Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Feinstein, who was hospitalized in early March for shingles and has remained in her San Francisco home since March 7, has missed 60 votes of the 82 taken in the Senate in 2023…
…Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said on Monday that Feinstein’s absence from the Senate—and the Judiciary Committee specifically—will impede Democrats’ ability to confirm judicial nominees.
“I can’t consider nominees in these circumstances, because a tie vote is a losing vote in committee,”…
…Feinstein announced she won’t seek reelection in 2024 as a handful of Democratic House members vie for her seat. But she intends to serve out the rest of her term, which is set to end in January 2025.
Ginsburg had cancer. It was a type of cancer which was almost always fatal. She refused to step down from the Supreme Court when a Democratic president could easily appoint her successor, and as a result the Democrats lost a court seat. Ginsburg was looked up to by liberal women, but she betrayed them, though most can’t see past their hero worship to recognize that.
Feinstein is in a similar position: shingles isn’t the real issue, she has dementia and everyone know it. If she cared about the interests of her constituents she would step down immediately so that judges could be appointed and laws passed which need her support. It’s not that she’s a good Senator, she’s voted for a lot of crap, but Democratic appointed judges tend to be better than Republican appointed judges and the difference is important.
Given how bad her dementia appears to be it may be that this isn’t mostly on her: it could be her circle who are keeping her in. If so, they’re the one’s betraying, though she did pick them before age took its toll.
A leader who puts themselves first is not a leader, just someone looking out for themselves.
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The simple history of the pre-Civil War era in the US is that the slave states wanted the non slave states to return escaped slaves to them. The free states did not want to do that, and it eventually led to war.
There is something similar going on in the US today. Anti-abortion/Anti-Trans states are making it illegal for people to go to other states for abortions or trans related medical care. Part of the mechanic of that was punishing people who helped slaves.
A law to protect providers and patients in Washington from out-of-state lawsuits for providing reproductive and gender-affirming care passed out of the state’s Senate Monday and now heads to Gov. Jay Inslee’s desk for his signature.
The so-called Shield Law will prohibit out-of-state subpoenas and criminal investigations that seek information related to abortion and reproductive healthcare services. It will also make it so the governor cannot extradite any person for out-of-state charges related to reproductive healthcare services and will protect healthcare service providers from harassment for providing protected services.
The next step will be to refuse to allow police to execute out of state subpoenas for laws relating to abortion and trans-care. In other words, to protect those fleeing to free states. This is a direct violation of the Constitution as I understand it and indicates the union is no longer working.
This is related to the current jurisdiction shopping where anti-abortion forces are using rulings by local justices in Republican to enact nationwide bans on abortificants, again imposing red-state law on blue states (though they would say this is turnaround.)
The step after that is either succession or war.
Honestly, If it doesn’t divide the country in half (as in separate the coasts) I’d consider allowing succession (though I suppose a bi-coastal “blue” America could ship thru Canada.)
Take this seriously. It doesn’t have to lead to war, but it is a very bad sign.
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So, back on March 16th I wrote an article about the Chinese brokered Iran-Saudi Arabia peace deal. At the end of the article I wrote:
I am most interested to see if this will mean some sort of peace can be worked out in Yemen, or if it means the Iranians will abandon the Houthis, which would be sad.
Turns out peace with Yemen was almost certainly part of the deal:
Saudi Arabia has decided to end the war in Yemen . A Saudi delegation will travel to Sana’a next week to conclude an agreement with Yemen, Reuters reported
I suppose it’s a little early to be sure the war will end, but it seems very likely and this wouldn’t have happened without China. The US helped Saudi Arabia bomb the hell out of Yemen and cause a massive famine: China helped bring peace.
This is part of a massive realignment happening right now.
The number of states that are planning to join BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) increased significantly last year, about 20 countries want to join……Among them are Turkey, Mexico, Indonesia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and a number of other African countries.
China will now be the most important member of the most important economic organizations in the world, other than the WTO and perhaps the IMF, though the IMF is going to be increasingly sidelined, because loans from the IMF always come with horrible conditions and more and more there will be other alternatives.
China is the biggest trade partner for almost every nation in Africa and South America already, so this realignment only makes sense. Those expecting the US to remain the center of the economic world when it was no longer the most important economy in the world were always fools.
I suspect a some of this is also due to freeing up Russian gas and oil for sale to non-European buyers. Again, the locus moves away from the West to the non-West.
China may not be the most important country in the world yet, but it’s only a matter of time absent war or some catastrophe stopping them. None of the countries joining ever liked America and China just offers a better deal on almost everything from loans to goods to IP.
The sun is near the horizon for the American Empire as world hegemon and the opposing bloc in the new bipolar world will be economically stronger than America’s bloc.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 9, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
Assange: Ithaka, Revisited
Scott Ritter [via Naked Capitalism 4-5-2023] Important.
Strategic Political Economy
Life Expectancy in USA, by zip code
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 4-3-2023]
Do this by zip code and you will find your city looks similarly disparate, zip codes in Houston separate life expectancy by 15-20 years when comparing the ship channel to the rest of the city. Every core has its periphery, it’s not just a regional contradiction. https://t.co/2TRjt3D75E
— Bathhouse Agitator (@gusselsprouts) April 2, 2023
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U.S. share of world wheat production hit record low in 2022
[Investigate Midwest, via Naked Capitalism 4-2-2023]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Use to discuss topics completely unrelated to recent posts.
This is a post a lot of readers will misunderstand or refuse to understand, because our society requires us to do evil regularly and we want to pretend it isn’t evil.
Some acts are always evil.
To understand this you need to make the correct division between an act and the consequences of that act.
The act and the consequences are two different things.
Let’s take something which is, I hope, universally agreed among my readers. Rape is always evil. It is always an evil act. Even if someone comes up with a convoluted scenario under which some good came as a consequence rape is always an evil act.
We start here to show something simple: that some acts are evil.
This is necessary because our society has gone too far in cultural determinism. “Evil and good are completely social constructs.”
No. They are human, but they are not constructs. We understand that slavery is an evil act. We understand that murder is an evil act. We understand that torture is an evil act.
It may be that on some occasions the results of an evil act are good, but that does not make the act itself good. I don’t believe in torture for getting information, but even if it did work, torturing someone to get information which saves people is still an evil act. The act is evil, even if the consequences are good.
In debt-slavery, common in the ancient world, you would sell yourself into slavery to settle your debts and get money. Let us say you did so and it saved your family from starvation because master now feeds you and your family.
The slavery is still evil, even if some of the consequences of it are not.
This is at the heart of just war theory. All wars are evil. There are no exceptions. Sometimes the consequences of war are better than not fighting the war. That does not, however, make the war itself not evil. (I can think of very few wars which were worth the evil of the war itself. WWII is the only recent major example.)
Some years ago I wrote an article on what the Tao teaches those who want a better world.
I’m going to quote it at length here:
In the Tao Te Ching there is a famous passage, as follows:
When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce orderTherefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.What is appropriate isn’t always what is good, but what is good makes up the vast majority of what is appropriate.
When one no longer knows what is appropriate, one devolves to the good and is still doing most of what should be done.
Kindness makes up most of what is good, so when one loses what is good, one devolves to kindness and retains most of what is good.
Losing kindness, one retreats to justice. The loss here is steep. Justice is maybe half of what is kind, because justice without kindness is about balance and tends to not restore people, but punish them: “an eye for an eye” and all that.
And then there is ritual, and ritual, in this context, is without any of the higher virtues, and thus leads to injustice, cruelty and evil, because it has lost almost all of appropriateness: it simply accepts that action A should lead to action B, and that will often be the wrong action, unguided by appropriateness, goodness, kindness or even justice.
I would add that when even ritual is lost; when people no longer obey the rules and are guided by no sense of ethics, that all chances of a good society and good results are lost.
The problem with “ends justify means” is that means are most of what we do. If you do evil acts all day, all week, all year, all life because they are part of how your society runs, then the amount of evil you do usually overwhelms all the “consequences”. This is why only someone who “has the Tao” should ever do evil, and since 99.9999% of us don’t have the Tao and don’t have the judgment to know when evil is justified, we should avoid evil actions like the plague. Certainly our leaders, who are the worst of us, shouldn’t be allowed to do evil.
But that’s consequence talk. You don’t not do evil acts because of the consequences, you don’t do them because they are evil. If you start engaging too much in consequence talk, then pretty soon you’re justifying all sorts of evil action.
Don’t rape. It’s always evil, no matter who does it or why. Don’t mistake whether an act is evil and with the questions “are the consequences of this act evil or good.”
And tamp down your social constructivism and moral relativism. Some things are always wrong.
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One problem with covering Covid right now is that it’s becoming harder and harder to get good stats, because governments want to pretend it’s over. In Canada, the best reporting provincial government is Quebec, so we’ll look at that and I’m quite sure this is effectively the picture everywhere, though the bumps may not synchronize. The important line is the orange one, that’s excess mortality. It’s over 35%. And these numbers are a known understatement.
Sorry. The picture above was NOT Canada's fast-reporting provinces. It was Quebec, Canada's fastest-reporting provinces and the only province that still tries to track and report COVID in a transparent, complete fashion.
More than 35% excess mortality on Dec 31/22. pic.twitter.com/bMfueZTADP
— Tara Moriarty (@MoriartyLab) April 1, 2023
This is typical of the charts I’ve seen tracking Covid—the numbers aren’t at peak, but they are as high or higher than they were for most of the official pandemic.
Meanwhile there is Long Covid. A Danish study:
As part of an effort to better flesh out the burden of long COVID, Danish researchers today reported a threefold increase in extended sick leave, defined as lasting longer than 30 days, in people who had recovered from COVID, compared to workers who weren’t infected.
Some 1.9 mln people across the UK are currently estimated to be suffering from #longCOVID, or 2.9% of the population. The figure is up from 689,000 at the start of January and 514,000 in September 2022
the number of children under 16 with self-reported Long Covid of any duration ‘increased from 77,000 in October 2021, to 119,000 in January 2022
So we decided to pretend the plague was over and stopped doing the anti-plague stuff like masking:
When you read on Twitter that #masks didn't work in schools,… you are reading a post from someone who is lying. Masks actually helped STAFF stay healthy, not just students. It is that simple. #CovidIsNotOver #maskswork #pediatrics #tweetiatrician https://t.co/Ob9sqYY5mg pic.twitter.com/2HHhko2v49
— Jake Kane, MD, MS, FCCM, FAAP (@JakeKaneMD) March 9, 2023
Covid is still a thing. What’s as bad, maybe worse, is the hospital crush. Politicians pretend Covid is over, but hospitals still have to deal with it, not just in terms of patients but in terms of sick doctors, nurses and other staff. Last year I went to a cancer clinic and had to wait many hours. I asked why? “Three of the four doctors are out with Covid.”
Oh.
Where I live wait times in emergency departments are often 8 hours, sometimes more. They were a couple hours or less before Covid and strangely, now that Covid is “over” they haven’t gone back to 2 hours.
Test times, surgery times, everything times are delayed, and as a result people become more seriously ill or die. Excess deaths from Covid are vastly overstated if they only include Covid and Covid-related damage, because patients with heart and cancer and other problems are dying due to delayed care.
The decision has been made to just live with the plague. If we want to do that, and we clearly do, then we have to adjust our society. We have to train more doctors and nurses and other hospital staff like technicians. We have to increase hospital budgets. We need more long-term care beds and we need to make support available to people with long Covid who can’t work: both financial and outpatient nursing care.
But to do that, as with doing anything, we’d have to spend quite a bit more money on healthcare, and since the only place to get money from is the rich, the poor and middle class being tapped out, that means taxing the rich, which is verboten.
The human propensity to just pretend that problems they don’t want to exist don’t exist in is full display now with respect to Covid, as it has been for generations with respect to climate and environmental collapse. The problem is that some problems don’t care if we don’t want them to exist, they still exist and they get worse (see those increases in people with Long Covid or all the fires and droughts and whatnot from early climate change.)
There is a real world, and sticking our heads in the sand doesn’t make it go away. But it does kill a lot of people and make a lot of other people disabled.
As usual, none of these problems can truly be dealt with while our current elites are in power. If we want them fixed, our elites have to go and be entirely replaced.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.