…it’s complicated [DOT 8/3/22]

…I tried to follow that advice I quoted about cultivating hope at the weekend

Ukraine on Monday dismissed Russia’s promise to allow its citizens to travel safely on designated routes to Russia or its close ally Belarus. A Ukrainian official called it propaganda and said it was not driven by humanitarian concerns.

Russia announced a cease-fire and said it was offering routes for safe passage out of the capital, Kyiv, the southern port city of Mariupol and hard-hit areas of Kharkiv and Sumy in the northeast. But it set out clearly defined paths for anyone seeking to escape, which Ukraine said were unacceptable and described as being meant to manipulate world leaders.
[…]
Macron criticized the proposal as a case of “cynicism.”

“I don’t know many Ukrainians who want to seek refuge in Russia. That’s hypocrisy,” he said in an interview with the French news broadcaster LCI.
[…]
Three of the six proposed routes led to either Russia or Belarus, from where Russian forces have launched parts of their campaign.
[…]
“Russia is organizing propaganda corridors, not humanitarian ones,” [Zelenskyy adviser Mykhailo Podolyak] said.
[…]
At one point Sunday, Red Cross workers halted an evacuation attempt when they realized the road indicated for them to use had been mined, Dominik Stillhart, the director of operations for the organization, told the BBC.
[…]
More than 1.735 million people have fled Ukraine to neighboring countries since the conflict began, the United Nations’ refugee agency said Monday, up from 1.53 million Sunday. Those who have remained have sheltered in basements and metro stations or packed trains heading west to areas largely free of the fighting.
[…]
Cities that have come under heavy Russian assault, including encircled Mariupol, have sounded the alarm about an impending humanitarian catastrophe. Russian shelling destroyed critical infrastructure and left residents without water, heat or electricity and with dwindling food supplies.
[…]
President Joe Biden spoke Monday morning with the leaders of France, Germany and the U.K. They agreed to “continue raising the costs on Russia for its unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine” and affirmed plans for “providing security, economic, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine,” the White House said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ukraine-rejects-russia-cease-fire-humanitarian-corridors-putin-belarus

…but here in the land of are-you-sure-it’s-not-monday there’s surely a lot of columns full of the other thing

Fallout from the fighting in Ukraine will take a meaningful bite out of the global economic recovery this year, with the greatest impact in Europe, economists said. A spike in oil prices to more than $110 per barrel and renewed supply chain disruptions — including fresh headaches for the auto industry — also are likely to aggravate U.S. inflation, already at a 40-year high.

But the war’s long-term consequences could be more profound. Even before Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks and missiles hurtling toward Ukraine, years of deteriorating U.S.-China relations and failed global trade talks had stalled the tighter integration of finance and trade flows that had been anticipated during globalization’s heyday.

What comes next is unlikely to mirror the Cold War’s distinct blocs. Even as the global economic order fractures, no rival ideologies compete for supremacy. And China’s harsh authoritarian turn under President Xi Jinping co-exists with extensive commercial ties to the United States, Europe and Japan. But governments, corporations and investors all are adjusting to a new reality.

“It’s the end of one era and the beginning of another, which is a less complete form of globalization than we had ambitions for in the immediate post-Cold War era,” said Michael Smart, managing director of Rock Creek Global Advisors. “We have to think differently about what we mean by the global trading system. There are certain requirements that, if you don’t meet them, you’re not part of it. You can’t be in the club.”

Russia’s Ukraine invasion could be a global economic ‘game changer’ [WaPo]

…& by way of a tangential distraction…it made me think, “why ‘hoping against hope”? – surely it would make sense to be hoping for hope, wouldn’t it?

The Amazon is approaching a tipping point, data shows, after which the rainforest would be lost with “profound” implications for the global climate and biodiversity.

Computer models have previously indicated a mass dieback of the Amazon is possible but the new analysis is based on real-world satellite observations over the past three decades.

Novel statistical analysis shows that more than 75% of the untouched forest has lost stability since the early 2000s, meaning it takes longer to recover after droughts and wildfires.

The greatest loss of stability is in areas closer to farms, roads and urban areas and in regions that are becoming drier, suggesting that forest destruction and global heating are the cause. These factors “may already have pushed the Amazon close to a critical threshold of rainforest dieback”, the scientists conclude.

The study does not enable a prediction of when the tipping point could be reached. But the researchers warned that by the time the triggering of the tipping point could be detected, it would be too late to stop it.

Once triggered, the rainforest would transform to grassland over a few decades at most, releasing huge amounts of carbon and accelerating global heating further.

Tipping points on a planetary scale are among the greatest fears of climate scientists, as they are irreversible on human timescales. In 2021, the same statistical technique revealed warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream and other key Atlantic currents, with “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century”.

A shutdown of these currents would have catastrophic consequences around the world, disrupting monsoon rains and endangering Antarctic ice sheets.

Another recent study showed that a significant part of the Greenland ice sheet is on the brink of a tipping point, which would lead to 7 metres of sea level rise over time.
[…]
The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, examined satellite data on the amount of vegetation in more than 6,000 grid cells across the untouched Amazon from 1991 to 2016.
[…]
Areas closer to human destruction of the forest also became more unstable. Trees are crucial in producing rain, so felling them to clear land for beef and soy production creates a vicious circle of drier conditions and more tree loss.

Another study in 2021, based on data from hundreds of small plane flights, showed the Amazon now emits more carbon dioxide than it absorbs, mostly because of fires.

But Boers said the data indicated that the tipping point has not yet been crossed: “So there’s hope.” Prof Tim Lenton at Exeter University in the UK, a co-author of the study, said: “It supports efforts to reverse deforestation and degradation of the Amazon to give it back some resilience against ongoing climate change.”
[…]
Boers said: “It’s really complicated to say what’s going to be first: reaching a tipping point by [loss of stability] of the natural vegetation system, or just the bulldozers reaching the forest.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/07/climate-crisis-amazon-rainforest-tipping-point

…so…if you’d rather just ponder etymological derivations you could read this whole thing instead

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/246831/why-hoping-against-hope

…short version…it’s pulled from a quote that dates to a (biblical) translation of a pun that uses two meanings for the term hope…one of which is no longer commonly understood in english though fairly comprehensible in at least some languages…it broadly translates, much as you might expect, to “hoping for the result it doesn’t look like you’ll get”…but there was one bit of head cannon in that thread that appealed to me…the idea that the “against” implied a sort of collateral scenario…where the only thing that could be offered in support of the hope was more hope…like a self-funding loan of some sort…maybe the stuff works differently for different folks…but it seemed like I could think of a lot of times that would have been a pretty good working definition as far as I can make out

Moscow has stoked fears of an energy war by threatening to close a major gas pipeline to Germany after the US pushed its European allies to consider banning Russian oil imports over its invasion of Ukraine.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/08/russia-threatens-europes-gas-supplies-as-west-mulls-oil-import-ban-over-ukraine-invasion

…what worries me…or at least worries me enough to be able to single it out from the general morass…is…well…you know how they say “cometh the hour, cometh the man”?

President Biden has displayed great leadership, consulting and convening allies, exposing the lie that America’s commitment to Europe is somehow diminished. The European Union has undertaken a remarkable effort to align behind severe sanctions on Russia. Dozens of European countries are sending defensive equipment to Ukraine’s armed forces. But have we done enough for Ukraine? The honest answer is no.

…he might admire the guy…but dude ain’t even a poor man’s churchill

Vladimir Putin’s act of aggression must fail and be seen to fail. We must not allow anyone in the Kremlin to get away with misrepresenting our intentions in order to find ex post facto justification for this war of choice. This is not a NATO conflict, and it will not become one. No ally has sent combat troops to Ukraine. We have no hostility toward the Russian people, and we have no desire to impugn a great nation and a world power. We despair of the decision to send young, innocent Russians into a futile war.

…& because he absolutely can’t pass up a way to pat himself on the back even when it’s largely inappropriate he claims “the UK” would know about this personally on account of the assassinations (the ones that went almost entirely unanswered beyond the part where we helpfully demonstrated pretty incontrovertibly that putin was responsible & that we knew that for a fact) to which a couple of people were victim on his patch…but not before he pushes the boat out

It is now clear diplomacy never had a chance. But it is precisely because of our respect for Russia that we find the actions of the Putin regime so unconscionable. Mr. Putin is attempting the destruction of the very foundation of international relations and the United Nations Charter: the right of nations to decide their own future, free from aggression and fear of invasion. His assault on Ukraine began with a confected pretext and a flagrant violation of international law. It is sinking further into a sordid campaign of war crimes and unthinkable violence against civilians.

…& after the “we’d know” bit he runs up the flagpole various flavors of “we said this would happen”…tries to retrospectively claim that cutting france out of that submarine deal with australia was all part of the sage strategy he’s such a lynchpin of…though it does pretty swiftly start to sound like it’s a long way out of his wheelhouse

It is no longer enough to express warm platitudes about the rules-based international order.

…so I don’t know how much hope he’s capable of instigating…but it’s interesting that he says this part right after

We are going to have to actively defend it against a sustained attempt to rewrite the rules by force and other tools, such as economic coercion.

…& if I have time I might come back to harp a little on why that last bit might be a sore spot for ol’ bojo & how bumpy the ride might get for his brexit clowncar…but to go back to the horse’s ass’ mouth

We are pleased to see more nations beginning to grasp this hard reality.

…irony, thy name is britain

That’s a welcome development, but it is not going to be enough on its own to save Ukraine or keep the flame of freedom alive. Russia has overwhelming force and apparently no regard for the laws of war. We need to prepare now for even darker days ahead.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/opinion/boris-johnson-russia-putin-ukraine-war.html

…if you’re interested he has a six-point plan…none of which will be new to you…though the part where he defines the line between “no matter how long it takes, we must prevent any creeping normalization of what Russia does in Ukraine.” in fourth place & “we should always be open to diplomacy and de-escalation” in fifth seems to have wound up on the cutting room floor somehow…possibly because it would have required an awkward link to pull it around to his closing on “we must act now to strengthen Euro-Atlantic security” given that accurately denoting russian aggression against its neighbors & providing them with material aid short of troops on the ground is something that putin is busy contending is somehow synonymous with active participation in military conflict…which he contends he had no choice but to commit to in the face of the encircling threat posed by neighbors that were on better terms with the west than russia

Let's discuss what's happening in Russia. To put it simply, it's going full fascist. Authorities launched a propaganda campaign to gain popular support for their invasion of Ukraine and they're getting lots of it. You can see "Z" on these guys' clothes. What does it mean? 🧵 pic.twitter.com/F2zjcpJCDZ

— Kamil Galeev (@kamilkazani) March 6, 2022

…but at this point…for all that there’s a surfeit of personal immediacy in so much of the coverage on the ground in ukraine…for those of us wringing our hands on the sidelines you have to imagine that the distance between the public facing side of this thing & anything that might be real ground gained toward a political resolution is a bit like the uncanny valley

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about disinformation and how it has been used as a cudgel to dismiss and silence opinions that some people might not like. This doesn’t mean that disinformation isn’t a problem — the speed with which unverified, mislabeled or outright false news came out of Ukraine was a grim reminder of this — but it’s become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what’s a purposeful attempt to mislead the public and what’s being called disinformation because of a genuine difference of opinion.

Plus, we really can’t trust that technology can solve the trouble it creates. After the 2016 election, the tech giants attempted to fix the disinformation problem by placing labels on potentially harmful posts. This, in theory, isn’t a bad idea if one can somehow corral and then sort every bit of online information. A 2020 study found that the filters for this sort of project could not possibly catch all of the disinformation, which presented a problem: If you can identify only, say, 20 percent of the bad information and label it as such, what happens to the 80 percent? The researchers found that readers would be more likely to assume that the unlabeled disinformation was trustworthy.

Given the difficulty of regulating every online post, especially in a country that protects most forms of speech, it seems far more prudent to focus most of our efforts on building an educated and resilient public that can spot and then ignore disinformation campaigns.

…somewhat ironically (there’s a lot of that going around, it would seem) after all the talk of finland-ization lately…he uses finland as an example of somewhere that’s taken steps to improve “media literacy”…along with another example that (I’d argue not coincidentally) also shares a border with russia

A potentially useful outlier is Estonia, a country that has roughly the population of San Diego. In 2010, after years of political turmoil and a wide-ranging series of cyberattacks, the government of Estonia decided to mandate “media literacy” education for all of its public school students. Elementary and middle school students are taught everything from how online content is created to how statistics can be manipulated. In high school, lessons about social media, trolls, the difference between fact and opinion and what makes a good source help students become more critical thinkers.

All this seems promising, especially when you consider that Estonia, a relatively poor country, has media literacy rates that surpass those of much wealthier countries like Germany and Sweden. Perhaps misinformation education alone can make the difference for poorer countries, or even countries with great wealth disparities, such as the United States. But would a solution in Estonia work in a country as different from it as America?

…probably another candidate for that hoping against hope thing

Poorer students mostly did much worse than wealthy students. White, Asian and students of “two or more races” on average scored up to three times as high as Black students when it came to “evaluating evidence.” Those disparities held for the most part throughout the study.

Students who qualified for free or reduced lunch did about half as well at “evaluating evidence” as other students. Those whose mothers had an advanced degree fared far better than those whose mothers had not finished high school. Students who received “mostly A’s” on their report cards scored higher than those who got “mostly C’s and D’s.”

What all this suggests, then, is that America’s disinformation problem isn’t all that much different from pretty much every other educational problem in this country. The same class and race disparities exist in standardized testing, grade point average and even the quality of essays students write for college applications. They also show up in vaccination rates and in levels of mistrust of public health officials. We live in a country where profound inequality affects nearly every part of a person’s life. Why would we expect disinformation resistance to be any different?

Fighting Disinformation Can Feel Like a Lost Cause. It Isn’t. [NYT]

…I’d have quoted more…but hearing that of the 14 states that offer some form of media literacy in their curriculum two of them are florida & texas…well…yeah

Today we live in an era of “cheap speech.” Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar at U.C.L.A., coined the term in 1995 to refer to a new period marked by changes in communications technology that would allow readers, viewers and listeners to receive speech from a practically infinite variety of sources unmediated by traditional media institutions, like newspapers, that had served as curators and gatekeepers. Professor Volokh was correct back in 1995 that the amount of speech flowing to us in formats like video would move from a trickle to a flood.

What Professor Volokh did not foresee in his largely optimistic prognostication was that our information environment would become increasingly “cheap” in a second sense of the word, favoring speech of little value over speech that is more valuable to voters.

It is expensive to produce quality journalism but cheap to produce polarizing political “takes” and easily shareable disinformation. The economic model for local newspapers and news gathering has collapsed over the past two decades; from 2000 to 2018, journalists lost jobs faster than coal miners.

…& that’s just in a part of the world that prizes free speech & where journalists are generally not in danger of losing anything more permanent than their livelihood

While some false claims spread inadvertently, the greater problem is not this misinformation but deliberately spread disinformation, which can be both politically and financially profitable. Feeding people reassuring lies on social media or cable television that provide simple answers to complex social and economic problems increases demand for more soothing falsities, creating a vicious cycle. False information about Covid-19 vaccines meant to undermine confidence in government or the Biden presidency has had deadly consequences.

The rise of cheap speech poses special dangers for American democracy and for faith and confidence in American elections. To put the matter bluntly, if we had the polarized politics of today but the information technology of the 1950s, we almost certainly would not have seen the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol. Millions of Republican voters would probably not have believed the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and demanded from state legislatures new restrictive voting rules and fake election “audits” to counter phantom voter fraud.

[…] cheap speech has already done damage to our democracy and has the potential to do even more. The demise of local newspapers — and their replacement in some cases with partisan or even foreign sources of information masquerading as legitimate journalism — fosters a loss of voter competence, as voters have a harder time getting objective information about candidates’ records and positions. Cheap speech also decreases officeholder accountability; studies show that corruption rises when journalists are not there to hold politicians accountable. And as technology makes it easier to spread “deep fakes” — false video or audio clips showing politicians or others saying or doing things they did not in fact say or do — voters will increasingly come to mistrust everything they see and hear, even when it is true.
[…]
We cannot — and would not want to — go back to a time when media gatekeepers deprived voters of valuable information. Cheap speech helped fuel Black Lives Matters protests and the racial justice movement both before and after the murder of George Floyd, and virally spread videos of police misconduct can help catalyze meaningful change. But the cheap speech era requires new legal tools to shore up our democracy.

…that, though, is a murky business…particularly if you try to account for the difference between legitimate speech that ought to have as low a barrier to entry as can be contrived…& bad-faith disinformation in a landscape referred to as “the information age” that includes the efforts of state actors…oh…& the supreme court the alleged administration foisted upon the world…so I can’t speak to the chances of hasen’s proposals on the matter

Even if Congress adopted all the changes I have proposed and the Supreme Court upheld them — two quite unlikely propositions — it would hardly be enough to sustain American democracy in the cheap speech era. For example, the First Amendment would surely bar a law that would require social media companies to remove demagogic candidates who undermine election integrity from social media platforms; we would not want a government bureaucrat (under the control of a partisan president) to make such a call. But such speech is among the greatest dangers we face today.
[…]
Society needs to figure out ways to subsidize real investigative journalism efforts, especially locally, like the excellent journalism of The Texas Tribune and The Nevada Independent, two relatively new news-gathering organizations that depend on donors and a nonprofit model.

Journalistic bodies should use accreditation methods to send signals to voters and social media companies about which content is reliable and which is counterfeit. Over time and with a lot of effort, we can reestablish greater faith in real journalism, at least for a significant part of the population.

The most important steps to counter cheap speech are the hardest to take. We need to rebuild civil society to strengthen reliable intermediaries and institutions that engage in truth telling. As a starting point, think of all the institutions Mr. Trump tried to undermine: the free press, the opposition party, his own party, the judiciary and the F.B.I., to name just a few. And we need an educational effort — including among older Americans, who are actually the most likely to spread political misinformation — to inculcate the values of truth, respect for science and the rule of law.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/opinion/cheap-speech-fake-news-democracy.html

…but I know I’m not the only person who’s got this stuff on their mind

The desire to be informed witnesses leads some of us to “doomscrolling” — obsessively checking media feeds for the latest update. I am no exception. I recently found myself on my phone at 3 a.m. refreshing news feeds.
[…]
We have more information at our fingertips than ever before, and the scale is larger than our individual and collective capacity for sustained attention. How do we manage scale when the information at hand is both so plentiful and urgent? My colleagues often talk about media diets, or the mix of information sources we can reasonably take in. The word “diet” has a lot of negative connotations — deprivation, self-denial, exclusion and penance. But it might be useful to think about variety. When a major information event happens, it is worth checking your diet against other informed people’s.

When I asked my colleagues at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill what they are paying attention to, there was a clear preference for legacy media. There are few substitutes for the systematic information-gathering that media institutions provide. Almost everyone named big sources like The New York Times, The Associated Press and the BBC. Additionally, The Kyiv Independent joins the list for providing local coverage in English. Experts say that in fast-moving events like armed conflicts or mass shootings, institutional media still has the edge.

But as we have learned, institutional media isn’t infallible. Information-dense moments are full of conflicts between worldviews, perspectives and ideological motivations. To counter that, I also rely on media organizations that aggregate news but also report on the state of media. The Nieman Journalism Lab, The Independent and The Editorial Board have been regulars for me over the past week. On a fellow doomscroller’s recommendation I am following the Media Manipulation Casebook, which tracks content removal in Russia and Ukraine. Organizations like these are window frames for information flows. They provide the scope of an information event. Still, every frame leaves something out of the picture. That is where social media is useful, with several caveats.

Twitter has taken the mantle as a single-stop aggregator of media from below — regular people, analysts, and independent writers and researchers can be found in one place. Talking Points Memo’s editor, Josh Marshall, compiled a list of Twitter accounts to follow for diverse perspectives on Ukraine and Russia. The list adds perspective on how the invasion is framed.[…]

Another way to look at information sources is to focus on genre, rather than platform. Newsletters are a powerful entry into the information ecosystem. My theory is that newsletters are an evolution of a very old genre: the new iteration of pamphlets. Political pamphlets are hundreds of years old. They are somewhere between “objective” journalism and polemic. They often present deep explorations of topics and explicitly unsettled arguments. Good newsletters during information events put those window frames up for debate. They are systematic in their analysis of the event but also think critically about the sources that shape the analysis. The historian Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter is a good example.

How to Avoid Drowning in an Ocean of Information [NYT]

…pretty sure that lady mentioned at the end there had an interview with biden the other day…so there are newsletters & then there are newsletters…& I guess it’s still true that “it’s who you know”…which is another flip-side to this whole thing…because there may only be six degrees of separation but the ones between the leaders of nations are probably of more moment than the ones between the likes of us

If China announced that, rather than staying neutral, it was joining the economic boycott of Russia — or even just strongly condemning its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and demanding that it withdraw — it might shake Vladimir Putin enough to stop this vicious war. At a minimum, it would give him pause, because he has no other significant ally aside from India in the world now.

Why would President Xi Jinping of China take such a stand, which would seemingly undermine his dream of seizing Taiwan the same way Putin is attempting to seize Ukraine? The short answer is that the past eight decades of relative peace among the great powers led to a rapidly globalizing world that has been the key to China’s rapid economic rise and the elevation out of poverty for some 800 million Chinese people since 1980. Peace has been very good for China. Its continued growth depends on China’s ability to export to and learn from that world of steadily integrating and modernizing free markets.

The whole Faustian bargain between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese citizenry — the C.C.P. gets to rule while the people get to be steadily better off economically — depends to a significant degree on the stability of the global economy and trading system.

To Chinese strategists caught up in old-think — that any war that weakens modern China’s two primary rivals, America and Russia, has to be a good thing — I would say the following: Every war brings with it innovations (new ways to fight, win and survive), and the war in Ukraine is no exception.

We have already seen three “weapons” deployed in ways we’ve never seen before or not seen in a long time, and China would be wise to study them all. Because if China doesn’t help stop Russia now, these weapons will either ultimately hammer Putin into submission — which means they might be used against China one day, should it seize Taiwan — or damage Russia so badly that the economic effects will radiate everywhere. These weapons might even prompt Putin to do the unthinkable with his nuclear arms, which could destabilize and even destroy the global foundations on which China’s future rests.

The most important innovation in this war is the use of the economic equivalent of a nuclear bomb, simultaneously deployed by a superpower and by superempowered people. The United States, along with the European Union and Britain, has imposed sanctions on Russia that are crippling its economy, critically threatening companies and shattering the savings of millions of Russians at an unprecedented speed and scope that bring to mind a nuclear blast.
[…]
Second, because the world is now so wired, superempowered individuals, companies and social activist groups can pile on their own sanctions and boycotts, without any government orders, amplifying the isolation and economic strangulation of Russia beyond what nation-states are likely to do. These new actors — a kind of global ad hoc pro-Ukraine-resistance-solidarity-movement — are collectively canceling Putin and Russia. Rarely, if ever, has a country this big and powerful been politically canceled and economically crippled so fast.
[…]
Oh, and by the way, in this wired world, guess who owns a significant portion of Russia’s commercial airline fleet.

Not Russia.

Roughly two-thirds of Russia’s commercial airliners were made by Boeing (334 jets) or Airbus (304), Reuters reported. A significant portion of those are owned by Irish leasing companies. The Dublin-based AerCap, the world’s biggest airplane-leasing company, owns “152 aircraft across Russia and Ukraine valued at almost $2.4 billion,” The Irish Times reported. In addition, the Dublin-based companies SMBC Aviation Capital and Avolon own 48 aircraft between them that are leased to Russian airlines.

E.U. sanctions require those companies to repossess all those planes on lease to Russian airlines by the end of March. And Boeing and Airbus announced that they will no longer service or provide spare parts for any of these planes. On Saturday, Russia’s state airline, Aeroflot, said that it would suspend all international flights because of “additional circumstances that prevent the performance of flights.” Domestic flights are sure to follow.

Russia spans 11 time zones. If this persists, the grip of the Russian central government over the Russian landmass could begin to loosen. In the Russian Far East there are a lot of cities closer to Beijing than Moscow. Just saying …
[…]
When Anonymous, the global hacker consortium, announced that it was attempting to take down Russian websites, that was not by government order; it just acted on its own. Who does Russia call to get Anonymous to accept a cease-fire?
[…]
There are signs that China recognizes some of these new realities — that no country is too big to be canceled in the wired world. But its initial instinct seems to be to try to insulate itself from that reality, rather than step up to help reverse Putin’s aggression. To which I say: Good luck with that. China cannot be connected and disconnected at the same time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/opinion/putin-ukraine-china.html

I can’t add anything to the discussion of the war itself, although I will note that much of the commentary I’ve been reading says that Russian forces are regrouping and will resume large-scale advances in a day or two — and has been saying that, day after day, for more than a week.

What I think I can add, however, is some analysis of the effects of sanctions, and in particular an answer to one question I keep being asked: Can China, by offering itself as an alternative trading partner, bail out Putin’s economy?

No, it can’t.

…somehow that doesn’t fill me with the relief I’d like it too, though?

One thing the West conspicuously hasn’t done is try to block Russian sales of oil and gas — the country’s principal exports. Oh, the United States might ban imports of Russian oil, but this would be a symbolic gesture: Oil is traded on a global market, so this would just reshuffle trade a bit, and in any case U.S. imports from Russia account for only about 5 percent of Russian production.

[…]In any case, consumer goods are only about a third of Russia’s imports. The rest are capital goods, intermediate goods — that is, components used in the production of other goods — and raw materials. These are things Russia needs to keep its economy running, and their absence may cause important sectors to grind to a halt. There are already suggestions, for example, that the cutoff of spare parts and servicing may quickly cripple Russia’s domestic aviation, a big problem in such a huge country.

[…]China, despite being an economic powerhouse, isn’t in a position to supply some things Russia needs, like spare parts for Western-made airplanes and high-end semiconductor chips.

[…]while China itself isn’t joining in the sanctions, it is deeply integrated into the world economy. This means that Chinese banks and other businesses, like Western corporations, may engage in self-sanctioning — that is, they’ll be reluctant to deal with Russia for fear of a backlash from consumers and regulators in more important markets.

[…]China and Russia are very far apart geographically. Yes, they share a border. But most of Russia’s economy is west of the Urals, while most of China’s is near its east coast. Beijing is 3,500 miles from Moscow, and the only practical way to move stuff across that vast expanse is via a handful of train lines that are already overstressed.
[…]
Putin may dream of restoring Soviet-era greatness, but China’s economy, which was roughly the same size as Russia’s 30 years ago, is now 10 times as large. For comparison, Germany’s gross domestic product was only two and a half times Italy’s when the original Axis was formed.

So if you try to imagine the creation of some neofascist alliance — and again, that no longer sounds like extreme language — it would be one in which Russia would be very much the junior partner, indeed very nearly a Chinese client state. Presumably that’s not what Putin, with his imperial dreams, has in mind.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/opinion/china-russia-sanctions-economy.html

…then again…someone (twain, I think) once said that history may not repeat…but it often rhymes?

Democrats have begun to pick up the pieces of President Joe Biden’s stalled domestic agenda, working in concert with the White House to rebrand it as a push to cut costs for families and zero in on a package that can win the decisive vote of Sen. Joe Manchin, the mutinous West Virginia centrist.

…so…before you get your hopes up

“Get your financial house in order. There’s only one thing all Democrats voted — we voted against the 2017 Republican tax cuts. We thought they were weighted unfairly,” Manchin said Sunday in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press.” “If you have one thing that you’re all united on, fix it.”

He added that there were “no formal talks going on.”
[…]
“Half of that money should be dedicated to fighting inflation and reducing the deficit,” he told reporters. “The other half you can pick for a 10-year program, whatever you think is the highest priority. Right now, it seems to be the environment.”
[…]
Obstacles remain. Many Democrats have yet to accept the exclusion of cherished programs that are unlikely to make it in the bill — including the $250-$300 monthly child tax credit payment, paid leave guarantees and enhanced Medicare benefits. Those programs have nearly unanimous support among Democrats, and axing them from the package could spark pushback. As the prior negotiation indicated, Schumer doesn’t like to be the bearer of bad news.

Some of the tax increases Manchin favors on corporations and upper earners could run into opposition from the centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., who continues to oppose rate hikes.
[…]
The House-passed $1.7 trillion bill has been rejected by Manchin because it sets programs to expire to lower the sticker price, which he has dubbed a gimmick. To win his vote, any new bill would likely require new programs to be permanently funded and for a big chunk of savings to be put to the deficit. It’s a tall order, particularly for House progressives who remain angry at Manchin’s opposition to a bill they say already includes major sacrifices on their part.
[…]
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Democrats “should listen to what Sen. Manchin has put on the table” and recognize that it would be a major achievement — including for those who, like him, believe the climate provisions are essential.

“If we’re talking about raising taxes on very wealthy people and corporations to save the planet, why wouldn’t we be in that conversation?” he said. “We all need to understand the limitations of what we can do in a 50-vote Senate. So let’s stop focusing on what we can’t do and let’s start focusing on what we can do. And my sense is that’s where the president’s head is as well.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/democrats-see-fresh-hope-bidens-stalled-agenda-eyeing-manchins-vote

…& sure…doing what we can seems like the order of the day just now…but if the looming prospect of potential global conflict isn’t enough to prompt some people to pull their head out of their ass I gotta wonder what it’s going to take to get that part done?

For a few seconds every hour, WZHF-AM interrupts its round-the-clock schedule of talk to air a curious disclaimer: “This radio programming is distributed by RM Broadcasting on behalf of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, Moscow, Russia. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.”

The cryptic notification masks a larger story. WZHF, a former Spanish-language station 11 miles east of the White House in Maryland’s Capitol Heights, is the flagship of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to harness America’s radio airwaves to sell the Kremlin’s point of view. Despite periodic legal and political challenges, and the imposition of sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, the station has stayed on the air, broadcasting its Kremlin-approved message.

The station at 1390 AM is one of only five outlets in the United States that air English-language broadcasts of “Radio Sputnik,” produced in Moscow and Washington under the Russian government’s supervision.

Sputnik is the radio and digital arm of Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today), the same Kremlin-controlled media agency that directs RT and RT America, the better-known TV and digital media operations founded by Putin’s regime in 2005.

But while American distributors and European governments have banned RT since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, leading to the collapse of RT’s American operations on Thursday, WZHF is still offering Sputnik’s content to Beltway listeners.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/03/07/radio-sputnik-wzhf/

…which is…well…weird…but it’s no radio free europe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Liberty

…anyway…I’ve basically run out of time…but remember that crack boris made about “economic coercion” that I said I might try to hark back to?

…well, here’s the thing…or a thing that bothers me, any road…I know we get to somehow take a moral highground over the part where ukraine currently stands as a proxy for fending off the sharp end of russian military aggression because it leaves putin going to war & killing folks while we merely tighten his purse strings…but…that isn’t a bloodless siege we’ve instigated, either…& when it comes to the potential fallout from having to hold that line…however hard we might find it to see where exactly it’s drawn…it’s not a bed putin made single-handedly

The true obstacle to Chambers’s plan was not health and safety legislation or even doubts over profitability. To hand over the old Brompton Road station to Chambers, the government department that owned it – which, since the second world war had been the Ministry of Defence – would have had to overcome the reflex to sell things to the highest bidder, whoever they are and whatever their intentions. Chambers claimed to have raised £25m to back his project, but as it turned out, that wouldn’t even have bought half of the ghost on Brompton Road when it did finally change hands in early 2014.

That sale was the final act in a remarkable tale that demonstrates how Britain is prepared to welcome anybody to its shores, no questions asked, if the price is right. When the government was asked to choose between helping an entrepreneur to realise an eccentric dream that would enrich its capital city in a unique way or selling an asset to the highest bidder, there was only going to be one winner, and it wasn’t going to be Chambers.

Instead, the winner was a man named Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch who was widely seen as helping to restore Russian influence over his homeland after a popular uprising in 2004 A man who the FBI was investigating prior to his arrival in the UK and continued to investigate in the years that followed. In choosing to make the UK his second home, Firtash had picked wisely. He was welcomed with open arms – by politicians, by Cambridge University, and even by royalty.

To understand how Firtash got so rich that he could buy a tube station, we need to go back to the days of the cold war, when the Communist party still wielded unchecked power over Russia and the other Soviet republics. By the 70s, the Soviet Union, which had been seen as a great economic rival of the west in the years after the second world war, was falling rapidly behind. However, the USSR did have one thing that the west lacked: vast quantities of natural gas, which it used to power its factories, heat its homes and earn valuable dollars as exports to the west. This abundance of gas – controlled by the country’s first state-run corporation, Gazprom – helped stitch the Soviet economy together, and nowhere more so than in Ukraine, which was a centre of heavy industry second only to Russia. Ukraine’s factories and chemical works were dependent on pipelines bringing fuel from the same distant Russian and central Asian gas fields that exported gas to Europe. Thanks to this subsidised source of energy, the factories could compete with their rivals, and millions of Ukrainians had stable, well-paid jobs.

And then, in 1991, everything changed. The Soviet Union collapsed. Ukraine became independent and suddenly went from being an energy-rich country to being energy-poor. Its factories were only viable because of cheap natural gas, and it had hardly any gas of its own. Without its factories, its people would have no work; if its people had no work, its economy would collapse. Logically, one of two things should then have happened. Ukraine should either have rapidly become far more efficient in its use of gas, closing the hungrier industries, finding new ways to earn a living, so its imports and exports could balance each other, or it should have been essentially reabsorbed into Russia. The first option was economically ruinous; the second option was politically inconceivable.

Fortunately, the need to reach an immediate decision was postponed by the fact that Russia also relied on gas. Its economy survived thanks to the hard currency it earned by exporting gas to Europe, and almost all those exports passed through Ukraine. That meant that if Ukraine couldn’t pay its gas bills, it could just steal it from the pipelines that ran through its territory, and Russia couldn’t turn off the taps without also cutting off its high-paying customers farther west.

It is well established that large reserves of oil or gas almost invariably corrupt countries, and this is what happened in Ukraine. But this corruption derived not from controlling the gas, but from controlling the pipelines that moved it, and thus the ability to reward supporters with valuable shipments, or export licences. This wasn’t so much rent-seeking behaviour as toll-seeking.

Insiders in Russia and Ukraine teamed up to create shady intermediary companies that took gas from Gazprom at the Russian border, sold it to high-paying Europeans, and split the proceeds. Often, they paid for the gas not with money but with goods, and barter transactions added a layer of opacity to the deals, which made them even harder for ordinary citizens to understand. Nothing did more to corrupt Ukraine or to maintain its dependence on Moscow than its politicians’ addiction to this money. Russia added the cost of the stolen gas to Ukraine’s bill, but the insiders didn’t care, since they were allowed to keep the profits.

When Vladimir Putin became Russian president in 2000, however, he decided that – at least at the Russian end – this wealth machine needed to be brought in house. If anyone was going to get rich from exporting gas, it was going to be him and his friends, not Gazprom managers and their shady enablers. It took him a little while to wrestle the old guard out of the door, but eventually he had a loyalist in charge of the gas giant. There would still be an intermediary company between Russia and Ukraine, so the money flows would remain hidden, but that company would be half-owned by Gazprom to ensure Putin got his share. Its name was RosUkrEnergo (RUE), and it took over gas supplies between the two countries in July 2004.
[…]
“Only one source of power proved to be stronger than the Orange Revolution,” wrote the scholar of international relations, Margarita M Balmaceda. “Not (former) PM Viktor Yanukovich, not Russia, but the power of energy-related interests.”

But who were those interests? Who actually were the owners of RUE? Everyone knew that Gazprom owned half of the company, but who owned the other half?

The owner of the other half of RUE, it turned out, was a 39-year-old Ukrainian man named Dmitry Firtash. According to the accounts he gave, he started out in business selling food to central Asia, but when his customers failed to pay their bills, he accepted payment in gas, which he sold at a profit in Europe. It was in this complex barter trade that he learned the skills required to run RUE.

[…]Journalists reported his alleged links to a notorious Russian mobster Semyon Mogilevich, which might perhaps explain it, but he denied there were direct business ties between them.

Thanks to his alliance with Gazprom and by extension with Putin, Firtash had gained extraordinary wealth and power. He was the Kremlin’s man in Ukraine, a gas-fuelled kingmaker. In his home country, Firtash became a controversial figure, accused of restoring Russia’s influence over their homeland. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that he started looking around for a foreign country where he might buy a second home. He chose the UK.

[…]What we know for sure is that in the years after his big gas coup, Firtash hired a lobbying company, Asquith & Granovski, to help burnish his image in the UK. The company, run by a Ukrainian spin doctor, Vladimir Granovski, and a British aristocrat and former spy, Raymond Asquith, served wealthy ex-Soviet citizens looking to engage with the UK.

In February 2007, a limited company – the British Ukrainian Society (BUS) – was incorporated. Granovski and Asquith became directors, along with Firtash’s right-hand man, Shetler-Jones, plus a Conservative MP called Richard Spring who provided Asquith & Granovski with advice on “political, economic and current affairs matters” in exchange for £35,000-40,000 a year. The society was headquartered in Knightsbridge. “Are we trying to improve our reputation? Of course,” Firtash later told the Wall Street Journal. “I can’t just be the place where people throw darts.”
[…]
In early 2008, the DF Foundation was created with the aim of funding education about Ukraine and giving scholarships to students. In 2010, Cambridge University created a formal Ukrainian Studies course thanks to a donation from Firtash of £4m. In March 2011, Firtash was welcomed into Cambridge’s prestigious Guild of Benefactors, a club for its most generous donors, by none other than the Duke of Edinburgh.

Firtash was busy elsewhere, too: he grouped all his businesses into one holding company based in the British Virgin Islands. According to later analysis by Reuters, he was able to earn $3bn just by reselling the gas that Gazprom sold him, thanks to receiving it at an artificially low price. With billions of dollars more in loans from Gazprombank – which made him the Russian bank’s largest single borrower – he expanded fast into fertiliser, titanium, banking and the media. He had funded Yanukovich’s successful political comeback – the former prime minister won the 2010 presidential election – so had an ally running his homeland, and thanks to his philanthropy he had met the husband of the queen of his adopted second home. Everything he touched was turning to gold.
[…]
In 2012, Firtash bought himself a London residence, a mansion just down the road from Harrods built by the luxury developer Mike Spink which, according to a property publication, cost something in the region of £60m. With this London base, his infiltration of the British establishment became even more ambitious.

Towards the end of 2013, he agreed another donation to Cambridge University and, in a series of events called the Days of Ukraine, opened trading on the London Stock Exchange and visited parliament with his wife, where he was greeted by the Speaker at the time, John Bercow. In a photograph of the occasion, Bercow and Firtash are shaking hands, while Lord Risby – as Richard Spring has been known since he was elevated to the House of Lords in 2010 – leans slightly forward in the background, with the kind of rapt smile you might see on the face of a proud father watching his son pick his way through a piano recital.

[…]In February 2014, as the British government scrambled to make sense of what was happening in Ukraine, the oligarch was invited into the Foreign Office. According to a later statement in parliament, matters of national security were not discussed. However, according to a report by a Russian news agency, Firtash said that he had “tried to persuade them that imposing sanctions against Russia was a bad idea.” He added: “That will only make things worse. America provoked Putin into this situation.”

Even this wasn’t quite the high-water mark of Firtash’s influence in Britain. That came three days later, when his purchase of the Brompton Road tube station for £53m from the MoD was finalised, and Ajit Chambers’s business dream was destroyed. The ghost station directly adjoined Firtash’s London property, and it’s not hard to imagine that he would have loathed Chambers’s plan to create a rooftop bar and restaurant. Late-night revellers would have had a view straight down into his back garden.
[…]
Criticising Britain for this may seem a little unfair. After all, the argument goes, any country would have welcomed Firtash’s money and expertise, so it would have been self-defeating to turn it away, right?

This is a troubling argument. Firtash was Putin’s man in Ukraine, and yet Britain integrated him so enthusiastically into the establishment that he advised the government on Putin’s invasion. Should it really be talking to a man like this? Or accepting his money? Or selling him a property with access to the London underground system? Or, indeed anything at all?

“This has clear implications for national security,” noted parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee in 2018 about the tendency to invite Kremlin-aligned oligarchs to buy what they liked in the UK. “Turning a blind eye to London’s role in hiding the proceedings of Kremlin-connected corruption risks signalling that the UK is not serious about confronting the full spectrum of President Putin’s offensive measures.”
[…]
And the response of the US to his activities provides a fascinating contrast to what happened in the UK.

Gas-powered kingmaker: how the UK welcomed Putin’s man in Ukraine [Guardian]

…seriously…it’s a long read…but if you can find the time to read it all it’s certainly an interesting one…particularly if you can put the parts that involve boris’ brexit-happy tories into a context that includes that speech he so kindly wrote out for the NYT…for which I’d argue there’s a piece from the FT that’s quite useful…& I don’t have time to wrestle it into yet more extended quotations (hence that link to a .pdf copy)…it’s a hell of a context?

For investors, Britain is not just the sick man of Europe but of the world. Since voting to leave the EU in 2016, UK stock market returns have lagged behind international peers and a historically wide valuation discount has become ingrained. So much so that the UK has become a hunting ground for foreign buyers searching for cheap deals[…]

This diminished position is not helped by comparisons to booming tech-fuelled US markets. Internet giants such as Google, Microsoft and Apple have all achieved trillion-dollar valuations at record high multiples. Yet Britain barely musters a mid-cap tech group. Software group Aveva, valued at £7.5bn, is currently the largest tech group in the FTSE 100.

And while the US market is packed with such racy growth stocks — companies that are often unprofitable but richly valued due to rapid revenue growth — the UK market is populated with profitable cash-generating businesses or value stocks that have reached maturity.

[…]tweaks, however, are unlikely to get to the heart of the problem: the UK stock market is cheap on almost every measure. Unless that changes, the implications for investment and innovation in the country could further diminish Britain’s international competitiveness.

For an economy strongly tied to the financial services industry, which accounts for about 10 per cent of gross domestic product, it is embarrassing that the value of UK equities has fallen so far behind that of international peers. And it is not just investor returns that have lagged behind. The market as a whole and individual sectors continue to trade at valuation discounts.
[…]
The reasons are varied but the decision to leave the EU in 2016 spooked investors who worried that trade with the UK’s biggest partner would collapse. The period after the vote is when valuations began to diverge sharply. The FTSE 100, valued at 16 times forward earnings in May 2016, was in line with other developed world markets. A year later, a 14 per cent discount had emerged. It widened to 25 per cent by the end of 2019.

The vote’s impact is undeniable. But there is more to the story than just heightened political and economic risks. The structure of the UK market has been out of favour with investors for far longer.
[…]
Instead, investors want businesses they think will produce high revenue growth and the potential to dominate the markets of tomorrow. Most of these are technology businesses where profits can be non-existent. In fact some, such as electric carmaker Tesla, have required constant funding by shareholders to progress. Bets on the distant future are often easier to justify when interest rates are low and money is cheap.

Lex in-depth: why is the UK stock market so cheap? [FT]

…& sure…that sucks for the brits…but I can’t help but wonder as I listen to people tell me over & over how the economy of the US dwarfs that of russia…if such a big slice of it is founded in businesses “where profits can be non-existent”…or ultimately derived from the unconstrained pillaging of the oceans of personal data with which we flood the online world on a daily basis…it’s…a bit ephemeral when you start looking at things like the finite & fragile nature of the international supply of fundamental resources…like food…or energy…or…accurate information?

[…I really have run out of time…which contrary to appearances will in fact shut me up for a bit…but I fully intend to add some tunes down here just as soon as I can think of something suitable…& find the time to paste them in?]