An angry M.D. on the optoid crisis

 

Matt Bivens M.D. is an emergency room doctor who writes a blog.  He is angry about how the nation, the drug industry and the medical profession are handling the optoid crisis.   Here are the highlights of the first installment of a series he is writing on the topic.

At the turn of the century, about 20,000 people each year would take an opioid — as a pill, or as a snorted or injected powder — and then stop breathing and die. Those of us working on ambulances or in emergency departments (EDs) could not save them.

But for every death, there are about 20 non-fatal overdoses. So, with bag mask ventilation and opioid reversal agents, we have dragged millions of people back to life. How many suffered anoxic brain injuries, and today are mentally a half-step slower? Unknown.

Overdoses at this scale were a new development, and they were occurring hand-in-hand with the aggressive new marketing and prescribing of opioids. This is the era chronicled so well by popular miniseries — “Dopesick” on Hulu, “Painkiller” on Netflix. In the midst of it, the Sackler family-owned Purdue Pharma pled guilty to a deception campaign meticulously designed to bring about recklessly liberal opioid prescribing. As punishment, the company had to shell out $600 million, and three top executives got multi-million-dollar fines and 400 hours of community service.

That should have been peak “Opioid Crisis.” But it was only 2007. Heck, George W. Bush was still president. The Sacklers were never contrite. They’d been raking in about $1 billion a year for more than a decade. The $600 million fine sounded impressive — but the Sacklers shrugged, cut the government in to the tune of less than 5 percent of the cash rolling in, and got right back to slinging opioids.  And in the 17 years since, everything has gotten terribly worse.

Did it feel like a catastrophe back in 2007, when 20,000 people a year would die, and people were enraged at Purdue?

Or a decade later, in 2017, when President Donald Trump declared it a national emergency, and 50,000 people a year would die?

That’s nothing. For the past three years, we’ve reliably seen 80,000 people each year take an opioid, stop breathing and die.

Can the USA ever end its wars?

Image via Newsweek

We US Americans need to end our wars.  War drains our strength as a nation, and we can’t deal with our other urgent problems – dysfunctional government, financial oligarchy, growing inequality and poverty, drug addiction – until we do.  War keeps the world divided, and unable to unite to deal with global problems – catastrophic climate change, pandemics, the migration crisis.

The United States is currently at war with at least six countries – North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria and Russia – and is getting ready add a seventh, China.  All of these are wars of choice.  There is no good reason to be at war with any of these countries.

Technically, of course, we are not at war.  Congress has not declared war on any of these countries.  No uniformed American troops are fighting troops of any of those countries, at least not directly and not in large numbers.

But this is not how wars are fought today.  War is not declared.  It is just waged.  There is no clear boundary between being at war and being “adversarial.” 

War is not limited to fighting by troops.  It includes economic warfare, covert warfare, cyber warfare and proxy warfare, all of which can be just as deadly as armed conflict by troops in uniform.   

Recently two African governments, Chad and Niger, asked the U.S. government to remove its military bases from their soil.  The U.S. Defense Department replied that this is something that will have to be negotiated.  Meanwhile U.S. troops are occupying countries against the will of their governments.  Is this war?

President Biden has criticized Israel for the mass killing of civilians in Gaza, while continuing to provide Israel with money, weapons and military advisers to use those weapons.  Is this war?

When U.S. forces exited Afghanistan in 2021, the U.S. government, along with European allies, blocked the Afghan government from access to its funds in foreign banks, while also cutting off foreign economic aid and grants.  The excuse was that the money could be used to help terrorist.  The result was a collapse of the Afghan economy and a food crisis.  Was this war?

Secretary of State Madeline Albright was famously asked if the blockage of Iraq in the 1990s was worth the deaths of up to 1 million Iraqi children.  Her reply was, yes, it was worth it.  Was this war?  It’s not peace.

My definition of war is that a policy becomes an act of war when it is intended to bring about regime change or when it results in deaths of the innocent.    Or if it is something that a government would only do if it were at war.

This includes attempted assassinations of heads of state (Cuba), support of terrorist groups (Cuba, Iran, Syria), economic blockades (North Korea, Cuba, Iran,  Venezuela, Syria, Russia), confiscation of financial assets (Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Russia), arming of enemies and rebels (Cuba, Iran, Syria, Russia) and cyber warfare (Iran).  

Of course the full extent of cyber warfare and covert warfare is not known.  And this  is not an exhaustive list of U.S. military operations, not all of which are known to the public.

How CIA manipulated press coverage of Vietnam

Frank Snepp was a CIA agent who arrived in Vietnam in 1969 and stayed on until he was evacuated as Saigon fell in 1975.  He spent a good deal of time working with the press while there and developed the ability to plant stories in major media outlets like the New York Times, the New Yorker, the LA Times, Chicago Daily News and others that supported the Agency’s goals.

He revealed how he did it in a book, Decent Interval, and in the above 1983 interview.

Does the CIA still do this?  The interview doesn’t prove that they do.  But why would they stop?

LINK

Does the CIA Still Do That? by Thomas Neuburger for God’s Spies.

Truth-tellers: Ai Weiwei and Edward Snowden

I ordinarily don’t like to watch long videos, especially ones based on talking heads like this one.  I’m hard of hearing, I don’t always catch everything that’s said, and I don’t see any point in watching a video that’s more than an hour long when I could read a transcript in 15 minutes.

This one is an exception.  It held my attention to the end.  Even if I had watched only 20 or so minutes of it, I would have gotten something out of it.

 The two characters, the dissident artist Ai Weiwei and the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, are people I admire.  They’re in exile for telling truths that their governments want to be hidden.

Neither one is an adherent of a particular political ideology, whether of the so-called left or so-called right.  They simply have strong senses of right and wrong, and a belief they have a duty to defy unjust authority.

They talk about the reasons for even trying to defy authority when it seems so powerful to crush any form of defiance.  They talk about why so many people agree about what’s wrong, but feel helpless to resist.

Snowden in particular resisted the notion that there is anything special about him.  There are no heroes, he said – that is, nobody who consistently acts without fear.  There are only people who occasionally make a heroic devision.

What was special about himself, he said, is that he was one of the few people in the CIA / NSA surveillance apparatus who had a full picture of the illegal surveillance program, who were in a position to collect the information, who knew how to get the information out of the building, and who knew home to escape capture while getting the information to the press.

He said he overlooked much wrongdoing before he made the decision to leak the information did, and had been hoping somebody else would leak the information about illegal surveillance.

One of the arguments he gets is that there is a duty to obey the law, even when you think the law is unjust.  If everyone decided for themselves whether to obey any particular law, the result would be anarchy.

The answer to that argument is that lawmakers and rule makers have no legitimate authority if they are not accountable in some way to the public.  The rule of law should mean that everybody, including kings, presidents and secret agents, are subject to the law.

Ai Weiwei said it is hard to think independently because the various social systems – in China, the USA and other countries – are designed to discourage independent thinking.  As students, young people learn they must absorb information from authoritative sources.  As employees, people learn they must  please bosses and customers.  As consumers, they learn to choose among what is provided for them.

To break away from this, and think for yourself, he said, is to enter a long, dark tunnel.  There is no freedom without struggle, Ai Weiwei said.

One reason for hope, he said, is the use of the Internet and social media.  These things can be means of social control, but they also can be means for widely-separated individuals to freely share ideas and information. 

A Chinese artist’s memoir of joys and sorrows

1000 YEARS OF JOYS AND SORROWS: A Memoir by Ai Weiwei.  Translated by Alan H. Barr (2021)

Ai Weiwei is a well-known Chinese artist.  His father, Ai Qing, was a well-known Chinese poet. Between them, their lives cover a century of Chinese cultural history.

 Both wanted to explore the wider world outside China.  Both believed that art and poetry were for the masses and not just the elite.  Both believed in artistic freedom.  Both were imprisoned by the Chinese government for exercising that freedom.

The first half of the book is Ai Weiwei’s biography of his father.  Ai Qing was a loyal Chinese Communist who nevertheless believed writers could serve the Revolution best if they were true to their own vision.  The regime disagreed.

The second half is Ai Weiwei’s own story.  Unlike his dad, who was loyal to a cause, he was a rebel who confronted and rejected all forms of authority – governmental, cultural and traditional.  The video above, a trailer for a 2012 documentary, gives an idea of his defiant spirit.

“Art should be a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe,” Weiwei wrote. “The reason art cannot be ignored is that it destabilizes what seems settled and secure.”

My interest in the book was awakened by learning it is one of Edward Snowden’s favorites. 

The title of the book is based on verses from one of Ai Qing’s poems:

Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows,

Not a trace can be found.

You who are living, live the best life you can.

Don’t count on the earth to preserve memory.

Ai Qing was born in 1910, one year before the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.  He loved poetry and art and persuaded his father to give him money to go to France for study in 1929.  

Ai Qing 1929

He lived in Paris among poor Chinese expatriates for three years, where he learned to speak French and love Russian literature.  He later said these were the happiest years of his life.  He returned three years later, having learned no marketable skills that would enable him to pay back his father.

When he got back, he moved to Shanghai, joined the Union of Left Wing Artists and was arrested just a few months later.  He wrote his first poems during his three years in prison.

For years after that, he lived hand-to-mouth, subsisting on low-paid teaching jobs or the charity of his father.  He managed to keep writing and was able to get some of his works published.

He was one of these poets who are inspired and driven to write, no matter what their circumstances.  The themes of his poetry were the suffering of the Chinese common people as a result of exploitation and war.

He was married, divorced and had relationships with various women.  He begat children who died in childbirth and infancy, probably as a result of poverty.  He somehow managed to get his poetry published.

In 1941, he made his way to Yunan and joined Mao Zedong.  Mao’s idea of the role of writers was that they were the propaganda arm of the revolutionary army and should be subject to military discipline.  

Ai Qing argued about this with Mao to his face.  He believed that writers could best serve the revolution by following their own inspiration.

Andrei Antunes and the Nandy Sisters

Pure enjoyment! I came across this video on Andrei Martyanov‘s blog.

Book note: The Russian art of war

THE RUSSIAN ART OF WAR: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat by Jacques Baud (2024)

I’ve long said that Ukraine and its NATO backers will lose the current war because Ukraine’s forces are outnumbered and outgunned.Jacques Baud, a former Swiss intelligence officer and UN consultant, said they also are being out-thought.

In this book, he outlined the history of the war, discussed the strategies of the contenders and compares their strengths in terms of troop strength, organization, strategy and tactics, economic strength and armaments.

He concluded that the Russians are more powerful than the anti-Russian alliance in terms of being able to win a war in this particular time in that particular place.
He also said that Russians are more realistic in terms of their strategy and goals.

The Ukrainian goal is to restore its 1991 boundaries. The U.S. goal is to weaken Russia so that it ceases to be a great power.

The Russian goal is to eliminate the possibility of surprise attack from forces close to its borders.

In order to achieve its goal, Russia is demilitarizing Ukraine by killing Ukrainian troops and destroying Ukrainian armaments on a war of attrition.

Russia is virtually killing off a generation of young Ukrainian men. It also is to an extent demilitarizing NATO nations by forcing them to deplete their arsenals to support Ukraine.

The U.S. seeks to weaken Russia by keeping Ukraine in the fight at whatever cost—to Ukraine. In order to do this, it is promoting a false narrative that says Ukraine has a fighting chance to win.

This narrative is the key to getting continued political support for continuing the flow of money and weapons to Ukraine. That is why there is such an effort to suppress information and argument that runs counter to the narrative.

Objective observers foresaw that Ukraine’s counter-offense last year was doomed from the beginning, but Ukraine launched it anyway in order to show its foreign arms suppliers that it was still in the fight.,

How corporations are replacing democracy

SILENT COUP: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard (2023)

Everybody knows that corporations influence and manipulate governments behind the scenes. In Silent Coup, two British journalists show ways in which corporations are actually replacing governments.

There are international corporate courts, whose decisions are binding on governments. The world is dotted with enclaves administered by corporations independent of any national laws. Even responsibility for public welfare and national defense is being handed over to corporations.

Few of these things are secret.  They are just ignored.  That is why the coup is a silent coup.

Corporate Courts

I first learned about international corporate courts when the Obama administration proposed the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, a free trade agreement binding all the important nations bordering the Pacific except China.

The problem with TTP agreement was in the fine print.  Any time a TPP country’s government adopted a policy that impacted the profits of a foreign company, that company could go to a special arbitration board and demand compensation for lost profits.  

Public outcry prevented U.S. ratification of that agreement, but then I learned that NAFTA also contained an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provision.  In fact, the whole world is covered by a web of ISDS agreements.

They were the brainchild of a German banker called Hermann Abs who had headed Deutsche Bank.  He helped finance the Nazi regime, although he did not belong to the Nazi party itself.  He helped settle allied claims against Germany after the war.  He was highly respected by bankers and industrialists, including in the USA.

In 1957, he made a speech in San Francisco to a group of bankers and industrialists from all over the world, calling for a “capitalist Magna Carta,” a system of international law that would protect global corporations from revolutionaries and nationalists. 

He joined with a British Lord called Lord Shawcross to write a document called the Abs-Shawcross Draft Convention.  It was taken up in the 1960s by the World Bank, which created the International Center for Dispute Settlement (ICDS) and pressured its clients to adopt ISDS rules.

Provost and Kennard came across the ICDS when they went to El Salvador, which was fighting a lawsuit brought by a Canadian-Australian company called OceanaGold, which demanded compensation for environmental regulations that prevent them from digging a gold mine.

Use NATO troops or face humiliating defeat?

Edward Luttwak, a well-known war hawk, says that the Western alliance faces a choice in the Ukraine war – direct intervention by NATO troops or acceptance of a humiliating defeat.

I think that’s true.  It is very similar to the situation President Lyndon Johnson faced in 1965.  

Image via The Telegraph

He had to choose whether to send American troops to South Vietnam or face a humiliating defeat at the hands of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong insurgents.  He chose to send troops.

The situation then was more favorable to the USA and its allies than it is in Ukraine now.

The USA then was by far the greatest industrial power and apparently the strongest military power in the world.  North Vietnam, although backed by the Soviet Union, was poor and primitive.  

Yet 10 years later, in 1975, the humiliating U.S. defeat came about anyway, after the loss of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives.

Russia is a much more formidable militarily and industrially than North Vietnam was, and the United States is weaker.  Russia has a decisive advantage in the production of missiles and artillery shells, which are the deciding factor in this war.  

Luttwak says that NATO troops could be confined to non-combatant roles, and leave Ukrainian troops to do the actual fighting.  

This reminds me of the argument for U.S. “advisers” in South Vietnam.  It is naive to think you can send troops into a war zone with the expectation they won’t have to do actual fighting.

The Russians, with their superiority in missiles, would target NATO troops wherever they were in Ukraine.  

In fact, I think that there are NATO troops covertly and unofficially in Ukraine already, and that they already are being targeted by Russia.

Russia does not have overall military superiority to the United States.  It could not intervene in a hypothetical Mexican civil war the way the United States. has intervened in Ukraine.  But it does have the upper hand in the specific war that is being fought in Ukraine.

Looking at the sun

Via European Space Agency

Via European Space Agency

The Highest Resolution Photo of the Sun Ever Taken by Jason Kottke for kottke.org (in 2023)

Why a physicist left academia

It seems to be the same old story everywhere.  Institutions that used to work, however imperfectly, to achieve aspirational goals, such as the quest for knowledge or service to the public, now aspire to maximize revenue.  Sabine Hossenfelder in the video above tells how this imperative played out with research in physics in the German university system and caused her to leave academia and set up her own YouTube channel.  This is also a business relationship, but it’s a more straightforward one.

Click on Science With Sabine for her YouTube channel.

Below she talks about Monday’s solar eclipse.

Wait, wait, wait! Maybe it’s not goodbye.

I may have been premature in writing the obituary for my blog. If you click on https://philebersole.com, you’ll get a notice that the blog is parked. But if you click on https://philebersole.wordpress.com, you’ll get my blog – as of today, that is.  I’m not sure this is permanent.

Goodbye to Phil Ebersole’s Blog

This is my last post on Phil Ebersole’s Blog.  If you have reached this post, you are probably a subscriber, because access to the home page is blocked.  I am not dead or incapacitated, and this blog is not shutting down because of censorship.  I accidentally disabled it while trying to change the settings, and I am unable to fix it.  The blog will remain on the Internet until my subscription runs out, and there will still be access to individual posts, but there will not be any new posts.

Thank you for your interest in my writing.

Update.  The blog is no longer disabled and I will be writing new posts.  Thanks for the good wishes.

U.S. decline and rise of Eurasia

For a transcript, click on:

The Duran: Economic Decline and the Rise of Greater Eurasia – Michael Hudson, Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen.

Disinformation and the Ukraine war

Image via Big Serge Thought

The good folk at the Institute for the Study of War can’t understand why so many people think the U.S. is losing in Ukraine.

The skepticism comes from all directions and from people who otherwise have little in common with each other – Trump supporters and Troskyites, former high officials in the U.S. security establishment and lonely bloggers working in isolation from each other.

Is it because the U.S. actually is losing? No, they say, it can’t be.  It must be because the Russians have super-powers in influencing public opinion.

Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West – and will likely lose – if the West mobilizes its resources to resist the Kremlin. The West’s existing and latent capability dwarfs that of Russia. The combined gross domestic product (GDP) of NATO countries, non-NATO European Union states, and our Asian allies is over $63 trillion.

The Russian GDP is on the close order of $1.9 trillion.  Iran and North Korea add little in terms of materiel support. China is enabling Russia, but it is not mobilized on behalf of Russia and is unlikely to do so.  If we lean in and surge, Russia loses.

The notion that the war is unwinnable because of Russia’s dominance is a Russian information operation, which gives us a glimpse of the Kremlin’s real strategy and only real hope of success.

The Kremlin must get the United States to the sidelines, allowing Russia to fight Ukraine in isolation and then proceed to Moscow’s next targets, which Russia will also seek to isolate. The Kremlin needs the United States to choose inaction and embrace the false inevitability that Russia will prevail in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin’s center of gravity is his ability to shape the will and decisions of the West, Ukraine, and Russia itself.  

The Russian strategy that matters most, therefore, is not Moscow’s warfighting strategy, but rather the Kremlin’s strategy to cause us to see the world as it wishes us to see it and make decisions in that Kremlin-generated alternative reality that will allow Russia to win in the real world.

According to this way of looking at things, there is no armaments gap nor manpower gap between the contenders, only a propaganda and censorship gap.  So the path to victory is to double down on suppressing “disinformation,” which is anything and everything that contradicts how “us” (a word that doesn’t include me) see the world.

But what is truth and what is disinformation?  

The gross domestic product (GDP) includes all payments for goods and services in a particular nation over a particular period of time.  

In the USA, our dysfunctional medical care system generates more GDP than the better functioning medical care systems of other nations.  Bloated administrative overhead contributes to GDP.  Much of GDP is generated by social problems, such as mental illness, not by a rising material standard of living.

Russia, on the other hand, is doing very well in producing tangible goods.  As an example, Russia has overtaken the United States in wheat production.  It is the world’s leader in nuclear power plant exports.  Its economy is forecast to grow at a higher rate than the U.S. economy.

The United States has the world’s largest and most expensive military establishment.  No other nation could afford to have bases in every continent, as the U.S. does.  The U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force are by far the largest in the world.

But this is not decisive.  Nuclear submarines can destroy surface ships.  Missiles can destroy aircraft.  Neither sea power nor air power is decisive in Ukraine.  The U.S. military is not superior in terms of the weapons needed to win in Ukraine.

Book note: Under a White Sky

UNDER A WHITE SKY: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert (2021)

Under a White Sky is an informative, readable book, which I recommend.

It is a book about people tampering with the environment to counteract damage done by previous tampering with the environment.

These people risk unintended consequences in order to undo previous unintended consequences.

This is unavoidable, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote.  There’s no state of unspoiled nature to get back to.  Doing nothing is an option, but it is not a good option.  The best that can be hoped for is to minimize previous damage.

Her first example is the ongoing struggle to keep Asian Carp, an invasive species, from jumping from the Mississippi Valley watershed to the Great Lakes Basin.

Introduction of Asian Carp (four different species) into the North American environment was actually a suggestion by the great environmentalist Rachel Carson.

She thought the carp would be a good alternative to pesticides to control the growth of aquatic weeds and algae.   Aquatic weeds were choking some rivers so badly that not only boats, but swimmers, were unable to get through them.

Asian Carp accomplished their intended purpose. The carp ate up the weeds, but they also ate up and crowded out native fish, mussels and other water life.

On the Illinois River, Asian Carp are nearly two-thirds of estimated fish biomass, Kolbert wrote; on other tributaries, the proportion is even higher.

She wrote that one species can grow to more than 80 pounds, eat half its weight in a day and lay hundreds of thousands of eggs.  Another species can grow to 100 pounds.

There is an ongoing struggle to keep the carp out of the Great Lakes Basin, which is connected with the Mississippi watershed by means of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which was originally constructed to divert sewage and other pollution away from Chicago beaches.

The canal was originally so polluted that it was toxic to fish.  But thanks to the Clean Waters Act and the work of Friends of the Chicago River, it is now possible for the Asian Carp to survive.

The carp are held back by massive fishing, which can yield literally tons of carp in a few days, and by an electrified fence on the Chicago River.

The irony of all this is obvious, but Kolbert does not criticize Rachel Carson or the diggers of the Chicago and Ship Canal.  They did the best they could on the basis of what they knew.  This is life.  This is the human condition.

Someone I would vote for

Daniel Ebey, a seventh grade math teacher in suburban Dallas, has had his name changed legally to Literally Anybody Else.  He hopes to run for President under his new name.

A vote for Literally Anybody Else would not be a vote for literally anybody else, since Mr. Else is an actual person, but it would be voting figuratively for anybody else, which is almost as good.

That raises the question, as Lambert Strether of Naked Capitalism pointed out, of who his running mate should be.

Why would ISIS attack Russia? (if it did)

Generic terrorist organization (via Aleks)

Aleks on his Black Mountain Analysis blog gave good reasons for thinking last Friday’s terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall in Russia was carried out by members of ISIS.

But he also thinks the killers were mere cannon fodder.  They didn’t know who was pulling their puppet strings and didn’t know they weren’t intended to survive their mission.

The terrorists killed between 100 and 200 Russian civilians, many of them children.  Aleks says the video record shows they were drugged and must have rehearsed their attack somewhere else.  Russia’s primary objective will be to find the location of their rehearsal

ISIS has a history of being a tool of CIA operations in the Middle East.  Rank-and-file members of ISIS no doubt thought they were fighting to reestablish the Caliphate, but the reality was different.

The actual operations of ISIS were carried out against the government of Syria and other designated enemies of Israel and the USA.  They also furnished personnel for the so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria.  Many people in the Middle East noticed that they rarely if ever attacked Israeli or U.S. forces directly.

At the middle levels, they were mercenaries.  Aleks wrote that the same must have been true in the Crocus attacks.

I personally think that Ukraine, namely, the GUR, has either been involved or informed about what is going on. But who handled ISIS and who gave the orders?

I don’t think that only one or two services can control ISIS on its own. So, I think that some rogue elements of the CIA have been driving this. I don’t think that such a terror attack is official US policy, and I think that the official Washington is in panic because such a case is the last thing they want to happen. What was [Undersecretary of State Victoria] Nuland talking about in Kiev? Where is she now? Hmm…

However, President Putin mentioned a change in his policy towards Palestine. This indicates that Mossad could have been involved. It would have a motive. Remember the Wars of Liberation? Moreover, the sudden French terror alarm invoked soon after the attacks is strange as well. Had the French some dirt as well?

I don’t know. However, the main handler of ISIS here could have been MI6. It is the favorite weapon of the rogue elements of the USA and, thereby, the Western Oligarchs when it comes to attacking Russia without putting the USA at risk. If the UK goes down, who cares (from an American perspective)? No one would ever avenge it or go down for it.

Eyeless in Gaza

Six-year-old Palestinian girl after an eye removal operation (The Intercept)

Yasser Khan, a Canadian eye surgeon, has twice travelled to Gaza to perform eye removal operations on Palestinian children and adults injured by Israeli Defense Forces shrapnel.  Just back from his second trip, he was interviewed by The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill about what he’d seen.

What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine… 

Doctors have been kidnapped, and, yes, they have been tortured. They dehumanize the doctors and health care workers when they capture them. We’ve seen pictures of them, so we know this happens, and it does indeed happen.

A few of the doctors went through torture, and one doctor that came back, he’s a general surgeon, he came back, I was speaking to his wife, and he’s not the same anymore. He was tortured and he still has torture marks over his body, and he’s a general surgeon….

These doctors when they come back, the few that are released, there’s still a lot that are under custody with the Israeli forces, they’re not the same anymore…..

I’m an eye surgeon, an eye plastic surgeon, and so I saw the classic, what I penned “the Gaza shrapnel face,” because in an explosive scenario, you don’t know what’s coming. When there’s an explosion, you don’t go like this [cover your face], you kind of actually, in fact, open your eyes. And so shrapnel’s everywhere.

It’s a well-known fact that the Israeli forces are experimenting [with] weapons in Gaza to boost their weapon manufacturing industry. Because if a weapon is battle-tested, it’s more valuable, isn’t it? It’s got a higher value.

So basically they’re using these weapons, these missiles that purposely, intently create these large shrapnel fragments that go everywhere. And they cause amputations that are unusual. ……

Most amputations occur at the weak points, the elbow or the knee, and so they’re better tolerated. But these [shrapnel fragments] are causing mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations that are more difficult, more challenging, and also the rehabilitation afterward is also more challenging. Also these shrapnels [are] unlike a bullet wound. A bullet wound goes in and out; there’s an entry and exit point. Shrapnel stays there. So you gotta take it out.

So the injuries I saw were — I mean, I saw people with their eyes blown apart. And when I was there, and this is my experience, I treated all children when I was there the first time. It was kids that [were aged] 2, 6, 9, 10, 13, 15, and 16, and 17 were the ones that I treated. And their eyes unfortunately had to be removed. They had shrapnel in their eye sockets that I had to remove and, of course, remove the eye. There’s many patients, many children who had shrapnel in both their eyes.

And you can only do so much because right now, because of the aid blockade and because of the destruction of most of Gaza, there’s no equipment available to take shrapnel that’s in the eye out. And so we just leave them alone and they eventually go blind.

And so I saw these facial injuries, I saw limbs of children just kind of hanging off, barely connected. I saw abdominal wounds where you had, of course, the intestines exposed. ……

Eternal spring: a time lapse of ice melting

Melting mounds of snow, icicles dripping from gutters, and morning frost quickly disappearing from the grass are all telltale signs that spring is near. But what happens when the landscape is suspended in a perpetual state of thaw not tied to the change of the season? Christopher Dormoy wades into this question in “Eternal Spring,” a mesmerizing short film that magnifies the properties of melting ice.

Shot with a macro lens, the timelapse zeroes in small frozen pockets that appear like cavernous landscapes and vast tundras, tying the film to its large-scale concerns. “Melting ice is beautiful and symbolizes spring, but it can also symbolize the problematic aspect of our climate,” the Montreal-based art director says. Given the incredible loss of ice already happening at the poles, “Eternal Spring” takes on additional meaning when linked to the climate crisis and what it means to inhabit a rapidly warming planet.

The film is part of a larger archive of Dormoy’s experimental projects, which you can find on Vimeo.

==Via the Colossal web site, which is a good source for interesting photography and other things.

Nina Paley’s “This Land Is Mine”

I first posted this more than 11 years ago.  Sadly, it is still relevant.  

Click on A Guide to Who’s Killing Who for an explanation.

A quote on war and revolution

Wars happen when the government tells you who the enemy is.  

Revolutions happen when you figure it out for yourselves.

==Attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte (probably falsely)

US defeat in Ukraine and the coming world order

THE UKRAINE WAR AND THE EURASIAN WORLD ORDER by Glenn Diesen (2024)

I’ve long felt that I’m living at a turning point in history, comparable to the eve of the French Revolution or the First World War.  There are so many things that can’t go on as they are, although what will or should replace them is not clear.

Glenn Diesen is a Norwegian political scientist whom I watch frequently on podcasts on The Duran web site, such as the one above.  His new book is a history of relations among nations, the reasons for the imminent end of the U.S.-backed “rules-based international order,” and how the Ukraine conflict fits into this.

The first printing of the book seems to be sold out.  Rather than wait for a second printing, I ordered a PDF version of the book, which is something I rarely do.

Diesen says there are two basic frameworks for relations among states.  One is hegemony, when the most powerful state imposes order on all the rest.  The other is a balance of power, with no one state allowed to dominate all the rest.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the aspirational goal of Western European Christians was unity under the rule of the Pope and a reconstituted Holy Roman Empire.  The Pope crowned Charlemagne as successor to the Caesars in the year 800 CE.  His empire broke apart after his death, but was reconstituted in 962 CE by Otto I and continued as Europe’s dominant power for centuries.

In theory, all the other kings and nobles were vassals of the Emperor and subject to the rule of the Pope.  Conflicts between Pope and Emperor lessened the prestige and power of both, and the goal of European unity faded and was sometimes resisted in practice, but did not entirely disappear.

A turning point came with the Thirty Years War in 1618-1648.  It began as a religious war in which Catholic Austria sought to suppress rebel Protestant German princes.  Catholic France and Protestant Sweden joined the conflict, and it became the bloodiest conflict in European history prior to the 20th century.

The war ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, in which it was agreed that the rulers of each principality has the right to determine their subjects’ religion without outside interference.  This was the origin of what is called the Westphalian system.  In this system, each ruler agrees to respect the others’ sovereignty and right to exist.

Seneca the Stoic on the good life

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

The suspicious death of a Boeing whistleblower

John Barnett was a quality assurance inspector for Boeing at its assembly plant in North Charleston, S.C., where the 787 Dreamliner was put together.

He claimed Boeing was ignoring safety issues, and he claimed Boeing forced him to retire for that reason. He sued Boeing for allegedly attacking his character and making it harder for him to get a new job.  Boeing denies these charges.

John Barnett

After having started to give a deposition last Friday in preparation for his trial, he was found dead in his pickup truck in the parking lot of his hotel the following morning.

 He had a bullet wound in the head, and was holding a silver pistol in his hand.  There was a note, whose contents haven’t been publicly revealed.

A number of people find this suspicious.  So do I.  Why wouldn’t the recoil kick the pistol out of his hand?  As the New York Post reported:

Steve Chancellor, who has written two books on staged crime scenes and runs Second Look Training and Forensic Consulting, said that when someone dies by suicide, the gun only remains in the person’s hand 25 percent of the time.

“The mere fact that the gun was in the hand, I would pay attention to that,” he told The Post.

“Because many times when someone is trying to make it look like a suicide, they make that mistake and they put the gun in the hand.”

WCIV ABC Channel 4 News in Charleston reported:

A close family friend of John Barnett said he predicted he might wind up dead and that a story could surface that he killed himself.

But at the time, he told her not to believe it.

“I know that he did not commit suicide,” said Jennifer, a friend of Barnett’s. “There’s no way.”

Jennifer said they talked about this exact scenario playing out. However, now, his words seem like a premonition he told her directly not to believe.