RO systems remove microplastics better than other filters alone

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10054062/

Not surprisingly, RO systems are better at removing microplastics than other filters and do so quite efficiently.  (I was even worried the RO might add microplastics, because the membrane itself is plastic, but apparently whatever it adds is dwarfed by what it removes.)

Other research shows that microplastics mainly result from heat, such as heating water in plastic cups.

I'm shocked at how many liberals and leftists are utterly opposed to RO filtration and insist you must drink tap water.

I use RO water for drinking--including icemaking, cooking, and facial cleansing.  I plan to get a chlorine filter for my shower.

I think it's worth it just for removing the chlorine and chlorine byproducts, not to mention mediocre taste, especially after chilling.  My chilled 9ppm RO filtered water tastes wonderfully crisp and everything cooked tastes better.

I noticed fewer issues on my fact when I started using RO water for facial cleansing.

Chlorine is one of the most reactive substances there is, but strangely people regard it as safe in tiny amounts in their drinking water, while sweating even smaller amounts of metals like lead (also removed by RO) which are relatively inert, in water supplies, chocolate, and protein powders.  Not long ago, we were literally drowning in lead, now in close to parts per billion it's become the reason to avoid everything good.

For that matter, microplastics are fairly inert too.

It is true that calcium supplementation is more called for since I would otherwise be getting about 250mg calcium from my water, which is largely lost.  But that would be true anyway, just in slightly smaller amount.  One must add up and determined the additional needed calcium to reach 1000mg or 1200mg for seniors.

The Gaza Genocide numbers

Tony goes through the numbers of Gazans and Israelis killed by Hamas and IDF.

Looking at who was killed, on October 7.

Total number of people killed    1139. (According to Israel's own security agency, Bituah Leumi. and not the often cited "1200")

Total number of babies killed    1     (accidental, name: Mila Cohen)

Soldiers and Police                    400    (legitimate military targets)

Civilians (1139-400)                 739    (mostly killed by Israel 'Hannibal Directive')

The Hannibal Directive to kill Israelis in danger of being taken hostage was invoked as early as 7:18 am, when an drone attack was ordered against soldiers at Erez Junction.

Tony cites a report indicating that ALL of the residents of Kibbutz Be'eri were killed by IDF.  (There is a well known report from one house...but a commander indicates it was the entire Kibbutz that had been identified as subject to Hannibal Directive...killing 112 people..."a difficult decision to make.")

The bombed out cars escaping from the Supernova music festival were certainly bombed by IDF helicopters because the light arms carried by Hamas could not have done such damage.

This all suggests the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas (<400) was lower than the number of active duty security forces killed by Hamas, as well as lower than the number of civilians killed by Israel itself.

(If we counted all security forces, we'd have to count all adult Israelis because all have served in IDF and are prepared to defend Israel.  Gaza couldn't afford that even with outside help, plus women are exempt.)

On the Gazan side, we have to not that history did not begin on October 7.  Thousands of innocent civilians have been killed in periodic military operations called "Mowing the Lawn" that have been performed on Gaza since 2008/9.  Plus 300 peaceful protestors, medics, and journalists at the Great March of Return.  (And that's not even mentioning the fact that Gaza has been a cruel open air prison for refugees who lost their property elsewhere in Israel in 1947-48, under total blockade now for decades.)

Tony goes through a bunch of estimates reaching concluding that number of killed civilians in Gaza is likely over 600,000 by now, mostly uncounted, from starvation and crushed buildings.

That is a number almost 2000 times higher than the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas on October 7.

Cory Doctorow

I just read this essay by Cory Doctorow, and I thought it was great.  Possibly with a few things I'd change (notably the Russophobia), but still great.  I'm just discovering Cory Doctorow now.  

(I've long followed Gilbert Doctorow, a European/Russian affairs analyst, not related, and Cory has inconsistently denied he's related to E.L. Doctorow, a novelist.)

Not some right wing crank, Doctorow is a DSA member, and has long had mutualistic associations with EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which aims to protect users digital rights.  (He was NOT a founder of EFF.)

That EFF connection is what enrages another of my sources, Yasha Levine.  Levine calls EFF "Electronic Friends of Facebook."  (That certainly isn't the impression you get reading EFF or Doctorow, but Levine finds connections underneath the surface.)

Generally, as an analyst of present affairs, I think I'm siding more with Doctorow, but seeing some faults in both.

Perhaps only because I know him better, I find more (minor) faults and food fights in Levine's work, so much so I quite subscribing to him about 5 years ago, but still treasure his book and other insights at least sometimes.  It's only because of Levine I know that Signal and Tor, for example, were CIA funded and promoted to the public because they didn't want only spies using them.  It's not that these networks are insecure, they are among the most secure, but users are serving as cover for the spying operations they were built for.  Doctorow would never say those things, EFF was also a proud sponsor of Signal and Tor.

But it's a minor issue, IMO.  I don't expect ANYTHING on the internet to be SECURE, and Signal and Tor are about as good as you can get.  Meanwhile, there are a whole host of other issues beyond simple privacy, which I care little about.  (I want to share my work with as many as possible, even if that includes spooks reading my hard drive, as I presume it does.*  I know they will never embarrass me because that would reveal their sources and methods, which they are loathe to do.  And keeping scammers in check is mostly the job of the financial institutions I deal with.)

Though identified with digital privacy, Cory's big baddie these days has been DRM, which is something I sympathize with him on.

* With ICE running rampant, and a looming future of repression, how can I say these things?  I don't expect martyrdom as I'm not important enough, nor am I begging for it, but it is one path to the greatness which has otherwise eluded me.  Anyway, if they wanted to find leftists, all they need to do is look at my fully public social media.  There isn't much more than that on my hard drive.

The Nobel War Prize

bernard of MoA explains how the Nobel Peace Price went to a US puppet in Venezuela who has been on the US payroll for years, already participated in two unsuccessful regime change operations there, along with the recent fantastical claims of winning the election.   Basically, this was a way of placating Trump while not giving the award to Trump either but to one of his puppets in a now gathering war with Venezuela the US is starting.

Thinking back over the history of the Prize, it's about time it's renamed to The Nobel War Prize.

One of those commenting on bernhard's post fills in some of the history:

Le Duc Tho refused to accept his joint award (Vietnam War) saying “Peace had not been established yet”. Yeah, any decent person would ignore the Nobel prizes as just another irrelevant construct.

Terrorist – Menachem Begin

War Criminal – Kissinger, Obama, Abiy Ahmed

Genocidal PM – Aung San Suu Kyi

Imperialist – Kipling

Chemical weapons – Haber (WW1)

Pedo – Guillaume

Degenerates – The EU (advancing peace, human rights and democracy), really can’t make this shit up.

There’s an article “The Dark History of the Nobel Prize (They prefer you forgot) from 2021.

This is not quite right either, Kipling won the prize in literature, Haber won the prize in Chemistry, and Guillaume won the prize in Physics.  But there's enough in there to illustrate the point even about the vaunted "Peace" prize.  The Nobel prizes are steered by western imperial interests.  The fact that any Americans, part of the largest and most powerful empire in history, have won the Prize shows that.  Meanwhile, few countries did more to defend actual democracy (against US empire and its endless puppets and vassals) in third world countries than the Soviet Union and China, and where are their prizes?

But most westerners will simply regard the latest prize as yet another proof that we're the good guys (see, even the Nobel Prize Committee agrees) and all the cranks in the wilderness who criticize western empire can be ignored.

The imperialistic weaponization of political formations in the USA

I'd wouldn't want to call our top down controlled political formations in the USA "Parties."

But for brevity's sake, I'll use the convention.

Looking only at the imperial posturing of each Party, the Democratic Party fosters war with Russia most, and the Republican Party fosters war with China most.

But mainstream parts of each Party will essentially tell the same story about the two most powerful geopolitical competitors with the USA.  They're the face of evil, brutal, endless tyranny and war crimes, etc.  Which in most cases wouldn't be a bad description of the USA and even moreso for some countries it supports, notably Israel.  But you can pretty much count on claims made about both Russia and China in the political center of the USA to be unfounded propaganda.

Only at the fringes, the ultra right and the ultra left, is some clarity allowed, for the other side.  So, on the ultra right, there is mass acceptance of Russia, and likewise for China on the ultra left.

It is more on these fringes that the truth is to be found, the mainstream being the standard pro-US propaganda.

So as general rule, I defer all claims of atrocities, war crimes, etc, by the Russians and Chinese, at least until I've had a chance to do my investigation of such.  Those I've done so var have always shown the US version to be propaganda.* In some cases, on left and right, there nevertheless will be some individuals and groups consistently opposing US imperialism.  There's a difference here worthy of note.

There ARE left formations, notably on the fringes, including some socialists and most communist, equally critical of US imperialism in all contests.

On the "left" (of some imaginary center which is more like center-right) this is seen as reducing the Democratic party vote, which is intended to absorb all voters on the left, keeping them on the controllable mainstream.

Fine, that aids Capital, the Oligarchs, etc, because it means fewer votes for democrats in the contest of Democrats v Republicans, when the democrats might bend over slightly less for Capital.

On the right, these people have rightwing economic and social values anyway, and will end up voting Republican anyway.  And that obviously aids capital in that same contest.

So in the end, the layout of permissable opinion in foreign affairs is intended to be all about aiding Capital, the Oligarchs, etc.  As should be expected.  Impermissable opinion is shadow banned in various ways.  At some point, for example, you won't advance in your academic, government, or business career if you hold the wrong opinions.

This also explains why it's necessary to include some otherwise right leaning blogs and hosts in my reading list.  There are precious few who share my domestic political leaning and a good critique of US imperialism (such as ConsortiumNews and some of the authors there, especially Aron Mate).  Another of my favorite commentators, Scott Ritter, is somewhat right leaning but keeps that out of his productions (I'd classify him as right leaning centrist, definitely not MAGA).  He has the most complete defense of Russia coming from a US commentator, also MoonOfAlabama, a German (from what used to be East Germany), who is also a right leaning centrist.  On the left, a multitude of smart people, including Tony Greenstein and his friends in UK.  Another of the best is John Helmer, former US journalist now living in Moscow.

*I include such things as claimed genocides in Ukraine (the Holodomor) and in Xinjiang...both of which I believe are fabrications of propaganda.  The Nazi Holocaust was real (and don't forget it included Communists and Homosexuals too, and the Communists were first).  Stalin's purges were far smaller than commonly claimed, and completely dwarfed by political killing performed or funded by the US.  To the point where, it was not surprising that most Russians of the time, later, and even at present still regard Stalin as a hero for directing Russia to become an industrial powerhouse and win the world war, while still providing jobs for all and some kind of simulation of modernity (which is looking comforting nowadays).  The mobs didn't rise up and kill Stalin, he was poisoned in a way implicating some insiders possibly having foreign connections.

Socialism vs Communism

Professor Wolff gives reasonable good explanations of Socialism vs Communism. However the idea of 'Communism' is more than just employee control of workplaces, it is the absence of all exploitation, of which the employee/employer relationship is only one kind. It should also be the end of state/subject and sex related exploitations for example. Marx called it the Realm of Freedom. And the practical difference between really existing Socialist and Communist parties (whose policies, as Wolff explains, are actually Socialist in one of three forms, and not actually Communist) is that Socialist parties usually fall in line with the foreign policy of their capitalist home government, whereas Communist parties consistently oppose capitalist Imperialism everywhere. That's why I am a member of the CPUSA, the original Communist party in the USA. (ACP is an upstart which wants to separate itself from concern over LGBTQ issues among others.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMn7RxaUJL4

The largest socialist group in USA, DSA, was once fairly ambivalent about US support of Israel (lots of liberal Zionists were part of DSA) until recently, when DSA has taken a strong stand against Gaza Genocide.  Many liberal Zionists left the party.  I have remained a member of DSA too, there's no rule that says I can't be.  (DSA used to enforce a rule that Communist members could not vote in DSA elections.  The founder of DSA was extremely anti-Communist.)

PSL is another anti-imperialist and essentially communist party, possibly one I like the most, but as it turns out, it's so Marxist-Leninist that only dedicated cadres can become true members rather than just supporters.  That was like Lenin's Bolshevik party, until it rose to power, he wanted only a small number of the most dedicated and trustworthy.  So I am a supporter but not a member.

It may be instructive to examine their official statements on the war in Ukraine.

https://international.dsausa.org/ukraine/

https://cpusa.org/article/the-communist-partys-position-on-russias-war-in-ukraine/

https://liberationnews.org/psl-statement-on-russias-military-intervention-in-ukraine/

DSA condemns Russia the most, PSL condemns Russia the least, and CPUSA is somewhere in between, with condemnation of US/NATO trending in the opposite direction.

ACP, which may at yet be a very small organization with an outsized influence in social media, has a position which does not condemn Russia at all.  I can't find a link but google AI says:

• Support for Russia: The ACP supports Russia's "special military operation," arguing that Ukraine represents a "legacy of fascism" while Russia continues the "legacy of the Soviet Union" in aiding developing countries.
• Denounces Ukraine's government: The ACP has described the government that took power in Ukraine in 2014 as a fascist-backed "junta" and expresses solidarity with communists in Russia, the Donbas, and Ukraine who oppose it.
• International cooperation: The ACP cooperates with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) and Russian Left Front, and has received praise from KPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov.
• Humanitarian aid: The ACP has provided humanitarian aid to Donbas, which it says is to "make the lives of people there better and help them fight NATO aggression".
• Current status: In August 2025, the party's continued alignment with Russia was noted by Zyuganov and other Russian officials.

In my experience, most actual communists think more like PSL or even ACP.  They will emphasize that the US 'provoked' this war and the Russian response was defensive towards ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

I am shocked to see I agree most with ACP here.  I am disappointed with DSA and CPUSA which in my view mostly soft pedal the 80 years of US meddling in Ukraine and what that means wrt the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government and what that means wrt the war (though CPUSA does spell that out in detail and condemn it, they simply both-sides it with the 'Russian aggression' which in my view is unfair to Russia).

Don't let the door hit you on the way out

 I saw news post in Nextdoor "Oakland-level embarrassed: Former mayor warns dangers of losing Spurs."  I was going to add my comment: "Go Spurs Go!  And don't let the door hit you on the way out."

But comments were already full of similar comments and no more were accepted.

American cities are classless and clueless.  From time immemorial, good cities have invested in the arts to improve their citizens and their quality of life.

Instead, in American cities, and San Antonio in particular, we blow billions of taxpayer money (that ends up in the pockets of wealthy owners, developers, and millionaire players) in pointless activities that have no beneficial effect on people's minds or bodies, stuff them full of cancer causing junk food, spoil their sleep and study time, etc.  If anything "positive" comes from this, it's pure tribalism, and that's not positive at all.  We'd be better off with gambling halls and racetracks, which at least develop a kind of numerical literacy. 

Also here in San Antonio we starve the arts, like the former San Antonio Symphony, and likewise it's successor San Antonio Philharmonic which have to pay their own way for awful facilities in awful parts of town with awful parking whose cost accrues to nearby churches.  (Actually, the parking was fine when they were at First Baptist, but now that they are at the Masonic Temple, parking is in the terrible First Presbyterian lot.)

The last Mayor, Ron Nirenberg, who let the San Antonio Symphony fail, and then refused to provide subsidies for it's successor Philharmonic, is forever seared in my mind as one of the worst.  When he was first running, he promised incredible things like mass transit, instead all we got was more billionaire developer giveaways and the initiation of Project Marvel.  No mayor was more in the pocket of developers, which is the pocket all of them are in.

Partner Dance Clubs may Have Issues

I've been wavering over the past few months on the utility of dance clubs in mating.  First I thought they were useless because they did not necessarily match people in the critical Values and Interests areas.  Then largely I started believing they had compensatory advantages such as physical factors matching, and that only in a dance club could you approach the prettiest girl in the club and do something wonderful, nearly like sex, with her, while sensing critical attributes like intelligence, strength and sensitivity.  You might be able to truly connect with someone directly bypassing the usual bullshit and propaganda which mainly divides us--even pretty well matched people.  You could jump to the person of your heart's greatest desire rather than enduring endless religious* bullshit to get there.  It seemed very promising and I wanted to take it as far as it would go.  (*And political clubs are even more hopeless.)

But all of a sudden this week I got the downside in a big way.  I think it's specific to partner dancing (though most people don't think much of square dancing, I'm thinking now it's more pro-social and somewhat more immune to these things, but perhaps slightly less fun, lacking in aesthetics, physical skill development, some kinds of social skills, and forging direct connections).  

The downside of partner dancing clubs is Jealosy and Envy.  I've often seen fights break out in dance bars, but I thought dance clubs would be immune.  Dance clubs might be more immune to violence as such, but Jealousy and Envy can express themselves in other ways .

Nick ("Mick") Johnson demonstrating Charleston steps

It was as a result of these things that I was banned by my club before I could make even the slightest progress in my finding a mate in a dance club project.  I had been coming to the club and dancing for over two years, but the axe fell two months after I actually started to talk to the two women I felt most strongly about in the club.  I wrote this letter to the club afterwards:

On Monday September 29, as I was in my car waiting for the club to open at 6:30, I heard a rapping on my car window by a police officer.  Shaking with fear, I opened the car door, stepped out, and was confronted by Nick Johnson, a tall and wide man with a full beard, with two other ACSR dance instructors in the background.  Nick said to me, "We have learned that you have been making unwelcome advances to members of our club.  You are no longer welcome here.  We ask that you leave immediately.  Do you have any questions?"

I said "No" and immediately got back in my car and left.

I have now recounted the whole story of what happened to several friends, mostly women, and they all say the same thing, "Bullshit!  You did nothing wrong.  Guys in the club are jealous or envious."

In 2.5 years as a club member, I have only made "advances" to two women that I had fallen in love with after dancing with them several times.  I walked up to each woman with a simple offer to determine their availability, rather than spending an hour drilling down into their personal affairs to see if it was appropriate, when there isn't much time available anyway.   I simply made friendly offers, and and I immediately accepted the rejections I received in a friendly way.

I offered marriage to one woman I was virtually certain I'd known many years before in San Diego and I'd heard was recently divorced.  I had been this close to doing that many years before when we got separated.  It turned out, this was not that same woman, and instead she was already married with a grand child often present.

To the second one, I more conservatively offered that we go somewhere and talk so I'd know her better.  

When they told me of their present attachments, which I had not known, I immediately accepted that this meant we'd not be seeing each other outside the club at all.  

But they both said they wanted to talk and dance with me more inside the club.  The second one thought it would be great if I'd ask one question every day to help me "get out of my shell" which she thought would be wonderful for me.  Initially, I was taken aback, but then I realized this is exactly what I need, and it was a wonderful opportunity I'd hope to continue as long as I could.  Sadly there was just one more question before I was banned.  I asked what course she was taking and she said Organic Chemistry, a conversation which took about a minute before someone else asked for help.*

The very last thing I did with each of these women was accept a dance that they offered to me.

Given that I have done nothing seriously wrong, and that I was terminated for personal reasons, and in a perilous and upsetting way, I believe at minimum my ACSR dues should be refunded.

I have had many minor disappointments with ACSR too.  The volunteer instructors pursue a poor, sloppy, and disconnected pedagogy, which makes me feel stuck at the same level, while the more elite who take classes elsewhere pull it all together and do very fancy stuff.  I have had lessons in 10 other partner dance clubs and schools, and none were this poorly conceived.  Nick is the worst.  There are no outside activities, afterparties, retreats, and the like where you can get to know other people in the club better.  The only real opportunity to do so is before the first classes, and hardly anyone but volunteers shows up then.  The music is too loud, and to preserve my hearing I wear earplugs, further making conversation during the social dancing difficult, but I expect that in dance clubs anyway.  

Maybe it is about time I try out other clubs anyway, especially if you are moving so far out.  But I've never enjoyed a club so much for one reason: all the wonderful women in the club.  Nearly all seemed to like me and like dancing with me, many asking me for a dance every night, or even multiple dances.

(*NB: The very smart and pretty woman taking Organic Chemistry is around 27 years old.  She has a bachelor's degree and is now taking prerequisites for going to Medical School. She is the fiancee of the club president, as I learned on the second day of the 3 days we had a few minutes to talk.  The first woman in the narrative is around 70.  Nick Johnson always pronounces his name "Mick."  I'm going by the printed name in the Calendar.  ACSR is the Alamo City Swing Revival, which currently has permanent home in the Alamo City anymore, with the night on which I was banned being the last night in its most recent Alamo City location, and the next night being at test location 10 miles further out at higher prices.  I've wondered if everything, including banning me, is part of a planned implosion.  At this point I hope everyone joins other clubs, as I plan to do.)

It does occur to me that dance clubs could combine square dancing, which is about the most pro-social form of non-partner dancing, with swing or something similar.  I think I have heard of clubs like this.  Also some of the concepts from square dancing could be applied to swing, for example, review of some moves before each dance...and even calling.  Another problem with ACSR is the the middle dance is a Shim Sham that's not even taught in the club.  I think everything 'required' in the club should be taught in the club, and every effort made to ensure everyone is at the highest level possible, and not too divergent either.  Even people who can't do some things should know what they are and what they look like so they can anticipate and deal with them.

Mixed bag of seven things

Lust, Gluttony, Pride, and Sloth are individual tendencies virtuous in moderation.  What they seem to want is a tireless emaciated sexless ninny.  Wrath, Greed, and Envy are the true antisocial tendencies which in practice are ignored or even inflamed among "believers"

Machine Consciousness ?

Consciousness is an illusion, a story we tell ourselves about our thinking after it has already occurred.  This helps in the programming of future thinking, or it basically IS the programming of future thinking.

Since different kinds of things do different kinds of thinking and learning, there will be different kinds of consciousness.   Any adaptive device or organism will have one kind or another.  We should be asking about human consciousness.  AI will never be identical with that since it learns differently.

Consciousness is not some kind of test which proves which things deserve a right to life or not.  It is a ubiquitous property of learning systems ("feedback") which we fail to recognize in it's lower orders.

Machines are tools, and they do not have a right to life.

They do not experience human life or society, therefore they are not human and can't create human decisions or human art.

A robot which DID experience something like human life and society sufficiently could attain something close enough to human consciousness to be considered as such.  But we'd still want to have the last call on whether it's a 'human life' we wish to preserve, as not having been subjected to our billions of years of evolution it could be even more evil.

Yahwism

 The original religion of the Hebrews was Yahwism, a polytheistic religion derived from the earlier Canaanite religion followed by Phoenicians.  The original central god was El, from which the word Israel is derived, but later the creator god Yahweh became central, and then sometimes El and Yahweh were held as the same god.  Elements of monotheism may have appeared in the 8th century BCE, and this was certainly true after the Babylonian Exile (when 42,000 descendants of exiled Israelites returned to the then Persian province of Yehud and were regarded as the original people, and the descendants of the people who had mostly never left and a few others who had moved in were somewhat displaced).  The Persians themselves had become Zoroastrian monotheists centuries earlier, and there are other similarities between Zoroastrianism and Second Temple Judaism.

I've previously blogged that "little was known" about the original Hebrew religion, but now I see it has a name and entry in Wikipedia FWIW.

Jerusalem was named by Canaanites after the Canaanite goddess of dusk and peace, which was certainly ironic for a city that has been reconquered 44 times.

The Phoenicians (who never regarded themselves as a "nation" but as a collection of city states such as Sidon and Tyre which are mentioned over 100 times in the Bible) were notably multicultural, peaceful and rich manufacturers*, traders and merchants.

In contrast, the Hebrews to the south of the Phoenician cities were often fanatical and notably hostile to their surrounding groups, a tendency even more visible in the Second Temple Hasmonean era (in earlier Second Temple societies, Judeans were mere subjects of other empires including Persia and Greece).   After Bar Kochba, for 1700 years Rabbinic (then Talmudic) Judaism recast itself as a universal religion of peace and global healing, and actually was a notably peaceful and pro-multicultural religion, far more so than the other Second Temple offshoot Christianity also proclaiming peace and love and which was also invented by Jews.  Sadly traditional Rabbinic/Talmudic Judaism was mostly supplanted in the 20th century by ethnic supremacist Zionist Judaism--as bad or worse than the bad old Hebrew or Hasmonean days.

Polytheistic societies are generally more tolerant of other cultures, and a prevailing view is that they are most often more peaceful.  The largest wars and empires have followed the rise of monotheism, though that could be coincidental.  Yahwism was somewhere in between--it was initially polytheistic but devolved into monolatry, with the local deity El being theologically merged with Yahweh to become the one god that needed to be worshipped.

(*The famous purple dye that never fades was not merely extracted, but made by Phoenicians (the greek word for "purple people") from sea snails in a complex manufacturing process that has never been duplicated.  And Phoenicians made other luxury goods and trinkets.  They were pioneers in mass production, as well as the phonetic alphabet.  Phoenicians pioneered the global trading business that Jews later took over because Phoenician culture was lost after their cities were defeated. OTHO, Zoroastrian Persians restored Second Temple Judaism, similarly monotheistic.  By 0 BCE, most Jews already lived outside of Judea.)

Boy Crisis

 I thought this article in the NYTimes by two Harvard sociologists was very good and neutral in tone.  However, look at the comments.  It angered many people who prefer to blame particular things, including porn and computer screens.  However there may be additional ideas to the ones suggested.

And I see the NYTimes has another oped denying there is a Boy Crisis, but the writer defines it in different terms.

Honeytraps

There is, actually, considerable evidence that Epstein ran a honeytrap, which takes compromising photos of powerful people doing stuff with prostitutes they might not want the public to know.

This was not an angle the government seriously investigated, which would have been investigating their own intelligence services.  Denials cannot be believed, and evidence from grand jury testimony is not going to explore such angles.

But what's rarely discussed is how this works.  Are rich and powerful people not capable of getting their own prostitutes rather than using a honeytrap operation.  Are rich and powerful people all pedophiles?

What's not understood here is that the honeytrap is not merely for your personal satisfaction.  The honeytrap is a initiation.  Other rich and powerful people are not going to return your phone calls until you have been initiated too.  Only once you have been initiated are you considered safe because you can be controlled.

Then, once you are part of the club, you can keep enjoying the perks.

We more or less know which people were doing that, with Donald Trump, for whom we have more Epstein photos than just about anyone, as one of the top clientele and not surprisingly Epstein was suicided during Trump's first administration.

Myths behind Magnitsky Act

https://therealistreview.substack.com/p/the-myths-behind-the-magnitsky-act

Quoting the above:

The true aim of the Magnitsky Act was to protect William Browder and Michael Khodorkovsky from Russian law for tax evasion. And to paint Russia as a “human rights” violator. And it worked very well indeed. Members of Congress didn’t care to examine the facts. They just bought the story Browder and Kyle Parker dreamt up.

Bisexual vs Pansexual

The (rather inside) argument whether Bisexual or Pansexual is a better term is discussed here.  The author (Kaylee) and I agree that Bisexual is the correct term.  In so doing, a lot of other concepts and words and online controversies are sussed out.

Zionism at home

It's often said by Noam Chomsky and others that the US imperial establishment created and uses Israel as their battleship in the middle east, to keep the other middle states from uniting against the west.

But there another angle.  The imperial establishment uses Zionism at home to defeat socialism.  They did this with Jeremy Corbyn, and they seem to be doing it to Zohran Mamdani.

 

Electoral Politics and the Circular Firing Squad of the Left

The chief political problem of the class of all primarily working people, is that is <i>division</i>.  This division was purposefully baked in to the Constitution of the United States, and has been augmented in various means by the ruling class from the beginning.

While the authors of the Constitution claimed to abhor parties, it seems what they actually abhorred were the other guy's parties.  Political parties arose almost immediately.

The construction of the republic virtually enssures that there will not be one but two competitive parties at the federal level and state constitutions typically do that for states as well.  The most obvious ways to enable multiple electorially viable parties is to have a Parliamentary Democracy  and also one of many systems that provides for Proportional Representation.  Such techniques are now used in some state and local elections, with mixed designs and mixed results.

But the electoral realities have led some left of center factions, nowadays including DSA and CPUSA, to endorse the "Vote for Democrats to defeat the Fascist Right" point of view, even though at one time both the major socialist group of the time and the Communist Party ran their own candidates.  The Communist Party only quit running candidates after 1988, partly driven by their loss of funding from the Comintern.  But it also shows the flexibility of Marxism-Leninism.

Other groups, such as the Green Party and PSL, often disparage the Democratic Party completely, sometimes making very unrealistic claims about the electoral viability of their candidates.

What's worse, groups even identify with their currently chosen position that they disparage the other one far more than those who all would agree are even worse, Republicans and far right.

After having studied the realities of electoral politics during the last election cycle, including theoretical analyses of voting impact, I've come to the conclusion that the best thing to do is Vote However You Damned Please.

This stems from both cynicism and optimism.  Cynically, the chance that your vote in any federal election is astronomically small, smaller than one over half the total number of voters, according to a very sophisticated probabilistic analysis by some economists a few decades ago.  When I pondered their analysis, but added the effect of pre-existing tendencies, they would only make the number much smaller.  So the probability of my vote changing a state-wide election would be not just one over millions but one over trillions or quadrillions.  Which is, more or less, the way it seems.  The result is pretty well baked in already.  Texas is a solid Republican state under present day rules that Republicans control.

Why give up the opportunity to speak with your real true voice, as loud and clear as you can, to enter such a game you are virtually certain to lose (as in fail to have an effect on the result)?  It's optimistic to believe that making your voice heard in such a way will change anyone's mind on anything, but it could.

(And nowadays, I always have the perfect argument post-facto for a "3rd-party" vote.  Just look at the totals, and my one vote for a lesser evil would still leave the lesser evil millions away from victory, so don't blame me.)

Voting for a candidate who truly represents your values would get noticed, if enough people had the courage to cast that sort of vote.

Now the very rational Noam Chomsky recommended long ago that you vote for the best person in a Presidential election, unless you live in a swing state.  In that case, he recommended voting for the lesser evil, most likely a Democrat.

That's a decent argument, but for me personally it would mean the same thing as what I just said, because I do not live in a swing state, nor do most people for that matter.  But I go farther out in my argument than Chomsky does here.

But I've finally come to the conclusion that squabbles over electoral politics simply aren't worth arguments among and between left groups.  As long as none of us votes for the greater evil, we're all cool.  We can still denounce it just the same as those who voted for the lesser evil.

What we always need to get across is our ideas, not necessarily our candidates today.

I myself would probably vote for a progressive Democrat also to make the point that's who Democrats should be running.  I felt no angst in not voting for Holocaust Harris, who promised to keep up the genocide on Palestinians that Biden had been engaged in.  But I might well have voted for Bernie Sanders, even though I realize now how compromised he is too.

And then once you get past the "who will actually be elected" arguments, there's what happens in that the vast majority of popular ideas will be suppressed and elite ideas amplified, no matter who gets elected.  So whatever astronomically small chance your vote has in changing election, the odds that it will change any policy outcome is much smaller still.

Meanwhile, if true parties of the working class begin to get enough votes to be competitive, everyone will notice.  Eventually, they could replace one of the other two major parties.

So, Vote for whoever you damned please.

And don't waste any time trying to persuade working class voters with a different defined political tendency to change their minds.  It's not worth the effort, and only leads to more division.  And tamp down such arguments when they are presented to you.  Concentrate on the shared concerns which create the broadest popular fronts for organizing and the dissemination of information.

The truth is, it's barely worth voting at all.  And the truth is damned important, maybe even more important than "who wins."  If enough people know the truth, the fire can be brought to any ruler's feet.

The Consequences of the War on Iran

 MoA covers all the bases here, knocks it out of the park.  Show there was no nuclear material damaged, only moved around and possibly to other "dark" sites Iran has.  Now there is much greater "danger" from Iran developing nukes because no one can see what is going on.  Iran is fighting war off attrition which it will win.  Israel doesn't want to fight that war, it wants a pretext for US.  US doesn't have anywhere near the army to take over Iran, and Iran is more unified than ever against the old Shah the US wants to bring back.  And so it will go, as we race towards the abyss.

The BuyBull

Ryan Dawson posted on X:

Ted Cruz actually said God told him he has to support Israel. Therefore no matter what israel does, we have to support it because some jew put it in a book that also has talking animals, concubines, slavery, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, plagues, global floods, living inside a whale, a bronze cobra curing poison, Azrael murdering all the first born children in Egypt, witches, giants, demon possession, magical hair, making the sun stand still, resurrections, feeding children to bears, bashing babies on rocks, turing people into salt, genocidal conquest, sound wave weapons, flaming horses, swallowing people with the earth, magic trees with magic fruit, curses, beasts, monsters, dragons, stoning people to death, rape, gang rape, child sacrifice, and war with outcomes depending on yahwehs mood swings and or iron chariots, a tower of babble, nephelim, turning sticks into snakes, socercery, scorpion locus human hybrid things, flesh eating birds, giant eyeballed wheels with wings, covering a nation with frogs, sea monsters, a flat earth with a dome, Hades, Ba'al, Asherah, and other gods borrowed from adjacent cultures, angels demons, posessed suicidal pigs, monarchy, and divine blood lines, and parting the Red Sea.

The buybull is full of crap. It's jewush mythology that rationalizing a cult that wants to kill off populations for dirt they self proclaim was given to them by God. Yahweh is Satan.

I posted a minor correction (thanks to algorithms and my refusal to pay for a blue checkmark, I get virtually zero views):

In the same Buybull, bad behavior on the part of Hebrews led God to modify his promise, and to demand that any future "Jewish State" be built by God himself and only after the Messiah comes.  That demand was repeated and underlined in the Talmud.  Zionist Jews are heretical.

Why I am still Philosemetic: Judaism requires faith in God*, but not belief in any specific thing.  You can follow Judaism and write off all the stories in the The Torah as allegorical myths and legends, and in the Talmud as hearsay.  It us up to each Jew to determine what they "believe."  Instead, Judaism has laws regarding behavior, and very detailed commentary on those laws.

(*"Faith in God" is not necessarily belief on one all powerful entity, but in the course of the universe, in effect that the arc of history bends towards justice.  Thus, a kind of atheism is consistent with Judaism.)

Jewish upbringing emphasizes reading and debating those laws.  This is excellent training for all kinds of modern careers in business, law, science, and medicine.  It is not entirely by nepotism that Jews have often been important contributors to human society.

Zionism perverts Judaism, essentially rendering it "faithless."  So rather than seeing the Holocaust as one more devastating epoch directed by God for some purpose (which would have to be a great evil sin against God's laws) it is seen as a reason to invoke some special conditions regarding waiting for the return of the Messiah.

The correct interpretation would be to see the Holocaust as an illustration of God's wrath regarding premature creation of the Jewish State.  Zionism had already been underway for some time.  Zionism was so evil it even collaborated with Hitler until 1937, and blocked an early boycott which could have caused the Nazi regime to fail.  Zionists were the ones often blocking Jews during World War II from reaching places like USA, trying to redirect them to Palestine.  Though sadly the victims of the Holocaust were mostly anti-Zionist Jews.

It's been my belief that some of the punishment of Jews in the Holocaust included punishment for (and hoped for education to prevent ) future crimes, like the ones underway now.  But how much we can't say.  It seems like that there will be more punishment coming.

I'd be begging God for seven generations of repairing the damage done to the Middle east, including all its peoples, through half celibate service.  There's also the Sodom and Gomorrah option, which sadly appears the way we are headed.

Iran

Iran is a large country, and one of the oldest in the world.  (Other contenders for oldest country are Egypt and Vietnam.). Iranians developed the first monotheism, and freed Jews from Babylonian captivity.

Tehran is a very large city of 10 million people, and the metropolitan area of Tehran includes 16 million people.  By comparison, New York City has 8.3 million people.  By all accounts, Tehran is a beautiful city:

Iran never "kicked out" Jews, and Tehran has a pampered Jewish community with more historic temples than non-Shia muslim faiths.  Jews have lived in Tehran since the founding of the Second Temple.  Not surprisingly, most Jews in Iran are anti-Zionist.  Judaism is a protected religion in Iran.  

(Bahai is not protected, Iranians are suspicious of Bahai because many spies have been Bahai.  Bahai leaders are often aligned with Israel and many Bahai live there.  But it looks like Iranians take this too far and it has become religious persecution.)

Many reports (and a few of my own personal experiences) suggest Iranians are the most hospitable people on earth.  For example, an American traveler posted this story:

I lived and traveled in Iran for months. In Tehran I lived with the family of a retired bank worker who saw me looking for housing. I roomed with his son for months, ate all my meals with them, and they never accepted any money. Once I was sick and throwing up and they all came into the bathroom and the dad stroked my head while I barfed and told me “Aybi nadare” (no shame, it’s ok). I traveled around most of the country by plane, train, bus, shared taxi, etc. Eventually I stopped booking hotels because I’d always meet people on the train, bus etc who’d insist I stay with them. The family of Iran/Iraq war vets from Yazd who took me to Taft for bbq in the mountains. The taxi driver from Rasht who made a bed for me on the floor of his tiny apartment because all the hotels were full. The only time a police officer talked to me was once to make sure I was ok. I never felt in any danger day or night. The land of Iran is as incredibly diverse as its people. There are mountainous rain forests and desert salt flats. I met among the most liberal and most conservative people there, and everything in between. Everyone was so kind it makes me cry with shame.

Yesterday western media reported that Iran struck a hospital in Beersheba.  The hospital is well known for treating IDF fighting in nearby Gaza.*  Left generally unreported (and actually hard to find online) is that Israel previously hit a hospital in Iran.

(*Iran also makes claims, more credible than similar Israeli ones which have

been proven false on endless occasions before, the the Beersheba hospital

was above some military base.  It seems interesting to me that Beersheba is only 42km from Dimona.)

The war between Israel and Iran was started by Israel, which had no legal reason to launch attacks against Iran.  Iran is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and has continued to follow a Fatah against making nuclear weapons, but meanwhile enriching uranium as high as NPT allows.  No one has ever proven that Iran has a nuclear weapons program (what they have is a nuclear enrichment program).  

Israel is NOT a signatory to NPT, has illegally helped other countries acquire nuclear materials, and has a significant number of nuclear weapons made possible by thefts of material from USA (most famously from NUMEC to which LBJ turned a blind eye, and which in general JFK had been trying to prevent).

For no good reason, Trump abrogated the JCA during his first term.  JCA gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for not developing nuclear weapons.  The US intelligence community still believes that Iran has not developed nuclear weapons.  But Trump broke the agreement in his first term and put sanctions back on Iran.  In negotiations for a new agreement, US has been pressing Iran to give up all missile development.  It seems that it's not really about nukes, US wants Iran and its proxies to be completely defenseless.  Most people I know think Iran has more rights to nukes than Israel, and wish they'd hurry up and build them.  I've generally believed Iran was following the wisest course.

Iran has fought back against Israeli aggression very conservatively, tit-for-tat, avoiding escalation, hoping to minimize US involvement.  It is easy to determine the side that is ethically better.  Israel has recently bombed many middle east countries and has been conducting a genocide in Gaza and pogroms in the West Bank against Palestinians.  That proxies of Iran have been resisting Israel is to their ethical credit and our ethical debt.

The Economy

 During the unusual Biden to Harris vs Trump election year, there were many conflicting claims about the economy.

Some said we faced terrible problems during the Covid years, including very high inflation and unemployment, but astute management by the Biden administration and the Fed brought both indicators better than seen in quite awhile.

Others complained about high inflation and underemployment with low paying jobs replacing earlier high paying jobs.

Both have some truth (though I believe MAGA Red made a lot of hay from the false belief that the inflation rate was still high.  By all standard measurements, it was not: although we previously had experienced very high inflation (along with vastly reduced income, especially for some) and that was now permanently baked in, the actual rate had come down, which at least demonstrated some kind of competent skill* from the Biden Administration and the Fed, the kind of skill that would probably be lost with a hard right doctrinaire team of unqualified morons that would be hired by Trump.

On the other hand, there are fundamental problems, a wise Biden Administration could have done far better, and lots of problems are simply baked in because of spending about 1/3 of our resources on our endless war of global domination against the rest of the world.  Two big wars started under the Biden Administration.  I believe they could have been prevented (and even be stopped now immediately) by the US by simply stopping the weapons and support being sent to them.

*****

Imagine we're in the proverbial spiral down to hell (in the center of the earth).  It's not a fixed constant spirl, but our path while sliding down the inside of a cone.

As we proceed downwards, at any one time, we may be headed north.  So some may call out, "The problem is we are headed north!"  So there's a great push to the side to knock us off that course.  But meanwhile all we have done is gone further down, though possibly more steeply in some quadrants than others.

Changing from down to up requires fundamental change like turning the world upside down.

The fundamental change we need has to start with putting people first.

(* I hesitate to say expertise any more in describing people like Treasury Sec Powell, who is it least much more competent and skillful than anyone that could be imagined being appointed by Trump.  But like all others before, he continues down the path of employing mainstream neoclassical economics, which has certain deleterious side effects, among them creating instability by stability,  facilitating destructive growth more than useful development, and endlessly ratcheting up inequality.  The anti-economics economist I like most, Steve Keen, has a marvelous essay on the current disasterous state of QE, which probably never should have been done...people's needs should have been funded directly...and then stopped asap.  Paying interest on the reserves essentially created by QE is even worse.)

Who Started the Terrorism?

Who Started Terrorism in the Arab-Israeli Conflict? Bombs in Cafes: first used by Zionists in Palestine on March 17th, 1937 in Jaffa. Bombs on Buses: first used by Zionists in Palestine Aug. 20th-Sep. 26, 1937. Bombs in Market Places: first used by Zionists on July 6th, 1938 in Haifa. Bombing of Hotels: first used by Zionists on July 22nd, 1946 in Jerusalem. Bombing of Foreign Embassies: first used by Zionists on October 1st, 1946 in Rome (against the British). Mining of Ambulances: First used by Zionists on October 31st, 1946 in Petah Tikvah. Letter Bombs: first used by Zionists in June 1947 against British targets in UK. (for documentation, consult The Arab Women's Information Committee and The Institute for Palestine Studies, Who Are the Terrorists? Aspects of Zionist and Israeli Terrorism, (Beirut: Insitute for Palestine Studies, 1972).

Slightly Modified Establishment Journalism

Yasha Levine show how much a lie it is that Substack represents anything other than the establishment itself.  Truly independent journalists like him are the clickbait Substack uses while their algorithms try to steer you to preferred establishment types, like Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, whose aura he deftly punches.

It's much like the real alternatives are merely the sizzle to sell the steak.

SMEJ, slightly modified establishment journalism.

China Belt and Road Initiative

China's BRI is consistently disparaged in mainstream US media including books.

Kyle on X has collected a trove of reports from official western sources that show BRI is positive for the world.  (This link is to a thread unroller not X.  I try to avoid sending you to X, though for certain strands of anti-Imperialism, there is more to be found on X than elsewhere, Kyle being one example.)

BTW, Kyle is an author, software engineer, and tenant organizer who lives in Portland, Oregon.  His book is Why The World Needs China.

The Communist Party in USA (CPUSA) has a very similar take.  In some earlier decades, CPUSA was very critical of the Communist Party of China (CPC).  Not anymore!  CPUSA Texas recently shared this book on China for discussion.  Published by Praxis Press, an independent Marxist publisher.

Here's another fairly upbeat take on China, from, of all places, UK's Conservative Telegraph.

The Human Economy is an Inversion of the Planet's Economy

 George T hits it out of the park again with another insightful essay.

Lab Leak Evidence Organized

I think this is the best article I've read on the Lab Leak, as it puts all the evidence and its context in a timeline.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/covid-19-lab-leak-origin-most-likely-matt-ridley/

Why are there more fascist anti-imperialists than left anti-imperialists in the West ?

The alignment of anti-imperialists with the fascist far right now seems firmly established in European politics if not US politics as well.

No where is this better illustrated than in German politics, where BSW party nearly got a seat in federal government, whereas MERE25 is nowhere to be seen.*

The way the story is told in mainstream US media is that right wing parties (deplorable) propose abandoning NATO (outrageous!!!).  Never ever is it mentioned that there are left movements, parties, and histories that also opposed NATO from its beginning and still.

(*Germany should not even be considered a representative democracy because the one party that could maybe challenge capitalist rule has been banned since 1956.  The Communist Party was never banned as such in the USA, and ran candidates in US Presidential elections until 1988 after which it decided not to anymore.  Individual Communists, however, were often persecuted by federal and state governments until freedom of speech was clarified by Brandenburg v Ohio in 1969.)

 Melenchon was originally anti-NATO, but now a serious person (as in the rightfully elected) he's become pro-NATO.

Liberal and left leaning people are not permitted, if politically visible, to be anti-Imperialist.  Even though much of the public feels that way, on both counts, they are not allowed to express either sentiment purely (they must instead vote against impending fascist oligarchy and for a weak "liberal" candidate who will basically do nothing to change the status quo for the better) and especially both at once.

But what else should we expect from a fascist capitalist oligarchy?  They're fine with anti-Imperialism, or populism, but only if it's Fascist.

Left anti-Imperialism is in the kitchens, and on the streets, but it's never on TV, in the corporate press, or acknowledged much elsewhere.

Tale of Three Parking Lots

For two years, the San Antonio Philharmonic (formed by the musicians of the San Antonio Symphony after it imploded) played at the First Baptist Church.  The cheap seats started at $30 ($35 for the second year) with a $5 per order charge.  The more expensive seats were $65.  Parking across the street was $10, and you paid the friendly congregation members in cash (and they usually had change for a $20).  Nothing on the parking ticket indicated a limited amount of time.  I often thought of going downtown after a concert to have a snack (but never actually did).  The parking lot has 3 exits on a relatively unused stretch of McCullough Avenue and it never took more than 4 minutes to get out of the parking lot, and usually half that.

The next year the Philharmonic intended to play at 3 different venues, First Baptist (as before), the Majestic Theater (where the Symphony--a predecessor organization--played from 1993-2015) and the Scottish Rite Temple (the new "home").  As the year wore on, most of the Majestic and First Baptist concerts were cancelled.  The prices for the cheapest seats at the Majestic were usually way higher (as high as $78 for the cheapest seats) but often came down to $40 or so a week or so before the performance.* (I paid about $40 after two fees were added to the base price of $25 for a performance of Beethoven Symphony No. 9).  The "average" seats were $78 and the high priced seats were well over $100.    The prices at the Scottish Rite Temple were just a bit lower on all scores.  My all-inclusive price for the Mahler Resurrection two days before the concert was a bargain, just $34 ($25 plus fees).  *When I had checked the price two months before it was at least double that (what I've called price whiplash).  Price Whiplash made it hard for me to convince a budgeting friend to go, and by the time the price came down it was too late.  Things were so messed up in 2024-2025 that maybe it wasn't really that the prices were changing, but somehow they were not being reported properly on the website.  Or maybe the prices came down after the Executive Director observed that not enough tickets were selling at the higher prices.

Parking at the Majestic was in a city lot that charged $15 for "the evening" (stamped no overnight parking).  You typically pay a city employee on the way in or out.  It can easily take 10 or more minutes to get through the traffic to the exit.

The only large lot near the Scottish Rite Temple is the First Presbyterian Church parking lot.  To get a ticket, you must scan a posted QR code and enter your license plate number and credit card into a webpage on your phone.  The posted prices are $15 for the first 2 hours and $15 for each additional 2 hours.  However, a fee is added which raises the $15 minimum cost to $20.78.  The web page immediately starts counting down your remaining minutes with a helpful link to "add more time" at $15 a pop (fees probably adding more again).

Symphonic performances typically last approximately 2 hours, plus or minus 30 minutes.  On May 24 there was a performance of Mahler's Resurrection without intermission which lasted very close to 2 hours.  I arrived with only a minute to spare and when I got back to my car, I was about 3 minutes past the 2 hour time limit.  I then had to wait 22 minutes for the bumper-to-bumper congestion of cars leaving via the one and only exit onto Avenue E to clear so I could get out without being stuck in that.  I still had a short line of cars in front of me.

If I had wanted to be absolutely sure I did not go over the time limit, I would have paid $30 plus fees parking, probably over $40.  This would be especially true if I were coming even more than a few minutes early or staying some extra time afterwards for refreshments and mingling.  The Executive Director of the Philharmonic said we would be able to have refreshments after performances in the fall.  He and former mayor Henry Cisneros spent about 12 minutes talking before the performance.  (I worried that would set me past the 2 hour limit, and in fact, it did.)

The prices at the First Presbyterian parking lot are exorbitant, and limiting the time to 2 hours is antisocial.  It's also very inconvenient to use.

Sovereign Wealth Funds

A friend asked for comments on a Telegraph article on Sovereign Wealth Funds of Norway and Qatar.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/30/gulf-states-and-norway-propping-up-uk-economy/

So here are my comments:

The US could have chosen a similar route, but instead it chose to "lease" oil lands at marginal costs if any, and otherwise allow private entities to profit from the material wealth of the landmass of the USA, which is among the greatest in the world.  So the money flows to private actors (mostly) in the US, not to the US itself.

Does Norway have greater material wealth than US-in-total?  No.  Are citizens of Norway more frugal with themselves?  I'd suspect Norway spends as much (if not more) on its citizens than USA.  Nevertheless, because we worship "wealth" in all it's arcane forms, so if someone/something has it we think it must show some kind of superiority (and along the peculiar myths of capitalist superiority, even when they are inapplicable).

This (1) is something like a social choice, though few ever had a chance to vote on it (in US anyway), and (2) arguably it maximizes the (aka destruction) wealth produced, since nobody is greedier than private actors.  It also tends to make the society more unequal (something I'd think the Telegraph would like).

And if you really want to see who/what is running the world, don't just look at government and their resources and/or debts.  Look at all the private actors.

IIRC, the world is awash in "funds" OTOH 100's of quadrillions if not more.  Much of it is controlled by actors in London and NYC.  That's where the western world is actually being run, not Norway and Qatar.

This is normally considered by capitalists to be a wonderful thing.

Much of that may be relatively soft compared to Norwegian investments.  But one the money is flowing around the world in risky investments, it looks pretty similar: promises to pay sometime in the future.

The Norwegians are obtaining this "wealth" by destroying the world with CO2 and other kinds of pollution.  (Others may do that and worse.).  Nevertheless we focus on the financial wealth (in the form of someone else's promises to pay sometime in the future) rather than the real material wealth and costs.  The real wealth of good soil, water, etc, is everywhere being compromised for financial wealth.  And the destruction of the earth's real wealth will likely continue until it's all gone.  Some people in USA are already savoring the next planet to destroy.

Knocking Down the House with the Family Inside

I predicted, in my last post, that the next step would be Trump Destroying Everything (his proven instinct and honed skill) in the least time necessary.

Sadly, I was right.  Here we are with Liberation Day.

I have never been a fan of Globalization, though I recognize the value of trade as such.  But this is not the way to end Globalization, or trade deficits, or budget deficits, or de-industrialization.

Whatever bad you may say about it, and there's plenty, the US has been for a long time the wealthiest country in human history.  A significant part of that today is reliant on global trade.  We trade hundreds of billions of services for hundreds of billions of manufactured goods, which in many cases we don't even make anymore and haven't done so in a long time.

Whatever else you can say about this, it has worked so far, and showed no signs of not working.

Even if you wanted a total shift, you don't just throw that into the recycler all at once.  Not while people still need stuff not made in the USA anymore!!!

Even on a firm footing such as good planning, such things take a lot of time because you have not just one industry but supply chains and networks.

Trump's Liberation Day is psychopathic madness.

The 25th Amendment should be applied immediately if Congress still can't do what it needed to do in 2021 after January 6th...Remove Trump From Office.  He's insane, he's a madman, he's the very kind of power, pain, and fear manipulating lawless demagogue that the Founders of the US Constitution worried about (they were thinking about Oliver Cromwell and others) and tried to prevent by creating the Separation of Powers.

And Liberation Day is just one in a long line of lawless actions, including defying the courts over deporting a gay Venezuelan hairdresser with no convictions to one of the world's worst prisons in El Salvador, on highly specious grounds that would probably fall apart on any examination.  Shutting down big science in health (a national Comparative Advantage we should be building and funding more) and other essential government operations--which were chronically understaffed rather than overstaffed, for a country of our size and complexity.

Further problem is all the President has appointed are fellow Yes-men if not outright morons like himself.  And those Yes-men, now at the top of federal agencies are not only engaged in massively destructive layoffs, and killing the careers of the youngest generation of scientists and experts, but performing other actions, like recoding the Social Security programs, all being done by fellow Dunning-Kruger morons (whose whiz kid expertise in computer gaming or some such leads them to believe they are the masters of everything) virtually certain to create more catastrophes going forwards.

This has to be stopped.

No economists of any qualification (and who haven't become members of Trump's court) ascribe any description other than bullshit to either the simple version or the fanciest version of the formula used by the Trump Administration to calculate "reciprocal" tariffs.

But even if you took the fanciest version as beautiful and elegant, it's wrong again because the numbers used are way far out.  The elasticity of prices to tariffs is given as 0.25%. IOW, the claim is being made that foreign producers (and domestic importers) will absorb 75% of the tariff costs, leaving the consumer to face only a 25% increase.

Most people intuit 1:1 but the answer from research is more that the wholesale prices will likely rise by over 90% of the tariff cost.  Retail cost would generally rise a bit less than that.  So generally the consumer, not the foreign producer, winds up paying most (but not all) of the tariff cost.  But then retailers with quasi monopoly power may raise prices more, using the increased cost as an excuse.

EPI studied this angle, and concluded that even to meet Trump's stupid goals (which would basically reduce the world to a barter economy of the kind that never existed in human society) the tariffs should be about 1/4 as big, because this elasticity is, in reality, about 4 times bigger than the 0.25 estimate, which seems to come out of nowhere.

Some people are speculating this is just a negotiation tool.  Well, I'm not sure anyone wants to negotiate with Trump anymore.  Canada and Mexico allowed Trump to renegotiate NAFTA during his first term, and the reward they get for that now is threats of annexation.  Pretty much all other countries are probably beginning to think (if not long before) they'd be better off dealing exclusively with BRICS countries.

There goes our trade, there goes the world reserve status of the dollar, there goes the wealthiest country on earth.  All in one go.

But I've noticed, over on the social media now called X because of the curious twisted mind of the owner, bots and other people with hardly any previous posts (but often with exactly 125 followers) have popped up--and even in my "Following" stream--to tell me the wonderfulness of the virtually certain (economists give 80-90% estimates) stagflation (which I'd call the Trumpcession or Trumpocalypse, it will be Stagflation on Steroids) that Trump is brilliant and it's going to be wonderful.

So we can guess where Elon Musk stands.  And it turns out, his enormously expensive cars, which few Americans can actually afford (even if they'd want to, which is unlikely anymore) have more American Content in them than most American Brands (and quite often, Foreign Brands have more American Content than American Brands).

So that's our future, working in the Dickensian factories of Elon Musk, making all the things that used to be made in China.  And hardly being able to afford them.

*****

The obvious bullshit aspects of Trump's Tariffs include:

1) Attempting to balance trade with each and every country.  We don't have things to sell to many countries, but they trade with other countries that trade with us, so it works out.  Attempting to balance trade with every country is like imposing a barter system.  Barter systems, when they even exist, are usually very limited.  In human history, we went from Gift Economies to Credit Economies according to to David Graeber.  And these are the most efficient.

2) Presuming all trade imbalances are due to protectionism.  No, No, No.  All goods are not fungible, nor are desires or needs.

3) Presuming the "elasticities" involved are fixed.

4) Not accounting for trade wars and alternative trading blocks.

5) Pulling the elasticities out of a hat when known values are quite different.

6) Finally, presuming a trade imbalance is something so bad you must employ a harsh measure that will make many people suffer and seek alternatives.  The fact is, we run a trade imbalance because we can.  Or at least we could, because the rest of the world valued US dollars as a means of trade and a store of value.

Trump's tariffs end this game abruptly.  People have no reason to use dollars to trade with anyone but US.  Taking these measures to their logical extreme...they can't.  They're simply bartering their goods for ours, and no currency need be touched.

This is the sort of thing we should never do.  It sets of a failure in trust and goodwill.  That's been the source of our wealth, and this is smashing it.

7) The correct solution for de-industrialization is investment and education.  We can't fix 45 years of dis-investment with tariffs.  We have to begin the process or re-investing in US.  And for quite some time, that's probably going to require more (not less) imported goods.

8) The correct solution for underemployment and bullshit jobs is more worker power and limits on corporate and finance power.

We had those sorts of things...in the New Deal Era.  

Much of that was done away with by Presidents from Carter to Obama (Clinton actually made the biggest change by eliminating Glass-Steagall, and Carter kicked off deregulation in a big and bad way, but Reagan generally gets the credit now and put the most visible face on it for most people, so by many accounts we live in the Reagan Era, sometimes referred to as neoliberalism...the belief that "markets" are the solution for everything, so instead of new entitlements we've gotten new insurance subsidies so we can choose from a market of nothing but restrictive policies, trying to guess which slant of coverage--and which company--will work best for us, if we can afford it at all).

Or at least, we used to live in the Reagan Era.  It seems, for many people now, that Trump is the solution for everything.  And some of his backers will face less competition with Trump Tariffs.

Links:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/04/trump-tariffs-reason-advisers/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp34nkj1kv2o

Faithful Execution

Many US officials take an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.  The Presidential oath is special, it also requires the President faithfully execute the laws of the United States.

Trump is violating both (and would be removed from office immediately if Congress was doing its job).

What does my Deep State theory say about this?  Has the "Deep State" lost control?

No!  This is, of course, what the Deep State has always wanted!  Democracy?  No it's Scamocracy (and has been since the Kennedy assassination).

Last time around, the Deep State tied rubberbands around Trump with the baseless Russiagate accusations.  The purpose of those sanctions were to help steer Trump to delivering weapons to Ukraine (which even Obama had refused) as well as to keep "liberals" (ie Democrats) hating Russia.

This time around, the Deep State approach is different.  The War in Ukraine didn't turn out to lead to the breakup of Russia as planned, and it wants (much as Trump does, at least at some level) to end the War in Ukraine and pivot to China and Iran.

To this end, instead of rubberbands, the Deep State has mixed Orange Sunshine (Manson's favorite LSD) into Trump's Kool-aid.  In effect, they are saying, "Let Trump be Trump!"

My interpretation is that the Deep State wants Trump to do the war pivot (of course), wrecking as much as possible (fine), and then ultimately going up in flames (because they still don't really trust him, and would like to substitute someone they can totally control like Vance as soon as the necessary changes are made).

Right now, however, the war pivot isn't going very well.  Instead of pivoting, we are getting a larger and larger pile up.

So maybe just wrecking everything will work, the deep state must be thinking now.

Left, Conservative, and Liberal in World Affairs

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-03-26/idiots-guide-world-affairs/

America Moving to Left ???

 MAGA Red and other right wingnuts are now proclaiming that America has been "moving to the left."

That's funny, because the America I live in has been steadily moving to the right all my life.  This has been analyzed many times: the rightward shifting of The Overton Window of mainstream acceptible politics is described in a large number of books.  Many have observed we still live in The Reagan Era with both parties emulating Reagan with one twist or another, but not really fundamentally changing matters.

In my lifetime, the New Deal era started by FDR gave way to the Neoliberal/Neoconservative era, which is clearly much farther to the right.

President Johnson unveiled the War on Poverty, Nixon unveiled the War on Drugs, and Clinton unveiled the War on the War on Poverty, ending the most fundamental aid program, AFDC, which guaranteed income support for needy mothers, and replacing it with a cheap limited duration and highly contingent substitute.

One key metric of social democracy (now called "leftist" because we've moved so far to the right) is union membership, which has been declining all my life.  Likewise, income inequality has been increasing all my life, to the extent that we now live in a second Gilded Age reflected by our current President who likes gold toilets.

Under Biden, universities were pressured by the US government to lock up students.  Trump took this one step further by threatening the funding of the universities unless they make even more draconian policies.

An apparent disciple of Ayn Rand has been given free reign to hack away at US government programs that he doesn't like.  It's worth noting that Naziism was most fundamentally about the elimination of socialism (European Jews were targeted because socialism was believed to have come from them).

We've moved so far the the right that fascism is now centrist in America.

We can only choose how much and how far, and with Trump Americans are going to see good and deep right now.

Fighting Darkness

The best way to fight darkness is with light.  (Heat isn't quite as much helpful.)

First thing, Fascists strangle expression of opposing views for that reason, and we must not let them.

Sadly, it's hard to light a single candle when faced with the high powered wind blowers of mass media.

AI is the perfect Fascist tool

 One of the first big uses of AI in society was the targeting of Palestinians in Gaza for assassination.  Hundreds of doctors, journalists, and others were targeted, part of the overall effort to make Gaza unlivable for Palestinians going forwards.

Apparently the Trump project to crack down on critics of Israel is also using AI, a fact briefly mentioned in this report by Jonathan Cook.  We can imagine AI has become useful in cracking down on critics of Israel in Germany and UK as well, whose prosecutions point to social media postings.

With AI, robots can scour people's social media accounts, with little fear that the AI itself might change it's mind or learn from the writing of the people it is reading.

So, by just "obeying orders," it's the perfect fascist tool.  If it's unable to make the fine distinctions that a well educated and thoughtful person might be able to do, that's a plus in these applications.

The Tesla Implosion

 Fairly straight up version from a marketing guy.

"Autopsy" from a sustainability guy.

From about 2011-2017 I was sure a Tesla was going to be my next car.  Then the Model 3 (on which I had purchased a "reservation") was very disappointing to me.  No dashboard, back window too high, and too wide for my garage.  By then I was becoming more and more disappointed that Tesla was not ushering in a new era of EV's, like a Henry Ford, but only making increasingly cranky statement pieces for whitewashing the unsustainable lifestyles of the rich people who buy them.

Back in 2009, I was impressed that Musk had done what others had long said was impossible: and EV with a range similar to a gasoline powered car.  It wasn't really that it was impossible, but there weren't enough moneybags to invest in it.  Somehow Elon got that done, so I respected him a lot.

Now I've lost all respect.  Elon Musk is Ayn Rand in drag and Hitler with a chainsaw.  Other people had actually designed the Tesla, all the ideas (and in all his other companies) were nothing new, Musk was simply able to sell them better to the corrupt and stupid capitalists of the western world.

And EV's aren't The Answer anyway, perhaps not even a help if not employed to actually reduce overall environmental destruction.  So what if one's car doesn't produce greenhouse gasses but the new infrastructure to build them toasts the planet?

The key point of being sustainable is to give up everything excessive.  And Teslas are full of excessive.

  

Pivoting to China and World War 3

 A decade ago, Professor John Mearsheimer was calling for greater peace with Russia and preparing for war with China instead.

Going back even further, around 1969 Gore Vidal also called the US fixation on fighting Russia stupid.  He argued for allying with Russia to keep China from taking over.  China was clearly going to have the top position eventually, and other major powers needed to ally ensure they wouldn't dominate.

About three decades ago for a brief moment we had something like peace (and lots of trade) with both Russia and China.  That started disappearing as soon as the Clinton Administration started reneging on the previous administration's promises not to expand NATO...  Then NATO sponsored wars in the former Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine.  The US sponsored Color Revolutions in many countries--including 2 in Ukraine because the first didn't run as intended--to oust Russian-friendly governments in Russia's backyards and replace them with highly dependent, corrupt, sold-out, and mostly unpopular western client states.  And here we are, at the precipice of WW3. 

 Brian Berletic argues the Trump Administration is not making the change (a reset with Russia) that it advertised and many of its fans believe (and that Maga Blue Democrats wrongly deplore).  Instead, he shows what the Trump Administration is doing is really just a continuation of previous policies.  They are unloading and outsourcing the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine to Europe, in order to free resources for war (and Berletic emphasizes that the moves make it clear that US has hot war in mind, not just economic war or cold war) with China.

So, yes, WW3.

The West's Moral Authority to Disparage Putin

None whatsoever, according to former UK diplomat Craig Murray.

I agree completely.  Craig states the basic case:

The plain truth is that the Western powers interfere far more in other countries than Russia does, through massive sponsorship of NGOs, journalists and politicians, much of which is open and some of which is covert.

I would have also explicitly mentioned the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, and the sanctions the US levies and enforces on many countries.  In the last 30 years alone, many millions of people have died as a result of US foreign wars, weapons, and sanctions.  (I've seen one believable estimate of 10 million.)  Nothing Russia or China have done in this epoch has come close, and this pattern holds all the way back to the end of WWII when US fought big wars in Korea, Vietnam and other countries, and funded 80 deadly coups also responsible for the deaths of millions.  US has been #1 in deaths from war, sanctions, and coups for some time now.

Craig also rejects a claim many of my friends nearly always make:

There is simply no evidence of Putin having territorial goals beyond Ukraine and the tiny enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It is perfectly fair to characterise Putin’s territorial expansion over two decades as limited to the reincorporation of threatened Russian-speaking minority districts in ex-Soviet states.

That it is worth a world war and unlimited dead over who should be mayor of the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking city of Lugansk is not entirely plain to me.

The notion that Putin is about to attack Poland or Finland is utter nonsense. The idea that the Russian army, which has struggled to subdue small and corrupt, if Western-backed, Ukraine, has the ability to attack Western Europe itself is plainly impractical.

Then, Craig points to the obvious inconsistency between how Russia is disparaged and Israel is defended:

Strangely, the same “logic” is not applied to Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not argued by neoliberals that his annexations of Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon mean he must have further territorial ambitions. In fact, they even fail to note Netanyahu’s aggressions at all, or portray them as “defensive” – the same argument advanced much more credibly by Putin in Ukraine, but which neoliberals there outright reject.

Many Zionists including members of current Israeli government have recently made aspirational visions of a Greater Israel which not only includes Gaza and other parts of Palestine, but Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and beyond.  Craig doesn't venture that far in this post.

Then Craig states how the current European chest thumping looks in Russia:

The economies of Western Europe are being realigned onto a war footing, led by the utterly transformed European Union. The enthusiastic proponents of genocide in Gaza who head the EU now are channelling an atavistic hereditary hatred of Russia.

The foreign policy of the EU is propelled by Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen. The fanatical Russophobia these two are spreading, and their undisguised desire to escalate the war in Ukraine, cannot help but remind Russians that they come from nations which were fanatically Nazi.

To Russians this feels a lot like 1941. With Europe in the grip of full-on anti-Russian propaganda, the background to Trump’s attempt to broker a peace deal is troubled and Russia is understandably wary.

Then he states the basic case where we concur:

But Putin is not Hitler. It is only through the blinkers of patriotism that Putin appears to be a worse person than the Western leaders behind massive invasion and death all around the globe, who now seek to extend war with Russia.