The world’s oldest Douglas fir trees have lived over 1,000 years FOX
How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World’s First Writing System Literary Hub
Climate
Plankton may not survive global warming with “devastating effects” Oceanographic
Water
How much water do Colorado communities actually need? In one, surprisingly little Colorado Sun
Syndemics
Despite warnings from bird flu experts, it’s business as usual in California dairy country LA Times
Canadian probe into teen’s critical H5N1 infection finds no clear source Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy
Microorganisms: The Growing Phenomenon of ‘Frozen’ Virus Genome Sequences and Their Likely Origin in Research Facility Escapes Avian Flu Diary
Thanksgiving Pre-Game Festivities
Take the turkey, leave the gravy: Thanksgiving food that TSA might confiscate at airport security FOX
Why a Family ‘F*rt Walk’ Should Be on Your Agenda This Thanksgiving SELF
China?
Beijing initiative on global supply chain cooperation released at 2nd CISCE CGTN
In careful protest, China Evergrande’s investors press for action Channel News Asia
‘Groundless’: China dismisses report about corruption probe into defence chief Dong Jun South China Morning Post
India
Adani Group says it lost nearly US$55 billion as US charges sparked rout Channel News Asia
Syraqistan
Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire takes effect, halting deadly war in Lebanon CBS. Commentary:
Don’t be fooled by the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon. It will not hold for long, given the weakness and passivity of the Lebanese Armed Forces. Israel retains the right to carry out military strikes within Lebanon to “enforce” the terms of the ceasefire. It can… https://t.co/TwRPE3yWyj
— Chris Hedges (@ChrisLynnHedges) November 26, 2024
Anger and distrust among displaced Israelis at ceasefire deal BBC
Israel May Sign Cease-fire Deal With Lebanon, but Iran Will Guarantee Hezbollah’s Compliance Haaretz
UN Resolution 1701 is at the heart of the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire. What is it? AP
* * * Displaced Craig Murray
* * * Surge in New Settler-supporting Parties Ahead of Next World Zionist Congress Elections Haaretz
* * * Supporters of Pakistan’s Imran Khan call off protest, his party says Reuters
Turkish bankers refilling ATMs three times a day as Erdogan resists printing bigger banknotes BNE Intellinews
US reconsiders F-35 sales to Türkiye after seeing KAAN fly: National Defense Minister Anadolu Agency
The New Great Game
The Georgian ombudsman backed parliament’s legitimacy, but 37 colleagues opposed JAM News
European Disunion
Scuffles in Serbian parliament as deadly station collapse sparks anger at the government AP
New Not-So-Cold War
Putin Isn’t Bluffing: Intermediate-Range Hypersonic Missile ‘Warning’ National Interest
Why all the fuss about Russia’s newly demonstrated Oreshnik hypersonic missile? Gilbert Doctorow
Swell of ‘WWIII’ Red Herrings Aims to Drown Out Mounting Russian Success Simplicius, Simplicius the Thinker
* * * Trump can’t deliver a peace deal, says ex-Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba Politico
Russia rejects the possibility of freezing the frontline and insists on Ukraine’s capitulation – ISW Ukrainska Pravda
Responding to America’s Machiavelli Wannabes on Ukraine Landmarks: A Journal of International Dialogue
* * * Russia accelerates advance in Ukraine’s east Reuters
Britain and France Just Surged Ukraine’s Cruise Missile Stockpiles Ready For Major Deep Strikes Into Russia Military Watch
Ukraine war briefing: Kyiv pulls back 100,000 mortar rounds after failures Guardian
* * * Sixty British troops deployed to investigate drones over US airbases The Times. Commentary:
Scott Bessent, Trump's pick for Treasury Secretary, is saying that their tariffs is a "10 year project" to make the Chinese consume more and manufacture less.
This says so much about so many things…
First of all, when your competitive strategy is premised on shaping your… https://t.co/K09XIOOiME
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) November 26, 2024
More Nord Stream intrigue! Bud’s Offshore Energy
South of the Border
BRICS Corridor: China Eyes Pacific-Atlantic Rail Project via Bolivia and Brazil Orinoco Tribune
Trump Transition
Trump proves he is serious on tariffs – but it’s not about trade BBC. Commentary:
Scott Bessent, Trump's pick for Treasury Secretary, is saying that their tariffs is a "10 year project" to make the Chinese consume more and manufacture less.
This says so much about so many things…
First of all, when your competitive strategy is premised on shaping your… https://t.co/K09XIOOiME
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) November 26, 2024
Tariffs, Low Prices, Wall Street. Pick Two Matt Stoller, BIG
* * * Jay Bhattacharya, prominent physician and economist, nominated by Trump for NIH director FOX
Marty Malarkey Closed Form
* * * Breaking norms, Trump signs transition memorandum with Biden White House Al Jazeera
How Trump Plans to Seize the Power of the Purse From Congress ProPublica
Eight is Enough Doomberg (PI).
Antitrust
Justice Dept., Google make closing arguments in ad-market antitrust case WaPo
Spook Country
We Tracked Every Visitor to Epstein Island WIRED. “Many of the visitors were likely wealthy, as indicated by coordinates pointing to gated communities in Michigan, as well as homes in Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket in Massachusetts.”
Digital Watch
Tether Has Become a Massive Money Laundering Tool for Mexican Drug Traffickers, Feds Say 404 Media
Australia moves step closer to world-first social media ban for under-16s Al Jazeera. See NC for online age verification issues.
The Final Frontier
Why India’s latest Sun mission finding is crucial for the world BBC
Zircon trace element evidence for early hydrothermal activity on Mars Science
Zeitgeist Watch
Hallucinogenic sci-fi movie: Inside the rather bizarre relaunch of Jaguar Car Dealer
Imperial Collapse Watch
The U.S. Navy Can’t Build Ships Foreign Policy
Biden’s ‘Samson Option’ Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News
Class Warfare
Billionaire Megadonors Push State Courts Rightward Exposed by CMD
* * * Thoughts on Oligarchy John R. MacArthur, Harper’s
The USA 2025, Germany 1933 History Unfolding
Antidote du jour (Lucy from manchester, uk):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
176 comments
Comments are closed.
Trump´s latest oddity, Sebastian Gorka.
John Kiriakou on Scheerpost:
Sebastian Gorka Is Back
https://scheerpost.com/2024/11/27/john-kiriakou-sebastian-gorka-is-back/
“Sebastian Gorka is back. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump last week named Gorka as the administration’s “terrorism czar” on the National Security Council. Trump has made a series of disastrous appointments to his administration since his election on Nov. 5. But this might be the worst. Don’t remember Sebastian Gorka?
Eight years ago, when Trump was elected president for the first time, Gorka was one of his more controversial appointments as “deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs,” that is, deputy national security adviser. That’s a hugely important position. The deputy national security advisor assists the president in managing the entire intelligence community and manages the administration’s anti-terrorism efforts. But Gorka immediately ran into trouble.”
When picking members of his team a President must assure all factions that supported him that have real power (ordinary citizens not included) that they are getting their piece of the pie, so to speak. Gorka solidly represents the fascist part of Trumps support that they have agency so tha that faction will no try to sabotage Trumps efforts in more important areas. Terrorism is, largely, a phony issue and a phony term used to gaslight the public in order to give some kind of justification to repressive measures. This may be to take action against anti-genocide student protesters or hassle (real) leftists. We’ll just have to see. The current set up of the new Trump administration reflects the real power in Washington and, so far, Trump has accurately reflected his real political support among those in power. We will just have to see which factions dominate policy and whether any of his efforts will help or hinder those of us without much power.
Indeed. I’m not especially sanguine that Trump will start stuffing flowers down the barrel of every gun, but I do think some good might come from his administration.
A lot of the Duran/Nima/Napolitano guests have been blasting Trump’s picks in recent days for being warmongering swamp denizens, and they’re not wrong about that. But I haven’t heard most of them note that Trump also appointed a bunch of warmongering swamp denizens in his first go-round, and didn’t start any new wars while putting the deal in place to end the one in Afghanistan. Also, Trump noted in a recent interview that he put Bolton in there to scare some foreign countries last time but never took Bolton all that seriously. He may be making up stories after the fact since I suspect he may not have even known who Bolton was before he was recommended to him, but still he didn’t let the Walrus start tossing nukes around either.
I also suspect that some of Trump’s picks may be gone within a few months of being hired, and Trump may already know which ones he intends to can. He does still prefer to play reality show over politics, much to the chagrin of the establishment ruling class.
Trump started arming Ukraine in earnest, cancelled JPCOA, killed Soleimani, recognized golan heights as Israel’s territory, asked NK to capitulate, etc… The precedents are not good. I am not giving him any rope but brace myself.
The Abraham Accords provide some basis for hope, something many did not expect to see in their lifetimes. It will be interesting to see how the Saudis and others act in the days and weeks prior to the Inauguration. There has to be a war fatigue in many parts of the Middle East and points to the east, for cooler heads to prevail against the Biden late stage escalations. Any positive statements from the region would be welcomed in this Thanksgiving period!
The Abraham Accords were contingent on realization of a Palestinian state along 76 borders. This was never likely & today seems impossible.
Don’t forget Trump dropped the mother of all bombs on Afghanistan early in his tenure.
It’s interesting how everyone forgot about that. He was so peace-making, that this just fell off the list as a misdemeanor. It is only the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever used. If Putin was to drop FOAB on an empty field in Banderistan, we would never hear the end of it. Canadians would instantly build a monument for victims.
P.S. Another thing that’s rarely mentioned are his Jerusalem shenanigans. Maybe because it was just a foreplay for the real thing that we have now.
A sixty day ceasefire designed to fail
If it doesn’t, Bibi will land in jail
He should sound the retreat
For his troops have been beat
And there’s no chance they’ll ever prevail
Both sides have signed for a fragile ceasefire
And the French will return to their old empire
All at Hezbollah’s peril:
The Israelis stay feral
They’ll attack any time they desire
The IDF has to repair and rebuild
Their quest for fresh blood for a time goes unfilled
Meanwhile Gaza is swimming in feces
A testament to our mad species
Israel cannot pay their wereguild
These northern Israelis don’t plan to go back
‘Who wants to live in a tarp covered shack?’
‘We’re not Palestinians!’
‘We had condominiums!’
‘We could die before we can unpack!’
This ceasefire will last, perhaps,
Till the IDF studies their maps
When Hezbollah won’t leave
For they aren’t that naive
That is that—this ceasefire will collapse
Bibi says he will bomb Iran after this
He keeps leading Israelis into an abyss
No one’s jets will get far
Against Russian radar
And Iran’s missiles do not miss
The U.S. can bomb Iran when they choose
Iran will then close the Strait of Hormuz
At $300 per barrel
There’ll be no Christmas carol
In three days we’ll admit that We Lose
Bravo!
And this in 6-minutes ago…
IDF opens fire as Lebanese return to southern villages where troops still deployed
Calm appears to hold, but Katz orders ‘forceful’ action, claiming Hezbollah members among those rushing back in defiance of instructions * Hamas says it’s ready for ceasefire too
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-november-27-2024/
“US reconsiders F-35 sales to Türkiye after seeing KAAN fly: National Defense Minister”
For the love of Allah, why are the Turks wanting to get F-35s in their air fleet? Would you believe that after all these years, that they still can’t get the F-35 guns to shoot straight?
https://archive.md/bbTpg
Probably because their homebrew plane is worse.
The KAAN has made surprising progress and looks (on paper) like a good aircraft, but it is likely a very long way from being fully operational and isn’t all that likely to be as good as Gen 5 aircraft from the big traditional countries – the Turks just don’t have the resources or industrial base to be able to match other powers.
The F-35 for Turkey would be a decent stop gap, and being part of the project would almost certainly give the Turks a foothold into some of the more obscure industrial tech required to make a genuine independent stealth contender, which is probably their main motivation in this. They are also probably motivated by having their traditional biggest foe, Greece having a squadron (20) of F-35’s. I know its standard now for everyone to diss the F-35 but it has some genuine groundbreaking capabilities which makes it something of a force multiplier for your older Gen 4 air force, which is why most countries want to get their hands on some.
Good points. I am highly dubious that all these countries without a historical infrastructure in aerospace could just jump in and start building credible indigenous 4th gen planes let alone 5th gen ones.
I’d guess even the “successes” will be cobbled together out of foreign electronics, foreign radars, foreign engines, foreign weapons, etc. Maybe I’m too cynical.
FWIW, Greece doesn’t get its F-35’s until 2030? Later?
Redistribution of kick-backs? The higher the price, the larger the commission.
Another day, another reminder that we live in the darkest time line.
Need many many cat pictures…
The Rev is at your service-
https://unsplash.com/s/photos/cat
I detest AI, but my search for 100% evil is frustrated by this:
https://x.com/OlgaBazova/status/1861297440789233923?t=zfeuvjlATS_QlSnjAUL6Qw&s=19
Hang in there Emma!
Thank you! I really needed this!
Wonderful photograph:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/wpy/gallery/2023-forest-rodeo
“The rodeo riding of deer by monkeys is rare, but not unheard of. Young male macaques have been seen clinging to female deer and trying to mate with them. In this case, however, the macaque was a young female, appearing just to be enjoying a free ride. After a while, the deer twitched its body, causing the macaque to jump off and wander on its way.”
Bodega cats, lots of them, all sorts in all sorts of situations. These hard working felines have a flair all their own:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bodegacats/?rdt=43681
The Field Museum has an upcoming exhibit on “Cats: Predators to Pets”. starting late November. I think it is supposed to be large enough to cover four rooms. Their exhibits are usually worth attending, for anyone near enough.
“Hallucinogenic sci-fi movie: Inside the rather bizarre relaunch of Jaguar”
So the future of Jaguar is both androgynous and cheerless. Good to know. If this advert had come out five years ago, it would have been par for the course. But now? If the re-election of Trump proved nothing else, it showed that the time of this nonsense has well and truly passed. Here is the actual video for those who have not seen it-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLtFIrqhfng (30 secs)
Somebody said that they looked like the Telly Tubbies after they had grown up.
I had read about the controversy, but not yet seen the ad. From the hip, I can only shoot two comments:
1) This is supposed to be an advertisement? It never shows any product. The association of the brand with a product (range) is missing.
2) I found it vaguely reminiscent of some early 1970s trends — exacerbated, tacky, supposedly provocatively modern aesthetics typical of a deliquescent culture that has exhausted its creative strength.
I do not quite understand how upper management could sign off on that production.
1) It’s a brand relaunch and the ad is an “it’s coming” teaser. The cars will be unveiled in December.
2) It’s a head-scratcher for me. If it works for Jaguar, and I really hope it does, then I can’t wait to see what Volvo and Citroën come up with then they follow the lead.
It’s a brand relaunch and the ad is an “it’s coming” teaser. The cars will be unveiled in December.
In that case one would at the minimum have presented a car entirely wrapped in a brightly coloured tarpaulin to suggest an upcoming revelation and establish the link between the brand and the product type.
For whom do they want to relaunch the brand? I doubt very much that Jaguar is a cool/awesome/desirable brand for anybody below 50 years. Does the brand enjoy any recognition amongst the younger generations?
> In that case one would at the minimum have presented a car entirely wrapped in a brightly coloured tarpaulin to suggest an upcoming revelation and establish the link between the brand and the product type.
If they had done something that banal, would we all be talking about it?
> For whom do they want to relaunch the brand?
Idk. I said it was a head-scratcher. Baggott reported, “So who’ll be buying these new Jaguars? Well, Glover says they’ll be ‘younger, more affluent, and urban livers’. They’ll be ‘cash rich and time poor’.” Idk why those people in particular would be buying fancy cars. I’d think taxi’s and rideshares would suit them better. I suppose that’s why Jaguar needs to do a 180 rebrand since Jag means geezers still wearing their military mustaches. Maybe the angry old Teletubbies look is just the ticket. Idk what younger, more affluent urban livers go for and it’s not my job to know. I just hope we get lots more of this stuff because it really brightens my day.
It looks like some Neflix Grace Jones remake thingy.
Nonono. Grace Jones is awesome and Jaguar is a car brand.
She’s Lost Control (long version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N64I_7HibVE (8:14)
The Jaguar ad in question is reminiscent of United Colors of Benetton. On its own it’s hilarious. But the reactions to it show how useful this kind of thing continues to be to the broader goal of keeping us from talking about real politics.
Nothing dulls faster than the Cutting Edge, but this edge has been worn down for many years. Quite embarrassing…
Oh, and don’t they have long-standing reputation of being lousy cars?
The Lucas electrics and SU carburators were always notoriously finicky.
Gorgeous coachwork though. The E type is the epitome of “sports car” in my book. The K and S types were no shirkers, not to mention the Marks.
Lucas Electrics, the infamous ‘Prince of Darkness’.
Jaguar’s are/were beautiful, if temperamental, sports cars. They are rare around here but I love seeing them.
“Hallucinogenic” is exactly the word to describe everything I’ve heard so far about their ‘rebranding’ exercise. Wondering whether a lifetime supply of crazy pills will come with each vehicle sold?
So many Jag owners kept a spare car for when their rolling art was stopped in the shop. Electrics, carbs and the random problem.
In a world from long ago, they made wonderful machines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a7Qx4Em49U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22NTet2n-Sg
More recently, yes. Lousy….
Classically, Jaguars, or Jags, were driven by well-off suburban dwellers in middle class areas outside the big cities. Areas often known as the Gin and Jag Belt for that very reason. The brand also had a proud racing car history and classic 2 seaters such as the E-type. In the 1960s, they were also used by the police in Britain as they performed well in car chases, and even famously more sedately by the fictional Oxford TV dectective Inspector Morse.
The ad goes so against the grain of the traditional Jaguar market, it is beyond belief. Oh to be a fly on the wall in a Surrey golf club.
Understand that I come at this as a gearhead mechanical engineer that’s tinkered with sports cars for maybe a bit too much of my youth, but Jaguar remained a pretty sharp knife for what they wanted to be good at, for a long time – making a reliable car for everybody might not have ever been at the top of the list:
Victory By Design Jaguar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRoNxWRm-kQ
This is long, but goes over all the important cars, and watching Alain de Cadenet put multi million dollar cars into a four wheel drift on a narrow road is a treat.
Back in the day, these were (as used cars) almost affordable, and if you liked wrenching on cars, pretty simple to work on, and very fun to drive. (E types were cheap to buy new and normally not very well maintained so you had to like working on them, but guys like me got priced out of this hobby long ago by people with lots of “free cash”.)
I don’t know who they’re making cars for now, and judging by what I’m hearing (I have yet to look at the ad), maybe they’ve decided making cars is unimportant sorta like Boeing upper management decided making good airplanes is unimportant. Well, we all gotta know our strengths I guess.
OK, I just watched the ad. I think I’m just going to have to stick to being an old fart gearhead, and keep my vehicles (older and newer) running, and let others sort that out.
Do you remember Siobhan Sharpe from the PR firm Perfect Curve consulting for the BBC as documented on the TV show W1A? What James Baggott described being put through at Jaguar sounds much weirder than that. What a strange inversion when satire is ordinary in comparison to its subject.
3 min W1A clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQgQxycJ0sw
So it’s New Coke for the younger generation of Gen Z and Millennials…. guess their new efforts can’t be called dull or the like.
Competitors should have a field day I suppose. Seems like their brand began losing direction once they were bought by Ford, I wanna say that was late 90s or roughly the timing. Eh looks like I’m off considerably on the timing of Ford’s acquisition.
re: The USA 2025, Germany 1933 History Unfolding
This piece is fascinating and almost unique in its mindboggling incompetence.
I have ran across it quickly. But already there I found crazy mistakes like this:
“Although Hitler’s militia the SA lost a power struggle in the first 18 months of his rule and was decapitated in June 1934, the competing SS under Heinrich Himmler assumed key police powers almost at once.”
NOT Hitler´s militia in a way SS would have been opposed to him. The name of Ernst Röhm, the boss of SA is not mentioned once. In fact The Night of the Long Knives 1934 happened for the very reason that SA was NOT Hitler´s SA.
This is kindergarten-level. No further comment.
Or this:
“Trump seems to want to create a state based entirely on personal allegiance to himself while removing all governmental obstacles to maximum profit and economic disruption. This is nearly the opposite of Hitler, who wanted to marshal all of Germany’s resources to fight a great war and create a new empire, and who imposed severe sacrifices on the German people even before the war started in 1939.”
“Opposite of Hitler? Seriously, man?! + any POTUS & friends ever left office as a poor man??? good god…
“Trump when he first took power in 2017 tried to work within existing structures, and with pretty traditional personnel. His leading cabinet officers came from the same kinds of backgrounds as his predecessors’, including elected Republican leaders, captains of industry, and high-ranking serving or retired military officers. It did not take him long to fire James Comey from the FBI, but he replaced him with Christopher Wray, a Justice Department veteran who has served until this day.”
Not a word of Russiagate and the other shit they pulled off.
Ahem.
With every new paragraph the author undermines his attempt of this completely unfounded comparison suggested in the headline.
The idea is to compare 1933 with 2025 on the grounds of how Hitler/Trump changed or tried to change the bureaucracies in their respective countries.
I don´t even know where to start …
only upside:
The author of above text is a Martin Broszat fan who I however haven´t read myself.
Broszat (1926-1989) was “controversial” because having been member of the NSDAP himself (a fact that became known in the early 2000s) and knowing realities back in the “dark days” he opinioned for a “normalisation” of historic scholarhip on the Third Reich.
Broszat got into a public fight over this with Saul Friedländer in the 1980s. Their letters on this were published in German by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich here:
https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/vfz-archiv/
(Broszat led the Institute in the 1970s)
Above archive of the institute´s quaterly is one of the best sources on history with free access in Germany.
The text with Boszat/Friedländer is contained in the downloadable pdf edition of 1988/2.
It is pathetic.
Better analogue from where I sit is Diocletian building a new government from scratch, or at least trying to, on the coast of Dalmatia.
Got that rotting empire another couple of centuries. But then, Diocletian didn’t build in a flood zone…
Der Staat Hitlers by Broszat is a book worth reading, because it shows that the nationalsocialist state was not some deviation from the structure of modern states, and the destruction of the European jews therefore was nothing that could not achieved within the logic of the modern state.
Holiday Pro Tip: Rely On ChatGPT AI At Your Thanksgiving Table To Ease Polarizing Arguments And Achieve A Peaceful Celebration
I think I’m going to stroke out.
That’s another way, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
(When you shake hands with an AI salesman, count your fingers afterward.)
You might get more than you originally had…
“Ukraine war briefing: Kyiv pulls back 100,000 mortar rounds after failures”
Wouldn’t wanna be part of a Ukrainian mortar team at the moment-
https://x.com/censor_net/status/1859168609202737583
This happened about two years ago with mortar rounds falling short like seen here. I guess that as the war is coming to a close, that some Ukrainians business people want to cash in one last time by providing dodgy mortar rounds.
To be honest, the round has to seriously accelerate and travel some distance (to avoid exploding on the tree branches above the tired crew failed to notice) before the fuse arms itself, so these flops are quite safe even if scary looking. Provided the Ukrainian fuses are up to the task.
What’s here at fail, though, is not the mortal shell itself, but the primary charge (hard to see, but there doesn’t seem to be any augmentation charges added). It kinda ignites, but burns at way, way too slow at rate. Maybe it’s way too old, maybe it’s soaking wet, maybe most of it is some inert material… who knows.
Now, the fact that they are pulled back means that there’s something wrong with the shells, too, but in this particular video the shell works pretty much as intended – it leaves the barrel too slow and doesn’t explode.
Russia rejects the possibility of freezing the frontline and insists on Ukraine’s capitulation – ISW,
no shit and a shoutout to BoJo.
re: More Nord Stream intrigue! Bud’s Offshore Energy
We’ve speculated about how Russia could possibly reach some kind of peace with the agreement incapable West, let alone a Nazi Ukraine, and the difficulties of a shared Dnieper, Desna, Donetsk Basin, etc. if a frozen war or DMZ, but I don’t think I’ve seen mention of resumption of flow in Nord Stream as a path to peace. And it seems like something Trump could implement.
The only thing Trump could implement is bombing the remaining pipe, to keep ze Germans from getting any ideas.
I think it’s the other way around. I don’t think Trump can manage a bombing, military/intelligence planning is alien to him, he seems allergic to it, but a business deal is his native language.
Also, I think he wants the world to think anything is possible to achieve with business deals, this is his particular ideology.
He made one hell of a business deal with that Iranian general back in the day. It made Iranians send ballistic fireworks to US bases. I expect nothing less now, with his right-hand Kushner and left-hand Crusader guy.
It’s funny how everyone forgot that he promised peace in Ukraine in 24 hours, after he becomes president elect. I wonder how many bought than nonsense, and now are ashamed to admit it.
I think most people here understood from the get go that the peace in Ukraine in 24 hours would happen only if US declared war on Ukraine and unreleased some “shock and awe” on it. Then Ukraine would capitulate in 24 hours.
Come to think of it, that could give some bragging rights. And as a bonus, US would have a seat in the post-war negotiations table, too.
Russia has been open to the idea of resuming flow through the undamaged portion of the pipeline, and the German public is getting increasingly restive. It seems inevitable that at some point it will be put back into use, so the only question is who will benefit. Lynch appears to think he can be that middle man, but once Russia demands restitution prior to opening the taps I have to wonder how profitable it will ultimately be.
IIRC, Russia just finished its’ pipelines to China (albeit from different gas fields) so they don’t need the Nordstream pipelines. If NS becomes a boondoggle, I wonder how fast the US will be to A. Bail Lynch out and B. To take umbrage over Russia’s refusal to supply gas over American controlled pipelines.
Here is another article on the state of play from last week:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/22/natural-gas-pipeline-russia-germany-nord-stream/
Thank you for that link, it adds so much more detail and context.
I’m not sure how given it’s still Russian gas entering the pipeline even if NS 1 and 2 are American owned, but I’m beginning to think this might become a way for the US to save face while exiting Ukraine. Perhaps Russia can be persuaded to sell the gas at a fixed low price in exchange for ceding ownership and freezing the line of territorial advance, with Germany agreeing to buy at a fixed higher price. Perhaps giving Ukraine a percentage of the difference would make it acceptable to Ukraine, the price for ceding the territory it has already lost and will never regain – it’s Russian-populated territory anyway, why would they want that.
It still leaves the problem of NATO wanting to place assets and nukes in Ukraine, but I can see Trump putting that on the back burner.
https://korybko.substack.com/p/why-might-the-us-let-an-american
As far as Nord Stream is concerned, Trump could implement paying reparations for the state level terrorist act his great country committed. He could, but he won’t. He will sweep it under the rug, just like everything else. Considering all the stuff USA have been sweeping under the rug, it must be a really great rug. The greatest rug in the world, as Tump would say.
re: The U.S. Navy Can’t Build Ships FP
A wise leader would have quietly built up the capacity and infrastructure BEFORE picking a fight with (all of) his adversaries. Of course, in America there are no wise leaders.
Link didn’t work for me, and when I Googled it, it was behind a paywall.
But it seemed rather obvious that picking a naval fight with an enemy whose shipbuilding capacity is 200 times your own is not a good idea. But what do I know? I didn’t go to Annapolis.
These people live on magic carpets of densely woven excel spreadsheets.
Reality has heretofore bent to the form their financial wizardry imposed, including the lucrative offshoring of the foundations of their power.
Thus far, the shocks of the collapsing edifice have been dampened with the lives of soldiers, the poor, the ill, but mostly foreign people to whom they still apply the 3/5ths clause in the Constitution.
They’ve got more ships than they can man, plus surface ships are just targets these days, why build mor? And, they’ve imo enough subs to get ww3 going, don’t really need more of them, either. What we need are infra.
This link (from searching on FP) is not behind a paywall
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/17/us-navy-ships-shipbuilding-fleet-china-naval-race-pacific/
Read that article, it has some gems (of stupidity), like
“has urged the Navy to convert commercial container ships into warships capable of launching missiles”
Ummm – what missiles? and misses the point of why warships are heavier. Yup, Ghetto the navy while threatening China. Brilliant!
I also loved that shipyards are losing workers to fast food! Obviously can’t pay a decent salary as that is pure cut into the share prices and CEO pay.
LOL. So we are moving from Mad Max to Waterworld stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoSLZP0e-M4
Note to FOX: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is not a physician. He has an MD from Stanford, yes. But he never completed internship and residency, so he never became a physician. And this means that if he passes himself off as a “doctor” in common parlance, he is violating the law in most jurisdictions. Based on his outdated CV that I looked at after the Great Barrington Declaration, he went straight from medical school to the Stanford Economics Department, where he obtained the PhD that has allowed him to scratch the itch that is Libertarianism. The two postnomials do give him leave to call himself “Doctor” in exactly the same sense as Dr. Jill Biden, so he has that going for him. Which is nice.
Anyway, mine is a small sample size, but Stanford seems to be good at graduating non-practicing MDs who go on to do significant things in other fields…
…like running PE medical divisions I’d wager.
In one case, yes, indeed. Makes a fortune moving fast and breaking things all across healthcare without any thought of what he leaves behind. No doubt the Development Office at Leland Stanford Junior University absolutely loves him!
And apologies for the CV link above. It leads directly to a pdf, for which I did not give warning.
As a matter of etiquette, what is the problem with linking directly to a pdf?
If that’s a faux pas, I’m afraid it’s one I make often in my ignorance!
Some (?) pdf’s will try to download to your device. Not sure if they all do or if it’s browser dependent or what.
I see, thanks, will note going forward!
For some definition of ‘significant’. And they don’t even have to be graduates. Maybe it’s time to check in on engineering school dropout Liz Holmes.
Completely aside, here’s an interesting substack, from Trends Compass guy Alex Krainer, that mentions Holmes It includes a utube link to the Holmes story in the context of a larger story he’s telling. Fact or fiction? At least it’s entertaining. / ;)
Things they forgot to teach us in school: the role of corporate “Protectors”
TrendCompass KeyMarkets report for 21 November 2024
https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/things-they-forgot-to-teach-us-in
Just how did she get so many wise, wealthy, well connected old guys like Shultz and Kissinger to join her BoD? Did they all forget about due diligence? enquiring minds…/ ;)
I have had not the time to probe deep into the GBD discussion when it was on. I have heard very contradictory views about it both by people who I respect.
In a Bhattacharya interview from past summer which I linked here some weeks ago he had made sensible arguments on the handling of Covid including an assessment of the Swedish approach. Which doesn´t mean he went into particular specifics of the science in-depth. But his conclusions and suggestions were sound.
FWIW: I am interested in what people say and do and can prove, instead of their degrees which prove nothing except that they have a degree. I understand your point and I am certainly not a friend of people abusing medical for capitalist endeavours.
Yet I like to not mix these things when not appropriate. Is he right or not? Based on science.
So what is it with the Great Barrington Declaration? Was the fuss and the defamation (at least in Germany) justified in any way?
One author., MD & PH.D although not in epidemiology objects.
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/?s=+Great+Barrington+Declaration
In my simpleminded interpretation of the GBD: Throw out everything we have learned since the Black Death and “let her rip”.
“Anger and distrust among displaced Israelis at ceasefire deal”
Just wait until some of those settlers start to trickle back. While Israel was bombing Lebanon, Hezbollah was doing the same for northern Israel and nearly 10,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed there. Who is going to want to rebuild there? One woman in that article said-
‘From Kfar Giladi there are clear views of the Lebanese village of Odaisseh just across the valley. “The only thing I can hope for is that Hezbollah will not infiltrate these villages and build a new network,” Rona told me. “Apart from completely erasing these villages, and having no people there, there is no real physical thing that can make me feel safe. It’s just, you know, hope.” ‘
So I am guessing that the cease fire deal will not last as the Israelis will try to make sure that no people return to southern Lebanon, just so those settlers can feel “safe”. As far as the Israelis are concerned, any Lebanese villagers must be Hezbollah-
https://thecradle.co/articles/nearly-10000-buildings-destroyed-by-hezbollah-in-israels-north-report
Biden gets his phony cease-fire deal, at last. Too bad Antony Blinken was nowhere to be found. Winkin’ Stinkin’ Blinken apparently did not want his reputation stained anymore by this monstrosity.
My guess is that Thanksgiving leftovers will have a better shelf life than this fake deal.
With this cease-fire deal, Biden can now concentrate on what is really important to him. No, not the economy-
‘Biden Asks Congress To Authorize $24 Billion More To Spend on Ukraine’
https://news.antiwar.com/2024/11/26/biden-asks-congress-to-authorize-24-billion-more-to-spend-on-ukraine/
No where in any of the articles I read last night did it say that Hezbollah had signed on the dotted line. The only amusing part of those articles was how hard they worked to not say that. One would think that the last “cease fire” with Hamas that they worked out would have been warning enough that PR wins tend to have blowback, but they just never learn.
The strategy has paid off so far. Right now the US and Israel keep equating all Palestinians with Hamas. The negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel start off with a deal, a bunch of news proclaiming peace. Then the Israeli’s just go back to indiscriminate killing and freezing aid, when the Palestinians fight back, boom peace deal blown by Hamas is all you hear. Lebanon is foolish in believing Israel is going to stop. They are agreement incapable and pushing for a wider Middle East war with US involvement. Right now I think they are keying up a narrative to feed Trump, they’ll show him some pictures of dead ducks claiming Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and Iran are responsible, then they’ll tell Trump that Iran was making fun of his penis and bam, WW3.
NY Times BURIES Study Exposing DEI Dangers!
Jimmy Dore Show 25 mins
A recent study exposing the failures of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs was buried by mainstream media outlets. The New York Times and Bloomberg opted not to publish stories on the research, however, suggesting a coordinated campaign to protect DEI from criticism.
Jimmy discusses the various harms described in the study from DEI initiatives and how little scrutiny these programs receive.
https://youtu.be/LfvHb8ypJM4?si=ZuIHRnOMcdjq2qeN
The study found that DEI programs increase hostility towards others as well as inculcating authoritarian tendencies.
The whole point of DEI is to increase division and hostility. For me, it has–I resent, for example, the lie that black people are 35 to 40 percent of the population as featured in commercials and have, very often, senior positions in hospitals and other institutions despite the fact that is not even remotely the case. In my case I don’t resent black people who are part of my family but I do resent the oligarch class who are distorting reality to an insane degree–is it any wonder that Americans live in a bizarre world of fantasy–they imagine that racism and marginalization of black families in real-estate doesn’t exist, that poverty is not an issue in the black community and we can just continue the permanent war regime. Other minorities are not treated is such condescending ways and their frequency on the TV screen tends to balance out pretty well.
“The study found that DEI programs increase hostility towards others as well as inculcating authoritarian tendencies.”
Welcome to the Cult! The Fearless Leader will be meeting you this morning! You are so ‘Blessed!(TM)’
I think the bathroom issue falls under DEI. Last week I watched a huge argument break out over that. I made the mistake of getting involved. Note to self; never do that again.
One of the reasons I find the trans issue so pernicious is that it is an authoritarian’s wet dream. Think of it: you tell people that something they know both experientially as well as scientifically is now, of a sudden, wrong. When they naturally push back in confusion and anger, you come down on them hard. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone for the authoritarian, guaranteed to trigger a response in a particular way that suits their needs.
Having been forced to sit through these programs, I do find myself becoming increasing hostile toward the middle aged white PMC ladies who so often lead them.
The USA 2025, Germany 1933 History Unfolding
The historian’s comments leave out one key difference between the US in 2025 and Germany in 1933: the Constitution of Germany’s Weimar Republic had Article 48, which allowed the Reich president, under certain circumstances, to take emergency measures without the prior consent of the Reichstag.
Article 48 was the basis for the Reichstag Fire Decree, an immediate response to the Reichstag fire. The Reichstag Fire Decree abolished most civil liberties, including the right to speak, assemble, protest, and due process, and the Nazis began a crackdown on their political enemies. Less than a month later the Enabling Act of 1933 was passed, giving the German cabinet, really, the German chancellor, the power to make and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag. The Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act, in effect, turned Germany into a dictatorship. The US has nothing like Article 48 in its Constitution.
But the US does have The Patriot Act that was forced down the throats of the populace and recalcitrant politicians by actors of The Deep State post 9/11.
That only makes sense if the majorities of congress are considered actors of the deep state, which is a contradiction of terms.
Not mutually exclusive. See “flexians” and “revolving doors” not to mention our increasingly spook populated “representatives” as discussed here.
The German government had been essentially a dictatorship since the start of the depression. That’s titally different from the way the American government has been since 2008.
Oh, wait . . .
As Taiibi and Kirn noted recently, every political comparison in the West starts with who’s Churchill, who’s Chamberlain, and who is Hitler, as if there had never been another war fought before or since.
I look forward to the day when historians start asking who’s Hussein, who’s Bush, and who is Cheney, or something similar.
Then move onto who’s Epstein, who’s Maxwell and insert your picks.
For domestic fun, who’s Diddy, and how many others!
@$#%&
Oh gosh. Nearly choked in my cup. For a moment accidentally misread as “insert your p(!)icks” with an R. Though it works just as fine without p and r as well. Ha
Alright, I will say it,
Anyone who knows how these tariffs will work when they go live and still wants them is probably angling to capture assets and revenue streams DOMESTICALLY, not from new production but from the lower/middle class Americans who will have to sell most of what they own to deal with the economic turmoil. Stocks, bonds, homes, land, etc… will be sold just to keep their heads above water while the rentiers you all know and love will buy it all.
Like a lot of this type of proposal that gets announced at the end of big international conferences, it really isn’t a serious project. There has been a long time project discussed between Peru, Brazil and China for a cross-South American line. Its been costed at $72 billion (and this is likely a huge underestimate). There are any number of better ways to invest this money in South America.
If the current project was serious, they would not have built the port at Chancay – this is almost literally the worst possible place to put the port if you want to link to the Atlantic by rail. You would need a brand new line going over some of the most difficult terrain on earth, and it would bypass Bolivia, where most of the resources everyone is interested in is inconveniently located.
There actually is a potential cross-South American line that could be built by re-opening older lines and using existing lines with just a few new sections. It would run from the Peru-Chile border using the existing line to La Paz and a line to Villazon on the Argentinian border (this conveniently runs close to the main lithium deposits south of La Paz). Then it could connect to existing lines to Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Argentina has the only really viable railway goods network in South America It could be built for a tiny fraction of the cost of the Peru-Brazil line proposed. When the simple sensible option is being ignored in favour of the one that pulls headlines, you know this is just a unicorn proposal.
Thank you, PK.
The map you linked to was particularly interesting. I focused on Buckinghamshire after looking at South America.
“When the simple sensible option is being ignored in favour of the one that pulls headlines, you know this is just a unicorn proposal.” Your conclusion made me think of HS2.
Indeed! Back when I worked in the UK in infrastructure we used to call it the Red Tape Syndrome. A fondness for big projects where you could invite the Queen along to open up the ‘new’ development, when some unglamorous upgrades would have made a lot more sense. Unfortunately, the Chinese/US competition in South America is going to litter the continent with similar projects, Chancay port included.
HS2 could have made sense as part of a (very expensive) all round upgrade of railway infrastructure and genuine fast connection from Edinburgh to London and Paris if it had been designed and conceived correctly (they could have just asked the French for advice). But its such a mess of a design, with consultant heavy over runs it can never be justified, either on cost or environmental impact. It all dates back to Thatchers insistence that the HS1 line had to be ‘private sector’ led. It didn’t seem to occur to them that the railways had to be nationalised for a very good reason.
I worked a long time ago with French engineers who were constantly baffled at the complexities piled on by the British system when it came to building something as superficially simple as a railway line. They simply couldn’t understand the logic of building a line from London to the Channel Tunnel without giving the slightest strategic thought to how it could connect north.
Thank you, PK.
Having lived in Buckinghamshire most of my life, I’m aware of the Central railway and branch lines of the Metropolitan, Varsity and Great Western that could have been brought back to life and made a big difference.
Initially, it was intended that what is now the Elizabeth line was to start where I live and link up with a resurrected Central railway, which was intended to link the Midlands with Paris in the 19th century.
The Buckinghamshire leg of the Liz line was not voted for, so the resurrected Central railway dispensed with and HS2 was eventually conceived.
With regard to contractors, I am staggered at the sheer number of firms involved. Many, if not most, contractor firm employees are from overseas. One hears French, Spanish, Indian and east European languages spoken on the HS2 and Varsity line sites and nearby. Some of the French and Spanish supervisors have brought their families as the work is not expected to conclude for at least twenty years. Some French supervisors are women.
As my parents and I are thinking seriously of going to Mauritius, we are thinking of letting a house or two to these contractors.
There is a huge floating population of construction workers who follow these big specialised projects. My oldest brother was a natural gas drill foreman and has had little choice over the years but move from Aberdeen to Baku to the Gulf of Mexico. Its just part of the life. For some odd reasons, most tunnellers are from either Glasgow or County Donegal. You’ll hear the accents anywhere in the world a big dig is underway. There are all sorts of construction specialities that end up getting attached to one country or another such that in the industry you’ll find everyone knows what your job is from your accent. I don’t need to say who does most of the on-site grunt work. International project management companies are usually experts at managing all these conflicting cultures and languages on site, its one of the skills to succeed.
The exception of course is the Chinese (also, to a limited degree, Turkish companies), who prefer bring entire crews with them if they possibly can rather than deal with multiple subcontractors, which is inevitably a source of local anger when outside their own countries.
Thank you, PK.
Working link for “The U.S. Navy Can’t Build Ships” article at-
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/17/us-navy-ships-shipbuilding-fleet-china-naval-race-pacific/
If they are interested, I know where they can pick up two new aircraft carriers going cheap. Some repair work needed. The only good thing about this article is that it shows that the US can’t get into a shooting war with China until they can get their ship-building program in order. So maybe by 2050?
Thank you, Rev.
Is that buy one and get one free?
There are two landing ships going, too.
I hope the broker fee is good.
Thank you, Colonel. The thought occurred to me that it is just as well that Boris the Clown is not still Prime Minister. Otherwise he might get the bright idea to have the Royal Navy re-designated as a US Navy flotilla. Think of the cost savings he would say.
Thank you, Rev.
There are Tory and Reform activists and voters pining for Johnson. I do not rule out a return in time for the next election.
Why not? After a few years of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, by the time that BoJo the Clown got back in there would be nothing left for him to destroy.
We should not forget there are two types of naval vessels in the current world: Targets and submarines.
As a WWII US Navy veteran of my acquaintance said, the Navy can’t hide its surface ships in the entire Western Pacific Ocean like Nimitz did. Our erstwhile “enemies” know exactly where they are, at all times. And I don’t think the Phalanx by Raytheon can shoot down a hypersonic missile.
The problem I always have with this argument is that if its true, then the question arises as to why nearly everyone is engaged in building large carriers, from Russia (Project 23000), China with its two (arguably three) new carrier designs, along with France, India and plenty of other countries, and thats not counting F-35B equipped mini-carriers which are now becoming ubiquitous. And the new hot topic is drone carriers. They might all be deluded, or they may have done their analyses and worked out that they are still a vital strategic asset and can be defended for long enough to make a difference.
Carrier killers have been discussed since the 1930s (both the US and Japan wargamed carrier battles then and worked out that no carrier will survive a first aerial dive bomb strike – the trick was to make sure your carrier air arms struck first). Guided torpedoes and ultra long range ASM’s were supposed to be carrier killers in the Cold War, but everyone still kept building flatops. And if anything, non-US aspiring powers seem even keener these days.
Interesting — they can certainly be made smaller; Escort carriers were relatively small in WW2, and they served a vital role as mobile platforms to attack German submarines. Of course a confluence of advances made German submarine warfare untenable, and this was but one.
Indeed the navies of the world have always been the ones to come out of the war as they entered the war. Oh, wait…
The lesson of the WW2, that the navies exits only to ensure the transfer of land forces, was quickly forgotten. They are also good at gunboat diplomacy, at least until the diesel-electric submarines enter the picture as great equalizers.
During the peace time navies serve purely a political purpose, projection of power, way more than any other branch of armed forces. I’d even say that as most armed forces tend to promote most politically keen officer to the top ranks, especially for the navies the procurement is dominated much more by the current political needs than any rational analysis of the requirements for the next war.
Yup, Blue Water navies are as much about politics as anything else. And as you say, they are very good for pushing around small nations who get out of line – carriers are particularly useful for this.
I suspect that the unspoken assumption about carriers among strategists is that they are, in effect, disposable in a peer to peer war. They are intended for one big early strike to cripple an opponent (a Pearl Harbour), and to act as a tripwire force. I guess thats why they name them after dead presidents and admirals.
Since WWII, no naval power with carriers has ever sent them into battle against another naval force with carriers, only against adversaries that did not have any, and actually mostly against enemies without a meaningful naval force.
The exception, and best evidence, is the Falklands war, since both Argentina and the UK had fleet carriers — and both made sure to keep them as far from harm as possible. They never dared repeating the battle of the Coral Sea, or of Midway.
Conjecture: large carriers are not a weapon to be used against peers, since they are so fragile, they are only intended to intimidate or be employed against those adversaries on a lower rung in the hierarchy of military power who cannot really fight back. Well, Ansarallah is showing that fighting back is becoming in principle accessible to many countries.
As for the French, they are only at the stage of preliminary studies for their “next generation aircraft carrier”, and I tend to believe that vessel will never be built:
1) The French are now at the same stage of development they were 45 years ago with the “Charles de Gaulle”. After so much time, the know-how is largely lost.
2) They may soon realize that, just like for the British, a carrier will suck the naval budget dry; there will be nothing left for the rest of the fleet — and the French must also maintain their nuclear-armed submarines.
3) The actual construction is to be started in about 7 years. Given how things are going economically, I doubt that such programmes will be affordable then.
As for “plenty of other countries” building aircraft carriers, colour me sceptical, except if by aircraft you mean helicopters.
The single Argentinian carrier was actively involved in the invasion and was part of the original task force protecting the islands, but withdrew following the sinking of the Belgrano. Due to the proximity of the Falklands to mainland Argentinan airfields, it hardly made much sense to have it in deep water. The carrier HMS Invincible was part of the task force and its Harriers were heavily involved in bombardments over the Falklands. Argentina has always claimed that it damaged Invincible, although that seems unlikely.
As for proposed carriers, it depends on the definition as there are lots of various types of flat tops around and proposed, but certainly Italy, South Korea, India, Thailand and Japan either have, or are actively looking at, carriers (in some cases, converting smaller helicopter carriers to use the F-35B, and a variety of other countries such as Egypt and Turkey have at various stages openly looked at getting one – Egypt has a Mistral (capable of using F-35Bs) which was built in France but originally intended for Russia.
I’m not for one moment suggesting this is sensible, but there is no question that many different large and mid sized powers are still very interested in building them.
If I read that carefully a retired Russian Admiral is advocating for aircraft carriers. No reasonable basis is advance for why.
I await with baited-breath the arrival of the first new Russian aircraft carrier.
If I read that carefully, an old man is yelling at clouds.
Submarines are a part of well balanced navy, but by no means are they the only worthy component. Compared to other vessels, submarines are basically blind and can’t survive without supporting surface fleet providing IRS. Submarines usually won’t survive long when the enemy locates them (be it before or after the submarines launches it weapons), unless they have the supporting surface fleet to run for safety.
Modern, dedicated, ASW assets can locate and destroy submarines quickly and efficiently, once they know where to look for them. Thus, in the presence of a relatively modern enemy navy, they are kinda one trick ponies. That’s why the nuclear missile submarines are supposed to launch their missiles in a quick salvoes – once a launch is detected by the enemy, all his available ASW platforms will be converging on that location with their sonars, radars, magnetometers and hydrophones scanning. While all the 20,000 ton submarine can do is pretending not to be there…
As good as the satellites are, it still takes a lot of effort to cover an area like Pacific Ocean 24/7, so no real time location information. That is if, the satellites are not taken out or blinded at the first minutes of the conflict. You just have to have some sensor system with a real time link looking at the target most of the time between launching the weapon and hitting the target.
Long range patrol aircraft are the real eyes on the sky. They are the first to provide good targeting info for the fleet. Long range fighter patrols are the first line of defense keeping the patrol aircraft away and the first ones to engage the incoming missiles.
China has been working on a next-gen submarine detection system:
https://interestingengineering.com/military/china-next-gen-submarine-detection
L’Orient-Le Jour published last night what it says is the actual text of the ceasefire agreement, in thirteen points. I haven’t seen an official English language source yet, but the LOLJ story has a link to an English translation.
https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1437070/lorient-le-jour-revele-les-13-points-de-laccord-de-cessez-le-feu-entre-le-liban-et-israel.html
The key to understanding an agreement of this kind is that if the political will exists, then the exact detail is irrelevant, because the agreement will be made to work, and violations excused so long as it is in everyone’s interest to keep it going. If there is no underlying agreement, then it won’t work anyway, no matter how detailed and comprehensive it is.
Here, I think we can see that there is something in a ceasefire for all parties. This is a completely unnecessary war, and neither Hezbollah nor Israel has anything to gain from continuing it. Neither can “win,” not least because it’s not clear what “winning” means, but neither can afford to stop unilaterally for political reasons.
For Israel, this represents a chance to withdraw and rest its troops, concentrate on Gaza and reassure public opinion that the attacks on Israel will cease. For Hezbollah also, there is a chance to rebuild its structures and consider where it goes from here, as well as recovering its somewhat battered reputation with the Lebanese people. Assuming that Iran gave the green light, which it must have done, then it would also reduce the threat of a war with Israel which Iran doesn’t want. Everybody gets to claim victory: the Israelis say they have forced Hezbollah away from the border, Hezbollah says it has ejected the Israelis once more, Lebanon breathes a sigh of relief and the US gets a diplomatic victory.
In reality, I think the reasonable best scenario would be a return to a pre-October 23 situation, with perhaps scattered clashes between Israel and Hezbollah. There would be a greater role for the LAF in the South (they already have one Brigade there, if I remember correctly) and at least some Hezbollah weapons would be withdrawn North. But it’s worth recalling that many Hezbollah fighters live near the border and keep their weapons at home, so “withdrawal” is a very flexible concept. In a sense, all the agreement does is to get us back to the status quo ante, but in Lebanon, where the situation has got steadily worse in recent years, that in itself is something. Overall, the Lebanese problem has no solution: the best that can be hoped for is that it is successfully managed.
The key will be Hezbollah, which has suffered a lot of damage, and has now, apparently, promised to end its attacks. We can assume that Iran has been leaning on them pretty hard. For what it’s worth, today’s Al-Ahkbar, the effective voice of Hezbollah, is claiming “victory” on the basis that the final agreement was based on UNSCR 1701, as opposed to the earlier UNSCR 1559, which called on the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah, although both the Israelis and the Americans had wanted a 1559-style forcible disarmament. Thus, says the newspaper, the heroism of the Resistance avoided such a solution. We’ll probably never know if this is true, but if it enables Hezbollah to ho ahead with its side of the agreement so much the better.
Merci, Aurelien.
https://x.com/justinpodur/status/1861778753090617483
https://x.com/samhusseini/status/1861553142917111981
So many words to not call out what Israel and its American and French backers are doing, have done for over 400 days.
And since Israel is the scorpion that just can’t help itself even when obeying 1701 gives it a respite and latitude to “finish the job” of bombing tents and blocking food to Gaza and increasingly the West Bank, it’s already violating the ceasefire.
https://x.com/ejmalrai/status/1861782965757345924
Yes, the West and its Fascist local compradors will do everything to help Israel, but Israel was and will be beaten in battle by the Axis of Resistance, sooner or later. No amount of Western
Orientalist victim blaming will alter the reality of the situation.
Related to me by an Israeli neighbor:
Scorpion asks frog for a ride across the river.
Frog says, No, you’ll sting me.
Scorpion replies, No, I swear I won’t.
Midway across, the scorpion stings the frog.
Frog asks Why do that after swearing you wouldn’t? Now we’ll both die.
Scorpion says, Because this is the Middle East.
No. It’s because the scorpion is a scorpion and backed by the completed settler colony of the USA. West Asia was a reasonably peaceful and civilized place in the centuries prior 1917. The problem is western settler colonialism in the form of Zionism.
la pura neta, 100% truth hermana. Appreciate your voice here.
Israel hopes to buy time to secure its positions and more territory in Palestine. Chances would be that goes faster without any assistance of any kind going to the Palestinians.
Probably the idea is that once that’s secure, Israel and its backers return to the heat on Lebanon.
“The Lebanese problem”…yeah, like that didn’t get any outside help.
What’s to be done about “the Israel problem” and “the genocide problem”?
All of which would leave the Palestinians out in the cold. If Hezbollah and Iran were to seek the single fastest way of delegitimizing their resistance, this would be it.
I don’t know, I think Wang Yi or Lavrov might issue an uncharacteristically caustic statement.
Who knows, perhaps there will be a Palestinian left above ground in Palestine to savor that historic moment. “Take that Bibi,” they will say.
Thanks for the link to the text.
Larry Wilkerson does not agree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w84uRVz3ER0
Even though he did not have the text, he stated that Bibi would not agree unless he were in control. And the US is the only party in the mix ex UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army, both of which are weak. So Israel is in charge via the US being the only other named party in the agreement, and in a supposed negotiating role. Amos Hochstein, who was part of this deal, is a famously biased actor for Israel.
I also do not understand the comments about Iran. Iran was not a party to these talks. There seems to be widespread misreading based on the misleading Haaretz headline included in Links. The text simply says Iran needs to guarantee Hezbollah’s conduct, not that it has.
There is no way, no how Iran was a party to this deal and the Iran’s Foreign Ministry remarks are consistent with that (emphasis mine):
https://x.com/IRIMFA_EN/status/1861670071619178992
There’s a difference between what the text says and what might happen on the ground, and we don’t know what private arrangements have been made between the US and Israel, or even what Bibi may be secretly planning or hoping to do. And of course Bibi has to sound tough for his domestic audience. But the reality is that Israel can attack again at any point if it feels like it, and nothing can stop them. To that extent the text is secondary. What really matters, as I said, is how far the various partners consider their interests to overlap. To the extent that everyone thinks that it’s in their interests to dial things down, then that will happen.
I wasn’t suggesting Iran was a party to the negotiations, although my understanding is that there are mechanisms for passing messages to and from Tehran indirectly. But by the same token, Hezbollah would have needed Iran’s OK to agree to this arrangement, so we can assume that Iran think’s it’s in their interest as well. (For what it’s worth Iran has formally welcomed the arrangement.)
Fair enough. Although beyond assassinating more top leadership than usual, how is Hezbollah’s military significantly damaged?
Like 2006, the IDF makes minimal gains while the IAF murders civilians until the other side cries uncle. Then Israel leaves and we pretend that Hezbollah is defeated, moving north, disarming, etc.
Unless we take Israel’s damage claims at face value, which I certainly don’t.
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1861695221832298610
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
This has largely been ignored but it’s actually a huge deal.
China’s robot density in manufacturing – one of the best metrics for measuring industrial advancement – has now surpassed almost all advanced economies.
For instance we often think of Taiwan as being on the cutting edge of advanced manufacturing with the mainland comparatively backwards but it’s now actually the other way around: robot density in mainland China ( 470) is now 60% higher than Taiwan’s ( 294).
China is also ahead of countries like Germany, Japan and of course the United States which has a robot density 40% lower. This means that China has not only closed the technological gap, it’s actually inverted it. And it’s all the more true when you look at recent innovation and scientific metrics that show China ahead in most of the important fields of the future.
More importantly China managed to do this at scale: the only two countries ahead of it are South Korea and Singapore but this is because their manufacturing sectors are extremely tiny compared with China, basically the size of an average Chinese city or maybe a small province in the case of South Korea. Doing it for a country the size of China – with a population twice larger than the US and the EU combined – is something else entirely.
Why does this matter? Because it fundamentally changes the narrative about competing with Chinese manufacturing. The West long assumed that automation and technological superiority would level the playing field against China’s traditional advantages. That window has closed. China now combines cutting-edge automation with massive scale – and keeps improving at breakneck speed (their current robot density is double what it was just 4 years ago).
Probably the best historical parallel for this moment is Europe’s Industrial Revolution, when some countries suddenly achieved manufacturing capabilities that no one else in the world could match. But China’s advantage is even more comprehensive today given its scale, internal supply chains and market size (though today’s interconnected global economy obviously means this manifests differently than back then).
The implications are profound: reshoring manufacturing through technological superiority is no longer realistic, except maybe in a handful of sectors. This explains the West’s shift toward tariffs and “overcapacity” narratives – they’re trying to artificially level a playing field they can no longer compete on directly.
This however doesn’t address the fundamental reality: you can build walls, cope or be in denial all you want, you’ll still have a China that’s succeeded at becoming completely dominant in manufacturing.
The West therefore now faces a critical choice: either find ways to constructively engage with and learn from China’s manufacturing capabilities, or risk repeating historical mistakes of isolation and parallel system building that proved disastrous for powers like the Qing dynasty and Soviet Union. The future likely belongs to those who can best integrate with and complement China’s manufacturing ecosystem while developing their own unique strengths in specialized sectors and emerging technologies…
3:55 AM · Nov 27, 2024
Thank you, CA.
I am particularly interested in your comment as my employer is a Dutch bank. I don’t detect your conclusion and what that means in terms of weaning the EU from the US featuring in debate in the still Atlanticist Netherlands.
BTW I agree with your recent comment about Mauritius not doing enough to protect itself from climate change. If you don’t mind me asking, how are you familiar with the island? Thank you.
https://english.news.cn/20241127/113d3af9daa643de8cd780fdc1c8182b/c.html
November 27, 2024
China ready to expand economic, trade exchanges with Netherlands: Chinese Premier
BEIJING — China is ready to keep expanding economic and trade exchanges with the Netherlands while adhering to the principle of mutual benefit, Chinese Premier Li Qiang said on Wednesday.
During a phone call with Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, Li said that in recent years, under the strategic guidance of the leaders of the two countries, China-Netherlands relations have developed steadily and rapidly, and cooperation in various fields has been continuously expanded, bringing tangible benefits to the two peoples.
China is ready to maintain close exchanges with the new Dutch government and work together to uphold the positive momentum in promoting the bilateral relations, he said.
Openness and practicality are valuable lessons drawn from the development of China-Netherlands relations, Li said, adding that China is ready to maintain close high-level exchanges with the Netherlands, strengthen dialogue and communication, continue to consolidate political mutual trust, so as to provide a solid foundation for the development of bilateral relations.
For his part, Schoof said that China plays an increasingly important role in global affairs, and the Netherlands attaches great importance to its relationship with China.
Bilateral relations, particularly in terms of economic and trade cooperation, have seen strong growth. The Dutch government firmly adheres to the one-China policy, recognizing that the government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China, Schoof said.
The Netherlands is ready to serve as a gateway for China’s cooperation with Europe, and looks forward to further strengthening cooperation in economic, trade, and other fields to advance Netherlands-China relations.
Thank you, CA.
https://english.news.cn/20240824/2ca81fe2fa2c42529c6e7fa1f7e31a46/c.html
August 24, 2024
China, Mauritius work together for underwater reforestation
“The project is a perfect example on how to merge technologies and active restoration of ecosystem,” said Nadeem Nazurally, an assistant professor with the University of Mauritius. “There is big potential for collaboration with China.”
PORT LOUIS — Off the east coast of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, not far from Pointe aux Feuilles, stand a number of coral nurseries.
Coral fragments collected from various places are cultivated here, and grown-up corals will then be transplanted to a degraded area of reef ecosystem, thus realizing reforestation under the sea.
As part of a project jointly undertaken by the Chinese tech giant Huawei and the Mauritius non-governmental environmental protection group EcoMode Society, “25,000 coral fragments were successfully raised in nurseries and planted over an area of 1.01 square km,” said Sudheer Maudhoo, Mauritian minister of blue economy, marine resources, fisheries and shipping.
Mauritius has more than 150 km of its coastline surrounded by coral reefs. Coral reefs play a crucial role in the Earth’s ecology. Dubbed rainforest of the sea, they serve as vital habitats for a multitude of marine animals and plants.
Maudhoo noted that coral reefs play an important economic and social role, as they not only attract tourists and provide jobs and a source of income for locals, but also serve as a natural barrier to protect the coastal areas from tropical storms. However, in the past few decades, the reef ecosystem faces many threats, including climate change, overfishing and pollution.
As an assistant professor with the Agriculture Faculty of the University of Mauritius, Nadeem Nazurally has long been involved in marine protection and coral conservation. He recalled that coral cultivation process used to be “lengthy and cumbersome.”
“Once we leave the site,” he said, “we don’t really have any vision or knowledge of what’s happening under water.”
And annoying “setbacks” can not be avoided. For example, the crown-of-thorns starfish, known as a “killer” of coral reefs, could eat up to four square meters of coral seedlings in a single night, only to be discovered the next day when it was too late, said Nadeem, also president of EcoMode Society.
The birth of the technology-supported project for coral reef restoration changed the scenario…
Thank you, CA.
I know the area, but have not been around there for a couple of years. I’m going in a month and will have a look.
Huawei has provided much of the telecoms infrastructure on the island. The airport was a present from Uncle Xi. We’re still waiting for goodies, not lectures, from Uncle Sam and John Bull.
Mauritius has been the most successful African economy these last 45 years. A wildly beautiful country, with governors conscious of the beauty and determined to keep it so. Mauritius has been close to China, having worked out the first African free trade pact with China. The closeness has spurred growth. Per capita GDP is some $29,500 as compared with $19,400 for Botswana.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/October/weo-report?c=684,&s=NGDP_RPCH,PPPGDP,PPPPC,NID_NGDP,NGSD_NGDP,PCPIPCH,GGXWDG_NGDP,BCA_NGDPD,&sy=2017&ey=2023&ssm=0&scsm=1&scc=0&ssd=1&ssc=0&sic=0&sort=country&ds=.&br=1
October 15, 2024
Mauritius, 2017-2023
Real GDP, percent change
Investment, percent of GDP
Savings, percent of GDP
Inflation rate, percent change
General government gross debt, percent of GDP
Current account balance, percent of GDP
Thank you, CA.
The west of course could compete with China by getting it’s act together and formulating an industrial policy to get the west where they want to be in relation to China. Who am I kidding? I couldn’t even type that sentence out with a straight face. Financial economies don’t do industrial policy and only think in terms of rentals. To compete with China they would have to totally abandon neoliberalism, overhaul all the educational facilities, spend money on education & infrastructure and to reign in all those billionaires pillaging the economy. Yeah, that’s really going to happen. In other words, in a race between China and western economies China would win because those western economies would be a no-show.
“Industrial policy” also means that some cast-in-stone principles in EU treaties would have to be abolished (e.g. subsidizing firms or bestowing some other material advantages to them, selecting suppliers that are not the cheapest ones, protecting the internal market against foreign competitors, multi-year budgets, etc).
Given the way the EU is organized, and who is running it, this is never going to happen. It had been said a long time ago that if the current EU had already been in place in the 1970s-1980s, neither Airbus, nor Ariane, nor GSM would ever have seen the light. Just look at how Galileo is going.
Europe is doomed.
I thought that Galileo was going reasonably well??
Vastly over budget, and very late — the system still has not the (originally planned) 30 satellites in place that were supposed to have been all launched by… 2014.
Actually, funding the programme was a case study in creative accounting by the EU, with funds meant for completely different programmes reallocated to Galileo to forestall catastrophic budget shortfalls.
The organization of the programme caused major frictions as well. The sensible approach would have been to let either the Italians or the French, who both had proven experience in satellites as well as launchers, take the lead. But Merkel, the mercantilist, was adamant that since Germany was the largest funding partner, it should also have the largest share of the work, including the programme leadership (and take advantage to acquire the know-how from the partners for later projects). The German firms involved were overwhelmed and, after much time wasted, had to ask for help from their Italian and French partners. There have been further frictions when it came to awarding the contracts for the second generation of satellites. In other words, Galileo left plenty of people pissed off.
So yes, Galileo works. But the whole programme is not exactly brilliant, and it was late compared to the Chinese Beidou. I cannot ascertain what the uptake of Galileo in applications has been — I only know there have been EU regulations making Galileo compulsory for some security services, and that in principle most mobile phones support it (whatever that means).
Okay,
Thanks for the update on that one.
Heh, eventually America will simply be a North Korea. An authoritarian regime with nukes, mostly irrelevant on the world stage.
Hang on, having oil won’t we be… a gas station with nukes?
That would imply the ability to be independent and produce for ourselves. Not gonna happen.
“The future likely belongs to those who can best integrate with and complement China’s manufacturing ecosystem while developing their own unique strengths in specialized sectors and emerging technologies…”
In the USA our particular strength is the financialization and privitization of those things that make living and working less expensive.
“The overwhelming influence of great private monopolies in both legislatures and courts cannot continue if we are to maintain popular government. If we fail to regulate grants of public powers properly, invasion of private rights by those powers will be our proper and certain reward.” – not sure who’s quote that was Woodrow Wilson maybe.
So what percentage of corporate profits are in the banking sector – last I heard a dozen years ago was it was at 40% …pretty sure it is higher now. In my view banking center profits are an overhead cost buried in the cost of everything produced and, anybody with a mortgage or credit cards or lease or rental is paying that out every month – if you are a farmer you got to recover that overhead with what you have grown. ETC etc. consider it a private tax that is just crippling USA ability to compete
Back to Woodrow
“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.”
and then going back to the 1920’s
“Let the right person, or the right number of persons, suggest a plausible, but utterly impossible idea, and shortly millions of people will acclaim its truth.
At the present moment there is a popular obsession that everybody is dishonest, particularly those holding public office. To be an office holder, runs the popular belief, is to be a tax-eater, a tax-eater is a politician, and a politician is a grafter.
Unfortunately some men are dishonest, and some of them get into office, where they betray the interest of the public. They should be brought to light as fast as possible, and summarily punished. But the fact of individual dishonesty should not be made an excuse for impeaching the human race.
The greatest enemy of good government is not knavery, but ignorance. Where the knave filches from us one dollar, the fool costs us a thousand. No law should be ignored by the executive, nor misinterpreted or modified by the judiciary; it should be either enforced or repealed.
But to honestly enforce a law based upon a false principle will result not in good but harm. Honesty and efficiency in public office are desirable in and of themselves; but until directed by intelligence and understanding they can accomplish little.
Party chiefs promise, if elected by the people, to “drive the rascals out”. Then what? A dishonest pilot at the wheel is safer for the ship than an honest man who knows not the channel.
The “letting down”, or “slowing up,” of business, the closing of banks. The growing unemployment, the high cost of living are not due to official grafting, scandalous though it has been, but to our unsound revenue system.
The first man who asked Congress for a special privilege, that is, the first man who confessed to our law making body that he could not conduct his affairs unless a special law was passed to protect him from the competition of another man who could operate without such protection, set in motion an evil train of effects.
Every man’s product is a raw material to the man who buys it. If government interferes with private business to the extent of enabling one man to charge more than the market rate for his product, it to that extent handicaps the man who buys that product and sooner or later the victim seeks similar relief from government.
The second special privilege lays a burden upon other consumers, who in turn seek relief. When the last man who commands sufficient political influence to secure a privilege has been favored, the first privilege-seeker finds that his raw materials have been raised in price, and in order that he may conduct his business at a profit he must have a greater privilege. When the second round of privileges has been distributed, the first man applies for a third; and so on without end.
If that were all of the story, if privileges could be distributed forever, it might be endured, except for two things. First, there are large numbers of people to whom these privileges are useless. Second, our higher scale of prices handicaps us in outside markets.
The result of this special privilege policy was inevitable from the beginning. Only the country’s exceptional resources, and the remarkable era of science and invention through which we are passing have enabled us to carry the burden this long.
The answer to our dilemma is not to be found in granting more special privileges, but in repealing as rapidly as may be those already in force. Every privilege taken from one man cheapens the raw materials of others. When all special laws have been repealed, all citizens will stand on a footing of equality, each engaged in the business for which he is best fitted.”
Today we have legislators and all just going on with the dead end that is neo-liberal globalism and to win by any means – to preserve the vaunted tie-wearing fear mongers (the DEM and REP parties) who cowardly hide away in fear that they might be discovered to have not an original thought or clue amongst them – the dollar has more value than the entire planet upon which the only known life exists – sure it does somewhere else or at some other time but- that does not help.
It just goes to show
However, the evolutionary process by which monkeys made men of themselves was considerably slower than the reverse process.
Only the time-bomb of debt will make some things clear
“How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World’s First Writing System”
This is a really good article this. In some ways you can say that the Sumerians were inventing civilization as they were going along as they had no real precedents to follow. I would disagree with the following bit though-
’They could not read or write, for there was no writing. Without writing, there was no history.’
Early civilizations had people with trained memories that passed history along verbally and it happens in primitive society. So many of the first stories were actually ones that had been written down from oral history.
getting into Julian Jaynes territory with this one –
Good morning everyone,
This very well may come up in today’s Water Cooler, but I figured that it’s a good discussion point here. Apparently, some of the people running Kamala’s campaign appeared on Pod Save America, which I assume is a popular Democrat podcast. Apparently, to the shock of everyone (or no one, really), there was never a point in Kamala’s internal polling that showed her with a lead over Trump. For more, here’s a HuffPost article:
Kamala Harris Campaign Aides Suggest Campaign Was Just Doomed
$1B and the campaign ends up in debt and all of the swing states swung one way.
How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World’s First Writing System Literary Hub
A few words for the blind authors of this fantasy: Göbekli Tepe, 9500 BCE
Good point, but the authors did use some clever wording to skirt that issue, since I think they must be aware of Göbekli Tepe.
There was this –
“Late in the fourth millennium BC, a couple of thousand years after the advent of agriculture with the Neolithic revolution, Sumer was one of several distinct cultures around the world. In none of these cultures had true urban life and, with it, civilization yet developed.”
Far from a Göbekli Tepe expert here, but I think the currently prevailing theory is that the site was not a permanent city, but a ritual gathering place for people from all over the surrounding area. As to why archaeologists must assume a ritual significance to almost every ancient ruin, well that’s a good question. Whether it was a civilization or not depends on how one defines “civilization”. To me, what’s been discovered so far implies a common culture and therefore a civilization as I’d define it, but your mileage may vary.
My suspicion/hope is that further excavation of Göbekli Tepe will bring a greater understanding of what people were really doing there.
I did notice the weasel-words in the article, but the notion that three thousand years passed after Göbekli Tepe without advances in “civilization” in roughly the same area of the world cannot be believed.
As I understand it, permanent residence or recurring residence of large numbers of people (by pre-modern standards) leave different chemical signatures in the soil than sites used by small numbers of people or sites used only for brief periods however recurring based largely on what we would now euphemize as bathroom habits. So a ritual site that is not also a habitation site would look distinct to LIDAR and other fancy gizmos that well-funded archeologists (those few, those precious few) get to use. I don’t know how that would apply in Rocky Anatolia.
RE: the Bertrand tweet
Firstly, it’s up there twice.
And to the subject matter, there was this –
“Lastly, and perhaps most funnily, China IS increasing domestic consumption – it’s a key pillar of their own development strategy. ”
Apparently the Western “elites” were the only people who didn’t see this coming. China has clearly been planning this for decades, because they almost always take the long view, as I remember David Graeber noting in Debt: the First 5,000 Years. 30+ years ago when the US started moving manufacturing to China to save on labor costs or something (as noted here at NC over the years, offshoring didn’t actually produce many of the benefits that were supposed to accrue) it was pretty easy to predict what would happen, and you didn’t need to be a brain genius to see it. Increased manufacturing in China would produce profits for the Chinese, which would raise standards of living, which would create a middle class, which would create a burgeoning domestic market for Chinese-made goods. At some point China wouldn’t need the West any more to take the manufactured goods off its hands once they could sell them domestically.
Thank you.
LAB: “Apparently the Western “elites” were the only people who didn’t see this coming. China has clearly been planning this for decades, because they almost always take the long view.”
I used to work for HSBC in London and sometimes Moscow from 1999 – 2006. The joint venture TNK BP and its parents were clients. Russian colleagues and Russian employees of the joint venture and Russian parent explained how the Russian government encouraged such projects so that Russian firms could access expertise, technology and capital, but, in the long-term, these projects would be dissolved.
I was on the periphery of the G20 in 2009 and observed how China and Russia sent young officials to learn from their UK peers, including City regulators, and at firms. It was made clear then that these governments were taking a long view for the multipolar world that is emerging.
Bertrand is just playing to his twitter gallery here, nothing in his tweet makes any sense in the context of the current debate within Chinese policy circles. Not that Trump has much of a clue either. The irony here though is that Trumps stated policy is the exact same as Beijings stated policy – to redirect development from export dependency to more balanced internal growth.
Chinese domestic consumption has been largely static since 2009 as a percentage of its overall economic growth (in absolute terms it has increased generally in line with overall nominal GDP growth). It has been official stated policy of the Chinese government to boost domestic consumption as a proportion of overall growth since 2004, but if anything the imbalance has become worse in recent years. Just because Beijing says it wants to do something, does not mean its happening (China actually has a very decentralized governmental structure). There is a pretty good overview of the topic and the difficulty in calculating the ‘real’ figures in this report.
For an interesting ‘insider’ Chinese perspective, the economist Li Xunlei has a good series of essays on Wechat on the challenges facing the Chinese economy at the moment – from what I’m told the machine translation of his work is pretty good.
“Bertrand is just playing to his twitter gallery here…”
Arnaud Bertrand is, of course, a superb China scholar and policy analyst. Bertrand is superb.
Are you sure you are not confusing the Sinologist Arnaud Bertrand of Printemps Asiatique, who is indeed a widely published author on Chinese history, with the businessman and occasional journalist linked above? They are different people who share a name and they are sometimes confused online. I don’t believe the latter has any scholarship published, but happy to be corrected on this.
Precisely the splendid China scholar and policy analyst meant:
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1860251354108953020
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
Contrary to this Economist article
( https://economist.com/china/2024/11/21/helping-americas-hawks-get-inside-the-head-of-xi-jinping )
that is very heavy in “inscrutable Oriental” tropes, I actually think that Xi is one of the easiest Chinese leaders to read.
I think at heart the issue isn’t so much that “America’s hawks” cannot “get inside the head of Xi Jinping” as the article’s title says, it’s simply that they really don’t like what they’re seeing…
4:17 AM · Nov 23, 2024
“Inscrutable”= we don’t bother to hear what they say and instead make stuff up and attribute it to them based on some more made up junk masquerading as “culture.”
Alternatively, Pettis and other China doomers were always wrong because China measured its household consumption differently from most of the world, esp. USA. Yet twenty years of unfulfilled doomerism evidently does not discredit them amongst Western eyes.
Steve Hsu and Han Feizin gets into this at 19:09 on a recent episode of Manifold. I admit that I haven’t looked closely into the matter but the explanation makes sense with what I’ve seen coming out of China. Clean and safe cities.
Reliable and inexpensive transportation. Dramatic improvements in air quality and amount of green space. People who were pushy and self centered changing over to being more polite and orderly.
There’s no particular reason for household consumption to increase when many of the consumables are getting cheaper and better over time.
https://youtu.be/-b4-ivxJeiA?si=voRSKqcHb9A2Ppj3
There is a lot of complaining right now in the West loving liberal circles of Shanghai/Beijing, because their RE gravy train stopped and a lot of their financial jobs went away or had their salaries cut in half.
But anyone who is still worshipping the West after Hong Kong, Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon does not deserve much attention or respect.
Re the Stoller
“At any rate, someone’s gotta pay for the re-shoring of production. So who? Well, I think it should come out of Apple’s profit share, and more broadly, that of big business. Here’s a chart of corporate profits, which loosely correlates to the stock market. Corporate profit margins are at a record high.
But Apple is 7% of the S&P weighting in the stock market, so a reduction in profit margin will lead to a meaningful decline. That Trump can’t abide.”
Maybe it will need Voodoo as in Voodoo economics–once a Republican specialty, now bipartisan. Maybe one of the NC songsters can do
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Old_Black_Magic
Of course Stoller’s example of the iPhone is what some of us would consider the luxury goods market where if you have to ask what it costs etc. But it goes without saying that most of the things in Walmart that aren’t food come from China and as Walmart goes, so goes inflation for the non luxury segment of the populace.
I wonder what an iPhone would cost if it were made in America?
Depends. Can an artisan blacksmith working out of a garage in Portland hammer out more than one a day?
Better chance in Portland, ME than Portland, OR?
I have an entirely functional Android phone that cost well under $100. Made in China of course….just like the iPhone.
My brother gave me an iPad that he never had used but don’t think the cost of those is in the stratosphere range. For that matter I think only the super duper iPhones cost $1000–the Rolex of touch gadgets.
That Wall Street Magic
(melody borrowed from That Old Black Magic by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, as performed by Judy Garland in 1942)
Trump plans to cast us into Tariff Hell
Stores will raise prices till the people yell
Till the only jobs around for me and mine
Will be armed guards there at the checkout line
Some Voodoo economics will be tried
Can’t quite explain it ’cause my tongue gets tied
You borrow more to owe till jobs begin to grow
Climb aboard for a wild hayride!
Wall Street profits a lot, that much is true
But wait five years for Step Number Two:
Jobs abound as companies hire
Though wages go lower, and never higher
That roll in clover you’re all waiting for?
The drop in prices at your grocery store?
It’s at the Food Bank and breadline
Voodoo never works, you know
You people work too slow
Out or in, Wall Street will fix the win
Something all of you shoulda thought of
Mmmm, something all of you shoulda thought of
Thanks!
One super easy way to do it is just enforce a 90 year old law:
Buy American Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_American_Act
Basically anything the US government buys has to be made in America.
There is an exemption process, and my understanding is that up until Reagan it was maybe a hundred exemptions a year. Under Reagan exemptions took off and never went back. I’m looking for the data I had at one time, but cannot find it.
LOLROFLLMAO
From How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World’s First Writing System.
…the Sumerian discovery of the power of paronomasia had helped the Uruk period’s written lexicon of two thousand characters halve in number, even as it covered more meaning… Most of writing’s symbols came to represent not meaning—an object, activity, or idea, for example—but rather sound… The impact was revolutionary. The boundaries of writing were now as infinite as those of speech.
A deflationary event in the realm of abstract communication that led to a multiple thousand year expansion in the marketplace of ideas…
Bartle Bull, what a great name to have as a name. In English anyway. Also, sprachbund – not a legal Scrabble word but a quality play nonetheless.
It will be a quiet turkey day for me because the Pandemic is over.
This will be the fourth time since 1964 that I have not spent T Day with my extended family, since none of the others are taking any precautions regarding Covid and since the two youngsters attending are just getting over a long lasting “Cold” I consider the risk to be too high.
Being told that I need to “Get over my paranoia about Covid” made it difficult to respond politely, not being suicidal made it easy to hold my ground.
Sorry you can’t be with your fam. it would have been nice of them to make accommodations for your concerns, (eat outdoors, corsi boxes, etc.)
Re the new drive for digital id and the above Corbishly NC linkback–from the latter
“There is also a chance, however slim, that enough members of the public may cotton on in time to mount a last-ditch resistance.”
It’s hardly last minute. Decades ago Cory Doctorow talked about the “Darknet” which represented the many ways that the public have managed to evade online restrictions. Back then it was about bittorrent and movie downloading. And Doctorow’s point was that if you rely to heavily on the long arm of the law to protect your intellectual property it merely inspires “piracy, the obvious choice.”
The truth is that driving web users underground is probably the last thing our government Panopticons want and certainly the last thing the tech companies want. They want your eyeballs glued to their ads 24/7.
And if content is so offensive and even illegal that kids shouldn’t see it then why should adults see it? Rather than kill the internet why not kill online pornography?
The reason is the same reason you can still download movies all these years later. “Eyeballs to screens” is the overwhelming objective. And money talks.