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Links and Notes for August 5th, 2022

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> </ul> <h>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/12/if-we-tax-share-buybacks-can-we-also-tax-stock-returns/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">If We Tax Share Buybacks, Can We Also Tax Stock Returns?</a> <bq>The taxation of share buybacks in the Inflation Reduction Act is a small but important step in this direction. It shows that we do not have to make profit the basis for the corporate income tax. After it has been in place for a few years, and we have the opportunity to see how effective it is in raising revenue, perhaps we can shift the basis for the rest of the corporate income tax to the stock returns we can all see, rather than the profit statements that are conjured up by accountants.</bq> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/08/us-china-taiwan-crisis-pelosi-visit-nuclear-war/" source="Jacobin" author="Branko Marcetic">We Shouldn’t Underestimate the Incredible Danger Posed by the Taiwan Crisis: An Interview with Lyle Goldstein</a> <bq>[...] most people don’t realize, but the United States was quite involved in that. From about 1850 to about 1920, almost a century, you had the US Navy patrolling the Yangtze, which involved gunboats operating together with the British Navy, and we were policing China. This was a form of imperialism, and if the natives got restless, then the gunboats would circle up. There are myriad instances of the US acting together with Japan and Britain to suppress rebellions.</bq> <bq>In 1683, the Qing Dynasty took over Taiwan. There were already a lot of Chinese on the island, and it became integrated into the Chinese empire, and later became its own province. That’s almost a century before the American Revolution, and many years before the United States even thought about Hawaii or California, Taiwan was part of China.</bq> <bq>Even submarines, which are our ace in the hole — the one force that can get to battlefield and fight strongly against an invasion — couldn’t be supported. They’d quickly run out of torpedoes, as submarines don’t have a large magazine, so in navy speak, they’d be “Winchestered,” meaning out of ammo and useless, and forced to sail the twenty or thirty days back to the rear to refill and refit supply, and then another twenty or thirty days to go back. So even the force that’s most prepared to go into the fight can’t sustain it.</bq> <bq>I briefed an air force general, saying, “Sir, are you aware the assets you’re keeping in Alaska would likely be targeted in the first week or two of a war with China?” He was surprised, but he shouldn’t be. Turnabout is fair play, and they’d strike these targets.</bq> <bq>One more thing: China is very energetically developing their nuclear forces. That’s sad — I don’t think it had to be this way, because China previously was quite proud of its low-level nuclear deterrent. But they think the likelihood of war with the US is quite high, particularly over Taiwan, and they want to match the US strength for strength.</bq> <bq>[...] the United States in this scenario can’t possibly bring enough firepower to win unless it resorts to nuclear weapons. That was understood in the 1950s, and nothing really has changed.</bq> <bq>I had urged that Europe act as a cushion for the US-China rivalry and be a friend of the court to both sides, tell each to chill out a little. Help China to mitigate its worst nationalist tendencies, but also help the US contain its seemingly endless desire for rivalry.</bq> <bq>I’m critical of NATO’s stance here. I think Europeans have surrendered their diplomatic cards, which were substantial, and China has become more skeptical of Europe. And this is sad, because I really thought Europe could help bring about a new, more peaceful world order.</bq> Agreed. Europe really shit the bed there. Of course, this estimation relies on the assumption that Europe is morally or ethically better than the U.S., which has no basis in historical reality. <bq>If I had to summarize Chinese policy in Africa, they do a lot of peacekeeping, and that’s difficult — and they deserve a lot of credit for peacekeeping. Number two, there are a lot of Chinese nationals and businesses in Africa, and I think they’re concerned that they may have to do what in the navy we call an NEO — a noncombatant evacuation operation — and that can be a high-risk operation.</bq> <bq>I’m watching a lot of Russian media now. The level of frustration there is immense. They’re more or less calling for American blood, one way or another. Their view of it is that this war is being run out of the Pentagon, and a lot of Russians and Ukrainians are dying, but the Americans are just kind of laughing about it. This is not sustainable, and could really explode.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/04/patrick-lawrence-language-and-its-enemies/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Language and Its Enemies</a> <bq>“Those who play with fire will perish by it,” Xi told Biden in a much-quoted remark. “It is hoped that the U.S. will be clear-eyed about this. The U.S. should honor the One China principle and implement the three joint communiqués both in word and in deed.” I see only one way to read this exchange. China’s trust in the U.S. has collapsed. I think China has chosen the Pelosi visit as the occasion to draw the line under the Biden regime’s inch-at-a-time shift toward formal recognition of Taiwan and a restoration of full relations. From here on out, Xi as much as said to Biden, we are playing hardball.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-press-is-already-working-overtime" source="TK News" author="Matt Taibbi">The Press is Already Working Overtime to Elect Trump Again</a> <bq>The most damning evidence of impotence that year was that Trump gained with black and Hispanic voters in 2020 after four years of relentless messaging about Trumpism as literal white supremacy. Even tiny shifts of this type in Trump’s direction would have been impossible if traditional media had anything like net positive legitimacy.</bq> <bq>Trump and Sanders both surged in 2016 when they described a country divided into a small corrupt establishment and everyone else, and declared themselves on the side of everyone else. The journalistic priesthood that’s spent the last 6-7 years denouncing these people and their voters has done the opposite, proudly aligning itself with the hated inside, celebrating credentialism, and worst of all, cheering a censorship movement that’s now proven to be an abject failure.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/stupidity-treason-or-business-as" source="Russian Dissent" author="Boris Kagarlitsky">Stupidity, Treason, or Business as Usual?</a> <bq>Alas, patriotic commentators neither then nor now could understand that the main cause of failures is not the people sitting in certain offices, but the system itself, which is inevitably and naturally sinking into collapse.</bq> <bq>[...] how can a regime mobilize civilians if its very existence has depended entirely on the passivity and apathy of that population for years? The failure of the government to rouse society and the weakness of the anti-war movement have the exact same cause: the Russian people are little more than a mass of individuals living mostly private lives.</bq> <bq>For there to be visible, bright, or at least recognizable figures that evoke positive emotions in any large number of people in this country simply cannot be allowed. The chief leader and his entourage must remain indispensable, otherwise they may be replaced. Therefore, any potential successor at any high level becomes a serious political problem and a threat to the stability of the regime.</bq> <bq>Many who complained about the rapid curtailment of the remnants of democratic freedoms in our country over the past three years have not noticed that a more or less ordered authoritarian regime has not been built during this time either. The state has fallen to a despotic government, in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a narrow clique, guided rather by their fears, desires, or moods than by any political or economic commitments.</bq> <bq>Under conditions of despotic-chaotic control, it cannot be otherwise. What is perceived by the patriotic layman as the indecision and inconsistency of power, in reality is only an inability to act in any other way. The system has become obsolete and is collapsing before our eyes. And in this respect, the comparison with 1916 really bears the highest degree of relevance.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/04/sometimes-you-just-want-to-scream/" source="CounterPunch" author="David Rosen">Sometimes You Just Want to Scream</a> <bq>Rising poverty and inequality are contributing to a deepening sense of resentment, especially among white working-class and lower-middle-class men. As Sherry Linkon insightfully observed , “Resentment is a cultural response to economic struggle.” And she adds, “It festered as people read national media stories about how deindustrialization was part of a process of ‘creative destruction’ that would revitalize the economy.”</bq> <bq>Despair and resentment are emotional responses to different kinds of failure and often involve a sense of defeat, of failing to fulfill personal aspirations. Such failure is often expressed as racial, ethnic and class resentments that find articulation in the political responses to reported incidents of urban crime involving poor and/or minorities peoples.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2022/08/03/presidents-kill-because-they-can/" source="Antiwar.com" author="Andrew Napolitano">Presidents Kill Because They Can</a> <bq>What if on Dec. 7, 1941, the government silently rejoiced as it had successfully manipulated the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, and was more than willing to sacrifice the lives of 2,400 sailors so as to change the attitude of Americans so they would support the US entry into World War II? What if it worked?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/04/chuck-schumers-war-on-free-speech/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">Chuck Schumer’s War on Free Speech</a> <bq>To recap: Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, angered by Rand Paul daring to ask for accountability over how $40 billion in U.S. taxpayer money was going to be spent in Ukraine, accused Paul — for doing his duty as a senator — of strengthening Putin’s hand, before allowing this very money, being doled out with zero oversight, to underwrite a Ukrainian entity which, with the active support of the U.S. State Department and U.S.-funded NGOs, labels Paul an “information terrorist” and threatens the Kentucky senator with prosecution as a “war criminal.”</bq> <bq>Diane Sare was singled out by the Schumer-funded, State Department-supported Center for Countering Disinformation as an “information terrorist” who should be prosecuted as a “war criminal” because of her public stance challenging the narrative about the Ukraine conflict.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/ted_galen_carpenter/2022/08/01/washington-is-making-the-same-blunder-regarding-taiwan-that-it-did-in-ukraine/" source="Antiwar.com" author="Ted Galen Carpenter">Washington Is Making the Same Blunder Regarding Taiwan That It Did in Ukraine</a> <bq>US arrogance and inflexibility helped lead to the current tragedy in Ukraine. Policymakers blew through red warning light after red warning light from the Kremlin. A similar approach seems to be taking place in Washington’s relations with Beijing, and it threatens to produce a similar ugly outcome in East Asia over the Taiwan issue.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/01/when-the-just-go-to-prison/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">When the Just Go to Prison</a> <bq>The silence on the part of the press over Hale’s imprisonment, as well as the persecution and imprisonment of other champions of an open society, such as Julian Assange , is stunningly shortsighted. If our most important public servants, those with the courage to inform the public, continue to be criminalized at this rate, we will cement in place total censorship, resulting in a world where the abuses and crimes of the powerful are shrouded in darkness.</bq> <bq>Barack Obama weaponized the Espionage Act to prosecute those who provided classified information to the press. The Obama White House, whose assault on civil liberties was worse than those of the Bush administration, used the 1917 Act, designed to prosecute spies, against eight people who leaked information to the media including Assange — although he is not a U.S. citizen, and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication — along with Edward Snowden , Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling and John Kiriakou , who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held in black sites.</bq> <bq author="Daniel Hale">Since that time and to this day, I continue to recall several such scenes of graphic violence carried out from the cold comfort of a computer chair. Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification for my actions. By the rules of engagement, it may have been permissible for me to have helped to kill those men — whose language I did not speak, whose customs I did not understand, and whose crimes I could not identify — in the gruesome manner that I did.</bq> <bq author="government attorneys, in the case against Hale">“Evidence of the defendant’s views of military and intelligence procedures would needlessly distract the jury from the question of whether he had illegally retained and transmitted classified documents, and instead convert the trail into an inquest of U.S. military and intelligence procedures,” government attorneys said in a motion at Hale’s trial .</bq> What a kangaroo court. <bq>Drones hover 24 hours a day in the skies over countries including Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria and, before our defeat, Afghanistan. Operated remotely from Air Force bases as far away from the target sites as Nevada, drones fire ordinance that instantly and without warning obliterates homes and vehicles or kills clusters of people.</bq> <bq>In a statement he read at his sentencing on July 27, 2021, Hale said:“I think of the farmers in their poppy fields whose daily harvest will gain them safe passage from the warlords, who will, in turn, trade it for weapons before it is synthesized, repackaged, and re-sold dozens of times before it finds its way into this country and into the broken veins of our nation’s next opioid victim. I think of the women who, despite living their entire lives never once allowed to make so much as a choice for themselves, are treated as pawns in a ruthless game politicians play when they need a justification to further the killing of their sons & husbands. And I think of the children, whose bright-eyed, dirty faces look to the sky and hope to see clouds of gray, afraid of the clear blue days that beckon drones to come carrying eager death notes for their fathers.”</bq> <bq>Obama authorized “ signature strikes ” allowing the CIA to carry out drone attacks against groups of suspected militants without getting positive identification. His administration approved “ follow-up ” or “double-tap” drone strikes, which deployed drones to strike anyone who assisted those injured in the initial drone strike.</bq> This has all continued, of course, but liberal/progressive hero Obama started it. That is nearly unbelievably appalling. Signature strikes on unknown people with no evidence, then double-tap strikes to take out those who would try to help any survivors. Dress it all up as the actions of a just and moral nation protecting the world. Can you conceive of anything more monstrous? One need only learn about real horrors; there is no need to make anything up. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/01/the-world-does-not-want-a-global-nato/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">The World Does Not Want a Global NATO</a> <bq>Governments representing 6.7 billion people – 85 percent of the world’s population – have refused to follow sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies against Russia, while countries representing only 15 percent of the world’s population have followed these measures. According to Reuters, the only non-Western governments to have enacted sanctions on Russia are Japan, South Korea, the Bahamas and Taiwan – all of which host U.S. military bases or personnel.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/01/from-2008-to-the-present-changes-in-china-and-the-world/" source="Scheer Post" author="Yáo Zhōngqiū">From 2008 to the Present: Changes in China and the World</a> <bq>[...] incorporating almost all peoples and countries of the world into the capitalist-imperialist world system for systematic oppression and exploitation. The industrialized imperialist countries thus presented a modern, prosperous scene, while the colonies and semi-colonies were gradually peripheralized, de-industrialized and de-structured, resulting in absolute impoverishment – China falls into the latter category.</bq> <bq>the U.S. and China have become the “two best” countries in the world. However, the American growth comes from the increasing globalization and virtualization of finance and high technology, which is increasingly disconnected from the lower and middle classes in the United States, and the growth has exacerbated social tensions.</bq> <bq>It is widely recognized today by the Chinese that China stands in the center of the world stage and has the combined power to defy the hegemon.</bq> <bq>[...] the Western-dominated world system has never been flat. As China’s renaissance has shaken its dominant structure, the West has turned to firmly and brutally contain and disrupt China in order to preserve its monopoly interests. China was forced to take self-protective measures, so that the relationship between China and the United States, which was based on cooperation and division of labor, gradually evolved into a “great power competition. The Chinese community was once quite shocked by this change.</bq> <bq>[...] the Chinese Communist Party has maintained a high degree of national autonomy, and China has actively opened up to the outside world without falling into peripheral capitalism, but has instead advanced industrialization autonomously and successfully. Economic enrichment has built cultural and political confidence, and since the 18th National Congress, China has clearly and firmly rejected the liberal-capitalist path. Frustrated and even desperate by this, the U.S. political and cultural elites have turned to great power competition with China and adopted a decoupling strategy.</bq> <bq>With Trump’s actions removing the aura of American values and the new crown epidemic exposing the failure of American state governance, liberalism ebbed globally and rapidly marginalized in China; Chinese Marxism and the excellent Chinese culture centered on Confucianism gradually became the main body of ideology, which largely decoupled from Western-style ideology, and the academy has begun to establish a Chinese system of philosophy and social science.</bq> This may be an exaggerated formulation (some of the formulations have the propagandistic feel of NYT pronouncements about the Biden administration), but there's more than a kernel of truth to it. <bq>Comprehensive poverty eradication and the fight against the epidemic show that political integration has reached a high level.</bq> <bq>The nation has generally gained cultural confidence and patriotic spirit.</bq> People would react strongly to such a formulation, but it's literally what the equally bombastic and overly flowery exhortations from any American politician sound like, to my ears. <bq>Economically, the strategic importance and political status of the state-owned economy has been reaffirmed. In recent years, strong measures have also been taken to reverse the trend of economic de-realization, re-layout the economy with manufacturing as the center, and promote the laddering of domestic industries; curb the disorderly expansion of capital and block the channels for capital to dominate political power.</bq> <bq>de-industrialization-financialization is the internal logic of capitalism, and its political power is controlled and constrained by capital, so the re-industrialization efforts have not been effective [in the U.S.]. The alienation and confrontation between the globalized financial and high-tech capitalism and the de-industrialized rust belt of the South Central region are becoming more and more serious.</bq> Again, though this is advantageous to the Chinese worldview, it's also a clear-eyed estimation of the situation in the U.S. <bq>The core of this is the hastily established “Australian British American Union” (AUKUS), which shows that white Christian racism has become the dominant value in American internal and external politics, and that this will deprive the United States of its universal moral appeal.</bq> This is also what Chris Hedges is saying. It's a real problem. People are lashing out because of the massively disorganized way that their country is being run and their anger is channelled into utterly unproductive, quasi-religious, hateful channels governed by magical thinking that their problems can be solved by destroying an arbitrarily selected "other". Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. <bq>First, the two world powers are moving apart, and the single liberal-capitalist world system has collapsed and fractured into two systems: a “developmental world system” led by China, with equality as a value and development as a goal [...]. The other is the U.S.-led liberal-capitalist system, after a significant contraction, which strives to defend the vested interests of a few developed countries in the name of freedom.</bq> <bq>[...] as stated in the Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Major Achievements and Historical Experiences of the Party’s Centennial Struggle: China has “expanded the way for developing countries to modernize, offering a new choice to those countries and nations in the world that wish to accelerate development while maintaining their independence.”</bq> <bq>This struggle is not a struggle for hegemony, but a struggle of justice against injustice: the United States is a reactionary force, striving to preserve the old civilization that relies on monopoly power; China is a progressive force, initially creating and continuing to expand a new form of universal, equal and autonomous human civilization.</bq> The characterization of the U.S. is spot-on. I imagine the Chinese one is---as when the U.S. describes itself---overly generous. <bq>[...] on the whole, China’s internal integration has been significantly more effective than that of the United States. Western-style liberal values are the values of the powerful, and Western-style democracy is a system for monopolies to distribute the “windfall” of external plunder;</bq> <bq>Only through the “Great Struggle”, breaking the military and political hegemony of the United States and the technological and economic monopoly maintained by the Western countries for two hundred years, can we finally achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and unite more nations and countries to open up a straight path to build a new form of human civilization in the world.</bq> <hr> <a href="http://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2022/07/why-january-6-means-more-to-washington.html" source="Exile In Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">Why January 6 Means More to Washington than It Does to America</a> <bq>Your average working-class hick in red state America, and I'm not just talking about Republicans, doesn't care about the threat Donald Trump poses to American democracy because American democracy doesn't fucking work for them anymore, if it ever has to begin with.</bq> <bq>[...] your average unwashed auto mechanic or trailer park housewife is actually quite shockingly well aware of how the American political system really operates. Aside from the culture war bullshit, these people really aren't that far off from Chomsky on what really counts.</bq> <bq>These people may never get my pronouns straight but when it comes to the basics of class warfare they are downright woke.</bq> <bq>Most of these people didn't vote for Trump. Most of these people didn't vote for anybody because they didn't see anybody at the podium who represented them and were they wrong?</bq> <bq>So why give a fuck about democracy now? Say what you will about hick country, at least their indifference is consistent. But why do a bunch of barely closeted fascists suddenly give a fuck about the dangers of fascism?</bq> <bq>Because Trump's brand of bush league fascism threatened their brand of legacy fascism, not because it was worse, but because it was embarrassing.</bq> <bq>They took care to properly maintain the facade carefully erected around our totalitarian government to make us appear respectable enough for the rest of the world to kick up to.</bq> <bq>The US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is little more than a glorified infomercial marketed towards the people still stupid enough to believe that this country was ever a real fucking democracy.</bq> <bq>People so fucking clueless that they honestly believe that they're superior to redneck farmers just because they haven't figured out that this rusty rattrap we call a democracy is already a rigged game.</bq> 👌🏼 <bq>House Select Committee won't save this country from its long legacy of fascism any more than Trump's QAnon soccer moms will save it from fucking Chupacabras.</bq> 👌🏼 <bq>Maybe woke poor people should give this insurrection thing a try. After all, it appears to have worked for Sri Lanka and what's good for one shithole country couldn't hurt another.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2022/07/30/zelensky-militants-convicted-child-rape-torture-military/" source="The Gray Zone" author="Esha Krishnaswamy">“These are animals, not people”: Zelensky frees convicted child rapists, torturers to reinforce depleted military</a> <bq>After banning virtually his entire political opposition, publishing a blacklist of foreign journalists and academics accused of advancing “Russian propaganda,” and ramming through a law exempting 70% of Ukrainians from workplace protections [...]</bq> Ukraine sounds like a great place. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/07/reeking-of-butter/" author="Patrick Lawrence" source="Scheer Post">Reeking of Butter</a> <bq>Pelosi is asleep to these differences. To East Asians she has come over as a butter-smelling clod—clumsy, indelicate, incapable of nuance, not the slightest interested in the perspectives of others, ignorant of how she was looked upon. Given she has offered the world a display of how American diplomats and administration officials conduct our trans–Pacific relations, we must conclude that America is destined to get nowhere in the world’s most dynamic region in the course of our century. Those purporting to serve as our statesmen and stateswomen simply do not have the intelligence or the craft.</bq> <bq>Asians can read maps, believe it or not. Asians have interests and little interest in ideologies. Asians have relations with China that they find have many advantages. Asians have no interest in a confrontation with China—and certainly not in any kind of open conflict. However, among people who, by and large, have never walked to and fro among Asians such that they understand them as anything other than dehumanized digits, pulling East Asia together in an anti–China consortium seems a capital idea and easy as pie: All Washington has to do is tell Asians what to do.</bq> <bq>There was no delegation to meet Pelosi at the airport, to her reported irritation. President Yoon Suk-yeol said he was on vacation and could not meet her; a telephone conversation would have to do. [...] Wow, given South Korea is one of five Pacific nations with which the U.S. has formal alliances—along with Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia— Diplomatic snubs do not get a lot more pointed.</bq> <bq>There is now speculation—interesting speculation, but speculation—that Taiwan citizens may now swing on the pendulum and want the governing Democratic Progressive Party to back off its pro-independence position and the U.S. to back off its open encouragement of the DPP.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/11/bamn-a11.html" author="Kevin Reed" source="WSWS">Roger Waters refutes US war propaganda in CNN interview and World Beyond War webinar</a> <bq>This prompted Smerconish to assert that Russia should have “learned their lesson from war” and not “invaded Ukraine.” Waters told the CNN commentator, “I would suggest to you, Michael, that you go away and read a bit more and then try and figure out what the United States would do if the Chinese were putting nuclear armed missiles into Mexico and Canada.” Smerconish blurted out, “The Chinese are too busy encircling Taiwan, as we speak.” Waters became more animated, “They’re not encircling Taiwan. Taiwan is part of China. And that has been accepted by the whole of the international community since 1948 and, if you don’t know that, you’re not reading enough.”</bq> <bq>He went on to say that the “gangster morons who run the world” were doing more to bring about a nuclear war “at the moment ... than at any time in my lifetime.” Waters then compared the present day to the Cuban missile crisis of 1961 and explained, “at least JFK and Nikita Khrushchev were talking to one another about things.”</bq> <bq>In an extended comment, the veteran musician pointed out that the US, in fact, is “trying to rule the world,” and “that’s why they have over a thousand military bases; that’s why they’re getting China surrounded; that’s why they’re brandishing the big stick every day; that’s why they’re poking this dangerous bear in the eye with a stick every day; that’s why they won’t negotiate; that’s why they didn’t support the Minsk agreements; that’s why they’re trying to enlarge NATO not just to the Russian border but also into the South China Sea. They want the South China Sea to become part of something that is nominally called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. What the f**k has the South China Sea got to do with the North Atlantic? That’s a question I’d also like to know. If anybody out there knows the answer to that question, I’d like to know it.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/08/06/smr-roger-waters.cnn" author="Michael Smerconish" source="CNN">Pink Floyd co-founder explains meaning behind warning at the top of his show</a> This is the seven-minute interview with Roger Waters on CNN discussed above. I'm honestly quite shocked they left mostly unaltered. It's not groundbreaking, but it's an alternate opinion on a news source largely opposed to airing them. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/11/infl-a11.html" author="Marcus Day" source="WSWS">“People can hardly afford to eat”: US inflation continues to hammer workers</a> <bq>An auto parts worker in Indianapolis reported to the WSWS: “They say that inflation has eased up, but it’s unnoticeable. I’m still struggling too hard. At the first of the year, a four pack of drumsticks was $3 and change, now it’s $11 and change. I have not bought chicken in months. Honestly, I can’t afford it. “I’m living on lunch meat and cheese. I can’t afford a decent meal that I cook at home. I used to buy a can of chili for $2 and a box of spaghetti. Now chili is five bucks, and that meal is out of reach. Cabbage is almost too much. People can hardly afford to eat. “Gas went up. Water went up. When they have to make improvements to the storm drains, the bill you pay for sewage doubles and triples. ASE is the utility company for both water and gas. I am hardly ever home, but my electric bill jumped from $20 a month to 50 some dollars a month.</bq> <bq>“It’s ridiculous,” said another Kroger worker in Indiana about inflation, “especially on things you can’t cut back on much, like groceries. I went to Aldi [a discount grocery chain] a few weeks ago for the first time in ages, and found their prices not that much cheaper. I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better as people have less and less to spend on basically anything but the bare necessities, which will then affect jobs overall. I am thinking about asking for extra hours, but it’s hard on me. I hate doing six days and 10 hours, it’s almost too much.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/12/roaming-charges-65/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Gaza by Bomblight</a> <bq>The more times Gaza is bombed and yet still exists, the less powerful Israel feels. The less powerful Israel feels, the more frightened it is at what it has become. The more frightened Israel is, the more frequently Gaza will be bombed. So it goes.</bq> <bq>In Tallahassee, the police have been getting trained at a place called Stronghold Solutions Defense Company by none other than MAGA-star Eddie “the Blade” Gallagher, the sadistic Navy SEAL sniper, whose multiple acts of cruelty and depravity revolting even members of his own, who turned him in. Of course, these were the very acts that appealed to Trump, who pardoned Gallagher of war crimes. One wonders how closely the newly trained Tallahassee cops will adhere to the Gallagher Method of ‘”killing anything that moved.”</bq> <bq>There’s a nursing shortage in America’s hospitals. In Maryland, more than 25 percent of the nursing positions are vacant. One recently retired nurse told the Baltimore CBS affiliate: “The labor is treacherous. You’re doing four, five people’s jobs, but only getting one pay. They’re not paying you what you’re worth.”</bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-third-world" author="Matt Taibbi" source="TK News">Welcome to the Third World</a> <bq>As of now, it’s impossible to say if Trump’s alleged offense was great, small, or in between. But this for sure is a huge story, and its hugeness extends in multiple directions, including the extraordinary political risk inherent in the decision to execute the raid. If it backfires, if underlying this action there isn’t a very substantial there there, the Biden administration just took the world’s most reputable police force and turned it into the American version of the Tonton Macoute on national television. We may be looking at simultaneously the dumbest and most inadvertently destructive political gambit in the recent history of this country.</bq> <bq>[...] they should have been asking: is there anything weird about dozens of FBI agents executing an Entebbe-style raid of the home of a former president over a records issue?</bq> <bq>[...] as a journalist it’s become impossible to believe that the endless investigations of Trump over the last six years have become anything but a permanent feature of his political opposition. That truth begins with the Trump-Russia scandal, which we now know was a hoax pursued as a real crime by a compromised police apparatus, after being concocted by Democrats.</bq> <bq>[...] unless yesterday’s events are tied, quickly, to an attempt by him to prevent Biden’s 2020 certification, or an effort to game the electoral system ahead of 2024, or some other devastatingly serious crime, this is absolutely going to play as the crudest harassment. I worry particularly about the reported presence of counterintelligence agents at the raid, raising the specter — which numerous sources told me is theoretically possible — of parts of this investigation remaining secret. If any of this happens, the Biden administration will have achieved the impossible, turning Donald “Grab ‘Em By the Pussy” Trump into a victim.</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/slightly-against-underpopulation" source="Astral Codex Ten" author="Scott Siskind">Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries</a> <bq>But Japan and China will drop a lot. By 2100, there will only be 800 million Chinese and 70 million Japanese.</bq> <bq>East Asia will probably be hit worst by underpopulation, with low birth rates and little immigration. But by 2100, there will still be 50% more East Asians than there were in 1920, when everyone was terrified of how many East Asians there were. Honestly, 800 million Chinese people still seems like a lot.</bq> <bq>140 million native-born white Americans is about as many as there were in 1965, when native-born white American Paul Ehrlich wrote Population Bomb , claiming that current populations were unsustainable and the world would collapse soon. On the way up, people were able to look at same these numbers and see them as terrifyingly high. Is there some objective standard by which we should look at them and instead find them worryingly low?</bq> No, that's just how people work. We consider the current reality to be "normal" regardless of how objectively abnormal it is. <bq>[...] people will call you a racist conspiracy theorist. I don’t think it’s racist to care about ethnic demographic shift - I think Japan as it currently exists is not completely interchangeable with a Japan made of 1/3 ethnic Japanese people and 2/3 ethnic Kenyans.</bq> That's not to say that we should necessarily prevent that future, should it come about organically, but that we should understand and accept that it would be a huge change and there would be something lost in the process. We can just let everything proceed organically---which it never does; there are always pressures and measures that bring about outcomes---and let the chips fall where they may. Those chips will tend to fall where those with the most power want them to fall, though, if history is to serve as a guide. Although the author's example is hyperbolic to prove a point that there are limits to the effectiveness and usefulness of immigration to a culture (i.e. that enough immigration without integration will end up eradicating that culture, for all practical purpose), we can see this effect in a microcosm with heavily tourist-infested areas in some countries. These areas end up being an utter caricature of the actual culture. <bq>I notice it’s weird to be worried both that the future will be racked by labor shortages, and that we’ll suffer from technological unemployment and need to worry about universal basic income. You really have to choose one or the other. I’m pretty worried about technological unemployment myself.</bq> <bq>There is some debate in the scientific community about whether this is happening, but as far as I can tell the people who claim it isn’t have no good refutation for the common sense argument that it has to be. The people who claim that it is make more sense, and have measured the effect in Iceland , an isolated population that it’s easy to measure genetic effects in. It seems to be a decline of about 0.3 IQ points per decade.</bq> <bq>If we don’t die of something else first, there will probably be a technological singularity before 2100. The way things are looking now, it will probably involve AI somehow. If by some miracle that doesn’t happen, we’ll get one involving human genetic engineering for intelligence. I think there’s maybe a 5-10% chance we somehow manage to miss both of those entirely, but I’m not spending too many of my brain cycles worrying about this weird sliver of probability space.</bq> <bq>a 2.5 point decline in IQ could be pretty bad. But if we can’t genetic engineer superbabies with arbitrary IQs by 2100, we have failed so overwhelmingly as a civilization that we deserve whatever kind of terrible discourse our idiot grandchildren inflict on us.</bq> <bq>The Amish have about seven children per family. Their population doubles every twenty years. This has been very consistent; the Amish never change. Relatively few Amish “defect” to regular modern society. As regular American birth rates get lower, the percent of the American population who are Amish rises.</bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/09/baseball-immortality-meets-ungodly-inequality/" author="Sam Pizzigati" source="CounterPunch">Baseball Immortality Meets Ungodly Inequality</a> <bq>Numbers like these are changing the fan experience. Fans, acting in emotional self-defense, have become consumers. They no longer see sports through the same emotional lens. “Instead of hoping that your team wins, you begin to demand it,” as sportscaster Bob Costas has noted. “It’s like you bought a car and if it doesn’t work, you want to know why. When a team doesn’t win, instead of disappointment or heartbreak, you now have anger and resentment.”</bq>