Author: condor

In General, I Try To Keep My Tangential Stuff Light, Here… But Banksy’s Work Is… Profoundly Important — And Should Not Have Been Removed.

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A tangent… courtesy of Billy (great find!):

Yeh — he has acknowledged that he chose Valentine’s 2023 on purpose, to debut the work above and at right, to bring attention to domestic violence.

And yes — it is hard to look at, after all the idealized imagery of. . . just yesterday. But (in my view) it is wrong that authorities have already removed it from the ex-urb of London called Margate. Trying to keep their city… “tidy” is exactly what Banksy’s latest speaks out against, and eloquently… if arrestingly so. Here’s a bit from NPR:

…At first glance, she could be a prototypical 1950s housewife, wearing an apron over a smart gingham dress, complete with yellow cleaning gloves. But this is a Banksy artwork on the side of a building we’re talking about, and the woman is pushing a freezer door closed — and a man’s legs are jutting out the other end.

The woman is also hurt. She appears to be missing a tooth, and an eye is swollen shut. And that’s where the title comes in: “Valentine’s Day mascara,” according to a post to Banksy’s Instagram account on Tuesday….

The local Thanet District Council said that while the graffiti art is a genuine Banksy, and it was on the wall of a privately owned property, the chest freezer “has been removed by council operatives on the grounds of safety as it was on public land.”

The council added, “The fridge freezer is now in storage and will be returned once it has been made safe to the public. We will be contacting the owner of the property to discuss the options to preserve the artwork for the district….”

Yes — it is dark. And for far too many women… it is a reality they have faced — perhaps not with the same vigilante’s conclusion. . . but it needs to be seen… and discussed. Now I will hush.

नमस्ते

Of Course Hinderaker Doesn’t Like Nikki Haley…

~ condor ~ 1 Comment

Look.

I don’t care, but she may be the last hope the GOP has of winning over suburban college educated women voters — ones who (by a 36% desertion margin) simply left the GOP high and dry in the 2022 midterms, post Roe being overturned at the Supremes.

Not that Haley would ever openly support abortion rights, but she knows how to dog whistle it — for educated (primarily whyte) women who’d like to vote GOP, but are repulsed by both Tangerine and DeSantis (a pair of crooks, still out “criming”).

Nah — I don’t care, because whether it’s Kamala Harris, or Gavin Newsom — Haley loses in 2024. [She would only be a contender against Mr. Biden — by offering the generational shift as an option.]

But as I say — this largely 19th Century version of the GOP will never nominate her.

As proof?

Hinderaker (speaking wholly unconsciously, but as the echo-chamber of the standard old whyte guys of GOP then, now and… always!) demeans her abilities — by saying it would be “fun” to have the first woman President be “non-whyte”. Gee — it is almost like he’d only vote for her if the GOP regulars agree… she’s a fun… joke.

Nothing more. Just a… punchline, to create (they imagine, wrongly)… liberal tears.

What a malevolent, bitter old man he is.

Out.

Funny. Hinderaker Didn’t Give A Crap About Four Years Of Ballooning Debt, Under Tangerine…

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It is hard to take any of these guys seriously. Truly.

Not one of them said “boo” — not even… once, about Trump’s growing and gargantuan national debt figures… over four long years.

But as ever now that a Democrat is at 1600 Penn. (as he complained for eight years about Mr. Obama — who was helping the nation out of a financial meltdown caused by Bush43 / Cheney inattention to details on the regulatory side)… of course the debt is a barn-burning emergency.

Hilarious. Mr. Biden is unwinding disastrous cuts in health care and regressive tax policies and senseless tariffs… all of which add to the deficit, John.

Trump just gave money away to millionaire donors, like you — PPP much, man?!

Damn.

SEC Schedule 13G Trend Watch: Both Vanguard And Blackrock “Jes’ Be… Lovin’ Up” — On Merck, In The Last Two Years…

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Clearly both of these well regarded, and vast investment houses… have an increasingly positive view of Merck, vis-a-vis the peers in the mega cap pharma space.

In fact, there was a time when most houses were slowly decreasing their exposure to Merck (about nine years ago). Then for four years, the largest houses held steady — at around 6.5%. So we stopped covering it.

But as Keytruda has blasted past all projections, quarter after quarter — and Merck has steadily climbed from the $45 range, ten years ago… to around $109 as I write this… it is too good to ignore — with a fat (and increasing!) quarterly cash dividend, to boot.

But to be clear, Vanguard, now at just under nine percent of Merck’s outstandings… is not likely to go over 10%. Should it do so, it would have immediate SEC reporting obligations, on each buy-in or sell off. And that’s a headache a passive investor doesn’t need. So — expect both of these institutional investors (here is Blackrock’s latest) to max out at around 9.8%, even if Merck continues its winning ways. Steady state will be no negative reflection on Merck, once each reaches near the immediate reporting thresholds.

Now you know — and a Happy Valentine’s — to one and all of good will!

नमस्ते

I Get That Higher Order Thinking Is Difficult For Senile Hinderaker… I Do.

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So… yet again because Hinderaker and the Powerliners have nothing remotely important — or even useful — to say any longer. Thus, John Hinderaker turns to defending Super Bowl ads (yes, advertisements!) from criticism by US House members.

The “ad” (for whatever it is worth) showed lots of opposing political and racial and ethnic arguments, and violence, in a black and white journalists’ photo slide show style — then closed with white lettering on a black screen reading “love your enemies” — an ad paid for by some organized religious group using the tag “jesus, he gets… us“.

Fine — I guess — if one adheres to that brand of christianity. I no longer am bound by that covenant. So I may not… love certain enemies. That is my clear right — and AOC’s central point.

Yup, John (once again!) weaponizes jesus’s words… to permit an ad hominem attack on AOC. John pretends he is too aged and infirm to actually discern / garner AOC’s meaning when she says she doesn’t want “fascism” to be seen as “benign“.

What John refuses to accept (but certainly, even now, in his doddering old age… well understands) is that if one doesn’t adhere to that brand of xtianity (or resents being told to love people who’ve terrorized one’s family)… or, if one is a follower of certain Hebrew sects that don’t believe in forgiveness of ALL sins… or — in short — if one is simply a humanist, agnostic or atheist… NOTHING compels the conclusion that we should “love” the KKK, the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers (all of which are the same organization under a larger tent pole)… or Hitler or even Vladimir Putin, who right now is slaughtering Ukrainian civilians (in an invasion justified by… nothing, actually).

So it is simply a disagreement of opinions — one about which… John often says he’s angry — at certain social media sites (for down-playing what he sees as the free expression of the more or less fascist set of opinions, BTW). Yet he cannot tolerate AOC’s disagreement with his hard right frother, intolerant brand of xtianity. In sum… he will not allow her… her opinion, should it go against his [mis-]reading of his bible.

Yes, Hinderaker’s blog postings — again, where irony goes… to die.

Hilarious — and out.

The Justifiable Labor Unrest At Amazon… Has Spread To Coventry Facility, Just Outside London: GMB Union Wage Actions, Coming…

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Since no one at Powerline can think of anything useful to write about (the boys are still mired in wacko conspiracy theories about… Twitter, and separately… about… balloons…) And yes, the video at the bottom is a reply to Hinderaker’s of last night….

So, we will return to a regular series of ours, at another property of mine, post the “Rihanna Baby Bump No. 2” night. [Personally, I wanted the Eagles and young Jalen Hurt to prevail, but I enjoyed probably the best back and forth, in a Super Bowl… ever. Patrick Mahomes has great heart. So it goes.]

Yep — this is my mid-monthly report on labor-related “tings” (ref. Rihanna’s second bump, last night!), at bad old Amazon. For its part, Amazon thinks it is doing well, by paying a max of about £11.45 — or just one about pound, over minimum wage in England. The newest workers at the facility make just 11 pence over UK minimum wage (at today’s exchange rates, that’s only about $12.62 an hour). Damn — and no one can really live on that, there — on even a fifty hour work week.

And so this fight is with already unionized warehouse workers — in a large distribution facility that serves most of the London exurbs. The workers are seeking a true living wage, and fairer benefits. A series of day long walk outs will be staged, between now and St. Patrick’s Day — each timed to disrupt speedy deliveries on these alloted days. Here’s the latest, from Reuters (UK bureau):

…Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Britain will walk out for seven further days in an escalation of a dispute over pay, their trade union said on Monday.

Last month GMB union members at the warehouse in Coventry, central England, staged the first ever strike at the U.S. e-commerce giant’s operations in Britain.

GMB said more than 350 staff at Coventry warehouse would now take further industrial action on February 28, March 2 and March 13-17….

That placard is pitch-perfect: human line workers are indeed… not robots. Mr. Bezos would do well to take that to heart here, and across the pond.

[And that legacy graphic at immediate left commemorates a would-be non-profit partnership that never got off the ground… again, Mr. Bezos backed out.]

Smile… Coventry (UK) has new, deeper meaning for us here, in my house now, as well… through my eldest daughter…. Onward!

नमस्ते

Very Disconcerting News: Over 20 Unexplained Deaths, Near Guinea / Cameroon Border of Kie-Ntem Province. New Ebola Outbreak?

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Though this news item, out of London is a few days old, it seems a certainty that people must have been sick for a few weeks, in Kie-Ntem Province, Guinea. None are confirmed Ebola cases (at least not by WHO standards of reporting), but at least 20 highly suspicious deaths have been recorded, among otherwise younger, healthy people. To be sure, it could be a Marburgs outbreak… but the outcome is much the same, either way. Both are often lethal, spread rapidly… and while there are vaccines for both… once infected. . . the prognosis is challenging — as no really effective therapeutics can be deployed rapidly, at least not at a price point that makes it possible in near real time, inside Equatorial Guinea.

So we are left to just cross our fingers, and hope. Hope that the Merck vaccine is already on the ground there, and boing given to all contacts of contacts… both in Kie-Ntem, and across the way… in Cameroon. Here’s a bit:

…Cameroon has restricted movement along its border with Equatorial Guinea following “several unexplained deaths” from hemorrhagic fever, the government said on Friday.

Cameroon said around 20 deaths had been recorded in a short space of time in Equatorial Guinea’s Kie-Ntem province, which borders Cameroon’s Olamze district.

The news will raise concerns of another Ebola outbreak, the last of which left 55 people dead in Uganda in 2022. The World Health Organization told the Telegraph on Friday that it doesn’t yet know if the cases are Ebola, but it is “not taking any chances”. It added that it will have test results back by Saturday [yesterday, US time]….

As ever with viral agents. . . it is three steps forward… then one or two, perhaps… back. Onward, resolutely just the same.

Be excellent to one another.

नमस्ते

Hinderaker: Deadly Boring — On Imagined UFOs…

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As Hinderaker also well knows, these balloons have all had communications jammed while over NORAD airspace. Yet he and Johnson try to stoke fear, lacking patriotism — and real courage, themselves.

But this means only that it is F-22 Raptor target practice… not much else.

If the Powerline boys think there’s a divisive story to be conjured from whole cloth here… they’re all in.

So it is we are forced to endure more Hinderakerian nonsense, tonight.

Yikes.

Curious Files Dept… Solar Plasma Loop Becomes A Very-Temporary Solar/Polar… “Halo”?

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Okay — first, the technical aspects (on a quiet Sunday morning, with clear skies, free of… “red” balloons, at the moment at least!) — as a ~24 MB gif file, the movie at right (capturing about a month of solar observations, in infrared) will take a moment to load, unless you are on wi-fi. But once it animates, look closely at the top of the globe. Late in the series, shortly after 02.05.23, you will begin to notice a darker ring around the top of the globe, down at about one-sixth of a radius, from the pole. That dark halo (in this wavelength) is a polar vortex of cooling plasma material — that was ejected from a massive plasma arc, near the pole, in the last two weeks.

It is not alarming — just… new. Similar, smaller arcs (or ropey loops — see below right, for one of those, also animated) have been observed many times, but this was the first recording of an entire loop detaching from the solar “surface” (really just the top layer of a vast cauldron of boiling hydrogen fueled fusion explosions), escaping into space, and then being pulled back down by the Sun’s immense gravitational and magnetic forces… to become a sort of aurora borealis, around the top of the globe. It is already fading out, but indicates (once again!) that our mathematical models of how that fusion-fired furnace works… may well be incomplete. Or in need of revision. Grin.

Here’s some of the better popular press reportage on it this week — but truly, nothing of danger to Earth — just more mysterious space physics, in all her myriad wonders:

…A normal “prominence” on the Sun was spotted doing something unusual. A solar prominence is loop of electrically charged gas called plasma, which often spout out of the Sun. Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com that a prominence like this happens at the same 55º latitude every 11 years or so….

What happened on Feb. 2 was that a prominence became detached… then whirled around above the Sun’s north pole….

Scientists don’t know why the event happened because they have no images of the Sun’s polar regions, but they might soon get more clues. In February 2025 the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft will begin an inclined orbit of the Sun, beginning its “high-latitude” mission during which it will take the first top-down images of the Sun’s polar regions….

Now you know. Back to lobbyists, and lobbying, below — this time, for Amgen. Smiling into the warming sunshine — and amazed at the endless warmth she offers, and we largely take for granted — each morning, when she rises.

नमस्ते

Nope. Not Even At No. 3, Now. Not A Meaningful Threat. Not Ever, Scott — We Own Our Skies… Geez. Sit Down.

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As Scott again churlishly forgets (or never knew) — we always jammed the communications abilities of these balloons. Always. But we never disclose to the press “means and methods” about spycraft. Damn.

He’s a pure moron.

Or worse, a malevolent liar — with an agenda to sow chaos, and to stir up his frothy hard right, third grade educational attainment base readers / voters.

That is all.