Dear Naked Capitalism Reader,
Welcome to July and The Best of Naked Capitalism. This month we say goodbye to Jerri-Lynn Scofield, a long-time well-loved author, and welcome KLG who will contribute posts on medical themes and issues. We're also expanding Yves's newsletter contributions to include her introductory essays ("Yves here:") to some crossposts. We'll miss Jerri-Lynn but we are excited about the changes coming to Naked Capitalism. And grateful that they are distracting us from the summer heat! | | Major Stories
07/27/22  Post by Yves Smith, One China Eyepoking Too Far: Biden Signals US Not Backing Down on Pelosi Taiwan Visit as China Promises Military Response. "The US is run by spoiled children who won't take 'no' for an answer. While I am not privy to what China has in the way of plans for Taiwan, and I welcome being corrected, I have yet to see any of the neocons make a substantiated allegation that China intended to invade Taiwan prior to the US meddling by arming Taiwan and supporting its nationalists. My impression from a considerable remove is that China was clearly not happy about Taiwanese declarations of independence, but was prepared to be patient and let time do its work. Specifically, China over time is becoming more affluent, which more high-level, well-paid technical and professional positions. And China has been encouraging Taiwanese to take them. ... But the US is frustrated at the China monster it has created. The US pushed to let China into the WTO even though it did not meet the requirements at the time. The US also ran sustained and large trade deficits with China, so our demand was a key driver of its rapid rise. It boggles the mind that the US is now upset that turning China into its factory and seeking to enrich 1.4 billion citizens so we could sell them Disney movies and deodorant had led to China becoming a dominant economic and increasingly important military power. If it was obvious enough in 2007 for Putin to talk about a multi-polar order at the Munich Security Conference, it was obvious to anyone paying a smidge of attention. The neocons above all seem unable to process that the days of US hegemony are over. It boggles the mind that they are not just eyepoking but escalating greatly with China via the still-planned Pelosi visit to Taiwan in August. As we'll explain, China is fully cognizant of the fact that Pelosi is number two in line after Harris should something happen to the increasingly addle-brained Biden. And they don't buy for a second that Pelosi is operating without the explicit approval of the Administration."
Colonel Smithers comments: "As so often, Yves' pithy opening remark(s) summarises / depicts what's going on / wrong. I won't comment much on what goes on in DC, but hope that former UK official David pipes up about the different forces at play in DC. Yves is not wrong to call out the children. Why? Much of the UK and US policy making and measures are proposed by people often relatively young and with little or no experience of and even interest in the area of policy making they are currently engaged in. Few speak a (relevant) foreign language and may not even have visited the region in question. They have no concept of the long term, hence NAFTA, China's accession into the WTO, Ukrainian membership of NATO and even Brexit. The revolving door with think tanks, Wall Street and DC and, increasingly Whitehall, does not require career long expertise a la David or, say, India's foreign minister Jaishankar. The MSM mirror is similar, hence the coverage and lack of insight and analysis."
07/18/22 Post by Yves Smith, Russia's Campaign in Ukraine: Nearing an Inflection Point? "Notice how the amount of Western reporting on Ukraine has fallen off dramatically? That's because the war is going well for Russia and its allies. Russia is continuing its steady and systematic grind through Donbass. However, Russia has also picked up the pace of its shelling, has moved some of its best equipment into Ukraine, presumably pre-positioning, and just had the head of its Ministry of Defense, Sergey Shoigu, visit key commanders in Donbass. Not only did Shoigu state that Russia would put an end to the Ukraine shelling of civilian targets in Donetsk, but also 'gave the necessary instructions for further buildup of the troops actions in all operational directions.' Part of this effort to stop the Ukraine shelling of civilians is recent and large uptick in Russian ballistic missile attacks. Jacob Dreizen (please filter out the Trumpian views for the comments on weaponry) describes starting at 14:10 of his latest video how the Ukrainians are so low on artillery that they are forced to use it strategically and are sending off 1-2 big salvos a day, targeting Russian ammo dumps behind the lines, with some effect. However, other Russia-friendly sources have claimed that Ukraine has been using Western munitions, including the HIMARS, to shell civilians in Donbass. Per Dreizen, Ukraine uses their Tochka-U's to tie up Russian missile defenses and then send some HIMARS and a few get through. ... To step back and put this in context, keep in mind that commentators keep focusing on Russian progress in terms of capturing territory, when that is not Russia's primary goal. It is to destroy Ukraine's ability to wage war. Thus while some Western accounts have fixated on the idea that Russia has or hasn't taken Bakhmut, Russia is more interested in getting fire or actual control of key roads and railroads to deny resupply and better yet, encircle troops so they can capture them or at worse, lead them to flee, abandoning materiel. Accounts in the last few days indicate that Russia is destroying Ukraine units and soldiers at an accelerating pace."
Cocomaan comments: "The silence in western media on Ukraine is super noticeable. I was just saying to my wife that they will need a new Current Thing soon to replace the various Current Things that have captured the cycle and then fallen off. Maybe a coup attempt against Z will be the thing to do it. Meanwhile you have blogs like Noahpinion saying today that Ukraine may be one of the successes of the Biden administration. What? How?"
07/25/22 Post by Yves Smith, Some Implications of the UN's Ukraine Grain and Russia Fertilizer/Food Agreements. "Since the battlefield action in Ukraine has slowed down a tad as Russia has been rotating troops and allegedly moving in more materiel, the big news story has been the UN success in consummating two deals. The one much talked about is coming up with a process for getting grain supposedly stuck in the Ukraine ports shipped out. The text for 'Initiative for the Safe Transportation of Grain and Food Products from Ukrainian Ports' is embedded at the end of this post. The second agreement, which has gotten very little attention, is that of the UN committing to 'facilitate the unimpeded exports to world markets of Russian food and fertilizer.' This goes well beyond the process established for transport of grain out of Ukraine. To work, several elements of the current sanctions against Russia and Belarus would need to be unwound. Since as we will explain, we doubt this will happen to the degree needed. If so, Russia will have succeeded in firmly establishing that blame for hunger resulting from reduced shipments of its fertilizer and food will lay squarely with the so-called Collective West. More generally, these two agreements illustrate the fix that the US, Europe, and their Asian allies have gotten themselves into, by throwing massive economic sanctions at a country that is a major player in way too many commodities they can't live without, from oil and gas to aluminum, titanium, neon, wheat ... to nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilizers. They believed they could break Russia's economy and use the resulting chaos to resume 1990s-style looting, either by splitting up the country or installing Yeltsin 2.0."
Stephen comments: "Thank you. It seriously had not occurred to me that the part of the deal relating to Russian food and fertiliser may have very real little effect. But your argument as to how commercial operators will respond feels spot on. Very few players will want to run the risk of being accused of aiding Russia by a US / EU that may even be itching to go after 'sanctions evaders' as a projection for their inability to get their way. I would want a signed letter or indemnity of some form from the Foreign Office for whatever I was doing. Case by case. As cover. Cannot see too many of these being issued."
07/21/22 Post by Jerri-Lynn Scofield, Farewell Post: I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together. "During the last couple of weeks, I went back and reread many of my posts to select some to discuss here. Let me begin by mentioning some posts I wrote during the first year of the pandemic. Some of what I posted has been superseded by subsequent events. Yet a couple of themes from these posts are still very much germane. Such as that many other countries initially coped far better with COVID-19 than did the U.S. And second, that the Democrats - e.g., especially Andrew Cuomo, who throughout much of 2020 was being hailed as a Second Coming character - was, actually not doing a very good job at all, when New York's performance was compared to places such as Hong Kong, which at that time was. In fact, he would eventually resign in disgrace, not alas, held accountable for his mishandling of the COVID-19 situation in New York state's nursing homes - as he should have been. Instead, it was Me-Too allegations that caused his downfall ... Fast forward to today, when Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky have managed to botch the current U.S. pandemic response - to the point where I'm nostalgic for the Trump administration's relative competence. To be sure, there was a bit of a deer-in-the headlights feel to early Trump policy. At least Trump and his minions managed to roll out vaccines quickly (leaving to one side how effective those might be). And Trump himself seemed open to considering that vaccines weren't the be-all and end-all of a comprehensive coronavirus response. Remember how he was ridiculed for touting hydroxychloroquine as a possible treatment for the disease, going so far as to strong-arm the Modi government to ship Indian supplies of the drug to the U.S. Note I'm not here opining on the efficacy of any particular COVID-19 treatment protocol; that's a question way above my pay-grade. My point is merely this: at least Trump seemed to recognize that a vaccine-uber-alles policy wouldn't suffice to halt the pandemic. It's been said many times but I'll nonetheless repeat it here: if Trump had made even some of the outrageous decisions taken since January 2021 - I'm thinking of the premature mission accomplished stance and dropping mask mandates as a reward for getting vaccinated - he would have been crucified by the media. ... Some of you might ask, if writing for you, the readers of Naked Capitalism, is such a great gig, then why am I retiring? Answer: I'm not retiring from writing entirely. Instead, I want to focus exclusively on my fiction. I'm nearly finished with Death in the Deep Red Sea, the first in a planned series of seven mysteries featuring private detective Durga Roy. Some years before the pandemic struck while I was on a Red Sea diving safari, a briefing for a dive on the Thistlegorm wreck sparked a novel. As I prepared to enter the water, I wondered whether any munitions bales that went down with the ship when the Luftwaffe sank it during World War II still posed a hazard. Could they explode? After all, bomb disposal teams are occasionally called upon to remove unexploded bombs from fields in Flanders and central London, among other places. What about underwater munitions? At the same time, I also happened to be reading Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile. Voila! I began to write a locked room mystery set on a diving boat. One thing that attracted me to this story was that by setting the explosion underwater, I could more or less ignore modern forensic techniques. I didn't want to write some CSI spin-off. Instead: Boom! People die. And any forensic evidence washes clean away. Leaving my detective free to use 'little grey cells' to unravel the mystery: who done it? And why?."
The Rev Kev comments: "Take care, Jerri-Lynn. Gunna miss you. In looking back, I think that the most important thing that I learned from all your work was the dangers of plastic of all things. Nowadays I regard it as a Clear and Present Danger because of the threat that it poses. Would never have thought about plastic like that before reading your work. In passing, if your detective Durga Roy is scuba-diving down onto the SS Thistlegorm, tell her to keep an eye out for another ship that went down in the Red Sea - the SS Dacca - as it has yet to be found. Most people wouldn't think so but the Red Sea is pretty deep in places."
07/21/22 Post by Brett Wilkins, 'Crushing News': Appeals Court Greenlights Georgia's 6-Week Abortion Ban. "Yves here: What the article skips over are the draconian punishments for women who obtain abortions for fetuses deemed to have heartbeats. In Alabama, it's MDs who are sanctioned for giving deemed-to-be-illegal abortions (allowed only in cases of endangerment of the mother, rape, or incest). In Georgia, the mother is subject to the death penalty for getting an abortions. ... Finally, what bothers me is that despite the considerable upset and concern about these retrograde laws, I don't see any serious discussion, let alone evidence of action, about creating an underground railroad for women who want abortions. For instance, I see the Planned Parenthood pledge of the 'We're here to help' sort not just as disingenuous but actively putting women at risk. If a woman in Georgia leaves the state to have an abortion and returns to Georgia, she is subject to prosecution for murder in Georgia., particularly if she left fingerprints, like buying a pregnancy test. ... I see a dearth of practical advice that is sufficiently cognizant of the legal and surveillance exposures: How can pregnant women communicate safely? Get transportation out of state? And if need be, get help in moving permanently to a state that is less hostile to women? Women and men who support abortion should be coming up with methods to help these women navigate so their actions (information gathering and movement) will be well-hidden in a flow of non-abortion-related activity."
The Rev Kev comments: "You just know that it can get worse. What if Georgia arrests a woman returning from another State after having a legal abortion and not only charges her with murder but also for kidnapping that new 'life' out of the State."
07/13/22 Post by Lambert Strether, New Biden BA.5 'Plan' Openly Abandons Metrics for Preventing Infection, Butchers Mask and Ventilation Policy. "In policy terms, the 'Fact Sheet' is not materially different from the Administrations 'National COVID-â 19 Preparedness Plan' of March 2, with the exception of a focus on 'equity,' a word that does not appear in the 'Fact Sheet', presumably because it has been achieved. There's more specific content on both masks and ventilation in the 'Fact Sheet' that in the 'Prepareness Plan,' which would be a good thing were the content not wholly inadequate, not to say lethal if you follow the advice. (I can't see that the White House Office of Science and Technology, which is good on both topics, had any input whatever, which would â€" hold onto your hats, here, folks â€" support the idea that the 'Fact Sheet' is a mere public relations strategy.) ... In this post, I'll skip over the vaccination and booster controversies, and focus on the Biden Administration's strategic goals, and also on masks and ventilation. I'm doing this for two reasons. First, I'm committed to policy of layered protection ('Swiss Cheese Model'), which I think would both subsume Biden's vax-first policy and be more effective in preventing airborne transmission, especially given that the operational definition of Biden's 'Preparedness Plan' has turned out to be 'Let 'Er Rip,' turning the United States into a global reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Second, I believe that the Biden Administration's guidance on both masking and ventilation is lethal, or to put matters more politely, won't save as many lives as it could. (The 'Fact Sheet' relies heavily on CDC content, so I'll have to stumble into that gruesome morass as well, for which I apologize in advance.) "
Lex comments: "To your point on improving those interactive models. The data on the volume of one human breath is easily available (without checking, i think it's 500 mL/breath and 10-15 breaths/minute). It would be so easy to make the models better that the fact they aren't better suggests it's intentional. Here's a little story, a parable if you will. I do a lot of indoor mold investigations and one of the things I tell people is that mold spores are everywhere all the time. Sometimes I make a little 'joke' about how the only way to not have spores indoors is if your HVAC system ran through a HEPA filter and then point out that nobody does that. Except this one time I was at a nursing home and the facility director said, 'We did that.' Turns out they only have to change the HEPA once per year because it has cyclonic prefiltration, etc. He told me that while the install was more expensive than other options (they had to replace the HVAC anyhow), in the first year of use the incidents of cold/flu dropped by more than 60% with no other controls (this was long before Covid). It turns out that the community fireworks are launched from next door and in the past the smell of powder would just coat the whole facility. After the HEPA install nobody could tell the fireworks were launched. While you couldn't retrofit this to any old commercial or home HVAC system because the fan wouldn't be speced to handle it, I'll bet you could build a retrofit to those units where a separate fan pulled through the HEPA(s) and fed the make up air to the HVAC unit. It would require some balancing of fans, but modern commercial HVAC requires lots of balancing anyhow."
07/20/22 Post by Yves Smith, IM Doc Could Not Get A Monkeypox Test for a Patient. What that Says About the Sorry State of the CDC and Public Health. "Medical experts and some pundits are raising alarm about the spread of monkeypox, a far more containable disease than Covid. But apparently because the public has been told to get used to endemic Covid, it's supposed to resign itself to endemic Covid. A fresh report from IM Doc illustrates how appalling state of public health in America. ... From IM Doc at the start of the week: Patient has had fever and chills and horrible headache for 3 days. A reticulonodular rash has developed but no vesicles yet. They have been playing in clubs, parties, and orgies in 4 major cities the past 2 weeks. There are so many things in that diagnostic differential but of course monkeypox is right up there. And of course NO TESTING IS AVAILABLE. I called all levels of health department and even CDC today. The CDC is voice mail hell. Never talked to a human. It took several hours for a health dept human but by then the patient was already gone potentially spreading the wealth everywhere. They are acting as if I was talking about the Martian Flu. Again, we have known about this two months now, and it was like I was asking for the Holy Grail. Testing? 'I need to call so and so ... ... not sure ... ..but I'll get right back to you ... ... ..'. And don't get me started about their handling of the quarantine.'"
Juneau comments: "If this continues to spread, I imagine fomite barriers that we originally got to protect against Covid may become more important, especially for health care workers (gloves and shields in particular). This virus can live on surfaces for days (up to 15 days on bedding per SF DOH). Thank you Yves and IM Doc and GM for raising awareness. There are public health experts who live and train to help out in these situations and it seems their hands are tied yet again. My heart hurts for those who are exposed and can't get the proper help, and for the experts who have apparently been sidelined to serve other purposes."
07/06/22 Post by Yves Smith, The Coming Sanctions-Induced Economic Tsunami? "Today I am risking being too glib, but my excuse is aspiring to meet the Einstein standard, 'Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.' It's not hard to see that as rough as economic conditions are now, they are set to get worse. And it's not hard to see that despite the considerable blowback from the sanctions against Russia, the West is not going to relent. Here's a simple baseline forecast. Russia wins in Ukraine. The West may try to define it somehow as not a victory, but it's hard to see how Russia does not take the entire Black Sea coast plus Ukraine east of the Dneiper by the end of the year, and I hazard to guess sooner, say October-November. What Russia decides to do with the western part is path dependent and so in play (consider how possible military coup/Zelensky flight, Democratic November wipeout, rising political strife in Europe, Poland deciding to get expansionist could all factor into Russian decisions). "
ChrisRUEcon comments: "When will the majority of the denizens of the US/EU realize the folly and malevolence of their so-called leaders? How many wars are you going to let these leaders lie you into without consequences? How much suffering are you expected to endure on behalf of the warmongering 1% and their apologists? I keep waiting for Americans to get angry at the right things instead of at each other. Sometimes I see signs of hope, but the level of inception as consent manufacturing is unbelievably strong. #NC is a place that encourages 'prepared minds' ... thankful for it, everyday."
Business/Finance
07/15/22 Post by Nick Corbishley, Banks Begin to Fret About the Threat of Civil Unrest. "Bank CEOs have good reason to be worried about rising civil unrest, as economic conditions deteriorate fast around the world. If 2019 was the year of protest, 2022 could be the year of unbottled rage. 'Businesses should prepare for a rise in civil unrest incidents as the cost-of-living crisis follows hard on the heels of the COVID pandemic.' That is the message of an article published on the corporate website of Allianz, the world's largest insurance company with over €1.1 trillion in assets. It reflects the growing concerns among executives in the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector about the risk of societal breakdown. ... Recent protest movements have already exacted a heavy toll on both economies and companies, the article notes. In 2018, French retailers lost $1.1 billion in revenue in just a few weeks of the Yellow Vest movement's Saturday protests against rising fuel prices and economic inequality. A year later in Chile, an increase in subway fares in the country's capital sparked large-scale demonstrations, leading to insured losses of $3 billion. South African riots of July 2021 caused $1.7 billion of damage. One recent protest the article doesn't mention is the Canadian Freedom Convoy's blockade of the US-Canada border in February this year, which is estimated to have caused over $1 billion in losses daily. ... According to the Verisk Civil Unrest Index Projections, 75 countries will likely see an increase in protests by late 2022."
chris comments: "Nick, from my travels around the US lately, things are going weird. It seems like people are just throwing up their hands and saying 'F$%& it all!' For example, I was in deep south Virginia on the coast yesterday. Not the nice places where you have beach house and restaurants. The nasty places where the roads aren't good and you have the remnants of shipyards. Anyway, stopping for gas at local regional chain, there was a group of drivers from various companies complaining to the management at the store because they couldn't buy salads for their lunch. The reason they couldn't buy salads was because the order for lids for the bowls used by the store for salads had not been received in two days. So they were out. Rather than just make the salads in lidless bowls, the store manager had decided to not let the deli staff make the salads. So you had a UPS driver, a random trucker for a logistics company, an Amazon driver, a FedEx driver, a local delivery person, and the fuel truck driver complaining that they wanted their salads and they didn't care that they wouldn't have lids. They needed the salads to eat healthy on the road. No fights erupted. But the drivers and the management were both clearly frustrated. I think this kind of thing is happening everywhere in the US lately. What I find odd about it is that I remember when a big reason capitalism was so obviously superior to communism was that we didn't have bread lines. Our super markets had all this stuff. But now that our version of capitalism has created all these bizarre shortages, you don't hear about how things aren't supposed to be this way in a capitalist society. I have no idea when enough people will get sick of the status quo and begin to rebel. The more I see different places in the US experience these issues the more I can feel the pressure building. Who can tell what will be the event that forces a release?"
07/08/22 Post by Yves Smith, CalPERS Cooks the Books While Taking an Unnecessary Loss to Exit $6 Billion of Private Equity Positions. "CalPERS is up to its old crooked, value-destroying ways. Its sale of $6 billion in private equity positions, at a big discount ... .because CalPERS was in a hurry despite no basis for urgency, shows yet again the sort of thing the giant fund routinely does that puts it at the very bottom of financial returns for major public pension funds. Oh, and on top of that, CalPERS admitted to Bloomberg that it is lying in its financial reports for the fiscal year just ended this June 30 by not writing down these private equity assets. "
flora comments: "Welp, CalPERS is so consistently one way (down) in its economic trades I'm starting to think there's a plan. (Not joking.) Former CA Atty. General X.Becerra won't be all over this one, though. He's in the B. admin now. (Like Kamala, his predecessor as CA AG.) Thanks for your continued reporting on CalPERS, PE, and pensions."
07/08/22 Post by Nick Corbishley, Washington Doubles Down on Hyper-Hypocrisy After Accusing China of Using Debt to 'Trap' Latin American Countries. "Washington has intensified its Latin American charm offensive (onus on the word 'offensive') by warning of the dangers posed by China's increasing use of 'debt trap' diplomacy in the region. It's clear who the message was intended for, given it was conveyed via a Spanish-only interview of the Commander of US Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, published by the Spanish edition of Voice of America. In the interview Richardson says that China is taking advantage of the growing economic vulnerability of many Latin American countries in order to offer them, among other things, high-interest loans that the countries will later struggle to service. This, she says, is one of the strategies by which China is trying to expand its power and reach in the region. By helping to finance the construction of ports, telecommunications facilities and other infrastructure projects, China is saddling countries with huge amounts of unpayable debt. Battered by the ongoing economic slowdown and high global inflation, many governments in South America see these projects as a means of shoring up their finances. "
Michael Hudson comments: "China normally stretches out the payment when a country can't pay. It doesn't enforce payment. And it's looking for equity investments that actually generate revenue, not just currency loans to governments (usually to finance capital flight in advance of a non-right-wing president being elected) as under US/IMF policy. The crisis will come this summer: Who will the Global South pay: US$ bondholders, China, or will they put paying more for food and energy first. Russia and China will provide energy and food exports on credit â€" but NOT simply to enable US$ debt to be paid"
Continuing Themes
07/20/22  Post by KLG, 'The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine'. "When we go to the doctor, we hope she bases her interaction with us on what has come to be called Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), which is the 'conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence everyday practice.' This is certainly how medical students and resident physicians think they are taught to choose how to treat their patients. But how does theory meet practice? Not so well according to The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research (IEBM) by Jon Jureidini (Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Adelaide) and Leemon B. McHenry (Emeritus Lecturer in Philosophy at Cal State-Northridge), which was published in 2020. An accessible, short precis of their work was published in BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) in March 2022. ... The gory technical details are included in the book so there is no reason to repeat them here. My question is 'How did 'science' go so far off the rails?' Money is the short answer. Money is also the correct answer. ... The problem with science conducted with a commercial outcome is that disinterest in the outcome required of a genuine Popperian scientist is essentially impossible in practice. This is marketing, not science. Clinical trials have been important in modern medicine since James Lind showed that citrus fruits prevent scurvy. Double blinding followed the development of the placebo, and shortly after World War II Bradford Hill showed in a clinical trial that streptomycin in association with para-aminosalicylic acid cures pulmonary tuberculosis (and at about the same time, using similar reasoning, Hill and Richard Doll also demonstrated that tobacco causes lung cancer). James Lind and Bradford Hill answered critical medical questions as scientists who went where their data and results sent them. According to Drs. Jureidini and McHenry, 'the randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial was perhaps the most important discovery of modern medicine.' One might use 'development' instead of 'discovery,' but the message is the same ... Unfortunately, 'the validity of this new paradigm ... depends on reliable data from clinical trials and because the data are largely, if not completely, manipulated, by the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, evidence-based medicine is largely an illusion.' "
SKM comments: "Much appreciated article, excellent analysis of the problem and a rarer clear identification of the fundamental source of the problem. Really look forward to more and to the ensuing discussion of this frightening problem afflicting us all. 'a lot of very smart and very highly qualified people have made fools of themselves by not rigorously questioning long held beliefs.' I agree with PK re the fact that this is compoounded by the extremely common feature of medical/clinical practise/research, viz the frequent failure to re-examine the underpinnings of current medical beliefs ( hardening into dogma all too often). Having had to look very deeply into such dogma in several medical specialties I have seen this at work. The mechanism often appears to be traceable if you look at how current dogma arose in the early postwar period when ideas about for example thyroid disease, heart disease, diabetes began to be formed often based on shaky or no evidence, certainly no rigorous studies. Opposing belief camps were formed and whichever theory won (not usually because any sort of proof had been supplied) slowly became accepted as fact. In some fields this was the point at which Pharma entered the fray and designed pills to deal with the clinical fall-out from these flawed theories, at which point any possibility of questioning the evidence was lost. The worst example is the so-called lipid hypothesis of heart disease and the scandal of Statin marketing. Diabetology and thyroidology are similarly affected although the thyroid situation is exclusively attributalbe to PK`s point (nothing to do with drug sales) - institutional schlerotic thinking, where no-one dares question the convictions of the big cheeses of the discipline concerned. The topic is too complex for a post so I`m sorry I can`t back up these points with references etc All this is to say nothing of what the pandemic has finally revealed about what modern medecine is really now about! All this is a source of incalculable, unnecessary, often extreme human suffering and it continues to break my heart.."
07/12/22 Post by Michael Hudson, Michael Hudson: The End of Western Civilization - Why It Lacks Resilience, and What Will Take Its Place. "The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors. All antiquity recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends to be exploitative and hence socially injurious. The moral values of most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and wealth addiction, which the Greeks called philarguria- love of money, silver-mania. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that wealth often was obtained at the expense of others, especially the weak. The Greek concept of hubrisinvolved egotistic behavior causing injury to others. Avarice and greed were to be punished by the justice goddess Nemesis, who had many Near Eastern antecedents, such as Nanshe of Lagash in Sumer, protecting the weak against the powerful, the debtor against the creditor. ... What did notseem likely 2500 years ago was that a warlord aristocracy would conquer the Western world. In creating what became the Roman Empire, an oligarchy took control of the land and, in due course, the political system. It abolished royal or civic authority, shifted the fiscal burden onto the lower classes, and ran the population and industry into debt."
Amfortas the hippie comments: "warlord aristocracy i have seen the same, in embryonic form, even at the small scale of my county petri dish. ... as well as just about every jawb i've ever had. it's in the dna, now. i'm anomalous as a bossman(when i can afford to be one for a time), in that i don't want slaves, or vast power over others. and i'm also anomalous, in that i avoid debt like the plague. even the working poor/precariat i know out here all have credit cards(i've never had one) it's just how its done. thanks, agin, Perfesser, for tying all this up with a bow. such already cracked nuts are perfect for sending to people, so that we can talk about such things later."
07/05/22 Post by Jerri-Lynn Scofield, Supremes Kayo Climate Change Regulation: West Virginia v. EPA. "The Supreme Court issued another blockbuster 6-3 opinion last Thursday in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in which it ruled that the Clean Air Act didn't provide EPA expansive powers to regulate carbon emissions. The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, re-establishes his shaky control over the Court - which had last week in the Dobbs case overturned the longstanding Roe v. Wade precedent, despite his quibbles and wish to allow that precedent to stand. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had promoted his nomination to the Supreme Court and this latest decision fulfils the Chamber's longstanding priority of guting federal regulatory authority (see David Siroia's take in Jacobin, Chief Justice John Roberts Is Carrying Out Corporate America's Long-Term Plan Perfectly.) ... I'll instead confine myself to two immediate implications of the latest decision, the first, the impact on U.S. global leadership and the second, the limitations the decision imposes on the ability of U.S. states to regulate, now that the feds cannot - or may not- do so in the absence of further congressional action."
Solarjay comments: "And what is even more disappointing to me is that the Dems had to anticipate a range of rulings. They could have passed any number of new laws to specifically address this or had bills ready to go to vote on. And just like Roe, nada, not a single action nothing. just vote harder. It's going to be a wipeout in the fall and our environment is going to suffer even more. Preventable snd so sad to see"
Other Politics
07/26/22 Post by Nick Corbishley, Unbeknown to Most US Citizens, Washington is Preparing to Share Their Biometric Data With Dozens of Other National Governments. "The US is planning to give up its citizens' most precious data in exchange for the biometric data harvested by its 'partner' governments in Europe and beyond. The Biden Adminstration is currently making an offer to dozens of governments in Europe and beyond that they probably will not be able to refuse. On offer is access to vast reams of sensitive data on US citizens held by the Department of Homeland Security. It includes the IDENT/HART database, which the British civil rights organization Statewatch describes as 'the largest U.S. Government biometric database and the second largest biometric database in the world, containing over 270 million identities from over 40 U.S. agencies.' Biometric identifiers include fingerprints, facial features and other physiological characteristics that can be used for automated identification. In many cases, these identifiers have been harvested by the US government without the consent of the citizens in question ... The US government will also gain access to the biometric data of untold millions of law-abiding civilians of VWP countries who, like untold millions of law-abiding citizens in the US, have been caught up in their respective government's biometric data dragnet. At least 600 law-enforcement agencies in the U.S., including ICE, have used the services of US company Clearview, which sells facial recognition tools to governments and companies after scraping the photos of hundreds of millions of people from social media platforms without their consent."
Petter comments: "Recalling from memory - the USA Visa form, both the green one and the electronic one, had a question, 'Have you ever been convicted for a crime of moral turpitude?' Moral turpitude? What the H is moral turpitude? I always answered NO but very nervous going through Immigration. Knowingly lying on the Visa application could also result in a prison sentence of five to ten years, IIRC."
07/23/22 Post by John Helmer, Seven Skripal Secrets The Secret Intelligence Service Didn't Want To Let Out. "In March of this year, the first of the seven Skripal secrets began to slip into the public prints when Adam Chapman (lead image, centre), a lawyer who was on sabbatical from his London office at the time, was appointed by the British government to represent the two Skripals as their legal representative. The official announcement of his appointment appeared on April 4. For the first time since March 4, 2018, when the front door-handle of their cottage was attacked, and Skripal and his daughter collapsed in the middle of Salisbury town four hours later, it appeared they had recovered their voice and their freewill. Except that Chapman refuses to speak for the Skripals; to acknowledge that he has been instructed by them to be their lawyer and that he has seen for himself that they are alive."
DJG, Reality Czar comments: "Curioser and curioser. Like Yves Smith, I am not a fan of mysteries, although I enjoy the occasional Maigret police procedural by Simenon. Yet both Yves Smith and John Helmer up top imply that the Skripals are dead. My question: Why is there so much fancy footwork going on by the lawyers and the government if the two of them area dead? I don't understand why Chapman can't just say, 'My clients are sleeping the sleep of the just, permanently.' Or does that mean that a viable murder investigation would have to follow? It being Chapman's responsibility then to pursue the case as it makes its way into Her Majesty's Pliant Criminal Law Courts? As we see from the Assange case, the facts don't have to get in the way in Her Majesty's Pliant Legal System. Why not admit that the Skripals are dead and simply deep-six the case through neglect? Or is it possible that the deaths can't be blamed on that Evil Vlad Putin? "
Science and Technology
07/13/22 Post by Lambert Strether, The Incredibly Cool James Webb Space Telescope. "I must also confess that I expected a JWST debacle; I well remember the day when the 'mirror flaw' of the Hubble Telescope, another Pharonic project, was discovered: '[T]he observatory's primary mirror had an aberration that affected the clarity of the telescope's early images.' My first thought: 'We can't manufacture anything anymore.' A reasonably advanced thought for 1990, I think, and a thought that I and many others have had since. Fortunately, however, there was no JWST debacle, which really did give me some hope and confidence that the country wasn't going to screw literally everything up. Here is a photo that shows what a glorious piece of machinery the JWST is (and by extension, the glory of its builders):"
ChrisPacific comments: "Thanks for writing this. I find this accomplishment and the new possibilities immensely exciting: we get to peer at things that have never before been seen by humans, either very far away or closer but in unprecedented detail. I get a sense of how the early polar explorers or climbers of Everest must have felt. Deep field images have the ability to convey the bigness of the universe in a very visceral way (these smudges of light are all galaxies; look at how many there are in just a tiny square of sky). I got that same feeling from the original Hubble deep field image. I am sure we will see more analysis of this new one in time, but there appears to be some gravitational lensing captured (the 'ripples' around a central object). Or maybe that's just a rotation artefact from the long exposure? I look forward to finding out. The atmospheric composition analysis is exciting as well - it's vastly more detailed than anything we've been able to accomplish previously. I think the reason so many known exoplanets are large, hot planets in close orbit is because they're the easiest ones to detect. But we do know of others, including some 'Goldilocks zone' planets. The Holy Grail would be detection of significant atmospheric oxygen (it's unstable, and only exists in significant quantity on Earth because living beings are constantly producing it) and it looks like the new telescope should be more than capable of finding it if it's there. On an aesthetic note, this is the first device I can think of that NASA has produced that looks like it might be at home in a sci fi movie. You have only to look at high performance vehicles and the like to know that there is a kind of beauty associated with highly optimized solutions to intersecting engineering problems, and it's definitely on display here."
Literary and Lifestyle
07/03/22 Post by Lambert Strether, An Ode in Praise of the Wood Stove. "The new boiler was the endpoint of the project, and so for a good decade I lived with a wood stove. At some point, the two Jotuls had been abandoned and replaced by a single no-name black steel box in the room where I had come to live. The steel box was extremely rugged and simple not to say primitive: You controlled the draft, which in turn controlled the amount of oxygen reaching the fire inside, with two valves that you screwed open or shut. To 'turn off' the stove, you screwed both valves shut. For a roaring blaze, you opened them all the way. That was it. For me, the important thing about a wood stove is that the quality of the heat is like no other. ​​​​ ... There is something about the way that a wood stove with a solid, long-lasting fire radiates heat that is highly conducive to relaxation or sleep. I can't explain it, but for me it is true. (The issue is the thermal mass of the stove, present whether the stove be steel, cast iron, or soapstone.) The heat from a wood stove is amazingly comforting."
Bsn comments: "Being in Oregon and using wood stoves, various types, for years - wood is everywhere. In fact, many people have wood, mostly cedar fences. Those fences only last 10 - 20 years so there's always cedar for kindling. 'M'am, you want me to haul that fence away?' Also, with global warming we have quite inconsistent weather with ice storms in late spring (for example) when plum and other trees are filling with leaves. So, lots of free wood. I've become more enamored of limb wood in that it's easy to chop (I use a chop saw) and not much splitting needed. I could go on and on but a nice, modern wood stove is a wonderful way to heat a house that's well insulated. I've learned not to stack it against or even real near the house. Rats will show up and termites can appear as well. I've never had to buy wood. One can get cheap permits and go into the woods to collect wood if needed. Get a wood stove with a flat top as it's great for toast on a cold winter morning. Lastly, build a wood box directly next to the stove on the outside of the house. Install an interior door next to the stove and open the door to extract the wood you need for a fire. Fill the box 1 - 2 times per week for lots less dirt and chips around the actual stove. I used an old cutting board for my wood box door and it's real attractive. Nuff Said. Thanks Lambert."
And another thing ... .
07/13/22 Soredemos comments: Space exploration and observation (which I hasten to add are not remotely the same as insane plans for space colonization, which is a. almost certainly impossible and is just going to to get a bunch of people killed, and b. not desirable anyway) is an area where the idealist in me comes out. Space programs have actually always given huge return on investment in terms of innovations, but even if that weren't the case I would still say they were worth doing, just for the beauty and principle of the thing. We complain a lot here about out-of-touch, overpaid specialists and ivory tower academics, and that loathing is richly deserved. But I would put people like astronomers (who I gather are not remotely overpaid, though I'm sure many wish they were) outside those categories. They're doing a lot of pure science that is doubtful will ever have much direct impact on human affairs (though something like being able to detect and divert or destroy a planet killing rock would clearly have practical worth), but which is still worth doing if for no another reason than some philosophical commitment to advancing human knowledge. Space programs could cost ten times more than they actually do, and they would still be worth doing (as well as still being a tiny sliver of our annual military spending. The total cost of the James Webb telescope is going to be around 10 billion dollars, which is a freaking rounding error to the Pentagon. We've already sent almost six times that to Ukraine for Russia to set on fire). When you're looking at any of these pictures (or pictures from Hubble or other older telescopes), but especially the extra-galactic ones, your mind really can't truly comprehend what it's looking at. Other than perhaps some of the especially bright spots, which are likely singular stars (relatively) close to the telescope, there are no stars in that Deep Field photo. Every light is an island of at least a billion stars, most of which are now long dead. You actually can't comprehend the scale, either of physical distance or of time, that you're looking at. Well, I keep saying 'you', but maybe this is a me thing and I'm projecting it onto other people. For me, I can know the numbers and understand it in abstract, but if I actually try to ponder the scales of space my head literally starts to throb. For example, the nearest star to the Sun is a bit over four light-years away. The two Voyager probes, which have have been traveling for almost 50 years at roughly 35,000 miles per hour, have still not traveled a single light-day. The Andromeda Galaxy, which is basically right next door to our Milky Way, is 2.5 million light-years away. And then the scales get almost literally exponentially larger as you zoom further out from there. And if you care about such things, assume one planet for every star (and the real number of planets is probably far higher than that). Even if life is a vanishingly rare occurrence in the universe, within that one photo we're probably looking at millions or billions of civilizations, all now long dead. 07/13/22 MP comments: Just wanted to tell a brief story. This has basically been the only place on the web (aside from the folks at Death Panel who grasp the 'macro truth' of the pandemic, and have from the beginning. My relatives, unfortunately, are very much not getting it, which isn't entirely their fault; it's not the responsibility of the citizen to be their own CDC and understand what you break down on epidemiological controls. But from the get-go, I realized I was talking to a wall based on the news they consumed. First, it was not listening to me about not going out the first week of March 2020, then ignoring me on going to restaurants or crowded events, or wearing masks. Now, even after getting three shots due to my insistence, they will not get a fourth shot despite being over 60. They have already gotten one confirmed infection in March 2020, and then another during the first Omicron wave (which they concealed from me). This now came to a head when one of them was diagnosed with kidney disease last week, which the doctor presumed was due to a viral infection. Perfectly healthy person with no other symptoms or risk factors, and while there are still tests to confirm, functions are something like 20%. 20%. Twenty. Percent. I have been sitting in shock for the past week. I keep going over and over the life expectancies and life outcomes for people with this disease, and then going over and over the rates of long COVID per infection and the number of infections we are presumed to get in the future. It drives me mad. It is very literally driving me crazy now that it is finally, like a black cloud I felt a cool chill coming on for, coming to my door. So first I just want to say thank you for sharing accurate and informed information on the pandemic, and how batshit insane the government's policies are. I've just been grinding my teeth right now trying to understand and wrap my mind around the life-years that the government is ripping from our clutches, and there is no level of justice that can get it back. I truly hope a working class movement can hold people to account, maybe one day in the future. I would even settle for an ACT UP to force our government to act on these common-sense measures on ventilation and disease control. But knowing the truth is very literally the first step, so I just wanted to thank you for helping people get to that step. I can't understate how important that is, and how it gives even a sprinkling of solace, of hope, in a world where people truly feel abandoned and forgot about, and where I feel increasingly isolated in a country where most people don't 'get it.' | | And there it is - August at Naked Capitalism. Thank you very much for your time and attention.
The Crew at Naked Capitalism
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