Ian Welsh

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

Month: August 2023 Page 2 of 3

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 20, 2023

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On August 20, 2023

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by Tony Wikrent

Climate and environmental crises

‘This Is Huge’: Judge Sides With Montana Youths in Historic Climate Ruling 

[Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 8-15-2023]

Climate Jurisprudence Gets a New Blueprint 

Gabrielle Gurley, August 17, 2023 [The American Prospect]

A Montana judge delivers a stunning, historic decision on the Mountain West state’s culpability for surging climate dangers that hit young people hard.

Montana Climate Lawsuit: Youths Win Landmark Case 

[Rolling Stone, via Naked Capitalism 8-15-2023]

Biden DOJ: “No Constitutional Right To A Stable Climate”

David Sirota, August 16, 2023 [The Lever]

As a heatwave scorched America with record-breaking temperatures this June, the Biden administration attempted to block a landmark climate lawsuit by declaring that “there is no constitutional right to a stable climate system,” according to court records reviewed by The Lever.

The assertion in Juliana v. United States — which echoed both the Trump and Obama administrations’ legal claims in the same long-running case — was part of the Justice Department’s latest attempt to halt the suit brought by children who assert that the Constitution requires the federal government to maintain a climate that supports human life.

That suit’s momentum could be bolstered by a separate legal victory in Montana this week, but neither the victory nor the intensifying climate disaster appear to have stopped the Biden administration’s crusade to kill the federal case. Indeed, Biden’s Justice Department filed its most recent motion to dismiss the case in the same week that large swaths of the country were under extreme heat warnings.

That filing came as President Joe Biden has refused repeated calls to declare a climate emergency, and as his administration backed a court case designed to accelerate the construction of a massive fossil gas pipeline, despite scientists’ climate warnings. Biden’s administration has also declared that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scientific report about climate change “does not present sufficient cause” to halt a massive expansion of fossil fuel drilling.

The world’s infrastructure was built for a climate no longer existing

Bill Haskell [Angry Bear, via Mike Norman Economics, August 15, 2023]

 

Global power shift

[Twitter-X, via Naked Capitalism 8-15-2023]

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Open Thread

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On August 19, 2023

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Quick Takes: Covid, China, Environment & More

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On August 18, 2023

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Another “quick takes” in which I make brief comments on pieces I think are worthy of note, but am not going to write a full article on.

One of the policies I’ve promoted is criminal charges for environmental crimes, rather than just fines, which are simply treated as a cost of business and don’t take money from the executives responsible. Seems at least one country is doing so.

Violating China’s environmental policies can lead to real punishment. In March 2021, four major steel mills in Hebei were caught falsifying records to evade carbon emission limits; the next year, dozens of executives responsible were sentenced to prison.

It’s worth remembering just how good the media is at making people hate and fear the enemy of the day. They did it to Iraq, to Russia and to China.

There’s been a fair bit of bad economic news out of China recently (which I intend do a fuller post on), but one piece cuts both ways. A huge decrease in exports means that China’s customers (the West, to a significant degree) are buying less and it’s not just because of sanctions. China is now the world linchpin economy, much as the US was in 1920s–the industrial power exporting to other countries. We all know how the 20s ended.

China’s exports in July were down 14.5% year on year, far worse than expected, to $282 billion, although it is worth noting that in July 2022, China recorded its highest monthly levels of exports in history.

Meanwhile, the Covid pandemic is not over. Our elites know this: they want us back in offices, but protect themselves.

“Anybody who meets with the president does indeed get tested. I do, we all do”

The problem with Covid isn’t so much the deaths, though that’s bad, it’s the damage it does to people, even to people who don’t appear to have Long Covid. This picture and article summarizes some of Covid’s sequelae.

Fun stuff.

Extra fun is that some school districts have a financial incentive to keep sick kids in school.

The superintendent also noted a financial impact. If the current 90% daily attendance rate rose to 95% — which it was pre-pandemic — the result, he said, would be $300 million more in state funding, which is largely based on attendance.

Carvalho spoke on a day when he took part in two home visits in North Hollywood with students who had poor attendance last year, including an eighth-grader who missed 40 days of school. Her mother, Marissa Garcia, said both of her daughters had trouble keeping up with studies during the pandemic and also adjusting once school resumed. But the single mother said she and her daughters would redouble efforts to get the most out of school.

 

Back early in the pandemic, when they wanted to send children back to school, I wrote multiple articles saying this would be a disaster, because children are illness sponges. Not only are they not immune to Covid damage, they spread disease, as all parents and teachers know.

In totally predictable news, we now have proof of the obvious. “More than 70% of US household COVID spread started with a child, study suggests.”

A fun article is the one claiming no one knows why working age people are dying more from “non Covid.” Perhaps you can figure it out.

No one knows precisely what is driving the phenomenon, but there is an inexplicable lack of urgency to find out. A concerted investigation is in order.

Deaths among young Americans documented in employee life insurance claims should alone set off alarms. Among working people 35 to 44 years old, a stunning 34% more died than expected in the last quarter of 2022, with above-average rates in other working-age groups, too.

Covid has all sorts of weird side effects. More car accidents, for example, which when you look at that Sequelae graphic, rather makes sense. A lot of damaged people are driving and driving badly.

The cost of auto insurance soared 16.9% from a year ago Car insurers lost on average 12 cents for every dollar of premium written in 2022, the worst performance in more than 20 years, according This is partially due to an increase in accidents

Enough Covid fun. Off in Britain, the UK continues its slide to 3rd world status. Start with this lovely list of Labour leader Keir Starmers continued retreat from his promises when elected leader of the party.

And “progressives” continue to slurp it up, ensuring Britain’s decline and the left’s irrelevance.

And that’s our week’s quicktakes. Mostly bad, but at least China is jailing some climate criminals. Remember, most importantly, that Covid is not over and that you don’t want to get it, and if you’ve had it, you don’t want to get it again.

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Why Human Judgment Must Be Primary Over Metrics (Academic Edition)

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On August 17, 2023

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So, you’re all probably aware of the replication and fraud crisis in the scientific community. Psychology’s been hit hardest, and the social sciences, but the physical sciences have not been immune.

Retractions have risen sharply in recent years for two main reasons: first, sleuthing, largely by volunteers who comb academic literature for anomalies, and, second, major publishers’ (belated) recognition that their business models have made them susceptible to paper mills – scientific chop shops that sell everything from authorships to entire manuscripts to researchers who need to publish lest they perish.

These researchers are required – sometimes in stark terms – to publish papers in order to earn and keep jobs or to be promoted. The governments of some countries have even offered cash bonuses for publishing in certain journals. Any surprise, then, that some scientists cheat? (my emphasis)

And these are not merely academic matters. Particularly when it comes to medical research, fakery hurts real people. Take the example of Joachim Boldt – the German anesthesiologist who, with 186 retractions, now sits atop the Retraction Watch leader board of scientists with the most pulled papers.

The key paragraph is #2: academics are judged on how many papers they have, and how many citations those papers receive. Getting hired and getting tenure are based on them. Since it’s hard to get a full time real academic job these days, let alone get tenure, there’s a LOT at stake for academics. Publish or perish.

This isn’t how such decisions were always made, however. At one point, human judgment was given a much bigger sway. Hiring committees read the research, looked at teaching, and talked to the academic. Some academics published only a few papers, but they were good papers, and others were considered to have potential.

Such a system was subject to standard human abuse: hiring people who were liked, in effect, so an independent measure of academic excellent was sought, and what was come up with citations: if your research was important, presumably other academics would refer to it.

But any metric which is used to make monetary decisions is quickly gamed. If you must have those citations, many people will cut corners to get them. After spending 10 years to earn a Ph.D. the idea of being part of the large majority who either get no job or become associate profs, badly paid and treated, isn’t palatable.

For a long time this went on and cutting corners worked: the people inside the system were those who had benefited from it, after all. Everyone knew it was occurring but the incentives to prove it were lacking. Then some outsiders started looking, people funded with outside money, and they found a ton of fraud and sloppiness.

We keep doing this: we keep seeking metrics to cut out human judgment, but it can’t be done. It’s not that metrics aren’t useful, but, again, as soon as everyone knows what the metrics are, they game them. (Note how similar this is to Google’s early metric: how many links a webpage received. Remember how good early Google was before everyone started search engine optimization and Google decided to maximize monetization.)

The solution isn’t to find new metrics, and to get back on the treadmill, it is to go back to judgment, and to review the results over time with groups of outsiders and insiders.

You can’t outsource human decisions on who gets power to algorithms. It never works and it never will, as we’re finding out with “AI”.

Just bit the bullet and take responsibility.

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The “It Can’t Be Done Because It’s Never Been Done” Problem

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On August 15, 2023

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This chart is going around:

This is a useful chart, in that it shows that we aren’t reducing absolute use of energy sources which increase global warming: the gains you constantly hear about, at a global level (there are country exceptions, such as Germany) are relative, not absolute and it’s absolute that matters.

But it’s a dangerous chart in the sense that it suggests that because we’ve never done something, we can’t. In the specific case it is misleading: we’ve never had any particular reason to not keeping old forms of energy, and energy revolutions are uneven: in Europe and America and Canada, biomass is used a lot less than it was in the past, but as population expands, especially in less developed countries, well, of course biomass keeps being used, especially for cooking, and as long as global population keeps increasing, even reduced per-capita energy use could easily lead to higher numbers.

But the larger issue is the “we can’t do what we’ve never done” before idea. It’s obviously untrue technologically.  Back in the 19th century many leading scientists believed powered flight was impossible, to give just one of thousands of example. But it’s also true socially: we never had universal sufferage states, for example. Older Democracies had very sharp limits on the franchise. Modern corporations are a new form of social organization though they have some similarities to older forms (primarily religious: temples and, in particular, monasteries). Double entry book-keeping had massive social effects, so did various religious innovations and so on.

“We’ve never done it so we can’t do it”, with standard excuses of “it’s just human nature” (as if human nature isn’t very plastic) is the true doomerism.

We have changed how we live, socially, culturally and technologically, over and over again and we can do it again.

If we can’t, if we are nothing but larger versions of bacteria multiplying in a petri dish, only pretending to sentient, then we are doomed and in a certain sense, deserve to be doomed.

Only if we can change and take conscious control of how we change, recognizing that most (but definitely not all) of the constraints we have put on our ability to change are cultural and created by us, can we have an expectation of a good future ahead of us.

I’m betting we can do things we’ve never done before because any other bet leads places we really don’t want to go.

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Why Positive Emotions Towards Difficult People And Things Can Be Good

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On August 14, 2023

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Here’s the thing, everything you experience is your consciousness. When you see or hear another person or any object, what you’re experiencing is a representation.

Again, what you’re experiencing is yourself;  your consciousness. This the heart of all of the “I am everything” spiritual forms. You have never known anything directly except yourself and you never will.

This is one reason why most spiritual systems emphasize positive emotions towards even difficult people and situations. “Love thy enemy” is about loving yourself, and it is intensely protective. When the Buddha said that a monk being sawed in half by bandits should feel love towards the bandits, that wasn’t to protect the bandits (who in Buddhist metaphysics, will get theirs eventually due to karma), it’s because if you’re feeling love, you don’t feel much in the way of fear: the two emotions are opposed.

(Relatedly, if you get rid of background fear and tension, what happens is you start feeling love all the time, though the feel is somewhat different from romantic love: it is not needy (this is not theoretical, I’ve experienced it, though I don’t live there right now.)

With something like Metta you start by sending out love to people you already love, move to neutral people and then move to people you hate. It’s the last step which is most important, though it is last for a reason: it’s hard.

What stops most people is the fear that if they don’t hate those who are dangerous or immoral, they won’t protect themselves or be considered part of the tribe. The key to dealing with this is having standards: not needing emotions to tell you when someone is acting badly. IF you don’t have those standards, then you can indeed get into trouble, and this is a problem in some spiritual communities, especially when people try to act as if they have attainments they don’t have and suppress negative emotions. You aren’t suppressing if you do loving-kindness or other emotion correctly: if you have the attainment, the emotions either don’t come up or they come up briefly.

Loving-kindness, compassion and so on are also useful because when something negative does happen, or does come up from your memory, the positive emotion is protective. Traumatic formations reduce over time, negative conditioning and fears reduce and if something new bad happens you are far less likely to wind up with a new trauma.

There are a lot of benefits to other people from being around someone who is constantly loving, but the Buddha and many other spiritual teachers didn’t suggest love just because of that: they did so because being loving is good for the person who is loving.

 

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 13, 2023

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On August 13, 2023

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by Tony Wikrent

 

Heather Cox Richardson, August 12, 2023 [Letters from an American]

In Marion, Kansas, yesterday morning, four local police officers and three sheriff’s deputies raided the office of the Marion County Record newspaper; the home of its co-owners, Eric Meyer and his 98 year old mother, Joan Meyer; and the home of Marion vice mayor Ruth Herbel, 80. They seized computers, cell phones, and other equipment. Joan Meyer was unable to eat or sleep after the raid; she collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home.

The search warrant alleged there was probable cause to believe the newspaper, its owners, or the vice mayor had committed identity theft and unlawful computer acts against restaurant owner Kari Newell, but Magistrate Laura Viar appears to have issued that warrant without any affidavit of wrongdoing on which to base it. Sherman Smith, Sam Bailey, Rachel Mipro, and Tim Carpenter of the nonprofit news service Kansas Reflector reported that federal law protects journalists from search and seizure and requires law enforcement instead to subpoena materials they want.

On August 2, Newell had thrown Meyer and a Marion County Record reporter out of a meeting with U.S. Representative Jake LaTurner (R-KS), and the paper had run a story on the incident. Newell had complained on her personal Facebook page,

On August 7, Newell publicly accused the newspaper of illegally getting information about a drunk-driving charge against her and giving it to Herbel. Eric Meyer says the information—which was accurate—was sent to him and Herbel over social media and that he decided not to publish it out of concerns it was leaked to help Newell’s estranged husband in divorce proceedings. Those same concerns made him take the story to local police. Newell accused the newspaper of violating her rights and called Meyer to accuse him of identity theft….

The Marion County Record will sue the city and the individuals involved in the raid, which, the paper wrote in its coverage, “legal experts contacted were unanimous in saying violated multiple state and federal laws, including the U.S. Constitution, and multiple court rulings.” “Our first priority is to be able to publish next week,” Meyer said, “but we also want to make sure no other news organization is ever exposed to the Gestapo tactics we witnessed today. We will be seeking the maximum sanctions possible under law.”

Executive director of the Kansas Press Association Emily Bradbury noted “An attack on a newspaper office through an illegal search is not just an infringement on the rights of journalists but an assault on the very foundation of democracy and the public’s right to know. This cannot be allowed to stand.”

 

Global power shift

Oil sanctions have failed after budget revenues surge as Russia completes the switch from European to Asian markets

[Intellinews, via Naked Capitalism 8-6-2023]

Russia overtakes Germany to become fifth biggest economy in the world in GDP on a PPP basis 

[BNE Intellinews, via Naked Capitalism 8-9-2023]

China, the fascinating flight of the Dragon

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Open Thread

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On August 11, 2023

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

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