TGIF! [DOT 15/12/23]

15/12/23 MegMegMcGee 22

Hope everyone had a decent week. Still super busy at work trying to tie up a bunch of loose ends. I started on the Christmas cookies last night and I’ve got my annual party at my house on Sunday night.

Ukraine updates:

EU sidesteps Viktor Orbán to open membership talks with Ukraine
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/14/eu-sidestep-viktor-orban-to-open-membership-talks-with-ukraine

Oooh they are going down!

The nation’s largest credit union rejected more than half its Black conventional mortgage applicants
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/14/business/navy-federal-credit-union-black-applicants-invs/index.html

Stonks!

Wall Street closes at fresh record high as Fed signals rate cuts
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/14/wall-street-fed-interest-rate-cuts

Sprots!

Shohei Ohtani, a one-man global spectacle, introduced as a Dodger
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2023/12/14/shohei-ohtani-dodgers-official/

OMG

Have a great weekend!

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22 Comments

  1. That’s weird, pretty sure racism is dead, so…. That’s probably just fake news, carry on, everything is fine and Hunter, thank God for the GOP, won’t be president anytime soon, so…

     

    This can’t be the good, normal timeline.

    • This is incredible:

      The disparity remains even among White and Black applicants who had similar incomes and debt-to-income ratios. Notably, Navy Federal approved a slightly higher percentage of applications from White borrowers making less than $62,000 a year than it did of Black borrowers making $140,000 or more.

      That’s completely indefensible and absolute evidence of systemic racism. Holy crap.

  3. …I might have had enough for one day

    How American citizens lead rise of ‘settler violence’ on Palestinian lands [Guardian]

    Georgia teacher accused of threatening to kill student over Israeli flag, police say [Guardian]

    Rape, murder, looting: massacre in Ardamata is the latest chapter in Darfur’s horror story [Guardian]

    US efforts to show it retains significant influence over the Israeli government were dealt a double blow yesterday when the Israeli defence minister said it would take months to complete the task of rooting out Hamas, and a leaked US intelligence assessment revealed up to 45% of the 29,000 air-to-ground munitions that Israel has dropped on Gaza since 7 October have been unguided “dumb bombs”.
    […]
    The leak about the munitions contradicted claims by the US state department that it had no concerns and no assessment whether Israeli bombing could be in breach of international humanitarian law.

    More broadly the two issues highlight questions about the nature of the control America has over Israel’s political and military response to Hamas’s bloody attacks of 7 October.
    […]
    On Tuesday, in what were interpreted as some of his most pointed comments about Israel’s conduct of a war, Biden was reported as saying Israel risked losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza. He also criticised Netanyahu’s far-right government, which he said does not “want anything remotely approaching a two-state solution”. It is hardly a revelation that Netanyahu and his government are opposed to a two-state solution, but it is normally left unsaid.

    With Biden, it is hard to know if a deliberate communications strategy is in play or if it is what the Middle East Institute policy analyst Brian Katulis described at the weekend as shuffle diplomacy – just something that edges the policy on a little.

    Either way, it is not great politics for the president. From one constituency he is getting it in the neck for “allowing Israel to kill 18,000 Palestinians”, and at the same time the impression left is that Israel is not listening to him. They are taking his guns, but not his advice.

    The danger for Biden is that he becomes part of Netanyahu’s survival plan. Netanyahu is effectively running a re-election campaign – expected next year – not just a war, and no one is more ruthless in the pursuit of power. If necessary, the argument runs, he is willing to use unwarranted US interference in Israel’s security as a campaign tool.

    In a brief video posted online, in Hebrew, Netanyahu claimed to be the only one capable of thwarting the desire of Washington and the Arab countries to revive the two-state solution. “I will not allow it. It is up to Israel not to repeat the mistake of Oslo,” he asserted. “I will not allow, after the immense sacrifice made by our citizens and our fighters, that we put [in power] in Gaza people who teach terrorism, support terrorism and finance it. Gaza will be neither Hamastan nor Fatahstan”.

    The prime minister thus tried to scupper the west’s plans for a revived Fatah-influenced Palestinian Authority to take charge across Gaza and the West Bank. The only solution left becomes Israel’s management of the Palestinian territories, something the US has said must not happen.

    The dilemma for Biden is how to handle Netanyahu and his cabinet now that his differences are so out in the open. Is it best to invest in other Israeli leaders, and try to reach some kind of understanding with Arab leaders that Netanyahu would be pressed to accept? It is not unknown for allies to diverge in war time, but to fall out completely over the long-term war aim is best avoided.
    [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/15/biden-in-a-bind-as-netanhayu-ready-to-flout-any-us-attempt-to-rein-in-israel]

    …I guess sympathy for the devil it is?

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/14/tennessee-school-satan-club-satanic-temple

    • In Republican upside-down land, you get to say whatever you want about American Jews and it’s not Anti-Semitic as long as you support Israel.  But if a leftist slags Israel they are Anti-Semitic.

      You know how we could have some fun?  Inform them that Arab Muslims are Semites too, even the Palestinians, and watch their heads explode.

      • I fear you give Republicans too much credit. They’ve embraced cognitive dissonance as a worldview. If you tell them that, they’ll blink sluggishly at you for a couple of seconds while they try to process it, and then resume shrieking and flinging shit.

  4. So Meg, are you “OMG”-ing our dilapidated rail system, or the bull?

    Jokes aside, what makes that story crazy is not just the highly urbanized area for the animal to be in, but those tracks are elevated for a few miles west of Newark, almost to the EWR station. So he wandered quite a ways before becoming viral.

  5. I’m sure that liquor will show up eventually.

    https://richmond.com/news/state-regional/government-politics/abc-retail-director-files-1-million-whistleblower-lawsuit/article_ede98816-9ac2-11ee-a29c-4b79d44015e5.html

    A whistleblower claims millions of dollars of liquor disappeared from Virginia’s state-owned warehouse, but Governor Youngkin’s appointed leadership covered it up.

    The lawsuit alleges that Burke began an investigation in late 2021 of ABC liquor shipments that appeared to have been sent from the warehouse but were “not making it to the stores.”

    Meanwhile, the system also “had discovered embezzlement at seven stores, at which employees had exploited a vulnerability in the point-of-sale system for transactions.” Somehow an audit report was “unknown” to leaders for months.

    If you’ve ever worked a register, you’ll know that there are always ways sell inventory and pocket the cash, and then make it appear as though the sale was voided and the inventory was returned to the shelves or marked as defective.

      • The booze industry has been a longstanding hotspot for internal theft due to all of the glass that is (and is not) broken and the opportunities for swapping cheap and expensive product.

        At the retail level, you can make a $100 bottle “break” or swap bottles on a drunk customer and keep the pricey one. At the wholesale level you can do the equivalent at the forklift and pallet scale. At the end of the day there is only so much that can be covered by cameras, or picked up by looking at patterns in transactions or shipping.

        The ease of largescale fraud was one of the reasons why the big Mafia bosses back in the Hoffa/Fitzsimmons days of the Teamsters targeted booze shipments. And what also happened is suppliers tolerated the losses as a cost of doing business as long as they stayed within a certain percentage. And often it was facilitated by corrupt people in the legit business side at a high level who could handle the acccounting and reporting.

        These days the Mafia’s role has shrunk, but other groups have taken over the opportunities for wholesale level ripoffs.

        Interestingly, the rise in the market for extra virgin olive oil has seen a similar level of fraud involving both organized crime and corporations long before bottles ever hit store shelves or make it to restaurants. Both sides are banking that audits will only catch a small part of what’s happening, and the losses can just be written off.

    • The NATO thing is actually pretty interesting and highlights that the GOP isn’t stupid, they’re evil. They know abandoning NATO with the snap of a finger is a terrible idea. It’s just they don’t want to tell their Big Sweet Boy “no” so they’re trying to but up a roadblock he can’t get around immediately. Double points for doing it now so they can lament it’s a “Biden thing.”

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