Why the Right Way To Fly a Rhino Is Upside Down ZME Science
Scientists hail ‘strongest evidence’ so far for life beyond our solar system The Guardian
Climate/Environment
HOW TRUMP’S TARIFF SHOCK COULD REROUTE DECARBONISATION Carbon Copy
Decarbonization reproduces colonial inequalities Review of African Political Economy
Extended heatwave in India, Pakistan to test survivability limits, with temperatures reaching Death Valley levels Carbon Brief
Japan’s deadly heat ‘will end summer sports’ by 2065 The Times
FUTURE CHIPS WILL BE HOTTER THAN EVER IEEE Spectrum
Pandemics
Fungal infections are ‘taking over the world’. Can they be stopped? The Telegraph
India
Trade war: US-China relation burnout may spark India’s rise from the smoke Economic Times
How an efficient integration of AI into our judicial system could help realise “complete justice” The Leaflet
China?
Some imports from China now face maximum tariff of 245%, US official says Anadolu Agency
China stocks face risk of $800 billion US outflows, says Goldman Sachs Bloomberg
Why China is going it alone on technology Programmable Mutter
China annual installations of industrial robots is more than the totality of rest of the world….think about that….. pic.twitter.com/766vnQ77w9
— Ray Wang (@rwang07) April 15, 2025
Old Blighty
Raw sewage pumped into UK waterways for 4.7 million hours in 2024: ‘This will only get worse’ Big Issue
Syraqistan
Saudi Arabia bombs Yemen border areas hours after intense US airstrikes The Cradle
***
Israel says it will keep troops in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria indefinitely. What does that mean? AP
Gaza has become a “mass grave” for Palestinians and those helping them Doctors Without Borders
“Poisoning ‘the Holy Land.’” The Floutist
Appalled at Funding Genocide, Over 2,000 US Taxpayers Turn to the UN for Redress Truthout
Israel ‘accidentally’ bombs own settlement near Gaza, due to ‘technical difficulties’ New Arab
***
Trump Waved Off Israeli Strike After Divisions Emerged in His Administration New York Times
Could Mossad kill IRGC air force chief to open up striking Iran nuke program? Jerusalem Post
Africa
Oligarchy and the subversion of democracy – warnings from South Africa Review of African Political Economy
European Disunion
JD Vance says Europe should have done more to stop Iraq War Deutsche Welle. Can they lay it on any thicker?
Will the new German government put a stop to far-right flirtations in Strasbourg? Euractiv
German car giants shake off their Nazi past to prepare for war The Telegraph
New Not-So-Cold War
US Softens Calls for Ukraine to Pay Back Aid in Minerals Deal Talks Bloomberg
Turns out the people grooming American teens into occult terrorism and presidential assassination plots aren’t some accelerationist satanic cult; it’s just Ukrainian intelligence agents.
A bit outside the usual scope of American moral panics, but here we are https://t.co/Tkuf5dHRhF
— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) April 16, 2025
Growth Of Ukraine’s Azov Units Follow Path Of The Waffen-SS Moon of Alabama
EUROPE DETERS PEACE: Trump’s Peace and Ukraine’s Demise Slowed But Not Stopped Gordon Hahn, Russian & Eurasian Politics
Trump 2.0
Trump signs directive on lowering drug prices even as he seeks tariffs on pharmaceuticals CNN
Trump administration plans to end the IRS Direct File program for free tax filing, AP sources say AP
Is Trump trying to save neoliberalism? Matt Stoller and Daniel Ranger, Unherd
Trump’s Tariffs Could Wreck California’s Economy. The State Is Suing KQED
I am more and more concerned about the White House’s trade negotiations, to the point where I feel I need to sound an alarm.
The White House needs new members on its team for trade.
In ~3-6 months we are going to start having shortages of transformers, pumps, air conditioners,… https://t.co/F4MXYVqSxG
— molson 🧠⚙️ (@Molson_Hart) April 15, 2025
***
Truth Social launches scheme to profit from Trump’s tariff policies Popular Information
DOGE
Government IT whistleblower calls out DOGE, says he was threatened at home Ars Technica
A Trump Administration Plan to Crowdsource Deregulation? Lawfare
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
LAPD Publishes Crime Footage It Got From a Waymo Driverless Car 404 Media
Immigration
Judge says Trump administration likely acted in contempt for not turning around deportation flights Euronews
Private Contractors, Fired Cops Are Making ‘Gang Member’ Determinations For ICE TechDirt
ICE Just Paid Palantir Tens of Millions for ‘Complete Target Analysis of Known Populations’ 404Media
Trump Is Spending Billions on Border Security. Some Residents Living There Lack Basic Resources. ProPublica
Van Hollen denied meeting, phone call with Abrego Garcia during El Salvador visit The Hill
Holy shit, even Senator Chuck Grassley’s constituents in solid red Iowa are on his case about bringing Abrego Garcia back. pic.twitter.com/5vvNI9sAnh
— BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ (@mmpadellan) April 15, 2025
Mystery Drones
FAA Testing Drone Detection Systems In New Jersey The War Zone
AI
OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At
How I Became Highly Educated Grist For The AI Mill Defector
Your AI ‘digital twin’ can take meetings and comfort your loved ones Coin Telegraph
Healthcare?
HHS funding slashed by 30 percent in budget proposal Politico
Groves of Academe
Our Famously Free Press
Q&A: Alec Karakatsanis on the Media’s Role in Spreading ‘Copaganda’ Columbia Journalism Review
Imperial Collapse Watch
Software is eating the DoD: Brought to you by the Atlantic Council Responsible Statecraft
The State of Capitalism in Flux: Economy, Society, and Hegemony under Today’s Interregnum MR Online
Supply Chain
Meanwhile at Safeway pic.twitter.com/pTeWGYJlB9
— Just 😱 (@_HolidayCity) April 16, 2025
The Bezzle
Exclusive: AgriDex Bets Stablecoins Will Transform $2.7 Trillion Ag Market PYMNTS
Guillotine Watch
How to Ruin an $800,000 Vacation? Hire the Wrong Person on Your Superyacht WSJ
Zeitgeist Watch
Class Warfare
fast food is expensive, so Chili’s wants to finance your next fast food meal, bc you can’t eat at Chili’s every day.
Repost this with #ChilisFastFoodFinancing, tell us how much your last fast food meal cost and where you got it, and you could win a $20* gift card. rules below: pic.twitter.com/25nPnUl3HQ
— Chili’s Grill & Bar (@Chilis) April 15, 2025
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
The Hawker
(melody borrowed from The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel in 1979).
Trump can only destroy; his heart’s empty and it’s cold
He will bankrupt every business as he fidgets and he fumbles
Which is all he does—and puffs his chest
He is in arrears at close of year, and then he must divest
Since he cannot count and he cannot read he has never been employed
Through the record of his failures; all his bankruptcies are brazen
Seldom shared—scraping dough, telling whoppers to reporters
Who are always last to know; Trump’s entire basis is a TV show
Lie la lie—Lie la la la—Lie la lie
Lie la lie—Lie la la la—Lie la lie, la la la la lie
When his name’s on the front pages, O it makes his mushroom throb
Plus a lot of scoffers—so he gets back on his horse and does a turn or two
Funds come from where? Bratva cash in games of zero sum
Are what gets you somewhere, la la la la la la la
(musical interlude)
Lie la lie—Lie la la la—Lie la lie
Lie la lie—Lie la la la—Lie la lie, la la la la lie
Donald claims he smells just like a rose
But that’s all part of his con—things are known:
There are stories told in splinters of duplicity,
Perfidy to the bone
Trump is really just a hawker who will speak as he is paid
He has managers and minders; his puppy love of Elon sounds
Like trusting he can ride out all the blowback and the shame
Elon’s thieving and deceiving cuz our President’s insane
Lie la lie—Lie la la la—Lie la lie
Lie la lie—Lie la la la—Lie la lie, la la la la lie
Lie la la la—Lie la lie
Lie la lie—Lie la la la—Lie la lie, la la la la lie
(repeats to end)
Trump is an unusually brazen liar. We need a scorecard to keep track.
+ Gaza ceasefire? That lasted about as long as gas station sushi
+ “rare earths” deal? hello, McFly?
+ Peace in Ukraine in 24 hours? cue laugh track …
+ World leaders ‘begging’ to talk to him and cut trade deals, m’kay
Now he’s after Jerome Powell … a decent guy who deserves much better treatment.
Everybody knows somebody in their lives that is a habitual liar and even when telling the truth is easier, they’d perpetuate a falsehood instead merely to keep in practice, its what they do.
Lying used to be considered a personal fault nowhere near as bad as picking your nose and eating the buggers in public, but right up there.
I kind of figured he was like the guy who is in a bar and just constantly BS whenever his mouth is running. Except Trump doesn’t drink I believe.
Or, while generally Presidents are lying sacks of excrement, as someone posted long ago, Trump is the Joe Isuzu of politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_1ASmweXYs
DOGE claims https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGUBm0XQbqA&pp=ygUVam9lIGlzdXp1IGNvbW1lcmNpYWxz
The wordsmithing is extremely impressive, but I fear this underestimates Trump. He is capable of performing a successful bust-out.
Goooooooood Mooooooooorning Fiatnam!
Deep in the jungle when you got right down to it, the Kilmar-ratio was what people wanted to know back in the world, just how many innocents got scooped up along with the usual tattooed rabble?
We had to destroy freedom in order to save face…
“Scientists hail ‘strongest evidence’ so far for life beyond our solar system”
They must have found one of the Quarantine signal buoys surrounding our system.
Re: Scientists hail ‘strongest evidence’ so far for life beyond our solar system The Guardian
Usually, the breathless reports about astronomers discovering new exoplanets amounts to mostly PR aimed at fund-raising. But this latest one really is interesting.
Scientists detected specific organic molecules in the atmosphere of K2-18b, a water-covered planet 8.6 times bigger than Earth, orbiting a red dwarf star. On Earth, such molecules are only produced by biology. “A world with an ocean teeming with life is the scenario that best fits the data,” says Nikku Madhusudhan, the Cambridge university profwho led the international project.
This is naive. There’s no reason alien evolution couldn’t go another direction than it has on Earth, towards a non-eukaryotic single organism covering the planet a la Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.
Anyway, till we know, what’s a finance guy to do in the event of First Contact? Today’s FT covers potential investment opportunities —
When aliens call, look to the ‘little green swan’ trade
https://www.ft.com/content/4502e62e-4538-42e6-a3a1-d9e5db038698
https://archive.ph/32YVq
yes. even personal sentience may be the exception, not the norm
a video essay on Blindness (a 2006 sci-fi book by Peter watts) and the Non-conscious Mind by the Feral Historian channel, 17 mim
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XqikPnYKo6M
If life on K2-18b has reached a certain stage, they would be best served by taking us out now before we have the means to get to them. All of our current funding and direction of space exploration seems to be based on us “escaping” our problems here and, presumably, exporting a version of such to wherever we might land. Apparently, in “Don’t Look Up” DiCaprio had them add in the line at the end where he says “we really did have everything, didn’t we? I mean, when you think about it.” From the mouths of babes….
All the evidence supports so far is lots of marine algae (if the hypothesis proves correct). And if intelligent life does exist there, they can take comfort in the fact that we lack the technology to exchange anything other than photons with them, and even those have a round trip time of two and a half centuries.
So, El Salvadore President Nayib Bukele, self described as the World’s coolest dictator, has Abrego Garcia stuffed away in a hell-hole, but says he can’t do anything about it. Strongman Hair Furor, whose style is to bend anyone to his will, says he can’t do anything about it. But what he believes he can do is snatch anyone and stuff them into the same hell-hole, although more hell-holes may be needed.
I’m just trying keep things straight and stay up to date. Before I get snatched.
Responsible Statecraft: AI for the pentagon.
“In his opening remarks, the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig claimed that policymakers adopted over 70% of the recommendations from a previous commission on defense acquisition.”
Cleaning the coffee off my laptop screen.
I came into DoD “acquisition” in 1985 after the first of several Packard (and others) commissions to improve “acquisition” we have the Ford carrier and F-35. Models of ineptitude advanced far beyond the 1960’s C-5 debacle by now with the aid of succeeding generations computing!
For war! I have seen over the years talk of data walls, “infospheres” controlling battlespace etc.
The issue with this is not getting at data it is pedigree of data, aging data and lack of epistemology, that is how close is the data to live ( because we never really do tests?).
Silicon valley has new ground to plow which we have no idea…..
If the dream of AI goes like the applications to battlespace and acquisition…… short NVIDIA!
As an ex-C5 loadmaster, I can attest: we did breakdown a lot. As a young, single airman, those extra per diem checks were quite welcome, along with having the time to explore the cities and places that we were delayed while awaiting repairs.
But the C5 did not live up to the pre-procurement hype: it was sold as an airdrop-capable aircraft that could takeoff and land on unimproved (dirt) runways… yeah, well…
Airdrops were rarely done out of C5s– more hazardous for troops than C141s or C130s, and generally impractical for cargo. As for unimproved runways, you’d probably land OK, and even depart OK, but if you needed to use brakes while landing after this sortie you could be screwed as rocks and debris from the dirt strip have probably damaged these (the hydraulic lines for the brakes were installed on the undersides of the landing-gear (titanium lines, 5000 PSI– some engineering reason for this beyond my paygrade)).
All-in-all, the C5 wasn’t a terrible machine and was excelled at carrying entire military units and/or outsized rolling-stock between continents, and we could trust this aircraft not to simply fall out of the sky, unlike others around today.
I was first stationed at McChord 1972. We were C 141 wing and had a few C-5 come through a lot of traffic to and from SEA.
Now C141 is long retired, worn out while C-5 is still flying.
C-5 has a lot of updates.
I deadheaded quite a few times on 141s to McChord, usually enroute to Travis. During Gulf War, I was added to a 141’s crew orders as a “student loadmaster” for a mission or two: I directed the circus (load/unload cargo/pax) while the instructor did the Form F and stuff– their squadron was that stretched for airmen, and (being “war-time”) this was a way of bending the rule that required two loadmasters on the 141 for those types of missions, this “rule” certainly not being the only one bent or broken during that period.
I’d be kinda curious to see what sorts of updates the C5s and C-130s have gone through since I last stepped foot on one, a little more than a thousand years ago.
a few C-5’s came over my place years ago, on their way to , apparently, Goodfellow AFB, in san angelo…deployed parachutes right over there, still around 75 miles away.
watched many more come and go while looking out hospital windows in san antonio, with Tam.
i dont know d*ck about aircraft, their maintenance, or anything else…but those thing look like miracles.
impossible machines that fly, somehow.
creep, creep, creep up to altitude, etc.
lol.
i’d never set foot on one, myself…
C-17 factory is long gone. The MBA types always seem to go into “that’s valuable real estate, and we’re going to make a bundle” mode, and slash and burn the equipment, tooling, buildings, people, everything. If it’s gonna be a shootn’ war, I would not even hazard a guess at where new heavy lift aircraft get made. Development cycle for the C-17 was over ten years.
We got some very good engineers from that program once the writing was on the wall in the early 2010’s.
I think the people at the top are writing checks with their idiocy that the country cannot cash if their bluff gets called.
Jesus Christ…
What the hell are they going to use to fill that gap in air-mobility and logistics when the next big hotspot ignites?
Maybe all the AI data centers are secret laser firing installations.
China has opened up production slots at Boeing.
Trump’s tariff tiff might be instrumental in sinking Boeing Commercial. Boeing is the largest American exporter of manufactured products something Trump says he wants supposedly, but he’s done nothing to mitigate the orderhit.
Ray Bradbury had something to say about using an AI twin in Marionettes, Inc.:
Re White House Easter egg hunt. I always thought these hunts were for children and the eggs made of chocolate. At least that is the norm in Europe. Which kids don’t prefer chocolate ones? Or is this simply thumbing the nose at peasants not able to source hens eggs durign a supposed shortage in the US and associated price hikes?
Just curious about how they do things in America.
We generally prefer not to do things in America; we have press events to say we did things. Sometimes the things can’t be done, and sometimes those things were already done. More often, they weren’t done, but just kind of are. America is more explicable if you see Americans, nearly all of us, as performing for some Big Other, where the reality of whatever it is we’re talking about remains a private matter between fellow investors, if we even comprehend it ourselves. Happy Easter!
Hi Vicky, thanks for answer, your explanation amused me, and got me thinking of Sir Humphry from Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister if you ever saw any other those programmes, if not there are plenty of clips on youtube.
For Pantheists in training such as yours truly, the rabbit test broke down to whether mom bought us a hollow milk chocolate bunny or a solid one, not to mention all the groovy accompanying candies in the basket.
Hard boil real eggs carefully – no cracks. Dye them with food coloring or special dye kits, adding vinegar. Decorate with decals or painting as you please. In some families, the grown-ups decorate and hide them at night, like Santa Clause; in others (our household practice), the kids do it – preferably on a plastic covered outdoor picnic table.
If you really want to go whole hog with eggs – you can do what all of our Mexican friends do. It is an Easter egg concept called cascarones. And for the life of me, I have no idea how they make these things. It is a real egg with the smaller end shaved off, emptied, and then dried out, brightly colored and then stuffed with confetti. Everybody then gets out on the lawn and goes around and cracks them over everyone else’s head. Confetti flies everywhere, all the kids in the entire area love it, and good times had by all.
my familia, and extended, and adjacent…lol…sell those to each other like hotcakes.
usually the tamale womyn that make them.
a whole gaggle, gossiping around a table in someones casita.
whole town will be littered with confetti for weeks.
and, to boot…its a sign of love and even respect to be accosted thusly in the damned feedstore or gas station.
hard for this guero(now honorary mexican) to get used to.
ive got confetti stuck in my hair right now…from feedstore parking lot.
Elon Musk seems to be in the same league as John Law and Jacques Necker, a couple of foreigners that were instigators of disaster in France in the 18th century, one with the Mississippi Bubble and the other with the French Revolution.
Necker is the better role model for Elon, sadly.
Jacques Necker 30 September 1732 – 9 April 1804) was a Genevan banker and statesman who served as finance minister for Louis XVI. He was a reformer, but his innovations sometimes caused great discontent. Necker was a constitutional monarchist, a political economist, and a moralist, who wrote a severe critique of the new principle of equality before the law.
Necker initially held the finance post between July 1777 and 1781. In 1781, he earned widespread recognition for his unprecedented decision to publish the Compte rendu – thus making the country’s budget public – “a novelty in an absolute monarchy where the state of finances had always been kept a secret.” Necker was dismissed within a few months. By 1788, the inexorable compounding of interest on the national debt brought France to a fiscal crisis. Necker was recalled to royal service. His dismissal on 11 July 1789 was a factor in causing the Storming of the Bastille. Within two days, Necker was recalled by the king and the assembly. Necker entered France in triumph and tried to accelerate the tax reform process. Faced with the opposition of the Constituent Assembly, he resigned in September 1790 to a reaction of general indifference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Necker
Good news, everybody-
‘Elon Musk wants to populate the Earth with a “legion” of high-intelligence children to prevent the collapse of human civilization due to a global decline in birth rates, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing sources.
Ashley St. Clair – one of the women Musk allegedly had an affair with and who claims to be the mother of one of his children – showed the WSJ a message purportedly sent by the billionaire. In it, Musk allegedly referred to his offspring as a “legion” – invoking the ancient Roman military units known for expanding imperial reach – and insisted on making even more babies with other women. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he reportedly said. “We will need to use surrogates.” ‘
https://www.rt.com/news/615883-musk-seed-earth-intelligent-babies/
No comment.
Handmaid’s Tale sans The Cross. Politics make strange bedfellows, but the strangest was Elroy…
Preportallegedly, hah?
And apparently if he selects you for IVF with his epic sperm, and you refuse, he will demonetise your Twitter income.
The earth is already populated with high intelligence people and so many are still discarded and disregarded.
He’s talking about legions of ideologues…which the earth is already populated with as well.
So what’s he really talking about?
himself
Dr. Estranged Love
Well, that would definitely explain the quarantine buoys right outside the Solar System…
Genghis Khan bedded what, 25,000 women?
This weirdo mails his sperm to golddiggers he meets on twitter.
And Kaczynski’s argument that technology degrades the human experience is validated yet again. Things are meaningfully worse, even for progeny-obsessed megalomaniacs.
Necker and the role he played in financing of the French monarchy is actually quite edifying.
1) As a minister of finance, Necker introduced a systematic reliance on lifetime annuities. The principle is simple: the State borrows a sum from private lenders, and pays a yearly fraction of it back for as long as a person, designated by the lenders, is alive. Proof of life is done by presenting the person to a French magistrate (typically an ambassador if the lenders are in a foreign country) in front of witnesses asserting that the right person is present.
2) Who were lenders eager to lend money to the French king? In particular, bankers and wealthy bourgeois from Geneva. In fact, banks from that tiny Swiss canton specialized in lending to the French state. Other frequent lenders came from the Netherlands.
3) Who were the persons on whose life the loans were constituted? They were girls from the impoverished branches of those wealthy citizens lending the money.
4) Girls, not boys. What would become Switzerland, and Geneva in particular, had the fortune of having physicians, famous throughout Europe, who had started studying mortality statistics. Names like Samuel Auguste Tissot and Daniel Bernouilli (of the family of mathematicians) are relevant. In any case: they had already figured out that females live significantly longer than males.
5) They had also determined that there was an age where survival probability was at its highest — after the child has overcome all those childhood diseases for which there are vaccines nowadays. Hence the persons designated in the loans were always girls, always above a certain age (about 8-10 years).
6) Those girls did get some material advantage from being an “asset” — in particular, they would get medical care from the aforementioned top physicians of the era. On the other hand, they would also be constrained to a strict life hygiene, were prohibited from travelling (too risky), and were condemned to a life of celibacy and virginity (maternity being way, way, way too risky for the lenders).
7) Even then, Swiss bankers had determined that constituting a loan on the life of just one person was still too risky. So they invented a synthetic lifetime annuity loan — constituted on the lives of 30 girls. If one died, only 3.33% of the interest payments fell out. This synthetic financial instrument became wildly popular throughout Europe, and soon the Dutch lenders (among the most eager adopters) were following that exact practice.
8) Now, who was Jacques Necker? A citizen from Geneva, who had made his career in banking before becoming a minister of Louis XVI — in banks from Geneva, of course. He actually made some big money early in his career speculating on… French loans.
Lifetime annuities could be reasonable in good times, but 15% became a typical rate. On the eve of the French Revolution, the rate had ascended to 40%.
The French revolutionists eventually repudiated all debts from the monarchy. There are nowadays several venerable private banks in Geneva; none of them was founded before the late 1790s — all previously existing banking establishments went bankrupt following the debt repudiation by the French. That ruin utterly discredited the old socio-political regime in Geneva, and was one of the reasons for a revolution (parallel, but independent from the French one) to break out. A genuine one, even with its very own Terror phase (relying upon the firing squad instead of the guillotine).
The moral of the story is left as an exercise to the reader.
the NC Commentariate really is the best commentariate.
Thanks, VAO.
Thanks. A few more tidbits, since the situation was even more baroque than I summarized above.
9) The physician from Geneva counseling the bankers was Louis Odier, who pioneered life expectancy statistics. Another very famous physician from Geneva was Théodore Tronchin. By the way: all those Swiss doctors were promoting the early vaccines against smallpox (they had studied their effect on life expectancy, and were fully convinced they were useful).
10) A reasonable rate for lifetime annuities was 8%-10%, but in the case of France, with its insatiable need for funds, this rised quickly to 12%-13% in the good years. Not just the French monarch, but also the French aristocrats at the highest level were relying upon those types of loans to fund themselves.
11) After a while, 7 years became the typical age at which the “heads” were chosen for those loans. Some girls as young as 4 had been enrolled though. That Louis Odier judged that a synthetic loan of 30 heads could last 45 years (even if diminished by deaths) when girls of 7 years of age were chosen. Sometimes, boys were also chosen, but had plenty of restrictions as to the profession they could practice — such as mercenary, a favourite amongst Swiss citizens. And since Geneva was not populated enough to select girls for all those loans, the heads would often be people in foreign countries (which made coordinating the proofs of life a bit cumbersome).
12) If you think that synthetic loans on 30 girls (the “30 demoiselles”) looked quite modern, you have seen nothing. Often a citizen was not wealthy enough to subscribe to one of those loans. So this is how he proceeded:
12.a) Let us assume you want to subscribe to a 30-head loan of 100’000, rated 12%, but you do not have the money at hand.
12.b) You go to your friendly banker in Geneva, and borrow from him the necessary 100’000.
12.c) You sign 10 promissory notes of, say, 13’000, staged for the next 10 years in favour of your banker.
12.d) You leave the IOU from the French monarch as collateral to your banker.
12.d) When the French treasury pays the yearly 12’000, the banker cashes them in; in addition, you pay 1’000. This goes on for 10 years.
12.e) After ten years, the banker gives you back the IOU, and you can cash in the 12’000 annuity. From a cash-flow perspective, you have to fork 10’000 in ten years — instead of 100’000 right away.
Clever no? But there is more.
13) What if several not wealthy enough citizens want to buy such a French lifetime annuity, but cannot pay 1’000 per year from their income as interest for the promissory notes? They join forces.
13.a) For instance, 10 people can get the 100’000 from the banker at 13’000/year, meaning each one is liable for just 100 per year, i.e. (13’000-12’000)/10, until all promissory notes have been paid. Afterwards, they receive their share of 1’200, a tenth from the annuity of 12’000.
13.b) The hitch is that those 10 persons are collectively responsible for the sum they borrowed from the banker. If one of them dies or goes bankrupt, the others have to pay his share of the promissory notes.
Clever no? But there is more.
14) Those 10 blokes would sometimes set up a tontine regarding the French loan. In other words, each one of them receives 1’200 per year as long as he lives. Upon his death, his share becomes the property of the other subscribers. The ultimate survivor becomes the happy owner of a 100’000 French loan producing 12’000 in annuities.
Clever no? But there is more.
15) The promissory notes constitute securities — which the banker can then pledge as collateral, or discount for cash with another party.
Frankly, when I read about all those ABS, CDO, CMO, CLO, etc, I feel that we have actually invented little, and that old is new.
“JD Vance says Europe should have done more to stop Iraq War”
JD Vance was only a 19 year-old punk at the time of the 2003 invasion but he has had 22 years to get himself an education but which he appears not to have done. Maybe somebody should give him a serving of Freedom Fries. Bush and the Neocons were determined to smash Iraq to steal their oil and to use that country as a base for the bigger invasion of Iran. Well it didn’t work out that way but not through lack of trying. The Bush regime ignored UN resolutions, had a dog & pony show at the UN itself with vials of WMD and pictures of what Iraqi WMD platforms probably looked like. The US media was all ecstatic over this war and wound everybody up about it and there was talk of Iraqi missiles maybe hitting London. Countries like Turkiye were put in the dog house because they would not let their country be used as a launch platform for this invasion. France really got whipped about this as did Germany.
So now Vance is saying that it was not really America’s fault that invasion but it was all those countries that did not force the US to back down. The invasion was all their fault. Seriously? I’m seeing it again and again in the Trump regime. People in power being profoundly ignorant about even recent history and maybe thinking it a strength. Even history only going back a year or so ago. Vance has no excuse, especially if he is thinking of being a future President. I would tell Vance that DC was so outraged at all those European countries saying no that they spent the next twenty years using mobs like USAID to make sure that no such strong leaders would ever arise in those European countries which partly explains the recent crop of weak, pliant leaders in the EU.
Well wasn’t getting Blair on board a big boost for Dubya’s disastrous invasion? And while Vance seems to be making a dumb argument he appears to be one of the smarter people in Trump’s not the sharpest knives in the drawer administration. According to the NYT story up in Links he has been arguing for restraint both publicly via that leaked Signal Yemen discussion and privately against a premature attack on Iran. The real villains here are Waltz and Rubio and of course the prez himself who seems to love hanging out with goons from overseas. Has Millei been yet?
We are in trouble with our reckless and out of touch president who needs advisors who will give him common sense counsel while, as it seems, still pandering to his ego. Child rearing is hard.
With Trump’s Cabinet, you can say that when you hire clowns, then the result will always be a circus. Agree with your thoughts about Waltz and Rubio. Waltz and Rubio really need replacing. With Rubio, for example, can you see him coming up against Lavrov?
The Chinese message to Americans, in this context as in the global socioeconomic one, is the correct one: ‘Stop whining.’
Too polite, really.
Not to nitpick, Rev, but the person you referred to was, in 2003, a 19 year old punk named James David Hamel. Later, by sheer grit and hillbilly hard work, he’s managed to transform himself into JD Vance, a 41 year old prick.
Heh! Heh! Heh!
‘the Peter Principle’
Come now, ignorance of facts is a defining characteristic of our American elite!
Some good news from Britain:
What is a woman? Britain’s Supreme Court gives its answer
The terms “woman” and “sex” refer to “a biological woman and biological sex”
https://archive.ph/hkbHR
Good.
Keep asking myself and still have no clue… if words matter-
what is gender, and how does IT fit in with the price of eggs? (apologies –had to dust off that old gem)
Sarc/Gender is essential to the plan to assist with dairy shortages in the US. We are going to define roosters as hens and then assign egg production responsibilities to those birds. Similarly, we will define bulls as cows and milk them for supply. We will not be allowed to comment on the strange taste of the liquid./Sarc
I’m not sure if words matter here. But I do think that it would be good for our society if we stopped trying to expand everything to include edge cases for living beings in general as opposed to the vastly experienced binary condition we all find ourselves in. It would also be good to understand why it appears so many people are interested in rejecting that nearly universal binary condition. I’m seeing numerous articles where even successful actors complain that they hate their bodies and want to change them. And while I haven’t seen statistics to support the claims that hordes of teens are transitioning, an awful lot of them are discussing it. What is going on?
I’d like us to be able to figure this out before the Pritzker’s sell us their solution…
I totally agree. When things are by and large binary, we need to enforce that, lest things get out of hand. for instance, adult human females are overwhelming attracted to adult human males, especially outside the decadent west, so I think that should be really how we define important terms, like marriage for instance. uh, /Sarc
I’m sure you’re being sarcastic, but I’m not sure about what parts.
I don’t think the state needs to enforce traditional definitions of marriage. It just needs to support the laws regarding that contract. In effect, every state defined marriage is a civil union. As that has nothing to do with my religion or culture, I don’t care if men can marry men, or women can marry women, or someone who calls them self a woman now wants to marry someone who does not consider themselves male or female. The only traditions that the state has an interest in upholding, in my opinion, are those against bigamy, pederasty, incest, and coercion. Those are associated with deep social ills and problems for everyone. But if two consenting adults with different expressions of genitalia want to marry each other, there’s no reason they should be barred from that by the state.
As for the rest of what you alluded to, this isn’t something that needs enforcement. It does need clear explanation. People should understand there are real risks to exposing children and adults to hormones for long periods of time. People should understand that care and discernment are required before planning to transition. And people should understand that just like anything else, there is no single cure for suicidal ideation. Similarly, women are adult human females. Men are adult human males. The edge distinctions here aren’t something our legislation is capable of handling.
aye!
ive known passing few actual “transgendered and transitioning individuals” in my sojourn among the mundanes.
5, perhaps.
known a whole lot of drag queens, crossdressers(more common than you might think in private,lol=ie manly men wearing panties under their rugged outer wear).
and you know what?
i dont give a damn.
i support individual choices…up until they impinge on y choices, or the choices of others.
everybody’s got their kinks and weird ass fetishes.
and i accept and support that…but theres this thing i like to call civilisation,lol.
we have to co-exist.
and the way the people referred to are going about it is just as toxic to that end as the hyperbible thumpers, yelling in front of book stores.
let people be themselves…within reasonable bounds, that should be collectively and individually delineated….and always subject to revision.
Or as was said in the 19th century ‘I Really Don’t Mind What People Do, So Long As They Don’t Do It In the Street and Frighten the Horses.’
I wonder if it has anything to do with so many kids now being diagnosed as on the autism spectrum. What is it now? 1 in 32? Something like that.
Michael Shellenberger did a long series on his substack about this.
https://www.public.news/p/why-i-was-wrong-about-trans
First we made the environment hostile with estrogen mimicking compounds, hormone fed proteins, and chemical additives to food.
Then we made the culture hostile by stressing everyone financially.
Then, to top it all off, rather than clean the environment and create conditions in which the majority of lives could improve, we systematically destroyed social norms on the altar of Civil Rights by using the blunt tool of law to address the subtleties of intimacy, destroying trust in both.
Newish culprit in the autism ordeal is our old friend Bisphenol A. Expecting Bobby to reference that among other contributing factors in his pending reveal.
Hard to keep up with the potential candidates and the harmful impacts in the heated debates and research.
In the meantime, no plastics, no canned goods, and pay attention to what is in the water that you drink and bathe in, too.
Also, the amount of estrogen in supermarket beef is astronomical.
Bad.
Been noticing a lot of anti-trans comments here recently. It seems contrary to a space that I thought aims at lifting up everyone
It’s not anti trans. It’s pro biological females in womens sports and womens safe houses and prisons and changing rooms. Even Caitlyn Jenner and Martina Navratilova say this. To say otherwise is anti-female.
the use of anti-female here reminds me of the current use of antisemitic. People who support the rights of trans people are clearly not anti-female, they just disagree with you. It demands a sort of credulity in the face of reality to say that there’s this false consciousness on the part of people who support trans rights.
Martina Navratilova slams USA Fencing over a recent fencing match. The trans-woman was fencing on the men’s team at Wagner College last year.
‘This is what happens when female athletes protest! Anyone here still thinks this is fair??? I am fuming… and shame on @USAFencing
, shame on you for doing this. How dare you throw women under the gender bullshit bus!!!’
https://x.com/Martina/status/1907494732323836151
So if I agree with the ruling then I am being anti-trans? To acknowledge fundamental biological differences between the sexes and a need to segregate them in very limited and situationally specific circumstances is anti-trans?
It’s more that it’s clearly in effect an attack on trans people. Given the failure of legislation against gay people and the failure of anti-trans bathroom laws, this is just the next attempt at limiting the social rights of trans people. People in support of it seem to just be playing coy about it. Trans people will of course continue to exist just as gay people have in the face of attacks on them.
There are fundamental biological differences between people with downs syndrome and people without. If there were legislation defining what a human was based number of chromosomes, I think most would recognize that for what it is.
How is this an “attack” on trans people? It is a rejection of the claim that “anyone who says they are a woman, is a woman”, a claim which is rejected by the vast majority of people in the UK (and US).
And it is not “legislation defining what a human is”. It in no way states that trans people are not human. It states that biological men are men, and biological women are women.
of course it’s not legislation defining what a human is, I was making an analogy to show the fault in this style of argumentation. I suspect that this is clear to most other readers though, and I should hope that you would find the notion that ‘biological humans are human’ as a motto for excluding people with down syndrome faulty and tendentious.
Maybe its because the liberal parties of the west seem to have made it their hill to die on at the expense of working class issues which directly contributes to the rise of far right parties.
As a leftist I’m sick to death of having to explain that not all of us think a guy can magically become a women because he put on a dress.
And the trans movement itself refuses to accept basic facts like men are stronger at most sports.
It seems pretty obvious that trans ideology was pushed out to destroy the left, the US has intentionally done this in other countries through USAID.
Or do think the same people who are pro genocide, sweep covid under the rug killing and disabling millions, deeply care about that particular half a percent of the population.
If nefarious forces are using a certain demographic as a wedge (granting you this for the sake of argument), and your response is to attack that demographic instead of those those using them as a wedge, aren’t you just making that wedge more effective? aren’t you just taking the bait?
Also, this same argument that you put forth seems to apply also to other minorities (say, gays, blacks, etc). Do you think this is the case, or is it just trans people?
just who is making trans people in sports a big to-do? they were in sports for decades before this media blitz. Should we not allow them in the relevant bathrooms?
Oh, it used to be just gays and now it is trans people. They are the wedge that is being used to prevent people from agreeing to universal healthcare. They are the topic that is used to splinter the groups pushing for economic justice. And they are the tool du jour by the Dems to show how they are performing the act of governance as opposed to actually doing what their constituents need them to do. Symbolic measures have symbolic costs. The stuff we need from our government costs real money though. So if they can spin up different groups to reduce the number of people asking for real change, they’ll do it.
I don’t really get the mechanism. how is the trans topic preventing people from agreeing to universal healthcare? I would venture to guess that most people who support trans rights also want universal health care. did civil rights for black people also stymie this?
The strongest advocates for single payer healthcare, or really any decent healthcare system besides the abomination we have now, are the leftists, who also tend to be socially very liberal. I am very much a leftist and a liberal, but because I don’t accept the entire current transgender ideology, I am deemed and have been labeled a bigot, which is some really weird shit, and therefore unacceptable to the Good People. This prevents me from working with many others in getting healthcare reforms done. I can either live a lie or work with others on important reforms.
Imagine if transgenderism was pushed during the Civil Rights Movement or during LBJ’s push for Medicare?
I guess you haven’t been involved in these conversations before. It goes like this… if transitioning is healthcare, and we have single payer universal Healthcare, then the government would be paying for people to transition. If you have religious or cultural problems with that, then you will be easily swayed to reject single payer universal healthcare.
Based on polls I’ve seen, and conversations with party type people, IF we are ever to get universal healthcare in the US, it is likely to exclude gender affirming care and transitioning, beyond any medically necessary care. Like breast reconstruction after mastectomy, or urological surgery for physically intersex people. Trans people are being used to block this, just like abortion was used earlier. There’s simply a large population of people who will never agree to universal healthcare if it includes coverage for transitioning.
While there were always debates about what should be taught in public schools, it seems that it changed to an argument against public schools after integration.
While in the early 20th Century, there was much investment in public transportation, that all seemed to slow down after Rosa Parks.
Made the marketing of the love affair with the automobile so much easier. And black people were paying a premium for their “rides”.
The psyops comes in when people’s fears are manipulated.
How am I attacking anybody?
I’m just stating facts.
I don’t really care about the bathroom thing.
Do you really think the people who can’t care about average lifespans going down, endless war etc. Care who uses what bathroom?
How can people be so naive?
And its always the same response “your a transphobe”
I have nothing against trans people, being against a policy is not being against a people.
How about actually engaging in debate?
I’m just sick of leftists always losing because of this non-issue
I agree, I think the trans stuff is profoundly unimportant, why all of a sudden I have been made into a culture war in the face of these vastly more important topics is really frustrating. But the animus seems to coming from those seeking to limit trans people’s social rights. Why is the response to trans people looking for rights not: “yeah fine whatever we have bigger fish to fry”, instead of “these degenerates are bringing us down”?
My suspicion: it’s not the trans issue that is the cause of these bad things in the world, but rather the most powerful people on earth. call me crazy
I don’t think it should be controversial to say that there’s a need in the medical profession for language that precisely describes anatomy, particularly something fundamental like physical gender. Yes, there are edge cases, but the vast majority of the time humans are sexually dimorphic.
Currently I think the whole thing is getting conflated with gender-as-cultural-role, because we don’t have different words for the two. I am perfectly fine with trans people picking and choosing whatever cultural gender role they prefer in non-medical settings (most of the time it’s nobody’s business what kind of genitals you have anyway) but a conspiracy of silence regarding biological gender and sexual dimorphism helps nobody.
English-only speaking people have no idea how much their worldview is skewed. That by itself would not be that big of a problem, if they were not enforcing it on the rest of the world.
“It seems pretty obvious that trans ideology was pushed out to destroy the left, the US has intentionally done this in other countries through USAID.”
This!
its an Op…just like Woke(tm) and Metoo, and the continuing focus by both “factions” of the uniparty on race issues.
when do we get to talk about Class Issues?
and how i can never get my teeth fixed in the current regime?
every brown person i know…and every gay person i know…are keenly aware that everything is frelled in this country.
and they are easily…easily!…talked into abandoning their Party Designation, and blaming the rich A$$holes who have seized it.
scratch a prole, or even a petty bougie, and theres rage at the bossclass…the real boss class.
(and mind you, one cant find a Dem in public with a geiger counter, out here)
the north remembers.
Ugly.
Theme song time.
The good the bad and the ugly. / ;)
Terrible for trans rights and also claims biological sex is binary, ignoring intersex people
This is the UK we’re talking about, not the US. The UK went far beyond what we’re doing in the US. A reasonable argument against people freaking out about trans issues in the US is that there are so few of them. This is not a moral crisis or a problem of any scale compared to what many conservatives make it out to be.
The intersex comment is not particularly relevant either. That is an even tinier population and if the individual in question is physically differentiated from a phenotypic binary, then they have a lot of other issues to deal with. The people who claim they feel intersex or believe their unexpressed genetics impose something on them that society needs to be involved in need help.
But all of this is besides the point. If we really care about marginalized populations like the trans community in the US, we need to have free healthcare and a federal job guarantee. Help these people obtain employment with a solid floor for wages and benefits so that they don’t have to be pushed to the economic margins. Help these people to get the care and attention they need so that if they choose other medical interventions they are supported. I’m more concerned about securing those for the trans and LGB communities than frothing at the mouth over definitions.
I am concerned about people like the Priztkers because they’re billionaires, they’re creepy, they’re funding a fleet of NGOs about these issues, and their ultimate goal seems to be pushing a solution where no one is male enough or female enough without the drugs that are sold by one Pritzker aligned company or another. I’d really prefer to not give those kinds of actors a lot of say in this matter.
Excellent comment, Chris.
sums up nicely how i think about such things.
(ie; if you really care about whatever unrepresented tinyass minorty, you should be for universal public benefits.)
Next question for Britain’s Supreme Court to answer: “What do women want?”
Some 30,000 eggs at the White House Egg Roll. Financing your malnutrious snack at Chili’s. Dyeing potatoes.
Signs of decadence? Say it ain’t so, Joe.
I am reminded of a custom from Italian history with class-based insanity and wretched excess. Also, too, a reason why Naples wasn’t the source of the Rigorgimento. (But then, being here in the Undisclosed Region, I am prejudiced.)
Cuccagna!
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cuccagna-italy-food-tradition
Because:
This description in Italian is even more tart:
https://grandenapoli.it/la-disperazione-della-festa-della-cuccagna/
File under What Goes Around Comes Around.
Turley’s latest:
“No One is Above the Law”: New York AG Letitia James Accused of Alleged Mortgage Fraud
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/04/16/no-one-is-above-the-law-new-york-ag-letitia-james-accused-of-alleged-mortgage-fraud/#more-230838
Wasn’t Trump accused of Bank fraud? Irony, paradox, rhyme?
Lawfare?
Happened during Biden’s time in office (I know this wasn’t a federal case). Opens a Pandora’s box with every subsequent Federal and State administration coming into office?
“Could Mossad kill IRGC air force chief to open up striking Iran nuke program?”
The usual Israeli lines of bs. Take this one-
‘Although Hajizadeh failed to kill Israelis, this was only due to a monumental air defense effort by the US, Israel, and many other allies.’
Another lie. Iran has the discipline to only hit military targets whereas Israel always hits civilian targets and try to murder their way to victory. This article is demanding a beefed up nuke deal and is almost ordering Trump to do it. Doesn’t really matter as it is not about Iran getting nukes and it never was. Israel just wants Iran to become another Libya as Iran is a roadblock to their ambition of being a regional hegemony. So I would suggest another article in future with a different title-
“Could Iran destroy Israel’s oil storage infrastructure to wake the Israelis up to themselves?”
“Could Iran destroy Israel’s oil storage infrastructure…?”
I have to wonder if they aren’t worried about that because they look at the USA (and other more quiet allies) as part of their oil storage infrastructure.
“How to Ruin an $800,000 Vacation? Hire the Wrong Person on Your Superyacht’
An interesting read and it reminded me of a reality TV series called “Below Deck” which follows workers on luxury yachts-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Below_Deck
Benedict Donald will be instrumental in destroying the same sect situation here in Godzone with regards to monocrops such as almonds, by destroying export markets en masse… which isn’t a bad thing unless you’re the almond grower losing his or her shirt.
Much of what gets grown here has been based on the best bang for the buck, and almonds peaked @ $4.50 a pound a decade ago, and not many foodstuffs are worth that much, and add on benefits included trees that could deliver a commercial crop in a short time compared to other foodstuff baums. The downside being sojourning bees needed in industrial quantities to service 350 million trees, and the idea the irreplaceable fossil water underfoot millions of years old was wasted to perpetuate what now looks like a sucker bet.
Once upon a time wheat was king in the Central Valley (The Octopus: A Story of California by Frank Norris is a perfect period piece of a couple of turns of century ago) and much was exported to the UK.
I call our torrid summers here The 100 Days of 100 Degrees, and it’s an exaggeration as the most hundred and hell days ever recorded in Fresno was 69 in 2021.
You can see from this link how hot it has been getting as climate change kicks in, and its all about chill hours for many food trees, and that limits what can be grown, not to mention how it can endure the hades and hades not variation in temperatures.
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/fresno/yearly-days-of-100-degrees
AZ has already cracked 100. Here in the South we are having a somewhat chilly spring.
Buckle up for a bumpy climate ride.
I saw the weather for Jay Peak in northern New England has had a record (Sierra-like) winter… 400″ plus, due for 12-18″ last night and today. Pow Pow Pow.
Spent my last couple days on skid row for 2024 @ Mammoth and spring skiing is tantamount to moving your chess pieces around, hit chair #9 first as it gets the most Sun exposure and is heavenly until 10 or so when it turns to mushy mashed potatoes, time to move over to chair #14 on the opposite side of the mountain and higher up where the piste is still al dente. By the time you’re done @ 12:30, its a struggle to get down that last slope to the bottom, so runny are the legs.
I’m usually good for a few falls of no consequence over the long season, and this year I managed to not fall once in 23 ski do days on the mountain.
It didn’t help that my buddy was aware of it, and similar to a catcher stopping the game in the 9th inning to go out to talk to the pitcher to let him know he has a perfect game going, he kept reminding me of what was at stake if I went horizontal, ha ha.
My buddy’s wife recently announced to his almost-octogenarian self that his skiing days were over. Risks of falling and not subsequently recovering, say, from a broken hip or a concussion loom too great when mobility and coherence are cherished.
More time enjoying the sights fireside with an appropriate beverage as the younger crowds indulge, then off to dinner and the jacuzzi. Can’t go all cold turkey, after all.
The oldest skier in the Dartful Codgers just turned 75 and has been going downhill for over 60 years and he does pretty good for having only 1 eye, but you can sense his days on the slopes are numbered.
I’m trying to have my last days on parallel planks coincide with no more snow falling down in the winter on account of climate change.
It’s the most fun you can have doing something while standing up…
Wife yells downstairs to husband: “Did you ever have that feeling like a stabbing pain like maybe someone has a voodoo doll and sticking pins in it?”
Husband, “No.”
Wife, “How about now?”
while i cannot yet tell if youre a troll sent to sow division, that was funny.
credit due.
cats all ran away when i laughed.
ATH,
Sorry, Canadians don’t do that. Sow division, I mean.
It’s my understanding almond trees take a mighty amount of water to produce nuts. It’s also my understanding that a lot of the water is from irrigation pumped from California’s ancient ground water reservoir. So if this is correct, almond growers are depleting ground water and shipping it to another country. Seems short sighted.
Almonds, alfalfa and other crops grown where water is scarce then shipped to where it is rare.
See the Resnick family, erstwhile producers of almonds, pomegranates and tangerines, and big friends of big Cali politicians accessing big water.
The almond tree is a typical plant from the Mediterranean rim, where water is not at all abundant. But at least in traditional agriculture, it does not need watering (except for very young trees) beyond whatever rain it gets during the autumn and winter months.
My understanding is that in California, those large almond tree plantations have been set up in desert areas — which is not a suitable ecosystem for that kind of plant.
adding about groundwater use in dry states, Arizona wised up a couple of years ago.
https://apnews.com/article/saudi-arabia-drought-arizona-alfalfa-water-agriculture-0d13957edaf882690e15c0bd9ccfa59f
Makes me wonder where all the water will be sourced for new chip fabs, and why Arizona needs large water consuming facilities in the middle of the desert! Why not somewhere wet like the Olympic Peninsula or elsewhere along the northwest coast? Not enough latte and avocado toast places?
Apparently, as I just read, apiaries in the US are losing 70% of their bees. The big die-off a few years ago was 50%. Of course, the article said no one knows why, but the only reference to almonds was that the crop might be seriously affected. How about millions of bees from all over are trucked to the almond groves every year where they mix up and swap diseases? And then there are the nicotinoids that the govt refuses to ban. No mystery at all. Prepare to pay a lot more for your almonds next year.
an aside:
Country-specific effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on honey bees and wild bees
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaa1190
thanks. I escaped the US, just in time, for Oax, Mx. Bees are celebrated here as an iconic species that has played a role in their cosmology forever. Every food market has local honey, and if one knows where to find it, some really good ones.
Walking around leads to observations not so readily available when driving. For example, seeing many dead bees on sidewalks leads to conclusions about bad landscape maintenance.
I asked some local districts to notify their maintenance people to tone down the pesticide and herbicide usage. For the past few years, the local bees have been very happy, pollenating away in numbers not seen for awhile.
Bonus, no stings for dogs, or barefoot people, walking on those sidewalks.
Sometimes, it can just take a phone call or email to lead to desired results. In the absence of that, people are less likely to reduce or eliminate spraying, for example, on their own.
On Youtube there is a movie about bees and almonds called “Queen of the Sun” and it’s free to watch, but you’ll cry. What they do to those hives is horrible.
i built a kenyan top bar hive from a buncha scrap lumber…but the wife got cancer and i dropped everything.
was gonna actually populate the hive this spring(im on the beelist with the local pest control guys)…but then mom had the pastures scraped clean,lol…so no grass for sheep, and no flowers for bees.
one of these days, after she’s gone, perhaps…
Chili’s just put out an 11 dollar burger and a ‘pick 3’ menu.
Thats likely a McDonalds ‘ad’ *Edit. or reverse psyche marketing. The building on the right looks like a censored McD location.
Re KQED Newsom v the tariffs–it may be a bit ironic for Dems to now express outrage at bending the law and “lawfare,” but Newsom is making the same argument as Napolitano who says Trump’s actions are a violation of his Constitutional oath. Ian Welsh says this too.
https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-chief-justice-has-made-his-ruling-now-let-him-enforce-it/
Secession is nothing new under the sun in Cali…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_and_Ready,_California
A year after surging to a 25-year population high, the number of endangered Devils Hole pupfish at Death Valley National Park has crashed as a result of two recent earthquakes, according to the National Park Service. However, biologists say the population is on the road to recovery.
During a semiannual survey this spring, biologists from the National Park Service (NPS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and the Nevada Department of Wildlife counted only 38 fish in the deep limestone cavern in Death Valley National Park where they live. In contrast, the official spring count one year earlier recorded 191 fish.
Two earthquakes — one in December and the other in February — triggered waves in Devils Hole’s normally still waters that moved algae, organic material, and fish eggs off a shallow shelf at the cavern’s entrance that provides critical food and spawning habitat for the fish.
Biologists consulted the 2022 Devils Hole Pupfish Strategic Plan, which includes plans on what to do in this situation, and for the first time added captive-raised fish — 19 of them — to the wild population. They also used data from the captive Devils Hole pupfish population at the USFWS Ash Meadows Fish Conservation Facility and the NPS Devils Hole monitoring program to decide how to supplement the fish’s diet until algae can regrow.
https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2025/04/devils-hole-pupfish-population-takes-dive
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Took a last trip to Death Valley NP until November, and had 10 really low flyovers of F-18’s & F-35’s along with a lone C-130 in Star Wars Canyon, half of them while ensconced in hot springs.
The lowest pass was about 100 feet overhead @ 500 mph.
theres a granite pluton, maybe a half mile to my east…like enchanted rock, but smaller…
and where it bends into the dry creekbed, to its north, theres an intermittant spring, and little pool there.
the granite batholith has numerous cracks in its otherwise solid mass.
these fill with water when it rains.
and that feeds the little spring and pool.
when that pool is full, there are suddenly little fish.
i have no idea what species, etc they are…but would bet a dollar that they are unique to that pool in some way…aside from feeding genetic diversity downstream when theres a flood.
i feel fortunate to have witnessed this, as well as to be aware of it, at all.
The latest Trump Outrage Of The Hour (TOOTH) regarding the White House Egg roll is a perfect example of life in these crazy times.
First of all, nobody said Boo when the Biden administration used 64,000 eggs for the 2024 White House Egg Roll event, according to this gushing NPR article. That’s more than double the 30,000 eggs needed for this year’s event, according to Newsweek.
Second, 30,000 eggs is about .33% of the 9 million eggs that are sold at retailers and grocers every day.
Thirdly, even that meager .33% isn’t really meaningful, since the Easter Egg event will use small and medium eggs, which are not meant for the retail and grocery channels, according to the Agriculture Department official quoted in the Newsweek article.
Fourthly, the price of eggs has moderated in the last few weeks anyway, with the national average of a dozen Grade A large eggs pegged at $3.10 according to Trading Economics.
(Obligatory humorous wrap-up)
So it turns out the whole controversy isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, which is why the White House isn’t concerned about walking on egg shells on the issue. But even though it’s not exactly an eggsistential crisis, I fear TDS sufferer won’t be getting over it easy.
Fifthly, the eggs are being donated by the American Egg Board, in a desperate attempt to suck up to Dear Leader.
Also, fewer eggs than Biden because fewer kids are being invited: DEI egg seekers need not apply.
Don’t want to poach on your wrap up but it’s obvious that the TDS afflicted are pretty hard boiled in their hatred of the Orange one. It’s Scrambled their brains and they don’t yolk around.
Absolutely love the TOOTH acronym.
Uncle Sugar
Oh, honey, honey
You are my candy krush
And you got me wanting you
Honey
Oh, Uncle Sugar’s sugar
You are my only friend in the world
And you got me wanting you
I just can’t believe
The loveliness of dominating you
I just can’t believe it’s true
I just can’t believe
The wonder of this feeling, too
I just can’t believe it’s true
Oh-oh-oh-oh, sugar daddy
Pour a little Uncle Sugar on it, honey
Pour a little Uncle Sugar on it, baby
Make your life so sweet, yeah, yeah, yeah
Ah, Uncle Sugar
Oh, honey, honey
You are my pushover
And you got me wanting you
Sugar, Sugar, by the Archies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3plj_Xplus
How I Became Highly Educated Grist For The AI Mill – Defector
What if the problem is they don’t need to speed up, but to slow down?
We just made him too hot. Like we always do. Damn that Christian Bale and his abs.
-‘American Psycho’ Director Baffled by ‘Wall Street Bros’ Still Idolizing Patrick Bateman: They Don’t Realize the Movie Is a ‘Gay Man’s Satire on Masculinity’-
re: The 7 major ways China has changed between 2019 and 2024
(The Twitter/X post above)
It’s a rather interesting comment. That in the years since the OP has been visiting China, he has witnessed a dramatic cultural shift in public hygiene. No more open coughing, no more spitting on sidewalks, increased public toilets and toilet paper. He says China now feels as clean as Japan. He attributes this to a mass postering and education blitz. And they’ve cleaned the air, he says, partly with mass embrace of EV’s.
Which is striking considering the US seems to be experiencing a cultural shift of its own and in the exact opposite direction, toward an embrace of the germs and viruses, and away from pollution control.
Its becoming more common all the time-the locked toilet, which is to ward off the homeless from having a bowel movement.
Smart & Final supermarket here has combo locks on the door, and they wont give you the combo, an employee has to escort you to the promised land and stealthily enter the numbers.
Closer to home, the main visitors center for Sequoia NP is at Lodgepole and was built in the early 1960’s as part of the Mission 66 era improvements.
It has 2 toilets and 2 urinals in the mens bathroom for 2 million visitors a year~
>It has 2 toilets and 2 urinals in the mens bathroom for 2 million visitors a year~
Reminds me of a book:
Race to the outhouse.
By Willie Makeit and illustrated by Doris Locked…
Seriously, I know this is common in many larger metropolitan areas to the south of us but this phenomenon has finally made it to the Upper Valley region of NH/VT.
Went into the local quick stop and you now have to ask for the key to the padlocked door. I got it when the bathroom entrances were outside but now with the inside entrances.
Foreword by Betty Dont
edit
p.s., funny sign seen in a restroom along the Continental Divide road in the Tetons, showing someone squatting on the seat, inside that red circle with the diagonal line through it.
“….the locked toilet, which is to ward off the homeless from having a bowel movement.”
lol.
which essentially necessitates them reliving themselves out of doors, somewheres…which is is obviously better for everyone,lol
and then we can kvetch about that, too…and plaster the pics of the deposits all over X, for the outrage and the clicks.
i loathe my own country.
lets engineer everything to where our biggest exports are debt and lethal weapons…and our biggest domestic products are despair and hopelessness…it’ll be great!
a reminder: i hear the super rich are quite tasty, if prepared and cooked properly.
i have recipes that would likely suffice.
sooner, rather than later.
I guess you are advocating shopping for long pork?
its way past time.
lotsa hungry folks in amurka.
be the change, and all.
eat them.
they aint nuthin but trouble, anyways.
They are full of microplastics, hormones and botox.
The tag “…In ~3-6 months we are going to start having shortages of transformers, pumps, air conditioners…” fails to encapsulate the full impact of Molson Hart’s observations while walking through Shanghai. Based on Hart’s observations, China appears to have transformed itself over the last five years. His observations about the amount of automation in China’s economy are especially interesting. Wherever China is heading, many aspects of the Chinese economy and society are rapidly evolving into — into I am not sure what. Some of the innovations are marvelous but many threaten some very dystopian potential.
This is a video I found linked on Mastodon – sort of internal promo video of the CPC I presume with Xi Jinping in which there are shown clips from 5 – 7 years ago where he promised people improvements which I understand now everyone can see with their own eyes have realised. He shows the Party has kept its promise.
https://social-cdn.vivaldi.net/system/cache/media_attachments/files/114/128/148/077/515/666/original/0eef7345167ae75f.mp4
I expect the Cops to get further out of hand, be very careful when you deal with them if you look poor or have a dark skin.
If you live in California and can afford to, join the 11-99 foundation and get their license plate holder, it might make the difference between a ticket and a trip to the Morgue.
Most State Highway Patrols/State Police have similar foundations, it would be prudent to look into it if you are high risk ( Look middle eastern/have a dark skin tone).
The Rule of Law is gone, the Cops are increasingly paranoid and they can cripple or kill you with no personal consequences.
…a KMA 367 license plate frame always got me out of a jam, the coppers knew I meant business
“KMA 367 license plate frame”
Care to explain what this is for non-Calfornians, non-USA readers?
My immunity came via 1-Adam-12, a TV show that always displayed KMA 367 every episode.
I remember watching 1-Adam-12 as a kid and it wasn’t bad. I would shudder if I heard that they intended remaking it though. These days Malloy and Reed would be seen as dinosaurs.
KMA-367 was the radio call sign of the LAPD back in the day.
re: Government IT whistleblower calls out DOGE, says he was threatened at home
It did occur to me that with all the uncertainty around the authority of DOGE to invade government systems there would be an opportunity here for state actors to do classic man-in-the-middle and impersonate DOGE, or DOGE itself is untrained, practicing bad opsec, is inadvertently compromising secure systems.
However, in the IT world just because something looks like activity from within Russia doesn’t mean it is. I would argue it’s more likely some state other than Russia has vacuumed the data. I would guess Palantir.
“Fungal infections are ‘taking over…”
Fungal infections [and also parasitic infections] will be growing threats in the future climate. The let-her rip idea for arriving at herd immunity has the Dutch Elm as fine poster child for how that might play out.
I am watching now Season two of The Last of Us…
“Is Trump trying to save China?”
This link is interesting but far less interesting than the comments it elicited.
My understanding is that the Israeli military is composed entirely of reserves, who are called up on those frequent occasions when Israel is starting a war with someone.
I don’t understand how they can do a permanent military presence anywhere without depopulating businesses and other organizations within Israel where the reserves usually work. In fact, Israel is presently being hit very hard by the absence of reserves from their normal civilian jobs and many businesses are struggling or closing.
Hard to see how Israel can do this permanently. Perhaps they are thinking career US soldiers will fill their ranks.
Settlers perhaps? They are armed.
And they are normally not in the army or civil service or in business so they would be free for occupation of other people’s land.
America is going just great
Lawyer Up? Increasingly, Americans Won’t, or Can’t. (NY Times via archive.ph)
So much for equal protection under the law.
You hate to see it…
Harvard may lose its tax exempt status.
It probably should. Not for these reasons though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDIA742ppIU/
Alex M. today, occasional cheeleader of DOGE, decrying social spending cuts in Britain.
re: Gaza Finkelstein Hedges
Emptying Gaza (w/ Norman Finkelstein) | The Chris Hedges Report
Finkelstein and Hedges assess the current state of the genocide in Palestine as well as how the media and the universities have all but abandoned their principles in servitude to the Zionist agenda.
58 min.
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/emptying-gaza-w-norman-finkelstein
recommended!
Among others Finkelstein – even if only briefly due to time constraints “challenges” Hedges on the issue of Trump v. universities. Of course with a smile on his face because he is aware of how rotten it all is. But in detail it is an important angle, which I very much welcome because it puts differentiation where Hedges likes to paint in stark Black & White.
p.s. Hedges reminds me a bit of Chomsky´s habit to switch to more homogeneous analyses for public discourse after he realized that – may he have tried as hard as he could – it became impossible in mass media to apply the same kind of exactness and differentiation to public statements as he was used to in his research and scholarship. Eventually evening out matters where in fact there is more to it. At least I would speculate.
FDA making plans to end its routine food safety inspections, sources say
Lol
No words
re: Germany / war / Easter bunnies
German bakery in Tübingen is selling WWII-era bunnies operating artillery and tanks.
German state media report
Easter bunny on a tank or with a cannon
Easter with war motifs: These sugar bunnies are sold by a Tübingen bakery
https://archive.is/POFbZ
I guess they forgot the Swastikas in the basement.
This business-mindset is not entirely new. 2022 bakeries liked to sell cake designed as Ukrainian flags.
They look more like interwar period bunnies to me. :) The tank resembles pre-war Czechoslovak designs, the howitzer is more like WWI era stuff (e.g. Big Bertha), while the cannon is something that would fit on a pirate ship.