Obsidian Wings

This is Sparta!!

by liberal japonicus

Yes, I know that the Battle of Marathon was the Athenians versus the Persians, but it is hard not to hear that phrase in my mind when I read this article from A. Wess Mitchell, "a principal at The Marathon Initiative and a former assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia during the Trump administration". A quick jump to the Marathon Initiative, their webpage has a 4 photo slideshow which are

1. The 1814 Congress of Vienna
2. Teddy Roosevelt posing with Russian and Japanese negotiators
3. The 1943 Casablanca conference with Churchill, FDR, De Gaulle and Henri Giraud where Roosevelt unveiled the requirement of 'unconditional surrender' by the Axis
4. and 1957 Paris summit of the heads of state of NATO

Ahh, the good ole days...

While one might ponder why anyone who worked in the Trump Administration might be worthy of paying attention to, an amuse-bouche from the piece:

The United States is a heartbeat away from a world war that it could lose. There are serious conflicts requiring U.S. attention in two of the world’s three most strategically important regions. Should China decide to launch an attack on Taiwan, the situation could quickly escalate into a global war on three fronts, directly or indirectly involving the United States. The hour is late, and while there are options for improving the U.S. position, they all require serious effort and inevitable trade-offs. It’s time to move with real urgency to mobilize the United States, its defenses, and its allies for what could become the world crisis of our time.

Did I say amuse-bouche? Not sure what the French is for 'making one throw up a little in the back of their throat'. I left the link in, which is to a WSJ op-ed which riffs off of Jack Nicolson's line in 'A Few Good Men'. Not the one that was Jack Nicolson's threat against Tom Cruise when he gets arrested, but it might was well be. A couple other gems:

As Russia mobilizes for a long war in Ukraine and a new front opens in the Levant, the temptation will grow for a rapidly arming China to make a move on Taiwan. Already, Beijing is testing Washington in East Asia, knowing full well that the United States would struggle to deal with a third geopolitical crisis. If war does come, the United States would find some very important factors suddenly working against it.

"The Levant" is a keeper. Someone must have played too many games of Risk as a teen. Again, I leave the links in for folks to click, but the first one is to the Moscow Times, which has this:

The record defense spending shows that the Kremlin has no intention of ending its war against Ukraine anytime soon: on the contrary. Even if the fighting becomes less intense or the conflict becomes frozen, the money will go toward replenishing Russia’s depleted military arsenals. Likewise, it has enough cash to fund an escalation such as the imposition of martial law or full mobilization.

Yes, I, like everyone else of my ilk, thought that Russia was just going to toss in the towel and turn all their munitions into plowshares.

This is not to claim that there is nothing to worry about with Taiwan, but tying it into some sort of three front conflict is not going to help keep things tamped down. But hey, defending Western Civilization from the barbarians doesn't need nuance. Anyway, a thread for musings about global stuff.

 

 

 

Grief

by JanieM

Report from my neighborhood, nineteen days later –

Flags are still flying at half-staff in Maine. I see them everywhere as I drive around the countryside, and I try not to cry. Twice a week I drive through the town where Robert Card shot his last victim – himself; it's not hard to imagine that he, like so many people, had to struggle with mental illness in a harsh, uncaring culture that would rather worship billionaires than take care of the ill and unlucky among us.

Similarly with every news article about the massacre, its antecedents, and its aftermath. I still cry. I don’t know when this will stop, and it makes me wonder how the families and friends of the victims of an event like this ever … I won’t say get over it, because I don’t see how they can … but at least pick up their lives and start moving forward again.

News articles are full of blather. Are there enough mental health resources? Did the police, or the army, or social services, screw up the handling of Card in the months before the shootings? Is Maine’s “yellow flag” law flawed? (Duh.) Was the manhunt mishandled?

On and on and on. It’s like we (the collective American “we”) have built a huge Rube Goldberg machine to avoid having to deal with the one part of this mess that's relatively straightforward, if not easily solvable, human nature being what it is. That part is the fact that this country allows private citizens to own weapons of mass murder, which apparently no one can stop them from taking to schools, bowling alleys, and places of worship to gun people down by the dozen.

I have a friend who works with a lot of gun owners, who, to a man (yes) say that they don’t care how many kindergartners are murdered, they will never give up their guns, or support any tighter restrictions on the private ownership of weapons of war.

...

Policing identity

by liberal japonicus

The question of identity is always one on my mind, so the CBC report of Buffy Saint-Marie's identity caught my attention. To summarise, Saint-Marie said that she was adopted by a white couple and was part of what is known as the Sixties Scoop, where First Nation children were taken from their parents and forcibly adopted by white middle class parents, the CBC report casts doubt on that. The Guardian article points out how the accusations and claims are not quite so cut and dry.

The fact that Saint-Marie was adopted into the tribe as an adult is not in question, the questions raised are dealing with her birth and youth. The CBC has published what they say are the questions that have to be answered affirmatively before they publish about so called 'pretendarian' claims. They are

• Is this a person of significant influence?
• Has this person benefited from their claims of Indigenous identity?
• Has this person shaped public perceptions of what it means to be Indigenous in Canada?
• Has this person taken space or opportunities away from others who might rightly deserve them?

I myself have a bit of difficulty seeing how the CBC was able to confidently answer yes to all those questions.

As often happens, a different article I read seems connected to this. This Guardian article discusses a case of harassment of an Australian doctor of aboriginal descent by another doctor, who was punished with a 1 year license renewal suspension. A few key grafs:

On 19 July 2022, the GP emailed Rallah-Baker’s ophthalmology practice, Sunshine Coast Ophthalmologists, with comments that had an “immediate, profound emotional toll” on the First Nations man, tribunal documents show.

According to the statement of facts agreed by both parties, the email read: “You are not full blood are you? Half? Quarter? One eight? Like a watered down bottle of Grange. Not the real thing. I have attached two photos of what real aboriginals look like just to remind you.”

The GP also went on to express his disaffection towards the Closing the Gap (CTG) pharmaceutical benefit scheme (PBS) co-payment program.

“To obtain a PBS subsidy for simple modified release paracetamol a patient MUST be aboriginal. This is not means tested. So rich dudes like you … could get your Panadol Osteo for absolutely NO CHARGE under the CTG legislation but my struggling old age pensioners with their osteoarthritis have to buy it at full cost.”

This paper by Ive Goddard, deals with Red Thunder Cloud, a famous pretendarian and this line from his last paragraph seems like a good line to end with. "Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West's life as Red Thunder Cloud confronts us with basic questions of race and identity that are emblematic of our age."

The Road to Somewhere

by JanieM

The picture is a blatantly obvious metaphor for the road ahead, with a wish that "we" (in the broadest possible sense) could turn a corner into sunshine. I have no hope, but it would be nice.

Open thread.

*****

The picture was taken almost exactly a year ago along Baldwin Hill Road in Fayette, Maine, near the entrance to the Baldwin Hill Conservation Cemetery.

Bigger version here.

 

being the open thread requested

by liberal japonicus

An open thread was requested, have at it!

Lewiston

by JanieM

Thanks for the good thoughts in the other thread, everyone. I am safe at home, as is everyone among my family and friends as far as I know. It is 7:30 a.m., the next morning, and the suspected shooter still has not been found. Schools are closed all over central Maine, including the one near me – which, I grieve to say, has been at the edge of my worries about mass shootings for a long time, given that it has had a couple of bomb threats over the years and that school shootings have – horrifyingly! how?! – become an event people train to meet in this era in this land.

Pollo de Muerte – yes, I felt the dread immediately. Usually I find it hard not to roll my eyes at unsolicited advice, but in this case I appreciate it and will take it to heart.

I have a semi-distant relative whom I’ve never met, who was with her daughter at the concert in Las Vegas in 2017 where another mass shooting took place. She and her daughter were unhurt, but having someone connected to me there made the horror of it a little more vivid. Not that in the abstract I wasn’t continually horrified to begin with, but there’s a difference between rational recognition and the ability to imagine something in the gut.

This, as Pollo says, is different. The area where the shootings took place is familiar – I’ve spent a lot of time in Lewiston and Auburn over the years (they are twin cities on opposite sides of the Androscoggin River). I know people connected to Bates College, which is about midway between the two shooting sites, and have gone to events there and taken pictures of the campus. I have tried to imagine this feeling, but I never really got it until now, and this is without a doubt absolutely nothing compared to actually being caught up in an event like this.  (And I am not forgetting, as I write, that actual bombs are falling on actual people’s actual neighborhoods in other places in the world. “It can’t happen here” recedes ever further into fantasy land.)

As to what is wrong with this country that a good portion of it in effect worships the “freedom” to own weapons that will let people perpetrate this kind of horror – I am out of words.

The picture is of Lewiston, taken from the Auburn side of the Androscoggin. Bigger version here here.

A mid-week open thread

by liberal japonicus

It's been 4 days since the last post, so just thought I'd open something, see what everyone has. What fresh hells do folks see on the horizon?

And third on the list

by liberal japonicus

Right after a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire and a solution for Israel-Hamas, I suppose is How to fix the internet, which seems like a topic y'all might have a lot to say about. A few grafs

When the internet began to be built out commercially in the 1990s, its culture was, perversely, anticommercial. Many of the leading internet thinkers of the day belonged to a cohort of AdBusters-reading Gen Xers and antiestablishment Boomers. They were passionate about making software open source. Their very mantra was “Information wants to be free”—a phrase attributed to Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and the pioneering internet community the WELL. This ethos also extended to a passion for freedom of speech, and a sense of responsibility to protect it.

It's interesting for me here in Japan, because the internet was more the domain of businesses, you have a situation where all information is siloed, and this notion of information wanting to be free is not really as much a thing.

Our modern internet is built on highly targeted advertising using our personal data. That is what makes it free. The social platforms, most digital publishers, Google—all run on ad revenue. For the social platforms and Google, their business model is to deliver highly sophisticated targeted ads. (And business is good: in addition to Google’s billions, Meta took in $116 billion in revenue for 2022. Nearly half the people living on planet Earth are monthly active users of a Meta-owned product.) Meanwhile, the sheer extent of the personal data we happily hand over to them in exchange for using their services for free would make people from the year 2000 drop their flip phones in shock.

The writer's solution, that we just have to realize we need to pay for things sometimes, seems a bit off. To me, the problem is not that we have to pay for things, it is the underlying greed that permeates society. It's hard to escape it, you think you will stop when you have enough, but enough is never enough.

My toxic trait is I can’t shake that naïve optimism of the early internet. Mistakes were made, a lot of things went sideways, and there have undeniably been a lot of pain and misery and bad things that came from the social era. The mistake now would be not to learn from them.

It's interesting that the toxic trait of optimism is immediately followed by 'Mistakes were made'. That absence of agent tell us a lot. Have at it.

Science at the end of the world

by liberal japonicus

A science thread. Below the fold is a youtube video. A little background, Toyota, despite having an early lead in electric vehicles because of its development of the Prius, it refused to go all electric and has been beaten out by other companies, notably Honda. Toyota argued that going all electric was not a solution, though a lot of this came out after Toyota got beat up in the market place, leading shareholders to express their disappointment.

For those of you who aren't link readers, a few grafs from the Slate article

How did Toyota end up gagging on the electric-car revolution’s dust? Not by making a careless business oversight, but through methodical decisions that came from the top. And worse: The company has paired this lack of innovation with aggressive attempts to protect its position as the world’s most valuable car company by stopping electric vehicles from taking hold more broadly.

[...]

A generation ago, Toyota was ahead of most automakers in researching and deploying clean-energy tech, and it gradually electrified some of its biggest models while expanding its fleet of hybrids, both plug-in and not. Yet, as the ever-warming atmosphere and the ever-boiling chargers-versus-gas-pumps battles demonstrate, there’s a key difference between electrifying and going fully electric. Toyota’s focus on the former at the expense of the latter may have made sense previously thanks to its domination of the hybrid market, but as those sales plummet, it increasingly looks like a mistake.

[...]

Toyota head Akio Toyoda, heir to the family dynasty that launched his company nearly 100 years ago and current chair of the powerful Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, has consistently pooh-poohed EVs while doubling down on his beloved hybrids. That’s not to say he dismisses all energy innovations—his company loves it some hydrogen, though its fuel-cell fleets haven’t quite taken off. But to hear it from him, an all-EV transition would be as apocalyptic as a future in which we don’t attempt to clear up transportation emissions. When the Japanese government considered a California-style future ban on gas cars in late 2020, Toyoda went off at a JAMA press conference, denouncing EVs as a bunch of hype while warning that expanded use would lead to lost jobs and reduced power capacity. Toyoda’s successful pushback was in step with EV-related remarks he’s made over the years as the voice of both JAMA and Toyota. In 2021: “Carbon is our enemy, not the internal combustion engine.” In 2022: “Playing to win also means doing things differently. Doing things that others may question, but that we believe will put us in the winner’s circle the longest,” referring to his company’s bearishness on EVs. Last month: “People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority. That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.” (all links are from the article)

While I'm just an interested observer, whenever I hear people in power talking about a silent majority, I retch for a few moments. This is compounded by the people who pop up and talk about how going all electric is a woke thing and good on Toyota for standing up to the EV mafia. FFS.

Anyway, the video seems to be another shoe dropping (I would say the other, but that implies that there is only one shoe, but the world has shown us that there is an infinite supply of shoes to be dropped) which is Toyota's new ammonia based engine.

Now, maybe I'm just stuck in my position, but given what is known about ammonia, I'm still thinking that this is just another group of people trying to keep power by employing whatever they can to stop change. But that's just my first reaction, maybe I'm just not seeing it, hence the post, which could be about anything science-y. Knock yerselves out.

Be Joyful Though You Have Considered All the Facts

by JanieM

 

GftNC: Sunt lacrimae rerum.

The title of the post is from a poem I’m sure I’ve linked here before: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, by Wendell Berry.

Another: Place, by W. S. Merwin.

Easy for me to say “be joyful”; bombs are not falling on my neighborhood. But my despair won’t stop the bombs from falling, so I try to use the time that’s given to me as best I can.

One way I get to use it is in the company of a person of the future (to borrow nous’s phrase) who is not quite two years old. I play an eclectic mix of music for her from the astonishing variety available on YouTube, and she has three particular favorites, for each of which she will stop what she’s doing and come over to watch the videos, move to the music, and clap to the beat. (More or less.)

Yuja Wang’s encores, from 1:24:45 to the end of the video. [ETA: Time has been corrected.]

Dolly and friends. [ETA: link fixed.....]

Taylor and friends. I have to confess that I have never paid the slightest bit of attention to Taylor Swift. But she has been in the news lately for various reasons, and someone in a BJ comment thread linked to this song, which is nothing like what I imagined her music to be.

Open thread, especially for musical offerings.

*****

Bigger version of the picture, which was taken in Montgomery Woods State Natural Reserve, Mendocino County, California, in the spring of 2022. It was a magical trip for me.