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| So this is a thing in South Asia. |
www.independent.co.uk/voices/douma-syria-opcw-chemical-weapons-chlorine-gas-video-conspiracy-theory-russia-a8927116.html
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theintercept.com/2019/05/28/bernie-sanders-asked-bill-kristol-to-apologize-for-pushing-the-iraq-war-guess-what-happened-next/
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theintercept.com/2019/05/28/bernie-sanders-asked-bill-kristol-to-apologize-for-pushing-the-iraq-war-guess-what-happened-next/
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www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/22/uk-suffers-crushing-defeat-un-vote-chagos-islands
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This reminded me of him:
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Another one from Jeffries:
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Another one from Jeffries:
(She's one of those people who famously seem to cheat time, like Kate Beckinsale, Patrick Stewart, Monica Bellucci, Paul Rudd, Suzanna Hoffs, Avril Lavigne, Jim Parsons, Allyson Hannigan, Christie Brinkley, Lori Loughlin, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock.)
There's an easy solution to end the warmongering against Iran and stabilise the Persian Gulf region's northern side for good: Iran needs to enter an alliance with a nuclear power. It could enter an alliance with Russia, with China, with India or major EU powers.
The media makes it look as if Europe couldn't decisively interfere against the warmongering. That's wrong. Europe's power and influence is limited by its own will more than by anything else.
Admittedly, the cooperation-focused policies in Europe have created a political class ill-suited to deal with sociopaths effectively.
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| Hat tip to "An economic sense", an underrated economics blog. He clearly should have made it into this list, but then again, the very well-known Mankiw didn't either. |
My background as economist sometimes lets me write about economics and military affairs issues myself once in a while:
This might be considered really wrong, but I still think the basic issue is a real one because I have this childish-naive notion that things better be sustainable:
"I'm curious how well this economic opinion will stand the test of time."
So far I'm not too enthusiastic.
So far I'm not too enthusiastic.
Looking back, I must say I did not fully resist the fashionable public debt craze of 2009-2012. I did largely resist the then fashionable calls for austerity (except for the Greek military budget IIRC, but that's a special case as much of the spending goes to imports), though. Another saving grace is that I called for at least some counter-cyclical spending (hastened military procurement and IIRC also infrastructure projects to have some expansionary effect without much influence on long-term public debt).
As a conclusion, I must say my previous (anti-Keynesian) professor for public finance lectures probably still had me influenced with the crowding-out thing that turned out to not matter under the specific circumstances (zero lower bound issue) of 2008-2013.
I like to cultivate an outside-the-box, non-mainstream attitude and way of thinking, but some of my macroeconomics postings from 2008-mid 2013 weren't nearly as timeless as I hoped my blog posts would prove to be. I still don't think I was wrong, but history didn't exactly prove me correct on the trade balance and public debt alarmism issues, either.
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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/05/30/after-neoliberalism
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My pageviews from an arbitrary recent 7-day period (monthly is about 25k):
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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/05/30/after-neoliberalism
What must be said; nothing in there is contrary to economic science. To the contrary, it's exactly what economic research suggests will or does work well. Neoliberalism on the other hand is only partially reconcilable with economic theory and empirical observations. Neoliberalism is based on first order effects in the better cases and utter nonsense in some other cases (the latter category is largely confined to the anglophone world). Stiglitz is no proponent of some radical left wing ideology; he's proposing to make use of what we know about real world economics as opposed to fantasyland economics.
Neoliberalism isn't the origin of all economic evils in the West, though. A couple metrics began a trend for the worse in the 1973-1980 period already. Neoliberalism was probably less harmful with its pursuit of its agenda than by not doing anything about those bad trends.
Neoliberalism isn't the origin of all economic evils in the West, though. A couple metrics began a trend for the worse in the 1973-1980 period already. Neoliberalism was probably less harmful with its pursuit of its agenda than by not doing anything about those bad trends.
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Don't fall the anarchists' voodoo economics,
which end up eroding the strength of the nation.
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My pageviews from an arbitrary recent 7-day period (monthly is about 25k):
I have no explanation for why the German share kept dwindling over time. The Russian share is even more confusing - it wasn't nearly this large before and I haven't written anything of special interest to Russians since the Shilka article in February.
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"The present T-34 ammunition capacity is 55 rounds: 5 APCR, 20 armour piercing, 30 HE. This is not enough and only lasts for 1.5-2 hours of battle."
This is a common theme from combat reports and memoirs about tank warfare (which is mostly combat against opposition other than tanks). 30 rds HE and thousands of machinegun rounds lasted for less than 2 hrs in this report. We should expect that 10+ of today's 120 mm HE rounds would be expended in an hour of combat. Resupply of munitions should be considered a most important aspect of tactical combat and operational-level efforts unless it's about pursuit (pursuit is much more about fuel supply and POW handling than about munitions supply).
I'm not informed about the inventories of dedicated 120 mm HE tank rounds such as DM11*, but I have a hunch they would be expended real quick, and then most Western tankers would use the less efficient HEAT supposed multi-purpose rounds against "soft" targets, expending them really quick to get the desired effects. Western MBTs might be downgraded to coaxial 7.62NATO machinegun fires against all soft targets well before the campaign ends.
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Sometimes, armed bureaucracy public relations people should better just admit they're clueless, useless and stupid. It would be less disastrous than them trying to do their job.
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I have argued against this myth myself as well. Claims that the durability of a T-34's was a few days does not square with the quantities produced and the inventories in service (thousands) over a span of years.
About 80,000 T-34s were produced during WW2, and the average inventory was somewhere around 3,000 to 4,000 That would lead to them lasting for 1/20th to about 1/30th of the war duration (June 1941 to August 1945 for the USSR) in a first approximation estimate. This leads to a likely average T-34 life of more than two months during WW2 (much of it in storage, transit or training, though). It certainly wasn't a few days, for then they couldn't have trained the tank crews.
My suspicion is that the myth rests on the rumour that T-34s produced in Leningrad during the siege had very short lifespans (some of them were supposedly manned by workers, not tank-trained soldiers). An average durability of few days at the front may have been correct there in 1942. Most T-34s in use were likely used for months, though.
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[for Germans] www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundesdatenschuetzer-Kritik-an-Darknet-Gesetz-will-Sicherheitsgesetz-Pause-4425762.html
 |
| Vote shares among first-time voters in the election for the European Parliament in Germany |
The radical right wingers largely failed in the recent election in Germany; they got more votes than previously (back when their party wasn't overtly xenophobic and nationalistic yet), but less than polls indicated for them if there had been federal elections instead. They got a mere 11% and frankly, I don't see them ever getting past 18% (but then again I didn't expect the FDP strawfire a couple years ago or the recent greens boom past 20% either). There are only so many right wingnuts and protest voters in this country.
The young voters clearly don't see their future in the radical right, and now don't seem to like the formerly huge and dominating conservative and social-democratic parties either.
I may have been too nice to the CDU last time when I diagnosed them to not be radical right wingers on the same slippery slope towards overt authoritarianism. Their chairwoman and designated future chancellor reacted to electoral defeat and Rezo's video with a public statement that can only be interpreted as the wish for censorship against such disagreeable non-traditional media. The previous CDU call for censorship was von der Leyen's anti-constitutional call for internet censorship (with pedophiles as excuse for the entrance into censorship).
The CDU may not seem so undemocratic as some radical right wing parties because so far it did not feel threatened in its power. Anyway, that chairwoman just disqualified herself from all high offices in my opinion.
I don't think she or the other CDU politicians who got in trouble this week really want censorship. It's less simple, but even more dangerous than that. They think of themselves as the 'good guys', and 'good guys' don't commit atrocities. So by definition they cannot want censorship, as censorship is bad. They just want some etiquette (I wonder why they didn't find this word themselves) that shuts up critics or at least moderates them to the level of harmlessness (taming) that the CDU is used to from newspapers and TV shows.
See? That's not 'censorship'. Just as Americans were the good guys and of course did not torture. They waterboarded, but since Americans are the good guys this meant that waterboarding must not be torture (when Americans do it). It's a slippery slope that unhinges the taboo of being evil. That's even more dangerous than overt agitation in favour of censorship.
The inability of the CDU to cope with the Youtuber criticism should not surprise**. The other parties would probably not be much better at it.
[for German speakers] Und nun noch mal in inhaltlich anderer Langform:
Wenn man sich dieses Wahlergebnis und diesen Link hier
ansieht, dann stellt sich hier in der Tat die Frage, ob das jetzt ein tipping point war, also ein Ereignis, bei dem ein scheinbar stabiles System an seiner Unzulänglichkeit kollabiert.
Könnte es wirklich sein, dass die Generation U30 oder gar Generation U40 aufsteht und gegen den Status Quo vorgeht? Es ist kaum ein Geheimnis, dass die Politik sich kaum um Langfristthemen und Jugendinteressen kümmert. Ebenso ist es kein Geheimnis, dass nach ca. 70 bzw. 30 Jahren Bundesrepublik in Politik und Verwaltung alles festgesetzt und kaum noch zu entschiedener Reform fähig zu sein scheint.
Falls das wirklich ein tipping point ist - und bei sowas verschätzt man sich sehr, sehr leicht -, dann wäre eine mögliche Konsequenz, dass wir von einer (abnehmend) programmatisch links-rechts orientierten Politik zu einer jung-alt Orientierung übergehen könnten.
Die alte links-rechts Orientierung der Politik funktioniert ohnehin nicht mehr, seit die SPD in den 90ern nach Lafontaines Wahlniederlage auf Bundesebene neoliberal wurde.
Eine jung-alt Orientierung würde allerdings auch eine urban-rural Spaltung bedeuten. Die bemerkt man in Ostdeutschland (wo Großstädte die einzigen Inseln des Wohlstandes und vorteilhafter Entwicklungen zu sein scheinen) jetzt schon in extremer Form.
Wir würden vielleicht in einer krassen Weise die Entwicklung zur Polarisierung nachholen, die die Amis vollzogen haben. Jetzt muss man wohl hoffen, dass es Russen und Springer Verlag nicht gelingt, hier sowas wie Fox News, rechtsradikales talk radio und Breitbart zu etablieren. Dann stünden uns nämlich einige Jahrzehnte der gesellschaftlichen Selbstvergiftung und dysfunktionaler Politik bevor.
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[German video]
I may have been too nice to the CDU last time when I diagnosed them to not be radical right wingers on the same slippery slope towards overt authoritarianism. Their chairwoman and designated future chancellor reacted to electoral defeat and Rezo's video with a public statement that can only be interpreted as the wish for censorship against such disagreeable non-traditional media. The previous CDU call for censorship was von der Leyen's anti-constitutional call for internet censorship (with pedophiles as excuse for the entrance into censorship).
The CDU may not seem so undemocratic as some radical right wing parties because so far it did not feel threatened in its power. Anyway, that chairwoman just disqualified herself from all high offices in my opinion.
I don't think she or the other CDU politicians who got in trouble this week really want censorship. It's less simple, but even more dangerous than that. They think of themselves as the 'good guys', and 'good guys' don't commit atrocities. So by definition they cannot want censorship, as censorship is bad. They just want some etiquette (I wonder why they didn't find this word themselves) that shuts up critics or at least moderates them to the level of harmlessness (taming) that the CDU is used to from newspapers and TV shows.
See? That's not 'censorship'. Just as Americans were the good guys and of course did not torture. They waterboarded, but since Americans are the good guys this meant that waterboarding must not be torture (when Americans do it). It's a slippery slope that unhinges the taboo of being evil. That's even more dangerous than overt agitation in favour of censorship.
"ich wusste nicht dass 70 Jahre Grundgesetz ne Abschiedsfeier war"
("I didn't know that 70 years German constitution was a farewell party)
A youtube comment
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The inability of the CDU to cope with the Youtuber criticism should not surprise**. The other parties would probably not be much better at it.
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[for German speakers] Und nun noch mal in inhaltlich anderer Langform:
Wenn man sich dieses Wahlergebnis und diesen Link hier
(= leider nur ein Beweis von Anekdotenqualität)
Könnte es wirklich sein, dass die Generation U30 oder gar Generation U40 aufsteht und gegen den Status Quo vorgeht? Es ist kaum ein Geheimnis, dass die Politik sich kaum um Langfristthemen und Jugendinteressen kümmert. Ebenso ist es kein Geheimnis, dass nach ca. 70 bzw. 30 Jahren Bundesrepublik in Politik und Verwaltung alles festgesetzt und kaum noch zu entschiedener Reform fähig zu sein scheint.
Falls das wirklich ein tipping point ist - und bei sowas verschätzt man sich sehr, sehr leicht -, dann wäre eine mögliche Konsequenz, dass wir von einer (abnehmend) programmatisch links-rechts orientierten Politik zu einer jung-alt Orientierung übergehen könnten.
Die alte links-rechts Orientierung der Politik funktioniert ohnehin nicht mehr, seit die SPD in den 90ern nach Lafontaines Wahlniederlage auf Bundesebene neoliberal wurde.
Eine jung-alt Orientierung würde allerdings auch eine urban-rural Spaltung bedeuten. Die bemerkt man in Ostdeutschland (wo Großstädte die einzigen Inseln des Wohlstandes und vorteilhafter Entwicklungen zu sein scheinen) jetzt schon in extremer Form.
Wir würden vielleicht in einer krassen Weise die Entwicklung zur Polarisierung nachholen, die die Amis vollzogen haben. Jetzt muss man wohl hoffen, dass es Russen und Springer Verlag nicht gelingt, hier sowas wie Fox News, rechtsradikales talk radio und Breitbart zu etablieren. Dann stünden uns nämlich einige Jahrzehnte der gesellschaftlichen Selbstvergiftung und dysfunktionaler Politik bevor.
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[for Germans] www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundesdatenschuetzer-Kritik-an-Darknet-Gesetz-will-Sicherheitsgesetz-Pause-4425762.html
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S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de
.
*: The initial order for DM11 was 5,000, which would barely be enough for a single sensible munitions mix combat load per in-use Leopard 2 of the German army. I don't think there was a 2nd order yet.
**: The link shows the average age of party members (not voters) at the end of 2017.
**: The link shows the average age of party members (not voters) at the end of 2017.
Trump destroyed the argumentation in thousands of US economic/political science books. Checks, balances what name so?
ReplyDeleteUsed to be that the argument went, England has an unwritten constitution which can be bent to fit short term political needs. The US has a beautiful faultless constitution crafted by supergeniuses who foresaw every edge case and will disallow any attempt at creeping autocracy.
Does this mean that Trump is operating outside of political or economic possibilities? Obviously not seeing as he is still in power (for now) and the stock market hasn't crashed (for now).
Economics operates within limited bounds set by political power. It is controlled and impacted by political strategy, starve the beast, capital flight, political corruption etc...
Any who focus solely on the small part of a nations total market cap that is subject to 'free' market forces will be constantly caught off guard when external forces impose themselves (just watch some of the nerks on CNBC for proof of this).
What happens if the US defaults? What happens if it intentionally devalues? Is the US just another player in the game, or does its scale render it too big to fail? What does it mean if the sole global superpower chooses to openly flout economic/trade/diplomatic rules?
Might is right.
The U.S. cannot really default (go bankrupt) unless it wants to. The Federal Reserve Bank is its lender of last resort. Countries with debt in foreign currency can go bankrupt.
DeleteIf rules and norms do not benefit the worlds strongest power, it need not obey them.
DeletePresident Trump issues an edict. "Our debt used to be 24T, now its 12T. All bonds will pay half their face value. The world owes us. Other countries treat us as a piggy bank. And that stops. NOW!!!!"
Well, that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
DeleteAmericans may not be aware of how much they depend on the rest of the world, but they do. Moreover, the whole scenario ignores the fundamental nature of the Trump administration. It's an administration by and for grifters, by and for bankers. The domestic big business world would suffer trillions of losses in such a move, which is why it would not happen.
Now about the (approx.) 24T:
1/4 is intragovernmental debt = just an accounting fiction.
Only 40% of the rest is owed to foreigners. That's about 7T $. So even a rip-off of foreigners with a 50% reduction of face value of U.S. bonds would "only" reduce the public debt by about 3...4T $.
This is much in itself, but what matters in comparison to sanctions that follow is the debt servicing. U.S. 10-year treasury yield is about 2% p.a.. 2% of 4T is 80 billion.
The U.S. would not -even under a total moron like Trump - accept sanctions worth damages of hundreds of billions of dollars p.a. to cut debt service by less than 100B $ p.a..
Strongman loudmouthing and universal disrespect against the 90% of mankind that's more intelligent doesn't change the fundamental facts that aggressive behaviour is hugely self-harming due to the unavoidable 2nd order effects.
I didn't mean to say it would be effective.
DeleteI didn't mean to say that there wouldn't be retribution, complexities, knock on etc...
It would be self defeating.
It would be playing around with figures that have little meaning.
What about all of that makes you think that Trump wouldn't do it?
As for the sanctions? For what? How? Why? Breaking norms, rules? What is he doing at the moment. He is currently trying to pass a new trade deal while unilaterally placing tarrifs on a co-party to that very unsigned trade deal. Explain that. Its insanity. It is not internally consistent. It is not consistent with his own aims or rhetoric. Doesn't matter, reality doesn't throw an exception and blue screen when someone divides by zero. (Remember the 'pull' side, with his cash protection racket he is running on countries, trade deficit and you're our enemy)
Its main effect would be political. Would the environment created be beneficial to the US? I couldn't play that out. How would international settlements be managed in that environment. Why would nominally hostile powers agree to a common rulebook in that world? Why should they if the US doesn't.
I don't know how that would play out, I do however have an idea of what the future holds for the US if it doesn't alter course (even if it does, it is rather constrained).
So, is a roll of the dice to an uncertain future better than entering a civilisational clash with a country with x3 the population and a bigger GDP from the US's current fiscal position? Net investment -8T, Forex reserves 130B.
World Bank, IMF, Bretton Woods, BIS are not natural and normal. They were created and/or altered to suit the US's desires. They did it before. It will change in the future.
The current system does not allow for yankish victory, so they will ditch it. Does that mean to say their strategy will work? No. Is their potential strategy required to have the slightest hint of intelligence behind it? Nope.
Return to the gold standard. Fiat moneyz. Its the central banks of the world that run everything. Its tha rockerfellas, they own the queen and the illumaniteee. We need the gold standard back to take back control it will solve all of our problems. Vote Ron Paul 2020!!!!!!
"What about all of that makes you think that Trump wouldn't do it?"
DeleteThe 'by cronies, for cronies' part. They'd bribe him into not doing it in time.
The PRC has 4x the population of the United States.
Frankly, Gold Standard and all commodity backing of currencies is utter B.S.. It's known to not improve anything, only adds additional risks and problems.
The Republicans should have voted for Paul instead of for GWB (despite Paul's arrogant ignorance on economics and Gore/Kerry would both have been better choices), but that train has left by now.
The Ron Paul bit was supposed to be clearly a joke. Guess I failed :(
DeleteA tulip bulb value derived distributed ledger altcoin SWIFT replacment is clearly the way to go.
After Trump is gone, the problem still remains. China is exploiting the current global economic system for their advantage (neutral comment). The US has zero free capital, has significant debts in infrastructure/education that will need to be levelled in order to return any societal strength. Where are they going to get it from?
I don't think US statists would have any pause in causing global economic chaos in order to secure those funds. The 'cheapest' and most deniable way to do that is structural reform (makes the US global capitalist system sound a bit Soviet doesn't it?). If Trump does it, they can blame him, isolate him in history but leave the changes in place. Headlines 3 months after he's gone "Trump may have been imperfect, but at least he shook things up."
No other country could have acted the way the US has under Trump (I would obviously say before as well) and not had economic war declared on them. Why can they get away with it? Economics does not operate at ground level, it functions in a structure that allows it to exist. Those lower, more important structural elements are not economic.
Might is right.
I'm not so sure that the U.S. escapes economic warfare. Elections are very much affected by the current change of the economy (not the absolute state).
DeleteThe Chinese and others (including European great powers, though not the EU as a whole) may simply wait for the optimum moment to hit it with a torrent of strikes that turns the opinion about the U.S. economy and thus the almost ensures the lying moron's defeat.
So far we've only seen counteractions that have slow effects. All the rapid effects stuff (the stock markets crashing stuff) including rare earths embargo and expropriations (also a possibly irreversible "update backdoor" hacking of GPS satellites) haven't been used yet.
Things can't continue as they are, true even before Trump got in. The global power blocks desired futures have too much confliction. I can't come up with an analogous bit of history to draw examples from. Maybe there aren't any because technology has changed the context in which these old great power games are played.
DeleteThe world is a small place now, no 'new land' to expand in to, geography and the tyranny of distance no longer offer total defence.
Blah blah, woof woof.
"The present T-34 ammunition capacity", this might indicate why the British Army prefers HESH for it's MBTs.
ReplyDeleteI haven't found a record of the proportion that tends to be carried.
HESH is but an alternative to HE-frag like DM11. DM11 is likely superior for most tasks.
Delete