Category: Quick Takes

In Covid news:

1) CO2 levels below 540 are sufficient to stop exponential Covid spread.

2) The European Mortality Project will start using death numbers from 2020-2022 and late when calculating excess mortality. Meaning that they will make “people who died due to Covid or Covid related mortality” just part of the normal. An out of control pandemic is normal now.

Given the reduction in testing, I have no idea what current Covid death numbers really are. Last time I wrote an article a commenter kindly pointed out that the CDC’s numbers were much less than the numbers I’d posted (always check the most recent numbers, woops) and I adjusted them down, but how much of that reduction in Covid deaths is real, I just don’t know. I’m 100% sure it’s not, well, 100%, however.

We’re all just going to pretend the pandemic is over and if that means not testing and changing statistical indices to make a pandemic level of death normal, well that’s what we’re going to do.

Meanwhile, readers who were with me thru the pandemic will know I constantly said we needed filtering and ventilation. Turns out that if we’d done that, we could have ended the damn thing. What a sur…-well, ok, not a surprise. Complete common sense solution would have worked. Who would’a’thunk?

Who’s Interfering In Country’s Politics?

Every time I hear some idiot whine about Russian interference in the US I laugh my ass off, and chasing it down and bolting it back in place has significantly inmproved my fitness.

But what everyone knows is that the country that interferes the most in other countries’ politics is the US. I knew a senior aide in the Mulroney government of the 80s, and she said they confirmed that the US had the place wired for sound. Everything said in the parliament buildings, including in private ministerial officers were known to the Americans.

Anyway, the French are doing a witch hunt about foreign (read “Russian”) interference, and Francois Fillion (prime Minister from 2007 to 2012) told them the following

“Have I encountered foreign interference in my political life, and particularly when I was in government? Yes, I have encountered it. Most of the time they came from a friendly and allied country called the United States. I am not passing judgement: your commission is working on foreign interference. I am telling you that, for example, I was listened to with President Sarkozy for 5 years by the NSA. We found out when documents from the American secret services leaked, and everyone focused on the fact that the NSA was listening to Ms. Merkel, but they were also listening to all members of the French government and probably those of other European countries.”

You’d have to have a room temperature IQ and the judgment of a cabbage to think otherwise, but our journalists and pundit class are down with the requirements of their jobs.

That China Developing Country Trade Thing

So, if you were Brazil, which country would be more important to you, the US or China?

Brazil’s extreme, but the issue is simple: this sort of stuff is going on all through Africa and South America, though in most cases it’s less one sided: the Chinese sell a lot of goods. But whatever way you slice it, Chinese grade is more important than the US or the EU now to most developing countries. (France, in particular, used to be a big deal in a lot of Africa. China has eaten their lunch.)

Then we have US/Israel Blowback. It seems that when Israel decided to support Ukraine, and Iran not only sold Russia drones it needed but helped them build a domestic factory, Russia decided to reciprocate by giving Iran hypersonic missile technology, which, yeah, the Israeli “Iron Dome” is not going to be able to shoot down worth a damn.

Russia spent a lot of time balancing its Syria interests against not antagonizing Israel, but I guess Israel didn’t realize there were limits.

And remember, Iran hit a US base with missiles when the US assassinated one of its generals.

Enough for today, more in the future.

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So, let’s do another quick takes. I’m feeling slightly compulsive about clearing out some of my backlog of stuff I should write about but never get to.

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One of the signs of Boeing’s decline (other than massive price over-runs and planes falling out of the sky), was when they decided to get rid of their wind tunnel and use computer modeling, and it’s something I noted at the time. So it’s interesting to me that the Chinese have just completed the world’s largest wind tunnel, specifically meant for testing hypersonic plane and missile models.

Computer models can be useful, but they aren’t the real world and relying on them when you can do direct observation is—stupid, and the sort of cost-cutting that leads to huge errors and costs down the road.

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State Farm has decided to no longer insure new customers homes in California! Why? Because of forest fires. Having worked for an insurance company home office, I can assure you that this is a cold mathematical decision. It will spread beyond California and if the government wants home insurance in a lot of places, it’s going to have to subsidize it or just do it themselves. (Government insurance is almost always cheaper than private but insuring stuff that truly is at very high risk is basically stupid.)

This is a half climate change, half capitalism issue. PG&E, the California electricity company has not been clearly brush around its poles and lines or replacing old poles, lines and equipment. They have, however, been paying huge dividends. Power supply is also something that government does best, though there’s some room for private (heavily regulated) generation.

The easiest way to make outsize profits is to push your costs onto other people. Walmart and Amazon telling their employees to get food stamps is another example, but neglecting maintainence that leads to thousands of houses being burnt down is another.

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Another of those “it’s happening faster than we expected” stories about climate change, in this case, ocean circulation slowing more quickly than expected. This leads to the oceans being a worse sink for carbon, leading to faster overall climate change, so it’s a compounding thing and it leads to less nutrients and oxygen for ocean life. If you’re young or maybe even middle aged, you will see the full collapse of fish stocks.

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In the “end of the dollar” news, ten Asean countries have agreed to cooperate in creating a currency for trade among themselves.

They are “Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.”

The end of the US dollar as international trade currency isn’t here yet, but it’s getting closer. The BRICS are acting on this (and multiple countries want to join BRICS) and oil deals are being cut in non-dollar terms.

A great deal of US privilege and US standard of living comes from having the global trade and reserve currency, and so does much of America’s ability to sanction other countries. It is, indeed, other countries desire to not be subject to US currency/bank based sanctions that is driving much of this, and the seizing of Russia’s reserves was the wake up call, whether one thinks it was justified or not.

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Back in the 70s one of my uncles was friends with a marine biologist in British Columbia, Canada. He stated that he expected to see the end of the BC salmon run in his lifetime. I suspect he was wrong, he probably died in the 2010s, but he wasn’t far wrong. It looks like the Alaska (and therefore BC) salmon run has collapsed, and it’s unlikely to come back. If it does, it will be brief.

The end of wild seafood is on the horizon.

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And that’s it for today’s quick takes.

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As long as I’ve been blogging, I’ve made notes of articles I wanted to write about at some point, and then, mostly, I haven’t written about them, generally because they don’t support a full article.

When I was the managing editor at the Agonist I’d put up a quick takes post fairly often, and use those links. The difference from Tony’s excellent roundups, is that every link gets some commentary.

I’m going to start doing “Quick Takes” here, and if people like them I’ll continue.

One of the signs of America’s decline is that it can’t make warships anymore. The Chinese produce better ships at one-third the price and are producing more than the Americans. American allies in Japan and South Korea produce slightly better ships than the Chinese at reasonable prices and have the ability to churn them out in numbers, so the suggested solution is to get them to build the ships.

This is similar to the F-35, which came in way over budget, is ludicrously expensive and while it might be the best jet in the world, certainly isn’t worth the price.

Everything in the US is too expensive. America is a rentier society: the idea is to make money without really doing anything; without making anything. That means high costs for things like housing, food, medicine and so on, which means high wages and high costs for most things made American. To bring production back to America means ending that, and it also means breaking up monopolies and oligopolies. When Clinton forced defense contractors to merge in the name of efficiency he destroyed their actual engineering cultures.

Late Imperial corruption, degeneration and decline.

Most people never really come to grips with the metaphysical horror of life on earth. We now know that trees are likely conscious and it turns out that most plants probably are conscious and can feel pain. So going vegan isn’t a solution to the problem of causing suffering just by eating to stay alive. Just as there are ethical concerns about how we produce meat, there should be ethical concerns about how we treat plants and all the trees we chop down. One issue, other than the whole pain thing, is that modern monocrops lose the ability to communicate with each other, which they normally do to say things like “hey, insects are eating me, better manufacture some poisons to keep them away.”

That means needing more insecticides (terrible for us), but hey, we could also be subjecting plants to the equivalent of solitary confinement.

Lovely.

China had planned to build a bunch of floating nuclear reactors in the South China Sea, but has decided not to. Why? Well, a few reasons but the primary one seems to be someone (the US) blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines. That got the Chinese thinking what Americans would do to their offshore nuclear reactors, not even necessarily in the case of war, but in the case of not-quite-war. (After all, at least in theory, the US and Russia are not at war.)

Offshore reactors make a lot of sense, because there’s plenty of water to keep them cooled, and they are part of a solution to climate change, but hey, America has the right to blow anything up, anywhere.

One key thing to remember about the 1920s is that the US was the world’s most important economy, and among major economies, the best performing. The Great Depression started in the US because it was the world’s lynchpin economy: it was the driver keeping consumer prices down, the primary manufacturing economy and so on. When it ditched, no one else could pick up the slack.

Which is why I keep a wary eye on China, whose economy now serves the same purpose. Yes, I know Americans like to pretend that America is world’s most important economy, but it isn’t and hasn’t been for at least a decade. It’s China that kept inflation under control for decades (with a solid wage crushing assist from Western central banks) and it’s China that is (as regular readers are tired of me saying) the primary manufacturing center. It’s even China who produces the most patents, and it isn’t close.

So China’s the one to watch, and that’s why I keep a weather eye on stories like China’s manufacturing activity contracting May. One month doesn’t matter, but people who get all happy when China stumbles don’t seem to get that it’s the one everyone else has their arm slung around so they can walk.

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That will do for now. Quick takes will return.

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