<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 <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</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="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h><span id="covid">COVID-19</span></h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/16/khkw-j16.html" author="Benjamin Mateus" source="WSWS">Chinese National Health Commission discloses 60,000 deaths since abandoning Zero COVID</a> <bq>In their article on the NHC data update, the New York Times noted, “<b>The lack of transparency prompted several countries, including Japan and South Korea, to impose travel curbs on Chinese visitors after China reopened its borders last Sunday.</b> Experts also warned that playing down the severity of the outbreak could lead people within the country to take fewer precautions.” <b>The hint of moralizing in these statements from the bourgeois press is hypocritical and cynical, as Japan is currently facing the highest mortality rate from COVID-19 it has ever experienced.</b> In the US, the weekly death rate has jumped to almost 4,000, or an average of around 550 per day, a byproduct of the national spread of the highly infectious and immune-resistant XBB.1.5 variant.</bq> <hr> The article <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/covid-19-vaccines-and-sudden-deaths" author="Katelyn Jetelina" source="Your Local Epidemiologist">COVID-19 vaccines and sudden deaths: Separating fact from fiction</a> is an excellent article and linked the following video, <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnu8NvnRmFY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Qnu8NvnRmFY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="You Can Know Things" caption="Why are the so many stories of people dying after COVID vaccines?"> At <b>05:20</b> (near the end), she says, <bq>To interpret deaths after vaccination, you <i>have</i> to compare to the baseline rate of that same cause of death in the population. You can't determine cause and effect from stories in isolation. Stories in isolation are uninterpretable.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-science-and-business-behind-covid" author="Katelyn Jetelina" source="Your Local Epidemiologist">The science (and business) behind COVID-19 disinformation. And what to do about it.</a> <bq><b>Twelve people are responsible for 65% of disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines on social media.</b> It’s coordinated, effective, lucrative, and costs lives. This is true during the pandemic and it will be true for other public health problems. It’s a public health and biosecurity threat. And we need to treat it like one.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/21/gkzt-j21.html" author="Benjamin Mateus" source="WSWS">The billionaires at Davos protect themselves from COVID-19, while declaring the pandemic “over” for working people</a> <bq>Perhaps the only comment that approached reality came from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who warned that the world’s failure to prepare for future pandemics was “straining credulity.” He added, <b>“Somehow—after all we have endured—we have not learned the global public health lessons of the pandemic. We are nowhere near ready for pandemics to come.”</b></bq> <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/13/whipped-inflation-now/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Whipped Inflation, Now</a> <bq>The December Consumer Price Index (CPI), following a great December jobs report, shows the economy has turned the corner and seems on a path to stable growth with moderate inflation. The CPI showed prices actually fell by 0.1 percent for the month. <b>This brought the annualized rate of inflation over the last three months in the overall index to just 1.8 percent.</b></bq> <bq>We actually got some very good news in that category in December, as grocery prices rose just 0.2 percent, the smallest increase since March of 2021. <b>Chicken prices actually fell by 0.6 percent in the month and milk prices dropped by 1.0 percent</b>, although the indexes for both are still up by double digit amounts year over year.</bq> I just heard from someone who lives in upstate NY that a gallon of milk costs $4.99 right now. A year ago, it was about $1.49. This is why people hate economists. They rejoice that the rate of increase is coming down when nothing is being done about the effects the increases heretofore. Real wages may be 0.3% higher than they were "pre-pandemic" (I suppose Baker keeps referring to that period in order to indicate that we've "recovered"), but what does it matter when the price of basic goods is now 350% higher? <bq>We always need caution when looking at a single month’s report, but the good December CPI report follows several months in which inflation has slowed sharply from the pace earlier in the year. <b>All the evidence suggests that the economy is still growing at solid pace.</b> (The latest projection for the fourth quarter from the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow is 4.1 percent.)</bq> I suppose you don't have to mention every time that the economy is being run for the rich---which Dean Baker often does in other articles---but he very much gives the impression with these types of reports that he is offering his resounding approval for how well the economy is being run and that the poor in America have truly turned a corner. Is that really true? <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/13/roaming-charges-77/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Woke Me When It’s Over</a> While we're on the subject of simply citing raw wage numbers in the hotel industry, perhaps we should also pay attention to the incredible amount of unpaid overtime there is in that industry (and many others). Economists can easy cite that real wages are up, but only when applied to official hours worked. Your official wages are better than they were five years ago, OK. But you're also required to work a higher percentage of completely unpaid hours in order to keep that job. It's a neat trick, right? <bq><b>Corporations are giving workers in low-wage jobs ornate titles</b> (“Guest Experience Leader” = restaurant host, “Director of First Impressions” = front desk clerk) <b>to evade the requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act</b> and deny workers overtime pay, a strategy that allowing corporations to avoid $4 billion in overtime payments annually.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-18/slicing-cash-flows-for-better-ratings" author="Matt Levine" source="Bloomberg">Slicing Cash Flows for Better Ratings</a> This edition starts with a brilliant, ordered list of steps to describing how tranches work in financial engineering to magically make things that look exactly same cost less when shaped on way. That is, they are financial-topologically equivalent, but they still somehow ... aren't. <bq>But you bought the same thing. <b>You had $100 of stuff that required $4 of capital, you sliced it into an $80 tranche and a $20 tranche, and somehow magically those two tranches add up to require $3.20 of capital.</b></bq> <bq>It is not quite true that the story of the 2008 financial crisis is “instead of making mortgage loans, holding them, giving them a 50% risk weight and holding 4% capital against them, banks made mortgage loans, sliced them up into securitizations, bought highly rated tranches of them, and held much less capital against them,” but <b>it is kind of true, and worth keeping in mind.</b></bq> <bq>This is the same thing: Buying a whole stake in the fund is economically identical to buying (1) a senior claim on the fund plus (2) a junior claim on the fund; you are just slicing up the cash flows. But now you can go to your regulator and say “oh no it’s not $100 of equity; it’s $20 of equity and $80 of <i>bonds</i>.” <b>Your regulator is much more comfortable with you buying bonds than buying equity, so you get better regulatory treatment and can do more of it.</b> You go and get the bonds rated by a credit ratings firm, and <b>from your regulator’s perspective you have transformed $100 of risky scary private equity investment into (1) $80 of safe A+ rated corporate bonds plus (2) $20 of risky scary private equity investment.</b></bq> It's when you read this kind of stuff that you realize that these people are just never, ever going to stop looking for loopholes because the incentives---the rewards---are so high that there is literally nothing that can stop them. No amount of principle seems to be able to stand up to the tsunami of money and evil influence. No, you have to change the system, you have to change the <i>religion</i>. You have to get people to the point where they hate this kind of thinking much more than they love money. Where, instead of being impressed that these people figured out the loophole, you should be disgusted that they would be willing to exploit it, all the while knowing that they're fucking someone or many someones over, people who are almost certainly much more societally useful---or at least have the potential to be when they're not being fleeced by assholes using their cleverness to earn money they neither need nor deserve. <bq><b>Finance is, in large part, about finding new ways to slice cash flows that will get better regulatory treatment than the old ways to slice cash flows.</b> And financial <i>regulation</i> is, in large part, about noticing the new ways that people are slicing cash flows, and adjusting the regulations so that the new ways get treated the same as the old ways. Or worse! Part of the goal here is logical consistency and treating economically similar things similarly, but part of the goal is <i>to deter people from doing this</i>, so the regulators might want to treat the new ways worse.</bq> Yup. <bq>The presentation describes this setting as “God Mode,” 6 which I am not sure is a technical term found in FTX’s actual codebase or documentation, but you get the idea. FTX built a video game for other people to trade crypto, but FTX — or rather its affiliate Alameda — had a cheat code. Everyone else got to trade crypto, and if they made money, they could take out the money that they made. <b>Alameda got to trade crypto, and it got to take out as much money as it wanted, whether or not it made money. It was playing in God Mode.</b></bq> <bq>If you think of the token as “more or less stock,” and you think of a crypto exchange as a securities broker-dealer, this is completely insane. <b>If you go to an investment bank and say “lend me $1 billion, and I will post $2 billion of your stock as collateral,” you are messing with very dark magic and they will say no.</b> The problem with this is that it is wrong-way risk. (It is also, at least sometimes, illegal.) If people start to worry about the investment bank’s financial health, its stock will go down, which means that its collateral will be less valuable, which means that its financial health will get worse, which means that its stock will go down, etc. It is a death spiral.</bq> <bq>How likely do you think FTX’s bankruptcy advisers think those outcomes are? <b>FTX is going around showing the world the code that allowed Alameda to take all of its customers’ money.</b> Confidence in FTX is not coming back, not if FTX’s current managers have anything to say about it. They are going to have a hard time shopping their stash of FTT tokens. The explanation undermines the recovery.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/12/the-good-and-better-news-about-the-economy/" source="CounterPunch" author="Dean Baker">The Good and Better News About the Economy</a> <bq>The media have also frequently told us that people are being forced to dip into their savings and that the saving rate is now at a record low. While the saving rate has fallen sharply in the last year, a major factor is that <b>people have sold stock at large gains and are now paying capital gains taxes on these gains.</b></bq> What do those people have to do with anything? Is Baker really arguing that the economy is doing well for the 10% of people who have stock? It's true, but it's kind of an odd argument for him to be making. I suppose he's just countering the "sky is falling" attitude in media, who should be aware that their nests are still being feathered. Or is he mad that places like Fox News are cynically representing the working class---who are really only benefitting from very minor improvements, if any---just to stick it to the Democrats? And is Baker sticking up for the Democrats? I'm a bit confused as to the purpose of this defense of the economy, which, as always, functions quite well in funneling money upward. That some of has stuck to the walls of the sluiceway near the bottom is great, but is clearly not anything that was intended. And it will likely be remedied by some other horror soon---because it was an unintended side-effect. <bq>The Fed’s rate hikes have largely put an end to refinancing, including cash-out refinancing. With this channel closed to households, people that formerly would have looked to borrow by refinancing mortgage <b>are instead turning to credit cards. This is hardly a crisis.</b></bq> At 19% instead of 3% but I'm picking nits. <bq><b>I don’t know if that explains why so many people say they think the economy is bad</b>, I’m an economist, not a social psychologist.</bq> Jesus, Dean. Those poor benighted souls who think they noticed that eggs cost 4x more year on year are too stupid to notice how great they have it. You sound like you're from the politburo, bro. <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <img src="{att_link}galluppoll.jpeg" href="{att_link}galluppoll.jpeg" align="none" caption="Americans' Ratings of Honesty and Ethics of Professions" scale="40%"> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/13/a-pentagon-report-on-china-fuels-a-military-spending-frenzy-in-the-us/" source="Scheer Post" author="Michael Clare">A Pentagon Report on China Fuels a Military Spending Frenzy in the US</a> <bq>With many in Washington now citing the Pentagon’s claims of a Chinese nuclear buildup to justify the further expansion of America’s already vast nuclear arsenal, it is essential to interrogate these assertions lest we all be caught up in a new, profoundly dangerous arms race. In particular, we need to ask three vital questions: First, <b>to what degree have the news media and US politicians accurately summarized the latest report’s findings? Second, to what degree should we assume the Pentagon assertions to be reliable?</b> Finally, what conclusions should we draw from all of this regarding the size and nature of America’s own nuclear arsenal?</bq> <bq>Yet it is <b>on this unsubstantiated claim—that Beijing “probably” accelerated its stockpile expansion in 2021—that the Pentagon now concludes, by extrapolating additional 200-warhead gains going forward, that the PRC will possess approximately 1,500 warheads by 2035.</b> The report states, “If China continues the pace of its nuclear expansion, it will likely field a stockpile of about 1,500 warheads by 2035” (emphasis added.) <b>Once again, the word “likely” does not appear in media summaries of the report.</b></bq> <bq><b>The Pentagon report</b> also bases its estimate of 1,500 Chinese warheads on the assumption that Beijing will succeed in vastly increasing its production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. It <b>acknowledges, however, that this will require the construction of new reactors and reprocessing facilities.</b></bq> <bq>Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda of the Federation of American Scientists, in the most recent edition of their <b>highly regarded inventory of “Chinese Nuclear Weapons,” identify only 110 true ICBMs in the Chinese arsenal, along with several hundred ballistic missiles of less-than-intercontinental range.</b> The Department of Defense probably combined all these types to arrive at its 300 ICBM count, but this is misleading and inaccurate.</bq> <bq>Add all this up, and a correct assessment of China’s triad efforts should read: <b>“The PRC is gradually assembling the rudiments of a fully operational nuclear triad, but is not likely to achieve this objective until the early 2030s, at the soonest”</b>—language entirely absent from the Pentagon assessment.</bq> <bq>[...] should China manage to overcome the current limitations to its nuclear weapons production capacity and actually assemble 1,500 warheads by 2035—no sure thing—<b>its arsenal will still be dwarfed by those of Russia and the United States.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>it has no reason to fear China’s nuclear modernization plans and no need to acquire additional atomic munitions</b> on top of those already encompassed in the Pentagon’s massive $1.8 trillion modernization scheme—which many analysts believe is excessive to begin with.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/13/the-winds-of-the-new-cold-war-are-howling-in-the-arctic-circle/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">The Winds of the New Cold War Are Howling in the Arctic Circle</a> <bq>[...] the <b>UNCLOS does constrain individual state sovereignty by declaring that the deep seabed is the ‘common heritage’ of humanity</b> and its exploration and exploitation ‘shall be carried out for the benefits of mankind as a whole, irrespective of the geographical location of States’.</bq> <bq><b>The Arctic Council was one of the few multilateral institutions to facilitate communication between the powers in the region. Now, seven of them have decided to no longer participate.</b> Five of these abstaining members (Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and the US) are already part of NATO, while the remaining two (Finland and Sweden) are being fast-tracked into the organisation. <b>Increasingly, NATO is replacing the Arctic Council as a decision-making authority in the region</b>, with its operations based out of the Centre of Excellence for Cold Weather Operations in Norway.</bq> <bq><b>Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of the NATO Military Committee. Bauer said that NATO must have a more muscular presence in the Arctic in order to check Russia as well as China</b>, which he called ‘another authoritarian regime that does not share our values and undermines the rules-based international order’.</bq> Oh fuck off. I wish these people would fall off the edge of the world. They are a danger to us all. <bq>During the discussion period, <b>China’s ambassador to Iceland, He Rulong, rose from his seat to say to the NATO admiral, ‘Your speech and remark are full of arrogance and also paranoid. The Arctic region is an area for high cooperation and low confrontation… The Arctic plays an important role when it comes to climate change… Every country should be part of this process’.</b> China, he continued, should not be ‘singled out [from] the cooperation’. Grímsson closed the session after He’s intervention to muted laughter in the hall.</bq> Fucking fantastic. China's the nerd and everyone laughs at them. We are royally screwed. You really can't side with those chuckling assholes. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/13/swiss-scandal-a-canton-tries-to-raise-university-fees/" source="CounterPunch" author="Daniel Warner">Swiss Scandal: A Canton Tries to Raise University Fees</a> <bq>To return to Switzerland: <b>The Neuchâtel protesters should realize how fortunate they are to have such low tuition fees</b> compared to costs in the U.S. The Ecole Polytechnic de Lausanne, Switzerland’s equivalent of M.I.T, ranked 14 in QS Global World Rankings in 2021, charges CHF730 per semester in tuition.</bq> Fortunate? No. Stupid word. Should we feel lucky about not being slaves and stop fighting for a four-day work-week? <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/04/benedicts-passing-no-tears-for-gods-rottweiler/" source="CounterPunch" author="Brian Kelly">Benedict’s Passing: No Tears for ‘God’s Rottweiler’</a> <bq><b>In a desperately poor region where the Catholic hierarchy had consistently aligned itself with corrupt US-supported regional oligarchs—including right-wing military dictatorships reliant on torture</b>—a challenge had begun to emerge in the late 1960s, led initially by grassroots missionaries among Jesuits and the other religious orders, including large numbers of women. By the mid-1970s these had won wide influence among workers and the poor, organized into ‘base communities’ that operated outside the control of the upper levels of the hierarchy.</bq> <bq>The campaign then underway was a comprehensive one, involving high-level collaboration between Rome and the Reagan administration at Washington, and included <b>generous support from the CIA and the targeting of the religious orders for murder and assassination.</b></bq> As documented in Chomsky and Herman's <i>Manufacturing Consent</i>. <bq><b>In 1984 he issued his Instruction on <i>Certain Aspects of Theology of Liberation</i>, which argued predictably that biblical refe[er]nces to the poor referred to a ‘poverty of the spirit’ rather than material inequality.</b> Wielding a ‘perverted’ concept of the poor and inciting envy of the rich, liberation theology represented in his eyes a “negation of the faith”. Ratzinger countered with a ‘theology of reconciliation’, following the Pope’s admonition that <b>“a more harmonious society” would “require both forgiveness from the poor, for past exploitation, and sacrifice from the rich”.</b></bq> But, of course, the forgiveness from.the poor would have to come first. The sacrifice by the rich would then, of course, be forgotten. <bq><b>By now a “consummate insider”, and with a curia mostly hand-picked by his predecessor, his ‘election’ as Pope Benedict XVI was in the bag before voting began.</b> The “victories already achieved in the last decades of the 20th century [around] questions of sexual morality, clerical celibacy, the place of women and religious freedom [were] secure,” Peter Stanford writes, and his papacy represented “an extended postscript to the one that had gone before”.</bq> <bq>In 2003 Ratzinger had denounced civil partnerships for same-sex couples as “the legislation of evil”, and on the cusp of his papacy in 2004, his Letter on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World <b>defined the role of women in terms of virginity followed by marriage, motherhood and support for the male head of family, citing Genesis 3:16: “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/ukraine-and-the-eclipse-of-pacifism/" source="Boston Review" author="Stephen Milder">Ukraine and the Eclipse of Pacifism</a> <bq>On the contrary, the experience of looking on while horrific war crimes were committed in Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, and elsewhere buttresses the righteous indignation that prompts young politicians’ outspoken support for Ukrainians’ efforts to defend themselves against the Russian onslaught. Baerbock, who was a teenager in the 1990s, made a point of traveling to the Balkans in April. <b>Upon visiting an exhibition on photos documenting the Srebernica massacre, she commented upon how that horrific event had “shaped her generation in Germany, socially as well as politically.”</b></bq> Instead of looking on, they want to take part in the horror. They have learned nothing. There are two U.S. bases in tiny Kosovo, a country carved out of Serbia after bombing it flat for having been accused of mounting a genocide. No-one involved in the hostilities were good people. It doesn't matter who started it, everyone got their licks in eventually. The U.S. and NATO emerged as clear winners, with an expanded military presence in territory that was formerly very solidly allied with first the Soviet Union and then Russia. I haven't read enough about how this all came to be, but I know enough about how the situation in Ukraine came to be---and I strongly suspect that similar shenanigans led to the civil war in Yugoslavia. I reserve my judgment, though, not having read enough. It sure is convenient for the U.S., though. <bq>[...] <b>we should not be so quick to celebrate the demise of a public culture of peace in Germany and the sidelining of the country’s staunchly pacifist voices.</b> If even talking about working toward peace—rather than marching to armed victory—is beyond the pale of debate, saber-rattling, with all its ugly consequences, becomes the norm.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>growing unwillingness to contemplate the idea that peace could be achieved without weapons has arguably prevented Germany from using the considerable resources and power it does have to work toward peace.</b> With the country’s top diplomat, Baerbock, repeatedly pledging to “supply Ukraine with weapons as long as it takes,” and fellow Green politicians arguing that cease-fire negotiations “would weaken Ukraine’s position,” no one seems to be thinking about how a non-military resolution to the conflict might be brought about.</bq> <bq>Instead, <b>the widespread sentiment—in Germany and across the West—that “Ukraine must win” expresses a belief both that war can be won and that victory, not peace, should be the goal of German policy.</b> Whatever limitations diplomacy will face in confronting Putin’s war of aggression, this attitude embodies not only a striking sense of resignation but also a disregard for what will happen whenever the guns finally do stop.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/12/scott-ritter-2023-outlook-for-ukraine/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">2023 Outlook for Ukraine</a> <bq>Neither NATO nor the United States appear able to sustain the quantity of weapons that have been delivered to Ukraine, which enabled the successful fall counteroffensives against the Russians. This equipment has largely been destroyed, and despite Ukraine’s insistence on its need for more tanks, armored fighting vehicles, artillery and air defense, and while new military aid appears to be forthcoming, it will be late to the battle and in insufficient quantities to have a game-winning impact on the battlefield. Likewise, <b>the casualty rates sustained by Ukraine, which at times reach more than 1,000 men per day, far exceed its ability to mobilize and train replacements.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>given the duplicitous history of the Minsk Accords, it is unlikely Russia can be dissuaded from undertaking its military offensive through diplomacy.</b> As such, 2023 appears to be shaping up as a year of continued violent confrontation leading to a decisive Russian military victory. How Russia leverages such a military victory into a sustainable political settlement that manifests itself in regional peace and security is yet to be seen.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/11/patrick-lawrence-dimming-the-lights/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Dimming the Lights</a> <bq>Good old Bertie Russell made this general point with an eloquence almost too piercing to take in “Free Thought and Official Propaganda,” a lecture he delivered in London 101 years ago:<bq>But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically; <b>it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative problems.</b></bq></bq> Citing Bertrand Russell again, <bq><bq><b>It must not be supposed that the officials in charge of education desire the young to become educated. On the contrary, their problem is to impart information without imparting intelligence.</b></bq>My thoughts on these questions are not new. I have for many years found the state of young people’s brains — a generalization with many, many exceptions — to be not short of appalling for their want of knowledge, of depth, of subtlety and especially of history. And I am quick to note in conversing with those of my own generation that the fault here lies very largely with us: <b>It is we who have imparted so poorly the principles of “free thought,” known among the Jesuits as discernment — we who have insisted everyone gets a prize and no one ever fails, we who have sent young men and women who cannot read off to universities, where no-one-fails remains the norm. It is we who have failed.</b></bq> <bq>Roth’s were the years the national security state shifted the subversion and coup functions from the C.I.A. to the National Endowment for Democracy and the “civil society” scene, and when <b>HRW became, accordingly, a chief sponsor of “humanitarian interventionism” as a cover for many of America’s unlawful intrusions abroad.</b></bq> <bq>At this point, the people advocating all this reprehensible conduct are tripping over their own feet. <b>We must “decolonize the scholarly canon,” they say, but we must oblige those who insist that certain images must not be shown.</b> The Qur`an, I should note, contains no prohibition against images of the Prophet, as should be obvious given the provenance of the painting in question. These proscriptions were added in the teachings of later centuries.</bq> <bq>Two different kinds of people, they both should nonetheless be defended against the forces that arrayed against them this past year, those <b>dedicated to dimming lights and reducing American minds to their narrowness.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=92281" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Deutschlands LNG-Strategie und der Elefant im Raum</a> <bq>In Mitteleuropa haben die ungewöhnlich milden Herbst- und Wintertemperaturen den Verbrauch massiv gesenkt. Chinas Volkswirtschaft lief durch die Coronamaßnahmen das gesamte Jahr mit angezogener Handbremse, so dass die Volksrepublik deutlich weniger LNG importieren musste. In Brasilien begünstigten dauerhafte starke Regenfälle die Stromproduktion in den gigantischen Wasserkraftwerken, so dass man nur sehr wenig LNG für die Gaskraftwerke importieren musste. Und Indien hat sich als dankbarer Abnehmer für die noch spärlichen russischen LNG-Exporte erwiesen, die so Lieferungen aus anderen Ländern substituieren konnten. <b>Durch all diese Sonderfaktoren sank bei leicht gestiegenem Angebot die Nachfrage so sehr, dass die zusätzlichen LNG-Mengen für Europa ohne großen Preissprung auf den Märkten eingekauft werden konnten.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/08/patrick-lawrence-europe-and-the-legitimization-of-deception/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Europe and the Legitimization of Deception</a> <bq>Now François Hollande weighs in. A few days before the year ended, the former French president gave a lengthy interview to The Kyiv Independent. In it he made the Franco–German position perfectly clear: Yes, Merkel and I lied to the Russians when we negotiated the Minsk I and Minsk II Protocols in September 2014 and February 2015. No, <b>we never had any intention of making Kyiv observe them or otherwise enforcing them. It was a charade from the first and—the part of this interview that truly galls—Hollande advanced this as wise, sound statesmanship.</b></bq> <bq><b>Here I will remind readers of the animosity Putin expressed in his New Year’s address, three days after Hollande described the Franco–German sting operation in detail</b>:<bq>The West lied to us about peace while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it and to cynically use Ukraine and its people as a means to weaken and divide Russia.</bq></bq> <bq>To betray the diplomatic process as Germany and France have done is also to betray trust as a necessary condition of orderly state-to-state relations. Nations may not fully trust one another but must be able to trust the diplomatic process—to trust the word given in the process of a negotiation. In this way <b>the core European powers have condemned all of us to an unstable, dangerous world—and so are guilty of betraying all of us—our security, our futures, our desire for a stable, peaceable world order.</b></bq> That's the essence of it, then main takeaway. <bq>I urge readers to peruse Hollande’s interview with The Kyiv Independent. The second-rate Socialist—and so much for France’s long and storied Socialist tradition—<b>competes with any duplicitous American diplomat as measured by his lies, omissions, and upside-down logic.</b></bq> <bq>[...] remark of a sentimental sort that Putin made many years ago: <b>Anyone who approves of the Soviet Union’s collapse has no heart, anyone who thinks it can be brought back to life has no brain.</b></bq> <bq>Hollande has just confirmed that <b>lying to Moscow remains perfectly acceptable among the major Western powers.</b> This has never led the world anywhere good and never will.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/09/caitlin-johnstone-unprovoked/" source="Scheer Post" author="Caitlin Johnstone">Unprovoked!</a> <bq>The U.S. power alliance could very easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost concessions like <b>enshrining Ukrainian neutrality, rolling back its war machinery from Russia’s borders and sincerely pursuing detente with Moscow instead of shredding treaties and ramping up Cold War escalations.</b> Hell, it could likely have prevented this war just by protecting President Volodymyr Zelensky from the anti-Moscow far right nationalists who were openly threatening to lynch him if he began honoring the Minsk agreements and pursuing peace with Russia, as he was originally elected to do</bq> <bq>If you relinquish the infantile idea that the US empire is helping its good friend Ukraine because it loves the Ukrainian people and wants them to have freedom and democracy, <b>it’s not hard to see that the U.S. sparked a convenient proxy war because it was in its geostrategic interests to do so, and because it wouldn’t be their lives and property getting laid to waste.</b></bq> <bq>[...] behind all the phony hand-wringing and flag-waving, <b>the U.S.-centralized empire is getting exactly what it wants from this conflict.</b> It gets to overextend Russia militarily and financially, promote its narratives around the world, rehabilitate the image of U.S. interventionism, expand internet censorship, expand militarily, bolster control over its European client states. And <b>all it costs is a little pretend empire money that gets funneled into the military-industrial complex anyway.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>the notion that this war is “unprovoked” is a fairy tale for idiots and children</b>; there’s no excuse for a grown adult with internet access and functioning brain matter to ever say such a thing.</bq> <bq><b>You’re only allowed to say Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked, in a vacuum, solely because he is evil and hates freedom.</b> And you have to do it while saying the word “unprovoked” at every opportunity.</bq> <bq><b>If I choose to provoke someone into doing something bad, then they’re guilty of choosing to do the bad thing, but I am also guilty of provoking them.</b> I’m not saying anything new here; this is the plot behind any movie or show with a sneaky or manipulative villain, and it’s been a part of our storytelling since ancient times. <b>Nobody has ever walked out of Shakespeare’s Othello thinking that maybe Iago was just an innocent bystander who was trying to help out his friends.</b></bq> <bq>Most of us learn that provocation is real as children with siblings, kicking the other under the table or whatever to provoke a loud outburst, and we’ve understood it ever since. But <b>everyone’s pretending that this extremely basic, kindergarten-level concept is some kind of bizarre, alien gibberish.</b> It’s intensely stupid, and it needs to stop.</bq> <bq>I find it extremely offensive when people compare blaming the most powerful empire that has ever existed for its well-documented aggressions to blaming victims of rape and domestic violence. <b>The globe-spanning empire is not comparable to a rape victim, and if you find yourself thinking so it’s time to re-think your entire worldview.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/06/cuba-says-biden-applies-blockade-even-more-aggressively-than-his-predecessors/" source="Scheer Post" author="Marjorie Cohn">Cuba Says Biden Applies Blockade Even More Aggressively Than His Predecessors</a> <bq><b>“The U.S. government cannot pretend to treat Cuba as if it were part of its territory or treat Cuba as if it were a colonial dominion, or treat Cuba as if it were an adversary defeated in a war. We are none of the three,” Fernández de Cossío declared.</b> He cited Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s observation that the intention of the United States is “to strangle the Cuban economy and thus try to provoke social collapse and a political crisis in Cuba.” Although the U.S. has failed in that purpose, it has led to “economic depression” in Cuba and “the extraordinary flow of Cuban migrants.” <b>Biden himself has called Cuba a “ failed state ,” and his administration “is doing virtually all that it can to make it so,” Heitzer said.</b></bq> <bq><b>On November 3, for the 30th time, the United Nations General Assembly called for an end to the illegal U.S. blockade against Cuba. The vote was 185 in favor, two opposed (the U.S. and Israel), and two abstentions (Brazil and Ukraine).</b> The resolution affirmed “the sovereign equality of States, non-intervention and non-interference in their internal affairs and freedom of international trade and navigation, which are also enshrined in many international legal instruments.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/07/mnvv-j07.html" source="WSWS" author="Samuel Tissot">Macron’s sending of tanks to Ukraine marks escalation of France’s role in war on Russia</a> <bq>In Macron’s New Year’s Eve speech, he announced that 2023 would be the year of pension reform, which has been a central goal of his government in both his first and second terms. His last attempt to force through the reform led to mass public sector strikes in December 2019. <b>By raising the retirement age and freezing pension increases, so that their real value is eaten away by inflation, Macron hopes to find the funds for a massive military expansion.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VBJtOCVc1g" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/9VBJtOCVc1g" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Lanxin Xiang" caption="China and Russia: An Unlikely Brotherhood"> At <b>10:00</b>, he says, The Russians and Chinese used to have over 8000 unresolved border issues and have reduced that to 71/2. This is an incredible achievement for peace: two giant powers have almost no border disputes anymore. This guy is quite brilliant, knowledgable, and insightful. This entire presentation and especially the Q&A afterward are well-worth watching. At <b>48:00</b>, he says in response to the question, <iq>what does the future of U.S.--China relations look like?</iq>, <bq>Let's go back to so-called <i>strategic ambiguity</i>. That would be my suggestion. What the Biden administration is doing is pursuing what's called <i>strategic clarity</i>. Clarity means you specify what American is going to do if there is conflict in Taiwan---military action. <b>Strategic ambiguity worked actually more than forty years.</b> Chinese understood <i>that logic</i> and they actually take that logic---strategic ambiguity---as part of the American deterrence. And deterrence [was for] both Taiwan and mainland China. That's what America's been doing the past forty, until recently, they seem to be abandoning this. So, when you're abandoning strategic ambiguity, you have a president who supposedly has a tongue-slip. <b>One time fine. Twice, OK. <i>Four times!</i> Where president Biden says, yes, yes, very affirmatively, we're going to defend Taiwan, meaning 'we', meaning the <i>U.S. military</i>, that's what's understood in Beijing.</b> Of course, you have Jake Sullivan walk it back four times, but where is the credibility when you have this kind of statement all the time, so they need to seriously discuss what your intention is on Taiwan. Let's put this thing on the table. I must say that Chinese policymakers still have some grudging---I know maybe you don't like to hear---grudging admiration of Mr. Trump, even today. However crazy he may be, <b>Trump put his cards on the table, you see? He's not using this very vague language, and Trump is not talking about ideology <i>at all</i>.</b> Ok, he end up---because of COVID---he gone crazy. He us 'Kung Fu Flu', this kind of racist attack on China. But, otherwise, <b>the Chinese elite say 'we can deal with Trump; we don't know how to deal with Biden.</b>'</bq> At <b>52:30</b>, he says, <bq>You talk about human rights. You go to China; you say 'what's your problem?' The American approach has always been that the State Department publishes every year a document naming everybody, poking each country in the eye [chuckles]. Is that useful? No. There's no effect. So, this is, I think, yes, a unipolar world is a fantasy anyway, but America made a mistake, I think. <b>They entertain the unipolar fantasy too much. They believe that when the Cold War ended, the enlargement of NATO---it's a kind of triumphalism.</b> Remember Fukuyama? With his 'End of History?' [chuckles] Even Fukuyama doesn't believe it anymore.</bq> At <b>1:07:00</b>, he says on Russia and Ukraine, <bq>If you ask my personal opinion, the Korean War ended with the Panmunjom ceasefire agreement, which is good! It's a ceasefire, not a peace treaty, but still, it lasted [chuckles] sixty-five years, right? Even though they never resolved the problem. <b>I doubt there will be a ceasefire agreement. What I see is, that Putin will be satisfied---or maybe he won't be---if there's Kashmir solution. Good enough for him. 'Kashmir' means <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_Actual_Control">Line of Control</a>.</b> Because nobody's going to recognize the four sham...whatever...referendums. No matter how good the relations between Russia and China are---I've been telling Russian friends, 'don't expect Chinese to publicly recognize at the U.N. That's like North Korea's Kim recognizing that they're part of Russia'. China can never do that. <b>So, nobody, including China, will deny [?] the legitimacy of those four republics. So, the best thing to do is 'Line of Control'. Maybe continued friction, but not war.</b> India and Pakistan, Kashmir---remember, India and Pakistan had several clashes over Kashmir, had one serious little war but, on the whole, it holds.I mean, it's not that bad. That's my view. I may be wrong. <b>I would say that both Ukraine and Russia probably end up satisfied.</b> Because Ukraine will continue to assert 'we don't lose territory, we don't recognize it.' Maybe, maybe [chuckles].</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2023/01/15/why-wouldnt-they-come/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">Why Wouldn’t They Come?</a> <bq>Colleges are looking at the percentages of people by race in the population and trying to replicate those numbers on their campus, all the while denying they’re doing so because it would be unlawful discrimination. They’ve been playing this game for almost three generations now, and still aren’t close to achieving the numbers they believe in their most empathetic hearts they should if they weren’t racist. <b>And they’ve turned racist in the process of doing so, even though they refuse to believe it and have redefined the word so as to create plausible deniability.</b></bq> <bq>[...] here was a time when many black students and their parents, teachers and guidance counselors, rightly believed that racist admissions precluded their being admitted. But things have changed, and <b>colleges have made it overwhelmingly clear that they desperately seek diversity. If black students, under these circumstances, choose not to apply anyway, at some point you have to respect their decision</b> and focus instead on educating the students whose butts are in the seats.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/16/how-many-ukrainian-refugees-will-return-home/" author="" source="CounterPunchJohn P. Ruehl">How Many Ukrainian Refugees Will Return Home?</a> <bq>While millions of Ukrainian refugees have since returned home, <b>almost 2.9 million moved to Russia, according to October 2022 figures, and roughly 7.9 million were registered across Europe between February and December 27, 2022</b>. Besides Russia, Poland (1.5 million), Germany (1 million), and the Czech Republic (474,731) have welcomed the largest numbers of Ukrainian refugees, while Italy, Spain, France, Romania, and the UK have also accepted more than 100,000 each.</bq> How can they move back? Their economy and infrastructure, while never good, is in an absolute shambles. Those that moved to Switzerland are unlikely to leave the relative comfort they have here for their home country, where electricity is touch-and-go. The economy simply doesn't work and is 100% dependent on external funding, provided by Europe and the U.S. <bq>Ukraine’s economy “shrank by 30 percent in 2022.” <b>Ukraine is now Europe’s poorest country</b>, and its entry into the EU will likely take years. Instability in the country’s Donbas region since 2014 coupled with almost a year of open conflict with Russia means that peace will likely continue to elude Ukraine.</bq> Wasn't it also Europe's poorest country before the war? Like, by far? <bq>[...] <b>it is estimated that 90 percent of Ukrainian refugees are women and children, as conscription prevented most Ukrainian men from leaving the country.</b> The men that remained in Ukraine may try to reunite with their families abroad, while those men that managed to leave may face the risk of being recruited into military service or being punished for evading it if they do return to Ukraine.</bq> Just another reminder that this is not the enlightened democracy that you're looking for. <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/2023/01/16/burn-after-reading-why-classified-documents-dont-matter" author="Ted Rall" source="">Burn After Reading: Why Classified Documents Don’t Matter</a> <bq><b>Fewer nations in history have ever been less at risk than the U.S. in 2023. Buffered by vast oceans and bordered by vassal states, enjoying total command of the world’s oceans</b>, the U.S. is uniquely impervious to invasion. No nation-state has launched a military attack on the mainland U.S. since the War of 1812—and we started that one. </bq> <bq>None of the “threats” we worry about—Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—want a war with the U.S., much less to invade. <b>When U.S. adversaries saber-rattle, their motivation is to dissuade us from attacking <i>them</i>.</b> To paraphrase Walter White in “Breaking Bad,” we are not the one who gets attacked. We are the one who attacks.</bq> <bq><b>Overclassification is wildly out of control. Publicly-available news articles are marked “top secret,”</b> Should we impeach President Biden over keeping some of these next to his car? Description of foreign cultural practices, like wedding ceremonies, are marked “confidential,” so you can be prosecuted as a felon under the Espionage Act for mishandling one. <b>The U.S. government has kept documents classified for a full century</b>; in 2011 the CIA finally declassified World War I-era memos explaining how to expose invisible ink.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/16/kingmaker/" author="Mr. Fish" source="Scheer Post">Kingmaker</a> <img src="{att_link}kingmakerbymrfish.jpg" href="{att_link}kingmakerbymrfish.jpg" align="none" scale="50%"> <bq>How about changing this one that says, 'we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice, the fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor - both black and white, both here and abroad', and making it, 'white people should have more black friends.'</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/the-institutional-insanity-of-defense#details" author="Ralph Nader" source="The Ralph Nader Radio Hour">The Institutional Insanity (of) “Defense”</a> This is a fantastic interview with Lawrence Wilkerson. Absolutely worth listening to in its entirely. <bq>My position on Ukraine now is: Shut up and start talking. To both sides. I’m convinced, from my contacts in Moscow, that the <b>Russians would do that. If we even <i>seemed</i> to be serious. <i>We’re</i> the impediment.</b></bq> <bq>One person, an otherwise very gifted diplomat, said to me the other day, “<b>We don’t know how to do diplomacy anymore. We don't do diplomacy anymore.</b> Because our diplomacy has been replaced by bombs, bullets, and bayonets.” He’s right. He’s absolutely right. That’s what we’ve done. That’s the kind of insanity I’m talking about. You have no diplomacy.</bq> <bq><b>We do not have a democracy. We have a deep-state oligarchical corporatocracy. And the American people are on the outside.</b> And the American people— intuitively and, in some cases, intellectually— understand that and go about their business and do what they have to do… but they don’t participate in the government.</bq> At <b>43:30</b>, on being asked about Republicans wanting to decrease the military budget, <bq>I think that's a dangerous, dangerous development in the sense that what they really want to do---now, remember, I've been in this Republican party for <i>fifty frickin' years</i>---<b>what they really want to do, is cut social spending.</b> And so, what they're after with that challenge to the defense money is not actually reducing the defense money---some of them, in closeted chambers, are worse war hawks than some of the Democrats, whom we call warmongers [...] <b>what they wanna do is to get a commensurate reduction---and ultimately what they want to do is double or triple that reduction---in the social budget.</b> I'm hearing right now---in my party's chambers---they're talking about how they're going to eliminate social security altogether, how they're going to eliminate Medicare altogether.</bq> At <b>1:01:00</b>. on Guantánamo, <bq><b>It's appalling what we did, absolutely appalling. Probably one of the worst group of war crimes perpetrated by an alleged democracy</b>, or a country that had a humanitarian instinct---or was supposed to have---in the history of the world. Just terrible what we did. Absolutely terrible.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/19/us-may-help-ukraine-launch-an-offensive-on-crimea/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Scheer Post">US May Help Ukraine Launch An Offensive On Crimea</a> <bq>The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias. <b>The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future, <i>even though you keep doing things to make it increasingly likely</i>, is just being a fucking idiot.</b></bq> <bq>Moscow considers Crimea to be Russian. A year after Russia’s 2014 annexation, western sources acknowledged that Crimeans feel the same way. But it’s actually immaterial whether you agree with Moscow or with the Crimeans over the issue of whether Crimea should be a hot red line which could spark an insanely dangerous escalation, because your opinions about this issue will not prevent a nuclear war. <b>Your disagreements with the Kremlin about Crimea will not protect you from nuclear fallout, and they will not protect anyone else.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/19/richest-1-took-2-3rds-of-global-wealth-since-2020-twice-as-much-as-99-of-population-earned/" author="Ben Norton" source="Scheer Post">Richest 1% Took 2/3rds of Global Wealth Since 2020 – Twice as Much as 99% of Population Earned</a> <bq><b>In the past decade, the richest 1% of people on Earth sucked up half of all new wealth.</b> In 2020 and 2021, the richest 1% took nearly two-thirds of all new wealth – six times greater than the wealth made by the poorest 90% of the global population. “Since 2020, <b>for every dollar of new global wealth gained by someone in the bottom 90%, one of the world’s billionaires has gained $1.7 million</b>”, wrote Oxfam.</bq> This data is taken from <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/survival-richest" author="" source="Oxfam">Survival of the Richest</a>. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82WPLWEN_9M" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/82WPLWEN_9M" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Geopolitical Economy Report: Ben Norton" caption="'World War 3 has already started' between US and Russia/China, argues French scholar"> This was an excellent translation and summary of the words of Emmanuel Todd, which he also captured in the article <a href="https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/01/14/world-war-3-us-russia-china-emmanuel-todd/" author="Ben Norton" source="Geopolitical Economy">‘World War 3 has already started’ between US and Russia/China, argues French scholar</a>. Norton translated it from the original French and also rescued from behind the <i>Le Figaro</i> paywall. <bq>Germany and France had become minor partners in NATO and were not aware of what was going on in Ukraine on the military level. French and German naivety has been criticized because our governments did not believe in the possibility of a Russian invasion. True, but because they did not know that Americans, British and Poles could make Ukraine be able to wage a larger war. <b>The fundamental axis of NATO now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.</b></bq> <bq>The basic axiom of American geopolitics is: ‘We can do whatever we want because we are sheltered, far away, between two oceans, nothing will ever happen to us’. Nothing would be existential for America. <b>Insufficiency of analysis which today leads Biden to a series of reckless actions.</b> America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system toward the precipice. <b>No one had expected that the Russian economy would hold up against the “economic power” of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it.</b></bq> <bq>If the Russian economy resisted the sanctions indefinitely and managed to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained backed by China, the American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to fund its huge trade deficit for nothing. <b>This war has therefore become existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go. </b>This is why we are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other.</bq> <bq>The first to lose all national autonomy will be (or already are) the English and the Australians. The Internet has produced human interaction with the United States in the Anglosphere of such intensity that its academic, media and artistic elites are, so to speak, annexed. <b>On the European continent we are somewhat protected by our national languages, but the fall in our autonomy is considerable, and rapid.</b></bq> <bq>War becomes a test of political economy, it is the great revealer. <b>The GDP of Russia and Belarus represents 3.3% of Western GDP (the US, Anglosphere, Europe, Japan, South Korea), practically nothing. One can ask oneself how this insignificant GDP can cope and continue to produce missiles.</b> The reason is that GDP is a fictional measure of production. If we take away from <b>the American GDP half of its overbilled health spending, then the “wealth produced” by the activity of its lawyers, by the most filled prisons in the world, then by an entire economy of ill-defined services, including the “production” of its 15 to 20 thousand economists with an average salary of 120,000 dollars, we realize that an important part of this GDP is water vapor.</b> War brings us back to the real economy, it allows us to understand what the real wealth of nations is, the capacity for production, and therefore the capacity for war.</bq> <bq>If we come back to material variables, we see the Russian economy. In 2014, we put in place the first important sanctions against Russia, but then it increased its wheat production, which went from 40 to 90 million tons in 2020. Meanwhile, thanks to neoliberalism, American wheat production, between 1980 and 2020, went from 80 to 40 million tons. <b>Russia has therefore a real capacity to adapt. When we want to make fun of centralized economies, we emphasize their rigidity, and when we glorify capitalism, we praise its flexibility.</b> The Russian economy, for its part, has accepted the rules of operation of the market (it is even an obsession of Putin to preserve them), but with a very large role for the state, but <b>it also derives its flexibility from training engineers, who allow the industrial and military adaptations.</b></bq> Is this a clash between economies based on classic production and engineering and those based on the frippery of financialization? <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0rBBMStw9Q" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/U0rBBMStw9Q" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Sarah Wagenknecht" caption="Erst Panzer, dann Kampfjets, dann deutsche Soldaten? Wer stoppt den Wahnsinn?"> I find Wagenknecht's unfiltered news broadcasts to be quite informative and politically well-adjusted. My impression of her runs at odds with the stories I'd been told of her narcissism and right-wing slide. I see none of that and must suspect that she's been slandered, much like so many other left-wing politicians and journalists in the U.S. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YL_iAA06nY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/3YL_iAA06nY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Geopolitical Economy Report: Ben Norton" caption="Richest 1% took 2/3rds of global wealth since 2020 - twice as much as 99% of population earned"> The numbers are utterly shocking, though not surprising, if that makes any sense. The vampires continue to hunker atop the corpse of the world, sucking the last dregs from its desiccated jugular. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOhLhaTrSxo" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/hOhLhaTrSxo" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Wire" caption="Modi Government is One of the Most Appalling in the World—Bharat Ratna & Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen"> Bharat Ratna is an enthusiastic and well-prepared interviewer. Amartya Sen is articulate and insightful despite his diminished appearance. Always interesting to hear information about one of the world's largest countries. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkZ-CBm-U7Q" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/UkZ-CBm-U7Q" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Behind the Headlines" caption="Raided by The FBI for Being Socialist: Lee Camp interviews Omali Yeshitela"> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omali_Yeshitela" source="Wikipedia">Omali Yeshitela</a> is an animated and extremely well-read historian with a plethora of stories and analogies. He is on the right side of history. Fantastic, fantastic interview from an intelligent and energetic member of the resistance. He's 81 years old and talks like a man half his age, but with all the wisdom of his years. He has a lot to say on a wide range of topics---mostly U.S.---but many of his comments on international matters dovetail with those of Emmanuel Todd cited above. It was wonderful to see this impressive, impressive man at 81, looking 20x better than any U.S. senator or congressperson of similar age. Joe Biden is the same age. Consider the immense difference in mental acuity. He calls Kamala Harris <iq>White power in blackface.</iq>. <bq><b>If it becomes necessary for a black face, they'll put a black face there.</b> They can convince masses of people to be anti-black. They can convince masses of people to be anti-woman. They don't give a damn about that.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/20/roaming-charges-78/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: The Specter of Equity and Other Evils</a> <bq>Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed the nation’s strictest (so far) voter ID law, requiring voters to show valid driver’s licenses at the polls. But in a state with 8 million registered voters at least 1 million Ohioans have suspended licenses because of debts from things such as a lack of insurance, unpaid fines, and court costs. In other words, <b>Ohio has just instituted a poll tax by other means.</b></bq> <bq>An Arizona man was sent to jail on a drug charge for taking fentanyl to ease chronic pain so he could continue working and pay for the insulin needed by his 9-year-old Type 1 diabetic son. <b>After he was incarcerated, his son was placed into state custody, where two weeks later the child died of ketoacidosis.</b></bq> <bq><b>New York City taxpayers are on pace to pay $820 million in just overtime for NYPD this year</b>, which is enough to house all 14,000 homeless families in NYC and pay several years of rent for 7,000 families out of work and facing eviction.</bq> <bq>After learning that she’d repeatedly been denied jobs because background checks showed she had a criminal record (she didn’t), Julie Hudson, a black 31-year-old Ph. D. student, visited a Philadelphia police station to try and clear things up. <b>She was promptly arrested and taken into custody after being mistaken for a suspect with the same name.</b></bq> She's black, so the cops think that she must be guilty of something. It's how they was raised. <bq><b>US climate czar John Kerry has endorsed Sultan al-Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., to the head the next round of UN climate talks in Dubai</b>, a choice which Alice Harrison of Global Witness compared to “asking an arms dealer to lead peace talks.” Kerry called al-Jaber a “terrific choice.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/20/fxdc-j20.html" author="Peter Schwarz" source="WSWS">The climate change protests at Lützerath and the reactionary face of Germany’s Greens</a> <bq><b>There is no crime they would not be capable of when it comes to defending the interests of the rich and powerful.</b> The party, which once entered the Bundestag (German parliament) with flower wreaths and peace pigeons, not only shouts the loudest for tanks for Ukraine and for the escalation of the war with Russia but is also one of the hardliners on environmental and domestic policy.</bq> <bq><b>Two green economy ministers – Robert Habeck at the federal level and Mona Neubaur in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) – agreed on the deal, which will allow the energy giant RWE to mine much higher amounts of coal than originally planned</b> and use it to generate energy until 2030. The relationship between RWE and the Christian Democrat/Green state government of NRW is now so close that many only speak of NRWE.</bq> <bq>The transformation of the Greens into a war and law-and-order party that suppresses environmental protests in the interests of energy companies cannot be explained by commonplaces such as “power corrupts.” It raises fundamental questions of perspective and class orientation. <b>It shows that the climate crisis—like all the major social problems of the 21st century—can only be solved by a socialist transformation of society.</b></bq> <bq>But class struggle and imperialism did not disappear. They returned with a vengeance. <b>The major Western powers, led by the US, lost all restraints and waged wars over oil, markets and power, destroying entire societies</b> in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and elsewhere. The Russian oligarchs and their political leader, Vladimir Putin, were highly welcomed in the West as long as they bought luxury properties, yachts and football clubs, but <b>the imperialist powers were determined not to leave the vast natural resources of Russia to them.</b> This is the reason for NATO's steady advance to the east, to which Putin responded with his reactionary war against Ukraine.</bq> <bq><b>The social base of the Greens, the wealthy urban upper middle class, is one of the winners of this orgy of enrichment.</b> This explains their steady development to the right, which becomes more aggressive the more resistance there is to social inequality and catastrophe from below.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2023/01/18/war-in-ukraine-when-international-laws-collide/" author="Ted Snider" source="Antiwar.com">War in Ukraine: When International Laws Collide</a> <bq>The US has insisted on the right of states to choose their own security alignments as a justification for NATO’s open door to Ukraine. If every state can choose its alignments, then Ukraine has the sovereign right to choose membership in NATO. Russia has insisted on the indivisibility of security as a justification for opposing NATO’s expansion to its borders and the flooding of Ukraine with lethal offensive weapons. <b>Both principles are right. But, as Sakwa points out, "they proved to be contradictory and ultimately undermined the two sides’ ability to peacefully co-exist."</b> <b>Russia holds that peace can be attained by a balance of powers in which the interests of all nations are respected.</b> A hegemon cannot ensure its security while ignoring the security interests of another country. The US holds that the spread of a system of trade and democracy, with the US as the hegemon, will create a common sphere where peace can be preserved. <b>The US argument implies that that spread cannot be a threat to other states.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2023/01/18/the-fbi-and-personal-liberty/" author="Andrew P. Napolitano" source="Antiwar.com">The FBI and Personal Liberty</a> <bq><b>What is startling is that the FBI actually reduced to writing its contempt for the Constitution that its employees have sworn to uphold</b>; and Congress and President Joe Biden have done nothing about this. <b>The FBI works for the Department of Justice. The CIA and the NSA work directly for the president. With a pen and paper, he can stop all domestic spying without search warrants.</b> He can re-erect the wall between spying and law enforcement. He can forbid all in the executive branch from engaging with the secret FISA Court. Biden can do all these things if he didn’t fear the revelation of the dirt his own spies have on him.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/21/jygw-j21.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">US pledges to “go on the offensive” against Russia</a> <bq>Milley announced the commitment of the United States and NATO to “go on the offensive to liberate Russian-occupied Ukraine.” He repeated that Ukraine would use NATO armored vehicles and tanks to go on the “tactical and operational offensive to liberate the occupied areas.” With this declaration, <b>the entire prestige of the NATO alliance is being staked on the reconquest of all Ukrainian territory, which according to the United States includes both the entire Donbas and the Crimean Peninsula.</b></bq> <bq>Milley is an active-duty military officer, and Austin is a retired four-star general who was granted a special dispensation from Congress to serve in the civilian office of defense secretary. <b>These two four-star generals were effectively setting the foreign policy of the United States, in a sweeping display of the power of the military in American society.</b></bq> <bq>The announcement by NATO that it is sending offensive weapons to Ukraine has exposed the Biden administration’s entire narrative of US involvement in Ukraine as a fraud. <b>It has repeatedly claimed that the US and NATO are not involved in the war. But NATO is not only a party to the conflict, it is its driving force.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the Wall Street Journal demanded strikes inside of Russian territory, declaring, “Why should a dictator who rolled over a foreign border be free to claim his territory as sacrosanct?” It concluded, <b>“The rejoinder is that Mr. Putin might unleash a nuclear weapon, but the past months have shown that he will make that decision based on his own calculations in any case.”</b></bq> This is the absolute danger in using the term "dictator"---because that word is used by people who are much more likely to act on that word. You may be making a sober estimation as to the level of individual and democratic autonomy in a nation, but others are using the word as the key to the steamroller that will pave the way to regime change. Every time that word has been used long enough, it's been followed by an invasion masked as a humanitarian war---RTP!---in which a benighted folk is taught what democracy is by having their enlightened betters choose their form of government and leaders for them. We saw it in Ukraine in 2014, perhaps most recently and prominently. Fortuitously, this type of arrangement almost always ensures that those setting up the "democracy" get to dip their beaks and get the first tranche of whatever initial economic surplus appears in the turmoil of that regime change. We saw this in Russia in the early 90s. <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/america-needs-truth-and-reconciliation" source="TK News" author="Matt Taibbi">America Needs Truth and Reconciliation on Russiagate</a> <bq>We have a lot of problems in this country, and there are serious arguments to be had between blue and red about all sorts of issues, from immigration to the wealth gap to abortion and race. <b>But the country is currently paralyzed by distrust of media that runs so deep that it prevents real dialogue</b>, and that situation can’t be resolved until the corporate press swallows its pride and admits <b>the clock has finally run out on its seven years of loony Russia conspiracies.</b></bq> <bq>It apparently <b>didn’t occur to the DiFi staffer, or to Senator Feinstein herself, to ask this crucial question of how Watts and Hamilton 68 were identifying Russians</b> before the Senator published an open letter with Schiff citing it as proof of Russian perfidy. Absolutely blind, in other words, they declared #ReleaseTheMemo to be Russian propaganda, saying it benefited from the “assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations.”</bq> <bq><b>That this preposterous parody of a web analytic tool was taken seriously by reporters for years is embarrassing enough.</b> That U.S. Senators relied upon it as a sole source in the #ReleaseTheMemo episode shows how desperate they were to change the subject, to deflect from a Nunes memo later proved correct by an Inspector General’s report.</bq> <bq>“Schiff and the Democrats falsely claimed Russians were behind the Release the Memo hashtag, all my investigative work, and Trump’s entire presidency,” he said this week. <b>“By spreading the Russia collusion hoax, they instigated one of the greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history.”</b></bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}chinamaths.jpeg" href="{att_link}chinamaths.jpeg" align="none" scale="40%"> <bq>Forcing maths on the population is straight out of China's playbook</bq> I can only hope that this person and "her" headline are completely AI-generated. If not, then how would we be able to tell when newspapers start using AIs to generate content? <hr> Following up on the theme of "the world is full of people who are shockingly stupid, even those who are actually kind of smart," is this article, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jan/15/scientists-ukraine-war-cern-physics-large-hadron-collider" author="Eleni Petrakou" source="Guardian">Splitting the atomic scientists: how the Ukraine war ruined physics</a> <bq>In normal times, the four large physics experiments using proton collisions at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland publish numerous scientific articles a year. But in March 2022, the number of new research papers by the LHC experiments fell to zero. The reason: <b>a lack of agreement on how to list Russian and Belarusian scientists and institutes, if at all. The temporary compromise, in place up to now, is not to publish.</b> [...] According to sources at Cern, after the invasion of Ukraine <b>some members objected to co-authorship with Russian institutes and even with individuals working for them</b> (making up about 7% of the collaborators).</bq> You see? They're fucking morons. This is madness. First they ostracized musicians, opera singers, and athletes. But now, scientists ostracizing scientists? These are all "smart" people with multiple degrees who can't think their way out of a paper bag. They think they're doing something principled here. Do you think they ever even once thought of ostracizing American scientists during any one of the multiple wars and invasions and toppled leaders of just the last couple of decades? Of course not. Because they're a bunch of babies, pretending play at being adults. They may be smart, but man are they dumb. <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-scooby-doo-psyop" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">The "Scooby Doo" psyop</a> <bq>[...] internet politics are driven not by what’s most important or even morally right, but by whatever’s easiest and most entertaining to do on social platforms. There are very few things that are politically similar about the left and the right, but I am comfortable saying that <b>at both ends of the horseshoe, there are a lot of people who care more about retweets or traffic than they do expressing a coherent political ideology.</b></bq> <bq>I think <i>Velma</i> is just another example of a lot of the people behind pop culture being totally unable to separate online discourse from real-world conversation. <b>It feels increasingly like the people who write our movies and TV shows are really only interested in feeding those movies and TV shows back into Twitter.</b> (The same is true for music right now, but with TikTok.) And I think people who spend a lot of time on Twitter, especially if they’re rich and famous enough for Twitter discourse to have no material consequence on their lives, write off internet outrage as just vague general “controversy” and <b>think that controversy is inherently good because all attention is good, especially in the world of streaming.</b> But that same driving force — that all attention is good — is also true for the people who think <i>Velma</i> can’t just be a weird bad show written by out-of-touch Twitter addicts, and, instead, must be a conspiracy theory. Because unraveling a right-wing psyop to make a bad edgy Scooby Doo reboot on purpose to generate edgelord YouTube traffic <b>is more compelling for your own content dunking on it than if you just admitted that you’re a weird adult yelling about cartoons on the internet.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/be-independent-no-not-like-that" author="Freddie DeBoer" source="SubStack">Be Independent! No, Not Like That</a> <bq>Typically, this pigeonholing is the work of people who are very much orthodox something, usually <b>orthodox liberal Democrats - they’ll claim that anyone who is not exactly what they are is therefore necessarily the opposite of what they are, which is usually a conservative Republican. This is how you get people claiming that Matt Taibbi is a “far-right” journalist.</b> (To add another layer to this onion, by saying that Taibbi is not a far-right journalist, in the eyes of some I have just marked myself as far-right myself.) This dynamic also exists on the right; the conservative Christian David French is frequently called a liberal by his many enemies on the right. None of this is particularly surprising. The orthodox tend to think only in terms of dueling orthodoxies, and if they’re sure you’re not a Yook, you must be a Zook. So it goes.</bq> <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Wp-WiNXH6hI" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Carl Sagan" caption="Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 on climate change"> This 17-minute video includes a short introduction a Mr. Durenberger, which, nearly 40 years later, seems incredibly polite, respectful, and grateful for Sagan's illustrious, learned, and voluntary contribution to help avoid an impending crisis. Sagan, for his part, delivers a summary of the history, the situation, the causes, and the likely effects of CO² accumulation in the atmosphere, explains the "Greenhouse Effect", and concludes brilliantly with, <bq>Not to say that this is inevitable, but the largest coal reserves on the planet are the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. China is undergoing a very major industrial development. The burning of coal is something that must be very attractive for the Chinese, looking into the future. I would say that there's no way to solve this problem, even if the United States and the Soviet Union were to come to a perfectly good accord on this issue without involving China---and many other nations that will be developing rapidly in the time period we're talking about. So, here is a sense in which the nations, to deal with this problem, have to make a change from their traditional concern about themselves, and not about the planet and the species, a change from the traditional short-term objectives to longer-term objectives. And we have to bear in mind that, in problems like this, the initial stages of global temperature increase, one region of the planet might benefit while another region suffers, and there has to be a kind of trading off of benefits and suffering and that requires a degree of international amity, which certainly doesn't exist today. I think that what is essential for this problem is a global consciousness, a view that transcends our exclusive identifications with the generational and political groupings into which, by accident, we have been born. The solution to these problems requires a perspective that embraces the planet and the future because we are all in this greenhouse together.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/16/stot-j16.html" author="Chase Lawrence" source="WSWS">California floods cause estimated $31 billion in damage, 19 dead</a> <bq>The sheer amount of precipitation delivered by atmospheric rivers has rapidly brought a significant portion of California out of extreme drought, which has decreased from 27.1 percent of the state last week to just 0.32 percent this week, according to the US drought monitor. Severe drought dropped from 71 to 46 percent. Parts of California have received in excess of three feet of rain. <b>The Sierra Nevada Mountains received record snowfall, which well surpasses seasonal averages, despite the season just starting. Much of the state is receiving rainfall totals of 400 to 600 percent above average.</b></bq> <bq><b>Reservoirs, while receiving some water, are still far below typical storage capacities. Most of the trillions of gallons of water are expected to be lost to runoff in the drought-stricken state.</b> 'The challenge there is getting the water from outfalls … or rivers and into the groundwater,' Jenny Pensky, a hydrogeologist at the University of California Santa Cruz, told CBS News. She added, “We just don’t quite have the infrastructure for that.”</bq> <bq><b>California, whose GDP would put it as the fourth richest country on the planet, has spent next to nothing on water resources even as the state’s population has increased by the millions over the decades.</b> If funded, a scientific plan could mitigate effects and protect lives and homes. The necessary dams to deal with flooding, reservoirs to both store runoff and prepare for droughts as well as the necessary water treatment capacity for such runoff, forestry programs to decrease damaging runoff, and desalinization plants to provide fresh drinking water from salt water, <b>could all be funded and built with a mere fraction of the wealth in the state.</b></bq> This is a bit of an odd statement because (A) the WSWS has often acknowledged that GDP is not a good measure of economic health, and (B) the high GDP in the state is directly related to its exploitation of the environment in a completely unsustainable manner. It's unclear how they could continue to fund everything if they were to stop the exploitation that produces the exorbitant wealth that they want to use to fund a sustainable approach. That would directly lead to cutting of the funding supply. It doesn't magically make California a sustainable environment for the level of development that it has, with the crops that it has (e.g., almonds, cotton, etc.) <bq>Instead, the money that is required for the necessary infrastructure is hoarded by the tiny corporate financial elite, a significant portion of which reside in California and whom both the Republicans and the Democrats represent.</bq> Yes, absolutely true. However, if these factions were to suddenly no longer profit so handsomely from California---because, e.g., much of the money would be funneled back into the sustaining of California rather than their own personal coffers---then they would <i>simply not do it</i>. When the high margins disappear, then so would the oligarchs. There is no direct path to funding California's infrastructure without a revolution and a seizing of the means of production (in this case, the massive hoards of wealth that oligarchs have accumulated at the people's expense over decades). And there is no mechanism that would <i>force them to do it</i> because the <i>government is not in charge</i>. Despite all of the whining about how over-regulated California is, it also is utterly unable to capture any of the wealth that its economy produces---it goes to its oligarchs, as pretty much anywhere else in the so-called "modern economies". <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/13/fmii-j13.html" source="WSWS" author="Paul Mitchell">Thames Water online map confirms appalling sewage pollution in UK</a> <bq>Local Windrush Against Sewage Pollution campaigner Ashley Smith told reporters, “It shows <b>the extent to which Thames Water is reliant on being able to use our rivers and streams as toilets</b> to deal with problems caused largely by underinvestment and profiteering.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/future-refrigerators-could-use-ionocaloric-cooling/" source="Ars Technica" author="Jennifer Ouellette">This cool new approach to refrigeration could replace harmful chemicals</a> <bq>In their first experiment, <b>Lilley and Prasher achieved a temperature change of 25° Celsius, which required less than one volt to achieve.</b> That's a significant improvement over other caloric alternatives to refrigeration. Changing the refrigerant's phase from solid to liquid also means it can be pumped through the system, making it easier to remove or return heat.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/the-james-webb-space-telescope-is-finding-too-many-early-galaxies/" source="Sky & Telescope" author="Monica Young">The James Webb Space Telescope Is Finding Too Many Early Galaxies</a> <bq>Since disks are thought to form only in serene environments, in which stars can settle into a spinning skirt instead of being thrown about, <b>their prevalence in a universe only a few percent of its current age is a bit like seeing teens when expecting toddlers.</b> “We're not surprised to see disk galaxies,” Kartaltepe clarifies. “I think the surprise is to see so many of them. ... We're really not seeing the earliest stages of galaxy formation yet.”</bq> <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/07/qzyy-j07.html" source="WSWS" author="David Walsh"><i>White Noise</i>: A film adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel</a> <bq>DeLillo has shown himself at various points to be a perceptive critic of American society and culture. In different works, he has subjected the political, financial, cultural and academic spheres in the US to scathing treatment, cutting through many of the lies that official America tells about itself. To his credit, <b>DeLillo once told an interviewer, “Writers must oppose systems. It’s important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments. … I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.”</b></bq> <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://madeinchinajournal.com/2023/01/08/lying-flat-profiling-the-tangping-attitude/" source="Made In China Journal" author="Marine Brossard">Lying Flat: Profiling the Tangping Attitude</a> <bq>Some months ago, a Chinese friend posted on her social media photos of her (fat) cat lying comfortably on its back on a carpet with the following caption: ‘Tangping Monday. Tangping against neijuan’, ending with an emoji face crying tears of joy. These two terms became buzzwords on the Chinese internet in 2021 and 2020, respectively: the attitude of ‘lying flat’ is a reaction to the phenomenon of neijuan (内卷, ‘involution’)—a buzzword also mentioned by Ambassador Qin—which <b>signals a rejection of the intense competitiveness of China’s education system and labour market.</b></bq> <bq><b>For young people exhausted by overwork</b>, frustrated by the stagnation of their purchasing power, and tormented by their loneliness (especially considering many do not have sufficient free time to socialise), <b>having their cat waiting for them at home is one of the rare comforts in their life.</b></bq> <bq>The specular relation between humans and cats has deepened with the Covid-19 pandemic, when many employees started to work from home on their laptop with their cat sleeping next to them. In this situation, <b>house cats reveal for pet owners the absurdity of their painful human condition in comparison with the cat’s comfortable and worry-free daily life.</b></bq> <bq>Although cat owners are inspired by their pets’ nonchalance, this amounts to a form of self-deception. Indeed, frustrated humans envy their cats for lazily sleeping throughout the day instead of realising that they have become apathetic because of their own boredom. <b>The image of the sterilised house cat devoid of desires is the figure to which they tragically aspire.</b></bq> <bq>The image of the lazy fat cat is the negation of the lying-flat attitude in that it is based on the capitalist imaginary that commodifies our relation to pets and animals in general. While <b>tangping-ism aspires to the idea of autonomy</b>, the portrayal of cats on social media conceals the fact that our relation to them is shaped by their dependency and their being dominated by humans.</bq> <bq>Rather than lazy fat cats, there is another meme that better represents the concept of tangping that has been circulating for a while on Chinese social media: <b>the image of chives (韭菜, jiucai ) lying on the ground. Because they slump on the ground, chives escape the harvester’s sickle.</b> It is a metaphor that stems from the slang term jiucai— an old expression that appeared online at the end of the 2010s to suggest that <b>young people were like chives in the way they were continuously harvested by the state to serve as a workforce and consumers.</b></bq> <bq><b>The word ‘silhouette’ comes from Etienne de Silhouette, Controller-General of Finances under Louis XV, who remained in office for less than a year because of his unpopular ‘tax the rich’ reform plan.</b> Himself passionate about the profile art form, his name was first used mockingly to describe something unfinished ( ‘à la silhouette’ ) and subsequently for the artistic technique using the simplicity of the line to create a portrait.</bq> <bq>[...] within China’s current context of state capitalism based on standardisation, young people who have learned how to identify themselves through subjectivity can only protect their individuality by stepping out of the game. <b>By avoiding the attention of the social order on their silhouette, the lying-flat-ers affirm their uniqueness.</b></bq> <bq>It is mostly in the city that tangping -ers find the temporary jobs that allow them to <b>survive financially without committing themselves to the tyranny of stable employment.</b></bq> <bq>French philosopher André Gorz (1989: 192–93) described the way <b>the middle class monopolises ‘skilled, complex, creative and responsible occupational activities’ to the detriment of lower social classes precisely by overworking.</b> Thus, the fight for liberation from the ideology of work is not the fight of middle-class people whose aim is to ‘defend the rank and the position of strength their work affords them’ (Gorz 1989: 235), but rather the fight of the lower social classes.</bq> <bq><b>Tangping is further from Buddhist detachment and closer to Marxist radicalism.</b></bq> <bq>David Graeber proposed in his visionary work by drawing from anthropological and archaeological data that proved the potentiality of non-capitalist social models to develop a new imaginative force: I was drawn to</bq> <bq>[...] anticapitalist anthropologist David Graeber proposed in his visionary work by drawing from anthropological and archaeological data that proved the potentiality of non-capitalist social models to develop a new imaginative force:<bq>I was drawn to the discipline [of anthropology] because it opens windows on other possible forms of human social existence; because it served as a constant reminder that <b>most of what we assume to be immutable has been, in other times and places, arranged quite differently, and therefore, that human possibilities are in almost every way greater than we ordinarily imagine.</b> (Graeber 2007: 1)</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/01/05/the-written-world-and-the-unwritten-world/" source="The Paris Review" author="Italo Calvino">The Written World and the Unwritten World</a> <bq>The principal philosophical currents of the moment say: No, none of this is true. The mind of the writer is obsessed by the contrasting positions of two philosophical currents. <b>The first says: The world doesn’t exist; only language exists. The second says: Common language has no meaning; the world is ineffable.</b></bq> <bq>Some, in order to have contact with the world outside, simply buy the newspaper every morning. I am not so naive. <b>I know that from the papers I get a reading of the world made by others, or, rather, made by an anonymous machine, expert in choosing from the infinite dust of events those which can be sifted out as “news.”</b> Others, to escape the grip of the written world, turn on the television. But I know that all the images, even those most directly drawn from life, are part of a constructed story, like the ones in the newspapers. So I won’t buy the newspaper, I won’t turn on the television but will confine myself to going out for a walk.</bq> <bq>Italy is a country where many mysterious things happen, which are every day widely discussed and commented on but never solved; where every event hides a secret plot, which is a secret and remains a secret; where <b>no story comes to an end because the beginning is unknown, but between beginning and end we can enjoy an infinity of details.</b></bq> Echoes of Eco. <bq>An important international tendency in our century’s culture, what we call the phenomenological approach in philosophy and the alienation effect in literature, drives us to break the screen of words and concepts and see the world as if it were appearing to our gaze for the first time. <b>Good, now I will try to make my mind blank, and look at the landscape with a gaze free of every cultural precedent.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>as for our daily world, it seems to us written, rather, as in a mosaic of languages, like a wall covered with graffiti, writings traced one on top of the other, a palimpsest whose parchment has been scratched and rewritten many times</b>, a collage by Schwitters, a layering of alphabets, of diverse citations, of slang terms, of flickering characters like those which appear on a computer screen.</bq> <bq>[...] in this case as in the others <b>my goal is not so much to make a book as to change myself, which I think should be the goal of every human undertaking.</b> You may object that you prefer books that convey a true experience, fully grasped. Well, so do I. But in my experience the motivation to write is always connected to the lack of something we would like to know and possess, something that escapes us.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/americas-theater-of-the-absurd" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">America’s Theater of the Absurd</a> <bq>Governance exists. But it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives, from the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret. <b>Corporations have seized the levers of power, including the media.</b> Growing obscenely rich, the ruling oligarchs have deformed national institutions, including state and federal legislatures and the courts, to serve their insatiable greed. <b>They know what they are doing. They understand the depths of their own corruption.</b> They know they are hated. They are prepared for that too. They have militarized police forces and have built a vast archipelago of prisons to keep the unemployed and underemployed in bondage. All the while, <b>they pay little to no income tax and exploit sweatshop labor overseas.</b> They lavishly bankroll the political clowns who speak in the vulgar and crude idiom of an enraged public or in the dulcet tones used to mollify the liberal class.</bq> <bq>H.G. Wells called the old guard, <b>the good liberals</b>, the ones who speak in measured words and embrace reason, the “inexplicit men.” They <b>say the right things and do nothing.</b></bq> <bq>But the second result of junk politics is more insidious. It solidifies the cult of the self, the amoral belief that we have the right to do anything, to betray and destroy anyone, to get what we want. <b>The cult of the self fosters a psychopathic cruelty, a culture built not on empathy, the common good and self-sacrifice but on unbridled narcissism and vengeance.</b> It celebrates, as mass media does, superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and an inability to feel guilt or remorse. <b>This is the dark ethic of corporate culture, celebrated by the entertainment industry, academia and social media.</b></bq> <bq>Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Citibank, Raytheon, ExxonMobile, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs will easily adapt. <b>Capitalism functions very efficiently without democracy.</b></bq> <bq>Trump may be finished politically, but the political and social decay that created Trump remains. This decay will give rise to new, perhaps more competent, demagogues. I fear the rise of Christian fascists endowed with the political skill, self-discipline, focus and intelligence that Trump lacks. <b>The longer we remain politically paralyzed, the more certain Christian fascism becomes.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/05/kbod-j05.html" source="WSWS" author="Clara Weiss">An interview with historian Christian Gerlach on the Nazi war of annihilation against the Soviet Union</a> <bq>Because of the British naval blockade in World War II, Germany could no longer rely on shipments of food, edible oil and mineral oil from overseas. Its reserves were soon exhausted. From the perspective of the Nazi leadership and military leaders, such lack of resources might lead to military defeat and revolution, as it had in World War I. To avoid this, German politicians in charge of food and agriculture, military and economic strategists developed in the months prior to the German attack against the Soviet Union the plan to extract these resources by force from Soviet territories to be occupied. <b>The idea was to starve to death tens of millions of Soviet citizens by cutting them off from food deliveries, namely the urban population in the Western Soviet Union and certain regions called “deficit areas” (Northern Russia, large parts of Central Russia and, to a degree, Belarus).</b></bq> <bq>Soviet POWs were undersupplied from the beginning, but the starvation policy against them was aggravated in the fall of 1941, actually with the onset of the cold season. <b>Their rations were significantly lowered, especially for non-working POWs. As a result, about 2 million died by February 1942. They died either from starvation, exhaustion or cold.</b> Many were also shot because they were unable to continue walking during marches. They died under the “care” of the German army, not of the SS,</bq> <bq><b>The destruction of Soviet POWs in German hands has been systematically marginalized in public memory and in scholarship, where it was often belittled or denied.</b> There is some scholarship in Russian and German, but, to my knowledge, until now <b>there is not a single scholarly monograph in English exclusively devoted to this topic.</b> None. This illustrates how humanistic and universal the Anglo-American scholarship about World War II is.</bq> <bq><b>Genocide is an analytically worthless concept made for political purposes.</b> I don’t use it. <b>It serves</b> for political condemnation and intervention, that is, <b>as a pretext for war (whether with aerial attacks, ground forces or deadly “sanctions,” as economic warfare is warfare).</b> It also serves for prosecution in show trials, as part of the two main remedies that bourgeois regimes offer: enforced regime change and a bit of re-education. But since the socioeconomic problems and conflicts underlying mass violence are not being addressed in that way, such interventions are as “successful” in stopping violence as they were in Iraq or Libya; often they aggravate it.</bq> <bq>Historically, <b>the term of genocide was coined in 1944 in the context of US imperialism, and the academic field of genocide studies became big in the 1990s and 2000s</b> as an instrument of liberal imperialism, which was on the rise. The field reached its peak in the early 2010s</bq> <bq>As an action-oriented concept, <b>“genocide” needs to be overly simplistic. It prevents people from understanding the deep roots and complexity of mass violence.</b> Genocide studies tend to focus on ethnic or racial issues instead of multi-causality; on the state instead of social actors; on long-term “intent” for violence, on planning and centralization, instead of a process and autonomous groups; and on one victim group instead of many [...]</bq> <bq>Thus, <b>the concept of genocide also produces hierarchies of victims</b> of different value, hierarchies which are actually racist.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/06/reading-zizek-seriously/" source="CounterPunch" author="Nick Pemberton">Reading Žižek Seriously</a> <bq>Lost in our politically correct discourse today is the ability to ask such questions. We are supposed to simply think straightforwardly without enjoyment. Thus intellectualism is left to prudes. <b>There should be no idea too provocative.</b> Forgive me for using the dreaded word of civilization but <b>it is civilized society that solves problems through ideas rather than violence.</b></bq> <bq>In Žižek’s best work <i>Sublime Object of Ideology</i>, he discusses the concept of dying twice. One example he uses is Tom and Jerry, where the cat and mouse regenerate their bodies after every fight scene. Another example he uses is communism where <b>Stalinism is willing to take history ‘on credit’, assuming that if the future generations implement social programs it will justify massive violence.</b></bq> <bq>Is this not exactly the critique of Stalinism which went so far as to see human beings themselves as cogs in the history of materialism who could be sacrificed for the future advancement of materialist production? <b>Was Stalinism not in this way the same as Eurocentric rationality which sacrificed real human beings for the advancement of so-called civilization?</b></bq> <bq><b>I’d much rather have the academic see me as an equal and joke with me than to explain things to me like a baby.</b> If Žižek hates regular people why is he the only theorist even willing to go near popular culture let alone take it as seriously as the greatest in the high arts and philosophy?</bq> <bq>Žižek sees Marx as critiquing a surplus value that justifies itself through use value (<b>things are bought because they are useful therefore they are made because they are useful even when such production may create the need itself and so on</b>). Not quoting Žižek directly just using and so on for fun.</bq> <bq>[...] he wants normal people to be able to have themselves represented within the rulers where the rule of the people becomes the will of the powerful rather than have alienation be overcome through abolishment of said power.</bq> <bq>[Žižek says that] the politics of simply doing nothing in the face of a Russian invasion is cowardly.</bq> And it is cowardly and simplistic to so quickly conclude that the only possible response is in kind. Violence is the only choice instead of just the easiest is fucking lazy. And causes more woe and danger for all. <bq><b>Žižek to me seems very happy to share his intellectual gifts with the rest of us. For this I am grateful</b> and I hope that if there are conservative strains in his thoughts, we can still use his redeemable ideas to make the world a better place.</bq> But we do have to call him out when he's being an ass and is no longer distinguishable from an imperialist warmonger. <hr> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2023/01/16/why-i-am-still-a-conservative-for-now/" author="Kevin Munger" source="Crooked Timber">Why I am (Still) a Conservative (For Now)</a> <bq><b>The traditional justification for conservatism is based in epistemic humility: there is only so much knowledge that we can accumulate within our lifetimes</b>—especially about life-changing events like marriage or raising a child—<b>so we should defer to the condensed knowledge of the past</b>, condensed in the form of traditions, norms and institutions. The challenge for any reasonable person is to evaluate the tradeoff between tradition and progress, and the conservative is simply someone who puts more weight on the former.</bq> <h><span id="technology">Technology</span></h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/06/hkdf-j06.html" source="WSWS" author="Dmitri Church">As Washington prepares for conflict with China, US confronts major labor shortages in semiconductor manufacture</a> <bq>Semiconductors are as essential to modern militaries as they are to every other part of the economy. Much of the practical effect of countries joining NATO is the integration of software systems used to coordinate the actions of troops and other military assets. <b>Semiconductors are likewise essential to the production, use and maintenance of planes, tanks, ships and other weapons systems. This is the background to the US decision to impose new export controls aimed at crippling China's ability to procure or manufacture advanced semiconductors.</b> Washington has long indicated that it would go to war to prevent Beijing from achieving its 'Made in China 2025' goals, and these latest measures are a marked escalation of this conflict.</bq> <bq>The subordination of semiconductor manufacture to the needs of private profit and nation-state conflict means that this supply chain, <b>the most sophisticated process humanity has ever devised, is mired in secrecy, with companies desperate to gain a competitive advantage with each new generation of hardware.</b> This has made talent shortages a problem globally. Often the knowledge of how a key manufacturing step works is isolated within a single firm or university department.</bq> <bq>One of the central challenges is creating the light in the first place. In order for the image to be sharp, the light must be tightly monochromatic, centered around 13.5nm. Producing the required light was the central challenge in developing EUV. <b>Tiny droplets of tin are released into a chamber where they are struck precisely in rapid succession by two high-powered laser pulses. The first pulse deforms the droplet into a platter, while the second vaporizes this platter, producing a flash of light that is then passed through a mask of the circuit and a series of mirrors to focus it down to the required size before producing an image on the silicon wafer.</b></bq> Wow. Just, wow. <bq>There is only one company in the world that currently produces EUV machines, ASML in the Netherlands. <b>Each machine weighs 200 tons and is the size of a school bus, costing over $1 billion.</b> The knowledge to design, build and run these machines is concentrated in the Netherlands at ASML and its partners at Eindhoven University of Technology.</bq> <bq>Further, lithography is just one of many steps in producing a semiconductor. <b>Growing the silicon monocrystals that are cut into wafers is largely concentrated in Japan.</b> After lithography, there are many steps that add electrically active materials according to the etched pattern to produce working transistors. Among the many technologies involved is <b>atomic vapor deposition, capable of building up single layers of atoms on a surface.</b> The degree of precision required by these machines means that they require skilled operators, and often a full-time engineer to supervise their installation and use.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-scooby-doo-psyop" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">The "Scooby Doo" psyop</a> <bq>I think we fundamentally need to ask ourselves what the point of automating things with A.I. is. We’re told that ChatGPT can code whole websites or that you can generate thousands of images with DALL-E 2, but <b>no one is really asking why. The unspoken answer seems to be: so we have more time to both make and consume more content.</b></bq> Slow. The fuck. Down. Why do we need millions of mediocre paintings? There is literally no way that an AI build on the technology we have today will ever be able to produce anything other than a local maximum in the field of data to which it's already been exposed. There are no insights waiting for us from AIs. The only possible upside is that a prompt will surface some content that you would not have otherwise found another way. I guess that's something. But, along the way, we're going to generate an even large tsunami of shit content than an army of soulless morons were already producing. For every interesting bauble surfaced by an AI, it will bury a thousand. <hr> <a href="https://www.genios.de/presse-archiv/artikel/BEO/20230106/ausgebrannt/208385403.html" author="Üsé Meyer" source="Beobachter">Ausgebrannt</a> <bq>Ferdinand Keils Einschätzung: «Bei günstigen LED-Beleuchtungen lohnen sich ernsthafte Tests für die Hersteller nicht. Sie dauern sehr lange und sind kostspielig.» <b>Das würde die Preise nach oben treiben, und die LED-Lampen wären nicht mehr konkurrenzfähig.</b></bq> <bq>Eine Nachrecherche zeigt: Die Testbedingungen, we sie in der entsprechenden EU-Verordnung beschrieben werden, sind nicht so ausgelegt, dass verwertbare Aussagen zur Lebensdauer möglich sind. <b>Die Begründung der Behörde: «Die Prüfung von LED-Lampen über die gesamte Lebensdauer ist für die Marktaufsichtsbehörden nicht machbar.» Der Aufwand und die Kosten seen zu hoch.</b> Der Verdacht liegt nahe, das Angaben zur Lebensdauer bei Retrofit-LED-Lampen reine Spekulation sind. Frage an Peter Jacob: Wenn die auf den Verpackungen angegebenen 15 000 bis 20 000 Stunden Lebensdauer nur für die Leuchtdioden gelten, nicht aber für den LED-Treiber - <b>werden die Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten nicht in die Irre geführt? «Ja, so kann man das sehen», sagt der Professor.</b></bq> <bq>Das Problem der Miniaturisierung der Elektronik betrifft vor allem die Retrofit-Leuchtmittel, die alte Glüh- oder Halogenlampen ersetzen. Bei Produkten, die von Anfang an als LED-Leuchten konzipiert wurden, sieht es meist besser aus. Denn dort kann die Elektronik separiert und grösser gebaut werden. «Die thermischen Probleme kommen hier kaum zum Tragen, weshalb man bei solchen Leuchtmitteln tatsächlich von einer längeren Lebensdauer ausgehen kann», sagt der Physiker Peter Jacob. <b>Er glaubt, dass das gesamte Lampendesign neu überdacht werden muss und es in rund 50 Jahren Retrofit-LED-Leuchten in der heutigen Form nicht mehr geben wird.</b></bq> Hahaha als ob es uns noch gibt bis dann. 🙃 <h><span id="fun">Fun</span></h> <a href="https://twitter.com/BigDirtyFry/status/1609261607691120640" author="Kevin Fry" source="Twitter">Grandad Squarepants talks about his life under the sea.</a> <img attachment="granddadsquarepants.jpg" align="right"><bq>And then we started living together and you know I was with him for a long time. But you know it was great in some ways under the sea, but in other ways it wasn't. We had a king down there too, so there were certain things you couldn't do. But then I heard that, on the surface, everybody was getting married. Everyone could get married in 2015. So, when I heard that, I ran home to tell Patrick. But I saw him in the window and he was getting old and a bit slow, so I didn't say anything. And I was afraid if we went up to the surface, he'd dry up. And there was one day, he was lying in the bed towards the end. He turned over to me and says, 'SpongeBob, I'm sorry I was never your husband,' and I says 'Patrick, what else were you? You looked after me, you made me feel safe, we went on all kinds of adventures, you and me. I didn't need any piece of paper to tell me that I was his and he was mine.'</bq>