Is this 1914 all over again?

[Updated 2022/3/1]

As I look around, I’m surprised at how everyone in the West seems almost to welcome war with Russia.  And I assume the feeling is much the same in Russia, although, unlike in the West, there have been peace protests, which have ruthlessly been put down.

Those of us distant from the battlefield don’t expect to fight ourselves.  But economic war, covert war and propaganda war are real forms of war, and we will pay a price for submitting to them.  It means we will be expected to accept austerity, authoritarianism and lies.

What surprises me is how eager some of our European allies have been to jump into the fray.  Don’t they realize the economic war will hurt them much more than it does Russia or us Americans?

It reminds me of what I read about the outbreak of the First World War.  Almost everyone thought it would end quickly.  Many thought it would be a glorious adventure.

In the years prior to World War One, just as at present, it had been a long time since there was a major war in Europe.   I think there are many leading frustrating lives who think war is a force that gives life meaning.

Both wars began with a large country (Austria, Russia) attacking a troublesome small neighboring country (Serbia, Ukraine) with a powerful sponsor (Russia, USA) in order to settle a problem for once and for all.  

They also began with the leaders of one country (Germany, Russia) feeling that they were being encircled, and had to fight to break out, and the leaders of the most powerful country (UK, USA) feeling their power was being threatened.

If the leaders had known what they were in for, they’d have found a way to compromise.  But once war began, compromise became impossible.  Too much had been sacrificed to settle for anything less than victory.

I don’t want to push the comparison too far.  To reverse something Mark Twain may have said, history rhymes, but it doesn’t repeat.

If we in the USA and UK are lucky, the actual fighting will be confined to what historian Timothy Snyder called the Bloodlands—Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Russia and the other killing fields of the 1930s and 1940s.  

But our economy, our government and our fundamental rights will be subordinated to the priority of winning the war.  And not just us Americans.   All the countries who are drawn into this war will be losers, including the nominal winners.

Our leaders in the USA will have an excuse to ignore the need to rebuild our manufacturing industry, to fix our dysfunctional government, to deal with the coming climate catastrophes, and we’ll take it.  National bankruptcy will be one of the bad possibilities.  Civilization-ending nuclear war is the worst.

Shock and awe in Ukraine

Kiev early this morning.

At this point in time, the Russian invasion of Kiev reminds me of the initial phase of the U.S. invasion of Iraq—except that the Russians so far seem to be doing their best to avoid civilian casualties and refraining from destroying the electrical grid, water and sewerage systems and other vital infrastructure.

Looked at purely as a military operation, it looks like a brilliant success.  Of course so did the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in their initial phase.

What made these wars disasters for the United States were the failed occupations and the unsuccessful attempts to establish friendly, self-sustaining governments.

President Vladimir Putin’s rule began with a bloody war to pacify the rebellious Chechen region.  Since then  Russia’s military occupations have been short and decisive.

Putin has stated he does not plan a permanent occupation of Ukraine.  He also says he plans to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine and to bring to justice all those who committed atrocities against Ukraine’s Russian minority.  Taking him at his word, is this possible without a long-term occupation?

The ideal outcome, from the Russian point of view, would be for the Ukrainian government to quickly surrender and agree to Russia’s terms.

What terms of surrender would Russia accept?  Would Ukraine be forced to become a puppet of Russia, like Poland during the Cold War era or the Central Asian countries today?  Or would Russia be willing to settle for neutrality, like Finland and Austria during the Cold War.

The least Russia would demand would be purging of Nazis from the Ukrainian government and armed forces, and turning over accused war criminals to Russia or to international tribunals.

This also would be the best outcome from the point of view of minimizing human suffering.  But it would leave Russia as the strongest—because most feared—power in Europe.

The risk Russia has taken is the possibility of getting bogged down in a long quagmire war, as the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan.

Why couldn’t the USA and Russia be friends?

The video is a 2015 lecture by political scientist John J. Mearsheimer.

After the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meetings, I thought the Cold War had ended for good, and the USA and post-Communist Russia would be partners.  A lot of other people, in the USA and in Russia, too, expected the same thing.  Why didn’t it happen?

The answer is in the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which was a 1992 policy document prepared by Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.  The document said that the way to keep the United States safe was to maintain the U.S. position as top nation and to prevent any other nation from becoming equal in power.

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.  

This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.  [snip]

The U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.  

In non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.  We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

This is the rationale for transforming NATO from an anti-Soviet alliance into an anti-Russian alliance.  The threat of Russia in the 1990s was not that it was hostile, but that it was potentially powerful.  

Here’s what George F. Kennan, said to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in 1998 about enlarging NATO.

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies.  I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

“We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”

Robots, sex, addiction and the human future

Robots have been used for physical labor for a long time. Some time ago they started being used for intellectual labor.

More recently they started being used for emotional labor—robot pets that provide companionship to children and lonely old people, for example.

And now we have sex robots.

If you accept that sexual pleasure need not be associated with marriage, human reproduction or even affection, and if you are okay with pornography and sex toys, it is hard to make a principled objection to sex robots.

The. problem with sex robots is that they will be able fulfill specific sex fantasies more precisely than actual human beings can.  And that means some people, maybe many people, possibly even most people, will be unable to move from the fantasy aspect of sex to the love, marriage and childbearing aspect.

Pornography addiction is a problem.  Internet addiction is a problem.  Some people can’t bear to be separated from their cell phones.  Would sex robots become just as addictive?

Suppose you could buy a sex robot that would allow you to act out a sexual fantasy of rape and torture, or of sex with a small child?  Would that be acceptable, since no sentient being was actually harmed?  Or would this intensify the forbidden desires? 

If you’re exclusively eat extremely spicy food, you may lose your appetite for bland food.  And what if you become habituated to eating things that don’t nourish you at all?  I hope you see the problem.

I note in passing that all the prototype sex robots seem to have the female form.  We men might react differently if there were a lot of large handsome, muscular male prototype sex robots.

The SF writer Charles Stross wrote two novels, Saturn’s Children and Neptune’s Brood, in which the characters were sentient androids.  Human beings had died out, presumably from apathy and lack of a sense of purpose, because anything biological humans could do, androids could do better.

I don’t believe sentient androids are possible.  I could be wrong, though, because I don’t really understand what sentience is.  

If sentient robot slaves, including sentient robot sex slaves, are possible, that opens up a whole new category of evil, and also a whole new danger to the human race, when the androids begin to understand the difference between slavery and freedom.

Texts of Putin’s and Biden’s talks

Address by the President of the Russian Federation.  Feb. 21, 2022.

Remarks by President Biden Announcing Response to Russian Actions in Ukraine.  Feb 22, 2022.

§§§

Some reactions to the speeches [Added 2022/2/23]

Putin recognizes Donbass republics: what comes next? by Gilbert Doctorow.

The body language of the speech – Putin has repudiated Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev, Yeltsin & mobilized Russian defense against US attack as never before by John Helmer for Dances With Bears.

Putin’s Century of Betrayal Speech by Branko Milanovic.  [The demon spell-check keeps changing Branko, the author’s first name, to “Frank.”]

Biden gives ’em heck & big promises by the Boston Herald editorial page.

§§§

[Added 2022/2/26]  I have trouble linking to official statements on the Russian government web site.  You can find most of these on The Vineyard of the Saker web site, which is maintained by an expatriate Russian living in the USA.

Incapable of making either war or peace?

A nation or individual should be capable of fighting if they must and making peace when they can.

The U.S. governing class, at this point in our history, seems incapable of doing either.

NATO & Russia 2017

The NATO alliance was formed to defend the western European nations against a possible Soviet invasion. Each member pledged to come to the aid of any other member that was attacked.

At the height of NATO’s power, there were hundreds of thousands of Americans stationed in Europe who were trained and prepared to fight the Red Army, if necessary.

The United States in the Cold War era was prepared for war, but also capable of negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which reduced the possibility of nuclear war between the great powers.

During the past 20 years, the U.S. government has grown increasingly belligerent toward Russia.  It canceled the ABM and IRNF treaties.  At the same time it has reduced its war-fighting capabilities in Europe, and we the American people have grown weary of military interventions.

After the 9/11 attacks, NATO allies, including France, sent troops to fight in Afghanistan in fulfillment of the self-defense pledge.  France did not follow the U.S. into Iraq, but some allies did.  Since then NATO allies have been less and less willing to support U.S. wars of choice.

So here we are.  Our government is unwilling to negotiate in any meaningful way with President Putin, but also unwilling to fight, except at arms length, through economic sanctions and shipments of arms.

I don’t justify everything the U.S. government did in the Cold War era.  That’s a topic for another time.  And I’m not a war hawk.  Far from it.  But there was a time when we Americans were capable of waging war, and also capable of negotiating treaties and abiding by them, and this is no longer so.

There are two ways of inviting trouble.  One is being too weak to defend yourself.  The other is going around starting fights.  I think we Americans would be willing and able to defend our homeland, but I don’t think the U.S. is capable of forcing our new “rules-based international order” on the world and I for one do not support it.

Putin makes his move in Ukraine

Well, it didn’t take long for my previous post to be overtaken by events.

Russia has recognized the independence of the Luhansk and Donetsk republics.  This almost certainly means that Russian forces will intervene to protect the separatists from Ukrainian forces.  It probably means that Russians will fight to drive Ukrainian forces back to the original borders of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Hopefully, the fighting will be confined to the Donbas region.

The U.S. government is in an embarrassing position, having whipped up war fever while being admittedly unwilling and unable to fight itself.

President Biden said that American troops would not fight in Ukraine because a direct American-Russian clash could escalate into World War Three.

This is true. The other reason is that American troops would be hopelessly outnumbered, and also unprepared to fight in unfamiliar country. This also applies to troops being rushed to Poland and Rumania.

Although this is embarrassing, I think Biden was right to not sacrifice the lives of American troops, just as a gesture.

This leaves the U.S. with only two ways to continue the fight: (1) Arm the Ukrainians and give them moral and economic support.  (2) Impose new economic sanctions on Russia.

The first means encouraging Ukrainians to fight and die in a war in which they are outmanned and outgunned.  The second means asking western Europeans to make serious economic sacrifices.  They might well ask: Why should we be the ones to expend blood and treasure?

Who is invading who in the Donbas?

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is sponsored by 57 countries, has a fact-finding mission in Ukraine.  The maps above show ceasefire violations, mainly explosions, that took place last Friday.

The line on the map is a cease-fire line between Ukrainian government forces and separatist forces, which was agreed to in 2015.  As you can see, most of the explosions happened on the separatist side of the line.

There are three possible explanations for these facts.

The first possibility is that they are an elaborate false-flag operation by Russia to justify a future invasion.  The evacuation of much of the Russian-speaking population of the Donbas would be intended to clear the way for an invasion.

The second possibility is that they are what they seem to be.  The purpose would be to provoke a reaction by Russia that could be used as an excuse to ramp up sanctions, prevent economic ties between Russia and the European Union countries and justify increased U.S. military spending.

When and if the predicted invasion doesn’t happen, the explanation will be that the Russians were deterred by President Biden’s and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s firm stance.

The third possibility is that the forces on both sides of the line are somewhat out of control, the ones on the government side firing somewhat more shells than those on the separatist side.  If this is so, neither side is fully in control of the situation, although both try to use it to their advantage.  This is the most dangerous of the three possibilities.

LINKS

Daily Report 2022 February 19 by the Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Who Is Firing at Who and Who Is Lying About It? by Bernhard for Moon of Alabama.

Ukraine: Where to Find the Truth in Enormous Detail by Craig Murray.

Joe Biden is trying to privatize Medicare

Branko Marcetic wrote a good article for Jacobin magazine about how President Biden is planning to privatize Medicare.

Over the past year, seniors around the country have been getting letters from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) informing them that they needn’t worry, but their doctor was now part of something called a direct contracting entity (DCE).

“Your Medicare Benefits have not changed,” the letters stress no less than twice. “NO ACTION NEEDED,” they blare.

If you take it from CMS, DCEs are simply a collection of different health care providers “who agree to work together to keep you healthy” — an innovative new payment model to keep health care costs down and raise the quality of care up. For its critics, the initiative is something far less benign.

“What direct contracting does is turn the public side of Medicare into a corporate goldmine,” says Diane Archer, president of Just Care USA.

Under traditional Medicare, when a beneficiary gets care from a doctor, a hospital or any other health care provider, the program reimburses that provider directly at a set rate.

Direct contracting adds a third party into the mix: Medicare makes a monthly payment to a DCE, which then decides what care a beneficiary will get, and uses that money to cover a specified part of their medical expenses — pocketing whatever they don’t spend as profit.

While making cost-saving efficiencies usually means cutting out the middleman, direct contracting adds one in.

In other words, as with health insurance, the less the physicians get paid, the higher the profit for the companies.

Critics like Physicians for a National Health Program warn that the program comes with the same kinds of pitfalls as Medicare Advantage, the program that for the first time carved out a role of private insurers in the public Medicare system, when it was passed as part of a Reagan-era deficit reduction bill forty years ago.

One is “upcoding,” the notorious practice where Medicare Advantage insurers make their patients appear less healthy than they really are, the better to drive up the payments they get from Medicare.

I say: “Keep your hands off my Medicare.”

LINK

Direct Contracting Entities: Wall Street Control of Traditional Medicare by Physicians for a National Health Program.

Joe Biden Is Quietly Pursuing the Creeping Privatization of Medicare by Branko Marcetic for Jacobin.

Warren Warns: Corporate Vultures Are Circling Medicare on Biden’s Watch by Jack Johnson for Common Dreams.  [Hat tip to Bill Harvey]

The Dark History of Medicare Privatization by Barbara Caress for The American Prospect.  [Hat tip to Bill Harvey]

Socrates on the blessing of being refuted

Socrates

The following is from Socrates on the Blessing of Being Refuted by Andrew Beer for the on-line journal Antigone.

Socrates says of himself: “[I am one of those people] who would be delighted to be refuted, if I say anything untrue, and who would be delighted to do the refuting, if someone else were to say something untrue.”

“But their delight would be no less,” Socrates continues, “in being refuted than in refuting: for I consider [being refuted] a greater good [than refuting], precisely inasmuch as it is a greater good to be released oneself from the greatest evil than to release another.” 

The greatest evil, Socrates next explains, is false opinion (δόξα ψευδής) concerning the subjects of the present conversation: “I believe there is no evil so great for a human being as false opinion about the things we are discussing right now.”

This is what I hoped for when I started this blog.  I wanted criticism that I could answer (validating what I wrote) or that show me I was wrong (leaving me wiser than before.).  Unfortunately I sometimes responded rudely tp criticism and drove away what might have been my most valuable critics..

The top optical illusions of 2021

These are the winners of the Top Optical Illusions of the Year contest for 2021.  

First place.

Second place (which I personally thought was the best).

Third place.

Here is a link to the Top Ten finalists.

What optical illusions prove is that the human mind is not a blank slate.  It is hard-wired to process information in certain ways.

Our visual information is received by light of different wave lengths falling on receptors (“rods” and “cones”) on the back surface of the eye.  But our brains process that information, and we see the world in three dimensions.  Because we do not perceive the world directly, it is possible to fool the brain.

What this means is that there are certain things that we see that our mental programming makes difficult or impossible to see.

Hat tip to kottke.org.

What I think about the Canadian trucker protests

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s emergency order is a radical violation of the principle of the rule of law.

He ordered Canadian banks and financial institutions to stop serving any participant or supporter of the Canadian trucker protests.

That means they’ll freeze their checking accounts, cancel their credit cards, cut off their insurance and refuse to issue them loans.

Of course the Canadian government was fully justified in making arrests of persons who unlawfully occupied their capital or blocked international bridge crossings.

But this doesn’t justify extreme actions against persons who haven’t been charged with any crime or, in many cases, have not violated any laws now on the books.

The Canadian trucker protest is an example of the uneven enforcement of laws against protesters.

Here in the USA, some kinds of protests are treated very harshly and others very leniently.  Sometimes it will protesters will be treated brutally by local authorities and coddled by federal authorities; sometimes it is just the reverse.

In Ottawa, it seems as if the truckers are being treated leniently by the local police, in contrast to the draconian policy of the national government.

I don’t think there will be a civil war in the USA, much less Canada, but if there is, it will have been possible because elements of the police and military support different sides.

I somewhat disagree with the truckers on the merits of their complaints.

The truckers initially protested requirements that they show proof of vaccination upon leaving Canada and and that they be subject to a two-week quarantine if they try to return unvaccinated.

Trying to prevent the spread of a deadly contagious disease is not tyranny.  The Canadian government has the right and duty to stop the spread of the virus

But vaccine passports, in my opinion, are not the best way to do this, because a vaccinated person can still be infectious and an unvaccinated person can be free from the disease.

It would be better to ask the truckers to show recent covid virus tests.  Or take their temperatures when they approach the border and, if they run a fever, ask them to take a virus test.

Where people stand on the truckers largely reflects where they stand on larger conflicts.

Team Red is largely pro-trucker and Team Blue is largely anti-trucker.  Rural people and people who work with their hands seem pre-disposed to be pro-trucker.  Urban people and college-educated professionals seem predisposed to be anti-trucker.

I’m not sure the protesters are representative of Canadian working people, or even of truckers as a whole.  But I see no particular reason to think the truckers are particularly racist.

LINKS

Banks are moving to freeze accounts linked to convoy protests | Here’s what you need to know by John Paul Tasker for CBC News.

Trudeau’s Money Heist: Emergencies Act Allows Seizure of Bank Accounts, Securities, Crypto of Those Suspected of “Links” to Convoy Members Without Court Order by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.

Squad member Ilhan Omar defends Ottawa cafe owner who donated to Canadian Freedom Convoy truckers by Ronny Reyes and James Gordon for The Daily Mail (London)

Why the Left Doesn’t Copy the Truck Protests by Ian Welsh.

What About the Canadian Truckers? by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative.

Thoughts on the Canadian Trucker “Freedom Convoys” by Lambert Strether for Naked Capitalism.

Reality Honks Back by N.S. Lyons for The Upheaval.

Global warming is here: We need to deal with it

Global warming is already here.  It is too late to avoid an era of continuing emergencies due to storms, floods, fires, droughts, heat waves and tidal waves.  The question is whether it will be possible to cope with these emergencies and to stop the acceleration of climate catastrophe.  

20 billion-dollar weather climate disasters in historical context by Adam B. Smith for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

In the Climate-Watching World, Everything New Is Old Again by Thomas Neuburger for God’s Spies.

Climate barbarism: Adapting to a wrong world by Jacob Blumenthal for Wiley Online Library.

Does Abraham Lincoln still deserve his pedestal?

Abraham Lincoln statue in Portland, Oregon, on Oct. 11, 2020

THE FIERY TRIAL: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner (2010)

WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE: The Life of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen B. Oates (1977)

When Abraham Lincoln was murdered by a fanatical pro-slavery diehard, the nation went into mourning.  His funeral train took 12 days to travel through seven states to his burial ground in Springfield, Illinois.  

An estimated 1.5 million viewed Lincoln’s body and 9 million watched the train or his hearse.  An estimated 25 million attended funeral services for him.  They were rich and poor, black and white, native-born and foreign-born.

A consensus arose, shared by almost everyone for 150 years,  that Lincoln was the greatest American, because his statesmanship preserved the Union from breakup and brought about the emancipation of American slaves.

But that consensus has been challenged.  Some now say Lincoln was nothing but a garden-variety racist and politician who only acted out of expediency.  Protestors have toppled at least one of his statues, and there have been demands for removal of others.

In order to reassess Lincoln’s legacy, I read these two biographies.  I was reminded that he was a man of an earlier era and not of ours.  Battle lines in his time were drawn differently.  I don’t think he would have known what to make of today’s controversies about race.

The slavery question bedeviled the USA from the earliest days.  The Republic of Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, which was the first abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere.  By 1804, all the states north of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River had abolished slavery.

But outside New England, abolition of slavery did not mean equal rights for black people.  Abolition did not necessarily give black people the right to vote, much less the right to equal treatment.

The motive in abolishing slavery was not predominantly humanitarian.  The great fear of white working people in the Northern states was having to compete with slave labor.

Slaveowners in the South had two great fears.  One was of abolition propaganda, which they feared could spark a slave revolt.  The other was that economic progress and growth in the North could reduce the South to a powerless minority.

Both fears had a basis in reality.  The North outpaced the South in every measure, including economic growth, population growth, education, infrastructure, the material standard of living and opportunity to rise in the social scale.  The poorest white people in the USA were in the areas where slavery was most predominant.  White people in those areas are still the poorest white Americans.  So all other things being equal, the slave states would be eventually left behind.

The South’s aim was to acquire new slave territory and bring new slave states into the Union.  This was partly because plantation agriculture as it was practiced then destroyed the fertility of the soil, and there was a continual need for new land.  New territory also was needed to preserve the balance of power of slave states vs. free states in the Senate.

World context of U.S. slavery, in maps

African slavery was a shameful part of American history.  The purpose of these maps is not to excuse slavery or deny its importance, but to provide context for understanding it.

At the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, slavery was legal in every transatlantic European colony in the New World from Quebec to Argentina.   Slavery was the most intense in the sugar and coffee plantations of Brazil, the sugar plantations of the West Indies and the tobacco plantations of British North America.

African Slave Trade, 1400-1900.  Source: Wikipedia.

The first abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere was by the Republic of Vermont, in 1777.   By 1804, slavery had been abolished throughout the northern United States—New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the territory of the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan—and still existed everywhere else.

In some states, though, abolition was gradual and did not take full effect until decades later.  Also, emancipated slaves were seldom granted full civil rights.

The younger generation and the decline of sex

Back in 2020, the conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher wrote a blog post deploring the growing lack of interest by young American women in marriage, children and heterosexual sex.

A blogger who called himself the Flaming Eyeball then wrote a blog post saying Dreher didn’t tell the half of it.  He linked to a series of article depicting a younger generation ravaged by poor physical and mental health, declining testosterone in young men, and loss of interest in dating, marriage, having children and in sex itself.  

A short time late he suspended his blog, but another blogger had taken the trouble to copy it.  

None of the trends he mentioned are new to me, and he didn’t even get into the topics of Internet addiction, pornography addiction and addiction to prescription drugs.  But getting all this information at one time in one post made me stop and think.

I’m hard-put to think of a single factor that would explain all of this.  It would have to explain not only rejection of old-time moral standards, but the general apathy and listlessness.

Has the decline of religion and traditional values left the new generations with a lack of purpose?  Do some people find a complete freedom of choice too much to deal with?  How much is due to addictions?

Or is there a general sense of hopelessness in the face of new existential threats to humanity—the new four horsemen of the apocalypse, famine, pestilence, nuclear war and global warming?

Or is there some insidious biochemical change in the environment, akin to lead poisoning?

I am re-posting the Flaming Eyeball links and summarizing their contents.  My goal is to create a second archive of this information, and to invite comments.  

Please let me know whether you think this is real, what you think the reason might be and what, if anything, might be a solution.

No Families, No Children, No Future by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative (2020)

There are more unmarried women in the United States than married women.  Fertility rates are at a 35-year low.  Thirty percent of American women under age 25 identify as LGBT.

The Kids Are Not Alright by the Flaming Eyeball (hat tip to Nikolai Vladivostock), saved by Eddie Willers on Anodyne Mendacity (2021). 

Flaming Eyeball said he’s a Zoomer university student, fairly successful and not an incel (involuntary celibate).  But he said a disturbingly large fraction of the guys he met in high school and college seldom or never went on dates, experienced sex or had girlfriends.  He thinks something must be going on.  So he did some research, the results of which follow.

War threat’s purpose is to keep U.S. allies in line

Click to enlarge.

U.S. policy for the past 10 or so years has been hard for me to understand. Our government has driven Russia, the world’s largest nuclear weapons power, into the arms of China, the world’s largest or second largest industrial power.

Since 2014, our leaders have talked about the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, but, as Scott Ritter has pointed out, they never tried to create a military force in or near Ukraine capable of resisting a Russian invasion.

The economist Michael Hudson has an answer.  U.S. war policy is not primarily about Ukraine or Russia.  Rather it is about the need for a war threat to keep U.S. allies in line.

Economic sanctions are not being imposed for strategic reasons, Hudson wrote recently. Rather the geopolitical struggle is an excuse for cutting off U.S. allies from trade with Russia, China and other designated U.S. enemies.

The U.S. is not pressuring Germany to stop Nord Stream 2 in order to block Russia in Ukraine.  It is whipping up war fever over Ukraine in order to block Nord Stream 2.

Here’s how he put it:

What worries American diplomats is that Germany, other NATO nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains that can be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment.

If there is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb them, what is the need for NATO?  And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why do foreign countries need to sacrifice their own trade and financial interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors?

These are the concerns that have prompted French Prime Minister Macron to call forth the ghost of Charles de Gaulle and urge Europe to turn away from what he calls NATO’s “brain-dead” Cold War and beak with the pro-U.S. trade arrangements that are imposing rising costs on Europe while denying it potential gains from trade with Eurasia.

Even Germany is balking at demands that it freeze by this coming March by going without Russian gas.

Instead of a real military threat from Russia and China, the problem for American strategists is the absence of such a threat.

All countries have come to realize that the world has reached a point at which no industrial economy has the manpower and political ability to mobilize a standing army of the size that would be needed to invade or even wage a major battle with a significant adversary.

That political cost makes it uneconomic for Russia to retaliate against NATO adventurism prodding at its western border trying to incite a military response. It’s just not worth taking over Ukraine.

A Chinese pianist performs Beethoven

My musical knowledge and appreciation is below average and I never heard Beethoven’s beautiful Für Elise before I came across this performance by Lang Lang a week or so ago.  It’s wonderful!

It’s interesting that so many Chinese musicians are superb performers of music in the classical European tradition, and also that there is interest in China in the Greek and Latin classics, especially when so many in the West are losing interest in the classics.

Waiting for Omicron: Links & comments

Covid Situation Continuing to Develop in Ways Not Necessarily to Officialdom’s Advantage by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.

The Big Name Journalists Who Are Trying to ‘Both Sides’ Covid by Melody Schreiber for The New Republic.

When We Are Done With Covid the Virus Will Not Be Done With Us by Bernhard for Moon of Alabama.

We’re being told that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is “mild” and that it soon will die down.  Infections and deaths in fact do seem to be declining, and this had better be permanent because we in the USA and other rich white countries don’t have a good alternative if it is.

We’re told that the Omicron virus is more infectious than the other variants, but less likely to kill us or leave us in intensive care.  This is true, but the number of deaths is bad enough and intensive care units in the USA are full to overflowing.

We’re further learning that immunity from vaccines and also from infection is not necessarily permanent.  We’re also learning that “mild” Omicron can create long-term organ damage, including brain fog, and shorten our life-expectancies.

Our basic resources for now are vaccines and masks.  I’ve been vaccinated, and I wear a mask when I’m indoors with people I don’t know, but this might not be enough.

If this doesn’t prove to be enough, we are told to blame the unvaccinated.  They are supposedly to blame for the fact that our hospitals and emergency care systems have been pared down so that there is no extra capacity for emergencies.

American capitalism demands the infection of China by Andre Damon for the World Socialist Web site.

Click to enlarge

I understand that the USA and other Western countries are not set up to do what the Chinese government does.  We are not capable of completely shutting down a medium-sized city overnight, making sure that every single family in the city has food and water and testing everyone for the coronavirus.  We could not build a completely functioning hospital in less than two weeks.

You can make the argument that preserving our values of individualism and limited government are more important.

But by what right do Americans demand that the Chinese relax their Covid restrictions so that world commerce flows more smoothly?  Why should they sacrifice the lives of their people in order to make things more convenient for us?

Our government let Covid take hold rather than impose moderate restrictions before the need was obvious to all.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans died as a result.  That, too, impeded world commerce.

New Triumphs & Struggles for Non-Profit Covid Vaxes by Hilda Bastian for Absolutely Maybe.

A Potential COVID Game-Changer by Walter Bragman and Andrew Perez for The Daily Poster.

Jeffrey Epstein and his protectors, exposed

PERVERSION OF JUSTICE: The Jeffrey Epstein Story by Julie K. Brown (2021)

Jeffrey Epstein was a rapist and a pimp.  He sexually abused young girls and trafficked them out to be abused by others.  

Yet for years he was shielded from criminal charges by his wealth and by his network of rich and powerful protectors.  

We the public may never know the names of Epstein’s clients.  But thanks to the reporting of Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, we do know some other things..

Her book, Perversion of Justice, touches on many aspects of the Epstein case, but the high points are how he used his wealth and connections to shield himself from prosecution for his crimes, and how he used seduction, blackmail and threats to trap young girls into sexual bondage.

She began her investigation in 2017 when Alex Acosta was nominated by President Trump to be Secretary of Labor.  Back in 2008, when Acosta was U.S. attorney for southern Florida, he signed a non-prosecution agreement that allowed Epstein to get off with a wrist slap in return to pleading guilty to trafficking young girls.

The fact that Epstein was prosecuted at all was due to the dogged persistence of Palm Beach Chief of Police and Detective Joe Recarey (who is deceased).  When they began to interview young girls victimized by Epstein, it seemed like an open-and-shut case, but they met resistance every step of the way.

Epstein was a social friend of the mayor of Palm Beach.  He donated expensive equipment to the Palm Beach Police Department and created a scholarship fund for children of police.  He was one of the leading members of the city’s social elite, and he was a lavish giver of gifts and donations to charity..

Epstein’s legal team consisted of Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and high-profile lawyer; Kenneth Starr, the former special prosecutor who brought about the impeachment of President Bill Clinton; and Jay Lefkowitz, a former senior adviser to both Presidents Bush.

He also hired a local lawyer, Jack Goldberger.  That resulted in an aggressive prosecutor, Dahlia Weiss, being pushed off the case, because her husband was one of Goldberger’s law partners.

The defense team gathered information about the girls Epstein had seduced, often looking at their social media and visiting them at their homes, trying to paint them as the seducers or at least as willing.  

One young woman phoned Recarey and told him Epstein’s investigators asked her about things that she had told him that she thought were confidential.  How did the investigator get access to that information? she asked. 

Reiter and Recarey got a search warrant for Epstein’s mansion, but when they got there, it had been stripped clean. Six computer hard drives had been removed.  Video surveillance cameras had been disconnected and the video recordings and other electronic data removed.  Nude photos of young girls that. had adorned the walls had been removed.

They never figured out who told Epstein of the warrant.

Palm Beach County prosecutor Barry Kirschner chose to take the case to a grand jury, although this wasn’t necessary.  He also chose to prosecute only one case, although Recarey had collected information on 14.

A universal graph of every crisis

Hat tip to Cheryl Rofer.

I recall coming across versions of this before.  I don’t know who originated it.