A Super Fungus Is Evolving in Polluted Cities – And It’s Spreading Through Cats SciTech Daily
Man Develops Life-Threatening Infection After Eating Feral Pig Science Alert
Imagining the Progressive Restaurant Tribune
Climate/Environment
Wildfires prompt evacuation in the Carolinas as New Jersey crews battle their own blaze AP
How Much Does Big Oil Owe Californians for the LA Fires? Breakthrough Journal
Recent Global Temperature: Acceleration or Surge? Open Mind
Nearly 300 million people in Africa faced life-threatening heat in past 3 months: Report Down to Earth
Peatlands’ carbon capture potential increases with rising temperatures Phys.org
Thriving Ecosystem Discovered Following Iceberg Calving British Antarctic Survey
Water
The High Cost of Fixing Lake Tahoe Cal Matters
Pandemics
Beyond long COVID — how reinfections could be causing silent long-term organ damage CBC
Whole-body visualization of SARS-CoV-2 biodistribution in vivo by immunoPET imaging in non-human primates Nature Communications. Commentary:
I may be wrong, but reviewing this article my ongoing suspicions only strengthens:
As diagnostic technologies advance, we will find that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t fully exit our bodies but instead persists in concealed “refuges”—specific sites shielded by our unique immune responses,… pic.twitter.com/6zoOJvkBpl
— Harry Spoelstra (@HarrySpoelstra) March 23, 2025
“There is no money to survive”: Long COVID pushes India’s marginalized workers deeper into poverty The Sick Times
Covid’s long shadow in California: Chronic absences, student depression and the limits of money EdSource. Commentary (the whole thread is worth a read):
I’ve written a couple of threads about these rates of absence for students in England, and there are other important things to get from the image… but look at 2020/2021.
That’s the school year that runs from September 2020 to July 2021. pic.twitter.com/48iE0mY6Bq— tern (@1goodtern) March 23, 2025
***
Oregon Man Sues Pet Food Company for Allegedly Killing His Cats With Bird Flu Gizmodo
The Koreas
Constitutional Court dismisses impeachment of Prime Minister Han Yonhap
China?
Dandan Zhang: China’s factory workers go gig The East is Read
China bans compulsory facial recognition and its use in private spaces like hotel rooms The Register
China’s cable cutter could sever 95% of world communications, work at extreme depths Interesting Engineering
Duterte trial loaded with heavy geopolitical implications Asia Times
European Disunion
From welfare to warfare: military Keynesianism Michael Robert’s Blog
No more soldiers: European big debt for defence, yet young men are vanishing Brussels Signal
Old Blighty
Mental health, disability and capitalism Counterfire
O Canada
Canada’s new Prime Minister Carney announces snap election in April Euro News
Syraqistan
Gaza medics issue malnutrition alert as total Israeli blockade enters fourth week The Guardian
Israel approves new agency for ‘voluntary departure’ of Palestinians from Gaza Middle East Monitor
DEVELOPING | Israeli troops besiege Rafah neighborhood; Gaza’s Civil Defense: 50,000 people near Rafah under ‘imminent danger’
Israeli forces have surrounded the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood in Rafah after ordering tens of thousands of residents to evacuate on foot toward the… https://t.co/5sp4tDQw9e
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) March 23, 2025
Israeli Airstrikes Kill Hamas Leader Salah al-Bardawil, Scores of Others in Gaza Orinoco Tribune
Massive Israeli airstrike on displacement tent camp in Gaza City.
In recent weeks and months, there have been several strikes on tent camps in Gaza, including in areas designated by Israel as “safe humanitarian zones”. pic.twitter.com/72yfUG4lfv
— Clash Report (@clashreport) March 23, 2025
Israel approves plan to separate, legalise 13 settlement outposts in occupied West Bank TRT World
Warnings from Israeli officials: Civil War No Longer Unthinkable Elijah J. Magnier
***
An Extreme Ultimatum for Iran Daniel Larison
Azerbaijan is already friendly with Israel. Why the push to ‘normalize’? Responsible Statecraft
***
Turkey suspends Imamoglu’s mayoral duties, keeps him under arrest as more protests expected Al-Monitor
Turkiye’s breaking point: Erdogan moves to crush his biggest electoral threat The Cradle
Turkiye’s Central Bank dumps $26 bln to halt lira freefall Al Mayadeen
U.S. Considering Turkish Return to F-35 Program Military Watch
Musk’s X suspends opposition accounts in Turkey amid civil unrest Politico
Kurds, for now, avoid Turkish hammer, thanks to the US Responsible Statecraft
New Not-So-Cold War
Ukraine, U.S. teams hold talks in Saudi Arabia, U.S. envoy hopeful on ending war Reuters
Negotiations Continue to Go Nowhere as Europe Bashes Head Against Wall Simplicius
Geoffrey Roberts – Seven Reasons Why Putin Might Compromise on Territory to Secure a Peace Deal with Trump Brave New Europe
***
Will the Ukrainian Army Turn Its Bayonets on Kiev? Gordon Hahn, Russian & Eurasian Politics
Stepan Bandera’s Sinister MI6 Alliance Exposed Kit Klarenberg, Global Delinquents
Spook Country
Deep State Still Desperate to Suppress the Facts About the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Larry Johnson, Sonar21
Trump 2.0
Constitutional Collapse New Left Review
White House Narrows April 2 Tariffs WSJ
U.S. delegation to visit Greenland as Trump talks of takeover Reuters
Tucker Carlson’s Interview with Steve Witkoff Reveals Surprising Ignorance Larry Johnson, Sonar21
DOGE
An Interview With A Fired USDA Specialist Defector
Musk Email Reaches Italian Workers. It Did Not Go Well. New York Times
“We had several black servants who were their friends” Musk Watch
The Monster that Government Made Dollars & Sense
Immigration
What the Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Experienced TIME
The man in the first paragraph sobbing as he’s beaten by Salvadoran prison guards appears to be Andry, a gay barber/makeup artist who entered the U.S. legally at a port of entry seeking asylum and who ICE seems to have falsely accused of gang membership based on his tattoos. https://t.co/Rg6cymgHg2 pic.twitter.com/NT2ty8bDK0
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) March 23, 2025
Democrats en déshabillé
Monopoly Round-Up: The Democrats’ Corporate Lawyers Get the Humiliation They Deserve BIG by Matt Stoller
Police State Watch
IRS close to finalizing data-sharing agreement with ICE, sources say ABC News
“First, They Came for Mahmoud Khalil” Drop Site
The NYPD is sending more drones to 911 calls, but privacy advocates don’t like the view The Register
L.A. Sheriff Luna defies subpoenas, sues oversight commission over deputy misconduct records Los Angeles Times
Groves of Academe
The Anti-democratic Legal Form of the University (And How to Fix It) LPE Project
Silicon Valley
What is it like to be a low I.Q.? Read Max
Supply Chain
Billion-Dollar US Levies On Chinese Ships Risk ‘Trade Apocalypse’ Bloomberg
FDA Finally Visited an Indian Drug Factory Linked to U.S. Deaths. It Found Problems ProPublica
AI
An Ordinary Analogy to Understand Pre-Training, Test-Time Compute, Inference Interconnected
Search the Database of Pirated Books AI Trained On While Trump Kills Your Local Library Gizmodo
Michigan rural libraries brace for hit from Trump order targeting spending Bridge Michigan
Imperial Collapse Watch
Scorch Marks in the Sand imetatronink
How F-35s became the new Tesla The Telegraph
The Domination Game: The American Eagle And The Canada Jay 3 Quarks Daily
Zeitgeist Watch
Quirky livestream that lets viewers help fish is a hit with millions AP
Class Warfare
When There’s Trouble Around Belt Magazine
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“Geoffrey Roberts – Seven Reasons Why Putin Might Compromise on Territory to Secure a Peace Deal with Trump”
If there is a compromise, it will be that Russia ensures that they take the territory for all four Oblasts that joined the Russian Federation and that includes the parts under Ukrainian occupation. The good professor should know that the Russian Constitution does not allow compromises of and trading of Russian territory so it won’t be over until it is over. If Trump would not be prepared to negotiate away US territory to others, then why should he expect Putin to do so?
Assumes US is agreement competent!
Russia will have security, territory is a means but not the sole nor sufficient means to provide “security”.
The hard part is shaky US agreements.
Not to mention the perfidious EU.
Rearm Germany! not.
Fool me 4 times…..
IMO, saying that is a “compromise” (keeping only the 4 oblists) for Putin is like saying Obama compromised on the ACA to get it passed into law. My current estimate based on Russian lackadaisical military actions and the Durans mention of internal chatter/complaints that Putin is slow walking the SMO to Russia’s detriment is that is exactly and only what Putin aims for, just as the low bar ACA that passed is pretty much nearly exactly what Obama wanted – from it’s very inception and right up to its actual enactment.
Re; New Not-So-Cold War
Via Simplicius: In return for recognition [of new territories] and if it happened “in the near future”, Kommersant said Putin would undertake not to lay claim to the Ukrainian port city of Odesa and other Ukrainian territory.
I think this helps lay to waste Roberts’ assessment, especially his first three points: Security not Territory, Russian Lives Matter, and The Limits of Liberation.
Russia has stated that there WILL be a buffer-zone, period. Russians are very aware of the human toll, and want to know that their soldier’s sacrifices result in real security. Odessa must be taken, as failure to do so leaves the ethnic Russians both there and in Transniestra at risk, and for several other reasons as well.
There’s pieces like this circulating in Russian media:
Refusal to liberate Odessa will be a mistake for Russia
Odessa has an important military, humanitarian and ideological significance for Russia, writes L’antidiplomatico. Refusing to release her would be a grave mistake, the author hints. Annexing the city to Russia will correct the historical injustice and provide Moscow with an advantageous strategic position.
https://inosmi-ru.turbopages.org/turbo/inosmi.ru/s/20250323/odessa-272305132.html
Unlike the West, who will scream bloody murder, I don’t think that the Global South will get too worked up when Russia liberates the historically Russian city of Odessa. So I don’t believe that it is a question of “if,” but of “how” and “when.” Perhaps the recent pipline operation in Kursk may serve as a good analogy for what is to come.
Also, everyone gets a pink pony.
Also, everyone gets a pink pony.
Somebody, somewhere (likely in the EU), might very well think that you are serious.
And for those who think that deploying a small, trip-wire contingent of troops from Western European countries in Odessa is a good idea…
Odessa underground is ready to transfer data on the locations of the French to the Russian Armed Forces if they appear in the city
The French desire to deploy their troops in Odessa may end very sadly, the Odessa underground is ready to pass on the coordinates of the locations of the French military to the Russian troops. This was stated by a representative of the underground movement Stop Grave.
The pro-Russian resistance of Odessa is ready to use its network to identify the locations of French troops if they appear in the city or the outskirts of Odessa, as Macron promises to do. According to the underground representative, he expresses his condolences in advance to those French soldiers or mercenaries who try to gain a foothold in Odessa…
https://en.topwar.ru/261702-odesskoe-podpole-gotovo-peredavat-vs-rf-dannye-o-mestah-dislokacii-francuzov-esli-oni-pojavjatsja-v-gorode.html
And from Russia, State Duma Deputy Anatoly Wasserman:
Dnipro-Split line: Odessa will become a bastion of the Russian world in eastern Ukraine
Wasserman proposed making Odessa the capital of “Russian Ukraine”
https://mk-ru.turbopages.org/turbo/mk.ru/s/politics/2025/03/24/dnepr-liniya-raskola-odessa-stanet-bastionom-russkogo-mira-na-vostoke-ukrainy.html
I don’t think that Trump is invited to the actual discussions as to how Ukraine will be divided after the war.
Remember when Trump was going to get elected and immediately call Putin on the phone, and the war was gonna be all over in 24 hours?
Good times.
Trump is operating on “Musk time”. Tommorow means next year, next year means next decade, and next decade means never (e.g. we will have self driving cars next year, and man on Mars next decade).
You might want to consider placement of articles about low IQ etc., next to exemplar articles. As a “News Paper” of old, would put seemingly disparate articles or photos alongside one another.
It seems there is no shortage of such symbiotes?
The Atlantic has been running some interesting articles that to me clearly demonstrate the close parallels between the Nazi’s rise to power in 1930s Germany and what is happening in the U.S. today. They merit reading.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trump-executive-order-lawlessness-constitutional-crisis/682112/?utm_source=apple_news
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/hitler-press-germany/682130/?utm_source=apple_news
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in finance, we shall fight on the seas of fired Fed workers, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in wealth conjured out of thin air, we shall defend our island of inanity, whatever the cost may be.
👍
p.s. Sadly once and for all the memory of that speech will be polluted with that rusty voice and Ukrainian accent delivering the words in a manner that in more honest times would have marked the prompt end of an acting career.
Thanks will read.
I however will not stop pointing out the supreme significance of brutal force to subjugate “the street” by the Nazis. Without everyday public brutality and without the systematic murder of the Left of the Weimar Republic history would have taken a different path.
1934 SA, the more proletarian predecessor to SS, and Hitler´s “private” army had 3,4 million members as public presence and street thugs. The German Army, Reichswehr, for comparison was much better equipped and trained but had 600k only. As well Reichswehr had been used against labour uprisings early on, already e.g. at the behest of the first Weimar President Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat.
One of the NSDAP´s biggest strengths and weaknesses was the size of its SA-Army. SA was doing huge PR before the elections, they were the foot soldiers, the public image, constantly present on the public stage. And as such needed to be paid which famously almost led to the bankruptcy of NSDAP in 1932.
As Norman Finkelstein in February pointed out, mocking AOC: If she truly believes that the present is fascism she should immediately go underground and hide from law enforcement out of fear for her life. Because exactly that same thing US Communists had done in the 1950s assuming fascism was descending upon the US.
But is AOC hiding? Is Cornel West hiding (okay he doesn´t have to, nobody knows him)? Is Elizabeth Warren hiding? The staff of the NEW YORKER or JACOBIN?
Finklestein finished with saying, there is no fascism currently because there is no Left. Fascism has only one role and that is wiping out The Left. Thus no opposition, no fascism.
People constantly use this term. Many well known activists who I think very highly of. But to incessantly use the term fascism void of the concrete violent meaning, always only projecting possible violent threats into the future is of no help. Fascism is first and foremost brutal, unchecked violence by the groups in charge. Blood, torture, murder.
Fascism is why in Germany of the late 1920s early 1930s eventually people dared not to speak out any more.
With the incarceration and murder of the Communist armed forces there was no one left to resist the Nazi street violence any more.
How many have been killed in the US.
And yet, even with concentration camps operational by 1933 and after Hitler assigned Chancellor in the final 1933 elections: NSDAP had 43,9%, SPD 18,3%, Communists 12,3%, the Catholics (who were SPD-allies) 11,3%, Nazi-ally DNVP (once bigger than NSDAP) 8%.
edit: Should not be there “How many have been killed in the US.”
That´s an entire paragrapgh that had been deleted for simplicity before posting. odd.
We should not forget that in Italy the black shirts (fascist party), and in Spain the blue shirts (Spanish falange), played a similar role, unleashing systematic (and often murderous) violence against political opponents. Actually, the black shirts were active well before the SA.
In Finland we had black-and-blue shirts (Lapua Movement).
With the difference that by 1932 they had already engaged for 14 years in political violence and extra-parliamentary activism, so when they started an armed mutiny (wikipedia) even the right-wing bourgeoisie backed the president who send the army to surround the mutineers and threat them with artillery until they surrendered.
Yes. And it´s of course a complex topic. I focus on the German (albeit clichéd) dimension.
In America, we had the WHITE SHEETS!
By 1992 the white sheets were already no longer needed to cover the races of the ‘fascists’. They could be used to conspicuously dress the Untermenschen.
Not to be dismissive, but I would suggest the ‘Fascism’ comes in many forms and faces. Perhaps there is a better more encompassing terminology for what we are witnessing. Just a thought.
I was having the same thought. Pondering of a better term.
But the facts as such – call them whatever you like – are there.
I might have turned thin-skinned due to the German rhetoric on this.
A place so much entrenched into this topic – no other scholarly subject has shaped German public in a comparable formative manner – and yet their voiced opinions are embarrassingly one-dimensional.
The more people say Nazi, the less they actually know what it meant.
I might fall victim to the flaw of equating the issue of Third Reich, which is confined to a defined period in history with a unversally used term known from political philosophy which has existed independently from Nazis. A relative problem vs. a universal term. But as universal as it may be it has become universally known mainyl due to a very specific phenomenon between 1933-1945.
I cannot solve that.
We agree about the absence of a left today capable of organizing a revolutionary resistance on anything like the scale needed to oppose the gathering fascist threat. But the hard core of fascism isn’t the violence itself (which is always incipient in fascism when it isn’t extant); it’s the utter contempt for perceived inferiors/weakness, and the assertion of an unstinting right of the state to dominate them. That is now in place.
Today’s fascism identifies trans people, unwhite immigrants, the “woke” of any stripe, liberals, leftists, and women a candidates for that inferiority or weakness. Once a resistance is mounted, if it ever is, they are the ones who will suffer mass violence, rest assured – at least until inferiors need to be produced.
The lack of more widespread violence thus far is down to at least a few interrelated things:
1. the vast apparatus of surveillance technologies that effectively enclose the entirety of the society. Most are nominally corporate, but they are all available for state inspection overtly and covertly. It’s unclear how serious organizing would even happen in a siloed, ultra-monitored society like ours;
2. An unparalleled buildup of deadly military force by the state, in combination with the Christianizing/conservatizing of the military service branches for decades; and the militarizing of police forces pretty much everywhere, tilting the scales completely in favor of their overwhelming capacity for violent force;
3. An overt, class-based alliance between both the budding fascists and the center-left “opposition” on Israel’s genocide. Support for political Zionism skews deeply bourgeois (controlling for Christian millennialists), and so disciplining activism supporting a free Palestine also functions as quasi-violent suppression of the left.
This is the group within which a revolutionary consciousness could grow, and that is why the cynical and obvious lies about alleged “pervasive climates of antisemitism” on campuses are being so strongly pushed. So far, the fascists have been able to rely on the cooperation of university administrations to do their suppression for them.
“Our democracy” of the past administration is not different than fascism.
Neither pole has a care for freedom.
Begs the question “ Which way will your county’s Sheriff’s Department fall?”.
For me that would put the issue over “sovereign due to use of force” in a nutshell.
Which this is all about eventually of course.
Yes, my black heart would point at the video in the Drop Site tweet above, “Coming to a theater near you!”, audience participation (partition?) required.
John Trudell is haunting me this morning.
Devil and Me
The dark makes night, baby
i agree that it isnt quite violent enough to be fascism.
BUT i do think the left is being a lil attacked and this could increase. Mahmoud Khalil and all. (speaking of him i tried to google his name but he did not show up on duckduckgo… lol.) but the fascism levels havent increased too much compared to previous admins. still supporting the same wars.
i think the idea of AOC and liz warren hiding from fascism is stupid. theyre part of the fascism. it would be better to look at people actually speaking out against the government. scott ritter, pro palestine organizers, etc. who have received threats. i don’t think the government is out here killing these people yet, but theyre definitely taking actions against them.
a lot of people are raising flags that the current anti-palestine actions are just the beginning and they’ll only crack down on the protestors further. it seems a lot of people are capitulating to their demands. (i need to attend functions at my uni and get a view from the ground.) but again: i feel like police forces cracking down on protestors is pretty standard levels of oppressive government. which is bad, but no different from last year.
“i tried to google his name but he did not show up on duckduckgo”
Seriously?
I had of course noticed that DuckDuckGo since 2022 has turned out to be the emperor´s messenger.
Not so long ago yet hailed as the engine of your choice if you wanted to counter the bad bad deep state.
As to AOC – I did like Finkelstein´s example simply because it illustrated the issue at hand so that I can communicate it to others (not NC of course.)
Simply for the undeserved reputation AOC and Co. are enjoying still – in Germany e.g.
The elementary, child-like level of information and discussion on the US that is public in Germany you cannot imagine. So you have to adjust to that level to be heard.
>>>I had of course noticed that DuckDuckGo since 2022 has turned out to be the emperor´s messenger.
It is interesting that each new, even semi honest and independent, source of information gets subverted and co-opted by the powers that be. Usually while still saying that they haven’t been.
Is AOC all that well-known in Germany? I highly doubt most people in Russia even heard of her, but I suppose American politics are a much bigger deal in NATO countries’ media.
The Greens-adjacent, “woke”-ish daily TAZ has often enough put AOC front and center in their coverage of American politics, as have other mainstream German media.
https://www.qwant.com/?q=taz.de+aoc+ocasio+cortez+repr%C3%A4sentantenhaus
I guess she is seen as a role model by Greens and their like?
I got a long list for Mahmoud Khalil on DDG.
Try startpage –
https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=Mahmoud+Khalil+
The “anti-fascists” I saw out on the street protesting Trump over the weekend were also advocating for moar war, either explicitly with their pro-Ukraine signs, or implicitly with their lack of pro-Palestinian signs.
Pro-war anti-fascists – who woulda thunk it?
If they support the Ukranian war, then they are pro-fascists.
But maybe that is what you meant, tongue-in-cheek?
One side benefit, if not intention, of Russiagate was essentially recruiting #McResistance liberals to support war with Russia. I’m sure if you asked those demonstrators you recently saw, they’d still tell you Trump is a Russian asset. These are also the same people who said nothing when the Patriot Act was re-authorized in 2018 for Hitler to govern under. They also spent their time and energy protesting the firing of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as Attorney General, but were silent on the roughly contemporaneous rescinding of the Iran Nuclear Deal.
Their predictions about fascism transact at a very high discount.
I understand that the comparisons to fascism are easy to make, but that isn’t it. It’s inverted totalitarianism, where the power to oppress is outsourced. We have been talking about it since the early 2000s, how the surveillance state gas been outsourced. The people know that if you shake too many branches in the tree, you will be economically suppressed. And with the lack of a safety net in the US, this keep dissent away.
So the country can keep moving more to the right, and there us no protest because of economic insecurity.
Robert Paxton wrote several books on fascism and in The Anatomy of Fascism, written about 20 years ago offers a surprising suggestion about the country of origin of the phenomenon:
Thanks I look that up. The question of origin is indeed interesting. Paxton having done some groundbreaking work.
I think the aspect of racism and attempt of total control by modern technological means as exerted by Mussolini might be closest. Some of that was missing in the French aristocratic pre-fascist movements (which is why those chose to fight against Germany 1940 because they were too patriotic eventually.)
How would KKK reach across the ocean? After all the New World was an exotic space beyond what was common consciousness.
I think one should also consider this book from my father’s generation.
https://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Fascism-Face-Power-America/dp/0896081494
It comprehensively discusses many of the issues that comments are discussing above.
Amazon book reviews can be a fascinating subject in themselves.
The very first and supposedly oldest review on “Friendly Fascism” from 2003 starts like this:
“I lost my trusty old `dogged-eared’ copy of this wonderful classic in a house fire a couple of years ago, and only recently found a used hardcover copy at the wonderful independent bookstore in Peterborough; The Toadstool Bookstore. Considering how relevant the book is to events transpiring in this country now, it was a fortuitous discovery. This is a relatively short but extremely cogent and well-argued treatise on the rise of a form of fascistic thought and social politics in late 20th century America. Author Bertram Gross’ thesis is quite straightforward; the power elite that comprises the corporate, governmental and military superstructure of the country is increasingly inclined to employ every element in their formidable arsenal of `friendly persuasion’ to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans through what Gross refers to as “friendly fascism””
The rest of the review (emphasis mine):
“(…)
For anyone familiar with modern social theory, it is apparent that the author’s thesis is a quite clever and accurate extension of sociologist C. Wright Mills’ well known notions of what came to be known as the `mass society’ theory. This was an essential aspect of Mills’ famous theory of the power elite as forwarded in a book with the same title. Like social theorist G. William Domhoff (“The Higher Circles”), Professor Gross shows how the deceptively friendly and engaging style of the powers that be actually constitute an increasingly dangerous threat to the democratic process and to the long-term survival of our precious civil liberties. Of course, for Americans used to the association between the term `fascism’ and the image of angry totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany and the Italy of the same period of time, it is perhaps difficult to associate with the notion that clever and systematic manipulation of the general population through use of the mass media is a form of fascistic influence. Yet, as Gross argues so persuasively, that is exactly what it is.
The term that pops to mind is that process that M.I.T. scholar Noam Chomsky would refer to as “manufacturing consent”, a dangerous propensity which dangerously influences the perceptions of individual citizens by continually immersing the populace in an electronic stream of messages, both blatant and subliminal, that serves to condition them to a particular way of experiencing, participating, and perceiving the world around them. We find ourselves constantly bombarded by powerful and suggestive images, message-laden icons which deliver consistent themes regarding the nature of the environment we are living in, one we come to employ more and more exclusively as our preferred method of interacting in both the civil and legal aspects of contemporary society.
As Professor Gross so prophetically forecasted, the mergers of all commercial news sources, both electronic and other, have come under the ownership and control of corporate America, one of the leading edges of the power elite. Amazingly, all of this also rings a responsive chord with the single most prophetic work of fiction in the 20th century, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”. Lost in our petty diversions and self-absorbed in a pool of trivial pursuits, we become increasingly more vulnerable to the solid wall of subliminal and other messages all conveying a message regarding he nature of the world and our social, economic, and political place in it.
As our experience with the several successful Presidents ranging from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, the artful use of personal charisma to cover a mean-spirited political agenda has worked amazingly well. In the twenty years since the book was originally published, many aspects of our collective socioeconomic well-being have been profoundly changed, almost exclusively to the favor of the rich and well placed and to the increasing detriment of the average man and woman on the street. The statistics available are overwhelming in detailing the levels to which ordinary citizens have been stripped of most of the socioeconomic gains of the last century. In every area of contemporary life, from the cost and extent of health coverage to the responsibility for a variety of aspects such as providing for individual retirements, the vastly expanding future tax liability, and the use of the federal treasury to provide for subsidies to corporate America, the story is the same.
Increasingly we are being manipulated into surrendering our voice in the democratic process and to playing a more limited role as consumers, which the elite evidently sees as our only crucial civic responsibility. As George W. Bush said with a booming voice and a congenial charismatic smile, post 911 Americans just had to get out to do their patriotic duty by once again buying things, to get the economy going once more. Indeed, it is becoming a brave new world. This is a wonderful book, and one that is a great, thought-provoking read. Enjoy!
(…)”
Both eBay and Powell’s books are asking big money for it… time for a repress.
Here it is on Archive.org.
at thriftbooks-dot-com the new paperback is almost 2X the cost of the used hardback – new paperback 44 – used hardback 27 -picked up my hardback copy from thrift a couple of years ago for 16 – eye-opener worth a read –
If you define fascism as “a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of the nation over the individual”, then the US isn’t yet fascist. It has been supremely nationalistic and supremacist for decades though.
Neither is the US a liberal democracy, that supports individual rights, competitive elections, and political dissent. The past few years has seen banning of political dissent. Against compulsory vax for example, and now banning of any dissent arising from the Palestine genocide.
And elections are a charade for ordinary people, in that they get to vote between two oligarch blocs. The only occasion in recent history where the concerns of ordinary people got a run was when Sanders ran, but he was put in his box eventually.
In fact, the US seems to have two mostly hidden but competing oligarch blocs pulling the strings. They each have arms like the famous octopus, sitting under the sea waiting for prey.
The Republicans are an arm of Bloc1, and the Democrats are an arm of Bloc2. There are some things both agree on eg Israel can genocide anyone they want. And “health care” only exists to loot the sick.
Right now Bloc1 controls the White House through Trump. The only reason he got the job was because of his excellent manipulative skills on the hustings ie he was the best path to Bloc1 winning.
Bloc2 is out of power and boy are they pissed. In their minds, as the educated elite, they just deserve to have the White House because they are superior intellectually and culturally. Hello Obama! Hello spies and diplomats and European oligarchs and bankers and Silicon Valley!
But their tide went out and they’re swimming naked. It ain’t a pretty sight to see the EU elite twisting and contorting to please the power that invisible Bloc2 has held over much of the EU, through money and corruption.
Starmer and Macron and Von der Leyen and Baerbock now have their butts exposed as mostly puppets in the service of Bloc2. And not a peep when Bloc2 Biden blew up their cheap gas and started the EU decline to peasantry. But these quislings know they will always be looked after financially. Let the peasants eat cake!
Bloc2 wants the war in Ukraine to keep going. Larry Wilkerson says they need $50 billion a year in arms sales to keep the MIC profits at an acceptable level. You can’t make a killing on arms sales if there are no wars.
But without the White House shovelling money to the puppets in the EU, Bloc2 is financially embarrassed right now as regards putting together a “EU” rescue package for the Ukraine war. Popcorn time.
Finklestein finished with saying, there is no fascism currently because there is no Left. Fascism has only one role and that is wiping out The Left. Thus no opposition, no fascism.
I’m sorry but that is patently wrong. European fascism was an imperialist project, led by Germany and Italy, Europe’s only industrial states that did not have colonial empires. Both had unified very late – Italy in 1871 and Germany in 1871. The long and complicated process of building nation-states stopped them from engaging in the general scramble for colonies.
We also need to remember that the gold standard had created a deflationary environment for global capitalism, and starting from 1920 we see the formation of trade blocs, as states were trying to protect their economies and resolve overproduction by exporting to their own colonies. The problem was that Italy and Germany had not been able to capture colonies, and in this context their economic fates looked grim.
There are many aspects in the interwar fascism that we see reproduced today: crisis of overproduction, trade wars, protectionism, imperialist projects, preparation for global war. It doesn’t mean that we are reliving the 1930s in exactly the same shape and form. Also you don’t wake up one morning and discover that the world turned fascist overnight: it is a process.
Norman Finkelstein might be a hero for many of us and an important historian of the Palestinian conflict but that doesn’t mean everything he says is the ultimate truth.
and that all indicates a certain cohesion that i simply do not see present in the current american society…with the caveat that 1: i dont leave the farm much, and 2: when i do, i go to the only actual town in the county.
and, to boot!…trump…and especially musk…are pissin people off that i overhear in the feedstore, etc.
bull in china closet “reform” that deletes ag payments, foodstamps, and potentially social security and medicare?
not SA facilitators, there.
alienating their own base, and with prejudice.
if there were some lefty organisation with any moxy, they could capitalise(sic) on this discontent to rally people to at least a new new deal.
hell, bernie almost did it.
but we have shumer…and the promise of kamalamadingdong 2.0, or mayo pete.
Mayo Pete? Did they ever find him? He’s been missing for most of the past five years. The Transport Department got very worried about his whereabouts.
on the second article about hitler being a silly little man- i dont see how hitler mockery was too different from general politican mockery. i dont know if there’s a politician who exists who isnt mocked and belittled by their opposition.
Some German intellectuals from that period readily acknowledge that they disregarded Hitler and his clique: definitely violent, narrow-minded, out of their depth when it came to dealing with problems of the State.
Klaus Mann, for instance, spent (by happenstance) some time in a restaurant close to the table where Hitler and his close circle were seated; he could hear their conversation. He left the restaurant convinced that those vulgar mediocrities would never make it — every German would see through them and their silly antics (see Der Wendepunkt).
His uncle Heinrich Mann (in Ein Zeitalter wird besichtigt) still had difficulties to understand how such an obviously deranged and intellectually limited person as Hitler could have enjoyed so much support. In fact, Heinrich Mann seems to have remained dismayed by Nazism till his death; he could not really fathom how such a catastrophe had been possible.
And Reichswehr generals also had plenty of contempt for the silly little corporal. And the upper crust of politicians, financiers, and industrialists also thought that it would be easy to circumvent Hitler and manipulate the NSDAP for their purposes.
They did not seem to have grasped that Hitler & co were ready to use any means — including sheer violence — to reach their objectives. See the above comment by AG.
Thinking of the Mann-clan as you mention them: Since 2022 I have come increasingly to the conclusion (only now thinking of these matters with such scrutiny) that one reason for today´s public not acknowledging certain facts about Weimar and the Third Reich is that the sources and witnesses through whose perspective the events are looked at in hindsight today are aligned with our own modern critical thinking.
We do not judge Nazism by reading literature by Nazis or Nazi-voters from 1931. We make judgements based on highly-privileged individuals who mostly could flee and make a decent living abroad. i.e. they did not care about the government that would eventually rule Germany. In other words: deeply-biased.
Back in the 1930s things we regard today as abnormal were casual. But to understand the events then and the political actors involved it is much more helpful to inquire the sources who are not as prominent as the Manns or those witnesses who ended up in KZs or even had fled Germany in time.
Nobody would watch a film or read a novel that would agree with the events back then. Nobody today would engage into the kind of redderick many people were sharing back then. It´s not unlike today´s contentions we make towards the PMC-Left which is looking at the situation from an elite POV and thus misses out on what 90% in fact think.
But to understand what is going and yet at the same time disregard what 90% think and say is obviously insane. And that is also true for historic analysis. Klaus Mann was elite, he was gay, he hated his family, he hated being elite – the guy had a million issues. He was the most likely candidate to either get killed or leave.
Together with the entire Mann family he went to the US in 1938. That alone identifies him as a highly privileged individual. Thousands attempted to do the same, people who were more in danger, and failed because they were not special.
Yet he did – and I grant him that – in his most famous novel “Mephisto” create e.g. an extraordinary character with Hen(d)rik Höfgen. Thinly disguised German star actor of the era, Gustaf Gründgens (the alliteration already gives it away). Gründgens albeit a leftwing, gay star actor made a deal with the Nazis. He was able to carry on with his career after 1945. So Gründgens was successful and popular before the Nazis came, while the Nazis were in power, and after the Nazis had been defeated. Go figure.
The Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film was given to the Austro-Hungarian film adaptation of “Mephisto” in 1982 btw.
https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0082736/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_in_0_q_mephisto
Mann´s novel “Mephisto” offers a good window into how these deals with the Nazis worked out – on the elite level. But they do not explain what 90% of the population was thinking and under what duress they might have been standing. Job, children, insurance, economic hardship, pride, patriotism, love, parents, hope (why leave Germany, the powerhouse of Europe?)
Also: We forget to remember this was an era pre-UN Charter, pre-Civil Rights Movement, pre-Emancipation of women. It was an odd time. Neither modern yet, not ancient any more.
One indicator I like to apply: Capital punishment. The FRG never knew it, Weimar did. As of course Third Reich.
Last point: The Third Reich was a highly legalistic creature. If you were not Jewish all kinds of regulations were there to safeguard peoples lives. Also: Throught the war Germany never turned into a real war-economy. I believe 70% was not affected by the war. Which was explicitely demanded by Hitler. He did no want the population to feel the war at home. Knowing that that would be a prerequisite for conducting the war the government was planning.
Yes.
To your last point, I always found it noteworthy that Hitler (temporarily) backed off on some of his kill-the-weak (eugenics) policies in response to public pressure organised by Catholic clergy. Of course the Jews were a whole other question, as were other undesirables that were outside conventional German society. Still, I cannot imagine Stalin even letting such a campaign (unsanctioned and directly opposed to ideologically mandated policies in practice and in spirit) get off the ground. When he backed away from a policy, it was due to his own estimation of practical effects rather than pressure. Hitler comes off as much less radical, secure and powerful within his own country by comparison, in spite of all of his and Goebbels’ bluster. Though I think he meant to introduce many more drastic changes after victory, so that was not for want of trying.
That is an interesting angle to look at – government rule as one that was not yet firm enough in place.
(If I understand your point correctly you would suggest the Soviet grip was much more total than German – which actually should be no surprise with how long Stalin had been in power by then.)
Of course the domestic violence applied in Germany was never a self-serving one. And Hitler´s circle knew that continuous war was their most likely way to survive politically. This was noted by Goebbels, Göring and Himmler.
The assassination plans as early as 1938 I believe are proof of this.
The Weimar elite for the reason you bring up sensed the system´s weakness and I assume didn´t quite expect the regime to hold out so long. And considering how the war went Germany was lucky the first 3 years. I guess there are some useful comparative studies as to how German and Soviet administrative bodies were or were not full-grown by they time they would clash.
May be looking at the administrations in particular only could have offered a prediction as to which side would win the war in the East. Like an Emmanuel Todd predicting – as he claims – the demise of the USSR based on birth rates well before the fact.
“(If I understand your point correctly you would suggest the Soviet grip was much more total than German – which actually should be no surprise with how long Stalin had been in power by then.)”
Yes, but also Soviet rule was more total and more radical from the start; a lot less willing to respect existing institutions and traditions, for better and for worse. The Nazis, I think more by necessity than by preference, had to put up with more remnants of the old regime (both the elites and societal institutions/traditions).
This relative moderation did help them appear more palatable to a lot of people than Germany’s own clearly Moscow-oriented Communists. There were even some Jews who favoured the NSDAP early on, because they assumed that they’d just lose some rights but gain security, while the Communists might take away their livelihoods and/or lives. (Obviously that didn’t pan out…)
I also recall that Hitler complained in 1944 that he should’ve followed Stalin’s example and purged his officers.
And yes, I get the impression that practically everyone in the Weimar elite and would-be elite expected the Nazis to fall quickly. IIRC, the Communists and the Social Democrats thought they’d sweep into power (through a revolution or elections, respectively) after Hitler failed to handle the economic crisis. Let him own that ongoing catastrophe, they figured. Right-wing parties and elites with less hope of outdoing him in popularity (far from universal though it was) thought they could tame the Nazis either by setting Hitler against his perceivedly more radical allies or by removing Hitler himself; either way, the plan was to divide the Nazis and ally with the moderates. Apparently none of the major players could conceive of the possibility of him establishing a lasting dictatorship. Or for that matter, that he (or rather, Hjalmar Schacht – one of the more interesting players on the right, who apparently decided to help bring Hitler to power after despairing of finding any halfway capable alternatives) would manage to at least temporarily fix the economy.
thats an excellent comment, AG.
in my current Prime que is this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall_(2004_film)
which has been my fave WW2 film since i first saw it.
next up, for the next painday.
i dont see a replay of 30’s germany or italy(or spain, for that matter).
i see wholesale looting of the public.
and no ideology…nothing close to a philosophy to justify it…i mean, just read moldbug…or slatestar codex’ ample treatment of Dark Enlightenment “thinking”.
or ayn rand, for that matter…easily picked apart, if only her supporters had at least some training in avoiding cognitive bias.
the nazi’s…and especially mussolini…had at least some connection to what we call Reason(the punch cards from IBM, etc)
i dont think these people do.
its all Id, all the time…flighty, swayed by whomever whispers in their ear last.
whims, writ large.
blunder through it all and insist, loudly, that “I win!!”.
a quote from Hitler i trot out to shock people:” what luck for the rulers that men do not think”
“He left the restaurant convinced that those vulgar mediocrities would never make it ”
And here we are, where vulgar mediocrities are now in positions of great power.
Uh… so *The Atlantic* has been running “Trump is the New Hitler” articles? Have they also been predicting that the sun will rise in the East?
I’m sorry. I am not trying to minimize the destructive effects of the current Trump administration, which are considerable. But we have been moving in this direction for a long time, and for most of that time The Atlantic has been providing cover for these developments. I quit taking it seriously as anything but a propaganda outlet a couple of decades ago. As is pointed out almost daily at NC now, our “fascist” history did not begin with Trump. Trump is just the culmination of the long trajectory of US political and economic history. Many of the key events driving this history were justified by articles in The Atlantic, often packaged in a way that would appeal to its “liberal” readership.
Apparently Trump is still perceived as too much of a threat to the “Atlanticist” Establishment. I guess his wholehearted support for Israel’s genocide is not enough for The Atlantic to pull back their rhetoric.
Am I being too cynical? I don’t think so.
Billmon that used to have the Whiskey Bar website caught onto this long ago. During the Cheney administration he would just post a quote from someone in that administration and then right next to it, a quote from some famous Nazi saying exactly the same thing.
re: JACOBIN
Pierre Naville Carved Out a Surrealist Path to Marxism
By Ian Birchall
The unconventional artistic rebellion of surrealism may seem a long way removed from the sober, disciplined work of Marxist revolutionaries. But French writer Pierre Naville brought surrealism and Marxism together amid the turmoil of interwar Europe.
https://jacobin.com/2025/03/pierre-naville-surrealism-marxism-breton
The High Cost of Fixing Lake Tahoe Cal Matters
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I lived in Tahoe in the mid 80’s thanks to a skiing addiction and a gambling problem (my car had casino cruise control-anytime it got near a parking lot of a house of chance it would automatically park the jalopy for me) and lived on the then sleepy west shore-not too far from where Zuckerberg et al have built grandiose Mountain McMansions as of late.
Similar to many wonderful mountain locales, Tahoe is radically pricey in terms of homes-many of which are only occupied for short periods of time, and thus finding employees is really difficult.
We are ensconced in Frisco, Colorado at present and needed some stuff so we went to the Wal*Mart in town and I saw something i’ve never seen before in that the entire staff of the store-with the exception of cashiers, was black men from Mauritania with the most exotic first names imaginable. Homes and condos are wickedly expensive here, so I wondered what their living arrangement must be like among people that probably never saw snow in their lives until brought here probably out of desperation in that nobody working for Wal*Mart could even begin to afford the high cost of living.
Anybody else seen such an array of employees @ your Wal*Mart?
Yes! I live outside of Portland, ME and recently went into the local walmart. Most employees generally and the entire front staff of the store–greeters, security, cashiers–were black and not American. My state is comparatively welcoming to political refugees and has a sizable refugee population but Ive learned from past jobs that an African co-worker could just as easily be a temporary worker, earning money for their families back home. (I worked with guys from Kenya who had zero interest in becoming US citizens.) Not sure what the deal is with Walmart though.
I wonder if walmart used the H(1)(b) visa program or something else?
Re that cat in today’s Antidote du jour. That cat looks like it is seriously unimpressed with what looks to be a cold day so he is not budging at all. Reminds me of another cat spotted recently-
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1jgmz17/a_cat_was_spotted_on_top_of_bolivias_iconic/
Why yes, it was a tuxedo cat.
Wow, I imagine the view is nice from up there.
After seeing today’s antidote, I invented a new word.
AIMAZING: An AI generated object that amazes people.
Re Long COVID article. Yep, all chimes with me. Just seen GP (the senior partner, who I’ve not seen in over 3 years…. remembers me very very well but then again she probably would since “care” of me caused our main hospital to refer her practice to the GMC and which forced her to fire one of her GPs for misconduct).
Nice as pie today (ha). I have antibiotics prescription (topical intra nasal) because my skin (scalp) problems have now reached there causing frequently opening wound and thus easy route for infection with anything.
However the neurological implications worry me most….. brain fog and memory issues have definitely got suddenly worse shortly after each of 4 suspected (but only two definite) COVID infections. It is ironic that I as a gay man took such precautions to avoid infection with a disease like HIV only to get a virus which seems to do a lot of similar stuff to my body that HIV would do. It really wears you down.
Really sorry to hear this Terry. Not giving medical advice but what has helped me are certain supplements along with Nicotine patches, lots of Komucha (COVID can live in the gut a long time) and drinking Zeolite mixed with water, which helps clean out your system.
re: No more soldiers: European big debt for defence, yet young men are vanishing Brussels Signal
I wonder if this might be why so many politicians are pro-war, they may be recalling the post-WW2 baby boom when there was a bit of scarcity of men and lots and lots of sex going on, so thinking they might be able to reproduce (ha) those conditions.
My understanding is that in the 1950s U.S. there was a “baby bust” because birth rates had fallen during the Depression. The military was drafting everybody it could, including people like Elvis Presley.
There are loads of pics of Larry the Downing Street cat looking hugely unimpressed…… which kinda makes sense given all the Prime Ministers under his tenure!
Watched some March Madness yesterday, and judging from the lack of ink on the most exposed bodies in sports-save boxing, tattoos are so yesterday-hardly any players had them.
I try not to be the stereotype in judging people because of tattoos. I’ve seen some really nice tasteful ones and worked with people in high up professional positions with one.
However I now wonder if more and more people are seeing what the typical tattoo looks like when you’ve aged 30 years…..yuk…
I know a number of younger PMCs with tattoos. They appear to spend a lot of time with skin care products to extend the life of the tattoos.
Interesting! I imagine such a skin regime works for a certain amount of time but eventually fails (just like those actresses who had face-lifts but their hands gave them away since there is little you can do to cover up age when it comes to hands and feet )
Skin loses elasticity. Accept that.
And hair gets thin even if you have a fair bit of it. Ask me how I know. :(
I won’t get personal by asking but long COVID changed my hair a LOT!
Now got patches of alopecia and hair on head is definitely dry as straw (and thinner) but still very strong growth elsewhere on my body. Weird.
You could always try a #1 buzz-cut Rev. My son- in-law has serious male pattern baldness which one barely notices with his close shave.
I, on the other hand, with a fullish head of hair, alternate between a #2 and #3. (Saves on barber visits and hair care product).
“U.S. delegation to visit Greenland as Trump talks of takeover”
‘Usha Vance, wife of Vice President JD Vance, will lead the delegation that includes White House national security adviser Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.’
Sounds like a top drawer delegation to me. After walking around the place, I am sure that they will be full of keen, insightful questions to ask the locals-
‘Why is it so cold here?’
‘Why do you let all these Eskimos roam around the place?’
‘What do you mean that it is not even winter yet?’
‘Would you all like American flag collar pins?’
‘Is that red and white flag the Canadian flag? What – you have your own flag?’
‘And again, what’s with all these Eskimos.’
‘And why are you called Greenland, all we’ve seen so far is snow and ice?’
They would answer: “For the same reason you call your country a democracy.“
“Usha Bala Chilukuri Vance is an American lawyer who has been the second lady of the United States since 2025, being married to Vice President JD Vance. She is the first Asian American and first Hindu American second lady. A former trial lawyer, she has also worked with justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Vance was born in San Diego County, California, to Telugu Indian immigrant parents and raised in an upper-middle-class suburb.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usha_Vance
Maybe she should be Veep rather than hubbie.
She needs better taste in men. :)
Is anyone else finding that both in app requests and particularly out of app links to TwitterX as used here on NC are loading very very slowly?
Elon of course claimed the outage the other day was a DDOS attack but now I’m wondering…..
Tech people were all over the claims from X central about an attack. Apparently about as credible as the woman who carved a backwards B in her face and claimed she had been attacked by Obama supporters.
Haha thanks. When I see this on different OSes and types of device then I begin to suspect something more serious….. the “twitter outage map” for UK doesn’t even load properly.
I suspect the site is in its death throes
The bankers are circling……
If it really is in its death throes, then concerted MDOS attacks could kill it faster. ( Of course, as an analog refugee in this digital world, I wouldn’t really know that. I just suppose it).
The group Anonymous claimed they would be attacking twitter so the DDOS thing might be real.
re: Minsk II
The Ukrainians failed to confront ultranationalists to secure peace in the Donbas
Boris Johnson finally says out loud what many already knew about the Minsk agreement
Ian Proud
Mar 19, 2025
https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/the-ukrainians-failed-to-confront
That one was a very good reading.
re: Monopoly Round-Up: The Democrats’ Corporate Lawyers Get the Humiliation They Deserve – BIG by Matt Stoller
Good article for the most part. Stoller lays out the rot in the Dem estab.
Stoller is still too credulous that a Bernie tour will spark a rebellion in the Dem estab’s machine, imo. I wondered who was funding this tour and arranging logistics, etc. I went to Bernie’s website for the Tour, and sure enough there was an ACTBLUE donation link. OK. This is primarily a fund raising event for the Dem party, imo.
Been there, done that.
thanks for pointing out the post
Yes, excellent analysis. I tried to subscribe after reading it but found the payment processor for other than Apple Pay to be unworkable and apparently designed to discourage payments from subscribers.
My simple-minded take is that the Democratic Party is run by people without principle. How can anyone with any sense of morality support such a corruption?
I agree with Mr Stroller’s reservations about Sen Sanders. I caucused for Bernie in 2016 and have long said we should have had President Sanders but we got a game show host. But the Democrats sabotaged Bernie in favor of their corrupt candidate. An unprincipled affront to party members who faithfully executed their civic duty to support their candidate only to be cheated by their own party.
Thanks. Yeah Bernie talks the talk but when push comes to shove won’t walk the walk.
The best the genuine progressives can hope for is that someone currently not “in the national spotlight” WILL walk the walk and get people behind them. Bernie is too old and doesn’t appear to have the cojones.
I supported Bernie twice. Second time even worse than the first. Now..I just skip over anything attributed to him. Bernie sanders is a joke. Democratic Party supporter through and through. Just forget about him. It figures the first place I ever saw him was on Thom Hartman, nothing but a democrat party operative.
Yeah if I were in USA I’d feel same as you and be wondering who to support…..
adding: ACTBLUE has its own problems.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/potential-actblue-criminal-charges-over-possible-fraud-donations-once-again-reveal-the-dems-fraud-campaign/ar-AA1qQv0D
Color me unsurprised
Until the Dems solve their ActBlue and pop-up NGO laundering issues, they won’t get much traction.
Consider a radical alternative: listen to all of their constituents and learn what they want and need.
‘Been there, done that.’
Did you at least get a t-shirt out of it?
ha! Yes, I did get the t-shirt. It’s still somewhere in the back of my closet. It’s a reminder. / ;)
an aside: after Hills lost in 2016, Bernie came to my state to give a fund raising, barn stormer of a speech. Most of the raised money was supposed to stay in the state to help the state Dem party. Guess where most all of the money went instead. / ;)
Bernie is an independent. He as well as any non-profit can use the Actblue platform to raise money. The money goes directly to his designated bank account, not the Democratic party. Many local candidates down to school board, city councils and county boards use this platform to accept political donations and the DNC never has control of the money, it goes right to the candidate’s designated campaign bank account. The fees charged by Actblue are about the same as changed by any CC payment system (like Square or Stripe).
Bernie gives us hope. He’s still out there elevating the message. It’s us vs the rich who have stacked the deck against everyday people. This message resonates with many people of all political stripes. Anti-vac people, Anti-pharma are all about the corporate control of government. Union members who were betrayed by NAFDA. They all still respect Bernie and were strongly behind him in 2016.
This… From the Stoller article. Sanders, who is attracting a lot of people who did not support him in 2016 and 2020 to his rallies, is building a different kind of politics. He has refined his argument to focus on oligarchy, the group of superrich who are running the United States.
Matt’s article exposes the real dark state which is the control of government by the big law firm that deeply intertwines corporations and government. We all knew Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and their admins were not for us. They were for the private equity and corps like Google where were carving up the wealth of the nation for their own pockets.
I came to this site because Wall Street was screwing Americans and Yves explained that well and advocated for change. Bernie Sanders is out there with that message, the same message he has had for years and now it’s wrong?
What should the message be?
I know that you like the guy but when you get down to it, you should not only listen to what people say but what they actually do and see if they match. And with Bernie they don’t. He always folds to the Democrats when push comes to shove and abandons the followers he has built up. Twice now. A long time ago I thought that after Bernie passes away, that there will be books written about him and that and that there should be a book called “Bernie Sanders: The Man Who Broke America’s Heart.” If he had gotten out of the way back in 2015, it might have been that a younger person might have taken up his mantle and made a Trump Presidency impossible. But he didn’t and now you have Trump sitting in the White House – for a second time.
Rev, I respect you a great deal, but I really don’t understand what you’re saying, especially in your last paragraph. Are you saying that trump being in the white house a second time is the result of sanders not getting out of the way back in 2015? Or is that some kind of idle speculation on your part? I think that a better reasoned argument, not reading sanders’ mind, of course, is that when he finally saw that he would not be permitted to win, he withdrew in order not to split the democratic party and have trump win the election. This, with sanders coming to realize that clinton was a very weak candidate. With your suggestion that he should’ve stepped aside for some younger candidate, whose name I can scarcely recall now, and with the almost religious belief among hardcore democrats that sanders’ entrance into the race caused clinton to lose, perhaps sanders should have done nothing and just shut up. I think that sanders entered the race to speak up for working americans and the legions of others who’ve been too long forgotten by the ruling classes. I think that sanders didn’t realize that his message would resonate so convincingly, and that his success was entirely unexpected. When he entered the race, from what I can recall, clinton was considered by many to be a shoo-in, and trump was just a joke. But we all know what happened. Clinton lost, trump won, and sanders went from being the lowliest of underdogs to Sheepdog. Don’t think it’s fair to blame sanders for having some nefarious purpose, to shepherd voters into the Democratic Party. Better to blame him for having the nerve to show the american public that there can be a better way to participate in the political system.
A few days ago there was a very interesting article linked here on the rise and fall of Wokeism. If I recall correctly the author marked the challenge by Sanders before 2016 elections as a turning point which made Wokeism to rise and become mainstream in the Dem party as an alternative narrative to Sander’s challenge focused on the defence of Labour and re-distributional policies. Dem. party donors couldn’t stomach that. The other event that pushed such transformation was the killing of Michael Brown according to the author and, again, if my memory is not failing.
Writing ‘sanders’ instead of Sanders does not help your arguments even if these are sensible. Advice from one who writes awful English.
Thanks for your reply. To my credit, though, I did capitalize Sheepdog. And I think your writing in english is quite good and always understandable. And your thinking is quite good, too, interesting to read.
I can’t answer for the rev, but from my perspective sanders revealed how right wing and globalist the dynamic core of the dem party has become.
The matt stoller link today paints the picture nicely.
(Sorry ignacio,i’m a rabid anti cpitalizer
anti capitalizeist :)
but i’m there with you on selective capitalization
Sanders, while earnest in his beliefs, is not a revolutionary.
Also, others have suggested that the Democrat Establishment had the goods on his wife, and perhaps he learned his place in exchange.
I think Bernie is suffering from a privileged person’s version of Stockholm Syndrome after spending all those years among the monsters in Congress. When those are the people you regard as your co-workers and have to deal with every day, you end up going along with many undesirable proceedings just to get along and have your own suggestions occasionally get some sort of hearing. And it doesn’t hurt if you’re getting wealthy during the process. Minus the getting wealthy part, I had some experience with that serving on high level committees in corporations, just trying to tone down the bad decisions a little instead of saying, “Hell, NO!” Which was my first reaction, but would’ve ensured I’d get ignored totally thereafter. And I don’t think Bernie was that far to the left to begin with; by European standards he would have been considered very center-left. But the Dems need a fire-breathing proletarian slugger to mount any kind of comeback now, not another vaguely left or “culturally left” or “centrist” type. Otherwise they will eventually cease circling the drain and just get sucked down it for good.
Short form? There was a lot of energy a decade ago for medicare for all, a minimal wage, justice reform, etc. You never hear them being talked about these days. Sanders put himself at the head of this movement, made the speeches, pulled in donations from the little people, made all the promises – and then abandoned them. Twice. The first time it was to support Hillary and the second time he did it was to support his good friend Joe. At the beginning of the pandemic there was an opportunity to bring in medicare for all but then Sanders announced that he was abandoning support for that in April of 2020 and yes, I have the receipts. Him being there sucked the energy of any other possible leader arising and that is the truth. One day there is going to have to be a damage assessment done about his place in American politics from about 2015 to 2020.
More to my point-
https://xcancel.com/PrimoRadical/status/1903792424494813310#m
This. The Democrat inner party clearly decided that Trump in the WH was far preferable to Sanders in the WH.
And Bernie knows this.
About Bernie.
From a news site in Tampa,FL.
https://baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2023/11/10/the-lawmakers-who-ve-never-passed-a-bill–and-the-ones-who-ve-done-it-plenty
From the article:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, has been in either the House or the Senate since 1991. His score of .200 was the 89th-highest among Senators during the 117th Congress, according to the Center for Effective Lawmaking. In his more than 30 years in the House or Senate, Sanders has only had one bill he sponsored become law.
From the Center for Effective Lawmaking itself and you can find your own reps. No idea as to the political leanings of the people that put this together.
https://thelawmakers.org/find-representatives
Oh well, at least he tries and that’s enough for the Green Mountain State . And he is consistent in his talk.
Does this include bills of Sanders that died in Committee? My guess is that most of his policy wouldn’t see the light of day. I do recall he was good at getting stuff attached to other bills. He still needs to retire and find an independent protege.
Most people never heard of Bernie before 2015. I grew up in VT and have followed his political career pretty closely, although I never lived in Burlington when he was mayor there, and moved from VT about the time he got in to Congress. I may have voted for him in 1990, but haven’t been able to since.
I never doubted the sincerity of his core political positions, like I do with 99.9% of the others, and I still don’t. I think he was as surprised as anybody to see his campaign catch on with the public, and I think he did the right thing in 2016 by supporting Clinton, since by doing so he kept a promise and his integrity, something rare in a politician.
That said, he should never have made any promises after getting backstabbed in 2016, and I have been very disappointed in his performance since. The problem with him in my opinion is that he is genuinely a nice person, and salty old baseball manager Leo Durocher told us where the nice guys finish a long time ago.
As far as his legislative record goes, when you have both parties united against any time you try to do anything beneficial for the people, it is difficult to get anything passed. To that point, there is the following article, which I was a little shocked to find is now 20(!) years old, where Bernie discusses with Matt Taibbi exactly how the sausage gets made. Definitely well worth a read, and not much has changed in 20 years – https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/inside-the-horror-show-that-is-congress-177955/
>I never doubted the sincerity of his core political positions, like I do with 99.9% of the others, and I still don’t. I think he was as surprised as anybody to see his campaign catch on with the public, and I think he did the right thing in 2016 by supporting Clinton, since by doing so he kept a promise and his integrity, something rare in a politician.
I think that’s extremely fair but what bothers me is that in the last election, the candidate and party that aligned most with his policies and positions all these years was the Green Party and Jill Stein. Supporting and campaigning for her and the party may have really raised the profile for the alternatives to the Rs and Ds. Not doing so to me puts a big dent in the integrity fender. Unless he was believing the “polls” that showed Harris winning and wanted to be with the winners.
Could have been the kick start to something new.
Not for nothing, but unlike most of the regular Democratic posers, I do believe that he sincerely considered Trump a great danger to the country. And that he took the position that since Biden and Harris had the better chance to beat him, they should be supported. I might not have entirely agreed with his assessment as I personally believed that those two were of equal or greater danger to the nation, but I do think this was a large part of his decision making process.
He may not have passed as much legislation as others, but a fair number of amendments he sponsored made legislation that was passed better. On the ACA for example, his participation got one of the best aspects into the bill, funding for community health clinics. And I am a huge critic of ACA.
The design of Congress and our current campaign funding policies mean that passing a bill is not just sausage making on the part of the legislators. It makes getting anything for the public a Sisyphean struggle as most every thing has to be lobbyist approved. Even getting those small bits of light in are major accomplishments.
Yes. Picture LBJ as a senator, roaming the countryside gathering the disaffected, giving stirring lectures and maybe some town halls. Instead of being back in his chair at the capitol, working the levers of power to actually do something about the republic going down the drain. I’m guessing he would have a hearty laugh at this situation.
Jimmy Dore’s take on the Tour. utube, ~7+ minutes.
AOC & Bernie PRETEND To Fight Against The Oligarchy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqNn2Drx7Vo
adding: Remember the 2024 Dem national convention when Ill Gov JB Pritzer called himself a real billionaire, unlike T ? Like being a real billionaire was a win? And the Dem delegates went wild with approval? Yeah. / heh
I’m no T supporter, to be sure. It’s that the Dems are not a real opposition. It’s the uniparty. Dore, utube, ~16+ minutes.
Secret Memo Reveals Trump’s Plan To GUT Social Security!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRw3LPlbLX4
Sorry- I agree with Flora’s reservations about Bernie. Mr Stoller I think has a decidedly rose hue to his Bernie stuff.
Too bad he folded but I’ll bet he didn’t have much choice. They attacked his wife and who knows what else.
Due Dissidence guys talking about the Tour. utube, ~9+ minutes.
Bernie STORMS OUT Of Interview Over SOFTBALL Question
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33QnCPlb07E
Time to retire. He’s 83 ffs. I retired at 55. I can’t imagine taking on that level of stress again. Leave it up the youngsters and go for a hike, Bernie. A sincere thanks for your service- better than most tho that’s a low bar.
Time to retire
I don’t know about that, without replacement he may have to go down with the ship.
hey flora
been following your generally insightful commentary since you started posting some 10 years ago??(maybe less??) I like that you often back commentary up with supporting links. Like you, I think Jimmy Dore is a perceptive hoot and I’m glad you found him (maybe here??)
But I wanted to speak with you about something else–Senator Sanders.
yea–he broke my heart too–since i ‘invested’ in him since 2013/14.
Despite a real bitter tone I am getting from your comments, you can’t dismiss that from last Thurs/Fri and Sat over 40,000 people came out in 2 states to hear his message. Pretty much that standard one–economic inequality/healthcare/education/union organizing/politics for sale…
Maybe 100,000 btwn IA/WI/MN/AZ/CO/NM over the past 5 weeks. And he is the only one doing it. I’m sorry for everyone that is bitter, but Sanders is the only one doing it.
You’ve been there.
Is he saying what needs said?? Did anybody force those folks to go listen. Do you think they are chumps for wanting affirmation for their own political beliefs? Could the next Sanders be in that audience listening? Do you think any of them will be stepping out this April 5??
You know Citizens United is always included– truly, imo, a hobble on US voting rights.
And just look at what happens to NC Comments when Sanders gets dragged into the arena.
Today almost 20% of ALL Links Comments are back and forth on him–yesterday it was 15% of the Links Comments.
And it has been a trend here (which is why I noticed it–since I like embedded patterns) since way before Lambert left us (May the Force be with Him). Do your own survey. He is like a lightning rod–
I have gotten OK with him not being the Leader, and instead just being the messenger.
Hope you can also.
RE: White House seeks corporate sponsorships for Easter event
Frist ‘Tesler’, and now this. I expect more. Reminds me of a forgotten John Ritter film, “Americathon (also known as Americathon 1998). Satire at the time, but seems perhaps prophetic, now. Set in 1998, America is bankrupt and destitute, so new president Ritter has a telethon auctioning off national assets like the statue of liberty. (They didn’t foresee France wanting it back, apparently). Some great cameos like Elvis Costello among others. Perhaps now to close for comfort and laughs…close to the bone so to speak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americathon
Great (bad) film, it foresaw the future.
Re “Canada’s new Prime Minister Carney announces snap election in April”
All my voting life (since 1980) we have had to endure a relatively meaningless back-and-forth between the neoliberal Liberals and the equally (more?) neoliberal Conservatives — which is to say between Tweedledum and and Tweedledummer 🙄
For myself I would prefer handing neither the insufferably arrogant Liberal Party nor a Conservative Party led by the odious rage-farming Poilievre a majority mandate. In Canada we generally get better governance from our minority parliaments …
Absolutely true: Pearson (1960s medicare); Trudeau (1970s National Energy Board) and almost daycare with Martin as PM; Trudeau fils (daycare, pharmacare and dental care). The key has been the NDP support or in the case of Pearson the NDP under its original name: CCF.
But:
Rick Salutin (Toronto Star, 22 Dec 2023) wrote that “…the NDP is a spent force. I don’t know if they should fold into the Liberals but it would at least make sense of their existence. They’d become the left wing of the Liberals, like Sanders for the Democrats and as Corbyn was for British Labour”.
He has been a life long supporter of the NDP. This gives some indication of the Carney “wave” which will not lift NDP boats as they vote across Canada to keep Poilievre out of power. On cable (CBC and CTV) political programmes, weekdays, the paid Conservatives commentators were giddy prior to Trudeau’s resignation. It was a done deal – Poilievre was shoe-in. Immediately after Freeland crucified Trudeau, the Party let her know as she was trounced by Carney that she too was toast. She was/is a boring, pedantic and accident prone Deputy Leader. And Freeland was rewarded accordingly in the leadership contest. The Conservative commentators currently (since Carney won handily) let slip every now and then that Poilievre is past his best buy date. Satirically referred as Skippy (15 year history on that epithet) the Conservatives are letting it be known that Skippy is finished and clearly he is no longer now or will be a political force in the future. In Quebec historically a technocrat leader at the federal level is preferred to lip readers: come on down Poilievre. Quebecois as a rule prefer a winner, to a loser – Poilievre. The NDP is going to get crushed and may not get Official Party status. Singh’s (NDP leader) vocabulary is watered social democracy and slides into PM McKenzie King’s (PM in 1920s-1940s) assessment of the NDP as “Liberals in a hurry”. This why the Liberals will crush the NDP and humiliate the Conservatives again. Rudderless and unprincipled, Poilievre is about to be handed his backside.
Ginger Goodwin
Much of value here Ginger, and thanks. One of the things that amused me most when I used to listen to a lot of Toronto talk radio (which is for the most part, by Canadian standards, rabidly right wing — I stopped listening in Fall of 2023 when the Zionism became too much to bear) was how much pleasure the hosts and callers enjoyed “dunking on” the NDP, not realizing that historically for the Conservatives to have a realistic chance of winning a Federal election they actually needed the NDP to bleed votes from the centre-left Liberals.
I doubt they’ve learned much since …
(since Carney won handily)? Really? Carney did win with a plurality of votes, true. But his rivals were dumped, applications for memberships were denied. Apparently out of 400,000 membership applications 200,000 were denied. So we Canadians will get yet another globalist. Remember Trudeau literally doubled our national debt in 10 years. Carney as well as Poilievre are “all in for Israel and Ukraine, what could go wrong. My ballot will be spoiled and I urge other Canadians to show your disgust with our system where 1/3 of voters can elect a majority. That works out to 20% of eligible voters in a normal election turnout.
You are entirely correct.
Yeah. Although the 2010 coalition govt in UK came about after I’d moved down under, I was worried from the get go and wanted a minority govt.
The LibDems claim to this day that the coalition was the only viable option. No. Rubbish. All you had to do was forgo ministerial leather seated Jags and said “confidence and supply only” to Cameron. Then kept him on his toes. You could even have used the nuclear option of voting him down at the RIGHT time to ensure the voting reform referendum. People round here have long memories. The Lib Dems typically lose their deposit every time.
May I suggest a vote for the NOTA party…. Take a sharpie and write it in I’m going to as I can’t bring myself to vote for anyone. I miss the Rhino party
NOTA…none of the above
I already do that. I spoil my ballot paper every General Election.
Spoilt ballots are counted. I just wish that here in UK we followed Australia and made voting compulsory – we’d get a much a better indicator of how many people despise the status quo.
I miss the Rhinos almost as much as I miss Les Entartistes 🤣
https://www.entartistes.ca/entree.html
“An Extreme Ultimatum for Iran”
Actually Trump’s demands are much more extreme than this article lets on. So one demand is no enrichment at all as in zero. Not even for short-lived medical isotopes to treat cancers. Verboten. I would imagine that there would even be a ban on isotopes coming from another country to treat those patients. They can just go die. Waltz also demands an end to their weaponization of uranium program which the Pentagon has long ago assessed as being nonexistent. So why demand it? To make Iran prove a negative? He also demanded that Iran get rid of its entire strategic missile program which Iran uses to give itself strategic depth. In short, this would be like the deal that they gave Gaddafi and we all now how that ended up. I for one would not like to see slave markets in Tehran come about-
https://news.antiwar.com/2025/03/23/nsa-waltz-demands-iran-give-up-entire-nuclear-program-including-civilian-enrichment/
Eliminating medical isotopes…… likely Iran’s reactors (as Hamas commanders) are in hospitals.
Houthis been target for years…..
If Trump wants to start a war with Iran doesn’t he need some kind of Congressional authorization? Just asking.
Trump even justified he Venezuelan deportations on the grounds that we are at war with Venezuela. When did that happen? A post elsewhere here today talks about challenging Trump in court on personnel matters but surely his constant FP threats of bringing “hell” are much greater affronts to the separation of powers. In the old world Americans came from kings got to do that. We don’t have a king.
Ritter & several others are suggesting that the only way the US can destroy the Iranian nuclear & missile sites us by using tactical nuclear weapons. There is a further suggestion that Trump may use nukes against Iran to preempt Israel’s using them. The thought that nuclear weapons may be used in the next few months is mind-boggling, but needs to be taken seriously.
Unless there is organized opposition immediately (IMO unlikely), and Trump follows through on his threat, the consequences will be apocalyptic, even if nukes don’t fly.
I don’t think Trump will do that or even bomb.
Crooke talks about this today.
https://conflictsforum.substack.com/p/whilst-trump-is-in-a-hurry-putin
But reality can intrude even on Trump who wants to help his son-in-law make money out of the ME. A radioactive Riviera not appealing
Iran has its own uranium reserves. The idea that the US has any say in whether or not Iran gets to dig up and process its own minerals is a non-starter.
This is the fatal flaw in the latest doomed attempt to scale up nuclear power generation, again: the enrichment, breeder, and waste reprocessing equipment and technologies for producing and enriching uranium can produce fuel for nuclear power, or material for nuclear weapons. More nuclear power means more nuclear proliferation. Period.
My dem friends that listen to MSM believe Iran needs to be taken out.
That they are why Yemen has weapons and the list goes on.
I think it’s extremely possible that Trump bombs Iran.
They count Yemen having weapons as a negative? Wow. Now the fact that Yemen can’t seem to hit anything worthwhile with their weapons, that could be counted as a negative… Which may be down to Iran not giving them the top-tier stuff. Your friends should appreciate that part, I guess.
The Tragedy of Joethello, the Moor of Delaware…
https://nypost.com/2025/03/24/us-news/joe-and-jill-biden-spotted-at-othellos-opening-night-in-nyc/
At least the article mentioned the ticket prices in passing. The Denzel Washington Othello has a top ‘listed’ ticket price of $921 a ticket. That is not the scalper price, but the box office price. The low for the Orchestra is $216. There are not going to be many tickets below that price even in the Broadway equivalent of nosebleed seats. And you know Joe and Jill wouldn’t be caught dead in those. (Broadway really is pricing itself totally out of existence.)
I’m waiting for the scuttle butt. I just can’t see Joe keeping it together for the play. Although this is NY, people might keep it to themselves just because Trump…
I haven’t seen any comments here about his passing. R.I.P. George Foreman.
It’s rare to see a person truly reinvent themselves. Foreman was a devastating puncher, and a menacing human who won the heavyweight title (“Down goes Frazier!” is my all-time favorite Howard Cosell memory) then lost to Ali in Zaire. Followed by the greatest comeback in sports history, IMO, winning the heavyweight title at age 45.
An inspirational figure, George was probably more well-known for selling grills by the time the kids in the 80s got to know him.
If you were a boxing fan and grew up in the 70s, it was an embarrassment of riches. Ali, Foreman, Smoking Joe Frazier, all titanic figures. Then Mike Tyson in the 80s.
Yes, RIP George. one of the pantheon of punchers we were blessed with in the 60’s & 70’s…
I saw Ali @ O’Hare airport in 1980, and tv and movies tend to
make small people big (Tom Cruise comes to mind) and big people small, and I remember being gobsmacked by what a beautiful specimen of humanity he was-larger than life.
I met briefly with Ali and shook his hand. OMG! It went half way up my wrist. Sure wouldn’t want to get tapped by one of those paws. RIP Mr. Forman and all of his George’s.
Me, it was in the late 70s near Times Square. I noticed people looking in my direction, turned my head slightly and there was Ali, striding within 3 feet of me. Amazing physical charisma. Which was matched, in a different manner, by a very, very elderly man being escorted from the Paris Cinematheque after a showing in his honor. Unmistakable smile. Charlie Chaplin.
Mike Tyson? I’m all ears.
Maybe we can trace the decline of the heavyweight era and boxing in general to that unfortunate incident. It seems that after Iron Mike’s decline, we have never seen a champion worthy of admiration.
I truly despise MMA, as it is IMO totally barbaric and completely lacking in the relatively restraining rules of boxing (no punches below the belt, no kicking, etc). One of the few instances where I agreed with the late John McCain – it should have been banned.
I feel like the rise of travel teams and PRO-liferation of high school team sports killed it. Even if every professional boxer talent wise is still there, they aren’t going to become good enough out of high school to get better because they aren’t forced to get better by the competition.
Then with MMA or even just martial arts, the kids aren’t boxing.
A Golden Age for fight fans, all divisions. Remember the first round of the Hearns/Hagler fight?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL2a2-8OHdg
Those two men did not play. Remember Cuban Teófilo Stevenson?
I do, thanks! A friend saw Greg Page spar. Friend said television could not remotely reproduce the sound of punches landing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Page_(boxer)
Chris from Georgia, Thanks for bringing him up. George Foreman was one of my all time favorite sports hero’s. A Transformational figure. Unlike Ali, Foreman came from a very poor environment. You just couldn’t say anything against him. His punch was a sledgehammer. The fight in Zaire was the only time I was sincerely worried for Ali. A truly inspiring individual he rose above everything. An amazing human being. And who doesn’t still love the George Foreman grill.
I just had seen the documentary “when we were kings”. I will very much miss George Foreman. He was a good man.
“Imagining the Progressive Restaurant”
I have no idea what he is talking about, especially because this is a UK publication. The British already had that. They called it the local pub. I went to a few while I was over there and they were full of locals and more to the point families. It was the social center for the local area or village and they usually had a friendly atmosphere. Unfortunately these pubs – some that go back centuries – have been closing by the hundreds the past few years-
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/30/number-of-pubs-in-england-and-wales-falls-below-39000-for-first-time
Can’t have places where people form social bonds. They might get ideas above their station. And why this guy’s insistence that all such places have to revolve around food and restaurants?
Yep. Some of my strongest bonds were via random conversation at local Bristol pub… at the height of the Facebook boom!
Now the key pubs are closing and the remainder encourage people to have their enclosed bubble just like so many have on social media. Very sad :(
Today, while talking about social isolation with my wife, it assaulted me the idea that the Covid pandemic, in a very radical way, helped the final assault of “Neoliberal individualism” to break the remaining cultural links in our modern societies. Pubs, bares where I live, are indeed, or were, part of that culture.
Yeah I am seeing that in an ultra marginal political area of the UK,
We’re killing proper social interaction (that recognises things like some people’s need to mask) and we’re effed.
Yeah I get that…… plus observations concerning terrible empathy regarding driving etc are consistent with your hypothesis.
Yes, it did. It’s awful. Just like how they abused the definition of social distance during the pandemic shutdown. Just like the most successful neoliberals broke the rules that they insisted the poor follow in public. The jokes on them though, I guess. Trump was re-elected and the entire network that those people relied on is being shredded in front of our eyes.
Regarding China’s “cable cutter”, does Chekhov’s gun principle apply?
Nations do not have “principles,” they have “interests.” So, to answer your question, Chinas “cable cutter” will be ‘interesting’ to see in action.
Well, he has acquired free speech for himself. Anyone else interested in free speech shoud buy their own X (with blackjack and hookers).
“Turkiye’s breaking point: Erdogan moves to crush his biggest electoral threat”
Well that kinda backfired. Even though the guy is under arrest, nearly 15 million voted for him thus securing the opposition party’s presidential nomination for the 2028 election. People voted for him just to let Erdogan know what they think of him and let him know that they know that those charges were just trumped up. If Erdogan was half smart, he would announce his retirement in 2028 and groom a successor but I think that he will do a Biden and cling to power by his finger nails
On the situation in Serbia
I noticed the article in the Links a few days ago that was talking about colour revolution in Serbia, unfortunately I was too busy to comment at the time, so I’ll give a quick update here. For those unfamiliar with the situation, Serbia has been embroiled in massive protests sparked by collapse of the part of the newly renovated railway station in second largest city in the country, Novi Sad. Death toll as of last week has increased to 16 as another victim passed away. The real causes for the protests are deep rooted corruption and general dissatisfaction with the political scene in the country.
The protests have been gradually escalating since November, culminating in the massive protest in Belgrade on March 15, where 400-500,000 people from around the country assembled (out of 6.5M total population), despite government shutting down all rail and bus transport the day before. The government planned to initiate violence at the protest, setting up their own rival encampment (“Caciland”) in front of the presidents office prior to the protests and assembling several hundred thugs in the encampment tents. Violence, other than a single use of a sound cannon, was avoided because the students shifted the location of the protest and because the crowd size was much larger than expected. One of the police captains was saying that they were afraid that if violence started they would be trampled by the crowd, so they did their best to deescalate.
Since the 15th the government ramped up the intimidation and violence, incuding withholding salaries from teachers and university employees. President Vucic has also started cutting ties with his party and started a new political “movement” through which he hopes to shed the corruption label associated with his party. On the other hand, the protesters are also getting more aggressive, they are assembling in front of city halls and pelting government officials with eggs and rocks. Situation around government party meeting in the southern city of Nis got so bad that Vucic, who was supposed to attend, turned around and went back to Belgrade before entering the building.
What’s going to happen next? Vucic and his government will be gone within few weeks, it’s just of question of whether it will be peaceful or violent. The opposition parties, most of which are remnants of the 2000-2012 government coalition, are completely marginalized and are unable to take any advantage of the situation. The most likely outcome is splintering of the ruling party, there have been negotiations behind the scenes to bring about a caretaker government for 1 year, while purging the media and government institution of Vucic’s people. Then there would be a new election in 2026, likely with a very different political scene, where the current crop of politicians, both ruling and opposition, would be swept under the rug of history. If he survives, President Vucic will be irrelevant, presidential powers in Serbia are minimal and the role is largely ceremonial, similar to for example Germany. So without a hold on his party and the parliament, he will be completely powerless.
New Serbian government will likely be a combination of splinters of the current ruling party and some new political movements arising from the protests. Ideologically, it’s still likely to be center-right with populist tendencies. Who will lead this is very hard to say, there will be a lot of opportunity for talented politicians to rise to the top in the next 12-18 month.
Thank you for this update!
This speaks of genuine unrest rather than colour revolution. Thank you voislav.
Good one from Taibbi from a few days ago, apologies if it was already mentioned here – https://www.racket.news/p/australias-biggest-wanker
May be behind a paywall so the brief summary is that there was an “anti-semitic” attack in Australia which prompted a new “anti-hate speech” law. But it turned out the attack was a phony so people protested the law and tried to have it repealed, only for authorities to tell them it would stay on the books.
There sure are ‘goodthinkers’ everywhere you look these days in the Western world.
I emailed and called my congresscritters more than a week ago and in 3 out of 4 cases got a canned response.
Today I recieved an Email from Adam Schiff’s office that was responsive, someone clearly took the time to read the email I sent and they responded thoughtfully to my remarks.
I am gobsmacked, a “Public Servant” actually responded to a member of the Public thoughtfully…is this a sign of the end times?
end times, lol, coming from Schiff no less. I’d say he’s got eyes on ’28.
I can’t imagine anybody less charismatic – he’s the proverbial damp squib, albeit a mendacious one.
So pretty much a lock to be the Dem nominee.
Team Blue’s very own turd in the punchbowl.
Anyone so central to RussiaGate really has a shoe-in for 2028, I bet!
It seems to me that we are at an inflection point where an inconvenient number of people will “Go Die” in a short period of time.
Culling the population is clearly the plan, however it doesn’t look like it will happen in an orderly and seemly manner.
The 2005 PREP Act is finally coming under judicial review. From Meryl Nass’s substack:
FINALLY, a court rules that the PREP Act does not provide a waiver of liability for battery (jabbing a child against their will)
https://merylnass.substack.com/p/finally-a-court-rules-that-the-prep/
re: Gaza Albanese
“When the banality of evil becomes normalized, it grows unchecked.”
A conversation with UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese
by Rafael Sergi
15/03/2025
https://www.theleftberlin.com/interview-francesca-albanese/
sorry if this is a bit older
re: Canada – interference into domestic elections
The foreign interference report’s great anticlimax
False accusations and exaggerated claims appear to have done far more damage than the actual interference itself
by Paul Robinson
January 30, 2025
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-foreign-interference-reports-great-anticlimax
“(…)
Overall, it is all a bit underwhelming.
The only point at which the report abandons its rather measured tone is in a passage in the initial “Word from the Commissioner,” in which Justice Hogue states her opinion that disinformation is a far greater threat to Canada than electoral interference. Disinformation “poses the single biggest risk to our democracy. It is an existential threat,” she writes. This is a rather curious statement as the commission’s report devotes almost no attention to disinformation and contains nothing that would justify labelling the threat it poses as “existential.” It’s almost as if Justice Hogue is saying that the thing she was asked to investigate doesn’t amount to much but there’s something else out there that she thinks people should be looking at. It’s a bit odd.
(…)”
re: Navalny post-mortem
Moscow Times: The Fall of the House of Navalny?
https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/03/moscow-times-the-fall-of-the-house-of-navalny/
How NOT to use ChatGPT or ANY AI…
Yahoo!Finance : I asked ChatGPT if Tesla stock is doomed and it said this…”
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/asked-chatgpt-tesla-stock-doomed-052545566.html
OMG!!! This is crazy! I’m hoping this is no more than click-bait reporting!
While the author’s final critique is realistic…
“As for valuation, it said the stock is “still pricey relative to legacy automakers”. That’s an understatement — the price-to-earnings ratio is currently above 100!
Weighing things up (myself), there is too much uncertainty here for me to invest.”
…the entire article points out ill informed truths about Tesla’s stock performance over its lifetime but are published as if they should or could inform the reader about future performance.
AI is NOT intelligent!!! It does not understand accounting from an analytical perspective, at best it understands the math, and if IT really knew what that meant it would have come to the same conclusion (at a minimum) as the author. The reality is that its output reflects the PAST published (and AI training data set) analyzed commentary about Tesla’s stock performance VS any real intelligent analysis of Tesla in light of any and all past know corporate performances.
Indeed. It’s just part of why people like me hate it. It can’t possibly go beyond what economists fixate on, namely the production possibilities frontier.
So why trust results?
Here’s a great example, albeit just as flawed, for sports enthusiasts…
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/19/ai-march-madness-brackets
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
It’s amazing and deserves to be read carefully. My post about it earlier went to moderation.
Can you believe all those people were in a Signal group with Jeffrey Goldberg and nobody noticed? Hard to imagine.
Unsurprising in a way, since Jeffrey Goldberg is the epitome of the “Jewish insider,” to the point where the website of that name has for years advertised its subscription service “Daily Kickoff” with Goldberg’s recommendation:
https://jewishinsider.com/subscribe/
One of the things characterizing insider status would certainly be direct advance access to information no one on the “outside” gets.
For the UFO fans
Inside Apple’s Blockbuster Deal for Jerry Bruckheimer, Joseph Kosinski, Zach Baylin UFO Conspiracy Thriller
The streamer has just acquired the rights to the feature, with unusually rich deals for the behind-the-scenes talent.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/inside-ufo-joseph-kosinski-apple-deal-1236170985/
A senior White House official has hinted at the possibility of the U.S. utilizing its gold reserves to acquire more Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC).
What Happened: Bo Hines, the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets, suggested in an interview that the U.S. could capitalize on the gains from its gold holdings to purchase more Bitcoin.
President Trump, in a pre-recorded message, expressed his commitment to making the US the leading Bitcoin superpower and the global hub for cryptocurrency.
“It’s high time that our president started accumulating assets for the American people, which is what president Trump is doing rather than taking it away,” Hines added.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/white-house-says-gold-reserves-may-be-used-to-purchase-bitcoin/ar-AA1BuLLs
Who needs all that useless gold sitting in Fort Knox doing nothing when it could be replaced with ones and zeroes instead.
One EMP later…
“Who needs all that useless gold sitting in Fort Knox”
A plan to cover up the lack of gold in FK?
Officially the goods are valued at around $42 an ounce, maybe if they can find a buyer at that level is where the financial flim-flam happens?
New Hedges on the groveling of the universities is good.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/24/chris-hedges-surrendering-to-authoritarianism/
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which ranked third in visitation in 2024, is heading into the high season with a half-dozen of its campgrounds closed.
Currently the Abrams Creek, Balsam Mountain, Big Creek, Cataloochee, Cosby, and Look Rock campgrounds are closed, the National Park Service confirmed Friday evening.
“The park’s largest campgrounds are currently open: Cades Cove, Elkmont, and Smokemont. Deep Creek will open as planned on April 18,” an email from Park Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., said. “Abrams Creek, Balsam Mountain, Big Creek, Cataloochee, Cosby, and Look Rock campgrounds are closed. We regret any inconvenience. Visitors who booked campsites in those campgrounds have received refunds.”
https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2025/03/great-smoky-mountains-heading-high-season-without-all-campgrounds-open
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The same thing is going to happen in Sequoia NP, except all campgrounds are expected to be closed, turning it into a drive-by National Park, please move along.
Does that mean that cars will not be able to drive into that national ark or that they have to be gone by the end of the day?
I’ve camped at Big Creek several times. It has like 20 campsites. Cataloochee is bigger but not much. Big Creek is even hard to get to this year because it’s where I-40 fell in the river. The freeway has reopened as a temporary two lane but long waits are threatened for those who use it.
If not hiking the AT or using a back country permit the Smokies are mostly day use anyway and full of cars. Boy is it full of cars. Tourist trap Gatlinburg is on one side (Dollywood not far) and tourist trap Cherokee (Harrah’s Cherokee not far) on the other.
Perhaps y’all could put a casino where Disney wanted his ski resort. A giant hotel could help with the overnighters.