John Helmer on the big beautiful boaters breaching the blockade https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11/the-thousand-boat-blockade-busting-operation-changes-everything-on-the-gaza-front-if-it-materialises.html

As usual with his articles there is a lot of diplomatic inside baseball, this time mostly about turkey using this flotilla to dickwave in Cyprus as well as Russian state support of Israel vs popular opinion. The article concludes on a down note:

“Let us say a Turkish aid flotilla materialises and gets to the new port and marina the Turks have built in North Cyprus. There are several problems with that. Small craft, especially leisure yachts and motor boats cannot ply the Eastern Med during the storm weather from December until April. Moreover, if Hamas is running the current ceasefire, it does not want Erdogan to give a reason for Israel to break it. A flotilla is therefore just PR at this stage.”

The more you hate FakeNews the stronger we get

Doing 20 to life in a Colorado Supermax because you didn’t buy a sodastream

Santos expelled from the house, my boy

My neighbors sink leaks and rains down through my apartment, but it doesn't matter!

https://archive.is/d1tvY

Business Insider decides to do a bit of cheeky red baiting about

"RED SPIES INSIDE THE BUILDING!"

In regards to how the ukro-nazis think there's a whole network of sleeper agent ~~communist~~ Russian SPIES embedded in every level of Ukrainian society thatve suddenly been activated to throw the peaceful and unified ~~Aryan~~ Ukrainian volk into a state of perceived anarchy with the Red SPIES goals being to destroy Ukrainian morale with fake news because Russias already lost the war and is betting everything on Facebook memes sent to babushka winning them the final victory.

Also they're mentioning that the ukronazis may be planning on purging their SBU because the agency has existed since '91 and was the Ukrainian SSR KGB before that, therefore it's filled with Red SPIES I mean Russians.

The bodies of Mohammad Ali Atai Shoorche and Panah Taqizadeh, who were martyred by the Zionist regime in Syria, were buried in the shrine of Hazrat Ruqiya, peace be upon them.

...

In the terrorist operation of the Zionist regime in Zainabiyah region, several people of Damascus were also martyred, and the bodies of these martyrs were also buried in Damascus.

Source (FarsNews)

They were IRGC Quds Force advisers. The article doesn't clearly state when they were killed.

Saying "Al-Aqsa" and setting off amazon echos

Unconfirmed via Al Jazeera live blog.

Family of infant captive says they are waiting on confirmation of his death

Family members of Kfir Bibas say in a statement that they have been informed by the Israeli army of Hamas claims that the infant has been killed but are awaiting official confirmation.

Earlier, we reported that Hamas’s armed wing released a statement saying that the 10-month-old, his four-year-old brother, and their mother were killed in the Israeli bombing of Gaza.

“Our family has learned of Hamas’ latest claims,” a statement from the Hostages and Missing Persons Families Forum said. “We are waiting for the information to be confirmed and hopefully refuted by military officials.”

Blasting crab rave on repeat and I don't care who hears

Essequibo Referendum Is a National Awakening: President Maduro

“Today we are not voting as the opposition or the ruling party... We are voting as Venezuela, with one color, one flag, and one feeling,” he stressed.

During a press conference held after casting his vote, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said that the referendum is an extraordinary moment in the country's electoral history because all the factors come together in a single force: the defense of the Venezuelan rights on the Essequibo territory.

“As Venezuelans, today we are not voting as the opposition or the ruling party. We are not voting as center, left or right. We are not voting red, blue, white or green. Today we are voting as Venezuela, with one color, one flag and one feeling,” he said.

Maduro highlighted that the consultative referendum on the Guayana Essequiba has prompted “an awakening of the national spirit of which the Liberator Simon Bolivar spoke about.”

Maduro highlighted that the consultative referendum allows Venezuela to take the initiative in the process of asserting its rights through “a powerful consensus in a feeling of defense of what is ours and a rejection of the dispossession carried out by the British Empire.”

He also stressed that citizen participation in this democratic process strengthens the nation in the face of recent aggressions by the government of Guyana and the empires.

“I am confident and optimistic. Starting today we will emerge stronger as a country to speak hard, clearly and powerfully,” he noted, highlighting that the world will see the power of Venezuelan men and women when exercising their right to vote.

Finally, the Bolivarian leader sent a message of unity directed towards citizens who have not yet decided whether they will participate in the referendum.

“Let's put aside pettiness, sectarianism and partisanship. It is Venezuela time. It is Venezuela day. It is the day of the people's free expression."

Really doubt Maduro will actually invade Guyana. Venezuela is only doing this now because the US wanted to build military bases around the Venezuelan border since they can't use Brazil or Colombia territory anymore as their base for a land invasion of Venezuela.

A few weeks from now the GOP boots its speaker and somebody nominates George Santos and they soon put him on the ballot. He says he'll never come back and they're crazy. But he wins and he does come back to congress - this time as speaker.

I fear that Derek Chauvin getting stabbed will turn out for the worse overall. I can see future high profile police abuse cases resulting in no prison time because it would be "too dangerous" for them inside.

another week, another thread.

Mkb on Pakistan applying for BRICS, India's friendliness with the west

https://www.indianpunchline.com/indias-brics-quandary-deepens/

Arguably, the more BRICS endeavours to remodel the US-dominated financial and trade architecture, the greater becomes India’s reservations about the grouping. The heart of the matter is that India is no longer enamoured of the BRICS as a vehicle challenging the US-dominated international institutions when Delhi is content with being a status quoist so long as Washington embraces it as its “indispensable partner”.

This contradiction is not easy to resolve. Logically, India no longer belongs to the BRICS. But quitting BRICS is also non-option, as India gains out of its membership — although it is hardly making any significant contribution to the advancement of the grouping. The good thing about Pakistan’s BRICS membership will be that it tilts the balance within the grouping in favour of a transformative agenda, and makes it more homogenous.

A number of examples of algorithms and AI being used to collude in today's NC - https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11/new-technologies-to-get-around-old-laws-ai-is-being-widely-used-to-evade-antitrust-fix-prices-and-worse.html

Researchers there wrote earlier this year that while the use of AI might be new, the antitrust laws that govern this type of behavior have been around for more than 140 years. And while AI might increase the speed of price-fixing based on up-to-the-second data, they’re otherwise nothing new:

Let’s just change the terms of the hypothetical slightly to understand why. Everywhere the word “algorithm” appears, please just insert the words “a guy named Bob.” Is it ok for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market, and then tell everybody how they should price? If it isn’t ok for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn’t ok for an algorithm to do it either.