...In the household of North America, one inhabitant has taken the momentous decision to empower a lie-based political movement led by a career fraudster — long after his authoritarian ambitions and violent means were laid bare. Whether this act of political suicide evolves as a murder-suicide is of more than passing interest to the US’s northern domestic partner.The consequences of US failure cannot be contained within US borders. As a direct result, African children who were alive on Jan. 19 are dead today. Summary executions, without even a pretense of law, have become US policy in the Caribbean Sea. Putin continues slaughtering Ukrainians while cashing dividends from a shrewd political investment. China is better-positioned for power.Canada’s precarious state is not the direst consequence of US political degradation. But it’s an all-but-impossible one to rectify. Joined at the hip to the US, Canada can only hope that Trump doesn’t continue to hold its trade hostage, or spill authoritarian values and violence over the border...
There's a lot of talk these days, some might call it hype for the merch machine, twenty years down the road, about re-investigating the good Docktor's demise.
Personally, I'm not sure there's much there, there.
Then again, as reader Lew E and I discussed on the thread to last week's post, and as HST himself once wrote....
...History is hard to know because of all the hired bullsh*t...
Fear and Loathing, The First Part, 1971
Not to mention the hangers on and the ten percenters.
Sod the streets at once!
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George Orwell’s 1984 warned of a future where Big Brother watches every move. Today, modern technology is making that vision a reality, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison—the world’s second-richest person—sees a growing opportunity for his company to help authorities analyze real-time data from millions of surveillance cameras.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Ellison said in an hour-long Q&A during Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting last week...
...This isn't like the early days of the web, or Amazon, or any of those other big winners that lost money before becoming profitable. Those were all propositions with excellent "unit economics" – they got cheaper with every successive technological generation, and the more customers they added, the more profitable they became. AI companies have – in the memorable phraseology of Ed Zitron – "dogshit unit-economics." Each generation of AI has been vastly more expensive than the previous one, and each new AI customer makes the AI companies lose more money...
"...Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning..."
...The charges (against the former FBI Director) were filed in the eastern district of Virginia only after Erik Siebert was forced out as US attorney (by Donald Trump) for reportedly finding no grounds to indict (James) Comey...
{snip}
...Trump has spent the hours since Comey’s indictment was announced insulting him on Truth Social, calling him “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to” Thursday night and “A DIRTY COP” Friday morning...
Christopher Guest on Maron - it turns out that there really is a method in his mad(cap)ness.
Jonathan Goldstein and Heavyweight are back! - The first episode is a touching one about JG's longtime nemesis Gregor's Mom.
The MoCo's Frontburner, which is more often miss than hit for me, had an excellent recent episode on the incredible life and times, including how he's dealing with the coming end of his life with dementia, of Robert Munsch.
It was the stuff of Bond villains. Two ageing autocrats, their younger ally in tow, ambled down a red-carpeted ramp before a military parade in Beijing when a hot mic picked up a question that seemed to be on their minds: how long could they keep going – and, between the lines, might science allow them to rule for ever?
With advances in technology, Russia’s Vladimir Putin assured Xi Jinping via his translator that “human organs can be constantly transplanted, to the extent that people can get younger, perhaps even immortal”.
The Chinese leader replied: “By the end of this century, people may live to 150 years old.”
Nearby, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un – three decades younger than the two 72-year-olds – appeared to take note with a smile....
Came back across the Salish Sea this afternoon...
To the best of my knowledge the Wacky One was not at the helm of the fine Spirit Class boat we rode in on.
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Postal services across Europe have suspended most parcel shipments to the US, citing widespread uncertainty about the impact of new import tariffs announced by Donald Trump.
{snip}
...PostEurop, an association of 51 European public postal operators, said that if no practical solutions could be found before 29 August, it was likely that all its members would suspend the bulk of parcel shipments to the US...
...Out in BC, the Greens are having a leadership contest - a topic, admittedly, that wouldn’t usually warrant a column. But, with David Eby having the slimmest of majorities and neither of the Greens MLAs running for the job, it’s an opening for Eby, if he wants to follow in John Horgan’s footsteps and ratfuck the next Green leader. In 2020, Horgan called the election for the same week the Greens elected Sonia Furstenau leader, depriving her of any time to bed in before the election. If Horgan’s act is repeated, a fall election would be on the cards - especially given Eby waited last time, and nearly lost for it, he’d be smart to go early...
...(M)ost of all, (the) fact that the Greens could be about to elect a genuine f*cking lunatic also makes the case pretty well for an early election.Emily Lowan is, to be quite blunt, the worst serious candidate to lead a party with actual elected officials in my lifetime. She is a dream to the NDP, because if the Greens are stupid enough to pick her as leader she will lead the party off the cliff......Her platform is best described as a fever dream for the worst of the Left - people who plainly have not realized that this isn’t 2018 anymore and that the issue set has changed...
The west faced no reckoning for the death and destruction it wreaked in Iraq. That made the war crimes we’re now witnessing (in Gaza) inevitable...
...A war of aggression, deemed illegal at the time by the then UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, plunged Iraq into murderous chaos. At a conservative count, 300,000 Iraqis suffered violent deaths, according to the painstaking research of Iraq Body Count, about two-thirds of whom were civilians...
{snip}
...(T)he Iraq war proved that Arab life is cheap indeed. Only a reckoning could have given it value...
In the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, nearly an hour from the closest city, a small group of homesteaders is building an exclusive community from scratch.
Applicants to the community are screened with an in-person interview, a criminal-background check, a questionnaire about ancestral heritage and sometimes even photographs of their relatives.
The community’s two architects — a classically trained French horn player who has livestreamed his own sex videos, and a former jazz pianist arrested but not charged for attempted murder in Ecuador — say they must personally confirm that applicants are white before they can be welcomed in...
...Housing rights experts say a community restricted to white residents is illegal, but the creators believe they could win a potential challenge in court in the current political climate...
