Nothing Got Better This Week
Aside from a bit of comic relief
Links are at the end.
If you look at the photo above for a while, it turns into a moving picture.
As you know, raging reactionary asshole Jim Jordan failed in his foredoomed attempt to gain the speakership of our very very very fine House, because it was foredoomed, because he is a raging asshole. (A raging reactionary with a more pleasant demeanor might ultimately succeed.)
So viscerally disliked is Jordan that his opponents promised to add more nays with each succeeding floor vote just to humiliate him further. Sadly the fight was stopped after three rounds when his colleagues cold-cocked him in a secret ballot, after which Matt “I’ll Pay You to Party With Me” Gaetz, also a raging reactionary, described Jordan as the most popular Republican member of the House, not counting the caucus majority who rejected him.
So that was fun, although a lot of reporters and ilk adulterated the purity of it by insisting on referring to “moderate” Republicans, as if walking around without a caged woman, or a half-eaten impoverished person dangling from one’s mouth, denotes moderation.
Israeli “settlers” are taking advantage of the focus on Gaza to accelerate their little West Bank ethnic cleansing project. Colonizing occupied lands is a no-no under international law but it’s been standard Israeli practice for most of the time since the country seized the West Bank in the 1967 war. The Guardian has a story about settlers taking aim, literally and figuratively, at Bedouins and their grazing territories.
The denial of grazing access adds economic warfare to physical violence. Cutting off land for grazing and growing fodder forces herders to sell off some animals, and with smaller flocks, they make less money and are more vulnerable to sickness, injury or other loss.
“Palestinian herders should be self-reliant based on their established livelihoods. Instead they need humanitarian assistance because of settler violence and the failure of Israeli authorities to hold perpetrators accountable,” the UN OCHA report said.
The impact was so serious, it may amount to a war crime, the statement added. Along with demolitions, evictions and restrictions on movement and construction, the attacks on herders created “a coercive environment that contributes to displacement that may amount to forcible transfer, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva convention”.1
Fortunately for the settlers and the Israeli governments deploying them, they have Joe Biden’s unconditional support. No war crimes among friends.
Everything is stressful, some days, and we all know that stress kills. The Washington Post has a long piece on how in America, stress kills with more exuberance than in other allegedly developed nations because, the article explains, America is vicious and stupid.
A cardiologist, endocrinologist, obesity specialist, health economist and social epidemiologists all said versions of the same thing: Striving to get ahead in an unequal society contributes to people in the United States aging quicker, becoming sicker and dying younger.
. . .
It is the repeated triggering of this process year after year — the persistence of striving to overcome barriers — that leads to poor health.
Stress = chronic illness = prematurely dead people.2
For a long time I thought that foreshortened American lives were due entirely to the horrors inflicted on people at the bottom of the economic heaps and racial hierarchies, but it seems rich people here are at something of a disadvantage to rich people elsewhere.
This is not to say that they’re in the same sinking vessel as most everybody else here—the gap in lifespan between rich Americans and poor ones continues to grow—but they’d be well-advised to move someplace where they’re not constantly having to crush the poor underfoot just to get to the corner store.
The Washington Post has a story on that subject too.3
What else, what else . . . The Verge has the story about a prospective class action suit against a non-stick pan manufacturer which says they use a proprietary 30,000° F process to make their cookware invincible.
Patricia Brown, the person who filed this lawsuit, isn’t buying it. As cited in Brown’s lawsuit, NASA recently said the “surface of the Sun is a blisteringly hot 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit,” meaning SharkNinja’s manufacturing process reaches about three times that temperature.
Not only that, but Brown argues that heating up SharkNinja’s pans to this temperature is a “physical impossibility,” given that aluminum vaporizes into gas at 4,478 degrees Fahrenheit. The lawsuit also points out that SharkNinja advertises the pan as oven-safe up to only 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
But wait! There’s more!
While SharkNinja’s claims may seem outrageous, the company might not actually be fibbing. This (really old) article from The Washington Post describes a ceramic coating process that sounds close to what SharkNinja advertises:
“The newest high-tech wrinkle in nonstickiness is a coating called ceramic-titanium, developed in Denmark and used on Scanpan cookware. A mixture of titanium and a ceramic, so hot (30,000 degrees) that their atoms are broken down into a cloud of charged particles (Techspeak: a plasma), is fired at supersonic speed at the surface of an aluminum pan, where it anchors itself right into the metal, making an extremely hard, unscratchable surface.”
The Post story isn’t that old (2002), and Scanpan is still in business, which is what the lawsuit might not be if it turns out that the processes are similar. They probably aren’t, though, because Scanpan stuff is pretty pricey and the Ninja stuff is considerably cheaper.
Anyway, good digging by The Verge.4 I’d buy some fusion-forged Scanpan stuff if I could afford it.5
(Full disclosure: I recently got a Ninja coffee maker which I like.)
Music: I used to listen a piece of music to death back in the not too distant day, but more recently I’ve been focused on listening to new stuff most of the time. The past several days I’ve reverted to form with CocoRosie’s “Put The Shine On,” on which the iconoclastic sisters lay down a hip-hoppy masterpiece.6
I also stumbled on “Silver Haze,” the debut album from Jim Jarmusch’s band, Sqürl. The official video linked here is not directed by Jim Jarmusch, which struck me as a bold move.7
And that, Comrades, is all I got. Please share it if you like it, and consider subscribing if you’ve not already—it’s free unless you want to pay.
Take care, be well, spike a pipeline.
It is all about the land. Biggest land grab since Custer was slaughtered by the Sioux and Cheyene. Starving them out of The Gaza and the West Bank. They think we do not know this. And still we play to them. Quit arming the Israelis.
"Goin' down the road", The Grateful Dead.