Luke 19; 41 -45 The Walmart chatGPT version in iambic pentameter:
When he approached Jerusalem, his heart did weep,
O’er the city’s fate, its secrets buried deep.
“If only you had known the path to peace,” he cried,
“But now, veiled from your eyes, it doth reside.
“For days will come, when foes your walls assail,
With barricades they’ll hem you, without fail.
They’ll raze you to the ground, no stone shall stand,
For you failed to heed, the time at hand.
“Lo! You persecute your neighbors in vain,
Vengeance is mine, I’ll repay, in pain.
Killing the children of Gaza, my wrath shall fall,
And the Zionist pigs shall crumble, one and all.”

Posted by: canuck | Feb 22 2024 14:24 utc | 3

The United States of Crooks and Liars & their Assange SNAFU.
Some Oz politicians have decided to grow a pair and press for Assange to be returned to Oz.
Equally surprising is the about-face of abc.net.au which has been less than curious about the insulting drivel it has been broadcsting as News for the last 12+ months.
But not this week. This week every abc News Assange report has been accompnied by the Wikileaks clip Collateral Murder depicting Yanks slaughtering Iraqi civilians from the safety of a helicopter gunship.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Feb 22 2024 14:48 utc | 5

With regards to JA Craig Murray has the newest. JA was too I’ll to be at trial today.
Hopefully I’m not right but I’m betting they’re just making a show of real justice by having him extradited and released to show some compassion for a man they know is about to die. Novocok anyone?

Posted by: PleaseBeleafMe | Feb 22 2024 16:27 utc | 7

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240221/germany-is-doomed-mep-paints-unflattering-picture-of-berlins-economic-prospects-1116909191.html
It is remarkable just how doomed the West seems to be. Will a new coalition in Germany make any difference? It doesn’t seem so. Will a Labour victory in Britain fend off mass refugees and revive the economy? It doesn’t seem so. Finally, what does Biden vs Trump portend? Nothing good.

Posted by: Eighthman | Feb 22 2024 16:31 utc | 9

I missed the new OT and left a long (and somewhat personal) comment at the tail end of the last OT. It’s about aircraft, bicycles, the nature and the powers of intuitive reasoning, everyone’s very own shining path, and the Golden Pudel Club. I forgot to hint UWDude at some woods he is missing, to be found in formulating and modeling time-dependent differential equations.

Posted by: persiflo | Feb 22 2024 17:27 utc | 11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBP2uRQk5pQ
A short video demonstrating the extraordinary resilience and vitality of Earth. Desert to forest in a few years by understanding the importance and nature of watersheds.

This country is has been making some large scale incredible transformations, restoring forests and farmland, turning a community from food aid dependent into food producers. It’s an amazing achievement considering the fact this countries geography makes it very venerable to desertification due to its proximity to several deserts, such as the Sahara and Great Arabian Deserts. This country also has a desert known as the hottest driest and most inhospitable place on earth known as the Danakil desert. Several factors have led to the population forgetting how to manage their landscapes sustainably causing an unprecedented crisis in the 1980’s with famine that continued to make the community food aid dependent, the landscape was eroded and degraded, causing devastating landslides and floods during the rainy season, and prolonged, crippling drought in the dry season. Over the last decade they have managed to turn this around working with Tony Rinaudo and WorldVison they have been able to restore hundred and thousands of hectares of land, that have help to restore the water-shed, holding water during the wet season and letting it soak into the aquifers, instead of being washed away, as a result there is still water flowing in the dry season and farmers have been able to not only be self-reliant but also food producers, selling their surplus crops.

All this climate doomer stuff is a HUGE distraction put out by the same international leadership class ghouls who are ruining our world in so many ways. When people DON’T follow the same Science (and scientism) of these capitalist, communist, socialist and fascist ghouls (all distinctions without substantive difference), solutions can be found. And are surprisingly easy.
The Kogi people in Colombia have had similar results using traditional perceptions about reality whereas this method was developed by Tony Renaldo in Niger. He reforests using saplings instead of seeds, aka pruning. The RSI method of boosting grain crops yield has a similar approach, along with naturally fermented fertilizing approaches which field crops need unlike forest terrain. Basically the philosophy is ‘ if you give Nature a chance, it will heal itself.’ Water returns, then wildlife. Naturally. ‘The solutions,’ Tony says, ‘are embarrassingly simple; but I’m not ashamed because it works!’
If only the world weren’t run by psychopaths, how simple it all could be…

Posted by: Scorpion | Feb 22 2024 17:49 utc | 13

“It will take some time for the new economic realities to settle in. They will likely change the current view of Europe’s real strategic interests.”
“Unfortunately the change of mind is taking much longer than I had hoped for.”
Good analysis as usual, but may suffer from a fundamental mistake.
It is evident by now that Western policies run counter to interests of Western populations and nations, yet Western leaders persist on these catastrophic policies. Regarding Ukraine and other socioeconomic issues too.
The common explanation is that Western leaders are: stupid, delusional, crazy, etc.
However, if we consider that Western leaders are not really leaders, but rather puppets with one puppet master, this is supported by the homogeneity observed across the board in Western leader’s decisions.
Let us further assume that the puppet master is no idiot, then we should try and figure out what the gameplan is of the puppet master.
It has been posited that the gameplan is creation of “Two Worlds”. The justification being, that since 2014 it has become evident that the RIC (Russia – Iran – China) have surpassed the West in all domains: economic, technological and consequently military and to make matters worse, the RIC have been expanding their footprint globally at the expense of the empire. Rather than lose everything the puppet master decided in 2014 to opt for the Two Worlds.
The wars and war rhetoric we have been witnessing against the RIC is merely to tighten control over the Western Realm, and pump RICophobia as the ideological basis for the Two Worlds.
https://fadilama.substack.com/p/the-great-dessert-the-geopolitical
https://thecradle.co/articles-id/3612
https://www.claritypress.com/product/why-the-west-cant-win-from-bretton-woods-to-a-multipolar-world/
Posted by: Fadi | Feb 22 2024 15:18 utc | 471
blueswede recommended to this author to repost on a newer thread. I too recommend reading his writings.
Thomas

Posted by: Thomas | Feb 22 2024 18:09 utc | 15

@scorpion
Global warming is real. Denial of this reality in favor of positions advanced by a fringe minority of climate scientists properly constitutes “scientism”.

Posted by: Brautigan | Feb 22 2024 18:28 utc | 17

We are experiencing the final stages of a massive bubble, a la 2000 dot come and 2008 GFC. This could crash tomorrow or just keep going up for another 6 months before crashing. Northman Trader over on X put it succinctly,

$META: $200B in market cap added in 1 day, $NVDA: $250B in market cap added in 1 day. It was the greatest monetary tightening ever.

Due to the market rally, the major increases in US government spending etc., financial conditions are as loose now as they were in January 2022; i.e. no real financial conditions tightening, it has all been undone. The Fed and US government (in effect the same thing) have decided that they need to keep the economy ramped through 2024 and will turn a blind eye to increasingly large US government deficits and signs of reemerging inflationary drivers, kick the commercial real estate/car loan/credit card crisis down the road into 2025, and not give a shit about an obvious stock market bubble. All they care about is getting the Dems re-elected, then they will worry about the problems in 2025.
This is a recipe for a huge crisis, perhaps one that the establishment cannot keep from happening in 2024 or perhaps they will stave it off to 2025. Either way, a huge set of issues is being allowed to fester and grow. If the stock market keeps going up we can expect precious metals to fall (and related stocks even more) and only reach a low with the first big flush down in the stock market (as in mid 2000 and late 2008). We may then have a redux of 1970s inflation. Bitcoin will probably ride the stock market wave until it breaks.
All the while China is re-balancing its economy skillfully away from its own property bubble and growing at a 5% of GDP per year rate while retail prices flirt with deflation. Another price war has started in the EV space, not a sign of economic contraction but of real competition between many players for market share in the rapidly growing EV market. This is what happened in the US in the 1800s, with both economic growth and price deflation being experienced at the same time. Meanwhile the Shanghai Composite Index is still only half the level it attained in early 2008, 16 years ago, as Xi has reduced corruption, enhanced regulations and supported competitive markets (compared to the monopolistic and oligopolistic markets that dominate the US). The increased wealth of the rapid growth of those 16 years (a trebling in the size of the economy) has not gone to shareholders but rather to the rest of society.
The come down of the US vs. China starting either later this year, or in 2025, is going to be utterly epic.

Posted by: Roger | Feb 22 2024 18:57 utc | 19

Roger,
Agreed that 2025 is likely when the first real effects of de-dollarization become evident.

Posted by: Exile | Feb 22 2024 19:02 utc | 21

@Brautigan
The issue is not global warming. It is rather whether it is caused by human industrial intervention or whether it is largely natural. What complicates the discussion is that we are currently coming out of the Little Ice Age. I do not know the answer to this.
What I do know, however, is that thinking EROEI (Energy Returned Out of Energy Invested) we are running out of easily recovered, i.e., cheap, sources of energy. Ultimately, this implies we will have to devote more of a household or industrial budget to sources of energy. This will result in the end of private cars because the energy to power them is too expensive. We will have to go back to the way it was in the late 1880s: public transit in cities and rail outside of cities supplemented by horse-drawn carriages.

Posted by: Albert65de | Feb 22 2024 19:05 utc | 23

Hoarsewhisperer@5….The Trust Fall is currently airing in Australian theatres, might explain the flak.
Cheers M

Posted by: sean the leprechaun | Feb 22 2024 19:18 utc | 25

https://openai.com/sora
This is frighteningly good. I don’t have a good feeling about it, especially in the election year
Very soon there will be no way of knowing which videos are real and which are completely made up AI…that is a challenge on a whole new level for verifying authenticity and preventing manipulation…

Posted by: SlowSoft | Feb 22 2024 19:40 utc | 27

Posted by: Fadi | Feb 22 2024 15:18 utc | 471
blueswede recommended to this author to repost on a newer thread. I too recommend reading his writings.
Thomas
Posted by: Thomas | Feb 22 2024 18:09 utc | 15
Yes! I have been characterizing this bifurcation as ‘Fortress America,’ and a new cold war. Europe will be held on to as long as it has technology that hasn’t been moved to the US, and as long as they find some way to be a market for the new US-based manufacturing, without actually making much of anything themselves. If it falls apart and RICs pick up the pieces, so be it. The primary goal is to make the New World a separate domain, with whatever ‘unsinkable aircraft carriers can be maintained on the other side of the oceans.
That’s the plan, anyway. Latin America may not be so enthusiastic.

Posted by: Honzo | Feb 22 2024 20:10 utc | 29

Posted by: Roger | Feb 22 2024 18:57 utc | 19
You are quoting a guy who has been wrong about everything since the pandemic Roger
Are you an ideologue ? Or can think for yourself ?
Why not quote somebody who has called EVERYTHING right since the pandemic ?
This guy ..
https://m.youtube.com/@mikeydoggy/videos

Posted by: Echo Chamber | Feb 22 2024 20:20 utc | 31

Posted by: Roger | Feb 22 2024 18:57 utc | 19
The come down of the US vs. China starting either later this year, or in 2025, is going to be utterly epic.

I remember after the 2020 US election along with international covid response feeling that quite possibly this was the last time the post-constitutional pseudo-republic would hold an ostensibly ‘free and fair election’. A huge crash this summer along with riots and race wars with millions of unemployed third world illegals, energy crunch, another disease etc. could be just the ticket to usher in a new type of one party system given how obviously more effective such a thing is in China, for example. I sure hope this doesn’t happen, but I think the election is setting up to break the country apart one way or another. The Center no longer holds so fracturing is the inevitable way forward from which most likely something authoritarian will emerge, much to the relief of a deeply traumatized population.

Posted by: Scorpion | Feb 22 2024 20:53 utc | 33

$ 7 trillion is being spent on build back better.
That is strengthening areas where there were bottle necks, strengthening areas that first cracked under the supply side oressures, ports , railways infrastructure etc, etc.
That ideologue just sees $7 trillion doesn’t even look at what it is being spent on.
Yes, sure if the $7trillion was being spent on giving every child a puppy then sure the price of puppies would explode.
It is being spent on the inflation reduction plan. Improving the productive capacity of the US economy so that inflationary pressures are being pushed out further into the future that allows more capacity.
Now ask that fucking ideologue you have quoted how that will crash the US economy.
So where does the $ 7 trillion end up ?
If you give somebody £100, they spend it which is taxed at 20%, leaving the next person with £80 as income. They then spend that £80 which is taxed at 20%, leaving the next person with £64 as income. And so on until the entire £100 disappears and creates £100 of extra tax. All without changing the tax rate one single percent
The result is lots of extra sales and income for people down the spending chain they wouldn’t otherwise have received. It’s a straightforward geometric progression.
There is no reason to raise taxes if there is significant unemployment. In fact if there is unemployment then by definition we are overtaxed for the size of government we have and we should be looking at cutting taxes, not raising them.
The £100 that is eventually collected as tax from the original £100 that was spent is burned, shredded, DESTROYED. The issuer of the $ does not need it.
Government spending is always with newly created money. All of it – all the time. No accounting exists that allows taxes to be respent back into the economy at the federal level.
Now instead of giving somebody £100. Give them £500 instead or £1000 instead or give $7 trillion instead.
What happens ?
When you crank up the spending you crank up the shredding machine ( taxes) as well. It’s a straightforward geometric progression.
If you give somebody $ 7 trillion, they spend it which is taxed at 20%, leaving the next person with $ 5.6 trillion as income. They then spend that which is taxed at 20%, leaving the next person with $4.4 trillion as income. And so on until the entire $ 7 trillion disappears and creates $ 7 trillion of extra tax. All without changing the tax rate one single percent.
The $7 trillion is shredded eventually but look at the good it has done as it flows down the spending chain. Many people don’t spend all of their income they save some of their income instead.
As cash – which shows up in the government accounts as a budget deficit
Or
As US treasuries to earn more interest than holding it as cash – Which shows up in the government accounts as the national debt.
That they can use to pay taxes later. The $ is nothing more than a tax credit. An IOU.
So tell me how will people saving keeping the loan sharks away from the door crash the US economy ?
When the money scarcity guys ( The gold bugs ) want exactly that. The loan sharks circling your house like a vulture. Cause 2008 all over again which they completely ignore as if it didn’t happen = Sociopath/ Psychopath. Take your pick the are one of the two.

Posted by: Echo Chamber | Feb 22 2024 20:58 utc | 35

David Horsman re-posted a statement from UWDude above to me, therein the UWDude explains about his job in game dev. Yes, I had seen this comment before, and it was precisely this statements of his which provoked my sparse response, which I gave mostly because I am one of the barflies in the humungous WiR OT who took the climate discussion into a field where I actually began to micro-lecture the esteemed audience of the bar on dynamical systems theory. The same still applies now. I admit that for some reasons I feel a desire to uphold my credentials on this topic, into which I had not ventured before during my time on the Moon of Alabama as a semi-regular poster. Let me say that I believe the bar might be better of tonight if we do not fully engage on the topic; as surely some can see, there is already some talking past going on. On the other hand, the debate is alive, and the technical aspects of climate (and other) modelling are very helpful when trying to understand Zeitgeist questions such as climater and AI. I will leave it to barflies to see if there is a compounding desire to continue our explorations of computational tools and their application to problems of the Lebenswelt. I shall provide my own knowledge of these things (gained from seven years at university, but not from actual jobs in the fields).
Again in regard to the UWDude’s post cited by Mr. Horsman to me, methinks that its author, by his own statements, knows trigonometry and calculous, plus coding and experience with stochastic process visualizations (that said, I have no idea how current computational approaches to generate fractals look like; I’d assume they are probabilistic, but may well be wrong). I would expect he does not know about and hence never uses numerical analysis; that is, mathematical approaches directed at the models themselves, as opposed to whatever the model attempts to describe. For instance, you’d like your algorithm to throw out, with rising computational depth, “solutions” (approximations) that close converge against a solution of the original PDE [which is known! as the right hand side of the differential equation – what’s not known is its temporal development along the boundaries in question]. You’ll also want it to do that in controlled way, which is hard to do, because the routines like to oscillate about while closing in on the solution; to gauge that, you first have to develop an appropriate measure that gives rise to a notion of distance. The UWDude describes how his tools are prone to “jumping”; I gather that he speaks about this very beaviour. As I said, I have never worked with these things in some kind of position, other than writing my diploma thesis in the field. My mentoring Professor was one of those special folks who could make everything appear incredibly simple, and now I remember him relating to the class of ten or so people (one pof them another Prof btw – it all facilitated a cooperative learning atmosphere) how he sees devs out there in the wild all the time who just forego to investigate the stability aspects of their models. He did not elaborate further, but it was absolutely awkward, because the guy sat in the super soft spoken and calm maths departement, went out to congresses from time to time, and worked full-on in problems of numerical stability, thus being himself tbe living prime example of the tediousness of it all. But then, his point does hold: if you don’t know if your model is stable, and it is not, then you have no way at all to estimate the quality of your simulation (because it exhibits “jumping”). Now, perhaps the UWDude is talking past me because in all real-world dev teams stability analysis is replaced with “experimental” re-runs over surrounding boundary area, and then infer or buest-guess if it looks any good. That may well be the case, on second thought now. – But another point remains, and it rhymes with the previous one: UWDude states that in some kind of future, we’d perhaps have modeling of weather down to square meters, or something along this line. Again this seems to exhibit a complete lack of conceptualization à la numerical analysis. So the bottom line now for me is, that I can’t tell whether it would be of any help in his game dev if he had studied the field; but I dare say that it would at least not be detrimental to his work.
I owe another comment here on Mani. Busy day for me! But I should make it in this here thread.

Posted by: persiflo | Feb 22 2024 21:17 utc | 37

Tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich.
Slash spending, annihilate the deficit. The money scarcity guys will be on the TV screens 24/7, 7 days a week.
Ideologues will Q round the block in November to vote for it. Laffer curve trickle down. As if it hasn’t been tried before and something new. Packaged and marketed as a new,set of disco lights. Call themselves patriots of the freedumb caucus.
Then wonder why the national debt isn’t dropping fast enough as the rich they have just given the tax cuts too. Park their gift in US treasuries until the next election when they can cash them in to rig the next election in the future.
Wonder Why households are suddenly drowning in private sector debt.
Voters, dumb as a bag of spanners.

Posted by: Echo Chamber | Feb 22 2024 21:39 utc | 39

@Posted by: Albert65de | Feb 22 2024 19:05 utc | 23
Only oil is at peak EROEI, natural gas and coal are not and can continue on at highly positive net-energy rates for decades. China is driving the EV revolution as it replaces oil (that it imports to the tune of 11 million barrels per day) for domestic coal, domestic and imported gas, nuclear, hydro and new renewable generated electricity. Chinese domestic gas production is making major gains due to new technology currently. Chinese EV (and other low carbon technology) manufacturers are also expanding rapidly across Asia, leading to growth in the car markets there being much less ICE oriented. Add in increasingly strict efficiency standards for the ICE cars and you get falling oil demand.
Anthropogenic climate change is a fact no matter how many tangents and obfuscations are rolled out. Each one of these has been systematically debunked numerous times by the scientific community, but that makes little or no impact on an opposition that is either incentivized to not know basic climate science and/or prefers full on cognitive dissonance. I myself have given up trying to explain as all that happens is that we go around in circles from one “challenge” to another until we end up back at the beginning and off we go again. The linkage between greenhouse gases and average global temperatures has been well proven for many, many decades.
We will not be running out of energy any time soon but we are in a climate emergency. I wrote a piece a few months ago Collapse: Soylent Green, Neo-Feudalism, or Socialist Eco-Paradise? covering all the different proposed scenarios and misinformation to address what an actual collapse will probably look like.
Oh and of course climate change can be caused by natural and anthropogenic causes, in this case its blindingly obvious that its anthropogenic given the rate of change and tight correlation to anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions. We are now actually starting to move into the area where man-made warming is triggering increases in natural emissions, so both now become compounding. That’s when mankind completely loses control and some form of collapse is guaranteed, but we will try just like King Canute to hold back that which cannot be held back while not reducing emissions at the increasingly fast rate required.
A bit of a primer on basic climate science:
Some Climate Science
Some More Climate Science And Politics: Supercharging the El Nino
Some of the latest research points to the supposed “Medieval Warm Period” and “Little Ice Age” as being regional rather than global phenomena.

A new study puts together the evidence on a global scale for the first time. Based on this, the authors say that the supposed warm and cold epochs may represent, more than anything, regional variations that can be explained by random variability. Published in the leading journal Nature this week, the study analyzes paleoclimate data from across the world, using multiple statistical methods and many sources: tree rings, glacial ice cores, corals, lake sediments. It does not suggest that the periods of high or low temperatures observed during the named epochs did not exist in certain places; rather that they did not exist everywhere at the same time, and thus probably were not caused by some kind of planetary driver.
That said, the study does find one very coherent period: an unprecedented warm one extending over 98 percent of the globe, starting in the 20th century. This is almost certainly caused by us …
We [the authors of the study] show that previously named climate epochs of the Common Era were not coherent phenomena across the globe. This goes against the widespread notion that periods like the Little Ice Age or Medieval Warm Period were global periods of cold or warmth. We’re not the first to point out that there are problems with this idea, but our study is the first to rigorously test the hypothesis on a global scale. In contrast to this, we see that current global warming is remarkably coherent … Paleoclimate is like many fields of study. There are historical biases in where data is collected, and how the stories about the data are developed. The first paleoclimate data were largely collected from Europe by Europeans, and so it’s not terribly surprising that the stories that try to make sense of such data are Euro-focused.

The Climate Epochs That Weren’t
And the real problem stopping the significant emissions reductions required:
The Core Climate Change Problem: Energy equals Wealth equals Power

Posted by: Roger | Feb 22 2024 21:40 utc | 41

When in hospital in Germany, Navalnyvwas diagnosed a surprising amount of ailments.
From John Helmer

The German laboratory test results for Alexei Navalny, published by a group of doctors at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin last month, reveal a surprising number of medical symptoms, … acute pancreatitis, diabetes, liver failure, severe dehydration, muscular rigidity, as well as a serious bacterial infection, and a possible heart attack associated with his kidney problems. According to the experts, these are not recognisable symptoms of a nerve agent attack.

Posted by: Passerby | Feb 22 2024 21:49 utc | 43

@Posted by: Scorpion | Feb 22 2024 20:53 utc | 33
I would not put it past the US establishment, which already has a one-party system. Its just a clever one with two parties to hide the one party nature of it. The Chinese Party-state is run by engineers and scientists while the US one is run by lawyers and PR types. Reminds me of the part in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy with the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ships.
Ship B was supposed to free the population of all the “useless” people such as telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants. As programmed it crashed into the Earth (I was told by someone in the know that it was near Croydon). They begin running the planet (i.e. the West that views itself as the centre of the universe) in accordance with their previous useless ways
Ships A and C were supposed to carry the people who ruled, thought, or actually did useful work. Unfortunately after ship B left the remaining population died from a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone. I consider this to be a cheap Western propagandist lie as both ships A and C successfully touched down in what is now known as China.
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was written by an English guy (Douglas Adams) for the state propaganda network the BBC, so yeah probably just the usual Cold War propaganda. The UK hit shitification way before the US.

Posted by: Roger | Feb 22 2024 21:57 utc | 45

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was written by an English guy (Douglas Adams) for the state propaganda network the BBC, so yeah probably just the usual Cold War propaganda. The UK hit shitification way before the US.
Posted by: Roger | Feb 22 2024 21:57 utc | 45
……………………..
Well, we disagree about climate (but in my case at least respectfully since clearly you put a lot of care and hard work into your well formed opinions) but we also might disagree about Douglas Adams who is the brilliant author of a little known coffee table work of genius, The Meaning of Liff. Well worth a postprandial look whilst passing the port.
No entry for Croydon, though, which I never visited because it just sounds unsavory somehow, as in ‘he had a nasty case of Croydon which left him bedridden for months….’

Posted by: Scorpion | Feb 22 2024 22:19 utc | 47

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was written by an English guy (Douglas Adams) for the state propaganda network the BBC, so yeah probably just the usual Cold War propaganda. The UK hit shitification way before the US.
Posted by: Roger | Feb 22 2024 21:57 utc | 45
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy has many marvelous items: “Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.”
To me, this is a description of todays’ TV news: if a news item might disturb viewers, the criminals’ face is pixelized.

Posted by: Passerby | Feb 22 2024 22:34 utc | 49

@Posted by: Scorpion | Feb 22 2024 22:19 utc | 47
I had the unfortunate experience of working in Croydon for a while, and I can confirm your opinion of it. It is now rated as the most dangerous town in Greater London!
24 Hours In London’s Most Dangerous Town

Posted by: Roger | Feb 22 2024 22:40 utc | 51

reveal a surprising number of medical symptoms, … acute pancreatitis, diabetes, liver failure, severe dehydration, muscular rigidity,
Posted by: Passerby | Feb 22 2024 21:49 utc | 43
These tend to point towards mineral deficiencies that in turn a caused by something else, and so we go back the the Russian doctors somewhat bland diagnosis of metabolic problems.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Feb 22 2024 23:08 utc | 53

WESTERN-USA HEGEMONY COLLAPSE?
I don’t accept all the expectations (HOPES) in this discussion in the video. It’s too ‘pat’ and ‘simplistic’ an overly ambitious/hopeful imo.
New Study: THIS Is Why The West Is Really Doomed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr5fAFlYBqE
I think much of it is still overly optimistic how fast a transition to a multi-polar world can/may occur – and understates the severe security and ongoing sanctions/trade and therefore Economic threats Russia is facing now and still in the near future. And imho they overstate how much support Russia can get from others along the way – and how useful that support might be.
In his new book “The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order”, Professor Glenn Diesen argues compellingly that the way the world used to work not only for the past century, but for the past 500 years is over and done with. From here on, the global system will be much more dynamic, multi-polar, and much more complex.
Professor Diesen also shows how Ukraine has been a pawn in the hands of NATO warmongers who despite their best efforts, however, have not been able to break even one of their strategic rivals in the system. The time of Western impunity is ending. The question is, what comes next?
NO, imv the big question for now is how long will it take for that Western system and fantasy beliefs to unwind and actually collapse — Diesen et al. do not know by WHEN or even HOW that might happen.
They also do not emphasis enough how mentally unstable, delusional and propagandized the US European western citizens really are. They will NOT be turning on a dime seeing the light of truth just because Tucker did a 2 hour interview with Russia. MSNBC and the NYTs are not about to change their world views.
The collective cognitive dissonance in the west is extreme and it is deeply entrenched psychologically. The overwhelming majority of the population will keep supporting the crazies no matter how bad things become — because? It;s all Putin’s and Xi’s fault – they are psychopathic dictators who Hate American Freedoms!
Nevertheless the issues Diesen covers and what he says is worth considering seriously. cheers LD

Posted by: Lavrov’s Dog | Feb 22 2024 23:34 utc | 55

Outside of immediately relatable analogies (metaphorical, symbolic, allegorical, etc.) this is where World War II belongs. 🙂 Please keep this Moon clean and recycle your tosh in the proper bin. Thank you, everyone! ^.^

Posted by: titmouse | Feb 23 2024 0:09 utc | 57

Cognitive Dissonance runs deep. There is no Power in this world greater than entrenched collective Beliefs.

Posted by: Lavrov’s Dog | Feb 23 2024 0:31 utc | 59

Roger | Feb 22 2024 21:40 utc | 41–
Putin addressed the climate change issue during the ASI Forum, specifically the melting permafrost issue which clearly has Russia’s attention that was brought about by an idea for dealing with the measuring of the degree of permafrost melting to know when to evacuate a threatened building or other structure. How Putin elaborated on the big problems posed by melting permafrost probably won’t get much play outside Russia. And since I don’t expect barflies that won’t take the time to read the transcript to go hunting to fond what Putin said, I’ll post it here:

Vladimir Putin: You have raised an extremely important issue of a global nature. We are talking about permafrost, and if it melts… I don’t want to talk about the serious consequences right now, I won’t say complicated words at all, so as not to frighten anyone. But when permafrost melts, a huge amount of gases rises into the atmosphere, which cause enormous damage to the environment, not comparable to any emissions from cars.
For our country, where quite large and medium-sized settlements are located beyond the Arctic Circle, the problems are even more acute. Of course, you need to watch the buildings that are built on permafrost. If someone doesn’t know, they are built on stilts that are driven into this permafrost-buildings are built on this permafrost on stilts. If it melts, then, naturally, the question arises: what to do with these buildings? This is a specific problem for us. Moreover, glaciers are melting faster in our region than in other regions of the world, and this is an absolutely urgent task for us.
Therefore, when someone somewhere says that we need to pay more attention to environmental issues and climate change, it concerns us first of all. We are in favor of uniting the efforts of all people on the planet who are interested both in analyzing the current events and in taking the necessary measures to prevent this process, if possible, and if it cannot be prevented, at least replace it, so that humanity, and in this case our country, will be able to do so, and the country could enter the period that is coming, if it is unavoidable. We must be prepared for these changes.

Yes, there’s more to that part of the discussion and to the other ideas voiced at the Forum. IMO, Putin’s words were the sharpest he’s spoken on the topic that I know of.

Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 23 2024 0:46 utc | 61

From the Too Funny Dept, RT reports:

Putin responds to Biden’s ‘crazy S.O.B.’ insult: The US leader’s offensive comment only proves that Moscow is better off with him in the White House, the Russian president has said….
“When you [Zarubin] asked me our preference for the next US president, I said we would work with any, but for us, for Russia, Biden was better,” Putin replied. “Judging by what he said, I was absolutely right.”
“That’s the appropriate reaction to what I said,” Putin continued. “It’s not like he could say ‘Good job, Volodya, thank you for the helping hand’. We understand what is going on there, in terms of internal politics.”
Biden’s insulting comments “mean I was right,” Putin said. In terms of who Moscow would like to see in the White House, he added, “I can say it again: Biden.”
In an interview with Zarubin last week, Putin described Biden as “a more experienced and predictable person…a politician of the old sort” and waved off claims of the US president’s much-discussed apparent dementia.

The affair is hilarious, particularly the responses from the DC idiot brigade.

Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 23 2024 0:54 utc | 63

The lead idea suggested at the ASI Forum was supported by Putin and the government has given it further study to the point where RT has published an article about it:
“Russia to welcome foreigners who share ‘traditional values’: What we know so far: The idea was floated at a Moscow forum by an Italian student who calls it a process of “impatriation,” and is supported by President Putin.”
The RT article does a better job of presenting the proposal than how it was done love at the Forum as it sticks to the issues and avoids the chit-chat between Putin and Ms. Cecchini. Immigration is a socio-political issue within Russia that hasn’t evaded Ms. Cecchini’s gaze, and IMO she clearly wants to spark policy accommodation that will find favor with Russians.
As the West goes further down the drain, many would like to vote with their feet but don’t know where to go. In Russia’s case, it’s been demonized so hard by the West; but as Tucker Carlson has shown, Russia isn’t at all as it’s being portrayed. It appears Russia’s government wants to modify its procedures to make such a move easier. I don’t know how many younger barflies are lurking, but I’d expect a few to be motivated by this and look further.

Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 23 2024 1:15 utc | 65

psychohistorian | Feb 23 2024 0:59 utc | 64–
Thanks for your reply. In my preamble to the ASI Forum article, I dig into the history and the basic nature of VEB.RF, which IMO will surprise most. In the previous article I did on the 2023 ASI Forum, I looked into what ASI is and does. Both are Public Utilities charged with furthering Russian development. And ASI Forum gives Russian the opportunity to become directly involved in their governance and economic development. No wonder the West doesn’t want anyone to learn about Russia and we see desperate slanders and libels aimed at Putin on a daily basis by several trolls who have landed here and attempted to camouflage their genuine nature.

Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 23 2024 1:24 utc | 67

Wow! Former Senate aide Tara Reade told RT some interesting things during their interview, whose headlines read:
“Russia protects family values and children – Tara Reade: The West is “weaponizing” LGBT propaganda to distract voters from its crumbling economic infrastructure, the former US Senate aide told RT.”

Russia places more importance on protecting children and family values than waging a culture war, former US Senate aide Tara Reade told RT on Thursday, explaining that many in the West are poorly informed about what life is really like in the country.
The West has “weaponized culture wars…against some of the more conservatives in the United States,” Reade, now a commentator with RT, told her colleague. Russia, “watching that from the outside,” has rightly prioritized the “values of [its] vast population” over the interests of a tiny fraction of people – a stance that is often misunderstood, she said.
It is not illegal to be gay in Russia, despite oft-repeated rumors in the West, Reade explained, clarifying that Russia’s policy against “LGBT propaganda” directed at minors is just that – an effort to shield children from the promotion of alternative sexual orientations and other potentially unwholesome influences, not a blanket prohibition on non-traditional sexual practices.
“In Russia there is a protection of family and a protection of children,” she stressed, attributing this to the strong religious values of the population.
The West’s obsessive focus on LGBT issues is underscored by an effort to “distract from the fact in the United States that the economy and infrastructure are falling apart,” Reade said. “Lifting up .01% of the population” serves as a diversion “from what’s really going on”; it’s a wedge issue for dividing society.
The presidential administration of Joe Biden, whom Reade accused of sexual assault when she worked for him in Washington in 1993 while he was a senator, is “a very strange kind of totalitarian government, kind of moving toward fascism,” she argued. She highlighted the FBI’s surveillance of Catholics as part of what she framed as a nationwide “attack on religion.”
Explaining that she was essentially forced to seek political asylum in Russia after being informed by her own government that she would be arrested if she tried to come home, Reade praised Moscow for welcoming her “without knowing my religion or background” and being “very open-armed about it.”
Reade drew a further contrast between her birthplace and her adopted home, comparing Moscow’s Gorky Park, full of “families walking together,” with the parks in American cities. “Right now in the United States, when you walk through a park, you’re seeing people laying on a bench, homeless, or on drugs, or begging for money or drugs.”

Powerful testimony. How many more will vote with their feet?

Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 23 2024 1:38 utc | 69

Posted by: persiflo | Feb 22 2024 21:17 utc | 37
It has always seemed to me that if I had a climate model that was “good”, it should be possible to run it against the past, and have it match up, at least for some reasonable period. Since both the solar system itself and earth’s climate are known to be chaotic, you can’t expect too much though. I was reading lately about a paper that asserts some millions of years ago a passing star came close to affect planetary orbits, so the more so for smaller objects, and the existing planets every once in a while line up and funny things can happen.
As I remember, the way you draw a Mandelbrot set is by iterating a particular function recursively over some part of the complex plane, with some cutoff for max iterations, and then you color the area based on how long it takes the iteration to stop at each point, black when it never stops, other colors for steps in how long it takes to stop. Near zero it stops, farther away, it doesn’t stop (it diverges), but there are exceptions to that…
Takes a lot of computes. Other color schemes are possible. I have a little program around here somewhere that does it. Yep, it still works, crude but effective.
The universe seems to be recursive too, each next moment depends on what went before, sometimes I wonder when it will stop.

Posted by: Bemildred | Feb 23 2024 1:54 utc | 71

@ UWDude | Feb 23 2024 1:36 utc | 68 who seems to think math is some sort of religion instead of an incomplete human language
Do you really think that the Cosmos can be defined/constrained by the human language of math?
Your dissing of The Systems View of Life w/o even seeing what it is sounds a bit hubristic to me.

Posted by: psychohistorian | Feb 23 2024 2:13 utc | 73

Posted by: persiflo | Feb 22 2024 21:17 utc | 37
The UWDude describes how his tools are prone to “jumping”;
****”
I didn’t say anything about “jumping”,
****
****”””
… perhaps the UWDude is talking past me because in all real-world dev teams stability analysis is replaced with “experimental” re-runs over surrounding boundary area, and then infer or buest-guess if it looks any good. That may well be the case, on second thought now.
*****
All of them? There are lots of dev environments, and there are even more game dev environments, and as one successful dev said once in a game dev talk, “dont be fooled, nobody knows what the hell they are doing”.
When you first start, you have many misconceptions about everything, and how any of it works. The finished product looks fairly straightforward. You know about bugs, and you think about them as show stoppers in games you’ve played, you dont think.about them as something acting almost right, but not exactly as you visioned.
******
– But another point remains, and it rhymes with the previous one: UWDude states that in some kind of future, we’d perhaps have modeling of weather down to square meters, or something along this line. Again this seems to exhibit a complete lack of conceptualization à la numerical analysis. So the bottom line now for me is, that I can’t tell whether it would be of any help in his game dev if he had studied the field; but I dare say that it would at least not be detrimental to his work.
*****
I am not a mathematician, I am a game dev. I think if there was a “Manhattan project” level of effort to make a working climate model, it could be done in ten years, with today’s technology.
The only problem would be the effects of man. But you could make the natural model, and then add in bots simulating human behavior, as they overall ate similar, and their effects, are in aggregate on the daily movements of the local atmosphere and chemical composition of it.
Does a traffic jam affect the weather? Ok guess our climate model could figure that out.
Computers are fast beyond human comprehension now, and that is just household desktops.
However, Game dev itself, especially complex games, is a lifetime learning experience, in have plenty on my plate with shaders, ai, generation, optimization, and trying to make a comprehensive magic system.
I am not trying to solve scientific real world models. I am trying to make an interactive experience, that is different every time.
My iterations, my “experiments” are things like trying to make generated rivers flow downhill, and graphics thay show them flowing in the correct directions, how to create illusions of depth on flat planes, how to store massive amounts of information in small spaces, how to create the tools that will best allow artists to make items that will respond to procedural directions to create unique items, all based on a checksum number.
The biggest problems are things like order of operations and memory index problems. The game generates from nothing, and then runs a works in top of that.
The only reality I am testing against is my own wishes for how this world should feel.

Posted by: UWDude | Feb 23 2024 2:18 utc | 75

@Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 23 2024 0:46 utc | 61
Thanks for that. The city of Norilsk and the nearby huge nickel and palladium mines are especially at risk. Plus of course all the northern oil and gas fields and pipelines (an exceptional irony).

Posted by: Roger | Feb 23 2024 2:33 utc | 77

@Karlof1 10, 65, 67:
I read the ASI report you provided @ 10. There are several aspects of the presentation I’d like to highlight:
a. Russia has made a major effort to include its citizens in designing the society and the economy of their future. People actually get _asked_ to provide their ideas, and the state is interested in hearing, vetting, prioritizing and funding the implementation of those ideas. The _state_ wants to do it. I don’t remember my Nation (U.S.) ever actively soliciting my ideas for how to improve our economy and our society. Instead I get a menu of bad choices someone else has made, and I have to choose from that bad menu. I am excluded from policy-making.
b. This ASI forum (the citizen-input forum) seems to be a valued source of ideas that feed into Russian national industrial and social policy. Key point: Russia actually _has_ an industrial policy at the Federal level. The U.S. doesn’t. You read right: the U.S. doesn’t have a national public industrial policy.
c. This forum is important enough for the President to attend, to speak at, and to actively engage in dialog with the people that originated and promoted their idea/suggestion (e.g. the individual citizen). Can anyone think of a time when that happened here in the U.S.? I can’t think of one.
This ASI forum presentation is worth reading. It’s exciting, it’s engaging, and it’s competent. This is what “soft power” is supposed to look like and act like.
The Russian President is actively asking all of Russia’s citizens to identify and champion the products the nation will use as stepping stones toward its future. He’s asking the people to be creators.
Our President tells us to shop…. to be consumers.
That’s a pretty stark contrast.
This material needs to be read and considered by the next generation of political leaders in the U.S. so we can copy and implement this sort of thing here.
Thanks Karlof1 for the link (@10 above).

Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Feb 23 2024 2:36 utc | 79

@ UWDude | Feb 23 2024 2:37 utc | 80 who may not like another book suggestion from me….grin
My EEG therapy neural network healer has just put out a book titled Becoming Psychic (Jeff Tarrant) wherein he shows the current science description of the state that the psychics brain are in when they do their thing and provides scientific supportive proof of human psychic abilities.
The Systems View Of Life is an undergraduate/graduate level text book focused mostly on medical students and examines the appearance of key concepts such as autopoiesis, dissipative structures, social networks, and a systematic understanding of evolution.

Posted by: psychohistorian | Feb 23 2024 3:01 utc | 81

Does he say their brains are empty?
That’s what it seems to me.
My grandma was put on lsd everyday for two weeks for experimental depression treatment at UCal Berkely.
She was often quite innocent, very Catholic, and often seemed absent minded.
I was super atheist, didnt believe anything paranormal, had heard stories of her abilities. She seemed to have a connection with phones, she talked on it all the time, and one day, she predicted a call from my cousin, about 10 seconds before the call. She was staring out the window, and said,”oh, theres Lisa”, we looked put the window, no Lisa put there, and that’s when the phone rang.
One of my gfs called 4 cards drawn randomly from a deck at a new years eve party, but failed on the fifth. She said she was just “blanked out” and naming cards. There actually was. “Married With Children” episode where the daughter did and said the same thing.
All the stories of my grandmas abilities were with blood relatives. There were a lot of them. In fact, when I witnessed it, I asked my uncle all excited, “did you just see that”, and he said, “oh, that’s just what mom does”
Its not that I “believe” in the paranormal now, as I find belief limiting. Life has billions of moments. But it certainly is interesting.

Posted by: UWDude | Feb 23 2024 3:18 utc | 83

All that denial and obfuscation of the stone cold reality of global warming must be recognized as Simpletonian Physics, incapable of application to anything other than outright lies.
One situation where I dont pity the lowbrow failure to understand.
I dont care how much the Petrochemical Marketing Lobby has invested in their lunacy. Pure manure.

Posted by: Not Ewe | Feb 23 2024 3:26 utc | 85

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Feb 23 2024 1:51 utc | 70
Quite possibly. There are also 460,000 (?) Milky Way Galaxy cycles wherein we are closer to or further away from large particle belts etc. I suspect our chaps are more attuned to sun and moon than these much longer-term cycles, but they all go into the mix.
Then throw in axis tilt disruptions every 60,000 years or so (which is one explanation for why tropical vegetation remains are found in part of the Arctic Circle I believe) and….
My personal beef with the climate change hypothesis is that after reading up on it for several months – admittedly not enough – I came away convinced that we simply don’t have the means to understand such a complex, multi-variable phenomenon and are nowhere near knowing the core variables involved to even map basic long-term climate, let alone drill down to the level of detail needed to measure any effects from our own contributions. I continue to suspect that deforestation may well have more effect than Co2 outputs, but then some say agriculture more than offsets any such changes and so it goes.
I find some of the examples of regional-climate changing due to intelligent local treatments – as done with some permaculture people in desert areas, or the Kogi in Colombia – quite inspiring also because it is humans working with nature on a human scale making measurable, surprisingly rapid differences. If this were done more generally, I suspect all climate concerns would soon evaporate.

Posted by: Scorpion | Feb 23 2024 3:31 utc | 87

Scorpion | Feb 23 2024 3:31 utc | 87
The solar system rather than the far simpler Sun and moon. Other galaxies and their gravitational input? Perhaps exceptionally minor compared to the planets within our solar system. I’m not sure there is an orbital system between solar systems nor galaxies let alone one that would account for the regularity of glaciates and inter-glacials.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Feb 23 2024 3:46 utc | 89

Voters, dumb as a bag of spanners.
Posted by: Echo Chamber | Feb 22 2024 21:39 utc | 39
Sorry, American voters are dumb as a box of rocks. You must be thinking of British voters, we don’t even know what a spanner is over here.

Posted by: Honzo | Feb 23 2024 4:13 utc | 91

Its not that I “believe” in the paranormal now, as I find belief limiting. Life has billions of moments. But it certainly is interesting.
Posted by: UWDude | Feb 23 2024 3:18 utc | 83
‘Paranormal’ is supposed to refer to things beyond ‘normal’ experience and the reach of ‘scientific’ explanation. By nature, ‘believing’ in such things is contradictory, but ‘believing’ there are no unexplained phenomena is just absurd. FFS, nobody has really ‘explained’ gravity yet, but there it is. We can measure it, and we can make up a lot of narratives about it, but at this point, there are several competitors of completely different natures that are not falsifiable. So, yes, absolutely allow phenomena to be ‘interesting,’ whether or not they can be explained. To do otherwise is, as you say, limiting.

Posted by: Honzo | Feb 23 2024 4:21 utc | 93

The only way that I can make sense of the ridiculous suicidal stupidity of all western leadership is their moral vacuity which they compensate for by ideology or by narrative. Their perceptions and values serve an ideology rather pragmatic governance for the people they were empowered to serve.
Its like they don’t care cause devolution is the game.
Outside of their cultish ideology it looks a little like it did when Moses came down from the hill.
THOU SHALT NOT KILL!
Posted by: simon crow | Feb 23 2024 4:16 utc | 92
It all makes sense when you realize that none of the ‘western leaders’ that you see are actually leaders. They are mere employees of less visible powers. Their job is to ‘lead’ people to believe that they have a voice in great affairs and small, when they almost never do. The interests of the people at the top of the pyramid simply do not align with national interests except situationally. The nation-state is largely obsolete as a meaningful category of analysis in the west. Global finance owns the system, and it may be based more one place than another at any given time, but its interests are entirely in itself, regardless of borders.

Posted by: Honzo | Feb 23 2024 4:26 utc | 95

As I remember, the way you draw a Mandelbrot set is by iterating a particular function recursively over some part of the complex plane, with some cutoff for max iterations, and then you color the area based on how long it takes the iteration to stop at each point, black when it never stops, other colors for steps in how long it takes to stop. Near zero it stops, farther away, it doesn’t stop (it diverges), but there are exceptions to that…
Posted by: Bemildred | Feb 23 2024 1:54 utc | 71
The iterative function is begun with a specific input number that describes a point on the complex plane, but this is represented as an ‘area’ because otherwise we couldn’t see it. The Mandelbrot images can be ‘zoomed’ by calculating an array of points that basically have more digits to the right of the decimal point. In either case, the points are infinitely far apart in the sense that there are an infinite number of possible points between any two selected points, but by correlating the points to a screen-sized grid, they create the appearance of a solid plane of various colors.
My math isn’t adequate to understanding how these unconnected points can form the kinds of visible patterns we see at different scales, except that the ‘snowmen’ seem to have some correlation to series of primes- and I probably have that wrong.

Posted by: Honzo | Feb 23 2024 4:49 utc | 97

Like Brautigan said global warming is real and IPCC is not wrong about its cause being human use of fossile fuels
However IPCC in the versions from 2018 makes predictions until 2300 (and the later versions dont provide similar data after what I have seen)
The prediction is that temperature in the worst version 8.5 will be between +2.5 and +12 degrees in 2300 with the most probable +8 degrees C
At that stage the fossile material is likely to be finished and before that time other methods will have to be used.
So +8C in the year 2300 is what the discussion ought to be about.

Posted by: petergrfstrm | Feb 23 2024 5:09 utc | 99