Yascha on California

 Journalist Yascha Levine has written some great essays (and he has a movie too, Pistachio Wars) about oligarchs in California.

This one starts with legendary California land baron Henry Miller.

This one exposes how unnatural Southern California is.

This one shows how the Resnick's built their pistachio business on the sanctioning of Iran (the previous major producer of pistachios) and therefore has a shared interest with Israel.

Why we feel poorer

In my first 4 years of life, my mother moved 4 times.  She had traveled to Southern California, and with a high school diploma and no particular experience (other than an attempt at Opera singing) she got secretarial jobs that paid the rent in some pretty cool apartments in places like Manhattan Beach.

No one could do that now.

My father retired from Sears Roebuck in Minneapolis, where he had been a buyer (a mid level management job), at 62 and bought a new home in Woodland Hills and sent his two kids to college on his Sears pension.

No one could do that now.

Now even back in those glorious (hah) days, I might point out that (1) we were the last on the block to have any kind of TV, and then, (2) we were the last on the block to have a color TV, and then (3) we were the last on the block to have a TV with remote control, etc.

What's happened in the last 60 years is that the "essentials" of life like rent and education and health care have gone up in price dramatically, and finding new jobs has become orders of magnitude more difficult.  The precariat has been created.

On the other hand, "discretionary" items like TV and computers have become dramatically cheaper for the amount of capabilities they have.

This all gets boiled down into official "inflation" numbers which disguise how much poorer many people are, if you look at how many hours they have, after paying for essentials, to pay for discretionary items.

Because these "inflation" numbers themselves are averages, even (given their way of downplaying essentials) they also paint a very incomplete picture.  Back in the 1960's-1980's there were huge price differentials in things like rents.  If you couldn't afford the rent in a pricey area, and were willing to drive a way (using cheap gas), there were much cheaper rents elsewhere.  Now, the rent is high everywhere.  There are no "cheap" options.  Just like there are no jobs that are easy for an inexperienced person lacking higher education to get, etc.

One other way that official inflation numbers (which are based on hedonic calculus...which of these two options would you prefer, etc) hide the way things have changed is that the definition of what is "acceptable" has changed.

Cars, homes, and many other things are generally much nicer right now than they were in the mid 20th century.  Cars are more powerful, comfortable, safer, etc., and last longer.  Houses are much bigger, have better insulation, and more efficient appliances.  (OTOH, the quality of wood seems to be going down.)

This means you "get" more so of course you have to "pay" more.  But generally speaking, you don't have a choice.  All homes are bigger, so the part of the market with small cheap homes doesn't give you very many choices.  The only small cheap homes are in poor neighborhoods with poor schools.  Etc.

There's simply no way to go back to nice middle class neighborhoods of 1,100 sq ft homes, $1000 new cars, etc.  They don't make 'em like that anymore.

It seems that everything has been rigged to keep ordinary people nailed to their grindstones in fear.  No one can just take off on a lark, like my mother, and establish a new home elsewhere on a dime.

Here's an essay on this topic by someone else.

Regime change, from Iran, to Syria, to Iran?

A masterful piece (by a master journalist, Patrick Lawrence) on how western regime change operations since WWII led to the HTS takeover of Syria.  He delineates between earlier surgical Iran Model coups and the later Jakarta Model in which a million deaths from mass violence were acceptable to American planners.  That continued in Chile, then in Afghanistan challenging the Soviet-aligned secular regime.  No one should have been confused by the earlier Syrian civil war (2011-2019) which was straight out of the same playbook, except that the Russians by (actually) bombing ISIS ultimately saved the Syrian government.  But it was premature then to say it was over, obviously it can be said now.  This time neither Russia nor Iran helped (with plenty of reasons on their sides).  But now, clearly, Iran is next.  One would hope this madness would come to an end, but there's no end in sight.

 

Artificial Sweetners

I dislike all artificial sweeteners.  But the supposedly natural ones, like Stevia and the sugar alcohols, are the worst.  They give me gas and bladder irritation which can persist into the next day.

I hate the way the fake health food industry has adopted Stevia as it's current best standard.  (Stuff like Adkins, etc.)  After sampling many of those, I'd decided not to consume the rest of the box.  Perhaps it's just as well I'm not much tempted to buy more of these kinds of foods.  When I see Stevia I run.

Aspertame is awful too.  The bladder effects combined with caffeine like jitters.  It seems to have a potent stimulant effect (which I'm often wondering if I can use positively somehow, but the downsides are always way too much).  I wonder why people don't seem to notice that.  A friend of mine loved it for that reason and called Crystal Light, which originally used only Aspartame, called it Crystal Meth.  Now Crystal Light also uses Splenda and Ace-K and sometimes even (yes) Stevia.

Speaking of which, I'm suspicious of Ace-K and Splenda too, but I don't recall any specific problems with either.  I'm sure I've had Splenda many times without issue.  I still worry that it hasn't been around long enough to know what long term effects are.

I've had saccharine many many times without issue, and I think it's well established now to be safe in humans, it just tastes awful.

I hardly use sugar at all, about a half teaspoon in my protein drink helps it go down.  And I mix about 2oz of fruit juices into a glass with ice and mineral water.  But when I have sodas, which I hardly ever do, I will only drink the regularly sugared kind.

Letter to my representative about Post Office

My neighborhood has postal cluster boxes which were vandalized in September.  Now, 3 months later, they have still not fixed my cluster box.  I need to drive 5 miles to pick up my mail from the local Post Office (4950 E Houston St), which I only have time to do about once a week.  They tell me they will hold mail "forever" from my box so weekly pickup should be fine.  But it does not appear to be reliable.  One time after an entire week they had no mail for me to pick up at all.  I normally receive 20-30 pieces of mail every week.  Today they had only 5 pieces of mail, which I am sure must be wrong.  I ordered a box of chocolates in September via Fedex which got transferred to the Post Office for final delivery.  The tracking information indicates it was received by my local post office in October and should have been received the next day.  The local post office could not find it for 3 weeks until I showed them the tracking number which was complicated to find because it was originally shipped Fedex.

Can I get my cluster box fixed soon?  Can you see about making the post office more reliable in circumstances like these?  Could I have mail delivered to my door (as was done for all of my life prior to moving to San Antonio)?

Syria RIP: Another Pyrrhic Victory for the Empire of Chaos

The greatest breadth is given in the analysis by Simplicius.  I second his views on this too.

MoonOfAlabama has a more succinct list of winners and losers.

Craig Murray proclaimed the loss of an historic secular state as it was happening.  A few days later, the victorious foreign militarily aided and funded terrorists (no doubt coached by Western Intelligence on this) said they would respect Syria's diversity.  This was not in line with their previous actions, though we might hope that they had grown into the situation they were apparently inheriting.

Assad was to the end, apparently, a defender of Syria's territorial integrity.  He wanted all the stolen provinces back, and he wasn't willing to trade them away as others wanted, or accept the refugees from those areas to be settled elsewhere (effectively conceding they had been lost).  Turkey especially tried to get him to move on this, and when he failed to do so, triggered the HTS and other funded militias for a long planned offensive, which turned out to be surprisingly easy so they just kept on going.  Syria is a small poor country, Assad never trained to be the ruler (his brother died) and had poor military judgement, and the whole country was strangulated by sanctions and the theft of its most resource rich area.  Troops in the SAA were very poorly paid, even officers.  The whole country was basically starving.  Prior to US sanctions, there were no people in deep poverty, and decades ago Syria was the most progressive and equal and well run country in the middle east.  It made this mistake of looking eastward for its alliances.

Now, there's no Syrian in Syria who will say anything good about Assad.  Syrians know how this operates.  Anyone who has anything good to say isn't saying it.  A few decades from now, it's certain that Assad will be a hero to some if not most former Syrians, just as Stalin is still a hero to many Russians.

But now it's true, the west owns Syria.  Whatever happens to Syria, it's going to be the fault of the west.

Already, we can be sure Israel is taking an additional chunk.  Is Idlib going to be re-integrated with post-Assad Syria, or permanently separated?

Turkey and Israel are the principal local actors for the West, and Iran and Russia have chosen to be relatively passive.  So whatever happens we can be sure it will be more favorable to Turkey and Israel, at least in the short run.

All of the US "nation building" exercises, have been disasters, before long the old autocrats or their successors are demanded back, if that's even possible.  Libya and Afghanistan are among the latest examples.  When the astronomical cost of rebuilding Syria to something stable again becomes clear, US will probably duck it as usual, leading to the usual results.

Other than an un-earned halo of success, Israel has not gained much from this, and in the end it will probably only add to their undoing as the region becomes even more unstable, and their reputation is further undermined by highly visible actions, such as grabbing more of the Golan.

Geopolitically, this was a trap for Russia and Iran, already embattled by the West, and they wisely chose their limits.  Russia had offered a few things, like training Syrian troops, that Assad had refused, possibly in the interests of independence and sovereignty.  US backed proxies never make that decision.

One thing that might weigh against the historical elevation of Assad is how his regime started embracing neoliberalism in the 1990's, roughly at the same time that Russia under Yeltsin (and his backer USA) did.  This helped to further impoverish Syria and make it more vulnerable to western sanctions and theft, and there was no relief in the form of a strong leader returning and reversing it.  This is one thing that the trotskyites get right.  However it would probably have taken a Messiah to save Syria despite the sanctions and actions of US, Israel, and Turkey.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Michael Tracy, a pundit I follow, published in Newsweek, with views similar to Simplicius (but slightly more negative on Putin).

People's World (American Marxist-Leninist) also has a view similar to all of the above.

A Syrian journalist who barely escaped describes endless Israeli bombing.

More wars , more killings, more violence, more ethnic conflict, millions of more refugees , courtesy of America , Israel and turkey

Here's "Arab Progressive" (looks like CIA/Mossad trained Zionist) attempting to debunk Dan Cohen's article immediately above, as if it existed in a vacuum, that Netanyahu did nothing to help the "rebels" and was actually decrying the defeat of Assad.  According to Arab Progressive,  HTS has transformed "pragmatically" to become the kind of inclusive leadership Syria needs.  (I can hope this will be so while lacking any confidence it will.  We've heard this kind of story so many times before it has become ridiculous.)  I think you can pretty much take every point "Arab Progressive" makes and invert it.  For example, it simply ridicules Cohen (as if he was a lone nut saying this) for claiming that neoconservatives wanted Islamists to take over Damascus (for which there is endless evidence, and in fact the ultimate path of history itself to prove it).  Several of the essays I have linked refer to Wesley Clark's speech in the 90's listing the countries we needed to overthrow.  Nearly ever one of these countries has been upended (except Iran).   This follows a longstanding western intelligence tradition of picking off critics of US empire one by one as if they existed in a vacuum, here's a similar tract on Ukraine (and you can tell this other guy is well funded)  Once again, nearly everything they say can simply be inverted.

Seymour Hersh interviewed Bashir al Assad many times.  The man himself seemed very nice, but in over his head, in the midst of a corrupt family (which he himself conceded and said he had no power over them), and beseiged on all sides by major powers, terrorists, etc.  Hersh's report tends to blame the Russians for not protecting their ally, though he finds this understandable since they were already tied down in Ukraine.*

Other information I have is consonant with Hersh's report on Assad the man, including the analysis from Simplicius.  I have other information saying that the emails of Assad were hacked, and there was simply no dirt to be had, only love letters to his wife.  (Everyone says Assad's wife is outstanding.)

(*Other reports are generally less critical of how the Russians handled this, and lean more on the Iranians, including the new reformist president, who was not willing to commit troops to Syria. The Russian response is that they couldn't give air protection for SAA troops that were already deserting.  Then that response is critiqued on the basis of "what about Russian intelligence?"  But I think it's clear that Russia decided Russia was not up to the heavy losses that continuing to defend Syria would entail, and especially now, with the entire west panting for a big Russian or Iranian response to justify even more ME war.  So Hersh is basically correct, but too dismissive of Russian capabilities.  They *could* do more, but only if Assad did more and if it wasn't clearly a trap to set WW3 into motion.  Finally, the most interesting bit is how in recent days it has been reported that Assad himself had been dangled the carrot of having sanctions lifted by the US, if only he would stop helping Iran with weapons shipments to Hezbollah.  Assad seemed to have been taking this seriously, and was slow in responding to both Russians and Iranians for a few days just before the end.  Then it appears that the follow through Assad was hoping for from the West never arrived.  Assad was set up.  In the end, at least according to these reports, he was willing to entertain being a traitor to his own causes, and be independent from his allies, but in order to save his country.)

Here's another strongly pro-Putin POV describing how Assad failed the Syrian people after the war paused (raised taxes rather than encouraging economic self-sufficiency, failed to reconcile Syrians) and effectively deserved what he got (troops unwilling to fight) despite trying to be a nice guy.  It then praises Putin for having traded a defective Syrian alliance for better relations with Turkey (while leaving Turkey with the damaged goods they've long lusted for, and leaving Israel with a proxy of Turkey on its border), and having previously established new routes to Africa which bypass Syria making it unnecessary for Russia.  These are interesting bits I haven't seen elsewhere but (1) keeping taxes lower would probably not have fixed the economics of Syria (to think they would is Koolaid drinking "supply side" economics), the only plausible solution for the west's total blockade and theft would have been Cuban style communism and it's interesting that Baathism was originally a socialist movement, so the Trotskyites are correct about the devolution of Syria.  Ultimately the Ba'ath party became the kind of nepotistic and kleptocratic party the Ba'ath party was created to eliminate.  It could not have been fixed by Bashar who himself admitted he couldn't even control his own extended family of kleptocrats.  I believe corruption is often overrated as a cause of economic failure, many corrupt countries do quite well and capitalism itself is merely a legalized form of corruption.  But here the situation with sanctions and theft made economic survival of Syria all but impossible--only a charismatic revolutionary figure like Castro could have done it, (2) Russia has important bases in Syria which are simply being ignored in this narrative--though for now the 'rebel' government has promised they will stay (which might have been a sweetener for Russian non-participation, with many skeptics of it being permanent), and (3) it doesn't look good either that Russia abandoned it's ally Syria or broke the transit corridor from Iran to Lebanon for Hezbollah--it makes Russia look weak and not the kind of global power needed to counter or replace the terrible and terrifying US (though I think this "looks weak" argument is overplayed because well informed people see how problematic this situation was for Russia, and the west is often biting off more than it can chew leading to the kinds of disastrous outcomes that Russia is wise not to echo else it never be seen as a better replacement).  I would add "what about Iran" and wasn't Russia's alliance with Iran important, but it appears in the end that Iran was on the same page as Russia on Assad and does not blame Russia for what happened.

The Times (London) recites the usual Western lies about Assad, blaming him for chemical attacks that were actually used by western backed terrorists against him (now well established by independent journalists), and even blaming him for the (foreign created and funded) jihidis in the first place.  The West is unspeakably evil, and still more evil because it then blames its victims for its crimes to justify even more evil.

*****

Of course Syria, like "Israel", is just an idea.  The modern state of Syria was created in 1946 from bits of the Ottoman Empire the victors of World War Two stuck together.  Perhaps the idea was that the relatively more western leaning Alawite area would dominate the rest, simplifying Western control.  Some Alawites wanted their own independent state from the start.  Then the oil weath of the inland became known.  For awhile, Syria was the richest and most progressive Arab state with all the right ingredients.

There's no reason why any state has to be, and not smaller states or bigger ones.  The best questions are how well they preserve rights and wealth and make the most for everyone's lives.  Usually the questions actually asked are more about "what's best for me/my tribe/etc".

Syria under the Assad's became may have become more and more about protecting the rights and wealth of the Alawites, and to some degree just the Assad family.  But this itself was exacerbated by the west first with western ideologies (neoliberalism) and ultimately because the the opposition was armed and "educated" for decades by the west, then completely separated from it, with ultimate conquest that occurred in mind if not presumed to happen so quickly.

Separating a region that has greater resources is not necessarily advantageous even to the people who live(d) in those separated regions (which resulted in 5 million Syrian refugees last time).  There's also something known as the resource curse.  It helps to be connected to a larger society, especially when that society itself is good.  (Syria had been in steep decline, but that was largely because of Western policies which amounted to a total siege and theft.)

Many kinds of blowback can be expected from regime changed and dismembered Syria, starting with a new round of Syrian refugees.

If Israel collapses, as many believe it will, this will be considered a key moment beforehand that led to that collapse.  Overextension.  And so forth.

Whether Syria was a state that deserved existing remains to be seen.  And likewise, for all, it's likely the negative side will be more convincing rhetorically.  But that's only compare to an ideal "good state."  Compared to the alternative of no Syria, (or lesser Syria, Islamic Syria, etc) Syria under Assad may have been a very good idea.

The modern state of Syria was created in 1946.  But the Syrian region and empires in overlapping areas existed for millenia, and the stuff in Syria is some of the oldest on earth, such as Palmyra and even the City of Damascus.  There are considable concerns about the future of many such ancient locations as well as organizations and people under the new regime(s).

If Syria is to remain, there needs to be a reconciliation and unification process.  As of this writing, the opposite seems to be happening, with former enemies of the 'rebels' being hunted down and killed.  There also needs to be the possibility of self-defense.  Currently Israel freely bombs all the remains of Syrian military installations with the hoped for effect of creating a neutered neighbor.   The conflicting aims of neighbors and sponsors doesn't look good for statehood even if the internal situation were good.

Craig Murray reports from the Syrian/Lebanese border.

Jonathan Cook says this was the US plan.

After letting Israel bomb all Syrian military facilities, and grab some extra land that they wanted, the new Syrian government intends to make peace with Israel.  So it's now Syrisrael.

Duran discusses the grim likely future of what was Syria now that the state has been "collapsed".

Electronic Intifada paints this as a tragedy, but expecially for the Syrian people and their sovereignty, the resistance (which Bashar hadn't supported since 10/7) will use other conduits and continue.  In stating that Iran is the principal enemy of Syria, and not Israel and the US, the HTS leader proves he doesn't represent the majority of the Syrian people, but is merely a shill for his US and Israeli backers.

Debunking the "Victims of Communism"

What started as far right crankdom in the Black Book of Communism 10 years ago has gone mainstream, with the allegation that Communism has over 100 million "victims".

This count of victims now includes the (newly estimated at 42 million) Russian deaths defending the Soviet Union from the Nazis.  Those should fairly be assessed as victims of Naziism.  

As is quite often done when assessing deaths in "enemy" countries, declines in birthrate due to things like freer abortion adds to the count of victims.

Noam Chomsky pointed out that applying the same methodology to India would show it had over 100 million "Victims of Capitalism" in just 3 decades, and more since.

Grayzone has a good debunking.