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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature

Public Policy & Politics

The Souls of Ukrainian Folk by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Europeans, or at least those purporting to lead them, now seem perfectly pleased to welcome into their ranks a regime given to official religious persecution.”

They already had, with Israel. The ESC has always had Israel. Germany loves Israel. Never had a problem with anything they’ve done. Let’s not pretend that acceptance of religious persecution is something new.

“Zelensky announced his intent to draft a law banning the traditional Orthodox church in his nightly national broadcast on December 2. Three weeks later he was greeted as a courageous defender of democracy and freedom with an extravagant standing ovation when he addressed a joint session of Congress. There is no avoiding the conclusion here: The U.S. imperium does not give a tinker’s damn about democracy and freedom in Ukraine, religious or otherwise. It cares about manipulating these totemic notions as it cynically sacrifices Ukraine and Ukrainians to its campaign to subvert, ultimately, the Russian Federation.”

Colonial Patriotism by Arseniy Krasnikov (Russian Dissent)

“The Russian philosopher Ilya Budraitskis very aptly expressed himself on this topic: “All crises and revolutions in Russian history are considered as the results of external interference, because the very concept of the Russian state excludes the possibility of any failure” − such an ideological basis is possible only in the context of an eclectic (where any solution interpreted as, perhaps, not easy, but a solution for the good) and deeply colonial patriotism (through the lens of confrontation between Russia and the collective West in the first place, all problems are from betrayal and enemies).”

There’s some more common ground right there. The U.S. never makes mistakes or commits crimes; it’s always forced to by external circumstances.

A War of Rhetoric & Reality by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“A Russian defeat in Ukraine would be a direct threat to its security, sovereignty, and altogether its survival. These are legitimate causes. What people would not defend themselves against such a threat — especially given Washington’s long record of subterfuge in nations, not least the Russian Federation, that insist on their independence.”

“This is a sovereign nation defending itself against an imperium that will not stop aggressing until it is forced to stop. Thirty years of ignoring Moscow’s repeated requests to negotiate a mutually beneficial post–Cold War security order are demonstration enough of this.”

This is how it appears to Russia and we are forced to take this point of view seriously. Only Russia or China or perhaps India is big enough to try to resist. Switzerland Isn’t. Neither is Slovakia. What if Russia’s wrong? What if the American hegemony is one of benevolence, as advertised? What if there really is no choice where you don’t have a boot on your neck? What if there is no world without great powers, agitating to become greater? America tells the story that it is so good that it should be allowed to “help” other countries try to become as good by quasi-absorbing them into its culture/empire. Russia and China are very publicly saying that everyone should be able to do as they please internally and should cooperate on the international level. To belabor a metaphor, if you were walking on an open, public trail in the woods and you met a bear (Russia) that claimed all of that territory as its own, you would have to deal with the bear: either turn around, go around, try to drive it off, or try to kill it. If you meet a butterfly (Switzerland or Slovakia), you just keep moving without any consideration of what the butterfly wants or thinks.

See 16:00 in the following video for a discussion of how Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik is difference than neocon “philosophy”. The neocons don’t accept that there is any nation large enough that the U.S. can’t dictate terms to it, “you can’t talk to us; we’ll talk to you.”

Lee Camp & Brian Becker: What Next For The Anti-War Movement? by Behind the News (YouTube)

“This war is going very badly for the Ukrainian side and its backers, never mind the pabulum you read in the major dailies. We read of battlefield victories that are not victories. We read that Russia is running out of matériel when there is no shred of evidence that this is so. As Alexander Mercouris noted in a podcast the other day, Kiev’s response to wave upon wave of punishing rocket and drone attacks amounts to fables to the effect that almost all the drones and rockets are shot down.”

“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who appears these days to be as mentally diminished as Biden, compared Zelensky with Churchill and called his remarks to Congress, which his hosts evidently wrote for him, one of the greatest speeches ever delivered on Capitol Hill. I do not think I have ever seen a state visit so thoroughly Hollywood-ized. But it is important to get beyond mere derision. This garish display was timed to ease passage of a defense authorization bill that provides Ukraine with $44 billion more in weaponry during the coming year.”

“Let us not miss the import here. In my read, China has just signaled that it shares Russia’s assessment that its adversary in Ukraine is neither Ukraine nor the Ukrainian people; its adversary is the West as led by the American imperium. This is what getting the nomenclature right means. Name something correctly and understanding is bound to follow.”

“I do not want those waging war by rhetoric and display to win. I do not want the war waged by fanatical neoconservative ideologues to win. I do not want the imperium to win. I do not want the West to win so long as it insists intolerantly that the rest of the world observe its diktats.”

The Bitterness of Victory, the Sweetness of Defeat by Anna Ochkina (Scheer Post)

“The fact is that Russians are a little obsessed with national pride, which in our country is somehow mystically intertwined with a passion for self-abasement, prone to an over-the-top boast that “only we could have done such a disgrace.” At the same time, Russians will hardly tolerate foreigners’ criticism of their country, while they themselves incessantly criticize an abstract “them,” and don’t really like to notice and discuss real or past defeats.”

That feels kind of familiar, actually. Never mess with America, but the government sucks.

“Coming to a dead end, and then marking it with a flag so that it may be easier for others to find the right path − this is not for Russians. We have never praised those who found a dead end. Falling in a lost battle, even one that later becomes a springboard for subsequent victories, is not a triumph from our point of view. Give us a victory without a prehistory.”

“Now Russia faces the greatest defeat in its history. The greatest because, no matter how events unfolded after February 24, 2022, Russia had lost the precise moment when the first bomber took off towards Kyiv. Why? Because at that moment Russia had only two options left − to become an invader or to be crushed on the battlefield. The capture of Ukraine would require a Russia bursting with weapons, and feeding on unjust anger for a long time, constantly suppressing resistance in the captured country − a country intimately close to Russia in language, blood, culture, history. This would be the path to the decomposition of the moral core of society, to the death of the soul of the people. This could destroy once and for all those truly great achievements of the USSR and Russia, both of which in reality, and not in the feverish delirium of propagandists, made our world a better place. Such a “victory” would in reality be a complete failure for Russia.”

“But what will come of Russia’s looming defeat on the battlefield? Will Russian society be able to understand, and, most importantly, to admit that it was simply deceived, that the goals were false? Will Russian citizens be able to understand that, behind the inflated enthusiasm generated by well-paid propagandists, the authorities were merely striving for a very primitive and utilitarian kind of survival? And, having understood, will they be able to perceive the defeat not as the end of Russia, but as its true beginning?”

Good lord, the similarities to the U.S. are uncanny. We could ask the same questions of the U.S.: will the people be able to understand and digest the massive defeat that is coming? When the empire is forced to shrink?

“I think the Russians need to grow up. We all need, finally, to stop perceiving the state as a hybrid of Leviathan and Santa Claus, from which one can expect either big trouble or big gifts. My fellow citizens must finally understand that the state is nothing more than an instrument that they direct for the solution of common problems. The instrument cannot control its owner, cannot dictate to him how to live and what to do. But the owner also has a duty − to keep his tool in order, use it correctly, control it, and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.”

✊✊✊

“[…] perhaps the current generations of Russians will be able to become the generations of the Great Defeat, which will clear the way to real victories. A defeat that will help defeat real, not imagined evil: dictatorship, lawlessness, social oppression and corruption. We must overcome all this in our own country, and this will be the greatest victory that no interpreters of history can belittle.”

So much in common with the U.S.

The states of Mississippi incarcerates over 1% of its population. The U.S. overall incarcerates 0.66% of its population, over 5x what the next-closest “ally” does.

Incarceration Rates

Extended episode: Useful Idiots 2022 Special plus Mick Wallace & Claire Daly Unlocked by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

The two EU parliamentarians Mick Wallace and Claire Daly are absolute national treasures. They chew nails and spit bullets. Christ, we need many, many more people like this.

This was also a great interview with a Ukrainian historian working in Canada.

Extended episode: Ukrainian scholar calls out US media's lies about war by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

“Ivan Katchanovski, Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist who teaches at the University of Ottawa, is exposing US media lies about the Ukraine proxy war. And, like many Useful Idiot guests, no one will report on his story.

“This week, Katchanovski shares his research on the Maidan Massacre, a mass killing of Ukrainians protesting the Yanukovich government in February 2014. The US and opposition leaders blamed Yanukovich, triggered a coup and the ensuing civil war that radically escalated with Russia’s invasion eight years later.

“But when Professor Katchanovski dug into video, witness testimony, and other evidence which reveals who really committed the massacre — including footage that CNN tried to bury — he was ignored by mainstream media for attempted disruption of the approved narrative.”

Journalism & Media

Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“[…] for anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the distant and recent histories of the CIA and FBI — an agency that privately labels anti-police brutality protesters “black identity extremists” to be spied on and has a long track record of targeting young and often disadvantaged Muslim men with predatory entrapment schemes — the fact they’re playing this extensive a role in deciding what social media companies censor should be disturbing.”

“The bureau likewise pressured Twitter to relax its privacy standards and hand over more user information. It asked executives if they would revise their terms of service to effectively allow intelligence agencies to scoop up open-source data more easily (they said no), and if they’d share information about accounts using VPNs, which are used to mask online activity (also no).”

“Intelligence reports flagged dozens of YouTube videos and posts allegedly linked to a Russian troll farm that “highlighted predominantly anti-Ukraine narratives,” and listed more than one thousand accounts that it determined were “linked to the [Venezuelan president Nicolás] Maduro (VEN) & [Cuban president Miguel Mario] Díaz-Canel (CUB) regimes” and were “propagating anti-Bolsonaro/pro-Lula hashtags””

This is, of course, exactly not what we want. That Maduro—the democratically elected president of Venezuela—is flagged as some sort of subversive is already quite sick.

“[…] the creeping merger of the national security state with Twitter doesn’t just bring up issues of political censorship. It also suggests that the website supposedly meant to be the “global public square” is being used as a geopolitical tool in the service of one government’s foreign policy interests.”

Science & Nature

You can’t take it with you: straight talk about epigenetics and intergenerational trauma by Razib Khan (SubStack)

“Epigenetics is a powerful and ubiquitous process in biology but entails no mechanism equipped to explain any of the multi-generational psychological phenomena it’s called upon to legitimize in media coverage, claims about which are both reliably overblown and entirely speculative.”

“Epigenetics as an idea has been with us for decades, since embryologist Conrad Waddington created the term in 1942, combining the words “epigenesis” and “genetics.” He was trying to grasp how one single genetic instruction manual begat the vast diversity of cell types observed in a multicellular organism and how it shaped organismic development.”

“Transcriptional factors, proteins that bind to DNA and regulate the reading-out of the sequence that ultimately produces proteins, are nudged and modulated dynamically by epigenetic forces receiving inputs from signals within […]”

“Through this chain of molecular processes that runs from receptors on the cell surface all the way to proteins interacting with DNA, epigenetics even allows for an element of improvisation in the expression of the genome and activation of specific genes to tackle unexpected conditions. To wit, when nearly all organisms are exposed to very high temperatures, epigenetic forces turn on heat shock genes in direct response to physical changes to the structure of proteins on the cell surface.”

“But molecular epigenetics as an instrument of gene regulation is constantly in play within the human body’s 200 distinct cell types across a human lifetime’s 10 quadrillion cell divisions. Yes, that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000 cell divisions or mitoses across which epigenetic phenomena are essential. The script of epigenetic changes replays endlessly in every individual, in every organism, and is therefore usually highly deterministic. This is why humans look like humans and potatoes like potatoes. This reality rather than nebulous speculations about intergenerational trauma should frame how we understand epigenetics.”

“[…] just because a study is statistically significant does not mean it will stand the test of time or its results be broadly replicable; the p -value tells you only the probability of the given outcome assuming a certain model, and sometimes unlikely things do happen. But it doesn’t tell you anything about all the comparable studies that never saw print because the statistics didn’t cooperate, nor does it reveal all the datasets selectively discarded because they turned out to be junk. A study, or studies, may show something, but the truth of a matter is established through many replications, ideally with controls for confounding variables that may be driving some of the intergenerational associations […]”

“Epigenetics is defined by concrete biophysical changes to your DNA packaging and marks that impact how genes express themselves rather than changes to the heritable genes themselves. These changes can be temporary or persist across many cell divisions. Within cell lines, like muscle tissue, the epigenetic marks determining which genes are expressed or repressed can be passed on to new muscle cells throughout your lifetime. This is a feature; you don’t want muscle cells randomly transforming into brain cells.”

“[…] even if trans-generational epigenetic transmission does occur, it has to be vanishingly rare and not very impactful in any studied organisms. Why? Simply because, for a century, conventional geneticists, using Mendel’s framework of mutations passed onward through pedigrees, have studied how characteristics are transmitted in the real world. If many traits were strongly dependent on (previously unnoticed) epigenetic insults in the few most recent generations, that would distort these results, and the deviations would emerge rapidly, as particularly well-studied organisms with distinctive traits might change after every novel shock.”

“The existence of the entire field of transmission genetics negates the idea that epigenetic effects passed through families could ever be common, even in the case of plants where this is a well-known phenomenon. If epigenetic transmission was ubiquitous, then the textbooks of Mendelian genetics could never have been written.”

“If the duplication and passing on of DNA to future generations should be a high-fidelity process that maintains the characteristics natural selection has preferred, epigenetics should be a local adaptation mechanism that allows organisms to track environmental volatility without locking in one generation’s adaptations in perpetuity.”