Dear Naked Capitalism Reader,
Welcome to July 2023 and the Best of Naked Capitalism from the last month or so. This month we've got Prigozhin's revolt, Blinken in China, US Executives, and the pandemic & COVID. We hope you enjoy the collection!!
Breaking News
(6/30/2023) Rob Urie: Mr. Prigozhin Goes to Washington. The glee that greeted the news that Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian oligarch and the titular head of the Wagner Group, had gone rogue might have been unseemly if the American political establishment were capable of shame. It isn't. That alleged adults would hope for the dissolution of Russia, and the catastrophic social consequences that would follow, requires an ignorance of history that would be heroic if it were consciously chosen. The truism that people don't know what they don't know has particular relevance for the US in the current political moment.
The details of the story are reasonably well known by now and won't be restated here except where relevant. Missing from Western press accounts since Russia launched its SMO (Special Military Operation) is the actual history that led to the conflict. On his way to Rostov-on-Don Prigozhin stepped into this absence with a series of anti-historical claims regarding the start of the war, all while asserting his allegiance to Vladimir Putin. Knowing nothing about the war outside of the talking points handed it by the Biden administration, the American press had a collective wargasm at the sight of a Russian channeling CIA talking points.
As fresh as current events may 'feel,' the US has been interfering in the internal affairs of Russia for well over a century. Racist crank and Progressive fascist Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information to sell WWI to the American people. As the war was winding down, Wilson deployed the American Expeditionary Force to Russia to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution. Ironically (not), the Brits and French also sent Expeditionary Forces toward this same end. The point: most of the anti-Russian West currently supporting the NATO proxy war in Ukraine has been at it since the early twentieth century.
Stephen comments: This is an interesting article and it is very hard to disagree with the final request to end the war! Also good to see some exploration of history that the western narratives like to screen out. In similar ilk, the only pact with Hitler that ever gets discussed is the Soviet one. The various similar agreements from the 30s including the 1935 Anglo German Naval Agreement get forgotten. So do speeches by people such as Churchill which were complimentary of Hitler. The exception is Munich, of course, which is always invoked as "the great mistake", even though it was deeply popular at the time. We also forget that anti semitic acts in Nazi Germany were not in any way the proximate cause of Britain and France going to war, nor was ending them a particularly conscious war aim. If anything, they were typically ignored it seems, until the full horror hit home at the end.
When it comes to Prigozhin, I think multiple explanations can be true at once. He was losing his fiefdom and money flow. Larry Johnson also points out today that there was bad blood between him and the MoD going back to various Wagner "off the books" activities in Syria. Easy to believe that these internal Russian drivers would have led to his actions irrespective of western meddling. But, having said that it is also highly believable that Ukrainian / western agents were in touch with him too and might have promised support, although it is not clear what that was practically in the context of the coup itself. Promises of dollars in a bank account (if made) do not enable coups.
Ultimately, I tend to see him though as driven more by power and status (plus possibly mental disorder) than anything else. I do not think he necessarily had the burning desire to double down on the war effort that Douglas MacGregor discerns. Nor do I necessarily see him though as desperately seeking to end it, despite his mouthing of western talking points. After all, just as with our MIC war gave him his wealth. Western support would just have been a means to an end from Prigozhin's perspective, if we take this line. My suspicion is that if this apparent coup attempt had succeeded then Prigozhin would have gone simply in whatever direction made sense for him to be able to be in charge.
(6/24/2023) Fog of Prigozhin: His Bizarre and Surely Doomed Military Revolt. It's very hard to make sense of what Yevgeny Prigozhin thought he was accomplishing with his increasingly erratic behavior, particularly his attacks against senior members of the Russian military like defense chief Sergey Shoigu, where he's gone from having an arguable basis for his complaints (it did look bad for Russia to pull out of Kharkiv and Kherson even though it was doctrinally sound and preserved Russian lives and materiel) to publishing complete fabrications to try to undermine leaders who controlled most of his resources.
What is even more bizarre is that Putin tolerated this public attack on the bona fides of the regular forces, for what has now been shown to be too long.
To give a very brief and hopefully not oversimplified recap of immediate events, Prigozhin accused the Russian regular forces of killing a lot of Wagner troops. He provided some film that didn't even amount to evidence in terms of what it showed and even that was quickly dissected on social media as an obvious fake, as recapped even on Russian TV.
Prigozhin then announced his forces (at most 25,000, recall with limited supplies and materiel) were marching on Rostov, which is not only where a military base is located but also a center for conducting Ukraine combat operations. Prigozhin claimed to have taken control. The Western media is dignifying those statements but Twitter is casting a lot of doubt
Old Sovietologist comments: In political terms, the rebellion hasn't gathered much momentum. None of the public figures, politicians, officials, security officials have supported Prigozhin inside Russia. Indeed most of them condemned the rebellion and supported Putin. Among the population, judging by the videos from Rostov, the rebels also do not enjoy much support.
However, in purely military terms, the rebellion is developing. Columns of rebels were seen in the Voronezh and Lipetsk regions.
The main problem for Putin is where to find enough forces in the rear to cope with, wht is a, a full-fledged well armed rebellious army. Apparently, now the Russian military-political leadership is trying to quickly solve this problem. They report about the movement of the Chechens to Rostov, as well as about military preparations in the Moscow region.
The further development of events depends, firstly, on Putin's ability to concentrate enough forces in a short time to keep the rebels out of Moscow and block them in their current locations. Secondly, on how loyal the power structures and army units will remain with the President, third you would expect the Armed Forces of Ukraine will soon try to take advantage of the rebellion in the Russian Federation to step up their offensive.
(6/24/2023) From Pugachev To Lebed – The Muzhik Rebellion Fizzles Out Without Bloodshed, Prigozhin to Exile. Without the public support of any political figure in Russia, military or police unit, regional governor, or the officers of his Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his thousand rank-and-filers have agreed to return to their base camps on terms negotiated late on Saturday afternoon between Prigozhin and Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarus President.
The one-armed rebellion has failed with recriminations, immunity from prosecution, and almost no bloodshed. The Kremlin solution has followed the precedent of General Alexander Lebed's (lead image, centre) rebellion against President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, not the violent end of the rebellion of Yemelyan Pugachev (left) of 1773-75.
Dmitry Rogozin, who was one of the strategists of Lebed's campaign for the presidency and later became a deputy prime minister under President Vladimir Putin, made the difference clear in a statement he issued early on Saturday, before Putin spoke at 10 o'clock. 'I know the situation at the front as well as Prigozhin and I have never hidden my position, but whatever the explanation for an armed rebellion, it is still an armed rebellion in the rear of a belligerent army. In a war, you have to shove your political ambitions up your ass and support the front with all your might. Any attempts to weaken it are nothing but aiding the enemy.'
Daniil Adamov comments: Prigozhin is someone who was created in the 90s, along with the rest of our (Russian) political and business elites. They may pretend otherwise, but the basic assumptions and features of the era – self-aggrandisement over all, oligarch lawlessness, government weakness and fecklessness, low priority assigned to public interest or people's lives – are still with us through them. That's not to say that every single member of our Yeltsinite elite is an identical cutthroat opportunist, of course – just that this is the ideal type towards which most of them drift. Sometimes I feel that this changing somewhat over time as peak 90s recedes and the priorities of elite self-preservation require some adjustments in attitude. If this is not just wishful thinking, the evolution is still slower than Putin optimists like to assume.
I cannot say I expected any of this, but at the same time none of it seems shocking in the light of the above understanding. Nor do I think it really requires any explanation other than an internal elite conflict (although they are possible, surely – I just don't think they are necessary). At least there wasn't a full-scale battle, thank God for that.
Major Stories
(6/8/2023) Is Russia's Least Bad Option Now the Maximalist Stance of Taking Control of Western Ukraine? Russia is living out a risk that's even made its way into pop culture. In the movie Elizabeth, Cate Blanchette as the queen intones, 'I do not like wars. They have uncertain outcomes.'
Despite Western efforts to claim otherwise, Putin is risk averse. He seemed agitated when he announced the launch of the Special Military Operation, an underpowered attack which some non-neocon US military experts argue was meant to show Russia would no longer tolerate attacks on its border and the West continuing to arm Ukraine. The invasion initially did achieve the desired outcome of bringing Ukraine to the negotiating table. But after the initial talks showed progress, Boris Johnson visited Zelensky and scuppered the peace initiative.
European leaders no doubt read Putin's cautiousness since the start of the conflict in 2014 and may also have seen it as an admission of military weakness. They snookered him into the Minsk Accords, which the Russian side took seriously. Since then, gloating Western leaders have revealed it was a sham to buy time to better arm Ukraine.
Aurelien comments: The West still seems to be obsessed with the idea of military conquest and occupation or nothing. But I doubt if that ever figured in Russian plans, and I doubt that it does even now. Occupation of territory is, after all, only a means to an end, not an end in itself. The Soviet Union occupied the territory it occupied after 1945 because, broadly, that's where Soviet troops stopped. But the continued occupation was not about territorial conquest, but about the construction of a glacis hundreds of kilometres wide to ensure that any future attack would have to fight its way through a lot of non-Soviet territory first.
Same here, I think. The Russian objective is a demilitarised etc. Ukraine, but that's only one stage. The rest of the game is a weak, mostly disarmed, Europe, roughly in the position of Finland or Austria in the Cold War, and a US which no longer has much, if any, influence. Much of this can be accomplished simply by attrition, as Ukraine's combat power is exhausted, and NATO has nothing left to send, and no capacity to intervene. At that point Russia will be able to dictate terms, and there's nothing that Brussels or Washington will be able to do about it.
(6/19/2023) Blinken-Qin Talks in Beijing: US and China Agree to Keep Talking Past Each Other. The press in both the US and China seem to be doing their best in applying porcine maquillage to the meeting between Anthony Blinken and China's foreign minister Qin Gang yesterday. The session ran to seven and a half hours, longer than planned, which is seen as a good sign since neither party emerged with visible bruises.
The appearance of momentum continued, with Blinken meeting with China's top foreign official Wang Yi today.1 Blinken may see Xi Jinpeng later today, which is not something to which Blinken would seem to be entitled merely because he flew across the ocean. However, Xi recently met with Bill Gates, so not meeting with Blinken in light of that would come off as a snub. So Xi has wound up creating the conditions where he sort of has to see Blinken…or did so deliberately so as to have an excuse for this gesture?
But the Chinese and US readouts of the meeting tell a much less cheery story, and we were talking only very muted optimism to begin with.
Fazal Majid comments: Relations are at their lowest since formal diplomatic relations were established in 1979 but still nowhere as bad as during the Korean War when US and Chinese soldiers were shooting at one another and MacArthur was calling for Chinese cities to be nuked. Not a high bar, I know.
(6/18/2023) Are the Canadian Wildfires Really 'Natural' Disasters? I don't see how wildfires can be classified as unpredictable. They are no more unpredictable than the zoonotic tranmission of viruses when humans and other animals live in close proximity (and especially when humans encroach on previously 'wild' territory).
That there will be wildfires is thoroughly predictable; the issue is how and where to locate their causes.
One approach is the thoroughly neoliberal message of Smoky the Bear
Here, the blame cause is located in individual actions; 'only you,' and not global warming, or timber industry practices, or even lightning. Good propaganda, but not serious analytically.
A second approach is more sophisticated but no less ideological. From the Government of British Columbia:
"The cause of a wildfire is determined by professional investigations. The BC Wildfire Service employs fire origin and cause specialists to conduct investigations in accordance with international standards. They may look for:
•Ignition sources•Burn patterns
•Physical evidence
•Weather history
Wildfire investigations can be complex and may take weeks or even months to complete."
At least the professionals have moved beyond 'only you.' (Other approaches to causality are to blame climate alone or to deny that a problem exists.)
ChrisPacific comments: So when a tree plantation that was used for carbon offsets burns, the offsets should become null and void, right? Since all that carbon that was sequestered is now released. Do the sellers of the offsets have to pay the buyers back?
I bet I know the answer to that question.
Business/Finance
(6/1/2023) The Loss of Executive Function in the West. It's a stretch to use anecdata to build a theory…save when the evidence is overwhelming, as it is here, of the widespread erosion of executive ability. It's not be controversial to point out that the caliber of what passes for leadership in the West is now piss poor, and there's a dearth of promising upstarts to challenge the old guard. When Jamie Dimon is as good as it gets, you know it's bad.
The functioning of many important government and private institutions has deteriorated markedly in recent decades. Arguably, most of these fish rotted from the head. And if so, why has the executive function, which in very simple terms is assessing situations, deciding whether and how to act, and they carrying through, has decayed so quickly that poor top-level performance is widely visible?
Lex comments: It's a stretch to use anecdata to build a theory…save when the evidence is overwhelming, as it is here, of the widespread erosion of executive ability. It's not be controversial to point out that the caliber of what passes for leadership in the West is now piss poor, and there's a dearth of promising upstarts to challenge the old guard. When Jamie Dimon is as good as it gets, you know it's bad.
The functioning of many important government and private institutions has deteriorated markedly in recent decades. Arguably, most of these fish rotted from the head. And if so, why has the executive function, which in very simple terms is assessing situations, deciding whether and how to act, and they carrying through, has decayed so quickly that poor top-level performance is widely visible?
(6/14/2023) What's Behind the US-Driven Reforms Coming to the World Bank? . Change is coming to the World Bank. While not expected to be formalized until October, it looks like the two big shifts will involve climate change and a bigger emphasis on middle income countries. It's difficult to predict exactly how the new mission will play out, but one thing is clear: the efforts are being driven by the desire to counter/thwart Beijing's expanding global influence. Both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan devoted chunks of their big China speeches in April to the subject. And it looks like the reforms will go hand in hand with pushing the debunked narrative that Chinese lending is a debt trap while also trying to relegate China to the backseat in the growing number of distressed countries.
Ignacio comments: Every time I read one of your posts i become more depressed. This is not to say you aren't doing an excellent job. On the contrary. As a matter of fact all this reflects the need for lively debate and search for different solutions. Nothing useful will come from PMC institutions particularly from finance PMC institutions except further debt-slavering. And finance, this should be clear, is not the solution for climate issues it is rather an obstacle. IMO, the World Bank focusing on climate change will probably result in a worsening situation. Because 'the portfolios of the investors have to be protected'.
Thank you very much for this post.
Continuing Themes
(6/2/2023) EU's COVID-19 Vaccine Procurement Scandal Continues to Grow Despite Deafening Media Silence. If you blinked, you probably missed it: The European Commission has renegotiated its highly controversial COVID-19 vaccine contract with Pfizer-BioNTech, against a backdrop of almost zero press coverage. When parts of an interim report on the contract renegotiation recently leaked out, it was not to MEPs or the EU public but to journalists from the Financial Times and the Reuters news agency. And then the story quickly disappeared. Which is probably no surprise given how little difference the renegotiation will make, as Martin Sonneborn, a German MEP and former editor-in-chief of the Satirical magazine Titanic, documents in a withering account:
"If their reports are correct, then the Commission is proposing to replace Pfizer's existing €10 BILLION payment obligation with a €10 BILLION payment obligation to Pfizer."
An interesting shell game.
The EU may even end up paying more for less
Pavel comments: This is why I have some sympathy with those who called for Brexit. The EU has transformed itself from basically a free-trade zone into an anti-democratic, corrupt, bloated, kleptocratic monster of a regime.
(6/6/2023) WHO Forges Partnership With EU to Create Global Digital Vaccine Passport System. The World Health Organization (WHO) adopts the EU's expiring digital vaccine passport as a global standard, as we warned would happen over a year ago.
Yesterday (June 5) the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on its website the launch of a 'landmark digital health partnership' with the European Union. As part of this agreement, WHO will be taking up the EU's system of digital COVID-19 certification 'to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats, including pandemics.'
As we warned back in March 2022, when WHO began dropping hints that it was ready to endorse COVID-19 vaccine certificates, this means that digital vaccine passports are going to become both a universal and a permanent feature of the global health and travel landscape.
WRH comments: as he says this is merely a backdoor into Digital ID for all. And that is something that should deeply concern ALL of us.
(6/23/2023) Deadly Fungus Infections Rising Even as Doctors Keep Missing Them. We are running this post as a public service announcement of sorts. The short version is if you have an infection that does not respond to antibiotics, immediately and loudly insist your doctor look into fungal infections.
A very good Wall Street Journal story tonight describes how dangerous and often fatal fungal infections have been increasing and describes some examples. This piece is much broader than some other mainstream media pieces on the rise of Candida auris in hospitals in recent years. Those stories depicted it as mainly a problem of stubborn pathogen which has gotten itself into more and more hospitals meets inadequate infection control and immune-weakened patients. But these pieces stressed that Candida auris wasn't hazardous to those in rude good health. For instance, from Time in March:
"The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is tracking the rise of a deadly, treatment-resistant fungus that's causing outbreaks in a growing number of health care facilities across the country.
New data compiled by a CDC research team, published Mar. 21 in Annals of Internal Medicine, show that Candida auris infections have increased dramatically in the U.S. in recent years. In 2021, national cases reported by health care facilities increased by 95%, and from 2019 to 2021, 17 states reported their first case. With infections recorded in a total of 28 states and the District of Columbia, these numbers suggest that current disinfection and safety measures at care facilities may not be sufficient.
Experts do not currently view C. auris as much of a threat to the wider population, since most healthy people are not at risk for severe infections, which tend to spread in hospital settings. But there are fears that it could someday evolve to become one."
So the general public is told they don't have to worry about a fungal infection witha a 30% to 60% fatality rate unless they wind up in a hospital, rehab center or a nursing home. Oddly, none of these articles I read on Candida auris mentioned Covid as taxing immune systems and potentially (more like probably) accelerating this bad trend. By contrast, a new article by CIDRAP fingers Covid as playing a significant rate in the recent rise in fungal infections
Lex comments: I still can't really talk about the dangerous and rare pathogenic fungal outbreak (seen in Links 6-8 weeks ago) I was tasked with investigating, but one of the things Yves brings up is important. The Blastomycosis outbreak was a quite different than C. auris infections because the initial infection point of Blastomyces is always the lungs, which means presenting symptoms that indicate pneumonia. Since doctors don't suspect a fungal infection, the treatment is antibiotics. Those don't work. And by the time doctors decide to try antifungals, a lot of damage is done. When people would ask if I was worried about getting Blastomycosis my response was always, 'Well yeah, kind of but I do dangerous stuff and I'll know enough that if i start feeling sick I'll tell the doctors to give me the Blastomyces antigen test and start antifungals immediately because I was a probable infection.'
(6/2/2023) 'Lessons for a Pandemic'. The New England Journal of Medicine has a new article, Lessons for a Pandemic, which presents itself as a high level post mortem of the US pandemic response. While it does include some pointed criticisms, as we'll soon explain, that appears to have come despite a set-up that looked designed to gloss over problems. And readers will no doubt find it far too generous in its overall assessment, particularly of the Covid vaccines.
I would be particularly interested to get the perspective of those who lived in or were knowledgeable about the practices of countries that had much better results that the US, like South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand.
This article is an interview of NEJM editor-in-chief Dr. Eric Rubin and Dr. Harvey Fineberg, former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. I already find the format dodgy. What standing does a medical journal editor have to comment on Covid responses? He's not a public health expert nor was he otherwise on the front lines.
Worse, alert readers will recall that Rubin was the author of the NEJM editorial on the Pfizer vaccine safety and efficacy paper. IM Doc shredded that Rubin piece for abdicating the historical and important role of a medical journal editorial, of scrutinizing the material in the paper so as to discuss findings, problems, and conclusions, to instead act as Pfizer tout.
Carla comments: I'm going to go out on a limb and say that IMHO the US failed so badly because we have no concept of public health whatsoever (or public goods of any kind, really). The last 50 years of neoliberalism has erased 'public' from the American consciousness. In poorer countries, public health is all 90-95% of the population will ever get. Here, we don't even get that, because for-profit healthcare won't allow it. Yet a good public health system, EVEN IF IT'S BASICALLY ALL YOU'VE GOT, will beat for-profit care every time, as poorer countries show when they exceed U.S. in the lifespan dept, as they're increasingly doing.
Other Politics
(6/25/2023) The EU Sows the Seeds of Its Own Destruction . Working class Europeans are increasingly facing declining living standards and are turning against the EU. The war in Ukraine and the energy crisis has exacerbated this trend, and national governments and the European Commission are only making matters worse.
A shocking 66 percent of the EU working class feel their quality of life is getting worse; only 38 percent of the upper class feel the same way. How long can the European project survive with such a divide?
There is one EU country where this process has already been occurring for decades: Italy.
As I read a recent study on Italy's decades-long decline in living standards, it was shocking how many of the same policies that precipitated its decline are now being used across the EU. I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise since there has never been any admission that the economic playbook followed by Brussels and Italian elites has failed. Instead they only demand more. More privatization. More cuts in real wages. More labor flexibility. More austerity. In many ways that was the goal all along
JonnyJames comments: Years ago, I was naive and thought European Integration was a great. Now, I realize that it is mostly just a pro-oligarchy, neoliberal austerity straitjacket.
The seeds of its own destruction: The TEU or Maastricht Treaty (1992) 'convergence criteria' handcuffs national govts. and imposes structural austerity. This, in combination with a single currency, set the stage for self-imposed 'structural adjustments'. It's as if the IMF wrote the treaties (maybe not too far off the mark?). It is no surprise at all that EU denizens are not happy about it. In fact, I thought the EU would start to unravel sooner. Brexit is just the beginning.
In addition, the term oft-used term 'democratic deficit' in EU governance is clearly a euphemism. The Commission is not elected and consists mostly of financial and corporate 'expert' technocrats. In short, it is a giant conflict of interest and 'transparency and accountability' are lacking. The EU Parliament is a joke, just look at the turnouts at EU MP elections as well as their very limited institutional power.
The results of past referendums on subsequent treaties is also telling. As the article points out, Italy is not happy, but also France and even the Netherlands and others. We'll see, but the worsening standards of living will likely continue and public unrest will increase. It remains to be seen if public opinion will result in meaningful changes in policy.
(6/9/2023) Europe's Strawberry War Heats Up As Germany Sends Cross-Party Delegation to Spain. Germany's Bundestag sent a cross-party delegation to Spain this week to investigate a controversial proposed irrigation law in the southern region of Andalusia. The law has already caused friction between Spain's central government, majority controlled by the nominally left-wing Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), and Andalusia's Junta, controlled by a coalition of the conservative Popular Party and far-right VOX. The Junta's proposed law will regularise nearly 1,900 hectares of berry farmland currently irrigated by illegal wells, some of them in the endangered Doñana national park, one of Europe's largest wildlife sanctuaries and a UNESCO world heritage site.
'For Doñana it would be a disaster,' said Juanjo Carmona of the local branch of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF).
The park's diverse ecosystem of marshes, lagoons, pine forests and dunes stretches across 122,000 hectares — almost the size of London. It lies on the migratory route of millions of birds and is home to many rare species such as the Iberian lynx. But its iconic wetlands are rapidly drying up.
KLG comments: Great post, Nick! People just need to eat in season and then eat the jellies, jams, compotes, and canned or frozen vegetables out of season. What a concept! But it was not that long ago – pre-World War II – that we all did just that. I remember a passage in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver in which she remarked that something so out of season seemed unusual to have for dinner. She asked her host, 'Where did you get that?' The answer was, 'Zabar's, they have everything.' I paraphrase since that was at least 15 years ago, but that is precisely the problem. Well, one of several thousand problems, anyway.
Of course, as the climate warms, what will grow in season? People seem to think that warmer temperatures and more carbon dioxide are just what plants want. Not exactly, but I will leave the details to genuine botanists. The world will be a lot smaller for our grandchildren. If they can survive and thrive, it will be a better place for them, too. Big 'if'…
(6/16/2023) The UK's Tory Government, With Labour's Help, Just Took Another Big Step Toward Outlawing Peaceful Political Protest. It seems that the UK government is determined to use just about every trick up its sleeve to outlaw peaceful protest. In February, it lost a vote in the House of Lords on the Public Order Act to broaden the interpretation of 'serious disruption' (of other people's day-to-day activities) in the already draconian Public Order Bill, to mean 'anything more than minor'. Undeterred, the Home Secretary (the British equivalent of attorney general) Suella Braverman then tried to reinsert the change via secondary legislation, which has less parliamentary oversight and cannot be amended.
square coats comments: I think the liberal democrats are happily ruthless so long as they don't have to look directly at what they're doing.
But it seems like some kind of sustained direct confrontation is what's needed.
Science and Technology
(6/21/2023) Artificial Intelligence and Your Health – Thoughts on Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life. Artificial intelligence is the latest revolutionary development that will disrupt our world, said disruption considered without comment to be good for everyone and everything. Perhaps, but disruption – move fast (heedlessly) and break things – has had an uncertain past and an unknown future and its utility varies depending on whose lives are disrupted. For example: Deindustrialization, an obligate correlation of which has been the near-total loss of control of the real economy, despite a surge in paper profits leading to an income distribution mimicking that of the late-1920s. We all know how that turned out in a world that was not yet full. As for the future of the transnational corporation currently known as Meta, who knows? Hype rarely matches reality except sometimes in sports, where the scoreboard is unhidden and statisticians reign.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is naturally a topic of current conversation in the medicine. When ChatGPT dropped (the appropriate current use of that word) earlier this year, medical students were enthralled, especially the small cohort forever searching for the 'magic fairy dust' that will provide the mythical short cut to the many competencies required of a physician. AI in medicine has been a long time coming, though, and this is covered well in the readable and optimistic Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life (March 2023) by Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield.
There is a lot to consider in this book, and a complete review would require a companion commentary at nearly 1:1 scale, not too different from the subject of the (very) short story 'On Exactitude in Science' (145 words) by Jorge Luis Borges, which is the epigraph of Chapter 1 [1]. For now, there is no place to begin but the introduction, in which the authors write: 'In the long term, virtual cells, organs and humans – along with populations of virtual humans – will help evolve the current generation of one-size-fits-all medicine into truly personalized medicine.' How this is to be accomplished is covered in ten succinct and engaging chapters.
The Rev Kev comments: There has been much debate about the Star Trek transporter technology in whether when a person is transported from point A to point B, if their 'soul' gets transported as well. If not, then a person is essentially murdered when transported for the first time. Regardless, this AI model is only another high-priced gimmick and can never capture the person that it models. What about human will? Will that AI be able to capture that data for every person? You can have two patients equally sick and while one fights to survive with all they have, the other will sink quietly into death. Will an AI mirror be able to factor that into their calculations?
There is one thing that this will be useful for and which I have been thinking about for a long time ago. So you would have a 'digital' person and you would be able to administer' it a new experimental drug to see what the effects will be without putting real humans at risk. The 'model' will have variation packs for female, race, weights, heights, etc. The problem? I really do not think that we have a 100% understanding of how the human body works yet as shown by the three year effort to try to understand the effect of Coronavirus on the human body which we still do not fully understand yet.
Literary and Lifestyle
(6/16/2023) The Ironies of Neal Stephenson: Thoughts on His Thriller, Termination Shock. This is gruesome, and funny, and kinetic, and gun-humpy, and cartoonishly violent, with humor so dry as to be parched, like so much of Stephenson's fiction. Rufus is one of several protagonists, the others being the Queen of the Netherlands, truckstop chain baron and oil bidness squillionaire T.R. Schmidt, Laks, a young Sikh, and a ginormous supporting cast of entouragistes, corporate droids, Eurotrash, employees and service people, falconers, and so forth. If I sound a little vague here, it's because I don't feel the need to be more precise. For whatever reason, I don't remember any of characters the way I do Y.T., Hiro Protaganist (come on), or Uncle Enzo, from Snow Crash, or Randall Lawrence Waterhouse and Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe from Cryptonomicon. Frustratingly for me, I can't explain why this is; and I should be able to, being a former English major. At this point, I should emphasize that TS is what they call a 'rollicking good read,' and worth your time; I blasted through all seven million 700 pages, half before going to sleep in the morning, and the other half after waking up in the afternoon, and I very rarely do that. If nothing else, TS is immersive.
But where exactly is one immersed? Well, in a built world. And here again my nebulous sense of frustration besets me. The world of TS, exactly like the world of William Gibson's Jackpot Trilogy, is set in the near future, the mid-Twentieth Century. Yet I find Gibson's world infinitely more persuasive (not to mention being a better model of the social systems we confront). I suppose I prefer Gibson's milieu of trashy working class whites, mercs, intelligence operatives, public relations executives, and Russian mobsters to Stephenson's milieu of rich folks and their various service providers. I also prefer Gibson's exposition of the central premise of his work, which takes the form of a public relations executive from the future explaining the Jackpot while speaking through a Walmart-level robot (a 'Wheelie Boy'), to Stephenson's, where T.R. Schmidt lovingly expounds the workings of the 'Biggest Gun in the World.' Is that a failure in world-building?
ambrit comments: I read it last year and found it a 'ripping yarn.'
It struck me as more of a picquaresque novel. The whole did not become more than the sum of the parts.
If 'Termination Shock' had been paired with 'The Ministry For The Future,' we might have had something marvelous. Both deal with subversive movements trying to literally save the world. It actually hearkens back to the Heinlein type of 'Rugged Individualist' (who happens to be totally dependent on some nebulous rich f — ) making his or her way in the wicked fallen world. Where is the civic engagement here? The problems being faced are societal in scope and yet we are expected to suspend our disbelief enough to accept that some hardy individuals can solve such world encompassing problems. As I said earlier, the parts do not add up to a coherent whole.
I guess we are Doomed. (Cue ominous music.)Science and Technology
(6/7/2023) Science-Based Medicine: Sometimes 'n = 1' Is Enough. As has been noted here before, Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most frightening diagnoses imaginable, unforgettably expressed in the words of Dr. Alois Alzheimer's index patient Auguste D, 'Ich habe mich verloren – I've lost myself.' (registration at The Lancet required, but worth it if you are so inclined). Every time those of us of a certain age forget the name of a person or pause while searching for a word in conversation or in our writing, a mental twinge immediately follows. Research over the past 50 years has identified many of the concomitants of AD, but both the cause and agent of the disease have remained elusive, despite a predominant focus on the amyloid hypothesis of AD … . The current consensus is that the development of amyloid plaques of pathological fragments of amyloid precursor protein (APP) and Tau tangles in the brains of those with AD may be both cause and agent of AD. A paper published in Nature on 15 May 2023 casts some doubt on this hypothesis: Resilience to autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease in a Reelin-COLBOS heterozygous man (open access). There is a lot to unpack in this title, but understanding this research is no more difficult than understanding a 'derivative,' and I am not referring to the derivative function from the first semester of calculus.
Terry Flynn comments: Excellent article. Whilst not equivalent, similar thought went into 'n-of-1' trials which were a thing back during my PhD before the turn of the millennium. Essentially the patient is 'conceptually/philosophically' the sample. If you are able to produce reproducible theory-based outcomes based on 'stimulus x' then you may be onto something.
However, you must, essentially, administer stimuli (groups of stimulus) in a particular way (typically using statistical design theory) if you are to get real insights into the question of whether 'A causes B'.
Some of the article goes above my pay grade but if I understand correctly, it contributes to a branch of health and medicine that could be revolutionary….. Though it has a hurdle to cross in that it typically is expensive to conduct.
And Another Thing...
Pat (6/11/2023) comments:
I know too much about Clinton's email server to think for a moment that the documents housed in Florida in boxes were more of a security risk and more likely for sale than anything housed on an insecure server in Clinton's home. I realize that they are accusing Trump of espionage, but anyone who doesn't think that Clinton wouldn't have traded information for both money and power in a hot minute did not pay attention to the influence peddling done by the Clinton Foundation during her tenure at State. I will also say that while so far everything was clearly more for profit if anyone thinks that security concerns would have stopped Biden for selling influence to the deeply corrupt Ukrainian business community also was not paying attention.
chris (6/14/2023) comments:
I'd like to suggest that the delusion with respect to COVID and many other phenomena wrecking our country is color blind. Also applies regardless of sex. I can say that the population of people around me who believe that Joe Biden is doing a great job, the pandemic is over, and Ukraine is winning, is perfectly contained within the population of people who believe Trump is an existential threat foisted on the US by the Russians. What unites these people is income. I've heard the same concepts from Chinese engineers, Indian lawyers, African artists, and well to do families with mixed backgrounds and constellations of rainbow placards on their front lawns. The only thing different about the more recent immigrants is that they can also acknowledge that our government is hopelessly corrupt.
And there it is - July 2023 at Naked Capitalism. Thank you very much for your time and attention and we'll see you again next month.
The Crew at Naked Capitalism
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