Links and Notes for March 4th, 2022

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Technology

Economy & Finance

Russia’s Money Is Gone by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“If those people cross you off the list, or put an asterisk next to your entry freezing your funds, then you can’t use those funds anymore.”

This sets a very dangerous precedent, of course. If they can do it once, they can do it again. Maybe this time, you agree with the reason. Maybe next time you won’t . The point is, they’ve shown that they can freeze anyone’s money on a whim and are willing to do it. Maybe the final effect of Russia’s invasion will have been to give the world a chance to show what self-interested, vicious hypocrites the powers-that-be are, in stark relief.

“A ban on transactions with Russia’s central bank means that it can’t sell those securities or access those deposits. Its foreign currency reserves turned out to be mostly useless.”

They stole $600B from Russia. Venezuela says: join the club.

“To do this to a fellow central bank involves breaking the assumption of sovereign equality and the common interest in upholding the rights to property. It is a major step not easily taken against a central bank as important and as much part of the Western networks as the central bank of Russia.”

Worth it! Ammirite?!?!

“The U.S.-dollar-based international financial system, and the international financial system broadly, is an extremely valuable engine for global prosperity because people basically trust it to be reliable and neutral and rules-based; they trust that a dollar in a bank is usable and fungible, that the dollar system protects property rights.”

Maybe Russia’s intent was to get the West to kill itself, as it nearly did after 9-11. This is an opportunity to behave badly while virtue-signaling. The West has taken it with gusto. It’s unclear who’s going to end up costing the world the most. Climate change also wonders why no-one’s resisting it anymore.

“People get very excited about China’s social credit system, a sort of generalization of the “permanent record” we use to intimidate schoolchildren. And ok, it does sound kind of dystopian. If your rating is too low, you aren’t allowed to fly on a plane. Think about that — a number assigned to every person, adjusted based on somebody’s judgment of your pro-social or anti-social behavior. If your number is too low, you can’t on a plane. If it’s really low, you can’t even get on a bus. Could you imagine a system like that in the US?

“Except, of course, that we have exactly this system already. The number is called a bank account. The difference is simply that we have so naturalized the system that “how much money you have” seems like simply a fact about you, rather than a judgment imposed by society.”

Nobody Wants Russian Assets by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Your refusal to buy coal companies on the secondary market will lower the expected returns on opening a coal mine, leading to less coal mining in the long run. But in the short run it means that people who like coal mines can buy them cheap, and then the coal mines will all be owned by people who like coal mines.”

“[…] the fact that it is an issue is interesting. “The crypto community’s libertarian ideology” is not usually “every crypto exchange should be open to everyone,” rather, it is “crypto is uncensorable money that cannot be blocked by government fiat or any one big intermediary.” In crypto philosophy, intermediaries are not supposed to be noble and libertarian; they are supposed to be unable to stop you.”

“Anyway, if you are in the business of producing weapons, last week you were not particularly ESG, but this week you are very ESG: With a Russian invasion right on its doorstep, Europe now finds itself discussing whether weapons should be listed as ESG assets, to grant them more favorable access to financing.”

I wonder if they predicted this. I think that they can’t believe their luck.

“In a policy paper earlier this month, the bloc underlined the importance of ensuring that “initiatives on sustainable finance remain consistent with the European Union efforts to facilitate the European defense industry’s sufficient access to finance and investment.””

“Insider trading, I like to say, is not about fairness, it’s about theft, and here I clearly am not using anyone’s information illegitimately. I should say that some people, including at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, find this upsetting, and have a vague sense that big investors should not be allowed to trade when there is an “information asymmetry” in which they know their plans and others don’t. But I think the law is pretty clear here.”

“This seems like a cheaper trade to me: pay for one of the market makers to throw a week long party on some remote island … he will invite the entire market … run over whoever is left to quote you prices while the entire market is off partying … wait for the real traders to sober up long enough to beg you to unwind at a handsome profit.”

Russia’s Finances Are Closing Up by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“But every time the U.S. and its allies kick a country off this system, it goes and finds other systems and rails and currencies to use to trade. And other countries, countries that have not been kicked off the main network but who are not necessarily aligned with the U.S. in every way, think that the main network looks a bit less attractive: For one thing, a big potential trading partner has been kicked off of it and is now trading on some other system. For another thing, the main system is visibly a tool of political power, and if you are not aligned with the U.S. you might worry about one day being kicked off the system yourself.”

Capitalism is eating itself. Good.

“In this theory, it is not simply good to be in the international system and bad to be kicked out of it. There is a recoil, each time someone is kicked out of the system; the system is weakened each time it exercises its power.”

“The U.S. has substantial reserves of credibility to draw on here. Few dollar users, if any, are likely to commit the same offenses as Russia or draw the same punishment.”

Ohmigod hahahaha. Sure, right. What are the odds of the U.S. punishing anyone mercurially? Where have you been? The U.S. is a giant dick. A knob. A bell-end without peer. It has never not fucked over a “partner” because it doesn’t consider anyone else to be an equal. Putin puts it this way, “The U.S. allows only vassal nations.”

“ESG is, somewhat paradoxically, an attractive area of finance for people who don’t care about finance but do like the money it provides.”

Uninvestable Markets Are Hard to Trade by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Russian assets could always go down another 99% — but it is in expectation probably a lucrative time not to care about reputation or public opinion. If everyone is selling for noneconomic reasons, buying is more likely to be economically appealing. If you can find a way to do it.”

“I think the best articulation of the strategy is “We are attempting to convey enormous displeasure while sanctioning some banks which are believed to be close to politically exposed Russians, while not making it impossible for Russian firms generally to transact internationally nor sparking a humanitarian crisis either inside or outside of Russia.””

“International sanctions placed on the country in response to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine may both trigger credit-default swaps and also prevent the underlying bonds from being used for settlement, according to strategists and investors at Citigroup Inc., CreditSights Inc. and Vanguard Asset Management. …”

“No one explicitly made the decision ‘Your nation got invaded, so you should have less access to financial systems half a world away. This is a natural and just outcome in a democratic society.’ It flowed indirectly through ‘The Crimea now poses a heightened risk of money laundering’, ‘We lack the ability to discriminate between the Crimea and the rest of Ukraine’, ‘We care a lot more about not facilitating money laundering than we do about our infinitesimal Ukraine business so Ukraine is going on the High Risk Country list’, ‘Sorry, you have citizenship from the High Risk Country list, accordingly I’m not allowed to open this account for you. This is a commercial decision of the bank and will not be reversed.’ Maddeningly, no one—not the regulators, not Compliance, not the front-line employee delivering the decision—believes they are accountable for this result! Which happened! Tens! Of! Thousands! Of! Times!””

This is the same thing that’s happening with American/Swiss dual citizens living in Switzerland. Banks in Switzerland don’t want anything to do with people like that and disallow investments.

“I gather there is some legal uncertainty about what happens with the seized yachts. Here, meanwhile, is an argument for “giving the yachts to the Ukrainian navy, since many are armed with missile-defense systems and have submarines.””

Our responses to extra-legal activity is to become criminals ourselves. We have trained for this.

Public Policy & Politics

Not-So-Great-Powers by Rafia Zakaria (The Baffler)

“In the largest conflicts the world has seen in the 2000s, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, America has been the aggressor, the side that drones and bombs and kills. In those wars, its “embedded” and garishly nationalistic reporters presented idealized visions of the conflict to gullible audiences back home.”

“Russians believe the line that is told to them. Theirs is a “peacekeeping” mission in Ukraine, one that is geared toward preventing the genocide of ethnic Russians in the Donbas and Luhansk region. Putin’s propaganda isn’t close to reality because the war propaganda of a hegemon never is.”

“Suddenly, the defense of a homeland from a hegemon is noble and worthy—because the hegemon is the enemy of the United States.”

“That the 9/11 hijackers were not Afghan and there were no actual weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were details shelved away, just as the complete lack of provocation by Ukrainians likely escapes Russian minds with similar alacrity.”

“Complete lack of provocation” is certainly an exaggeration here. You can argue that Ukraine has every right as a sovereign power to buy weapons from and make allies with whomever it pleases, but you cannot argue that this does not count as a provocation for the country against whom these weapons—and animosity—are directed. What Russia has done and is doing is a grievous wrong, illegal and immoral alike, but it was not unprovoked, for any sane or just definition of the word. The reaction is not justifiable nor is it excusable, but to argue that it was unprovoked is to believe that it is inexplicable.

“When baffled Americans consider the inhumanity of Russian actions, they must remember this and say to themselves we, too, did this; we, too, were cruel; we, too, didn’t care.”

“The United States and Russia cannot be compared: one is a constitutional liberal democracy and the other a cruel dictatorship where dissenters are jailed, poisoned, or killed.”

What the fuck does this sentence think it’s doing? Is it saying that the U.S. doesn’t jail or kill dissenters? Julian Assange would like a word with you. Leonard Peltier will wait his turn. Edward Snowden is writing a tweet. JFC, how to reconcile the rest of the essay with this sentence? Did she write it automatically? Was it inserted by an editor? What the hell happened here? It feels almost like a commercial break from the rest of the essay.

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Is Not Just a Crime. It’s Also Wildly Irrational. by Daniel Denvir (Jacobin)

“The other reading is that it’s still as cynical as we thought it was. It’s using whatever pretext it can find. This time, it’s just lazier than usual. It didn’t even bother. It feels that it can do what it wants, but it’s still doing a series of tactical improvisations. It doesn’t have a big idea.”

Russia doesn’t seem like their heart is in it. They know they have to do it, but they don’t really want to have done it. I know that sounds like appeasement, but it goes a long way to explaining why the whole effort has been so half-hearted so far, especially as compared with previous Russian military operations under Putin—or as compared with the “shock and awe” tactics of the United States when it invades.

“I think they may have thought they knew what the Ukrainians could do but thought that they could do better. It’s not so much that they underestimated the Ukrainians; it’s possible that they overestimated themselves.”

“I do understand the basic moral imperative going on here: Who is being bombed, and who’s doing the bombing? From that point of view, there’s a gravitational pull in liberals’ support of Ukraine and condemnation of Russian aggression. There’s a reason that this argument has moral force beyond the dominance of liberal views in the media sphere. There is something moderately compelling about it, especially in terms of solidarity with ordinary Ukrainians who are being bombed.”

It’s the easy way out, for sure. You get to feel good about your intrinsic moral goodness without any hard thinking or reading. No-one can fault you for siding against the country dropping the bombs. But the world stage is more complicated than a Michael Bay movie, despite most people’s complete lack of desire to grapple with that complexity, to say nothing of their lack of mental acuity for and practice in doing so.

“The discourse of appeasement, which shuts down discussions of context, is designed to shut down these lines of inquiries, because any self-examination on the part of Western powers is not allowed.”

“The other thing about the discourse that worries me is that people are very understandably trying to support Ukraine and express solidarity, but some of the forms of solidarity I’ve seen floating around on the internet are crowdfunding the Ukrainian military and supporting Germany’s decision to send weapons. I’m very uneasy with the idea that flooding Ukraine with weapons can be equated to an antiwar position. That is extremely dangerous.”

“Obviously, the Ukrainians are trying to resist with what they have, but there is something very hypocritical about all of these external powers — those who have fanned this conflict and who will not fight in Ukraine — flooding the country with weapons to make sure it continues to be a war zone and calling that “support.””

“Ordinary Ukrainians want this to stop. We can discuss the question of conditions for a ceasefire and what kind of peace could be made, but I’m very uneasy about the degree to which support for the Ukrainian resistance can turn into support for continuation and escalation of this war. The West needs to separate those two things. Solidarity with Ukraine is one thing, and supporting the continuation and escalation of the war is another. We should try to stop that last part.”

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Is Not Just a Crime. It’s Also Wildly Irrational. (an Interview with Tony Wood) by Daniel Denvir (Jacobin)

“in Syria, the Russians and the US military were coordinating the timing of their bombing sorties so they didn’t fight each other. This was as recently as 2015. Russia’s aspiration to cooperate has been rebuffed because Western strategists have been quite clear that Russia is something separate from us and that we can’t integrate them. The Russians have gradually worked out over time that this is not going to happen.”

“NATO strategists have spent twenty years preparing for a hostile Russia, and now they have one. This is one of many ways in which, tragically, this war is giving NATO what it’s wanted this whole time. This war validates NATO. And that’s one of the things that’s very dangerous about it.”

“[…] back in December, the Russian government sent the United States a new proposal for discussions about a new strategic architecture and Ukrainian neutrality. These security proposals were ignored. The West has not put anything on the table except the continuation of business as usual.”

“[…] part of the antiwar critique should be that the people who have to live with the consequences of a war should have more say than people who live thousands of miles away.”

“There’s a weird asymmetry — the side actually doing the invading didn’t bother preparing its population for war, whereas the sides that were nowhere near the conflict have been psychologically most prepared for war.”

“We need to separate ethnic Russian nationalism from the project of great Russian statehood, which can be, in theory, pluri-ethnic. Putin is bent on something like that, where there is a pluri-ethnic Russian state that can contain other nationalities, but Russians play the state-forming role. That’s very much not what the Soviet Union was, and the sooner everyone recognizes this, the better.”

“A lot of people in the elite will be concerned about how this decision got made, because it is going to be a total disaster for Russia — either a (hopefully) brief disaster or a very long disaster, but no doubt a disaster, and it will rebound on Putin very badly. To the extent that everyone else in the leadership was on board with this idea, it will rebound on them all very badly.”

“Even if the elite was fully behind the project, if it turns out to be a disaster from which it can’t recover, it can off-load it all onto Putin and get rid of him. It’s a possibility that the close identification of the war with Putin gives the Russian elite an out. I think that’s one of the things Olaf Scholz’s message was supposed to say indirectly.”

And then the main drivers for the war will still be there.

“There’s talk about the government trying antiwar protesters for treason. They’re facing a much higher, harsher set of obstacles than the antiwar movements against Iraq and Afghanistan in the West.”

How so? America whips out treason for every little thing.

“From that point of view, the Russians currently have an interest in ending this very quickly, finding something they can call a win and backing out. From the Russian side, it just gets worse from here. My hope is that they can be brought to the negotiating table, very swiftly.”

“Ukraine has basically been at war since 2014. Between 2014 and 2021, there were something like 13,000 casualties in the Donbas. This is a substantial level of casualties, especially considering that there was a ceasefire. There has been an ongoing war in Ukraine, partly because the Minsk settlement was not implemented by any of the sides.”

“My fear is that the Russian preconditions for a ceasefire will not be met by the Ukrainian government. The Ukrainian populace will reject them and so will Ukraine’s Western allies. We could have a failed ceasefire, which will be framed in terms of refusing to appease Russia. We can’t give them what they want. We can’t make any concessions to this kind of aggressor. While this has a certain rhetorical ring to it again, Ukraine will be turned into a battlefield.”

“But the problem is that the rules of the “rules-based system” run by the United States don’t apply to the US. They do still apply to everyone else, and we are not yet in a world where they don’t apply. That’s the contradiction that Russia is currently caught in and why they may be surprised that their banks are being locked out of the SWIFT system.”

I don’t think they’re surprised at all. It’s been threatened and they’ve been preparing for it for a decade.

The War in Ukraine is Many Things, and One of Them is a Consequence of American Imperialism by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“Say you’re the Iranians. Each of those red dots above probably seems like a good argument for getting the bomb, to the Iranian regime. You saw the United States invade Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts. You saw the United States decapitate the Libyan government and leave the country to chaos and civil war. Your country’s government has already gone through a violent coup in the past thanks to American whim. And you notice that American troops and equipment are stationed all around you. If you would like to remain in power, knowing that you can’t possibly ever match the United States in terms of sheer conventional military firepower, what recourse do you have? Only nuclear power moves the needle.”

“Or we could ask whether the American sword of Damocles hanging forever over their heads makes them feel they have no other choice, and pursue a more sensible policy by drawing down our military presence in the greater Middle East. It would have the salutary benefit of saving us billions.”

The Greatest Evil Is War by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise by Washington not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy thousands of NATO troops in Eastern Europe, not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on the Russia’s border and the refusal to implement the Minsk II peace agreement. The invasion of Ukraine would, I expect, never have happened if these promises had been kept. Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry. But to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression.”

“If truth is the first casualty in war, ambiguity is the second. The bellicose rhetoric embraced and amplified by the American press, demonizing Vladimir Putin and elevating the Ukrainians to the status of demigods, demanding more robust military intervention along with the crippling sanctions meant to bring down Vladimir Putin’s government, is infantile and dangerous. The Russian media narrative is as simplistic as ours.”

“Only the autocrats and politicians who dream of empire and global hegemony, of the god-like power that comes with wielding armies, warplanes, and fleets, along with the merchants of death, whose business floods countries with weapons, profit from war. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe has earned Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Analytic Services, Huntington Ingalls, Humana, BAE Systems, and L3Harris billions in profits. The stoking of conflict in Ukraine will earn them billions more.”

“The permanent war economy operates outside the laws of supply and demand. It is the root of the two-decade-long quagmire in the Middle East. It is the root of the conflict with Moscow. The merchants of death are Satanic. The more corpses they produce, the more their bank accounts swell. They will cash in on this conflict, one that now flirts with the nuclear holocaust that would terminate life on earth as we know it.”

“This provocation, which includes establishing a NATO missile base 100 miles from Russia’s border, was foolish and highly irresponsible. It never made geopolitical sense. This does not, however, excuse the invasion of Ukraine. Yes, the Russians were baited. But they reacted by pulling the trigger. This is a crime. Their crime. Let us pray for a ceasefire. Let us work for a return to diplomacy and sanity, a moratorium on arms shipments to Ukraine and the withdrawal of Russian troops from the country. Let us hope for an end to war before we stumble into a nuclear holocaust that devours us all.”

Demands grow in Washington for US war with Russia by Andre Damon (WSWS)

““Is there a Brutus in Russia?”, Graham asked, referring to the assassination of Roman emperor Julius Caesar by Marcus Brutus and thus advocating what is, under international law, a war crime. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country—and the world—a great service.””

“In a pre-recorded message, Ukrainan President Zelensky called NATO “weak” for not imposing the no-fly zone, asserting: “NATO knowingly approved the decision not to close the skies over Ukraine. We believe that the NATO countries themselves have created a narrative that the alleged closing of the sky over Ukraine will provoke direct Russian aggression against NATO.””

Zelenskyy is a manipulative idiot who doesn’t give a shit what happens to the rest of the world, as long as Ukraine is defended. He was elected to bring peace and brought NATO weapons in instead. Maybe Russia predicted that this would happen and they would bring a conflagration down onto themselves. Who knows? Zelenskyy and the US seem to be goading each other into making this war much, much bigger.

““All the people who die from this day forward will also die because of you, because of your weakness, because of your lack of unity,” Zelensky said.”

JFC. These allies seem made for each other. He’s right about the blood being partly on NATO’s hands. He probably sees how badly his country has been fucked by NATO, but he should be negotiating with Russia, not pleading for the U.S. to escalate even further. An escalation will lose even more lives.

““It would essentially mean the U.S. military would be shooting down planes—Russian planes. That is definitely escalatory. That would potentially put us into a place where we’re in a military conflict with Russia. That is not something the president wants to do,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told MSNBC on Monday. “We are not going to have a military war with Russia with U.S. troops.””

Typical Psaki equivocation: “escalatory”, “potentially”—what part of the U.S. shooting down Russian planes would not be crystal clear as a military conflict? The final statement is telling: “with U.S. troops”. They’re perfectly happy to fight a proxy war—it is, in fact, what they’ve wanted all along.

“Retired Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan told the Hill he “suggested” that “the U.S. and NATO could establish a no-fly zone over the western part of the country where Russian troops haven’t arrived.””

Are the Russians in Kiev or are the Russian not in Kiev? I keep hearing that they are, but then occasionally read that the Russians are only in the east.

Metropolitan Opera announces the banning of soprano Anna Netrebko by Fred Mazelis (WSWS)

““It is a great artistic loss for the Met and for opera,” Gelb said with self-conscious solemnity. “Anna is one of the greatest singers in Met history, but with Putin killing innocent victims in Ukraine there was no way forward.” While Netrebko’s dates were canceled for the next two seasons, Gelb also added, “It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which she will return to the Met.””

That statement is madness.

“Only hours after Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine, the Social Democratic Party mayor of Munich, Dieter Reiter, issued an ultimatum to Gergiev, the chief conductor of the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra: either he clearly distance himself from Putin or he would be fired.

“When Gergiev did not respond to this ultimatum, all contracts with him were terminated with immediate effect. Previously, La Scala in Milan, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Lucerne Festival declared their collaboration with the Russian conductor to be finished and New York’s Carnegie Hall cancelled a concert with Gergiev and the Vienna Philharmonic.”

His employment was contingent on a loyalty oath. Very modern, Germany, very modern.

I hear loyalty oaths are huge in authoritarian governments: let’s do those.

“When Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivered his war speech in parliament last Sunday, announcing the biggest rearmament programme in Germany since Hitler and inaugurating direct arms deliveries to Ukraine, there was euphoria among the assembled deputies. There was no end to the standing ovations. Anyone who opposes this is to be intimidated. The agitation against the Russians serves the ideological mobilisation for NATO’s long-prepared war against Russia.”

Russia invades Ukraine. Europe responds by dismantling its civil society. Switzerland responds by joining the EU in all sanctions, present and future.

There are no adults in the room.

George Monbiot: NATO’s witchfinder by Chris Marsden (WSWS)

“The war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a McCarthyite smear campaign against anyone who refuses to parrot uncritically the pro-NATO apologetics that fill every edition of the Guardian and the rest of the world’s media. It is not enough to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nor even the regime of Russian oligarchs led by President Vladimir Putin.

“Anyone who does not explicitly back the NATO powers’ use of Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia, who warns against this war rapidly becoming an imperialist war for regime change in Moscow and the catastrophic consequences of a clash between nuclear powers, is the target of vicious denunciations and slanders.”

And this has happened all so quickly. We are two weeks into a rapidly developing situation with a tremendous amount of propaganda, lies, scams, and so on, but everyone should have formed the same simplistic opinion and joined ranks to fight the bugs in Starship Troopers. There is no room for thought, for even the slightest difference in opinion. Online, at least. In private, I’ve had no small amount of success with providing context to friends and colleagues.

“But the most well-known names cited as disseminators of Putin’s propaganda are world renowned journalists John Pilger, Seymour Hersh and the now deceased Robert Fisk.”

Monbiot is unhinged.

“Alienated from the broad mass of working people they view with disdain they march behind their ruling class headlong towards disaster.”

Another Casualty of the Ukraine Conflict: The Truth by Michael Brenner (Scheer Post)

“Civilian casualties in Ukraine are relatively few. Despite the strenuous efforts to find then, actual numbers appear to be in the order of 300-400. For good reasons, Russian forces are calculatingly avoiding attacks on urban centers; after all, 40% of the population is Russian and concentrated in the regions where the fighting is taking place. Moreover, Moscow has no interest in subjugating the country to its rule. In comparison, the Ukrainian army has been shelling the city centers of Lugansk and Donetsk, producing casualties estimated by a UN agency at more than 1,300 (3 or 4 times what objective observers estimate on the Ukrainian government’s side of the battle lines). Also. the water system has been destroyed.”

I would need verification on these statements. I know that the shelling in the east has taken dozens of thousands of victims over the last eight years.

“[…] despite the record of massive mendacity chalked up by the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and White House spokespersons over the years, the MSM swallow whole whatever is being sold and then they repackage it as reporting and sell it to us word-for-word.”

“So, we read in the august NYT that Russia Launches Missile Attack On Ukrainian Cities. Civilian Casualties Mount, Russian Offense on Kharkiv Stalls, Russia’s Pounding of Key Ukrainian Cities Is Escalated, etc., etc. All nonsense, all lies. Never corrected. They are just sub-heads in a fictional story designed to mythologize, to entertain, and to control thought.”

“[…] the famed soprano, Anna Netrebko, has [been] forced to drop appearances at the Zurich opera House because she is deemed irremeably [sic] tainted by having received an award for artistic achievement from Putin personally and having voted for him in a past election. Long resident in Vienna, married to a Uruguayan baritone, she in fact has issued a statement condemning the war as senseless “aggression” and calls on “Russia to end it right now.” Even that cut no ice with the Inquisition.”

“If Netrebko’s long-time colleagues in the music world had any principles or guts, they’ issue an ultimatum, quit her persecution or we’ll all boycott the Met’s entire season. Of course, that never will happen – these days, all spheres of Western society are pervaded with cowardice.”

Afghanistan, Not Ukraine, Is the Biggest Humanitarian Crisis by Ted Rall

“ “Afghanistan has become the world’s largest humanitarian crisis,” Jane Ferguson reported in The New Yorker in January. “More than 20 million people are on the brink of famine.” […] “Afghanistan,” says the U.N. World Food Program, “teeters on the brink of universal poverty. “As much as 97% of the population is at risk of sinking below the poverty line.” […] UNICEF warns that up to one million children under age five may die from malnutrition and lack of essential services by the end of 2022.”

“1.4 million Ukrainian refugees have fled; 200,000 are internally displaced. Compare that to Afghanistan: 2.2 million Afghans have gone to neighboring countries in the last six months and 3.5 million are internally displaced.”

“Coverage of the Afghans’ plight, such as it is, focuses on the $7 billion to $9.5 billion held by the former Afghanistan government in U.S. banks, now frozen by the Biden Administration, which stubbornly refuses to recognize the reality of Taliban rule.

“Biden wants to siphon off $3.5 billion of the Afghan funds to settle legal claims by the families of 9/11 victims, a bizarre stance given the fact that no Afghan national had anything to do with the terrorist attacks. ”

Stop the reckless spiral toward nuclear war! by Joseph Kishore (WSWS)

“Having been backed into a corner by the relentless expansion of NATO, Putin’s desperate invasion of Ukraine has played into the hands of US and European imperialism. But Putin believes, even as protests within Russia against the war grow, that he can compel NATO to negotiate and make concessions, through threats and nuclear brinksmanship. This strategy is based on a self-deluding underestimation of the Biden administration’s determination to escalate the conflict.”

“NATO’s supposed non-involvement in the conflict is already a fiction. More than 20 countries, including most of the members of NATO and the European Union, are flooding Ukraine with weapons, including anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft systems, and fighter jets.”

It’s almost like they’re incredibly excited to be able to do so. War is exciting! There’s money to be made! So fortuitous that they had all of this materiel ready and waiting! Let’s rely on Putin to be the sane one: we won’t give an inch and will call his nuclear bluff. If he doesn’t back down, we all die, but it will be his fault. If he does, then we get all of his stuff and win the game. Once again, we are in the uncomfortable position of hoping that Putin is not a madman and will back down and lose face—because we know our side is not willing to do that at all. They are buying and selling weapons at a prodigious rate, they are screaming for war from the hilltops, they are excited about the prospect on nuclear annihilation—or they are so naive as to believe it will happen (they know Putin wouldn’t do it) or too stupid to understand what it would entail.

“The protests that have developed in response to the invasion of Ukraine are anti-Russian, not anti-war. Genuine anti-war protests do not call for no-fly zones that could trigger a nuclear confrontation—a dominant slogan in demonstrations in Europe last week and in Chicago, Illinois yesterday. They do not applaud and call for massive increases in military budgets. They do not forget the war crimes committed by the governments of their own countries.”

Technology

Why RISC-V Is Succeeding by Brian Bailey (Semiconductor Engineering)

“that’s where OpenHW differentiates itself in the open-source hardware space, because they provide the complete verification environments. If you add a new instruction, you know you haven’t broken the rest. I don’t think people will just take an OpenHW core and use it. That doesn’t make much sense. You could do that if you want to save money. But what it allows you to do is to take it and extend it, and it’s an extremely good base to start from. That’s the key. You you’re not starting from scratch.””