back with a vengeance in the US thanks to Kennedy being wonky on such a simple vaccination as a solution.” As IM Doc pointed out about 4-5 days ago, most of the immigrants (millions mind you) who have “come roaring back with a vengeance” in the last few years, were not screened for measles. So, no surprise that measles is having an outbreak in a border state, and Tennessee too. Also, Kennedy has been on the job about a week now, so how does that relate to him?
Except this outbreak started in the Mennonite community, not among immigrants. The criticism of Kennedy is not blame for the outbreak but for the failure to take the lead calling for vaccination. Indefensible IMO and vindicates his critics.
Sure, but the underlying driver of Rev’s comment seems unassailable, that is encouraging vaccine skepticism opens the door for a measles comeback.
I absolutely agree with the “for the love of Mike” part.
True, but the people encouraging vaccine skepticism are quite often portrayed as MAGA knuckledraggers when the reality is that pre-COVID vaccine skepticism was most definitely encouraged by educated liberal hippy types. I know several otherwise intelligent liberals who didn’t get their kids vaccinated. Several years ago I was going to an outdoor concert and a woman in hippy regalia approached me to sign a petition. She equivocated about what it was all about but when I pressed her, it turned out she was one of the nutty anti-vax crowd and I refused to sign. Another friend who home schooled her kids because she refused to have them vaccinated had one of them die unexpectedly and mysteriously at ten years old. Haven’t heard what the cause was, but I sincerely hope it wasn’t something that could have been prevented with a childhood vaccine.
Plenty of blame to go around here, but like everything these days, people try to pin the blame on Trump and his people.
> pre-COVID vaccine skepticism was most definitely encouraged by educated liberal hippy types.
Where Nicole Hanrahan emerged from. That, and extremely insular religious communities.
This is a good point. There was vaccine hesitancy back in the 90’s when it was relative to my station in life having kids then, and a roundup of headwinds public health has faced is in order. Yet, if you were to choose where to focus moving forward wouldn’t it make sense to be looking at the top of the “food chain” for policy direction?
As an aside, I actually like RFK jr. I think his heart is in the right place. If one is to take his official ESTABLISHING THE PRESIDENT’S MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN COMMISSION, Feb 13, at face value, it looks pretty good. Yet set these goals within our current backdrop of razing public health institutions to the ground and I have to ask how.
Weather and climate office hour 02/27/2025: Update on mass firings at NOAA/NWS
https://www.youtube.com/live/W2Vv2p3CWXI (a little over an hour)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Daniel Swain is a weather wunderkind, and is always the guy everybody goes to in matters such as the LA Infernos et al, as he was there days before the calamity came calling, practically shouting HOUSTON, we have a problem!
In the video, he doesn’t really talk all that much about weather, but those whose jobs were axed yesterday by DOGE.
Thanks. I used to work at NOAA, way back in the day.
thank you for your service!
thats my favorite fedgov agency.
re: Payday from hell as several UK banks report major outages The Register
“The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s finance regulator, published a post-CrowdStrike report in October, saying it noticed an upward trend of third-party related outages hitting UK banks since the beginning of 2023.”
As Yves says, if your business depends on a platform then you don’t have a business. It would appear this is being put to the test.
Well this can all be fixed by going to digital IDs and all digital currency. // do I need to add a snark tag? / ;)
“Amid Profound Forensic Challenges, Israel May Never Fully Determine How Hostages Were Killed in Captivity”
Pro tip, fellas. If some of those bodies look like they have been squashed flat, then it is unlikely a bunch of Hamas guys picked up a concrete slab and dropped it on them. Much more likely the IDF dropped the building that they were being kept captive. They may make noises about bringing the hostages home but Netanyahu and the ultra-orthodox see them as a distraction and that it would be better if they were all just dead. That is why the families of the hostages and the ultra-Orthodox have fights with each other from time to time. The Hannibal Directive is still in operation and has been all this time.
The Firefighting Fire Sale Lever News
~~~~~~~~~~~
It’s insane firing firefighters just as The Big Heat® is ramping up, we’re idiots!
You wonder if Elon’s young whiz kidz have figured out the Firefighting Industrial Complex yet, and aimed for the head and not the tail instead.
I keep burning away the efforts of the day in my prune up agreement with the forest for the trees. You couldn’t help but notice how many live trees there were in the aftermath of the fire in Pacific Palisades.
That’s what i’m aiming for in my branch office underneath on the all cats and no cattle ranch.
Finding out fire categorization could be explanatory, to the extent practicable. Say, divide into likely arson and non-arson based on some methodology and whatever fact base there may be. Just a few years ago there were many apparent arson fires on the map, curiously tapering off abruptly at the international borders. For every firebug caught on video, how many escaped?
I found it interesting that the LA Times never mentioned the idea that the well spaced out LA Infernos could well have been unintentional warming or cooking fires among the homeless that simply got out of control in the face of fierce Santa Ana winds, but I kind of get it in that if you blame them, there isn’t any money in it in terms of recovery, good luck with that!
An arsonist with a couple dozen road flares and a tank full of gas could easily light up the Sierra Nevada, there’s no barrier to stop them from their appointed rounds.
The mess was wild. Also, I don’t ever remember fires raging in Cali with as many attempted arsonists running around during the crisis. That surely contributed to stretching resources already stretched.
Do you remember such a thing ever?
Eliminating arsonists does not eliminate the fact that it hasn’t rained in half a year, and the landscape is a literal tinderbox. Dry lightning, electric utility sparking, cigarette butt out the window, etc and whoosh. Hope it’s not windy.
Arson may be a problem, but it’s not the problem, which of course is climate change.
The biggest change here associated with climate change has been the idea of wildfires in the Sierra Nevada not going to bed at night as they always used to do in getting some sleep before resuming in the morning.
Nighttime aircraft drops aren’t really an option now, there’s a few nighttime Chinook helos, but that’s about it.
I think that Elon has been rich too long which means that there is always someone who is willing to make what he wants appear no matter what. And the whiz kidz have been living in a tech paradise most of their lives. Riding a keyboard and having better tech employment in the last few years has meant that you do not have to think ahead. There is always an ‘app’ for it. And even better someone desperate and not as smart as them on an e-bike ready to deliver it.
(And for the record, I think we can also consider this a Silicon Valley mutation of the Harvard/Chicago School of Business mismanagement delusion virus. It probably began before them, but they were super spreaders of never prepare for the obvious possibilities. )
Musical interlude:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XCQNpjWmRE/
Super Rich Kids
Ya got pumas?
‘Matt Stoller
@matthewstoller
American food monopolies are killing our ability to feed ourselves. We are now a massive net food importer.’
How does that one work out? Is it because of industrial farming methods? Apparently the amount of farming has been decreasing for a very long time-
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detail?chartId=58268
https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2024/09/loss-of-us-farmland-in-the-21st-century-the-national-perspective-from-the-census-of-agriculture.html
Anybody knows what is really going on here? For a country the size of the US, you would think that there would be no problem in feeding itself.
Isn’t a significant portion of food crops grown in the USA serving to produce “bio-fuels” instead of sugar, vegetable oil, maize flour, and the like for human consumption?
Most of the corn and soybeans grown in North Carolina are for animal feed. Not sure about elsewhere.
All right, I looked into it. The USDA has statistics about the usage of agriculture produce for biofuels.
The interesting figures are in tables 5 and 6. They refer to the “market year” — whatever period this encompasses — they include imports (which are dwarfed by domestic production anyway), and make adjustments for stocks. For 2024:
36.4% of all corn actually used ended up as ethanol fuel;
46.6% of all soybean oil actually used ended up as biofuel.
That is indeed a “significant portion of food crops”. Some years are even worse. In 2012, 61.5% of all corn ended up as biofuel, for instance.
not only that, but commodity crops as export weapon.
and! Big Ag are even bigger welfare queens than Big Weapon and Big Pharma…theyve really learned how to game the federal subsidy system…we pay them for corn, etc…so they go crazy and make orders of magnitude more than is needed…and, as i repeat often, hafta invent new ways to use it.
Ethanol has a negative EROEI, after all…costs more energy to produce than is contained within it.
and CAFO’s,lol…wouldnt be even remotely possible without subsidised grains.
i remember a guy back in my organic activist days(so, 25+ years ago) saying that if something like 8% of Big Ag’s welfare were diverted to people like me, we’d be a much healthier nation.
we dont subsidise tomatoes or fancy lettuce or fruit(except in tiny amounts that are more trouble than theyre worth, for all the conditions and strings attached)
its stupid, countrproductive and will ruin our fair country.
Further to this, when I lived in South Dakota, the contracts farmers had for growing corn and soybeans for bio-fuels were higher paying than growing for food. The problem is that when you grow for bio-fuels, there is no need to avoid spraying Round-up, pesticides, herbicides, etc. to the n-th degree in order to get the largest yield. This ends up staying in the dirt and you can’t grow for food for years after that. Plus the spray drifts onto neighbouring land.
Well, since the entire state of Iowa is basically a giant corn-fueled ethanol plant, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised.
Possibly a greater amount of animal feed is being farmed these days in the US in lieu of that for human consumption.
Also, I believe its cheaper to import many foods than grow them here. The food bank I worked at had massive amounts of canned goods shipped from China on the shelves.
Then there’s the enormous destruction of food processing plants in the US in the past few years.
Just look at the list: (ignore the politics. just look at the list)
https://mainstreetdigest.com/2024/06/must-see-map-shows-all-food-processing-plants-that-have-burned-down-blown-up-or-been-destroyed-under-biden/
Also, now there’s bird flu which has led the culling/killing of over 150 million US chickens. The result? We’re importing eggs from Turkey. (What, there’s no bird flu in Turkey?)
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/24/business/egg-prices-turkey-vaccine/index.html
Come on, Flora! The place is named Turkey! It’s obviously a haven for birds. :-)
Along with everything else mentioned, I don’t think you can leave the real estate industry out of this. There has been a lot of money made by ‘developing’ farm land. So we have a lot of factors helping to bring about yet another disastrous and unsustainable situation.
From the Daily Yonder:
Analysis: If You Care About Record Egg Prices, You Should Care About Corporate Consolidation
https://dailyyonder.com/analysis-if-you-care-about-record-egg-prices-you-should-care-about-corporate-consolidation/2025/02/20/
Aside from noting that revolutions, civil wars, and the collapse of empires and civilizations are quite often caused by hunger, which is not always due to crop failures, but also due to either transportation or corruption, the United States has always been an exporter of food, certainly growing enough to feed the population.
IIRC, it was only in the first winter of the Great Depression that actually had deaths caused by hunger albeit usually of people getting so weak that something else killed them, not just people going hungry, before the churches, charities, and philanthropists, all backstopped by different levels of the government stopped that.
Does anyone believe that the “elites” running our society know or care about all this, and would we the ability to ramp up a nationwide food program in less than a year as happened in the Great Depression? People are already going hungry just from poverty and the cost of food. What would happen if we got a Great Recession 2.0, or worse, a Second Great Depression?
More Jackpot.
Keir Starmer’s tactic of sucking up to Trump paid off handsomely… after an unlikely Labour stand-in for Donald helped rehearse the President’s alpha male handshake Daily Mail
This might be the first Daily Mail article I’ve ever read. A load of mush, pics, and zero information. Endless paragraphs of fluff with no info on what was agreed, except maybe trade deal something something with…Chagos islands?
Dima at Military Summary claims that Trump agreed relieve Britain from protecting Zelensky and restore the CIA protection that was recently cut off. I was looking for confirmation. Didn’t see it this Daily Mail, but I skimmed faster and faster past the pics and fluff so may have missed it.
In addition to verbally threatening (Russia?) with US troops in Ukraine to protect US deals, Trump is now reporting protecting Zelensky again and still supplying Ukraine with weapons. A bad trend.
John Helmer has many details, with Nima, published today
https://www.youtube.com/live/RCGtyGgi7Ig
Yes, that was interesting. Do you think he’s making too much of a comment that Starmer made under his breath about Canada?
Welcome to KILL, your defenestration station!
50,000 watts of Chainsaw rock!
Makita rock
I remember when D.O.G.E. was young
Me and Elon had so much fun
Busting skulls, like Sly Stallone
Did some email firings; a TRO of my own
But the biggest kick I ever got
Was doin’ a thing called the Makita rock
While the other kids were rocking with work stops
We were hoppin’ and boppin’ to the Makita rock, well!
[Bridge/Chorus]
Chainsaw rockin’! The sound is shocking when your workforce can’t stay still
I never knew me a better time, and I guess I never will
Aw, lawdy mama, on Friday nights, when Elon stole your legal rights
The chainsaw rockin’ was out of sight!
[Musical chainsaw noises]
Bzzzzz!, brrr-brrr-brrr-brrr-brrr! brrr-brrr-brrr-brrr-brrr, la-la-la-la-la!
Well, the years went by, and the D.O.G.E. just died
Orangeman went and left us for some Donkey guy
Long nights cryin’ with a record of greed
Dreamin’ of a bevy of new life-changing schemes
But they’ll never score the kills we got
Ending careers to the Makita rock
Breaking things, and moving fast
We really thought the chainsaw rock would last
Chainsaw rockin’! The sound is shocking when your workforce can’t stay still
I never knew me a better time, and I guess I never will
Aw, lawdy mama! on Friday nights, when Elon won those legal fights
The chainsaw rockin’ was out of sight!
Bzzzzz!, brrr-brrr-brrr-brrr-brrr! brrr-brrr-brrr-brrr-brrr, la-la-la-la-la!
I remember when D.O.G.E. was young
Me and Elon had so much fun
Busting skulls, like Sly Stallone
Did some email firings; a TRO of my own
But the biggest kick I ever got
Was doin’ a thing called the Makita rock
While the other kids were rocking with work stops
We were hoppin’ and boppin’ to the Makita rock, well!
[Repeat bridge, Chorus]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75r0nQu-hMs
A superb re-rendering!
Nice one, although one-handing a 20 inch Stihl while wearing white suede four inch platform clogs is risky.
Could Margorie Taylor-Greene handle a Makita in heels? Knee-high stripper boots, maybe.
I once saw her juggling a number of absurdities at once, she’s got mad skills in that regard, keeping those red herrings up.
She’s my femme fatale … if only I lived about 20 miles to the northwest.
It’s not that I’m not fond of Vince Fong, My Kevin’s replacement, just looked up his congressional record and the only thing he got through as 1 of 40 co-sponsors was this important bit of legislation now the law of the land:
I liked Marjorie better when she was a thorn in Johnson’s pride. She does provide comedic material, though.
I got re-districted into Barry Loudmouth-milk-the-taxpayers zone of danger.
With DOGE pushing to sell property and the coming cuts to the VA, even that might be erased soon.
It would be a tragedy if our Congressmen and Congresswomen were to run out of Federal buildings to rename.
Yup.
Black humor take… The Post Office has only survived the decades long bipartisan attempt to privatize it because too many Congress needs its offices to rename them to show their constituents they aren’t dead.
Looking at the size of that chainsaw Musk was handling I had “bar” envy.
I read that it was made in China.
Yes, customized into a very effective stage prop.
I think is was a Stihl. They used to be made in Germany and Italy.
The chainsaw is a 59.6 cc/2.6 kW TMC model MT-598 and was customized by Argentinian Tute Di Tella., FireAndSaw
Edit, Some good photos on this blog, worth a look.
With what looks like at least a 30″ bar that thing could take down some 200 year old institutions.
Well done.
“Me and Elon had so much fun” The “me” is Big Balls?
Now that DOGE has gutted OSHA, Elon can swing his chainsaw without benefit of PPE: hard hat, safety glasses, or full face shield, leather gloves, lace-up, steel-toed boot with sturdy soles and heels (I have a pair of ‘lady loggers’), ear protectors, and, really really important if you want to continue fathering children, overalls made of a fabric that will instantly gum up the chain if it ‘kicks back’ and …. um …. latches onto your upper thigh area.
A professional logger friend just barely nicked his knee with a chainsaw and he was out of action for 6 months and in mucho pain.
Someone once told me the average chainsaw injury resulted in 132 stitches. Seems like a lot.
Or a little, depending which parts you’re sewing back on.
My black and white street cat Ajax (RIP) had 25 stitches on his left haunch after being hit by something fast on wheels. Happily he was just a lad so healed quickly and went on to climb trees, run faster than a cheetah and live until 18 when he fell ill with hyperthyroid.
“Katy Perry, Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez headed to space on Blue Origin mission”
Yeah, that could be a lot of fun. I can see it now. Lauren Sánchez is floating through the cabin when she spots a lever that says ‘Do Not Touch.’ Curious about what it is for and taking a grip, an actual astronaut shouts at her to stop what she is doing. She turns to them and shouts back ‘Nobody can tell me what to do anymore. I’m Jeff Bezos’ fiancée and I have the dix pix to prove it!’ whereupon she throws the lever – and planet Earth gets several more satellites.
This is sub-orbital flight, and does not stand comparison with what Valentina Tereshkova did, or even Laika.
Kosmoneyacht?
“Kosmosannisquatsi,” an upcoming straight to streaming video about the parlous state of Terran Human cosmopolitanlogy. The word is a Flackverse term meaning “Rocket out of balance.”
Approved by Blue Check Origin. Look for the Blue Check, your Seal of Authority!
Typical of our world’s off-the-rails craziness, calling this a ‘mission’. It’s a joyride to amuse some celebrities. While the planet goes up in a dumpster fire.
DEI?
“It’s ok when we do it.”
> The commitment to collaborate Aeon
A relevant article:
Five rules for the evolution of cooperation
Saira Khan:
> This is known as the ‘free-rider’ problem.
Khan is focusing on human co-operation, but free-riders are a systemic problem. The technical solution is called Spite (costly behavior that harms others). Here’s an example paper:
Spite is contagious in dynamic networks
Also, some of the chimp assertions are contradicted by observations, as seen in The New Chimpanzee (1995). (Alas, all I can find is an incomplete version, but it has the cases in point.)
Thanks. The Aeon article seemed thin – I was trying to generously attribute that to space constraints instead of shallow thinking.
re: CBS 60 Minutes on German hate-speech
To come back to that topic:
A comment by known German retired judge Thomas Fischer (German Federal Court of Justice) – who usually was not the dumbest of people – here does what most laywers do – affirm the status quo of law enforcement and thus suppression of free speech.
He regards CBS´s item as lowlevel and ridiculous piece. I agree that it´s not good. But he misses the major points. And as a polemic commentator himself should be much more familiar with the practice of CBS and most other US AND German news shows which are all but serious.
And much worse: What standards CBS might not live up to in journalism he apparently misses on legal issues in Europe – like, er, the incarceration of protesters against genocide? In Germany, in GB, in France???
The suppression of peace protest???
Nothing from Mr. Fischer there.
And besides: I find it appalling that in Germany it has become normal that people are just being dragged out of their homes for words how hateful they may be. Some of my friends have no problem with that. They seem to not understand the epistemic implications and dangers of this practice.
“How naive was the German judiciary’s appearance in US documentary?”
https://www.lto.de/recht/meinung/m/cbs-us-doku-deutsche-justiz-staatsanwaltschaft-hass-im-netz-aktionstag-durchsuchungen-thomas-fischer
For a machine-translation please c&p in google-translate
https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&op=websites
Germany has even prevented Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, from speaking in a university setting, twice:
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-anger-over-cancelled-talks-by-un-special-rapporteur-for-palestinian-territories/a-71662122
It´s shameful what these oh-so-educated German elites are fabricating there. Just shameful…
Sorry for jesting with serious stuff, but I’ve seen you being repeatedly stressed for being German in the Germany as it is now, and helpless to do anything about it. Since such things are not good for health, I suggest converting to something else. You must have some non-Germanic blood in you, considering that you don’t fit in. Maybe you are partially Slavic. 😉
https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/rep-jeff-hurds-staffer-left-event-site-after-seeing-crowd-at-dolores-public-library/
Rep. Jeff Hurd’s staffer left event site after seeing crowd at Dolores Public Library
Montezuma County sheriff offered to escort regional director in and out of location
“Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud”
How long till Musk and his buddies get Trump to sanction Nigeria until they go back to using beautiful American servers and paying for them in wonderful American dollars?
Or they treat it like the Nordstream Pipeline.
Musk will send an email to Nigerian prince.
>FBI withheld ‘thousands’ of Epstein docs – US attorney general – RT
In a letter to Bondi on Wednesday, Ogles announced his intent to introduce the Preventing Epstein Documentation Obliteration Act, or PEDO Act, following “reports that certain FBI agents are allegedly attempting to destroy critical records.”
FBI should be dismantled, total lack of accountability.
https://www.rt.com/news/613418-fbi-withheld-epstein-files/
Love that history of the universe bit.
So we have found some fraud, apparently.
There are more details here:
Federal judge invalidates OPM’s directives to terminate federal probationary workers
Zelensky’s Absurd Minerals Deal, Putin: EU Sabotaging Peace; Starmer’s 2nd Attempt To Trap US In War (video) Alexander Mercouris, YouTube. Mercouris expresses his incredulity at the “peculiar” text of the “most extraordinary” mineral deal.
Yes, he said it could only be called “a document”.
An interesting part of the video for me was where he was hoping Trump was aware of the devious and gangster nature (my paraphrasing) of Z and wouldn’t be fooled. All I could do was remember that Trump dealt in casinos and NY real estate. While Trump can be distracted and miss details, I don’t think he doesn’t recognize a gangster when he sees one.
BTW: From 2023
https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/06/05/mob-making-comeback-in-construction/
Am I the only one who thinks Trump was recruited by anyone who ever made any kind of an offer?
The Kissinger files are full of weirdos who threated him, and then turned out to have some kind of snitch protection from being recruited by various departments and agencies and were maintained as assets on a “just because/just in case” basis even when they failed to provide any value.
Trump seems like he’d tell anyone he could be hella useful to see what was in it for him.
Money is a world within itself
With a language we all understand
With an equal opportunity
For all to sing, dance and hold out their hands
But just because a Richie Rich has a groove
Don’t make it in the groove
But you can tell right away at letter E
When the DOGE people start to move
They can feel it all over
But they can feel its all over for some people
They can feel it all over
They can feel its all over for some people, no, yeah
Money knows that it is and always will
Be one of the things that life just won’t quit
But here are some of the high tech pioneers
That time will not allow us to forget now
You can feel it all over
You can feel its all over for some people
You can feel it all over
You can feel its all over for some people
You can feel it all over
You can feel its all over for some people
You can feel it all over
I can feel it all, all, all-all-all over now people
Can’t you feel it all over?
Come on, let’s feel its all over for some people
You can feel it all over
Everybody all over for some people, go
Sir Duke, by Stevie Wonder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sIjSNTS7Fs
Re: DOGE is now dramatically raising the potential for a government shutdown (Politico)
“Senior Republicans are seriously exploring how to include cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in an upcoming government funding bill — a move that would skyrocket tensions with Democrats and drastically raise the potential for a government shutdown”
I would posit that a shutdown would suit the Dogebags/NRx cretins just fine, and that this is part of the plan. They win either way.
The overwhelming silence about a government shutdown deadline that is two weeks out gives the game away. Trump loves the idea of a government shutdown that doesn’t have his fingerprints on it. The entire Federal workforce gets put on indefinite unpaid leave, saving hundreds of billions of dollars. If it goes on for long enough, many of those Federal employees never come back. Mission accomplished.
Even better: Once the shutdown becomes a problem, Trump is free to use the government shutdown and ongoing Congressional deadlock as an excuse to engineer a phony disagreement between his sock puppets Johnson and Thune over when to recess Congress, invoke his twisted interpretation of the second clause of Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution to effectively dissolve Congress, declare a National State of Emergency, and begin rule by decree.
Eventually the Supreme Court rules whether to voluntarily surrender both the legislative and judicial branches to Trump’s authority, or not. In the event that they choose to take an unambiguous stand against dictatorship, we will find out whether or not Trump cares what the Supreme Court thinks in the middle of a National State of Emergency.
Then troops get deployed to the cities that Trump loves to hate, and the mass roundups of immigrants to concentration camps can begin. If we are lucky, we get elections in 2026 – if the National State of Emergency allows Congress to reconvene.
The creepiest part of all of this is that a) useless Congressional Democrats are still acting like there is anything left to negotiate, b) death cult Congressional Republicans are falling all over themselves congratulating Trump for taking urgent bold action to save the country from itself, and c) no elected Congressional representative, Republican or Democrat, is going to risk facing their constituents in any public forum, because they know exactly what people are going to want to tell them.
The only question left for state and local governments is whether to choose a French (enthusiastic assistance of a totalitarian regime), Italian (deliberately incompetent implementation of orders from a totalitarian regime) or Danish (open defiance of a totalitarian regime) response.
Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind London Review of Books
This is a beautiful essay. I sent it to two friends who have Parkinson’s disease. Out of seven siblings, two had forms of the disease. I had no idea that Cy Twombly had it. For me, this is a must read and I’m going to book mark it. Thanks, Lambert. You are a good teacher.
$4.01k update:
I’ve been on the silent side, not wanting to alienate those not in the Bitcoin fold with ribald tales of monetary conquest, buoyed by Trump being elected and we enthusiasts celebrated breaking the $100k barrier con much gusto, and it held there for a while, but that was then and this is now, and the Seinfeldian money about nothing dipped into the high $70’s, heavens to murgatroyd! being the typical reaction in the numismatrix.
Re vaccine effectiveness, I have update re my participation in REACT study. I noted recently how annoyed I wasn’t in first wave since my test was intercepted in the mail.
I’d forgotten that I’d answered a bunch of stuff mid 2022. Just had invite and done latest round. Lots of questions about when you think or know you had COVID, vaccination history, along with oodles of questions about known and suspected sequelae (thanks Lambert!).
A lot of enquiries about autoimmune conditions and neurological/psychological impairment. The cardiac section was clearly major but I was naturally directed away due to pre-existing heart condition so I can’t shed light on that. Also whole section about long COVID. It felt like someone was actually asking me about the stuff that mattered (except they administered EQ-5D-5L which in free text I duly criticised…… I’ve worked on the thing and it’s NOT good). News you can use?
PS I am very alert to questions that have been badly asked (and don’t conceal what the investigator is really interested in) and there was one example that stuck out like a sore thumb: “Have you been vaccinated against shingles?”
Totally weird and should have been disguised in a question about multiple conditions….. so I know they have a hypothesis concerning shingles. Curious. Why not nest it in the section about flu/covid vaccinations? Someone messed up there in terms of survey design.
There was a lot of discussion of COVID/vaccine shingles activation / reactivation for a period and then the discussion stopped (I don’t know about the shingles…).
Suisse Romande here. About shingles. I thought it very odd that suddenly there appeared large adverts/posters in the Metro and other public spaces ‘educating’ the public about “le zona” as the shingles is called in French. That was during 2023. There seemed to be some type of campaign going on. My GP even spoke with me about a vaccination during one visit, I declined.
I think it is always good to point out a common statistical manipulation being used with these kinds of studies as in the above link.
The numbers in the 30-50% as they are quoting – are relative risk numbers. This is Big Pharma’s most commonly used tactic to distort things.
When one looks at the studies – and uses absolute numbers – the way the normal human beings in the population would look at things – we are looking at rates in the vaccine arms that are 0.8%-3% better than placebo or other controls. It is very marginal at best.
Regardless, the initial threshold for the COVID vaccines in 2020-2021 to maintain their authorization was 50% – relative risk – so we are really below even that threshold. Rapidly approaching flu vaccine status, if not already there or even worse this year.
Thanks. A portion of my career was about relative vs absolute risk so I’m with you there.
The study gave me the impression that they’ve already given up the vaccine fight and are in disaster mitigation mode. I’ve heard local health officials at my general practice say things like “we are well below target rates” (implication being “quit trying”). You don’t automatically get covid vaccinations now and must satisfy the same clinical thresholds required for free flu vaccinations.
One interesting question in the study was whether you knew or suspected you had a bad dose of COVID before vaccine rollout. Yep. I was almost hospitalised. It’s what they’re NOT saying or implying to survey experts like me that are most illuminating. I KNOW what terrifies them from understanding how survey designs work.
Doc, I’m sure misunderstanding of relative risk can be abused, but to me, relative risk seems the only sensible way to evaluate vaccines. I mean, take a hypothetical disease that afflicts 5% of unvaccinated people, but has terrible life-altering (or -ending) consequences. There’s a vaccine that reduces the infection rate to 1% and has no side effects (as I said, hypothetical!). Are you saying that the vaccine should be presented to the public as 4% effective, rather than 80%? If I understand you correctly, I disagree that that’s how “normal human beings in the population” would look at things.
No. When systems become non-linear with the potential for exponential growth before we even see symptoms then vaccination hesitation – IMNSHO – becomes something we should “kick to the kerb” with all that individual mandate stuff.
Should the “new COVID vaccines” have been dealt with better? OF COURSE! But Given the recent uptick in measles in Texas I get sick of us going through these cycles.
I do not believe in individual rights when it comes to hugle communicable diseases. Societal rights come first. Sorry if that makes me an undemocratic git. But when you’ve taught medical students in 1999 who can’t do the basic maths to understand sensitivity and specificity of a test then how the holy hell do we expect the population to do so?
So yeah. Sorry I’m not a “100% democrat”. I think there should be elements of a country’s constitution which rely on well-explored/checked methods when it comes to vaccination and you do not get to opt out. With rights must come responsibilities. Responsibilities to your society/community. Else we are in biiiiiig trouble.
As for respecting the “normal human being in the population”. No. The normal human being is a family-blogging idiot. I don’t mind saying it and I’m sick of us thinking that “we must have a properly accredited gas engineer to do stuff to our heating” but “we cant have any old moron make laws that ignore statistics, epididemiology and whole branches of science” MAKING OUR LAWS!
I saw morons present at conferences, I experienced nasty horrid verging on abusive people shout at me in the local suburb for mask-wearing. I’m done with playing nice.
If my ideas to how a UK Second Chamber with “experts” in there make you Americans uncomfortable on grounds of democracy I have just two words: The Senate. I quite admire the IDEA of the Senate (though I think its implementation needs a lot more work).
Greetings, Terry. Goodness, that is quite a list of arguments against things I didn’t say, nor even think, along with a nice sprinkling of “you Americans” stereotyping. To be clear, I was responding to IM Doc’s comment of 1:19 PM; I had not yet seen your 1:50 PM comment. My point was about how risk is perceived by family-blogging idiots, not about how it should be considered by public health experts. I’m sorry that my first sentence didn’t make that clear.
I guess I have been around residents too long. Residents are MDs who are completing their post-graduate work. EVEN RESIDENTS have to have this education. When the Pharma advertising states there is a 60% reduction THAT DOES NOT MEAN YOUR RISK GOES FROM 90% to 30%. This is what the whole entire society thinks when Pharma makes these claims. When even the vast majority of residents think this way with their MD degree in hand, one has only to assume that the rest of the population does as well. The publication and yes of the relative risk reduction is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It is a complete distortion except to the very few people who understand it.
It is also completely dangerous and I am certain killed lots of people in the early days of the COVID vaccine. Thanks to Rachel Maddow et al, we literally had patients walking around everywhere, including with grandmama, that truly felt the 99% reduction that Pfizer and Rachel were promoting meant their risk went from 100% to 1%. Remember the Delta surge – much of that was caused by this very thing. THAT FRAMEWORK WAS NOT TRUE THEN – IT IS NOT TRUE NOW – AND IT HAS NEVER BEEN TRUE FOR MY LIFETIME OF LOOKING AT PHARMA GLOSSIES AND ADS.
I would like to correct you here in all this “democratic”/”non-democratic” rant. I am 99% sure that in most countries, be they democratic or not, that have some form of body of laws under which they function, there is the Public Health legislation (either drafted and voted democratically or not) in which some of the measures public health officials (given they are the entrusted professionals appointed on these positions) have at their fingertips, as provided by laws and regulations can drastically curtail individual rights, privacy, etc., because they are actions that are considered to serve the common good.
Evo Morales resigns from MAS and launches new candidacy for FPV – Página 12
News you can use from ZDNet:
A new Android feature is scanning your photos for ‘sensitive content’ – how to stop it
Google didn’t tell Android users much about Android System SafetyCore before it hit their phones, and people are unhappy. Fortunately, you’re not stuck with it.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-new-android-feature-is-scanning-your-photos-for-sensitive-content-how-to-stop-it
Edward Snowden warned of the implications to privacy of Apple’s new OS update last month that would search contents on your phone for illegal images and report to authorities, not even waiting for them to be uploaded onto the cloud.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-157175101?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thanks for the link.
I don’t understand what this article is talking about. Snowden expressed concern about an Apple anti-CSAM plan that ended up getting cancelled several years ago because there was so much outcry against it. Where is something that documents it getting revived in last month’s IOS update? I’m not finding anything in the article that links to evidence for this (such as a statement from Apple, a warning from the EFF, etc.).
Polaroid Instamatic.
It’s the only way to be sure.
Meet The Swinger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTO5ToZlaYo&ab_channel=Beatles%E2%9D%A4Girl
Fun times!
“Was 40 year old Trump recruited by the KGB?”
Russiagate is SOOOOO back, baby!!! This time, we’ve got Facebook posts!!! They openly admit no docs or other evidence, just desperately hoping that 3 liars are more credible than 1 liar.
I’ll never get tired of how hilariously dumb this stuff is. They just can’t stop cranking it out!!!
Dear lord. Trump has lead a very public life in one of the nation’s largest media markets with tabloids, at least back in the day, as feral as any on earth. If I recall the village voice had one reporter whose exclusive assignment was the Trump beat. And it’s not as though the man is terribly discrete, and yet people still believe this nonsense.
Wouldn’t be the same three letter agency I would wonder about.
Taibbi and Kirn. America This Week, public excerpt, ~30+ minutes
America This Week, Feb 28, 2025: “America Breaks from Europe”
Faced with collapse, the Luftreich – the international elite consensus – fights back.
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-feb-28-2025-america
“Luftreich”!!!!
Lol
“kingdom of air”
excellent!
„Franzosen und Russen gehört das Land,
Das Meer gehört den Briten,
Wir aber besitzen im Luftreich des Traums
Die Herrschaft unbestritten.“
“The Russians and the French held the land,
The British rule the seas,
But our sway is uncontested
In the airy realm of dreams.”
“In the airy kingdom of dreams” sounds interesting too albeit too long for the rhythm I guess.
The problem is the emphasis in the original in the last line with the “tt” which is missing in the Engl. transl. “kingdom” could offer that punch but it´s no entirely adequate.
See the Engl. translation of the entire “Germany. A Winter’s Tale” by Heinrich Heine
https://www.heinrich-heine.net/winter/wintereng7.htm
Interim Estimates of 2024–2025 COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Among Adults Aged ≥18 Years
COVID-19 vaccination averted approximately 68,000 hospitalizations during the 2023–24
“
COVID-19 case-patients were also excluded if they were co-infected with influenza or respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) at the time of their COVID-19–like illness encounter.” I’m assuming hospitalizations for anything other than Covid-19 were also excluded. My best friend got vaccinated (boosted) in September 2022 was hospitalized for RSV at end of December and pasted away in hospital in early March 2023, he was 2 months short of 68. I’m guessing that his case would be confirmation that the vaccine was effective since he didn’t have Covid upon hospitalization. What is not in this study is the health outcomes of the ones who were boosted and rejected out of study due to other health issues. Why? Short of looking at All Cause Mortality there can be no generalization of benefits of this intervention.
RE: “He Dropped Out to Become a Poet…”
I enjoyed reading about this remarkable mathematician, June Huh.
These comments by one of his colleagues were especially striking:
“I have this math competition experience, that as a mathematician you have to be clever, you have to be fast,” he said. “But June is the opposite.”
“…he realized that Huh was learning even seemingly simple concepts in a much deeper way — and in precisely the way that would later prove useful.”
My memories of the way mathematics was taught, indeed the way all subjects were taught, impressed me with a sense that the only thing that mattered was learning as much, and as quickly as possible. There was little concern for how well we understood the material. That was adequately proven by how well we cranked out the answers on the midterm and final. At the time I pursued my studies I recall a peculiar philosophy that getting the right answer was all that mattered. In mathematics, the theorems proceeded from the axioms through abstract manipulations — exemplified to me in the way a long brute force computer-generated proof of the four-color problem was celebrated. What insights did the proof offer? Similarly in engineering, the concern for getting the right answer turned design into crafting the right set of equations to enable a computer to calculate the answer. It did not matter whether anyone understood why a technique for solving a problem worked as long as they followed all the rules for the process and obtained the right answer — I am thinking of the root-locus techniques in systems engineering. For me, what passed for education was frustrating and unsatisfying. Schools were factories dedicated to producing ‘educated’ credentialed widgets as fast, as cheaply, and in as great a quantity as possible.
It is most pleasing to hear of the success of a mathematician with such devotion to discovering “the Heart of Things”. I feel that our civilization has amassed a large store of Knowledge that present ‘incentives’ never reduce to its heart.
Yes this is so true. Math is supposed to be beautiful. I was reading a paper on density functional theory and how models actually became less accurate when people began throwing AI at them instead of building models from basic physics. Paul Dirac was so real when he said math should be elegant.
I am in heat and mass diffusion right now and there’s a lot of “here’s the formula, derivation is in the textbook if you’re interested” which i understand. Engineers just need to get things built. And I can read the textbook on my own time. Part of it is just how engineering education works. Its just a fire hose of information, and i do get that, as the point is get introduced to a lot of topics and see what becomes useful down the line. If you like the topic enough, you can probably take a class that goes more in depth, or do your own research on the side.
Math can certainly be beautiful and elegance is a good word for it. If the great proofs don’t produce a thrilling feeling you might be studying the wrong field.
I’m old and out of engineering school a long time, but when I studied, math theory and proofs were covered before moving on to applications. What wasn’t required was memorization; testing was all open book. Working through theorems and applying them to applications was really training you to think.
i have loathed math for as long as i can remember…being a congenitally more humanities guy, with quite a bit of observationally based life science tossed in and mixed well.
(i mean, i was a chef, which means i did chemistry,lol)
but i consistently come up with the right answer, when faced with say, geometry and trig problems that often present when doing construction with…essentially…trash(telephone poles as foundation uprights, each one a different dimension at top and ground than the next)….i cannot say where this “right answer” comes from, nor how it is derived.
it just sorta bubbles up and presents itself to my consciousness.
but i love cosmology and astronomy and physics…sadly, i do not actually speak Maths…so i am keenly aware that i aint getting the full Elegance of it all.
not acquiring that language(higher maths) is one of my few regrets.
(i mean, hell…i speak passable Quendi, ffs)
Sorry to hear that. I mostly had the good fortune to learn math with people who loved it and loved teaching it.
i think the teachers were likely a big reason i quickly hated math class…and therefore math, itself.
my formative years were spent in the northern exurbs of houston…montgomery county…which, at the time(late 70’s, early 80’s) were one of the main spawning grounds of what would become the reagan revolution.
and, for whatever reason, every math teacher i ever had was a rabid right wing nutjob.
That’s funny. A raving right wing nut job maths teacher still needs to show that 2+2=4.
Probably easier now when facts and science can be pushed aside. But none of that will help in the great competition with China who still obviously believe in facts and maths.
Just curious, what was the right preferred answer to the 2+2 question?
Now we look on Reagan as some sort of non degenerate! Which I definitely did not do back then.
Why investors should be worrying about Trump and impoundment ,FT, archived here.
Impoundment is a technique of sidestepping congressional authority on spending. The president “impounds”. This was outlawed in1974. Team Trump plans to overturn the law via the supremes. If successful, the author draws this conclusion:
“If so, there are three implications. One is that Trump will become even more autocratic, controlling America’s purse strings. The second is that there will be even more warfare between Maga populists, techno-libertarians and old-style constitution-loving Republicans. The third is that bond investors will need to rethink fiscal policy. For while they are used to parsing fiscal risks around congressional processes, they do not know how to price fiscal autocracy.”
The third implication has legs. Adding uncertainties to the treasury market introduces new inefficiencies, rising costs to borrowing must follow. It’s above my pay grade to assess how much inefficiency treasuries can take before debt on record overwhelms the ability to borrow.
Old-style constitution loving Republicans? There aren’t enough to matter. They have no power here.
I can foresee an eventual showdown over the theory of the unitary executive and the notion that congressionally founded agencies encroach on the Article 2 power to execute being with the President. I have no idea if the Roberts court wants to let it get that far or how they would rule.
Is it still a “Roberts” Court? Or is it an Opus Dei Gilead Republic Court now?
This seems like a major shift in global reach for starlink
https://mexicodailypost.com/2025/02/24/carlos-slim-orders-to-cancel-his-collaboration-with-elon-musks-starlink/
F* around and find out.
Musk tends to put his mouth in gear before his brain is engaged. / ;)
In Return to Oz, there is a mechanical man (named Tik-Tok) that needs to be wind-up like a mechanical clock, and has separate windings for thought, action, and speech. He can also put his mouth in gear before his brain is engaged. ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uQTVTH5qdw
Meanwhile in Hollywood the Pentagon is always available to put the bang bang in ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.’
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/oscars-military-hollywood/
“Both Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper exalt the military and U.S. intelligence agencies while stereotyping and minimizing the humanity of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples harmed by American black ops.”
Big liberals Jessica Chastain and Bradley Cooper joined the military in making these films possible. Naturally H’wood hasn’t held it against them at the Oscars (which happen again on Sunday).
If Trump does reduce the military or make peace with Russia it could be a blow to Tinsel Town. Or, as Brando says in Apocalypse Now, “the horror, the horror.”
One thing which always caused me to doubt the world is the fact that the public seriously thinks famous actors know anything about politics. Truth is they are the dumbest individuals around. In the past you were allowed to say that especially as stage director. Not any more. Today everybody loves everyone else but the backstabbing is worse than ever and takes place via attorneys. Disgusting…
I was content to see Chastain eventually make it later in her career. But plz do not let her speak about politics. plz. The horror the horror. Actually that applies to 999 out of 1000 of those people. The ones who do not speak out are the ones who are smart and thus afraid to say the truth.
p.s. perhaps someone like Samuel L. Jackson might be a rare exception…🤔
Truman Capote said “all actors are stupid” but there are different ways of being smart and Brando’s gift was one of those ways.
The reason I bash Chastain and Cooper is that they are selling themselves as liberals and that goes beyond private knowledge or belief. I’d rate both of them as very much in the middling rank of acting talent. Meanwhile Matt Damon is set to play the lead in Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey! Can’t casting directors find anybody new? I don’t dislike Damon but he’s like the new Streep–in everything.
One problem with big epics is that they need name actors to sell tickets–however inappropriate they may be.
on the other hand, anything with matt damon tends to be at least watchable.
there are few dudes in that world that i would allow out here, and he’s one.
seems rather genuine, given where he works.
so…in spite of apparently getting the headgear wrong…his version of the Odyssey might be pretty cool.
however…its a high bar: few hollywood interpretations of such things impress me,lol.
one that did was the maybe hbo thing on the roman civil war…where Caesar was played by the dude that played Mance/King Beyond the Wall/whatever in GOT.
it looks to me like hollywood is increasingly abandoning hiring actual historians to keep it real.
like a stealth 1884 ministry of truth…subtly rewriting history.
Yeah, Damon appears to be decent as far as I have heard, too.
The issue with historic accuracy vs. entertainment will never go away: But film is simply fiction not historic scholarship. The one has nothing to do with the other. It would not work. And apart from a few artistic exceptions I believe it never has.
Would anyone expect a historic novel being accurate in a way non-fiction studies are? No. So why expect it from a movie. It´s not even the same medium. But we only find out in the movie theatre. And Nolan being his own studio boss by now might come up with something crazy.
Damon was in Chinese costume in The Great Wall—directed by a better director than Nolan, Zhang Yimou–and it was ridiculous. Apparently he says yes to anything.
What was wrong with that fantasy movie?
Americans did not save the day?
Yes the Damon case illustrates this very vividly.
When I heard it I had to laugh even harder, after I already had an attack over Nolan doing Homer.
p.s. May be it works if he puts on a ton of make-up. But babyface Damon as an ancient bad-ass mass murderer (which those guys all were)?
I already had difficulty with him as General Groves in “Oppenheimer” considering that Paul Newman had impersonated Groves 30 years ago.
But lets not judge prematurely and give´em a chance.
Not the Samuel L. Jackson who has been the face of a high interest predatory credit card for many, many years?
Not the one who embraces blaxploitation characters as a career choice and then complains about Tarantino’s usage of the N word?
He’s not even close to a good person.
Well then I´m wrong. I thought he did not complain. But truth is I am bad with rumours, gossip and tabloid news from TinselT.
The thing about Hollywood filmmaking, at least historically, was that actors were important in the sense that they were visible and the public loved them but that they were often peripheral to the business of film making.
When all the footage is shot and has to be edited the film takes its shape and that is controlled by other people than the actors. Their favourite scenes get edited out, the best speeches are ignored. This changed a bit in the 60s when the Studio System ended but only the most bankable stars managed to get real creative power. Usually by forming their own production companies. But, a BIG but, they still needed finance. They virtually never put up their own money.
A lot of actors were successful at this and made heaps of money. The first (after United Artists, which was unique) were James Stewart and then Burt Lancaster. Brando tried it but it didn’t work out. He was forced to be just a jobbing actor but he still made some good films. Watch Burn! If you haven’t already.
By the 70s-80s studio financial capitalism have taken control again, despite a limited admiration for “directors” as the auteur theory was exported to America. However, by then film production companies were often not only film companies. MGM, for example, was into Hotels and Casinos and had Elvis singing for them in Vegas.
Since then the financialisation of everything has meant that film offerings are less and less able to be risky or imaginative. They are so expensive to make for one thing. Some good films do still get made. I do not know how. But, when you consider the amount of cinematic heritage there is in the West and what an important art form it has was in the 20th Century we can see that the studio system was indeed a Golden Age of cinema culture.
We do not have that anymore.
Things apparently went very badly for Zelensky at the WH, I’ll leave it to others to provide the links, there is one up on ZH right now.
He left without a signed deal and Trump told him essentially “Come back when you’re ready for peace.”
Press conference after the meeting was cancelled. TheHill dot com is so aghast that they forgot to take down the link to the video, giving a 404:
https://thehill.com/Watch%20live:%20Trump,%20Zelensky%20give%20remarks%20as%20Ukraine%20minerals%20deal%20comes%20into%20focus/
At one point in today’s America This Week episode, Walter Kirn compares the first weeks of the T admin as being like a Martin Scorsese movie. Pretty apt comparison, imo. / ;)
“Come back when you’re ready for peace.” That’s hardball. Maybe Z will turn to Brussels or London for help. Or maybe he was delivering Brussels and London’s talking points.
‘The door is over there, kid. See yourself out.’ / ;)
Says here the minerals deal was not in fact signed
https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-zelensky-news-02-28-25/index.html
CNN says minerals deal not signed, Z told to leave.
B over at MoA has a thread going:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/02/the-guessing-game-over-trumps-real-aims-in-ukraine.html#comments
Also a debate on what Trump’s real aims are, with a hat tip to Yves.
Fox News interview apparently still on, should be worth a watch.
Neocon meltdown, incoming!
https://thehill.com/homenews/5169618-liz-cheney-on-trump-zelensky-blowup-history-will-remember-this-day/
Karl Rove also screaming like a stuck pig:
https://thehill.com/homenews/5169734-rove-putin-trump-zelensky-winner/
This is useful to smoke out all the rats. Note that both of these two are out of power, helpless to watch from the sidelines (as it should be.)
Glitch McConnell still hasn’t entered his rage arc, yet. Probably he is only capable of rage when he forgets where he put his walker.
After all the applause, the lionization, the comparisons to Churchill, Zelensky brought a considerably swollen head to that meeting. Brutal way to find out that it’s all over now, through an almost incomprehensible combination of childish bullying and harsh truth-telling by Trump and Vance.
Heartlessly entertaining stuff! I find that I’m both repelled and relieved.
Z was played, Trump style.
Trump is a master of building people up so they will do what he wants. Then tearing them down if they fail to obey him.
That interview was pure theatre, and Trump and Z both know how to milk spectacle.
Trump to Z “You’re fired”.
What I love about Trump is he is showing the world a little of how the sausage is made.
And people can only wake up to how much cr*p is in a sausage,and how it is ruining their health, if they see it being made.
Pretty funny that a bronze bust of Churchill’s head was displayed on a table in the background. Caught on camera several times. Wonder if Z noticed? / ;)
Liberals (are enthrall to the neocons/dep state/our democracy of the MIC by their TDS) who were rabidly anti war in 1970 are now all for open ended war to save Stain’s Kievan SSR! As if it were our faux credibility on the line!
Watching the convo in the Oval Office with the cold fireplace behind Trump; I saw Zelenski talk to Trump and Vance as if “how dare you not idolize me like the Biden/UK/EU leaders?”
Trump inserted forcefully he does not take on the propaganda! Or vague moralizing over EU fears of Russia.
Trump again said “we won’t do nuclear war for Kiev!”
No imaginary mineral deal! No open ended limitless security guarantee.
Peace now!
When
ChurchillZelensky loses Lindsey Graham, it pretty much spells the end of his career.Truly unprecedented spectacle that was.
Massive Z fail. The Ukrainian ambassador watching in the room, had her head in her hand.
It seems as if President Trump has brought realism and transparency to the White House and he and Vance work incredibly well together. And after giving Starmer nothing, the Prez walked away with an invitation from King Charles in his pocket, then followed it up by giving the little green Alberch a good kicking, and I get the impression we are seeing the US foreign policy Titanic turn on a dime as Trump and Vance toss the unnecessary passengers overboard. And even Lindsay Graham has demonstrated how quickly a man’s mind can changed when his balls are caught in a slowly closing vice. A great way to start the weekend!
realism and transparency = mafia masquerading as a country
Chris Hedges Q&A
4pm PT / 7pm ET
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNqucrPSrtM
” The” Democrats will do whatever they believe would have made Alan From, David Boren, Paul Tsongas, and other people like that happy. They will do whatever would make Bill Clinton, Dick Morris, and other people like that happy today.
What “the” Democrats SHOULD do is to shut the government down and keep it shut down and tell the Republicans’s contituents that ” this is what having no Administrative State looks like”. And keep it shut down until the Republicans’ constituents torture and terrorise the Republicans into voting to remove all Trump’s appointments from their positions, forcibly re-hire every single one of the layoffed and/or fired and or resignationized Federal Workers back, the abolition of DOGE, etc. And once those conditions are promised, then “the” Democrats would permit government to open back up.
And upon re-opening , if those conditions were not all immediately fulfilled, ” the” Democrats would shut the whole government right back down again and keep raising the pain and the stakes against the MAGA constituency and its Republican officeholders.
But “the” Democrats won’t do that.
That is why citizens need to figure out how to create Class Blitzkrieg strike-forces to conduct Class Blitzkrieg actions against the most fragile and brittle and easily destroyed Internal Enemy pain-points to begin destroying Internal Enemy functionality, in the spirit of John Robb.
I am sorry to say that Bernie Sanders has nothing to offer us any more. A left wing version of John Robb is where citizens should look for information and inspiration. How to apply the lessons from John Robb’s cookbook against the Project 2025 Musk (trump/vance) Administration and its class comrades and movement supporters and members.
https://doomeroptimism.substack.com/
https://morrisberman.blogspot.com/2016/05/dual-process-only-game-in-town.html
“Dropping Out is a Revolutionary Act”-Wulf Zendik
Sadly.
For over 30 years the Dems have stiffed ordinary working Americans who keep sliding towards poverty and being the precariat. Even the PMC IT Crowd are being decimated by AI. So why bother with the Dems unless your goal is to make the Dem donors richer? “Left wing” Dems is an oxymoron.
Under Trump ordinary working Americans will keep sliding towards poverty and the precariat, especially the PMC IT Crowd being decimated by AI. The power of Musk says it all. He cares not one bit for working people. So why bother with Trump et al unless your goal is to make the Republican donors richer?
That is US politics today. Nobody cares about you. And western politics is the same. France, UK, Germany are all basket cases, impoverishing their people while their rich use taxpayer money to fight amongst themselves for spoils.
Yes, citizens must save themselves. But quietly. Any show of resistance is being met with armed police, detention and interrogation. Just ask alternative journalists.
Passive Obstruction.
UnCivil Obedience. As per the old Spanish Colonial saying ” I obey but I do not comply”.
Ways to shrink the Forced Market Economy some and grow the Free UnMarket CounterEconomy some. Some of each can shift power-balances.
We live in an impure world, so I am an impurist. I won’t expect purism from others as long as they are impure in directions parallel to my own.
We’re less than 6 weeks into the Trump Presidency and you can’t turn around the cosequences of fity years of economic policy around in a weekend, but you can begin the process during this Presidential term. One key to effectively changing policies for the the declining PMC and a slowly increasing precariat is for the US to deliberately and publicly wind back from its imperial overreach, and to use the resources wasted overseas to build up a stronger real productive economy and more stable real productive jobs generating goods and services and re-building the physical infrastructure.
Thank you, bertl for your two posts.
[Thank you, lambert, for your hard work here.]
https://www.workersstrikeback.org/?
Kshama Sawant is pretty awesome imo.