Paul Beecher

Science, technology and innovation, plus global affairs; armchair sportsman; washed up quizzer; occasional scribbler -

[Paul Beecher @BeecherP]

X with a hat on top, if you can picture the Roman numeral that marks this moment. Do Twitter users say "the magic ten thousand"? I don't know whether to feel pride or shame.
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[Joshwelt @weltszzn]

when i accidentally close my 45 tabs it's like the burning of the library of alexandria, but worse and much more dire

[David Wallace-Wells @dwallacewells]

“The real surprise from the OECD’s subsidy numbers is that it cost China less than $18bn in sectoral support over 15 years to build an industry that can now provide more clean power than the world can readily absorb.”

[Isi Breen @isaiah_bb]

Israel has killed more Palestinian children in the last 3 years than Palestinians have killed Israelis of any kind over the last 80 years.

And it’s the Palestinians who are bloodthirsty and violent. Sure.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

There's nothing "offensive" about comparing the actions and mentality of Israel to those of the Nazis. What is offensive is demanding that one country and only it -- Israel -- be exempt from those comparisons because it hurts people's feelings, or because it seems "bigoted" to compare them.

The whole point of the Nuremberg Trials was that the precedents set there would only have meaning -- i.e., be something beyond mere "victor's justice" -- if those principles applied to the actions of **all countries** in the future. Israel doesn't have some special, unique exemption from the imperative.

[Hugh Laurie @hughlaurie]

Thanks for your critique, Janet. We actually tried a couple of episodes where House (Hugh Laurie) (please put the brackets in the right place) gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy.

One could apply your trenchant analysis to other art forms: JS Bach wrote 30 Goldberg variations on the same chord structure; Frida Kahlo painted 50 portraits of herself; Henry Moore, what??

The point is, or was, variations on a theme; if all you see is hospital, medical blah blah, then it wasn’t meant for you.

Nonetheless, I look forward to your first novel!

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

Hard to think of a greater honor than to be considered The Economist‘s intellectual enemy #1.

My work is “intellectual ballast” for the largest number of Americans since 1975 wanting government to “improve the standard of living” of the poor, cut their costs, raise their incomes and stop AI from wrecking society, they say. Dream of an endorsement. Thank you @TheEconomist!

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

Iran's ability to check Israel's rogue barbarism is precisely the reason why the Israelis are so committed to its destruction.

[Tanita Tikaram💙 @tanita_tikaram]

The pretence that you are holding these awful people to account while continually platforming them & their hateful divisive politics makes the BBC slightly more vomit inducing than Reform . That’s quite an accomplishment.

[Greg @GregGrandin]

I was a premature anti-génocidaire as well, both after 9/11 and 10/7. You only had to have had a minimal historical imagination to have seen what was coming.

[David Ullrich @DavidUllrich202]

Mysterious ‘cold blob’ in the Atlantic suggests the AMOC is weakening

A patch of ocean south-east of Greenland is the only place on Earth that is cooling, and it could be a sign that the warm water “conveyor belt” in the Atlantic is slowing down

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[Eoin Higgins @EoinHiggins_]

Just to be clear, if this was the other way around, a Palestinian filmmaker mocking the sexual assault of Israelis, they would be banned from the festival for life

[Jason Smith - 上官杰文 @ShangguanJiewen]

The easiest way to tell if the USA is planning a color-revolution in another nation?

NYT starts publishing propaganda about that nation.
👇

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

Trump has just destroyed the US beef industry. No country in their right mind is going to import US beef.

After Trump cut funding for Screwworm monitoring programs, the dangerous flesh-eating parasite has been found in US cattle for the first time since 1966.

[Paul Beecher @BeecherP]

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[Flying_Rodent @flying_rodent]

There’s a reason why the global fascist movement is pushing so hard at Britain specifically, and it’s because they can see they are pushing at an open door.

[Mouin Rabbani @MouinRabbani]

Israel flunkies are now going back in history to whitewash earlier colonial conquests and genocides in an effort to whitewash their own criminal enterprise.

As with their own history, they also fabricate an invented past to make their case.

Contrary to the claim below, the French conquest of Algeria had nothing to do with the enslavement of Europeans and Americans.

For centuries, corsairs, or state-sponsored pirates, operated throughout the Mediterranean.

North African corsairs captured European (and later American) ships, seizing their cargo and capturing their crew and passengers in order to enslave or ransom them.

European corsairs similarly captured Ottoman and other ships and enslaved or ransomed their crews and passengers.

The various corsairs also raided and plundered coastal settlements in southern Europe and northern Africa.

By the time French troops occupied Algiers in 1830, the seizure of US ships had already ended as a result of the Barbary Wars.

North African corsairs had stopped attacking US ships in 1805 at the conclusion of the First Barbary War, but had resumed their activities during the War of 1812 after they were encouraged to attack American shipping by Britain.

The attacks on US ships definitively ceased in 1815 with the end of the Second Barbary War.

The French invaded Algeria, then known as the Regency of Algiers, in 1830.

By that time both North African and European corsairs had already largely ceased operations.

The proximate cause of the French conquest of Algeria is what was known as the Bakri-Busnach Affair.

Two Algerian merchants, Bakri and Busnach, had during the Napoleonic Wars supplied the French military with large amounts of grain. Napoleon refused to pay his bills, as well as others incurred by previous French governments to the duo’s company.

As a result the merchants were unable to repay the large loans they had taken from the ruler of Algiers to finance their dealings with France.

The Affair was therefore not just a commercial dispute between Algerian merchants and their French clients, but also a diplomatic one between the governments of Algiers and France.

Bakri and Busnach were Sephardic Jews, whose families had found refuge in Algiers after their expulsion from Spain.

At one point their company sent two representatives, Jacob Cohen Bakri and Simon Abousaya, to France to collect their debts and use the funds to settle their loan. Instead of paying up, the French authorities arrested them.

Intervention by Algiers secured their release, and also an agreement to settle the debt. The French however declined to fulfil their commitments, and further efforts by Algiers and the merchants to recoup their losses similarly came to nothing.

Tensions increased further when Algiers suspected Paris and the merchants were colluding to deprive Algiers of funds it was owed, and thereby weaken it vis-à-vis France.

In 1827, in what came to be known as the Fly Whisk Incident, the Algerian ruler Hussain Dey hit the French Consul, Pierre Deval, in the face with a fly whisk at a public gathering, and ordered him out, in exasperation at being informed by Deval that there had been no progress in the Affair. For good measure Deval had also made various disparaging remarks about Islam and Muslims.

Paris seized upon this as a casus belli, at a time when the French monarch, Charles X, was facing increasing domestic challenges and eager to divert attention to a patriotic campaign abroad.

Fortified by support from Istanbul and Britain, Hussain refused to apologise, and the subsequent French blockade did more damage to French commerce in Marseille than to Algiers.

The crisis was ultimately resolved by the French occupation of Algiers in 1830.

By the time France consolidated its rule over Algeria in 1875, between 500,000 and one million Algerians, out of a total population of some three million, lay dead. Many scholars describe the French pacification campaign as a genocidal war.

The above details notwithstanding, France’s motivations in seizing Algeria were ultimately no different than those that led it and other European powers to occupy and colonize other territories around the globe.

It had everything to do with France’s commercial interests and its rivalries with other powers, and absolutely nothing to do with what it liked to call "La mission civilisatrice".

The pretensions of Israel flunkies aside, it is useful to bear in mind that colonialism and its associated crimes is infinitely more vile than the worst of its victims.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

Adam Johnson, author of How to Sell a Genocide says in order to carry out a genocide, the US, Israel, and liberal media “needed to make a ceasefire with Hamas politically toxic… politically ‘unserious.’”

To achieve that, he explains, “it became so central [that Hamas and Palestinian resistance] are removed from history. And their grievances are [portrayed as] not secular or political but as instead driven entirely by hatred of Jews.”

“Then a ceasefire becomes not only impossible, it becomes immoral… and then genocide was inevitable.”

@adamjohnsonCHI | @PlutoPress

[Jenson Puffin ہائدی 🐦‍⬛ @MissOoo1g]

Marie Antoinette lost her head for less

[Time Capsule Tales @timecaptales]

I miss the days of the coaches just being blunt and honest about their teams.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
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