Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Month: March 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Global power shift
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 03-06-2024]
Very interesting interview with Russo-Ukrainian political scientist Rostislav Ishchenko on why the collapse of the West is a big problem for Russia as well:
“Our enemies’ problems are growing. The Western system is no longer able to stabilise itself. It is self-destructing… pic.twitter.com/faWTWELe4G
— Thomas Fazi (@battleforeurope) March 6, 2024
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Ukraine war and Western system’s fatal flaw
Alex Krainer, Marck 6, 2024 [substack]
One of the talking points that has been making rounds among the West’s true believers, is that we can outspend Russia by a factor of 10 in military expenditures….
As the New York Times reported last September, Russia is producing at least seven times more ammunition than the US and its Western allies combined, and she is producing it at about 1/10th of the cost of western manufacturers. For example, while the cost per round for a Russian 152 mm round is about $600, NATO must budget between $6,000 and $8,000 per each 155 mm round.
Not only is Russia vastly ahead in terms of sheer production volumes but also in terms of innovation, quality and overall effectiveness. Her arsenal spans a very large array of weaponry from ultra-sophisticated hypersonic precision-guided missiles, world’s most effective air-defense complexes and cheap but deadly drones, to the basic stuff like field artillery and ample ammunition to keep it firing 24/7 for months on end. At the same time, the United States and NATO still rely on legacy weapons systems that were state-of-the art in the 1990s, but are in large part obsolete today.
Purpose-driven vs. profit-driven systems: it’s no match
In a superb and important piece of analysis referencing the recent US Department of Defense National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS), former Marine and military affairs analyst Brian Berletic dissected many of the reasons why the combined West is now clearly losing the arms race, not only against Russia but also against China. He points out the key differentiator: while Russia’s defense industry is purpose-driven, that of the West is profit-driven….
The undiagnosed malignancy
… Even as it endeavors to maintain a dominant geostrategic position in the world, Western powers have cannibalized their own capability to enforce and defend that position. The inescapable conclusion is that there is a deep, systemic flaw in the Western model of governance.
For generations, we’d all been educated to worship at the altar of private capital’s unrestrained pursuit of profit for the greatest benefit of its shareholders, as Milton Friedman argued in his 1970 essay entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits” (PDF). No other considerations can shape the development of production and distribution of goods and services in our economies, else someone will shriek, SOCIALISM! Worse, we’ve even allowed ourselves to become convinced that individuals’ unrestrained pursuit of their own interests can somehow automagically lead to the best possible outcome for the whole society.
As it turns out, those ideas were the owner class’s self-serving delusions that incubated the fatal flaw within their system, rendering it fragile and weak. The flaw has festered as an undiagnosed malignancy because it enabled the interests who own our Military Industrial Complex and other key industries (the big banks, big tech, big ag, and big pharma) to become extremely wealthy. They also became deeply entrenched in society’s power networks. As such they’ve grown and wholly resistant to any curtailment of their extraordinary privileges, even when it becomes clear that they are driving their nations to destruction….
China and Russia, the industrial production superpowers that could win a war
[bne Intellinews, via Naked Capitalism 03-03-2024]
This post is by Eric Anderson
What’s the first thing you think about when you hear the word club? Does it bring to mind a night out dancing with your friends? A day behind a fancy gate wining and dining between rounds of golf? Perhaps getting together with friends to play chess, or cards, watching birds, or exploring nature? Or, does it bring to mind something entirely different — such as bashing your enemy over the head?
The comedian George Carlin wryly observed that the elite are “… one big club, and you’re not in it.” Were Carlin to better understand the nature of clubs he might have more accurately stated “it’s one big club, and you’re not swinging it.” Carlin’s predecessor Groucho Marx understood, once stating “I got a good mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it.” What the elite have always known, and the left tragically fails to understand, is that “club” means power.
Originally used in the violent sense, the word club originated c. 1200 from the old Norse klubbe, as in cudgel. The word’s transition from connotations of violence, to ease, is fascinating. As any wildlife biologist knows, humans are by far the most violent species. Most animals displace aggression by use of elaborate dominance rituals, that while serving to measure the species’ fitness to reproduce, or defend territory, rarely result in death.
And while humans are the least skilled at this adaptive ritual capacity, forms of it have evolved. Sports are one such outlet. And so it appears that the paradoxical use of the word as both a means of violence, and ease, evolved from this same capacity. The club, as cudgel, was used in early gatherings of individuals to play games and sports. See: the golf club. From there, it’s easy to see how the differentiation to such wildly different connotations evolved. The modern usage of the word club seems to have emerged as a means to symbolize displaced social aggression.
Clubs — in the groups of people wielding power sense of the word — serve another important function. They diffuse responsibility. As stated by Frederick Douglas, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” And, in the same speech “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.” Douglas is saying, in no uncertain terms, that when demands go unmet the only recourse is to clubs. But, using clubs is messy business. A demand, made by one moral human alone, is no demand at all.
This is because most humans are moral, and it viscerally pains us to hurt another human being. Not so with the sociopathic elite, who employ their clubs of attack dogs to beat justice bloody, while standing one-thousand feet removed from violence in their towers. Clubs allow diffusion of the pain it causes a moral human to hurt another. But, unlike the elite who can afford to pay attack dogs, among the poor “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.”
Today the elite — and their traditionally conservative constituents — appear to understand this relationship far better than their traditional leftist enemies. For example, try strolling into Davos and see if you’re not met by a human attack dog with a badge who will revel in taking a club to your head. “Good dog! Here’s your promotion. Now, heel. Sit. Good dog.” So too, the elite’s conservative constituency understand that “club” means the power to smash your enemy over the head. Witness a sample of right-wing clubs having no qualms about using the club to achieve power: the Ku Klux Clan, NRA, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Stormfront, Constitutional Sheriff’s Association, Three Percent, Redoubt Movement, Patriot Front, Family Research Council, Atomwaffen Division, and virtually every fundamentalist religious organization one chooses to identify.
The list on the left is not nearly so extensive. Witness: Antifa. Wait, WHAT? How is this working out for leftists? Not so well.
There was a time in the U.S. when the left did understand the relationship between clubs and power. We called those clubs Unions. The reasons behind the erosion of Union power are numerous, but this discussion must include the fact that their vision was not large enough. Union vision was limited to jobs. Those clubs failed to threaten to use the club on those elite who sold America’s soul to the foreign bidder offering the lowest wages. They failed to use their power on politicians and capitalists. Then, when the jobs were gone, so too were the clubs. The left was left powerless, and remains so. In America, the left go clubbing to dance. The right goes clubbing for dominance.
One billion theoretical leftists using the tools of their elite internet masters, remain alone in practice – myself included. As it stands, we remain like those described by Thoreau, as “a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Leftists desperately need new clubs, on the ground, that are willing to use clubs to effectively strike at the roots of power, or the perpetual slide down the slope of fascism will continue. It’s past time all those identifying as leftists join clubs, and courageously set about beating the elite over the head with them.
My next installment will discuss a model to begin rebuilding the grassroots clubs necessary to take power.
Do as thou will, so long as you increase biodiversity and biomass, reduce pollution and heat, and replace any resources used.
Want to live in the howling wilderness? OK. But only if you can increase the number and amount of lifeforms, and reduce pollution by being there. If you can’t do all three, you don’t get to live in the wilderness.
Freedom today is based on money. If you have enough money, you can do what you want, if you obey the law. The more money you have, the fewer laws apply to you: either they are laws which if violated are punished with fines, which you don’t care about, or they are laws which are effectively not enforced against the rich.
The Green Age, instead of having a zero tolerance policy for minor infractions, will have no tolerance for people who damage the ecosphere or the climate.
Likewise, you will need to replace the resources you’re using if you’re using them beyond any natural replacement rate. If you’re taking water from a river or an aquifer, you’ll have an amount you can use that is equal to natural replenishment. If you use any more, you’ll need to replace it. Chop trees, plant them, and since you also need to maintain biomass and biodiversity, that won’t mean tree farms and will require you to keep doing it and, most likely, to have done it in the past. (This will make clear-cutting very rare.)
This also means that you don’t get to do what you want if you use non-renewable resources. Mining and other forms of permanent extraction will be something that society has a strict limit on. Much will be assigned by government, and much will likely be divided and given to each member of society and when they buy something which uses a non-renewable resource, that account will be debited, with no credit except in life-saving emergencies.
The principle is simple: replace what you use if it can be replaced, make the ecology and the environment better because of your existence and use limited amounts of non-renewable resources. This is how we fix the environment and make an environment is healthier and far more enjoyable to live in. (Just as almost everyone wants to live on a street with lots of trees.)
Long term, if you want to use a lot of non-renewable resources, we will have to go into space, but taking masses from Earth will be verboeten.
These rules will apply to individuals and groups, including whatever replaces corporations as our primary private economic vehicle and to households. This will lead to the end of suburbs and exurbs as we know them. Most people will either be rural (working on food production and environmental projects) or will live in dense cities. If we want the privilege of living in low population density areas, we will have to earn it by figuring out how to do so in a way that doesn’t decrease biodiversity, biomass or renewable resources, and instead of those who make more money being allowed to do more, those who will be allowed to do more will be those who increase those environmental variables the most.
This is only the first of the Green Age articles, we’ll dive into the rest of the principles and some of the details of how such a society must be run as the series continues.
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As usual, just some links with takes. I bookmark more than I can write articles on, and some things aren’t worth a full article but are still worthy of comment.
Note: There is one article on Long Covid and vaccines. No vax comments will be allowed thru. If you want to talk about that, comment in the last open thread and link. Otherwise the comments will be swamped by anti-vax.
Swedish Unions Taking On Tesla. What’s important isn’t the direct strike, it’s that sympathy strikes are legal in Sweden. That explains much of the decline of unions in other countries, and that they have stayed strong in Sweden.
The Tesla strike has attracted secondary action from eight other unions and is threatening to spread to neighbouring Norway
Since that article, more unions have indeed started sympathy strikes. As for Musk, he’s virulently anti-union, and needs to be broken
The Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC) could shut down anywhere from 2025 to 2075. Consequences?
In their model of the AMOC, London cools by an average of 18°F and Bergen, Norway by 27°F…
… Sea levels in the Atlantic would rise by a meter in some regions, inundating many coastal cities. The wet and dry seasons in the Amazon would flip, potentially pushing the already weakened rain forest past its own tipping point…
…it will severely disrupt the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America, and West Africa. It will increase storms and lower temperatures in Europe.
Long term readers will know that I have been particularly concerned with changes in rainfall patterns and the end of monsoons.
Vaccination appears to lower prevalence of Long Covid:
A new study based on 4,605 participants in the Michigan COVID-19 Recovery Surveillance Study shows that the prevalence of long COVID symptoms at 30 and 90 days post-infection was 43% to 58% lower among adults who were fully vaccinated before infection.
This does not mean that vaccines may not also cause harm, calm down anti-vaxxers (and remember, no comments on anti-vax in this thread, put them in the open thread.)
Economic Damage to Israel As Of Late February:
Tourism in Israel decreased by 70-75%, 7% of citizens became internally displaced and 14% of dual citizens left the occupied territories.
Not precisely a surprise, and the internal displacement quantifies the damage Hezbollah is doing: that’s almost all from the norther settlements they are shelling and hitting with missiles.
How Much Damage Can Hezbollah Do To Israel In A War?
Well, according to Israel’s Haaretz (screen shot since they are subscription gated):
I’ve been saying this for a long time, but it’s good to put numbers to it. To go further, this means Israel will be hit as hard as Lebanon. Hezbollah has been very clear about this: if Israel bombs Lebanon indiscriminantly, Hezbollah will destroy as much of Israel as it can.
It should also be noted that Israel needs airfields, and they can be targeted by Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s missiles, on the other hand, are much harder to find and destroy.
Apparently China has rest station for delivery and sanitation workers.
This is interesting, because a couple years ago Beijing cracked down on abuse of delivery workers, forcing the delivery firms to increase wages and improve conditions. But apparently they didn’t just do that, the government stepped in to help them directly.
It’s both gladdening and dismaying to see that China can and will do things like this, and we don’t. Anyway, the thread is worth reading. Please do.
Understanding Chinese Ship and Naval Build Capacity
This is one shipbuilding yard in Shanghai in 2019. The Chinese are building one carrier and six destroyers simultaneously.
For comparison, that is equivalent to the French navy. Not equivalent to French naval construction, but to the main part of the French surface fleet. pic.twitter.com/oH1cCHhtuQ
— Accidental Tokyoite (@Wilfrie77917027) March 4, 2024
Not much to say. The Japan analogy is excellent. The US has, in many ways, a great military. But they can’t replace losses or even manufacture enough ammunition.
I made this criticism for the first time in the 90s, with regards to smart munitions. All very nice, but in a real war the US would soon be using dumb munitions. Nowadays, the US and NATO can’t even make enough dumb munitions to fight a real war.
It’s an oversimplification to say that oil sanctions on Russia had no effect. It’s not just about price, but quantity and a lot of price is determined in bulk deals. The Chinese did not pay Russia well for their bulk deal. Still, it’s clear that anti-Russia oil sanctions haven’t done what their creators hoped:
And that concluded Quick Takes, though I’ve still got a lot of saved articles, so there may be another one soon.
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by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Amitav Ghosh’s Reckoning With Opium.
Alexander Zaitchik, March 1, 2024 [The New Republic]
His new book, Smoke and Ashes, traces the ravages of British opium on India from the eighteenth century to the present.
[TW: I April 2016 I posted an excerpt from Commerce, Christianity, and Civilization, Versus British Free Trade. Letters in Reply to the London Times, by Henry C. Carey. Philadelphia, Collins, 1876. Though Carey today is rarely mentioned in economics textbooks, he was the leading USA economist of the mid-nineteenth century, a staunch protectionist who was probably the single greatest proponent of what was then called the American School of Political Economy.
[American protectionism was much more than simply a rejection of the concept of comparative advantage. Michael Hudson explains in the Preface to his 2010 book America’s Protectionist Takeoff: The Neglected American School of Political Economy:
The protectionist doctrine that shaped America’s industry and agriculture… went beyond the narrow boundaries of today’s economics discipline by deeming public policy and technology central to economic theorizing, not “exogenous.” Analyzing what was needed to increase productivity, the American School emphasized that wages and prices had to be high enough to sustain rising living and educational standards for labor, and investment in rising energy mobilization by capital.”
[But the American School even went beyond that. Carey and other American School economists always kept in view the ultimate goal of economic policies: the establishment and enhancement of civilization. And unlike the competing British School of Adams, Ricardo, and Mill, a central element of the American School was morality. Note the heavy tone of scorn and sarcasm Carey uses in his fifth letter to the editors of the Times of London, as he reviews and condemns the British opium trade and its disastrous consequences for China. -TW]
Japan’s new births fall to record low as demographic woes worsen
[ABC Australia, via Naked Capitalism 02-28-2024]
Power in the shadows
CIA, Ukraine Exchange Pre-Divorce Propaganda
Matt Taibbi, via Naked Capitalism 02-28-2024] Important
The CIA in Ukraine — The NY Times Gets a Guided Tour
[ScheerPost, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2024]
In fact, no evidence of even a single rape.
I noted, repeatedly, that I doubted these rape claims and was correct, as usual.
Now if you believed them you need to think very carefully about why. Every war always includes reports of fake atrocities and this is especially true at the start of the war, in order to gin up support. My “favorite” is that when Iraq invaded Kuwait, we were told that Iraqi soldiers were bayoneting babies in incubators.
Never happened.
Note that the primary purveyor of the mass rape claims was the New York Times, who also were the primary purveyors of fake nuclear weapon scares in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
The New York times is Hasbara from the top, intensely dedicated to Israel and the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing and genocide. I cannot recall any war it didn’t support. It also has a record of intensely political editorial decisions: for example in the 2004 election it decided not to publish revelations of mass spying on American citizens, against the law, because it would effect the election (hurt Bush, help the Democratic candidate.)
If you believe the New York Times without running what they claim thru a common sense filter (do they have reason to lie about this or to twist it?) you’re a fool. This applies to the media in general.
The fact is that whatever you think of Hamas, they were first elected because they had a reputation for incorruptability, as opposed to the PLO, which had becoming a sewer of corruption as well as servants of the Israeli state. They have no record of using rape as a weapon, none, and no reason to mass rape. We even had eye-witness reports from Israelis that they had treated women well, from October 7th and 8th.
There was a possibility that a few rapes had occurred, but even that turns out to not be true.
If you fell for it originally, you should have become suspicious quickly, because there was so little evidence. Haaretz noted that they couldn’t find any hospital admittances, there was no flood of claims (which there would have been) and so on. There was virtually no evidence to back up a very few claims from extremely biased sources.
If you trust the media, you are a fool. That’s understandable. You were brought up to think that authority figures were trustworthy (even though they’re the ones who do almost all the harm in the world). But at some point you have to grow up and notice that the much of the media is your enemy, just like most corporations, rich people and governments. They want your support, they want to take as much from you as they can, and they want to use you for their purposes and most of them don’t care how much you are hurt as a result.
Don’t be a fool.
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So, the American military can’t make its enlistment quotas:
According to widely-reported leaks the US Army missed its recruiting target by an enormous amount in FY23 and will shrink by some 24,000 people going into 2024 – over 5% of its end strength. Apparently most of the positions being cut are already empty.
It’s no mystery why this is happening – most of the recruiting crisis is attributable to a catastrophic drop in accessions among white men. This is a huge demographic which disproportionately seeks to join the combat arms, so the impact to the Army’s combat power is disproportionately large even in comparison to those bleak numbers.
The usual explanation given for this is the one given at the link: it’s primarily about woke politics.
I’ve spent some time hanging around where US veterans talk, and there’s something to it. The people who aren’t enlisting seem to be disproportionately the children of previous veterans: those veterans used to encourage their children to enlist, now they are telling them not to. These are often families where members have served for generations.
But it’s not all culture war, and I’m not sure it’s even primarily culture war: complaints about under-pay, terrible base housing (including black mold) and forever-war abound. The only really good thing the army has going it for it now is that it still pays for college— or that’s the consensus. And enlistment issues were developing under Trump, even before Biden, it’s not primarily a partisan issue.
None of these problems can be easily fixed. The US military budget is already huge, but raising pay would require paying less for equipment and to contractors, and that’s how politicians, important donors and ex-generals get rich. Fixing bases might be slightly easier, since it can be done by contractors, but it’s not as high return to the political donor class as vastly over-priced equipment and shitty weapons. As for Forever War, well, the neoliberal and neoconservative factions are united in support.
There are two obvious solutions. The first is a draft and there has been floating of the idea. I think it will happen. Among the veterans and military hangers-on there’s a lot of doubt about it for a variety of reasons. It would require the army to organize to work with a draft, among other things, but one criticism is that it would be hard to enforce the draft because America is full of dangerous men with lots of guns and seizing people off the street the way the Ukrainians do wouldn’t go well.
I tend to agree, but that’s not how it will be done. Instead, if you don’t report, they’ll freeze all your accounts and forbid all financial institutions, including credit card companies, paypal and crypto exchanges from doing any business with you, including transferring money or even cashing endorsed checks (though checks are barely a thing any more.)
If your family aids and abets you, well, the same thing can be done to them.
This was pioneered en-masse during the Canadian truckers protest. I didn’t like the protest, but the way it was shut down was absolute totalitarian garbage. It worked, though. People can’t survive without money in this economy, and the cash economy is miniscule. Back in the late 80s I lived in it for a while, and it was easily do-able with very minor sacrifices, at least at the lower-class level. Tons of businesses would accept endorsed checks and checks were the main way wages were paid, for example. Landlords would take cash and didn’t sneer at it, nor did they check your credit rating. Full time jobs even existed which would pay in cash, and tons of part time jobs and casual labor paid cash, plus every business accepted it.
Now, not so much. No need to go into details, we all live in our near-post-cash shitty economy.
The reduction of the cash economy is the hall mark off all semi-totalitarian systems: systems which want to enforce how you spend your money and how you get paid. Much as I like them in other ways, this includes Scandinavian systems and much of Europe. Almost the first thing Modi in India did was remove all large bills from circulation, this was part of his authoritarian bent, and was economically disastrous.
Paper cash is freedom. Centralized electronic exchange is tyranny. As with all tyranny, it’s great for strop crime, but “crime” is defined by politicians and judges owned by oligarchs. Not sending your child to die for your country? Crime.
Now the second way around this is still not quite possible, but it will be very soon: autonomous killer robots. I remember reading that in the invasion of Armenia some people were killed by them, but they’ll soon be mainline because they are resistant to jamming and they don’t require operators.
Internally this is great: you don’t have the “will they fire?” issue that troops and even cops sometimes have when faced with dissent. All you need is techies to maintain and program them and someone to give the orders, none of whom have to be right there doing the killed and hearing the screams of the people they’re killing, right up and personal. Plus there’ll be lots of profit opportunities for the oligarch class, retired generals and politicians and their families.
Externally it’s great too. Who cares if your population won’t sign up for forever war killing gooks who never did anything to you?
Welcome to the future of war. Join the military or starve, and, increasingly, be killed by a robot.
(This will be a brief era, though it will seem long to live thru. Civilization collapse will deal with it, though not as fast as we’d like. Now that they’re perfected, drones/robots are not that hard to build. Rescue from them will probably require collapse of the semiconductor or battery industry.)
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