Ian Welsh

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

Reasons For Hope (1): The Solutions Are Known

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On February 8, 2023

23 Comments

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.

Lean Into The Good

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On February 6, 2023

7 Comments

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.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 5, 2023

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On February 5, 2023

13 Comments

by Tony Wikrent

War

Russian Foreign Ministry Rejects Blinken and Nuland Proposals, Condemns Scholz for Reviving Hitler’s Plan to Destroy Russia 

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…

[TW: Not the language of diplomacy. At all.]

 

Sanctions and Geography are Replacing the Russian Oligarchy With State Planning, Producing a Better Growth Rate than the US, Germany

John Helmer [Dances with Bears 1-31-2023]

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.

 

Concerning the arguments for ‘total defeat’ of Russia 

[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.

 

Inside the global battle over chip manufacturing 

[The Verge, via Naked Capitalism 2-3-2023]

Chris Miller, Tufts professor and author of Chip War: The Fight For The World’s Most Critical Technology walked 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.

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Open Thread

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On February 4, 2023

18 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

I’m Just Embarrassed For Humanity At This Point

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On February 3, 2023

27 Comments

I was thinking today about China giving up on Zero Covid. They were responding to significant public protests. The CCP isn’t democratic by our standards, but they actually care a great deal about public opinion, especially “expressed” public opinion.

What’s embarrassing, however, is the failure to spend the two years Zero-Covid bought fixing infrastructure. We know, at this point, that ventilation, HEPA filtering and UV radiation work. (This is what the rich gave themselves at Davos, so don’t waste anyone’s time arguing.)

There was a time, basically in the Victorian era, where we rebuilt all of the water infrastructure because we had finally got it thru our thick skulls that disease spread thru water. We did it, and it made a huge difference.

I think particularly of China because no other major country even really tried. China had the time, and they have the industrial resources to do what is necessary (also, refit buildings with water traps, those little u-bends you see  under your sink or by your toilet.) They’re the largest manufacturing nation in the world, and they had spare housing workers hanging around.

Clean the air flow in buildings. Even just putting a HEPA filter in a classroom, without any other changes, drops Covid massively.

Now, this is a symptom of a larger problem. We have known about climate change for decades. The science was clear and known to the educated public by the late 70s, before there was a huge push for climate denialism backed by big money. There were some obvious easy solutions that amounted to “change infrastructure to use less energy.” Every building in developed country could have been made to use vastly less energy, and since we had an unemployment crisis combined with an energy crisis, it would have been the obvious right thing to do. Instead we did demand restriction through wage suppression, which had the side-benefit of making the rich a lot richer.

It has remained the right thing to do for decades. AOC’s New Green Deal is just a version of what everyone with sense has known needed to be done. I put out a similar plan first in the early 2000s at BOPNews, but I was nowhere near the first.

This is just embarrassing. We know what’s wrong, we know how to do some of the major steps required to fix it and we don’t do anything. Zero Covid was, on top of that run incompetently (but China gets points for at least trying till they gave up.)

Embarrassing. I’m just embarrassed for our leadership, who are psychopathic morons, even the ones who sometimes try to do the right thing, and I’m embarrassed or humanity, given how human social dynamics lead to such terrible leadership, over and over. Periods with competent leadership are rare, those where the leadership is both competent and non-psychopathic rarer still (in the US, this period in the 20th century arguably only exists for the period where FDR was in charge, and was marred even then by the sad fact that he was racist, particularly against Japanese (ironically because he liked the Chinese.) Truman, despite his good reputation, was a disaster.)

But this is a human problem which has gone on for about eight thousand years, and maybe longer.

The entire shit-show is just embarrassing and pathetic.

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.

Britain Stops Making Vaccine Available (But the Rich Will Still Get It)

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On February 1, 2023

15 Comments

So, here we go:

Now, I want to point out again, that at Davos, where the rich and powerful meet to decide the fate of the world, everyone has to be vaccinated, and has to be tested and if they aren’t or they test positive, their badges are deactivated.

In other words, the rich get vaccinated. Current vaccines are pretty shitty, because they haven’t been keeping up with the mutation speed, but they’re still better than nothing, and do reduce the seriousness of cases.

But that’s not really the point: the point is that for the rich the cost of vaccine (Modern is raising it from $26 to $110 to $130 in the US) is meaningless to our lords and masters: they don’t even notice $120: they spend more, much more, for lunch. But to ordinary people such a price can be the difference between eating or paying the rent. If it has to go, it goes.

One policy for the rich, who can afford bespoke medicine, and another for the plebes.

This is also terrible public health policy. While the vaccines don’t prevent spread, they do reduce viral load in infected individuals, and thus reduce the odds people around them will get infected. Mass vaccination (note that it is voluntary) is a good thing.

Leaving aside the whole “death” thing, there has been so much disabling due to Covid that the Bank of England, hardly touchy-feely compassionate sorts have noticed it with alarm, so even if you, like our lords and masters, are functionally a psychopath, this is going to continue to cause disaster in the economy.

But then labor shortages and supply chain problems have been used as an excuse to raise prices much higher than cost increases, so from the point of view of the ruling class, who is this their problem? They’re getting richer; they make sure the people around them are tested and vaccinated and most of them can work from home and even before Covid lived inside carefully vetted bubbles. And if they do get sick, they’ll get the best care, far better than you will.

So, really, Covid continues to be win-win-win for the ruling class and who cares if it’s a mass death, mass disabling event of the sheep they rule over?

WIN! From WIN to WIN. That’s what it’s like to be in the ruling class. Even a pandemic that kills millions is just another profit opportunity.

Too bad you aren’t a member.

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.

What Hungary’s Purge of Senior Military Officers Can Teach Us All

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On January 31, 2023

21 Comments

Victor Orban is not a stupid man even though I disagree with him on a great deal:

Hungarian military leadership is receiving a purge. Over 170 generals and high-ranking officers were fired in a matter of a couple days. A deNATOization is occurring in the Hungarian command purging those that were socialized in NATO and international partnerships.

Now, it’s easy to reflexively say this is bad, but imagine you were a left-wing South American leader.

Yeah, you’d be an idiot not to purge the military of those trained by “NATO” and the US, because those are the guys who resist and who launch coups. The only question is how to do it without causing a purge. If you want to run your country in ways the West doesn’t approve of, this is what you have to do. It may be you want to do things that are worse or better (or a mix of both), but whatever you want to do, if it doesn’t agree with the US, you can’t leave those military officers in command.

This is more broadly true, of course, military officers who are loyal to a different ideology are poison. This is why the Angl0-American ideology was supposed to be that career military men don’t have political opinions; or at least don’t share or act on them. More violated in the breach, etc…

In Turkey Edrogan spent years purging the military, and used the failed coup to finish the job. But if he hadn’t already been purging, it wouldn’t have failed. In Brazil, Lula is currently cleaning at least some house, though nowhere near as much as Orban.

And some may remember that in Britain, there were threats of a coup if Corbyn became Prime Minister.

The military and paramilitary forces, police and secret police in particular, are always a problem. But there’s an argument that the worst are those who were foreign trained and whose loyalty isn’t truly to their home country. And given how senior officers in NATO countries are trained and socialized, well, their loyalties must always be suspect. Is it their own country their loyalty is with, or America?

Within a country, the question is “loyal to which faction.” In the US, for example, if push had come to shove it’s safe to say that the border cops would have sided with Trump and will side with any future “strong man.” Those watching the storming of the capital will remember how restrained the police were: if it had been a bunch of blacks, would they have been so considerate?

Brazil had an attempted coup during the election, and Lula, the new President is treating it very differently than Orban: he’s not just going after the foot soldiers, but after the people behind them. But then Lula went to prison on trumped up charges designed to stop him from running in the previous election: he understand the stakes viscerally.

American elites, internally, operate by a simple rule that if a member doesn’t betray the class, they don’t go to prison and they don’t lose their cushy lifestyle, even if they lose their power. There’s been some movement to hold Trump to account, but it’s half-hearted, simply because elites don’t want “their” president to be the one on the chopping block next. They all do things which could be considered illegal, after all, they’re little better than Mafia dons.

But if the stakes are “I keep power or I lose everything” then the game changes. The problem is that knowing they essentially have immunity, crimes in the elite class  have become worse and worse over time.

All systems have written and unwritten norms, but all systems have in and out groups. The norms apply to some people, and not to others. If any regular employee had treated classified documents the way Trump, Clinton and Biden did they’d be in prison, that’s just a fact. Blacks are treated worse than whites; but poor people are treated worse than rich people. Kinda shitty to be poor and black.

And some people and groups are considered legitimate in power and others aren’t. Corbyn wasn’t, which is why the media lied about him 80% or so of the time and why a nonsense anti-semitism scandal was whipped up (there was anti-semitism in the party, but Corbyn isn’t one, and the party is less anti-semitic than the Conservatives, which is what you would expect.)

And it’s why the British military might have couped Corbyn if he won and it’s why Orban, and his dispute with the EU heats up because of his refusal to go along with the consensus in the Russian war, on top of his various other policies, is getting rid of those officers committed to a different ideology, who might feel that he is illegitimate, and that he needs to go.

 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 29, 2023

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On January 29, 2023

8 Comments

by Tony Wikrent

 

Altercation: Goodbye and Thanks

Eric Alterman, January 27, 2023 [The American Prospect]

The key question I want to leave people with is this: Given the lack of guardrails, how far are these people willing to go? Trump is as popular as he was before January 6th and has been invited back on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. His only credible alternative for the Republican nomination at this point, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is in many significant respects even worse than Trump. Kevin McCarthy is elevating lunatic insurrectionists who fear Jewish space lasers and children’s books about loving gay parents to positions with real power and rejecting people merely because they are competent and committed to the Constitution. Tucker Carlson, a paranoid, racist co-conspirator of the morally disgusting Alex Jones, has the highest ratings in cable news. Thanks in part to a great lineup at the New York Jewish Film Festival this month, I’ve just recently seen a whole bunch of films about the fate of fascism in Germany, Austria, France, Ukraine, and Poland—I’m considering Stalinism to be a form of fascism here—and another about Eichmann’s trial and death in Israel, and elsewhere in theaters about town, about fascism in Argentina, in Italy (which I wrote about here), and another one about Austria. They speak to this question, which has long been on my mind: How far are these people willing to go and what is to stop them?

 

War

What Russian elites are saying:

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-2023]

.

Why is Egypt’s Navy commanding a NATO-led coalition in the Red Sea? 

[The Cradle, via Naked Capitalism 1-24-2023]

 

U.S. Weapons Industry Unprepared for a China Conflict, Report Says 

[WSJ, via Naked Capitalism 1-24-2023]

 

The pandemic

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-23-2023]

.

“The #DavosStandard safe air should be for all of us”

[Boing Boing, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-23-2023]

“Folks who have long been advocating for similar safety measures for public spaces, schools, workplaces, and more are taking to Twitter to praise the measures in effect at the WEF, and to spread the news that we should all have access to safe places to work, gather, learn, and more…. We should all be asking the same question — shouldn’t we all be as protected from COVID-19 as the attendees at the World Economic Forum are?”

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