VIDEO: Chinese Warship, Cutter Collide in South China Sea – USNI News

When my battle group transited the South China Sea back in the early 1990s, the only Chinese reaction was a surveillance flight from two Chinese YAK-derivative aircraft. The Chinese military has become more foolish and aggressive since then and mistakes like this one are bound to not be the last.

A Chinese cutter and guided-missile destroyer collided with each other in the South China Sea on Monday during a botched blockade attempt of Philippine Coast Guard vessels ten nautical miles off Scarborough Shoal in one of the most severe incidents among Chinese forces to date.

Just before the incident, Philippine Coast Guard patrol vessels responded to reports of harassment and “hazardous maneuvers” against Philippine fishing vessels around the contested maritime feature, according to a statement from Philippine Coast Guard spokesperson Commodore Jay Tarriela. BRP Teresa Magbanua (MRRV-9701) and BRP Suluan (MRRV-4406) escorted fishing carrier MV Pamamalakaya and 35 local fishing vessels in support of Manila’s Kadiwa Operation, a Philippine government-led initiative designed to support and empower fishing communities in the country’s western exclusive economic zone.

Chinese forces failed to water cannon Suluan after Philippine sailors maneuvered away, according to the press release. China Coast Guard cutter 3104, one of several former People’s Liberation Army Navy 056-class corvettes transferred to China’s maritime law enforcement agency, proceeded to chase the Philippine vessel alongside the PLAN 052D-class guided-missile destroyer Guilin (164) in what Tarriela described as a “risky” maneuver.

Source: VIDEO: Chinese Warship, Cutter Collide in South China Sea – USNI News

Putting my posting money where my mouth is

I had to leave Twitter when Twitter became X (motto: we put the X in Toxic!). I first hopped over to Mastodon but found it too technically challenging even for me. Then Bluesky opened to public use and I set up an account there, happy that posts weren’t being throttled/algorithmized, etc.

Lately, though, even BlueSky isn’t scratching my itch. I am just done with 300-byte conversations. This world absolutely needs context. It needs depth! You can’t explain anything reliably in 300 characters; you can talk past people but you can’t make a point with any reliability. Trite sound bites are what has gotten us the distracted world we now find ourselves in.

So last week, I posted to BlueSky how I was going to dust off my RSS Feed Reader and start consuming news again without any billionaire nor algorithm telling me what to read.
BlueSky post from markturner.net, saying 'I am dusting off my RSS feed reader to take back control of what stories I see. What are your favorite RSS news feeds?'
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Montserrat and music

AIR Studios Montserrat in 2014,. Photo by CaptMatty, Wikipedia.Commons.

As you may know, I got serious about my music when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020. I will talk more about that in a moment, but the gist is that music takes up much of my free time at the moment. I still ask myself “wouldn’t it be great if I could do this full time?”

Recently, I learned of a recent documentary called “Under the Volcano” about Sir George Martin’s recording studio built on a hill in Montserrat under … well, a volcano. While I have not yet seen the documentary, I did read up on this studio, called AIR Studios Montserrat.

As a music fan in the 1980s, I knew many of my favorite albums of the time had been recorded in the Caribbean. I just didn’t know exactly where, or that most had been made at a single studio: AIR Montserrat. The Police; Dire Straits; Paul McCartney; the Rolling Stones; Jimmy Buffett; Elton John, Earth, Wind, & Fire, and so many others recorded some of their best work in Montserrat. Oh, if those walls could talk! They don’t have much to say anymore, sadly, as they are literally crumbling as the harsh Caribbean weather tears into these exposed, abandoned buildings.
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What Happened to Southwest Airlines? A Deep Dive Into Its Decline

he U.S. airline industry is an unforgiving, cynical business where success tends to be fragile and short-lived. Unless—until recently—you were Southwest Airlines.

The brand that started flying as a tiny intrastate airline in Texas in 1971 tended to buck industry trends for decades, with consistent profitability, stable workforce relations, and high marks for customer service and operational reliability. It also grew to become the fifth-largest airline in the world in terms of passengers carried. That formula worked for a number of reasons, most of which were the result of being in the right place at the right time. Growing an airline in the booming Sunbelt in the 1980s and 1990s was a lucky break. Being profitable with a single aircraft type and happy employees when the major competitors were saddled with aging, diverse aircraft fleets and overburdened employees eager to strike to protect union contracts that dated back to before the government stopped price-fixing the domestic airline industry was good business.

But then the industry got more complex.

Source: What Happened to Southwest Airlines? A Deep Dive Into Its Decline

What happens if Trump starts ignoring court rulings? We break it down | KUNC

In less than a month in office, President Trump has signed dozens of executive orders that are now facing pushback in the courts.Many are wondering: What happens if he simply ignores them?Law professors who spoke to NPR saw warning signs of a constitutional crisis based on a recent court order and comments from the vice president over the weekend.

Source: What happens if Trump starts ignoring court rulings? We break it down | KUNC

The Wiretap: Kamala Harris’ Campaign Staff Suspected iPhones Had Been Hacked. Apple Declined To Give Them The Help They Wanted.

In late October, a week before the presidential election, Kamala Harris’ cybersecurity team called Apple looking for help. A spyware detection tool had flagged anomalies on two iPhones belonging to senior members of the vice president’s team, and staff were worried the devices had been hacked.

The Harris team’s ask was a simple one, sources familiar with the incident told Forbes. It wanted Apple to extract a “raw image” copy of the operating system from one of the devices to better assess what had happened to it.

Though the phone’s owner had consented to its examination, Apple declined to provide the image, sources said. The company did offer to provide iCloud backup information and some telemetry data linked to the device, but neither were of interest to the Harris campaign, which did not press the issue over fears of the issue becoming politicized. The phone continues to be investigated by iVerify, the company whose spyware detection tool first flagged the issues. Both Apple and the Harris campaign declined to comment on the matter. The FBI, which had been investigating the matter, declined to comment.

Source: The Wiretap: Kamala Harris’ Campaign Staff Suspected iPhones Had Been Hacked. Apple Declined To Give Them The Help They Wanted.

Popular rock band forced to turned down tours, can’t make money on them anymore – nj.com

Even as big-scale tours and festivals have resumed, many musicians are still navigating a tumultuous concert landscape four years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher discussed how his popular heavy metal band manages these difficulties on YouTube interview series “The Break Down With Nath & Johnny.”

“During COVID, no one toured, a lot of places shut down, and a lot of people changed careers,x said Kelliher. Techs that work for bands went into the real estate business or got regular jobs. Everyone was scrambling for money. And it was a f—ing disaster. So, the trickle-down effect of supply and demand. For instance, petrol and gas. It’s all economics. Everything relies on transportation.”

Source: Popular rock band forced to turned down tours, can’t make money on them anymore – nj.com

YouTube Interview here.

Billionaire cowardice led to The Washington Post, L.A. Times non-endorsements

Once upon a time, after the publisher decided our newspaper would endorse a candidate that those of us on the editorial board didn’t prefer, a colleague circled the date on the calendar and joked that it was “Reminder That We Work for The Man Day.” We knew, even if readers didn’t, that newspaper endorsements don’t always reflect a consensus or the majority opinion of its editorial writers.

At The Los Angeles Times, the man in charge is Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire doctor and founder of the health care software company NantHealth who spent $500 million for the newspaper in 2018. Soon-Shiong’s decision to block the paper from endorsing California’s own Kamala Harris for president, as its board was reportedly planning to do, led to Donald Trump crowing and the paper’s editorials editor quitting. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.” Two more members of the newspaper’s editorial board resigned after Garza did.

At The Washington Post, the world’s third-richest man, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is The Man. And his venerable newspaper, which he bought in 2013 for $250 million, will not endorse a presidential candidate this year. And won’t going forward, according to its relatively new publisher and chief executive, Will Lewis. “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election,” Lewis wrote on the newspaper’s website Friday. “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” The newspaper, Lewis writes, didn’t endorse in presidential races from 1960 to 1972 but did from 1976 to 2020.

Source: Billionaire cowardice led to The Washington Post, L.A. Times non-endorsements

Wealth distribution in the United States

Forbes recently published the Forbes 400 List for 2024, listing the 400 richest people in the United States. This inspired me to make a histogram to show the distribution of wealth in the United States. It turns out that if you put Elon Musk on the graph, almost the entire US population is crammed into a vertical bar, one pixel wide. Each pixel is $500 million wide, illustrating that $500 million essentially rounds to zero from the perspective of the wealthiest Americans.

Source: Wealth distribution in the United States