Your therapist wants you to go outside ScienceBlog (Dr. Kevin)
Critical Public Health Threat: Deadly Fungus Discovered in Commercial Soil, Compost, and Flower Bulbs ScienceTech (ma)
US probes nearly 70 suspected human cases of H5N1 bird flu Telegraph
Danish insect farm sets sights on feeding Europe’s livestock PhysOrg
Heparin: A Common Blood Thinner Emerges as Potential Cobra Bite Antidote ScienceBlog. If you are in cobra territory, Dr. Kevin recommends carrying a dose on you and practicing administering a sterile saline shot into your calf, for example, so you don’t muff it in a real emergency. He recommends using BD-II 1ml insulin syringes with 12 or 13 mm needles (a bag of ten might cost ~$10). We do have cobras here but only in the country, and yours truly does not do nature/wilderness hikes, so I am not at risk. The only victims of cobras I know of here are….furzy’s dogs! A friend of hers quipped she has an Arlington (cemetery) in her back yard.
#COVID-19
With many people getting COVID from the summer surge, a reminder that the CDC’s isolation guidelines are inadequate.
It’s best to isolate until you test negative on multiple tests. If you can’t stay home the whole time, wear an N95 mask to stop the virus spreading to others. pic.twitter.com/0cFRgmb59Q
— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) July 18, 2024
Climate/Environment
Breaking News!
Code UFB!!!As of July 16, 2024, global sea-ice extent hit a new record low for the date, beating the record low set just last year. pic.twitter.com/pRGJTmBDBm
— Prof. Eliot Jacobson (@EliotJacobson) July 17, 2024
Deadly floods engulf parts of South Asia as extreme weather devastates vulnerable region CNN
China places 15 provinces on emergency alert as deadly floods make their way north South China Morning Post
How effective are buried power lines in preventing widespread power outages in cases like Beryl? ABC 13 (Kevin W)
European Disunion
European leaders discuss migration and Ukraine at a UK summit as concern grows about direction of US Associated Press (Kevin W)
Germany found a way to get rid of Ukrainians Vzglyad via machine translation (guurst)
How France’s “allies” are turning the country down Anti-Spiegel via machine translation (Micael T). Important.
A Trump-Vance White House could undermine European security – and end up pushing Russia and China closer The Conversation. Kevin W:
Key sentence – ‘Putin’s Russia has proven to be an untrustworthy negotiation partner before, as the collapse of the 2014 and 2015 Minsk ceasefire agreements clearly demonstrates.’ WTF
Old Blighty
No more ‘basket-case Britain’: Europe welcomes Starmer reset in UK-EU ties Guardian (Kevin W)
The Caucuses
❗️US Army advisor to be attached to the Ministry of Defence of Armenia.
— Tigran Khzmalyan (Տիգրան Խզմալյան) (@TigranKhzmalyan) July 18, 2024
Gaza
A video shows Israeli army forces releasing a number of Palestinian civilians whom they had detained and tortured in detention centers. The video reveals how the Israeli army forced the prisoners to run barefoot under the threat of gunfire. #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/u4sXraG2Cb
— Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده (@RamAbdu) July 18, 2024
We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable. Politico (Tom H)
UN court orders Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories Guardian (Dr. Kevin). But this is only a non-binding, advisory opinion.
Overwhelming ICJ Ruling against Israel Highlights Need for UN Action Sam Husseini
Jordan behind attempted sabotage of China-hosted Palestinian talks: Report The Cradle (Chuck L)
Bedwetting, nightmares and shaking. War in Gaza takes a mental health toll, especially on children Associated Press (ma)
Far-right Israeli minister Ben-Gvir makes inflammatory Al-Aqsa visit Al Jazeera (Kevin W)
U.S. Launches Effort to Stop Russia From Arming Houthis With Antiship Missiles Wall Street Journal (Robin K). This is almost funny. Headline plus lead photo of exploding tanker suggests Russia is doing this not. But para 5 states, emphasis mine: “The combination of intelligence that Moscow might be planning to provide military support in Yemen…” Ahem, the US needs intelligence to figure out Russia might assist the Houthis? After US supplied and targeted weapons killed people on a beach in Crimea, Putin warned that Russia was prepared to hit US assets out of theater, basically saying Russia now regarded it as on to back US-opposed active operations in other parts of the world. This humble blog even said the US if it had any sense would see the Houthis and Hezbollah at the top of the list.
New Not-So-Cold War
Russia may deploy nuclear missiles in response to US missile deployment in Germany — MFA TASS (guurst)
SITREP 7/19/24: West Searches for New Deflection in Russian “Barrel Crisis” Simplicius
Russia Sentences Evan Gershkovich to 16 Years in Prison on Spying Charges Moscow Times
Syraqistan
Will European Powers Return to Afghanistan and Recognize the Taliban? Sputnik (Robin K)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap TechCrunch (BC)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Mark Sleboda: Putin and China Just Put U.S. Military on HIGH ALERT and War is Coming to Eurasia Danny Haiphong, YouTube. Note the remark at 23:10, of a new Pentagon announcement stating it is planning for decades of conflict. So elected leaders have no say?
Biden
The Memo: Biden on the brink The Hill
🔴 Joe Biden said he is ‘looking forward’ to getting back on the campaign trail as he defies pressure to quit his run for re-election
Follow the latest 👇https://t.co/L9mbDQ5lte pic.twitter.com/aFqK9ndlkv
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) July 19, 2024
Biden’s family starts discussing his possible exit plan from the 2024 race NBC.
Good news: Joe Biden has only minor COVID symptoms: a headache, a loss of smell, and an inability to see the writing on the wall. pic.twitter.com/FnI5LlmaIb
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) July 20, 2024
Trump
Trump didn’t say he wouldn’t defend Taiwan Asia Times
Trump Assassination Attempt Post Mortem
ANOTHER PROFESSIONAL UPDATE ON THE FAILED TRUMP ASSASSINATION — WAS IT A SANCTIONED PLOT? Larry Johnson
Police didn’t have ‘manpower’ to watch building Trump rally shooter fired from Washington Post (furzy). Note Lambert posted a tweet yesterday, which was originally a Facebook post, supposedly by a Butler police official who said it was bogus that the police underperformed. They were asked to provide only 7 men for traffic detail
Vance
How Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley funded the sudden rise of JD Vance Financial Times (Kevin W)
J.D Vance on Tech and the Internet Reclaim the Net (Micael T)
Why Trump picking Vance as VP is about US foreign policy Responsible Statecraft
Not ONE of my Republican colleagues has supported my efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15/hr.
And about 90% of them want to cut Social Security.
Anybody who is under the illusion that the Republicans care two wits for the working class is terribly wrong. pic.twitter.com/GsTZLUYSeg
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 19, 2024
Abortion
Storm Lake has a complicated history with abortion Art Cullen (Chuck L)
Our No Longer Free Press
Facebook and Instagram’s algorithmic favoritism towards extremist parties revealed in new study PsyPost (Paul R)
Meta’s Policy on Zionism Exposed: CyberWell Scrambles After Israel Ties Revealed Mint Press News (Chuck L)
Antitrust
Antitrust as Allocator of Coordination Rights UCLA Law Review
AI
Academic authors ‘shocked’ after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI The Bookseller (Paul R)
Croudstrike 404
Companies around the world hit by Microsoft outage Financial Times. Lead story.
CrowdStrike and Microsoft: all the latest news on the global IT outage The Verge
CrowdStrike has performed the largest ransomware attack in history.
Accidentally.
— vx-underground (@vxunderground) July 19, 2024
Crowdstrike Analysis:
It was a NULL pointer from the memory unsafe C++ language.
Since I am a professional C++ programmer, let me decode this stack trace dump for you. pic.twitter.com/uUkXB2A8rm
— Zach Vorhies / Google Whistleblower (@Perpetualmaniac) July 19, 2024
We are in the midst of one of the biggest meltdowns in tech history. The crowdstrike situation is already showing the institutional failure that happens when your incentives are growth at all costs with no regard for organisational memory and stability https://t.co/xUIi6E82ll
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) July 19, 2024
For those who don’t remember, in 2010, McAfee had a colossal glitch with Windows XP that took down a good part of the internet. The man who was McAfee’s CTO at that time is now the CEO of Crowdstrike. The McAfee incident cost the company so much they ended up selling to Intel. pic.twitter.com/DgWid6MSK0
— Anshel Sag (@anshelsag) July 19, 2024
Russia Unaffected as Mass IT Outage Hits Companies Worldwide Sputnik (Robin K)
Class Warfare
Even a PhD isn’t enough to erase the effects of class Financial Times
Antidote du jour. Tracie H:
My husband pointed out this tiny kitten stumbling blindly about on our back patio. There are stray cats back there, and we’d not been aware of this one’s birth. I saw no parent, so picked it up and it’s little eyes appeared too crusted over to open, if it was even old enough to open them. A greenish fluid was leaking from them that had me concerned that it wasn’t normal, so off to the vet we went. The vet gave guessed its age at about 2 weeks, due to the presence of a tooth or two, placed a little drop of flea treatment (the fleas were almost bigger than the kitty, dubbed, “Indie” for Independence Day (it was that weekend), and equally appropriate, for an Indiana Jones adventurous-type spirit. He also provided us with some infection medication, and the sweet receptionist who was currently bottle feeding puppies had some advice along those lines.
When we got back home though, we discovered its mom had come out of hiding (an extremely shy feral kitty we are familiar with but hadn’t noticed her being in the family way) and was frantically pacing around calling out regularly. So, hoping the kitty’s eyes would be alright without the medication, since we hadn’t started it yet, and feeling that the Mom could care for Indie much better than we could, we set little Indie in his new basket here (sorry for the unattractive cardboard tag that we’d not taken time to remove!) and placed him back on the patio. It’s mom, Zsa-Zsa for her beautiful long fancy fur, was reluctant to come forward for him while we watched, so we left. When I later went to retrieve the basket I was greeted by a horrendous odor of quite pungent urine. Interesting. I’d been concerned for her with that flea medication. I’m guessing she washed it off with the only fluid available to her.
And a bonus (Chuck L):
One of the most fascinating processes in nature.pic.twitter.com/ixMuClswbf
— Figen (@TheFigen_) July 19, 2024
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
