Open Thread - 23 July 2017

pl

Comments

[Hood Canal Gardner]

Perhaps someone will post/comment why Stockman's 22 July piece re Brennan, Rice, Powers .. is it too "hot" for the likes of Unz & Truthout? Just old news i guess.

[Lord Curzon]

The first Queen Elizabeth class carrier is currently undergoing sea trials.

For a detailed understanding of British maritime and naval strategy and the reason why cats and traps were not implemented:

https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/44864805/2014_Bosbotinis_James_0113376_ethesis.pdf

[Alaric]

Is it true Mueller is now investigating Jill Stein as part of Dems lost it gate (I mean russiagate)? If so, this is truly disgusting and an act of absolute desperation, really icky pathetic

[Babak Makkinejad]

TTG:

You might like reading this and the book to which it refers - a Junk version of Kon Tiki:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7663/full/547278a.html

[FourthAndLong]

Colonel:

Appears the Dems have not been entirely comatose koolaid drinkers after all. They are rolling out their new economic plan on Monday. "A Better Real," is being leaked:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/politics/trump-had-the-art-of-the-deal-now-democrats-say-their-economic-agenda-is-a-better-deal/2017/07/22/c1f54b8c-6d56-11e7-9c15-177740635e83_story.html

Features Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) lambasting noe other than Hilary Clinton:

“When you lose to somebody who has 40 percent popularity, you don’t blame other things — Comey, Russia — you blame yourself,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in an interview previewing the new plan. “So what did we do wrong? People didn’t know what we stood for, just that we were against Trump. And still believe that.”

Will wonders never cease ?

On another point entirely, here is a fascinating discussion of the Dunkirk episode:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-mystery-left-out-of-christopher-nolans-dunkirk-why-didnt-hitler-go-in-for-the-kill

Yes, it's in the interest of promoting the soon to released eponymous British blockbuster "Dunkirk." But it contains details which up to now have eluded a WW II history junkie such as myself. Never quite appreciated how von Runstedt inserted himself between Rommel and AH, if the info within is to be believed. I suspect some members of the SST community may enjoy a look-see.

[Babak Makkinejad]

All:

The following article from Nature, states that humans settled in Australia at least 65,000 years ago.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7663/full/nature22968.html

I think it clear that the Aborigines in Australia had achieved and maintained some of the mist cherished notions of the Enlightenment Tradition and its offshoots:

No paternalistic supreme deity,
personal liberty to do very much as they pleased,
no state (the Withering away of the State),
equality (of poverty, one must say)
living in harmony with nature,
sustainable development (in part through infanticide)

Of course, they still had miles to go to achieve full sexual equality/anarchy - just gave them another 65,000 years to approximate and realize, finally, the vision of such eminent intellects as Rousseau.

[Babak Makkinejad]

All:

CRISPR–Cas encoding of a digital movie into the genomes of a population of living bacteria

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7663/full/nature23017.html

I wonder if the Creator has embedded audio-visual-tactile messages in Human DNA.

[Chris Chuba]

I asked this question on Daniel Larison's American Conservative and will ask it here (and include his short response)

Does anyone have a recommendation of where to donate to assist the Yemenis?

I found three different organizations that target projects in Yemen.

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/yemen-war-time-cholera
My dad had a particular fondness for the Red Cross as a POW in WW2 he received food parcels and this is targeting the cholera epidemic

http://irusa.org/yemen/?gclid=CjwKCAjw16HLBRBFEiwAElREqDHrBEZ9JMPrTgE7Do_WCdqyAFmxBeooyV7d3KxiS2yzLMhTWWgW6hoCiVYQAvD_BwE
http://whm2q99smo2ozzei318jpo8e.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/YemenDR_May2017_Web2.pdf
This is an Islamic organization which doesn’t bother me if they are effective. Scanning the pdf document, they have projects in Location: Ta’iz, Saa’da (Sanaa) and Aden which would definitely include the Houthi areas.

https://www.unicefusa.org/donate/protect-children-conflict/32476?utm_campaign=2017_misc
This is the U.N.

Daniel Larison's Response:

"ICRC and UNICEF are good options. I don’t know much about the other group, but they may be worth supporting. Personally, I have donated to Oxfam, Mercy Corps, and MSF (Doctors Without Borders)."

If anyone here has their own recommendation I'd like to here them.

[Fred]

A musical interlude to use as background to your browsing.
Carlos Paredes - "Coimbra e o Mondego":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd2DXER9tCg

[The Twisted Genius]

Babak,

Thanks for that. I just may have to look for that book. In a much smaller way, this reminded me of the kayaks a friend of mine and I made out of scrounged pieces of wood, some canvas and leftover house paint. At the time we worked in a Swiss Precision Screw Machine shop... my time with the proletariat. In the spirit of sharing, here's an article that appeared in today's paper issue of the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star. This is a magnificent spot only twenty minutes from my house.

http://www.fredericksburg.com/news/local/columns/paul-sullivan-crow-s-nest-is-a-preservation-success-story/article_495261d1-586d-5fd6-a856-c13b8a815501.html

[steve g]

HCG
Read it at Lew Rockwell today. His posts at
Contra Corner are now behind a paywall I
believe.

[Thirdeye]

They were the first known mariners.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Thanks.

[Thirdeye]

Another blow against the chivalrous-stop-at-Dunkirk myth. I think it was on the British show Battlefield that someone described interoffice politics between the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe having a role in the stop. Goering convinced Hitler that the Luftwaffe could reduce the beachhead and Hitler, who was worried about attacks on the flank of the Wehrmacht driving through France, ordered Von Rundstedt to not fully commit at Dunkirk.

[Eric Newhill]

Sen. Al Franken said today that he trusts the Russian ambassador more than he trusts Sessions or Trump. So Franken - and by extension, the Democrats - are colluding with Russia to upset our elected government.

WOW! Franken is colluding with Russia to bust the Trump admin for colluding with Russia. You couldn't make this stuff up. It's too bizarre.

Investigation of Franken should begin immediately!

[Haralambos]

Thanks, Fred,
Tenho saudades. I lived and taught at the university from 1986-1998. He was a master. I will send you back one: the song that launched the Socialist (Carnation) Revolution against the Junta. The signal for the start was the playing on the radio of a song by Zeca Afonso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeca_Afonso
Here is the song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeca_Afonso

The revolution was triggered by professional soldiers after many years of colonial warfare to preserve their colonies. One of my colleagues pointed out that the colonial wars required the equivalent percentage of Portuguese fighting as British soldiers under arms and fighting in WWII.

I always think of minefields and an initial question I had when I arrived in Portugal.

I recall being struck by the number of young men with missing limbs when I arrived in Coimbra. When I contemplated the colonial wars, I understood that they were often veterans of the wars and land mines.

These thoughts recur as I often recall this when I work on projects editing academic papers for a forensic pathologist on the border of Greece and Turkey. Many of her reports detail causes of death for illegals crossing the river into Greece and traversing as minefields minefields.

My apologies for getting so personal.

[Allen Thomson]

Or a lower-case-c creator:

http://nautil.us/blog/-if-you-were-a-secret-message-where-in-the-human-genome-would-you-hide

[mike]

TTG -

That is Powhatan & Pocahontas country. I took the kids there a hundred years ago when at Quantico. We looked for arrowpoints but were skunked.

[mike]

Chris -

I've now heard the figure of 6 million cholera vics in Yemen soon.

Both UNICEF and the Red Cross work with or through the Yemen Red Crescent Society. So my opinion is that with either of those you would be good. UNICEF is of course primarily for children, and much of the cholera is also taking a toll on seniors. So the red cross may be a better choice.

Although my dad never had much good to say about the red cross during WW2. Said he had heard about the donut dollies but never saw any in North Africa and Italy.

[Keith Harbaugh]

A recurring issue and question at this blog and elsewhere is:
“How does U.S. intervention in Russian politics compare to
Russian intervention in U.S. politics?”
The general consensus at SST seems to be that the U.S. has interfered as much or more in Russian politics as vice versa.
The opposite POV is expressed in this WaPo op-ed:

“Did the United States interfere in Russian elections?”
by Tom Malinkowki, 2017-07-23
(Tom Malinowski served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor from 2014 to 2017.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/07/21/did-the-united-states-interfere-in-russian-elections/

Among other points, Malinkowski makes the following comparison:

The U.S. government never hacked into Russian leaders’ emails and released them selectively to favor one side in their elections, or flooded Russian social media with fake stories to discredit their ruling party. What it did do, until the U.S. Agency for International Development was expelled from Russia in 2012, was to help fund some of the country’s leading nongovernmental organizations. These included the human rights group Memorial, the Committee Against Torture and, most important, given the drama to come, a group called Golos, Russia’s main nongovernment organization for election fraud monitoring. This effort was non-partisan and it aimed to strengthen democracy for everyone in Russia, not to steer the outcome.

If the Russian government were to offer grants in the United States to NGOs that promote voting rights for minority citizens, or that fight corruption in our politics, that would be the equivalent of what the United States did in Russia, and we would have no cause to complain. Indeed, to this day, we let the Kremlin fund a Russian cultural center in Washington (though it closed the U.S. cultural center in Moscow) and allow its Sputnik propaganda outlet to broadcast on FM radio in America (though it has denied Voice of America a license to broadcast locally in Russia). We don’t stop Russia or any other country from trying to influence public debate in the United States on any issue.

[Cortes]

A very readable account of plastic in the oceans is

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Duck

[Cortes]

On living in harmony with nature, if memory serves the following linked book argues that evidence exists that people chose to employ technology which they had already superseded, maybe for ecological reasons:

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Civilizations-Stone-Age/dp/0684862700

[Cortes]

The "At Our Own Peril" report referred to in the linked article by Wayne Madsen seems (to this untutored eye) to suggest that a more measured approach to geopolitics is contemplated by "movers and shakers" within the Beltway:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/07/23/the-end-new-american-century-pronounced-pentagon.html

[LG]

the international committee for the Red Cross or icrc and the Yemeni red crescent are two quite different entities. national red cross/crescent societies are locally registered, fairly independent NGOs and often receive support from their ministries of health and civil defence. they are merely affiliated to the icrc and not administered by them in any way.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Excellent thanks
Sir Fred Hoyle would have enjoyed this
Another place to look would have been in the mithocondrial DNA
The purported message could be a musical piece, rather than a picture
Or it could be encoded in the electric field of DNA