[The Onion, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-25-2023]
“‘It is resolved by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives that any American whose wealth exceeds $1 million shall be white,’ read the bipartisan legislation, which went on to state that citizens who were dissatisfied with the race they were assigned under the new criteria would be ‘free to pull themselves up by their bootstraps” in order to reach a racial category of greater privilege. ‘Now, regardless of the color of their skin, those who are rich will receive all the rights a wealthy person is entitled to in this country. Meanwhile, those with a net worth in the six figures, though they cannot be white, will still qualify as Asian, with the social scale moving downward from there to Latino and Black. This should go a long way toward making our racial stereotypes as accurate as possible.’ In an attempt to deal a final blow to the complications of intersectionality, Congress was reportedly taking up additional legislation to ensure everyone earning above the median income level was classified as a man, and everyone below it as a woman.”
It was in 2018 that Vladimir Putin took the stage to present Russia’s new hypersonic weapons. The term “hypersonic” refers to missiles that fly at speeds of 5 mach and higher. At the time, many in the west dismissed Putin’s claims and thought it was a bluff. We now know that he wasn’t bluffing. Russia is the only country in the world that has deployment-ready hypersonic missiles – not one but three types: Zircons, Kinzhals and Avantguards.…
Russia’s new Kinzhal missile flies at speeds of mach 12 to mach 15 and nothing in western defensive arsenals can stop its strike. During the war in Ukraine, Russia staged a stunning demonstration of its power. The first Kinzhal strike, delivered one month after the beginning of hostilities in Ukraine, was perhaps the most significant: Russian forces targeted a large weapons depot in Ukraine which had been built during the Soviet times to withstand a nuclear strike. It was buried 170 meters (over 500 ft) underground and protected by several layers of armored concrete.
The Kinzhal flies at altitudes of between 20 and 40 km, with a maximum range of 2,000 km. When above target, it dives perpendicularly and accelerates to 15 mach, generating enormous kinetic energy in addition to its explosive payload. That first strike with a single Kinzhal missile destroyed Ukraine’s nuke-proof underground weapons depot. This was a message for the west.
The Kinzhal was developed with the express purpose of destroying aircraft carrier strike groups…
According to Admiral Domazet, neither the western powers nor China are anywhere near having weapons like that. He explained that the critical issue with hypersonic weapons are the extreme temperatures reached during hypersonic flights on the surface of missiles, which can cause them to break apart mid-flight. Russia is the only nation that has developed special materials that enable the missiles to withstand this stress, so their flight can be controlled throughout its trajectory and delivered with pinpoint accuracy.
Western intelligence estimated that Russia had some 50 Kinzhals at the start of the war in Ukraine, and thus far it has used only 9 of them. Last week, they fired six Kinzhals in a single salvo. That too, was a message. Here’s how Domazet explained it: United States have 11 aircraft carrier strike groups. Of these, fewer than half will be active at any one time (while others are in dock for maintenance, or in preparation). Firing six Kinzhals in one go is military-speak for, “we have the capability to sink ALL of your aircraft carriers at once.”
Something which has slipped past most people’s radar is that China recently acted as the intermediary for peace talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The two countries have been at each other’s throats for decades, funding and running operations and proxies against each other….
Now it’s obvious why the US couldn’t be involved: it hates Iran and doesn’t intend to change that any time soon. But that China was reached out to indicates that it has good relationships with Iran and Saudi Arabia and that it’s considered powerful and prestigious enough to be involved a region far from its core.
On the Saudi side this shows the continued movement away from being a US ally. It suggests continued movement towards China, and that the petro-dollar really is under significant threat.
For Iran, it suggests that the days of the US being able to coordinate sanctions over it are likely numbered. If the Sauds break out of the US bloc, one can expect the Gulf States to follow if Iran is also in the Chinese bloc: these are the regional and cultural great powers. As Chinese/Russian payments expand and with petrochemicals priced in Yuan or Rubles, and with the most important Middle Eastern powers friendly to China, the US is reduced to its core allies.
Ever since it pushed aside colonial Britain and France, the United States has prided itself on being the dominant outside power in the Middle East. That lofty image was shaken this past week by the surprise announcement that Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. partner, and Iran, a longtime enemy, had negotiated a normalization agreement on their own to restore diplomatic ties. The final meeting to conclude the agreement took place in the Chinese capital of Beijing.
Chengfan Zhao [Rail Freight, via Mike Norman Economics 3-18-2023]
Linking Moscow and Beijing is of symbolic value, but the symbolism says a lot. The big news is that Sino-Russia trade is increasing and it is not just energy that formerly went to Europe heading East. China as “the factory of the world” is now supplying Russia directly with its output, further eroding the effect of sanctions. And the trade is being settled in RIB and CYN.
…It’s also not considered polite to point out that the activities of the Palo Alto ecosystem are in aggregate extractive. Start with the venture capital funds themselves. We’ve pointed out that private equity has not beaten the S&P 500 since 2006. The underperformance of VC is longer-standing, since the dot-com glory returns rolled off. And the positive side of that ledger came from a tiny number of companies delivering moonshot returns.
[The Nation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-10-2023]
Your background is different from the typical presidential candidate. You’ve run for office before, but you’ve gained notoriety as someone who helps people explore their experiences, often from a spiritual perspective. Do you see that as a challenge or an advantage?
[WILLIAMSON]: It is key to my strength here and I’ll tell you why: I have dealt in my 40-year career with helping people both endure crises, and transform them. That is exactly what this country needs now: someone who can help us both endure and transform the trauma of these times. The chaos is external, but the trauma created by the chaos is internal. Secondly, because of my experience with all kinds of personality types and all kinds of people, I have a deep understanding of what a sociopath is. A sociopath is someone who simply doesn’t care.… It is because of that that I recognize as deeply as I do that an economic system—namely hyper-capitalism, namely neoliberalism—has at its root a deep spiritual darkness. It does not care. It is a sociopathic economic system that prioritizes short-term profit maximization for these huge corporate entities. It is a destructive force. And the political establishment, at its best right now, only tries to stave off its worst aspects. That’s what corporatist Democrats do. They recognize the disease to some extent, and they try to help people survive it. But they refuse to challenge the underlying corporate forces that make the return of all that pain and all that trauma inevitable.
According to public opinion, the U.S. is seemingly in a semi-permanent recession, and the Fed has failed to improve matters….
In reality, the economy is hot, unemployment is at record lows, and there’s no sign of a downturn any time soon.
[TW: Not sure if it’s stupidity or cupidity, but it remains astonishing how many journalists, academicians, politicians, and other elites continue to cling to national income accounting that clearly no longer captures what is actually happening in the economy. There can’t be a stronger signal that our economic statistical tools are misleading at best, useless at worst, than collapsing life expectancy.
Furthermore, if you reject the doctrine of mainstream classical neoliberal economics that there is no place for normative judgement and policy preferences in economics, you can easily see that world industrial productions needs to be vastly increased if we are to meet the challenges of climate change and environmental destruction. The rub, of course, is that this increase in industrial production must not occur under the reigning doctrine of “economic efficiency” as measured by lowest “price,” but by full and unhesitating investment in complete environmental protection and remediation, including, for example, designing for disassembly and recycling. [See Jon Larson’s Elegant Technology: Economic Prosperity from and Environmental Blueprint.]
From this perspective, we need at least an order of magnitude increase in electric vehicle sales and manufacturing, while ceasing entirely manufacture of internal combustion engine vehicles.
[TW: Sorry this week’s wrap is light. I was in the hospital overnight for a medical procedure and my energy has been sapped. I’m tired and sore, but otherwise fine.]
“Use the sliders to select the UV index, temperature and relative humidity of interest. Information on how long SARS-CoV-2 would be expected to remain stable in aerosols (airborne) will be displayed in the table below. Users can find the environmental conditions for a specific location by accessing general weather resources online.”
In an interview with an Israeli outlet (vid), former prime minister of Israel Naftali Bennett, who was personally deeply involved in the negotiation process, also alleged that the ‘West’ blocked them:
“Reports at the time reflect Bennet’s comments and said Russia and Ukraine were softening their positions. Citing Israeli officials, Axios reported on March 8 that Putin’s “proposal is difficult for Zelensky to accept but not as extreme as they anticipated. They said the proposal doesn’t include regime change in Kyiv and allows Ukraine to keep its sovereignty.”
“Discussing how Western leaders felt about his mediation efforts, Bennett said then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson took an “aggressive line” while French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were more “pragmatic.” Bennett said President Biden adopted “both” positions.
“But ultimately, the Western leaders opposed Bennet’s efforts. “I’ll say this in the broad sense. I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin and not [negotiate],” Bennett said.
“When asked if the Western powers “blocked” the mediation efforts, Bennet said,
“ “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”
The State Duma has just approved a law sent to it by the President declaring the suspension of Russian participation in the New Start treaty. There is now no remaining convention limiting the nuclear arsenals of the nuclear superpowers.
The constellation of treaties that was developed starting in the 1970s was important not only for setting down numbers and kinds of systems that were permitted to the signatories. Still more important were the verification procedures which were ongoing. They involved regular meetings of high officials from both sides and served to establish some kind of mutual respect and trust. As I noted from the opening remarks of Vladimir Putin in his address, there is now zero mutual trust and the guard rails protecting us from nuclear holocaust have been removed.
[Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, via Naked Capitalism 2-24-2023]
Putin’s state of the nation address effectively suggests that in the growing confrontation with the West, Russia will rely on one sole argument: the nuclear option. In this respect, suspending the New START treaty also sends a warning to non-Western countries of the consequences for the entire world of the West’s anti-Russian policies. Moscow is presenting the global community with a choice between Russia or descending into a nuclear disaster.
“Absolute crickets. That is the sound in the major mainstream media — both foreign and domestic — following the charges by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that the United States led a covert operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022…. Second, they point to what appears to be “single sourcing” in Hersh’s Substack report (though he is much more ambiguous about this in his interview with Radio War Nerd this week). Additionally, Twitter and Substack sleuths, using OSINT (open source intelligence,) say they’ve found holes in the details (like the class of minesweeper ship involved and where it was located the day Hersh claims the explosives were planted) that cast doubt on his entire story. But the questions raised about Hersh and his reporting (appropriate or not) do not explain the lack of mainstream coverage of his extremely detailed, 5300-word article, which under any other circumstances should have opened the floodgates of journalistic inquiry. … Media critic, author, and podcaster Robert Wright suggests the media blackout is part of an ongoing trend of one-sided and incurious Ukraine War coverage. He pointed to explosive, yet little-reported claims by former Israeli prime minister Neftali Bennett earlier this month that the West had killed a tentative peace deal between Russia and Ukraine last March. ‘In some ways I think MSM’s more or less ignoring Naftali Bennett’s comments on aborted early-March Ukraine negotiations is even less excusable than ignoring the Hersh story,’ Wright said in an email exchange with RS. ‘MSM can always say Hersh is now just a freelancer and was relying basically on a single anonymous source, etc — but Bennett is an eyewitness to what he’s describing, and he’s the former prime minister of Israel!’”
[Military Watch Headlines, via Mike Norman Economics 2-15-2023]
On February 14 a high ranking NATO source, cited by Bloomberg, warned that NATO members were preparing plans for the alliance to involve itself in multiple conflicts simultaneously – including conflicts beyond its traditional areas of responsibility. During meetings in Brussels on February 14-15 NATO Defence Ministers will sign a classified guidebook containing plans of action for “high intensity” conflicts and conflicts “beyond the area of responsibility” of the alliance, which will include requirements for NATO members’ military investments. Members will additionally be directed to redirect investments to the sectors seen as most important for collective security – whether it be tank forces or missile defences – to strengthen the military bloc’s collective warfighting capabilities. The report comes as NATO members have not only increasingly involved themselves in the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian War, whether by dispatching hundreds of Marines to the battlefield as in Britain’s case, or providing even larger personnel contributions through private military contractor groups as was done by Poland among others. As Western intervention in the conflict has continued to increase, NATO members have also expanded their military footprints in the East Asia aimed at China – most recently in the form of aerial warfare drills involving the U.S., Britain and Australia.…
“The West is unprepared for everything all at once…. Well, at least that is what Rep. Mike Gallagher along with a team of academics and generals had to imagine when they poured over what looked like the most complicated “Risk” board ever assembled. It was only a war game, an exercise hosted last May by the Center for a New American Security…. If the U.S. and China go to war, the Wisconsin Republican said in a ‘Meet the Press’ interview, ‘a lot of people are going to lose their lives.’ The lesson: ‘We want deterrence to actually work.’ That is also the mission statement, in so many words, of the House Select Committee on China which Gallagher now chairs, a mammoth undertaking to examine not just the military risk but also the ideological and economic threats presented by the Chinese Communist Party. It is serious business. And Gallagher, a 38-year-old former U.S. Marine, is a serious man. Everyone says so. There is a feeling in Congress that the effort might just rise above the normal self-importance of Capitol Hill. ‘The word ‘serious’ has been tossed around about this committee because that’s the desire,’ said Rep. Mikie Sherrill. Confronting an existential threat, the New Jersey Democrat told RealClearPolitics, shouldn’t be something members ‘do for personal edification or partisan means.’ And that’s what had Gallagher ‘worried’ when he pulled her aside. The two have served on committees together, and they teamed up in the CNAS war game. A U.S. Navy pilot before entering politics, Sherrill said during that exercise she appreciated the Marine’s ‘knowledge of ground operations.’ His question on the House floor, between votes earlier this year, didn’t have to do with tactics or grand strategy. Who would the Democrats seat on his committee?”
Rebecca Burns & Julia Rock, February 16, 2023 [The Lever]
In the case against Norfolk Southern, the Biden administration is siding with the railroad in its conflict with a cancer-stricken former rail worker. A high court ruling for Norfolk Southern could create a national precedent limiting where workers and consumers can bring cases against corporations.
The lawsuit in question, filed initially in a Pennsylvania county court in 2017, deals with a state law that permits plaintiffs to file suit against any corporation registered to do business there, even if the actions that gave rise to the case occurred elsewhere.
In its fight against the lawsuit, Norfolk Southern is asking the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court ruling, overturn Pennsylvania’s law, and restrict where corporations can be sued, upending centuries of precedent….
If the court rules in favor of Norfolk Southern, it could overturn plaintiff-friendly laws on the books in states including Pennsylvania, New York, and Georgia that give workers and consumers more leeway to choose where they take corporations to court — an advantage national corporations already enjoy, as they often require customers and employees to agree to file litigation in specific locales whose laws make it harder to hold companies accountable.
The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center…. has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades….
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning….
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
[Washington Examiner, via Naked Capitalism, 2-10-2023]
Hersh’s story — all 5,000-plus words of it — is based entirely on a lone anonymous source “with direct knowledge of the operational planning.” That’s it. Hersh supplies no further evidence proving unequivocally the United States planned and executed what would be rightly viewed as an “act of war.”
Michael: Well the whole purpose of the war is economic, but it’s not economic just about Ukraine and the winners and losers of the United States and Europe.
President Biden has said this is a ten- or a twenty-year war, and it’s [a war] for what kind of economy [the world is] going to have.
Is it going to be a finance-based neoliberal rentier economy centered in the United States, with the United States controlling all of the monopoly rents:….
Radhika: …if you look at a map of the world, of all the countries in the world that are imposing sanctions on Russia [and] supplying arms to Ukraine — what you see is essentially the core of world capitalism as it was in 1914, with a few little additions — very tiny, very insignificant, not very economically important [additions].
Whereas the entire rest of the world is going in the other direction, and the divide between this “West” and “the rest” is growing precisely in the ways that Michael is saying.
The West [has basically been] in a long-term trend of decline, but the Western leaders have continued to pursue the policies that are responsible for the decline, because even though [those policies] are not good for the economy, they are great for the monopoly financialized corporations of the West which, as Michael says, have become more and more reliant on rentier income — on rent and interest — rather than profits from production….
Remember, all the major European countries know who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. [They know] that the United States is so ruthless in its efforts to achieve the goals that Michael just outlined that they are willing to go as far as actually blow up a [so-called] friendly country’s infrastructure. So that’s what you’re looking at….
…recently there has been a Rand Corporation report — the Rand Corporation being very close to the U.S. administration— which has been interpreted in very different ways. The warmongers say [that] the Rand Corporation says, we have to continue this war and intensify it and prolong it and so on. Others are saying it means something completely different
So I think that what we have to realize is that the U.S. is trying to achieve a whole range of conflicting objectives. I think one [objective] is obviously to try and retain its purchase on world affairs, [and] try and retain its dominance on world affairs. It’s not succeeding but that’s what the effort is about.
At the same time the US is also trying to profit. The military-industrial complex is profiting. It’s making money hand over fist. Not only right now, but we should watch the coming U.S. budget. Basically it looks as though the Pentagon and associated interests are going to use the Ukraine war as a way of essentially increasing the contracts being given to the five major U.S corporations [which have dominated] over the 20 years or 30 years since the end of the Cold War.
What used to be dozens and dozens of military suppliers have become condensed into five. You can imagine if there are only five, they find it very easy to talk to the American government. They are making money, [and] they are going to take long term contracts under the guise of — Obviously people like them want to prolong the Ukraine war.
But there are also a whole bunch of other things. For example, we are being told [that] the United States is “aiding Ukraine.” And in order to aid Ukraine the United States has passed a new version of the Lend-Lease Act through which it had “aided” European countries during the [Second] World War. But if you look more closely at the Lend-Lease Act, what you see very clearly is the opposite of that.
Most people, when they hear the word “aid,” they think that the United States is giving money to Ukraine. It’s not giving money to Ukraine. If you look at this text of the [Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022] that was passed and look at clause 3, it says very clearly,
“(3) CONDITION.—Any loan or lease of defense articles to the Government of Ukraine under paragraph (1) shall be subject to all applicable laws concerning the return of and reimbursement and repayment for defense articles loaned or leased to foreign governments.”
Ukraine is going to have to pay for this….
The United States is also sending two kinds of weapons. Number one: obsolete weapons that it needs to get rid of anyway. This way it gets to make money out of assets that they would have had to write off otherwise. [Number two:] it wants to send those weapons which its military industrial complex corporations want to have tested in “battle conditions.”
Benjamin Selwyn [Developing Economics, via Mike Norman Economics, February 10, 2023]
Sen’s 1981 book Poverty and Famines was an essential intervention into the political economy of famine and the analysis and alleviation of hunger. Born in 1933, the economist grew up in British-controlled India and experienced firsthand the 1943 Bengal famine, in which at least three million people perished.
Dominant explanations of the Bengal famine as well as other famines and episodes of widespread hunger resort to food availability decline (FAD) arguments. Simply put, they argue that there were too many mouths to feed.Sen’s 1981 book Poverty and Famines was an essential intervention into the political economy of famine.
By contrast, Sen showed how in a series of cases, from Bengal in the 1940s to the Bangladesh famine of 1974, food was available at the time — often in higher quantities than during non-famine periods. Crucially, it was not the absolute volume of food that determined whether people died or lived, but the capitalist price mechanism.
Sen demonstrated that the Bengal famine was caused by rapid price inflation rather than crop failure. British military and civil construction investments, including air strips, barracks, munitions, and clothing for soldiers and civilians, fueled such inflation. It pushed up food prices in relation to agricultural wages, leaving agricultural laborers unable to afford food….
Sen’s arguments in Poverty and Famines were a necessary counterargument to the mainstream apologetics for mass hunger. Such arguments often ended up blaming the poor themselves for being too numerous, conveniently obscuring how the capitalist economy continually reproduces poverty.Despite his perspicacity, even Sen himself underestimated the deliberately manufactured causes of the Bengal famine.
However, more recent scholarship has shown that despite his perspicacity, even Sen himself underestimated the deliberately manufactured causes of the Bengal famine. His analysis is thus incomplete as an explanation for the persistence of global hunger.
Indian academic Utsa Patnaik’s study of the Bengal famine demonstrates how the price inflation in Bengal represented a deliberate British policy. This policy was recommended by none other than the famed liberal political economist John Maynard Keynes.
In the context of the UK’s wartime crisis, Keynes advocated “profit inflation” to achieve a “forced transference of purchasing power” from the mass of the population to the British exchequer. Military investments in Bengal were to be paid for by printing money, without regard for their impact upon the poor of the region.
The increased money supply pushed up prices, benefiting the region’s capitalists who were then taxed in turn by the colonial state. The state used these funds to raise its military investments in India itself while siphoning off surplus funds to the UK exchequer to finance its European war effort.
“Without deliberate state policy of curtailing mass consumption, over £1,600 million of extra resources could not have been extracted from Indians during the war, with the bulk of this enormous burden falling on the population of Bengal since the Allied forces were located in and operated from that province. The state policy was to induce a very rapid profit inflation which redistributed incomes away from the working population, towards capitalists and companies, which were then taxed.”
….At present, the world already produces 1.5 times the amount necessary to feed everyone on the planet — indeed, it produces enough to feed even a population as high as ten billion by 2050.The problem of world hunger is not insufficient food but rather the poverty and unequal power relations that are intrinsic to capitalism.
The problem of world hunger now, as in the cases analyzed by Sen, is not insufficient food but rather the poverty and unequal power relations that are intrinsic to capitalism. The world’s poor simply do not have the money to pay for the food they need to live healthy lives….
[Brave New World, via Mike Norman Economics 1-5-2023]
There are at least five major theories about the current geopolitics. The first three are variants of the Hegemonic Stability Theory; the fourth is the important school of international realism. The fifth is my preferred theory of multilateralism, based on the pre-eminent importance of global cooperation to solve pressing global problems.
The Hegemonic Stability Theory, favored by American elites in politics, government, and academia, holds that the United States remains the world’s hegemon, the sole superpower, albeit a hegemon that is challenged by a rising competitor, China, and by a lesser but nuclear-armed competitor, Russia….
In the past 30 years, three basic economic changes have transformed geopolitics. The first is that the U.S. share of global output declined from 21.0 percent in 1991 to 15.7 percent in 2021, while China’s rose from 4.3 percent in 1991 to 18.6 percent in 2021. The second is that China has overtaken the United States in total GDP and has become the leading trade partner for much of the world. The third is that the BRICS, constituting Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, have also overtaken the G7 countries in total output. In 2021, the BRICS had a combined GDP of $42.1 trillion (measured in constant 2017 international prices), compared with $41.0 trillion in the G7. In terms of combined population, the BRICS, with a 2021 population of 3.2 billion, is 4.2 times the combined population of the G7 countries, at 770 million. In short, the world economy is no longer American-dominated or Western-led. China is of comparable overall economic size to the United States, and the large middle-income countries are a counterweight to the G7 nations….
John Helmer [Dances with Bears, via Naked Capitalism 1-29-2023]
The Russian Foreign Ministry has dismissed proposals issued this week in Washington by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Under Secretary, Victoria Nuland. Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova has confirmed that Russia’s military plan for the Ukraine will not be interrupted or delayed.
“It is not necessary to talk about what will happen if someone does something [in the Ukraine],” Zakharova said. “There is a situation on the ground that we are solving. Everything. This is not a question of guesswork, but of our assessment of what is happening. This is based on the situation on the ground and direct political statements by Western politicians. Given that all negotiations have been terminated by Ukraine, this issue will be resolved on the ground. Under pressure or on its own, Kiev has banned any negotiations with Russia at the government level. So that’s it. The rest is for the military experts.”
Russia has also dismissed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as the successor of the Nazi Wehrmacht and the puppet of the US Government. Scholz, according to Zakharova, is one of the Germans who “lack[s] the spirit to make the right choice, not to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors, for which the people of Germany, among others, paid a huge price… We remember well what German tanks are. These are machines which have become a symbol, not just of death and deadly ideology, but of hatred of humanity — a global, existential threat to the entire planet…
There is nothing like facing the gun muzzles of the Germans, British and Americans to teach Russians what to do to correct their past mistakes. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) would be the last US bank in the world to admit as much.
Nor would the IMF concede that everything it bribed the Kremlin to accept, when Boris Yeltsin was president and Anatoly Chubais and Alexei Kudrin were his economic ministers, is now being reversed – at a speed unmatched since Joseph Stalin directed the relocation of heavy industry out of reach of German guns between August and December of 1941.
This time round, the IMF is reporting that after Russia recorded a 2.2% drop in real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measurement in 2022 – 35% less than the IMF had been forecasting – by 2024, the second and third years of the war, the Russian growth rate will be more than double the US, British and Japanese rates; 33% better than Germany’s; 24% better than France; 29% better than Canada.
This is the first official acknowledgement by the US and international banks that the long war against Russia is being lost.
[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 1-29-2023]
Zealous advocates of Western support for the total defeat of Russia in Ukraine — including, if necessary, direct Western intervention and NATO-Russia war — base their case on a disparate set of arguments, almost every one of which turns out on examination to be either exaggerated or wholly mistaken.
Chris Miller, Tufts professor and author of Chip War: The Fight For The World’s Most Critical Technologywalked me through a lot of this, along with some deep dives into geopolitics and the absolutely fascinating chip manufacturing process. This one has everything: foreign policy, high-powered lasers, hotshot executives, monopolies, the fundamental limits of physics, and, of course, Texas….
EUV lithography uses light at a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, an ultra-small light far smaller than the wavelength of visible light. You need really small wavelength light because the circuits you’re carving are very, very tiny; they themselves often measure just a couple of nanometers in dimension. Producing this type of light is really hard, because it’s right next to the X-ray spectrum. Production of it is complicated and the development of mirrors to reflect it is also very difficult.
