Is just “all our lives will be good, or yours won’t be.”
Since there’s always some idiot who reads these posts and thinks they’re smart, no this doesn’t mean everything turns out identical or that some people won’t get cancer.
It means everyone gets enough if society has it, and gets treated fairly. It means that if a rich or powerful person gets cancer they get the exact same treatment the poorest and weakest person in society does. It means money and power can’t get you anything that actually matters: not education, not health care, not food when other people are going hungry.
“No one gets seconds until everyone has had firsts.” And no one gets thirds till everyone who wants them has had seconds.
The job of actual class struggle is to make it so that the rich and powerful can’t enjoy their wealth and power until everyone is taken care of and treated the same.
This is why the gays got Obama to support gay marriage by the way. It seems to be forgotten by Obama was an anti gay marriage bigot who recorded a call against gay marriage and whose chaplain for his inauguration was anti-gay marriage. So the gays, a lot of whom had carried water for him during the election did two things: they cut off the donations, hard, and they went after his wife: broke into a fundraising party and made her life miserable.
Oh, the squeals. The hand-wringing.
But it was pretty mild, she gets to be famous and rich because of her husband and she carried his water, for sure. She can take a little screaming and if she can’t, too bad.
But as I said, this is mild. Things will be serious when people start saying “if you make one of us dead or homeless, we make one of you dead or homeless.”
We’re all in the same life raft, or we aren’t and if we aren’t, then the only solution is to put us in the same raft and make the powerful bail and drown with the rest of us.
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So, there are different measures of creativity. One of them is divergent thinking, the ability to come up with lots of different ideas. George Land created a famous test for NASA, then applied it to children. Test-takers were given a problem and then had to come up with many different ways to tackle it.
Land’s dead now but before he died he gave a Ted talk. Generally loathe them, but this one is interesting.
Yeah. Woops. The reason for this is simple (and I can hear some regular readers eyes rolling, since this is a subject I’ve talked about a lot.) School is about coming up with the “right” answer the “right” way. There aren’t 50 right ways. I have many memories of coming up with the right answer in math, for example, using different methods than the teacher and being downgraded for it.
In math there’s often a “right” answer but in other disciplines, there isn’t one. What caused the French revolution or World War I? There isn’t a right answer.
Now, perhaps you’re thinking “but the social sciences and humanities are different.”
Oh, somewhat.
Back in the 90s I used to tutor university students. I’d tell them I could teach them to consistently get a B, but not an A, because the extra step from B to A was knowing the person who is marking your tests and essays, and both working them so they like and respect you and tailoring your answers to their prejudices. It’s actually harder to get get an A in the humanities and social sciences than in the sciences and in math. I’ve gotten 100% on a chemistry or physics test. I have never done so on a paper or non multiple choice test in the humanities or social sciences because there isn’t a correct answer.
But you will get higher grades if you learn to give the marker about what they want.
In the sciences it’s about getting the right answer the right way. In the humanities and social sciences it’s a social game of “please the market” or in very rigid standardized tests of “please the test designer.”
In realm of the real world this leads to the something called “best practices”, which I loathe. There are no such things as best practices. That doesn’t mean you can’t teach workers what is known to work, but if you enforce “best practices” then they can’t innovate. If you tell people “how” to do something, rather than say “I need you to accomplish X” you shut down learning and creativity and you also strangle advancement.
People have to be free to try new things. There are degrees of this, of course, in some cases the task still needs to get done. But mandating how and not what stiffles progress and creativity faster than almost anything else.
What we do to children and adults is psychologically cripple them. It’s better, in our society, to be wrong with the pack or in the approved fashion than to be right against the pack or using non-standard methods.
Very, very much better. In the pack, wrong with the pack, or more accurately wrong in the way leader-teacher wants you to be, you’re safe.
But get it right the wrong way, or get it wrong trying something new, and you’re toast.
We all know this, but many of us refuse to admit it and this is especially true with regards to school. We spent more awake time in school for twelve to sixteen or more years than we did anywhere else, except in some cases home. That creates strong identification. We either want to believe school is good, or we rebel against it, but very few people can remain neutral. If something “must” be then it must be good.
But school teaches (eye-roll time) us to be a bunch of conformists, giving teacher what they want in the way they want, sitting down and not even talking or using the bathroom without permission.
That’s school and denying that is what school is is rank stupidity.
It’s also most workplaces. You replace teacher with boss.
And then you think you’re free when you’ve spent most of your life doing what you were told, the way you were told to do it.
(By the way, one corollary of Land’s test is that you started out as a creative genius. Perhaps you can be one again? It’s not nature that made you un-creative. Nature started you as a genius.)
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.
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….
I mean, I feel kind of lame for even posting about this because unless you were stupid (or on the payroll) you knew it was either the US or an ally, and if an ally the US was involved.
Of course he had to post this on his substack because not a single mainstream outlet will publish it.
A Dalek commented how surprising the CIA’s competence was in this operation, but what I find interesting is how effective media control is now: if no one will cover it, did it even happen? The level of control over the media is astounding, and the majority of it is tacit, I doubt the CIA had to call outlets and say “don’t publish Hersh”, the people in charge know what their job is and do it without any threats, then see themselves on the same side as the CIA and if a truth is too inconvenient, well, it isn’t important.
It really does remind me of the early post 9/11 and Iraq War period, where you just couldn’t tell the truth and be heard on anything mainstream, and trying was a career death sentence.
And yeah, I do think this is worse than it was in the past. The old media was corrupt and often complicit, too often, but it wasn’t this bad. A combination of almost every media asset being owned by just a few companies and the Ivy League takeover of journalism jobs, which used to be working class, has made the vast majority of the media little more than collaborators with the powers that be.
I’m a bit of a broken record on this, but I still find it extraordinary that they lied about Corbyn about 80% of the time. Amazing.
Dog bites man. It is tedious that this had to be proved. The amount of cycles wasted by intelligent people proving what is obvious to anyone who isn’t a moron or dishonest is pathetic. (And this nonsense is why I rarely bother proving the obvious any more. It’s just meant to waste cycles and anyone asking for proof of the obvious is not an honest interlocutor.)
Note: corrected “cover” to “publish”, which was my original intent.
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Ok, this place has mostly been about how fucked we are, and how we’ve fucked up. Blame is more on our leaders than us, but as a species we’re on the hook.
But there is cause of hope because mostly we know what we have to do.
We know we have to reduce CO2 and Methane emissions. We even know mostly how. We pretend we don’t, because the how will involve changing the economic basis of our societies. Something between forty to fifty percent of our jobs aren’t needed or are actively harmful. People should mostly work from home if they can. We need to outlaw planned obsolesence and get rid of suburbs and exurbs as they currently exist. Everyone and everything needs to prove that it increases biodiversity and communities need to show a CO2/Methane deficit, without cheating and bullshit offsets.
We need to prepare for what’s coming. Solutions include but are not limited to
building seawalls
moving to renewable resources,
rewilding,
creating wetlands around vulnerable areas and replanting and rebuilding ecospheres
change agriculture to huge hothouses and vertical farming and so on
reduce our reliance on meat though not remove it entirely since there are regions that make sense as pasture land
Move to regional manufacture of specific items
Reduce reliance on large power grids
fix our infrastructure
replace a lot of our infrastructure with styles that last longer and/or are easier to repair (asphalt and steel-reinforced concrete have to go, fortunately we now know how the Romans created concrete that lasted thousands of years)
Fix our air infrastructure to check for CO2 , oxygen and to clean the air
Set up systems to allow individual buildings and neighbourhoods to be power and water self-sufficient where possible
stop poisoning or overusing our aquifers
stop growing water intensive crops we don’t really need in areas that don’t have water (almonds in California)
All of this is fairly basic. The details can be complicated, but we know what must be done and we either have the technology or can develop it.
The hard problem is not the technical stuff, complicated as it may be, the hard problem is the political question. The hard thing is that we have to change how we live and how we organize our societies in fundamental ways.
But we know, generally speaking, what has to be done. And that is cause for reasonable hope, because it means that if we do solve the political problem, we’ll be able to get moving very quickly.
We just, like any addict, have to be willing to actually change, and that means giving up our current way of living.
That’s hard. But it is going to happen. We can do it before we hit bottom, or we can do it the hard way. But we will do it.
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.
We spend a lot of time here dealing with everything that’s going wrong in the world.
Rather a lot.
The goal isn’t to be pessimistic, nor is it to be optimistic, the goals is to be realistic. But in some eras realism can be fairly depressing.
So I think it’s important to remember that there’s still a lot of good in life. Love, food, beauty, excitement and more. An excellent book or movie; a beautiful sunset or a gorgeous person; that feeling of warm mature love or the excitement of new love; warm soup on a cold day or the feeling of cheese squishing between our teeth.
Many people live too much in their thoughts: chains of predictions of bad events, many of which will never happen and even if they do, aren’t happening now. Instead, lean into the good stuff: that feeling of relaxation when you lie down in bed after a busy day or the pleasant languor when you wake.
If you look for these events, many of which are small, like my very comfortable chair, and you choose to rest in them, you’ll find life a lot better, I suspect. In ill times, savor what is good.
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.
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.
