Don’t say a word about your Monday Visual images of collapsing and collapsed buildings are horrible. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and Syria before dawn Monday. A severe aftershock struck at midday. Early numbers (headlines keep shifting) are over 1,500 dead and climbing, per a Guardian report: CNN meteorologist Chad Myers explained what makes this type of quake different from those that strike the Pacific Rim: The 7.5 aftershock was “an earthquake in itself,” Myers told CNN’s This Morning. “It would have been the strongest earthquake since 1999 in the region.” We always talk about the epicenter, but in this case we should talk about the epi-line. Two massive tectonic plates – the Arabian and the Eurasian – meet underneath Turkey’s southeastern provinces. Along this fault line, “about 100 miles from one side to the other, the earth slipped,” said Myers. Seismologists refer to this event as a “strike slip” – “where the plates are touching, and all of a sudden they slide sideways,” said Myers.
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I have lived through some tiresome news cycles in my life but this Chinese balloon cycle was one of the worst. The hysteria was completely inane, particularly on the right but among the media as well. But it is a story and it’s bizarre enough that a little calm expertise is called for. James Fallows is not only a great journalist but also an aviator and a China hand so his analysis is particularly astute: I. The Chinese Balloon Q: Do we believe the Chinese government statement that this was just a science-oriented weather mission? A: No. Q: Then what could the people who launched it conceivably have been thinking? A: Who knows. At the moment I can imagine three possibilities, all bad. -First, this could have been a screwup in the most basic sense. Whoever launched it thought the jet-stream winds would keep it over Canada, rather than dipping into the U.S. Of course that would still mean traversing airspace of a NATO member, and of course it would mean crossing Alaska before that. This possibility is conceivable but not likely. -Second, this could have been a screwup within the Chinese leadership.
They’ve even dragged anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist out of his crypt. This isn’t new. The quote below is from Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech in which he was describing the slave states’ threats to blow up the union. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose …
“Statistically speaking, of course, it’s still the safest way to travel.” — Superman in Superman (1978) Fly enough times and you’ll experience an aborted landing. I’ve experienced two or three. The first, in Minneapolis (1989?) in low-visibility conditions, resembled one this weekend. Those who follow James Fallows’s newsletter know the veteran pilot follows aviation news closely. He reported recently on a Jan. 13 “runway incursion” at Kennedy Airport in New York. But over the weekend, two aircraft had an even closer call in Austin, Texas: The short version of what happened is: “For perspective,” writes Fallows, “around the world some 100,000 airline flights take off and land safely every day.” So there’s that. A graphical recreation follows: A friend just earned her multi-engine rating, so I hear aviation chatter from her as well. What strikes me about this Austin incident was how much it resembled my experience in Minneapolis years ago. Our aircraft was arriving from Seattle early that morning.
Not bloody likely If you need proof that the Republican Party is fully in the hands of far-right extremists, look no further than the case of Congressman Jim Jordan. The Ohio Republican, first elected in 2006, is the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Jordan has been a right-wing bomb thrower and ruthless partisan street fighter from the start. An early endorser of the Tea Party and a founder of the hardcore austerity crusaders the Freedom Caucus, Jordan was always at the center of the obstructionist tactics during the Obama years. He then ran interference for Donald Trump during his many scandals. From Tea Party to Freedom Caucus to MAGA, for the last 16 years, Jim Jordan has been the quintessential far-right Republican, in whatever permutation that is at a given time. Jordan was involved in the efforts to oust former GOP Speaker John Boehner as a member of the Freedom Caucus, causing Boehner to dub him a “legislative terrorist” which is a very accurate description of his tactics. And he led unsuccessful efforts to do the same to his successor Paul Ryan.
A Trumper family goes down the rabbit hole This is very sad. These people obviously had problems to begin with and ended up focusing on Trump’s Big Lie, leading to a suicide pact: A Pennsylvania family found shot dead in their backyard last week in what police say appears to be a suicide pact, included a mother and daughter who loved bowling and were devout Christian conservatives, people who knew them said. Morgan Daub, 26, and her parents, James Daub, 62, and Deborah Daub, 59, were found dead on the ground in the backyard of their home in York County, Pennsylvania, on the morning of Jan. 25, after police responded to a request for a welfare check from a neighbor. The West Manchester Township Police Department has since said that notes left inside the house indicate that the family recently made a “joint decision” to end their lives. Police believe Deborah Daub shot and killed her husband and then was shot and killed by Morgan, who died by suicide. Police said there were no signs of forced entry or struggle and no evidence that anyone else had been present. An investigation into the deaths has been closed.
Documentos do processo de falência da FTX mostram como a empresa de criptomoedas despejou dinheiro em consultores, think tanks e grupos de lobby.
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How much of Shell’s record US $40 billion profit was due to the Ukraine war and freezing Russia out of the market? If you apply the “excess deaths” methodology we became familiar with during covid, comparing profit against a running average of the previous five years, we get a figure of about $25 billion “excess […]
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They’re getting in — against Trump The Washington Post reports: The network of donors and activist groups led by conservative billionaire Charles Koch will oppose Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, mounting a direct challenge to the former president’s campaign to win back the White House. “The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” Emily Seidel, chief executive of the network’s flagship group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), wrote in a memo released publicly on Sunday. The three-page missive repeatedly suggests that AFP is taking on the responsibility of stopping Trump, with Seidel writing: “Lots of people are frustrated. But very few people are in a position to do something about it. AFP is. Now is the time to rise to the occasion.” I think this actually works in Trump’s favor for two reasons. First, it allows him to run against the “establishment elite” (which he is actually at the center of) and pretend he’s the outsider. His followers are dim so they’ll buy it.
Greg Sargent makes the point that while GOP Governors are trying to turn their states into antediluvian hellscapes, Democratic Governors in the big blue states are moving forward: Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, is fond of describing his state as the place “where woke goes to die.” If so, perhaps Democratic governors can do more to advertise their states as places where Florida-style school crackdowns go to die. Some Democratic governors — not just in coastal states but also in Midwestern ones — are beginning to test this idea. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has seized on DeSantis’s latest culture-warring — Florida’s decision to ban an Advanced Placement course in African American studies — to articulate a contrasting vision for what topics should be permitted in classrooms. This week, Pritzker singled out DeSantis as an “extremist,” after the College Board introduced a revised AP course in Black studies in response to DeSantis’s attacks.