Links 11/15/2023 | naked capitalism

by · November 15, 2023

How Citizen Scientists Rescued Crucial World War II Weather Data Smithsonian

Escaped Zoo Owl May Be On A Futile Search For Love, And People Can Relate HuffPo

The Home of Fly-Fishing Literature Field and Stream

How mice choose to eat or to drink (press release) Stanford University

Investors Better Hope This Disinflation Stays Immaculate John Authers, Bloomberg

How To Kill a Superhero The Honest Broker. “It takes a special kind of stupid to kill off Indiana Jones or Toy Story or a Marvel superhero, but that’s exactly what’s playing out right now in the Magic Kingdom.”

Climate

Kasigluk endures the many challenges of thawing permafrost High Country News

‘Surprised’ NASA Analyst Issues El Niño Warning for US Cities Newsweek. Nobody could have predicted…. 

Amazon deforestation: A time bomb for new pandemics Climate and Capitalism

#COVID19

Why does COVID-19 cause brain fog? Scientists may finally have an answer. National Geographic. Because the United States adopted a policy of mass infection without mitigation? Apparently not.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Public Health, Eugenics, and COVID-19 Harvard Public Health Review

APEC San Francisco

Biden will push China to resume military ties with US, official says Channel News Asia

Joe Biden halts plan for Indo-Pacific trade deal after opposition from Democrats FT

San Francisco mocked in China for moving homeless away from Apec summit venue South China Morning Post

Myanmar

Myanmar rebels seek to control border with India after early wins Channel News Asia. I don’t want to foster a “good guys are winning” narrative here, because so often, after winning, the “good guys” are, shall we say, faced with fresh complexities. Nevertheless, “early wins” is good news.

Is Indonesia finally set to become an economic superpower? FT

Commentary: For a digital detox, Japan seeks ‘The Way of the Sauna’ Channel News Asia

Syraqistan

Israeli forces raid Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, urge Hamas to surrender South China Morning Post. As plausible as anything else:

Top Secret Hamas Command Bunker in Gaza Revealed The Tablet. From 2014. “Back in 1983, when Israel still ruled Gaza, they built a secure underground operating room and tunnel network beneath Shifa hospital.”

Israel-Hamas war: Al Shifa Hospital becomes focus of conflicting narratives France24. I’m baffled at how capturing a headquarters can be presented as having strategic importance, even if it is under a hospital. If the hospital were turned into a smoking crater today, HAMAS would still exist tomorrow, exactly as the DNC would exist if the same thing were done to its Watergate headquarters. The only benefit I can see is that it would reinforce the Zionist narrative that Hamas uses civilians (in this case, patients) as human shields. Of course, “the narrative” these days can be said to be strategic. So here we are.

* * *

Hamas Must Go Hillary Clinton, The Atlantic. With video:

Israeli minister supports ‘voluntary migration’ of Palestinians in Gaza Al Jazeera. Why go that far? Why not stick with “protective custody”?

‘No ceasefire’: Israel supporters gather in Washington, DC, amid Gaza war Al Jazeera

‘Now, Now, Now, All of Them’: The Pain and Fear of Israel’s Hostage Families Haaretz

* * *

“Our democracy”:

Dear Old Blighty

Leaked: British spies constructed Zionist propaganda network Al Mayadeen. If Corybn were Prime Minister, perhaps the UK would be in a very different place.

New Not-So-Cold War

Russians actively attack on 3 fronts – General Staff report Ukrainska Pravda and Russia attempts to seize initiative on battlefield – ISW

Michael von der Schulenburg, Hajo Funke, Harald Kujat – Peace For Ukraine Brave New Europe. The deck: “The disastrous derailment of early peace efforts to end the war in Ukraine.”

Ukraine’s Demographics Dictate To End The Fight Moon of Alabama. “Do the math,” as the liberal Democrat catchphrase has it.

Wild Day as the Ukrainian Game of Thrones Revs Up! Simplicius the Thinker(s). “A peaceful land, a quiet people. That has always been my rule. Make it yours.” –Roose Bolton, Game of Thrones.

Why is the West moving to replace Zelensky? Asia Times (MA via Douglas MacGregor).

Negotiating Security with Autocracies: Implications for the Russo-Ukrainian War PONARS Eurasia. Life’s little ironies:

Autocratic regimes find it politically risky to discuss the principles underlying their foreign policy because those principles are often no more than a disguise for the desire to maintain the ruling group’s grip on power or to implement a whimsical foreign policy project that an autocratic leader sees as his mission.

No ability to self-reflect whatever. And Covid hasn’t been helping.

Postscript to ‘What’s on the tube…’ Gilbert Doctorow

Biden Administration

House passes two-tiered stopgap bill days before shutdown Government Executive. One for the Bible-thumper!

Senate Rules panel votes along party lines to break Tuberville’s military holds The Hill

USPS leaders forecast it would break even this year. It just lost $6.5 billion. CBS

Spook Country

DOJ asked court to hide surveillance of congressional investigators for five years, ex-aide says Just the News

Assange

They write letters:

Good for them; more like this, please.

The Bezzle

Millions of Old Bitcoin Wallets Have Critical Security Flaws, Experts Say Gizmodo. One of the nice things about paper money is that no programmers were involved in its creation, so it’s not buggy.

Digital Watch

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft The New Yorker. AI would be good at writing code, because code is the ultimately stereotypical form of language (unless you’re a Donald Knuth). Still, this doesn’t bode well for many fields, since many credentials are granted based on the mastery of stereotypical language, particularly for “classification struggles” (e.g., PMC gatekeeping).

UnitedHealth pushed employees to follow an algorithm to cut off Medicare patients’ rehab care STAT. Replace the employees with AI. Problem solved!

Observers Observed: The Ethnographer in Silicon Valley Crooked Timber

Google shares 36% of its revenue with Apple Big Tech on Trial  But What Do We Do If Google Is Legitimately Just A Better Search Engine? TechDirt

Realignment and Legitimacy

One Theory Explains Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Jessica Wildfire, OK Doomer. Worth a read, though as usual, I don’t agree with everything Wildfire claims at a granular level.

Customer service:

Imperial Collapse Watch

The Hinge of History Patrick Lawrence, Scheerpost. Very good. Word of the day: Zeitenwende. Comes from Scholz, of all people, but these are strange times.

Mearsheimer in 2020. Grab a cup of coffee because it’s well worth a listen:

Mearsheimer is a brilliant lecturer, able to encapsulate complex ideas in simple language. Commentary: (1) Clearly, Mearsheimer’s concepts have predictive value; he makes good calls. (2) I notice Mearsheimer uses three-point constructs a lot; one wonders whether that reflects the world as it is, his habits of thought, or the rhetoric of a successful teacher. (3) Mearsheimer believes that nationalism is the most powerful force in the world today, but as a “realist” “he would, wouldn’t he?” I would say nationalism has that power because both national and international (global) capital wants it that way (if capital — granted, ultimately embodied in humans — can be said to have wants). After all, whose “realism”?

The Trouble With America’s Ultra-Processed Diet WSJ

Class Warfare

51% of GM Workers Have Voted Against Contract w/ over 17,000 Votes Cast Payday Report. Many contract details.

A General Strike in 2028 Is a Uniquely Plausible Dream In These Times. The deck: “The UAW’s call for unions to align their contract expirations is legitimately achievable. But the work starts now.”

The average hamburger in Colorado now costs $15. Here’s how that price breaks down. Colorado Sun

What Elon Musk’s ‘Age of Abundance’ Means for the Future of Capitalism WSJ

pre-recession, post-taste McMansion Hell. An awesome retrospective.

Antidote du jour (via):

What texture!

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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Mike Ibanoz

Mike Ibanoz is an Emmy Award-winning journalist who has spent the better part of two decades covering gadgets and apps, and helping people make smarter tech decisions.

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