Top Ten Songs

Because the world needed to hear from my basic b pop taste? Top ten songs, but the twist is that every new entry is from five years before. And probably not my actual top songs from those years as my memory is like a sieve. 

2024 - I am as surprised as anyone that Macklemore is on this list. Hind's Hall

2019 - Fond memories of singing "I don't want to live like this" with the kid. Harmony Hall

2014 - For the music video - Hideaway

2009 - Weird Al. Craigslist

2004 - KT Tunstall's debut album was this year and Miniature Disasters is my favourite track from it.

1999 - Because the internet has shaped my idea of culture - All Star

1994 - TMBG - Extra Savoir Faire

1989 - The number, another summer - Fight the Power

1984 - Let's dance for a while - Forever Young

1979 - A slight cheat as thus was released in 1978, but it is definitely a 1979 song - I Will Survive

Korean Impeachment Drama

The situation in Korea has gotten quite interesting. Truly k-drama levels of drama, only less motivated by romantic affairs. A convoluted mess of a plot with surprise twists upon surprise twists upon surprise twists. There's probably a lesson here about hubris and maybe not doubling down when faced with overwhelming opposition - but that's going to wait until the current cliffhangers are resolved.

Recall that earlier this month, the president declared martial law - which was immediately cancelled by the National Assembly. He was then impeached and the prime minister took his place. This is the instigating incident for the craziness to follow.

An interesting aspect of Korean government - the prime minister is appointed by the president and then confirmed by the National Assembly. Since the elections for the presidency and National Assembly are independent and can happen years apart, there can be some very divided governments, as in this case where the opposition controls 192 of 300 seats in the National Assembly. Also, the prime minister does not need to be a member of the National Assembly, as it is the current situation.

Now the impeachment of the president took two attempts - it requires 2/3 of the National Assembly to vote for it. The opposition Democratic Party only had 192 of the required 200 votes and the first time around, the president's party just left the chambers and didn't vote at all. But the outrage at the declaration of martial law was still so intense that they caved and agreed to have their president impeached.

And now, the Democratic Party is demanding a special commission to investigate the president for treason (and his wife for corruption) but the prime minister/acting president is not signing those laws into force. In response, the opposition is now threatening the prime minister/acting president with impeachment and they say that the 2/3 threshold for impeachment only applies to the president, other members of government are impeached on simple majorities. The opposition says it's only a simple majority since he is only acting as president and not the actual elected president. 

Now IANAL - let alone someone with any actual knowledge of Korea's constitutional intricacies, but my understanding is that this decision - along with the actual verdict of the impeachment - would be decided by the Korean Constitutional Court. So now we get the mid-season introduction of a bunch of new characters.

The Korean Constitutional Court only has 6 of 9 justices at the moment, and four of those were appointed by the impeached president - so it may seem like this bodes poorly for the opposition. HOWEVER, these justices are also confirmed by the National Assembly - so they needed bipartisan support. And the president only directly appoints 3 of them. And due to term lengths, 2 of those direct appointments are from the previous president who was a Democrat and had a Democratic National Assembly to confirm. What of the other 3 justices? Those were recommended by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, whom the impeached president appointed. But the Chief Justice is also a position requiring confirmation by the National Assembly, and is his second choice since the first was too conservative to be confirmed. So it's not so clear how those votes will go. 

The bill to impeach the prime minister/acting president is scheduled for Thursday, the day after Christmas. It will almost certainly fall between 1/2 and 2/3 of the National Assembly supporting it. And then it is a true constitutional crisis as the legitimacy of the acting president will be in shreds. It's really wild - the conservatives are doing all of this to protect their impeached president - a man whose approval ratings are just off the charts bad. Even before that guy declared martial law, he was at 19% support, and his crazy ass gambit certainly did not turn things around for him. A net negative 74 approval rating - try to wrap your head around that. There's a glaringly obvious solution - and that's to just throw the wildly unpopular asshole under the bus - but the conservatives of South Korea are just refusing to do so.

So thanks to South Korea for providing more end-of-year drama to fill in the dead space between Christmas and New Years.

Genocide Genocide Everywhere and not a Drop to Drink

In reverse chronological order:

Israel has accused Human Rights Watch (HRW) of blood libel. What prompted this?

Yesterday, HRW accused Israel of acts of genocide by depriving Gazans of access to water, including things like destroying vital water infrastructure.

July 29, US State Department says they are "seeking additional information" after an IDF soldier posted a video to social media of "blowing up the Tel Sultan water reservoir in honour of Shabbat".

July 27 - the IDF blows up Rafah's water reservoir.

Now for this timeline to be more accurate, please imagine around three or four entries per week in that five month span stating "US sends more bombs and weapons to Israel".

It's okay though Israel might still be investigating itself who needs water when you can be drinking 2,000 pound bombs? And I guess water is Hamas.  There were gunmen hiding with SCUBA tanks in the reservoir, the IDF could hear them as they casually filmed themselves wiring in explosives.

Songs of a Lost World

This post is in case any of you didn't know I'm Gen X.

It's been sixteen years since the last album from The Cure. I heard A Fragile Thing back in October as part of the whole teaser thing and got pretty hyped about the prospect of new album. A Fragile Thing most definitely sounds like The Cure. Well, I'm only just now getting around to listening to it, and feeling regret about what I've been doing instead for the past six weeks.

I mean it's not some transcendent work of genius or whatever - but what it is, is unmistakable and definitely The Cure. And if you like The Cure, you will like this album. And if you love The Cure, you will love this album. And if you have no idea what the Cure is and you like this album, you have a deep ass rabbit hole that will bury you deep inside of Robert Smith. Just like heaven.

I'm mentioning this now because remarkably, after over a decade and a half, The Cure managed to completely nail the news cycle about one month ahead of time.

It Has Been Four Hiroshimas

It's been over a month since I suggested that I had an idea about what was causing the disconnect between perceptions of the economy and the actual economy. I really thought I had it - I had an explanation, which might not account for all of it, I thought might have accounted for a significant chunk. And then on firther reflection, I determined that I was probably wrong. And now I've been struggling to fill in my understanding of what happened and what is happening. So I'm still trying to parse the November disatser - but in the meantime, here are some thoughts about the scale of destruction in Gaza. 

It's fucking nuts. Like, we don't really comprehend how fucking nuts it is. I keep trying to find ways to contextualize it so we can understand how absolutely fucking ludicrous the campaign of genocide has been, but it's just beyond comprehension.

One example I tried earlier was to note that US military aid to Israel over the span of a year was on the order of $18 billion. There's another half dozen billion dollars spent on shit like keeping a carrier group deployed to the region and such.  By comparison, the GDP of the West Bank and the Gaza strip combined hit a peak of 19 billion in 2022. Now Gaza was under siege in 2022, and while economic activity in the West Bank was forcibly depressed by Israel, Gaza definitely had it worse.  Meaning that the value of US military aid to perpetrate this war is multiple times higher than the peak total economic activity of the region being bombed. Even if every man, woman, and child in Gaza decided to dedicate their entire productive output to "destroying Israel" or whatever racist bullshit the genocidal maniacs believe - this would still be far less than what the US has provided to destroy them. Multiple times less.

Here's another way of thinking about it. Between 1965 and 1975, the US dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos - roughly 100 times more than the amount of bombs dropped on Gaza in roughly one year. Here's an interesting article from ESRI's StoryMaps Team about the Vietnam bombing campaign. They are GIS people so they've plotted out the areas hit by bombs - and since it's ESRI, you can scroll the map around as you please. You can even drag it all the way over to the Middle East and compare the size of the bombing area with the size of Gaza.  It looks something like this:

What's my point here? It's the intensity of the bombing. We're talking about less than 1% of the area being hit by about 1% of the bombs dropped in the Vietnam War - but only in one tenth the amount of time. IOW - Israel is conducting a bombing campaign thats an order of magnitude more intense than the air power used during the Vietnam War.

The StoryMaps article ends with the following:

But there's no doubt that the aerial bombardment of Vietnam will forever remain one of the most staggering sustained attacks in human history.

That was written in 2017. It's already wrong. Incomprehensibly, it has been knocked down to a lower tier of destruction - because what Israel is doing to Gaza is just on a completely different scale.

The people at Airwars have done a study about Israel's bombing campaign for the month of October 2023. They have a bunch of ways of trying to contextualize just how much harm Israel is inflicting on Gaza. That one month was about as deadly for children in Gaza than the deadliest year in the Syrian civil war. And let's not forget that Syria is much larger than Gaza - with almost ten times the population.

85,000 tons of bombs. Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had a yield of 21 kilotons. It has been four Hiroshimas.

EDIT - added a link I missed earleir