Links and Notes for March 25th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology

Economy & Finance

The SEC Will Regulate Climate by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“There are … subtler, more interesting, more financial problems with an approach that relies on complex accounting methodologies and proxy measurements for emissions? It just feels like the industry that these rules will create, the industry of optimizing this reporting, will be an industry of optimizing this reporting, which is not quite the same thing as an industry of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

Everyone Wants to Do ESG Now by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Or you could think of the 2008 financial crisis as being driven, to some extent, by people asking themselves “what is the riskiest possible thing that I could construct that will nonetheless get a AAA rating from the credit ratings agencies?” “Buy things that yield a lot but are safe” is a reasonable, dull mandate for an investment manager, but “understand the ratings agency criteria for structured credit inside and out so that you can maximize yield subject to the constraint of achieving a AAA rating” is a fun puzzle.”

’I don’t wish it on my worst enemy’: Calgarians detail life with an electricity load limiter by Lucie Edwardson (CBC)

“The extra fees — $52 for the notice, $52 to remove the limiter — only made it worse. Plus, the black mark on their files means they often can’t get a contract with more favourable fixed rates. When the device is installed, a stove or anything else requiring 240 volts of electricity won’t work.”

Public Policy & Politics

When you corrode and corrupt democracy, it has consequences by Greg Palast

“Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil on the planet. If you look at OPEC, they put Saudi Arabia as number two. Venezuela’s producing very little oil, not even enough for its own needs at this moment, when it was producing 3.2 million barrels of oil a day — 2 million barrels a day for export. If we unleash oil from Venezuela, then Putin’s profit from the invasion evaporates.”

This is what war does to people. It gives them an excuse to be their stupidest selves. Greg Palast is an excellent journalist and an excellent human. What he wrote above is ignorant, born of a jingoist anti-Putinism that blinds him to all other issues—like climate change. His overarching desire to exact revenge on Putin—not Bush, not Cheney, not Biden, but Putin—means all other goals and considerations can fall by the wayside. It means that he is freed from considered thought, from weighing difficult options. He thinks somehow that defeating Putin with Venezuela’s oil would be a good thing, that this angle “gets back” at both Putin and the U.S. it does nothing of the kind. It’s playing into their hands.

Ukraine Changes the Face of War Forever by Nick Gillespie and Regan Taylor (Reason)

“Every Russian tank that gets fried in Ukraine is sending the message that traditional armies can no longer expect to dominate simply because they have more troops, weapons, and money. Russian armored vehicles are falling victim to Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapons (NLAWs), which can be carried by individual soldiers, unslung in seconds, and deployed with little training and fatal accuracy. There are credible reports that Russia has already lost $5 billion worth of military equipment in a month of fighting in Ukraine. The human cost for Russia is even more staggering: Nearly 10,000 soldiers have been killed in action, including at least five generals.”

What an asinine thing to write: We already learned this from dozens of American invasions. Literally last year with Afghanistan. How is it that otherwise intelligent people end up writing such pap? George Orwell was right: the media really do just end up writing hackneyed phrases, regurgitated without thought.

The U.S. never suffered something like this because it always made sure to flatten everything with carpet-bombing before it entered a country with boots on the ground.

Ukraine Could Turn Into Another Endless War, Especially if NATO Decides More Than Just Peace is Needed by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“Parallels are occasionally drawn between the Ukrainian war and a dozen or so conventional and guerrilla wars being fought out in this vast area of conflict to the south of Ukraine. When similarities between these conflicts are noted, it is usually on the grounds that Russian shelling and bombing of cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv is similar to that of Damascus and Aleppo by Russian-backed Syrian forces. This is true enough, but keep in mind that the bombardment of Gaza by Israel and Raqqa and Mosul by the Americans likewise led to massive physical destruction and heavy civilian loss of life.”

The Blowback from Sanctions on Russia by Michael Hudson & Ross Ashcroft (CounterPunch)

“It most recently, on Monday, March 14, Jake Sullivan came out and told China, we will sanction countries that break our sanctions against Russia. And basically, China said, fine. You know, we’ll just break off all the trade between East and West now and the East, Eurasia is pretty much self-sufficient. The West is not self-sufficient since it began to industrialise, and it’s heavily dependent on Russia for not only oil and gas, but palladium and many raw materials. So the sanctions are ending up driving a wedge between the European countries.”

“They know that not only will it block the energy that Germany and Italy and other countries in Europe need through their oil and gas, but also it’ll block the use of gas for fertiliser, upping their fertiliser production and decreasing their food production. They look at this and they say, How can America gain from all of this? There’s always a way of gaining what something looks to be bad. Well, one way they’ll gain is oil prices are going way up. And that benefits the United States whose foreign policy is based very largely on oil and gas.”

“While most of the European public wants to prevent global warming and prevent carbon into the atmosphere, U.S. foreign policy is based on increasing, and even accelerating, global warming, accelerating carbon emissions because that’s the oil trade.”

“Europe doesn’t really have a voice, and this is what the complaint by Putin and Foreign Secretary Lavrov have been saying. They say that Europe is just following the United States and it doesn’t matter what the European people want or what European politicians want. The United States is so deeply in control that they really don’t have much of a choice.”

“The United States said Well, in another year and a half, we’ll be able to provide Europe with liquefied natural gas. Well, the problem is, first of all, they’re not the ports to handle the liquefied natural gas to go into Europe. Secondly, there are not enough ships and tankers to carry all of this gas to Europe. So unless there is very warm winters, Europe is not going to have a very easy time for the next few years.”

“We certainly need the following list of critical materials that we need, like helium and crypton. These are our pressure points. Please don’t press on them. Well, you can imagine what Putin and his advisers are saying. Thank you for giving us this list of the pressure points that you’re exempting from the trade sanctions. I think if you really want a break in the unilateral, unipolar world, I think we should break now and see whether you really want to get along without trading.”

“There’s almost a disgust with the West and a feeling from Putin, Lavrov and the other Russian spokesmen, how could we ever have hoped to have an integration with Europe after 1991? Europe really was not on our side at all, and we didn’t realise that Europe is really part of the U.S. diplomatic sphere.”

“Even the Financial Times of London has been writing about this, saying, how can the United States that was getting a free ride off the dollar standard for the last 50 years, ever since 1971, when foreign countries held dollars instead of gold and basically holding dollars means you buy U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the US budget deficit and the balance of payments deficit. How can the United States kill the goose that’s giving it the free ride?”

“So other countries are not only moving to gold, Germany is bringing its gold back from New York, the Federal Reserve, in aeroplanes back to Germany, so it’ll have its own gold just in case German politicians would do something the United States didn’t like and the United States would simply grab Germany’s gold.”

“I don’t see any cooler heads in the United States. The surprising thing is that here it’s the right wing channel, the Republican Fox News channel, is the only channel that’s taking the anti-war stand and is saying we shouldn’t be at war in Ukraine. It’s the only channel that’s talking about here is how Russia sees the world. Do we really want to take a one sided perspective or do we want to see the actual dynamics at work?”

US fighting Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’: veteran US diplomat by Aaron Maté (The Gray Zone)

“I thought in the run-up to this that Mr. Putin was following a classic form of coercive diplomacy: massing troops on Ukraine’s border, issuing very clear offers to negotiate, threatening indirectly to escalate beyond the border—not in Ukraine, which the Russians repeatedly said they did not intend to invade, but perhaps through putting pressure on the United States similar to the pressure that the Russians feel from us, namely missiles within no-warning distance at all of the capital.”

“There are lots of things being said about the course of the war which is now about a month old, and many of them are, I think, frankly, tendentious nonsense. For example, it’s alleged that the Russians are deliberately targeting civilians. But I think in most wars the ratio of military-to-civilian deaths is roughly one-to-one, and in this case the recorded civilian deaths are about one-tenth of that, which strongly suggests that the Russians have been holding back.”

“The war is a fog of lies on all sides. It is virtually impossible to tell what is actually happening because every side is staging the show. The champion of that is Mr. Zelenskyy, who is brilliant as a communicator, it turns out. He’s an actor who has found his role, and it probably helps Ukraine a great deal to have a president who is an accomplished actor, who came equipped with his own studio staff, who is using that brilliantly.”

“And more to the point, the United States is not part of any effort to negotiate an end to the fighting. To the extent that there is mediation going on, it seems to be by Turkey, possibly Israel, maybe China. That’s about it. And the United States is not in the room. Everything we are doing, rather than accelerating an end to the fighting and some compromise, seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting, assisting the Ukrainian resistance—which is a noble cause, I suppose, but that will result in a lot of dead Ukrainians as well as dead Russians. And, also, the sanctions have no goals attached to them. There’re no conditions which we’ve stated which would result in their end.”

“At root, this is a contest over whether Ukraine will be in the US sphere of influence, the Russian sphere of influence, or neither’s. And, neutrality, which is what Mr. Putin had started out saying he wanted, what’s compatible with neither side having Ukraine within its sphere, whether that’s now possible or not, I don’t know. I think one of the mistakes Mr. Putin made in upping the ante was to make it very difficult for Ukraine to become neutral.”

“I think that this has very injurious effects on Western liberties, and it has enforced an almost—I won’t say it’s totalitarian, but it’s certainly a similar kind of control on freedom of expression and inquiry in the West. It’s very depressing, really. We should rise to this occasion. We should be concerned about achieving a balance in Europe that sustains peace. That requires incorporating Russia into a governing council for Europe, of some sort. Europe historically has been at peace only when all the great powers who could overthrow the peace have been co-opted into it.”

“[…] it’s really depressing that instead of trying to figure out how to give Russia reasons not to invade countries and to violate international laws as it has—that does not make Russia unique, of course—but instead of trying to give Russia reasons for being well-behaved, we have, in its view, left it with no alternative but the use of force.”

“So, there should have been no surprise about this. For 28 years Russia has been warning that at some point it would snap, and it has, and it has done it in a very destructive way, both in terms of its own interests and in terms of the broader prospects for peace in Europe.”

“At the moment I understand the Ukrainian forces, although they’ve lost their command and control, there are major units that are surrounded and in danger of being annihilated by the Russians. There are cities that are in danger of being pulverized. None of this has happened yet, but the Ukrainians do not lack weaponry. They have more than enough to deal with the Russian forces on a dispersed basis, and they have shown themselves to be very courageous in defending their country with those weapons. A lot of them are dying for their country. One can admire that, but one must also lament it.”

“I noticed that recently the Chinese have emphasized heavily the need for there to be negotiations, to bring that fighting to an end at the earliest possible moment. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to end up mediating. Mediation is a very difficult thing, and often mediators enter the mediation with two friends and end up with two enemies.”

“[…] nobody knows what’s going on between…or at least, if anybody does know, they’re not saying what’s going on between Russians and Ukrainians in the meetings that they are having. Turks claim that the two sides are close to an agreement. Various points [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov and [Dmytro] Kuleba, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, have both said something similar, but there is no agreement. And it’s not clear at this point whether there can be an agreement.”

“I’ve seen no indication there has been any sort of support from Washington for making peace with Russia. Trump, of course, was impeached when he paused those weapons sales. There’s that famous incident where [US Senators] Lindsey Graham and John McCain and Amy Klobuchar go to the front lines in late 2016, of the Ukrainian military’s fight against the rebels in the Donbas. And Lindsey Graham says, ‘2017 is going to be the year of offense, and Russia has to pay a heavier price.’”

“But what is clear to me is that Mr. Zelenskyy’s performance as the leader of wartime Ukraine has gained him enormous political capital. He has the ability now to make a compromise. It will not be easy.”

“[…] by the way, antisemitism is a disastrous aspect of Nazism, but it’s not the definition of Nazism, and apparently you can be a Nazi and have a Jewish president and not feel uncomfortable about it. So, I think this simplistic argument that, well, because Ukraine has as a secular Jewish president who apparently doesn’t really identify as Jewish but is identified as Jewish, this means somehow that there can’t be any Nazis backing him. It’s ridiculous.”

“[…] out of leaders in the West, including President Biden, but we also have people like [UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnson saying the sanctions have to stay on, whatever Russia does, because Russia has to be punished. Well, this means Russia has absolutely no incentive to accommodate, and it also means that Mr. Zelenskyy has no freedom to accommodate.”

“I frankly don’t know Ukraine personally well enough to know exactly what the definition of a member of the Azov brigade or other neo-Nazi groups is. I think right-wing populism is ugly enough in our own country. To imagine that it’s even uglier in a country as divided as Ukraine—and I don’t dismiss the whole thing at all, because Ukraine has a horrible history of running pogroms, first against Jews, and then, frankly, against Russians. And so, to dismiss the argument that there are people with violent tendencies and great prejudice, ethnic prejudices, involved in this fight seems to me to be wrong.”

“From a military point of view, I can’t see any reason that the Russians would want to use chemical weapons. Usually, they are a defensive device against a mass attack, but there’s no such thing going on in Ukraine. They don’t need chemical weapons. They have enough rightful weapons of other types without having to do that.”

“[…] this brings us all back to the Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians, others who have not got onto the bandwagon hurling invective at Russia. I think the Chinese ambassador the other day went onto one of the Sunday talk shows, and to the extent they let him get a word in, he said very clearly—and I agree with him—that condemnation does not accomplish anything very much at all, and what is required is serious diplomacy, and what has been missing has been serious diplomacy.”

“Let’s face it. This is in large measure, as I said at the outset, a struggle between the United States and Russia for a sphere of influence that will include Ukraine. It’s US-Russia. It’s not Russia versus Europe. So, in this context, why would a great power that values its cooperation with Russia want to alienate Russia?”

“if you start saying SWIFT, the communications system in Belgium that handles most of the world’s transactions was established to ensure that trade could be conducted unencumbered by politics and now it’s being encumbered by US-imposed unilateral sanctions on a huge array of countries—Iran, Russia, China, you name it, even threatened against India—so, if the use of the dollar is now encumbered, it’s less desirable, and people will want to make workarounds around it.”

“I’ll add a final factor, which I think is very injurious, potentially, and that is: bankers get deposits because they are fiduciaries; they are meant to hold the deposits for the benefit of those who deposit the money and not to rip it off themselves. But we’ve just confiscated the entire national treasury of Afghanistan and we’ve confiscated half of Russian reserves. We’ve confiscated the Venezuelan reserves. We have our allies the British having confiscated Venezuela’s gold reserves. The Anglo-American reputation—its bankers, its fiduciaries—is in trouble.”

The Marriage of Julian Assange by Chris Hedges (The Chris Hedges Report)

“I am standing at the gates of HM Prison Belmarsh, a high security penitentiary in southeast London, with Craig Murray, who was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan until he was fired for exposing the CIA black sites and torture centers in that country. Inside the prison, Julian Assange and Stella Morris are being married. Craig and I were on the list of the six guests invited to the wedding, but the prison authorities, in an example of the institutional sadism that characterizes all prisons, denied us entry. Craig, who was to have been one of two witnesses, was informed that he could not enter because he would “endanger the security of the prison.””

Perverse. No better than Russia or Iran or China. This is Britain. They plead with us to recognize their moral authority. They have none. None of these nation-states do, not really. Some are better, some are worse, some are even more gobsmackingly hypocritical than others, but none have principles. They all have different rules for themselves than they do for others.

The United States is Exceptional, Just Not in the Ways Any of Us Should Want by Aviva Chomsky (Scheer Post)

“That, in a nutshell, was the postwar version of U.S. exceptionalism and Washington was then planning to manage the world in such a way as to maintain that remarkably grotesque disparity. The only obstacle Kennan saw was poor people demanding a share of the wealth.”

“Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal proposal adopted the concept of the “fair share.” True leadership in the global climate fight, Sanders has argued, means recognizing that “the United States has for over a century spewed carbon pollution emissions into the atmosphere in order to gain economic standing in the world. Therefore, we have an outsized obligation to help less industrialized nations meet their targets while improving quality of life.””

“If energy is a scarce and precious resource, then ways must be found to prioritize its use to meet the urgent needs of the world’s poor, rather than endlessly expanding the luxuries of the wealthiest among us.”

“In 2010, about half of the new vehicles sold in the United States were cars and half were SUVs or trucks. By 2021, close to 80% were SUVs or trucks. In 2020, more than 900,000 new houses were built in this country, their median size, 2,261 square feet. Most of them had four or more bedrooms and 870,000 had central air conditioning.”

“China does have a big role to play. But to the rest of the world, such an insistence on diverting attention from our own role in the climate crisis rings hollow indeed.”

“Degrowth scholars argue that, rather than risking all of our futures on as-yet-unproven technologies in order to cling to economic growth, we should seek social and political solutions that would involve redistributing the planet’s wealth, its scarce resources, and its carbon budget in ways that prioritize basic needs and social wellbeing globally.”

US State Department accusation of China ‘genocide’ relied on data abuse and baseless claims by far-right ideologue by Gareth Porter & Max Blumenthal (The Grayzone)

““Preventing births” by itself cannot be evidence of alleged genocide without evidence of intent to destroy the group in question. Otherwise, any birth control program provided to an ethnic group would be prima facie evidence of a policy of genocide against the group.”

“Both the rapid surge in Uyghur population growth rates and the increased margin of the Uyghur majority over the Han population of Xinjiang in recent years are the result of the one-child policy imposed on Han Chinese couples by the Chinese government in 1979. According to China specialist Martin King Whyte, the one-child policy was accompanied by a long-term pattern of abuses in its implementation, including “intrusive menstrual monitoring, coerced sterilizations and abortions, staggering monetary fines for ‘over-quota’ births, smashing of furniture and housing of those who resist and withholding registration for babies born outside the plan.” Uyghur families, however, were exempted from the one child policy. Urban Uyghur couples were allowed to have two children, and rural Uyghur couples three. In practice, moreover, rural Uyghurs often had large families, with as many as nine or ten children in some cases, as even Zenz acknowledged.”

“In July 2017, Xinjiang’s regional government ended the exemption on the old child limits for Uyghurs. Uyghur couples were thus expected to follow the same limitations recently imposed on Han couples: two children in urban areas and three in rural regions.”

“A 2019 study by Lancet described China’s improvement of maternal health and infant mortality reduction as a “remarkable success story.” Another study that year by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences arrived at a similar conclusion. How these positive health indicators could serve as proof of genocide was left unexplained by Zenz, who simply omitted the numbers from his report.”

“While it’s hard to understand how Zenz has gotten away with so much statistical malpractice, a look at his background helps explain his ideological motivations, and provides important context on his negative focus on the application of birth control. He is an anti-abortion, anti-feminist Christian fundamentalist captivated by End Times theology, and has said that god has led him on a mission against the Chinese government.”

“While he is almost invariably touted in Western media as a leading scholar on China, he described himself in 2015 as “a lecturer in empirical research methods at a Christian university.” As late as 2018, in fact, Zenz was listed as a faculty member of the European School of Culture and Theology at Columbia International University in Korntal, Germany.”

“In April 2020, Zenz’s employer listed all global deaths from Covid-19 as “victims of communism,” blaming each of them on the Chinese government.”

““The United States has set out to vilify China,” former US Deputy Chief of Mission in Beijing and Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman told The Grayzone, and the accusation of Uyghur genocide “is the perfect issue with which to do so.””

Like Iran’s nukes or Iraq’s incubator babies.

“Freeman opined that the Chinese “seem to be doing many cruel and counterproductive things in Xinjiang.” However, he cautioned against taking the genocide accusation at face value: “In the current atmosphere, we should be especially skeptical about any and all assertions by people who have become part of the current anti-China campaign in the West. Before we condemn, we should be sure of our facts.””

Ukraine War Lies Debunked by Ted Rall

“[…] has been flying fast and furious as media outlets dutifully align behind the U.S. government war machine and the array of defense contractors that influence it. As usual, their purpose is clear: spook the American people into supporting a war in a country they hardly know anything about, take the side of a highly problematic regime and create a world of death and destruction for the benefit of greedy warmongers before the rubes/voters figure out they’ve been conned.”

“Here’s an analogy for Americans: instead of failing, Trump’s January 6th coup succeeds. Biden flees to Canada and, even though he lost, Trump serves a second term. Trump endorses Mike Pence in 2024. Pence wins that election. Is Pence a legitimate president? Is America a democracy?”

“Zelensky recently signed a decree ordering that all TV broadcasters in the country show the same exact government-controlled programming on every channel. “It’s important that the country has a unified information policy” under martial law, read the edict. This followed his banning of 11 rival political parties, threatening “a tough response” to politicians who disagree with him.”

“Yemen is on fire. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict grinds on. Afghanistan is starving. Those are three cases where the United States is involved, as usual on the wrong side. There are dozens of other conflicts in which the United States has little to no interest. The only reason we are involved in Ukraine is because the media tells us to be.”

The Lie of American Innocence by Chris Hedges (The Chris Hedges Report)

“Assange, currently housed in a high security prison in London, is fighting a losing battle in the British courts to block his extradition to the United States, where he faces 175 years in prison. One set of rules for Russia, another set of rules for the United States. Weeping crocodile tears for the Russian media, which is being heavily censored by Putin, while ignoring the plight of the most important publisher of our generation speaks volumes about how much the ruling class cares about press freedom and truth.”

“Well, we know why. Our war crimes don’t count, and neither do the victims of our war crimes. And this hypocrisy makes a rules-based world, one that abides by international law, impossible.”

“War crimes demand the same moral judgment and accountability. But they don’t get them. And they don’t get them because we have one set of standards for white Europeans, and another for non-white people around the globe. The western media has turned European and American volunteers flocking to fight in Ukraine into heroes, while Muslims in the west who join resistance groups battling foreign occupiers in the Middle East are criminalized as terrorists.”

“World War II began with an understanding, at least by the allies, that employing industrial weapons against civilian populations was a war crime. But within 18 months of the start of the war, the Germans, Americans and British were relentlessly bombing cities. By the end of the war, one-fifth of German homes had been destroyed. One million German civilians were killed or wounded in bombing raids. Seven-and-a-half million Germans were made homeless.”

““LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals,” McNamara said in the film. “And I think he’s right…LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose, and not immoral if you win?””

“LeMay, later head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, would go on to drop tons of napalm and firebombs on civilian targets in Korea which, by his own estimate, killed 20 percent of the population over a three-year period.”

“Industrial war destroys existing value systems that protect and nurture life, replacing them with fear, hatred, and a dehumanization of those who we are made to believe deserve to be exterminated. It is driven by emotions, not truth or fact. It obliterates nuance, replacing it with an infantile binary universe of us and them.”

“Historically, those who are prosecuted for war crimes, whether the Nazi hierarchy at Nuremberg or the leaders of Liberia, Chad, Serbia, and Bosnia, are prosecuted because they lost the war and because they are adversaries of the United States.”

“Author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi understood that the annihilation of the humanity of others is prerequisite for their physical annihilation. We have become captives to our machines of industrial death. Politicians and generals wield their destructive fury as if they were toys. Those who decry the madness, who demand the rule of law, are attacked and condemned.”

Baby Boomer by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post)

Mr. Fish 'Baby Boomer' (April 1st, 2022)

“So just remember, Lily, there is no real national security and we will never be safe. There’s only a very tenuous deterrent implied by the threat of excessive retaliation. That’s why we elect leaders who are prone to overreact in crisis situations and one day they will overreact and you and I will die screaming on fire, wondering why nobody ever thought to concoct a guardianship for our civilization that wasn’t based on paranoia and weaponized jingoism.”

Russia’s War on Ukraine Has Already Changed the World: An Interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko by Jerko Bakotin (Jacobin)

“As far as the explanation that he turned into an ideological fanatic with a messianic mission of rebuilding the Russian Empire is concerned, one must say that leaders with sincere ideological beliefs are very, very atypical in post-Soviet politics. All post-Soviet leaders were cynical pragmatists who built kleptocratic regimes bereft of ideological vision. Even if it is true that Putin has become an ideological fanatic, it remains a mystery how this came about, and further explanations are needed.”

“The question is whether this is just rhetoric to legitimize moves driven by other reasons. Today many interpret his essay in the way you mentioned. However, that text does not deny Ukrainian independence but rather a specific form of Ukrainian identity, which is not the only possible one. Putin argues against Ukraine based on anti-Russian identity. In his vision, Ukraine and Russia could be two states for “one and the same people.””

“I fear that if sanctions and arms deliveries remain the dominant response, it means that the West is actually interested in this war. Putin cannot afford to lose, so he will wage war for as long as possible. That will mean a huge number of dead and the complete destruction of Ukrainian cities.”

“US and British intelligence had been announcing the invasion for months. If London and Washington were so sure of the invasion, why didn’t they prevent it, why didn’t they negotiate with Putin more actively? Certainly, Putin is most responsible for the war. But the West knew about the invasion and didn’t do enough to prevent it.”

“Jerko: Possible outcomes of the war include partitioning the country (i.e., imposing a repressive pro-Russian regime in the East while the West becomes a nationalist NATO external base), Russian occupation of all of Ukraine, or Russia’s complete defeat.”

It’s fucking amazing how the interviewer doesn’t notice his own bias. Where Russia is “repressive”, NATO “establishes” a base. They’re both repressive. Stop excusing the crimes of your “team”.

“The Russian state currently operates on the principle of kleptocratic patronage capitalism, in which a small elite enriches itself.”

Sounds super-familiar. I can’t quite put my finger on where I’ve seen something like that before.

Half Baked by Chapo Trap House on March 22, 2022 (YouTube)

At 27:40, referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Matt Christman says,

“What difference does it make whether I think it’s legitimate or not? Who gives a shit? Legitimacy is determined by the power that the state has to affirm its legitimacy. That’s what makes it legitimate is that, if you don’t agree, they will do something about it.

“There is no legitimacy that exists outside of power-projection and force-projection. You’re supposed to live in a fantasy land to assert this hypothetical notion of legitimacy on a foreign country. And, again, that is the signal difference. It’s because you’re talking about values versus an analysis of reality.

“And they always point out, well, you’ve got these values when you’re talking about America but, all of a sudden, when you’re talking about these other countries, you’re embracing realism, and you’re not using languages of morals, and all that.

“The reason that people talk about their own country morally is that they’re trying to effect political change. They’re trying to make a pitch for a politics that other people can sign onto and do something about.

“That project is totally pointless when referring to other countries. And doing so, insisting on larding on moralistic language, only makes it harder to actually understand and discuss what the fuck is going on.”

Is Putin a War Criminal? by Andrew Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“The phrase “war criminal” entered our parlance from the Nuremberg trials of surviving high-ranking Nazi officials after the conclusion of World War II. Those trials alleged that German government officials committed crimes against humanity.

“The crimes alleged were invented ex post facto – a procedure expressly prohibited in the US – and were accepted by the American, British and Soviet prosecutors and judges. In a bit of bitter irony, the phrase “crimes against humanity” was coined by Joseph Stalin’s hand-picked prosecutor.

“Just imagine a court today where the prosecutors get to write retroactive laws to apply to the defendants they are about to try.

“This is the culture out of which Nuremberg sprang and the jurisprudence it spawned. Notwithstanding the egregious unfairness of these trials, world opinion generally accepted them.”

“Stated differently, a country – like a person – can defend itself from an invader and use violence to do so, but no more violence than is necessary to stop the invasion, lest the defender become the aggressor.

“Now, back to Putin. Biden’s “war criminal” statement ignores American use of state violence. Biden himself, while a senator, supported President George W. Bush’s immoral invasion of Iraq, which slaughtered hundreds of thousands for the purpose of regime change. If Biden means what he says, Bush as well as Truman and himself are war criminals.”

This War Is Actually About Central Banking by Lee Camp (YouTube)

This was an excellent 8-minute video about the mysterious correlation between countries that try to get off the dollar standard and those that are invaded. It’s kind of related to one of the main points of the article The End of Dollar Hegemony by Michael Hudson (CounterPunch): The U.S. has three pillars to its economy,

1. Dollar hegemony (world reserve currency)
2. Fossil fuels (oil, LNG, etc.)
3. The armaments industry

Although the U.S. fossil-fuel and armaments industries are firing on all cylinders right now, the victory might be pyrrhic because it’s the first of those that is the most important—and seizing foreign reserves makes countries stop using the dollar.

Journalism & Media

The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the Point of Absurdity by Matt Taibbi (Scheer Post)

“After reading this latest Times piece, which among other things confirms that Joe Biden (if not the Burisma official) was present at the infamous “meeting” referenced in the original Pozharsky email, I’m not sure so sure. At minimum, this looks like it will be a serious political problem for Biden in any future election, especially should events in the Ukraine war take a turn that motivates Ukrainian officials to unload on the first family.”

“This is a crucial question — effectively, the difference between knowing whether Russia is at war with just Ukraine, or with us — and no one wants to go near it, because our newshounds suck so badly, they think anything that makes the administration uncomfortable is Russian disinformation.”

World’s Dullest Editorial Launches Panic by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Its critics view the mention of Republican legislative bans in conjunction with canceling as a monstrous affront, a felony case of both-sidesism. Obviously any implication that there’s any moral comparison between Republicans banning speech by law and Democrats doing it by way of informal backroom deals with unaccountable tech monopolies is unacceptable. Beyond that now, much of the commentariat seems to believe the op-ed page has outlived its usefulness unless it’s engaged in fulsome denunciations of correct targets […]”

“The underlying premise of all these formats is the conviction that the ordinary schlub media consumer will make the wrong decision if the correct message isn’t hammered out everywhere for him or her in all caps by mental superiors. This idea isn’t just insulting but usually incorrect, like thinking Lord Haw Haw broadcasts would make English soldiers bayonet each other rather than laugh or fight harder.”

“Even just on the level of commercial self-preservation, one would think media people would eventually realize there’s a limit to how many times you can tell people they’re too dumb to be trusted with controversial ideas, and still keep any audience. But they never do.”

““consensus enforcers who feverishly insist there’s no problem, and the fact that you disagree is evidence that you should resign your position.” It was crazy enough when jobs were lost over the Harper’s letter. But calling for firings over this? An editorial that drives two miles an hour down the middle of the middle of the middle of the road? If this is anybody’s idea of a taboo, we really have lost it.”

Science & Nature

What is the strongest material on Earth? by Ethan Siegel (Big Think)

“Of all the spiders in the world, Darwin’s bark spiders have the toughest: ten times stronger than kevlar. It’s so thin and light that approximately a pound (454 grams) of Darwin’s bark spider silk would compose a strand long enough to trace out the circumference of the entire planet.”

Art & Literature

Shoot Out the Lights by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Bulgakov was a Russian speaker living in a Russian-speaking city surrounded by Ukrainian peasants, people the elites of the Kyiv snubbed, looked down upon, considered subliterate and backward. Millions of them would perish in the Holomdor, starved to death during the Great Famine, as consequence of Stalin’s depraved agricultural policies. Kyiv had long been a center of learning, of science and art, philosophy and medicine. Its intelligentsia would fall next, victims of the Great Purges of the 1930s, where the intellectual lights of the city were literally shot out, or sent off to the distant labor camps of the gulag. Later Kyiv’s Jews would join the swelling ranks of the dead, 33,771 of whom were rounded up in a ravine known as Baba Yar by the Nazis over the course of two September days in 1941, and machine-gunned to death.”

“The White Guard is a novel about being caught off guard, despite the evidence of impending destruction piling up right in front of you. It’s a story of the middle class being snuffed out, while cocooned in layers of false comfort. Bulgakov saw it coming, even when so many others in his Kiev milieu didn’t.”

“By the late 1960s, Bulgakov’s work read less like a wild prophecy than a history of a surreal era, the sanguinary ramifications of which Bulgakov seemed to have intuited all those years ago when he wrote The White Guard: wars that seem apocalyptic at the time settle nothing. They will, in fact, serve merely as preludes for episodes of even more unimaginable carnage and loss.”

Philosophy & Sociology

The Very Possibility of Nuclear War by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“We laugh and laugh. We continue to laugh, and then I say some dumb protophilosophical thing: “You just have to laugh, otherwise it’s unbearable.” My words were still basic, but the thought behind them would be both infinitely terrifying, and evidently permanent: the conditions of our existence are an unrelenting nightmare, and humor is the only partial salvation on offer, a sort of momentary this-worldly transcendence.”

“(“What music do you want them to play at your funeral?” Laurie Anderson was asked once. “Not my problem,” she rightly replied).”

Agreed. Once I’m gone, what I think of me no longer matters. What others think has primacy. People should remember me the way that makes them the happiest. When I’m dead, what I think about it has, by definition, ceased to matter entirely.

“I do not want my headlines about nuclear brinksmanship to be either jocular or alarmist, and I think pretty much any sincere effort simply to present the facts risks falling to the one side or the other. I suppose this is just another way of saying I do not want to have to see headlines about nuclear brinksmanship at all.”

“My current feeling is this: fuck nation-states, fuck territorial sovereignty, fuck heroic resistance, fuck the NATO redline, fuck worship of charismatic individuals like Zelensky who would lead us into something to which we would never commit if he were not young and handsome and a talented rhetorician. There is only one thing that matters, and that is not having a nuclear war. It would be better for Putin to annex the entire continent of Europe, it would be better to have a century-long reign of brutal Putinite totalitarianism from Vladivostok to Cherbourg, than to have a nuclear war. It seems to me that this is just obvious to anyone who thinks about it honestly for even a second.”

“[…] the White House press corps has been bombarding the Biden administration with inane demands for a no-fly zone, as if consequences did not matter, or as if the possibility of nuclear escalation were just one consequence alongside others, were just another event of history, rather than the end of history.”

“The activist media hacks who are pushing for war are living in a fantasy world. They literally do not understand that their own lives are not a movie. They need to be marginalized, ignored. The idiot liberal consensus in the United States, which has moved overnight from domestic covid-hygiene theater to a deliriously foolhardy war-footing, is, after Putin, the most dangerous force in the world. God damn them, and God keep the rest of us safe from those who come by their convictions so easily and swiftly that they are unable to contemplate how things might go wrong when these convictions become policy.”

“God bless spiders. God bless cancer. And thank God for death. For these are all esteemed members in full of our beautiful Creation. But God damn nuclear weapons, and the people responsible for their production and proliferation. They have no place in our world, and a life is no life at all when it is spent as a hostage in their glowering shadow.”

Technology

I Do Not Think That NFT Means What You Think It Does by James Grimmelmann (The Laboratorium (2d ser.))

“Sometimes, NFT advocates avoid dealing with the inconvenient fact that the physical world doesn’t run on a blockchain by shifting to a future in online spaces that do. They propose a blockchain-based metaverse, or online games with NFT-based economies, etc. The thing is that we’ve had digital property in those virtual spaces for decades. None of them needed a blockchain to work.

“The bottom line is that almost everything NFT advocates want to do on a blockchain can be done more easily and efficiently without one, and the legal infrastructure needed to make NFTs work defeats the point of using a blockchain in the first place.”

If you’re not using SSH certificates you’re doing SSH wrong by Mike Malone (smallstep)

“SSH encourages bad security practices. Rekeying is hard, so it’s not done. Users are exposed to key material and encouraged to reuse keys across devices. Keys are trusted permanently, so mistakes are fail-open.”

“Since certificate authentication uses certificates to communicate public key bindings, clients are always able to authenticate, even if it’s the first time connecting to a host. TOFU warnings go away.”

“This can be leveraged to further enhance SSH usability. In particular, it lets you extend single sign-on (SSO) to SSH. SSO for SSH is certificate authentication’s biggest party trick. We’ll return to this idea and see how it further enhances usability and security later.”

“Once the user completes SSO, a bearer token (e.g., an OIDC identity token) is returned to the login utility. The utility generates a new key pair and requests a signed certificate from the CA, using the bearer token to authenticate and authorize the certificate request. The CA returns a certificate with an expiry long enough for a work day (e.g., 16-20 hours).”

“It’s a simple process that must be completed, at most, once per day. This is infrequent enough that strong MFA can be used without frustrating or desensitizing users. New private keys and certificates are generated automatically every time the user logs in, and they never touch disk.”