archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20231113001800/https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/11/11/tennessee-book-ban-public-ordinance-banning-homosexuality/

from https://t.me/PalestineResist/19276

Image is of the Herðubreið tuya in northeast Iceland, formed when ice sheets covered Iceland thousands of years ago. It's not really relevant to the Grindavik situation but I think they look neat. The title also doesn't make much sense but I saw the pun and took it.

Off in Iceland, different kinds of tunnels are causing problems. Underneath the town of Grindavik in southwestern Iceland, not far from the capital of Reykjavik, tens of thousands of earthquakes are portending the movement of magma in tunnels underneath the peninsula, which could breach the surface and cause an eruption. The 4000 residents of the town have been evacuated as the magma has risen to less than a kilometer below the surface.^TRG^

Icelandic volcanism is pretty fascinating, with the country sitting on the mid-Atlantic ridge, the birthing line of new oceanic crustal rock running right down the Atlantic ocean for many thousands of kilometers, as well as a hotspot, an upwelling of mantle material of debated origin which also feeds otherwise-inexplicable volcanism in the middle of tectonic plates, like Yellowstone and Hawaii.

An additional factor here is the presence of glaciers. When a volcano erupts underneath a glacier, the melting water cools the lava rapidly, causing features usually seen in volcanoes that erupt under the sea like pillow basalts, but also unique features like tuyas, which are steep-sided but flat-topped volcanoes. The rapid melting of water can also cause glacial floods called jökulhlaups.

Icelandic volcanoes have had significant regional and even global impacts in the past. In 2010, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which was a volcano covered by an ice cap, erupted and the ash cloud spread across Europe, causing airline disruption for about a month which caused nearly $2 billion in total losses for airline companies - though this seems pretty quaint compared to the pandemic's impact on airlines in retrospect. Back in the 1780s, the Laki volcano killed a quarter of the Icelandic population due to sulphur dioxide causing massive crop failure and cattle death. This eruption's impacts spread to Europe and beyond, causing notable worldwide temperature drops and thus crop failures and may well have been a contributing factor to the outbreak of the French Revolution, which obviously heralded the death of the feudal order and the eventual primacy of capitalism in its place. That being said, any eruption at Grindavik is very probably not going to have any significant worldwide impacts - there are over a hundred volcanoes already in Iceland, and regular climate change is doing a great job at causing mayhem right now anyway. It's also still possible that there won't be an eruption at all, at least not in the short to medium term.

Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.

Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.

The Country of the Week is Iceland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

This week's update is here!

Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.

A meter-deep sinkhole has formed in Grindavík and this indicates that the magma tunnel that has formed under the town has come very close to the surface. It is possible that the magma will reach the surface within the town limits of Grindavík.

This was said by Þorvaldur Þórðarson, a volcanologist, who reviewed the situation in Kvöldfréttir Stöðvar 2 tonight.

He said that the depression in question and its depth are in accordance with the GPS measurements of the Norwegian Meteorological Agency. This depression would be an indication that the magma tunnel under Grindavík had come close to the surface.

"It indicates that it will soon erupt and that, unfortunately, indicates that the eruption will occur within the town limits of Grindavík."

"It's a darker scenario than I had imagined," said Þorvaldur.

The earthquakes of the last few days seem to have followed a two-thousand-year-old series of craters, and this suggests that the magma is exploiting a weakness in the crust. Þorvalður said it was about eight hundred meters north of Grindavík, and therefore he considered it unlikely that an eruption would occur in the town.

Since then, the earthquakes have extended under the town and out to the shallows to the south of the town.

"He has lengthened as much as possible. As I said earlier, everything points to Grindavík getting to see an eruption that is ideally close by," said Þorvaldur.

Þorvalður said that if the lava comes up where the subsidence is, it will most likely flow to the west and then away from the town. Something will go east, but probably not much, based on analytics.

"Then the only question is how much damage there will be to the town and how large a part of it will be covered by lava, if this all comes true," said Þorvaldur.

How the hell is the fucking Vatican doing better on this than a large amount of western left?

Do not let up on the protests.

Biden will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in person for the first time in a year on Wednesday during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco.

"The president is determined to see the re-establishment of military-to-military ties because he believes it's in the U.S. national security interest," Sullivan said in an interview with CBS

Sullivan said on CNN's "State of the Union" that Biden would seek to "advance the ball" on military ties during his meeting with Xi, but declined to provide further details.

The Biden-Xi meeting is expected to cover global issues from the Israel-Hamas war to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, North Korea's ties with Russia, Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific, human rights, fentanyl production, artificial intelligence, as well as "fair" trade and economic relations, a senior U.S. official said.

Global conflicts have a habit of sneaking up on money-managers Illustration of a man watching the financial markets, behind him is a globe with a lit fuse image: Satoshi Kambayashi Oct 30th 2023 Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

Europe had been moving towards the slaughterhouse for years, and by 1914 a conflict was all but inevitable—that, at least, is the argument often made in hindsight. Yet at the time, as Niall Ferguson, a historian, noted in a paper published in 2008, it did not feel that way to investors. For them, the first world war came as a shock. Until the week before it erupted, prices in the bond, currency and money markets barely budged. Then all hell broke loose. “The City has seen in a flash the meaning of war,” wrote this newspaper on August 1st 1914.

Could financial markets once again be underpricing the risk of a global conflict? In the nightmare scenario, the descent into a third world war began two years ago, as Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border. Today Israel’s battle against Hamas has the frightening potential to spill across its borders. American military support is crucial to both Ukraine and Israel, and in Iraq and Syria the superpower’s bases have come under fire, probably from proxies of Iran. Should China decide it is time to take advantage of a distracted superpower and invade Taiwan, America could all too easily end up being drawn into three wars at once. The rest of the world risks those wars interlocking and turning into something even more devastating.

This scenario would of course place financial damage a long way down the list of horrors. Even so, it is part of an investor’s job to consider exactly what it would mean for their portfolio. So far the possibility of a world war has barely caused a tremor in the markets. True, they have for some time now been more seized by fear than greed. Bond prices have been turbulent, even for supposedly risk-free American Treasuries, and yields have been climbing for most of this year. Stock indices in America, China and Europe have fallen for three consecutive months. Yet this choppiness can all be plausibly explained by peacetime factors, including outsized government borrowing, interest-rate expectations and shareholders whose previous optimism had got the better of them.

In short, it does not look anything like the panic you might expect if the odds of the world entering into war were edging higher. The brightest conclusion is that such odds really are close to zero. A darker one is that, like the investors of 1914, today’s may soon be blindsided. History points to a third possibility: that even if investors expect a major war, there is little they can do to reliably profit from it.

The easiest way to understand this is to imagine yourself in 1914, knowing that the first world war was about to arrive. You would need to place your bets quickly—within weeks, the main exchanges in London, New York and continental Europe would be closed. They would stay that way for months. Would you be able to guess how many, and which way the war might have turned by then? If you wisely judged American stocks to be a good bet, would you have managed to trade with a broker who avoided bankruptcy amid a liquidity crisis? You might have decided, again wisely, to trim positions in soon-to-be war-strained government debt. Would you have guessed that Russian bonds, which would experience a communist revolution and Bolshevik-driven default, were the ones to dump completely?

War, in other words, involves a level of radical uncertainty far beyond the calculable risks to which most investors have become accustomed. This means that even previous world wars have limited lessons for later ones, since no two are alike. Mr Ferguson’s paper shows that the optimal playbook for 1914 (buy commodities and American stocks; sell European bonds, stocks and currencies) was of little use in the late 1930s. Investors in that decade did try to learn from history. Anticipating another world war, they sold continental European stocks and currencies. But this different war had different winning investments. British stocks beat American ones, and so did British government bonds.

Today there is a greater and more terrible source of uncertainty, since many of the potential belligerent powers wield nuclear weapons. Yet in a sense, this has little financial relevance. After all, in a nuclear conflagration your portfolio would be unlikely to rank highly among your priorities. The upshot of it all? That the fog of war is even thicker for investors than it is for military generals, who at least have sight of the action. If the worst happens, future historians might wonder about the seeming insouciance of today’s investors. They will only be able to do so because, for them, the fog will have cleared.■

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukrainian-military-officer-coordinated-nord-stream-pipeline-attack/ar-AA1jLI1c

Father was wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh in a school playground in Brooklyn with his son when Zionist Karen attacked them and called them terrorists.