Our favorite logistics guy on concrete structures and kleptocracy!

The Wall Street Banker Bros are back!

Banker jerks with money are spending money at strip clubs and fancy bars like it's 2006:

https://nypost.com/2022/04/09/wall-street-bros-wild-nights-of-sex-debauchery-on-the-rise/

The Rise and Fall of the Neo-Liberal Order by Gary Gerstle

From the NY Times book review:

Over the next eight years Reagan laid the neoliberal order’s foundations. Gerstle emphasizes its market side — the administration’s busting of the air-traffic controllers’ union, its deregulation of key industries, its dramatic reduction of the wealthiest Americans’ tax rate and its attempt to construct a Supreme Court hostile to the New Deal order — which, as it turned out, released the force of greed more than it did the genius of the marketplace. The administration’s racial policies, Gerstle says, centered on the drug war it waged on young Black men, though he could have chosen any number of other positions as well — from the ravaging of public housing to the quiet resegregation of public schools — so thoroughly was race embedded in the Reagan Revolution.

What Reagan created, Bill Clinton consolidated. The economic story is straightforward. Having stumbled through his first two years in office, Clinton claimed neoliberalism as his own, proudly promoting the globalization of manufacturing, the deregulation of banking and telecommunication, and a fiscal policy designed to convince investors that they could make as much money under a Democratic government as they could under a Republican one. By the turn of the 21st century the American economy had been remade, its old industrial base replaced by the wondrous world of high tech, high finance and high-end real estate. The racial story was more complicated. Clinton celebrated multiculturalism as a marker of the nation’s vitality, Gerstle says. But he also doubled down on Reagan’s racialized law-and-order campaigns and completed the assault on the welfare state, even as the new economy was hitting poor communities with particular force. By the end of the Clinton years, Allen Park’s median household income was 15 percent lower than it had been when Reagan stopped by for a beer. Detroit’s had tumbled by 39 percent.

https://nyti.ms/35MMiww

More Russian money for botox!

Look who's strolling the streets of Kyiv today!

I hope BoJo brought missiles with him.

Wasn't Shanghai supposed to be in lockdown?

How to furnish an apartment for nothing in NYC

A great read from today's NY Times:

A few weeks ago, Denise Gordon was walking near her Gramercy home when she spotted an antique chest of drawers on the curb. She didn’t need it, but this dresser was too good to ignore — solid wood, with clawed feet and dovetail joinery. It was also too heavy for Ms. Gordon, who is 68, to carry. So she did what any good sidewalk stooper would do: She offered two random men on the street $20 apiece to carry it back to her apartment. And, being New Yorkers, they did.

“People don’t know what they’re throwing away,” said Ms. Gordon, who grew up on the Upper East Side and has been digging for discarded treasure since she paid 35 cents for a silk blouse at a thrift store when she was 13 years old. “In my neighborhood, they don’t know and they don’t care.”

New York City curbs are awash in furniture left behind by people who are moving, who died, or who are simply fickle. If you know where to look, and how to get the stuff home, it’s possible to furnish an entire apartment with someone else’s junk. And if you don’t know where to look, an entire ecosystem of expert scavengers has emerged on TikTok and Instagram, ready to help you scout out great finds.


A good sidewalk sleuth can spot a quality piece, knowing to check its heft and to look for features like tongue and groove joinery, before committing. They deftly enlist strangers and Uber drivers to help drag loot home, and often travel with screwdrivers, bungee cords and flashlights, in case they happen upon a gem.

https://nyti.ms/3Kqyo21

Amazing BBC story about US-UK intelligence on Russia and Ukraine:

By autumn, Washington had decided it needed to do something with what it was being told by its spies. That decision, those involved say, was taken at the very highest level of the White House by President Biden.

A crucial moment came in early November when CIA Director William Burns travelled to Moscow - to warn that Washington knew what was being planned. The trip was not kept secret. The first time some Russian officials were told that their country might be seriously intending to act against Ukraine was when they heard it from the director of the CIA, one official says.

The next stage was to make some of the intelligence public. One individual involved in the discussions, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity, recalls times where it was asked: "What is the point of knowing all of this, if we can't do something with it?"

In Washington, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines - who briefed allies at Nato in November - and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan are credited with pushing for the release of material. Experts on declassification, trained to understand the risks, began to work round the clock to establish what could be shared.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61044063


It would seem that the US and UK have sources in the heart of the Kremlin.

The war for borscht.

This is a Russian spokesperson I've seen before. Apparently she came to the podium completely bombed:

https://twitter.com/carlbildt/status/1512488818078887941