Links and Notes for September 30th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Programming

COVID-19

COVID-19 infection significantly increases one’s risk of a neurological disorder by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“In the discussion section of the study, the authors note pointedly, “It is imperative that we recognize the enormous challenges posed by Long COVID and all its downstream long-term consequences. Meeting these challenges requires urgent and coordinated–but so far absent–global, national, and regional response strategies.””

“The results were astonishing. Dr. Al-Aly recalled that the “breadth of organ dysfunction” people were experiencing shook him to his core. More concerning for him was that even those with mild symptoms that precluded the need for hospital or ICU admission were still significantly impacted.

“Dr. Al-Aly and his team have also conducted the following studies that looked at Long-COVID’s impact on the cardiovascular system, kidneys, metabolic function, and mental health. In each category, the outcomes proved detrimental.”

“In their latest study, Dr. Al-Aly et al. make important observations on the long-term neurological consequences of the pandemic, writing, “Given the colossal scale of the pandemic, and even though the absolute numbers reported in this work are small, these may translate into a large number of affected individuals around the world–and this will likely contribute to a rise in the burden of neurological disorders.””

Munich Oktoberfest emerges as COVID superspreader event in Germany by Tamino Dreisam (WSWS)

“In fact, the situation is more serious than at the same time in recent years. After a slight decline in infections in recent weeks, cases are starting to rise again. The official 7-day incidence was 410 infections per 100,000 inhabitants on Thursday. A week ago it was 281.1. This means that the 7-day incidence has increased by 46 percent within a week. The number of current new infections is about four times as high as a year ago at the same time.”

Fall surge of COVID-19 begins across Northern Europe by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“Viral evolution expert Dr. Cornelius Roemer of the University of Basel, Switzerland, recently told the journal Science, “We can say with certainty that something is coming. Probably multiple things are coming.” Molecular epidemiologist Dr. Emma Hodcroft of the University of Bern added, “It’s not surprising that we’re seeing changes that yet again help the virus to evade immune responses.”

“Pandemic expert Dr. Michael Osterholm recently made similar remarks, stating, “this is not the same virus we dealt with back in January of 2020. It’s evolved every time we put pressure on it. We get more immunity in people, and it finds a way to get around immunity. Then it gets more infectious.”

“While official deaths from COVID-19 stand at 6.54 million globally, the central estimate for excess deaths by The Economist has reached 22.4 million, or 3.4 times the official tally.”

“Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, told the New York Times about the United States’ complete lack of preparedness for future pandemics, stating, “In people’s minds, perhaps, is the idea that this COVID thing was such a freak of nature, was a once-in-a-century crisis, and we’re good for the next 99 years. [But] This is the new normal…””

COVID State of Affairs: Oct 5 by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)

“This is what we know. More than 90% of testing and sequencing has been stopped across the globe. This means we are largely flying blind and there may be a surprise in the mix we are unaware of just yet.”

“We may be in for a bumpy ride this winter. SARS-CoV-2 is already gaining ground thanks to weather and behavior change. We expect growth to accelerate with subvariants on the horizon. There’s a lot you can do, but the lowest hanging fruit is to get your fall booster.”

Life Expectancy: The US and Cuba in the Time of Covid by Don Fitz (CounterPunch)

“Another energy positive being expanded in Cuba is farms being run entirely on agroecology principles. Such farms can produce 12 times the energy they consume. Biodigesters break down manure and other biomass to create biogas (very different in Cuba than the US) which is used for tractors or transportation. Vegetable and herb production in Cuba exploded from 4000 tons in 1994 to over four million tons by 2006. This is why Jason Hickel’s “ Sustainable Development Index ” rated Cuba’s ecological efficiency as the best in the world in 2019.”

Economy & Finance

Total Family Wealth by Wealth Group

See that tiny, dark line at the bottom? The one that barely fluctuates? That’s barely visible? That’s the wealth of half of the country—about 2% of the total. The share owned by the top 10% has increased by about 50% to what looks like about 70%. I’ve read elsewhere that the top 1% own about 20% total. Incredible that there’s even a discussion as to whether this is a sane, moral way to run a society.

UK Pensions Got Margin Calls by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Most big investors in financial markets are, to some degree or other, structurally short-term, in ways that make markets fragile. Banks borrow most of their money short-term (from depositors, from capital markets), and if there’s a run on the bank then the bank will need to dump assets to pay back depositors. Mutual funds let their investors take money out every day, and if a lot of investors want out then the funds will have to dump stocks to give them their money back. Hedge funds let investors take money out and also tend to borrow money from prime brokers; if their assets go down then they will get margin calls from brokers and will have to sell assets to meet them.”

“[…] if rates go down, the value of your portfolio goes up to match the increasing value of your liabilities. So you are hedged. You were short gilts, as an accounting matter, and you’ve solved that by borrowing money to buy more gilts. In practice, the way you have borrowed this money is probably not by actually getting a loan and buying gilts but by doing some sort of derivative (interest-rate swap, etc.) with a bank, where the bank pays you if rates go down and you pay the bank if rates go up. And you have posted some collateral with the bank, and as interest rates move up or down you post more or less collateral. This all makes total sense, in its way. But notice that you now have borrowed short-term money to buy volatile financial assets . The thing that was so good about pension funds — their structural long-termism, the fact that you can’t have a run on a pension fund: You’ve ruined that!”

“I know this is bad but I find something aesthetically beautiful about it. If you have a pot of money that is immune to bank runs, over time, modern finance will find a way to make it vulnerable to bank runs. That is an emergent property of modern finance.”

“Modern finance made UK pensions vulnerable to runs, and then there was a run on those pensions, and the Bank of England had to step in to buy gilts to save them, because that’s what happens in a bank run.”

“If you thought that Luna was an investment in the collaborative effort to build the value of the Terra blockchain, then (1) it’s a security and (2) maybe you wanted to buy it, which is why Luna had a market capitalization in the tens of billions of dollars. If you thought that Luna was just, like, an electronic token with no investment thesis, then maybe it wasn’t a security — but why were you buying it?”

The US Response to the World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis: Seize and Privatize by Andrés Arauz (CEPR)

“[…] what if a customer from Afghan bank A wants to send money to a manufacturer’s bank account (at German bank G) in Germany, to pay for the import of machinery for their textile business? Because bank G does not have an account at DAB, the pair of banks have to find another “central” bank to do that job. In this case, it would not be a domestic central bank, but a “common correspondent” bank. Often, transnational megabanks, such as J.P. Morgan or HSBC, can do the job. But if none of the megabanks have accounts for both bank A and bank G (or DAB and bank G), they have to iterate the search until they reach the last resort, the mother of all international correspondent banks: the New York Fed.”

“The United States dollar is the de facto global currency, and its issuing bank is thus at the top of the global monetary pyramid. Out of the 12 regional reserve banks of the United States, the NY Fed is the designated bank for international correspondent banking. Three-quarters of all international interbank transactions are settled at the New York Fed.”

“But what if a customer from Afghan bank A wants to send money to a manufacturer’s bank account (at German bank G) in Germany, to pay for the import of machinery for their textile business? Because bank G does not have an account at DAB, the pair of banks have to find another “central” bank to do that job. In this case, it would not be a domestic central bank, but a “common correspondent” bank.”

“Second, it is crucial to understand that the government is an account holder at the central bank; i.e., the government’s treasury account is on the liability side of the central bank’s balance sheet, while the reserves are on the asset side. It cannot wire reserves to an account on its own ledger. The central bank may thus credit the treasury account — usually in its own currency — in what is traditionally called “monetary financing.””

Public Policy & Politics

Chevron Ad by Hyperobject Industries / Adam McKay (YouTube)

“We at Chevron believe that nothing is more precious than life. And that the most precious life of all…is the dead kind, that has been compressed for hundreds of millions of years, under magic rocks, until it becomes oil. Oil that we can refine and sell as gasoline, so that a cool-ass tank can crush a clay hut, or an airplane can take a businessman 3,000 miles to have dinner with someone…or whatever.

“All the while, producing greenhouse gases that are transforming the planet right this second, into a hellish George Miller film. Because, at the end of the day, we at Chevron don’t give a single fuck about you, your weird children, or your stupid ratty-ass dog.

“And we have billions and billions of dollars to pay for this commercial time, this cheesy footage, and this bullshit music. All so that you’ll be lulled into a catatonic state that makes you forget one singular fact: Chevron is actively murdering you, every day.

“See, the human brain can only deal with so many things at once, so these emotionally loaded scenes will always push aside other thoughts, like ‘Chevron is murdering me.’ It’s just how our brains work, you meat-puppet who exists only to feed us profits. Chevron, it’s hard to even comprehend how little of a fuck we give about you.

“And this commercial also applies equally to Exxon, BP, Shell, our delinquent, lap-tug media, or any hack politician who’s trading the future life on this planet for filthy money and oil stocks.”

Zachary Karabell: China Is Not the Enemy—It Is America’s Indispensable Economic Partner by Robert Scheer (Scheer Post)

“[…] the United States seems not to have gotten either the collective or governmental hint about, which is our ability to coerce China to be different is radically limited and our ability to encourage them to be different is radically limited. And that’s not a place that the United States is comfortable occupying. We’re used to be in a position of power and privilege where we can dictate or coerce or do some carrot and stick that does both and I don’t think that works with China.”

“[…] to act like you can just pursue ideological and military and political conflict and competition without recognizing how profoundly intertwined these economies remained, even though we think they’re not, I just think it’s foolish beyond belief.”

“We are threatened by China’s move to high tech. They have to get a bigger share of the pie. They have a billion more people almost than they had before. And they can’t just be the factory for low level production. They need to get into the big game and we find that threatening and I wonder if that is not the source of the tension now.”

No shit.

“The reaction increasingly amongst US elites and policy makers and scholars and public opinion has been, we’d messed up, that was wrong. We should never have integrated China into the World Trade Organization because all they did was steal American intellectual property, use that for domestic gains, develop their own domestic champions as they are called in things like 5G and wireless communication in military and cyber warfare and in sort of surveillance and AI.”

The story I always hear is that they only steal because they can’t innovate on their own. They’re too benighted as a race.

“I think Nixon and Kissinger understood that and they understood it was going to be a multipolar world. I think that, I know people are going to get very angry at me, but when I talked to Nixon about that, he was very clear, we have to get used to the idea that is not going to be an America centric world. And it isn’t that the big issue right now?”

Anyone who gets mad at that is a jingoistic moron, or benefits from the system staying as it is: a fading empire ruling alone.

“They actually developed a society in which hundreds of million, what three, four hundred million have been lifted out of the worst poverty. People can travel more. We have at the school I teach at USC, there’s 6000 Chinese students, they don’t seem to be overly intimidated. They seem to be very alert, questioning, learning a lot. And so it’s been a great success even from a human rights point of view if you actually look at the numbers. And so what I’m really asking about is, do we have adults watching the store? With all [due] respect to some people you mentioned, what are they doing now? Why do they want to push China or for that matter Putin? Yes, Putin has done reckless wrong things, but Nixon went and negotiated right with Mao, where are we now?”

“I think whatever China is doing in Uyghur-land is atrocious, meaning I think it is morally wrong to silence an entire other people just like I think is wrong for the Turks to do it to the Kurds now. But it was morally wrong for the United States to intern 200,000 Japanese Americans in 1942 to 1945. And I do think that moral equivalency about these things is important. It wasn’t exactly a shining moment of American democracy to invade Iraq in 2003, which many people now point out about Putin and Ukraine. The fact that we did it doesn’t make it better than the fact that he does it. Hundreds of thousands of people died for no good reason regardless and at our hands.”

“So, they’re taking advantage of their external adversaries, COVID and the United States, to create a domestic sort of security authoritarianism that I would not want to live in and I certainly would not want to export. Although, what’s fascinating about China is they don’t even seem interested in exporting it, so why we are so hell bent on seeing them as an enemy?”

“[…] is there any immediate or even tangential threat of a Chinese authoritarian surveillance state coming to the United States?”

I mean…isn’t it kind of already there? Or am I vastly underestimating China’s state or overestimating America’s … or both?

“China is so perfectly cast as the adversary for a system that was set up to deal with an adversary. And I think it’s very hard once you’re in government particularly to not enter that groove and China is so perfect for that groove, even though it totally misses all this other stuff, which is that the economic interdependence was simply a good thing, was a net good thing for the United States,”

“I’m so struck by about American policy towards China today is almost how detached from our own domestic economy it’s become. I think, talk about playing with fire that American policy makers in the national security bureaucracy really don’t understand how domestically destructive a rupture with China would be.”

“I’m so struck by about American policy towards China today is almost how detached from our own domestic economy it’s become. I think, talk about playing with fire that American policy makers in the national security bureaucracy really don’t understand how domestically destructive a rupture with China would be. And I don’t mean the kind of rhetorical cold war that we have, and I think they get how destructive a military conflict would be because that’s their bread and butter. But not understanding that the harm that this conflict can potentially do to everyday Americans, even without a shot being fired. The indifference to that I think is stunning and really, really a massive failing of that group of policy makers.”

The New Cold War is a War on the Poor and the Poor Need to Fight Back by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)

“Russia sees this. They’ve gotten the message loud and clear and they’re more than prepared to obliterate even more impoverished Ukrainians with their own slave army of impoverished conscripts just to prove that their dicks are still big enough to swing with the Western superpowers and if all else fails, they can always just strap on a nuclear marital aid for the same effect.”

“Even with Turkish brokered deals to allow shipments of food and fertilizer to leave the bombarded Black Sea ports, nations like Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan are still facing famine thanks to another senseless pissing match between rich white assholes and those rich white assholes on both sides of this proxy abortion are doing just fucking dandy while they burn the rest of the world around them to the fucking ground.”

“The First World War was an eerily familiar blitz of dying empires firing poor people out of howitzers into castle gates and feeding the unobliterated increasingly incoherent excuses for a rapidly expanding global clusterfuck. Millions died without ever understanding why and the impoverished survivors finally got fed up with killing each other and turned their rifles around to bring the war home where it belonged.”

“Frankly, I’m not convinced that we have another century of this bullshit left in us. Poor people across the globe must not only realize that imperialism is a tax on human life that only ever falls on our broken shoulders but that this industry of violence only exists at the behest of the state and that this madness only ends with the state’s destruction.”

I don’t even know what to highlight there. It’s wonderful in its entirety.

“There is no end to war without anarchy and there is no time left for half-measures on a dying planet. We can end this Cold War today by ending the rich, but we can only prevent the next one by ending the state. Now let’s stop talking and fuck some shit up for peace.”

In the Terrain of Word War III by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“It will then be readily evident that the sobering, sit-up-straight dangers confronting us are the perversely logical outcome of a long succession of deluded and reckless policies Washington has insisted on pursuing and imposing on its European allies over many years—and most actively over the past eight.”

“It is America’s hegemonic hubris and an egotistical will to power that land us in a global crisis that could have been avoided at many turns by resort to the mahogany table. In the war planners, technocrats, rational-choice charlatans, and game theorists who “reasoned” the world into this mess, we find what I call the irrationality of hyper-rationality.”

“We have read incessantly over the past seven months of Russian incompetence, disorganization, demoralization, and so on: The running theme has been the Russians do not have it in them to prevail. This now seems to me mere cover for those unwilling to acknowledge that Russian forces were not operating at anything like maximum force. As the cliché police have taken a day off, I will say this directly: Putin and his high command have just taken the gloves off. I leave it to readers to think through where this conflict is now likely to head on the ground.”

“These are Russian-speaking people who have been betrayed since a small minority in the west of the country overthrew their elected president in 2014. These are people whose language was immediately outlawed after the U.S.–cultivated coup. Many of these people—those in the two breakaway republics—were denied the federalist autonomy called for in the two Minsk Protocols of 2014 and 2015 because the Kyiv regime refused to take those commitments seriously. This same many then suffered eight years of shelling, at a cost of roughly 11,000 civilian lives, by those valorous, upright, clean-living Ukrainian forces.”

““There is an inherent, indeed irreconcilable conflict between two fundamental principles of international law—the territorial integrity of states and the self-determination of peoples.””

This is not an easy problem, not to be hand-waved away so easily, as many attempt to do. The problem does not just apply to Ukraine, but pretty much anywhere. What if Ticino wants to be its own country. Can it? What about Barcelona? What sanctifies the current configuration of political borders? What prevents us from letting every group and tribe start its own country? Would we gain something in autonomy but lose something in efficiency? Would we be able to corral thousands of communities to tackle something like climate change? Or COVID? We saw how damaging federalism could be during COVID. We would need some hope that things would get better with more autonomy. Would the communities undermine each other? Attack each other? Would things get better than they are now?

“Post-referendums, assuming the result is as anticipated, the AFU will be waging war against Russians on Russian territory—not, grotesque as it has been to watch, against its own people. This will change more or less everything. These votes will preclude any prospect of negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv. And the U.S. and NATO will thenceforth be arming the Kyiv regime in a war against the Russian Federation.”

Biden said this—with no trace of self-awareness.

“[…] the world is advised that the U.S. has no intention of stepping back from its current course, or even altering it in response to changed circumstances. Implicit here is a recommitment to the delusions of a Ukrainian victory that led to this crisis. The weapons shipments will continue. The wasteful deaths and destruction will continue. The silence between Moscow and Washington will continue.”

“If Biden is to be taken seriously on this point, why isn’t he on the telephone with Putin as we speak? As things stand, it starts to look as though Washington wants a Cold War well on the way to a hot one.”

“Biden places a higher value on the nation-state and its power than he does on self-determination for the millions of Donbas residents the Kyiv regime has violently alienated for the past eight years with the West’s blessing.”

“The U.S. does not care if Russians and the Russian leadership feel under threat. It has no intention of opening diplomatic channels with a view to negotiating a settlement not only of the Ukraine conflict but also of the wider question of a stable European order.”

“I do not think Putin is cornered. I think he is fed up, altogether rightfully. And I think he is frightened now, as we all must be. As I have argued for many months, he faces an imperium that has decided Ukraine is its make-or-break moment—its O.K. Corral, its big roll of the dice in defense of its declining power.”

“In 1847, the French historian and critic Charles Augustin Sainte–Beuve wrote these words in a notebook:”

“There are now but two great nations—the first is Russia, still barbarian but large, and worthy of respect…. The other nation is America, an intoxicated, immature democracy that knows no obstacles. The future of the world lies between these two great nations. One day they will collide, and then we will see struggles the like of which no one has dreamed of.”

Reaping the Whirlwind by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“When viewed through the prism of historical fact, the narrative being promulgated by Biden becomes flipped. The reality is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the U.S. and its European allies have been conspiring to subjugate Russia in an effort to ensure that the Russian people are never again able to mount a geopolitical challenge to an American hegemony”

“Ukraine had been pursuing NATO membership since 2008, enshrining this goal in its constitution. While actual membership still eluded Ukraine as of 2022, the level of involvement of NATO with the Ukrainian armed forces made it a de facto extension of the NATO alliance.”

“Confronted with this new reality, Putin informed the Russian people that he considered it “necessary to take the following decision, which is fully responsive to the threats we face: In order to defend our homeland, its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the security of our people and that of the population and to ensure the liberated areas, I consider it necessary to support the proposal of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff to introduce partial mobilization in the Russian Federation.””

“All Ukrainian forces that are on the territory of the regions to be incorporated into Russia will be viewed as occupiers; and Ukrainian shelling of this territory will be treated as an attack on Russia, triggering a Russian response. Whereas the SMO had, by design, been implemented to preserve Ukrainian civil infrastructure and reduce civilian casualties, a post-SMO military operation will be one configured to destroy an active threat to Mother Russia itself. The gloves will come off.”

“This is what the world has come to — a mad rush toward nuclear apocalypse predicated on the irrational expansion of NATO and hubris-laced Russophobic policies seemingly ignorant of the reality that the Ukraine conflict has now become a matter of existential importance to Russia.”

“The doomsday clock is literally one second to midnight and we in the West have only ourselves to blame.”

Long Time Coming: The Second Sino-American War by Ben Seattle (CounterPunch)

“European civilization was the first to develop modern capitalism, technology and weapons, and wasted little time before looting and raping the rest of world, including Asia. In the 1600’s, regions of Taiwan were ruled by the Spanish and the Dutch. In the 1800’s, mainland China itself was carved up by outside powers like a melon. Japan grabbed Taiwan from China in 1895. Until Japan’s defeat in 1945, Japan used Taiwan as a base for its invasion of China. For China, foreign military power on Taiwan is a bitter memory.”

“The KMT massacred tens of thousands of Taiwanese civilians (and threw another 140,000 into squalid prisons, where many died) [2] for things like knowing how to read and write, in order to eliminate any possible sources of resistance. This was the origin of the current separation of mainland China and Taiwan.”

“In response, the working class has developed the principle of self-determination, in order to overcome national distrust and build international solidarity. The principle of self-determination holds that the peoples of any region that have a common territory, economic life and culture must have the right to determine their own destiny.”

This is fine I guess, but we have to be honest about what we lose in efficiency if the units are smaller or more fluid. Trade might be much slower and complicated. Travel and migration as well. The sentiment sounds perfect, but may quickly lead to oppressed minorities. No worse than now, perhaps, but not a guaranteed panacea.

“This means that the people of Ukraine must have the right to be independent from Russia (if that is what they want) and similarly, the people of Taiwan (or Hong Kong) must have the right to be independent from China (if that is what they want).”

Also Donbass, right? Right? Right? I mean, they’re also a people yearning to be free.

“This means that we must find ways of expressing real solidarity with, and supporting, the democratic aspirations of Taiwanese workers.”

In principle yes, but we have limited energy and time. Why invest it in a hopeless mission that may blow up severely? Why do we always seem to pick the independence movements to support—or to create them out of thing air—where we would personally benefit enormously as well? The independence of peoples in countries with no geopolitical significance doesn’t matter at all. Once again, we are faced with the obvious conclusion that we don’t act by the principle espoused above at all. Instead, we pay it lip service when we find it convenient, but we don’t care about the principle as such.

“[…] it is necessary to support the Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s invasion and recognize the right of the Ukrainians to get arms from any source, including NATO […]”

They have the right, but it’s not even close to the best solution for them. So many will die and suffer as they throw more soldiers and materiel into Zelensky’s hopeless abyss. He is truly a Svengali, holding many in his sway. I don’t think this will end well at all.

“We need to keep in mind that it is not only the workers in Taiwan who do not want to live in a police state–the same also applies to the workers in China–where the authorities routinely detain or arrest activists and dissident journalists by using the catchall accusation of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.”

We are not so different after all!

The Return of Fascism by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“By next spring, following a punishing winter of rolling blackouts and months when families struggle to pay for food and heat, what is left of our anemic western democracy could be largely extinguished.”

I have a friend who thinks that this threat is exaggerated, but something has to change fundamentally in how resources are allocated to avoid it. In some places, fuel costs an order of magnitude more now. Most people can expect cost increases of about 80%. Do people go without? Are their costs subsidized? Do they go into massive debt? Does the government impose price caps? Does the western world capitulate and stabilize the price by buying from Russia again?

“Operation Gladio, as the BBC detailed in a now-forgotten investigative series, created “secret armies,” networks of illegal stay-behind soldiers, who would remain behind enemy lines if the Soviet Union made a military move into Europe. In actuality, the “secret armies” carried-out assassinations, bombings, massacres and false flag terror attacks against leftists, trade unionists and others throughout Europe.”

“The Weimar government, tone deaf and hostage to the big industrialists, prioritized paying bank loans and austerity rather than feeding and employing a desperate population. It foolishly imposed severe restrictions on who was eligible for unemployment insurance . Millions of Germans went hungry. Desperation and rage rippled through the population. Mass rallies, led by a collection of buffoonish Nazis in brown uniforms who would have felt at home at Mar-a-Lago, denounced Jews, Communists, intellectuals, artists and the ruling class, as internal enemies. Hate was their main currency. It sold well.”

“Article 48 was the Weimar equivalent of the executive orders liberally used by Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, to bypass our own legislative impasses.”

“The two ruling parties slavishly serve the dictates of the war industry, global corporations and the oligarchy, to which it has given huge tax cuts. It has established the most pervasive and intrusive system of government surveillance in human history. It runs the largest prison system in the world. It has militarized the police.”

“The fascists instantly snuffed out the pretense of Weimar democracy. They legalized imprisonment without trial for anyone considered a national security threat. They abolished independent labor unions, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press, along with the privacy of postal and telephone communications.”

This is eerily familiar. Not for me, of course, as I am aware of my privileged position in this society, but this is the world that poor minorities in the U.S. inhabit.

“[…] will increasingly see any political figure or political party willing to attack the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. These sentiments are true here and in Europe, where energy costs are expected to rise by as much as 80 percent this winter and an inflation rate of 10 percent is eating away at incomes.”

“Fascism in the 1930s succeeded, as Peter Drucker observed, not because people believed its conspiracy theories and lies but in spite of the fact that they saw through them. Fascism thrived in the face of “a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” He added, “nobody would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.””

Referendums and Joining Russia by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“The US not only ignored the UN in recognizing Kosovo’s independence from Yugoslavia, they ignored the UN in severing Kosovo from Yugoslavia. In March 1999, the US and NATO began bombing Serbian army positions in Kosovo without Security Council approval. In Not One Inch, M.E. Sarotte quotes an August 1998 conversation in which President Clinton told German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that “we need to make it clear that NATO can and will act without a Security Council resolution.”

“Under international law, Kosovo was part of Serbia. The US was taking another country’s territory by force – just as it is now accusing Russia of – and then recognizing its independence – just as it is now accusing Russia of – without even the pretense of a referendum.”

“Now is the time to aggressively negotiate in the hope that the referendums were Putin’s way of raising the stakes and that his promise that he wasn’t bluffing was a bid to force the US to negotiate. The US can raise the stakes again, and they can call Putin’s bluff; Russia can raise the stakes again in an endless cycle of escalation and, devastatingly, be forced to show they were not bluffing. O[n] Ukraine, the US and Russia can finally negotiate an end to this war.”

Putin Approves Annexation of Ukrainian Territories at Ceremony Friday by Dave DeCamp (ScheerPost)

“The US and its allies have condemned the referendums as shams and said they will not recognize the territories as Russia. But Moscow has made clear that after the annexation, it will consider attacks on the areas as attacks on Russian territory, which could potentially be defended with nuclear weapons if Russia feels that its existence is threatened.”

The west will completely ignore this and drive straight into nuclear war. They will continue to support Ukraine militarily and financially. Ukraine will get into NATO. The U.S. will have boots on the ground attacking Russia by year’s end. Maybe they’ll wait until spring. Or maybe they’ll try to get it done by the elections?

America This Week, September 25-October 1 by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“The massive dual Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines between Russia and Germany were struck by highly suspicious twin underwater explosions, causing a giant environmental disaster and deepening an already devastating European energy crisis. Reactions from Russian, European, and especially American political protagonists ranged from merely unbelievable to abjectly comic. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan tsk-tsked that some unknown not-American actor must have committed a “deliberate act.” Not since Shaggy came out with the one-hit-wonder It Wasn’t Me in 1999, or O.J. launched his hunt for the real killers, has American popular culture seen a less convincing cover story. U.S. officials were long ago on record promising to cut off the pipeline if Russia invaded Ukraine, with Joe Biden saying in February, “We will bring an end to it.” When asked how, Biden coyly said, “I promise you, we will be able to do it.” The operation, no joke, came in the same week NATO tweeted that ongoing exercises presented “opportunities to test new unmanned systems at sea” (see TWEET HISTORY MAY REMEMBER). A rapid-fire tweet by former Polish Foreign Minister saying, “Thank you, USA” was mysteriously taken down later in the week, inspiring trolls to tease that his hardcore interventionist wife Anne Applebaum made him do it. Meanwhile, mainstream pundits in the U.S. and the U.K. in impressive deadpan argued that Russia had sabotaged its own pipeline, its best and perhaps only source of leverage internationally. The U.K. Spectator for instance suggested Russia did it to “up the ante on the West.” Throughout, three boiling patches of methane, one a kilometer across, poured toxic gases into the atmosphere in an “unprecedented” climate disaster. Fortunately this worries almost no one, since we’re now currently preoccupied with an even bigger fear, of nuclear war.”

The West—Technocrats, Incompetents, Ideologues by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Meloni already signals she will moderate some of the positions that won her the support of voters. She is now O.K. with NATO, which she once spoke against, and she will go along, however reluctantly, opportunistically, briefly, or all three, with E.U. support for Ukraine. She no longer proposes to pull Italy out of the euro, as she once did.

“But the E.U.’s prevalent neoliberalism and the austerity policies that reflect it are another matter. Meloni may speak more softly than before on these questions, but it is a leopard-and-spots question: The E.U. now has another voice that will speak out of national interests in the name of voters. The others at the moment are Poland and Hungary, but the Poles and Hungarians are post–Berlin Wall members; Italy is Core Europe, inner circle. Whether or not she intends to do so, Meloni raises the question of the E.U.’s long-term coherence. This is an excellent thing to do.”

“[…] parties labeled populist tend to favor a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine crisis more than “mainstream parties.” Negotiations, bad. War, good: This seems to be the point among Kupchan’s mainstream parties.”

“It has been clear since that the E.U. is little more than the instrument with which intolerant ideologues impose the no-exceptions rigors of neoliberal orthodoxy on those Europeans who, whatever their stripe, defend the mediating, democratic institutions through which they can express their will. There is a straight line between Brussels’ antidemocratic conduct and the rise of Meloni and her coalition partners in Italian politics.”

“There are many things about Matteo Salvini that do not recommend him, but there are a few that do. “What is this, a threat?” he asked in response. He then accused von der Leyen of “shameful arrogance and institutional bullying” while insisting that she “respect the free, democratic and sovereign vote of the Italian people.””

“I am with the incoming coalition in Rome on this point, if not on various others. Whatever else they get up to, they wage a war against the tyrannies of technocrats that must be fought if we are to find our way beyond the liberal authoritarianism that now overtakes us. Do you want to complain about their positions? O.K., but remember, it is this liberal intolerance that encouraged them. ”

“Politicians always think of themselves and their climbs up the greasy pole, of course. But in our time this seems to be all they think about. Few, and it is hard to think of any, have any vision of the larger questions facing the people they pretend to lead.”

“Biden’s misfortune, apart from the ineptitude of the people he appointed his secretary of state and national security adviser, is that the music stopped more or less as he took office. It fell to him to manage the passage of American primacy into history and greet a new epoch with new ideas as to America’s place in the world. The end of pretend has landed on his watch. Biden is plainly not up to this moment, although in fairness it is hard to imagine a U.S. president who would be, given the kind of people our political process thrusts forward.”

“ The lesson that lands so squarely upon us this autumn is that leadership in the West is now in critical decline. It has nothing to do with Russia, China, or any of our other scapegoats. Our crisis is ours alone, a rot within that reminds me of the slow demise of the Soviet Union by way of internal decay. This is the truth of events of the past week pushed unkindly before us with a savage clarity.”

Blinken Says Nord Stream Sabotage Is a ‘Tremendous Opportunity’ by Dave DeCamp (ScheerPost)

“Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that the attacks on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that connect Russia to Germany offer a “tremendous opportunity” to end Europe’s dependency on Russian energy.

““It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs,” Blinken said at a joint press conference with Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly.

““That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come,” Blinken added.

“Blinken made the comments when asked what the US and Canada are doing to ease Europe’s energy crisis in the wake of the Nord Stream sabotage. Blinken said that Washington had been working for some time to provide Europe with more energy, and as a result, the US is now Europe’s biggest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

““And we’re now the leading supplier of LNG to Europe to help compensate for any gas or oil that it’s losing as a result of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine,” Blinken said.”

He doesn’t know or doesn’t care what this looks like to the rest of the world. Just pure piracy. Just taking out competitors and replacing them.

However, things aren’t so easy. See the next link.

Developing Developments by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)

“Let’s get a few technical matters straight about natgas. Gas pipelines allow for cheap gas, without costly intervening shipping procedures. Flows are continuous from producer to customer. LNG requires compression of the gas at super-cold temperatures and costly-to-build LNG tanker ships to keep that gas cold and compressed in transit. Each tanker can carry only so-much gas and the flow is not continuous. At each end of the energy-losing journey there is a costly LNG terminal to load and unload the gas. Bottom line: Euroland customers can’t afford US LNG, though for now they’ll be getting it good and hard to struggle through the first winter of a permanent depression that will feel more like the forecourt of a new dark age. Also bear in mind that American shale gas is a finite resource; that we need plenty of it ourselves; and that the earliest-developed US shale gas fields are crapping out one-by-one.”

“Secretary Blinken is, of course, completely insane. Germany’s industry will now collapse, the Euro currency will collapse with it, and the exchange rate with the dollars Euroland needs to buy in order to purchase US LNG will bankrupt them further. It will also probably blow up the European Union, which is chiefly a trade scaffold. With industrial production sinking, trade sinks too, and the flimsy cooperative arrangements between nations turn into a desperate competition as each nation of Euroland struggles to stay alive.”

“Kerosene is becoming scarce — there’s none, for instance, at the Hudson Valley’s Albany storage facility. The winter trucking fuel mix is 70-percent diesel and 30-percent kerosene, which is added to lighten the fuel and keep it flowing under freezing weather conditions. This shortage suggests a supply-line collapse for just about everything, but especially food. Doesn’t sound too peachy for Christmastime. “Joe Biden” and Company are destroying the USA at just about every level. Thirty-five days to the midterm election. So, let’s send a few more billion dollars to the sucking chest wound that is Ukraine.”

‘We Are Close to Nuclear Armageddon’ Warns President Who Keeps Fighting Proxy War With Nuclear-Armed Country (Babylon Bee)

““This is a dangerous time, folks,” Biden said to the assembled media. “No other leader has brought our nation — and the world — closer to nuclear destruction than I have in my short time as President.” Reporters were puzzled as to why Biden seemed to be lauding this as an achievement, though they all agreed these were some of the more coherent comments he’s made as of late.”

Journalism & Media

Memory Holed: “The Election Was Hacked” by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Cleverly vague formulations like this led to ubiquitous use of the phrase, “Russia hacked the election,” which led to media reports saying things like, “ It increasingly looks like Russian hackers may have affected actual vote totals ,” which in turn pushed an increasingly high percentage of Democrats into the Q-like la-la land of thinking Russians “tampered with vote tallies.” By 2018, a YouGov poll found 67% of Democrats agreed with that proposition. Hillary Clinton was one of the worst offenders on this score, telling audiences as late as 2019 that “actual interference” took place, that “we know it happened,” but the details just aren’t known because they’re “classified.””

“It can’t be held against Trump that his brand of election denial was dumber and less likely to succeed than that of his opponents. Orfalea’s video shows the double-standard. We either censor and condemn election denial, or we don’t. You can’t have it both ways, but they sure are trying.”

We have too many Main Characters now by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“I mean, at this point America’s information systems are so broken that the viral hurricane street shark hoax that goes around every year finally actually happened in Florida and ended up being “debunked” anyways by a “professor of intelligence studies” who confidently claimed on Twitter that it was fake. So, yeah, why wouldn’t you sit in front of your TV and film cable news reporters needlessly running around in a hurricane and then go claim it was all made up and get some internet points on a platform no one cares enough to moderate.”

Oh cool, we’re talking about anonymity again by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“I think it’s particularly funny that people who make this argument assume that anyone would even keep using the internet if the only thing they could do on it was read posts from verified users. In fact, I have never written anything more confidently in my life than what I am about to write right here: Verified users are without question the worst part of any mainstream platform and if you want to imagine a world without online anonymity, go tell me about the incredible original content trending on LinkedIn right now.”

Science & Nature

No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent new particles is pointless by Sabine Hossfelder (The Guardian)

“Experimental particle physicists know of the problem, and try to distance themselves from what their colleagues in theory development do. At the same time, they profit from it, because all those hypothetical particles are used in grant proposals to justify experiments. And so the experimentalists keep their mouths shut, too. This leaves people like me, who have left the field – I now work in astrophysics – as the only ones able and willing to criticise the situation.”

“But I believe the biggest contributor to this trend is a misunderstanding of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which, to make a long story short, demands that a good scientific idea has to be falsifiable. Particle physicists seem to have misconstrued this to mean that any falsifiable idea is also good science.”

“Each time an anomaly is reported, particle physicists will quickly write hundreds of papers about how new particles allegedly explain the observation.”

“Ambulance-chasing is a good strategy to further one’s career in particle physics. Most of those papers pass peer review and get published because they are not technically wrong. And since ambulance-chasers cite each other’s papers, they can each rack up hundreds of citations quickly. But it’s a bad strategy for scientific progress.”

“I believe there are breakthroughs waiting to be made in the foundations of physics; the world needs technological advances more than ever before, and now is not the time to idle around inventing particles, arguing that even a blind chicken sometimes finds a grain. As a former particle physicist, it saddens me to see that the field has become a factory for useless academic papers.”

Lawsuits on mRNA technology show profit-driven struggle for control over vital scientific discoveries by Benjamin Mateus & Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“Briefly, regarding the purpose and function of mRNA , as the figure denotes, a cell’s DNA resides in its nucleus. When a signal for the construction of a protein is received, a small portion of the DNA that contains all the necessary instruction for that particular protein unravels, and a single-stranded pre-mRNA template in the form of a messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is transcribed, then spliced into mRNA and transported out of the nucleus into the cell’s cytoplasm where the ribosomes translate the instructions into a polypeptide chain that eventually is processed into a finished protein.”

“As an evolving discipline, science has been a byproduct of a highly developed social relation that has amassed the historical breadth of knowledge over centuries of diligent work to make the current advances in various fields possible. From such a perspective, the Moderna lawsuit must be seen as the most egregious form of exploitation of human labor. In this regard, the corporation functions to strip away any historical connection to this social reality by employing the state’s legal system in the form of patent acquisition and monetizing these achievements to enrich the financial stakeholders.”

Art & Literature

Life in the buff by Annebella Pollen & Nigel Warburton (Aeon)

“A book about nude photography with a nude on the cover still cannot be sold on most bookselling platforms in the 21st century. Facebook and Instagram will not allow uncensored images from the book’s contents to be shown, even those with historic retouching or otherwise concealed pubic areas. Breasts and buttocks, deemed harmless a century ago, are now forbidden by social media moderators, our new censors.”

Programming

By Reference in C# by Pete Ritchie

“How far the value of an expression can leave the confines of its declaration scope is called “escape scope”. Sometimes the escape scope is the same as the declaration scope. The compiler verifies compatible escape scopes during assignment.”

“The return-only scope is a special case for ref struct types that can only leave the method scope via a return and not through a ref or out parameter.”