Less than 1% of Japanese sake is made this traditional way pic.twitter.com/ywtnrTUqxp
— Business Insider (@BusinessInsider) March 9, 2025
A lion pushes its child without knowing it is water Instagram. Robin K: “Oops!”
What Made the Irish Famine So Deadly New Yorker
#COVID-19/Pandemics
New biosensor can detect airborne bird flu in under five minutes Washington University
Climate/Environment
>Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis, study finds, threatening millions with starvation Guardian
Tipping Point: The Politics of Water Insecurity in the Middle East CSIS
Rotting recorded on fields of Tatarstan — will winter crops die? Real noevremya
>Oil tanker spills fuel in North Sea collision with cargo ship carrying sodium cyanide sparking fears of environmental disaster The Standard (Kevin W). This story has off and on been the lead at BBC
Tax clear-cutting for what it costs our environment Aftonbladet via machine translation (Micael T)
Electric vehicle industry will persist, experts say, despite Trump funding cuts Kansas Reflector (Robin K)
China?
China all in on RISC-V open-source chip design Asia Times (Kevin W)
China’s deflationary pressures deepen in February Reuters
Global art market slumps as Chinese auction sales plummet: data France24
China to impose retaliatory tariffs on certain Canadian imports as trade war intensifies EuroNews
BREAKING Philippine police arrest ex-President Duterte on ICC charges Nikkei
European Disunion
European arms imports surge, US expands lead as top global weapons exporter France24
Can the US switch off Europe’s weapons? Financial Times
European countries should ‘absolutely’ introduce conscription, Latvia’s president says Sky
O Canada
Oh Canada! Carney and the Trump Shock Kim Cambpell AND Lawrence Freedman
Israel v. The Resistance
On Amputation Institute of Palestine Studies (guurst)
New Not-So-Cold War
Russia-Ukraine war live: Ukrainian, US officials meet; drones hit Moscow Aljazeera
Zelenskyy flies to Saudi Arabia to meet crown prince as Russia steps up attacks Guardian (Kevin W)
The EU Goes Full Frothing Hysteria Mark Sleboda
«Nous sommes les idiots utiles de Vladimir Poutine» : Nate, cousin germain de JD Vance et combattant volontaire en Ukraine Le Figaro (Micael T)
Perfidious Albion Scott Ritter
Gordon Hahn On Europe’s Role And A Possible Coup In Kiev Moon of Alabama. We linked to the underlying Hahn piece, but good to focus on its key points.
Russia warns Australia deploying peacekeeping troops to Ukraine would lead to ‘grave consequences’ Guardian (Kevin W)
AN ENDGAME IN UKRAINE? Seymour Hersh (Robin K). Hersh is a CIA scrivener. Sometimes he gets tossed real finds based on insider unhappiness or fractures. Russia is not negotiating with Ukraine until there is a new President and constitutional provisions and decrees barring negotiations are revoked. So there’s no point in talking because the current crew is unlikely to be in power much longer. Plus Russia has zero reason to hurry. See how it is forcing the US to go step by step in those talks.
The West is preparing to flood Russia with money Vyzglad via machine translation (Micael T)
Thousands report outages of Musk’s X platform in US and UK BBC. Musk says cyber attack originated in Ukraine area.
Syraqistan
Thousands of Syrians flood into Lebanon seeking refuge from government massacres The Cradle (guurst)
Syria’s sectarian massacres are blowback for foreign-led dirty war Aaron Mate
‘They left nobody’: More than 1,000 people killed in some of Syria’s deadliest violence Sky. Even Western MSM clearing its throat.
CODEPINK Ignored Sanctions That Suffocated Syria Since 2011 but Now They Want To Visit Syria Under Control of Al Qaeda Orinoco Tribune (Robin K)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Superpower Collaboration in Crisis: Rethinking Russian — U.S. Dynamics in the Context of Iran and Ukraine Russia in Global Affairs (Micael T)
Twitter is still broken today. I can’t embed but I could see the entire tweet (Chuck L).
Cuba sends doctors, the US sends sanctions Jacobin (Robin K)
Trump 2.0
Trump Is Privatizing America Persuasion (Micael T)
Ontario imposes fee on power exports, warns of potential cutoff new over Trump’s tariff threats Politico (Kevin W). BWAHAHA
National Cancer Institute Employees Can’t Publish Information on These Topics Without Special Approval ProPublica (Robin K). Vaccines top the list.
DOGE
Scientists, Supporters Rally Against NIH Dismissals, Budget Cuts MedPage
OPM watchdog to investigate IT risks tied to DOGE’s agency access NextGov
Trump administration eyes 30 percent payroll reduction at National Park Service The Hill
Nationwide Tesla Protests Against Elon Musk Are Escalating Vanity Fair (resilc)
USAID funded Ukraine group that smeared VP Vance as pro-Russia ‘propagandist’ Grayzone (Kevin W)
CFPB official details DOGE ‘chaos’ in overtaking agency The Hill
Immigration
Judge temporarily blocks effort to deport Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia student protests CNN (Kevin W). Note a green card holder.
Trump Is Coming After Legal Residents. Are Citizens Next? Ken Klippenstein
Mahmoud Khalil Was Detained by ICE Agent Honored by Trump at State of the Union Drop Site.
ICE Arrest of Columbia Student Marks New Era of Campus Politics Wall Street Journal. Prominent placement.
Our No Longer Free Press
Jerusalem Post Targets MintPress After Exposé on Israeli Spies in US Media Orinoco Tribune (Robin K)
Corporate America’s dirty trick Unherd (Chuck L)
Mr. Market Has a Sad
Revenge Of The Expectations Fairies Brian Romanchuk
New Car Tech Is Overloaded and It’s Starting to Drive People Nuts Wall Street Journal (resilc)
AI
Google ‘AI Mode’ Is Coming to Feed You Even More AI Slop Vice
Spotify’s biggest sin? Its algorithms have pushed artists to make joyless, toothless music Guardian (Kevin W)
Class Warfare
Why housing affordability keeps getting worse Axios
Inflation vs. Wages: Where Salaries Haven’t Kept Pace With Rising Costs Upgraded Points
Lively vs. Baldoni: How Right-Wing Influencers Are Weaponizing the Fight to Take Down #MeToo Zeteo. This sort of backlash is what happens when absolutely legitimate cases get swept up with marginal ones. But we still have too many instances of powerful men like Biden and Hegseth not being held to account.
Antidote du jour (via)
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Working link for “Oil tanker spills fuel in North Sea collision with cargo ship carrying sodium cyanide sparking fears of environmental disaster” article at-
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/tanker-cargo-ship-collision-north-sea-b1215731.html
Cargoes of jet fuel and sodium cyanide colliding? What’s next. A cargo ship of nitrogen colliding with a cargo ship carrying glycerine?
I so love your humor Rev!
What’s next? A cargo ship of puppies colliding with a cargo ship carrying hungry Chinese migrants*.
* This offensive non-PC joke was intentionally made in order to see if CA is still here (otherwise I would have written Haitians, for the Trump crowd).
asked yesterday where the astute commenter CA has been – always had intelligent responses – where are you CA?
I’ve saw that post today (so this could count as indirect answer). CA had a couple of warnings from The Boss, so maybe there is a (self-)ban situation of sorts.
do recall the warnings – seemed soft warnings – oh well –
Sal at “What’s Going on With Shipping” provides a detailed report on the collision:
RECAP: Solong Rams Anchored US Tanker Stena Immaculate | Ships Abandoned & On Fire | Port Closed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a03EAv2vZO8
Clarke and Dawe did a spot on cargo-tanker accidents at sea once . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
There was also a third kind of language used to cloak the horrors of the famine: an accusatory rage against the British authorities who had failed to prevent it….Pataki announced that “history teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” But this is not what history teaches us. A much more accurate conclusion is the one drawn by the Irish historian Peter Gray, who wrote that there was “not a policy of deliberate genocide” on the part of the British.
I watched a Ytube video, no longer available with author of The Great Irish Potato Famine by James S. Donnelly Jr. which convinced me that the British could have prevented the famine, that it wasn’t soley the potato “blight” but gov’t policy that led to the tragedy. I reject the assertion that “Peter Gray’s” account is “a much more accurate” description. The reader, after researching the subject should be the who comes to that conclusion on his/her own.
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Irish-Potato-Famine/dp/0750926325
There was another famine in Ireland about twenty or thirty years earlier so the government stopped the exporting of food to put a lid on it which worked. But in the decades after, the mercantile class was able to take more power for themselves in Britain so when the 1840s famine hit, Britain insisted that food contracts for export had to be filled and could not be used to feed the local people instead. It turned a severe famine into a catastrophic famine whose effects were felt near and far with a massive death count. Would you believe that when the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire heard about this famine and sent two shiploads of food, that the Royal Navy tried to intercept and stop those ships? But at least those contracts were filled and those food exporters did not suffer.
Ah, the glory days of early Empire, the Raj and all that. Expansive policies and ebullience to benefit the upper orders. /s
The scale of cruelty and dehumanizing behavior was shocking and should be required reading.
For those who’d like to read about it, I put this one on my reading list after seeing the author mentioned here a while ago – Late Victorian Holocausts:El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
I believe the same author also noted that the Irish famine was a deliberate choice, as have many others over the years. What I had not realized was that perfidious Albion also starved tens of millions of Indians back in the 19th century. All this was largely forgotten, to the point that Westerners can still lecture “the jungle” about how they are the ones who need to be “civilized”.
PDF 472 page free download from URLVOID safe link:
https://www.pdfdrive.to/filedownload/late-victorian-holocausts-el-nino-famines-and-the-making-of-the-third-world-6
So the Mavi Marmara has a precedent. I remember reading that the Choctaw, fresh off of Jacksonian relocation, sent the Irish $700 at the time of the famine.
Zagonostra and The Rev Kev: And there is this paragraph, which sounds rather familiar, “What the British ruling class could not grasp was that the Irish famine was a phenomenon of “modern times,” the product, as Scanlan convincingly argues, of a particularly virulent form of exploitative capitalism that left millions of people utterly exposed to the instability of short-term rental of land, to fluctuating food markets, and to wages driven downward by the pressure of too many laborers looking for too little work.”
Fintan O’Toole’s article in The New Yorker is a must-read for what it says about the development of capitalism, Anglosphere ideas about the depravity of the poor, and the blitheness in the U S of A and England about genocide. (When was the last time anyone in the U S of A mentioned the Trail of Tear, which started first with the Choctaw Nation and only later the Cherokee Nation?)
Our correspondents from Ireland will weigh in and help us to understand this article and the book being reviewed.
I was reminded, though, that the traditional Turkish defense against the charges of the Armenian genocide is that the Ottoman government hardly knew about it and (contrariwise) the genocide was carried about by a few evil politicians. So forgiving the English elites for killing off millions of the Irish, as a kind of afterthought, I suppose, struck me as an abdication.
One would think that people with enormous landholdings in Ireland might have paused over their bloaters to note that their tenants were dying off.
And then the same British elites caused famines in India, largely through the same economic policies.
But the chilling part of the the quote I paste above is that by changing a few words — ‘’not enough in savings for a medical emergency,” “inflationary food prices with price gouging,” “on-line markets and platforms engaged in predatory pricing,” “wages stagnant even as productivity increases” — it becomes a description of the U S of A of the last twenty or so years.
“It’s instructive to have the poor suffering, it helps us to appreciate the fortitude with which others bear cold and hunger.”
— Pecksniff
Much depends on your definition of ‘deliberate’. There is little evidence of a systematic policy of using famine to kill off the population, but lots of evidence that the authorities were fully aware of the extent of the likely die off but considered it a sort of sad but inevitable cull of surplus and largely useless people. That it would simultaneously kill off Papism (and its threat of alliances with France and Spain) was seen as an additional bonus (ironically, it did the opposite in the long term).
For context, what is often overlooked is that the wealth of the Irish landowners was based to a large degree on the Napoleonic wars – Ireland was one of the few parts of Europe left with the labour and land to provide grain to Britain, making the landowners and merchants of the time extraordinarily rich. The relative peace after Waterloo along with the increasing supply of cheap US grain made Irish grain far less competitive, hence the move towards pasture, which of course required far fewer labourers. So the landless population was increasingly seen as a burden, not a benefit to the country as farming turned to cattle rather than grain for profit. The initial railway boom had used up some of the population surplus, but that was also fading by the end of the 1840’s. Irelands rich fisheries were at the time being largely exploited by the new larger boats from the UK – these were promoted by government subsidies that did not apply to Ireland – Irish fishermen were limited to rowing boats close to the coast, and dependent on unreliable shifting shoals of mackerel.
The historical context is clouded somewhat by the inherent contradictions of the time. Many landowning aristocrats were simultaneously working to help locals within their parishes, while sympathising with policies which were leading to an inevitable wipe out of the wider population. There were lots of competing dynamics at work at the time – ideological, economic, political. But for the most part, it was an increasingly absent landowning class (the political centre of Ireland had moved from Dublin to London following the abolition of the Irish parliament), so many could simply pretend to themselves and others that the famine wasn’t happening. There was also a lack of an influential catholic/Irish middle class who could have to some extent filled in the power vacuum of an Anglo Irish class decamping to England (this middle class would emerge in the later 19th Century). To a very large degree, despite the enormity of the famine, it would at the time have been quite possible for the uncurious to live in one of the larger towns or cities in Ireland and be largely unaware of what was going on in the countryside, as so much of it was hidden from view. Food prices in shops didn’t appreciably increase and most people died out of sight as the most vulnerable were simply too weak to leave their villages. Only the burgeoning and dreaded workhouses and the waves of relatively healthy people trying to get boats to Britain or the Americas would have given away what was happening.
Its still possible to wander the uplands in Ireland, especially around the 500 foot contour where grassland gives way to heath and bog that you can find the old pre-famine villages – these were often astonishingly large, although you can walk through them now and not appreciate how many people lived in them. The population density in parts of rural Kerry were at density levels that you generally only find in wet rice cultivating areas in SE Asia or China – near suburban urban densities in upland areas, with farms of just 1-4 acres supporting large families. The people lived largely in stone and turf cabins that are now just small piles, if they are visible at all. The old potato ridges can still be seen pretty much everywhere on higher hills, on lands now abandoned or used for sheep.
Thanks for this. I’ve had this general impression but the details are very interesting.
Charles Trevelyan, who I understand played a major role in managing the famine for the British government, wrote at length about how it was an example of God doing a lasting good through temporary evil, with which work man should not interfere through excessive assistance. The good was not so much (or maybe more “not only”) the Irish dying or leaving en masse as the destruction of the old, economically irrational and Papist-dominated Irish society, opening the way to its transformation along Liberal ideological lines (in the sense of being made up of thrifty, self-reliant individuals). Not exactly a deliberate genocide through artificial famine, but social engineering through deliberately hobbled relief isn’t much better. Though I’d grant that Trevelyan’s actual influence isn’t very clear, from my cursory reading, and other British government figures may not have seen things in the same way.
You express it very well. Trevelyan is a good example of the complexity of the political response – in some respects he governed with humanity during his career, especially in Scotland, and (from my memory of reading the history) worked very hard and efficiently to ensure the small amount of relief available was well administered and targeted. But he was very much of the view that the Famine was Gods Plan (or just the outcome of natural selection), like most of his contemporaries and didn’t devote much energy to finding any additional resources for aid, unlike in Scotland, which was also hit by crop failure but it didn’t have anywhere near the same impact. The latter is probably due to the much greater influence of Scottish elites in Britain, as Edinburgh was firmly supplanting Dublin as the second city of the Empire.
By the way, just to elaborate on my comment above about fish, a frequent question about the famine is why on earth people didn’t just go to the coast and survive on fish – Ireland is surrounded by productive fishing grounds. The answer is complex, but much of it is down to official government policy to promote then high tech fishing in Britain, while deliberately suppressing it in Ireland, at least in part because they didn’t like the idea of Irish people having access to boats that could be used to maintain contacts on the Continent. Coastal populations did have access to some fish protein, but near shore fishing is highly seasonal so it probably wasn’t enough to help during the long winter. And at the time productive inland fisheries (salmon and trout) were firmly controlled by the aristocratic elite.
Incidentally, the article is probably wrong in saying that its the worst major Famine in terms of percentage of deaths – its not even the worst in Irish history, although its the only one with unambiguous census data. There was a terrible famine in 1740-1 caused by a very intense cold spell which destroyed all grain and tuber crops and may have killed a fifth of the population. And there were two out and out genocidal campaigns which may have killed up to a quarter of the population each – one in the late 16th Century prior to the Nine Years War (1592 to 1601), and several regional ones in the 17th Century in the course of the various wars of conquest. But the intensity of the 19th Century famine largely wiped out folk memory of the earlier ones. In the previous famines, the population jumped back very rapidly (probably due to the rapid increase in nourishment provided by breeding better strains of potato), but the impact of the last famine was permanent as emigration kept the population growth very slow. Its only very recently approaching the levels of the 1840’s (around 8 million).
Another important minister at the time was Charles Wood at the treasury, who also recognised God’s providence in the disaster. As a young Liberal backbencher in 1831 on the passing of the Reform Act he privately celebrated the support for his party by the Radicals as a defeat for democracy.
Fortuitous famine seized upon as a Jackpot opportunity?
Reading some of politicians of the time especially Trevelyan, I think so. Of course, reading about the descriptions of the Irish as white chimpanzees I almost could believe that it was deliberate and not opportunistic. It does help to explain why Irish Americans were not considered “white” until the 1930s.
My great great grandfather came from Kerry to Boston as a young man due to the famine. He ended up fighting in the Civil War. I’ve wanted to look deeper into the history of what caused him to emigrate. Thanks PK.
I am reminded by your comment of my readings in political ecology. Nice.
One hundred years later, in the late 1940’s, the effects of the Great Hunger, were visited upon me, verbally at least. My grandmother, whose mother had been brought to Vermont (the marble quarries needed strong, ‘dumb’ workers) as a baby, would admonish me when I did not ‘clean my plate’ at dinner: “If you were there the day the dog died in the ditch from The Hunger, you would eat those (beans, mashed potatoes, carrots, etc.)”
Bad link for the politico article on Ontario, Canada’s export surcharge on electricity. Delete from the % to the end.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/10/ontario-premier-ratchets-up-pressure-over-tariffs-00221052
Ford is a gridiot. What will happen is the 25% tariff will be added to the location-based marginal price ie, the transmission stations on the Ontario border with NY & MI. Because ine ISOs dispatch sources based on LMP and Ontario’s price is now higher, other non-tariff domestic sources will be dispatched before transfers from Ontario, including fossil plants. Ontario willfully less to the US and expect the US will slap tariffs on its exports. Electricity flows in both directions! It should also be noted the cross boarder connections help insure grid stability on both sides of the border. This is a losing proposition in every regard.
Ford, the tub-of-lard that is the current premier of Ontario, is grandstanding. He has more in common with the Trump government than 99% of Canadians, and one can only imagine that this scheme is part of a joint effort between the Trump government and Canadian Conservative Party members to create enough chaos for a fire sale of government assets and full privatization.
The lout just won a third term with less than 40% of the vote and because of the province’s post-democratic rules, he has a majority government that dutifully enacts his every whim. No cheques, no balances.
Except it’s illegal to tax exports in the US per the US constitution, but I in general agree the whole mess is a lose-lose.
I think that this should be seen as a middle finger raised to the sky gesture rather than a trade strategy. Effective? Don’t matter — the thing about Canadian politeness is that it assumes reciprocation, and when it doesn’t follow, watch out. The hockey term is “elbows up”. It’s like the booing of Oh say can you see (always followed by heartfelt applause for the anthem singer). The level of anger up here is astonishing; produce from the US is rotting in the supermarket bins, and in a poll from a week or so ago, 27% indicated that they regarded the USA as an “enemy state” — it will be higher now.
The Onion, Columbia University Gives Students Option To Finish Classes From Prison, from late April last year.
Guantanamo U!
>Oh Canada Oh no!
All you have to do to determine who Mark Carney is and what he represents is to research his stand on the Canadian Trucker Protest, which, consequently, the Canadian courts ruled the govt’s actions were not warranted and illegal (although I don’t have the ruling at my finger tips). That he is in the same vein, as someone in the comments section yesterday pointed out, as Macron, Sunak, Mertz, Draghi is accurate. It seems that the “powers that be” are inserting more overlords to more countries with each passing day and the majority of the people’s concerns/needs are more and more ignored.
But by now anyone sending money to the convoy should be in no doubt: You are funding sedition. Foreign funders of an insurrection interfered in our domestic affairs from the start. Canadian authorities should take every step within the law to identify and thoroughly punish them. The involvement of foreign governments and any officials connected to them should be identified, exposed and addressed.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-mark-carney-end-freedom-convoy-ottawa-state-of-emergency/
Another clue is the email I received yesterday about Carney, Harvard class of ’87.
And the article in the The Harvard Crimson paints a picture of what a nice, cozy world it is:
Little truths revealed on occasion, like that dedication to what matters.
To whom?
As a graduate of fancy pants schools that are not Harvard and Yale, lol…..the Harvard-Yale duopoly (Clintons, Obama, Bushes, even JD Vance), when it comes to the government, needs to negative affirmative action.
The Harvard-Yale-DC triangle is an intellectual monoculture that is patient zero for much of the rot in the Post-Cold War western world.
I mostly agree but would caution when it comes to certain universities like Oxford and Cambridge that are essentially federal. Certain colleges have economics fellows who’d feel very at home here.
Trouble is the exams are set by their “federal overseers”. Those are UNIVERSITY employees are usually gladly co-opted by the PMC.
I received instructions on what to write to get my degree (thus get by the PMC types) but also advice on why that was BS and what the actual truth was.
So, it is an a easy school to to get into if you have any money or political pull
I often think think a few sons and daughters of Canadian politicians go to Harvard because they do not have the qualifications to attend a really good Canadian one.
Aparently that is the word on the street in China too…
“…..inserting more overlords to more countries with each passing day….”
this is a process exemplified and honed by Rockefellers starting with the old man JDR Sr and effectively carried out by Nelson, Laurance and David throughout the world – all done carefully, legally with great PR and a lot of cash – what Gramsci indicated in this quote, and the above thread, has been occurring for over a century –
“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.”
Antonio Gramsci
“The Latest Car Technology Is Starting to Drive People Nuts”
As someone who drives a 2002 minivan, I cannot really relate, but this paragraph stuck with me:
What a physically useless, but psychologically devious, door handle to make. It pops out for you like a butler ready to take off your coat as you enter the room. It give you the impression of someone at your beck and call, making your feel rich and important.
I do not think most people realize how much they want power over anything else, and they will work day and night at their wage-slave jobs because the story is one day you too can have a butler, but for now your door handles will pop out for you.
This is an old story. Will we ever face, and give up, our lust for power?
Here’s two intelligent people searching for an answer to your question:
“Wisdom Over Power” Iain McGilchrist and Nate Hagens (or as Hagens puts it, power vs life)
And this is a “trailer” of a three-way discussion among three people, McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger and John Vervaeke, who are working on a new worldview to address the Metacrisis. Essentially, they’re looking for a new attractor to counter the power problem. (Full video)
Hi Henry. Thank you for the links.
Yes, a double thank you for those links. Them people are talking my language!
Glad you found them useful. They’re among a growing number of people who have recognized that there is no way to address the polycrisis without first gaining an understanding of the metacrisis.
As one part of that polycrisis, we’ve breached 6 of 8 planetary boundaries with a 7th not far behind. Ironically, one of the two not in immediate danger of being breached (but Starlink re-entries!) is the ozone layer. It was one of the first boundaries that was threatened, but the world came together and agreed to limit activities and products that threatened the vital layer that partially protects us from cancer-causing UV radiation. Even the U.S. enacted a regulatory regime that significantly restricted use of the harmful substances and otherwise limited consumer and business “freedom.” Why are we unable to do the same when the situation is even more threatening? People like Hagens, McGilchrist, Schmachtenberger and Vervaeke point to a metacrisis, also called a loss of meaning or wisdom, as what prevents us from taking effective action.
It turns out that you cannot have a successful civilization based on a worldview that amount to not much more than “the one who dies with the most toys wins.”
In the first pages of “The Dawn of Everything, David Graber interprest some prehistoric painting from North Africa, with the group of hunters spering to death another one as the killing of the guy that argued he deserves a bigger share of the hunt…
The origins of the metacrisis likely started when there was no enforcement on punishing individual greed over the welfare of the group.
And there is no real replacement for it, no new paradigm to confront the damage done. In my optimistic phase, I imagine that the aftermath of the jackpot (combination of war, climate change / crops failures all over, pandemics), there will be a reset washed not only in the billions of innocent deaths, but in the blood letting of the elite.
After that, an international week of Shame has to be introduced, with rich guys/gals that trespass made to do Cersei’s walk of shame (plus other wrinkles), all broadcasted for the whole world to see, and participate…
A manual door handle option should be a basic safety feature requirement. Easy to find in case of software or electrical failure. FFS…common sense!
I don’t care for cars where the seats, steering wheel, and/or mirrors move or park automatically. A failure makes the car unusable or dangerous to use. It’s back to the Stepford Wives excuse of “because we can”. I’ll add electric parking brakes (so can’t be used as a manual emergency brake) and electrically unlocked fuel covers.
I love my Prius but once had an electrical issue (don’t remember the cause) and it died while making a left turn. Coasted to the corner but wasn’t able to properly park it and the rear was blocking traffic. Due to the power outage the car was a brick. Couldn’t even get it into neutral to push it. And required a special tow rig to lift it since neutral didn’t work.
Was shocked when tow driver told me how many cars now turn into dead weights without battery power now days. Seems like such an obvious and easy issue to fix. Just add a manual lever to shift it into neutral!
What you think is a transmission on your Prius may not be able to be ‘shifted into neutral’. EV’s don’t have transmissions like ICE cars. An electric motor can spin/rotate the drive shafts at various speed without them. So, a ‘dead battery’ can leave the EV motor/drive gear in a ‘locked’ state.
(I drive a classic car with all those things you prefer: key ignition; real door handles; roll-up windows; and real levers for heat/AC.)
Cars have always been in part fashion accessories, and the handle thing is in imitation of the Tesla just as the partial glass roof of some Japanese cars revel the same motive. Of course luxury brands like those Italian and British sports cars have always had finicky repair problems. Perhaps that is chic too.
Ironically now that Musk is killing his own chic car makers may scramble to look as little like a Tesla as possible.
One could refer to a car as a Three Thousand Piece Suit.
Most of that was never needed to put EVs or hybrids on the road. They could have all been manufactured more cheaply.
It’s crapola like that makes people think “green” is about something else…
And yet these companies are constantly saying that they are just giving the consumer what they want when they roll out these juggernauts larded up with moar tech.
I’d like a small, affordable, two seater pick-up truck with windows I can roll down myself, but there aren’t too many of those on offer, at least not in the US. Meanwhile other countries sell them new for $10K.
I use a 2001 S10 around the farm and I love it. It’s no longer legal for non-farm trips, sadly, but it is 24 years old. A neighbor borrowed it one day to get mulch and commented on how nice it was to actually be able to reach into the whole bed if the truck with a shovel without needing a stepladder.
I had never had a post 2010 car until I had to buy a 2016 one last week due to antler-kamikaze attacks. It took me a half hour to figure out how to turn on the headlights. There is no reason for this crap. Keys weren’t a burden. Door handles weren’t a source of anguish or puzzlement. It warnt broke, don’t fix it.
Working link for Guardian “Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis…” article:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/10/microplastics-hinder-plant-photosynthesis-study-finds-threatening-millions-with-starvation
Very good article lamenting the US’s sorry state of industrial engineering -> https://semianalysis.com/2025/03/11/america-is-missing-the-new-labor-economy-robotics-part-1/
Thank you for the link! In addition to the linked discussion of Robotics, there appear to be a number of interesting discussions on a range of semiconductor business, technical, and management issues in the Archives of this site.
YW! I found this pretty interesting, from the article…
“Xiaomi’s “lights-out” factory currently operates constantly with 0 humans employed and produces 1 smartphone every minute. This is not the only one either, China is able to achieve this level of automation without general purpose robotics, and the implications for their production capacity when general-purpose arrives cannot be understated. This is not a statement that the US is losing, this is to demonstrate an absurd difference in manufacturing proficiency. This has nothing to do with cheap Chinese labor, this is a manufacturing country with a robust industrial base that has now created one single machine that can produce goods entirely autonomously. General purpose robotics would make this indistinguishable from a living organism, with mobile robots constantly moving around and solving tasks to support and keep the organism alive and functional.”
Mr. Market having a sad moment, or rather early days in March and the action is heavily trending down, someone on the CNBC mentioned the key word of the week. Capitulation is perhaps drawing nearer and Monday market close levels definitely were eye catching.
I’m not hearing much, on TV anyway , on convincing arguments for a near term recession. Delta airlines late yesterday cut their guidance on Q1 but did maintain their full year guidance. From here this looks a decent pullback in market indices from sugar high records, and using a convenient proxy for other key markets such as Bitcoin for the cryptocurrency it really appears to be the case. I’ll retain my ability to be proven wrong naturally.
Adding a final thought but I do suggest that Cabinet positions who frequently appear and speak on CNBC should dispense with the broad platitudes. We’re not in “winning mode” yet and Americans will grant some rope for a limited time, but not much more.
when the NYT has a stock market article on top of its (internet) lede—as happened yesterday, the end is closer than the beginning. IMO. YMMV
I’ve given up trying to make any sort of predictions, when it comes to stonks.
I never bought into the notion that the stock market was much of anything other than a proxy for sentiment. There certainly is a sense that we’re not in Kansas anymore. The free money spigot seems to be at least partially shut off. Thanks to DOGE, we are in firing not hiring mode, and anecdotal tales from my LinkedIn feed are of woe, misery, and long odds in finding “muh jobz!” for those unfortunate people who are laid off.
Where we go from here is a matter of whether the Fed put is still in place, and we haven’t heard much from the Dread Pirate Powell lately. I will say that AI is a bubble and it is showing signs of fatigue – NVDA can’t get it up (sorry, family blog, I know) anymore. Maybe we should go long viagra?
It helps to think of the stock market as a sort of high school popularity contest. And the people working Wall Street have the same sort of mentality. Let me illustrate-
Wall Street: ‘Hey, corporation XYZ has cut a third of their workforce. We are going to value their stock much higher now and their execs will be rewarded with bonuses.’
Questioner: ‘But much of that workforce was their research & development division as well as all the older hands that built up that corporation.’
Wall Street: ‘So, so?’
Questioner: ‘Well wouldn’t that mean that XYZ will soon no longer be able to compete anymore and eventually get the chop-shop treatment from some private equity corporation?’
Wall Street: (smirking) ‘That’s tomorrow’s problem and nothing to do with us.’
A fun mash-up of the Keynesian stock market popularity contest, trying to identify what people think that others think will succeed, and the pithy Street acronym, IBGYBG.
Tarot cards and crystal balls next? Maybe there is a fund for that. /s
The news headlines from just recently on the vaunted investor Buffet, and more in particular that Berkshire was selling equities looks highly informed and dare one suggests it, an excellent occasion to trim holdings and move into short term and cash.
Anecdotally, I saw today that pricing of a key staple, a dozen eggs, isn’t getting the memo to Make Eggs Great Bargain Again. My local grocery is requesting $5.97 for a dozen large eggs, here in South Carolina.
My better half paid $8 yesterday in Maine.
It depends on the “brand” of egg, such as plain white, speckled, (yes, I have run across those,) brown or the “Organic” versions thereof as to the price point.
Phyllis grew up on a working dairy in Metairie, Louisiana, and so is partial to brown, yard fed chicken eggs. Right now, regional chain sourced “organic” brown eggs are a dollar each at our local “Whole Food Clone” shop. The locally sourced brown eggs are not available right now. The dreaded white eggs are running at $5.97 a dozen at our local Bigg Boxx store.
Our Half Horse town does not allow the keeping of chickens within the town limits. Gentrification strikes again!
Stay safe.
Dow Jonestown cocktail:
3 jiggers of trading halts mixed with kool-aid, serve chilled.
>Lively vs. Baldoni: How Right-Wing Influencers Are Weaponizing the Fight to Take Down #MeToo
If you’re on social media platforms, especially if you’re a woman or under the age of 40, content about Lively vs. Baldoni has likely become inescapable.
I’m not a women and I’m far from under 40, though I am on Twitter/X, watch Ytube, and read articles on Substack, and I’ve never heard of “Lively vs. Baldoni. I guess I live in a digital “algorithm ghettos,” thanks NC for giving me a peek outside of it.
I read the piece and while the tone clearly signals we should think the conservative influencers are peddling fake news or whatever, it actually completely omits any discussion of facts of the case. So it occurred to me… maybe conservatives have success with this even with liberal women because they are kinda right, at least directionally? (I know nothing about the case, just guessing from this one article.)
Lively v. Baldoni.
I haven’t been following the case either, Zagonostra, yet the article is remarkable for reporting the sheer amount of time being wasted on it. It’s worth a peek for what social media may be best at, errrrrr.
Yves Smith’s observation is important: “This sort of backlash is what happens when absolutely legitimate cases get swept up with marginal ones. But we still have too many instances of powerful men like Biden and Hegseth not being held to account.”
From the article, it is hard to know the merits of Lively’s case. As I read the article, the scandal (?) and back-and-forth are a whole lotta bourgeois oneupsmanship. As is so often the case in the U S of A, the bourgeois hijack a necessary service or social movement and turn it to service of the status quo. See: Catherine Liu on trauma. See: Trying to arrange plastic surgery for someone who is poor and in serious need of the work (a harelip, aftermath of burns, results of cancer) as opposed to the endless liposuctions, botox-o-ganzas, and (as Lambert Strether posted in a kind of parting shot) the recent plague of penis modifiers and girthers and enlargers.
The backlash is the backlash of the comfortable. These are people who have time to argue, rather than cabin attendants midflight or nurses or factory workers or farmworkers.
Then there is this cluelessness:
“As the right amasses more power and online attention, the left-wing creator ecosystem’s complete detachment from cultural moments reveals liberals’ total incapacity to engage and mobilize people around influential narratives.”
I am reminded of two things:
–The experiment in Italy of rightists trying to push Italian culture “rightward.” It hasn’t worked. Cultural movements and artists are always moving in directions away from the hierarchy, tradition, and control that rightists consider part of their ethos.
–Which leads to that Mythical Lefist Joe Rogan. The “creatives” bemoaning loss of the so-called narrative don’t have a clue about Joe Rogan’s politics. He isn’t a conservative. Further, there are plenty of left-wing influencers out there. My favorite is Shoe0nHead, who has gotten into plenty of dustups with narrowminded feminists. But Rogan and Shoe0nHead are openly contemptuous of the Democrats and liberals – which is why the bourgeois can’t engage with them.
Finally:
Candace Owens Watch: “Owens, meanwhile, is leveraging the runaway success of her anti-Blake Lively crusade to drive millions of eyeballs to her two latest series, a deep dive investigation claiming that the first lady of France is secretly a biological man, and a series vindicating Harvey Weinstein. Owens claims that Weinstein, like Baldoni and Depp, is a victim of the justice system and that the #MeToo movement has gone too far.” Brigitte Macron has three children from her first marriage, and children are hard to fake, eh. But, yes, Candace, Brigitte est un mec.
And, hell, Candace, as a playwright in Chicago, even I had heard rumors about Harvey Weinstein. Come on. Next up? The love affairs of lusty Hillary Clinton.
“The experiment in Italy of rightists trying to push Italian culture “rightward.” It hasn’t worked. Cultural movements and artists are always moving in directions away from the hierarchy, tradition, and control that rightists consider part of their ethos.”
Something I’ve considered with the accepted theft of the IP of artists of various disciplines, journalists…
I have had articles on that topic shoved at me for weeks, even though I’ve never clicked on any of them. I have no idea who these people are. Very odd – usually the algos try to get me to read things I might have shown an interest in, even if accidentally.
This means that The Critical Drinker is not your movie critic…
>The house always wins: The EU’s sham ‘democracy’ is on show against Romania’s Georgescu – RT
After the massive manipulations used in France to build bizarre governments to shut out both the populist right and left and not reflect the vote, the brazen “firewalling” (against the AfD) and probably outright falsifications (against the BSW of Sarah Wagenknecht) in Germany, now we have reached the stage of direct, open election suppression.
I like the title of this article. It made me think that Canada’s selection of Carney to take over for Trudeau and Biden’s attempt to install Kamala is one such method of manipulation, but there are many more, some more overtly anti-democratic than others at installing leaders who are not accountable to the majority population.
https://www.rt.com/news/613982-romania-georgescu-eu-democracy/
It could have been worse for Canada. They could have had Chrystia Freeland put in charge.
Voters may have balked at the black-fringed maple leaf on the flag, reminiscent of those Freeland forbears?
I don’t think that Canadians would have been happy with replacing the red and white of the Canadian flag with the colours red and black instead.
Although those RCMP formal uniforms seem well suited for goosestepping.
The “P” in RCMP stands for psychopath.
Psychopath pyromaniacs.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/story-of-how-canadian-police-committed-arson-to-stop-a-black-panther-meeting/
As noted above, they’re probably two peas in a pod. Carney: Harvard ’87; Freeland: Harvard ’90.
Shame on you. This is bigotry. Of the only two people I know in the class of ’87, one was a class traitor via becoming a major financial services industry whistleblower (tons of confidential filings). The other is Jewish who spent tons of time in Israel trying to promote better treatment of Palestinians.
You should hear John Helmer talking about little Chrystia…
Y, that’s the default response for any complaints about Carney: the alternative was Freeland.
I don’t know Romania well enough to comment, but the sideswipe at France is just silly. What happened last year was that the parliamentary elections produced three large blocs, none of which was prepared to ally with the other two. Thus, a minority government had to be formed from an alliance of one of the blocs with smaller parties, which is what happened, and was expected. Insofar as there was manipulation, it was an electoral pact between the Centrists and the Progressives (there is no populist Left in France) to give each of them more seats than they should have been entitled to, and stop Le Pen’s party from being the largest in the National Assembly (there was never any chance of the RN forming a government.) Each party to the pact hoped to be the basis for a government. The Progressives, led by Mélenchon, came out ahead with more seats than they should have been entitled to, although nothing like an overall majority. They would never have been able to form a government anyway, riven as they are with bitter disputes. But Mélenchon, who had visions of himself as a Prime Minister marked out by history to rule, took the results of the operation of a parliamentary system very badly, and has been sulking ever since.
Re European countries should ‘absolutely’ introduce conscription, Latvia’s president says
Easy enough for the Baltic country Chihuahuas to say, pretty much all the young people there who could, emigrated to other EU countries thanks to the neoliberal shock doctrine imposed there post USSR collapse. There is noone left there to press gang. And as potential conscription age kids in the rest of the EU endure ever more enshittification of their quality of life thanks to ongoing and no end in sight austerity, who in their right mind would want to defend the EU elite in any case? In an interview a couple of years ago, Ursula VdL was asked if any of her 7 kids would ever serve in the military. She laughed, shook her head and said no, of course not.
I’m sure that if you asked the Latvian President what they should do with all those trained conscripts of the various EU nations, that he would say that they should all be sent to where the border with Russia is most vulnerable. Namely Latvia.
I wonder how many people here can tell the name of Latvia’s president without clicking on the link. I couldn’t, even if my conscription depended on it. I expected it to be some Nazi lady.
“And as potential conscription age kids in the rest of the EU endure ever more enshittification of their quality of life thanks to ongoing and no end in sight austerity, who in their right mind would want to defend the EU elite in any case?”
Perhaps that is why the EU elites have been so gung-ho on immigration in recent years – someone always needs to be the cannon fodder. How sweet to die for somebody else’s county.
Another aspect about Starlink is that the number of practical orbits in space (without risking collision), while very large, is finite. The Starlink constellation has taken up a good chunk of space real estate.
It’s the Oklahoma Land Rush in plain sight.
Plan is for Starlink to have ~42K in orbit, and that’s just one company. There will be no escape from “Skynet,” even underground caverns can be mapped using lidar…my friend homesteading and trying to get off the grid, growing his own food, and stocking up on ammo doesn’t have a chance against Skynet’s T-Series models designed to kill humans created by the artificial intelligence (Movie Terminator fictional, Lidar factual).
Lidar is also in use in hydrographic surveying. Depending upon the clarity of the water lidar can measure depths from 0.9 to 40 m (3 to 131 ft) with a vertical accuracy of 15 cm (6 in) and horizontal accuracy of 2.5 m (8 ft).[16
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar
wasn’t there a link previously about China attempting a similar satphone satellite system? –
even more debris to rain down on us –
https://www.space.com/kessler-syndrome-space-debris
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/09/1108076/satellite-reentry-atmospheric-pollution/
And wasn’t there another link recently where China claimed they could take out Starlink in about 12 hours by causing most of the little satellites to crash into each other? That could be fun to watch on a clear night.
How to tell when someone has zero feel for orbital mechanics.
I keep waiting for my royalty check for Musk using my share of low – earth orbit. Between that and Social Security… Cat Food Futures(tm).
Re Japanese sake. I’d personally hate for the genuine article to get crowded out but have a semi amusing counter example. Dad’s company make Japanese panels (shoji blinds) which are used as room dividers or as conventional window coverings.
He does not use old school rice paper but a type of spun polyester which in 2020 he coincidentally realised was one of the key fabrics in (K)N95 surgical masks.
He is always amused by Japanese immigrants who love his product. It’s largely baby-proof and cat-proof and has fooled elderly Japanese parents who want the traditional ways continued and on visits to their adult children have been fooled by this method that accommodates modern life. His business partner is also very skilled at methods to create patterns etc which have gone down well. My BFF (now senior at Tokyo uni) has confirmed how often people get annoyed by shojis getting wrecked by kids and our feline overlords ;-)
The hard core fans would say its not real sake unless its been chewed by a temple maiden. Like a lot of alcoholic drinks everywhere, its changed dramatically over the years, notions of what is ‘traditional’ owes as much to marketing as anything else (much the same applies to whiskey and other spirits).
Thats interesting about shoji blinds. They are lovely, but I’ve never understood how people could raise children in houses with them. Most kids I know would have them ripped to pieces in minutes.
Yeah he had been so amused by Japanese who have kids and definitely don’t want “the old ways”. Some of his biggest repeat clients are Japanese immigrants.
One thing though…. he’s been very picky regarding the wood used in the frames, which I think helped him. Only one supplier in the entirety of Europe provided what he wanted. A Spanish company who told him stories of the Euro area business being so bad they wanted him to buy them out.
Interesting given recent NC pieces about EU weakness. I’m still puzzled so don’t offer uninformed answers.
What wood species does he use in his shoji frames? Inquiring mind of a woodworker….
Obeche…..apparently it’s NOT uncommon but works very well in shojis.
Dad just told me.
I wonder if any commercially available wine today is made the traditional way.
‘Natural’ wines are a big thing now, there are lots on the market, including some that claim to use very ancient methods. The ones I’ve tried taste like the home brew we made in our bedroom as teenagers.
“Can the US switch off Europe’s weapons?”
This article mentions the withdrawal of contractors from Afghanistan but they should have also mentioned what happened in Iraq. So Iraq purchased scores of Abrams tanks from the US for their military and with them came the private contractors. All good so far. But then images emerged of some renegade group driving American vehicles that they had gotten a hold of from somewhere and Washington did not like that one bit. So they made Iraq responsible for trying to track down and retrieve the US vehicles from this group. And to make them do it, they had the corporation servicing those Abrams pull back home again. With the rugged Iraqi conditions, those tanks started to fall out of service one after another and the Iraq military were left with some very expensive paper-weights. So then they had to go to the Russians to buy their tanks as not only were they familiar with them already, they knew that the Russians were actually reliable.
US military systems do not need “rugged conditions” to break down! Normal training operations present a significant maintenance repair and overhaul burden.
Presented differently, poor quality and wretched design for reliability are business development.
Over the weekend NC posted link to GAO’s annual report on US tactical aircraft years long failing to meet readiness requirements.
WRT supporting contractors leaving the job site, what happens when that job site becomes a target?
Those US contractors in Kiev must have deep bunkers.
Speaking of reliable, I saw a clip yesterday of an Indian host telling Luttnick that India has always purchased arms from the US, France, the UK, and Russia, and that the non US countries were proving more reliable and might be seeing more business from India. Luttnick said you’re going to buy from the Russians? Good luck with that, the US has the very best weapons in the world! I thought Biden’s commerce secretary was arrogant, going to China and lecturing them, but Luttnick has her beat.
I wonder if Trump will try to sanction India due to their purchase of Russian weapons? I would not be surprised. There is even a law on the books about stopping smaller countries from buying Russian weapons which is more about stopping competing weapons from that country. But such a move would be hard to square with the strategic idea of using India as a bastion against China. Come to think of it, just a few days ago the Chinese told Washington that they can’t sanction and punish Chinese firms and then expect China to cooperate with them on other matters that concern the US. They actually said that the US was two-faced for trying to do so. I bet that that went down well with Washington.
I worked in U.S. DoD from 1972 to 2019. Concern for reliability design was always subordinate to budget overruns elsewhere. While taking money from reliability and quality rarely fixed the weapons.
It decayed in my time. Not good.
Countries buy US stuff because they get tech insight, and some manufacturing work.
EU can’t buy Russian bc standardized excess maintenance.
EU help MIC, not its defense
>”EU help MIC, not its defense”
Martyanov on F-35 as tool to achieve just that
TC 15:30-31:00
NATO’s Shrinking Air Forces
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/03/f-35-issues.html
if you prefer YT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w1_ipM_tFM
Thank you, I largely agree with Martyanov.
The engine is a major problem with F-35, they stacked so many computers on the aircraft in small volumetric spaces it needs large cooling systems! The trade off is cool the computers or they shut down or cool the engine or it wears out too frequently.
A new more powerful engine that fits is not in development, much less design!
For European customers: owning 45 or 50 in the whole country makes sustainment very inefficient, at the on equipment level (maintaining day to day mission capable rates is near impossible), to say nothing about depot which if they have any sense goes back to Lockheed, or EU spends billions to try to to depots in UK or Belgium.
I saw a statement from the F-35 Lt Gen program lead F-35 in all 3 variants has been flown 1 million flight hours. No one will discuss the failure rates, or the cost per flight hour or the mission abort rates……
In those hours since 2002, the aircraft has been about 40% partially mission capable, means the aircraft can fly some missions reducing flexiblity to call on the aircraft.
The F-35 “network” chart with 5 “wingman pairs” can happen about once a year for a typical F-35 squadron too many aborts.
Sadly F-16 at 60 years old design is the best the west has.
Last I looked (over 10 years ago) it had engine reliability issues still.
I call F-35 costly unilateral disarmament!
Good for Lockheed!
Interestingly, the Soviet stuff left in Ukraine and Eastern Europe seems to work just fine without need for Putin’s sign off. Fortunately it’s all gone now, so Easter Europe is finally free from Russia’s yoke. Or at least that’s what they say on TV.
The West is preparing to flood Russia with money Vyzglad via machine translation (Micael T).
When I was still in Massachusetts, I told the kids (anyone aged up the early 30-ish) I worked with complaining they’ve resigned them selves to never owning a house, they might consider “go east young man” and investigating if/how they might move to Russia. They usually responded that Russia is a poor nation except maybe St Petersburg. Regarding flooding Russia with money, let’s hope they learned from the Yeltsin era and do not allow such a thing.
This guy should wear a wife beater shirt instead of a suit, in order to match his rhetoric.
Re: the piece on spotify’s biggest sin, I am tempted to paraphrase Norm McDonald on Cosby
No, algos made by people, serving other people’s taste for pablum, which I would argue predates Spotify by many decades (century?).
He has the cart before the horse.
“Do you like music? Everyone says they do.” – David Byrne, True Stories
Although I’m a Norm fan I must confess I missed that.
The guy really had society sussed so long before MSM “accepted comedians” started to make any remotely controversial points. Plus anyone who can weave obscure Russian literature into a long winded joke and still keep the mainstream audience with him gets my vote of approval (RIP).
(Have tried to repost in proper position because skynet got it wrong first time)
It’s been written that the “Top 40” playlists of radio conglomerates have nefarious origins.
“Serving other people’s taste for pablum” is a perfect way to describe the lists of pop music from the days of Rick Dees to the Billboard charts and onward. Anytime anyone talks about “music these days” I just remind them of Disco Duck (another Dees atrocity), New Kids on the Block, and so many other abominations of sound that topped the charts.
But, where Spotify is different in my opinion is that’s it’s turned consumption of music into a passive and monotonous experience. I tried Spotify for about six months and found myself barely listening to what it played and rarely inspired by its recommendations. “Oh, a Billie Eilish song? Cool. Thanks for introducing me to an artist everyone already knows about.” Even tried making an account that only “liked” unsigned indie artists and the recommendations and playlists it fed me were almost all mainstream or aesthetically similar artists. Reminded me of the music on those Starbucks CD compilations back in the day.
Having quit all streaming platforms a few years ago I’ve found my own consumption of music has rebounded and I feel an active relationship with it again. I choose the album to put on. I listen to entire songs and albums letting some songs grow on me while tiring of the ones that first caught my ear. I explore new music in bargain bins and on Bandcamp. I support the artist by purchasing their albums and often get sweet notes from them thanking me for it.
Turning art into passive filler content is ruining art more than anything else in my opinion. As Fran Lebowitz once said, “A great audience is more important for the creation of great art than great artists are. Great audiences create great artists, by giving people the freedom to take chances.” https://theamericanscholar.org/curtains/
I’m not defending spotify here, but I have found it useful for finding new music. But I also probably use it differently than a lot of people. I used to try creating “stations” on Pandora by seeding it with music I already liked, but found it would mostly just repeat the same stuff I was already familiar with. When I first tried spotify, I’d look up albums I liked and listen to them the whole way through. Spotify then started creating “channels” with stuff it thought I’d like, without me needing to seed anything. Those channels do recommend new stuff I haven’t heard before, and if I really like it, I then go buy the CD. I only listen to those channels though when I’m looking for something new. Most of the time I listen on spotify, I listen to whole albums I’ve saved to a library.
These days though I take it one step further, given the amount of AI generated crap on spotify. Now if I find a band I like, I check to see if there are any videos of live performances online and if they have toured recently to make sure there are actual human being involved.
the most aggravating thing about spotify for me is its shuffle algorithm. i like it when playlists have tonal whiplash and pull out deep cuts i havent heard in ages. however, the shuffle algorithm prioritizes popular songs and songs i’ve listened to recently. it also tries to make the songs flow together nicely – ruining my beloved tonal whiplash playlists. it was not like this when i started using spotify ~5 years ago.
my sister has switched to bandcamp and offline music which i respect. i use a mixture of soundcloud and spotify. i never use the algorithm though. i get new songs through friends, irl shows, newsletters, everynoise.com, and “fans also like.” what helps is blocking every mainstream artist spotify tries to rec me.
Good morning,
Given the ongoing Xitter issues, and it’s ongoing leadership concerns, I thought I’d share a little news from the #fediverse front. The big news???
They’re working hard on “search.”
Once accomplished, the federated network of open source social media providers will provide a superior product based on it’s comprehensive “federated” nature: Friedica (facebook), Mastodon (Twitter), PeerTube (YouTube), PixelFed (Instagram) … and the list goes on.
The corporate walled media gardens are a cancer. We have to do better. The good news, better is being built out.
Please check the link if you’d like to know more:
https://www.fediscovery.org
Re: Arnaud Bertrand: Starlink —
And he’s got a kill switch in every one of them, giving him the ability to blackmail the world if he decides to detonate them and create a Kessler Syndrome.
We got that going for us.
A small country like North Korea could have the same effect by launching a rocket into orbit and dispensing hundreds of thousands of needles there. You know, like the US Air Force did back in the early 60s-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford
And there are clumps of them still in orbit over sixty years later.
It’s a definite concern. Personally though, I think it might be a blessing in disguise. Perhaps Kessler better explains the Fermi paradox. Advanced civilizations trap them selves in a cloud of their own planetary debris.
I’m glad someone with more reach mentions Starlink; Musk is a modern day Pharaoh. The elite are happy to let this guy do whatever he wants. And here he controls what has become crucial communications infrastructure, here in the US, too, during national disasters as we’ve seen during the recent flooding in the Appalachians. We’re really in a new Gilded Age and beyond. These people have wealth that the robber barons could only dream of.
albeit minimal at best the robber barons were concerned about how they were perceived by the public – the new robber barons laugh in your face at any concern – rather than be devious they are contemptuous – hopefully to their own misfortune – it does seem the muskman is taking a little drubbing to his wallet –
Goooooooood Mooooooooorning Fiatnam!
With the ides of March folly approaching, the platoon was in high readiness for something wicked this way comes, with the possibility that DOGE makes extensive cuts to the executive branch, which will be initially cheered on by the President, that is until its too late and he’s fired by Elon and forced to get a motel room in Alexandria instead.
Musical interlude: (apropos of current arc of the economy)
Can’t Afford No Shoes – Zappa
Trump administration eyes 30 percent payroll reduction at National Park Service The Hill
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Its gonna be interesting this summer as services in National Parks are reduced to a trickle of what they were previously.
Probably around 30% of visitors to Sequoia NP are foreigners who make for great little spenders on lodging, rental vehicles, food and more, essentially we’re exporting our crown jewels to them, but they have to do all the heavy lifting of getting here.
Apparently, none of the campgrounds here in SNP are expected to be opened, and the tourist experience will be largely a drive-by gig, move along please.
Contrarian take – could there be a silver lining to clearing out all the obnoxious foreign tourists, saving the spaces for the locals?
Of course, if there are no staff to open the gates to the park, well, scratch that thought.
At least the animals will have some more peace.
In the minds of the traitor-tots, the parks can easily be made unattended; everything will just get done by app. Seriously, this is how these techno-mutants think, and they’ll do it.
Absolutely batshit insane that people are putting up with this slashing at NPs, as if they are the bloat problem.
It isn’t as if people are going to be out on the streets protesting IRS or VA cuts, but this is different-the last socialist redoubt (every American owns the NP’s) and a damned popular one.
This is where protests will be most viable…
The crowds have for some time now created rationing at the most popular parks. I once accompanied someone driving up to Grand Canyon just so he could sign up for a back country permit on the opening day of availability. Meanwhile at Yosemite and Zion you have to tour via shuttle bus because the limited road system can’t handle the crush during high season.
All of which is to say that yes the tourist carrying capacity of some parks is being exceeded by often casual foreign tourism. At Zion much of this is from busloads of day visitors brought over from nearby Las Vegas.
As Wuk has reported, practically all of the scenery in Utah is eye popping and other Western states have regions that compete. Fewer visitors may indeed be a benefit for our most famous parks that get all the attention.
The record backup to get into Sequoia NP was just under 6 miles last summer.
When they get something such as that happening, all 4 lanes are opened up (including opposing traffic) and they let about 30 to 40 cars at a time go through the NP entrance without paying, a loss of perhaps a thousand bucks per gaggle in missed entrance fees. This would happen 30 or 40 times a day in attempting to alleviate the traffic jam.
I think we could have new record backups of say 10 miles this summer~
“Obnoxious foreign tourists”?
N=1
Foreign tourist threw a Diet Coke can into the Grand Canyon. grrr, ymmv
Crapification, courtesy of Elliott Management:
WOW: Southwest Will Start Charging For Checked Bags OMAAT
Of course, if we had regulation of the terrible airline industry at least on checked bag would be free for safety reasons. I flew on a domestic Qantas flight and checked bags were free… what a pleasure in boarding and stuffing a backpack in the overhead bin.
Then there was this, no surprise at tapped out consumers:
Delta Slashes Earnings Guidance, Cites Sinking Consumer Confidence
Yup. What is the point to Southwest without the things that made it different – free bags, unassigned seating.
It’s just waiting to be bought out by some corporate raiders now, so that it can take it’s final flight on the crapification arc.
I thought it was the mini skirted stewardesses with go-go boots, circa 1971.
Replaced with AI crap-bots on a screen bungee-corded to the seat in front of you.
Strike that – no screen. Bring your own device and download their “app” which will relentlessly track you and sell your data to Scam Altman.
Insert bitcoin to ask for a pillow, which will cost you an additional charge.
Just booked a flight to Denver on United, and oh joy-they now charge for seats.
If I didn’t opt for that route, would there be straps like on a NYC subway for me to hold onto for dear life while standing for a few hours?
It could be like flying “budget class” on Jimmy Stewarts start up, Phoenix Air.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tob2k3D81Q&ab_channel=JTWPilotChannel
Checked bags were free in the same sense that internet service at some hotels is free: free means included in the purchase price rather than broken out separately. Breaking out separately improves how you appear to travel search sites.
I’m old enough to remember that air travel before deregulation was far more pleasant, and much more expensive.
Just reading about Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canada. The man is insane.
National Cancer Institute Employees Can’t Publish Information on These Topics Without Special Approval
If there’s a comment here on this extraordinary subject, I can’t find it. Scroll down the message to the topics. Check out “cancer moonshot” and see all that it entails. NCI employees “can’t publish” information on these topics without “special approval”?
I am not really sure why everyone is so surprised by this. To me, this is old hat. This was unheard of in the first few years of my career; over the past 10-15 years, this is now the rule in academic medicine. You run everything by the chairman. There will be no chance that donors, or pharma research money or NIH money will be compromised in any way. This is in no small part why no one said anything against the narrative about COVID until the narrative itself started to change.
The fact that this is now happening at the National agency level is no surprise. Indeed, I am very surprised it took so long. In reality, it has been going on for some time. And FYI, the reason you are now hearing about this is because the powers that be really do not like who is now doing the censoring. They were very OK when it was Big Pharma.
Absolutely none of this is good in any way. This is not the scientific method in any way, shape or form. This is not how discoveries get made in medicine or science. It is, however, how money is made and how we keep the money train going at any cost.
I have been aghast at this behavior at decades. Now that the circle is complete, I just shake my head. So many of my old professors and ethics professors back in the day were all over this and all about where this would lead. No one listened. No one cared. Just keep the gravy train rolling. Now, we have inherited the whirlwind.
Cancer is extremely political, as is chronic illness, much of which is caused by human-made toxins. stopping further production would cost many very wealthy people their fortunes.
For example, look at that chart on long covid above. It didn’t really start with covid in 2020, the chart actually takes off (spikes upwards in a way it never had before) with the vaccines in 2021. Plastics, pfos, covid vax, a thousand other chemicals and corporate pollution – so long as there are rulers who impose law on others, and the people tolerate it, this pattern of governments ignoring the truths that are inconvenient to the rich is normal.
China all in on RISC-V open-source chip design – Asia Times
The sub-header reads: “Open architecture breaking Arm, Intel and Nvidia’s hold on high-end chip market while eroding effectiveness of US export controls”
Then reading the body of the article, I find this part:
“Several Chinese companies are “premier” members of RISC-V International, including Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, ZTE, Tencent and semiconductor products and services supplier Beijing ESWIN. Andes Technology, Google, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Synopsis and SiFive are also premium members.”
It’s not about the chips, it’s about the ISA. The ISA is open, so anyone can use it and manufacture devices. Unlike Arm and x86, which require licenses.
The fact that Intel, NVIDIA, etc. are members of RISC-V International is orthogonal to the the premise of the article.
Ok. I’m going to marinate on that for a while.
re: C19 and disability. The other side of the story. utube, ~17+ minutes.
Day of Reflection: The Covishield Scandal (2025) | Oracle Films
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu51GMb0SA4
But, we must now focus our attention on war, according to the MSM and the pols.
I’m sure that there is a member of the commentariat that can explain how vulnerable Tesla’s vehicles are to being bricked ( which would make them much safer..).
They are part of the “Internet of Things” and to my limited understanding the fact that all of them can have their software updated automatically makes them insecure.
Would it take a talented High Schooler or someone with “Mad Skillz” ?, A Nation State or just someone with moderate talent and a bad attitude?
I looked into this and apparently there is a setting in Tesla firmware where you can turn off the cell radio. Assuming it really does this then presumably neither Tesla or anyone else can communicate with your vehicle.
However if the cell radio is on, as it is by default, then one guesses Tesla could disable the car if they wanted. Whether hackers can do this is controversial. Allegedly as a demo a hacker did once take control of a Jeep brand car.
And all cars now have these cell radios for remote “telematics” although on many brands you have to subscribe to a service for such monitoring to be routine. Think Onstar.
The spotify link is another article where the author will tell you some horrible harm its causing, then at some point say the love using it. I have gotten so tired of people doing this, why even write a criticle article if your just going to say “yeah its destroying music but I sure love the service”
Until people are willing to stop using these services nothing will change, its as simple as that.
Same is true for Facebook and other “convenient” apps, if not using those apps is too much to ask then you really have no business complaining about them.
Another reason we’re doomed, its just too inconvenient to do anything.
Thank you. One of my biggest annoyances as well. As someone who has cut subscription to all streaming services, boycotted Amazon since it’s inception, and engages in many other boycotts of awful companies it is so aggravating that people see the problems but let convenience coerce them into compliance. It’s the “just following orders” of consumer capitalism.
If it keeps on rainin’ tariffs, levy’s goin’ to break
If it keeps on rainin’ tariffs, levy’s goin’ to break
Until the levy’s break, import prices are gonna sway
Mean old Trump’s levy’s taught me to weep and moan, Lord
Mean old Trump’s levy’s taught me to weep and moan
It’s got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home
Oh well, oh well, oh well
Don’t it make you feel bad
When you’re tryin’ to find your way
You don’t know which way to go?
If your imports goin’ down south
They got no work to do
If your consumer goods come from Shenzhen
A-ah, a-ah, a-ah
Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good
No, cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good
Until the levy’s break, mama, you got to move, ooh
All last night thought about the levy’s and moaned
All last night thought about the levy’s and moaned
Thinkin’ ’bout my country and my happy home
Ah-oh
Ah, ah, ah, ah
Ah, ah, ah, ah
Goin’
I’m goin’ to pay more
Goin’ to pay more
Sorry, but I can’t take it, ahhh
Goin’ down, goin’ down now
Goin’ down, goin’ down now
Goin’ down, goin’ down
Goin’ down, goin’ down
Goin’ down, goin’ down now
Goin’ down, goin’ down now
Goin’ down, goin’ down now
Goin’ down, goin’ down-down-down-down-down
When the Levee Breaks, by Led Zeppelin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwiTs60VoTM
the famous HBO-doc (sorry if I mess up the indeed fun party via Zeppelin with this serious conent…)
WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE
part 1
2 hours
When The levees broke part 1 (2006) New Orleans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjFCv6JvZnU
part 2
2 hours
When The Levees Broke Part 2 (2006) New Orleans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59WXFka7eEU
It´s beyond me that by now nobody in the media gives a shit about this any more.
Useful term/acronym which is new to me, for personal and institutional-level gaslighting/deflection/victim-reversal for avoiding accountability – DARVO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
Nearly 20% of San Diego fires ‘likely’ began by homeless encampments, data shows (San Diego Union-Tribune)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the midst of The Big Heat®, fires will be omnipresent and a good many of them will be started by our utterly careless untouchables, people get ready.
I haven’t looked at the facts, but plenty of alternative, suspicious, some would call conspiratorial, narratives exist on the Paradise and Palisade fires so I can’t say whether the “likely” origin of the fires out West were started by homeless encampments, but they sure do make for a good scapegoating.
>>>but they sure do make for a good scapegoating.
Well, yes. We mustn’t look at ourselves after all for the causes of our problems.
Just in case you had any doubts about Bernie’s irrelevancy:
Trans punk rocker slammed for ungodly lyrics during onstage performance at Bernie Sanders rally: ‘Pure evil’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14480485/Trans-punk-rocker-Laure-Jane-Grace-ungodly-lyrics-Bernie-Sanders-rally.html
Atta boy, Bernie. That’s the way to win hearts and minds over to help “Fight Oligarchy”.
I remember BS sitting down with Cardi B for a long interview. Prior to that, I had no clue on who she was and I never paid any attention to her since, until recently. I was listening to a Substack on Led Zeppelin and their connection with Aleister Crowley, when the narrator to illustrate the devolution of modern music read so of Cardi B’s lyrics. The contents of those lyrics are filthy beyond measure, at least to my sensebilities. That BS did that interview makes me dislike him even more
Perhaps a vacuum is being created for the arrisal of an economically radical culturally moderate new party-movement? Perhaps a party which leaves the “culture” to the “culturatti”?
A New Deal Party?
Oh no. Ungodly lyrics? Sanders should have had wholesome godly musicians like Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, and The Village People.
Sorry for the snark but pearl clutching about culture war stuff in our current era is pretty tiring. Reminds me of how libs all freaked about that comedian at the RNC convention as if some tasteless jokes were gonna bring down Donald.
Right, alienating huge swaths of the electorate is a winning strategy. Not to mention handing ammo to the Right. But then Bernie probably doesn’t want to win. Easier to keep grifting donations and playing the “alternative to the Democrats” card…
Noboa says Ecuador will soon have “special forces from abroad” to fight organized crime – CNN
Since the Americans seem increasingly reluctant to send their own troops abroad, they could try as they did in Haiti by sending the closest thing to locals within their range of puppet countries. What’s the closest thing to “special security forces,” then? THS’s “security forces”? That’s right: Noboa is a genius.
Nathan Tankus: https://www.crisesnotes.com/special-notice-my-colleague-rohan-grey-has-finished-the-defining-law-review-article-of-the-trump-musk-treasury-payments-crisis/?ref=notes-on-the-crises-newsletter
Tankus links to a new paper, DIGITIZING THE FISC by Willamette University law professor Rohan Grey: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://rohangrey.net/files/Grey-DigitalFisc-Draft-Mar11.pdf?ref=crisesnotes.com
“Whatever the judicial outcome, Trump’s actions have revealed the inherent constitutional fragility of the existing centralized public payments architecture. A nation in which a single government IT official can effectively commandeer all federal budget activity is a nation vulnerable to attack and compromise by a dictatorial president.”
More on Google forcing all businesses to use Gemini in their Workspace accounts. I couldn’t get rid of it:
So no dice for me, apparently. The Google help link said otherwise, as I understood it, but the CSR seems adamant that there’s no way to get it off your bill. Sigh.
Thanks for sharing this. It looks like Big Tech plans to recover some of their huge investment in AI by “slamming” customers with shoddy features that are bundled. Reminiscent of the 90’s when Microsoft was accused of bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows OS.
I am working on an essay on the AI bubble and when it may finally implode. Can I use your anecdote?
Thanks.
PS – Legal trouble mounting for Meta.
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/sarah-silvermans-meta-copyright-lawsuit-advances-as-judge-allows-authors-dmca-claims/
(These individual suits can be written off by Big Tech as a cost of doing business and passed on to consumers like you and me. But if a large group of writers filed a class action, there might be trouble in paradise.)
WSJ New Car Tech
I’m a bit out of the loop because the state saw fit to revoke my driving privilege over a decade ago. I was to say the least a very enthusiastic driver.. A motorsport fan, on the road for the better part of the day for work. Add to that that I worked in technology and saw the ruination of its implementation.
I think it’s starting to dawn on people that throwing technological complexity into performing a simple task is beyond stupid and more problematic than it’s worth.
The manufacturers love this crap because it is cheaper to implement and more easily adapted to many platforms and the cost of repair and replacement falls on the end user.
If I ever saw fit to get back on the road today, there’s virtually nothing on the market that would suit my desire. Manual everything two door hatchback with GVW under 2500 lbs.
Hold on a minute now, Starlink is cool but ‘rendering terrestrial infrastructure obsolete’ is a bit histrionic, the resolution on SL means it can’t be used in dense urban areas, if I’m not mistaken there would be far too many dishes per mile in a city for even the massive completed constellation to handle at any reasonable speed
Also our friend Helios could swat them all aside in a single day if he has a tantrum.
re: Germany post-election
As expected BSW sues Federal Constitutional Court for recount.
Tuberculosis Resurgent as Trump Funding Cut Disrupts Treatment Globally (NY Times via archive.ph)
It’s a good thing that disease can’t spread around the world in less than 24-hours via air travel… oh, oops.
Per Trump privatizing America link: neoliberalism
As a development model, it refers to the rejection of structuralist economics in favor of the Washington Consensus.
As an ideology, it denotes a conception of freedom as an overarching social value associated with reducing state functions to those of a minimal state.
As a public policy, it involves the privatization of public economic sectors or services, the deregulation of private corporations, sharp decrease of government budget deficits and reduction of spending on public works.
Neoliberalism is a political philosophy which seeks to “liberate” the processes of capital accumulation.
Three policy pillars of neoliberalism are “privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending”.
I could go on and on and on … even too – the point that Trump is the B. Clinton [waves at Spud] reformer of the GOP with Elon being the ***Purifier*** unleashing this private[tm] acolytes on the un-pure corrupting utopias potential … having gone from classical liberalism, social liberalism[FDR era], back to classical and now total financial/techno liberalism.
A lot of misleading news articles today on the supposed ‘ceasefire’ deal with Ukraine.
Reading on a little, it turns out to be an agreement between the US and Ukraine (not Russia!) There do not appear to be any actual offers on the table besides a 30 day halt in fighting. Russia would see this as a huge concession and is never going to agree to it without a lot of sweeteners, none of which seem to be on the table.
In practical terms it seems like a diplomatic coup for Ukraine, as it gets intelligence sharing restored and the US back onside and ready to blame Russia instead of Ukraine when this non-offer inevitably gets rejected.
It’s a distraction, to move attention from the Kursk debacle.
re: Seth Rich / FBI / Russiagate
FBI Redactions on Seth Rich Index Leave No Answers
March 11, 2025
Joe Lauria
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/03/11/fbi-redactions-on-seth-rich-index-leave-no-answers/
final paragraphs:
“Yaacov Apelbaum, a technical expert for the plaintiff, says that redacting a file called “Chart of Calls Made and Shifts Scheduled” because it supposedly could interfere with law enforcement suggests “evidence of coordination or activity the FBI does not want exposed.”
He said the redacted “List of Events by Date and Time” file “could suggest organized activities or misconduct.” “Roster of Names and Phone Numbers” “may contain associates, informants, or persons of interest that the FBI is protecting” or “indicates repeated efforts to hide individuals connected to a case,” Apelbaum said.
Clevenger tweeted, somewhat sarcastically it seems: “A lot to sort through here. They’re withholding his job offer letter from the DNC, for example, ‘to protect information, that if disclosed, could reasonably be expected to interfere with law enforcement proceedings or investigations.’ So the DNC is a suspect in his murder?”
Clevenger told Consortium News in an email: “We will definitely challenge the indexes. The small number of files in the indexes indicates one of two things: files have been deleted or files have not yet been accounted for. Even the files listed in the indexes have been redacted excessively.”
Binney went further in his reaction to the released index, telling an email group:
“Where’s the index of all the email? Further, where are the emails? … They only show an index of a few email from November and December of 2012. Guess they don’t want to show any connection to Wikileaks. This is a major issue for KP [F.B.I. Director Kash Patel] – coverup of criminal activity.”
re: Lively vs. Baldoni: How Right-Wing Influencers Are Weaponizing the Fight to Take Down #MeToo
I am having arguments with a close friend when I am trying to point out how media has been demonizing Trump on this issue. I argue out that Biden was apparently never charged with anything and that this was only possible to be ignored due to complicity by the media. Totally contrary to their handling of Trump.
Yet the friend persists that Trump is by design a misogynist racist monster. Unlike I assume the non-Trumps.
But then what is real here? What is not?
The general German view would be Dems are always better than Trump/GOP people.
And that even if latter won´t get us into WWIII that´s not an argument on judging them over private/personal conduct – which – and this is the core: lets us make conclusions about their overall integrity, i.e. world politics too.
Thus private IS public.
And this is in fact the heart of the EU morality/ double standard issue.
Judging Trump and all Me2 related issues leads us to the
conviction of the Western elites to be morally superior (see EU vs. wife-beating Russians).
Which eventually leads us to the ungodly task to present what president or PM has raped how many secretaries in order to judge how their world politics fare.
And to whether nuke or not nuke someone.
Or as a Russian commenter once wrote: Darling, they will try to wage WWIII over gay rights in RU.
Mike Johnson gets his “clean CR” thru the House.
217-213. Massie is a no; one donkey defects to the dark side (film at eleven.)
Johnson to Schumer: go choke on a shamrock ☘️ shake!
Caught a stinker buried on pg. 76:
Looks like those naughty swamp scum snuck in a provision extending loan guarantees to Israel for another year.
https://appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-appropriations.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/bill-text.pdf
Kathy Hochul’s PATCO moment. Where does she think she’s going to get to 2000 prison guards she fired today and the thousand more of because of chronic unsderstaffing? 6000 National Guard remain in the prisons… i bet those guys are really happy with this deployment. Maybe she’s going to import Azov types from Ukraine?
2,000 Striking N.Y. Prison Officers Fired and Barred From Public Jobs NYT archive
Hochul says it’s “over”, huh?
The Due Dissidence guys on the Columbia college protests and the arrest of Mahmoud Kalil. utube, long clip. Lots of points covered.
Judge BLOCKS Mahmoud Khalil Deportation,
https://youtu.be/hx9krCejfls?t=2260
#NotSoNewColdWar
Ceasefire-Shmeasefire
It was this wonderful family blog that introduced me to Gilbert Doctorow. Today’s blog entry about the ceasefire announcement is brutal – i.e. it’s a nothing-burger.
Fave excerpt:
Damn!
For those interested – Moon of Alabama has a new post on the pipeline raid of Sudzha-
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/03/pipelineraid.html
Can’t wait till the movie comes out.
#TYVM
Wow!