Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: September 2018

Baked In, Baked Off: The Trump Administration Climate “Admission”

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On September 29, 2018

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MANDOS POST MANDOS POST MANDOS POST

The next century from this point on is likely to be pretty awful, and unless something changes drastically Real Soon Now, a lot of that will be due to very large global temperature increases. Not much will change for the better, though, because the world’s largest economy was willing, after all, to elect a man whose platform includes digging for and burning more coal, doing more offshore drilling, etc. More importantly, be believes shouting out loudly that these are good and praiseworthy things to advertise to the world, which makes it all significantly worse because saying is doing.

There’s a lot of hullaballoo about a report that appeared in the Washington Post (paywalled but sometimes you can get through). Everyone is saying that it reveals that the Trump administration accepts that a four-degree-Celsius increase in temperature is baked in. If you read the fine print, however, what is being argued that if a four degree increase is baked in, then the contribution of some emissions control measures is so small that it is not worth the alleged economic drag created by regulating them. The intended corollary being that if there is no global warming in the first place, there is no point in regulating emissions, therefore there is no point in regulating emissions either way. It is either insignificant or useless.

There is no “admission” here — the Trump administration is not accepting the likelihood of a four degree increase. One should consider who is running Trump’s environmental policy. I have been following the right-wing for a long time, and what were once internet trolls and small-time lobbyists are running the show. One of those characters is Steve Milloy, the tobacco and chemical industry lobbyist who has blogged for a long time at JunkScience.com. In a nutshell, Milloy vociferously denies the worth or necessity of any pollution control, particularly air particulates of the kind people blame for respiratory disorders (after all, if tobacco smoke can’t hurt you, how can small amounts of particulates?), and he most certainly rejects the prospect of global warming. Milloy now also boasts, quite credibly, of having a direct line to the people dismantling the EPA (they cite his work in their justification of doing so).

And for quite a while now, Milloy has been saying precisely what the Trump administration is “admitting” — that if car emissions standards are enforced, they will have a trivial effect on the climate, if the worst forecasts — which he and other denialist lobbyists love to emphasize — are true. But under no circumstances are they advising “resignation” to a fate they have consistently claimed they don’t believe is going to happen. (Whether they secretly believe it and are knowingly lying is one of those “stupid or evil” debates that are, on the whole, rather distracting and pointless. Maybe there will be a smoking gun screenshot of Milloy’s phone or something.) The draft government report to which the WaPo article refers uses a reference scenario in which no climate action whatsoever is taken to emphasize how small the effect of the regulations being relaxed really are.

So if the Trumpists don’t really believe in global warming, why would they deploy an argument based on the premise that regulation would have a trivial effect even if it were true? After all, it would be more straightforward to deny global warming full stop as a justification to cancel regulation. The reason is ideological: They know that other people believe in anthropogenic catastrophic global warming, so they know that regulation is tempting. And they believe firmly in a regulatory slippery-slope argument (this goes along with the deeply embedded libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism) — that if they allow a little regulation that has small effects, the regulatory system may entrench itself and produce much larger regulations. (And worse, people might like those regulations.)

And they’re right. The — alas — too-slow path to large-scale regulation under our present systems of government do mostly work their way through using small/insufficient regulations as wedges or levers to much larger regulation. That is why they vociferously scuppered US participation in the Paris Agreement, because the Paris Agreement admits that regulation is necessary, regardless of how small the Paris Agreement’s actual goals were.  And saying is doing: The minimal regulatory “admission” is necessary for anything else to proceed.

Kavanaugh Discussion Thread

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On September 28, 2018

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Since folks want to discuss it, discuss it here please.

My personal view is that he’s lied a lot under oath. As for the attempted rape accusation, of course, they are not proven beyond a reasonable benefit of a doubt, but this is not a criminal trial.

This isn’t a case of “any Republican candidate would be accused”, because they aren’t.

Frankly, if I were Democratic leadership I’d have held it up as much as possible. If Obama couldn’t have his nominee voted on, I see no reason why Trump should before the mid-terms.

But Democrats only play hardball against left-wingers, not against Republicans.

And yes, this is the end of US abortion rights. It will be even if Kavanaugh isn’t confirmed.

Of Course Ted Cruz Should Be Publicly Ostracized

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On September 25, 2018

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So, Ted Cruz and his family were surrounded in a Washington, DC restaurant and left.

Much hand wringing ensues about civility.

It’s bullshit.

If you could have only one rule for creating a good society it would be the following:

Elites must experience the consequences of their behaviour.

The simplest reason the US is a shitshow and getting worse is that, for important people, it’s been getting better since about 1980, while it’s been getting worse for everyone else since about that time.

Because it only gets better for people who matter, they keep doing more of what they are doing.

Why wouldn’t they?

Forcing people who make life worse for everyone else to at least suffer public approbation is a baby step in the right direction.

Of course, it’s not enough, and people are morons. Barack Obama made life worse for most Americans in many, many ways and he wouldn’t be shamed. (But then, he did make New York bankers’ lives better….)

Shame people who make your lives worse. When you riot, don’t riot in your neighborhood, go to theirs, then riot. And so on.

People like Cruz and Obama are responsible for a ton of deaths. Generally incremental deaths, deaths due to policies which impoverish and immiserate people, but deaths nonetheless. They are responsible for even more suffering.

Being unable to eat a meal at a restaurant is pretty minor in comparison. It’s not enough.

But don’t think public shaming like this does nothing. People forget that Obama was anti-gay marriage at first. He changed his mind because gay activists got in his face and the faces of his family. They crashed public fundraisers, they made a fuss, they made his life, and the life of people he cared, about unpleasant. They backed it up with a donor strike.

And they won.

Obama caved and became pro-gay marriage, and fools and idiots pretend he always was. But he changed only because of personal and political considerations. Obama is no more moral than most politicians; he does what serves him best.

If you want politicians and rich people to do what you want, apply pressure. Make them hurt. They don’t respond to appeals to their better nature because, even if they had one, it doesn’t apply to ordinary people because they don’t identify with ordinary people. Politicians understand that, in most cases, their personal interests are directly opposed to the interests of ordinary people.

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.

 

Six Lessons From Genghis Khan’s Victories

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On September 19, 2018

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Genghis Khan, Photo by Francois Phillipe

Genghis Khan, Photo by Francois Phillipe

Some years ago I wrote about the genius of Temujin—Genghis Khan.

I want to return to this, but take a different approach. Why was Temujin so successful?

“Hired A’s”

Yeah, I hate startup culture too. But, the bottom line is that Temujin’s main lieutenants were all brilliant too. Subodei is in the running for one of the world’s greatest generals. His main administrator was brilliant. And Temujin took people who were his enemies and made them his leaders, and they stayed loyal. That’s genius, and it’s the number one thing that made him great, especially because he let them do their jobs without getting in the way: He trusted them and didn’t second guess them.

Effectively Used Spies and Intelligence

Temujin cultivated merchants. He talked to them, he treated them well, he offered them real protection. Before he ever went to war with anyone, he knew their military, he knew any internal problems they had, from disloyal satraps to recently conquered and still restive people. He knew the geography, and so on.

He Prioritized Local Superiority of Force

Westerners have this weird idea that the Mongols were a horde. To the contrary, in all major campaigns of Temujin’s life, they were outnumbered. In many cases, this is true even after his death. Subodei’s invasion of Europe was against much larger numbers.

Temujin and Subodei used feints and threats and encircling movements to deceive their enemies. During the invasion of Afghanistan, for example, an initial attack burned down a large area, making it uninhabitable. The troops then withdrew. The enemy thought that, all the farms having been burned, no invasion could come through that area. Of course, then an invasion did.

This sort of attacking from directions that are assumed impossible was used all the time, and is routine for great generals. (Scipio Africanus and Hannibal, the two greatest generals of ancient times, used it to great effect.)

He also used detached columns to threaten areas that his enemies needed to defend. A small force, moving fast, would force enemies to run back to defend, even if the enemy was much larger.

He used multiple columns all the time, threatening multiple targets that had to be defended, forcing dispersion of enemy forces. Then he would bring his forces together and achieve numerical superiority against armies, that, in toto, were much larger than his.

It doesn’t matter if your enemy outnumbers you overall, if you outnumber them every time you fight them.

He Didn’t Attack Strong Positions or Waste His Own Troops

For example, he left the Chinese capital alone multiple times when he knew the Chinese army was still too strong to defeat. He didn’t order frontal assaults and waste his own troops. He would happily waste unreliable troops: Often, he would levy all men from defeated cities and towns and use them as the first wave attack against enemy walls, for example.

He Didn’t Trust Traitors

Temujin turned enemies into his chief leaders, but he did so after defeating them honestly. Anyone who betrayed their previous masters before defeat he did not trust.

None of this…

…is to deny his obvious advantages–like horse archers, among others. But contrary to what people think, horse archers were defeated often. Yes, they had the ability to break out and conquer far larger civilized nations, but most of the time, large, civilized nations kept them in their place.

Many of Temujin’s victories were over other horse archers: He unified tribes beyond just the Mongols and did so fighting troops which had the same horses and bows and so on that he did.

It was genius on three fronts that made Temujin into Genghis Khan. He was a genius general, who did not interfere with other generals (reading WWII history, and how hard Guderian, Manstein, and Rommel had to fight to get German high command to properly use blitzkrieg is instructive).

He was a genius leader, who could recognize other genius leaders and was able to earn their loyalty and not get in their way.

He made brilliant use of intelligence and planning. Temujin did not fight a war until he knew his enemies’ strengths and weaknesses better than they did.

Finally, he fought his enemies minds. He defeated the enemy leaders by out-thinking them, by making them react to illusions he presented, moving them and their troops around almost as much as he moved his own troops around.

The Mongols, absent a leader like Temujin, might well have broken out. But they would never have created the greatest land empire ever known to man.

More on what this means, for us, later.

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.

Breaking Your Chains

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On September 17, 2018

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I started blogging in 2003. Since then, I’ve written well over a million words. There was a time when I wrote two or three articles a day.

I thought that the writing mattered, that it made a difference. It did to some people, but not to many. Seven billion people have a lot of momentum, and stopping them or even turning them is close to impossible, especially when the lever you have is just blogging.

Oh well.

Various bad stuff has happened. More bad stuff will happen. As I’ve written before, this stuff is now baked in. It will happen, it cannot be stopped. When you’re going 200 miles an hour and ten feet from the wall, everything is over except the casualty report.

You should probably still slam on the brakes, though.

A few years ago, I turned my primary emphasis from, oh, let’s call it political economics to more fundamental issues.

Why do people believe in what they do? Why do they do what they do? And how can that be changed?

Because, as I’ve written before, the primary problem isn’t that we don’t know what our problems are, or even how to fix them (in technical terms). It is that we aren’t fixing them even though we know they exist and have a pretty good idea how to fix them.

I mean, to repeat myself yet again, we’ve known about climate change, undeniably, since the late 70s at the latest. And we did, well, basically nothing. We know that inequality is terrible for everyone, and people were warning back in the late 80s about it and we, well, slammed our foot down on the accelerator.

And so on.

Now, this isn’t a new pursuit for me. I wondered about it when I was a teenager, but I examined it, mostly, the wrong way–through anthropology, sociology, linguistics, history, neuroscience, and so on.

Oh, it’s not that these disciplines don’t have important insights, but they are all fragmentary and none of them tell you the most important thing, not really: How to change.

I mean, it’s nice to have some insights into why you’re fucked up, but if those insights don’t lead to the ability to become less fucked up, the exercise is somewhat sterile.

There are a group of people who have, over millennia, spent virtually all their time examining  how the human mind works, and why it believes what it believes. Spiritual people.

Not religious people, understand; religion is what people who want pat answers to the insights of spiritual people. They suck the insights dry, and turn them into set rules.

You’ve got someone like Mohammed, say, whose first followers are mostly slaves, women, and poor people. And Mohammed, well, he made their lives better; he made new rules which were not as bad as the old rules. Sure, women still weren’t equal to men, but they had more rights than before.

And poltroons and fools think that the new rules are now set in stone for eternity, rather than considering that he was making things as much better as he could under the circumstances and given his own, unbroken conditioning.

Then there’s poor Jesus. Good God, what his followers have done to his teachings! They’ve turned them into, with some exceptions like the social gospel (now dead), an utter force for evil.

This is the fate of the great spiritual figures–to be misunderstood. Sometimes that misunderstanding doesn’t do too much harm (Buddha, yes, some); sometimes it does a lot, as with Mohammed and Christ.

Or, as Marx, a great ideologue, though not a great spiritual figure, said: “I am not a Marxist.”

Or Jesus: “I am not a Christian.”

Anyway, there’s a type of spirituality which basically involves learning to examine one’s mind, until the way it really works becomes something one can’t deny any more.

Jiddu Krishnamurti tried to teach this. Failed miserably. Maybe got one person enlightened, despite spending his entire life working at it.

The problem he had was that he really wouldn’t give instructions. He was scared of the founder effect; he wanted people to learn to think for themselves and not reify a bunch of new rules.

So, yeah, that didn’t work too well.

The simplest rule of the mind is that everything in it is stuff given to you by other people. Your religion, your nationality, your love of sports, whatever… it’s all conditioning and while it isn’t precisely all garbage, it’s close to it. You didn’t choose it, but you think it is “you.” You think your personality is you, or that you are American or Chinese or Hindu or Christian or Jewish.

You’re full up to the brim with stinking garbage; realities created by “wise” men of the past, which served their purposes and which has been, usually, completely unsuited to living a healthy, happy life with other humans in such a way that you don’t, well, destroy the ecosphere, for one.

And the humor of it is in the identification with it–that you, that we, think that all this garbage is actually us. It’s closer to a sickness, a virus, passed from sufferer to sufferer.

And it’s why we’re ten yards from a wall, going 100 miles an hour.

If you want to stop being sick, and a vector for sickness, start by just resting and examining the contents of your consciousness as they come and go.

And be ready to be really unhappy, as you realize you’re a slave.

But it is the slave who believes they are free who is most chained: You can’t break invisible chains.

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.

Tales of Canadian Healthcare and Potential Russia/US War in Syria

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On September 13, 2018

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So, posting has been, errr, non-existent for a bit as I’ve been dealing with some (probably minor) healthcare issues.

Earlier this week, I had exploratory surgery and, later, an MRI. The total time for the exploratory surgery (entering the hospital to leaving) was about five hours. The total time for the MRI was two hours, of which I spent 45 minutes semi-dozing inside the machine.

Total price? $20 for some pain killers to take home with me after the day-surgery. Oxycodone (the generic form of Oxycontin), which is the first time I’ve had it (I’ve had plenty of morphine and codeine at various points), and, ummm, I can see why a lot of people get addicted.

Generally speaking the nurses, doctors, techs, and orderlies were all polite and efficient. The nurses and doctors at the day surgery stood out as particularly solicitous, which I appreciated. I haven’t always had the best experience with surgery (understatement alert), so getting the feeling that they cared and were competent was nice.

Contrary to the propaganda, all of this was relatively expeditious. I don’t have an urgent problem, so the process hasn’t been super fast, but it hasn’t been slow, either.

And this is Canadian healthcare.

Regular posting should resume soon.

Idlib province in Syria is a potential flashpoint between the US and Syria/Russia. The Syrians want to clear up the Al-Qaeda subsidiary there, and the Americans want to pretend they aren’t Al-Qaeda, and have been saber rattling and stating that Assad is going to attack chemically, and the US will retaliate.

Lots of stupid here, and a small–but real–chance of starting something nasty between the US and Russia, which the US might well lose, actually, since the US has fallen behind both on missiles and missile defense technology.

Let’s hope not. Not getting into a war in Syria with Russia was Trump’s main selling point, but he seems to have since become deranged about Syria’s Iran ties, because the US’s foreign policy, apparently, is about doing what Saudi Arabia and Israel want, not what is good for the US.

Sigh.

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.

Why Did The New Yorker Want Steve Bannon to Headline Their Festival?

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On September 4, 2018

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Steve Bannon

So, Bannon was due to headline a New Yorker festival. People became upset and now he isn’t.

Why was he invited in the first place?

I’m not one of those who’ll argue that Bannon isn’t smart. He is–very much so. But there are plenty of very smart, and indeed smarter, people on the left. Chomsky has never headlined for the New Yorker, and he’s a straight-up genius.

Bannon was invited because what the alt-right/fascists want is something centrists can live with. Fascists are big believers in corporations. Under the Nazis, executive wages soared. They crushed unions and depressed wages. They managed unemployment by choosing entire classes of people to make non-people, and the rest of the population mostly got a job.

All of this is stuff that centrists can live with. Elevated executive compensation, pro-corporate policies, keeping unions, and the left down.

Remember, always, that Jews weren’t killed first. Socialists and anarchists were.

So the bottom line is that centrists are okay with fascists because fascists are pro-corporate and executive wealth.

(Oh, Bannon says the right things about the working class, but then Trump gives a huge tax cut to rich people and corporations.)

On the other hand, the left-wing is hostile to large corporations and high executive compensation. At the least, the left would highly regulate corporations and break many of them up, while slapping on 90 percent marginal tax rates and punitive estate taxes.

At the most, some left-wingers would nationalize corporations wholesale and redistribute wealth, or they might force employee ownership of corporations or some version of that.

All actual left-wingers would end the obscene system of over-payment in corporate America.

Left-wingers are an existential threat to centrists because centrists are, substantially, supporters of the status quo. The state of the US and the world is (or was before Trump) essentially good to them. The parts of the status quo that right-wingers want to overthrow don’t hurt centrists. The parts of the status quo that left-wingers want to overthrow do.

So Bannon is okay with them. They don’t really believe he means his class war rhetoric (Hitler didn’t). They are sure that they’ll still be okay under him.

They might not be right. But that’s their bet.

It’s a bet that has been made over and over again since WWII. US elites have always been willing to support right-wingers over left-wingers. You see it in almost every Latin American country. You saw it in Greece, in Iran, and so on, and you’ve seen it domestically–repeatedly.

The center prefers the center. But they’ll always choose the right over the left on anything that even slightly smells of economics, because they want to retain their wealth and the right will allow that and the left won’t.

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.

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