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Links and Notes for October 28th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#covid">COVID-19</a> <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="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h>COVID-19</h> <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affairs-102622-triple-threat" source="Your Local Epidemiologist" author="Katelyn Jetelina">State of Affairs 10/26/22: Triple Threat</a> <bq>Most people recover in a week or two, but it can be serious for two groups: Young children . Before the pandemic, we saw ~2,300 per 100,000 children under the age of 1 hospitalized. (In comparison, the estimated hospitalizations rate is 30-40 per 100,000 children for flu and 48 per 100,000 children for COVID-19 , pre-vaccine.) RSV is the most common cause of bronchiolitis (inflammation of the small airways in the lung) and pneumonia (infection of the lungs).</bq> <h>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/28/otdh-o28.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">European Central Bank announces another big interest rate hike as recession trends strengthen</a> <bq>These criticisms were raised in a question to Lagarde at her press conference. She gave them short shrift, saying “we have to do what we have to do.” Lagarde said the ECB was not oblivious to the “risk of recession,” but, based on its mandate, had to deal with the “reality of inflation.”</bq> When did Christine LeGarde become president of Europe? She's never been elected to anything. She is a functionary. And yet. And yet, she somehow ends up setting economic policy for the entire European Union---doing an end-run around democracy. It goes largely unmentioned and mostly unnoticed that this setup presupposes that economics is somehow not under the purview of a democracy. Not a single elected official can do a goddamned thing because the ECB does what it wants. It is the de-facto ruler of Europe. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/28/new-yorkers-visit-vienna-for-social-housing-inspiration/" author="Bella DeVaan" source="CounterPunch">New Yorkers Visit Vienna for Social Housing Inspiration</a> <bq>[...] housing experts explain the genius of the Viennese system: city intervention and long-term investment. The city tethers the affordability of housing to its land prices by buying land or reappropriating its land reserves, and heavily regulates developers’ use of the land, requiring profits to be capped and reinvested in affordable housing construction. Residency in affordable housing is allowed for long periods of time, even subsidized further the longer that tenants reside in their units – strengthening community ties. Developers couple density with parks and access to public transport.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/11/big-oil-price-gouging-profiteering-gas-biden-administration/" author="Jordan Uhl" source="Jacobin">Big Oil’s Price Gouging Is Pulling in Big Profits</a> <bq>ExxonMobil posted its biggest quarter ever on Friday, with nearly $20 billion in earnings during the third quarter of this year. This was a 191 percent increase from the $6.75 billion it raked in during Q3 2021. Chevron reported similarly robust results on Friday. The California-based oil giant’s third-quarter earnings of $11.2 billion were its second-highest quarterly returns ever, nearly double its earnings during Q3 2021. On Thursday, Shell reported $9.5 billion in earnings over the last three months, more than double the $4.1 billion it earned during the same period last year. In its report to investors, the oil and gas giant announced a $4 billion round of stock buybacks, creating yet another windfall for investors and bringing its total buybacks this year to $18.5 billion.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/11/an-economists-chart-goes-viral-shows-main-source-of-inflation/" author="Pam and Russ Martens" source="Wall Street on Parade">An Economist’s Chart Goes Viral: Shows Main Source of Inflation</a> <bq author="">It is unlikely that either the extent of corporate greed or even the power of corporations generally has increased during the past two years. Instead, the already-excessive power of corporations has been channeled into raising prices rather than the more traditional form it has taken in recent decades: suppressing wages. That said, one effective way to prevent corporate power from being channeled into higher prices in the coming year would be a temporary excess profits tax.</bq> <img src="{att_link}chart-using-bea-data-on-where-inflation-is-coming-from.jpeg" href="{att_link}chart-using-bea-data-on-where-inflation-is-coming-from.jpeg" align="none" caption="Chart-Using-BEA-Data-on-Where-Inflation-Is-Coming-From" scale="75%"> <img src="{att_link}growth-in-corporate-profits-after-tax-1947-through-q2-2022.jpeg" href="{att_link}growth-in-corporate-profits-after-tax-1947-through-q2-2022.jpeg" align="none" caption="Growth-in-Corporate-Profits-After-Tax-1947-through-Q2-2022" scale="75%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/04/how-the-elites-are-really-screwing-the-masses/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">How the Elites are Really Screwing the Masses</a> <bq>If we had a story where we were seeing rapid productivity growth, accompanied by rising inequality, then we could say that we face an unfortunate trade-off, with the cost of more rapid growth being higher inequality. But in fact, the opposite is the case. We see very slow productivity growth accompanied by rising inequality. It is not clear what gain we are supposed to be getting for this increase in inequality.</bq> <bq>We made a conscious decision to put manufacturing workers in direct competition with much lower paid workers in developing countries, while continuing to protect more highly paid workers. We could have designed trade policies that would have made it much easier for doctors, dentists, and other highly educated professionals in developing countries (and rich countries) to come to the United States and compete with our professionals. This would have offered large gains to the economy, as we could have saved hundreds of billions of dollars annually paying less money for these professionals. Our trade negotiators never pursued this type of free trade because doctors and lawyers have far more political power than steel workers and textile workers. As a result, we structured trade in a way that redistributed a huge amount of income upward and pretended that it was just the natural course of globalization.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-crisis-europe-fashion-industry-11666103793" source="Wall Street Journal" author="Stacy Meichtry & Jenny Strasburg">Fashion Industry Gets Torn by Europe’s Soaring Energy Bills</a> <bq>Mr. Reali calculated, based on his bills in July and August, that he would have to come up with about one million euros to cover two months of gas bills if his vendor made a similar demand. To make it through the year, he would have to burn more than half of his €10 million in annual revenue on energy bills, compared with the 10% he used to spend. The cost of gas, he said, had gone from being “one of the thousand business costs” that he rarely thought about to “a monster that’s devouring us.”</bq> <bq>When Moscow decided this summer to first restrict, then close, the Nord Stream pipeline, a vital artery for Europe’s gas supply, gas prices rose to more than 10 times what Mr. Reali had paid a year earlier.</bq> They did no such thing. Europe chose not to pay the price. The price was not supporting Ukraine militarily. Europe declared war on Russia with its sanctions instead. That was a choice. Also, it appears that the enormously elevated natural-gas prices of the summer are coming down tremendously, now that the energy companies and their compliant media have terrified every business in Europe into buying a year's worth of energy at massively inflated prices. <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-brutal-comedy-of-the-withdrawn" source="TK News" author="Matt Taibbi">The Brutal Comedy of the Withdrawn Peace Letter</a> <bq>The significance of “progressive holy war” language from Raskin is that it’s designed to divert attention from this central question of just exactly how much chicken voters might want us to be playing over there. If you asked Americans a year ago if they’d be willing to risk their kids’ lives for dairy farms in the Kherson Oblast, 99% would say “Where?” and then no. But frame the project as a war to halt the “export” of bigotry by conquering the “world center” of political regression, and you might just get a plurality of voters casting votes to roll the dice.</bq> <bq>With control of the White House but not Congress — and with Republican leaders sounding anxious to turn off the money faucet for Kyiv — the obvious endgame for the Democrats is total commitment to being the War Party through 2024.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/27/the-west-must-stop-blocking-negotiations-between-ukraine-and-russia/" source="CounterPunch" author="Vijay Prashad">The West Must Stop Blocking Negotiations Between Ukraine and Russia</a> <bq>In a December 2019 press conference, Putin said , “there is nothing more important than the Minsk Agreements.” At this point, Putin said that all he expected was that the Donbas region would be given special status in the Ukrainian Constitution, and during the time of the expected Ukraine-Russia April 2020 meeting, the troops on both sides would have pulled back and agreed to “disengagement along the entire contact line.”</bq> Literally where the bargaining position was. Now lunatics have blown that all away. <bq>In late 2020, Zelenskyy said he wanted Biden at the table, but a year later it became clear that Russia was not interested in having the United States be part of the Normandy Four. Putin said that the Normandy Four was “self-sufficient.” Biden, meanwhile, chose to intensify threats and sanctions against Russia based on the claims of Kremlin interference in the United States 2016 and 2018 elections. By December 2021, there was no proper reciprocal dialogue between Biden and Putin.</bq> <bq>Nor was an agreement with Russia feasible if it meant that Russian concerns were to be taken seriously by the West. Ukrainians have been paying a terrible price for the failure of ensuring sensible and reasonable negotiations from 2014 to February 2022—which could have prevented the invasion by Russia in the first place, and once the war started, could have led to the end of this war. All wars end in negotiations, but these negotiations to end wars should be permitted to restart.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/10/mike-davis-death-socialism-workers-hope/" source="Jacobin" author="Micah Uetricht">Mike Davis Showed Us What “Old-School Socialism” Looked Like</a> <bq>One is always negotiating the slippery dialectic between individual reason, which must be intransigently self-critical, and the fact that one needs to be part of a movement or a radical collective in order, as Sartre put it, to “be in history.” Moral dilemmas and hard choices come with the turf and they cannot be evaded with “correct lines.”</bq> <bq>Davis hated that readers like me were always prattling on about hope. (“Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely,” he told one interviewer.) But in any case, in his final works before death, as the excitement of the Bernie Sanders campaign faded and coronavirus ravaged the earth while climate change worsened and cruelty kept winning the day in politics and culture, that window that I had noticed open felt closed.</bq> <bq author="Mike Davis">This seems an age of catastrophe, but it’s also an age equipped, in an abstract sense, with all the tools it needs. Utopia is available to us. If, like me, you lived through the civil-rights movement, the antiwar movement, you can never discard hope. I’ve seen social miracles in my life, ones that have stunned me — the courageousness of ordinary people in a struggle. Eleven years ago, Bill Moyers brought me on his show and presented me as the last socialist in America. Now there are millions of young people who prefer socialism to capitalism.</bq> Utopia is available, which is, on the one hand, heartening. The tools and resources are there. We see every day how those resources are squandered on short-term power- and wealth-consolidation for various elites, which is discouraging. Perhaps the tools are there, but are out of our reach. The resources we can see, we cannot mine. Perhaps humanity is doomed to be an ape cracking walnuts with a Macbook. The few apes who know how to make better use of it, can't get anywhere near it. <hr> <a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-roots-of-war/" source="Boston Review" author="Chris Blattman">The Roots of War</a> <bq>The reason was simple: violence seemed too costly. Fighting kills little brothers and friends, and no one wants to pay protection money or buy drugs in the middle of a gunfight. Most of all, though, a war between the gangs would have brought police attention to the crime bosses and risked their arrest. These leaders could not care less about civilian casualties. Mass violence would have compromised leaders’ bottom line and their freedom.</bq> <bq>They occasionally have skirmishes (where things can get pretty rough). But they steer clear of war, knowing that it would result in vastly more damage. Today their pact has been held for a decade and Medellín’s homicide rate is nearly half that of U.S. cities such as Chicago.</bq> <bq>Medellín’s hostile peace is not unusual. Indeed, its gangs are an allegory for our wider world. The globe is a patchwork of rival territories. Controlling them brings wealth and status. Different groups covet their neighbors’ resources and prey on the weak, but most do their best not to wage war.</bq> <bq>And while there’s a reason for every war and a war for every reason, there are only so many logical ways that the incentives for peace can break down. There are five main reasons it happens: unchecked interests, intangible incentives, misperceptions, uncertainty, and commitment problems.</bq> <bq>Ukrainians had tossed out two Russian-facing leaders in the previous two decades. But while an increasingly restive and democratic Ukraine was hardly a danger to ordinary Russians, from Putin’s point of view, Ukrainian democracy was a dangerous example to dissidents at home, potentially threatening his system of control.</bq> Um, what? The Russian domino theory? Really? Methinks you're projecting a bit. Who is this author? <bq>Dictators are the most extreme and dangerous of the lot, because they are accountable to the fewest people and bear the least costs.</bq> Does this guy really not know that Putin was elected? Or does he just assume it was corrupt, in a way he would never assume of Joe Biden? This is sadly simplistic reasoning. I saw at the end of the article that this is from a guy's book, that the libs seem to love. This is what passes for intellectual discourse these days. I'm sure the German translation is also selling like hotcakes. <bq>This is probably the most common explanation for Putin’s invasion: nationalist pride and a desire to see Russia restored to its imperial glory. If it adds to Putin’s personal renown and place in history, so much the better.</bq> These are the Western reasons, yes, but not those that Putin expresses. Again, is the assumption that Putin is lying? His actions seem to line up pretty well with his statements. They're at-times brutal statements followed up by brutal actions, but he's not particularly mendacious when he speaks about his and Russia's motives. I'm sure he lies more to his own people, but he's quite open about his goals for Russia. Imperial glory is expressly not one of them. He shouts from every hilltop that his goal is a multipolar world---and doesn't even stipulate that Russia be one of those poles (although I can't imagine him not hoping that there is enough of Russia left over for it to take its place at the table). <bq>Putin demanded Ukraine sacrifice its sovereignty, a price other neighbors have paid. But like the U.S. revolutionaries over two centuries before, Ukrainians refused the bargain. In both cases they were willing to bear some costs of war because compromise on freedom and sovereignty was simply repugnant.</bq> This is wild mischaracterization of the history. He's comparing the Ukrainian resistance to an invasion to the founding of America. That's a bit thick, I'd say. They're not really comparable, not because one is better than the other, but because they're just different. Putin's demands were much, much smaller years ago, but they were continuously ignored. The west can't even say that Putin would never be satisfied even were his demands to be satisfied, that he would always demand more. This will remain a theory because the U.S. and NATO have never given in to a single request or demand. Not once. No concessions because Putin is not in charge, ammirite? The U.S. is. Of everybody. <bq>In this scenario decision-makers do not stop acting strategically, but rather strategize from a set of delusional and biased beliefs. We often misperceive others.</bq> The irony is lost on him. He's describing his own book without even being aware of it. <bq>It is also one of the most familiar narratives for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: an isolated and insulated ruling cabal overconfidently expected to easily topple the Zelensky regime, so much so that they were unprepared for the possibility of failure.</bq> He can literally only come up with negative examples about Russia, but never thinks to apply them to the U.S. or NATO, even when they are glaringly applicable. It's so sad that he seems incapable of applying the principles to all parties. The examples are obvious. <bq>Elected presidents, such as Ukraine’s Zelensky, can agree to peace terms, but a year down the road, should circumstances change, a legislature could refuse to ratify the agreement, or citizens could elect a leader who rejects the previous terms. Again, a deal unravels before it begins. Meanwhile, dictators such as Putin have even greater difficulty making deals because nothing constrains them from changing their mind later.</bq> This is fucking amazing at this point. Does this pass for intellectual discourse? Is it this horseshit that is gladhanded around elite circles? It's gobsmackingly simplistic and childish. We are truly doomed if the elites gobble this up. <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/my-war-never-ends" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">My War Never Ends</a> <bq>The war in Ukraine raised the familiar bile, the revulsion at those who don’t go to war and yet revel in the mad destructive power of violence. Once again, by embracing a childish binary universe of good and evil from a distance, war was turned into a morality play, gripping the popular imagination [...]</bq> <bq>Russian President Vladimir Putin, like Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein, instantly became the new Hitler. Ukraine, which most Americans undoubtedly couldn’t have found on a map, was suddenly the front line in the eternal fight for democracy and liberty.</bq> <bq>As Edward Said once wrote about these courtiers to power:<bq>Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s own eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/stop-worrying-and-love-the-bomb?publication_id=778851&isFreemail=false" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb</a> <bq>They are salivating at the prospect of taking on Russia, and then, if there is any habitation left on the globe, China. Trapped in the polarizing mindset of the Cold War — where any effort to de-escalate conflicts through diplomacy is considered appeasement, a perfidious Munich moment — they smugly push the human species closer and closer toward obliteration. Unfortunately for us, one of these true believers is Secretary of State Antony Blinken.</bq> <bq>They are the pimps of war . If you reported on them, as I did, you would not sleep well at night. They are vain enough and stupid enough to blow up the world long before we go extinct because of the climate crisis, which they have also dutifully accelerated.</bq> <bq>Why did Washington and Whitehall dissuade Vladimir Zelensky, a former stand-up comic who has been magically transformed by these war lovers into the new Winston Churchill, from pursuing negotiations with Moscow, set up by Turkey? Why do they believe that militarily humiliating Putin, whom they are also determined to remove from power, won’t lead him to do the unthinkable in a final act of desperation?</bq> <bq>“A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal,” it reads. “Though Russia’s planning and fighting have been surprisingly sloppy, Russia remains too strong, and Mr. Putin has invested too much personal prestige in the invasion to back down.”</bq> <bq>[...] well aware it was provoking Russia. But it was drunk on its own power, especially as it emerged as the world’s sole superpower at the end of the Cold War, and besides, there were billions in profits to be made in arms sales to new NATO members.</bq> <bq>If you think nuclear war can’t happen, pay a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These Japanese cities had no military value . They were wiped out because most of the rest of Japan’s urban centers had already been destroyed by saturation bombing campaigns directed by LeMay. The U.S. knew Japan was crippled and ready to surrender, but it wanted to send a message to the Soviet Union that with its new atomic weapons it was going to dominate the world. We saw how that turned out.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-proto-fascist-guide-to-destroying-the-world/" source="Boston Review" author="Noam Chomsky & David Barsamian">The Proto-Fascist Guide to Destroying the World</a> <bq>[...] very much like the Republican Party here—dedicated to destroying the planet as quickly as possible. They don’t put it in those words, but that’s the meaning of the policies. Maximize the use of fossil fuels, including the most dangerous of them, and eliminate regulations that might mitigate their effect. I’m not saying anything secret: this is perfectly public. In fact, it’s gotten so extreme that the corporate sector, which is really on a roll under this period of savage capitalist proto-fascism, is now actually organizing to punish corporations that even reveal information about the ecological effect of their investments and development. Otherwise they get punished by Republican state legislatures, which take away the pension funds and so on. That’s really savage capitalism carried to an almost grotesque extreme. And it’s only one case; there are lots of things like that.</bq> <bq>What happens to the Eastern Mediterranean when the sea level rises 2.5 meters? Just imagine. Meanwhile, Israel and Lebanon are squabbling over who will have the right to produce more fossil fuels at their maritime border. While their countries are sinking under the Mediterranean, they’re squabbling about who will have the right—the honor—to administer the final touch. It’s insanity.</bq> <bq>Meanwhile, India and Pakistan are developing their nuclear weapons systems so that they can destroy each other in a competition over who will control the diminishing waters on which they both rely as the glaciers melt. It’s as if the whole species has gone insane.</bq> <bq>That’s what it means when U.S. official policy is, let’s continue the war to weaken Russia and put off negotiations. That’s what it means. Not just increasing the threat of nuclear war, killing Ukrainians, and starving millions of people because the flow of grain and fertilizers is cut, but also the race to destroy organized human life on Earth by maximizing fossil fuel use during the brief period when we could curtail it or save ourselves. That‘s the situation we‘re now in.</bq> <bq>It’s been a major class war, a brutal class war, which has devastated much of the world and led to tremendous anger, resentment, contempt for institutions. That’s the background out of which you start getting these proto-fascist parties. It’s not too late to reverse it, but there isn’t a lot of time.</bq> <bq>Take a look at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. On September 14 it advanced the Taiwan Policy Act, which totally undermines the strategic ambiguity. It calls for the United States to move to treat Taiwan as a non-NATO ally. But otherwise, very much like a NATO power, it would open up full diplomatic relations, just as with any sovereign state, and move for large-scale weapons transfers, joint military maneuvers, and interoperability of weapons and military systems—very similar to the policies of the last decade toward Ukraine, in fact, which were designed to integrate it into the NATO military command and make it a de facto NATO power. Well, we know where that led.</bq> <bq>when Greta Thunberg gets up at the Davos meeting. It’s exactly what she said. She said, “You’ve betrayed us.” How did the elite react? Polite applause. “Nice little girl. Now go back to school. We’ll take care of it.” That’s what grandpa’s saying.</bq> <bq>There’s plenty of response in the Third World. They’re mostly collapsing in ridicule. You read Third World commentary and they hardly believe what’s going on. Here’s the leading violator of the UN Charter, way ahead of anyone else, telling us, “Oh, somebody violated the UN Charter.” I mean, it’s actually pretty wild when you look at it. It’s almost hard to believe.</bq> <bq>In Europe, there’s talk now about expelling Russia from the Security Council. Did anybody talk about expelling the United States and Britain from the Security Council after the invasion of Iraq? In fact, if you look back at the record on Vietnam, the UN was afraid even to discuss it because they understood that if they brought it up, the United States would just destroy the UN. So, you can’t bring it up. That’s the world, the intellectual community, we live in.</bq> They're finally just saying the quiet part out loud. America rules; Russia drools. Nothing more complicated than that. The rulers think themselves so sophisticated but they're nothing but thugs, cavemen, reacting on their basest instincts. Putin, Von de Leyen, Blinken, Biden, the lot of them. <bq>Try to find somebody in the mainstream who will say what 70 percent of the American population said in 1978—that the Vietnam War was not a “mistake,” it was “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” The left wing of the establishment at the time, people like Anthony Lewis in the New York Times, said the war began with “blundering efforts to do good,” but it turned into a mistake because we couldn’t bring democracy to Vietnam at a cost acceptable to us. Meanwhile, 70 percent of the population are saying—not a mistake; fundamentally wrong and immoral. Now, in the present, see if you can find somebody in the mainstream who will criticize the Iraq War not just as strategic blunder, like Obama did, but what it was: supreme international crime. Brutal, vicious crime and disaster.</bq> <bq>Back in 1975, the United States health system was pretty normal among advanced societies—roughly the same outcomes, roughly the same costs. Then comes the split that comes along with neoliberalism. Now, it’s twice the costs of comparable societies, some of the worst outcomes. It’s even so extreme that mortality is increasing in the United States. That doesn’t happen anywhere except for war, severe pestilence. But in the United States it’s happening alone. I’d like to see a reform of that. I’d like to see the United States have a health system like other societies. That’s nowhere near enough, but it‘s a significant reform. It would save many lives, save infant lives, older people’s lives. It means you don’t go bankrupt if you have to go to a hospital. I’m not against that reform; I’m for it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/22/patrick-lawrence-europes-self-destruction/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Europe's Self Destruction</a> <bq>Absolutely remarkable, Western media’s determination to ignore the recent Baltic Sea detonations, which knocked out the Nord Stream I and II gas pipelines. A major piece of Europe’s energy infrastructure, the joint property of Germany and Russia, has been destroyed. Any chance that Russian gas transmissions westward will be resumed is off the table. The Continent is now sent on a desperate search for new sources of natural gas, inevitably at higher prices. I cannot think of many stories that are more significant.</bq> <bq>On October 14, Reuters reported that Sweden has declined to participate in a joint investigation with Germany and Denmark. German television reported that the Danes also dropped out. Now we have a German minister stating his government knows who is responsible for the attack but cannot say who it is. In all three cases, the explanation is the same: This matter is too sensitive to pursue and doing so risks “national security.” So: There will be no joint investigation of the Nord Stream I and II incident. And whatever Sweden and the others may discover on their own, they have no intention of telling the world about it.</bq> <bq>The nearly incredible refusal of Germany and its neighbors to stick up for themselves on the pipeline question suggests that the larger consequence is the final collapse of all pretense that Europe is other than a collection of vassal states subservient to the U.S., even at the expense of their own citizens.</bq> <bq>Then Emmanuel Macron came along. When he hosted the Group of 7 in Biarritz three years ago, the French president tried on his de Gaulle act, declaring that Russia was inevitably part of Europe’s destiny and the Continent must find its own relationship with its vast eastern neighbor. Yes, I said again, failing to see that Macron is little more than a squeaky weather vane mounted grandly atop the European barn.</bq> Oh, Patrick Lawrence, you have quite a way with words. I might steal that one. <bq>[...] the most discouraging aspect of the Nord Stream incident is a tie between two grim realities. On the one hand, it seems clear now the U.S. is emboldened to do anything it likes to the Europeans to preserve its power over them, and on the other it seems just as clear the Europeans will take it in the way of the Stockholm syndrome</bq> <bq>I do not see that the U.S. can bring history’s wheel to a screeching halt even if it looks as if it just did: Macron was for once right when he asserted that Russia’s destiny was with Europe and Europe’s in an interdependent relationship with it. This is history’s longue durée, plain and simple. I’ve never heard of any nation stopping it for more than a short while.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/10/biden-china-semiconductors-chips-export-controls/" source="Jacobin" author="Branko Marcetic">Biden Has Fired the First Shot in a New Kind of Anti-China Cold War</a> <bq>Thirty-one Chinese firms have been added to the Bureau of Industry and Security’s (BIS) Unverified List , which makes it more difficult to send items to the listed entities that are US-made or produced with US supply-chain links, including foreign-made products created using technology that originated in the United States. And it’s not just items that are targeted for restriction, but “US persons,” too. (More on that later).</bq> <bq>[...] when a government proves itself uncooperative in allowing regulators to check they’re complying with US export rules ― like the Chinese government, which doesn’t allow US auditors ― companies based in that country can be slapped with sanctions. In other words, US regulators will now effectively have free rein to freeze any Chinese company out of American supply chains.</bq> <bq>You only need to look at Huawei to get a sense of how devastating such trade curbs can be. Though Huawei was once the number one smartphone maker in the world, Donald Trump’s decision to add it and dozens of its non-US affiliates to the Entity List wreaked havoc on the firm, which, among other things, was no longer able to put the Google Play app store on its phones.</bq> Trump just destroyed a company. No-one talks about it. Like no-one will talk about Biden and Nordstream. Certainly not in a list of bad things he's done. And, yet, Citibank lives. They almost destroyed the world economy, did a lot more damage than Huawei ever die, but nobody took them out. They're now at least three times bigger than they were when they almost killed the world. <bq>The BIS foregrounded the chips’ military uses in justifying these restrictions, but US officials have been clear that maintaining US technological dominance and hobbling China’s accelerating industrial development are at least as big a concern here.</bq> <bq>[...] the Biden administration’s recently released and somewhat incoherent National Security Strategy, which pits the United States against China in a “contest for the future of our world” and singles out “investments in innovation to sharpen our competitive edge” to that end.</bq> <bq>China is, after all, the largest trading partner of most of the world, including Taiwan and South Korea, which are home to two of the world’s top-three advanced processor chip firms. Washington had to rush to exempt both chipmakers just hours before the controls went into effect, according to Reuters, so they could keep doing business in China undisrupted.</bq> Then who is sanctioned? Just certain other, non-favored companies? The free market is out the window again, but for good now? Do people finally see it? That the U.S. picks winners and losers? <bq>Meanwhile, US hopes for creating a fully US-sourced supply chain for semiconductors rests in large part on Intel, which is set to start firing thousands of workers in the face of slumping demand, despite the many billions of dollars of government subsidies it successfully lobbied for earlier this year.</bq> <bq>The first Cold War may have been dangerous, but it took place between two countries that barely traded with each other. We may be about to find out what that war looks like when the two countries are each other’s largest trading partners.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/an-introduction/" source="Phenomenal World" author="Kate Mackenzie , Tim Sahay">An Introduction</a> <bq>Europe and richer east Asia countries are now in a bidding war for limited gas supplies. Others have been priced out of the market entirely. Pakistan had rolling weeks-long power outages; while gas rationing by Bangladesh was not enough to prevent a grid collapse earlier this month, leaving over a hundred million people to grapple with blackouts.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/28/diana-johnstone-omerta-in-the-gangster-war/" source="Consortium News" author="Diana Johnstone">Omerta in the Gangster War</a> <bq>Imperialist wars are waged to conquer lands, peoples, territories. Gangster wars are waged to remove competitors. In gangster wars you issue an obscure warning, then you smash the windows or burn the place down. Gangster war is what you wage when you already are the boss and won’t let any outsider muscle in on your territory. For the dons in Washington, the territory can be just about everywhere, but its core is occupied Europe.</bq> <bq>The Baltic Sea is a nearly closed body of water, with narrow access to the Atlantic through Danish and Swedish straits. The waters near the Danish island of Bornholm where the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged by massive underwater explosions is under constant military surveillance by these neighbors.</bq> <bq>“It seems completely impossible that a state actor could carry out a major naval operation in the middle of this densely monitored area without being noticed by the countless active and passive sensors of the littoral states; certainly not directly off the island of Bornholm, where Danes, Swedes and Germans have a rendezvous in monitoring the surface and undersea activities,” writes Jens Berger in the excellent German website Nachdenkseiten.</bq> <bq>By an odd coincidence, only a few hours after the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2, ceremonies began opening the new Baltic Pipe carrying gas from Norway to Denmark and Poland.</bq> <bq>In recent years, great alarm is raised about alleged Russian efforts to exert “influence” in European countries, while Europeans bathe in perpetual American influence: movies, Netflix, pop culture, influence in universities, media, everywhere.</bq> <bq>When disaster strikes Europe, it can’t be blamed on America (except for former President Donald Trump, because the American establishment despised and rejected him, so Europeans must do the same). It has to be the bad guy in the movie, Putin.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2022/10/27/antiwar-com-the-need-for-courageous-media/" author="Ted Snider" source="Antiware.com">The Need for Courageous Media</a> <bq>On March 1, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Noam Chomsky condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as "a major war crime." That’s obvious and easy. But he went on to add this important insight:<bq>It’s easy to understand why those suffering from the crime may regard it as an unacceptable indulgence to inquire into why it happened and whether it could have been avoided. Understandable, but mistaken. If we want to respond to the tragedy in ways that will help the victims, and avert still worse catastrophes that loom ahead, it is wise, and necessary, to learn as much as we can about what went wrong and how the course could have been corrected. Heroic gestures may be satisfying. They are not helpful.</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/28/ukcr-o28.html" author="Robert Stevens" source="WSWS">Sunak prepares scorched earth UK November budget</a> <bq>Sunak’s Chancellor Jeremy Hunt was brought into government nine days ago at the behest of the financial markets and Bank of England, in the last days of the short-lived Truss government, in order to tear up her unfunded tax giveaway budget for big business and replace it with “eye-wateringly” brutal austerity. Naming his new cabinet this week, Sunak ensured Hunt remained in place.</bq> <bq>Everything is being considered for the axe, including welfare benefits and the state pension, relied on by tens of millions, by keeping payment increases well below the rate of inflation.</bq> <bq>Savage austerity is being imposed on a working class already bled white. Out of a 68 million UK population, 14.5 million people live in poverty, including 8.1 million working-age adults, 4.3 million children and 2.1 million pensioners.</bq> <bq>Research published in September by the Legatum Institute found that even if the previous energy cap on annual average bills stayed at £1,971, another 1.3 million people would be thrown into poverty. Under measures enacted by Truss, average household prices were capped at £2,500. In junking Kwarteng’s budget, Hunt ditched plans to extend the cap beyond next April, when bills are predicted to shoot up to over £4,300 annually.</bq> That's not a problem. Neither he nor Sunak will have anything to do with the government by then. Thinking about April is "long-term thinking". <bq>The most accurate level of inflation, RPI, is heading towards 13 percent, but this is being outstripped by food inflation which has soared to 14.5 percent. For the poorest who rely on budget food items it is even worse, with the cost of these rising by 17 percent.</bq> And food inflation is very uneven. 17% is the average. If you're unfortunate, you may not live anywhere where it's that low. This is the zombie apocalypse that will oust what we can only hope will be the last attempt by the tories to select a prime minister. <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2022/10/27/ukraine-will-us-back-off-as-russia-did-on-cuba/" author="Ray McGovern" source="Antiwar.com">Ukraine: Will US Back Off as Russia Did on Cuba?</a> Here's a snippet from back when we still had a couple of adults who spoke to each other. <bq>On October 28, 1962, Khrushchev wrote Kennedy:<bq>I thank you for the sense of proportion you have displayed. … The Soviet Government has given a new order to dismantle the arms which you describe as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union.</bq></bq> <bq>Clearly, Kennedy had been provoked and later he made that abundantly clear to Khrushchev. Kennedy’s aggressive reactions were of dubious legality. But no one, no one said those actions were "unprovoked." The provoker, of course, was Khrushchev. Sending missiles to Cuba was a gambit; he thought he could get away with it; he misjudged; he folded. For Khrushchev there was no existential threat in withdrawing the missiles – merely political embarrassment. He and Kennedy exchanged messages. Persuaded that the gambit had failed, and unwilling to risk a nuclear exchange, Khrushchev withdrew the missiles. To help Khrushchev save face, Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba.</bq> <bq>In his private letter of Oct. 28 to Kennedy, Khrushchev pointed out that he had acquiesced in the president’s wish that the understanding on Turkey not be made public, but added that the concessions made in his public letter were given "on account of your having agreed on the Turkish issue" – meaning RFK’s assurance to Dobrynin.</bq> Yeah, I honestly can't imagine that we're blessed with anything like this happening right now. The people in charge of our fates right now haven't a tenth the sense. Instead, we get this: <bq>In a video call between Biden and Putin on December 7, 2021,Putin told the US president that "Russia is seriously interested in obtaining reliable, legally fixed guarantees that rule out NATO expansion eastward and the deployment of offensive strike weapons systems in states adjacent to Russia." [Emphasis added.] No such guarantee was provided at the time.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/28/rishi-sunak-and-britains-post-brexit-fairy-tales/" author="Patrick Cockburn" source="CounterPunch">Rishi Sunak and Britain’s Post-Brexit Fairy Tales</a> <bq>Sunak’s jibe at Truss during the summer Tory leadership campaign that she was indulging in “fairy-tale economics” has been ceaselessly replayed on television in the past few days. But no channel I have seen is showing Sunak telling even more disastrous “fairy tales” about the advantages to Britain of putting up trade barriers with its largest market.</bq> <bq>Go too far in meeting the anti-Protocol demands of the Tory right and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and he alienates the Irish Republic, EU and – most significantly for the UK – the US. He will presumably try to fudge and delay negotiations to avoid a trade war with the EU. But any dispute involving Northern Ireland has so many moving parts that it is largely insoluble and has its own momentum outside the control of Westminster governments – as many British prime ministers have learned to their cost.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/28/tales-from-the-democratic-crypt/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Tales From the Democratic Crypt</a> <bq>It’s hard to imagine a more cautiously worded letter. It was in no way an indictment of US policy toward Ukraine. It didn’t raise questions about NATO provocation or Ukrainian corruption. It pins the blame for the war squarely on what it starkly calls Putin’s “outrageous and illegal invasion of Ukraine.” The peace plan it outlines calls for a “free and independent Ukraine,” which would require near total capitulation from Russia. It would oblige NATO to militarily defend Ukraine against any future territorial incursions from Russia. The letter also cautioned against any coercion of Ukraine to come to the table, saying (ludicrously) “it is not America’s place to pressure Ukraine’s government regarding sovereign decisions.” Where’s the controversy? This is as tame as it gets. The tripwire, of course, was Putin. The Progressive Caucus had the temerity to urge Biden to engage in direct talks with the Russian leader, sidestepping the combustible Zelensky. What was standard diplomatic practice during the Cold War is now apparently verboten. Putin is just too toxic to ring up on the hot line to Moscow.</bq> <bq>Farah Ahmed: “Fingers crossed for Rishi today. I love seeing my fellow brown people succeed. It reminds me that I too could be PM if only I was born rich, stole from the working classes, embraced fascism, and delighted in deporting people. Truly inspirational stuff.”</bq> <bq>The benchmark price of European natural gas has fallen to a level that is more than 70 percent below its record high in August. A key main reason for the retreat in prices is that Europe appears to have filled its stockpiles of natural gas for the winter months.</bq> Interesting if true. I wonder if the price-gouging will continue? <bq>Over the next two years, new coal-fired power projects in China with total capacity of 80 gigawatts are expected to start annually–a level that will surpass the peak during the 11th Five-Year Plan from 2006 to 2010. Still, in the first half of 2022 sales of Electric Vehicles in China, despite its slowing economy, eclipsed those in the rest of the world combined. Meanwhile, India is set to expand its solar power generation capacity by more than 25gw this year–ten times more than any other country.</bq> <bq>In his memoir, Bono the Banal claims that the IRA put him on a kill list. Gerry Adams said that was news to him (though it may have been an oversight): “Some of your commentary on the conflict here was shrill, ill-informed and unhelpful. However, you weren’t on your own. You echoed the Irish establishment line. It was the wrong line for decades. A failure of governance and the abandonment of responsibility to lead a process of peace and justice. Thankfully that changed. But it took a long time. Despite this some of us got through it all. With or without you.”</bq> <bq>Although they arrived independently at the theory of evolution by natural selection, [Alfred Russel] Wallace and Darwin were very different people. The intrepid Wallace was one of the greatest field naturalists ever. Darwin barely left his estate in Down after the voyage of the Beagle. A lifelong socialist, Wallace had to work his entire life. Darwin, a starchy Whig, was a trust-funder who never held a job. Imagine the strength of character it took for Wallace to recover after watching 4 years of his grueling work in the Amazon go up in smoke during a ship fire on the voyage home–not only all of his meticulously documented specimens but hundreds of pages of his field journals–then several years later while deep in the Malay Archipelago have Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell connive to delay publication of his theory of natural selection so as not to pre-empt Darwin.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/america-this-week-october-23-29" author="Matt Taibbi" source="TK News">America This Week, October 23-29</a> <bq>With Democrats united against negotiation, the partisan play going forward — especially if Democrats lose both houses in midterm elections — will surely be to equate Republican isolationism with Russian aggression. This will likely lock the Democratic Party into escalation mode through 2024, making prospects for a negotiated end to hostilities dim for the foreseeable future.</bq> <bq>ExxonMobil reported second-quarter profits of $18.7 billion, while Chevron reported adjusted earnings of $10.7 billion, nearly double last year’s number. [...] American oil companies have defied requests from the Biden administration to increase production in the midst of lower global energy output, said to be related to war in Ukraine and to the OPEC+ decision to cut production by 2 million barrels a day. But, they’ve been more than happy to have the extra million barrels per day coming out of America’s strategic petroleum reserve run through their refineries, to earn a little extra while families bleed cash. Carrying charges, carrying charges!</bq> It should be absolutely crystal-clear now that the higher fossil-fuel prices have nothing to do with actual scarcity and everything to do with private cartels. They will not be taxed in any country. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/30/liz-theoharis-the-true-extent-of-poverty-in-the-richest-nation-on-earth/" author="Liz Theoharis" source="Scheer Post">Liz Theoharis: The True Extent of Poverty in the Richest Nation on Earth</a> <bq>In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, Reverend Martin Luther King wrote tellingly,<bq>The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease. A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself. But redemption can come only through a humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.</bq>Neither exists in this country. Rather than an honest sense of self-awareness when it comes to poverty in the United States, policymakers in Washington and so many states continue to legislate as if inequality weren’t an emergency for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of us. When it comes to accurately diagnosing what ails America, let alone prescribing a cure, those with the power and resources to lift the load of poverty have fallen desperately short of the mark.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/31/russia-says-us-lowering-nuclear-threshold-by-upgrading-nukes-in-europe/" author="Dave DeCamp" source="Scheer Post">Russia Says US Lowering ‘Nuclear Threshold’ By Upgrading Nukes in Europe</a> <bq>The B61 is the US’s primary thermonuclear gravity bomb, and it is being modernized into a newer weapon known as the B61-12. Politico reported last week that the US told NATO allies at a recent meeting that it is deploying the B-61-12 to Europe to replace older bombs by this December, a faster timeline than the originally planned spring deployment. [...] The US has approximately 100 B61s currently stored at air bases in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Turkey. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the B61-12s carry a lower yield and are more accurate than older B61s.</bq> <bq>The plans to deploy the B61-12s to Europe by December have puzzled experts as the accelerated timeline does little but raises tensions with Russia. The Pentagon insists its B61-12 plans have nothing to do with the current situation and denies the characterization of the Politico report.</bq> Yeah, OK, buddy. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/31/does-the-u-s-chip-ban-on-china-amount-to-a-declaration-of-war-in-the-computer-age/" author="Prabir Purkayastha" source="CounterPunch">Does the U.S. Chip Ban on China Amount to a Declaration of War in the Computer Age?</a> <bq>The United States has gambled big in its latest across-the-board sanctions on Chinese companies in the semiconductor industry, believing it can kneecap China and retain its global dominance. From the slogans of globalization and “free trade” of the neoliberal 1990s, Washington has reverted to good old technology denial regimes that the U.S. and its allies followed during the Cold War. While it might work in the short run in slowing down the Chinese advances, the cost to the U.S. semiconductor industry of losing China—its biggest market—will have significant consequences in the long run. In the process, the semiconductor industries of Taiwan and South Korea and equipment manufacturers in Japan and the European Union are likely to become collateral damage. It reminds us again of what former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”</bq> <bq>Though the U.S. sanctions are cloaked in military terms—denying China access to technology and products that can help China’s military—in reality, these sanctions target almost all leading semiconductor players in China and, therefore, its civilian sector as well. The fiction of ‘barring military use’ is only to provide the fig leaf of a cover under the World Trade Organization (WTO) exceptions on having to provide market access to all WTO members. Most military applications use older-generation chips and not the latest versions.</bq> <bq>The sanctions also encompass any company that uses U.S. technology or products in its supply chain. This is a provision in the U.S. laws: any company that ‘touches’ the United States while manufacturing its products is automatically brought under the U.S. sanctions regime. It is a unilateral extension of the United States’ national legal jurisdiction and can be used to punish and crush any entity—a company or any other institution—that is directly or indirectly linked to the United States.</bq> <bq>China is expected to account for approximately 40 percent of the semiconductor industry growth by 2030, displacing the United States as the global leader. This is the immediate trigger for the U.S. sanctions and its attempt to halt China’s industry from taking over the lead from the United States and its allies.</bq> <bq>In essence, they were technology denial regimes that applied to any country that the United States considered an “enemy,” with its allies following—then as now—what the United States dictated.</bq> <bq>The current chip war against China is being waged at a time when China has become the biggest manufacturing hub of the world and the largest trade partner for 70 percent of countries in the world. With the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries no longer obeying the U.S. diktats, Washington has lost control of the global energy market.</bq> <bq>With the new series of sanctions by the United States, one issue has been settled: the neoliberal world of free trade is officially over. The sooner other countries understand it, the better it will be for their people. And self-reliance means not simply the fake self-reliance of supporting local manufacturing, but instead means developing the technology and knowledge to sustain and grow it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/31/the-long-indecisive-war-in-ukraine-is-reshaping-the-political-world-map/" author="Patrick Cockburn" source="CounterPunch">The Long, Indecisive War in Ukraine is Reshaping the Political World Map</a> <bq>Putin says that “the West’s undivided dominance over world affairs is coming to an end.” But the trend has, if anything, gone in the opposite direction as the Russian military machine blundered from defeat to defeat over the last eight months. Yet there are plenty of countries in the world who see Russia as a counter-balance to Western hegemony and will not want to see it removed as a powerful piece from the international chess board.</bq> Sure, Ukraine may directly attack Russia with drones, but the retaliation would be swift and fierce, I think. Maybe Russia really is almost dead, but that's not something I believe yet. I think it's a dangerous assumption to make. What I don't understand is Cockburn's simplistic interpretation---I would say more that Russia will have been right regardless of whether Russia itself triumphs or even survives. That is, the unipolar hegemony is gone, probably for good. Time will tell which countries fill that power vacuum, but it will no longer just be the U.S. and it's unlikely that Europe will be any part of it. Great Britain is falling apart and everyone else is so far up their own asses that they have no time for anything but themselves. If they move to austerity, they'll be more than busy enough quelling their own worker's movements qua civil wars to have any energy left over to try to rule the world. I think China isn't delighted with the way things are going, but they're satisfied enough if it's going to play out this way. Between Russia and China, they have a ton of resources that the western world seems to have forgotten they depend on. The West thinks that it can still just take it. The age of piracy may be done for a while. Or maybe it's just beginning? Who the hell knows? <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQLqIWbc9VM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/xQLqIWbc9VM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)" caption="Bail Reform"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V2ceD_K_VY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/2V2ceD_K_VY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Bill Moyers" caption="Mike Davis political activist, urban and historical theorist, Marxist American writer"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk40UKzbDrA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/xk40UKzbDrA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Grayzone" caption="Dennis Kucinich: where are the pro-peace Democrats?"> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2022/10/31/putin-skewers-us-ineptitude/" author="Ray McGovern" source="Antiwar.com">Putin Skewers US Ineptitude</a> <bq>In his Valdai speech Putin quoted from a Harvard Commencement address by Alexander Solzhenitsyn:<bq>A continuous blindness of superiority is typical of the West; it upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present-day Western Systems.</bq>Putin adds:<bq>Solzhenitsyn said this in 1978. Nothing has changed. … Belief in one’s infallibility is very dangerous; it is only one step away from the desire of the infallible to destroy those they do not like. … "They arrogantly rejected all other variants and forms of government by the people and, I want to emphasize this, did so contemptuously and disdainfully … as if everyone else were second-rate, while they were exceptional.</bq></bq> <bq>Now this historical period of boundless Western domination in world affairs is coming to an end. The unipolar world is being relegated to the past. We are at a historical crossroads. We are in for probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time most important decade since the end of World War II. The West is unable to rule humanity single-handedly and the majority of nations no longer want to put up with this. This is the main contradiction of the new era. To cite a classic, this is a revolutionary situation to some extent – the elites cannot and the people do not want to live like that any longer.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2022/11/03/us-admits-iran-is-not-building-a-bomb/" author="Ted Snider" source="Antiwar.com">US Admits Iran Is Not Building a Nuclear Bomb</a> <bq>Were Iran developing a nuclear weapon, it would be worthwhile negotiating a nuclear agreement to prevent it from getting one whatever its position on protests or Russia. The US is wasting its time renegotiating a nuclear agreement to stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb because the US has admitted that Iran is not developing a nuclear bomb. On October 27, after a long delay, the US Department of Defense finally released its Nuclear Posture Review. The review contained a bombshell that failed to explode in the media because it was understandably lost in the glare of three other bombshells that the Secretary of Defense dropped. The US insistence that it would use a nuclear weapon in a first strike, that it would use a nuclear weapon in the face of a conventional threat and that it would use a nuclear weapon, not only to defend itself, but to defend an ally were colossal enough to draw all the attention. But that meant that what went unnoticed was the colossal admission that Iran is not even building a nuclear weapon nor has it even made a decision to pursue one. The Nuclear Posture Review makes that admission, not once, but twice. And the admission is made again in the National Defense Strategy in which it is included. The Nuclear Posture Review first says that "Iran does not currently pose a nuclear threat but continues to develop capabilities that would enable it to produce a nuclear weapon should it make the decision to do so." It then formulates the truth about Iran in the greatest clarity: "Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one."</bq> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/comic/us-dictatorships-have-to-stick-together" author="Ted Rall" source="">Us Dictatorships Have To Stick Together</a> <img src="{att_link}ted-rall-11-4-22.jpg" href="{att_link}ted-rall-11-4-22.jpg" align="none" caption="Ted Rall 04.11.2022" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/04/entire-world-votes-185-to-2-against-blockade-of-cuba-us-and-israel-are-rogue-states-at-un/" author="Ben Norton" source="Scheer Post">Entire World Votes 185 to 2 Against Blockade of Cuba—US and Israel Are Rogue States at UN</a> <bq>For the 30th year in a row, almost every country on Earth voted at the United Nations to oppose the six-decade US blockade of Cuba. On November 3, the UN General Assembly voted an overwhelming 185 to two to condemn Washington’s suffocating embargo. The only countries that supported the illegal blockade were the United States itself and the Israeli apartheid regime. Just two nations abstained: Brazil’s far-right Jair Bolsonaro administration, and the NATO client regime in Ukraine.</bq> <img src="{att_link}un-vote-cuba-blockade-embargo-2022.jpg" href="{att_link}un-vote-cuba-blockade-embargo-2022.jpg" align="none" caption="UN-vote-Cuba-blockade-embargo-2022" scale="75%"> <hr> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/america-this-week-october-30th-november" author="Matt Taibbi" source="TK News">America This Week: October 30th - November 5th, 2022</a> <bq>[...] a sitting president first warning that his opponents are a violent existential threat and then announcing in advance that counting votes may take a long time, especially in the context of unfavorable polling, is certain to elevate conspiratorial doubts about coming results, especially if a Democrat is declared a paper-thin winner in a key close race in Georgia or Pennsylvania after many weeks. Why does it suddenly take so long to count votes in this country? Biden implied “it’s always been” that way, but it hasn’t. You couldn’t script a scenario more likely to produce instability and suspicion.</bq> <bq>High C02 emitters, rather than invest significant capital to reduce emissions, just buy RECs and apply them against their real emissions. Renewable energy producers then theoretically take the proceeds and expand the production capacity of renewables. Sounds great, except at least a decade of research shows purchases made by the likes of P&G do little to stimulate new investment by existing clean producers. Walmart put it best when it said that REC investing was, “simply shifting around ownership of existing renewable electrons” without “the desired impact of accelerating renewable energy development.” They said that in 2014. Good times.</bq> <bq>Currently Japan is the only major central bank in the world keeping interest rates around zero. This has put tremendous pressure on their currency, the Yen. If the rest of the world keeps raising rates, Japan may find it impossible to keep their YCC going. Should the BOJ take its thumb out of the JGB dike, it could be a calamity on par with 2008 or worse. Many Japanese institutions, like pension funds own JGBs and it is thought that they have “enhanced” returns by selling options that go against them if JGB yields surge. These institutions would become forced sellers. Happily, the Japanese own over $1 trillion U.S. Treasury bonds, and if they have to bail out their own financial system, that’s one of the first things they will be selling. So that’s awesome.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/04/roaming-charges-72/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: History Ain’t Changed</a> <bq>Kate MacKenzie and Tim Shay argue convincingly that Lula’s victory will do more for the climate than anything coming out of the COP27 summit in Cairo: “When Lula was last in power, soy and beef moratoriums reduced Brazil’s deforestation of the Amazon by 80% between 2004 and 2012, even as Brazilian agricultural production boomed. Norway paid over a billion dollars to Brazil for avoided deforestation.”</bq> <bq>Glenn Greenwald performed some strange historical contortions to explain why the Biden administration immediately recognized the legitimacy of Lula’s election.</bq> Jeffrey St. Clair just can't leave it be for a second. Without Glenn Greenwald, Lula would still be in jail. Without Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden would never have proved to the world that the U.S. is a duplicitous peeping tom. The man is a fucking hero. Sure, he's on Tucker Carlson's show a lot, but no-one else will have him---precisely because of liberals like St. Clair. Just give him the win here. <bq>Bite mark analysis is a form of junk science that has been deployed by prosecutors across the country to wrongly convict hundreds of people. But bite mark analysts often can’t even agree on what bite marks actually depict. In one 2015 study, 39 experts were asked to examine 100 case photos. The experts were asked to answer basic questions, such as: “whether a bite mark was human or not, and whether there was enough evidence in the photo to determine what (human or animal) or who (which person) made the bite. In only 8% of the cases did the experts agree at a high rate (90%). In other words, for almost every case photo given, experts couldn’t even agree on the basic facts: was the photo of a human bite mark, and did it have enough information to be useful.”</bq> <bq>Esther George, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, was refreshingly explicit about its belief that working class Americans are earning and saving too much money: “We see today that there is a bit of a savings buffer still sitting for households, that may allow them to continue to spend in a way that keeps demand strong. That suggests we may have to keep at this for a while.”</bq> Obviously the problem is that the lower classes have too much money and cannot be exploited sufficiently by the elites. See the graphic at the top of this article though: corporate profits are provably responsible for most of the inflation. The Fed is even more criminal than usual. <bq>CEO-to-worker pay ratio since 1965… 1965: 20-to-1 1978: 30-to-1 1989: 58-to-1 1995: 121-to-1 2020: 351-to-1 2022: 399-to-1</bq> <bq>Tony Benn: “The way a government treats refugees is very instructive, because it shows you the way they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could away with it.”</bq> <bq>Dan Savage: “If kids got raped by clowns as often as they get raped by preachers it would be against the law to take your kids to the circus.”</bq> <bq>As flows from the Colorado River dwindle, the state of Arizona is quietly leasing water from its largest underground aquifer to the Saudis, who are pumping it into alfalfa fields, which is then harvested and shipped back to Saudi Arabia to feed cattle. The market rate for the lease is $5 million per year. The Saudis are paying $86,000.</bq> <bq>Like the oil companies, Ticketmaster-Live Nation–the extortionate monopoly Pearl Jam tried to bust– reported record quarterly earnings of $6.2 billion. Not because of more ticket sales. The profits were generated by an all-time high in combined ticket prices and fee charges. Ticketmaster fees now cost as much as 78% the price of a ticket.</bq> <bq>Dennis Hopper on his 8-day marriage in 1971 to Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas: “Seven of those days were pretty good. The eighth day was the bad one.”</bq> <bq>In 1973, Allen Ginsberg and Kurt Vonnegut were both inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. During his speech, Vonnegut turned to Ginsberg and said of the most famous poem of the Beat movement:<bq>I like “Howl” a lot. Who wouldn’t? It just doesn’t have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg’s closest friends, if I’m not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University. No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first — and after that biochemistry. Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.</bq></bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2022/10/30/but-with-a-duty-of-care/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">But With A “Duty of Care”?</a> <bq>Every censor, every book burner, believes they are doing so for the greater good. At least their flavor of it. They do not condemn the ideas in the book, as they have no clue what the book will say as yet. But they do condemn the author [...] [...] They could instead choose not to buy the book. The could tell other people not to buy the book. Just as they could have not watched Dave Chappelle and told others not to watch him either. Calling it a “duty of care” is much like journalists who eschew facts that conflict with their narrative [...] that leaves their readers with no choice but to reach what they deem to be the correct conclusion. They call this “moral clarity,” assigning to themselves the lofty position of moral arbiter for the rest of us.</bq> <bq>[...] as warm and fuzzy as “duty of care” may sound, like preventing kittens from being inadvertently run over by speeding cars, there can be no free speech if it becomes subject to the populists’ notion of “duty of care.” Not for books in libraries about gay families. Not for a politically incorrect comedian. Not for a Supreme Court justice who sided against abortion in a decision.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/your-mental-illness-beliefs-are-incoherent" author="Freddie deBoer" source="SubStack">The Incoherence and Cruelty of a Mental Illness as Meme</a> <bq>You see that motherfucker up there in the image at the top? In the mug shot, with the crazy eyes? He’s the guy who, under the influence of his blooming schizophrenia, shot 74 people in a movie theater. He’s spending the rest of his life locked up in a federal prison. That is not the ideal scenario; the ideal scenario is that he would spend the rest of his life locked up in an appropriate maximum-security mental health facility. He would still be locked up. Because, you see, no one, no one at all, thinks that the actions we undertake under the influence of our mental illnesses should carry no penalty, that we should not be held at all responsible for them.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/who-blew-up-the-nord-stream-pipelines" source="TK News" author="Matt Taibbi">Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipelines? "Russia, Russia, Russia!"</a> <bq>Stopping Nord Stream was a central goal of American foreign policy for nearly a decade, with politicians from both parties pounding the table to stop it, and all that history was disappeared the moment the blasts took place.</bq> <bq>Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year likely wouldn’t have happened had the project linking Russia’s Yamal gas fields with the German town of Lubmin not been completed the previous September. Before Nord Stream, Russian gas had to travel over land to Europe by way of Ukraine, which annually extracted as much as $2 billion in transit fees. Once the Baltic pipeline was complete, Ukraine not only lost a huge revenue source, but its main leverage against Russian attack.</bq> <bq>At the same time Russiagate-mad press figures were casting Trump-Putin as geopolitical Brokeback Mountain, Trump was maybe the most resolute opponent of Nord Stream in American politics. He used his address to the United Nations in 2018 to blast Europeans for cooperating on the pipeline, saying it would leave EU nations open to “extortion and intimidation,” adding that “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy” if it didn’t “immediately change course.”</bq> And now Europe is dependent on the U.S. instead, as it should be. Antony Blinken is a happy camper, which is what's really important. <bq>National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on January 14, 2022, when he told CNN’s Jake Tapper “that pipeline is at risk if they move further into Ukraine.”</bq> <bq>At least 300 million metric tons of gas poured into the atmosphere, making it the largest-ever dump of greenhouse gases from a single event, equivalent to a year of emissions from a million cars. But outrage was muted if it was there at all.</bq> Not a word over here on the Continent. Nothing. Bupkus. <bq>That such an experienced reporter would pretend he didn’t live through ten years of American politicians screeching demands to stop the pipeline tells you the extent to which government and media have merged. There’s no discernible difference now between the Sangers and Chuck Todds of the world and the craggy-faced retired CIA flacks the networks bring on as guests. The media performance on this one was and is as bad as it gets.</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://phys.org/news/2022-10-astrophysicists-alternative-theory-gravity.html" source="Phys.org" author="University of Bonn">Astrophysicists make observations consistent with the predictions of an alternative theory of gravity</a> <bq>"In most cases, open star clusters survive only a few hundred million years before they dissolve," explains Prof. Dr. Pavel Kroupa of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. In the process, they regularly lose stars, which accumulate in two so-called "tidal tails." One of these tails is pulled behind the cluster as it travels through space.</bq> How do we know all this? By analyzing the galactic archeological record, by collecting a ton of observational data. By extrapolation and inference. By matching to theory to fill gaps. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/28/hlud-o28.html" author="Anthony Wallace" source="WSWS">Mississippi River water levels plummet to all-time lows</a> <bq>Dredging the floor of the Mississippi River, thereby deepening it, has long been a tactic of the Army Corps of Engineers, the body in charge of maintaining the river. While dredging will allow an increase in barge traffic, with water levels continuing to drop throughout what is predicted by many climatologists to be a particularly dry autumn and winter, dredging will prove a temporary fix, at best. Furthermore, dredging is not only an unsustainable response to a greater issue, but it is also prohibitively expensive. The Army Corps of Engineers dredges 265 million cubic yards of Mississippi River bottom per year, says corps representative Lisa Parker, and in 2020 that amounted to an expenditure of $2.45 billion.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://quillette.com/2022/10/18/hyping-the-energy-transition/" source="Quillette" author="Robert Bryce">Hyping the Energy Transition</a> <bq>But there’s a problem: despite more than $2 trillion in spending on renewables over the past three decades, there is scant evidence that an energy transition is underway. Last year, according to data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, in both the US, and the world as a whole, the growth in hydrocarbons—oil, natural gas, and coal—far exceeded the growth of wind and solar by huge margins.</bq> <bq>According to the last BP Statistical Review of World Energy , the average African uses less than 15 gigajoules of energy per year. By comparison, the average resident of the US consumes 18 times more, and the average European uses eight times more.</bq> <bq>[...] the electric sector isn’t decarbonizing, it’s recarbonizing. Global coal demand is soaring. The Newcastle benchmark price for thermal coal going into the Asian market has been at, or near, $400 per ton for several months in a row. That’s an eight-fold increase over the levels seen in early 2020. European electric utilities are scrambling to buy as much coal as they can to replace Russian natural gas. In July, the International Energy Agency said that global coal use will hit an all-time high this year.</bq> <bq>According to updated figures from BP’s Statistical Review , in 2021, US oil use grew by 2.8 exajoules (EJ). (An exajoule is roughly equal to one quadrillion Btu, or the energy contained in 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.) For comparison, solar energy use grew by 0.3 EJ, and wind energy increased by 0.4 EJ, for a total increase of 0.7 EJ. Thus, last year, US oil use grew four times faster times than the growth seen in wind and solar combined. Meanwhile, coal use jumped by 1.4 exajoules, or twice the growth in wind and solar.</bq> <bq>Last year [in the EU], the use of oil, gas, and coal grew by 10.5, 7.7, and 8.7 EJ respectively, resulting in a total one-year increase in hydrocarbon consumption of 26.9 EJ. Meanwhile, in 2021, wind and solar grew by 3.4 and 2.1 EJ, respectively, for a total of 5.5 EJ. Thus, in 2021, global hydrocarbon use grew nearly five times faster than the growth in wind and solar combined.</bq> <bq>[...] the undeniable takeaway from the BP numbers is that wind and solar energy are not displacing hydrocarbons. Instead, they are being added to our existing energy mix. Why aren’t they making more headway? The reasons are readily apparent: wind and solar simply cannot provide the staggering scale of energy the world needs at prices consumers can afford.</bq> <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://babylonbee.com/amicus-brief" author="Emmet E. Robinson" source="Babylon Bee">On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit</a> <bq>[...] Who knows what other kinds of speech might eventually be protected by the Bill of Rights? Speech from people we disagree with? Second, our society can only function if people get their information from a tightly controlled source that has never lied to us, like the government or the police. Then they can know it’s 100% accurate. Petitioner’s case threatens this status quo. Third, the feelings of those who are being made fun of are rarely considered in free-speech cases like this one. In other words, when assessing whether particular speech is protected by the First Amendment, courts must also consider whether that speech hurts someone’s feelings.</bq> <bq>In short, the First Amendment cannot cover Mr. Novak’s disparaging parody of the fine, upstanding police officers in this case, because he did not write it with quill and ink by the light of a lamp fueled by whale oil. Much as how the Second Amendment was only intended to protect the citizenry’s right to bear muzzle-loading muskets and not fully semi-automatic 30-magazine-clip assault pistol grip firearms, so the First Amendment cannot be applied to parody Facebook pages.</bq> <bq>Throughout history we find examples of the powerless speaking out against the powerful, and every time, we find the people who spoke out were on the wrong side of history. The powerful are always right. If they weren’t right all the time, they would never be able to achieve such power. That’s just science.</bq> <bq>Freedom requires public safety, and when the public safety is threatened by the sadness of an authority figure, stopping people from joking becomes a literal matter of life and death. As we all know, any use of government power that saves even just one life is always worth it and will never backfire in any way. History clearly shows us this.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/244213/20221028092221628_Babylon%20Bee%20-%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf" author="Emmett E. Robinson" source="U.S. Supreme Court">Brief of the Babylon Bee as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioner</a> <bq>[...] the prospect that an individual or entity charged with a speech crime might ultimately be vindicated at a criminal trial does little, if anything, to temper the speech-chilling effects of the decision below. The Sixth Circuit’s qualified-immunity-on-steroids approach means that state actors can search, arrest, jail, and prosecute “offenders” like Mr. Novak without fear of ever being held to account themselves. Knowledge that they may be searched, arrested, jailed, and prosecuted without recourse is enough to dissuade most would-be speakers, regardless of the potential for ultimate acquittal.</bq> <bq>[...] parody shouldn’t be stripped of constitutional protection just because it’s not clearly labeled as parody. And requiring that parody be written so as to ensure that the most gullible in our society—the Facebook-using grandmother, the tween TikTok addict, the CNN reporter—don’t take it seriously ruins the parody for everyone else.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/10/they-live-capitalism-ideology-john-carpenter-critique/" author="Eileen Jones" source="Jacobin">They Live Is a Timeless Anti-Capitalist Horror Classic</a> <bq>[...] even if you manage to kill your monstrous inner capitalist, there are still those government-controlling plutocrats out there, external and real as hell. They’re sucking up every possible resource, laying waste to the planet, making it harder and harder for you and yours to afford housing, education, health care, and other basic necessities. That’s not some perceptual error, and it’s certainly no comforting fantasy. It’s really happening. Carpenter is unambiguous about his own take on his film in relation to the contemporary state of the world, as he put it on the eve of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016:<bq>I made They Live back in 1988, and nothing has changed! Everything has stayed the same. Reaganomics has continued to flourish. . . . The problem is unrestrained capitalism. It’s worshiped and adored by everybody here. Well, not everybody, but a lot of people. It’s unbelievable, and I’m scared. I’m just scared of the future.</bq></bq> <bq>It’s a great Carpenter perception hiding in plain sight in the film: you need people with the time and mental freedom to observe what’s going on around them, and to wonder about it, before you can get political traction. It makes you realize how well our current overlords are doing — they’ve got practically everybody who might object to the current system working around the clock, in a daze of exhaustion, just to get by.</bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/26/mr-fish-whats-the-alternative/" source="Scheer Post" author="Mr. Fish">What’s the Alternative?</a> <bq>Unfortunately, this is where we are now as a culture, surrounded by the distracting burlesque of inarticulate clowns juggling our common fate like raw eggs while we are confined to our seats and made to sit on our hands, wincing powerlessly in anticipation of an endless cascade of ghastly splats.</bq> <bq>[...] nuclear warheads swam through the depths of our national consciousness like ravenous sharks circling a dying leviathan,</bq> <bq>[...] there are equally suspect assumptions often made about our politics, our history, and our cultural perspectives; these uninterrogated proclamations made true by the redundancy of their own lore and the perpetuation of a timeworn and exaggerated mythology popularized by rote repetition and nothing else.</bq> <bq>[...] there have been artists and writers working in contempt of mainstream thinking and conventional wisdom because there has always been an innate understanding, by those least offended by contrarianism and most attuned to the magnificent multiplicity of the human heart and head, that truth is an average, not an absolute.</bq> <bq>[...] we lost the active participation of an independent press that refused to allow the powerbrokers of government and big business to frame the parameters of all public debate on how to craft a meaningful life,</bq> <bq>[...] there can only be a consumer class of customers who rely on big business to help them curate the intake of their news and information the same way they help them curate their intake of everything else for sale; that is, in accordance with an economic model designed to conceal the manipulation of market forces whose only purpose is to guarantee that capital flows in one direction, upward, and that shoppers be made compliant and even enthusiastic about their participation in the pecking order of hierarchy by buying into the sadistic hoax that the rich and powerful have always been and must always be allowed to remain as the trusted arbiters of our collective fate.</bq> <bq>“We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.” Then there came the pause that elucidated the significance wherein self-reflection is supposed to happen and didn’t. “This is the material, by the way,” Bill continued, “that has kept me virtually anonymous in America for the past 15 years. Gee, I wonder why we’re hated the world over?”</bq> I love Bill Hicks. The man was an American hero. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/26/tim-robbins-and-the-lost-art-of-finding-common-ground/" source="Scheer Post" author="Matt Taibbi">Tim Robbins and the Lost Art of Finding Common Ground</a> <bq>Tim Robbins: Listen, Matt, if you told me 20 years ago that there would be no video stores where you could talk to a clerk and see what that person might be recommending, or no record stores where you could go see what’s new in music, or no bookstores in most towns, I would’ve told you you were crazy. But we’re here. This is part of a larger movement away from the gathering place.</bq> <bq>Tim Robbins: You save their lives. Because they’re part of us. They may be troubled and they may be having to take these drugs for whatever emotional reasons they are, but what the hell man, you gotta take care of them. And like you say, it could be that you apply that to obesity, you could apply that to any physical malady that has anything to do with something you put in your body. Well, that’s a choice that you made. Maybe a bad choice, but don’t worry about it. We got you. And then you have the choice as to whether you want to change your life or not. That, for me, is a functioning society.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/10/kim-stanley-robinson-democratic-socialism-science-fiction-utopianism-capitalism-climate-crisis/" source="Jacobin" author="Philippe Vion-Dury">Kim Stanley Robinson: We Need Democratic Socialism</a> <bq>So one needs to say that science fiction is the realism of our time; that it is a better genre for dealing with our current moment than the “bourgeois literature” that he exemplifies; and that his own attempts at climate fiction written since The Great Derangement are very weak because he doesn’t understand the power of science fiction, and therefore doesn’t believe in it, and so his powerful talent is wasted on finely written but trivial work.</bq> <bq>So, if the underlying power source for our civilization — a technology — has accidentally poisoned us — which it has — then it’s entirely appropriate to wield other technologies to reverse the damage if we can. Some damage can be reversed (buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere), but other damage can never be reversed (extinctions). Since we’re beginning a mass extinction event, we have to consider all possible actions as things we might want to do while they will still help.</bq> But we also have to realize that most of the solutions will be tailored to fit our economic system, designed first to generate profit. Actually saving the planet will never be anything but a side-effect. <bq>Women’s rights are geoengineering: when women have their full human rights, the number of humans goes down, and there is less impact on the Earth. Once you accept that, the uselessness of the word is made evident.</bq> <bq>[...] the real creation of danger comes from capitalism, as Le Guin would also agree with. If technology was deployed for human and biosphere welfare, we would be in good shape even now; but it’s deployed for profit, appropriation, exploitation, and gains for the rich, very often — and so the best good is not accomplished and we are in terrible danger.</bq> <bq>If the US is too individualist or libertarian or right-wing, and China is too authoritarian or socialist or left-wing, then maybe the EU is the space in the middle, where effective action might be created as a kind of social democracy of member states — or so one can hope.</bq> Jesus, I know these are just examples, but how can you write something so simplistic? This kind of flies in the face of some of the rest of his more nuanced approach. Why are such supposedly intelligent people sometimes so happy to characterize countries of hundreds of millions or billions as caricatures? <bq>[...] neoliberal capitalism — which is to say, let the market do the thinking for us — has now shown itself to be a massive failure, in that it has created huge injustice among humans, and started a mass extinction event in the biosphere, all the while proclaiming itself a success — which it has been for the 1 percent and their enablers, but for no one else [...]</bq> <bq>I don’t like the term degrowth because it seems wrong to me, as being some kind of capitulation to the current definition of “growth” that is quantified by GDP and GWP — in effect, growth of profit, as being the only rubric or measurement system we use. This is a very narrow use of the word, and new definitions of growth are already there which suggest “growth of goodness” or “growth of human welfare.’’ I would suggest that we might work for something like growth of sophistication, or stylishness, which implies doing more with less, by way of science and clever applications of technology.</bq> <bq>[...] the coming decades are going to include a lot of violence, both slow violence (a good term from Rob Nixon) and fast violence, as it so often is.</bq> Slow violence is that which targets the powerless. Its intent is to subjugate, not to kill. <h>Technology</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/passkeys-microsoft-apple-and-googles-password-killer-are-finally-here/" source="Ars Technica" author="dan Goodin">Passkeys—Microsoft, Apple, and Google’s password killer—are finally here</a> <bq>By enabling the private key to be securely synced across an OS cloud, the user needs to only enroll once for a service, and then is essentially pre-enrolled for that service on all of their other devices. This brings better usability for the end-user and—very significantly—allows the service provider to start retiring passwords as a means of account recovery and re-enrollment.</bq> <bq>Passkeys just trade WebAuthn cryptographic keys with the website directly. There's no need for a human to tell a password manager to generate, store, and recall a secret—that will all happen automatically, with way better secrets than what the old text box supported, and with uniqueness enforced.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/why-the-app-stores-tone-deaf-gambling-ads-make-me-worry-about-apple/" author="Andrew Cunningham" source="Ars Technica">Why the App Store’s tone-deaf gambling ads make me worry about Apple</a> <bq>I'm still worried about the overall trend here. When I see these ads, when Apple TV+ notifies me about new shows that I haven't watched and have shown no interest in, when Apple News pops up a notification in my feed even though I never open or use it, these represent small incursions by the Services division into the iOS experience. I can ignore the ads, I can disable the notifications, but the default settings are to nudge me in the direction of things I don't want using methods I don't care for.</bq> <bq>I think that the pressure for Apple to degrade the experience for users and developers in the name of expanding its ad business will gradually increase as Apple tries to satisfy shareholders looking for perpetual growth.</bq> <h>Programming</h> <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/functional-programming" source="IEEE Spectrum" author="Charles Scalfani">Why Functional Programming Should Be the Future of Software Development</a> <bq>Today, we have a slew of dangerous practices that compromise the robustness and maintainability of software. Nearly all modern programming languages have some form of null references, shared global state, and functions with side effects [...]</bq> <bq>The biggest problem with this hybrid approach is that it still allows developers to ignore the functional aspects of the language. Had we left GOTO as an option 50 years ago, we might still be struggling with spaghetti code today.</bq> First of all, hilarious that the author seems to be implying that there is no spaghetti code. But more seriously, I think the assertion is untrue. C# has "unsafe" and almost no-one uses it. How many databases are written in functional languages? How do you express inherently impure concepts like databases in a performant manner? <bq>We have had no production runtime bugs, which were so common in what we were formerly using, JavaScript on the front end and Java on the back. This improvement allowed the team to spend far more time adding new features to the system. Now, we spend almost no time debugging production issues.</bq> I call bullshit. My work with imperatives could be described similarly, but it would warp the reality. Your bugs will still be there, but will be about missing functionality, inadequate requirements, or misunderstandings of the domain model or customer. <hr> <a href="https://jrsinclair.com/articles/2022/what-if-the-team-hates-my-functional-code/" author="James Sinclair" source="">What if the team hates my functional code?</a> <bq>We write our code to suit our audience. And that will involve some compromises. Which sounds like writing inferior code. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can find ways to write code that make it more familiar to others, without losing our confidence. The specific approach you take will change, depending on your audience. But you can almost always find a way to make the code more familiar to others.</bq> <bq>We don’t start a physics paper with a recap of the laws of thermodynamics. If you’re writing an academic paper in physics, you expect the audience to know those. And to include them would be tedious for the readers. It would make their life harder, not easier. And the same thing goes for writing code. Different audiences will prefer different styles. And different people will need help with different aspects of the code.</bq>