Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

I don’t think the US can win against Russia.

Most certainly not against the alliance of China, Russia, and Iran with assorted friends thrown in.

I hope someone stops whoever is driving this bid for WWIII.

The missile spoke pretty clearly.

Whatever it might be that China or Iran would want to "win", considering the prospect of fighting alongside a band of oafish stumblefucks – alcoholics and addicts, pedophiles and rapists, inbreds and the malnourished poor, to name a few –

Yes, we all know.

Because since it was designed to carry nukes and could’ve been carrying nuclear warheads—& thought to be carrying them—it was important to clarify.

And all of those facts should be contemplated carefully by the bozos provoking this incredibly dangerous situation.

We now face, on all fronts, a war not just against the living planet and the common good, but against material reality. Power in the United States will soon be shared between people who believe they will ascend to sit at the right hand of God, perhaps after a cleansing apocalypse; and people who believe their consciousness will be uploaded on to machines in a great Singularity.

The Christian rapture and the tech rapture are essentially the same belief. Both are examples of “substance dualism”: the idea that the mind or soul can exist in a realm separate from the body. This idea often drives a desire to escape from the grubby immanence of life on Earth. Once the rapture is achieved, there will be no need for a living planet.

But while it is easy to point to the counter-qualified, science-denying fanatics Donald Trump is appointing to high office, the war against reality is everywhere. You can see it in the British government’s carbon capture and storage scheme, a new fossil fuel project that will greatly raise emissions but is dressed up as a climate solution. And it informs every aspect of this week’s Cop29 climate talks in Azerbaijan.

Here, as everywhere, the living planet is forgotten while capital extends its frontiers. The one thing Cop29 has achieved so far – and it may well be the only thing – is an attempt to rush through new rules for carbon markets, enabling countries and businesses to trade carbon credits – which amount, in effect, to permission to carry on polluting.

In theory, you could justify a role for such markets, if they were used only to counteract emissions that are otherwise impossible to reduce (each credit purchased is meant to represent a tonne of carbon dioxide that has been reduced or removed from the atmosphere). But they’re routinely used as a first resort: a substitute for decarbonisation at home. The living world has become a dump for policy failure.

Essential as ecological carbon stores are, trading them against fossil fuel emissions, which is how these markets operate, cannot possibly work. The carbon that current ecosystems can absorb in one year is pitched against the burning of fossil carbon accumulated by ancient ecosystems over many years.

Nowhere is this magical thinking more apparent than in soil carbon markets, a great new adventure for commodity traders selling both kinds of carbon market products: official “credits” and voluntary carbon offsets. Every form of wishful thinking, over-claiming and outright fraud that has blighted the carbon market so far is magnified when it comes to soil.

We should do all we can to protect and restore soil carbon. About 80% of the organic carbon on the land surface of the planet is held in soil. It’s essential for soil health. There should be strong rules and incentives for good soil management. But there is no realistic way in which carbon trading can help. Here are the reasons why.

First, tradable increments of soil carbon are impossible to measure. Because soil depths can vary greatly even within one field, there is currently no accurate, affordable means of estimating soil volume. Nor do we have a good-enough test, across a field or a farm, for bulk density – the amount of soil packed into a given volume. So, even if you could produce a reliable measure of carbon per cubic metre of soil, if you don’t know how much soil you have, you can’t calculate the impact of any changes you make.

A reliable measure of soil carbon per cubic metre is also elusive, as carbon levels can fluctuate massively from one spot to the next. Repeated measurements from thousands of sites across a farm, necessary to show how carbon levels are changing, would be prohibitively expensive. Nor are simulation models, on which the whole market relies, an effective substitute for measurement. So much for the “verification” supposed to underpin this trade.

Second, soil is a complex, biological system that seeks equilibrium. With the exception of peat, it reaches equilibrium at a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of roughly 12:1. This means that if you want to raise soil carbon, in most cases you will also need to raise soil nitrogen. But whether nitrogen is applied in synthetic fertilisers or in animal manure, it’s a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, which could counteract any gains in soil carbon. It is also one of the most potent causes of water pollution.

Third, carbon levels in agricultural soils soon saturate. Some promoters of soil carbon credits create the impression that accumulation can continue indefinitely. It can’t. There’s a limit to how much a given soil can absorb.

Fourth, any accumulation is reversible. Soil is a highly dynamic system: you cannot permanently lock carbon into it. Microbes constantly process carbon, sometimes stitching it into the soil, sometimes releasing it: this is an essential property of soil health. With rises in temperature, the carbon sequestration you’ve paid for can simply evaporate: there’s likely to be a massive outgassing of carbon from soils as a direct result of continued heating. Droughts can also hammer soil carbon.

Even under current market standards, in which science takes second place to money, you need to show that carbon storage will last for a minimum of 40 years. There is no way of guaranteeing that carbon accumulation in soil will last that long. But as a new paper in Nature argues: “A CO2 storage period of less than 1,000 years is insufficient for neutralising remaining fossil CO2 emissions.”

The only form of organic carbon that might last this long – though only under certain conditions – is added biochar (fine-grained charcoal). But biochar is phenomenally expensive: the cheapest source I was able to find costs roughly 26 times as much as agricultural lime, which itself costs too much for many farmers. There’s a limited amount of material that can be turned into biochar. While making it, if you get the burn just slightly wrong, the methane, nitrous oxide and black carbon you produce will cancel any carbon savings.

There is a kind of substance dualism at work here, too: a concept of soil and soil carbon entirely detached from their earthly realities. This bubble of delusion will burst. If I were a devious financier, I would short the stocks of companies selling these credits.

All such approaches are substitutes for action, whose primary purpose is to enable governments to avoid conflict with powerful interests, especially the fossil fuel industry. At a moment of existential crisis, governments everywhere are retreating into a dreamworld, in which impossible contradictions are reconciled. You can send your legions to war with reality, but eventually we all lose.

We’ve been discussing a lot of plans and ingenious new strategies for a Democratic comeback which are variously half-baked, hyperbolic, histrionic or merely silly. Here’s one that I believe is not. It’s not even a strategy. It’s simply identifying a real challenge, or a knot Democrats need to untangle.

A key reason that many people are Democrats today is that they’re attached to a cluster of ideas like the rule of law, respect for and the employment of science and expertise, a free press and the protection of the range of institutions that guard civic life, quality of life and more. On the other side, say we have adherents of a revanchist, authoritarian politics which seeks break all those things and rule from the wreckage that destruction leaves in its path. So Democrats constantly find themselves defending institutions, or “the establishment,” or simply the status quo. Yet we live in an age of pervasive public distrust — distrust of institutions, leaders, expertise. And not all of this distrust is misplaced. Many institutions, professions, and power centers have failed to live up to their sides of the social contract.

In short, Democrats are by and large institutionalists in an age of mistrust. And that is challenging place to be.

What puts a finer point on the matter is that Democrats often find themselves carrying the water of institutions which do them no favors or are even affirmatively hostile. I think of this a lot when it comes to the establishment press. Civic democrats should and generally are in favor of a free and vital press. But that doesn’t or shouldn’t mean the press exactly as it’s structured right now. That’s not only wrong on the merits; it’s a losers’ game.

I remember earlier this year a reporter for the Times chided critics of the paper by saying she thought everyone agreed that in the Trump era it was critical to build up and support the press rather than tear it down. To me this illustrates the conundrum and often the sucker’s deal: Democrats get called in to run defense for flawed institutions which in this case routinely shortchange them on basic fairness.

The simple answer is just to move into tear it down mode, a populist rejection of the status quo. And in some cases that absolutely makes sense. There are still some people who lament every latest Supreme Court travesty because it reduces faith or trust in the Court. I jettisoned this thinking years ago. To me this is one of the few silver linings. The Court is thoroughly corrupt. It must be thoroughly reformed and the corruption rooted out. Respect for the Court’s decisions and the Court itself is a problem to be solved, not a rampart or castle wall to be reinforced.

When it comes to the establishment press, I think Democrats need to get used to running against the press. I don’t mean that simply because it’s good politics, though it probably is in many cases. I mean it because in many cases the way establishment press covers political news is very much part of the problem. You can criticize and yes even bash bad news coverage without in any way questioning the centrality of press freedom. A lot of people really seem to think they’re the same thing. They’re not. It’s stupid and wildly counterproductive to think otherwise.

But often it’s not as simple as that. The country needs an at least relatively disinterested Department of Justice. It needs scientists and clinicians studying and safeguarding public health. It needs a robust press and all the other infrastructure of civil society that together make up the soft tissue of civic freedom. If one side is saying “Burn it down!” and another is saying “We’re rootin’ tootin’ mad and we have many questions!” well then it’s definitely going to get burned to the ground because there’s no one taking up the defense. So often it’s not that simple.

We seem likely to see these issues come to the fore if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets confirmed to run HHS. I’m sure there are problems at FDA, NIH, CDC, the whole complex of food, medical and public health agencies. There’s no question that there’s a significant degree of agency capture when it comes to the national food supply, nutrition guidance and so forth. But that’s not going to be solved by a crank degenerate who claims COVID was created as part of a government plot. What is the public argument for why Kennedy shouldn’t be allowed to fire 500 or 600 government research scientists at NIH?

Often in political conversations I’ll hear people say, well, you need to move in a more populist direction. Start attacking Big This, Big That, Big The Other Thing. And I agree. But some of the big stuff is actually really necessary.

To some degree, Democrats need to fine tune their message to be one that works in an age of perverse public distrust — without losing its hold on those voters who have flocked to the party over the last 20 years precisely because it’s the party of civic democracy. But it’s not only that. Democrats are increasingly a party of the college educated. Certainly the people who define its messages come out of that cultural world. And they — we — are acculturated to think in terms of formal expertise, disinterested government, thinking there’s one bucket for policy and another for politics and you don’t mix them. Some of that is just a belief in civic democracy, how things really should run. But some of it is simply the mental habits of our acculturation, something that is substantively and certainly politically limiting.

This may all sound highly abstract, way more academic — for lack of a better word — than more concrete and immediate questions about coalition management or moving to the center or the left and whatever else. But I think it’s actually at the core of the big questions. Being the party of institutions in an age of distrust is an inherent challenge. It’s at the heart of why Democrats often think and talk in ways that don’t connect, break through to big chunks of the electorate. Democrats aren’t going to stop being the party of institutions because they want the rule of law; they want elections where votes are counted; they want real medicine over quacks. This is the foolery of those people whose response to the election is to fire Democrats’ voters. That’s not how anything works. But being a party of institutions and expertise in era of pervasive distrust is, again, an inherent challenge. You don’t surmount that challenge without giving the issue some real time and thought.

A staunch ally of Donald Trump has warned Sir Keir Starmer that the UK will face severe economic consequences if it helps to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.

Senator Lindsey Graham said the US should “crush” the economies of all those who comply with the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The Israeli prime minister faces arrest if he enters Britain, Downing Street has said.

On Friday No 10 refused to explicitly comment on the case, saying it was a hypothetical situation, but added that the UK would follow its legal obligations.

The ICC has also issued an arrest warrant for Yoav Gallant, Israel’s former defence minister, over alleged war crimes in Gaza.

But the move has provoked fury among Republicans in the US.

In response, Senator Graham tweeted: “Any nation or organization that aids or abets this outrage should expect to meet firm resistance from the United States, and I look forward to working with President Trump, his team, and my colleagues in Congress to come up with a powerful response.”

The South Carolina senator later told Fox News: “If you are going to help the ICC as a nation and force the arrest warrant against Bibi and Gallant…I will put sanctions on you as a nation.

“You’re gonna have to pick the rogue ICC versus America. I’m working with [another US senator] Tom Cotton to have legislation passed as soon as we can to sanction any country that aids and abets the arrest of any politician in Israel. What they’re doing in Israel is trying to prevent a second Holocaust. So, to any ally, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, if you try to help the ICC, we’re gonna sanction you.”

Asked what the penalty should be, he added: “We should crush your economy because we’re next…Why can’t they go after Trump or any other American president?”

No 10 backed the ICC on Thursday after it issued the arrest warrants, saying the government respected the independence of the court.

But shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel described the move as “concerning and provocative” and called on the government to “condemn” them.

Before July’s general election, Conservative ministers had been considering a legal challenge to the issuing of arrest warrants, but the new Labour administration dropped the idea saying that it was a matter for the court.

The ICC said there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that both Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant were responsible for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts”.

Neither Israel not the USA are members of the ICC.

That is the deal that Vladimir Putin is offering new recruits in his country.

And in the US of A, the only option for many lower income demographics, is to join the military.

Please explain what the difference is here, Walter?