#3
Somebody should screen a couple of these. I've watched this one. And a black Frankenstein one. Weren't bad at all. Better than that Jordan Peele boo hoo hoo.
Why we can't have those uppity blacks saying that other blacks have agency and have the ability to make their own choices. He reacted to that like a vampire to sunlight. Shut it down!
[NYP] Nouriel Roubini is seriously reconsidering whether he wants to continue living in New York. Mostly because, well, he wants to survive.
"There’s a scenario in which, in the next twelve months, Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and then they attack NATO and we start a conventional war with Russia. The first nuclear weapon is gonna go to New York," said the 64-year-old NYU economics professor and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates. "Being in New York City is not safe."
Even if Manhattan manages to avoid nuclear annihilation, there’s still the possibility of a natural disaster, like Hurricane Sandy that flooded New York in 2012, but "much, much worse," Roubini told The Post. "In the next 20 years, most of downtown New York is gonna be underwater."
A recent $52 billion proposal from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which promises to build sea barriers to protect the city from another storm surge, are impractical, he added, because "Who’s gonna pay for that? They don’t even know if it’s gonna work. It’ll take twenty-five years to build and even if we save Manhattan, all of the Jersey Shore and Long Island will get flooded because that water needs to go somewhere."
You don’t have to talk with Roubini for very long to realize why he earned the nickname "Dr. Doom" — a moniker that, along with his Page Six reputation for partying with models at hot-tub soirées, has always given him a sort of supervillain sheen.
[ClearanceJobs] "On the anniversary of Shaheed Gen Raziq’s death,
...that would be police lieutenant general Abdul Raziq, murdered by the Taliban in October 2018 by a bodyguard following a meeting in the governor’s compound in Kandahar, the last of many murder attempts. It was a family tradition, his father and uncle having both been murdered by the Taliban in 1994. Though Pashtun, he joined the effort to take Kandahar back from the Taliban following the American invasion...
the Taliban ...mindless ferocity in a turban... -Haqqani regime with Pak ISI support started a campaign glorifying jacket wallahs, and specifically the boy who murdered General Raziq. This campaign celebrates suicide bombers and terrorism, and Afghans are standing up against it." -Former Afghan Parliamentarian Mariam Solaimankhil
[SpecialEurasia] Since the U.S. troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, the National Resistance® Front of Afghanistan (NRF), under the leadership of Ahmed Massoud, has fought against the Taliban ...Arabic for students... and asked international support to contrast a government labelled as an "oppressor" and "no-democratic".
Since the U.S. troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, the National Resistance® Front of Afghanistan (NRF), under the leadership of Ahmed Massoud, has fought against the Taliban and asked international support to contrast a government labelled as an "oppressor" and "no-democratic".
Continued on Page 49
BLUF: Yes and yes, continuing a century-old tradition.
[AlAraby] The Taliban ...Arabic for students... are not only facilitating settlements of Pashtuns and their supporters from within Afghanistan but they are also helping Pashtuns from the other side of the Durand line — from Pakistain — to usurp lands of other ethnic groups in the country
On 15 August 2021, the Taliban usurped power in Afghanistan. This violent mostly peaceful seizure of power was followed by the creation of a non-inclusive — both ethnically and gender-wise — government.
Continued on Page 49
[YouTube - History Matters] Siberia is vast and despite the long distances Russia conquered it throughout the 16th and seventeenth centuries. But given that it was mostly empty and put Russia in contact with potential enemies why did Moscow conquer it? To find out watch this short and simple animated history documentary.
[PJ] Oil prices and President Joe Biden’s continued draining of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) have dominated the headlines over the past few weeks, but analysts say a more impactful and serious crisis on the energy front looms: a diesel fuel shortage.
Diesel doesn’t get as much of the limelight as oil and gas, but it should because diesel fuel is the industrial lifeblood of the United States, and the price of diesel alone probably has a more significant impact on inflation and the prices you’re paying at the grocery store over any other factor. Without ample amounts of diesel, semi-trucks don’t move, farms are shut down, and critical manufacturing sectors are crippled.
As Bloomberg noted this week, "The US has just 25 days of diesel supply, the lowest since 2008, according to the Energy Information Administration. At the same time, the four-week rolling average of distillates supplied, a proxy for demand, rose to its highest seasonal level since 2007."
The Biden administration has remained strangely silent, probably hoping that the dismal news doesn’t hit the mainstream because it’s a total political timebomb waiting to go off, especially as the midterm elections are so close.
#2
We also have been noticing a lot more people buying in bulk amounts. As we usually shop in SAM's, COSTCO, a national food wholesaler and a local meat processing facility selling bulk items.
Also noticed Vacuum Food Sealer systems and bags selling at 2 to 3 times 2020 prices.
Also noticing on trash days, some of the "less" wise leaving their new Chest Freezer boxes on the curb in open sight for pickup.
[Jpost] UK Prime Minister Liz Truss ignored these basic laws of economic gravity, and set out to pour oil on a financial fire. But it is part of a broader global leadership crisis.
Like Lenin’s flight from communist economics in 1921, what just happened in London will be counted among the most spectacular U-turns in political history.
Liz Truss had hardly unpacked when her residency at 10 Downing St. seemed ready to end following a sudden run on the pound that was all her fault. Lurking behind this drama were economic blindness, political arrogance and mental frivolity that created the impression that the crisis is about her. It isn’t.
Yes, what happened is first and foremost about Britain’s 56th prime minister, but it’s also about a broad leadership crisis that plagues her party, her country, and much of the free world.
The run on the pound was triggered by the prime minister’s plan to cut taxes and subsidize the public’s energy bills, without attaching to these expensive measures any budget cuts. In economese, this means deficit borrowing. In the language of any owner of a bank account, this means spending more, borrowing more and owing more while earning less.
Financial markets would detest such a derelict combination on any day, but this one came at a time of serious global inflation, which in Britain’s case is already scratching 10%.
As any economics student knows, inflation happens when too much cash chases after too few goods. That’s why its treatment begins with cutting money supply, first by raising interest rates, which makes money more expensive; then by cutting spending, which means feeding the economy less cash.
Truss ignored these basic laws of economic gravity, and set out to pour oil on a financial fire.
Currency traders responded sharply because to them, this meant the pound’s manufacturer will soon swamp the market with more pounds. Traders thus shed billions of pounds, whose price plummeted from $1.16 to $1.04, a historic low.
The same dynamic happened in the debt markets. Bond traders lower the price at which they are ready to buy a wasteful government’s bonds, and they raise the interest rates at which they are prepared to own them. That is why the British 10-year bond’s rate more than doubled last month, from 2% to 4.5%.
The lone analogy in today’s international system to what just happened between Britain’s politics and markets is in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been obstructing monetary policy, prattling the economic gibberish that higher interest rates fan inflation. The result of this reckless imposition is 83% inflation, 10% unemployment and a 51% plunge in the lira’s value over the past 12 months alone.
Fortunately, Britain is not Turkey. When the markets spoke, Truss summarily saluted and reversed course, firing the Chancellor of the Exchequer – that’s the minister of finance – and letting his successor undo nearly the entire package that unsettled the markets.
As of this writing, calm has been restored to the markets, where the pound’s plunge has been stemmed and also moderately reversed, to $1.13, while the 10-year bond rate slid to 3.96%.
How much of all this, then, is Liz Truss’s doing, and how much can be attributed to things larger than her?
NEW POLICY IS NOT INHERENTLY BAD
POLICY REVERSALS are not bad in themselves. Richard Nixon’s embrace of China and Menachem Begin’s retreat from Sinai violated their political vows, but are recalled as acts of diplomatic agility and political heroism. But those U-turns were about vision. Truss’s was about panic, the way Lenin, when faced with famine, disease and inflation, staged the New Economic Policy retreat from radical communism.
Truss’s panic was well earned. This was, after all, the same politician who had just left out of her new cabinet her most notable rivals in the contest for the premiership: Rishi Sunak, who was Boris Johnson’s Chancellor of the Exchequer; and Jeremy Hunt, who was Theresa May’s foreign secretary, and before that David Cameron’s health secretary.
Such a soloist attitude may be plausible in presidential systems, but in parliamentary systems it is a recipe for trouble, especially for a leader who was not elected by the public, and is therefore even more dependent on fellow lawmakers. Truss surely understands this now, but two months ago she was too conceited to deploy the spirit of humility and collaboration her situation demanded.
Even so, Truss was not alone in her frivolity.
The plan she unleashed was no secret and in fact constituted the ticket on which she ran for Johnson’s succession. The 81,326 party members who handed her the 57% majority with which she defeated Sunak are no less responsible for the mess her plan made. They heard Truss and they heard Sunak, who rejected her plan as irresponsible, and they chose Truss.
Besides defying basic economics, their choice contradicted the conservative ideology they claim to share, which says budgetary balance and monetary discipline should drive economic growth.
Worst of all, there was no original idea in this plan, other than a populist hodgepodge of socialist goodies like subsidized gas, and capitalist goodies like seaport deregulation without the bitter pills of socialism’s high taxation or capitalism’s budget cuts.
Seen this way, what Britain just faced is a variation of the political frivolity and ideological cynicism that Donald Trump personifies in America, and Benjamin Netanyahu is ready to impose on the Jewish state.
It’s a disease. On both sides of the Atlantic, multiple democracies increasingly fail to generate leaders who combine principles, originality, vision and charisma, producing instead cynics who disorientate voters, fracture nations and destabilize politics. That’s why Australia had six prime ministers over the past 12 years, Britain’s Tories may soon have a fifth leader in six years, and Israel’s voters are now heading to the polls for the fifth time in less than four years.
Hardly a generation since its defeat of communist despotism, Western democracy is begging: help!
This column was written 24 hours before Truss’s Thursday resignation.
#3
We've been hearing for years that the world will be run much better by women. So far, we get women like Bath House Barry and Justin Blackface Treaudeau. Then Truss comes along and doesn't last 5 weeks.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/23/2022 9:28 Comments ||
Top||
#4
a broad leadership crisis
ICWYDT
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/23/2022 9:38 Comments ||
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#6
Such a big deal about a cabinet with no white men. Didn't work out so well, did it? Maybe actual competence and ability is more important thatn chromosomes and skin color, after all.
Posted by: Tom ||
10/23/2022 14:27 Comments ||
Top||
[The Real Anthony Fauci Movie] Within the first 5 minutes, you know why Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s blockbuster bestelling book The Real Anthony Fauci is now a full-length feature documentary exposing Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Government.
[BabylonBee] Everyone's favorite transplants from California, Steve and Timpani, are going door to door trying to get their new Texas neighbors to vote for Beto O'Rourke. And then, plot twist, they end up in a good old-fashioned Baptist church!
[Dawn] AFTER nearly four-and-a-half years of trials and tribulations, Pakistain has finally exited the FATF’s so-called grey list of countries. It is a victory that ought to be celebrated as an example of what it is possible for the country to achieve when the national leadership works together towards a common goal.
The exit had long been awaited, with the country hoping for a reprieve after each progress review held in the last couple of years. Islamabad had been prescribed two concurrent action plans by the FATF, which tracked compliance on a total of 34 action points. It is no mean feat that the country came through on them all, even though it seemed at times that the goalposts were being shifted to put it at a disadvantage. A FATF team had, towards the end of August this year, verified Pakistain’s progress on reforming its anti-money laundering regime as well as the measures taken to block terrorism financing and found them to be satisfactory.
Pakistain’s placement on the FATF’s enhanced monitoring list had been widely resented, but it has done considerable good for the country. As a result of the pressure from the international watchdog, Pak authorities worked together to overhaul the regulation of the domestic financial system to enhance monitoring of who has been using it and how. This not just helped satisfy the FATF’s conditions, but it has also made it much more difficult for nefarious elements to use the system to launder black funds or move them around. Oversight of the various channels of the financial system will greatly strengthen the state’s hand as it targets criminal activities and the proceeds from their crimes in the future.
Where we go from here is entirely up to Pakistain. So far, the authorities have been acting on a prescription handed to them by the FATF, but they should take the baton and continue strengthening the Pak financial system. Nobody understands its deficiencies better than the people who operate within it. They should use those insights to plug any remaining gaps and make sure no vulnerabilities are remaining that may be exploited.
The fact is, Pakistain would never have ended up on the FATF grey list in the first place had our regulatory agencies acted more responsibly and proactively in the past. Grey-listing scares both investors and lenders, hurts exports and creates a barrier for the global financial system from participating freely in the country. We should now do everything to make sure we are not exposed to those risks again. Pakistain is at a difficult juncture in its history, with global powers no longer averse to pointing fingers or even punishing it over transgressions, perceived or otherwise. It would be wise to cover our flanks, especially if any weak spots may create further sanction risks.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Nikolai Guryanov
[RIA] The medieval plague pandemic was a turning point in the history of world civilization. A recent study shows that the Black Death has left a deep mark on the human genome and continues to affect people's health.
"THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH"
The bacterium Yersinia pestis, spread by rat fleas , originated from the region of Lake Issyk-Kul (modern Kyrgyzstan ). First, the Golden Horde was defeated. After the devastation of the capital, Saray, the infection moved along trade and military routes through the current south of Russia to the Crimea. According to one version, during the siege, the Horde pelted the Genoese fortress of Kaffa ( Feodosia ) with the corpses of those who died from the plague. Then, on the ships of the Genoese, the infection reached Europe.
Spreading at an inexplicably high speed (four kilometers a day), in a few years (1346-1353) it destroyed, according to various estimates, from 30 to 50 percent of the European population. This may have affected human evolution.
A team of scientists from the United States , Canada and a number of European countries analyzed DNA from the teeth of 206 people buried before, during and after the pandemic in London and Denmark, including in plague pits.
The focus of researchers was the ERAP2 gene. It is responsible for the production of proteins that "crush" invading microbes and then "show" the fragments to the immune system, making it more efficient at recognizing and destroying pathogens.
There are effective and ineffective versions of this gene. It turned out that after the pandemic, ERAP2 variants that work well spread throughout the European population. The shift reached ten percent within two or three generations. The gene helped to survive the pandemic and give offspring - the chances of this increased by one and a half times.
“In a pandemic that kills 30 to 50 percent of the population, people are bound to select for protective alleles (gene variations). People susceptible to a circulating pathogen die. Even a small advantage means the difference between life and death. Of course, survivors who have reached childbearing age, pass on their genes," explains evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar, one of the authors of the paper.
BLACK DEATH IN A PETRI DISH
Scientists have recreated the Black Death in a petri dish. Blood samples from people with beneficial mutations have shown greater resistance to the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague.
According to geneticists, the versions of ERAP2 that allowed medieval Europeans to survive the pandemic still dominate the population. However, having ceased to protect people from the plague, this genetic feature began to be harmful. A number of studies have linked ERAP2 variations to increased susceptibility to infectious and autoimmune diseases, such as Crohn's disease, which affects the gut in particular.
It is noteworthy that this immune disorder is primarily characteristic of European countries and states with a population of European origin. So, the prevalence of the disease in Australia is 29.3 people per 100 thousand, in Canada - 20.2, in the UK - 10.6. In Russia, which is believed to have suffered from the plague not so much (although significantly), - only 3.5.
Another "anti-plague" allele is suspected of being involved in rheumatoid arthritis and the deadly systemic lupus erythematosus . The authors of the work consider this "the balancing act of evolution."
By the way, SARS-CoV-2 will not have such an impact on humans. The coronavirus killed mostly the elderly, while the black death affected everyone, including children.
WELLNESS PROCEDURE
By the middle of the 14th century, due to global cooling, Europe was suffering from crop failure and famine - this weakened collective immunity. In addition, the Europeans were constantly at war.
Plague has been plagued since the Stone Age , but epidemics have been rare. The previous one, Justinianova, was quite a long time ago - in the middle of the first millennium, so the body of a medieval person was not ready to repel the attack of Yersinia pestis.
In a 2014 study, which also examined the DNA of the remains from medieval London graves, they concluded that people became healthier overall after the plague pandemic. There were several more waves, but the mortality rate steadily decreased each time. The population grew rapidly, which continued until the demographic transition.
The society has improved as well. According to a number of researchers, the sharp reduction in the labor force contributed to technological development. It is with the consequences of the plague pandemic that the appearance of the spinning wheel and the printing press, the widespread use of windmills and watermills are associated.
Due to the high cost of labor, a demand was formed to increase its productivity. Feudalism was replaced by early capitalism.
As noted in the book "Farewell, poverty!" economic historian Gregory Clark, against the background of a decrease in the population, his well-being increased: for example, in the second half of the 14th century, the share of expensive meat products in the diet of an English peasant sharply increased (55% compared to 43% in the pre-plague period).
At the same time, the mass death of people in the east of the continent had the opposite effect - the pandemic significantly weakened the Golden Horde and ultimately led to its collapse.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
