Horrific and incredible tweet by Trump

I am so very very very tired of posting war-related matters on TYWKIWDBI, but this turn of events cannot go unmentioned.  The embeds above are copypasted from Facebook.

The tweet by Trump is real and accurate.  I saw it displayed this morning on Bloomberg television's "Opening Bell" segment, accompanied by an excerpt of a video of Trump being interviewed on a plane in which he says talks with Iran are going "very well" but they are difficult because after we talk with people "we negotiate with them but then we have to keep blowing them up." (!!!)

The response by Alt National Park Service is to my knowledge correct.  These threats by Trump may be just "jawboning" and empty rhetoric, similar to the Iranian boasts that they would incinerate America "boots on the ground."  It is my understanding that since taking office, Trump has replaced the top brass i the Joint Chiefs of Staff with men who are more hawkish, but I believe seasoned warriors would be hesitant to implement war plans that are internationally-recognized war crimes.

The stock market opened up this morning in response to weekend claims that "talks are underway," perhaps referring to third-party talks hosted by Pakistan.  I took this morning's upward move as an opportunity to add to my bearish positions.

"The Life List"

(I'll write a proper review later.  Today I'm in a hurry to get gardening and other things done, but didn't want to leave the blog with war stuff at the top, so this is a complete change of direction.  Highly recommended for those who enjoy quiet, pleasant movies during times of global catastrophes).

Details and comparisons later.  I think it's on Netflix; if not, the DVD may be in your library...

Mispronouncing Henry David Thoreau's last name

As reported by The New York Times -

It turns out that the accent does not belong on the second syllable, as in “merlot” or “Poirot.” It rests on the first syllable, like “thorough” — as in, “I am thoroughly confused by this strange turn of events.”

This front-loaded pronunciation has apparently always been there, hiding in plain sight in the halls of academe, even if no one told us about it. “There is a consensus that “THU-ro” is the correct way to pronounce it,” John J. Kucich, co-president of the nonprofit Thoreau Alliance, said in an interview. “But somehow “Thu-RO” — here Kucich uttered the word the common way — “got into the culture, and it’s in the water to pronounce it that way.”..

“People aren’t used to seeing that name; it’s not a New England name, and they pronounced it THU-ro” she said in an interview. So did the man himself, judging from ample contemporary evidence.

For instance, there’s an 1860 journal entry from Thoreau’s neighbor Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa May Alcott. “Comes Thoreau and sups with us,” Alcott wrote. “He is rightly named Thorough … the pervading Thor, the sturdy sensibility and force in things.”

And in a 1918 letter from Edward Emerson, son of Thoreau’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We always called my friend Thórow, the h sounded, and accent on the first syllable,” he wrote...

(Both pronunciations are actually technically incorrect, at least from the French perspective, he adds; the proper French pronunciation would be “tu-row,” with the “th” pronounced as a hard T and an accent on neither syllable.)

The Houthis (Yemen) enter the war

As reported in The Guardian:

The US-Israeli war with Iran has expanded with the entry of Houthi forces in Yemen, representing a dangerous spread of the conflict and bringing with it the threat of more damage to the global economy...

Multiple outlets reported that the Houthis, the Iran-aligned militant group in Yemen, had attacked Israel for a second time in less than 24 hours, after joining the war on Saturday.

Despite US claims to have devastated Iran’s military, Reuters cited intelligence sources as saying Washington could only be certain it had destroyed a third of Iran’s missile and drone arsenal.

US media reported that a missile and drone attack on Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia wounded at least 12 US soldiers, two of them seriously. Drones also struck Kuwait international airport on Saturday, causing significant damage to its radar system...

The entry of the Houthis, who control Yemen’s most populous areas, poses a direct threat to the Bab al-Mandab strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, a second major choke point in the supply chain of energy supplies and other trade in and out of the Middle East.

With Iran’s near total closure of the strait of Hormuz, a shutdown of the Bab al-Mandab, located between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, would amplify the already grave impact of the war on the global economy, and could also reignite a Saudi-Yemen conflict that caused huge humanitarian suffering for seven years before a 2022 truce.

Since the US-Israeli attack on Iran on 28 February, Saudi Arabia has been able to divert some of its oil exports by pipeline to the Red Sea. Saudi commentators have said that if this route was also threatened, Riyadh could also enter the war directly.

More at the link.  And more re the Houthis.

I think it's clear to anyone not relying on U.S. news sources that this war is not winding down anytime soon.   The Trump/Netanyahu preemptive attack on Iran has unleashed longstanding grievances in the Middle East.   Some readers here will be old enough to remember the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s that resulted in 500,000 deaths.  Now the Saudis are encouraging Trump to strike a definitive blow.  Yemen may have the capability of significantly impairing access to the Red Sea/Suez Canal.  The Kurds are being encouraged to join the regional assault.  Iran will attack its Gulf neighbors who are assisting the U.S. and they know that impairing oil transport through the Strait of Hormuz will severely hurt European economies, putting pressure on the U.S. not to proceed with a land war.  The U.S. is no longer in a position to "declare victory and go home."  I've heard more than one analyst say that "when you kick a hornet's nest, the hornets decide when it's over."

And where does Iran get the resources to continue the war after sustaining so much damage from aerial bombinb?  Probably from Russia, which is treating this as a "proxy war" and is accumulating immense wealth from its oil reserves (including potentially selling to Europe!), which it can use to resume its assault on Ukraine.  China also has vast oil reserves stored and has military capacities probably equal to the United States.  Any involvement by them so far appears to be deeply behind the scene.

Informed discussion of the advice "never to get involved in a land war in Asia."

Word for the day:  "Clusterfuck" is a vulgar slang term for an extremely chaotic, disorganized, or severely mismanaged situation, often where multiple things go wrong simultaneously. Originating as U.S. military slang in 1969, it describes a "total mess" or "shitshow". It is sometimes used to describe a complex, messy, and unproductive endeavor.

"The Remains of the Day" (1993)

This classic movie was released in 1993, fifteen years before I started this blog, so I've never reviewed it here.  But after re-watching it last evening, I feel the trailer should be saved in TYWKIWDBI as a heads-up for any readers who may not have been paying attention to movies 30 years ago.

The movie is a Merchant-Ivory production, presenting an extended and often sympathetic character study of one man's obsessive devotion to his life's work - serving the grand house where he is employed, and serving his master (however defective), at a cost of his family life and his personal life.

The movie was nominated for eight Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, Screenplay, Costume, Music, and Art Direction), and Hopkins won the BAFTA that year.  But be aware that this is not a "fun" movie, with a happy Hollywood ending.  Its power lies in the absolutely superb acting of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.  

Puffer jacket stuffed with pickles

The product is offered by the United Kingdom division of Kentucky Fried Chicken to promote their marketing of pickle-enhanced foods (Pepsi, french fries).  Personally, I'd prefer stuffing my half of my jacket with olives, but everyone has different tastes.  

Image cropped for size from the original at the Neatorama via.

It may cost you more to return a rental car early

From the travel section of the New York Times:

"Last summer, I flew to Geneva, Switzerland, and picked up a rental car from Budget for a two-week vacation in neighboring France. More precisely, I reserved the car for 13 days and four hours, for an estimated 866 Swiss francs, worth about $1,060 at the time. I ended up returning the vehicle not just on time but a little earlier than planned — after 13 days and 30 minutes — so imagine my surprise when the final bill came to 1,545 francs. The lion’s share of the difference was in the base rental rate, so I assume I lost my discount for returning the car early. I’ve heard of car rental companies recalculating rates for returning a weeklong rental a day early, but hours? That is ridiculous."

The explanation:

The car rental industry is notorious for charging customers for services they do not need or sometimes never agreed to, but collecting what amounts to a $595 fee for bringing back a car a few hours early seems beyond the pale.

Even more astonishingly, perhaps, is that after examining the documentation you sent me and combing through Budget’s policies, I now believe it was not even a question of hours. You could have saved $595 by returning the car just 10 minutes later than you did...

“Because the vehicle was returned earlier than the 14-day period, the rental no longer qualified for the weekly promotional pricing,” Lauren Bristow, the director of marketing communications for Avis Budget Group, wrote in response to my emailed questions. “As a result, the system recalculated the rental at the applicable shorter-term rate.”

And I’ll admit that Budget’s “General Conditions of Rental” (Part 12, if you’re following along) does back her up. “Because special offers and discounts often relate to specific time slots,” it reads, “you may even end up having to pay more if you bring back the vehicle early.”

Offered without comment.

Word for the day: kerning

In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the space between two specific characters, or letterforms, in a font... The term "keming" is sometimes used informally to refer to poor kerning (the letters r and n placed too closely together being easily mistaken for the letter m).

More information at Kerning, spacing, leading: the invisible art of typography.

Reconsidering Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is a UNESCO World Heritage site because of its monumental statues (moai).  For several hundred years it has captured the public's imagination because of its mind-staggering physical remoteness and the seemingly incredible feat of humans locating and colonizing the island, located 2,000 miles from the nearest island in East Polynesia:

Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island is a new book recently acquired by our library system, which I borrowed after reading that the author offered a new vision of the history of the island.  It is indeed an awesome book, which I have no doubt will become a standard reference citation, but it is probably TMI for the average reader because it examines every single detail about the history of the island, giving new emphasis to original ethnographic research conducted a century ago and debunking many modern interpretations.

"Conventional wisdom" (repeated in pop science articles and television shows) suggests as follows:

"That theory argues that Islanders let their population outgrow their home's capacity to support them.   In the quest for food they overfished the sea and destroyed soils, and in desperate religious tumoil they cut down all the trees to move statues.  Society collapsed in a fit of war and cannibalism.  When Europeans first saw Rapa Nui, it is said, they witnessed the result: a devastated land with few people, who could not have created the island's spectacular archaeological legacy." (xix)  

Thor Heyerdahl speculated and tried to prove that Rapa Nui had been colonized by white people who had crossed the Atlantic, built the South American civilizations and then continued west across the Pacific. 

The book convincingly debunks previous speculations.  The author notes for example that the population was not starving when the first Europeans arrived.  In fact, they offered food to the sailors.  They had an elaborate system for harvesting intermittent rainfall and had developed farming techniques suitable to the terrain.  The state of their society in modern times is in part a reflection of their more recent history:

"Lost in the haunting seduction of this eco-collapse theory was the true history of what the Islanders had endured at the hands of colonial imperialists.  Within a century and a half of having been found by Dutch sailors, Rapa Nui's people had been kidnapped, sold into slavery, killed off by new diseases, and removed to other islands.  They were all but extinguished.  Survivors were housed in a walled settlement, forbidden to return to their traditional homes and gardens and their sacred places, which were overrun by sheep and cattle making money for businesses half a world away.  Their history was written by outsiders who could not credit them with the abilities their monuments revealed... Those abandoned monuments were plundered and restored to make a museum for tourists... Their ancestors were an example to the world of the worst imaginable negligence, of behavior so lacking in respect for life, for the very soils that nurtured their existence, that they brought down their own future in a violent orgy of self-destruction..." (143)

An interesting book to browse.

Government debt vs. GDP

The embedded image is harvested from Facebook, but I will vouch for the economic credentials of Mohamed El-Erian, whose opinions on world economics I have valued for years.

Posted because the economic consequences of the U.S./Israel war on Iran are going to be extreme.  There is almost no foreseeable outcome that will not adversely affect most of the major economies of the world.

And while I'm on Facebook, I'll add these other items -

Introducing a "from Facebook" category in TYWKIWDBI

I have deeply conflicting feelings about Facebook, which I joined last year.  One the one hand it allows me simple and frequent communication with friends, classmates, neighbors, relatives.  On the other hand it is loaded with utter crap, including extraordinarily realistic AI creations and misleading clickbait. Of course on the third hand it reassures me by feeding me more and more material I agree with because its algorithm is designed to do just that.

Intermixed with all that is a potential abundance of "ordinary" (nonpolitical, nonpersonal) postings from history groups, science and technology groups, scholarly institutions, and reputable news sources.  It's sometimes hard to tell which is which.

Take for example the screencap embedded above.  Interesting, certainly.  And makes sense.  If you are already fucking up the ecosystem of the abyssal plane of the world's oceans by harvesting manganese nodules, it makes sense to add the capability to do a little snip-snip on a rival's undersea cables.

I don't have time to chase down primary sources all the time.  I made a screencap of that item, but did not go to the South China Morning Post to confirm that the article exists.  

Going forward, anything I post in the "from Facebook" category should be viewed with suspicion.  And I'm not providing links because I don't want to support clickbait.  You can search for relevant info elsewhere.  

Assessing geopolitical turmoil

The embed is a screencap from Facebook, which I haven't tracked to the primary source, but I quite agree with the expressed sentiment.

I am disappointed (but not surprised) that major news outlets tend to report on what Trump is saying without adding any nuance or interpretation.  Perhaps that is their perceived role, or perhaps they are under pressure not to openly criticize this authoritarian president.

Personally, I have been monitoring Al Jazeera every night.  They have a You Tube channel that broadcasts live in English 24/7.  Whether you hear live news or recordings depends on your global time lag (mine is 9 hours).  The broadcasts originate from Qatar and include interviews with Middle Eastern and European leaders or their representatives.

What I hear just from brief visits to that site is quite different from what I hear on American sites.  This morning the equity, bond, and oil markets are reacting positively to reports that U.S. and Iranian representatives "are talking" and that "there are hopes for a settlement."

The underlying truth (I think) is that the Trump administration has issued a set of 15 guidelines (no nuclear weapons capability etc).  Trump is expecting "unconditional surrender" including control of Iranian oil production.  Iranian leaders have issued their "talking points" which include "sovereignty over their nation and the Gulf of Hormuz" and "reparations for damages done by the U.S. and Israel."

Does anyone actually think there is serious talking going on.  Nonsense.  Everyone knows that this apparent cease-fire is nothing more than an opportunity for both sides to reload.  The U.S. has elite ground forces en route to the conflict area:

For their part, the Iranians are at least talking locally about unceasing resistance:

Trump and Hegseth seem to feel they can bomb Iran into submission - a sentiment that scarily echoes what I remember from coming of age during the Vietnam war, when the goal was to "bomb them into the Stone Age."  Iran is not Vietnam.  Consider just the size:

Now consider Iran's leverage in the Gulf region.  The obvious first leverage was control of the Strait of Hormuz.  Trump has said "we don't care, we don't need oil from there, we have our own", which is true and quite irrelevant.  Here is the outflow from the Gulf:

Very little oil goes to the U.S.  But India is already hurting from gasoline shortages.  China less so because they have the world's largest strategic reserves of oil stored underground.  But the rest of Asia is suffering, and Europe is worried.  

The other things that come out of the Stait of Hormuz include the fertilizers that much of the world depends on for agriculture.  Trump's cavalier assessment that he doesn't care about Hormuz closing ignores U.S. farmers, who may be pushed to insolvency because of fertilizer costs.

Liquid helium comes out of the Gulf.  I think some MRI centers in the Americas and Europe have already indicated that they will decrease the availability of MRIs.  And I think liquid helium is also critical for some computer chip manufacturing.

Note that Iran has been attacking neighboring Gulf states, in part because those states have supported the U.S. with air bases, but also because they can do immense damage to the regional economies.  The next potential targets:  desalination plants.

Image cropped for size from the original in The Guardian.

Most Gulf countries only have water reserves to last about a week. Analysts have said that if any of these plants are struck and capacity taken out, the impact would be quick and severe and it could wipe out water to major cities in a matter of days.

Power plants need desalinated water for cooling, so electricity supply would be affected. It would particularly affect healthcare and the running of hospitals, and would likely have to cause industries and businesses to shut down for as long as there was a water shortage.

Water rationing would likely have to be introduced. There are concerns that this could lead to mass panic and civil unrest.

You want to talk about "bombing someone into the Stone Age"?  

Trump undoubtedly feels "the pressure of the midterms" because Republicans have been losing local elections all around the country, including Texas and yesterday in the district that includes his precious Mar-a-Lago. He will certainly be getting panicy calls from Gulf emirates who worry that their entire economies may be destroyed by a few well-placed ballistic missiles.  

Enough gloom and doom for right now.  More later on the potential for a world-wide recession, because despite Trump's assertion that things will quickly revert back to normal, it's more likely that "things" are going to continue to get worse...

Addendum Wednesday evening:

(Excerpted from Facebook, so no guarantee that it is true.)

Anomalous behavior in financial markets

I did not blog it at the time, but when Trump overthrew the government of Venezuela with his military action, an article in The Atlantic noted that some people profited very handsomely by correctly betting on that outcome via the prediction markets:

When U.S. Delta Force commandos slipped into Venezuelan airspace over the weekend, they did so in secrecy. And yet, in the hours before President Donald Trump gave the final order for the strike, someone bet more than $20,000 that Nicolás Maduro would be ousted as the country’s leader by the end of January.

On Polymarket, the online platform that lets people wager on almost anything, an anonymous trader somewhere in the world placed a series of suspiciously well-timed bets. Using a fresh account created last month, the individual made just a few bets in the days leading up to the raid, according to The Wall Street Journal—all on the possibility of imminent regime change in Venezuela—and appeared to come away with more than $400,000.

The Guardian made the same observation and interpretation:

The online wager platform Polymarket has angered some gamblers by declaring it will not settle millions of dollars’ worth of bets on a US invasion of Venezuela, arguing that the capture of the then president, Nicolás Maduro, does not qualify.

Before Donald Trump’s forces seized Maduro on Saturday morning, some traders appeared to have anticipated the shock move by placing bets on “prediction markets”.

These were not random "man on the street" bets.  Someone had inside knowledge and bet accordingly.  The publicly available data do not allow one to judge whether the people doing this are friends of Trump, or military commanders, or low-level communications staff.

Now it has happened again.  The embed at the top of this post is a cropped photo of my television, which was tuned in to Bloomberg at about the start of the trading day.  Donald Trump had announced (via Truth Social for crying out loud...) that he was going to scale back military action, which might lead to a easing of tensions and the reopening of the Gulf of Hormuz and (theoretically) lowering the price of oil.

The circled data point in the charts show that someone (??who??) traded options on the S&P 500 (proxy for the general market) and oil futures to the extent of more than a billion dollars IIRC.   The purple line in the bottom graph is either Brent or West Texas Intermediate, which immediately traded down when the market opened (and the equity indexes immediately traded up).

Someone knew this would happen.  Again, available data (at least public data) don't show whether it was a Trump friend.  But somebody is making big bucks from Trump's decisions.

Addendum:  Here are more details, from a BBC report -

...However, at 07:04 Eastern Time (11:04 GMT) on Monday, before US markets opened for the week, the president posted on his Truth Social platform that Washington had held "VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS" with Tehran over a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities.

Immediately, stocks bounced and the price of oil dipped to as low as $84 (£63) per barrel for the benchmark US price.

Observers have since scrutinised what happened in financial markets in the minutes leading up to the president's post.

At 06:49 ET, traders placed 734 bets on WTI crude oil contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex). 

One minute later, that number had jumped to 2,168. That's equivalent to about $170m.

The same pattern can be seen in traders buying contracts for Brent crude, the other major oil benchmark. Between 06:48 and 06:50 ET, the volume of trades rose from 20 to more than 1,650. That's about $150m in contracts.

Data for previous Mondays shows that far fewer trades are normally made at that time of day. 

Similar trades also happened on Monday with futures contracts for the S&P 500, Euro Stoxx 50, and other markets.

This means traders placed bets on the value of the largest firms listed in the US and Europe rising minutes before Trump's announcement.

Light pillars and sun pillars - updated x4

An Astronomy Picture of the Day from Finland, explained at the link and in my previous post on the subject.

Reposted from 2013 to add this awesome Astronomy Picture of the Day taken over Whitefish Bay:

"...vertical lines of light over a ground source that reflect from falling ice crystals. As the ground temperature was above freezing, the flat crystals likely melted as they approached the ground, creating a lower end to the vertical light pillars."

Reposted from 2018 to add this photo, via. 

And reposted yet again to add this remarkable image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day, which depicts a sun pillar.

"This was not a typical sun pillar. Just after sunrise two weeks ago in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, a photographer, looking out his window, was suddenly awestruck. The astonishment was caused by a sun pillar that fanned out at the top. Sun pillars, singular columns of light going up from the Sun, are themselves rare to see, and are known to be caused by sunlight reflecting from wobbling, hexagon-shaped ice-disks falling through Earth's atmosphere. Separately, upper tangent arcs are known to be caused by sunlight refracting through falling hexagon-shaped ice-tubes. Finding a sun pillar connected to an upper tangent arc is extraordinary, and, initially, took some analysis to figure out what was going on. A leading theory is that this sun pillar was also created, in a complex and unusual way, by falling ice tubes."

Might as well link to my previous posts on sun and light pillars in 2009 and 2010.

This schematic from Wikipedia -

- illustrates how the phenomenon is created.

Reposted from 2021 to add yet one more spectacular photo -

"Stool inspection shelf" illustrated

The discussion thread at the WeirdToilets subreddit includes extensive discussion as to whether a "stool inspection shelf" is a common feature of toilets in various European and worldwide locations.

Additional discussion at this archived article and in the "washout toilet" section of the Wikipedia page on flush toilets.

"Washout, or Flachspüler ("shallow flush"), toilets have a flat platform with a shallow pool of water. They are flushed by a jet of water from the back that drives waste into the trap below. From there, the water flow removes it into the sewage system. An advantage of the design is that users will not get splashed from below. Taking of stool samples is also simplified. Washout toilets have a shallow pool of water into which waste is deposited, with a trapped drain just behind this pool... Washout pans were among the first types of ceramic toilets invented and since the early 1970s are now only found in a decreasing number of localities in Europe.[citation needed] A washout toilet is a kind of flush toilet which was once predominantly used in Germany, Austria and France. It was patented in Britain by George Jennings in 1852 and remained the standard toilet type in Britain throughout the 19th century..."