tabarnick
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“Can You Locate Iran on a Map? Few Americans Can. (MC)”
Dr. D: absolutely right. Clearly a good number of people just picked absurd points (middle of the ocean, Texas, Greenland) and meant: you can take that geography test and shove it… I would not put much faith in it!
Why share the black hole article at all?
In theory, a black hole can have any sort of mass. We have a model of how stars of a range of given masses can create black holes, but once created they can grow their mass by accretion. Even assuming the measurements are correct, scientists are not baffled, since the very article body shows them having no problem coming up with one obvious explanation.
It’s dumb science click bait. Lose belly fat with this weird trick!
@Dr. D
Methuselah Star.
Have you ever heard of measurement uncertainty? The age of the universe, 13.8 billion years, is within the age estimate for that star, 14.46 ± 0.8 – that star is certainly nowhere near 50% older than the unverse itself.Possible increased risk of serious organised crime? You don’t say! Because under Sadiq Khan and not under no deal brexit, knife crime in London has increased by 52 per cent, burglary by 17 per cent and robbery by 59 per cent. As to homicides, they reached 135 last year – a 24 per cent increase since 2016.
@ John Day
A fire commissioner doesn’t necessarily have any experience in firefighting or education in fire science. It’s a minor elected position and duties are administrative.The actual fire department is diplomatically referring questions back to the Commission:
Due to the recent vote by the Board of Fire Commissioners in regards to their resolution on launching a new 9/11 investigation, the department has received multiple questions and emails on the topic. The opinions of the Franklin Square and Munson Board of Fire Commissioners does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Chiefs, Officers and Members of the Fire DepartmentThe Law of the Sea mandates ships to rescue people in danger at sea, and then bring them to the nearest port. That’s all it says. The idea that anyone, once picked up from a boat anywhere in the world, has a right to just charge into any country they like ignoring all laws and authorities in the process is absurd. Of course Salvini is not breaking the law of the Sea. That is a scoffingly false accusation, and I suspect you know it well, though in matters of immigration, I can’t tell if you write the nonsense you do because you are a fanatic, a demagogue or a liar.
In the case of those African migrants right off the coast of Libya, the nearest port happens to be… in Libya, 10 kms away. Sea Watch is not rescuing shipwrecked mariners in distress. It provides taxi service to the cargo of human traffickers intent on breaking European countries immigration laws. Sea Watch insists on crossing the Mediterranean to Italy, 250 kms away, instead of bringing them to the nearest port, which would be in Lybia – or, if for any reason you dislike Libya, Tunisia is also next door.
@VietnamVet
“They are splitting families apart right now in order to discourage migration”More absurdities. If bank robbers would take their children with them when they go out robbing a bank, they might end up being separated from their kids – the alternative would be to have their kids with them in jail. If you don’t want to be separated from your kid, an easy alternative is to not try to smuggle with them, illegally, into a country where you have no business being and that does not want you there.
Keeping kids with adults, many of them criminals and smugglers, had liberals screaming genocide. Separating them has liberals screaming genocide. Deporting them has liberals screaming genocide. I guess the only alternative left that would placate liberal sensitivities is open borders.
I now wish a state, say California, would secede from the US and declare open borders. And get swamped with the Third World. And in a decade become the Third World.
VietnamVet
“Central American families fleeing oppression and climate change”
There is climate change that they are fleeing. That is utter nonsense.
Central American are not fleeing oppression. They are fleeing their own Central American criminals, their own Central American corruption, their own Central American graft, their own Central American violent culture, their own countries win-lose mentalities, their Central American country’s failure to provide them with a decent life.
I have sympathy for them, but that does not mean the billions of people in the Third World should just move to the western countries. That would just destroy them. No, I believe that they should stay within their own countries, and make them better places, like a growing number of East Asian countries have done in a few decades. Either they will succeed, and they will have made the world a better place. Or they are incapable of fixing their very own country. Which may mean that, maybe, just maybe, allowing migration of millions of people incapable of building a good country is not a good strategy for western countries. Well, which is it?
Yes yes yes. Camps for illegal migrants are concentration camps. Illegal immigrants are put there. And sometimes die in them. Concentration camps, I say. Nursing homes are concentration camps for senior citizens. They are put there. And sometimes they die there. Concentration camps. Prisons are concentration camps for lawbreakers. They are put there. And sometimes they die in them. Concentration camps, I say. Hospitals are concentration camps for the sick. They are put there. And sometimes they die there. Concentration camps. Kindergarden are concentration camps for toddlers. They are put there. And sometimes they die in them. Concentration camps, I say.
Argghh! It’s nonsense.
“the infamous, election-interfering and oft-EPA-convicted Koch brothers have a dominant stake in the toxic crude of the Alberta tar-sands seeking a massive BC-pipeline out to their US refineries”
That is a comically-wrong conspiracy theory. The goal of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is to allow greater Albertan oil export to **Asian** market, and to diversify exports of canadian oil away from american markets.
I am outraged by the way the reports blame race, when in the article, it’s clear the killer is heart problems, striking during pregnancy, or up to a year after birth. It’s not being black that is the problem, it is being obese and poor.
In 2015, African American women were 60 percent more likely to be obese than non-Hispanic white women (56.5% of them were).
The results of the Finnish experiment were that UBI had basically no effect on getting the unemployed to work. And that it cost the state significantly more (42% more).
Frankly, I don’t believe the Steele dossier is Kremlin disinformation. To me it’s just the latest case of the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” intelligence reports. You get people who are desperate to find evidence for something, who are willing to pay any price for any confirmation of what they are so eager to find, who will not be skeptical in the least about what they collect. Then you will find a sordid bag of rumours, lies, fabrications and tall tales.
Austerity leading to teachers having to pay for books? Bollocks! The UK government is spending more than ever. Even in real, per pupil terms it is about at historical highest levels ever.
https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/comms/R126.pdf p.29 fig. 6.1a
Real spending per pupil in the UKPrimary schools, Secondary schools, higher education resources all steadily going up, or at worse leveling off. For instance, real per student spending for primary school was at 2000£ in 1989-90, now well over 4000£.
The reality is not that the government is not spending money. It’s that the education system is a monstrous bureaucracy ever growing in complexity, administration, specials needs, counselors, regulation, tracking etc
https://www.rt.com/news/454328-france-minister-brexit-cat/
“I’ve ended up calling my cat Brexit,” the paper quoted France’s Europe Minister Nathalie Loiseau as writing. “It wakes me up meowing like crazy every morning because it wants to go out, but as soon as I open the door, it just sits there undecided and then looks angry when I put it outside.”I read the global trade madness piece. I find it compelling, and yet I would really want to understand what is going on, deeper. For instance, it says that the US imports 365,000 tons of potatoes and exports 325,000 tons. Which countries are the imports coming from, and which ones going to? Why? This does not seem to make much economic sense, and yet somehow it must. How? The piece does not say. It would explain a lot if the authors actually followed through and dug deeper. But the piece stops at a very superficial: how crazy is that?
Now what really puzzles me is the Automatic Earth stance on the matter. These economic international and really intercontinental arrangements have only been set up recently, as a result of economic trade agreements pursued by entities such as transnational corporations, technocrats and politicians in, say, the European Union. It used to be that TAE would expose, mock and denounce the turbo-capitalist financial economy as an environmental and financial unsustainable disastrous Ponzi scheme, and preach a more resilient and sustainable economy based on something more local and human scale. Fine, but now enters Brexit, which would constitute a modest attempt to disentangle somewhat one country from this very global economic world order and its opaque international obligations. And curiously on this topic, TAE has been predicting apocalypse, peddling a barrage of critical pieces, suggesting that the Brits can expect to collapse into a new Venezuela, huddling poor, hungry and lacking medication under bridges if they intend to actually go through wih their illegal, idiotic plan by knaves, racists, certified cretins and fools to leave the European Union.
I cannot understand the logic here. Has TAE come to love Big Brother?
PS: I find ironic that Local Futures that wrote the Trade Madness piece claims it wants to ‘shift away from dependence on global monopolies, and towards decentralized, regional economies’. Local Futures is at least consistent by calling the EU as dedicated to corporate interests and economic globalization; the EU economy as increasing pollution and CO2 emissions; economic integration as imposing human and ecological monoculture; and the EU as stripping national governments of political power
The post-Brexit train wreck is really something that should make you cry in despair. But in case you’d rather laugh, an all-too-true analogy:
Brexit explained.
Five people, A, B, C, D & E, are in a car, driving past Heathrow on the M4.
A [the driver]: "We're about to leave London, and there's a junction ahead. Where do we go next?"
(1/n)— Kristian Niemietz is an Irish Border Issue denier (@K_Niemietz) March 27, 2019
I used to think that the UK was still a place of grown-ups, responsible, confident and capable, keep calm and carry on. What this farce shows is how low that country has sunk. Their entire political class: timid, incompetent, confused, pusillanimous, faint-hearted, indecisive, quarrelsome, weak-willed, irresolute, in over their heads. A laughingstock of the world. Prisoners of a thousand bureaucracies. “What are we going to do with the Halibut Commission? Oh, goodness gracious, the Halibut Commission! This is just too, too much! I think I’m about to faint!” Their ancestors set up an empire on which the sun never sets, now they go weak at the knee at the very thought of just ruling themselves… Unthinkable! Inconceivable! We will all be dead by week 2! Lord, lord, have mercy on our souls!
Regarding Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
– who exactly said, who had headlines saying that she trails in every group except for a few? I checked all the referenced articles, I saw no such headlines. Who exactly said that old conservative white men are now everybody? Some anonymous random person on the internet?
– I’m not impressed with democrats who wail at how unfair it is that one tv network is biased against them when pretty much the entirety of the US media is biased in their favour
– the fact that she sinks as more people get to know her is difficult to spin positively
– she tenuously leads (falling) among women, but trails badly among men
– she tenuously leads among the youngest (falling), but trails badly among all others age categories
– at 31% favorable, this is much lower than Trump. Would you say that “Americans” view HIM favorably, or that “Americans” view him unfavorably? So, yeah, as most articles accurately pointed out, she is very much a mirror image of Donald Trump (except not viewed as favourably overall)OK, so Montréal home prices have grown more than San Francisco since 2002, but before talking bubbles you’d need to compare actual prices. And Montréal started from a baseline that was way, way lower. It used to be one of the cheapest large cities in North America.
And the city’s economy is doing surprisingly well at the moment. Record low unemployment, and some well paying jobs in tech.
Meanwhile Alberta is having its coldest February in decades
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-cold-spring-forecast-record-wind-chill-temperatures-calgary-1.5032649As the other guy said…
The golden rule of pro (anti) climate policy activists:
Weather is not climate when it’s cold (hot).
Weather is climate when it’s hot (cold).UK And Ireland Retailers Warn Of 40% Tariffs On Food In No-Deal Brexit
Godohgodthehumanity!
Another one of those scaremongering, idiotic anti-tariff anti-Brexit stories.
OK so we have a no-deal Brexit, and tariffs kick in and due to them some food items go, I’ll trust you on that, 40%.
Sure, the costs of tariffs being levied will be transfered to the consumers, and that, ceteris paribus, means price increases for the consumer. The stories then usually turn to moaning about the idiotic poor fools who voted for Brexit and who will now die of hunger. What those stories systematically studiously avoid considering is that those ceteris will certainly not remain paribus. For that to occur, we would have to think that the UK government will be collecting all those tariffs, presumably untold billions of pounds if they are to starve the British public, and then promptly setting them on fire. OF COURSE THEY WILL NOT DO NOTHING WITH THEM. This is increased revenue, available to spend as the UK government wishes: increased welfare payments, unemployment payments etc. But if it is not too dumb, the UK government would be returning this money straight to UK consumers. Sales tax, VAT could be lowered from 20% to 18%, 15%, 10%, whatever is enough to offset tariffs so that their imposition is cost-neutral to consumers.
I won’t even get into how imported goods being suddenly markedly higher might stimulate import replacement. Milk? Cheddar? Whoever heard of Brits ever producing cheddar?
People peddling those stories might sometimes be dumb enough never to think the story through. But I bet most of the times, they know very well it makes no sense. It’s agitprop – for a good cause.
Yeah, in other insignificant trade news today – unreported by the automatic earth: another trade deal signed between the UK and another insignificant Seychelles, called the United States of America.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-and-usa-agree-to-continue-mutual-recognition-agreement
An arrangement which helps boost British trade with the US will continue when the UK leaves the European Union, supporting jobs in both countries.The Mutual Recognition Agreement on Conformity Assessment (MRA) was signed by Her Majesty’s Ambassador Sir Kim Darroch and Deputy United States Trade Representative C.J. Mahoney in Washington today (Thursday 14 February).
The agreement will maintain all relevant aspects of the current EU-US MRA when the EU-US agreement ceases to apply to the UK. It helps facilitate goods trade between the two nations and means UK exporters can continue to ensure goods are compliant with technical regulations before they depart the UK, saving businesses time, money and resources. American exporters to the UK benefit in the same way.
Oh-hum. Yet another Brexit apocalypse prediction. Brexit bemoaners have predicted 5 of the zero post-brexit recessions. One will certainly arrive. One day. As a reminder of failed brexit predictions:
CHAOS was predicted. Most economists believed that a recession was imminent. A government study published in the run-up to the referendum forecast that house prices would fall quickly, by up to a fifth, and that unemployment would rise by over 800,000. But growth in both 2016 and 2017 averaged around 2%, roughly similar to 2015. Furthermore, house prices are steady and unemployment has dropped to a 43-year low of 4.0%
Andrew Cooper (Populus): Remain to win by 10 points
Goldman Sachs: Recession by 2017
HM Treasury: Half a million job losses
JP Morgan: Scotland will leave the UK and get a new currency
Robert Ward (The Economist): UKIP revival, Labour split and end of two party politicsAgree completely that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Trump coming from what we will call the left, getting support from people who no longer expect anything from the status quo, and, as you said well, shake things up that needs shaking up. Like Trump, not everything she says makes a lot of sense but that won’t trouble her fans.
On a lighter side, saw this, found it hilarious and can’t help sharing: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explains stuff
The ‘Chinese were white’ article was almost offendingly idiotic. Asians are not particularly yellow. So what? Whites are not particularly white. You might call them pink. Blacks are not very black.
Oooh, goes the author. This is the hate-mongering of twisted racist ‘white’ minds. No it is not. Chinese, Europeans, Africans are visibly different, physically and instantly recognizable as such. Walk as a European in an Asian or African town or village, and kids (and adults) will stare at you and your weird, strange unusual skin and hair and face. You need a word to describe that body type. You could call it asian. You could call it swyziglik. Usage settled on ‘Yellow’. So what? What freaking difference does it make?
‘Whites’ get called all sorts of names by all sorts of people. ‘Ghosts’, toubabs, palefaces. Jimminy Cricket! There are names in all sorts of languages throughout the world for designating people of a different race? What is the world coming to?
I know very little about most of the Indigenous nations of North America, but in my neck of the woods (Algonquins, Montagnais, Abenakis, Mic-macs) it was basically all stone-age hunter-gatherers. Somewhat to the south-west, the Iroquois Confederacy and the Hurons were semi-nomads, doing slash and burn agriculture for maybe 10 years before depleting the soil and moving away – when they weren’t trying to genocide their neighbours, or being massacred by them..
I would also note that the Iroquois of the Sullivan expedition were no longer the pre-European Iroquois: they had started to use tools and techniques from the Europeans.
One last remark: the Mayan world was an advanced civilization that had a population of millions. That civilization had collapsed on its own centuries before the Europeans ever came.
zerosum,
the only act of war is the invasion of a country by foreigners.
Those guys are not Mexicans, they are Hondurans who are illegally in Mexico, and are trying to break into yet another country.
Firing tear gas at them is no more an act of war than police firing tear gas at rioters, or shooting at gunmen robbing a bank.
Here is a reaction to that german journalist’s “Trump supporter country” piece: https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7?fbclid=IwAR3piKt5bveME82Z7YVdLWbfO_Y28zU-0WGGTxeA-r7UARGa_Yime6eSvlA
Wondering what his Syrian refugee article was like… and what he made up.
Ah, deportations of illegal immigrants on airplanes. The humanity! Remember Elin Ersson, the swedish student, hero of the immigrationists, who prevented an Afghan man from being deported in an airplane? She was praised to heaven for her principled, moral stand.
But that man had been convicted for viciously assaulting women and children. Whipping kids with electric cords. Smashing his wife’s head into the ground. He had also decided that Sweden, a country where a man cannot just beat his wife and kids, was not for him after all. So he decided to go back to Afghanistan. Willingly. He was not being forcefully deported.
This mattered little to the no-border, no-man-is-illegal grandstanding pea-brain activist. Every criminal from every distant land has to be welcome and cuddled in our societies in which they illegally broke. Because Sweden needs every wife-beater, drug-dealer, welfare case and rapist from every third-world country. It’s in its national interest. None can be expelled. There is no moral alternative.
V. Arnold
“Gaia, by definition, is an organism which strives for balance”For a dose of perspective, a little physics.
Approximately 1.1 billion years from now, the Sun will be 10% brighter than it is today. This increase in luminosity will also mean an increase in heat energy, one which the Earth’s atmosphere will absorb. This will trigger a runaway greenhouse effect. Basically Earth will turn into Venus.
In 3.5 billion years, the Sun will be 40% brighter than it is right now, which will cause the oceans to boil, the ice caps to permanently melt, and all water vapor in the atmosphere to be lost to space.
In 5.4 billion years from now, the Sun will enter what is known as the Red Giant phase of its evolution. This will begin once all hydrogen is exhausted in the core and the inert helium ash that has built up there becomes unstable and collapses under its own weight. This will cause the core to heat up and get denser, causing the Sun to grow in size. The expanding Sun will grow large enough to encompass the orbits of Mercury, Venus, and even Earth.
Gaia will be thoroughly roasted and in the end engulfed by the Sun. That is written into stone, in the mass of the Sun and the orbit of Gaia, known to most of us as planet Earth. Good luck with your balance, Gaia.
Regarding bananas…
Sure surveillance technology is becoming ubiquitous in China. But… how is it different from anywhere in the western world?
Thanks, Dr. D.
Next time I read someone dropping accusations of wanting the death of a million brown people just because you don’t think open borders are a great idea, I think I’ll blow a gasket.
Catching up with my TAE backlog, I have to respond to your vanishing migrant link of https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2018/11/debt-rattle-november-2-2018/ to https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-01/thousands-europe-bound-migrants-have-simply-vanished-ap
“A growing number of migrants have drowned, died in deserts or fallen prey to traffickers”
The word you’re looking for is not ‘growing’, it’s ‘dwindling’. The number of migrant deaths on the Mediterranean went down from 5096 in 2016 to 3139 in 2017, and 2018 is on a pace to fall to 2400. This is due to policies (denounced by migrant defense NGO) in Libya, Italy, Turkey, Hungary by monsters such as Salvini or Orban to stem the flow of migrants. Fewer migrants crossed, fewer died, the difficult conditions in centers for migrants could at least stop deteriorating.“Is that double morals or no morals at all?”
Policies resulting in fewer deaths look like morals to me.““many of those who go missing are uncounted, including boatfuls [sic] of young Tunisians or Algerians”
Yeah, in spite of an improvement in the last couple of years, there is a warning sign flashing yellow. Spain got itself a new cuddly, left-wing, humanitarian government welcoming refugees. As you could expect, the number of migrants responding to the call has been exploding (and the number of drowned migrants with it). In February 3844 migrants arrived in Spain, 7893 in April, 13188 in June, 15416 in October. We can expect the improvements in all categories to revert, and more “young Tunisians or Algerians” to vanish. Because indeed Algeria and Tunisia are among the countries that most migrants come from, along with the neighbouring country of Morocco, and Guinea, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire. All countries admitedly poor, but not oppressing their population.Dr. D
I am with you on this. It used to be that a dollar in debt would get you 4$ in GDP growth. There were plenty of productive uses for debt back in the days. Then through the years this dollar in debt bought you 3$, then two, then one, and now there it gets you even less than that.
Our economies are in worse shape than they appear. After years of supposed growth, pretty much all countries are still deep in deficits, and everyone only speaks of how the economy needs ever more stimulus just not to collapse.
OK I don’t know why I feel I have to defend pollsters, yet they were not off by much regarding Hillary-Trump 2016. They had given Hillary a slight edge, and that was what actually happened. But being off by maybe 1%, and with the distribution of votes in the odd american electoral system, Trump ended up in the White House. That fairly minor error seems light to go charging with “so wrong in 2016 they would have changed jobs” or “entire polling industry look like useless fools”
I’ll be frank and say I actually hope republicans hang on to as many seats as they can. This is the only way we can lay to rest the Russiagate hysteria and neverending threats of impeachment. I wish the Democrats would focus on Trump’s foreign policy team of certified neocon loons, Bolton, Haley, Pompeo threatening, blustering, antagonizing pretty much everyone on planet Earth.
Photoshopped camera images: hmmm.
Here is a third explanation. The images come from two different cameras, as the angle is clearly not the same in both images (they might even be not of the same corridor). And their clocks are not perfectly in synch, which is not an esoterical possibility.
So on one hand we have a completely mundane explanation. On the other, we have secret services who decide to photoshop or create cctv images of travellers who certainly have come to England on a flight, so that they would doctor an impossible time for their arrival, in order to… what exactly? Unless the Russians come in a secret russian submarine landing and british intelligence had to cover that up because…???
Definitely Ockham’s razor for me.
This says nothing about the involvement of the two men in the Skripal murder.
In other Lesbos migrant news today:
Greek police announced it has dismantled a criminal human trafficking network involving 30 people, members of a NGO on the island of Lesbos, a key gateway for migrants to Greece. That NGO would be ERCI (Emergency Response Centre International). 3 of the suspects have been arrested. In all, 30 people would be involved, 6 Greeks and 24 foreigners.
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/greek-activists-held-illegally-aiding-migrants-130012215.html
