If the Covid death toll in the US alone is already really above 900,000 (something that doesn’t come as a surprise to me), and deaths continue at what was once considered a very high rate, we should be able to recognize, finally, how paradigm shifting this virus has been and is. If India comes out of it more or less intact, it will be a wonder.
Now the various low-wage industries in the US are complaining because they can’t find enough workers to come in and work at shit jobs at shit wages and no benefits. Unsurprisingly, a lot of their former workers are dead. The ones who might otherwise take those jobs are not as stupid as those employers think they are, so they want the state to wield the whip over them. Nice.
The idea that these employers should pay more and treat workers better and provide decent benefits if the state doesn’t do it doesn’t occur to them and so far, it is not part of the National Discussion of Lack of Low Wage Workers. No, can’t have that.
The absence of the obvious in this discussion seems like a throwback to another era altogether. The shifting paradigm makes it so.
There seems to be no shortage of toilet paper these days, but we face continuing and growing shortages of all kinds of necessities and desirable objects and supplies. Some things are not available at any price (I tried to buy clothes the other day; ha! Back ordered, out of stock, discontinued, orders cancelled, on and on. So I continue wearing my rags for the duration.) Others are available, but only at extraordinary prices (try lumber; ha!) And so it goes. As the shortages come and go and shift over time, we get used to not having things. But everyone knows the rabble had too much to begin with anyway, right?
Quite clearly, we aren’t done with uprisings spurred by the virus and climate change and political power plays either. Anarchy and chaos, civil war and genocide are inevitable consequences. We’re seeing it play out, and it’s closer than we think.
On the other hand, those who try to do the right thing in the midst of the madness are too often slammed for bothering.
Labour bloodbath in English local Council elections (London not voting) — will Keir Starmer’s suicidal leadership of the now official Loser Party be questioned? Of course not.
Starmer may not have led Labour to victory in this battle but one must keep their eye on the larger cause: the noble war he is fighting against the hoards of anti-semites in the party!
At least he has his priorities straight: f’ the limey working class and all hail Israel and the financial market lords who are funding the conflict.
If a so-called “business” can’t get McShit wage workers for its McShit jobs, that so-called “business” has no right to exist and does not deserve to survive.
Pleas of “can’t get workers” might be a giveaway to how unpleasant such a “business” might really be. People who do have any money should perhaps spend more of it at places where people are not abused for the “privilege” of working and where they are paid more than at other places.
Now that the top 4 parties in British politics are all Tories, of course the Conservatives win. The LibDems, UKIP and the rump of so-called Labour are all effectively Tories, follow the conservative consensus, offer nothing that constitutes any essential variation from the Conservative line. With the choice between actual and ersatz Tories,who are Britons going to vote for? Frankly, Scotland can’t ditch the dumpster fire that the UK has become fast enough, and I’d wager Wales is wondering how to do the same.
NC linked to a tweet that used stats to make the point that “none of the above” has drawn off Labor support in previously deep red areas, while Tory support has declined only marginally, leaving the Tories to win “surprising” seats.
Northern Ireland has an out — wonder if they will take it.
The votes are there for a left party, but no leader or organization can survive long enough to win.
I read about issues regarding people dumping stuff randomly on the road in the UK. Is that happening in the US too?
People on lock-down cleaned house, de-cluttered and did a lot of DIY projects…and then dumped it on the road because trash and recycle pickup were restricted and they didn’t want to pay the fee for extra waste. There’s a lot of scams going on, illegal pickup services advertising on FB that they’re cheaper than the state recycling fees, so a rando comes and picks up your stuff, takes your money and then dumps it on the roadside of your beautiful country.
I remember getting a super threatening letter from the government to not overfill the dumpsters last year and wondering what on earth they were talking about. That must’ve been it. Living at density means windows everywhere filled with snoops. I couldn’t get away with roadside dumping if I tried.
There’s moral justification to loot every business that doesn’t pay its workers $15/hour IMO since those businesses are looting their workers and other U.S. citizens who have to subsidize those workers in one way or another so they can actually survive to work at these state funded wage slave shops.
It looks like the notion that COVID could have been man-made is beginning to overcome the anti-conspiracy theorist resistance in the statestream media and has finally gained critical mass in the collective consciousness of a planet that’s currently a couple billion people over sustainability.
But even if that’s the case, we absolutely know it must have been an accident and leaked from the Wuhan lab because it’s utterly unfathomable that an entity other than the Wuhan lab would have created COVID and thought it would be best to drop it in Wuhan to cover their tracks. I mean jeez, nobody could be that smart and forward thinking. That’s Doctor Evil sh*t that’s only found in QOVID comic books …
Bruce W. : “Northern Ireland has an out — wonder if they will take it.”
Where does NI have an out _to_, even were the pro-Unionist and Loyalist demographic there to magically shrink in the next couple of years to a minority small enough to permit unification?
That’s not going to happen without a rapid die-off, but for argument’s sake let’s assume it does.
Even then, a unification referendum would also have to take account of the wishes of voters south of the border and the ROI doesn’t want the economic burden of NI. At nearly £5,000 per capita annually, Northern Ireland requires the highest deficit spending in the U.K. (followed by a £4,300 per capita fiscal deficit in Wales). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_fiscal_deficit
Furthermore, the so-called Irish miracle in the ROI has a lot to with having the lowest corporate tax rates in the developed world and U.S. companies like Apple maintaining their legal headquarters there. That ride will to some extent be coming to an end, if only because the EU will be coming for what it regards as its fair share of those corporate taxes — something like 3 percent of Republic of Ireland’s GDP, IIRC. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong.) In that scenario, ROI — whatever the sentiment of its voters — won’t find bearing the burden of NI tenable.
Then there would be the question of the currency. NI would have to go into the Euro and the roach motel of the Eurozone with its neoliberal rules against higher that 3 percent deficits and national industrial strategies.
I think it was Ricky Gervais who was laughing about someone saying that Scotland is like Canada to Britain, and Gervais said no, Britain is like Mexico to Scotland.
The first 17 hires to the court system responsible for determining whether migrants get to remain in the country is filled with former prosecutors and counselors for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as a few picks with little immigration experience.
Almost none have made their career representing migrants in court.
The Thursday announcement from the Department of Justice (DOJ) initially perplexed immigration attorneys, advocates and even some former immigration judges who wondered why the group so closely mirrored the jurists favored by the Trump administration.
“The 17 new immigration judges referenced in the notice all received their conditional offers under the prior administration,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Hill.
Critics said the Biden administration has an obligation to fully vet the judges hired under their watch and rebalance a court system heavily shaped by the Trump team.
It’s also a surprising move for a president that has otherwise sought to quickly reverse a number of Trump immigration policies while calling for a more humane response to migration.
The evolution of Irish politics follows many contradictory tracks at once.
The die-off has been underway already for a longtime. Irish nationalist politics is fairly well-integrated cross-border; British Unionist politics conspicuously has not been since roughly 1973. The social basis for the old UUP is gone with the wind. The social basis for the DUP is, weirdly, not the mainstream but rather a tiny Protestant sect.
The money NI costs the UK exchequer is only a minor subtext to the general sense in Britain that NI is much more trouble than it is worth, if it is worth anything at all. The cost of Brexit is about to overwhelm every aspect of British politics as the profound debacle emeges from behind the dust cloud of COVID — the money for subsidizing NI to keep what? will be asked by Tories, too.
And, if NI were not alien enough from England, NI remains in the EU with the Republic.
I think the Republic of Ireland has a good economic game going and that gravy train will not end soon. If it doesn’t, that game is one Belfast can play and win at, very well, so it is not the case that Ireland would have to subsidize NI in the way Britain does to keep it. Business looking south for salvation is not implausible. That could well make the Alliance Party . . . versatile and that might be the ballgame for practical political purposes.
You are certainly correct that the Unionist minority — and it is a minority now — has an element ready to react violently. There have already been Brexit riots. It can be hard to sustain that anger against a tide though, if business and society at large are ok with swimming.
Good diary on ivermectin use in India at nakedcapitalism: “India Just Became Latest Country to Approve Use of Ivermectin to Treat Covid-19”
I’ve watched about 20 youtube videos related to the 2nd covid wave in India, and there’s been zero discussion of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, or hydrogen peroxide (save 1, that seemed sourced from an anglo country, which was about ivermectin in India, but I didn’t save the link). It’s like the only thing the Indian media can process is the SAME, disgustingly limited context we’ve seen in American media – hand washing, social distancing, masks, vaccines. Oh, and hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work! Except in Fox-world, minus Neil Cavuto.
The most involved discussion I’ve heard is probably “India “Squandered” Early Successes In Controlling Covid: Lancet” on the NDTV channel.
Also, EVEN GIVEN this extremely limited palette of policy options, there’s no serious discussion of cost/benefit analysis (well, I vaguely recall somebody using the phrase “cost/benefit”, but no specific reference.)
This is not unlike the superficial treatment of “climate change” in American media, where, like just about every other issue, “cost/benefit” is not discussed. Well, I’m pretty sure Lomborg has appeared on Fox, so that’s a significant exception. However, I’ve never heard of Lomborg appearing anywhere other than a right leaning venue; nor have I heard of any lefty alternative to Lomborg’s analytical conclusions, who has gone into it as deeply as Lomborg.
I remember a while ago that our host said that he would at-the-least delete any statement advancing the “cause” of manmade-global-warming-denialism.
I notice that some people ( well . . . one person in particular) has perfected the art of coming within a Zeno’s Paradoxth of denialing the man-madeness of the ongoing global warming we are entering deeper into, without quite triggering Ian Welsh’s ” okay, that’s it” response. I will continue non-engaging with the velcro tarbaby our resident oh-so-exquisitely not-quite-denialist
sets up by the side of the road from time to time. And I will continue failing to chase every particular bright shiny there’s-a-squirrel! object offered to lure us into running on the Gish Gallop Hamster Wheel to Nowhere.
I want to echo Che Pasa…
There is a simple explanation for the so-called job miss — the low-paid workforce is decimated by COVID. 900k (by the latest credibly-looking estimate from the academia) is dead, a multiple of that is suffering from long-COVID and a multiple of the latter is taking care of the long-COVID afflicted family members and/or is terrified seeing how family and friends suffer from the consequences of the disease. The low-paid workforce went into this pandemic being sicker and more susceptible to death and long-COVID than the better paid-technocrats. The low-paid workers could not work from home, like the paper-pusher technocrats. Here and there, news leaked that the CA Tesla factory had these many cases, meat packing factories had huge infection rates, certain employers complained about absenteeism due to disease, but overall where SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted has not been talked about. There are 40-50-60k of new reported cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection every day right now — where do you think most of these people get infected? — Restaurants?, jogging? grocery stores? — how about work.
We are now seeing an effort to manufacture a notional end to the pandemic and push the technocrats into the office. Moderna admitted that the vaccine will wear off in a year or so — that means it would wear off on average in a year or so, many people will lose protection well before that and many will have it longer than that — plus the variants –> packing the technocrats into the office is like serving them an a platter to the virus.
I blame myself. It was I who offered the idea of debating the “cost/benefit” of climate change, instead of just coming across like a brainwashed cult zombie all the damned time.
This is something that I have mentioned maybe here but certainly elsewhere, and that falls under the rubric ‘back 500 years to the future’ and ‘the end of a European expansion cycle’. I am seeing it now popping up here and there in hints and whispers.
Naked Capitalism recently posted a link to a paper by Voigtlander and Voth entitled Gifts from Mars: warfare and Europe’s early rise to riches (2013). The article argues that the Europe had been a blood bath and pandemic cesspool where people killed each other and died from disease at prodigious rates, but that was good for the survivors, because the survivors pocketed the property of the dead and became wealthy. The authors also argue that China had neither war nor pandemic and therefore its people where poorer on the per capita basis. I don’t buy the argument of the authors, they don’t understand what agriculture is. Agriculture is land + seed. When famine happens, land is there, but the seed is not. Armies walking all over your fields, burning your crop and eating your seed is not good for you. You will not have anything to plant next year and nothing to eat, although you will have lots of empty land (sort of like what we may end up having now — lots of money in the deposit account, but not much to buy in the store, so then you buy virtual properties). My guess is that the people then were malnourished and therefore more susceptible to disease.
But setting the war is good argument aside, what I note is that Europe could not eradicate pandemic, while China could — doesn’t that sound familiar? It’s as if 500 years and massive advances in technology do not matter. Another question is what does the appearance of SARS-CoV-2 herald in socioeconomic and demographic terms? One author called Mirko Grmek has argued that appearance of new disease marks a socioeconomic change. One hypothesis is that the appearance of SARS-CoV-2 marks the end of an expansion cycle and begging of an involution… back 500 years to the future and primitive accumulation…
I remember once reading a different flavor of this ” why so much advance in Europe?” theory.
The flavor I read went like this: that the various war-fighting polities of Europe fought eachother so constantly and so ever-shiftingly every-which-way for centuries that they turned Europe into a series of forced-march technological evolution petri dishes, constantly improving their warfighting and war-supporting technology against eachother to the point where they had transformed their civilization into a bigger deadlier Mongol Menace to the entire world than Genghis Khan had been able to transform his own Mongol Hordes into.
About all the disgruntled and disatisfied McRent-a-Slaves who are not returning to the McShit McJobs at McShit McWages under McShit Conditions which certain parts of the McSmall McBusiness Sector is demanding they come back to . . .
What if all the do-gooder liberal donations to this and that do-gooder cause were all instead pooled into one great mission . . . . giving enough money to the disgruntled McRent-a-Slaves so they could keep surviving without going back to those McShit McJobs. How long could Liberal Donor America keep giving survival money to the McShit McJobs boycotters? A year? Two years? Five years? Long enough to totally exterminate the McShit McJob sector from existence?
Leaving nothing left except Shinola jobs at Shinola wages? Which the disgruntled workers could then take if they wanted to?
It seems that unfolding events are themselves revealing a fragile pain point in the system.
Time to hit that pain point with a nail-studded baseball bat over and over and over again.
The system has a thousand kneecaps. And the field of economic combat offers a thousand tire irons just lying around for people to pick up and use. There’s a kneecap for every tire iron and a tire iron for every kneecap. Acres of tire irons . . .
And you know . . . . those places of business which were most heavily infested with No Mask Freedom Typhoid MAGA coronavid germ-spreaders will have the hardest time getting back workers smart enough to not want to be exposed to that any more.
Smarter-than-that young people may even begin diffusing en-stealthy-mass out of the Majority MAGA areas into the Majority Safety-First areas, leaving the broad masses of Trumpistanis to poach in their own poo over the next few years.
I am well aware of that version of the war story as well. A most extreme version of this type of story holds that Europe and the world is being tormented by the uber-aggressive genocidal Yamnaya strain of humanity. Yamnaya emerged ~5000 years ago in the North East Europe and quickly exterminated all the indigenous males and interbred with the indigenous females. This of course tamed aggression in their mixed decedents. But new waves of pure Yamnaya kept coming from the North East, displacing men and interbreeding with the female descendants of the previous wave. This had an effect of continuous enrichment for Yamnaya genes in Europe. There is an episode in the ancient history when ‘sea people’ attacked and destroyed the palace societies in Crete, Ionia, and (almost) Egypt. The ‘sea people’ attached like a herd. The Romans fought pure Yamnaya. There is an ancient saying something like ‘any barbarian can kill a Roman in an instant, but 10 Romans can hold off a 100 barbarians and a 1oo Romans will lay waste to a barbarian army’. To me the point of this story was that the barbarians, while physically superior, had no conception of an organization and attacked individually like a herd. They also buried their dead individually in holes in the ground — hence their name from the Russian word yama, which means a hole in the ground. Other people buried their dead in communal graves. Here’s your origin of individual freedom. Yamnaya are also said to appropriate the culture of the defeated people as their own — some of the cultures they have appropriated as their own: the Corded Wire culture, Bell Beaker culture, Roman/ancient Greek culture, Renaissance (the Yamnaya North from the less Yamnaya Latin South). About ~500 years ago, they finally learned how to sale long distance, spread out to the North and South America and Australia, completely displacing the indigenous people there. They attacked the palace societies in China and India and enslaved the tribes of Africa. South West Russia and East Steppe of the present day Ukraine are the heart of the old Yamnaya, so attacks from the West Yamnaya on the original East Yamnaya have generally not worked well.
Google Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA for an article in New Scientist.
For the ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and hydrogen peroxide deniers amongst us, may I suggest that you live out your fondest desires for social ‘responsibility’* by strongly advocating for legislation forcing AIDS carriers to be celibate for the rest of their lives, and eschewing any drug cocktails, least of all any inexpensive ones as may exist? Since AIDS is spread by bodily fluids, and by now everybody knows that droplets fly out of your mouth when you talk or sing, I suppose we should ban any AIDS carriers from talking or singing, unless they’re triple masked.
It goes without saying that for the REAL control freaks amongst us, any AIDS carriers caught on zoom, without a mask, even in the privacy of their own home, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
We can’t force them to take a vaccine, since there isn’t one; but that’s all the more reason for the government to forcibly tag everybody with an RFID chip, and mandate constant geolocation, monitored via 5G networks, either directly, or with a bluetooth intermediate link with mandatory cellphones. This will allow any easy identification of AIDS spreaders, should anybody sharing the same geolocation for more than 5 minutes with them come down with AIDS.
We probably need to eventually put video cameras in every room, since even 4 minutes might suffice for a viagra-assisted “quicky”.
We can start out with just firing any AIDS carriers who refuse to bend the knee. Hey, let them starve! But prison camps are sort of traditional with both Communists and Nazis, so let’s not anybody hold back.
* or CommieNazi control, if we’re being more direct
You don’t seem to understand AIDS. People don’t carry AIDS. The label of “having AIDs”* just means their immune system is messed up. HIV is the virus that allegedly causes AIDS, though there has always been dispute around this, HIV has never been properly isolated, and there are any number of underlying causes/comorbidities that exist along with an alleged positive HIV test in order to arrive at a diagnosis of AIDS. HIV in the US never exploded into the larger population the way they said it would and this certainly isn’t because everyone began wearing condoms. It’s always been predominantly prevalent in the intravenous drug community and the gay male community in the US. In Africa, the profile is completely different. Strange virus.
*Being given the label of “having AIDS” is often immunosuppressive in and of itself.
My sense of the elections in the UK, from a low-information distance, is that the people who pushed Corbyn aside and offered themselves in his place got a drubbing. In the US the people who pushed Bernie aside and offered themselves in his place won in a squeaker because of covid.
In other words, it’s all going according to plan. Anyone still supporting Labour or the Democraric party is either a fool or a plant. The odds might be against any true left third party, but they’re the only shot we have at this point. Though I would not be surprised if we end up with a situation akin to what happens in Russia after failure of the Decembrists.
Boris Johnson and Labour are just further examples of the political bankruptcy of our times. They are hardly alone. I can think of no political entity that isn’t.
Yeah Jeremy, it’s not much better here in Bibi’s bitch state where he has annexed the State Department by having the top three people in the State Department (Tony Blinken, Wendy Sherman and Victoria Nuland) instilled in what’s turning out to be the worst part of the Biden Administration. No mysteries why that would be when there are three scumbag traitors running U.S. foreign policy that don’t represent the best interests of the citizens of the U.S. but instead all-blessed Israel’s interests.
Don’t forget the Holocaust though, no no no, don’t ever forget that, let’s all keep our focus on an event that happened damn near 80 years ago and probably not even one person is alive who had anything to do with it but that guilt trip is supposed to supersede what the scumbag fascist apartheid state Israel is doing right now to the Palestinians.
There was a man in his 90’s living in the US who was a German soldier during WWII and they recently deported him to Germany for sentencing. He’s in his fucking 90’s.
I hope I live to see the day these fuckers get theirs.
The complaint of the oligarchs that they can’t find employees for their McShit jobs is a perfect example of how the seeds of their destruction lies within their activities. This is Nature at her best, where there are natural limits to growth through balancing feedback loops to counteract the reinforcing feedback loops. We’ve been enduring a reinforcing feedback (in terms of our oligarchs and economic policy) with no balancing feedback loop, like a furnace set to run all the time. The crazy weather is the attempt to rebalance temperatures (and I just read that the Earth’s poles are also moving albeit slightly. This is not good.)
The best example I could come up with relates to resources as food. A warmer-than-usual and rainy spring significantly increases an ant’s food sources, so the ant population explodes. Most years, the population is held in check by more modest resources.
It doesn’t end well, with a large swath of the ant population starving when the cycle doesn’t repeat.
The effects cascade (the populations of animals or insects that eat ants also explode and then starve). Perhaps the number of fast food outlets will be reduced, or meat becomes very expensive because so much of it rots before it can be processed (which also reduces the number of fast food outlets). Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for us unless you happen to live off fast food.
The reason I bring this up is that these are also examples of how to beat the oligarchs. Just requires careful planning to avoid unintended consequences (something they *never* do). It would be nice if we had a functioning government to help sustain the critical populations until the oligarch herd is significantly thinned. And to provide education opportunities so our most needed people can reinvent themselves as craftspeople or smallholders, providing them a living and society to meet a real need (fast food is not a real need, not to mention it is specifically designed to be addictive).
Also has the added benefit of not requiring any violence whatsoever. And the benefit of turning people into producers again, instead of the forced consumerism that benefits only a few. I can only dream, however, because we also lack the ability/knowledge to adequately manage such a system of producers.
This was going to happen anyway, but over a longer time period because they have been ensuring that people don’t have enough money for everything, and many people don’t have enough money for anything at all. They don’t think ahead, except in terms of themselves and their own addictions. I would posit that their destruction sooner is really the only window we have left.
And on a different topic, Biden said very specifically: nothing will change. We need to take him at his word until he proves otherwise, because so far it’s all talk while his actions speak to nothing changing (his choices for immigration specifically). I hope I’m wrong.
About survival-education for the non-rich majority masses . . . . all the people reading this blog are already literate enough to pursue survival-enhancement information while it still exists to be found, including on the Internet before it crashes and goes dark for good. Some of the people here may have psychological hangups which will prevent them from applying their own literacy and intelligence skills in the furtherance of their own survival information aquisition.
The ” Hard Times Survival” thread which Ian Welsh has given us is a good place to put good information, links to it, links to sources of it, etc.
Astrid wrote: “Anyone still supporting Labour or the Democraric party is either a fool or a plant.”
I just came from reading the GUARDIAN where much wailing and gnashing of teeth was ongoing in the comments section. Mostly the usual sort of thing — “those stupid, bigoted voters voting against their interests.”
I saw one rejoinder that struck me so much that I will reproduce it here.
‘The new Hartlepool (conservative) incumbent MP, Jill Mortimer, has said that a vote for her was a “vote for change.” Think about that for a minute – the party that’s been in power for 11 years, that by its own definition is about *conserving* is…a vote for something different.
‘This really is the core of Labour’s current problem, if you asked, “Does the conservative party represent change?” you’d be quite right to chuckle at the question.
‘But if you change that question to “Who represents change more, the current Tory party or the current Labour party?”
‘Suddenly, the question isn’t nearly as funny and the answer is the same as the question “Who won the 2021 Hartlepool by-election?”‘
Excellent framing. I am going to try using that framing the next time an otherwise decent and intelligent liberal ( who also smeared Tulsi and Bernie) goes off on Trump voters. I don’t think anything will really overcome their conditioning, however.
Jeremy
@ Missy .
The video is back up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG7n1ZbDTww
Ché Pasa
If the Covid death toll in the US alone is already really above 900,000 (something that doesn’t come as a surprise to me), and deaths continue at what was once considered a very high rate, we should be able to recognize, finally, how paradigm shifting this virus has been and is. If India comes out of it more or less intact, it will be a wonder.
Now the various low-wage industries in the US are complaining because they can’t find enough workers to come in and work at shit jobs at shit wages and no benefits. Unsurprisingly, a lot of their former workers are dead. The ones who might otherwise take those jobs are not as stupid as those employers think they are, so they want the state to wield the whip over them. Nice.
The idea that these employers should pay more and treat workers better and provide decent benefits if the state doesn’t do it doesn’t occur to them and so far, it is not part of the National Discussion of Lack of Low Wage Workers. No, can’t have that.
The absence of the obvious in this discussion seems like a throwback to another era altogether. The shifting paradigm makes it so.
There seems to be no shortage of toilet paper these days, but we face continuing and growing shortages of all kinds of necessities and desirable objects and supplies. Some things are not available at any price (I tried to buy clothes the other day; ha! Back ordered, out of stock, discontinued, orders cancelled, on and on. So I continue wearing my rags for the duration.) Others are available, but only at extraordinary prices (try lumber; ha!) And so it goes. As the shortages come and go and shift over time, we get used to not having things. But everyone knows the rabble had too much to begin with anyway, right?
Quite clearly, we aren’t done with uprisings spurred by the virus and climate change and political power plays either. Anarchy and chaos, civil war and genocide are inevitable consequences. We’re seeing it play out, and it’s closer than we think.
On the other hand, those who try to do the right thing in the midst of the madness are too often slammed for bothering.
Plague Species
https://furry.substack.com/p/the-pga-tour-is-a-super-spreader
bruce wilder
Scottish election results today.
Labour bloodbath in English local Council elections (London not voting) — will Keir Starmer’s suicidal leadership of the now official Loser Party be questioned? Of course not.
Z
Starmer may not have led Labour to victory in this battle but one must keep their eye on the larger cause: the noble war he is fighting against the hoards of anti-semites in the party!
At least he has his priorities straight: f’ the limey working class and all hail Israel and the financial market lords who are funding the conflict.
Z
different clue
If a so-called “business” can’t get McShit wage workers for its McShit jobs, that so-called “business” has no right to exist and does not deserve to survive.
Pleas of “can’t get workers” might be a giveaway to how unpleasant such a “business” might really be. People who do have any money should perhaps spend more of it at places where people are not abused for the “privilege” of working and where they are paid more than at other places.
DMC
Now that the top 4 parties in British politics are all Tories, of course the Conservatives win. The LibDems, UKIP and the rump of so-called Labour are all effectively Tories, follow the conservative consensus, offer nothing that constitutes any essential variation from the Conservative line. With the choice between actual and ersatz Tories,who are Britons going to vote for? Frankly, Scotland can’t ditch the dumpster fire that the UK has become fast enough, and I’d wager Wales is wondering how to do the same.
bruce wilder
NC linked to a tweet that used stats to make the point that “none of the above” has drawn off Labor support in previously deep red areas, while Tory support has declined only marginally, leaving the Tories to win “surprising” seats.
Northern Ireland has an out — wonder if they will take it.
The votes are there for a left party, but no leader or organization can survive long enough to win.
Joan
I read about issues regarding people dumping stuff randomly on the road in the UK. Is that happening in the US too?
People on lock-down cleaned house, de-cluttered and did a lot of DIY projects…and then dumped it on the road because trash and recycle pickup were restricted and they didn’t want to pay the fee for extra waste. There’s a lot of scams going on, illegal pickup services advertising on FB that they’re cheaper than the state recycling fees, so a rando comes and picks up your stuff, takes your money and then dumps it on the roadside of your beautiful country.
I remember getting a super threatening letter from the government to not overfill the dumpsters last year and wondering what on earth they were talking about. That must’ve been it. Living at density means windows everywhere filled with snoops. I couldn’t get away with roadside dumping if I tried.
Z
There’s moral justification to loot every business that doesn’t pay its workers $15/hour IMO since those businesses are looting their workers and other U.S. citizens who have to subsidize those workers in one way or another so they can actually survive to work at these state funded wage slave shops.
Z
Z
It looks like the notion that COVID could have been man-made is beginning to overcome the anti-conspiracy theorist resistance in the statestream media and has finally gained critical mass in the collective consciousness of a planet that’s currently a couple billion people over sustainability.
But even if that’s the case, we absolutely know it must have been an accident and leaked from the Wuhan lab because it’s utterly unfathomable that an entity other than the Wuhan lab would have created COVID and thought it would be best to drop it in Wuhan to cover their tracks. I mean jeez, nobody could be that smart and forward thinking. That’s Doctor Evil sh*t that’s only found in QOVID comic books …
Z
Mark Pontin
Bruce W. : “Northern Ireland has an out — wonder if they will take it.”
Where does NI have an out _to_, even were the pro-Unionist and Loyalist demographic there to magically shrink in the next couple of years to a minority small enough to permit unification?
That’s not going to happen without a rapid die-off, but for argument’s sake let’s assume it does.
Even then, a unification referendum would also have to take account of the wishes of voters south of the border and the ROI doesn’t want the economic burden of NI. At nearly £5,000 per capita annually, Northern Ireland requires the highest deficit spending in the U.K. (followed by a £4,300 per capita fiscal deficit in Wales).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_fiscal_deficit
Furthermore, the so-called Irish miracle in the ROI has a lot to with having the lowest corporate tax rates in the developed world and U.S. companies like Apple maintaining their legal headquarters there. That ride will to some extent be coming to an end, if only because the EU will be coming for what it regards as its fair share of those corporate taxes — something like 3 percent of Republic of Ireland’s GDP, IIRC. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong.) In that scenario, ROI — whatever the sentiment of its voters — won’t find bearing the burden of NI tenable.
Then there would be the question of the currency. NI would have to go into the Euro and the roach motel of the Eurozone with its neoliberal rules against higher that 3 percent deficits and national industrial strategies.
Z
Starmer’s next star move is apparently a blame-the-voters drive to increase Labour turnout.
Z
Z
Listen you little ungrateful limey bastards …
Z
someofparts
I think it was Ricky Gervais who was laughing about someone saying that Scotland is like Canada to Britain, and Gervais said no, Britain is like Mexico to Scotland.
Jason
Biden Scandals continued…
Biden fills immigration court with Trump hires:
The first 17 hires to the court system responsible for determining whether migrants get to remain in the country is filled with former prosecutors and counselors for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as a few picks with little immigration experience.
Almost none have made their career representing migrants in court.
The Thursday announcement from the Department of Justice (DOJ) initially perplexed immigration attorneys, advocates and even some former immigration judges who wondered why the group so closely mirrored the jurists favored by the Trump administration.
“The 17 new immigration judges referenced in the notice all received their conditional offers under the prior administration,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Hill.
Critics said the Biden administration has an obligation to fully vet the judges hired under their watch and rebalance a court system heavily shaped by the Trump team.
It’s also a surprising move for a president that has otherwise sought to quickly reverse a number of Trump immigration policies while calling for a more humane response to migration.
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/552373-biden-fills-immigration-court-with-trump-hires
bruce wilder
Re: NI
The evolution of Irish politics follows many contradictory tracks at once.
The die-off has been underway already for a longtime. Irish nationalist politics is fairly well-integrated cross-border; British Unionist politics conspicuously has not been since roughly 1973. The social basis for the old UUP is gone with the wind. The social basis for the DUP is, weirdly, not the mainstream but rather a tiny Protestant sect.
The money NI costs the UK exchequer is only a minor subtext to the general sense in Britain that NI is much more trouble than it is worth, if it is worth anything at all. The cost of Brexit is about to overwhelm every aspect of British politics as the profound debacle emeges from behind the dust cloud of COVID — the money for subsidizing NI to keep what? will be asked by Tories, too.
And, if NI were not alien enough from England, NI remains in the EU with the Republic.
I think the Republic of Ireland has a good economic game going and that gravy train will not end soon. If it doesn’t, that game is one Belfast can play and win at, very well, so it is not the case that Ireland would have to subsidize NI in the way Britain does to keep it. Business looking south for salvation is not implausible. That could well make the Alliance Party . . . versatile and that might be the ballgame for practical political purposes.
You are certainly correct that the Unionist minority — and it is a minority now — has an element ready to react violently. There have already been Brexit riots. It can be hard to sustain that anger against a tide though, if business and society at large are ok with swimming.
metamars
Good diary on ivermectin use in India at nakedcapitalism: “India Just Became Latest Country to Approve Use of Ivermectin to Treat Covid-19”
I’ve watched about 20 youtube videos related to the 2nd covid wave in India, and there’s been zero discussion of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, or hydrogen peroxide (save 1, that seemed sourced from an anglo country, which was about ivermectin in India, but I didn’t save the link). It’s like the only thing the Indian media can process is the SAME, disgustingly limited context we’ve seen in American media – hand washing, social distancing, masks, vaccines. Oh, and hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work! Except in Fox-world, minus Neil Cavuto.
The most involved discussion I’ve heard is probably “India “Squandered” Early Successes In Controlling Covid: Lancet” on the NDTV channel.
Also, EVEN GIVEN this extremely limited palette of policy options, there’s no serious discussion of cost/benefit analysis (well, I vaguely recall somebody using the phrase “cost/benefit”, but no specific reference.)
This is not unlike the superficial treatment of “climate change” in American media, where, like just about every other issue, “cost/benefit” is not discussed. Well, I’m pretty sure Lomborg has appeared on Fox, so that’s a significant exception. However, I’ve never heard of Lomborg appearing anywhere other than a right leaning venue; nor have I heard of any lefty alternative to Lomborg’s analytical conclusions, who has gone into it as deeply as Lomborg.
different clue
I remember a while ago that our host said that he would at-the-least delete any statement advancing the “cause” of manmade-global-warming-denialism.
I notice that some people ( well . . . one person in particular) has perfected the art of coming within a Zeno’s Paradoxth of denialing the man-madeness of the ongoing global warming we are entering deeper into, without quite triggering Ian Welsh’s ” okay, that’s it” response. I will continue non-engaging with the velcro tarbaby our resident oh-so-exquisitely not-quite-denialist
sets up by the side of the road from time to time. And I will continue failing to chase every particular bright shiny there’s-a-squirrel! object offered to lure us into running on the Gish Gallop Hamster Wheel to Nowhere.
NL
I want to echo Che Pasa…
There is a simple explanation for the so-called job miss — the low-paid workforce is decimated by COVID. 900k (by the latest credibly-looking estimate from the academia) is dead, a multiple of that is suffering from long-COVID and a multiple of the latter is taking care of the long-COVID afflicted family members and/or is terrified seeing how family and friends suffer from the consequences of the disease. The low-paid workforce went into this pandemic being sicker and more susceptible to death and long-COVID than the better paid-technocrats. The low-paid workers could not work from home, like the paper-pusher technocrats. Here and there, news leaked that the CA Tesla factory had these many cases, meat packing factories had huge infection rates, certain employers complained about absenteeism due to disease, but overall where SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted has not been talked about. There are 40-50-60k of new reported cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection every day right now — where do you think most of these people get infected? — Restaurants?, jogging? grocery stores? — how about work.
We are now seeing an effort to manufacture a notional end to the pandemic and push the technocrats into the office. Moderna admitted that the vaccine will wear off in a year or so — that means it would wear off on average in a year or so, many people will lose protection well before that and many will have it longer than that — plus the variants –> packing the technocrats into the office is like serving them an a platter to the virus.
Willy
I blame myself. It was I who offered the idea of debating the “cost/benefit” of climate change, instead of just coming across like a brainwashed cult zombie all the damned time.
Willy
NL snuck in there. I was responding to different clue.
NL
This is something that I have mentioned maybe here but certainly elsewhere, and that falls under the rubric ‘back 500 years to the future’ and ‘the end of a European expansion cycle’. I am seeing it now popping up here and there in hints and whispers.
Naked Capitalism recently posted a link to a paper by Voigtlander and Voth entitled Gifts from Mars: warfare and Europe’s early rise to riches (2013). The article argues that the Europe had been a blood bath and pandemic cesspool where people killed each other and died from disease at prodigious rates, but that was good for the survivors, because the survivors pocketed the property of the dead and became wealthy. The authors also argue that China had neither war nor pandemic and therefore its people where poorer on the per capita basis. I don’t buy the argument of the authors, they don’t understand what agriculture is. Agriculture is land + seed. When famine happens, land is there, but the seed is not. Armies walking all over your fields, burning your crop and eating your seed is not good for you. You will not have anything to plant next year and nothing to eat, although you will have lots of empty land (sort of like what we may end up having now — lots of money in the deposit account, but not much to buy in the store, so then you buy virtual properties). My guess is that the people then were malnourished and therefore more susceptible to disease.
But setting the war is good argument aside, what I note is that Europe could not eradicate pandemic, while China could — doesn’t that sound familiar? It’s as if 500 years and massive advances in technology do not matter. Another question is what does the appearance of SARS-CoV-2 herald in socioeconomic and demographic terms? One author called Mirko Grmek has argued that appearance of new disease marks a socioeconomic change. One hypothesis is that the appearance of SARS-CoV-2 marks the end of an expansion cycle and begging of an involution… back 500 years to the future and primitive accumulation…
different clue
@Willy,
No, Willy, it was not and is not you. It is someone else . . . someone who may well give theyself away by responding.
(Patience . . . patience . . .)
different clue
I remember once reading a different flavor of this ” why so much advance in Europe?” theory.
The flavor I read went like this: that the various war-fighting polities of Europe fought eachother so constantly and so ever-shiftingly every-which-way for centuries that they turned Europe into a series of forced-march technological evolution petri dishes, constantly improving their warfighting and war-supporting technology against eachother to the point where they had transformed their civilization into a bigger deadlier Mongol Menace to the entire world than Genghis Khan had been able to transform his own Mongol Hordes into.
different clue
About all the disgruntled and disatisfied McRent-a-Slaves who are not returning to the McShit McJobs at McShit McWages under McShit Conditions which certain parts of the McSmall McBusiness Sector is demanding they come back to . . .
What if all the do-gooder liberal donations to this and that do-gooder cause were all instead pooled into one great mission . . . . giving enough money to the disgruntled McRent-a-Slaves so they could keep surviving without going back to those McShit McJobs. How long could Liberal Donor America keep giving survival money to the McShit McJobs boycotters? A year? Two years? Five years? Long enough to totally exterminate the McShit McJob sector from existence?
Leaving nothing left except Shinola jobs at Shinola wages? Which the disgruntled workers could then take if they wanted to?
It seems that unfolding events are themselves revealing a fragile pain point in the system.
Time to hit that pain point with a nail-studded baseball bat over and over and over again.
The system has a thousand kneecaps. And the field of economic combat offers a thousand tire irons just lying around for people to pick up and use. There’s a kneecap for every tire iron and a tire iron for every kneecap. Acres of tire irons . . .
different clue
And you know . . . . those places of business which were most heavily infested with No Mask Freedom Typhoid MAGA coronavid germ-spreaders will have the hardest time getting back workers smart enough to not want to be exposed to that any more.
Smarter-than-that young people may even begin diffusing en-stealthy-mass out of the Majority MAGA areas into the Majority Safety-First areas, leaving the broad masses of Trumpistanis to poach in their own poo over the next few years.
NL
@different clue
I am well aware of that version of the war story as well. A most extreme version of this type of story holds that Europe and the world is being tormented by the uber-aggressive genocidal Yamnaya strain of humanity. Yamnaya emerged ~5000 years ago in the North East Europe and quickly exterminated all the indigenous males and interbred with the indigenous females. This of course tamed aggression in their mixed decedents. But new waves of pure Yamnaya kept coming from the North East, displacing men and interbreeding with the female descendants of the previous wave. This had an effect of continuous enrichment for Yamnaya genes in Europe. There is an episode in the ancient history when ‘sea people’ attacked and destroyed the palace societies in Crete, Ionia, and (almost) Egypt. The ‘sea people’ attached like a herd. The Romans fought pure Yamnaya. There is an ancient saying something like ‘any barbarian can kill a Roman in an instant, but 10 Romans can hold off a 100 barbarians and a 1oo Romans will lay waste to a barbarian army’. To me the point of this story was that the barbarians, while physically superior, had no conception of an organization and attacked individually like a herd. They also buried their dead individually in holes in the ground — hence their name from the Russian word yama, which means a hole in the ground. Other people buried their dead in communal graves. Here’s your origin of individual freedom. Yamnaya are also said to appropriate the culture of the defeated people as their own — some of the cultures they have appropriated as their own: the Corded Wire culture, Bell Beaker culture, Roman/ancient Greek culture, Renaissance (the Yamnaya North from the less Yamnaya Latin South). About ~500 years ago, they finally learned how to sale long distance, spread out to the North and South America and Australia, completely displacing the indigenous people there. They attacked the palace societies in China and India and enslaved the tribes of Africa. South West Russia and East Steppe of the present day Ukraine are the heart of the old Yamnaya, so attacks from the West Yamnaya on the original East Yamnaya have generally not worked well.
Google Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA for an article in New Scientist.
metamars
For the ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and hydrogen peroxide deniers amongst us, may I suggest that you live out your fondest desires for social ‘responsibility’* by strongly advocating for legislation forcing AIDS carriers to be celibate for the rest of their lives, and eschewing any drug cocktails, least of all any inexpensive ones as may exist? Since AIDS is spread by bodily fluids, and by now everybody knows that droplets fly out of your mouth when you talk or sing, I suppose we should ban any AIDS carriers from talking or singing, unless they’re triple masked.
It goes without saying that for the REAL control freaks amongst us, any AIDS carriers caught on zoom, without a mask, even in the privacy of their own home, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
We can’t force them to take a vaccine, since there isn’t one; but that’s all the more reason for the government to forcibly tag everybody with an RFID chip, and mandate constant geolocation, monitored via 5G networks, either directly, or with a bluetooth intermediate link with mandatory cellphones. This will allow any easy identification of AIDS spreaders, should anybody sharing the same geolocation for more than 5 minutes with them come down with AIDS.
We probably need to eventually put video cameras in every room, since even 4 minutes might suffice for a viagra-assisted “quicky”.
We can start out with just firing any AIDS carriers who refuse to bend the knee. Hey, let them starve! But prison camps are sort of traditional with both Communists and Nazis, so let’s not anybody hold back.
* or CommieNazi control, if we’re being more direct
Missy
You don’t seem to understand AIDS. People don’t carry AIDS. The label of “having AIDs”* just means their immune system is messed up. HIV is the virus that allegedly causes AIDS, though there has always been dispute around this, HIV has never been properly isolated, and there are any number of underlying causes/comorbidities that exist along with an alleged positive HIV test in order to arrive at a diagnosis of AIDS. HIV in the US never exploded into the larger population the way they said it would and this certainly isn’t because everyone began wearing condoms. It’s always been predominantly prevalent in the intravenous drug community and the gay male community in the US. In Africa, the profile is completely different. Strange virus.
*Being given the label of “having AIDS” is often immunosuppressive in and of itself.
someofparts
My sense of the elections in the UK, from a low-information distance, is that the people who pushed Corbyn aside and offered themselves in his place got a drubbing. In the US the people who pushed Bernie aside and offered themselves in his place won in a squeaker because of covid.
Astrid
In other words, it’s all going according to plan. Anyone still supporting Labour or the Democraric party is either a fool or a plant. The odds might be against any true left third party, but they’re the only shot we have at this point. Though I would not be surprised if we end up with a situation akin to what happens in Russia after failure of the Decembrists.
Jeremy
@Someofparts:
“…the people who pushed Corbyn aside…”#
These are the people who pushed him aside.
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/video-how-israel-helped-bring-down-jeremy-corbyn
And you thought AIPAC was a force to be reckoned with?!
Hugh
Boris Johnson and Labour are just further examples of the political bankruptcy of our times. They are hardly alone. I can think of no political entity that isn’t.
Z
Yeah Jeremy, it’s not much better here in Bibi’s bitch state where he has annexed the State Department by having the top three people in the State Department (Tony Blinken, Wendy Sherman and Victoria Nuland) instilled in what’s turning out to be the worst part of the Biden Administration. No mysteries why that would be when there are three scumbag traitors running U.S. foreign policy that don’t represent the best interests of the citizens of the U.S. but instead all-blessed Israel’s interests.
Don’t forget the Holocaust though, no no no, don’t ever forget that, let’s all keep our focus on an event that happened damn near 80 years ago and probably not even one person is alive who had anything to do with it but that guilt trip is supposed to supersede what the scumbag fascist apartheid state Israel is doing right now to the Palestinians.
Z
666
There was a man in his 90’s living in the US who was a German soldier during WWII and they recently deported him to Germany for sentencing. He’s in his fucking 90’s.
I hope I live to see the day these fuckers get theirs.
666
Here it is:
95-year-old Tennessee man who was Nazi guard gets deported to Germany: Feds
Friedrich Karl Berger was the 70th Nazi to be removed from the U.S.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/95-year-tennessee-man-nazi-guard-deported-germany/story?id=76017746
Trinity
The complaint of the oligarchs that they can’t find employees for their McShit jobs is a perfect example of how the seeds of their destruction lies within their activities. This is Nature at her best, where there are natural limits to growth through balancing feedback loops to counteract the reinforcing feedback loops. We’ve been enduring a reinforcing feedback (in terms of our oligarchs and economic policy) with no balancing feedback loop, like a furnace set to run all the time. The crazy weather is the attempt to rebalance temperatures (and I just read that the Earth’s poles are also moving albeit slightly. This is not good.)
The best example I could come up with relates to resources as food. A warmer-than-usual and rainy spring significantly increases an ant’s food sources, so the ant population explodes. Most years, the population is held in check by more modest resources.
It doesn’t end well, with a large swath of the ant population starving when the cycle doesn’t repeat.
The effects cascade (the populations of animals or insects that eat ants also explode and then starve). Perhaps the number of fast food outlets will be reduced, or meat becomes very expensive because so much of it rots before it can be processed (which also reduces the number of fast food outlets). Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for us unless you happen to live off fast food.
The reason I bring this up is that these are also examples of how to beat the oligarchs. Just requires careful planning to avoid unintended consequences (something they *never* do). It would be nice if we had a functioning government to help sustain the critical populations until the oligarch herd is significantly thinned. And to provide education opportunities so our most needed people can reinvent themselves as craftspeople or smallholders, providing them a living and society to meet a real need (fast food is not a real need, not to mention it is specifically designed to be addictive).
Also has the added benefit of not requiring any violence whatsoever. And the benefit of turning people into producers again, instead of the forced consumerism that benefits only a few. I can only dream, however, because we also lack the ability/knowledge to adequately manage such a system of producers.
This was going to happen anyway, but over a longer time period because they have been ensuring that people don’t have enough money for everything, and many people don’t have enough money for anything at all. They don’t think ahead, except in terms of themselves and their own addictions. I would posit that their destruction sooner is really the only window we have left.
And on a different topic, Biden said very specifically: nothing will change. We need to take him at his word until he proves otherwise, because so far it’s all talk while his actions speak to nothing changing (his choices for immigration specifically). I hope I’m wrong.
different clue
@Trinity,
About survival-education for the non-rich majority masses . . . . all the people reading this blog are already literate enough to pursue survival-enhancement information while it still exists to be found, including on the Internet before it crashes and goes dark for good. Some of the people here may have psychological hangups which will prevent them from applying their own literacy and intelligence skills in the furtherance of their own survival information aquisition.
The ” Hard Times Survival” thread which Ian Welsh has given us is a good place to put good information, links to it, links to sources of it, etc.
Mark Pontin
Astrid wrote: “Anyone still supporting Labour or the Democraric party is either a fool or a plant.”
I just came from reading the GUARDIAN where much wailing and gnashing of teeth was ongoing in the comments section. Mostly the usual sort of thing — “those stupid, bigoted voters voting against their interests.”
I saw one rejoinder that struck me so much that I will reproduce it here.
‘The new Hartlepool (conservative) incumbent MP, Jill Mortimer, has said that a vote for her was a “vote for change.” Think about that for a minute – the party that’s been in power for 11 years, that by its own definition is about *conserving* is…a vote for something different.
‘This really is the core of Labour’s current problem, if you asked, “Does the conservative party represent change?” you’d be quite right to chuckle at the question.
‘But if you change that question to “Who represents change more, the current Tory party or the current Labour party?”
‘Suddenly, the question isn’t nearly as funny and the answer is the same as the question “Who won the 2021 Hartlepool by-election?”‘
Astrid
Mark,
Excellent framing. I am going to try using that framing the next time an otherwise decent and intelligent liberal ( who also smeared Tulsi and Bernie) goes off on Trump voters. I don’t think anything will really overcome their conditioning, however.
Mark Pontin
Astrid wrote: ” I don’t think anything will really overcome their conditioning, however.”
Probably, if the relationship is important to you, you shouldn’t try.
Most people, if you actually start to persuade them that their some of their core beliefs might be wrong, just feel threatened.