She’s One of Florida’s Most Lethal Python Hunters Garden & Gun
Which Movies Do People Love to Hate? A Statistical Analysis Stat Significant
Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? Space.com
Visualized: All of the World’s Data Visual Capitalist
COVID-19/Pandemics
New Drug Could Block COVID-19 Before It Starts, Study Finds UVA Today
With crumbling public health infrastructure, rural Texas scrambles to respond to measles The Texas Tribune
Study explores impact of pandemics on birth rates in Switzerland News Medical
Climate/Environment
Climate change will reduce the number of satellites that can safely orbit in space MIT News
Can the Tools of Finance Help Combat Climate Change? Yale Insights
China?
Ship Wars: Confronting China’s Dual-Use Shipbuilding Empire CSIS
Trump’s China strategy seeks ‘containment with a smile’ The Hill
Chinese ‘invasion barges’ spotted on drills for first time The Guardian
Africa
Fear spreads that NIH will terminate grants involving South Africa Science
US expels South Africa’s ambassador, calling him ‘race-baiting’ Trump hater Reuters
How well is Africa doing across the Sustainable Development Goals? Brookings
Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access ‘weaponised’ The Guardian
South of the Border
Pentagon asked for military options to access Panama Canal Reuters
‘Haiti’s survival is at stake,’ says UN expert, warning of worsening crisis UN News
From Mexico cartel safe house to US streets: BBC tracks deadly fentanyl targeted by Trump tariffs BBC
European Disunion
Fury erupts at Keir Starmer’s EU capitulation as he sets date for Brexit betrayal Express
Dutch lawmakers object to EU’s multibillion defense proposal DW
Israel v. The Resistance
Trump’s Bombast Towards Yemen and Iran Could Sink his Presidency Larry Johnson
US and Israel look to Africa for moving Palestinians uprooted from Gaza AP
Former head of Israeli military intelligence welcomes ‘chaos’ in Syria Middle East Eye
Israel is Denying Doctors and International Aid Workers Entry to Gaza at Unprecedented Rates Dropsite News
Growing despair in besieged Gaza amid shortages of much-needed food and fuel DAWN
this is straight gestapo shit btw https://t.co/zW1hfZcGsy
— hasanabi (@hasanthehun) March 14, 2025
New Not-So-Cold War
Putin guarantees life of Ukrainian soldiers in Kursk if they surrender Euronews
BREAKING: Absolutely *damning* ECHR ruling finds Kiev bears heavy responsibility for the massacre of scores anti-Maidan activists in Odessa, May 2014. Inevitable Western media blackout on this, as it confirms what Russia was saying all along.🧵…https://t.co/4g8hVCTe2j pic.twitter.com/NNUc3HFVtA
— Kit Klarenberg 🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻 (@KitKlarenberg) March 13, 2025
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
If you think AI Agents will be a boon to our lives then just stop and think a moment about what the AI Agent has to have access to. The security/privacy implications are profound. Description of the problem very nicely put here by @mer__edith pic.twitter.com/nVpJ3c6k4B
— Alan Woodward (@ProfWoodward) March 10, 2025
Data Privacy Experts Concerned About DOGE Access to ED Government TechnologyCPPA Puts the Brakes on Honda’s Data Privacy Practices McDermott, Will & Emery
Imperial Collapse Watch
High attrition rates and increased waivers muddy enlistment numbers Responsible Statecraft
US Air Force in Crisis as Only 6 in 10 Aircraft Mission-Ready Newsweek
I tried the viral $20 strawberry. It tasted like the end of the American empire The Guardian
No empire dies quietly: the violent twilight of US dominance Morning Star
Trump 2.0
Donald Trump threatens opponents with jail in Justice Department speech Al Jazeera
Trump’s Canadian tariffs are having a chilling effect on Vermont’s small business owners CNBC
‘My career is over’: Columbia University scientists hit hard by Trump team’s cuts Nature
Donald Trump’s Slumping Poll Numbers Council on Foreign Relations
DOGE
Elon Musk wants to use AI to run US gov’t, but experts say ‘very bad’ idea Al Jazeera
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Teams Up With DOGE to Gut USPS TruthOut (Kevin W)
Are Elon Musk’s politics threatening Tesla and his empire? DW
DOGE is endangering Trump’s priorities Brookings
Democrat Death Watch
The Democrats’ Enabling Act: Senate votes to fund Trump’s dictatorship WSWS
The Big Lesson From Bernie Sanders’s Gangbusters Anti-Oligarchy Tour The New Republic
The Schumer-Jeffries Split Explodes in Public Politico
Charlamagne tha God: Schumer, Jeffries should step down The Hill
Immigration
Judge blocks Trump administration from implementing Alien Enemies Act The Hill
Birthright Citizenship in the United States American Immigration Council
Trump’s New Immigration Ban: An Arbitrary, Discriminatory Legal Immigration Rewrite Cato Institute
Scoop: ICE already short $2 billion as Trump’s immigration crackdown ramps up Axios
Our No Longer Free Press
CPJ, partners urge FCC to stop threatening press freedom and free speech Committee to Protect Journalists
News Guild President Jon Schleuss identifies three big threats to press freedom People’s World
Mr. Market Is Moody
Wall Street tumbles 10% below its record for first ‘correction’ since 2023 on Trump’s trade war AP
Ominous market signals show more trouble could await US stocks Reuters
DC housing market shows signs of cracks amid mass federal layoffs CNBC
AI
Anthropic CEO says spies are after $100M AI secrets in a ‘few lines of code’ TechCrunch
Google’s New Robot AI Can Fold Delicate Origami, Close Zipper Bags Slashdot
Google’s Gemini DeepResearch is now available to everyone engadget
The Bezzle
New FTC Data Show a Big Jump in Reported Losses to Fraud to $12.5 Billion in 2024 FTC
AI voice-cloning scams: A persistent threat with limited guardrails Axios
Guillotine Watch
The Top 6 Most Expensive Hermès Birkin Bags Southeby’s
Class Warfare
The push to restore semiconductor manufacturing faces a labor crisis − can the US train enough workers in time? The Conversation
Antidote du Jour (via)
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
and
Bookends of our present situation.
The present Senate offers a beautifully structured way for our Elites to have their way. Bills that lead to any sort of controversy can be passed by Cloture Vote Kabuki. A selected handful of Democrats can vote for Cloture and then vote against the controversial bill. To see how the Senators voted you need to identify the right Cloture vote on the Senate’s https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/vote_menu_119_1.htm where vote #128 (62-38) is tallied: Agreed to On the Cloture Motion: Motion to Invoke Cloture: H.R. 1968; A bill making further continuing appropriations and other extensions for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2025, and for other purposes. Just to make things interesting there were at least two other Cloture Votes tallied in the list of Recent Senate Roll Call Votes, and to reach the vote tally for vote 128 you need to go to the Senate.gov => Legislation & Records => Votes => Detailed Session List
I think the way this Enabling Act was passed was doubly sneaky in the way it was tucked into the continuing appropriates bill that had to pass to avoid a government shutdown.
I was not aware of House version of the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025. Was there a Cloture Vote in the House or did the Democrats avoid pushing for a filibuster so that none was needed? I think when Democrats are in the minority in the House they usually immediately buckle to the Republicans after some symbolic contention to impress their constituents back home. With the Republican majority so thin, 218 to 213 with 4 vacant seats, perhaps filibusters are a more credible threat to the Elite getting their way and Cloture is more problematic herding any ‘cats’ among the Representatives.
We can have Representative Government without responsible representation of our interests or concern for our welfare.
The game in the House is often “motions to recommit”, which was often used to get the opposing party on record as voting against some kind of virtue signaling rider. I don’t know if Republicans nuked these or if they’re still possible to offer under the rules of this House. In the House, the majority party can do whatever it wants, if it has the votes.
Looks like this is the 119th Congress. Looks like the Democrats nerf’d the MTR in the 117th (gag, Indivisible):
So it might be in the House, the Democrat Party really is as helpless as it is hapless. Not so in the Senate, as you’ve described. (The helpless part; they’re still listless or more likely complicit.)
“Trump’s Bombast Towards Yemen and Iran Could Sink his Presidency”
Like Obama, Trump firmly believes that there is no foreign problem that he cannot solve by using bombs and troops. Thing is, Obama bombed so many people that at one stage he ran out of bombs. And you just know that the inventory of bombs was far higher way back then. So what does Trump do if he starts to run out of bombs. What if Ansar Allah make it a point to hit a US ship? And why the bluster against Iran? He has already said that he is imposing maximum pressure against them. Does he think that offering – temporary – relief will get them to shut off supplies to Yemen? What makes him think that Ansar Allah are under Iran’s direct control? But I guess that at the end of the day, this is all about doing his buddy Bibi a solid.
2 days ago the info that Obama actually ran out of bombs already got mentioned; do we have the news item on that? I wasn ´t so much into things back then.
Just a quick search coughs up this article-
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/04/politics/air-force-20000-bombs-missiles-isis/index.html
Don’t forget that Obama was the guy that started his first few months of his Presidency by being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
Appreciate it!
Frankly I didn´t expect it to be that easy with an actual headline saying “The U.S. is running out of bombs to drop on ISIS”.
I would have never typed that into search…
How naive we all were then!
(I’m using the figurative meaning of all, not the literal)
Obama and that Nobel, the pyrrhic triumph of Hope over experience. Plus ça change…
I thought it pretty bad in his acceptance speech to turn it into a war speech. The gall of the man.
It was a novel thought by the Nobel committee-thrusting the idea that he was a champion of peace and hoping it sticks, it’d be like giving a pre-emptive Oscar to Ishtar in hopes that the film would never be made.
Obama’s Nobel Lecture. As the Rev says, do not read after eating.
They had to give it fast, before he starts the killings.
We (collectively) really want to think of our Presidents as heroic characters, like the one in the Independence Day movie piloting a fighter against the alien mothership at the climax. But experience shows that the last 6-7 at least have been loathsome people who perpetrate murder and torture with zero compunction while spouting outrageous lies on a regular basis. I don’t know if we can say Carter and Ford were exceptions, despite their milder demeanors…judging by who they appointed to formulate and carry out policy, it seems doubtful. So that might make it more like the last 11. It’s hard not to believe at this point that the system has been geared to elevate the worst among us to the highest ranks.
Obama bragged about being great at killing people.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/obama-defends-deadly-drone-campaign-new-book
“Trump firmly believes that there is no foreign problem that he cannot solve by using bombs and troops.”
I disagree. He also believes that maximum economic and financial pressure can bring adversaries to heel — see all those tariffs and other, hem, incitements.
In this respect, Panama (ports transfered from a Chinese firm to Blackrock) and Taiwan (TSMC agreeing to invest $100B in the USA, and possibly to take over/partner with Intel against the commercial, technological, and IPR interests of Taiwan) can be counted as successes for the USA.
As well, bombs and troops resulted in some successes recently — even if by proxy: Lebanon, Syria.
I have been reading many articles in the past couple of decades arguing that the USA, overextended, overstretched, overtaxed, overloaded with foreign entanglements, with a decaying military and a run-down industrial infrastructure, will incur a massive setback in some exotic place resulting in the collapse of its hegemony. I have the impression we are nowhere near this turning point.
If you want to look at how that scenario might play out, then I would recommend the novel “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” by John Michael Greer. Very much worth the read-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight%27s_Last_Gleaming_(novel)
The ending is more optimistic than this Wikipedia article would make out.
Up until now it hasn’t really mattered when we lost in some overseas conflict, not a lot of soul searching when we left with our tales between our legs in Kabul, for instance.
I’m a big fan of the fourth turning, and follow along:
1865: Appomattox
1945: Tokyo Bay
2025: Kiev
Will we lose hegemony when we lose Ukraine?
When the US abandons a war like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan they usually just sail away in the ships or fly away in their planes i.e on their own terms. Ex-Colonel Douglas Macgregor has made the same point. The only time that was different was Appomattox. That time you had tens of millions of Americans suffering an outright defeat. The South has never forgotten – or forgiven – that defeat and generations later it’s effects are still felt. You have the US suffer that sort of defeat and who know how people will react. That novel shows what could happen.
Another endorsement for Twilight’s Last Gleaming. The ending is best case scenario for our current predicament
If the draft had one good thing going on, it was the idea that Minnesota hung out with Alabama, and California with Kansas and so on and so forth for all 50 states in the service, and in lieu of (usually bad) stereotypes of how states think of one another without really ever getting to know the place now, it was good for cohesion.
Yup, read it about 10 years ago. A very optimistic scenario for the end of the Empire. One can hope.
This is ripoff from an old post at Eschation a long time ago…
America’s Foreign Policy:
Plan A: Bomb
Plan B: Bomb Bomb
Plan C: Bomb Bomb Bomb
Plan D: Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb
For some reason, my mind puts your post up, backed by some Tito Puente percussion and a horny latino band playing some up-tempo background jazzy salsa! I need different coffee beans?
Perhaps courtesy of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass?
Spanish Flea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBE9EQ7gXKI
It’s my expectation that Mother Nature will be the impetus for this. All you need is a few more bad hurricanes, fires, and other climate collapse natural disasters to cause a mess stateside. It’s a lot more difficult to maintain a global empire without a stable climate.
I wish Her the best of luck.
Like what happened in a not so distant past, but an order of magnitude worse? I agree with you: this has more potential to wreak havoc on imperialistic plans than the skillful actions of some fearsome enemy.
If “U.S. hegemony” does collapse, the result probably won’t be sweetness and light. Most likely after a period of chaos there will be a new hegemon. Why does anybody think that will be better than what we have now?
John Kenneth Galbraith
My main hope is that, in absence of America’s particularly reckless approach to foreign policy, the world would be at least a little more stable and diplomacy and compromise would become more viable.
It definitely won’t be sweetness and light, though. For one thing, I expect many “Western ideals” like democracy, human rights, minority protections, etc. to be widely discredited by association with those claiming ownership of them today and consequently many babies to be thrown out with the bathwater.
There is no “we”. Some will have it better, some won’t. Those that want to keep the status quo deserve to have it worse, as far as I’m concerned.
If the hegemon’s overall framework is on of more egalitarianism, then I don’t know, maybe?!
So the argument is US hegemony is the best we can have. Nice one.
I think it’s surely not the best and quite likely the worst (because of a particular way in which America’s ideological and domestic and foreign policy idiosyncrasies interact making it a uniquely irresponsible actor), but the replacement will be more different than obviously better for a lot of people.
Also, 9 out of 10 slaveowners recommend slavery as the best we can have. Also, 10 out of 10 Zionists confirms that flattening Gaza is the best we can have, and will bring the light (approved by God). Also, high-fructose corn syrup manufacturers associations say that the high-fructose corn syrup is the best we can have. They have all the sweetness that the plebs crave.
From what I have seen, the Taiwanese are very angry about the move and it seems to me that their government, in order to take people’s attention from this sellout, is raising tensions with China.
Also, the Canadiens are very, very, very incensed about all this oinking of Trump about Canada being the 51st state. CBC just had a show with a psychiatrist on how to cope with all this bubbling anger and resentment and there were quite a few callers, some with long friendships with Americans, now broken, etc. (there is quite a lot of jingoism in the US).
I was happy to hear that both the Liberals and NDP are considering the cancellation of the 15 Billion contract for 88 F-35s. Fingers crossed.
It really doesn’t look quite like winning to me, never mind first, secon, hird order consequences…
The really pathetic thing is that Saudi Arabia and the US have been bombing Yemen pretty intensively for almost a decade, most recently via the ill-fated Prosperity Guardian operation by the US, with very little result. The houthis seem to have developed a more or less bomb proof society that continues to fight on even when targeted by much bigger and wealthier nations.
So the one thing we know is definitely not going to work, bombing Yemen, is the thing that Trump seems to be hanging his hat on.
It’s the same thing every other US president hangs his hat on sooner or later, but still it would be nice to see them try something different.
Those robots spraying a Cybertruck reminded me of this film from back in the day, starring Yul Brynner.
Westworld (1973) Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoUWNBcBKkA
exactly!
(I didn´t want to say it, always coming up with these film analogies).
But… yeahhh
Can you imagine a few years down the track a new sport? Robots vs robots. You would have an area hooked up with cameras everywhere and two teams of robots armed with human weapons would go for each other. Hunger Games but for Robots or maybe just Terminators vs Robocops. The main rule would be that they would have to be humanoid in shape and size like these ones were so you do not end up with just robot tanks. You could have sponsorship deals, online betting, team favourites and the full nine yards. And nobody need get hurt.
well there is this…
“Real Steel”, 2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU3ZqtbIRPI
We have had RC robot gladiators hacking and crushing each other for approximately 25yrs now.
Always been a niche thing for Auspy STEM nerds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleBots
It made me think about the number of people that thought that it was for real.
Just watched that movie recently recorded on cable. Really very creepy. Never imagined that it would become a real thing. That we would have an unelected AI automaton with a kid named X tearing apart the US government, destroying everything we hold dear, while a fat bald game show host cheered him on and the democrats put up zero defense and even helped pass a budget that codified the whole thing. Since we can’t stop Musk and his minion, we need to stop voting for these people. It can only get worse from here.
Yes, I need me some minions. And some henchmen. Plus I can’t decide between a lackey and a sidekick. Which is cheaper?
I can get you a sideclick working out of Pakistan on the cheap.
Probably the average five-year-old child (Rule #12).
True. The first movie that came to mind for me was Robocop (1987.) My mind always goes to ED-209 in these secnarios.
Meanwhile, Beijing is organizing the world’s first humanoid half marathon (https://english.beijing.gov.cn/latest/news/202503/t20250307_4028142.html)
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1901098665466536343
The Southpark clip with the brief history of America is spot on.
It´s almost as if one were hesitant about calling out Trump´s bullshit simply out of fear that might help the other idiots who want to go on with “project WWIII” get back in office…this really is a rock/hard place conundrum. Regardless that they wouldn´t get far with WWIII. But just to know there is a bit of communication going on now and the embassies are getting staffed again. I mean Rutte saying out loud that there won´t be NATO for UKR in a way that nobody can deny it? Like a new era.
From a Mad magazine decades ago, paraphrasing perhaps, “Nixxon. New name, same old gas”.
…possible they (Americans) would be better off with a Mr. N now?🙄
I assume N and T are the most hated POTUSes outside USA in the history of POTUSes.
May be I should write POSSUM instead. President of …SSUM… can´t come up with anything good right now.
One would think we’d be better off with N, but the this stupid timeline confounds determination.
President Of States Supposedly United, Maybe.
I think we’d be better off with N now. (Never thought I’d think this.) He started the EPA and ended the Vietnam War. Of course, for that he had to be got rid of on some pretext. Odd that 4 of the 5 Watergate burglers were ex-CIA agents. (Is anyone ever ex-CIA?) / ;)
Ditto on Nixon. IIRC he also proposed a guaranteed annual income and a national health care system. In 1972 he was a “conservative”. Who’d have thought…
Didn’t know that about the burglers being ‘ex’-CIA. Thanks, Flora.
They can deny anything thing they wish because that’s what they do, and it doesn’t matter if they have to tell big lies, little lies, or in-betweeny lies. I’m just wondering how the Russians will respond if a couple or two NATO or EU boot touches Ukrainian soil if there should be a ceasefire once the parties have agreed the basic terms of the peace settlement.
I can’t help wondering if Russia were to make its displeasure known by lobbing a fully armed Oreshnik at each the offending countries whether that would result in significant efforts to establish European systems of governance which actually reflect the wishes of their people and deal with the matters which really affect their day to day lives like the provision of decent schools, cheap and timely public transport, major improvements in our decling health care and public health systems, correcting the under-supply of homes fit to live in a prices young families can afford, etc. God knows there’s enough or governents to do in every EU state rather than getting under Russia’s feet as the Russian people go about their business..
Not to worry there will be no ceasefire.
Rubio on CBS this morning stated the ceasefire is step one! Peace conference is step two.
And yet the Russians have been stating the opposite in public statements since at least last year. The “ceasefire” will just be an excuse to have the place quiet enough so that NATO troops can be sent in to “keep the peace” with NATO aircraft overhead giving cover i.e. a no-fly zone. Meanwhile the Russians have given those troops trapped in Kursk till Monday to surrender – or else. Rumour has it that there are a coupla dozen NATO officers trapped as well. I’m sure that if so, there would be intense negotiations for their release.
Newsweek on USAF “mission capable” rate.
Newsweek related the “partial mission capable rate (PMC). Sadly, GAO does as well.
There are three mission capable rates: fully mission capable (FMC), PMC and not mission capable (NMC).
Flexibility is key to military success. A unit with a tiny FMC fleet has restricted flexibility. Most of its aircraft cannot do missions that could be combat critical.
Using PMC hides a lot of issues.
This is what appears to be the actual longer news report quoted:
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2025/03/06/air-force-aircraft-readiness-plunges-to-new-low-alarming-chief/
And here are actual charts for “Air Force Mission Capable Rates” per model if one scrolls down:
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-mission-capable-rates-fiscal-2024/
Having grown up in a small town home overlooking a lake in southern Minnesota, I’m old enough to remember the winter ice harvests. They stopped sometime in the late ’40s, presumably because electric refrigeration was coming to the nearby farms thanks to the REA program.
Canada is now officially reviewing its order of 85 F35s, due to cost, crappiness, the post-purchase possession of kill switches by the US, and the whole 51st state deal. Also looking into selling the 16 units already paid for to a third party who can’t bear to wait to acquire their very own dependent-on-a-subscription-so you-dont-really-own-it ’35s, but the US would likely not go along with that.
F-35 needs a new jet engine!
Puts me in mind of the ice trade in North America which at one time employed about 90,000 people and 25,000 horses. At the beginning of the season, you would have ice shipped into the big cities where some of the blocks would be put in display in store windows where crowds of people came to stare at it. It fetched a good price and was a lucrative trade once but you are still talking about frozen water. And a twenty buck strawberry? What’s that old saw about a fool and their money?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade
Would make more sense to do a taste comparison at the height of the strawberry season, and make it a blind tasting. There is a world of difference between peak season strawbs picked locally, and the first ones that appear in stores.
The writer could also have done a price check on how much they charge for strawberries at Wimbledon, apparently quite a lot. Maybe not 19.99 but still.
A $20 strawberry? Meh. 13 years ago there was already a $1000 ice-cream.
Shhh, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want anyone to know about her strategic ice cream reserve secured in special freezers! /s
Carefully hidden behind the dry powder.
Hmm, maybe so, but even the locally grown and freshly picked strawberries are losing their flavor – nothing like they used to taste only 30 years ago. Maybe if you’re growing them from older seed stocks you can still get the old flavor, but lately the only ones I’ve been able to locate are the wild varieties, which still taste like strawberries, but have to be eaten that day.
American strawberries, like most of our fruits, have had their flavor bred out of them in favor of durability during shipping and shelving. Compare to a French strawberry like the gariguette or the Mara de Bois if you can find one. Delicious strawberry flavor.
More Grauniad:
«Erewhon, the only grocery store to have inspired both a Louis Vuitton perfume and a Balenciaga collection, is not the first to introduce this luxury fruit trend to Americans.»
Some kind of sequel to Yves’ post yesterday on digital brain rot….
I wonder if the customers (or perhaps even the owners) of the Erehwon stores know the origin story of their brand
Citrus gets picked and graded, with perfect examples headed to Japan where it sells for a big premium. No American would ever really care about a slight blemish or an orange being out of round and not perfectly symmetrical, but they do in Nippon,
When I was growing up, Orange County was kind of a backwater and not a great deal of houses compared to now, and what it had was maybe a dozen 2nd and 3rd generation Japanese-Americans who owned a bit of land and grew the most amazing strawberries-the size of a small child’s fist and oh so full of flavor.
One by one they all sold their ‘truck farms’ and homes were built in their place.
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” (One Hundred Years of Solitude, p1, pp1)
… and in the American grain, Ralph Fasanella: https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/ice-man-crucified-4-86406
I recognized your initial quote immediately, Michael. One of my all-time favorite books, and I’m glad you brought it back to my mind.
Likewise. My favourite quote from it, not relevant to this thread but relevant to much else, is:
I’m going to have to reread the book now. Thank you, Daniil.
Yes, a wonderful book. The Netflix version was disappointing.
I had an older friend who delivered fuel oil to my parents house. His father delivered ice. He described to me what back-breaking work it was. From loading the blocks to climbing stairs in walk-ups.
Fasanella’s father earned his living delivering ice in Lower Manhattan, thus the Crucifixion theme.
“High attrition rates and increased waivers muddy enlistment numbers”
‘According to a senior Army official, only 8% of the population is eligible for “clean enlistment” with no waivers, much lower than the 23% found in a 2020 DOD study.’
Maybe that was why they allowed RFK jr into the government. If he can get Americans healthier again, that would have to increase the pool of recruits available to be recruited and sent out to the ends of the empire. But if numbers are going down, perhaps it is because young people see how Trump wants to gut the Veterans Health Administration which means that if they join up and get wounded, then they won’t have much government hep when they get back but left to their own devices.
“Thank you for your service,now Go Die.”
This in combo with “The Conversation” regarding semiconductor manufacturing, is there no one in the pundit/political class with any residual numerate instincts? I’m a superannuating architect who outside of trig hasn’t used much math since the calculus I briefly studied during the Reagan Administration, but even then its burningly obvious that industrial production, and downstream from that, industrial war is only viable for a nation that values its citizens as creative, capable and that means healthy human beings.
If you make education unaffordable, you will get an uneducated workforce. If you make housing unaffordable, you will get and un-housed and less healthy workforce. If you make medicine a profit center it is damn near impossible to see how the structured incentives will produce anything other than more disease, death and disability, exactly as our system is now doing.
I’m expecting that when the IP/IT air starts coming out of the big American tech stocks, which our IP treaty voiding, tariffic President is encouraging, we won’t be able to attract H1B candidates any more and will be left with a disabled, diseased, and social media addled “productive” workforce. If you look at domestic birthrates as the baseline of “cultural reproduction”, you can see that our is no longer reproducing. If on top of that cultural failure you ensure it’s a hellscape to live in, the border wall is to keep anyone who can still climb in to try to force them into some kind of prison labor arrangement. War would then be an option for advancement for convicts.
Maybe this is how SalUSA Secundus gets set up.
Oh my. You just triggered my defective brain to consider the scene in David Lynch’s film version of “Dune” where the Emperor meets with the Spacing Guild navigator.
Imagine the Guild Navigator floating in his spice drenched travel bus as Elon, and a certain Orange Haired Demon as the Emperor.
Navigator: “We have just folded space from X.”
It looks like the same type of article complaining about a STEM shortage that never really seems to show up. As in new grads still often struggle to find work and companies keep having layoffs of experienced engineers.
There is a big clue in a link to semiconductors dot org which says there is an expected shortfall of 27,300 engineers including 12,300 master’s. There’s nothing wrong with the consolation prize for not getting a PhD. But it is one of the favorite ways to get H1Bs. Natives might as well go with a BS and appropriate on the job training.
That was certainly one of the motives for setting up the national health service and providing milk and meals for schoolchildren and other dietary initiatives after world war two in Britain. At the start of the war, too many conscripted men were simply unfit for military service due to poor diet and associated poor health.
Now Starmer is willy waving about sending troops to Ukraine, most likely to seize Odessa as a British naval port, one has to wonder how many future conscripts in Britain will be sufficiently healthy, both physically and perhaps more importantly in our neoliberal age, mentally fit.
Of course the ludicrous health minister Streeting, who has no medical expertise but is heavily funded by private health sector parties, has already declared that too many people are being diagnosed with mental problems! It is clear to see what direction the Labour government is moving in.
The Top 6 Most Expensive Hermès Birkin Bags Southeby’s
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
First I look at the purse-some fetching $450k, and then you try and think of how any mens wallet could ever be worth $450k unless it had about 11 pounds of crisp brand new Benjamins in it?
Now when it comes to time its the other way around-no womens watches fetch anywhere near what an intricate vintage Swiss made high end mens wristwatch sells for.
It’s really difficult for a man of glutinous wealth to display it on his person, with wristwatches being about the only thing possible-this despite any old Timex supplying the very same time.
Maybe a tattoo? (ducks)
Wuk’s nephew with $450k of tattoos would pound-for-pound be a better asset class than gold I reckon
Maybe an arm-bracelet with very expensive tastes. Just ask Jeff Bezos.
…and she can pilot a helicopter.
‘Hey, Jeff. Ever seen a helicopter do a barrel roll?’ Better buckle up!’
Balthazar?
I was once looking at very expensive watches in a jewellers with a more-glamorous-than-me friend and I said something along the line of ‘who on earth would bay 10k for a watch when a cheap one does the same job? Who notices?’ She looked at me pointedly and said ‘beautiful women notice’.
I’ve a friend with a taste for very expensive bags who insists that her net spend on them is zero – she will buy much sought after bags new and used and usually sell then on after a year or so, depending on demand and fashion. While I suspect that her ‘net zero’ line is more for her husbands ears, I think she has a point that there comes a level where you can justify very expensive items as investments (although YTer Patrick Boyle has an amusing video pointing out that in general watches are not a good investment). But I would guess that like with antiques, if you have a very good eye and a bit of luck, it is a taste you can indulge in without doing yourself long term financial damage, and may even make a profit out of it.
The thing is, you wouldn’t dare use a purse such as a Birkin for it’s intended purpose-just as you would be daft to don a pair of vintage Air Jordan’s and then throw away the cardboard box and go shoot hoops on the blacktop.
These are trading totems, not using totems
My friend absolutely uses her bags and purses for their intended purpose (though obviously not in dodgy bars or suchlike). She regularly points out to me random women with very expensive accessories (like most men I’m oblivious to most of those things, and only recently started to notice when other men are wearing very expensive watches). Many of course can be fake. My sister loves her $200 *cough* Birkin bought in Bangkok and likes to tease the curious who ask about it.
I suppose you could drive your 1955 Gullwing Mercedes to 7-11 to get a slurpee…
The value of most everything highly sought after is in the condition, older coins that were caught with a gloved hand after being minted and never circulated and are in pristine condition are worth infinitely more than the same coin that circulated for decades or even 30 days worth of commerce.
Yes, well, that’s where it all gets complicated. Some items – even fashion items – do benefit from a ‘lived in’ look – I’m told there is quite a second hand market for things like ‘lived in’ Mulberry and even Patagonia where they go for much higher than the original sales price. Of course genuinely old clothes can be very expensive – good quality old linens are very popular.
I think this is all part of the marketing – for most people, it’s delusional to think that the watch or bag or jacket they buy can keep its long term value. You have to really know your product niche well. There are of course lots of people who do this as a hobby. I’m told the market for trading upmarket brands of clothes in Japan is enormous. It’s a cheap way for some people to keep up with fashion trends if you are willing to devote time to it and I guess its a lot more environmentally sustainable than buying new from mainstream stores.
A friend went from buying and selling camera stuff gravitated to clothing – he has a positive rep from the website he uses, so people regularly give him things to sell and they split the profit. He’s always asking me for my Patagonia cast offs (I used to buy a lot years ago when I lived near one of their outlet stores).
I am pretty active in the market for old bicycles. The market for fifty year old Paramounts and Colnagos has absolutely cratered as the guys my age and older all start looking to unload their hoards. A critical part of making money in a market like that is to turn the inventory over quickly because the market can change completely in a year or two.
Classic bikes are an area that seem to swing wildly in popularity. I think the popularity of fixies a few years ago drove a lot of interest in vintage bikes.
The whole bike market is a little crazy now, there has been over investment in bikes that are just too pricy. I’d hold on to those Colnago’s, I’m sure they’ll swing back into popularity again.
I had a conversation this week with some American friends who moved here a couple of years ago. They said their pension nest egg in the US had been hit very hard by the stock market going down the past few weeks (and the US dollar going down too) and are looking into alternatives. So I wonder if things like collectables are kind of counter-cyclical to ‘conventional’ investments.
There is a sort of a Patagucci cult out there and well deserved.
Mine was made in the USA & Colombia long ago and each article of clothing has little rips and tears as testament to the garments having fun over many decades of use.
This is the kind of “risk” the communistic super-rich, insured by us prols in every other aspect, revel in!
Rolex watch bought by U.S. air force serviceman in 1974 for $345 (then about a months wages for him) appraised decades later at five to seven hundred thousand dollars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9Y4bmbh1KY
“I never used it” The vet kept it pristine in a safe deposit box, hence the astronomical value. “New in Box” is the ultimate condition and rare as unicorns.
Paul Newman’s Rolex sold for $17.75 million, but I can buy his salad dressing for $4.
The Art of Relicing Guitars.
https://www.wood-finishes-direct.com/blog/art-aging-guitars/
The ironic thing is that the original bag gifted to Jane Birkin was well used and well loved for over ten years. It was auctioned off at that point to support a French AIDS charity. It had little of the glitz and while of good leather it wasn’t crocodile or specially dyed lizard, the hardware wasn’t jewelry. Reading their other article about the differences between it and the marketed bags is interesting.
I really wonder about the evolution from a hand crafted well designed bag to an item largely meant for show. I’m sure there is a history out there. I’ll have to look.
Au contraire, Wuk! Expensive watches have one and only one use case. Tax evasion. Why is *Switzerland* the centre of the luxury watch industry? And not Austria, which has near identical cultural and geographical advantages?
Consider:
1) Man opens Swiss bank account to hide his wealth from German / French / Italian tax authorities
2) Man needs some tax-free money
3) Man goes to Switzerland not wearing a watch
4) Man leaves Switzerland wearing a very expensive watch. Nobody notices.
5) Man sells watch in Germany / France / Italy for €€€
High end jewellery has the same function on women.
True, but one has to balance preserving condition and use. Kids and pets would lay waste to that investment strategy.
Back in the 80s, I acquired a late 18th century slant-front desk from a neighbor, which I planned on enjoying and then reselling. Not one week in and the cats had discovered the joy of surfing the slanted lid.
If it was an antique violin you could have put the cat to good use if it damaged it.
Murdurous thoughts indeed occurred. Nevertheless, an assessment of what really makes us happy also took place. The desk was unloaded.
Did you check out to see if there were any hidden draws and the like? You often had those in those old 19th century desks.
It was a pretty common thing also in the 19th century to hide cash inbetween the backing of a painting in a frame and the painting.
I was told years ago that is a place where many a land deed, marriage certificate, maybe even a fraktur, were hidden from burglars. It makes sense that stock certificates or money could be there too.
It did have a secret drawer, hidden behind the central gallery of small drawers which could be removed via a hidden latch.
Between you, me and the IRS, I bet that it was completely empty and there was nothing to be found.
Boyle has pretty awful politics (pro-Milei, for example) but he mostly keeps that in check and is otherwise quite witty and a lot of fun. His video on Neom, the deranged Saudi/MBS desert-ruin/city-of-the-future (and McKinsey, etc. hyper grift) is very entertaining.
Yes, I love his super dry sense of humour. And he knows his stuff – his video on the South Seas Bubble was fantastic.
A second follow-up on Neom dropped just recently. His first one about the train needing to travel at sonic speeds while stopping every few seconds had me in hysterics.
Then there’s Scottie Pippen’s wisdom on the matter.
Good one. (Widely covered) Charles Barkley on Trump’s 2017 tax breaks for the wealthy, which Trump referenced Reagan’s “trickle down economic theory”, “I’m going to trickle my fat ass down to the jewelry story and get me a new Rolex,” he said. “I’m not going to pass it to nobody.”.
Charles Barkley Rips Trump Tax Bill: ‘I’m Going to Trickle My Fat Ass Down to the Jewelry Store’, Newsweek
A hedzup for owners of 1970’s stereo receivers– yours is worth a lot now. I have a Marantz receiver and Advent Loudspeakers bought new in the 70’s and used continuously since. Of late they’re worth about ten times what I paid for them. Among audiophiles the ‘perfect’ receiver is the Marantz 2250. News you can use.
Furthermore, two hours ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MIhzU4llEs
That was a fun watch, thanks. I’m running a large Pioneer, lol, a 1050 into a pair of Advent 2a and a pair of Altec Maderas.
A friend bought some great stereo receivers from me, checked them on American, and the TSA destroyed them. Literally ripped them open.
An advantage of old 70’s and 80’s hi-fi gear is that it is usually repairable.
Not many custom integrated circuits. And the integrated circuits they use (operational amplifiers and FM stereo decoders) can still be sourced.
The electrolytic capacitors that may have dried out can usually be sourced.
The printed circuit boards use through hole rather than surface mount parts and lower melting temperature tin-lead solder.
And, frequently, the service documentation is online.
Plus there is the nostalgia aspect when the covers are taken off to see the build quality.
I repair that stuff,and old guitar amps too. I tell people “If it’s five years old, it’s probably not repairable. If it’s 50 years old I can keep it running til the sun goes dark….”
I was into that for a bit:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ryuuoh/6957819881/
And this was the “budget” model from Luxman.
$450G for a purse — you could buy 20,556.39 strawberries for that!!!
That Prem Thakker tweet video is a heartbreaker.
How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Dylan, Masters of War
I thought this piece was unusual and hard to argue with regarding Zion*s grip:
https://open.substack.com/pub/alonmizrahi/p/dear-american-student?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=jz47a
This is exactly why I left the US 9 years ago in February 2016. In The awakening of the Occupy Wall Street movement I had become an activist, actually a hardcore activist. I’m proud to say that I was arrested three times for protesting, twice against the implementation of Citizens United decision and once for raising the minimum wage to $15. (I was a class traitor perhaps, having achieved a class that I was not raised in.)
And I have to agree with what this writer says, nobody cares in the US. It’s even more true now than it was when I realized it in 2015. And so I left and took my energy, intelligence and humanity elsewhere. Probably one of the best decisions I ever made.
nobody cares, simply not true. Mothers care. Fathers, brothers, sisters care. I remember my mom crying while watched the news coverage the day Kent State happened. That care transfers across those demographics.
And thanks for from-lining it. I firmly believe that it makes a difference.
I agree. A lot of people in the US care. They lack the resources to show their opinion or coordinate their actions on a large enough scale to get attention. The groups who do have those resources engage in symbolic displays that make their members feel like they did “something” before going to brunch.
The piece certainly covered the broad reach of Zionism here in the US, but perhaps went a bit too far in labeling every organization and institution as a cog in the Zionist machine. While I understand the point that my local fire department is Zionist because it exists in the US and it is under that umbrella, I don’t agree. Not every organization is tainted beyond repair and not every individual action can be labeled as Zionist because it is under this umbrella. He has simplified his argument to make a point, but then destroyed his argument in the process.
And this one: “Look what happened to the anti-Vietnam or the civil rights movements. They made no difference. The system swallowed them whole.”. Yes, the system fights back by swallowing movements, but did they not make any difference?
And since these students are not cut out for armed revolution or massive cultural upheaval, they should just leave?
This could have been written by the Trump administration.
“Yes, the system fights back by swallowing movements, but did they not make any difference?”
I can speak to the direct effects the civil rights movement had on me. I was born into an upper middle-class family in Mississippi. My mother was outspoken about her prejudice and repeated racist ideas such as Blacks were inferior in intelligence and poor because they didn’t work hard enough. My father, on the other hand, never expressed an opinion on race matters, so I deduced that there was dissonance between their views
Integration began the year I entered 10th grade. I discovered to my surprise that there was a young Black woman named Rita in one of my advanced classes. If Blacks were inferior in intelligence, how did Rita end up in an advanced class? Her class performance answered that question.
In a social studies class, we all were expected to give short talk on a recent current event. When the only Black student in the class, Andrew, stood up to give his talk, he was painfully shy and struggling. That evoked my empathy because, I, too was painfully shy. My next thought was that it took tremendous courage to stand up in front of a bunch of white faces, many of which were hostile, so I tried to show him a friendly face. I’m not trying to make myself out as a saint, here; I’m trying to explain a couple of the many things during those high school years that shaped me and helped to burst the racist bubble I was born in. The value of those years to my development is incalculable, and almost 60 years later, I still remember those students and the lessons they taught me.
Fast forward to today: I recently read an essay written by a white man about his interracial family’s experiences living in Oxford, MS, home to ‘Ole Miss. I have to admit I was stunned by this article because all these many years later, it’s still hard for me to believe that this family’s experiences are real. I hope ambrit chimes in with his experiences in MS.
Greetings judy2shoes.
I am not a really good exemplar of the Sothron type because I am an immigrant, from Fulham, London, UK. I came to America when young, so, I grew up in America.
We settled eventually, in Miami Beach, Florida, back in the late sixties. That place had it’s own “troubles.” Miami Beach had a non-white night-time deadline up until 1968. “Coloureds” found on the Beach after dark needed a letter from their employer to identify them and avoid incarceration. Thus, racism was alive and well in Florida well into the sixties, and, as I can attest to, the seventies.
I don’t really remember it, but when we came to America in the early 1960s, we stayed in urban Miami for a time. Mom and I would take the bus to shopping, outings during the day, etc. Mom later told me about the time she took us to the back of the bus, because she liked it there. The bus driver stopped the bus in the middle of Flagler Street, (a main drag back then,) came back, and demanded to know why we were sitting back “in the couloured section of the bus.” My Mom tried to explain, and the driver figured out that we were “not from around here.” Mom says he explained the legal segregation to her and escorted us to the front of the bus before starting the bus up again and continuing on. That was Miami in the 1960s.
As for Mississippi, I used to date a woman from Macomb, MS. She told me of the time they had a cross burned on their front lawn by the local Klans because the family was Catholic. This also in the 1960s.
I personally, from I guess what Conrad described as “the fascination of the abomination,” went to what was the last open, public cross burning ceremony, in Walker Louisiana, back in the early 1970s. There was a large crowd.
Despite Mississippi having probably the largest percentage of “mixed” children in the country, do not confuse the racial aspects of the equation with the economic and ‘power’ aspects. From what I have seen, the North American Deep South has been controlled by a social and economic elite from the very beginning. The American Civil War just changed the identities of those at the top.
I could go on, but you get the drift.
You stay very safe where you are and keep those you love close.
>>>The American Civil War just changed the identities of those at the top. I could go on, but you get the drift.
This is debatable as in Alabama, and I believe to a lesser extent, in Mississippi and Missouri, the exact same ruling families of the Antebellum South remained in charge with the Reconstruction just a brief inconvenience ended with ample use of bullets and rope. I have to assume that the rest of the South has a similar pattern although this is merely from inference.
Restated, not only has the system remained very similar as you say, the identities of the oligarchy’s families often remain the same. Disgusting, isn’t?
I think Alon Mizrahi is just saying that if attending the institution is humiliating/abusive to the student who expresses empathy for victims of genocide,the student should boycott the institution by walking away and matriculate at one that is not hostile to those who oppose genocide.
I studied abroad in a non English speaking country when I realized I was deemed an unqualified candidate for post graduate professional study in spite of having fulfilled academic requirements.
Miko Peled ,a deprogrammed Zionist believes that Zionism has inserted itself ino US culture.
I am sympathetic to Mizrahi’s advice, but as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War I didn’t have enough money to study abroad. In 2025 only the few rich kids who don’t have an impaired conscience will be able to take his advice.
I would advise kids not born rich into Josep Borrell’s ‘garden’ to drop out, find an ecologically sound community, and learn a useful trade. Western higher education hasn’t been ecologically sound for many, many years. The garden has already begun to shed the bullsh¡t jobs its higher education has created.
Pythons – wirh a functional state you could have created a large department with salaried python catchers and systematically manage/root out the problem instead of relying on minimum salaried volunteers.
It is a common good to get rid of invasive species.
But hey who am I? Just an old socialist shouting at the gesellschaft-cloud.
A cold blooded grasp
And panicked furtive hand wave
The lone signal made
Burma Slave
May I just say that the magazine title of Garden & Gun is just so American and Southern. That and the “solution” a program having volunteers and minimum wage employees doing the work in a program managed by the water department.
Dutch lawmakers object to EU’s multibillion defense proposal DW
This was interesting even if seemingly inconsequential (not binding decision). One of the parties voting for the objection was the NSC (New Social Contract) which are described as “pro-EU Christian Democrats” and their reason is that the ReArm project will result in excess debt even if they fully support the Ukrainian adventure. One could consider them as ordoliberals. Not against the ReArm program but against the Eurobonds as financial tool. The PVV (Party for Freedom) is considered nationalist and populist right wing and voted in favour of the objection as well as the BBB (Another right wing populist party aligned with the farmers). All these i believe agree that they see this program as another “free-check” for poorer countries (say Italy, Spain, and Portugal) that will be re-paid by the rich countries.
The reason i find this interesting is that it shows the widening vaults of European disunion. The ReArm project might turn having results opposite to those intended, creating divisions rather than uniting the EU around supposed collective defence. I have come to find a Manifesto opposing the very same program though for very different reasons. Against Militarization: Scientists Unite in Opposition to EU Rearmament. This is mostly an Italian initiative (showing how DJG is right to show us how reluctant are many Italians to the Ukrainian adventure) though there are signatories from different countries including about half a dozen from Spain.
This was inevitable, because it represents the beginning of the transition from rhetoric to reality and from theory to practice. It’s one thing to sign up to a slogan, it’s another thing to have to agree to practical measures which will impact your country and population, or which will cost identified amounts of money. And European politicians have not even really begun to wake up yet to what “rearmament ” would actually mean, let alone to understand why it will be politically divisive and practically impossible. Watching this all come apart is going to be fun for those of a sadistic disposition.
“because it represents the beginning of the transition from rhetoric to reality and from theory to practice”
Lets spray that on the German Chancellory´s entrance. (Alright if you get caught you gonna get arrested and put behind bars for 100 years. But without the risk no fun.)
btw: Part 1 of a conversation with military analyst Wolfgang Richter on Ukraine. It´s not genius but considering the standard idiocy it´s ok. He still won´t get some military truths but lets not be too demanding:
Richter so far has been 1 of about 10 sane people heard in public in a country of 80M:
Ukraine War: The new reality after the US U-turn
https://archive.is/cE4YU
p.s. it will be interesting to see how German Bundesrat (Senate) which has to agree to the Sondervermögen will fare with BSW being part of the government coalition in Brandenburg.
After all it might turn out coalescing into government was not such a bad idea after all – if BSW messes up the plan by blocking the vote. May be that´ll be more fun than I expected.
Theory to practice. In Spain i have only read about some, not yet defined, increases in military spending though Sánchez, willing to appease his political partners, prefers to talk with them about “security” rather than purchases of weapons. I guess every government will face different problems and each one will reach their own conclusions on what to do or not do. Objections to such fund will be aplenty and agreeing on what use these might have comes as very tall order with 27 different views and priorities. My best guess is that it will fail and it might probably be substituted with agreements involving few countries if they manage to find some common ground.
On the new Journalists Union: It sounds like “The Union versus the Corporate Media”. And this comes at a time when so many ex-corporate voices are competing for audience and revenues on new media … in a more open “market”. And the audience is increasingly rewarding them and other non-traditional sources with attention and subscriptions.
I wish them well against the financiers, oligarchs, and “the right” (whatever they mean by that). Windmills are popular enemies in my humble opinion.
“No empire dies quietly: the violent twilight of US dominance”
If this ever happens, then Israel is toast. Who would want to be that country’s big buddy. Saudi Arabia? Russia? China? Swaziland? They have alienated just about everyone because they always have the US at their back and knew that they never had to suffer the consequences of their actions. If the US leaves the scene, there will be no end of countries that will be glad to put the boot in and a world-wide boycott of anything Israeli would just be a start.
I’ve been thinking that one of the ways to understand many of Israel’s recent actions is that its leadership or a part of it understands that it will be in big trouble a few decades down the line, and wants to secure the most favourable positions for that time while it still has America. Occupy as much territory as it can feasibly hold, crush or weaken the opposition(s), cull the herd(s) and then dig in.
Whether that’s their thinking or not, Israel does have one other key advantage: the weakness of most other states in the region. All of them have major problems of their own that hinder effective action even if they wanted to take it. Syria is still in a civil war and Lebanon is hopelessly divided, but even a more stable state like Egypt still has trouble feeding its populace and keeping the peace. I have trouble gauging how bad the much-reported problems in Iran (e.g. corruption, poverty) really are, but their protests don’t come out of nowhere either. Non-government/unrecognised resistance groups seem more cohesive and capable of decisive action, but their resources are more limited. While this remains the case, it can hold out. How long it will remain the case, I do not know.
I’ve been struggling for years trying to decide whether I believe that a dictator (or equivelant elected government) is solely responsible for their crimes (and aggressions) or is the entire populace, who usually have no say in the matter? While I voted against Harris, Trump does not represent my views either.
This brings up philosophical musings on the nature of democracy, both theoretical and applied. Should 51% of the population have the right to dictate to the other 49%? I’ve read that that is why the US founders created the Electoral College so that the states could protect the nation from popular, but destructive votes.
One thought is to require much greater that 50% votes for most laws to be passed. Another thought is to ban any laws that are not necessary to the function of the nation (state, county, city, etc). For example, the decision on driving on the left or right side of the road might be suitable for 51% but a law requiring the wearing of hats should not be allowed to even be voted on. Of course how this could be practically enacted in our fractured society(s) remains problematic.
In The Hamilton Scheme by William Hogeland, it is clear the disdain that the Continentalists had for what was called The Democracy, or the “regulators”, that thought government ought to perhaps restrain the worst impulses of the financial class. These are people that took the war of independence thinking too far for the financial elite of the day.
It’s an enlightening read about the Public Debt from the war, who it benefited, and why.
>>>>In The Hamilton Scheme by William Hogeland,
Gosh darn it. Yet another book that I have to buy and read.
You could vote against a candidate on your ballot paper? Interesting… I’ve only ever seen “vote for” type entries.
We used to have the option to vote against everyone in Russia. It was abolished, partly because it won on a few (local) occasions, nullifying elections and forcing re-runs. I think it was worth the added expenses, though, as a way of accurately relaying public opinion. It also surely encouraged turnout and therefore political participation in general. I understand something similar still exists in some other countries?
There’s also been population growth to consider, as there’s been an ever growing number of inconvenient (to the Israelis) humans living in Gaza.
Yeah, I think they have been considering that…
Isn’t it curious that the Prime Minister of Israel is non Semitic? His surname is Mielikowski which is polish.
He hails from the same region as Ukraine and prosecutes war like his former neighbors in Ukraine.
That’s not how it works. My Jewish great-great-grandfather was a Wilenski (i.e. “from Vilnius”, even though he wasn’t; he was actually from Romny in Ukraine, though presumably some still more distant ancestor came there from Lithuania). No one had any doubts about him and his children being Semitic, even though he changed his and their surname to the Russian-sounding (though actually still Jewish) Shubin.
Can the US train enough semiconductor workers in time?
Of course it can, but as readers here well know, the US cannot — or will not — pay those workers enough for housing, healthcare, reproduction, or retirement. This is why H1B remains the only option.
Its ridiculous… according to the BLS median wage for a Semiconductor Tech: 45k
I am about done being told that basic supply and demand doesn’t have to apply to labor.
45k is almost starvation wages for the San Francisco Bay Area and I am not kidding.
“US cannot — or will not — pay those workers enough for housing, healthcare, reproduction, or retirement. ”
In other words, the costs of “rentier overhead” renders American workers non-competitive, and at the same time hampers their ability to address the class contradictions of industrial capitalism.
From: The Destiny of Civilization: An Interview with Michael Hudson on Economic Development, Rentierism, Debt, China
In that piece from The Conversation: Did anyone else notice something strange about the pic of the worker entering the clean room?
Zoom in on the leg area of the person and you see through them. The tiles of the floor are visible. It’s as if it is a hologram in a clean room.
Those are not the floor tiles, because they are over the walls too. The part around his left hand looks especially dodgy. It’s not a hologram but poor Photoshop skillz, or AI.
“It’s not a hologram but poor Photoshop skillz, or AI.”
Yes, so bad it looks like a hologram.
Mr. Market doesn’t want you training your workers. The way foolish firms were doing even up into the 1980s. No, not now, especially when you can get already trained workers from India and a few other countries with 101% accurate resumes and lists of qualifications. At a lesser price. And nothing is real except money, don’t we all agree?
So along those lines: Not until they can take away more rights that citizens have and pay them even less? Then they wouldn’t mind doing that training.
no less than 32 Americans got killed by storms this weekend.
30/40 years ago this would be the news cycle for days. Today, the NYT’s lede is all about tariffs.
And pundits wonder why “flyover country” hates the NY-DC media
It was a noted TV news story in Oz tonight and it looked bad.
One of the YT recommended vids was about the 1980 Texas heatwave. 40 days of 100+ degree freedom units temperature.
Not so noteworthy in last year few years…and not JUST because the news is biased towards PMC issues.
Main story on the South African radio until you kicked our ambassador out.
I have a great idea.
Let’s fire meteorologists.
Better yet. Put them in jail for a coupla years for failing to predict that storm accurately. Like how Italy jailed a bunch of seismologists for getting an earthquake assessment wrong-
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/23/jailing-italian-seismologists-scientific-community
More likely meteorologists will be jailed for being accurate. Sunny and 70 forever.
Sigh. Grauniad again. A certain Giampaolo Giuliani, based on monitoring ozone levels had predicted the earthquake but couldn’t warn anyone since seismologists had obtained a court order stopping him (This is an oversimplification, but less so than the version in the non-Italian press)
The scientists were eventually acquitted (Italian justice grinds slowly):
https://www.science.org/content/article/italy-s-supreme-court-clears-l-aquila-earthquake-scientists-good
It was an interesting legal case. If politicians implore us to trust the science but the scientists turn out to be wrong, then who bears responsibility? In this case, the appeals court cleared the scientists but not the politician in question.
Most of the deaths were in the Deep South. They count less.
Those of us who can count, above 20. (There is a rare, mutated Sothron that has six fingers and toes and thus can count up to 24.)
I guess it’s happening…
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/heres-a-dead-person-on-social-security-in-seattle-with-plenty-to-say/
Here’s a ‘dead’ person on Social Security in Seattle, with plenty to say
And this one…
https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/oklahoma-man-says-social-security-benefits-terminated-without-warning-or-explanation/
{Courtesy note from DOGE…}
‘Thanks for being a consumer and so loyal, but in living so long-well beyond the typical lifespan norms and taking in more than you gave out, we have no choice but to inform you to Go Die.’
I know someone in Marin Co CA ( a rich co.) who just this week has had her SSA check absent for no reason.
Maybe Trump wants to declare Musk a new South Africa’s ambassador.
No, according to local media he has a particularly demented person named Sacks (no relation to the neurologist), a violent zionist apartheid nostalgist, to appoint.
By the way, in the old days you expelled ambassadors for spying or murdering people. Now it’s for repeating editorials from the New York Times (which was basically what Rasool did in a South AFrican webinar).
Incidentally, although I can’t prove it, I notice that Rasool’s expulsion followed the visit by the South African opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, to the White House. The DA hates Rasool because he was briefly able to split off the “cape coloured” vote from the DA early this century. Maybe a coincidence, but I don’t know.
The Schumer-Jeffries Split Explodes in Public PoliticoRepublic
A policy free high school level soap opera account of who was right and who was wrong based on norms etiquette and tradition based procedure.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/mar/15/viral-strawberry-erewhon-los-angeles
While it is doubtful that modern Russia can be called the successor to the Eastern Roman Empire, the parallels between Ukraine and the Western Roman Empire are obvious. The neo-Nazis should rebrand themselves as legitimate descendants of the great Romans with more history.
Russia has always claimed to be the successor to the Eastern Roman Empire, y’know–Orthodoxy and all that, and the Western Empire is what “Europe” always aspired to be–Charlemagne, HRE, EU (and Karlspreis), etc… So the parallel does seem pretty evident.
Plus, the 1% existing without needing a state is how we got the Medieval feudalism…and that is what’s taking place again now in the West again–techno-neofeudalism is a really apt description.
Makes sense, since Byzantium started falling when higher nobility stopped paying taxes…
Carney orders review of Canada’s F-35 purchase from Lockheed-Martin:
https://torontosun.com/news/national/carney-orders-review-of-f-35-fighter-jet-purchase-from-u-s-s-lockheed-martin
“Defence Minister Bill Blair will look into whether the contract for 88 planes costing about US$85 million each is the best investment for Canada”
Defence Minister Bill Blair will look into whether the contract for 88 planes costing about US$85 million each is the best investment for Canada
https://torontosun.com/news/national/carney-orders-review-of-f-35-fighter-jet-purchase-from-u-s-s-lockheed-martin
I understand much of the issue is the metrics of the situation, and can be easily rectified by calling it F-35/F-89 and labeling it so.
When we come right down to it, the Sukhoi Su-57 looks like a much better choice.
On a slightly more practical note, the Saab JAS 39 Gripen, albeit only one engined, does not look bad. We really do not need something that flies on Tuesdays and Saturdays, if the constellations are in alignment.
Or better yet, pull a New Zealand move as they did around the turn of the century when their fighter jets were looking long in the tooth and the USA was offering attractive deals on something more modern and sporty, they simply got rid of that part of the RNZAF, as it was 1,200 miles of open ocean just to get to the country from somewhere else, similar to your gig in Canada.
Only from north, west and east. The barbarians from the south are the problem… All old Canadian forts look south as the direction the enemy might come…
As I understand it, jrkrideau, the Saab was the second choice in the original review.
“AP Exclusive: US and Israel look to Africa for moving Palestinians uprooted from Gaza”
If I were the Sudan, Somalia or the breakaway region of Somalia known as Somaliland I would be very careful. Somebody like Trump would promise that they would financially help settle those Palestinians and give them food, water, shelter and medical services on an ongoing basis. But as soon as the next elections were over in 2028 that would be all shut down and the new President would say that all the financial support was promised by the last guy, not him, and he is gone so no more support for those Palestinians so it is all on you.
Here’s an idea.
Step One: Let Russia ‘lead’ and ‘support’ a movement to relocate the Gazans to Baja California. Mexico would get lots of foreign ‘investment,’ and a large, cohesive minority group happy to have a safe place to live, with massive positive world publicity for Mexico in general.
Step Two: Let ‘various actors’ ‘support’ a rejuvenated Hamas, aimed straight North. I think that Mexico wouldn’t have much of a problem with that either. “Fast and Furious” in reverse.
Alternatively the Zionists can move into the autonomous Jewish region in the Russian Federation. That is if Zionists consider themselves Jewish.
Autonomous Jewish Region…..Kamchatka?
(Heaven help me. I’m beginning to think like a headline writer for Der Sturmer!)
The Autonomous Jewish Region of Birobidzhan is on the border with China, pretty far from Kamchatka and not quite as cold, though also less scenic for lack of volcanoes. Neither has many Jews right now, but who knows what the future holds? Reviving the Jewish Region might be safer for everyone involved.
Madagascar?
Ah, an integral part of Stalin’s infamous proposed plan to “solve” the “Jewish problem” of the Soviet Union.
Fascinating, and, considering the trajectory of modern day Middle Eastern events, still a possibility.
As an Afrikaner-born South African, I am absolutely incensed at the toxic fake perpetual victomhood of the people who will sell out our country for a return to some violent fever dream of white-minority rule. There is no practical goal I see here that I can parse other than a continuing death spiral of social unrest. All I can continue to hope for is that the majority of my rational and peace loving countrymen continue to resist the pull of darkness and chaos.
Anyway, for anyone interested an article locally about the influence of philosopher Dugin in the particular strand of white nationalist Afrikanerdom.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-03-03-dugin-how-a-russian-philosopher-shaped-antiliberal-sentiment-in-sa/
Regarding the film of Mahmoud Khalil being “arrested”, why do they block out the faces of the “arrestors”? I’d like people to know who they are so they can be “arrested” for kidnapping.
when will americans have had enough of the police state? the police unions, corrupt D.A.s offices, corrupt town and city councils will make sure that gestopo tactics will remain the norm.
in the beginnings of any civil movement like occupy wall street or the battle in seattle which are both very vague.
lots of crude terminology, yet the movement is gaining steam.you see in the early stages terminology usually sticks to any movement.
https://journalistsresource.org/criminal-justice/defund-the-police/
“For some, “defund the police” is a movement, a stepping stone toward abolishing police departments entirely.
For others, the idea of defunding the police is limited to simply restricting money for military-style equipment.
For many, the definition lies in the middle — there should be police, but their role in communities should be limited to crime prevention. The idea goes that service agencies other than police could and should respond to non-violent calls related to mental health, housing and other issues.
Berkeley, California has even moved to create a separate department to handle routine traffic violations.”“Nearly two dozen cities have since taken steps to reduce police funding or redirect funds toward other services — though the 50 largest U.S. cities slightly increased their law enforcement spending as a percentage of their combined 2021 budgets.
As some cities recalibrate police spending, “defund the police” remains relevant, and contentious, in the national conversation.”“Seth Stoughton, an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina, sees “defund” as shorthand for more social service investment, as well as reexamining what law enforcement means in America.
“Homelessness, poverty, substance abuse — we’ve criminalized a range of human behaviors and we’ve relied on the police to be the social service agency not just of first resort, but sometimes our only social service agency that deals with these issues,” he says.
“So what I think when I hear ‘defund the police’ tends to be, ‘Reduce the need for police to respond to some of these social issues by investing in a more robust overarching social service infrastructure.’”
”“Camden, New Jersey, often comes up as an example of a city that reframed its approach to policing and reduced crime. It also spent more to do so.
Camden disbanded its police force in 2013 after one of the city’s most violent years on record. Camden County took over and in May 2013 formed a new department, the Camden County Police Department, to patrol the city.CCPD instituted community-based policing tactics along with new technology, such as a video observation platform covering a six-block radius.
Overall crime per 100,000 Camdenites decreased by more than half from 2012 to 2020, according to CCPD data, while the number of shooting homicides fell by 68%.“Camden got more money,” Moskos says. “More money is not a panacea, but you’re not going to get better for less money.
That’s my issue with ‘defund.’ It makes policing worse. It is that simple. The people who generally want to abolish police think police don’t prevent crime.
”Research published in late 2019 in Preventive Medicine Reports also associates the new policing tactics in Camden with lower rates of gunshot patients at a major regional trauma center. On average, there were 34 gunshot patients treated every three months before the policing changes, and 26 quarterly gunshot patients afterward.”
Your link is from 2021. It is NOT evidence that defund the police is gaining traction.
Everyone talks about Camden. One example. Outlier Berkeley + that does not make a trend.
“Outlier Berkeley ” – what a laugh. Here in Berzerkly we have a totally mismanaged PD that never cares about the bothersome Police Accountability Board. The PAB has reams of ignored pleas for correction of over use of force, arrest quotas and targeting of the Black community which was pushed out of the city due to loss of affordable housing etc.
We finally got a Specialized Care Unit (SCU) that is supposed to be a Crisis response team without police. But the police always show up anyway. Add to that the fact that statewide there are basically NO 5150s (the transport of people with a psychotic brake) to a psych hospital. The reason? the poor police are afraid that they will be sued for “excessive use of force” or death holds on the poor souls that may even want to be hospitalized. Grrr.
I just now bumped into this via Doug Henwood´s podcast, paper on BLM&Defund the Police:
The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How “Defund the Police” Sparked Political Backlash
by Mathias Ebbinghaus
https://academic.oup.com/socpro/advance-article/doi/10.1093/socpro/spae004/7630127?login=false
additionally Henwood has an interview with him:
See latest entry, top, March 13th
https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S240704
on the paper:
“Abstract
This article investigates whether a core political demand of the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests was realized: “defund the police.” Original hand-compiled data containing budget information on 264 major cities in the United States and comprehensive protest data enable us to assess the effect of protests on changes in city police budgets. We find no evidence that BLM protests led to police defunding. In cities with large Republican vote shares, protest is associated with significant increases in police budgets. We demonstrate that electoral incentives cannot explain this policy backlash. Instead, we provide tentative evidence that backlash in Republican cities might stem from policymakers’ own conservatism and entrenched right-wing influences within city politics. The analysis offers novel evidence on the consequences of the largest protest movement in U.S. history and reveals the importance of backlash in explaining policy outcomes of social movements.”
>>>In cities with large Republican vote shares, protest is associated with significant increases in police budgets. We demonstrate that electoral incentives cannot explain this policy backlash. Instead, we provide tentative evidence that backlash in Republican cities might stem from policymakers’ own conservatism and entrenched right-wing influences within city politics.
Quite often the police are used to suppress and control, in the worst instances act like prison guards, while also extracting wealth in the form of fees and fines, which in financially stressed governments can be excessive. If the tax base is shrinking or the government refuses to tax, creating imaginative laws and regulations with hefty fines enforced by enthusiastic law enforcement is common. A good example is the use of civil asset forfeiture laws where the owners of the property including cash are not charged with a crime, but have it stolen, because they are presumed to doing something unlawful with it. A common tactic is saying cash is used for selling or buying drugs, then the cash in the car is likely drug money and the police can take it.
And the example of problematic funding can be seen in Los Angeles where they not only cut the fire department’s budget, they also shifted almost entirely the same amount to the police department.
As the economy keeps getting worse and protests continue, I expect police funding to increase even further as necessary services such as sewage, water, and fire fighting are cut, which will strengthen the protests, and that will create more rounds of cuts and protests…
The government and the elites are afraid of the mob, but instead of funding the solutions, they fund the causes of the problems.
defunding the police is also a fight against neo-liberalism. you can see it in the many many youtubes calling for police reform.
some even get well over a million views.
we have to remember, the fight to defund is because now the funding of the police and their unions, has reached a point where vast area’s of america, the constitution no longer exists. they are the tail that wags the dog.
and you are right, that funding will increase in certain areas as neo-liberalism fails. but in the end, most civil rights movements in america over come the corruption.
Just logging off for the night but before I do. Footage has emerged of Trump making a phone call to Putin demanding that he sign that ceasefire deal-
https://www.bitchute.com/video/0qkDqMlcLs8k (57 secs)
Tx
Tablet magazine has a long article about Obama’s thought machine that has many insights about politics and the media over the past few decades.
Thank you! Yeah, 10,000+ words so that’s long. It will take me awhile.
I kept going, even though I don’t share some of the writer’s key assumptions (Iran deal bad; Covid lockdowns bad). He did manage to simulate rational discourse for awhile, before presenting his pantheon. And what a pantheon it is! Musk, Netanyahu, and Trump.
It is indeed fascinating but, in view of the anti-Iran screed at the end, it’s not surprising that there’s no mention of the Zionist capture of the US government.
OK I said I’d not touch these star rated things (in this case movies) but I’m waiting for a meal to finish cooking so thought I’d take a look.
There are so many flaws that it makes me despair as to human ability to critique.
1. Star ratings are treated like cardinal numbers which they are definitely not. (If you have an example that the math psych people passed in peer review I’d love to hear). So no stars should be 0% utility, up to 5 stars with 100% utility. That’s the ONLY way you can apply mathematical operators.
2. Averaging over movie genre is the perfect analogy to averaging over apples and oranges. Of course my own internal star rating scale isn’t consistent when watching those “family comedy” films against cerebral sci-fi. If even the individual person isn’t consistent, why are you averaging over people? These are discrete choices with not a single published paper showing the required mathematical properties even WITHIN an individual.
3. Does your local supermarket make its supply decisions based on star ratings? No. It looks at sales. Things that don’t sell well get bought less, and using the power of large survey datasets they know exactly how much less shelf-sapce to devote to unpopular goods and how to vary this according to location and typical customer.
4. Quantifying “love to hate” might be fun but it’s hardly proper statistically quantified. For reasons above it’ll differ by market segment. Overall sales, when compared to the MAIN MOVIES IN THEATRES AT SAME TIME provides a better metric, again, taking into account differentiation in market conditions. Odds ratios of watching movie x over movie y is a real metric. Chain together the odds ratios of actual ticket sales and you have proper data.
5. People game the system these days. That suspicious boost in 1-star values recently is merely evidence of something I’ve seen since the start of this century.
6. Going on from 5: I believe NC itself has drawn attention to the fraudulent star ratings for goods on Amazon. It’s very possible Amazon is DRIVING demand for certain things by giving star ratings that are not necessarily *Ahem* correct but they sure don’t decide what to supply based on any purported genuine star ratings. No more than supermarkets. Profit maximisation doesn’t work that way. Econ 101.
7. Nobody is the average person. Indeed a contribution of math psych and academic marketing is that the distribution is usually multimodal. So I rely on the views of reviewers who have previously recommended movies I’ve liked. Quite a lot of these were “box office flops” (Donnie Darko, Predestination, Gattaca etc) but went on to become cult classics. Streaming services are beginning to cotton on to this. With enough data they can spot that someone else likes the first two movies, so they use my data to suggest Gattaca.
Love to hate is merely what it is. The fact we don’t lke a certain “religion”, we don’t like certain actors, and we we get bored of cookie cutter schlop. I know this article was suggested merely for discussion but the fact websites still churn this out is dispiriting. Watched a YT video about 1980s/90s quiz show “The Krypton Factor” on UK TV. Someone in the comments made a very observant comment that “that show would never pass muster today in our idiocracy”. Indeed.
Are you trying to say that poorly defined scales are useless? How useless would you rate them, on a scale of 0% to 100% utility?
thanks
I glanced over it but had no time to even attempt what you have explained.
All what we learn from 1-stars is – if anything – that the industry is ailing under lack of proper funding, cannibalisation, exchangeable content, i.e. many 1-stars tell us the situation is bad. Which anybody in high school could have guessed.
There were a few years when the centre e.g. tried to advertise Kavanaugh´s Relativity Media, which was eventually blunt manipulation of the market and the public. It was all about figuring out via Algos how to put together a movie in order to make it´s performance controllable and success predictable.
A few years later the same press that had featured Kavanaugh as a new black magician “revealed” it all as hum-bug and not much worth and in fact a bone to satisfy his ego.
Is there a chart showing the correlation between star ratings and box-office? That could be interesting. But then, streamers are not gonna give you the numbers. And I merely guess one would end up with a salad of no helpful data. As you point out, ratings have no objective foundation. So your entire chart is worthless.
Of course the ideology of star-ratings has turned film even more into a 2-dimensional commodity where only screenplays and perhaps actors matter which cuts out 99% of the people actually working on a production.
These ratings are a means to provoke chatter. Which is important. But people who don´t care about the movies and mainly use it to chatter, following the chatter, turning movies into chatter, are not going to pay actual money to provide the financing of new good content that is in fact better than would-be-1-star-films.
Currently they think that advertising holds together the other half of the business. Just like since TV-age began. But when the actual wealth is declining, populations won´t be interested in advertising and fancy consumption and those companies are eventually not going to invest into film/series. So far drawing audiences and turning them into paying customers of goods paid for advertised-based content-production. At some point that won´t work. I am not sure if media companies understand this. If I were a company I would seriously start bolstering the labour market and pushing unionization of every market segment trying to push for New-Deal-policies.
Film is a luxury item. People who are scrambling to pay for eggs are not going to pay for luxury items. And where the mass audience won´t pay for movies there is no movie industry. Period.
p.s. Wiki in the article on Relativity Media, first paragraph: “The company was commercially successful prior to bankruptcy”. 😂😂😂
That´s how film works – “oops, you mean we are broke? But I just got a new house.”
Climate change will reduce the number of satellites that can safely orbit in space MIT News
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Heretofore, the Kessler Effect has mainly been on account of drinking too much cheap hard liquor in 1 go, resulting in a bad hangover… but now we have a bad hangover us once that other Kessler Effect kicks in and its 1956 again!
I was considering some of the economic effects of a “Unitary Executive” and the first thing that came to mind was that Congressional staffers will have to start paying for their own hookers and blow.
With only one person needing to be bribed there will be no need for so many lobbyists which will crater the value of properties along K Street, with nothing to sell the cost of buying a seat in the House or the Senate will drop to levels the middle class can afford.
And Political Consultants will start learning how to code because it beats working at an Amazon warehouse.
Sacrifices will have to be made to Make America Great Again and I’m sure these patriotic Americans will do their part with joyful vigor!
It is bizarre that Congress as an institution has no interest in its own Constitutional prerogatives. Maybe we should just shut it down and have done with it. It’s become a farce.
If Trump ultimately sets the precedent that the Executive decides on what appropriations are valid and which ones are not, that’s a short hop from simply (re)appropriating funds as the Executive sees fit. Because the Federal government simply spends money, no tax collection required, the Executive really can just spend money on whatever it wants, Congress or not.
This entire Constitutional Republican only works if everyone agrees to the same set of rules. If the Executive decides it is unitary, there’s no peaceful mechanism to assert otherwise. The game is up. That way lies dragons.
I’d suggest it’s the end goal of congress under a neoliberal order. The state-craft goal of the legislative project is to outsource any accountability so that you are never, ever to blame for anything. Ideally, you’d outsource it to the market. However, a sin eater works just as well.
Tucker and Col. Macgregor. utube, ~1hr. 13+ minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvbd6HAziaE
The Duran. utube, ~57+ minutes.
Europe and Israel Decline & Fragment – Alastair Crooke, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu1l9Yk-yMg
Pandemics
A particularly informative episode of Clinical Update with Dr. Daniel Griffin:
Wildfires erupted in Texas and Oklahoma. Nearly 300 homes and structures have been destroyed and 170,000 acres burned in Oklahoma after several wildfires broke out, prompting evacuations amid extreme fire weather conditions on Friday.
“It was just a perfect storm. The humidity levels went down to kind of record lows, below 10%, and then with the winds where they were just dried everything out,” Stitt said.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Same scenario as the LA Infernos, and 170k acres burning in Oklahoma in March?!
It is surprising that no one has commented on the political and racial moves by Trump to ban people from immigrating and visiting from certain countries. What makes the link – Trump’s New Immigration Ban: An Arbitrary, Discriminatory Legal Immigration Rewrite – amazing is that it is written by the Cato Institute!!
“Trump plans to create a national origins hierarchy. His order will rank countries as either red, orange, yellow, and green:
“Red” nationalities would be subject to a total ban.
“Orange” nationalities would be subject to a partial ban.
“Yellow” nationalities would be subject to new requirements, which could escalate into a “Red” or “Orange” classification if their governments failed to adopt changes within 60 days.
“Green” would presumably be required to avoid restrictions.
The Times reports that the Red list will include at least Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen, and Reuters reports that Afghanistan and Pakistan will also fall onto the list. President Trump has previously promised to target Palestinians.”
“More than a dozen nationalities face potential travel ban –
Most immigrants excluded by a travel ban would be close family of US citizens and legal permanent residents”
>The UK’s War on Privacy is a Warning for America
Hahaha, “mere subjects”! Nice.
When we’re all replaced by robots, it will be a populace of mere objects
Whilst I don’t necessarily disagree with your general point, using the term “British subjects” is disingenuous. Until the 1980s British Subjects were members of the British Empire who didn’t have the status of British citizens with associated rights to reside in UK etc….. I know this because I had family members who had to jump through lots of hoops to gain the latter when administrative messups caused problems.
“British subject” is IIRC not a legally recognised term under ECHR anymore etc and should only be used metaphorically. Even then it it is unwise because it suggests you are 30 years out of date regarding UK Law. Under European laws implemented by the UK you must have full citizenship of somewhere.
What makes the link – Trump’s New Immigration Ban: An Arbitrary, Discriminatory Legal Immigration Rewrite – amazing, is that it is written by the Cato Institute!! Trump plans to ban people from immigrating and visiting from certain countries.
“Trump plans to create a national origins hierarchy. His order will rank countries as either red, orange, yellow, and green:
“Red” nationalities would be subject to a total ban.
“Orange” nationalities would be subject to a partial ban.
“Yellow” nationalities would be subject to new requirements, which could escalate into a “Red” or “Orange” classification if their governments failed to adopt changes within 60 days.
“Green” would presumably be required to avoid restrictions.
The Times reports that the Red list will include at least Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen, and Reuters reports that Afghanistan and Pakistan will also fall onto the list. President Trump has previously promised to target Palestinians.”
“More than a dozen nationalities face potential travel ban –
Most immigrants excluded by a travel ban would be close family of US citizens and legal permanent residents”
Remember when Biden — if he was actually president at the time, we don’t know — could have maneuvered to replace DeJoy in 2022:
NYT article today from Zeynip Tufecki about the Wuhan lab leak. Link brings up just first part of article so apply reader skills to see the rest.
Hey, All The News blah blah blah, where were you years ago when we were
being badly misledlearning about pangolins?She’s a horrid COVID minimizing hack, so I’m immediately skeptical of whatever she’s gotten approved as an oped. She was an aggressive rejector of the theory very much proven that COVID damages the immune system, t cells specifically. I hope she gets to enjoy the fruits of infection.
The black hole theory is interesting. The idea is that we are connected to another universe (which sees our containing black hole as a ‘white hole’ that can never be entered) but with no possibility of information being communicated between them.
Perhaps the larger universe we are connected to experiences time flowing in the opposite direction from us. In that case the theoretical ‘white hole’ indicating the presence of our universe would look just like a regular black hole to them, and it would also answer the question of why we’ve never observed a white hole in our universe (i.e., we have, but we just perceive them as black holes due to the direction in which we subjectively experience time progressing).
Not being a physicist, I can’t properly evaluate this, but I’ve heard that in terms of Einstein’s field equations, directional progression of time is something of an arbitrary concept.
A few days ago some here were asking why Hunter Biden’s rental home was uninhabitable since it did not suffer any apparent damage from the fires.
The answer is smoke damage.
After the Tubbs fire I had an opportunity to see what remediation was necessary at homes that survived the fire and it was extensive because the smoke was highly toxic.
All the interior walls had to be stripped to the studs, all the insulation removed and replaced, all the wiring and plumbing had to be inspected for heat damage, and all the materials removed treated as toxic waste.
In 2017 the estimate for an 1,800 Sq Ft 3/2 was $200K.
On a home that showed no obvious damage on the outside.
This was a home that was empty and being prepped for sale, that $200K does not include any damage to its contents.
Even if the house (it was a rental) was pristine, the neighborhood is a smoking environmental catastrophe. I remember people being more curious as to how it was still standing when everything else was leveled. That article said that Hunter still retains a secret service detail. (That and his “art sales” were plummeting, lol.) I figure he needs that security, because Hunter’s probably got more than a couple enemies with means (and some bad art on the wall). It follows that Trump can leverage that secret service detail to keep Jill and the family docile.
It’s weird watching Valkyrie, and when we’re facing supposed fascism, see liberal Democrat politicians wet themselves. What worthless hacks. What useless existences.
I’m not sure what’s worse: that they’re lying about fascism or that they’re right and can’t be bothered.
via a Martyanov hint (we commented here on caricature yesterday):
1958 caricature from then-Soviet satire magazine Perets´
https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/183mz9t/1958_soviet_caricature_depicting_a_ukrainian/
excellent!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUUcg9Bar-k
Real Crisis Not Inflation, Tariffs; It’s Private Debt | Steve Keen