World’s deepest art installation dumped 4.3 miles underwater near Mariana Trench Interesting Engineering
Ancient Greek and Roman Statues Were Not Only Beautiful, but Also Smelled Nice, Too Smithsonian
Your Poop Schedule Says a Lot About Your Overall Health, Study Discovers Science Alert
Lean Cuisine and Stouffer’s meals recalled for ‘wood-like material’ linked to choking AP
What’s the Matter with Abundance? Malcolm Harris, The Baffler
Climate/Environment
‘Travesty of Justice’: Jury Finds Greenpeace Must Pay Over $660 Million in Dakota Access Pipeline Case Common Dreams
CRYPTO MINING COMPANY AGREES TO SPEED CLEANUP OF ITS COAL ASH PILE Allegheny Front
Billions needed to save forests, but funding fuelling their destruction, reveals UNDP report Down to Earth
Pandemics
New measles cases confirmed in 2 Prince George’s County residents who traveled internationally WBAL-TV
USDA launches biosecurity steps for poultry producers, adds details on H7N9 avian flu detection CIDRAP
China?
Chinese semiconductors and alternative paths to innovation High Capacity
Africa
Causes of War New Left Review. On the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Alliance of Sahel States Forges Ahead Black Agenda Report
India
India’s coddled billionaires feel the pain of US tariffs Bloomberg
What is behind the Nagpur riots? Frontline
Old Blighty
Labour’s cuts: politics of the bully and economics of the miser Counterfire
O Canada
Off the shelf, up the flagpole: Canadian flags fly high in response to Trump Christian Science Monitor
Menaced by Trump, Canada Prepares to Join E.U. Military Industry Buildup New York Times
The Irving empire just landed an $8B payday—for warships no one asked for The Breach
Syraqistan
‘Nothing Short of Genocide’: Israel Kills 200 Children Common Dreams
More US Airstrikes Hit Yemen as Houthis Fire Missiles at Israel Antiwar
The Limitations of the US Naval Air Defense System will Force the US to Withdraw from the Red Sea Larry C Johnson, SONAR21
Trump threatens entire Resistance Axis and the EU, UK increase funding Al Qaeda in Syria Vanessa Beeley
US continues ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran, sanctions Chinese firm for buying Tehran’s oil Hindustan Times
US approves sale of advanced precision kill weapon systems to Saudi Arabia Anadolu Agency
For much of the ‘Iranian Cultural Continent’, Nowruz is a time to celebrate the renewal of Nature and new beginnings Down to Earth
European Disunion
Probable Color Revolution Ongoing in Serbia Arktos
Sense of an Ending Lily Lynch, New Left Review. From last month, but Lynch has documented how Serbian regime actually enjoys support from the West.
Does the EU Stabilise or Destabilise its Neighbourhood? Glenn Diesen’s Substack
EU Summit Live: #Ukraine peace talks are not ‘real negotiations’, EU leaders say: EU leaders gather for a second summit this month. Follow live: https://t.co/uVkFh956Eg pic.twitter.com/NcNZ27HcZQ
— Euractiv (@Euractiv) March 20, 2025
New Not-So-Cold War
Putin to Drag Out Diplomacy with Trump, While Progressing on the Battlefield The Real Politick with Mark Sleboda (Video)
Massive Explosion Rocks Key Bomber Base Deep Inside Russia The War Zone
🇷🇺💥 Odessa Getting POUNDED
Ukraine’s air defense and electronic warfare systems are overloaded as an unprecedented wave of drones hits Odessa.
– Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, admits the sheer number of drones is overwhelming defenses.
-… https://t.co/hrKyeRpTyl pic.twitter.com/YsOtzQCB9k— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) March 20, 2025
***
RAF in talks to police skies above Ukraine The Telegraph
Starmer warns Putin of ‘severe consequences’ if he breaches peace deal The Guardian
European military powers work on 5-10 year plan to replace US in Nato FT
Germany’s military rebirth is Europe’s best bet against Putin Kyiv Independent
Poland And South Korea: Going All In On Tactical Nuclear Weapons? 1945
South of the Border
Trump 2.0
Judge rips DOJ’s ‘woefully insufficient’ response to questions on Alien Enemies Act case NBC News
Trump: Impeach Uncooperative Judges HOGELAND’S BAD HISTORY
DOGE
Federal Judge Blocks DOGE’s Social Security “Fishing Expedition” Democracy Docket
Musk Is Firing Federal Workers Who Prevent Bloated Tech Contracts The Intercept
Small businesses fearful as DOGE has USPS revamp in its sights The Loadstar
DOGE is going global. It needs to be stopped. Disconnect
The schools trying to teach America’s kids to think like Elon Musk Musk Watch
Democrats en Déshabillé
Democrats Become What They Once Opposed America’s Undoing
Panicked Democratic voters are turning on their own leaders Christian Science Monitor
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Police State Watch
Guilt by Association The Baffler
The Destruction of Gaza, Yemen And U.S. Free Speech Are Parts of The Same Project Spencer Ackerman
Healthcare?
Grünenthal pushed its latest opioid as a safer option. People around the world got hooked. The Examination
Scientists Uncover Lyme Disease’s Hidden Achilles’ Heel – And How to Exploit It SciTech Daily
Why CDC’s Planned Vaccine-Autism Study Is Raising Eyebrows MedPage Today
AI
Should AGI-preppers embrace DOGE? Programmable Mutter
Space Force unveils strategic plan for AI integration Space News
Putting Missile Interceptors In Space Critical To Defending U.S. Citizens: Space Force Boss The War Zone
Woke Watch
The Rise and (Likely) Fall of Wokeness The Ideas Letter
Groves of Academe
Trump’s Battles With Colleges Could Change American Culture for a Generation New York Times
Our Famously Free Press
America Needs a New Free Speech Movement Zephyr Teachout, The Nation
Supply Chain
Chinese state funding in mineral exploration on the rise: FT Mining.com
Trump to Expand Critical Mineral Output Using Wartime Powers Bloomberg
Red Sea crisis forces Maersk to increase capacity over strategy limit The Loadstar
The Final Frontier
Nuclear-powered spacecraft with 11,000-pound payload planned by US space firms Interesting Engineering
The 420
Weed Users At Greater Risk For Heart Attack, Stroke Health Day
I’m sure it’s the CANNABIS, and definitely NOT the novel pandemic pathogen that directly harms the heart & destroys the vascular system.
They’re going to come for everything but Covid, get ready. Just kill me already. pic.twitter.com/Ev0ymuMU7b
— Laura Miers (@LauraMiers) March 20, 2025
The Bezzle
$1.4bn is a lot to fall through the cracks, even for Tesla FT
‘Get it Right for Elon Musk’ Boondoggle. “Delaware looks to empower corporate insiders.”
Class Warfare
Middle-income New Yorkers are the new face of eviction in the city, report finds Gothamist
Americans living in their cars are finding refuge in ‘safe parking lots’ The Guardian
For Labor, Caution Is Fatal In These Times
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
228 comments
Comments are closed.
My wife and daughter both work in the non-profit world, and have most of their careers. They regularly report that the non-profit world is in complete freakout mode, not knowing what will happen to their funding, their missions, etc. I am told by a mid-size accounting firm that there has been mass shutdown of non-profits over indiscriminate funding cuts by DOGE. They are all scraping their websites and sanitizing their missions and objectives statements out of feral fear. This is not just fear for their hard work, they fear for their safety.
I know of a major food pantry in Westchester County, NY, that has had their shipments of food that they received from the Federal government stop cold turkey. This is cutting off much needed assistance and people will go hungry. (I am told by executive leadership that much of the food is sitting in warehouses rotting.) They were given no explanations.
In my opinion, not enough attention is being given to this and the self-inflicted harm it is causing.
Just within my circle of friends and family…
— Niece works as an attorney for the federal government. Has NO idea whether she will keep her job.
— another niece has a child with disabilities and has NO idea what will happen with special ed programs
— brother bought a retirement home that needs renovations and cannot get suppliers to commit to pricing because of trade wars
— another niece has a son in college. He doesn’t know if his classmates will return in the fall because financial aid is up in the air.
“The schools trying to teach America’s kids to think like Elon Musk”
‘A “conundrum” that asks young school children whether humans would be better off being governed by an AI overlord. Another that revolves around the ethics of rigging an arcade game to make it unwinnable. And a third scenario on a company that uses its products to illicitly gather data from conversations its customers have in their homes.’
I’ll give those kids a hand with those answers-
a) No, that’s how you get Skynet.
b) That is how you end up losing your business.
c) Do I even have to say it? This may actually be illegal and only a scummy Silicon Valley billionaire would think this a good idea. Somebody like Musk
But a final one-
‘Musk, an avid gamer, served as the inspiration for the collaborative, problem-solving video games created by Synthesis.’
Musk solved his problem of getting good at video games by hiring professionals to play for him under his account name to boost his scores. Now that’s inspiring. :)
I think the second is quite a clever way of initiating a new ruling class. For working people, life is rather like an arcade game rigged to be unwinnable.
>>>“The schools trying to teach America’s kids to think like Elon Musk”
lol. The progressive left created Elon Musk….mal-directed green subsidies* allowed Elon to pivot his Paypal pot into becoming the world’s richest man.
Elon’s lesson is to encourage kids to become the next “Music Man” (or Monorail salesman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4z_9NcIJXI ) and find a way to grift from gullible politicians, bureaucrats, and activists.
* Mal-directed by giving white-collar-folks $7,500 to buy electric cars that perform better than Ferraris from 20 years ago versus subsidizing the frumpy Toyota Prius or Chevy Volts of the world. Any vehicle doing 0 to 100 kph in less than 8.0 seconds should have been excluded from any government subsidy.
As someone who works, I can assure you there are people who go into meetings and “audit reasoning” and “communicate priorities” despite being shockingly uninformed in the practical questions raised by their demands.
Their priorities are for us to do something, because they just told a client we can do that thing. And their audit or our reasoning consists of nonsense, complaining, and threats.
Very like Musk, who may well be the world’s most self-absorbed man, to think this refusal to have the context is unique and also not something to be ashamed of.
I’ll also note that Elon also routinely claims to be a fast study who does have “all the context.”
RE: Musk’s gaming claims, https://youtu.be/z1ykCc588Zw?si=36Y-DFhGUu60hfQa
TL:DW, like everything else, Musk bought his way in and then took credit when he wasn’t just outright making stuff up.
There’s a German word for Elon Musk: backpfeifengesicht
Genau!
There’s an academic version,frankfurter’s ‘on bullshit’.
Herr Musk has not invented anything, created a product independent of public or private subsidy or shown any ability to leave or aid Mother Earth (though the latter might aid the former).
He is the golden boy of capital misapplication (=convenient exploitation).
Very much the character of the planter, white south affrikannah.
Backpfeifengesicht is a long and relatable German insult that means someone deserves a face slap. Bitch slap?
People forget the novels written by Iain M. Banks
https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft
Run by Minds. Orbitals not included…
Not Skynet.
Enlarge Overtone Window.
Why is DOGE considered to be Trump acting in his official capacity?
It is not a cabinet department. Its composition has not been ratified. Its members are merely unpaid advisors.
This is Little Red Book territory where a mob is out hanging signs around people’s necks and putting dunce caps on their heads.
Exactly. It is hooligan private citizens running around smashing public property. Arrest them all and make each of them sit in the slammer for a few days until they get sober and come to their senses and pay their fines after appearing in Court the following day.
IIRC, DOGE takes its presidential authority from an executive agency created under Obama. “DOGE” isn’t its official birth name, it’s “United States Digital Service”
Either NC or Water Cooler, I forget which, covered this here in some detail, noting how clever it was — because impeccably legitimate — simply to repurpose an office already uncontroversially created by Obama.
Yes, this is the question I keep asking how is this made up agency or dept, that no one is named as running, as no agency head was confirmed. How is this unpaid unnamed person
Firing federal workers?
Something seems really wrong with this scenario.
Its’ the Nerd Reich. Brown Shirts & Squadrismo weren’t legal either.
Besides, with the Greenpeace verdict, the law is obviously captured.
What are we going to do about it?
Your question says it all. Not seeing many responses. There will not be someone or something coming to our rescue. Massive protests in the streets is our last, best option to prevent full blown tyranny. Not sure if the population is up for it.
The problem with caterwauling online is, the look is always of 1 person protesting.
I’ve been increasingly focused on this question. Now is certainly the time, but no one I know up close has any direct experience of mobilization, and I’m 63.
I participated in Occupy, and I spent the weekend after the Santelli rant up in Rockland County watching the Tea Party get seeded with satchels of cash, but I haven’t managed to do more than have more conversations with a broader range of people and discover everyone sees what’s happening but doesn’t know what to do.
It’s in the air, but effective action is still too far away.
I was one of a quarter million on the street in San Francisco protesting against the upcoming war in Iraq, and all the local fish wraps could talk about the next day was some hooligan threw a rock through a plate glass window of a business, their updated version of ‘Kristallnacht’.
It was the same with the huge antiwar demos of the late 60s. 30 thousand people marching, and the papers covered marginal bad behavior. I realized then that we needed acting-out a**holes to drum up our publicity. Hug a black blocer near you.
true. nobody covered my college’s protests until people got arrested. i maintain theyre good because they kinda help build organizing structures – altho still not great ones. somethings better than nothing tho.
Had a friend with a protest addiction around the turn of the century in LA, so I went to a number of them with him, and I’d swear you’d see the same people for a myriad of really different protests-it’s what they do.
I don’t think that it’s fully sunk in yet how cravenly submissive the people that we elected or expected to lead have turned out to be. I keep thinking that maybe one Governor or Mayor or university President will finally acknowledge the new reality that Mexico and Canada and the EU are beginning to recognize: however humiliating your attempt to surrender to Trump may be, it will never be enough. Nobody is coming to save us. There is no point to negotiating with death cult terrorists.
Los Angeles will never get Federal disaster recovery money. Universities will never get Federal funding for basic research. Sanctuary cities will never see a dime of Federal funding for anything but militarizing police and randomly rounding up immigrants, documented or not, to put in private corporate concentration camps.
We really are on our own. State, local, and infrastructure leaders need to accept that, and act accordingly.
Municipalities have no business in the area of immigration policy. For instance, would you approve of a city government that established a migrant exclusion zone?
Cutting budgets might be good policy or bad policy, but it’s not, “death cult terrorism.”
The people you elected are not, “cravenly submissive.” Rather, your country’s highest elected official is attempting to change a variety of policies. He has gotten more heat than any US politician in living memory. Your president is neither craven nor submissive; you just hate his guts.
Duck and cower?
Just like during the height of the cold war when we hid under our school desks. Except the enemy is now our “leaders”. Cowering – the all-American way.
What are we going to do about i?
http://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwiejc-Cs5yMAxVHM9AFHaWiHlMQFnoECAoQAg&usg=AOvVaw0ojdSrt_W41G4LQX__Tw3W
Or
HandsOff via Mobilize.us
Saturday April 5 you could go protest (link to Mobilize) probably pretty close.
Nationwide interest building.
Make your own sign/mask up/make friends/vent and feel good.
Are you going to change anything April5?
No—but you will be doing something with like minded others.
SC’s 5th largest city is has got an event from 2-4 at its Fountain Park. Four more larger in state cities have events scheduled—so far.
City is really proud of FP.
City doesn’t cotton to rabble rousing at that venue. I’ve been informed.
Should be interesting.
Better than nothing!
Thanks!
Perhaps individual States should start seceding from the union. Why not? Those running the show seem to want to devolve everything to a State level anyway. If individual States want to maintain programs previously funded by Washington, they’ll have to fund these programs themselves. At that point why bother remaining in the union? Federal rules and regulations are no longer worth the headache – a lot of burden for no benefit. Real change might be possible at a State and local level.
But yes, there is the issue of what currency to use to pay the bills since that remains a prerogative of Washington (along with a raft of other things).
Pie in the sky idea, I know. But seriously, if there is to be any change for the benefit of the average American, it will require the break up of the American republic (IMHO). Washington has demonstrated repeatedly that it’s not capable.
How about a constitutional amendment to establish an official, recognized procedure for a state or states to secede?
Alternatively, that could be something on the agenda of the constitutional convention that many, though apparently not yet enough, states (mostly “red”) have called for.
That’s a pretty Zen looking bear in today’s Antidote du jour. Must be smarter than the average bear, eh Boo Boo? Is his name Yoga bear?
Mother Russia? Sitting across the table from Rubio and other US counterparts?
Saying, “Listen to what I have been articulating about for the last few years!”
It’s so cute I just want to stroke that round furry belly. Or maybe not. I hope the photographer had a long lens.
looks pretty smart, a statement on the Market?
Looks are on thing, but I wouldn’t walk up and “rub Buddha’s belly” if I were you.
That is _not_ a whale with anthropormorphic blubber!
I won’t even try the dad joke “no, that’s your mom” :p
CEO’s dismissal signals the beginning of the end for Amtrak: Analysis Trains
Left unsaid is the active role of the class 1 railroads to intentionally operationally cripple long distance (eg, Southern Crescent, CN, UP) and many state supported trains (Empire Service). Add to this fact, the industry employees swarms of DC lobbyists (how else to explain the Rail Safety Act of 2023’s bipartisan derailment and death). Both are insurmountable barriers for Amtrak. Only dedicated public policy and litigation can remove them.
The central economic planners on Wall Street have dictated every railroad adopt “Precision Scheduled Railroading “, PSR. Passenger trains are incompatible with PSR and require operational flexibility, well maintained infrastructure and sidings. Wall Street requires asset stripping and reduced CapEx.
There is no substantive regulation of class 1 railroads, we’re back to the Robber Barrons. Nor is their vigorous enforcement of both common carrier obligations and Amtrak’s statutory rights to operate.
In spite of Amtrak Joe and Mayo Pete trickling out some long over due funding, it has long been bipartisan legislative and executive policy to starve Amtrak and assure the US will never have world class passenger rail.
“Off the shelf, up the flagpole: Canadian flags fly high in response to Trump”
I can confirm for a fact that Canadians are a very patriotic people at heart. How so? As I was going around Europe in the early 80s, I noted that there were quite a few Canadians also touring around. And I saw how they all of them took care to have Canadian flags on display on their gear – no matter how long – so that others would know that they were in fact Canadians and not some other unnamed nation. :)
(“Alright everybody, gather around
The Canada Man is here
What kind of Canadian do you want?
a GTA type? Saudi Albertan?
Quebecois too? Anything you want
You’ve come to the right man because
I’m the Canada Man”)
Who can take an American (who can take an American)
Sprinkle luggage with a maple leaf or two (sprinkle it with a few)
Cover up with subterfuge and have a toque on too?
The Canada Man (the Canada Man)
Oh, the Canada Man can (the Canada Man can)
The Canada Man can ’cause he messes with their minds
And makes the world feel good (makes the world feel good)
Who can take a sentence (who can take a sentence?)
And end it in an eh (end it in an eh?)
Speak softly and carry a big schtick?
The Canada Man (the Canada Man)
The Canada Man can (the Canada Man can)
The Canada Man can ’cause he messes with their minds
And makes the world feel good (makes the world feel good)
The Canada Man fakes everyone he takes
Its satisfying and delicious
Now you talk about your identity wishes
You can hook a lot of fishes
Oh who can take an American (who can take an American)
Depict him differently as seen (depict him differently as seen)
Separate the sorrow and collect up all the cream?
The Canada Man (the Canada Man)
Oh the Canada Man can (the Canada Man can)
The Canada Man can ’cause he messes with their minds
And makes the world feel good (makes the world feel good)
Candy Man performed by Sammy Davis, Jr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq7WX5oINAQ
I can report the same and from the same period but that was before Europeans decided they loved Americans, American culture, EuroDisney etc.Guess Trump is killing the buzz
There were exceptions back then of course and I can recall an old man coming up to me in Paris and expressing thanks for our help in kicking out the Nazis. But Vietnam caused the then leftist Euro youth to regard the US as full of military industrial dolts. That last part is still true, needless to say.
That works for Kiwis too ;-)
We had a kiwi lecturer at Cambridge who straight off taught us the NZ “shifted vowel sounds” so we’d listen out and not potentially insult them in future by mistaking them for Aussies.
This was already losing its usefulness by 2009 when I moved to Sydney. A lot of NZ immigrants were sounding more Aussie.
In NZ:
The joy of sex sounds like a cricketer just hit one out of the boundary, while the joy of six is a lot more intimate.
Living in the US, my standards were much lower. Most people thought I was English. If somebody picked me for Australian, they were already ahead of the game, and if they apologized when they found out then they were easily top 5%.
Some people did get it right the first time but it was very rare.
As a former ESL teacher of 2+ decades, I can confidently tell you that I thing it’s a good think to give piss a chance.
Ha, you fell for it. That was often Americans wanting to seem like Canadians and avoid being asked about the Vietnam war. Seriously.
I met one of those but it wasn’t about Vietnam. This was the era when Ronald Reagan was elected President and things got serious on the nuclear front from time to time because he had a whole bunch of people in his admin nicknamed ‘laptop bombardiers’ who were as keen for a nuclear showdown with Russia as they were for avoiding any military service during the Vietnam war a few years earlier.
The key back in the 80’s in Europe wasn’t having maple leaf stickers on your luggage, but making an effort not to look like an American and it was so easy, just don’t wear all white athletic shoes such as Reeboks et al, and wear a University of Guelph t-shirt while you’re at it.
It was the same in the 70’s.
Obligatory Beaverton post:
Canada places 200% tariff on little Canadian flags Americans wear while travelling
(FYI – the Beaverton is the northern version of the Onion.)
Are you sure they weren’t Americans wearing false flags?
Talked with most of them but except for one, they were all Canadians.
Syraqistan
A lot of grim violent belligerent headlines under ‘Syraqistan’. Is it too…something…to observe that getting rid of the nation state called Israel and its entire philosophic underpinning would solve a lot of the world’s problems and conflicts?
In the tech world, we have this term called technical debt which is used to describe the cumulative short cuts and short sighted decisions that lead to a system becoming chaotic and unmaintainable. Feels like Israelis and Americans are God’s technical debts that the rest of the world are supposed to fix.
Don’t forget Israel is far more a creature of UK colonialists than Americans many of whom, with the exception of the heavily bribed Truman, were against it. All the skeptics in the State Department were then expelled. Seems like now.
So our US reenactor empire is running up on the shoals of that earlier sun never sets empire. Churchill didn’t care for natives either–even sprayed them with mustard gas.
I often wonder if US elites are fighting to decide if we should be imperial Spain or Imperial Britain…
The decision was made a while ago: it is Spain.
Great link! Thanks! The parallels are even more obvious now than they were in ’21.
I remember that post! Thanks for reminding us of that.
One point or two that didn’t get raised that’s also pertinent is the disdain for manufactures in conjunction with “religious” fanaticism. There is an amazing quote by a Spanish grandee that I couldn’t find again that goes somethibg like “let the English and the Dutch make stuff. We’ll do more important stuff.” In the like vein, the “Democracy” activists today could easily be the modern day incarnation of the Jesuits…
On Judge Napolitano’s show recently John Mearsheimer said (paraphrasing), “Israel does not act in America’s interest.” And that Israel is an albatross around America’s neck. utube, ~27+ minutes.
Prof. John Mearsheimer : Can Europe Survive?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWgFgOIXnEk
A report in English from Votaire magazine, pub. 2013:
Kennedy, the Lobby and the Bomb
https://www.voltairenet.org/article178401.html
and from Mondoweiss:
When a U.S. president demanded inspections of a nuclear facility in the Middle East (and failed)
https://mondoweiss.net/2015/07/president-inspections-facility/
I’m just barely old enough to remember these events.
Thanks so much, I was ca 14 and hardly politically aware. I will read them. I have been trying to find an understanding of those events.
A lovely article, and a reminder of how little we really know about forest ecology. Most attempts to reconstruct ‘native’ forests fail for so many reasons. Its even questionable if there are many real ‘native’ forests left anywhere – humans have been engineering forests for millennia. Its even possible that the native forests of Europe are profoundly different from previous glacial interstadials because mesolithic hunter gatherers deliberately spread the ‘right’ mix of seeds as they moved to ensure the forests were suitably edible for man and beast.
Last weekend I went hiking with a friend who organises a small hiking group of local Chinese (I’m dragged along sometimes as an unofficial guide) – she lives in the mountains (really just hills) south of Dublin and loves to explore outside the usual places. She told me she’d found a beautiful fragment of ancient oak forest that wasn’t on any official lists. I was, to put it mildly, sceptical, but sure enough, after a short hike along a riverbank we found ourselves in a beautiful temperate rainforest, oaks, birch and holly dripping with moss, the underfloor soft with deep layers of peat and luscious green sphagnum. The area was surrounded by grim commercial conifers.
I later did some research – the oaks were in fact no more than around 150 years old. The 1830 maps showed a long vanished village nearby and the area subdivided into what was probably potato fields. It was scrubland by the end of the century – the original farmers no doubt dead or in Boston. At some stage the oaks were coppiced, then left alone. There must have been some fragment of original older forest there to allow for such a very rich subfloor to have developed – its notoriously difficult (as the article explains) to recreate a genuine ancient forest. Overgrazing by Asian deer (introduced to replace the native Reds in the 19th century – the latter having been hunted out along with the wolves by the 18th Century), it is clear that the forest won’t last much longer. After much online searching, I found an old survey report that concluded it was nice, but not rich enough to justify a formal designation, and so ignored by officialdom. So it will probably eventually disappear, like nearly all of Irelands ancient rainforests, destroyed first to provide timber for the Royal Navy, then later to deny rebels places to hide, and finally by farm subsidies and official neglect.
Thank you for sharing that. How large was the area?
Now I’ll go read the article…
Not that huge – around 150-200 acres, but surrounded by mixed conifer plantation and scrub, so no real boundaries.
I saw another effect of human activities on Ireland’s forests which I disliked: invasive trees i guess from gardens. The Benbulben Forest walk in Sligo was infested with some (for me) unknown species even if the forest keepers try to control it.
That would be rhododendron – very beautiful in summer, but it completely destroys forests. It was very popular in the 19th century. It has destroyed huge areas of the Killarney National Park. In some areas they’ve simply given up fighting it and turned it into a tourism resource. Its originally from western China, so there is a regular joke that we need to import pandas to keep it under control.
Unfortunately, the only way to control it is to use very intensive cutting and herbicides, so as usual the forest authorities have gotten themselves tied up in bureaucracy and cost issues, and have decided to do next to nothing.
I know Benbulben Forest Walk very well – the mountain is unique. I hope you had the opportunity to drop into the graveyard where the poet WB Yeats is buried, its a very peaceful place.
I did and enjoyed. One of the things i liked about our 4 days stay around Sligo is that it was much quieter than the more touristic regions. It invites to learn about Yeats, read about the history of Ireland (which I did), walks, or just enjoy a beer by the porch of the cottage with a nice view. While in Ireland, one of the things that I enjoyed the most is that it wasn’t difficult to engage in talks with the locals, even with very young locals, which is normally extremely rare anywhere else. When they noticed we are from Spain, they showed increased cordiality.
I have several species of beetles in my yard that chew the [family blog] out of my rhododendron’s foliage every summer. I would be happy to donate them to Ireland’s forest service.
Now that I think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rhododendron with any sign of insect infestation in Ireland or Britain. I just googled it, and there does seem to be a variety of insects and weevils that normally control it. For whatever reason, the various bugs that munch on rhododendron didn’t arrive in Ireland with the plants. I would guess they’d arrive sometime, but they’d probably end up eating something else too.
Irish forests are very ecologically bare – mostly because we lost the big game range of other countries – the early bears and wolves and beavers were driven to extinction. Interestingly, modern DNA analysis suggests that almost all native animals in Ireland were deliberately introduced by mesolithic peoples from Spain, which shows that maybe they knew more about the subject than many modern forest managers.
I take it that they have done soil analysis from earlier layers in lake bottoms to get an idea of what was growing in Ireland before humans changed everything.
Yes, actually this discussion reminded me of my college days when I used to do some lake bed and peat sampling – a very messy (but fun) business. A typical Irish lake would have seen multiple cycles of afforestation and (presumably human induced) clearances over many centuries. But these don’t tell a full story – for example, you can know if the local forest was a mix of oak and hazel, but you don’t necessarily know if it was a dense, impenetrable forest and scrub, or a more open environment with lots of clearances and gaps. DNA studies on animals and plants though have produced fascinating and unexpected results.
When I was in school I was taught that all the animals and plants in Ireland were those that crossed the land bridge to Britain and France that existed just before the sea levels rose. We now know that this isn’t true – most Irish flora and fauna is genetically linked to northern Spain, not Britain. And maybe significantly, this was also the origin of the first hunter gatherers who arrived by boat. There aren’t enough remains to be sure of the origins of Irish bears and wolves (the former were driven to extinction by medieval times, the wolves in the 18th Century), but it raises the tantalising prospect that even those were brought across by boat.
My personal unscientific guess is that the first hunters arrived to find a land largely empty of animals, with thick, impenetrable forests, and they realised that if they wanted the more open landscape that they’d left at home, they’d have to bring over a full range of grazers and predators, and proceeded to do just that.
Thank for your answer. Bringing in predators & grazers would suggest that they had an understanding of the local ecology and what would be needed to unbalance it in their favour.
In the mountains north of Venice there are some multistoried forests managed (uneven aged management) in the past for ship masts, from the time of the republic, that look really cool.
Also, I have seen some really old trees around the Tismana Monastery in Romania while doing Forest Management Planning there. Some hundreds and hundreds years old comestible chestnut trees (Fagus sativa) as well as impressive beech trees (Fagus sylvatica) and some hornbeam trees (Carpinus sp.). The romans introduced the chesnut in Romania, but those were not from their time…
Also one can find some very old patches on the Pacific west coast.
How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree NOEMA
~~~~~~~~~~~
Interesting article~
I remember being driven by friends in the 1980’s to what was one of the biggest oak trees left in the south of England, quite impressive and you wondered just how many of them that size there were once upon a time?
Closer to home, i’m just a little over half a mile walk to perhaps the most interesting Sequoia get-together of all, the Atwell Grove in Mineral King.
It’s full of superlatives, the most interesting being that the highest altitude Sequoias grow here at around 9,000 feet, nothing like their usual 5,500 to 6,500 foot range, and there are quite a few trees over 300 feet tall-near the record height, and my favorite Sequoia of all, the Arm Tree-which is at least 3,000 years old, and might see a handful of humans coming to admire it every summer, but that’s it.
Sequoias on steep slopes look even larger when you are approaching them from below, and i’m down with that-bigger is better, and the Arm Tree like many of the aged ones in the forest for the trees, had it’s backside burned eons ago by a log on fire that rolled down the slope and ended up burning enough to allow a friend working on the redwood genome sequencing team @ UC Davis to peer into the growth rings to ascertain its age.
I don’t think the Arm Tree would make it in the pantheon of Sequoias of size in that it’s a Yoda tree of sorts that branches out into 4 trunks about 50 feet up, along with the largest branch of all baums which is nearly 10 feet wide in diameter.
https://sequoiaquest.com/atwell-mill-arm-tree-tour-6212019.html
http://famousredwoods.com/arm/
The 19th, 23rd and 30th largest trees in the world are in this majestic forest, where there really aren’t that many young Sequoias and the average size is about 15 feet wide at chest height-these are all trees around 1,000 years old.
The 19th largest tree in the world is the Diamond Tree-so named on account of old large fire scar about 100 feet up the tree, shaped similar to a marquise diamond and 12 feet higher than the Sherman Tree. It was the only notable Sequoia that suffered in the 2021 KNP Fire in the grove, in that fire burned through the base of the tree and continued up about 125 feet in a fire tunnel which burned through the old diamond fire scar and beyond, and despite the punishment rendered-still keeps on living, a trademark of Sequoias, i’ll sometimes see examples that are 80% burned up and yet the remaining live parts of the tree still keep on going. Don’t try that with a mere mortal tree.
https://sequoiaquest.com/atwell-mill-east-fork-may-25-27-2024.html
Most of the Sequoias in Atwell are on steep slopes and there aren’t any walking interstates except for the Paradise trail-which is a fine trail that will get you to the highest examples-but not notable ones of size or age, which require off-trail hiking and navigation.
The English cut down their oaks to build the Royal Navy. The tough wood and curvy bits were useful for framing ships.
Some Americans cut down some of the Sequoia for no reason at all, as you know. Guess they were showing the trees who is boss. The wood is not very useful.
Walked to the Boole Tree in the Converse Basin a few years ago, and pretty much the entire grove was taken out around 1900, and they left the 7th largest tree, how sentimental of them!
I’ll sometimes have a fire using fallen Sequoia branches, and true to form, it doesn’t burn that well-you need to put it on top of a blazing fire to get it to go.
Until the recent fires in the past 5 years took out approx 20% of Monarch Sequoias (4 feet wide or larger examples) 95% of the coastal redwoods were cut down for lumber, while 95% of Giant Sequoias were still standing-as a testament to it’s use for anything other than grape stakes, fence posts or pencils.
http://famousredwoods.com/boole/
Poe
The British cut down so many trees fighting the Napoleonic wars that afterwards ship-building moved across the Atlantic to Canada and northern parts of the US. You had huge forests going down to the waters edge and for much of the 19th century Canada seems to have become a power house in ship-building until the advent of iron ships towards the end of the century. You had brand new ships being launched and were then loaded up with timber before crossing the Atlantic where those ships were registered and the timber sold off to supply the constant need of timber in new construction because of the industrial revolution. Each ship weighed several hundred tons and typically they lasted for only about twenty years before being broken up so there was a constant demand for new ships. I have noted that most of the wooden ships that carried my ancestors out here to Oz were Canadian built.
Henry VIII did his fair share of destroying forests for his navy. The So-called Ashdown Forest, that straddles Kent and Sussex and was also home to Winnie the Pooh, Piglet et al, has barely a tree worth its name these days, thanks to him.
Henry VIII was known as the ‘Father of the Royal Navy’ so perhaps he used all those forests to supply the timber he needed for it. The following article mentions the large forests in parts of Kent and Sussex that he used-
https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/henry-viii-his-navy
There’s a 380 hectare Visingsö oak forest in Sweden, duly planted by the Swedish Navy to have all the oak they would ever need. As the story goes, the forest was ready for the first harvest in 1975…
I think the dependency of the UK on shipyards from North America (especially Canada) because of the availability of large trees for construction had started even earlier.
For that matter, Spain was in a similar situation, and had its own fleet (amongst the top three with France and Great Britain) largely built in America; Havana was a major, or even the main, naval shipyard of the Spanish empire.
Too many trees had been killed for the Armada Invencible. Trees from the very centre of Spain. Think Cuenca, Soria and places like those. Humans have been modifying landscapes for long.
Do you mean that the Castilian plateau was covered with forests 5 centuries ago? When I crossed that region it looked so utterly barren.
I am not saying that, though earlier than that yes. Yet, there were large forests around mountain ranges of which there are quite a few around and in the Mesetas. Many oaks particularly from Cuenca but also from Sierra de Cazorla in Jaen were cut for the armada which in total + fishing ships in the period + others, is said to have costed 6 million trees. A German Forest Engineer, Erich Bauer Manderscheid, whose PhD thesis was on German Forests History went to Spain in the 60s and later authored a book on the History of Forests in Spain which I would like to buy, expensive as it is. He almost certainly wrote about this.
This is a good article from the museum in Greenwich where the Victory is displayed (Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar).
It says the Victory required “ 2000 oak trees were used in the construction of the hull – equivalent to 60 acres of forest.”
No wonder the forests disappeared. The British fleet had 27 ships in it at Trafalgar!
https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/hms-victory
Time to dig out Stewart Brands story about the oaks of the late medieval Kings College, Oxford dining hall. When death watch beetle was found in the huge roof beams in the late 19th Century, it was thought that it would be impossible to find oaks that size and quality anywhere in England. Brand writes:
Lovely story, thanks.
It brings to mind a similar one, perhaps also from S. Brand, which (imperfectly remembered) relates how at the top of a medieval bell tower somebody found ancient, written instructions to the sexton(s): ‘Every 75 years, be sure to rotate the bell 90°, to equalise the wear from the clapper’.
That may be standard procedure. They do this with the bells in Florence though eventually the wear is so bad it needs to be recast.
Well, yeah … but I think you may have missed the funny part. In the case of the oak beams and probably similar for the bells, your ‘eventually’ amounts to over 500 years! In this modern world where the average human being has an attention span of three minutes, the transmission of the beam- and bell-lore through such an extended period is simply astounding.
And by the way, I cite no scientific studies supporting my statement that ‘the average human being has an attention span of three minutes’ because I am being facetious, although I would not be surprised in the slightest if that number was somewhere near the truth, if for no other reason than the fact that the concept of ‘average’ is capable of some very heavy lifting indeed. If you recall from your elementary maths classes, the term ‘average’ properly comprises three distinct metrics: the mean, median and mode. The mean may be the most frequently used of these functions but the median is pretty handy as well. It’s the idea of the median that makes the following statement true, which, in my mind, explains a lot about the state of the world: ‘Half of the population is below average in intelligence.’
This would have been King’s College, Cambridge, or some other college Oxford.
(There’s The Queen’s College, Oxford.
And of course Queens’ College, Cambridge.
The only “people” with Colleges named after them at both places are Jesus, the Trinity, St. John and… the Earls of Pembroke. Also Mary Magdalene if you allow the Magdalen(e) variation)
Ah, I meant New College. Its been a while since I watched University Challenge (where I first found out how to pronounce Magdalene the ‘proper’ way).
Ah, “New” College.
I was with a former colleague this week, being shown around his home town of Bergamo. He kept pointing out the new this and new that, all ancient and beautiful. Apparent everything in Bergamo after the Black Death is the New stuff. :-)
When Seoul’s Southern Gate (Namdaemun) burned down some years ago, they could not find the kind of timber necessady to rebuild it anywhere in South Korea. The funny thing, of course, is that nowadays, most trees in Korea are pine, not good as lumber. Most are product of reforestation efforts after the Korean War. You gotta wonder what kind of trees existed in Korea in the earlier days. (Or, perhaps not much at all–there’s a famous short story from the era of Japanese rule (1920s, I think). The setting is in Manchuria and as one of the characters is dying, he hallucinates seeing “red hills” of his homeland, that is, treeless hills where only mud is visible (and when my mother first took a trip on a plane in, I think, early 1960s, she remembers seeing something similar) FWIW, South Korean mountains are surprisingly green today …
The hills around Busan are charmingly wooded. It’s a lovely location. But I think the line of contact came close to Busan at the zenith of the DPRK advance so I don’t know if any of that woodland is pre-20th century.
Indeed, people are often surprised to find out how often ‘pristine’ forest is of fairly recent origin. Much of Taiwan was deforested in the mid-20th century – fortunately, enough was left to allow most of the mountains to revegetate rapidly. I think the same applies to much of Korea, but I’m not sure the sequence. North Korea of course is largely bare. Vast amounts of native forests in Japan have been replaced with commercial cedar – to the extent that many Japanese think their forests are ‘natural’. Much of the forests of the US East Coast are secondary growth on former farmland.
In Japan they have an easy solution to finding old timber for construction of historic buildings. They just replace it with concrete. Usually with the castles (including famous ones like Osaka castle) they did it after getting bored with rebuilding after various fires. I recall one time visiting what seemed a very beautiful remote temple in the mountains of Kyushu to find that everything, including the ‘timber’ railings leading up to the temple – were made of cast and moulded concrete.
Of course, the ‘natural’ landscape of Scotland and Ireland is mostly forest, but people are so used to expanses of bare hillsides they consider it natural, even picturesque, when in reality they are viewing a very ecologically degraded landscape kept bare by too many sheep.
When I was in the school way back when in the last millennia, our biology teacher stated that basically every square meter of Europe has been a forest, a field and a meadow several times over since the beginning of agriculture. There are no primeval forests this side of the Urals.
Pretty much so. They are discovering that even the Amazon was once heavily cultivated – in fact, it may have been that led to its extreme level of species diversity (human activity dividing the forest into ‘islands’, which then merged repeatedly).
There are large parts of the world where its almost impossible to say what the ‘natural’ cover is if you define it its ‘what it would look like if there were no humans’. Some have argued that big game would have actually kept a lot of Europe much more open and savannah like than we think of as ‘natural’ forests. The deep, dark forests of European mythology may have been the result of human culling of predators and big game.
There is growing evidence that after the last glacial period, the early mesolithic peoples quite deliberately introduced and suppressed species to create a series of forests more to their liking. Almost all animals bigger than a rabbit seem to have been introduced quite deliberately from Spain from a very early date. Even possibly bears.
Lake Tahoe is pretty striking in that so many trees in particular on the Nevada side were cut down to be used for square set timbering in Virginia City mines and melting down of ore, etc.
It really hasn’t recovered all that much in 150 years~
Toothpicks?
Probably to be filed under ‘Class Warfare’: DoorDash, DASH, and Klarna have signed a deal where customers can choose to pay for food deliveries in interest-free installments. While restaurant food delivery is discretionary spending, or should be, buy now pay later plans for it no doubt are another sign of the financial shape of Americans.
“Massive Explosion Rocks Key Bomber Base Deep Inside Russia”
Putting on my mark-one tin foil cap, I am going to say that this was the doing of the White House as a way of pressuring the Russians to go for a ceasefire deal. The message is sign it or else there will be more attacks on your nuke bases and we can make it happen. Somebody gave the Ukrainians targeting information which is why I say the White House. But if I were the Russians, I would have a different take away. I would say to myself that it is essential to shut down that viper’s nest in the Ukraine less the war ends and the US/EU load up the entire country with drones to take out the Russian nuclear posture in case of war and leave them defenseless. It never maters who is President, the aim is always the same. To get the nuclear drop on the Russians. But have they really thought it through? What would be the US reaction if drones targeted one of the big US nuke bomber bases?
Two comments,
1 Zelensky is already claiming the gas pipeline attack is a Russian false flag (sigh).
2. British tabloids are already trying to blame Putin for the substation fire near Heathrow that has caused the airport to shut down.
In both cases, ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they’, is the only response that springs to mind.
I think we are finding that under Trump too the US is “not agreement capable.” There’s a theory going around that his opening towards Russia is merely to neutralize their opposition to a new assault, diplomatic or otherwise, on Iran.
Just a theory.
Depending on when the Odessa attack occurred, it would seem to have had to opposite reaction from what the US would want…
A surprisingly good article from a Prof. of Sociology.
A while ago I was wondering what sort of visual turning point would indicate the end of the high tide mark of wokeness. I thought maybe it would be a negative review of Disneys Snow White in the Guardian. And sure enough, they’ve given it one star.
Future historians will have an interesting time trying to work out what drove this period of madness, where genuine concern for repressed minorities became weaponised to such destructive effect. The useful idiots of wokeness have done more to empower the worst elements of the conservative right than any number of well funded right wing foundations. Or maybe that was the whole point.
the irony is that there are lots of non-political things wrong with the 2025 “Snow White” reboot: “uncanny valley” computer animation, uninspired plot twist, Disney’s laziness of rehashing existing intellectual property versus creating something new. (Disney went from “Frozen” to lazy reboots in less than 15 years.)
The political controversy is just the icing on the cake.
That´s actually one important point – the below YT-rant (representative for many others I guess) says almost nothing about the movie itself.
For instance one huge problem are the lead actresses.
Gal Gadot is among the worst actresses in this segment.
I don´t like to make such assumptions having experienced that many actors are full of self-doubt – but is there a connection between Gadot´s rise and her pro-genocidal racism + former IDF-service???
She has still not learned to articulate naturally and her acting is just extremely artificial. I frankly can hardly stand watching her. It´s a bit like the early Schwarzenegger in English. Both Gadot and that Arnie are insufferable in their own voices. They have some excellent dubbing actors in Germany at least.
Besides – surprisingly – keeping in mind Gadot´s training in martial arts basics – Gadot cannot move properly. She appears very clumsy (compare Ana de Armas´s fluent movement and rhythm in Bond 25.)
It could be due to Gadot´s height. But then Dick van Dyke or Sigourney Weaver or Geena Davis learned that. It´s part of the job.
Considering how much she has done so far this is not a good sign.
Many might disagree with me. But I am really surprised over her success considering the sheer talent available in the industry.
Zegler is your usual case of immature actress who is supposed to be turned into a star because she has learned to sing. Which is the only thing she can deliver in a convincing manner. But being the USA there are thousands out there who can sing.
Zegler should be cautious. If everything around you – like with Hunger Games and now Snow White again (!) falls apart its only your substance that can keep it all together but not with that milk toast kind of acting.
And to be fair: She is probably better than the genre allows her to be. If she did more classical, art film stuff she could engage much more in other areas which I think she could deliver more convincingly.
And offer her room to mature and grow.
I just have to think of the excellence of French actresses who will never grace a “Snow White” and would make any US star pale.
So may be being cast for the remake of “West Side Story” has turned out to be a curse for Zengler. She might have thought she made it. At least her media appearances suggest that.
p.s. there is a golden rule for movie-goers: You do not watch Disney live-action remakes of animation. Will save you money and nerves.
Here a list of all Disney live-action since the 1950s, without Marvel and Star Wars:
350 titles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkAjPl_SFqA
edit: correct link to the film list
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls077114097/
The above youtube link instead features a short clip from “Snow White” that reveals a few issues. Gadot acting with her fingers makes no sense. Way too much. I don´t know why they didn´t tell her to tone it down. If you listen to her articulating the text it´s always as if she were about to stumble. It´s never in complete control of the material. And then in the counter-shot milk-toast-faced Snow White written “movie message” all over. Any sane kid would be cracking up over this.
The issue of woke is not about “wokeness” as such. It´s the lack of any sublime quality. This would be artistically second-rate in any era. It´s simply bad acting.
Five years ago a film like “Snow White” would have just been part of the pack. But now? Disney is in full panic mode over the release of this film as every preview gets savaged and gets ratioed to hell-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbW8pOO7eYg (7:00 mins)
But you are absolutely correct in you saying that ‘the useful idiots of wokeness have done more to empower the worst elements of the conservative right than any number of well funded right wing foundations.’ Through a brief time of having power, their total abuse of it have helped with the election of Trump and his buddies like Musk and Thiel. And it has helped pushed the peoples of several countries to the right in revulsion and seek shelter in nationalism. Lots of material at least for future historians to work through to see this progress over a relatively limited number of years.
>>> ‘the useful idiots of wokeness have done more to empower the worst elements of the conservative right than any number of well funded right wing foundations.’
Just as government subsidies created post-Paypal Elon Musk.
Musk even got a shout-out (alongside Stacy Abrams, remember her?) on one of the wokest of woke shows, “Star Trek: Discovery” when Musk was on the woke side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bgMCNXzNtE11
If you want real Star Trek, you can skip “Star Trek: Discovery” and watch “The Orville” instead. A lot of the actors and people that worked on Star Trek went over to work for “The Orville”-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej24W8gcmXQ (2:48 mins)
Seconded.
There’s some weird idpol plots but Seth Mcfarlane writes some sweet stories!
Is that Jason “Field Marshal Zhukov” Isaacs I see? Seriously? I wasn´t aware he does B-movies still.
Something tells me they were laughin their asses off in the writers´ room.
Yes, and Isaacs is awesoem when he pledges to “Make the Terran Empire Glorius Again!”
An excellent actor.
He has gained in quality over the years.
Initially a bit unsure of himself sometimes or so it seemed, due to not being properly directed? I don´t know (would have to rewatch more of his early stuff).
He was the doctor on board of the “EVENT HORIZON”. 30 years ago.
Which I found a great concept from the sci-fi POV, bringing in hell as the inter-dimensional space…
Ha! I didn´t know the above youtube review of the Snow White disaster quotes… “Event Horizon”!
With respect, I think you have this right but using a terrible example. I’m on record in the last day or so on here about the awful alphabeti rubbish that Disney is chasing. So we’re on the same page there.
The criticisms put forward by people like the Critical Drinker are often on the nose. However, if you’re going to nail your colours to the mast with a list of key criticisms that you use in EVERY critique, you can understand when we find that you’ve moved onto “content creation” and used ALL those tropes yourself. You are a blatant hypocrite.
Please look up the media creation this guy made and the YouTube critiques. It was initially billed as a feature film. When the money (from the public) didn’t show, he downgraded it into a “proof of concept” kinda thing for a future movie franchise.
Trouble was, a few YouTubers watched it. Oh dear. ALL the tropes he claimed to “hate” (like 100 pound girls overpowering 300 pound guys) were there. He broke EVERY rule he claimed to hold dear as a “movie reviewer”. Oops
If you are going to be a movie critic you do NOT have to be a movie provider yourself. However, if you go on to make a so-called movie that breaks EVERY SINGLE rule you set for “what makes a good film” we are entitled to think you are a grifter.
FWIW I think the best critics have “done something themselves”. I wrote a book. I feel able, via 15 years of research, to call out frauds. If you’re gonna call out frauds you had better make sure you’ve done enough work to back this up……and if YOUR attmpt at an original work falls victim to EVERY SINGLE TROPE then we are entitled to call you out. The Critical Drinker had a good “schtick”…….but you can’t survive on that unless you put in serious work. Which he clearly has NOT done. Now he’s a parody of himself. His books don’t make much money, I’d LOVE to see his profits for that “film” he made, given the comments in the supposedly positive threads.
Maybe don’t quote him in future? The guy has yet to demonstrate financial success beyond “grifting in YT”. Do you want to link to that? Personally I’d like to link to a book I wrote on basis on 15 years of peer-reviewed work rather than just presenting an artificial persona as a drunk Scottish guy.
Well, that’s you. Me, on this I’m different.
I thought about what you said today but I think that I am going to go with the saying how you have to separate the player from the game that they are playing. So I have only gone into his history a little bit but what really interests me is what he says and his analysis of what is going on. That is what really interests me. So I guess that here we are going to have to agree to disagree with each other.
Fair enough. I’m not going to launch diatribes against his fans. Humour is subjective. I just found it funny when loads of his strongest supporters, upon watching his “film” did a 180 in the comments. It reminded me of the Max Gogarty scandal which I watched in real time and saw the so-called left (but are really just the Islingtonistas at the Guardian) had their meltdown when caught out.
Plus whilst as you and others know I’m not the kind to get triggered by alphebetty stuff, his late night sessions with mates look an awful like the stories I heard from peers who boarded at the type of posh school I attended, with the soggy biscuit game etc. There are very unshielded homophobic comments by his peers that are allowed to go by. (BTW I refuse to subscribe to him and his peers to give him income but I occasionally check in to see how deranged his peers are getting.)
Feel free to attack the stupid “wokeness” thing, which I equally despise, but his peers making some very suspect comments suggesting they’re so far in the closet that they’re in Narnia? Hmmmm. In case this is is seen as ad hominem, here is one of the takedowns of the guys’ methods and fanbase, going scene by scene through his “production”.
I noticed upon Roe v Wade being dead upon political delivery, that the Donkey Show practically embraced anything trans-knowing all too well how much the evangs hate-hate-hate trans with a burning passion, as it gave them a huge wedge platform in the us versus them intermural games.
Notice now a few months into Trump 2.0 that only the T in LGBTQ has been targeted?
When it was the gay movement, most people were cool with that or didn’t even care. But when it became LGBTQ, that is when the games began and the ‘L’s were sometimes targeted by the other letters for not getting in line with ALL the latest fashionable beliefs.
It is interesting that, in my limited experience, outside media and media workers almost nobody cares about this issue or those who are kinda opposed don´t know that it hardly matters in the real world. A phantom chased by phantoms. It was a genius move by the left to use to destroy itself. Never has so little shit caused so much reek. However the discussion as hyped does prove that people do want their intimate spaces and think not completely destroyed or levelled. In how far that is mere culture and social pattern or more I don´t know.
Yep. Making it alphabetty was classic Judean People’s Front and the people like me on the ground didn’t care for this, when we saw that the real issue was and remains us workers vs the Musks of this world.
What IM Doc said the other say in post about the troublemakers sums up the insanity. I used my exit from Facebook many years ago to give a bunch of LGBQT etc friends who frankly couldn’t argue out of a paper bag the chance to cut ties with me, since I wanted to return to more traditional methods (email). I was not surprised when not a single one kept up with me via email.
Every single one was a LGBQT activitist who had never read a single thing by Marx or Smith or others. All entitled idiots. No loss to me. I’m just hoping that at the next election someone wears a sandwich board to quote how our gay MP is voting for cuts. I certainly won’t forget that. If someone wanted to be awkward they could point out that the guy with funny moustache was vegetarian……but I don’t condone that.
>”I’m just hoping that at the next election someone wears a sandwich board to quote how our gay MP is voting for cuts.”
Remember the “pro-NATO” signs and pro arms-manufacturers ads during various Cristopher Street Days marches since 2022?
That alone was insane.
And thanks for saying this:
>”Every single one was a LGBQT activitist who had never read a single thing by Marx or Smith or others.”
I cannot emphasize it enough.
If you talk to sociology professors at universities they are desparate. They argue they cannot read serious scholarship any more. Students do not understand it. At some point you give up.
For Germany this is a serious intellectual demise with the Frankfurt School traditions in ruins and what not. Germany had been Europe´s center of labour movements in the 20th century. Almost nothing of that is left. And the disolution of the Left was also due to the fact that there was no knowledge base any more that would connect the various groups invovled. Intellectual classes with labour and vice versa. Which was an understanding of how the world works.
And this leads everyone to Dave Chappelles alphabet people….
thanks
Never watched him since I have stopped watching US comedy long ago
Some of it works, some of it so-so.
But is this the reason they have made so much fuss about him that even in small Germany one could hear about it?
Odd. But I heard same is happening in the scene in Germany.
Of course those same comedians who call for censoring other comedians making jokes à la Chappelle behind the stage are backstabbing rivals when it comes to money and business. Duplicitous as entertainment has ever been.
It´s an ugly planet, it´s a human planet.
My favourite online movie critic just dropped a (very funny) review of Snow White.
As for comedians – yes, the whole cancelling thing is, unbelievably, still going on. A very popular Irish online comedian, known for his very gentle (if potty mouthed) humour was drive off social media this week because he made some very mild comments about immigration (i.e., this is something we really should be talking about).
It has, of course, been entirely counter productive, as a host of right wing nasties have been able to portray themselves as defenders of free speech.
OK I just subscribed to that YouTuber! Much funnier than so many reviewers who have a “schtick”. Thanks.
I am glad to see I am not the only one being puzzled over Gadot.
I have the impression this production must have been a very very huge mess. There were about 1000 authors involved at some point, as different as Erin Wilson, Greta Gerwig, Jez Butterworth, Steven Levenson, Jeff Nathanson, Victoria Strouse, Chris Weitz. If you wonder how this script could not work out look up their films.
And why their choice fell on Marc Webb I have no clue. (I guess because he has a thing with music videos and his stars singing in 500 Days of Summer.)
p.s. Is this youtuber imitating Brie Larson as Envy Adams in Scott Pilgrim, one of my personal favourites?
Academia bought in too. More signatures indicating preferred pronouns there than anywhere Eli’s I would guess
It’s the logic that the apostate is more dangerous than the heretic is more dangerous than the infidel. Most Gs, Ls, and Bs I know are getting tired of it.
My recollection is that the Repubs started it by attacking Ts, and the Dems then rallied to the Ts defense. Pro forma, too little too late. The Dems should have codified Roe v Wade when they had the chance, but like good little scool children, they believed stare decisis was a thing.
It hasn’t been a thing since the Civil War:
https://constitution.congress.gov/resources/decisions-overruled/
The moral (also arriving too late) is that all laws SCOTUS legislates or overturns should be brought to a vote as a principle of democratic governance.
And this is particularly tragic since, having front-paged this group of humans, liberal Democrats elevated it into the national consciousness, to be terrorized by Republicans. Trans-rights would have been better off being left alone by liberal Democrats, rather than used and discarded as a political prop.
Much like protecting the disabled was a key virtue signal during the early stages of the Pandemic, and after Biden declared it over, well, immunocompromised and disabled people have been literally left to die by liberal Democrats. Shut in their homes, unable to leave, at risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2 when engaged in necessary activities in the medical “system” we have.
Liberal Democrats are worthy of nothing but contempt and scorn. That their Trump authoritarianism nightmare is coming true is mildly amusing, in fact. More so that liberal Democrat “leaders” clearly never took it so seriously as it was promulgated, and have no plan or energy to present even a unified front of weak sauce opposition, is duly amusing.
I do wonder if there is something of a logic behind why modern “liberals” are drawn to Trans-rights like moths to fire.
One thing that modern liberals inherited from the classical liberals is the idea that “you are what you want” (as an individual). The moderns have expanded the idea to ithe notion that you have the right to be whatever you want to be. The idea that you cannot be what you want to be because of some “natural” laws that simply exist because they do is anathema to them. If you believe that you can be (insert name of the job/role here), who’s to say that the Y chromosome should prevent one from being a woman, if you want to be one? But, this becomes problematic fast if you believe in diversity because, well, actual diversity exists in nature–there are such people called “women” who are as they are because of two X chromosomes, not necessarily because they conscientiously want to be women. If you are whatever you want to be, what’s the point of recognizing this “diversity”? So “liberalism” cannot coexist with “diversity.” (I think Brian Barry made an argument along these lines, but I can’t remember exactly).
But, this in turn, raises another interesting problem: what does it matter what you want to “be”? Here, I’m wandering a bit into a territory that I don’t know too much about, but, as I remember it, classical liberalism was ultimately about what you “want” and what you “want to do,” not what you want to “be.” “Identity” is, in many ways, anti-liberal, romanticist notion, I think. So we come across the second internal contradiction: illogical mixing of liberal and anti-liberal ideas in guise of liberal lingo.
Blaming people who want the boot off their neck (or the thugs out of their doctor’s office) is an interesting view.
PlutoniumKun: I agree that the article by Vivek Chibber is intriguing, particularly early on when he talks about the communist / socialist background of important members of the civil-rights movement under the headline The Path Not Taken.
Yet his diagnosis is correct: “In contrast to its left-wing defenders, I will suggest that [wokeness] expresses a profound narrowing of what counts as social redress; and against the Right, I will show that its success is due to the retreat of the radical Left, not its hegemony. Woke culture is the organic ideology of a narrow elite, drunk with power, and backed by the key power centers of American politics.”
Further, I read Chibber’s article in tandem with Stephen Lerner’s article in In These Times about how labor is too cautious and should take risks. Yet Lerner fails to mention redistributionist policies, Social Security, health care, and practicalities. Like so many of the woke, he proposes a more or less leaderless movement — which is somehow to get organized enough to occupy a factory. He should read a tad more Gramsci. Lerner likes SNCC and ignores those leaders mentioned in Chibber under The Path Not Taken.
So if you want to understand how thoroughly woke-a-fied the U S remains, give a look at Lerner. I read it all, even as I lost patience with his shillyshallying.
Politics has to take a materialist approach, but the Lerners of the world are still trying to “save” us through intersectionality. He even proposes a job action against ICE by air traffic controllers. Who is going to support the air traffic controllers? And if the deported are not citizens — and I’m not trying to be the blue meanie here, because I understand the flagrant disregard for due process — why should unionists take the risk?
>”why should unionists take the risk?”
Greenwald in his System Update on this topic pointed out – and I have to trust him on this – that black labour unionists were opposed to pro-immigration regulations under Bush Jr. Something which your usual well-to-do European “leftist” most likely would not grasp at first.
Of course we do have the problem that into this entire complex racist prejudice is finding its way as a source for explanations for papering over bigger ideological contradictions which would eventually upset the entire construction.
It is unsettling to how all of a sudden all over the fabric the seams burst and questions arise that were so obvious and yet so totally muted for decades.
Greenwald interviewed Susan Neiman yesterday, who made the same point as you did in your last paragraph regarding the backlash caused by the overreach of these useful idiots – https://rumble.com/v6qyamg-life-long-leftist-philosopher-susan-neiman-on-how-wokeism-assaults-and-subv.html
It really was not that hard to predict that a lot of the hard fought progress made over the course of decades would be undone if these ‘woke’ cancellations continued, and yet here we are.
However I still share the belief that the “woke” issue is only a surface. The capitalist order and its redicalisation is neither woke nor not-woke.
To now blame everything on them “wokes” is a fine excuse for those forces who truly held and hold power. None of what has destroyed civil society since the advent of Clintons lot has in essence anything to do with woke.
Not in the finance sector, nor the destruction of labour outsourcing, not the rise of the national security state, not the insane concentration of capital and power.
Have the 9/11 wars and those 6+million dead, dozens of countries destroyed, the cost thereof, the ripping off resources by US multis, and so on anything to do with woke? The finance crashes, debt of Global South? The trillions spent on WMDs´ modernisation? Increase of poverty in the US? No money for education? Health care? No public transport?
Yeah kinda with you on this. I don’t believe the “original” (generally not steeped in religious nonsense) generation of proto-oligarchs in the 1960s were pro or anti feminism. However they definitely saw it as a useful vehicle for their gradual erosion of the welfare state and real household wages, which FORCED wives to work if household income was to be maintained.
These feminists boasted that they had the choice to work if they wanted, not realising that this would not be a choice for long but would become a necessity, unless they wanted to fall back into poverty.
That is the whole point.
Destroy objectivity, as that degrades into democracy.
Which is a terrible thing for the established.
“Weed Users At Greater Risk For Heart Attack, Stroke Health Day”
Two weeks ago it was alcohol, now it s cannabis. My intial reaction to these sorts of headlines is “refer madness is back!” But I clicked through to the actual study to see for myself.
In that paper, “cannabis-user” is not defined. It sould be good to know if they were looking at all varieties of cannabis use, or just smokers. Even smokers should be broken out into those who inhale “hot” smoke versus “cold” smoke given that hot particles damage do significantly more lung damage (per my primary doctor).
It would also be nice to know the risk in smoke versus edibles, whether it is THC other cannabanoids or something else that causes the higher risk. It would be nice to know if dosage affects the risk (the authors admit on the bottom of page 6 that they have no idea about dosage). Then again, they never seem to look at what component of cannabis seems to cause the risk, so the question of dosage cannot even be approached. We don’t even know how much cannabis in whatever form at whatever levels of components is being consumed. Ar these people who take an edible every other week or people who are constantly smoking high grade weed? Again, cannabis user is left undefined in the study.
Color me not impressed. I’m filing under “refer madness” for the time being.
Chris, thanks for reading it and paraphrasing. It was so “weak” that I couldn’t read it. I was wondering how far back in time it went. To 2020? to 2000, to 1968. Lots of confounding issues, in fact pointless really, except for its propaganda value.
‘Nothing Short of Genocide’: Israel Kills 200 Children Common Dreams
“Nearly 200 children are among those killed by Israel in Gaza over the last three days since the powerful U.S. ally broke a cease-fire agreement and began a massive bombing campaign with the blessing of the Trump administration.”
I watch the nightly news, usually NBC, mainly to catch the daily propaganda line. So I’m used to ridiculous BS and can usually control my ranting for my wife’s sake. But last night I went nuts. The segment on Gaza, the only one of the night, was about this program “led by the US” for taking injured Palestinian children who had managed to get out on to Western countries for medical care. It featured two children who were being taken to the US for cancer treatment. According to the story, about 260 Palestinian children have been helped by this program over the entire course of the genocide.
Having read about the renewed Israeli bombing earlier in the day, this story was an absolute obscenity to me. Not because of the featured medical program itself, which seemed to be run by well-meaning “humanitarians,” but by the fact that *this* was the NBC News coverage of Gaza; a “feel good” story about Americans helping Palestinian kids. There was nothing about Americans providing the bombs that had vaporized 200+ Palestinian children in the previous 48 hours! Andrea Mitchell – naturally – was the reporter.
Obscenity on top of obscenity.
I saw that last night. Pretty much one of most disgusting segments in ages on nightly news. Jeez, if only the cancer center and hospitals in Gaza weren’t blown up in the first place i screamed at Lester Dolt. How these mother ( Family blog) look at themselves in the mirror, never mind sleeping at night, is beyond my comprehension. Should put that segment right on the shelf next to Madeleine Albright’s 60 minute segment from years ago regarding the children killed in Iraq.
They put as much pancake makeup on the truth to save face, as Andrea Mitchell applies on her mug.
pjay: What you are pointing to is something that I am now seeing emerging in the U S of A. I’m certainly seeing it on BkFace, the world’s source of earnest snark.
Americans are now engaged in a phase that I will identify as: We Are the Good Germans.
No conscience with regard to Ukraine and the proxy genocide of a million soldiers, mainly men 25-45, along with a “diaspora” of seven million in the EU and who knows how many in the Russian Federation. The Good Germans only count certain things, and the Good Germans certainly won’t take notice of things like Antony Blinken’s misadventures in that pizzeria that served up Nazi regalia.
Likewise, Francesca Albanese has detailed over and over how the actions by the Israeli army and government in Gaza are genocide, along with the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, all the way down to uprooting of olive trees and confiscation of mosques. The Good Germans are still bruiting about the figure of 40,000 dead in Gaza — because a year-old figure means to them that not enough Palestinians have been killed.
I’m Speaking, indeed.
I’ve reached the point where I think that journalists should be prosecuted as war criminals. Failing to report the murders of these children, juxtaposed to a story that obscures their dying due to genocide, only serves the propaganda interests of homicidal zionists. A free press? Hardly. A captured press.
The piece on labor caution is worthwhile thanks. I have been thinking lately that the same legal structures that are supposed to protect workers who are trying to organize also protect employers from wildcat soapbox strikes. I believe the future will involve more labor unrest and I’m sorry to say I also believe it is likely to be necessary. If you don’t believe your peaceful cooperation will ever get you anything, the time for a strike is now.
The UTube thingy keeps showing me videos of Republicans in red states screaming “Tax the Rich” at GOP incumbents in safe seats. So it feels like Trump has achieved a new level of class consciousness. I don’t think the claim that these people are actors paid by Soros et al is going to hold up much longer.
I hope you’re right and also wonder how many are also having a bit of think about how Prager U, for instance, has such a huge ad budget.
One can now get a genuine Canadian made MAGA hat: ‘Make America Go Away’. Highly recommend at all your locally owned businesses.
Back in the ‘70’s you could occasionally see a “US Out of North America” bumper sticker.
This piece is excellent. Thanks for sharing! Fascinating study of the way in which investing in “dated” technologies can reap excellent rewards, as well as showing that Japan was totally kneecapped by their vassalage to the US.
“Putting Missile Interceptors In Space Critical To Defending U.S. Citizens: Space Force Boss”
They’re talking about militarizing space. The US is actually a signatory of the 1968 Outer Space treaty which tried to put a lid on putting weapons in space as this could end up with nukes orbiting the Earth waiting to be directed to any city or target on the surface. Do we really want to go there? The US Space Force said that their job was to ‘dominate space’ which implies that they want to deny it to any other country. And the reason is not to make America safe whatever that means but to enrich the MIC. Those officers in the USSF will get huge budgets and rapid promotions as well as important assignments. The Pentagon imagines that they will be in a position to get the drop on any country on the planet and all the big corporations will be given another trough to feed from. This will bring the era of cooperative space ventures to an end and will make the world less safe as there will be an arms race in space over our heads-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
Coffee through sinuses warning!
Gen Saltzman quoted his admiration for US space tech.
I guess he thinks Boeing getting out of the capsule business impressive.
The challenges of space based boost phase intercept are beyond US.
I doubt the Russian will provide launch services.
Note THAAD has launch phase capability I.e. put it in S Korea and if 100 miracles happen it might try shooting on boost.
Golden brick is what we will get.
There have been Space Force recruiting commercials on YT over the past 2 weeks. Seems like a new thing.
Why did Mississippians always make for the best astronauts?
…they all took up space in school
Worse is this:
We went through this whole deal several decades ago. Everyone should be aware that anything you launch into space has a good chance of exploding and showering the Earth with particles from the former spacecraft. This may be bad enough with traditional boosters and satellites. If the satellite includes radioactive material, say plutonium, then an explosion would shower the planet with plutonium dust, perhaps the most toxic substance around, and one that does not become harmless for hundreds of thousands of years. A doomsday weapon if there ever was one.
The space industry has done its best to downplay this incredible hazard for a long time. I don’t understand why.
They’re going to come for everything but Covid, get ready. Just kill me already. The tweet by Laura Miers reminds me of an old buddy, Lambert. “Tis a mystery”.
MDA Elonothon* ’25!
Now in iThon format. give generously to Musk Deserving Assets in order to ward off insignificance. Operators are standing by!
* any similarities to Ivar Kreuger are strictly coincidental.
DOGE is going global. It needs to be stopped. – Disconnect
Like I have said…there is a poison pill in the “multipolar” world.
“The Alliance of Sahel States Forges Ahead”
I was reading recently that ECOWAS was kind enough to invite the countries of the Sahel States to come back into their union again. Yeah, nah!
‘Doug Fir with penne pasta in a creamy Alfredo sauce’
Lean Cuisine and Stouffer’s meals recalled for ‘wood-like material’ linked to choking AP
Wood cellulose, used as a filler material? The Soviets used it to adulterate/stretch the use of bread flour during the siege of Leningrad.
“Nuclear-powered spacecraft with 11,000-pound payload planned by US space firms”
Mini-nuclear reactors in space? What could possibly go wrong? Well, except for that time a Russian satellite equipped with a mini-reactor suffered a mishap and came down over northern Canada back in ’78 scattering nuclear material near and far-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954
And is the Kessler syndrome still a thing?
Agent Orange: “We will totally militarize the Arctic and Canada will pay for it!”
“The Limitations of the US Naval Air Defense System will Force the US to Withdraw from the Red Sea”
‘A single Aegis destroyer can carry up to 96 missiles in its Mk 41 Vertical Launching System (VLS) cells.’
So if each of those cells are loaded up with 2 or 3 million dollar missiles, that is about a quarter of a billion dollars worth in each VLS. And as two missiles are used for each target to get a 90% hit rate to shoot down $40,000 drones, that is not exactly a great return of investment.
It’s tantamount to quelling a wildfire by dropping enormous piles of banded bundles of Benjamins by air, in other to smother it.
Oh, my coffee, and my sinus!
It is excellent return of investment, for those that invested in a company that makes missiles. It’s so good, that it justifies them investing a bit in drone capabilites of the “other side”.
I suppose USS Truman has moved north in the Red Sea and its aircraft are getting refueled a bit to get to Sana’a.
Earlier this week the carrier was under USAF fighter cover who took out most of the drones.
Probably used AIM 9 which is relative cheap or a bit more costly AIM 120. I doubt they used guns.
The Aegis SM 3 are for ballistic threat, or high altitude aircraft.
Navy does not like the press reports about USAF keeping their carriers safe.
I don’t think SM-3s (what the blog post is about) are being used against drones.
re: German war budget passed by 2nd chamber of the House
THE LEFT was involved in the yes-vote as government partners in the smaller states of Bremen (which is depending on naval industries) and Mecklenburg Vorpommern.
In Mecklenburg Vorpommern THE LEFT protesteth in order to however agree “in the interest of the nation”.
The state is supposed to receive 1B Euros.
The longest explanation/justification by a LEFT comes from the smallest state, Bremen:
“(…)
“Ultimately, the decisive factor for our approval today in the Bundesrat was our responsibility for the state of Bremen. This package can provide Bremen and Bremerhaven with urgently needed financial leeway, even if it is limited. Given the current pressure on public finances, which is felt deep into the city districts, this can make a tangible difference. We will now advocate for the additional financial resources for Bremen and Bremerhaven to be used for truly necessary investments and fight to ensure that these are not offset by social cuts. This also includes investments in social infrastructure and the city districts.
Furthermore, we expect the debt brake to be fundamentally reformed with the participation of the new Left Party faction in the Bundestag. To advance this, we have agreed with our coalition partners in Bremen and the red-red coalition in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania to submit an initiative for a resolution to reform the debt brake in the Bundesrat.”
(…)”
re: THE GREENS, climate obligations and the new budget:
BERLINER ZEITUNG, machine translation
The big climate lie: Has Habeck betrayed the Greens?
The climate targets in the Basic Law are non-binding. The military buildup is ruining the balance sheet. Has Robert Habeck misled his party?
https://archive.is/EL8gH
There a few words about arms and emissions:
“(…)
A Leopard 2 tank consumes an average of just over four liters of diesel and emits 1.5 kilograms of CO₂ per kilometer, as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) reports. An F-35 fighter jet emits almost 28 tons of greenhouse gas per mission. The ecological footprint of the modern aircraft is worse than that of its predecessor, the F-16,
(…)
It will never be possible to determine this precisely, as armaments, the military, and war are exempt from all climate damage measurements. Armed forces are not required to report their emissions to the United Nations (UN) and therefore do not appear in the statistics. The Paris Agreement, which Germany intends to follow for the civilian sector, stipulates that reporting of military climate damage is purely voluntary. The researchers say the key to a real reduction in military CO₂ emissions lies “in cutting the enormous military budgets worldwide.”
(…)”
To mention “war” and “arms” in connection with reducing emissions alludes to something idiotic, perverted. It is reminiscent of the craziest Sci-Fi out there. Eventually we will shed tears over too high emission by a new “Leopard ZERO” but have no qualms about the people killed.
WWIII is okay unless the climate is affected.
Wer hat uns verraten – Sozialdemokraten!
‘Wer soll das bezahlen?
Wer hat das bestellt?’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkPIe5kLdw8&ab_channel=TheDuran/
US-Iran conflict and Russian mediation
The Duran refuses to understand the commitment to the expansion of Israel by its allies.
I went off the Duran a bit during the last British Election.
Mercouris was banging on about Farage all the time but I never heard him mention Galloway once. He is hostile to the Left in general and always excuses Trump if he can.
I found the same. So when they talk about Trump you have to take what they say with a pinch of salt. But otherwise they give excellent coverage.
CRYPTO MINING COMPANY AGREES TO SPEED CLEANUP OF ITS COAL ASH PILE Allegheny Front
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Proud to announce the launch of CAPCoin, get your pile today!
Take down Tesla organization.
Purely an organic protest movement. yeah. right….
https://www.teslatakedown.com/
real grassroots stuff.
https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/teslatakedown?link_id=1
BLM’s “mostly peaceful protests”, anyone? / ;)
It’s the Indivisible org that’s worth looking in to this time: funding, sponsors, etc. / imo.
https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/758736/
Imagine the reaction if it were “Iresla (cough anagram cough) takedown” instead?
RE: “Federal Judge Blocks DOGE’s Social Security “Fishing Expedition””
https://archive.ph/k9efu#selection-1781.0-1803.221
Trump Admin Threatens to Stop Social Security If DOGE Can’t Have Personal Data
Trump’s interim Social Security chief says he wants to turn off the program if Musk and DOGE can’t access Americans’ most sensitive data
The “Democrats Become What They Once Opposed” is a pretty good personal recap of how changes to the Democrat project betrayed the people who were once their base. The problem of getting funding is certainly real, which was why corporations were able to push the Democratic Leadership Council and its fellow travelers into positions of power from the late 1970s on, reaching fulfillment under Clinton. But I would argue funding becomes difficult and more dependent on large donors when you’re running on an unpopular (or anti-populist) agenda. And what positive in the Democrats’ agenda now is popular? They’ve clearly given up on Medicare-for-all by now and instead are all on board with weakening Medicare with Obamacare and Medicare Advantage scams, and their support for increasing the minimum wage is faint and sporadic. The writer says, “Despite all the talk about diversity and inclusion, working-class voices without college credentials were virtually nonexistent.” And that pretty much sums up the party and its values. Identity politics and DEI, where diversity is based on a narrow selection of predefined checkboxes, equity involves righting historic wrongs by inflicting new ones, and inclusion means excluding to the greatest extent possible anyone who doesn’t fit into the narrowly defined “diverse” categories. I won’t say there’s no there there, but there’s nothing resembling the base for a mass political party or movement you can get out of that. The same message can be found in the other article, “The Rise and (Likely) Fall of Wokeness”.
If genuine leftists with a message of improving the material circumstances and economic opportunities of most Americans’ lives can’t mount a hostile takeover of the Democrat machine,n maybe it’s time to start a new party and begin peeling existing Democrat politicians who want a future away from the old one. Have a leftist version of Gingrich’s “Contract With America” that promises a small number of positions and that prominently does not mention “social justice” (and all its associated acronyms), gun control, warmongering as the “exceptional, indispensable nation”, “free trade”, and “public-private partnerships” among those positions.
That one also nails it on the housing and related issues, similar to what I quoted in another comment below –
“America needs a party that will actually compete with corporations when they fail us. A party that will build public housing when developers make homes unaffordable. A party that will manufacture vaccines when pharmaceutical companies price-gouge. A party that will create public broadband when telecom monopolies fail to deliver.”
Amen.
The problem with this idea, as many have found, is that the political counties that comprise the United States control which parties can appear on voters ballots. They do this because they are the ones who print the ballots. So starting a new party is a practical impossibility because of the need to capture all 3,143 counties in the US and get them to print ballots with your party on it. Obviously both the Democratic and Republican parties see the writing on the wall here and will fight to the nail to keep things as they are.
The only viable approach for a “new party” is to take over one of the existing parties which are already included on voter ballots (much like the Cordyceps fungus that takes over the brain of an insect and then uses its body to get around!) This is pretty much what the Tea Party people did, and in my opinion it’s the only way for leftist US voters to move forward.
Well, the counties are not in charge of who gets on the ballots in WA State at least in terms of Presidential elections. The process is run through the office of the Secretary of State. Major parties select the candidates they want to appear on their side of the ballot for the primary. Minor parties and individuals have a separate process and set of requirements they have to satisfy to appear on the ballot. However, as you note, both major parties fight tooth and nail to keep the minor parties off the ballot.
I’m not up on all the capabilities of this newfangled internet thing, but wasn’t it supposed to be good for activities like organizing a movement…or a new party? People in those 3,143 counties have to know about it before they’ll put signatures on any nominating petitions, and the only avenue to making them aware of it would seem to be the internet. I don’t know if one of things like GoFundMe or KickStarter or whatever would be of use, but you need a way to get the word out and start collecting funds. Even taking over an existing party you would need to identify what you’re for that’s different from the old version and put up candidates in every Congressional district. The Democrats have poisoned their brand for sure with all this culture wars junk, so I’m not sure how easy it would be to revert them to a working class party fighting “the malefactors of great wealth”.
RE: What’s the Matter with Abundance?
It’s a review of Ezra Klein’s book and well worth the read. It talks a lot about how to fix the housing crisis and the author of the article, as opposed to Klein, nails it –
“The only way to guarantee real housing abundance is deep and concerted public support, by adding the necessary state capacity to build and maintain a home for everyone who needs one.”
I have been saying the same thing for years, as our city keeps expecting the private sector or some non-profit to fix the problem. The only way to provide truly affordable housing is for the city to build it, manage it, and maintain it. Systemic changes are needed to make that happen, and there’s very little political will to make it so. I fear capitalism is going to have to kill most of us and pauperize the rest before learning to share becomes a valid option for improving society.
thanks
In Germany alone there are 2M uninhabited apartments.
German daily TAZ (i.e. even here it´s the Russians´ fault we have a shortage. But it at least provides the data)
German original
https://taz.de/Neue-Prognose-zu-Wohnraumbedarf/!6073483/
New forecast for housing demand
320,000 new apartments needed per year
According to a recent forecast by the Federal Institute for Social and Cultural Affairs (BBSR), the demand for housing is immense. However, there are significant regional differences.
March 20, 2025
It was this one figure that repeatedly blew up in the minds of former Federal Construction Minister Klara Geywitz (SPD) during her term in office: Germany needed 400,000 new apartments per year, the traffic light government had written into its coalition agreement. This target was nowhere near achieved. Of course, Geywitz couldn’t do anything about the difficult construction conditions caused by the Russian war of aggression, but her success was measured by this figure. A mere 294,400 apartments were built in 2023.
The Federal Ministry of Construction has now commissioned a new housing forecast from the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR). The result is that 320,000 apartments will be needed annually by 2030. Is the construction and housing crisis smaller than expected?
The answer to this question varies greatly depending on the institute. According to the Pestel Institute, the current demand is 550,000 apartments . The German Economic Institute (IW), on the other hand, estimates 372,600 new apartments.
What’s interesting about the BBSR’s forecast, however, is that it also breaks down regional demand. According to the forecast, 60,000 new apartments will be needed annually in Germany’s seven largest cities alone: Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, Cologne, and Düsseldorf. This corresponds to 20 percent of total demand.
The highest demand per capita is found in independent cities and rural districts in southern Germany: The city of Landshut ranks first (87 apartments per 10,000 inhabitants per year), followed by the districts of Regensburg (83), Kempten im Allgäu (77), and Memmingen (75), as well as the state capital of Munich (74 apartments). At the bottom of the list is the Weimarer Land district in Thuringia (5 apartments per 10,000 inhabitants). The national average demand is 38 apartments per 10,000 inhabitants per year.
“New housing must be built, especially in fast-growing cities and their surrounding areas,” said BBSR expert Anna Maria Müther at the presentation on Thursday. The focus is on rental and owner-occupied apartments in multi-family buildings. It is also important to stabilize building permits and further promote social housing.
In many rural regions, however, the need for new construction is rather moderate. In structurally weak districts with declining populations, the focus is more on maintaining the modern housing stock.
The demand forecast also took into account the approximately two million vacant apartments . However, only about half of these are ready for occupancy – and many vacant apartments are located in regions with low demand. According to the forecast, the need for new housing construction will be reduced “including the vacancy component by around 10,000 residential units.”
The forecast assumes that while population numbers will stagnate in the long term, the number of households will continue to grow. “This is due to the ongoing trend of single-person populations and aging,” explained BBSR expert Matthias Waltersbacher. One- to two-room apartments are particularly needed, but also those for families.
re: history of US transportation
book review of:
The American Transportation Revolution. A Social and Cultural History
by Marrs, Aaron W.
Baltimore, MD 2024, Johns Hopkins University Press
https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-143778?title=a-w-marrs-the-american-transportation-revolution&recno=22&page=2&q=&sort=&fq=&total=20488
Why Bukele opened his notorious prison to Trump deportees – The Washington Post
Isn’t that the same thing Trump is doing? First he jovially negotiates the release of some U.S. mercenaries imprisoned in Venezuela, after seeing regime change operations thwarted time and again. Then he tries to downplay the migratory consequences of the sanctions – which, among other things, triggered precisely the internationalization of the Aragua Train – by sending Venezuelan immigrants to human rights-violating prisons in El Salvador in one fell swoop and without trial.
“Probable Color Revolution Ongoing in Serbia”
My Serbs tell me no, this is organic and the ask is for investigation and tough enforcement of anticorruption laws on all parties, and as well to shut down the Rio Tinto deal. It seems the rare EU flags in the protests were used by the author to support his sort of hard right view. There’s a lot more euro scepticism there now then 10 years ago and Serbs really do understand that they’re in between a rock and a hard place. There were also some Yugoslav flags being held up. Makes me wistful…
There’s a Serbian guy who regularly comments here so it would be great to hear his view.
And yet it wouldn’t be surprising if the usual color revolutionaries weren’t trying to figure out a way to commandeer this. Let’s hope that can be warded off. Maybe the USAID cuts will help slightly.
https://archive.ph/VOzqQ
Law Firm Bends in Face of Trump Demands
Paul, Weiss — one of three law firms targeted by President Trump as part of his retribution campaign — said it resolved the conflict by agreeing to a range of commitments.
Regarding Serbia: it’s been going on for the past few months and most media (in neighboring EU countries) has scarcely mentioned the protests or its scale, which leads me to believe the protests are not a color revolution directed from abroad. It’s also interesting to draw a comparison with the grass-root anti-lithium-mining protests a while back… folks in Serbia seem justifiably angry at their political-capitalist elites …
From The Rise and (Likely) Fall of Wokeness
Gets its history wrong, oddly
(bold mine)
But that’s not what happened; everyone but Warren withdrew. Warren absolutely did not quit the primary until she got shellacked on Super Tuesday. It’s odd that the author doesn’t mention this, as this gives weight to the Democrat Party knifing Sanders because of his redistributionist leanings, with Warren being the spoiler here.
Elizabeth Warren ends her presidential campaign
For Sanders supporters, it is impossible to forget this moment. It signaled the end of any possible redemption for the Democrat Party, were that even possible. I have no doubt liberal Democrats would have found a way to effectively fight a Sanders’ presidency, had it happened, unlike their inability to navigate a Trump presidency today.
But wasn´t it Warren who had some serious contentions over some of Sanders´s social democratic policies. I believe this got mentioned here a few weeks ago.
I am not good on Warren. So forgive my lack of knowledge.
>”For Sanders supporters, it is impossible to forget this moment. It signaled the end of any possible redemption for the Democrat Party.”
Why exactly? She dropped out after finishing No. 3. So what was the bigger issue re: Sanders?
re: disappointment over Trump on the First
From Taibbi´s latest guest post
“What is most vexing about all of this—aside from, you know, said constitutional rights abuses—is that the left has spent the past decade or more punishing wrongthinkers, often destroying people’s livelihoods by unfairly labeling them sexist, or racist, or transphobic. The election of Donald Trump offered a glimmer of hope that, for all the malignancy he represents, we might at least get a rest from the relentless censorship of politically incorrect views. But no: now we just have the right playing the same game, using the cudgel of antisemitism to intimidate anyone who dares to speak against the state of Israel on a college campus.”
What did the author expect?
see entire piece:
“Donald Trump’s War on Anti-Semitism is the Last Thing We Jews Need
Not long ago, conservatives laughed at the idea that words are violence. Now, they’re embracing the same concept. Is that a good idea, morally or politically?”
by Ben Kawaller
Mar 21
https://www.racket.news/p/donald-trumps-war-on-anti-semitism
I don’t think Taibbi/Kirn are really on our (or my) side on this one. The Racket writer says the protestors are unwittingly against the existence of Israel by protesting the genocide. Here’s suggesting the counter proposal that any one who defends Israel re genocide is against the existence of Israel–perhaps “unwittingly.”
Which is exactly how we have gotten to where we are on speech as well as foreign policy. It has little to do with Trump although his recent actions are deplorable.
It’s complicated….
re: Israel T&K are most likely dragging their feet. No question.
I say “most likely” since Taibbi often adds so many parts of a phrase in parentheses that you see his attempt to remain “neutral” almost as in a science. Which – and that is a gordian knot he won´t solve – journalism is not. Because the information we process is not pure data from an uncommitted god. It´s the result of powerful institutions with pretty strong interests. In other word: capitalism. And T&K believe in capitalism. That is the underlying issue with their show. But I seldom see it as an argument against the show. They can´t explain it all. And I think they lost around 40k subscribers lately? (The original figure was around 540.000 subscribers?) Whether only due to Trump, DOGE and Co. or also Israel I don´t know.
But it´s important they´re there.
Maybe it ok to be against the existence of Israel. Perhaps that should be open for discussion. Funny Taibbi doesn’t think so, free speech being his thing for a while now.
From Trump’s Battles With Colleges Could Change American Culture for a Generation
Well, yeah. I mean the NIH allocated over a billion dollars to long-COVID research. Where did that money go, exactly?
Of course there’s no mention that modern universities simply hoover up public dollars in the form of student loans and aid from the Federal government, and from foreign students that pay full freight, and meanwhile adjunct professors get paid poverty level wages. Prestigious universities are just hedge funds. And we can go on at length about the athletics departments.
The American “university system” is very sick indeed; Trump is probably not the cure, but the system is absolutely exploitative and broken already.
Brittle to the point of cracking, and Admin bloat means lots of useless jobs on the chopping block. I have seen it coming for a long time now. With the fancy gyms and student housing, the football coach the highest paid state employee – the proliferation of pronouns was just the latest outburst of malign activity on their part.
In 2003 I moved back to the college town where I went to University, at first temporarily, that then became permanent due to a child and a house purchase. Being a townie and viewing the U as an alum and also potential employee and subject to their power, I have traveled down the road of disabusement. I moved back here in part because I had such fond memories of being a student in the 80s. Since then I’ve experienced a humiliating job interview that I was overqualified for (at the College of Public Health, ahem), witnessed the hospital CEO collect 3 million a year while bankrupting patients, watched in astonishment as prime real estate downtown went for both a three story gym with 100% glass windows, and a wildly huge and inefficient music building go up on even pricier ground, none of it taxable.
I have a friend who is an adjunct and at one point was making less than I was as a freelancer with a part-time job, while working twice the hours. He is a saint, and really cares, and has told me that in meetings the arrogance is off the charts about the local residents of our fine Midwestern town and don’t even start to talk about the rural areas.
Re Ukraine, Maidan et al.
Apologies this has already been referenced.
There is a Twitter / X account writing as @The_War_Economy with a new long thread covering background on Maidan, subsequent events and key players for the US, Ukraine and othes.
A good and seldom spoken analysis of the co-opting of anti-racism from part of a broader left coalition into a vicious and rather pointless striving for mindless control of linguistic and other non-dangerous (to elites) features of society.
IMO there have been two main phases to this:
(1) (1970 to 2000) The co-optation of the 60s civil rights movement from a dangerous redistributive movement into a harmless identity-politics-focused movement.
(2) (2010 to 2020) The destruction of a large leftist popular movement with far reaching economic agenda, symbolized by Bernie Sanders, Occupy, and others, supported by the broad US population, and replacing it with a traditional milquetoast liberal agenda housed in the Democratic party.
It’s hard to express how depressing this trajectory has been over the course of my lifetime, and how naive and gullible the US population has been to let this happen, seemingly without much resistance (with certain very honorable exceptions).
grass roots civil rights movements are not always large in scope, they can start out small and chaotic, misnamed like occupy wall street, which the nay sayers who spread doubt and confusion the currency of deceit. have said its failed, yet in todays red state world, red staters seem to be demanding that we tax the rich away. surely a win for occupy wall street.
so in reality, grass roots movements need not to have huge followings, we see that in revolutions, many times its about 1/4 to 1/3rd of citizens is all it takes to topple governments.
so we see that today with the defund the police movement. its spreading because it luminated vast corruption and lawlessness.
its started reform that will be hard for the well funded police unions and their boot licker supporters to put back into the bottle. this of course is a win for the defund the police movement.
law enforcement even admits it, yet they say its faltered, but the response says different.
https://www.copmag.org/police-reform-in-america-progress-challenges-and-new-approaches/
Police Reform in America: Progress, Challenges, and New Approaches CopMag.org Staff March 1, 2025 Articles, Current Issue
“The call to “defund the police” has reshaped the landscape of American law enforcement, leading to an array of reforms, new recruitment strategies, and experimental approaches to public safety. From budget reallocations(cough cough what it really means is defunding the police and using that money to transform policing) and specialized response programs to expanded recruitment efforts and enhanced training, police departments are evolving to meet the demands of a changing society.”
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smaller cities and towns are finding out that disbanding whole police departments, is not the end of the world.https://www.voanews.com/a/smaller-us-cities-disbanding-police-departments-are-they-still-safe-/7299583.html October 06, 2023 8:55 AMBy Liliya Anisimova
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and even officers themselves are calling for not only reform, but a defunding that puts some skin in the game for officers that break the law.
they are calling for the elimination of immunity, and the end to some state funding for the law breaker officers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM6cjuFiJe8
Real Talk #4- Police Lawsuits – Constitutional Audits, Accountability, The Cost of Misconduct
33 views Mar 17, 2025 Real Talk – Beyond the Badge
Welcome back to Real Talk – Behind the Badge, this is our fourth podcast and where we dig into the gritty realities of law enforcement, civil rights, and public trust. Today, we’re going to talk about the “Problems of Policing Lawsuits—the Constitutional Audits, Accountability, The Cost of Misconduct and how to make Improvements”. We’ll unpack what’s happening, why it matters, and what it’s costing—literally and figuratively.
I’m Tim, your host, a retired police sergeant with years on the beat, and lately, I’ve been diving deep into a phenomenon that’s reshaping how we view policing: First, Second, and Fourth Amendment audits. I’ve watched hundreds—maybe close to a thousand—of these videos on YouTube and Facebook, and as someone who wore the badge, I’m stunned.
Some officers uphold the law with professionalism; others violate citizens’ rights without a second thought. These “audit” videos feature self-styled journalists—armed with cameras and a working knowledge of their rights—testing police and business owners’ responses in public spaces. It’s interesting how many businesses believed they own the public sidewalks or the public right-of-ways in front of their business. What I find even more interesting is the number of police who believe the owners, with no evidence of ownership, no matter how absurd it is.
The number of police that take an owners word as gospel without investigating is breath-taking!
What I’ve witnessed ranges from inspiring to infuriating. Hundreds of clips show officers outright trampling on constitutional protections with illegal detentions, unlawful searches and demands for ID without cause. Some seem to act out of habit, trained to push boundaries. Others display ignorance of the law or departmental policies. And then there’s the arrogance—officers who act like dictators, unmoved even when citizens threaten lawsuits or complaints. Why don’t they care? Why is that and what does that tell us? That’s a question we’ll circle back to.
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the defund the police movement has gone main stream.
This is desperate. A link to a YouTube with all of 33 views proves the reverse of your claim.
And thread-jacking is a violation of our written site Policies. You keep bringing up defend the police, and worse your personal interpretation of what that is supposed to mean, on unrelated threads. I will not approve any more comments like this so do not bother providing them.
re: NATO/US
ha ha!
via Martyanov “The Simpsons” clip
30 sec.
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/03/open-thread_21.html
There is still an enormous power vacuum in America, the Dems are not just corrupt and craven they are bone stupid while the Republicans are headed by Co Regents Elon and Trump who are exploring realms of incompetence never before witnessed by Mankind.
Which doesn’t sit well with those Republicans who want to live in a Republic.
And there is where I see the only faint hope of avoiding a despotism of historic cruelty and incompetence, Republicans who want to live in a Republic.
You should link up with me at Class Unity and help start a new party, Tom!
A happy spring to all in the northern hemisphere. And a happy autumn to all in the southern hemisphere.
For those in the northern hemisphere here’s my favorite, or one of my favorite G&S tunes that I’ve left here often before, (so sue me. ha.), and is a very spring glad tidings music, imo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhhX6O6h_dw
Thank you Flora.
Always nice hearing a bit of G&S.
The Harris review is exactly what the abundance bros need more of-
“Abundance is not a permanent solution—Klein and Thompson would probably admit that we’ll need to cycle back toward environmental concerns at some point—but society is a living body, and the abundance perspective is an advocacy campaign for rebalancing its humors. Klein and Thompson suggest a controlled bleeding of regulations not because they are antigovernment ideologues but because society has become melancholic.”
Abundance of humors
Hail Columbia, happy land!
Hail, ye zeroes, heav’n-born band,
Who fought and bled in funding’s cause,
Who fought and bled in funding’s cause,
And when the storm of a funding war was gone
Enjoy’d the peace your acquiescence won.
Let independence be no longer your boast,
Ever mindful what it cost;
Ever grateful for the prize,
Let its alma matter not criticize.
Behold the chief who now commands,
Once more to serve his country stands.
The rock on which the storm will break,
The rock on which the storm will break,
But armed in virtue, firm, and true,
His hopes are fixed on Hasbara and you.
When hope was sinking in dismay,
When his gloom obscured Columbia’s day,
His steady mind, from changes free,
Resolved on death of liberty.
Sound, sound the trump of fame,
Let’s honor his great name
Ring through the world with loud applause,
Ring through the world with loud applause,
Let ev’ry decline to freedom dear,
Listen with a joyful ear,
With equal skill, with God-like pow’r
He governs in the fearful hour
Of horrid war, or guides with ease
The happier time of honest peace.
Hail, Columbia!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4S9AM3P_bU
Good news, everyone. Biden wants to make a political comeback-
‘Former US President Joe Biden has offered to raise funds, campaign, and do whatever is needed to help Democrats regain ground lost to the Republicans during his tenure, NBC News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Biden has reportedly made the offer in private conversations with party leaders, including a meeting last month with new Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin. The former president expressed his willingness to support the party amid its declining popularity, according to individuals familiar with the discussions.’
https://www.rt.com/news/614604-biden-offers-help-democrats/
Yeah, that should totally happen.
The article I read mentioned Jill. Trying to find a way back in maybe, though not sure why the D party seems like a good vehicle for that at the moment.
Ha ha.
Trump Revokes Security Clearances for Biden, Harris, Clinton and More
And as former electeds, why do these people need security clearances anyway?
…World’s deepest art installation dumped 4.3 miles underwater near Mariana Trench…
Best place for “art installations” in my opinion. Heh.
– CT
I agree with you here though I note a critic of the Eiffel Tower when it was first built saying that he spent every day at the top of it. When asked why, he said that it was the only place in Paris where if you looked up, you never saw it looming in the near distance.