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Month: November 2023 Page 3 of 4
Well, this is what I pointed out would be the problem the minute Israel cut off all water and electricity then went and bombed the power and water infrastructure.
Also have widespread diarrhea. This is just what WHO has seen in their shelters, w/o the internet and with all the bombs they don’t know what’s going on with everyone else.
The current disease trends are very concerning. Since mid-October 2023, over 33,551 cases of diarrhea have been reported. Over half of these are among children under age five—a significant increase compared to an average of 2000 cases monthly in children under five throughout 2021 and 2022. 8944 cases of scabies and lice, 1005 cases of chickenpox, 12635 cases of skin rash, and 54,866 cases of upper respiratory infections have also been reported.
It’s just going to get worse, a lot worse:
Lack of fuel has led to the shutting down of desalination plants, significantly increasing the risk of bacterial infections like diarrhea spreading as people consume contaminated water. Lack of fuel has also disrupted all solid waste collection, creating an environment conducive to the rapid and widespread proliferation of insects, rodents that can carry and transmit diseases.
Meanwhile, most people are living on almost no water. They can’t make bread any more, even if they had flour, so there’s very little food. Stories of people not eating so that what little food they have can go to their children are common. Lines for what food there is can take all day, and fights are becoming common.
None of this is unexpected. Netanyahu and Genocide Joe are responsible.
If Turkish President Erdogan is sincere about wanting to help, there’s a simple way to do it. Send a squad of military cargo planes with pallets to drop (ie. with parachutes) into Gaza. Tell Israel that if they are shot down, it’s an automatic declaration of war: pass a bill saying that before the planes go.
Meanwhile, the real part of the genocide has begun. It was never about killing them all with explosives, most will die from disease, hunger and lack of water.
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I don’t believe the 1,400 number for casualties from the Hamas attack. I suspect less civilians were killed than Israel claims and that many who were killed were killed by Israeli fire (there were plenty of reports of Israeli military not exercising fire control when civilians were around.) I also don’t believe accusations of widespread rape by Hamas. Certainly 40 babies weren’t beheaded.
Israel has lied a ton, while Gaza casualty numbers are generally taken as understatement. Indeed, Israel has stated 20K civilians casualties at least once, twice what Gaza is claiming, which makes sense, since so many people are buried and counting is hard in the middle of a massacre.
This stuff will eventually be worked out, long after it matters, but I’m going to lay down this marker. This doesn’t mean I believe Hamas killed no civilians or children, or that there were zero rapes. I just don’t believe the Israeli numbers.
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We all know that civilization is in collapse due to climate change, environmental degradation and over-use of resources. The classic graph is this one.
Not pretty, and this blog tends to write about such topics a lot.
But it’s not all bad. Let’s run thru that.
Collapse will be unevenly distributed, and that means some places and positions in society will be a lot better for a long time. The trick is figuring out where those will be. Obviously not lowlands, or places which are likely to run out of water, or places where heat will move over the wet-bulb point. I’d suggest water and stability and food are the main things to look for: so, for example, in North America around the great lakes, up by Great Bear Lake (not a nice place to live right now, though) and so on.
Some people always do well. Even in the Roman collapse, there were people living good lives. Of course, those were mostly the “masters of violence” but if you have key skills people need, including technological skills or if you’re liked by many people, that will help.
Note that in the Dark Ages the other group who did relatively well were the priests and monks. Expect a religious revival and an upsurge in real “intentional” communities: monasteries, nunneries and the like. If you’re a priest, you’ll benefit, if you’re a senior monk or nun you’ll do fine.
So, a relatively senior person in charge of violence or community, or someone with useful skills, or someone who liked by a lot of people.
Work will be hard, but meaningful. Right now we have, in David Graeber’s phasing, a lot of “bullshit jobs.” Those will mostly go away. Your work may suck, but you’ll know that it’s actually needed.
A restoration of the extended family. Leaving aside refugees, but even there only partially, the family household will be a thing again, as it is one of the most effective ways to deal with bad times, and as people won’t be leaving to find work that doesn’t exist. This is a good/bad thing, the extended family, generally patriarchal, has a lot of downsides, but people in religious communities and extended families are happier and healthier in general and have a buffer against bad times. This is pretty robust in the literature.
More local autonomy. International trade and expeditions half way around the world to beat up other people up will decrease significantly, we won’t have the resources for them. Because of this local agriculture and production will come back, and with that will come an end to a universal “Americanized/European/Han” culture. Areas will be able to make their own choices, for good or bad, and will not be overwhelmed by power and economy of scale from far away.
The consumer lifestyle will end but appropriate tech will take its place. We do know a lot more than when the Romans went into the Dark Ages, and there are lot of solutions for our problems. Green houses with shutters, non-panel solar power. Water resevoirs attached to homes, and far more. You’ll live local, you’ll be more independent as a household (if you belong to one), and you’ll spend a lot less time working for other people and much more working for yourself and your family. Again, this is a mixed bag, but there are upsides.
The Possibility of the New. What happens will break all existing ruling ideologies: capitalism, representative democracy, the CCP (China will break up at some point, my guess centers around the 70s) and so on. If your ideology was in charge, it’s going to take a huge hit. Of course much of what will happen is a reversion to household patriarchy and religion, but there is the real possibility of new forms of organization, ideology and politics.
This is why it is important, now, to win the storytelling wars. Why this world collapsed and what a good world should look like. When everything goes to Hell people will use the ideas on the ground. If they’re good ones, great. If not, Hell. In a lesser way look at the Great Depression: Germany gets Hitler, the US lucks out and gets FDR. But the times coming will be much worse than the Great Depression and the possibility of change likewise greater.
The end of something old is always the chance to create something new and that new thing may be better. In fact, I’m sure it will be, in some places, just as in many places it will be something much worse.
Hope isn’t optimism. It’s a realistic way of saying “there are possibilities and we can reach for the better ones.”
Let it be so.
(We’ll talk more specifics in future articles. There’s a category “The Green Age After the Collapse.” It will see more use.
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As I noted in comments, it’s the angriest I’ve been since 2015 when Syriza crumbled to European austerity. The day that happened I was furious. I wrote an angry post and went for a walk, still boiling with anger. About half an hour later I thought “this is ridiculous, it isn’t helping the Greeks and I don’t like it” and the anger went away.
It was odd, in the sense that we often have thoughts and feelings we don’t like, but usually they don’t go away just because think “I’d rather not feel this way.”
But a fair bit of it stuck, and over the past eight years my anger has reduced radically, and on those occasions when I do get angry, I can end it quickly if I want to. I was angry when I wrote that post, but I didn’t go to bed angry.
From about the run-up to the Iraq war till 2014 I was angry most of the time. Lots of dead people, tortured people, raped people, hungry people, homeless people that didn’t need to be any of those things.
Our leaders and too many of us (remember approval for the Iraq war polled over 70%) were creating Hell when we could just as easily create Heaven.
In many ways the current Gaza war reminds me of the run-up to and early Iraq war. The same feeling of frustrated helplessness while vast evil was planned and performed. Iraq didn’t radicalize me, Obama confirming he was neoliberal scum and condemning a billion+ people to die by slamming the pedal down on climate change did, but Iraq turned me into an activist, a role I occupied from 2002 to 2009, and emotionally inhabited till 2014.
Anyway, what I learned in 2014, and what I grounded into my consciousness in 2015 was that being angry all the time was destroying me. My health, my effectiveness and my enjoyment of life. My anger wasn’t hurting the people doing all the evil, they could care less, and why should they care, they were well off or rich, powerful and living very pleasant lives while I was poor, sick and angry?
The only person my anger was hurting was me.
Don’t get me wrong, if my anger had let me, in some sense, win, I’d have taken the hit. I was committed, oh was I committed. But it didn’t work.
Andrew Cockburn once asked someone working for him if their hate was pure and I get it. Still is. I won’t pretend or cavil, or pretend to be a Saint. I hate Obama. I hate Biden. I hate Trump. I hate Clinton and Bush. Netanyahu. Didn’t use to hate Trudeau but genocide support has pushed me over.
My hate is pure, but these days not intense. Just a sort of background contempt (the most dangerous emotion, by far, contempt.)
At the same time I feel this odd empathy and sympathy for them. I get it, I feel it, the self-righteousness (especially evident in Obama and Trudeau), the love of power and adulation, the sense that they are the ones who know and make the hard decisions and so on.
Ben Gurion knew he was evil, and I respect him for that, but most of our leaders think they are good.
(And no, don’t succumb to the bullshit of “well if I think they’re evil, and they think they’re good, who knows who’s right. That’s garbage. Have you aided a genocide recently? Invaded a country based on lies? Denied the children of Iraq cancer medicines? Bombed a hospital or pharmaceutical plant? Made millions homeless then effectively made being homeless illegal?” )
Life is good for the people in charge: the senior pols, the CEOS, the high level executives, the tools who run NGOs (whose workers lives are mostly shit).
Anyway, I write this because I bet a lot of my readers feel the same way, and recognize a lot of what I’m saying.
Rule #1: don’t let the monsters ruin your life. Don’t let them control your emotions. Surges of anger are fine, but don’t live there. Seek out joy and happiness and as much as possible fight from there.
But remember also that emotions like hate, anger and contempt, in controlled doses exist to let you know who is an enemy, who shouldn’t have power, and who is dangerous to you. Such emotions are dangerous, absolutely, because they can be weaponized by others to turn you against people who don’t deserve them. See Jews, WWII and Palestinians, today. See Americans who think Putin is a bigger threat to them than Biden or Trump or the CEO of any Fortune 500 company.
What’s happening in Gaza is an atrocity. By all means do something, but don’t let it make your miserable, because if you do, the bastards have a victory, the suffering of their enemy, you.
But remember, oh yes, always remember. And remembering, act if you ever have the chance.
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OK. Let’s lay this out.
Israel is genociding Palestinians in Gaza. It has killed more civilians in three weeks than Ukraine and Russia have all war. Over 60% of casualties are children and women. They are deliberately flattening as many residential buildings as possible. They have bombed multiple hospitals, every single university and just hit the remaining water facility, while Palestinians have almost no water to drink.
Their end-goal is to force whoever survives into Egypt.
The US, may their empire collapse now, is sheep-dogging the Israeli genocide.
Senior U.S. Officials have reportedly been Warning the Iranian Government and Iranian-Backed Militias in the Middle East such as Hezbollah for several weeks now, both Directly and through Back-Channels in Countries like Turkey, that if they decide to launch a Significant or… pic.twitter.com/TizdWsk9kn
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) November 6, 2023
Let me translate this.
America. “If Iran or Hezbollah try to stop the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, we will fuck up Iran and Lebanon to make sure Israel can keep mass-murdering civilians.”
Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.
Not 5% of people in political power aren’t, functionally, psychopathic mass murderers, any chance they can get.
I will not forget anyone who was for this. Anyone. At best every single person who had any power and supported this, including Justin Trudeau, Biden, etc… need to go to jail for the rest of their lives. All their wealth should be taken and given to their victims.
This has always been true, by the way. Our societies have been run by absolute scum, basically forever. Our system does not work. It promotes to the top of both private and public power the worst people in the world, people who make Jeffrey Dahmer look like a boy-scout. If their victim counts were as low as Dahmer’s, we’d live in a comparative paradise.
We need to figure out a better way to run our societies and don’t even start with “but democracy”. Our form of democracy is a complete failure, and those still alive in even 25 years will be entirely clear about that.
I don’t imagine Trump being any better (remember how he supported Israel), but I’ll never endorse Genocide Joe or any Democrat or Republican who voted to help Israel.
Enough.
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by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Rana Foroohar, October 29, 2023 [Washington Monthly, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-31-2023]
There can be no doubt now that an epochal shift is underway in how the economy—in America and across the globe—is governed. The mystery is how a moderate, conventional politician like Joe Biden engineered it….
The record on that score is unequivocal. His COVID-19 stimulus bailed out people, not banks. His domestic economic policy has been about curbing giant corporations and promoting income growth. His infrastructure bills invested in America in a way not seen since the Eisenhower administration. He has taken commerce back to an earlier era in which it was broadly understood that trade needed to serve domestic interests before those of international markets.
The contrast with the so-called neoliberal economics of recent decades, in which it was presumed that markets always know best, and particularly the Clintonian idea that “free” trade and globalization were inevitable, could not be starker. With a few notable exceptions (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Jared Bernstein), Bill Clinton’s administration, like Barack Obama’s, was filled with neoliberal technocrats who bought fully into the idea of the inherent efficiency of markets. Although they might have occasionally looked to tweak the system, many of the academic economists running policy basically believed that capital, goods, and people would ultimately end up where it was best and most productive for them to be without the sort of public-sector intervention you’ve seen during the Biden administration.
In this world, so long as stock prices were going up and consumer prices were going down, all was well. Monetary policy trumped fiscal stimulus. And if the latter had to be used, it should be, in the words of the economist Larry Summers, “timely, targeted, and temporary.” (The Biden stimulus, by contrast, is designed to be broad based and long term.) In this political economy, outsourcing wasn’t a bad thing. China would get freer as it got richer. Americans should aim to be bankers and software engineers, not manufacturers….
“Rather than speaking to Goldman Sachs, Biden spoke to autoworkers.”
Winning the Anti-monopoly Game
Will Norris, October 29, 2023 [Washington Monthly]
Despite press accounts to the contrary, the Biden administration’s revival of antitrust policy isn’t failing. It’s just getting started.
How the Youth Boom in Africa Will Change the World
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-31-2023]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
US Special Operations Forces are in Israel Helping Locate Hostages
[Antiwar, via Naked Capitalism 11-01-2023]
Israel pounds Gaza with U.S. “heavy” bunker-busting bombs. Erdogan speaks of a Cross vs Crescent war
Gilbert Doctorow [via Naked Capitalism 10-30-2023]
US sends forces to Jordan amid buildup in “defense of Israel”
[Electronic Intifada, via Naked Capitalism 10-30-2023]
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.