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Links and Notes for November 18th, 2022

Published by marco on

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

COVID-19

The disastrous implications of lifting Zero-COVID in China by Evan Black (WSWS)

“Despite the immense significance of China’s Zero-COVID policy, which for over two years has saved millions of lives and proven that elimination is possible, the nationalist basis of this policy has always rendered it unviable in the long term.

“Efforts to maintain Zero-COVID have become increasingly costly, with the World Bank predicting in late September that China’s GDP growth will shrink by over 5 percent this year.

“It appears that a tipping point was reached when Apple threatened to shift production away from China after a major COVID-19 outbreak at the notorious Foxconn sweatshop in Zhengzhou, the world’s largest iPhone factory, severely disrupted production ahead of the peak holiday shopping season. By lifting Zero-COVID, the CCP clearly seeks to reintegrate with the world economy and fully restore capitalist production, symbolized by Xi’s maskless participation in the G20 summit this week.

“The full implications of the lifting of Zero-COVID will emerge in the coming weeks and months. It is clear that the CCP has not yet adopted the mass infection “herd immunity” policy which has been universally embraced in the West, and their current policy could now be described as the most stringent mitigationist strategy possible.
“[…] the objective laws of viral transmission are relentless and the situation could quickly spiral out of control. Any shift away from a Zero-COVID elimination strategy carries with it the potential for a monumental catastrophe. In this regard, the experiences in New Zealand and Hong Kong over the past year are most illustrative of the coming dangers.

“In the United States alone, official figures indicate that at least 20 million Americans are now suffering from long-term sequelae known as Long COVID, which can cause a wide range of symptoms affecting nearly every organ in the body. Up to 4 million Americans are so profoundly disabled by Long COVID that they have entirely left the workforce.

“Extrapolated for the Chinese population, if the “herd immunity” strategy pursued in the West is eventually adopted, upwards of 85 million Chinese people could end up suffering from Long COVID, including over 15 million completely disabled by the virus.

Economy & Finance

Crypto Meltdown is a Great Time to Eliminate Waste in Bloated Financial Sector by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“The big question is, what are we getting for all the extra resources the financial sector is taking from the rest of us? This is asking about the extent to which our means of payments have been improved and the extent to which we better allocate capital today than we would be with a smaller financial sector.”

Exactly: how does society benefit? Why would we want to encourage it?

“Suppose the growth of the financial sector has not led to corresponding benefits to the productive economy. In that case, we should view it as a source of waste and inefficiency, just as we would view a massive increase in the size of the trucking industry without any benefits in terms of improved delivery times. From the standpoint of policy, we should be looking at every opportunity to whittle down the size of the financial sector to reduce waste in the economy.
The proper government response is not to encourage people to gamble in crypto by regulating the industry and making it safer for ordinary people to throw their money in the toilet. The proper response is to throw the fraudsters in jail and tell people they invest in crypto at their own risk. If they want to engage in honest gambling, let them go to Vegas.”


Tuesday Talk*: Cashing Out by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“Though the U.S. Treasury notes on all bills, “This Note Is Legal Tender for All Debts, Public and Private,” there is no federal law mandating that all businesses accept cash. In the absence of an explicit law stating otherwise, merchants can decline any form of payment they like.”
“[…] for businesses, cash is a headache. It requires employees to be able to make change, a skill no longer common amongst cashiers. It enables employee theft. And it presents problems when the bank teller asks you to fill out this form for the government. The government hates cash because it doesn’t know where people got it, can’t trace it, and might not be able to tax it.
“Visa and Mastercard reap $138 billion from participating merchants in service fees a year. According to a recent report in The Economist, Visa and Mastercard are two of the most profitable companies in the world, with net margins of 51 percent and 46 percent last year.
“[…] credit cards generally require a bank account. Not everyone — including 301,700 households , or almost one in 10 households in New York City — has one.”
“[…] the point is for a business to be paid for its goods and services, should it be a minefield for consumers or should there be some reliable norm? But then, giving up four percent to Visa is quite a bite, though the government loves being able to access records of your every transaction. Where are we heading and where should we head?”


IMF Warns of ‘Wave of Debt Crises’ Coming in Global South, With War, Interest Rate Hikes, Overvalued Dollar by Ben Norton (Scheer Post)

“Gourinchas explained that “the energy crisis, especially in Europe, is not a transitory shock. The geopolitical realignment of energy supplies in the wake of the war is both broad and permanent.” Furthermore, the rallying of the US dollar against most other currencies could fuel a global economic crisis, he warned.”
““Too many low‑income countries are close to or are already in debt distress. Progress toward orderly debt restructuring,” he said, “is urgently needed to avert a wave of sovereign debt crises. Time may soon run out.””
“Desai also stressed that, despite interest rate hikes up to roughly 4% as of November 2022, the real Fed rate is still technically negative, because inflation is larger than the federal funds rate.
“The Federal Reserve always uses inflation rates and unemployment rates to justify its policy decisions as though it is making policy in the interest of ordinary Americans, and even the world. But in reality, the main thing that the Federal Reserve, in a long string of chair people of the Federal Reserve, going back to at least Alan Greenspan, what they have been primarily concerned about is the vast quantity of elite wealth that rests on said house of cards. They will not bring it down, because who pays the piper calls the tune.
So the world needs a more secure financial system. And for the last 70 years and more, the world has been prevented from having the international financial system it really needs, that would really promote development, because the United States has wanted to impose its own will and its own currency on the rest of the world.”


Universal Benefits Are Actually Cheaper Than Means-Tested Ones by Matt Bruenig (Jacobin)

“If (1) big, nontargeted welfare states reduce inequality and poverty more than small, targeted welfare states, and (2) targeting causes welfare states to be small, then (3) targeting is actually worse for inequality and poverty than not targeting.”
“For now, nobody has had to make an argument quite like that, because almost nobody who argues about these topics actually understands that targeting efficiency is an accounting trick. But maybe one day that understanding will be more widespread, and we will get a hallmark paper about the paradoxical way in which implementing taxes as phaseouts, despite being administratively wasteful and reducing program participation among the poor, nevertheless results in more benefits for the poor than the more efficient universal designs.”


As fallout from crypto collapse spreads, concerns grow over financial stability by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“South Korean bond markets have been plunged into turmoil because the newly elected right-wing governor of the Gangwon province, Kim Jin-tae, refused to honour debt commitments incurred in the building of a Legoland Korea theme park.

“The theme park, which opened on May 5, was intended to boost the depressed economy of the province but failed to generate sufficient revenue to pay the debt used to construct it. On September 28, Kim announced he would not honour the commitment made by the previous province administration.

“The South Korean bond market, the total value of which is more than $2 trillion and already under stress because of the interest rates emanating from the US, was thrown into turmoil. As an article in Foreign Policy put it, “Kim’s declaration all but threw a match” into what was a “dry winter forest.”

The withdrawal of support for a supposed government-backed project cast a dark shadow over the riskier corporate bond market.

“It noted that one of the safest bonds in South Korea, that issued by the Korea Electric Power Corp, saw the yield on its three-year debt climb from around 2.2 percent at the start of the year to 5.8 percent and its latest issuance, worth about $146 million, could not find a buyer.

“In response to the turmoil the government and financial authorities have had to intervene. The government has provided a liquidity facility of more than 50 trillion won, equivalent to $35 billion.

“The Bank of Korea has injected the equivalent of $67 billion into the short-term bond market, and South Korea’s five largest banks have stepped in to pledge $67 billion in liquidity.

“As the Foreign Policy report noted, there is an “absurdist” quality to these measures.

“On the one hand, following the interest rate hikes initiated by the US Fed, the Bank of Korea has been “aggressively raising the benchmark rate to curb inflation by reducing liquidity, but on the other hand, the South Korean government is injecting liquidity to the market to stave off a total economic collapse.”

Yeah, this sounds like exactly what happened when Liz Truss was fired. Austerity and belt-tightening on one side, and massive infusions of free money elsewhere. Raising the prime rate won’t have what is purported to be the intended effect—lowering inflation—if you simultaneously devalue your currency by printing a lot of new money—raising inflation.

“[…] electing bad politicians leads to a bad economy.”


Yellen, Zelensky and Zuckerberg Will Speak at DealBook Summit by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Ravi Mattu, Bernhard Warner, Vivian Giang, Sarah Kessler, Stephen Gandel, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni on October 18, 2022 (New York Times)

“The conference, scheduled for Nov. 30, will bring together the biggest newsmakers in business, politics and culture.

Who are these biggest newsmakers, you might ask?

“Among the speakers: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine; Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen; Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s co-founder, chairman and C.E.O.; Shou Chew, TikTok’s C.E.O.; Mike Pence, former vice president of the United States; Andy Jassy, Amazon’s C.E.O.; Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder and co-C.E.O.; Mayor Eric Adams of New York; Larry Fink, BlackRock’s chairman and C.E.O.; Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s C.E.O.; and Priscilla Sims Brown, Amalgamated Bank’s C.E.O.”

I highlighted a few of the interesting ones. The treasury secretary of the U.S. was just one of many invited speakers that included FTX’s C.E.O., who is almost certainly no longer going, right? Good ol’ Zelensky will be there, to represent the corporation of Ukraine, which has obtained more funding than any other organization this year. I wonder if Zuckerberg will be there? His company has also lost about 65% of its value this year, so one wonders whether he’s still worthy. ESG champion and head of the world’s largest financial entity Blackrock (north of $10T under management, as of Jan. 2022 … that may be less by now) will almost certainly still be there, if for nothing else than to give Janet her marching orders in person.


What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? by Corey Mohler (Existential Comics)

Public Policy & Politics

Toothache, Bleeding, Farewell by Miljenko Jergović (The Baffler)

“The siege was thoroughly reported on and studied as a social, political, and cultural event, as a site of a collective tragedy that, according to the general perception, was suffered by the Bosnian Muslims, while the story of intimate experiences of the siege, and the transformation that each person underwent, was told by no one. That’s a pity though, for each of those 527,049 individual stories, which is how many of us there were in Sarajevo and the satellite municipalities in 1991, is truer than the historical and the collective narrative.
“I never stayed in the basement for more than two days without sticking my head out. You had to carry on, aware of being in the crosshairs all the time, and that the person on the other side didn’t see you as a human being but as a varicolored Tetris block.


More Futile Pacific Overtures by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

I’ve given up being amazed at how stupidly the Biden administration conducts its diplomacy with China and, by extension, Asia altogether. I spend my time now being amazed at how stupid these people assume the Chinese and other Asians to be. Nearly halfway through his term in office — and let us hope there is not another after this one — the man from Scranton finally met Chinese President Xi Jinping Monday to discuss the single most important relationship between any two nations anywhere in the world.”
“[…] new era and new geopolitical circumstances. But those sailing the American ship of state, from the president on down, have neither imagination nor creativity nor courage. All they can do is reiterate past positions while expecting the other side to respond differently.”
Refusing to put a floor in the Sino–American relationship has been the building block of U.S. policy since the Biden regime came to power in January 2021. China has since that day made its perfectly reasonable expectations clear and has drawn all the red lines it needs, only to see Washington ignore the expectations, the red lines and everything else the Chinese have had to say.”
“At that press conference last Wednesday Biden asserted with evident righteousness that he would make “no fundamental concessions” to China on the Taiwan question. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…

That’s a lovely turn of phrase (Urban Dictionary), Mr. Lawrence.

“[…] by assigning China responsibility for Pyongyang’s conduct, ridiculous on the face of it, Joe “Diplomacy First” Biden is weaseling out of any renewed effort to open talks with the North: It is all on you, Mr. Xi.
“I do not know where in the proceedings this remark occurred, but I consider Xi had the last word: “History is the best textbook. We should take it as a mirror and let it guide the future…. A statesman should think about and know where to lead his country. He should also think about and know how to get along with other countries and the wider world.” Excellent stuff. After half a millennium of the Atlantic world’s dominance, the non–West lectures the West. It tells us just what time it is on history’s clock.”


Cornel West: There Is No Progressive Politics Without Internationalism by Srećko Horvat (Jacobin)

“Russia has its own deep authoritarian and neofascist elites who are in control and concerned about the Russian empire being gloriously based on its past, Ukraine being a part of it, and Ukraine not existing. This is the typical colonizing language that you get going back to the early moments of the age of Europe — the people are not there, the land is ours, etc.


Sanktionen töten Menschen. Beispiel Syrien. Höchste Zeit, mit diesen Spielereien aufzuhören. by Albrecht Müller (NachDenkSeiten)

“Ihr Krankenhaus habe einen eigenen Brunnen, ein Großteil der Bevölkerung aber sei gezwungen, sich Wasser von Tankfahrzeugen von privaten Händlern für viel Geld zu kaufen. Gas zum Kochen sei streng rationiert, die Menge völlig unzureichend. Nur jedes Vierteljahr gebe es für die Bürger eine Gasflasche. Es herrsche eine galoppierende Inflation und die Lebensmittelpreise explodierten. Fleisch, Obst und Gemüse seien unbezahlbar geworden. Viele Menschen hungerten und suchten in Abfallhalden nach Essbarem. In weiten Teilen des Landes sei die Cholera ausgebrochen.”

Just to be clear: he’s talking about Syria, not Germany. 😒

“Der Präsident bat sie um eine schriftliche Eingabe. Zumindest die Zuteilung von Diesel für ihr Krankenhaus sei anschließend ein wenig erhöht worden. Die Möglichkeiten der Regierung, unter den Bedingungen der Sanktionen zu helfen, sind allerdings äußerst begrenzt.
“Die Fakten, die sie in ihrem Bericht aufführt, sind erschütternd: 90 Prozent der Bevölkerung leben unterhalb der Armutsgrenze. Die Preise sind seit 2019 um 800 Prozent gestiegen. Die Stromproduktion Syriens ist von täglich 9.500 Megawatt auf 2.100 Megawatt gesunken. Nur noch 20 Prozent der landwirtschaftlichen Fläche Syriens können bewässert werden. Die Getreideernte hat sich von 3,1 Mio. Tonnen 2019 auf 1,7 Mio. Tonnen 2022 nahezu halbiert.”

They have no water, no power, and no food, but the sanctions continue. Is this not war by other means? People suffer nearly immeasurably—in collective punishment, explicitly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions—and no one is punished or pilloried for it in the sanctioning world. Instead, the sanctions are not discussed. They are just there, unchanging and eternal. They are applied by the west to Syria the way a picnicker sweeps an ant off the blanket. Most people who even knew that there were ever sanctions have forgotten that they’d ever been applied. “Oh, are we still doing those? Or, well, that’s not very proper. Oh, well, Christmas is coming up. We’ll look into it in the new year. Or never. How’s never?”

500.000 Menschen in Syrien hat der Krieg das Leben gekostet, Hunderttausende sind zu Invaliden geworden, 6,8 Millionen leben als Flüchtlinge im eigenen Land, ein Großteil der Wohngebäude und Infrastruktur sind zerstört oder schwer beschädigt. Trotzdem halten Berlin und Brüssel an ihren Sanktionen gegen Syrien”
“Nachdem es USA und ihrer Koalition der „Freunde Syriens“ nicht gelungen ist, die Regierung in Damaskus mit Hilfe von Moslembrüdern und Jihadisten zu stürzen, versuchen sie jetzt das Land wirtschaftlich völlig zu erdrosseln: Seit 2019 halten US-Truppen Syriens eigene Ölfelder, unverzichtbar für seine Stromproduktion, besetzt.

The U.S. has Syria’s oil fields. What a surprise. How these assholes must just laugh and laugh and laugh as people repeat their own propaganda back at them! They must be barely able to contain themselves as they hear “Putin is the devil! May the U.S. save us from him!” Breathtaking.


Putin’s Russia, Front and Rear by Boris Kagarlitsky (Russian Dissent)

“Yevgeny Prigozhin, who heads the Wagner Private Military Company, and the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, have not only created their own private armies, but are also openly at odds with the Russian military. These two have not only driven the commander of the Central Group of Forces, General Alexander Lapin, to submit his resignation, but reports of armed skirmishes between the army and the Wagnerites come literally every week. The struggle for Putin’s legacy is already in full swing, and the ruler himself, who has lost his former grip, can only hope to contain these conflicts, not to prevent or resolve them.


Why the War in Ukraine Is a True Act of Madness by Rajan Menon (Scheer Post)

“Keep in mind that, before the war, Russia had accounted for just 1% of Indian oil imports. By early October, that number had reached 21%. Worse yet, India’s purchases of Russian coal — which emits far more carbon dioxide into the air than oil and natural gas — may increase to 40 million tons by 2035, five times the current amount.”
“Many other countries simply preferred not to get sucked into a confrontation between Russia and the West. As they saw it, their chances of changing Putin’s mind were nil, given their lack of leverage, so why incur his displeasure? (After all, what was the West offering that might make choosing sides more palatable?) Besides, given their immediate daily struggles with energy prices, debt, food security, poverty, and climate change, a war in Europe seemed a distant affair, a distinctly secondary concern.
“India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, highlighted such sentiments when, in response to a question about the European Union’s efforts to push his country to get tougher on Russia, he remarked that Europe “has to grow out of the mindset that [its] problems are the world’s problem, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problem.” Given how “singularly silent” European countries had been “on many things which were happening, for example in Asia,” he added, “you could ask why anybody in Asia would trust Europe on anything at all?”
“The second problem was an increase in the cost of both borrowing money and of debt repayments following interest rate hikes by Western central banks seeking to tamp down inflation stoked by a war-induced spike in fuel prices. On average, interest rates in the poorest countries jumped by 5.7% — about twice as much as in the U.S. — increasing the cost of their further borrowing by 10% to 46%.
“As a start, the $100 billion per year that richer countries pledged to poor ones in 2009 to help move them away from hydrocarbon-based energy hasn’t been met in any year so far and recent disbursements, minimal as they have been, were largely in the form of loans, not grants.”
Evidence is also needed that the most powerful countries on this planet can set aside their short-term interests long enough to act in a concerted fashion and decisively when faced with planet-threatening problems like climate change. The war in Ukraine offers no such evidence.”


War Sums up the Era by Andrei Rudoy, Liza Smirnova and Alexei Sakhnin (Russian Dissent)

“Liza Smirnova spoke about the work of the anti-war socialist coalition in Russia, which included 9 communist and socialist organizations. “Much of the Western media completely agree with Russian propaganda in describing how society in Russia reacts to the war: both of them repeat that the Russian people are in unison supporting Putin’s meat grinder. This is complete nonsense. There are millions of opponents of the war in the country, and every day there are more and more of them.


Congressional Amendment Opens Floodgates for War Profiteers and a Major Ground War on Russia by Medea Benjamin & Nicholas J.S. Davies (Antiwar.com)

“ATACMS, Harpoons and Stingers are all weapons the Pentagon was already phasing out, so why spend billions of dollars to buy thousands of them now? What is this really all about? Is this amendment a particularly egregious example of war profiteering by the military-industrial-Congressional complex? Or is the United States really preparing to fight a major ground war against Russia? Our best judgment is that both are true.
“While over $20 billion has been allocated for weapons, contracts to actually buy weapons for Ukraine and replace the ones sent there so far totaled only $2.7 billion by early November. So the expected arms sales bonanza had not yet materialized, and the weapons makers were getting impatient. With the rest of the world increasingly calling for diplomatic negotiations, if Congress didn’t get moving, the war might be over before the arms makers’ much-anticipated jackpot ever arrived.

One can only hope.


Die Chinapolitik der Ampel ist schlecht für Deutschland, Europa und den Klimaschutz! by Jürgen Kurz (NachDenkSeiten)

“Für mich ist unbegreiflich, wie gerade Regierungsvertreter meiner Partei die Rede von Xi Jinping komplett ignorieren und China lediglich an dem Thema Taiwan beurteilen und das auch noch auf falschen Informationen basierend.”
Die Chinesen haben das Recht, sich ein eigenes Gesellschaftsmodell zu geben, das am besten nach vielen unruhigen Jahren zu ihnen passt. Und dass es passt, zeigen die Zahlen: Welches Land kann schon von sich behaupten, innerhalb von 30 Jahren sein BSP fast ums 50-Fache vergrößert und mehr als 700 Mio. aus der Armut geführt zu haben?”
“Anstatt unvoreingenommen zu analysieren, was Xi Jinping in seiner 2-stündigen Rede dem Parteitag und der Weltöffentlichkeit mitgeteilt hat, befassen wir uns hauptsächlich voller Entrüstung mit einem kurzen Abschnitt zu Taiwan, in dem Xi klar zum Ausdruck bringt, dass China sich weiter für eine friedliche Klärung der Taiwan-Frage einsetzen will, aber im Einklang mit dem Völkerrecht darauf besteht, dass es sich um eine chinesische Frage handelt.”
Warum übersehen wir all die positiven Vorhaben zur Stadtentwicklung, zum Ausbau der Infrastruktur, zum Naturhaushalt, zum Arten- und Klimaschutz usw., die ähnlich in unseren früheren Wahlprogrammen zu finden waren und jetzt in dem größten Land der Welt auf der Agenda stehen?”


Why Foxconn Workers in China Walked Off the Job by Eli Friedman (Jacobin)

“In China there has been a growing sense at least since the Shanghai lockdowns in April 2022 that a growing percentage of Chinese people, particularly in urban areas, are beginning to grow fed up and are increasingly resistant to the COVID-19 policies. I should say that there are good justifications for the zero-COVID policies. China’s vaccination rate among the elderly and other vulnerable people is quite low. The health care infrastructure is not adequate, and migrant worker populations in particular are poorly covered by health insurance. If they were to take the step that just about every other country in the world has taken and allow the virus to spread more or less unchecked, it would lead to probably hundreds of thousands of deaths.”
“When the rest of the world has moved on, even if it was following tragic and massive loss of life, it is hard for people in Chinese cities to have to continue to live in a situation where life can be very precarious. If your health code turns up red and suddenly you can’t leave your house and you can’t go to work, your livelihood might therefore be imperiled. Sometimes it feels a little bit arbitrary, and not necessarily in the best interest of public health.
“At a certain point in April, the government identified 666 companies that are key to the functioning of Shanghai’s economy, and these companies implement the closed-loop system. These firms were told to continue to continue operation.”
“Evidence suggests that workers were given a choice about going into the closed loop. But there’s a question of how much of a choice that was if you’re a blue-collar worker. If you don’t go in, that means you are no longer employed. If you did go into the loop, it was not at all clear how long you were going to go in for. Initially people thought it might just be two weeks, but in some cases it ended up being more than seventy days.
“[…] ensure that they can meet Apple’s incredibly stringent deadlines. As workers were falling sick, and more and more were being put into quarantine, they wanted to ensure workers who were healthy would stay on the production line. The other thing is that a lot of the responsibilities of maintaining the closed-loop system have been decentralized. So it’s actually not the state that’s implementing them, but these employers.
“The good news is that there was this mass refusal. You can think of it as a kind of a strike: people refusing to work, at least under those kinds of conditions. And this actually forced a change. Foxconn has since said, “Well, okay, actually you can leave now and if you’re willing to stay we’ll pay you more money.” I think we have to be attentive to the ways in which worker collective action has already forced some important changes and potentially improvements.
“First I should provide a little bit of background on Foxconn’s expansion in China. It is a Taiwanese company. Its first major production facility, which it expanded in the early 2000s, was in Shenzhen. At its peak, the largest facility in Shenzhen had close to four hundred thousand workers. But amid this huge expansion in the mid-2000s, Shenzhen began to experience a labor shortage. So part of their strategy, in order to ensure that they could produce on the massive scale that Apple demands from them, was to expand some of their factories to more inland areas, including Zhengzhou, as well as Taiyuan, Chengdu, and some other places.”
“Foxconn will do everything in their power to prevent those numbers from coming out. According to Chinese labor law, you’re not allowed to have more than 10 percent of your workforce be these kinds of irregular workers. But there have been many reports that Foxconn and other Apple suppliers have systematically violated that for many years.”
“There’s one other category of worker that I think is really important to mention. That is the student interns. There was widespread use of intern labor. These people are enrolled in technical schools and they are sent out as interns to Foxconn and other electronics factories. Zhengzhou Foxconn has been illegally making use of these student interns for more than ten years.
“[…] but at least sending out signals of solidarity. I think it’s important for people within China to be able to see that people outside of the country — who are consuming the products they make or living in the countries where their employers might be based — are showing solidarity with them […]”
“If we’re interested in really addressing the problem rather than just relocating the labor abuses to another country, we do have to have that global perspective and think about a different way of organizing production at the global scale.”


Wie reagieren auf militärische Aggression? by Hans van der Waerden (NachDenkSeiten)

“Entscheidend ist die Frage: Hat Russland das Ziel, seine Herrschaft ins Uferlose auszudehnen, wie einst das nationalsozialistische Deutschland? Dann sind Verhandlungen zwecklos, „appeasement“ bringt nichts; hartes Auftreten, „containment“, ist angesagt. Oder hat die russische Führung ganz andere Motive? Führt sie Krieg, weil sie sich durch die westliche Politik in die Enge getrieben und existentiell bedroht fühlt und nun keinen anderen Ausweg mehr sieht? Wenn das der Fall wäre, dann würde ein hartes Auftreten das Gegenteil von dem bewirken, was wir davon erhoffen. Es würde den Gegner nur noch weiter in seinem Panikverhalten bestärken.”
“Aus all dem können wir nur schließen, dass das Narrativ vom expansionslüsternen Russland, das sich in unseren Köpfen festgesetzt hat, nicht den Tatsachen entspricht. Angst, Ratlosigkeit, verletzter Stolz sind der Motor hinter Russlands Aggressivität. Und das bedeutet, dass wir mit der ständig verschärften Einschüchterung, und nun gar mit dem totalen Wirtschaftskrieg, auf dem falschen Weg sind.
“Irren ist menschlich, aber töricht ist es, im Irrtum zu verharren. Der Westen muss umdenken, muss Kompromissbereitschaft signalisieren. Die Bereitschaft zu Verhandlungen bei sofortiger Waffenruhe muss der erste Schritt sein, eine Friedensordnung mit Neutralitätsstatus für die Ukraine und allgemeiner Abrüstung in Europa das ferne Ziel. Der Westen muss endlich zeigen, dass er das legitime russische Sicherheitsbedürfnis ernst nimmt.”


Zelensky, media lackeys caught in most dangerous lie yet by Alexander Rubinstein (The Grayzone)

“Despite the clear risk of such a catastrophic escalation – or perhaps because of it – Western corporate media immediately blamed Russia for the strike, never even posing the question of why Russia would consider Polish farmland such an important military target that it would be willing to risk a full-scale war with the 30-member NATO alliance.
“As the war grinds on, elements in the Biden administration appear to be growing impatient with the tall tales of their Ukrainian clients. “This is getting ridiculous,” an unnamed NATO official told the Financial Times on November 16. “The Ukrainians are destroying our confidence and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”

Yeah, it’s so hard to run a proxy war when your proxy forgets that it’s a proxy, ammirite?


Comparing the Orders Appointing Special Counsel Mueller and Special Counsel Smith by Josh Blackman (Reason)

“Justice Scalia’s admonition in Morrison v. Olson about the independent counsel aptly describes our present moment:”
“As I observed earlier, in the nature of things, this has to be done by finding lawyers who are willing to lay aside their current careers for an indeterminate amount of time, to take on a job that has no prospect of permanence and little prospect for promotion. One thing is certain, however: it involves investigating and perhaps prosecuting a particular individual. Can one imagine a less equitable manner of fulfilling the Executive responsibility to investigate and prosecute? What would be the reaction if, in an area not covered by this statute, the Justice Department posted a public notice inviting applicants to assist in an investigation and possible prosecution of a certain prominent person? Does this not invite what Justice Jackson described as “picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him”?


Signs of Diplomacy in Ukraine? Finding a Faint Pulse. by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“Even Biden made the rare suggestion that Ukraine will need to compromise in negotiations, saying in a press conference the day after the midterms that “it remains to be seen whether or not there’ll be a judgment made as to whether or not Ukraine is prepared to compromise with Russia.”

I honestly find it hard to believe that Biden actually uttered that sentence in anything approaching a comprehensible manner. Still, congrats if he did. He’s managed to channel his few adjacent neurons to utter one of the more mush-mouthed, evasive, and noncommittal things I’ve heard in a while, even for a politician.

A close second is this statement,

“On November 9, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said, “There has to be a mutual recognition that a military victory is probably, in the true sense of the word is maybe not achievable through military means,” he added, “and therefore you need to turn to other means.””

All bullshit aside, though, this is a good sign that the western lust of war may no longer match—or, at least, no longer exceed—that of the Russians.

“On November 8, Zelensky announced a new openness to for “real peace talks” with Russia.

“On November 7, Italy’s La Repubblica reported that “The US and NATO think that launching peace talks on Ukraine would be possible if Kiev takes back Kherson.” Two days later, NBC similarly reported that “U.S. and Western officials” have said that “If Ukraine wins in Kherson, it could put the Zelensky government in a better position to negotiate.”

On November 9, reports broke that Russia seemed to be withdrawing from Kherson City.

“On November 14, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that “negotiations did, indeed, take place.” He said that the talks were held in Ankara and that they “were initiated by the US side.” It was later revealed that the US official present at the talks in Turkey was CIA Director William Burns and that the official he was meeting was his Russian counterpart, the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, Sergei Naryshkin.
“Zelensky has revealed that on November 15, after Burns spoke to his Russian counterpart in Ankara, he headed to Ukraine for talks with Zelensky and top Ukrainian intelligence officials.”


Boykott − Warum nicht by Renato Kaiser (YouTube)


Sozial, fair, FIFA-Funktionär by Renato Kaiser (YouTube)


In Kiew zehn Stunden am Tag kein Strom – Bürgermeister Klitschko schließt Evakuierung der Bevölkerung nicht aus by Ulrich Heyden (NachDenkSeiten)

Die seit dem 10. Oktober laufenden russischen Angriffe mit Raketen und Drohnen auf das Elektrizitätssystem der Ukraine haben insbesondere in Kiew dramatische Auswirkungen. Strom gibt es in der Hauptstadt nur noch acht bis zwölf Stunden am Tag. In vielen Wohnvierteln von Kiew ist es nachts stockdunkel. Vor den Wasserverteil-Stellen bilden sich lange Schlangen. Verkehrsampeln sind abgeschaltet. Polizisten werden zur Verkehrsregelung eingesetzt. Trolleybusse bleiben wegen Strom-Mangel auf offener Strecke liegen.”

It should go without saying that this Russian attack on infrastructure is certainly targeting civilians, albeit with the same fig-leaf of legality the west often grants itself—people are dying indirectly, of exposure, of hunger, of thirst, but not of bullets. It’s probably not technically a war crime—as the U.S. would defend itself from similar accusations—but it’s horrific.

However, this is exactly what was to be expected. This is what we anti-war people are talking about when we say that we have to talk, to compromise in order to avoid these situations. What was the alternative? What were those supporting Ukraine’s continued war effort thinking?

There was never a realistic way to stop Russia from doing this, when the time came. They escalated their bombings about five weeks ago, moving to a new phase about seven months in. The reasons don’t matter. It’s the inevitability that matters. No-one had ever proposed a way of preventing Russia from doing exactly this when they felt the need to do so.

Those people who pressed on to continue Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion without any attempts to compromise or talk either knew that this was going to be a consequence and didn’t care, or were so incompetent that they couldn’t imagine it. People are suffering now because of the Russian attack, but not only because of the Russian attack, also because of the incompetence or unwillingness of western diplomacy.

It’s also because of the combined obstinance of everyone who is not in Kiev—and who would not feel the wrath of the Russians—of everyone who said that we must press on, that we cannot give in to the Russians, all the while knowing that the Russians would be able to exact exactly this level of destruction on the Ukrainian infrastructure, just as things are getting cold.

It doesn’t sound like Ukraine has much of an upper hand, but that’s what I keep reading in “official” sources. But the Ukrainians are considering evacuating their capital city—that doesn’t sound great.

“Wenn es jetzt kälter wird, werde es für die Menschen in Kiew nicht mehr als sechs Stunden am Tag Strom geben, prophezeit Juri Koroltschuk, Mitarbeiter des Instituts für strategische Forschungen. Das Fernwärmesystem könne unter diesen Bedingungen nicht normal funktionieren. Die Stadt werde Wärmehallen einrichten und Gebläse mit warmer Luft aufstellen. Aber diese Maßnahmen könnten nur kurzzeitig Abhilfe schaffen. Eine komplette Evakuierung der Bevölkerung sei „nicht realistisch“.

“wie aus einem am 15. November veröffentlichten Bericht der UNHCR hervorgeht, sind seit Februar 2022 2,8 Millionen Menschen aus der Ukraine nach Russland geflüchtet. Nach dieser Statistik ist Russland damit weltweit der Spitzenreiter bei der Aufnahme von Flüchtlingen aus der Ukraine. Nach Polen flüchteten 1,48 Millionen, nach Deutschland 1,01 Millionen und nach Tschechien 485.000 Menschen.

“Wie kommt es zu der hohen Zahl von Flüchtlingen nach Russland? Nach meiner Vermutung hängt die hohe Zahl damit zusammen, dass sehr viele Menschen wegen ukrainischem Beschuss aus den Volksrepubliken Donezk und Lugansk nach Russland geflüchtet sind.

Journalism & Media

The Burning of Witches Will Continue by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Public indifference to the madness of this was astonishing. We’ve had a secret grand jury system for centuries precisely to prevent this situation, i.e. the injustice of a person not charged with a crime having to live under public suspicion. Of course erstwhile progressives being indifferent to important civil liberties concerns has become routine in the Trump era.”
“The New York Times penned a basic indictment on October 26th, “How Elon Musk Became a Geopolitical Chaos Agent ,” but the piece read like a parent’s deranged fantasy about the impact of a child’s friend who has a nose ring. The paper mourned Musk’s “influence and ability to cause trouble,” reporting he’s often “waded into situations even after he was advised not to” (again, was this a preschool report card?).”
Musk voted for Barack Obama in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020, but he’s not being denounced as a dangerous right-wing reactionary and traitor because of his politics. The real problem is he’s a rich industrialist who has mild disagreements with Current Thing speech theology, and enough money to refuse to back down when threatened. This can’t be tolerated.”
“The math isn’t hard: if the DHS or the NSC can do this to the world’s richest man, they can do it to anyone, making this story into a test case to see what the new censorship regime can get away with.
“This is a country whose top-rated sports entertainment is watching obvious steroid users give each other incurable brain trauma in front of half-naked cheerleaders.
“Twitter in other words is the social media version of the 19th-century Russian aristocrats who by day deflowered servant girls and by night hissed at Anna and Vronsky for trying to see an opera while living in sin.
All the lowest moments in our history are marked by Salem-like panics in which torch-bearing moralists rooted out heretics, from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the immigrant hunts after the 1886 Haymarket bombing (the Chicago Times calling for whipping “these Slavic wolves back to the European dens from which they issue”) to the Palmer raids to Japanese internment to the Red Scare, and so on.”

Here, Taibbi cites from Miller’s Crucible,

Parris: —now he’s out with it: There is a party in this church. I am not blind; there is a faction and a party.
Proctor: Against you?
Putnam: Against him and all authority!
Proctor: Why, then I must find it and join it.”

This is the same pattern of the last six or seven years of American politics. When you invent deranged fantasies about treasonous factions, you mostly end up creating them. Does anyone seriously think Tulsi Gabbard was a “Russian asset”? No, but she’s sure as hell not a loyal Democrat anymore. There’s a finite number of times you can throw people out of the village gates. Eventually you get a neighboring town packed with seething exiles.
The problems couldn’t be the town’s fault, because its leaders were so obviously faultless and “devoted to God and righteousness.” Thus the hunt for the external threat begins, and that process only ends one way. Sound familiar?”
The Musk version of a radical idea is allowing “all legal speech.” If that turns out to be enough to trigger a successful national security review, what chance does someone without $200 billion have?”


America This Week: November 13-19, 2022 by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Trump will never be finished, so long as he breathes air, because he draws his political energy from true observations about lies America tells to itself about its rectitude in comparison to him. The next two years will be a fascinating referendum on whose brand of lying Americans find less appealing, officialdom’s, or the Orange One’s.
“Other big losers included, but were not limited to, Tiger Global, Third Point Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, BlackRock, Temasek, Paradigm, Ontario Teachers’ Pension, and of course, Softbank, the Zelig of investment faceplants. It seems our venture capital heroes, lauded for two decades as masters of the universe, jetting around the world divining value and driving hard bargains, are just a bunch of mediocrities who feasted on favorable investment climates. Times have changed. Get ready to fly commercial again, fellas.”
The president of El Salvador this week announced his country would sign a free trade agreement with China, in which China would purchase El Salvador’s $21 billion in foreign debt. […] Starting in September 2021, when Bitcoin was at around $40,000, down from $63,000 that spring, El Presidente’s treasury started buying a few million dollars’ worth at a time, and about $107 million total. […] With Bitcoin now around $16,500, Bukele now must give at least a little of a fuck, because he probably just sold his country to China to pay off his investment mistake.

Science & Nature

Inside the Proton, the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’ by Charlie Wood & Merrill Sherman (Quanta)

The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form. And its forms differ drastically depending on how researchers set up their experiment. Connecting the particle’s many faces has been the work of generations. “We’re kind of just starting to understand this system in a complete way,” said Richard Milner , a nuclear physicist at MIT.”
“But in 1988, the European Muon Collaboration reported that the quark spins add up to far less than one-half. Similarly, the masses of two up quarks and one down quark only comprise about 1% of the proton’s total mass. These deficits drove home a point physicists were already coming to appreciate: The proton is much more than three quarks.
“Developed in the 1970s, it was a quantum theory of the “strong force” that acts between quarks. The theory describes quarks as being roped together by force-carrying particles called gluons. Each quark and each gluon has one of three types of “color” charge, labeled red, green and blue; these color-charged particles naturally tug on each other and form a group — such as a proton — whose colors add up to a neutral white. The colorful theory became known as quantum chromodynamics, or QCD.”
“But the results from Rojo and colleagues suggest that the charms have a more permanent presence, making them detectable in gentler collisions. In these collisions, the proton appears as a quantum mixture, or superposition, of multiple states: An electron usually encounters the three lightweight quarks. But it will occasionally encounter a rarer “molecule” of five quarks, such as an up, down and charm quark grouped on one side and an up quark and charm antiquark on the other.


Greenland is Worse Than Ever, Much Worse by Josh Frank (CounterPunch)

“Here’s one that cannot be told often enough because of the gravity of its implications for the 130 coastal cities of the world each with over one million residents: During the 1990s Greenland and Antarctica combined lost 81 billion tons of ice mass per year on average. A decade later, during the decade of the 2010s, the ice mass loss increased 6-fold to 475 billion tons per year on average. (Source: Greenland, Antarctica Melting Six Times Faster Than in the 1990s, NASA, March 16, 2020)

“It should be noted that it takes billions upon billions of tons of melted ice to move sea levels appreciably up, which does give some pause to any immediacy of cities overrun by gushing water. Yet, what if 475 billion tons per year becomes much more than that?

These numbers are simply inconceivable for me. How much is 475 billion tons? Well, according to How Much Does Mount Everest Weigh? Mass, Volume and Calculations, that’s about 2.5 Mt. Everests per year.

“The principal area studied, known as the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) covers approximately 12% of the ice sheet. The thinning is estimated to add 13.5 to 15.5 mm to sea levels over time, which is equivalent to the contribution of the past 50 years. More to the point, according to the scientists: “The NEGIS could lose six times more ice than existing climate models estimate.” Thus, it’s getting worse, much worse, six-times worse than previous studies. 6xs is really a lot, off the charts.”
“The Khan study unfortunately comes on top of a chilling statement by the world’s leading Greenland expert as mentioned on a Radio Ecoshock interview d/d October 26, 2022: Luke Kemp: Climate Endgame: “Greenland ice expert Jason Box warns Earth is already committed to at least another foot of sea level rise from Greenland no matter what we do.”

Brace yourselves, coastal cities. That’s a lot of humanity affected.

Art & Literature

Triangle of Sadness Is as Absurd as 21st-Century Capitalism Is by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)

“So from a cheerfully irreverent, though overlong, satire of the callous, self-important, and idiotic behaviors of the rich, we suddenly move to a more general take on humanity as united by a hopeless kind of dopey sadism. You can make a case for that too, of course. But it hardly seems worth spending hours on a class-based black comedy if, in the end, the point seems to be that everybody’s fundamentally awful.
“Though according to Östlund, one insight he wanted to offer was that lots of wealthy people are delightful, whereas plenty of poors are nasty, which is why Dimitry is clearly supposed to come across as self-amused and charming whereas the scowling Abigail, as soon as she acquires some power, abuses it harshly: “There is a conventional way of looking at class: the poor people are nice and rich people are mean,” says Östlund , who was aware how subverting this cliché might be perceived. “If I say ‘No, they are human beings’, and they are going to maybe be mean or good”

Sure, if you’re a moron uninterested in getting anywhere in a discussion.


The End Of An Era: On Roger Federer’s Retirement by Derek Neal (3 Quarks Daily)

“It’s impossible to write about Federer without mentioning David Foster Wallace’s New York Times essay on him, wherein he posits that “high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty” and that this beauty has to do with “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.” I agree with Wallace, clearly; I also think this is why sports are so popular, and it’s why I’m dismayed any time someone whose intelligence I respect acts as if sports are beneath them. It’s the same response I have when someone dismisses art or movies—to my mind, they are all just different expressions of aesthetics, and to fail to appreciate any of them is to reveal oneself to be lacking in a fundamental human quality, that of the appreciation of beauty.”

Philosophy & Sociology

An Ocean of Earth by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“Russia was not an island, and could not control the importation of books from a single inspection bureau on a single dock. In the centuries prior to Peter’s opening up of Russia, a typical inventory of a library’s books might include the Paterikon , and the Chronicles , and some translations from the Greek of animal fables suitable for moral instruction. In 1698 Christiaan Huygens’s Cosmotheoros was translated into Russian. At first it was taken by many to be another contribution to the large and familiar corpus of Byzantine-derived angelological writings, and the author’s arguments for the existence of extraterrestrials were read as yet another meditation on the nature and divinity of the celestial intelligences, the hierarchies of angels and archangels. Around the same time Jacob Bruce, a Muscovite of Scottish descent, who had read Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle and wished to conduct his own chemical experiments in a makeshift lab in the Sukharev Tower, was rumored by the locals to be practicing black magic: his copies of the Philosophical Transactions were said to be grimoires, and he was said to fly around in the sky over Moscow at night, using his telescope in place of a broom.”

More than shades of Umberto Eco.

The Tobol flows peaceably northwards, without cataracts or shallows. It is strengthened by the confluence of the Ubagan, and at the town of Tobolsk joins with the great Irtysh, and loses its name. Yermak Timofeyevich subdued these parts with the band of Cossacks whose thirst for battle he had whipped up on the promise that the inhabitants there were among the only people in the world more vicious than they themselves.”
“The Easternmost of the great Siberian rivers, the Lena, flows to the Northwest from Lake Baikal to Yakutsk, before turning to the Northeast and issuing likewise in the Northern Ocean, after having flowed past strange geographical features for which no true name can be found in translation: alaases, pingos.
Although the voyage takes three weeks, Irkutsk and Yakutsk are conceived as neighboring towns. Distance is reckoned differently here. Lake Baikal itself, which one ordinarily crosses toward the Southeast from Irkutsk in order then to head Northeast toward Yakutsk, defies any European sense of scale. The Buryats there do not like to hear it called a lake. They say that Baikal itself does not like to be called a lake, and if any traveller should characterize it as such when he sets out to cross it, he may expect to find himself lost in a maelstrom before he reaches the other side. The seals of Baikal, too, are said to applaud such tragic events, by striking their flippers together excitedly when they catch sight of a ship in peril from the rocky shores. But what lake properly so called is home to seals ? These more than anything stand as testament to the paradox in inner Asia of the proximity of distant places. We can only infer that the Baikal seals arrived there from the Northern Ocean, no matter that they must have travelled 1500 versts to the South to reach their new home.
It is largely beside the point to wonder whether a shaman is a con-artist or not — the very distinction between a performance and “the real thing” already presupposes a “culture of fact” in which the two parties to a moment of intercultural contact such as the one I have just described do not share equally.”
The history of the modern world has witnessed a gradual elimination of spiritual exchange in favor of exchange of goods. Goods become the highest —indeed the only— good known to men. Though it may once have contained the secret of existence, Oghaoo now sounds to us like a nonsense word.”
“Putin has recently been heard conjuring up old anti-Westernizing tropes, reflecting that Americans are wrong to look at the Chinese and think, “They’re different from us,” while at the same time looking at the Russians and thinking, “They’re the same as us”. The Asian minorities of his empire help him to make this point. Americans, along with the other inhabitants of the Atlantic world, are so preoccupied with “race” that they can’t imagine carving the world up any other way. Putin sees things differently, and knows how to play on Western fears — he is the pirate captain of a multiethnic band, sailing the telluride seas of Eurasia.


No One Should Have To Earn a Living by Ted Rall

“It would take one hell of a sociopath for a survivor of a shipping disaster to deny a share of his sunblock or his extra hat to his fellows in a lifeboat. Yet we routinely conform to psychosis that violates the communitarianism that is central to the lifestyle of our species. Almost every day, I walk by a woman sleeping outside my apartment building; sometimes I give her money but not always. Except for the cat, the extra bedroom in my apartment remains empty, neat, useless.

“I have “earned” a living, you see. She has not.

“It is cold. At night, it’s in the 30s.

“I don’t know why she sleeps outside. Is she mentally ill? Lazy? Addicted to drugs? Maybe it’s bad luck. She worked in a field that’s no longer looking for workers. I do know she’s cold and hungry.

Capitalism gives me permission not to care. I justify my callousness by judging her choices, none of which I know anything about.

The country is rich. Not everyone must work. There is plenty to go around. Those who work must share. Socialism and communism are political structures designed to distribute that sharing.

“Please retire the expression “earn a living.””

Programming

An Interactive Guide to Flexbox by Josh Comeau

This whole article is very good, if quite long-winded. If you need a flex-box refresher, this is the one.

“Earlier, we saw how the flex-grow property can gobble up any extra space, applying it to a child.

Auto margins will gobble up the extra space, and apply it to the element’s margin. It gives us precise control over where to distribute the extra space.

“A common header layout features the logo on one side, and some navigation links on the other side. Here’s how we can build this layout using auto margins […]

“The Corpatech logo is the first list item in the list. By giving it margin-right: auto, we gather up all of the extra space, and force it between the 1st and 2nd item.

“[…]

“There are lots of other ways we could have solved this problem: we could have grouped the navigation links in their own Flex container, or we could have grown the first list item with flex-grow. But personally, I love the auto-margins solution. We’re treating the extra space as a resource, and deciding exactly where it should go.

To summarize what’s happening here:

flex-wrap: wrap gives us two rows of stuff.

  • Within each row, align-items lets us slide each individual child up or down
  • Zooming out, however, we have these two rows within a single Flex context! The cross axis will now intersect two rows, not one. And so, we can’t move the rows individually, we need to distribute them as a group.
  • Using our definitions from above, we’re dealing with content, not items. But we’re also still talking about the cross axis! And so the property we want is align-content.