Julia and Nick sit down with Lena and Michael from the German language podcast, Parallelwelt Palästina, about the current war in Gaza and the response from the German state and media demonizing and criminalizing criticism of Israel.
The near-revolution in Spain in 1909 turns out to be more of a cause of World War 2 than a cause of World War 1 but it includes anarchism, conspiracy, revolution, and ends in a show trial. Our final pause before we roll into the immediate causes of WW1.
SINGULAR demolition of the homilies of the Church of Anglophone Academic Economics regarding anthropogenic climate change
William Nordhaus speaks during a press conference after winning the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on Oct. 8, 2018. Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images
William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most consequential thinkers. His ideas have been adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services industry, and universities worldwide that teach climate economics. Nordhaus’s work literally could affect the lives of billions of people. This is because his quantification of the immediate costs of climate action — as balanced against the long-term economic harms of not acting — is the basis of key proposals to mitigate carbon emissions. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the fate of nations and a sizable portion of humanity depends on whether his projections are correct.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assumed Nordhaus is to be trusted. The integrated assessment models used at the IPCC are based on Nordhausian visions of adaptation to warming that only marginally reduces global gross domestic product. If future GDP is barely affected by rising temperatures, there’s less incentive for world governments to act now to reduce emissions.
Nordhaus’s models tell us that at a temperature rise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius, the global economy reaches “optimal” adaptation. What’s optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can continue to be burned late into the 21st century, powering economic growth, jobs, and innovation. Humanity, asserts Nordhaus, can adapt to such warming with modest infrastructure investments, gradual social change, and, in wealthy developed countries, little sacrifice. All the while, the world economy expands with the spewing of more carbon.
His models, it turns out, are fatally flawed, and a growing number of Nordhaus’s colleagues are repudiating his work. Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist and professor of economics at Columbia University, told me recently that Nordhaus’s projections are “wildly wrong.” Stiglitz singled out as especially bizarre the idea that optimization of the world economy would occur at 3.5 C warming, which physical scientists say would produce global chaos and a kind of climate genocide in the poorest and most vulnerable nations.
In a journal article published last year, Stiglitz and co-authors Nicholas Stern and Charlotte Taylor, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, declared that Nordhausian integrated assessment models are “inadequate to capture deep uncertainty and extreme risk.” They fail to incorporate “potential loss of lives and livelihoods on immense scale and fundamental transformation and destruction of our natural environment.”
Climate change is one of the instances, Stiglitz and Stern told me in an email, in which “it is generally agreed there is extreme risk — we know there are some really extreme events that could occur — and we know we cannot pretend (i.e., act as if) we know the probabilities. Nordhaus’s work doesn’t appropriately take into account either extreme risk or deep uncertainty.”
In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light by the global institution tasked with shepherding humanity through the climate crisis, who has been awarded a Nobel for climate costing, who is widely feted as the doyen of his field, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Farmers harvest barley and wheat in northwest Syria on May 31, 2023, crops that are being threatened by drought and climate fluctuations. Photo: Rami Alsayed/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Among most scientists, it’s lunacy to discuss optimization of anything anywhere when the globe hits even 2 C warming. Climate researchers Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, in a widely cited 2017 paper, defined 1.5 C warming as “dangerous” and 3 C or greater as “catastrophic,” while above 5 C was “beyond catastrophic,” with consequences that include “existential threats.” The late Will Steffen, a pioneering Earth systems thinker, warned alongside many of his colleagues that 2 C was a critical marker. At 2 C warming, we could “activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take the Earth system to even higher temperatures.” Such “tipping cascades” could lead quickly to “conditions that would be inhospitable to current human societies,” a scenario known as hothouse Earth.
But the path to hothouse Earth will be long and tortured. When I interviewed him in 2021, Steffen, who died last January at age 75, was concerned about “near-term collapse” of the global food system. Drought and heat have already reduced global cereal production by as much as 10 percent in recent years, according to Steffen. “Food shocks are likely to get much worse,” he wrote in a 2019 piece co-authored with Aled Jones, director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. “The risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing, and rises much faster beyond 1.5 C of global heating. … Such shocks pose grave threats — rocketing food prices, civil unrest, major financial losses, starvation, and death.”
In a 2022 report titled “Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios,” 11 leading Earth systems and climate scientists, Steffen among them, concluded there is “ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic … at even modest levels of warming.” According to the report:
Climate change could exacerbate vulnerabilities and cause multiple, indirect stresses (such as economic damage, loss of land, and water and food insecurity) that coalesce into system-wide synchronous failures. … It is plausible that a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.
What these scientists are describing is global civilizational collapse, possibly in the lifetime of a young or even middle-aged reader of this article.
According to the “Climate Endgame” report, the current trajectory of carbon emissions puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 C and 3.9 C by 2100. This is a horrific prospect. Earth systems analysts tell us that habitable and cultivable land in a 3 C to 4 C warming regime would be so reduced and ecosystem services so battered that the deaths of billions of people could occur in the next eight decades or less.
Terrible numbers get thrown around. But scientists mean what they say. Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and Uppsala University in Sweden, asserts that “something like 10 percent of the planet’s population — around half a billion people — will survive if global temperatures rise by 4 C.” He notes, with a modicum of hopefulness, that we “will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 C.”
Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a leading researcher on climate tipping points and “safe boundaries” for humanity, projects that in a 4 C warmer world, “it’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that.” Global population today stands at 7.6 billion, with 80 million people added every year.
By contrast, when Nordhaus looked at the effects of 6 C warming, he did not forecast horror. Instead, we should expect “damages” of between 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP over the course of the 21st century. Writing in the Economic Journal, Stern set Nordhaus straight in the harshest terms: “We could see deaths on a huge scale, migration of billions of people, and severe conflicts around the world,” he wrote. “It is profoundly implausible that numbers around 10 percent of GDP offer a sensible description of the kind of disruption and catastrophe that 6 C of warming could cause.”
In an email to The Intercept, Nordhaus characterized his colleagues’ critiques as “a distorted and inaccurate description of the work and my views. I have long supported carbon pricing and climate-focused [research and development], which are key to slowing climate change. The proposals in my writings have pointed to targets that are FAR more ambitious than current policies.” He declined to elaborate on any distortions or inaccuracies.
To understand the gap between climate scientists and climate economists, one must first understand that most economists — the folks we call mainstream or neoclassical economists — have little knowledge of or interest in how things really work on planet Earth. The problem of their ecological benightedness starts as a matter of training at university, where a typical undergraduate course in economics prepares students for a lifetime of abject ignorance about the complex underpinnings of the thing called the “market.”
Start with your typical textbook for the dismal science — say, the definitive one by Paul Samuelson, co-written with Nordhaus, titled “Economics.” The book is considered “the standard-bearer” of “modern economics principles.” You’ll find in its pages a circular flow diagram that shows “households” and “firms” exchanging money and goods. This is called the market. Households are the owners of land, labor, and capital, which they sell to firms for the manufacture of goods. Households then buy the goods, enriching firms, which allows the firms to buy more land, labor, and capital, enriching households. The quantity in the flow diagram, in ideal circumstances, is ever expanding: The profits of firms grow and so does the income of households.
A simple, imperturbable closed system that’s also ludicrous, fantastical, a fairy tale. In the circular flow diagram of standard economics, nothing enters from the outside to keep it flowing, and nothing exits as a result of the flow. There are no resource inputs from the environment: no oil, coal, or natural gas, no minerals and metals, no water, soil, or food. There are no outputs into the ecosphere: no garbage, no pollution, no greenhouse gasses. That’s because in the circular flow diagram, there is no ecosphere, no environment. The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.
The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.
“I taught that foolish little diagram to undergraduates at Louisiana State University for 30 years,” the late Herman Daly, one of the 20th century’s great dissenters from standard economics, told me in an interview before his death at age 84 last year. “I thought it was just great. I was well beyond a Ph.D. before it came crashing in on my head that this is a very bad paradigm.”
In the 1970s, working at the University of Maryland, Daly pioneered the field of ecological economics, which models the biophysical reality that delimits all economies. “The human economy,” wrote Daly, “is a fully contained wholly dependent growing subsystem of the non-growing ecosphere” — a commonsense observation that amounted to heresy in mainstream economics. Daly emphasized that the economy depends on nonrenewable resources that are always subject to depletion and a functioning biosphere whose limits need to be respected. His most important contribution to the literature of this renegade economics was his famous (in some circles, infamous) “steady state” model that accounts for biophysical limits to growth. Daly paid the price of heterodoxy. His fellow economists declared him an apostate.
E.F. Schumacher arrived at similar conclusions about mainstream economics in his 1973 book “Small Is Beautiful,” which became a bestseller. “It is inherent in the methodology of economics to ignore man’s dependence on the natural world,” Schumacher wrote, the emphasis his. Economics, said Schumacher, only touches the “surface of society.” It has no capacity to probe the depths of the systemic interactions between civilization and the planet. Faced with the “pressing problems of the times” — the negative environmental effects of growth — economics acts “as a most effective barrier against the understanding of these problems, owing to its addiction to purely quantitative analysis and its timorous refusal to look into the real nature of things.”
Purely quantitative analysis is the amphetamine of the mainstream economist. The steady dosing keeps his pencil sharp and his eyes blind. It has not gone unnoticed that graduate schools produce a kind of ingenious hollowness in economists who race to the finish on the schools’ assembly line. As early as 1991, a report from a commission on “graduate education in economics” warned that the university system in the United States was churning out “too many idiot savants,” economists “skilled in technique but innocent of real economic issues” — unable, that is, to look into the real nature of things.
Forest fires spread due to the dry season and high temperatures in Karanganyar, Central Java, Indonesia, Oct. 6, 2023. Photo: Devi Rahman/AFP via Getty Images
By what mathemagical sorcery has Nordhaus, celebrated member of the Ivy League elite, arrived at projections that are so out of line with those of climate scientists?
The answer is in something called DICE, the mother of integrated assessment models for climate costing. It stands for dynamic integrated climate-economy. Nordhaus formulated DICE for the first time in 1992 and updated it most recently last year.
In DICE, the effect of a warmed climate is measured solely as a percentage loss (or gain) in GDP. Growth of GDP is assumed to be “exogenously determined,” in the language of economics theory, meaning it will persist at a set rate over time regardless of climate shocks. Earth systems scientists will tell you that to assume exogenously determined growth is the height of hubristic arrogance. By contrast, Nordhaus assures us in his DICE model that growth continues like a cruising Cadillac on the California coast with an occasional pothole. But the reality is rainstorms, mudslides, earthquakes, and other drivers on the road.
This blithe presumption of constant growth in a climate-damaged future is the first of Nordhaus’s errors, as Stern and Stiglitz point out. “Nordhaus’s model doesn’t fully take into account the fact that if we don’t do more to avert climate change, climate change will affect growth rates,” they told me in an email. “We will have to spend more and more repairing damage, leaving us less and less to spend on growth-enhancing investments.” And, they add, some outcomes arising from weak climate action could profoundly alter what is possible in terms of economic activity. Extreme heat, submergence, desertification, hurricanes, and so on: Such weather events and broad climatic shifts could render large areas of the world low productivity, unproductive, or uninhabitable.
The second of Nordhaus’s errors is the use of reductionist mathematical formulas. He employs something called a quadratic to calculate the relationship between rising temperatures and economic outcomes. Among the properties of a quadratic is that it permits no discontinuities; there are no points at which the relationship implied by the function breaks down. But smooth functions chart smooth progressions, and climate change will be anything but smooth. Such calculations do not account for extreme weather, vector-borne diseases, displacement and migration, international and local conflict, mass morbidity and mortality, biodiversity crash, state fragility, or food, fuel, and water shortages. There’s no measurement of amplifying feedbacks and tipping points such as Arctic sea ice loss, shutdown of vital ocean currents, collapse of the Amazon, and the like.
The third of Nordhaus’s errors is related to similarly simplistic formulas. Nordhaus calculates GDP of a particular location as fundamentally related to the temperature of that place. So, if in 2023 it’s a certain temperature in London, and the GDP in London is such-and-such, it’s reasonable to assume that when latitudes north of London rise in temperature in the future, GDP will rise to be the same as London’s today. Make of this what you will — it’s foolishness on a grand scale, and yet it’s central to the Nordhaus model.
The fourth fatal error Nordhaus makes is the most farcical. In a 1991 paper that became a touchstone for all his later work, he assumed that, because 87 percent of GDP occurs in what he called “carefully controlled environments” — otherwise known as “indoors” — it will not be affected by climate. Nordhaus’s list of the indoor activities free of any effects from climate disruption include manufacturing, mining, transportation, communication, finance, insurance, real estate, trade, private sector services, and government services. Nordhaus appears to be conflating weather with climate. The one can make trouble for outdoor dining plans on your yacht. The other sinks the yacht.
Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.
This crude mess of a model is what won him the Nobel. “It shows how little quality control goes into selecting a winner in economics that he was even nominated for the prize,” Steve Keen, a research fellow at University College London and self-described renegade economist, told me. Keen has authored numerous books that question the orthodoxy of mainstream economics. He was an early critic of the integrated assessment models at the IPCC that owe their optimistic sheen to Nordhaus’s methodology. His caustic 2021 essay, “The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change,” delved into the problems of Nordhausian models.
“When it comes to climate, the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”
“Any investigative journalist who overcame a fear of equations and simply read Nordhaus’s texts would have known that his work was nonsense,” Keen told me. “Assuming that 87 percent of the economy would be ‘negligibly affected by climate change’ because it takes place in ‘carefully controlled environments’?”
“When it comes to climate,” Keen said, “the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”
And it’s not just Nordhaus. Climate economists have followed dutifully in his footsteps and come up with cost models that appear to have no relationship with known laws of physics, the dynamics of climate, or the complexities of Earth systems.
A 2016 study by economists David Anthoff of University of California, Berkeley; Francisco Estrada of the Institute for Environmental Studies in Amsterdam; and Richard Tol of the University of Sussex offers one of the more egregious examples of Nordhausian nonsense. (Tol is one of Nordhaus’s protégés, and Nordhaus is listed as a reviewer of the paper.) The three academics boldly assert that shutdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC — a pivotally important Earth system that loops warm equatorial water toward the Arctic and cold water back south — could have beneficial effects on the European economy.
Over the last several thousand years, the AMOC, also known as the thermohaline circulation, has functioned to keep Europe relatively warm in winter because of the warm water it draws northward from the equator. The slowing and eventual shutdown of this system could plunge Europe and broad parts of the Northern Hemisphere into extreme cold. Such a shutdown is a growing likelihood as glacial melt pours into the North Atlantic and alters the delicate balance of salt water and fresh water that drives the looping current.
For Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, however, collapse of one of the Earth systems that undergirds the climatic stability of the Holocene might be a good thing. “If the [AMOC] slows down a little, the global impact is a positive 0.2-0.3 percent of income,” they concluded. “This goes up to 1.3 percent for a more pronounced slowdown.” They argued that while climate heating cooks the rest of the world, European countries will benefit from a cooling effect of the current’s collapse.
This sunny assessment comes as a surprise to James Hansen, father of climate science, who has calculated that a massive temperature differential between the poles and the equator would occur with an AMOC shutdown, producing superstorms of immense fury across the Atlantic Ocean. According to Hansen, the last time Earth experienced those kinds of temperature differentials, during the interglacial Eemian era roughly 120,000 years ago, raging tempests deposited house-sized boulders on coastlines in Europe and the Caribbean. Waves from the storms were estimated to have surged inland to 40 meters above sea level.
Under these extreme conditions, what would happen to shipping lanes, coastal cities and ports, and trans-Atlantic traffic of all kinds? For the climate simpletons Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, the question doesn’t come up. “It will be a helluva lot stormier on the North Atlantic, especially for Europeans,” Hansen told me in an email. His study team concluded that shutdown of AMOC “is in the cards this century, possibly by mid-century, with continued high emissions.”
It gets worse. Simon Dietz, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models. They examined the consequences to GDP of hitting eight Earth system tipping points that climate scientists have identified as existential threats to industrial civilization. The tipping points are as familiar as a funeral litany to anybody schooled in climate literature: loss of Arctic summer ice; loss of the Amazon rainforest; loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets; release of ocean methane hydrates; release of carbon in permafrost; collapse of the AMOC; and collapse of the Indian monsoon.
Dietz and friends came to the astounding conclusion that if all eight were tipped, the economic cost by 2100 would amount to an additional 1.4 percent of lost GDP on top of the roughly 8 to 12 percent that Nordhaus projected.
Think of this projection in commonsense terms: A negligible effect on world affairs when the Arctic during summer is deep blue rather than white; when the jungle of the Amazon is no longer green but brown savannah or desert; when in Greenland and the West Antarctic, white ice is barren rock. A transformation of immense proportions on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, and in terrestrial biotic communities. Ocean methane hydrates have an energy content that exceeds that of all other fossil fuel deposits. Permafrost holds an amount of carbon roughly twice the current carbon content of the atmosphere. With the weakening or collapse of the AMOC, Europe could be plunged into conditions akin to the Little Ice Age, with drastic reduction of the land area suitable for wheat and corn farming. Increased variability of the Indian monsoon would jeopardize the lives of over a billion people.
“The claim that these changes would have effectively zero impact upon the human economy is extraordinary,” wrote Keen. The reality is that if all eight Earth system tipping points were reached, humanity would be in terrible trouble.
An aerial view of a polar bear, one of the species most affected by climate change, walking on partially melting glaciers in Svalbard and Jan Mayen on July 15, 2023. Photo: Sebnem Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
An uncharitable view of the work of climate economists in the Nordhaus school is that they offer a kind of sociopathy as policy prescription. Nordhaus estimates that as economic activity heads poleward with warming, the massive reduction in GDP in the tropics will be offset by optimal adaptation in the Global North. “Massive reduction in GDP,” of course, is not explicitly understood by Nordhaus as food system collapse across the equator, followed by social collapse, mass death, wars, and biblical exoduses that produce cascading nonlinear effects drawing the world into a nexus of unknowns.
Nothing to worry about, assures Nordhaus: The violent extinction of low-GDP nations will hardly affect the outlook for economic growth because things will improve in the cold Global North. This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.
This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.
Do governments, policymakers, and the public have any clue that the message from climate economist elites is unhinged? So far, we have followed along in the belief that all is well. One of the better indicators of this lemming-like fealty to a narrative of delusory optimism is in the financial sector.
Keen authored a report for investors this year in which he noted that pension funds have swallowed whole the Nordhausian projections of our sunny future as the climate system collapses. “Following the advice of investment consultants, pension funds have informed their members that global warming of 2-4.3 C will have only a minimal impact upon their portfolios,” Keen wrote. “This results in a huge disconnect between what scientists expect from global warming, and what pensioners/investors/financial systems are prepared for.” Keen does not expect things to end well for investors.
When I asked him what needed to be done to alter policy at the IPCC, Keen replied, “We need everyone to be as angry as I am.” Negligence by economists like Nordhaus, he said, “will end up killing billions of people.”
Andrew Glikson, who teaches at Australian National University in Canberra and advises the IPCC, has written about the coming era of mass human death, what he calls the Plutocene, the natural successor to the Anthropocene. Global governments, he charges, are “criminals” for ushering in the Plutocene in pursuit of short-term political and economic gain. I first reached out to him during the black summer of bushfires that raged across Australia in 2020. Glikson’s mood was foul then, and it has not gotten better since.
“The governing classes have given up on the survival of numerous species and future generations,” he told me, “and their inaction constitutes the ultimate crime against life on Earth.” Part of the reason for inaction is the false cheer that Nordhaus has spread with his math-genius, climate-idiot models.
EXCELLENT esp regarding * Ukraine-Palestine as gutpunch to empire prestige * preview of Israel ground invasion of Gaza, predicting Israel military to use chemical weapons against Hamas tunnels
Roth week continues as we go round the horn discussing who we got in this year’s World Bible Championship. More seriously, we discuss updates on the Israel-Gaza war, including Biden’s comments doubting the accuracy of Palestinian casualties. And then later, more news on Congressman George Santos and his many criminal shenanigans, and a reading series in classic Chapo style: a right wing ghoul with bizarre opinions on candy. Get bonus content on Patreon
Krystal and Saagar do better-than-recent-usual BP. segments in order of presentation:
- mass shooter de jour: will have zero effect on US politics (and ~0 on population), so why bother? + KB and SE good on how Israel and US deepstates (including new US Speaker of the House) are going pro-Israel apocalypse as rest of world going harder pro-Palestine + KB and SE discuss US empire global military footprint, and how it's pausing Israel invasion of Gaza to prepare global protection + new US Speaker of the House (Mike Johnson) is very rightwing culture warrior: anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-Israel, pro-rapture - KB and SE debate Jamaal Bowman fire-alarm-ing: gotta say I'm with Krystal on not caring + KB and SE pullback just a bit (KB more than SE) from their (pro tip: mistaken) conclusion (on their 18-19 Oct 2023 shows) that the 17 Oct 2023 attack on the Gaza al-Ahli hospital was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket (pro tip: far more evidence indicts Israeli airburst JDAM, which KB+SE continue to ignore). KB (more than SE, who's waffling) is drawn to new NYT report blaming errant Iron Dome (failed) interceptor. ~ KB (/much/ more than SE) now admitting that ... there's actual journalists in Gaza! (now that much of bureau chief Wael Dahdouh's family as been killed) but SE is still on his anti-Qatar jihad. - Hollywood (and beyond) Israel-Palestine virtue-signaling (who cares?) + UAW seems to make big gains from tentative Ford contract
Krystal and Saagar discuss a mass shooter in Maine that's on the loose after leaving at least 16 dead, Israeli tanks enter Gaza as Netanyahu declares Holy war, 21 US troops reported injured in Iraq and Syria attacks, we look into the New House Speaker's wild past, Krystal and Saagar debate Jamaal Bowman as he's charged with a misdemeanor for pulling the fire alarm, NYT disputes Hospital strike intel from Israel, Al Jazeera Gaza Chief's family killed in Israel, Hollywood melts down with dueling Israel Palestine letters, and Ford folds to UAW demands in a historic contract.
Will & Hesse look at two starring God Tom Atkins: John Carpenter’s “The Fog” (1980) & Tommy Lee Wallace’s “Halloween III: Season of the Witch”. Also a Carpenter double feature of sorts, one from the director himself, and one continuing from his iconic Halloween (1978) film as he intended the franchise to be, an anthology. The Fog is a true American ghost story wrestling with monstrous crimes of our past, and Halloween III is an outrageous gorefest with one of the most infamously ludicrous plots in all horror cinema. Tom Atkins plays an everyman sex symbol in both, laying pipe as he’s terrorized by ghosts & robots through anonymous northern California towns.
Note: Will promised we’d timestamp the Tom Atkins Ass Shot in the description. I do not have time to do that this evening. Sorry.
In order to be a really proficient Emacs user, you’re going to have to learn at least a little bit of Elisp. As I’ve said before, Elisp is at once both easy and hard to learn. Like all Lisps, there’s not much syntax or dark corners to know. That’s simple. The hard part is the huge run time library. There are hundreds of functions performing all sorts of actions. Even after 15 years, I still don’t know all of them.
Over at Emacs Elements there’s a new video titled Great links to help you learn Emacs Lisp. The video starts off by saying that unlike many other languages you’re going to have to learn Elisp by yourself. That’s true, I guess, but no more true than for any other language. There are plenty of resources for learning Elisp—indeed, that’s the point of the video—probably not as many for learning, say, Python but still plenty.
One of the commenters complained that there was no point in having a video; all that’s really required, he says, is the list of links. I disagree with that. The video discusses each link in the list and why it’s worthwhile spending your time on. In any event, the list is here. As you can see, there are lots of way to learn Elisp but like everything else you have make the effort. I don’t know of any other way of learning anything but learning it yourself.
> 1. Kia EV6 > 2. BMW iX > 3. Genesis GV60 > 4. BMW i4 > 5. Hyundai Ioniq 6
> None of the five vehicles qualify for federal tax credits (though next year’s Equinox EV will), which can be up to $7,500 for models that meet standards for being assembled in the United States with battery components from the United States or certain other countries. [This searchable {database, tax-credit calculator}](https://fueleconomy.gov/feg/tax2023.shtml) shows which vehicles qualify.
While Tesla leads in sales, Kia, Hyundai and Genesis stand out for quality, according to a leading tester.
By Dan Gearino
General Motors CEO Mary Barra said this week that her company is “moderating the pace” of its electric vehicle rollout.
David J. Roth joins us this week as we continue discussing the relatively limp and unconvincing propaganda emerging around the Israel-Gaza war. Then, David gives us his review of “Moneyball” Michael Lewis’ new book on Sam Bankman-Fried, and we take a look at a new Washington Post piece chronicling Jim Jordan’s career arc from college wrestling champion to almost-Speaker of the House.
David’s review of Going Infinite is here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/how-michael-lewis-got-duped-by-sam-bankman-fried.html
Leading up to 1914 socialist movements all over Europe, notably in France and Germany, had become so strong that they were in the very halls of power. But when faced with the onset of the Great War, the established socialists blinked, unwilling to risk their heard-earned position and possibly be arrested and have their parties … Continue reading "World War Civ 24: Why socialists failed to stop the war"
AbstProcDo, like me, is a terrible artist. Sometimes, though, we need to add a diagram to our documentation, report, or Blog post. I usually use Graphviz or, when I’m in Troff mode, Pic for this. But these aren’t the only possibilities. Another that I keep meaning to try is PlantUML. Despite its name, it’s a pretty flexible drawing program—at least for the types of diagrams that I need to draw.
AbstProcDo has a short reddit post that very succinctly demonstrates using PlantUML with Org Babel. It’s by no means a complete exegesis on using PlantUML but it does give a flavor of using it with Org mode and showcases two very different types of diagrams that you can produce with it.
I like that the markup language is intuitive and probably easy to remember. Take a look at the second diagram and the markup that it generated. It would be a lot harder to generate that in Pic or even Graphviz. Don’t get me wrong, they’re both great applications that I’ve used many, many times over the years but I don’t use them everyday and I always have to refresh my memory on their use when I do.
If you occasionally have to produce line drawings in your work, PlantUML is definitely worth a look.
Afterward
After writing this post, I discovered a second reddit post by AbstProcDo that describes making Gantt-like charts with PlantUML. You can see an example of its actual use in Org Babel blocks here by clicking on the Raw button.
because it has vastly less agriculture, esp cotton (which was a major AZ crop into the 1970s)
> But past conditions bear a dwindling resemblance to Arizona’s future. This summer was, globally, probably the hottest that humans have ever experienced. In Phoenix, there were a record 31 consecutive days above 100 degrees F (37 degrees C) and the seasonal monsoon season was the driest since 1895. It will only get hotter and drier.
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Arizona, stressed by years of drought, has declared its house-building boom will have to be curbed due to a lack of water, but one of its fastest-growing cities is refusing to give up its relentless march into the desert — even if it requires constructing a pipeline that would bring water across the border from Mexico.
The population of Buckeye, located 35 miles west of Phoenix, has doubled over the past decade to just under 120,000, and it is now priming itself to eventually become one of the largest cities in the U.S. West. The city’s boundaries are vast — covering an area stretching out into the Sonoran Desert that would encompass two New York Cities — and so are its ambitions.
Buckeye expects to one day contain as many as 1.5 million people, rivaling or even surpassing Phoenix — the sixth largest city in the U.S. that uses roughly 2 billion gallons of water a day — by sprawling out the tendrils of suburbia, with its neat lawns, snaking roads, and large homes, into the baking desert.
Arizona’s challenging water situation appears a major barrier to such hopes, however. In June, the state announced that new uses of its groundwater have essentially hit a limit, placing restrictions on house building, just a few months after the state lost a fifth of its water allocation from the ailing Colorado River.
There isn’t enough water beneath Buckeye to support homes not already being built, Arizona’s water department has said. But the city is embarking upon an extraordinary scramble to find water from other sources — by recycling it, purchasing it, or importing it — to maintain the sort of hurtling growth that continues to propel the U.S. West even in an era of climate crisis.
People golf by new homes under construction at a housing development near undeveloped Sonoran Desert on June 8, 2023 in Buckeye, Arizona.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
“Personally, my view is that we are still full steam ahead,” said Eric Orsborn, Buckeye’s ebullient mayor. Orsborn said he understands the state has to be “really careful” with water resources but that the city is exploring “options to keep us going and allow us to continue to grow at the rate that we want to grow.”
Some of the grander options are ambitious to the point of appearing outlandish, such as a plan to bring desalinated seawater from Mexico to Arizona via a lengthy, uphill pipeline. Arizona may, instead, pipe in water west from California, or from 1,000 miles east, from the Missouri River. Buckeye has already shown it is prepared to spend big to achieve its dreams — in January the city council agreed to spend $80 million for a single acre of nearby land, an area smaller than a football pitch, just to secure its attached water rights.
“We’ll be as big or larger than Phoenix, ultimately — we don’t have to have all that water solved today,” Orsborn said in city hall, which itself may have to be upsized to deal with Buckeye’s growth. On his office wall is a map of the vast expanse of untouched desert that sits within the city’s voluminous territory.
Courtesy of the Guardian
“What we need to figure out is what’s that next crazy idea that’s out there,” said the mayor, who also owns a construction company. “We’re just hustling to get to that point, to keep things moving along.”
Perhaps the most “crazy” of the ideas is the one that would involve building a desalination plant in the Mexican town of Puerto Peñasco, perched on the edge of the Gulf of California, to suck up seawater and then send the treated water in a pipeline several hundred miles north to Arizona. Much of the pipeline’s proposed route is uphill and will traverse an international border, a federally protected area famed for its cactus and several small towns.
Environmentalists have already criticized the plan for its potential ecological impact upon both land and sea — the salty brine left over would be dumped back into the Gulf of California, altering its composition and potentially harming its marine life. The odds may be against the pipeline, given the cost and opposition. But IDE, the Israeli company that proposed the $5 billion plan, has said the pipeline would be “transformative” for Arizona, would provide enough water for the entire state and “secure Arizona’s future growth.”
Arizona’sWater Infrastructure Finance Authority (or WIFA), the agency tasked with implementing a new inflow of water to the state, is assessing the Mexico idea, as well as other options. Chuck Podolak, director of the agency, has his own office map that helps him envision other possible stupendous infrastructure undertakings, such as a pipeline running from another desalination plant, in California, or a pipeline that could convey water from the distant Missouri River to the thirsty desert.
“Those are big, audacious ideas, but I don’t think any are off the table,” said Podolak. “We’re going to seek the wild ideas and fund the good ones.”
Podolak acknowledged any pipeline from Mexico will face numerous hurdles — Wifa has been in touch with lawmakers in Mexico, some of whom are unfavorable to the idea — but insisted Arizona will continue to push for a new, leviathan project to make up its water shortfall.
“I just want to see multiple projects and figure out the best one for us. If we want to have that long-term security, we do need a new bucket, so to speak, a new source of supply outside of the state. This is a fantastic place to live.”
A sign advertises land for sale in the Sonoran Desert on June 7, 2023, in Buckeye, Arizona. Mario Tama/Getty Images
Podolak points out such big ideas are in keeping with previous monumental, and seemingly impossible, projects. “We dammed up the Colorado River and built the Hoover Dam, we have an artificial river that runs from Lake Havasu to Tucson uphill 300 miles — it’s called the Central Arizona Project,” he said.
“All these things seemed audacious, but now they’re part of the landscape. We’ve been doing it for 100 years.”
Such grandiose plans are being mulled because Arizona faces pressures like never before. The state has been in the teeth of a drought, spurred by global heating, that is the worst the U.S. Southwest has seen in approximately 1,200 years. About a third of the state’s water supply comes from the Colorado River, which has shrunk as temperatures have risen. Last year, under a mechanism where Arizona shares water with other states, its allotment of Colorado River water was cut by 21 percent.
Arizona’s other major water source — from underground aquifers, sucked up by wells — has become depleted in some parts of the state and, in the rapidly growing areas on the fringes of Phoenix, have been entirely laid claim to by developers who have to show under law that there is a reliable 100-year supply of water before erecting new homes on the cheap desert land.
In June, in a sobering dose of reality, the state declared there was not enough water for all current planned construction in the Phoenix region — amounting to a 4 percent shortfall over the next century — and that all future housing developments will have to find some other source of water. Already approved projects, and new housing within Phoenix itself, could still continue, the state stressed. “We are not out of water and we will not be running out of water,” said Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s governor.
While the decision won’t halt Arizona’s growth — which has been fueled by relatively cheap housing, fine weather, and fresh jobs brought by firms such as Intel and newcomer battery manufacturers — some see the end of an era in which sprawling homes, swimming pools, lawns, and water-intensive crops could endlessly unfurl into the desert.
“It’s a clear sign that this sprawl was never sustainable and that there is just no more groundwater left to do that,” said Christopher Kuzdas, senior water program manager at Environmental Defense Fund who argues Arizona should better conserve its own groundwater before turning to new pipelines.
“We are at a real crossroads as to how Arizona grows,” he said. “There just aren’t many easy options left when it comes to water.”
For Buckeye, the conversion of farmland to new housing will subsume existing irrigation rights — agriculture takes up more than 70 percent of Arizona’s water, after all, with Hobbs recently removing state land from being used to grow alfalfa, a particularly thirsty, and controversial, crop in order to protect what she called the state’s “water future.”
Beyond that, as the city expands into virgin desert, there is water recycling, where waste water is treated and reused, or perhaps a raising of the dam on the nearby Verde River to collect more water. Any new water pipeline from further away will take many years, and billions of dollars, if it happens at all. But Orsborn insists the city will find a way.
“I’m not saying it’s not going to be a challenge, but it’s not going to break that growth,” said the mayor. “For thousands of years, water’s been moved from one point to another point. We just have to continue to do that.”
Driving around Buckeye — there isn’t really any other option to get around — can feel rather disjointed. The city’s downtown is somewhat threadbare but then at the periphery there is a frenzy of building activity, with rows of new beige and cream colored houses with piles of roof slates being put in place, swarms of machinery preparing dusty tracts of ground, flags fluttering with legends such as “new homes” and “now selling.”
Courtesy of the Guardian
Drive a further 30 minutes north into the desert, a mix of scrubland dotted with saguaro cacti and two starkly beautiful mountain outcrops, you’re somehow still in Buckeye and work is under way to conjure up a massive new development called Teravalis — meaning “land of the valley” — that calls itself a “city of the future” that will eventually house 300,000 people and various businesses.
“We are effectively building a small city,” said Heath Melton, president of the Phoenix region for the developer, the Howard Hughes Corporation. Teravalis will reclaim water and be cautious with its use of turf and irrigation, according to Melton. “We want to enrich people’s lives and be good stewards of the environment,” he said. “Buckeye is very bullish on its growth and it’s good for them to be bullish.”
For the optimists, Arizona’s past is instructive. The state has found spectacular fixes to secure the water that has catapulted its growth and is getting better at saving it — somehow Arizona uses less water than it did in the 1950s despite now having 500 percent more people.
But past conditions bear a dwindling resemblance to Arizona’s future. This summer was, globally, probably the hottest that humans have ever experienced. In Phoenix, there were a record 31 consecutive days above 100 degrees F (37 degrees C) and the seasonal monsoon season was the driest since 1895. It will only get hotter and drier. Arizona may be able to move the sea from Mexico, but somehow out-engineering the climate crisis in the longer term will be an even more grueling feat.
“I think Buckeye has some real challenges and the degree of their success will depend on the degree to which people are willing to pay for those more expensive solutions,” said Kathryn Sorensen, an expert in water policy at Arizona State University.
“But it’s absolutely feasible,” she adds. “We pave over rivers, we build sea walls, we drain swamps, we destroy wetlands, we import water supplies where they never would have otherwise gone. Humans always do outlandish things, it’s what we do.”
VERY EXCELLENT, very insightful, 92.5 min audio with no waste
As Israel’s war on Gaza heats up with the potential to escalate into a regional fight, Rania Khalek hosts a special live episode of Dispatches w/ Ali Abunimah, executive director of the @TheElectronicIntifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine.
mostly EXCELLENT Nerds (no guest, recorded H 19 Oct) do 1st of promised-2-parter on Hamas. Topics discussed, in ~order of appearance in the audio
* review of Palestine war to date (7-19 Oct 2023) * currently-available books on Hamas * 17 Oct attack on al-Ahli hospital: evidence points to Israel JDAM, despite ... * ... Anglophone corporate-funded media is ~uniformly Zionist, esp the empire-{funded, cutouts} OSINT sockpuppets platformed by ACFM * Gaza as focus of Palestinian resistance from 1947 UN partition to 2023 * Palestinian resistance factions, esp Islamists vs Nasserists vs Marxists * 1973-1979: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's establishes Islamic association/charity (basically Muslim Brotherhood chapter) in Gaza, eventually approved/funded by Israel deepstate (as manipulable divide-and-conquer opponents to mostly-secular Palestinian resistance factions) ***** (introduced during 1st-Intifada discussion below) does not adopt name=Hamas (which is Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) until 1988 ***** 1st goal: Islamicize Gaza population: pursue social-welfare and religious-proselytization strategies, before attempting armed revolt ***** early beefs: ********* Hamas vs Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) ********* Hamas vs PLO/Fatah: latter proposed [1974 10-point program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLO%27s_Ten_Point_Program) to 1st focus on liberation of 1967 occupied territories ('2-state solution') before 1947 occupied territories * 1982-1983 Lebanon war: Israel and Christian militias destroy Beirut Palestinian camps, PLO Beirut-based "standing army" and HQ * Dec 1987: 1st Intifada starts in Gaza ***** 1988: Gaza MB renames itself Hamas (see above), attracts secular militants away from (e.g.) PFLP and PLO, begins violent anti-Israel anti-occupation insurgency
With the crisis in Gaza on our minds, we spend a little time with one of the most acclaimed Palestinian filmmakers, Elia Suleiman, and his lovely film IT MUST BE HEAVEN (2019).
*
"We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other" by Arielle Angel - https://jewishcurrents.org/we-cannot-cross-until-we-carry-each-other
*
Order Luke's new book "Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality," coauthored with Ed Broadbent - ecwpress.com/products/seeking-s…cracy-ed-broadbent
TORONTO: See Luke and Ed Broadbent in conversation at the Toronto Reference Library on October 22 - www.eventbrite.ca/e/seeking-social…ets-713793665067
VANCOUVER: See Luke and Ed at the Central Library on November 1 - vpl.bibliocommons.com/events/650b36e…0219cf8b5cf95f
Join us on Patreon for an extra episode every week - https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus
Another BP "mixed bag." Krystal and Saagar are definitely better than USCFM (mass-oriented corporate-funded media), and good on the US deepstate's insane pro-Zionism, and esp the fact that the deepstate can always find money for empire but never for working/underclass Americans ... but then KB doubles-down on yesterday's claim that there are no journalists in Gaza, and (while backing off a bit) that the al-Ahli hospital attack was an Islamic Jihad misfire. TOTALLY skip last ~40 min (67:41 to end of audio):
- pathetic "power panel"==KB+SE+Emily Jashinsky+Kyle Kulinski on ticktock/horserace bullshit (US House speakership, RFK Jr candidacy, 2024 US presidential race in general) - more excerpts from the BP Atlanta focus group, this time regarding Kamala Harris: can you say, "shoot fish in a barrel"? sure, I knew you could.
Krystal and Saagar discuss Biden secretly pledging the US military to any Israel-Hezbollah War, Military expert Jocko sounds off on Israel military bombing tactics on a recent podcast, Americans in Gaza are stranded, new evidence emerges in Gaza Hospital explosion, Biden wants 100 Billion for Israel-Ukraine package, Ryan and Emily join for a panel on Jim Jordan as Speaker and a new poll showing RFK Jr. Kneecapping Trump, and finally we look at another clip from our recent BP focus group asking if Kamala Harris would be a good president.
only moderately amusing: definitely not his best material, but Chaponda is always engaging
Daliso Chaponda is back for a fourth series.
Episode 1 - Monsters Under The Bed.
In this new series, Daliso is in a more philosophical mood. We find him working through his thoughts, feelings, and opinions by sharing his stories with a live audience in his hometown of Manchester.
Since his last series, Daliso has become a British Citizen and is looking forward to talking about anything other than being a migrant. To prove he’s no longer a 'Citizen of Nowhere', he’s decided to write silly jokes about animals, Hobbits, and monsters under the bed! But Daliso soon realises that he won’t get to truly enjoy his spoils just yet, because anti-immigrant sentiment has become unavoidable… In fact, what Daliso really finds in his first show since becoming a Brit is that those monsters under the bed have started to crawl out and take on a different meaning altogether.
Seeking advice from his father, a former refugee who worked for the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees before returning to Malawi and becoming a politician, he gets his expert opinion on the current migrant crisis and gets to the bottom of whether his dad really did try to ban farting in Malawi.
Writer... Daliso Chaponda
Additional Material... Meryl O'Rourke
Production Co-Ordinator... Katie Baum
Sound Manger... Jerry Peal
Theme music by Lawi
Image by Steve Ullathorne
Producer... Carl Cooper
This is a BBC Studios Production for Radio 4.
--
Daliso Chaponda shot to fame on Britain’s Got Talent, making it to the final of the 2017 series and establishing himself a firm favourite with the judges and the British public. He became a Facebook and YouTube star amassing over 200 million views of his performances. He's also appeared on the Royal Variety Performance.
He has performed around the world and at the Edinburgh, Melbourne, Singapore, and Cape Town comedy festivals. He has also toured the UK and Africa to sell out audiences and rave reviews.
In addition to standup comedy, Daliso is also a prolific fiction writer. He has published science fiction, murder mysteries and fantasy fiction in numerous magazines, and anthologies. He is currently working on his new novel and a children’s book.
This is this fourth series of his Rose D'Or nominated Radio 4 series.
- no Grim (which has in past usually decreased analytic quality): it's Emily and Krystal, which has problems for the current news cycle: - KB's boy Kyle Kulinski is part of the TYT "cinematic universe," who get big Katzenbucks (TYT got 6 M$ stake, IIRC), and Jeffrey Katzenberg is a longterm/bigtime Zionist (and LA-homeless-hater etc, which helps explain why Kasparian is such a Nazi) - EJ works for The Federalist, co-founded and published by notorious Zionist Ben Domenech (the guy who recently claimed Charlie Kirk is antisemitic for claiming that the Netanyahu made a major intel fail). Worse yet, EJ has [cowritten with Domenech](https://thefederalist.com/author/domenechjashinsky/) (archived [here](http://web.archive.org/web/20231016163139/https://thefederalist.com/author/domenechjashinsky/)) - in the 1st 12:30 of the audio KB says /twice/ (following is quote of 2nd, and 1st was quite similar) that 'there are no journalists on the ground', despite the fact that Al Jazeera and several other new orgs have journalists on the ground all over Gaza. - 1st half (44 of 87 total min) is at best better-than-mass-oriented-US-corporate-funded-media on Israel deepstate unreliability/lies, US deepstate's failed diplomacy and dangerous war threats, and USCFM incompetence ... but also {bothsides, fog-of-war}s on Israel's (obvious, given the weight of evidence) responsibility for the al-Ahli hospital attack (though KB semi-sidles-up to denying it was Islamic Jihad, as the Zionist deepstate is now claiming), and of course both KB and EJ both bothsides on "warcrimes" (despite the fact that everyone in "southern Israel" who is not Bedouin or Palestine is a settler in occupied territory).
Krystal and Emily discuss everything we know so far about the tragic Gaza hospital bombing, Biden shunned as Middle East summit collapses, Israel and Hamas battle over hostage negotiations, Jim Jordan faceplants on first house speaker vote, Democrats in civil war as Rashida Tlaib attacks Biden's Israel policy, and US influence implodes as Putin and Xi hold important meeting.
good to see that AOC, Jamaal Bowman, and Ayanna Pressley finally found some ... intestinal fortitude
On Monday, 13 Democrats in the House of Representatives, led by Reps. Cori Bush of Missouri, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, André Carson of Indiana, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, and Delia Ramirez of Illinois, introduced a resolution urging the Biden administration to call for an “immediate deescalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine” and to send humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“They are running out of body bags,” Tlaib said through tears in a press conference Monday. “We all know collective punishment of Palestinians is a war crime. The answer to war crimes can never be more war crimes.” It is a disgrace, Tlaib added, that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the majority of Congress have not even mentioned the possibility of a ceasefire.
The resolution comes after two earlier efforts in the House both fell short of calling for an end to violence. The first — a bipartisan resolution led by Reps. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., and supported by over 420 members of Congress — did not even mention Palestinian civilians. As of Monday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that at least 2,808 Palestinians have been killed, while 10,859 have been wounded.
The second, a letter led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Mark Pocan, D-Wis., urged Biden to push for access to food and water in Gaza and ensure Israel follows international law but similarly fell short of calling for a ceasefire. Sources said the letter excluded that language because doing so would have reduced the number of signers from 55 to a dozen or fewer.
The “pro-peace, pro-Israel” J Street threatened to withhold endorsements from members who refused to sign onto the McCaul–Meeks resolution. J Street was once considered an alternative group to support progressive members who did not agree with hard-line and unconditional stances of pro-Israel support like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or Democratic Majority for Israel. As The Intercept reported, J Street’s stance on the ongoing war has frustrated both former and current staffers who said its mission has been compromised.
“What we are hearing from Dems right now is even worse than the typical anti-Palestinian narrative we always hear from the government. Israeli officials have openly admitted to genocidal intent, and Democrats are deliberately silent,” said one Democratic staffer who requested anonymity to speak freely. “They are willing accomplices to what is happening and what will happen in the coming days. Those of us staffers who have Palestinian family — or are Palestinians themselves — are totally abandoned and isolated here.”
Below are the 13 representatives who support an immediate deescalation and ceasefire as of Monday afternoon:
Cori Bush Rashida Tlaib André Carson Summer Lee Delia Ramirez Jamaal Bowman Bonnie Watson Coleman Jesus “Chuy” Garcia Jonathan Jackson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Ilhan Omar Ayanna Pressley Nydia Velázquez
M 16 Oct 2023 Breaking Points is ~all Israel-Palestine (but including global and US effects), and mostly pretty good (esp excellent final segment on Reuters' craven doublespeak about Israel deliberately killing Reuters' own videographer), though the focus-group excerpts in the middle are skippable.
Krystal and Saagar discuss the Israel Gaza humanitarian criss deepening as water runs out and hospitals collapse, Biden bumbling in a 60 minutes interview on America’s involvement, Arab states erupting, our newest Breaking Points focus group where we ask Democratic voters about the situation on Israel-Gaza, Europeans criminalizing Palestinian protests, Candace Owens fights Megyn Kelly over Israel cancel culture, polls show Israelis blame Bibi for security failure, MSNBC benches their Muslim anchors after ADL comments, and Reuters can’t admit their own journalist was killed by an Israeli strike.
I wanted to use Mermaid to make diagrams, but I ran into this issue when trying to run it:
Error: Could not find Chromium (rev. 1108766). This can occur if either
1. you did not perform an installation before running the script (e.g. `npm install`) or
2. your cache path is incorrectly configured (which is: /home/sacha/.cache/puppeteer).
For (2), check out our guide on configuring puppeteer at https://pptr.dev/guides/configuration.
It turns out that I needed to do the following:
sudo npm install -g puppeteer mermaid @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli --unsafe-perm
# Cache Chromium for my own user
node /usr/lib/node_modules/puppeteer/install.js --unsafe-perm
sudo npm install -g mermaid @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli
ln -s ~/.cache/puppeteer/chrome/linux-117.0.5938.149 ~/.cache/puppeteer/chrome/linux-1108766
ln -s ~/.cache/puppeteer/chrome/linux-117.0.5938.149/chrome-linux64 ~/.cache/puppeteer/chrome/linux-117.0.5938.149/chrome-linux
(The exact versions might be different for your installation.)
Then I could make a Mermaid file and try it out with mmdc -i input.mmd -o output.svg,
and then I could confirm that it works directly from Org with ob-mermaid:
EXCELLENT survey of Palestine issues on day 7 (13 Oct) after the 20231007 Hamas prison riot, including
* Gaza sitrep 'on the ground' from Refaat Alareer and Khalil Abu Shammala * Israeli crimes 1948 to now * problems stalling Israel military invasion: they're not ready to invade Gaza, much less to fight a multifront war. (If they /were/, the Israeli military would have done it already! like so many aggressive wars before.) * ... nor is the US ready for multifront, which is why Blinken is all over
(BTW: ep length is only 105 min, not 120 as my player displayed.)
"How many people does Israel need to kill in order to be satisfied? How much blood? How many Palestinian kids?" Refaat Alareer tells The Electronic Intifada live from Gaza.
And human rights activist Khalil Abu Shammala discusses how Palestinians in Gaza fear Israel is planning a "second Nakba."
Plus:
* Ali Abunimah discusses how US President Joe Biden is granting carte blanche to Benjamin Netanyahu to commit atrocities
* Journalist Jon Elmer has the latest military analysis of the Palestinian resistance fight against Israel
Watch the entire broadcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhP7jQBtzyY&ab_channel=TheElectronicIntifada
