…it’s not like we get to just skip over the 13th on account of there being more than enough bad luck going around as it is…but “at least it’s not friday” isn’t the sort of thing I tend to think of as a silver lining

The number of people worldwide who died because of the pandemic in its first two years may total more than 18 million, according to a sobering study released Thursday. That’s three times more than the reported global death toll from Covid-19, which crossed 6 million earlier this week.

The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet, analyzed data from 74 countries and 266 states and territories between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2021. The scientists calculated excess deaths, a measure of how many more people died than would be expected had the pandemic not occurred. That means the estimate accounts both for people killed by Covid directly — confirmed and undiagnosed cases — as well as those whose deaths may be indirectly attributed to the pandemic.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/excess-pandemic-deaths-are-3-higher-official-covid-toll-study

…so it’s fair to say things could stand to look a little less stacked in favor of the bad luck…but a bit like the “at least it isn’t friday the 13th” thing…at least this particular ill-timed fuck up didn’t fuck things all the way up?

One nuclear-armed state fired a cruise missile at another nuclear-armed state this week. They were not at war, and it did not start one.

On Friday, India acknowledged that one of its missiles had mistakenly been fired into Pakistan two days earlier. Pakistan criticized India’s “callousness and ineptitude” in a “nuclear environment.” And that, so far, has been the end of the matter — a subdued aftermath that many saw as nothing short of a small miracle.
[…]
Analysts in India commended the Pakistani military, the country’s most powerful institution, for its reserved response to the missile firing, which apparently caused no casualties. That muted reaction seems to have headed off what could have become a disastrous escalation.

But the episode is bound to raise concerns about the safety of India’s weapons systems, and about the government’s credibility on that subject. India waited 48 hours to confirm that the accident had happened, and Pakistani officials said they had received no information about it from their Indian counterparts in the meantime.

“The Pakistani side has shown great maturity,” said Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research. “We have been lucky this time. We should not make the mistake to think we will be lucky every time.”

India Accidentally Fires a Missile at Pakistan. Calm Ensues. [NYT]

…although…we do seem to have been lucky more times than it’s comfortable to think about

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/10/i-was-a-nuclear-missile-operator-there-have-been-more-near-misses-than-the-world-knows

…the thing is…we might all be looking at the same world…but we definitely aren’t all seeing the same picture

WASHINGTON — Beyond the reports of undercounts and overcounts in population totals, there is another takeaway from the post-mortem of 2020 census data issued on Thursday: This could be the last census of its kind.

The next census will be taken in a nation where Amazon may have a better handle on where many people live than the Census Bureau itself. For some advocates of a more accurate count, the era in which census-takers knock on millions of doors to persuade people to fill out forms should give way in 2030 to a sleeker approach: data mining, surveys, sophisticated statistical projections and, if politics allows, even help from the nation’s tech giants and their endless petabytes of personal information.
[…]
The Census Bureau has stuck with more traditional survey work in part because of legal constraints — a 1999 Supreme Court ruling barred the bureau from using statistical estimates in population counts to reapportion seats in the House of Representatives. But politicians, experts, local governments and industries that consume Census Bureau data worry that seizing on data from other sources without vetting it could make the bureau’s snapshots of the nation less accurate, not more.

It is an article of faith among data experts and the Census Bureau itself that data obtained directly from people are more reliable than secondhand or thirdhand data from other sources. And experts are wary that other data can raise privacy issues or allegations that it was cherry picked to fit an agenda.

One More Census Takeaway: The End of an Era of Counting the Nation? [NYT]

…or in some cases specifically the same pictures

Official and mainstream [Chinese] media carry regular reports on the situation in Ukraine but have stopped short of calling Russia’s actions a “war” or “invasion”.

Doublethink Lab, which has been tracking disinformation attempts in real time, has pointed out the Chinese media are “regularly quoting disinformation and conspiracy theories from Russian sources”.

False claims, such as that the Ukrainians set fire to their own nuclear plant, are repeated by Chinese media with little attempt to challenge them.

There is also very little reporting on the resistance from the Ukraine side nor the wider Western response to Russia’s invasion.
[…]
Where criticism of events in Ukraine does appear, it is often directed at the United States, placing the blame on it for fanning the flames of the conflict.

In one article published in China’s Global Times, the US is accused of profiteering from selling weapons to Ukraine.

In another, the US is accused of releasing “disinformation on the Ukraine crisis to smear China”.

Ukraine: How China is censoring online discussion of the war [BBC]

Last week, Russia passed a law making it a major crime to publish what it deems “fake” news about the country’s military. Violators could face 15 years in prison.

And what is “fake” news, exactly? That’s up to Russian authorities. Reportedly, it will include any references to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that call it an invasion, which would contradict the Kremlin’s insistence that it’s simply a “special military operation.” The Kremlin has also applied the term “fake news” to reports that a Russian airstrike hit a maternity hospital in Ukraine.

In other words, fake news means real news.
[…]
Russia’s Orwellian use of the word “фейки” — a phonetic translation of the English word “fake” — to criminalize truth is the logical endpoint of a years-long heel turn for the term “fake news.” The concept was first popularized in the United States by well-meaning misinformation researchers to describe hoax websites that posed as news outlets to intentionally spread fabricated information. But it wasn’t long before it was turned against the media itself, most notably by the new president, Donald Trump.
[…]
By 2016, the trend of hoax sites hoodwinking social media users with whole-cloth fabrications had exploded. Silverman, then a journalist at BuzzFeed, published an analysis that found the most viral “fake news” stories — such as a baseless report that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump — were reaching wider audiences on Facebook than real news stories from real news outlets. That was thanks in part to Facebook’s news feed algorithm, an efficient machine for widely distributing the posts that provoke the most reactions, regardless of whether they’re true.
[…]
Trump’s rhetorical jujitsu was not lost on political leaders in other countries — particularly, but not exclusively, those with a populist or authoritarian bent. Numerous countries in recent years, from Singapore to Hungary to Vietnam, have passed laws against fake news or misinformation, some of them arguably using the covid-19 pandemic as cover for a press crackdown with wider implications. Russia previously passed fake news laws in 2019, instituting fines and jail sentences of up to 15 days for “unreliable” information that disrespects state authorities.

Russia’s latest law goes much farther, with jail terms up to 15 years. Media outlets that were prepared to navigate the threat of censorship and wrist-slaps under the previous laws have understandably balked at the prospect of their employees and journalists spending large chunks of their lives incarcerated.

In just the past week, news organizations from the BBC to the New York Times to Bloomberg News and tech platforms such as Netflix and TikTok have either suspended or scaled back their operations in Russia, contributing to a truth desert in the name of “fake news.” No doubt that was part of the Kremlin’s intent.
[…]
Perhaps the most efficient way to deceive a populace en masse in the social media era is not to try to convince them of falsehoods, but to discredit the media and sow doubt about the truth. For Putin, as for Trump, the concept of fake news has proven a potent tool for just that.

A term coined by misinformation researchers was coopted by President Trump. It has become a tool of authoritarians. [WaPo]

Russian agents came to the home of Google’s top executive in Moscow to deliver a frightening ultimatum last September: take down an app that had drawn the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin within 24 hours or be taken to prison.
[…]
Within hours, an app designed to help Russians register protest votes against Putin could no longer be downloaded from Google or Apple, whose main representative in Moscow faced a similarly harrowing sequence. Titans of American technology had been brought to their knees by some of the most primitive intimidation tactics in the Kremlin playbook.

The unnerving encounters, which have not previously been disclosed, were part of a broader campaign that Putin intensified last year to erode sources of internal opposition — moves now helping him maintain his hold on power amid a global backlash over the invasion of Ukraine.

In a single year, Putin had his political nemesis Alexei Navalny imprisoned after a poisoning attempt failed to kill him; pushed independent news outlets to the brink of extinction; orchestrated a Kremlin-controlled takeover of Russia’s Facebook equivalent; and issued “liquidation” orders against human rights organizations.

Amid this internal offensive, Putin also moved to bring foreign technology companies to heel. Moscow deployed new devices that let it degrade or even block Russians’ access to Facebook and Twitter, imposed fines totaling $120 million on firms accused of defying Kremlin censors, and ordered 13 of the world’s largest technology companies to keep employees in Russia and thus exposed to potential arrest orother punishment for their employers’ actions — a measure that U.S. executives refer to as the “hostage law.”

On their own, these moves were seen as disparate signs of Russia’s descent into authoritarianism. But they also laid the groundwork for the Soviet-style suppression of free expression now underway in Russia, much as the months-long military buildup set the stage for the invasion of Ukraine.

Putin’s crackdown has accelerated in recent weeks. Facebook and Twitter have been knocked offline by the government for millions of Russians. News outlets that survived state harassment for years shut down this month in the face of a new law imposing prison time of up to 15 years for spreading “fake” news — understood to be anything contradicting the Kremlin’s depiction of a “special military operation” unfolding with precision in Ukraine.
[…]
There is preliminary evidence that the suppression strategy is working. Polls, whose reliability is always uncertain in Russia, show that a majority of Russians support the war. In interviews with Western journalists that have gone viral online, Russians who rely on state-controlled media have consistently echoed Kremlin falsehoods about eradicating alleged Nazism in Ukraine while seeming to be genuinely oblivious to the war’s carnage.

For relatives on opposite sides of the Ukraine border, reality has cleaved. Civilians in the besieged cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa have described surreal conversations with family members in Russia who refuse to believe that Russian forces are bombing residential districts, that women and children are among the casualties, and that 2 million people have fled a country hit by power outages and food shortages.
[…]
Apple, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms have played a major role in galvanizing the global response. Viral images of the devastation in Ukraine and video clips of the country’s resilient leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, have shaped world opinion and exposed Moscow’s war claims as fiction.
[…]
But American tech companies have also made numerous compromises with the Kremlin in recent years that have undermined activist groups, impaired Russians’ access to reliable information and look increasingly problematic in the wake of the invasion.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/12/russia-putin-google-apple-navalny

…let alone thinking the same things about what we’re seeing

The unification in Europe that Mr. Biden speaks of is certainly real, but in a cruel paradox, European cohesion appears achievable only by further binding itself to the mast of American power and prerogatives. The idea of a geopolitically autonomous Europe acting independently of the United States — a vision historically dear to the French — is rapidly becoming unutterable. Although the fact sometimes fails to register in Washington, Europeans live in Europe and assess their threats differently from their American security providers, who are 5,000 miles from Moscow. The more Europe and America conflate their security interests, the less Europe can develop its own place in the world and play the mediator between the United States and rival powers.

But the greater problem is that “the West,” unified and committed to fighting authoritarianism as it claims to be, is itself showing signs of sharing Mr. Putin’s highly confected logic of civilizational identity and conflict. The result may be an escalatory contest in which each adversary dares the other to believe that its inflated, civilizational identity is — existentially — on the line.
[…]
One of the striking things about Western civilization is that as an idea it is not particularly old. It came to the fore during World War I, when the fight against Germany and its allies — the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires — was conceived by Anglophone liberals as a war of Western civilization against Eastern despotism. John Maynard Keynes, a cosmopolitan liberal, was convinced there was a civilizational gulf even between Germans and Anglo-Saxons, while the Russians, though allied with the West, were well beyond the pale of Western modernity. In the wake of World War I, courses on Western civilization began to be taught at elite American universities.

[…] During his first years in power, Mr. Putin was viewed positively by Western politicians and journalists. Thomas L. Friedman of The Times advised his readers to “keep rootin’ for Putin” in 2001, while Madeleine Albright called him a “can-do person,” and Bill Clinton deemed him someone “the United States can do business with.”

Mr. Clinton was perhaps more correct than he knew. The transactional attitude he identified appeared to be the key to understanding Russia’s president. Mr. Putin had inherited a very particular vision of what the West actually was. For him, it was, according to Gleb Pavlovsky, a former close aide, synonymous with the liberal capitalist order, which he understood in terms of Soviet caricature: It meant tolerating oligarchs, privatizing state industries, paying and accepting bribes, hollowing out state capacity and having some semblance of power-sharing. Mr. Putin thought his predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had failed because they failed to understand this.
[…]
But as the economy Mr. Putin presided over threatened to crash in a state-stripping bonanza, he tried to shore up the state sector and turned to increasingly authoritarian measures at home. As former Warsaw Pact countries welcomed NATO expansion, he shifted to a more civilizational understanding of Russia’s place in the world, one based on “Eastern” values: the Orthodox Church, patriarchal chauvinism, anti-homosexuality edicts, as well as a notion of a greater ethnic Russian identity whose ancient wellspring is inconveniently Kyiv, Ukraine.[…]

For all the talk about how Ukraine is — despite whatever losses on the battlefield — winning the P.R. war, there is a sense in which Mr. Putin has already won at another level of framing the conflict. The more we hear about the resolve of the West, the more the values of a liberal international order appear like the provincial set of principles of a particular people, in a particular place.

Of the 10 most-populous countries in the world, only one — the United States — supports major economic sanctions against Russia. Indonesia, Nigeria, India and Brazil have all condemned the Russian invasion, but they do not seem prepared to follow the West in its preferred countermeasures. Nor do non-Western states appear to welcome the kind of economic disruptions that will result from, as Senator Rob Portman phrased it, “putting a noose on the Putin economy.” North Africa and the Middle East rely on Russia for basics from fertilizer to wheat; Central Asian populations rely on its remittances. Major disruptions to these economic networks seem unlikely to relieve Ukrainian suffering.

Although they have been remarkably effective at starving Iraqi, Iranian and now Afghan children while satisfying the American appetite for moral aggrandizement, modern economic sanctions have rarely curbed any regime’s behavior. The lack of enthusiasm around the world for the West training its economic weapons on Russia indicates that the rest of the world is concerned not only about wider economic immiseration but also about the global escalation of a conflict between two “civilizations” that share the preponderance of the world’s nuclear weapons between them.

Putin Wants a Clash of Civilizations. Is ‘The West’ Falling for It? [NYT]

[…]In recent days, many commentators have pointed to a global map of the UN resolution to demonstrate the unity of the west and the world in taking on the Putin government. But to make sense of the geopolitical consequences of the Russian invasion, we must look beyond the diplomatic theater of the general assembly to examine how these nations are actually engaged with the war in this phase of rapid escalation. And to do that, we should start with a very different map of the world – a map of global participation in the sanctions set against Russia by the United States and its allies.

The contrast between these maps could not be more striking. The US, the UK, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Singapore, the EU: beyond this fortified coalition, very few nations have chosen to take part in the economic warfare set against the Putin government. On the contrary, many of the world’s largest nations – including China, India, Brazil, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, and even Nato ally Turkey – have refused to join in. “We will not blindly follow the steps taken by another country,” said Indonesia’s foreign ministry representative at a recent press conference.

Latin America has been equally steadfast in its commitment to neutrality. “We do not consider that [this war] concerns us,” said the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “We are not going to take any sort of economic reprisal because we want to have good relations with all governments.” Argentina may have voted to condemn Russia’s actions at the UN, but its foreign minister, Santiago Cafiero, was adamant about his country’s non-participation in the new sanctions push: “Argentina does not consider that they are a mechanism to generate peace and harmony, or generate a frank dialogue table that serves to save lives.”

The Latin American position has been echoed in Africa. “For five centuries, we have been pawns in the hands of the warring European states, bent on looting Africa of its human and natural sources,” says Pierre Sané, president of the Imagine Africa Institute and former secretary-general of Amnesty International. Sané tells me that the embassy in Ukraine has been recruiting “volunteer” mercenaries from countries like Senegal and Ivory Coast to fight in the war. “Should this war in Ukraine escalate, we say and we say it loud: do not bring it to our shores.”
[…]
But the map of sanctions suggests that the true rift is not between left and right, nor even between east and west. On the contrary, the map reveals a rift between north and south, between the nations that we call developed and those we call developing. And by revealing this tectonic shift, the map can tell us something important about geopolitics in the coming age of multipolarity.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/10/russia-ukraine-west-global-south-sanctions-war

…& it’s not as though the hypocrisy is all on one side of the equation, either

But in the Opinion Video above, Jonathan Pie, the fictional broadcast journalist played by the comedian Tom Walker, argues that even while the United States and the European Union have come down hard on Russian oligarchs, Britain has taken a gentler approach. This response, he argues, is the result of a dark symbiotic relationship that the country has developed with ill-gotten Russian money.

For years, Russian wealth has poured into Britain with few questions asked, helping to finance political campaigns and buoying the luxury property market. Russian oligarchs have been so happy to avail themselves of Britain’s laissez-faire regulatory climate to park their wealth and launder dirty money that the nation’s capital has earned the moniker Londongrad.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/opinion/london-oligarchs-sanctions-putin.html

Goldman Sachs, the giant New York investment bank, is cashing in on the war in Ukraine by selling Russian debt to U.S. hedge funds — and using a legal loophole in the Biden administration’s sanctions to do it.

As the Western world scrambles to defend Ukraine by locking down Russian money, the company is acting as a broker between Moscow’s creditors and U.S. investors, pitching clients on the opportunity to take advantage of Russia’s war-crippled economy by buying its debt securities low now and selling them high later, according to four financial world sources familiar with the strategy.
[…]
That does not violate the U.S. sanctions regime, but it is very different from the public face Goldman is putting on its relationship with Russia. In an emailed statement, Goldman is telling the public that it is “winding down” its business in Russia, portraying its actions as supportive of America’s effort to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin.
[…]
When U.S. officials sanctioned Russian banks this month, it became illegal for U.S. companies to do business directly with major Russian financial institutions. But the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, issued a memo affirming the legal legitimacy of trading Russian assets in “secondary markets” — those not directly involving the Russian banks. That’s why Goldman can act as a broker.

The sanctions action “does not prohibit trading in the secondary markets for debt or equity” of the Russian central bank, the Russian national wealth fund or the Russian Finance Ministry, as long as those institutions aren’t parties to the trades and the debts were issued before March 1, OFAC wrote.
[…]
Goldman’s effort to profit from the war highlights the complexities the Biden administration faces in trying to punish Russia without harming Wall Street and the economies of the U.S. and its allies. And it is a stark reminder that no asset is too toxic to be traded when there are willing buyers, sellers and brokers.

“Russian sovereign debt is awash throughout our economy,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to explain the administration’s reluctance to ban the trading of Russian debt. “It’s just infused into our economy. It’s so pervasive.”
[…]
The official said blocking all Russian debt trades could mess — the official used a different four-letter word — with financial markets in the U.S. and other countries in unintended ways.
[…]
That means the public may never know whether profits are derived by pumping money into the pockets of Putin’s cronies when Russia faces a cash crunch. In other words, it is more clear that U.S. investors — and middlemen like Goldman Sachs — are profiting from the cheap cost of Russian debt and less clear who is benefiting from the sales.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/goldman-sachs-profits-ukraine-war-loophole-sanctions

…or that winning some battles

Investigations of parents with transgender children for possible child abuse were temporarily halted across Texas on Friday after a state court ruled that the policy, ordered last month by Gov. Greg Abbott, had been improperly adopted and violated the State Constitution.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/us/texas-transgender-child-abuse.html

…means victory is in sight

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday effectively shut down a federal challenge to the state’s novel and controversial ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, closing off what abortion rights advocates said was their last, narrow path to blocking the new law.

The decision was the latest in a line of blows to the constitutional right to abortion that has prevailed for five decades.
[…]
On Friday, the justices of the Texas Supreme Court, all Republicans, said that those [medical licensing] officials [who might discipline abortion providers who violate the law] did not, in fact, have any power to enforce the law, “either directly or indirectly,” and so could not be sued.

The justices said the law had effectively tied their hands. They agreed that the state’s licensing officials had the authority to discipline providers for violating other abortion restrictions. “But we conclude that the Heartbeat Act expressly provides otherwise,” the court said, using the title of S.B. 8.

“The act’s emphatic, unambiguous and repeated provisions” declare that a private civil action is the “exclusive” method for enforcing the law, the justices wrote. They added, “These provisions deprive the state-agency executives of any authority they might otherwise have to enforce the requirements through a disciplinary action.”

Texas Supreme Court Shuts Down Final Challenge to Abortion Law [NYT]

…still…you have to celebrate the little victories

A New York judge has rejected a bid by Donald Trump to sue author and columnist E. Jean Carroll on the grounds that her defamation case against him in 2019 was baseless — a ruling that accused the former president of causing repeated delays to keep a sensitive matter from moving closer to trial.
[…]
Trump’s obstructive actions in the Carroll proceeding, which began in a New York state court three years ago, “have had a dilatory effect and, indeed, strongly suggest that he is acting out of a strong desire to delay any opportunity [Carroll] may have to present her case against him,” Kaplan added.
[…]
In a previous decision, Kaplan denied the Justice Department’s request to take the case over from Trump’s personal lawyers — which would have the procedural effect of ending the lawsuit, because the “sovereign immunity” doctrine generally protects a government employee from liability over actions taken in their official capacity. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has heard arguments on that issue but has not yet ruled.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/11/carroll-trump-lawsuit-rejected/

…because when it comes to picking sides

Having studied civil wars all over the world, and the conditions that give rise to them, you argue in your book, somewhat chillingly, that the United States is coming dangerously close to those conditions. Can you explain that?

So we actually know a lot about civil wars — how they start, how long they last, why they’re so hard to resolve, how you end them. And we know a lot because since 1946, there have been over 200 major armed conflicts. And for the last 30 years, people have been collecting a lot of data, analyzing the data, looking at patterns. I’ve been one of those people.

We went from thinking, even as late as the 1980s, that every one of these was unique. And the way people studied it is they would be a Somalia expert, a Yugoslavia expert, a Tajikistan expert. And everybody thought their case was unique and that you could draw no parallels. Then methods and computers got better, and people like me came and could collect data and analyze it. And what we saw is that there are lots of patterns at the macro level.

In 1994, the U.S. government put together this Political Instability Task Force. They were interested in trying to predict what countries around the world were going to become unstable, potentially fall apart, experience political violence and civil war.
[…]
That was done through the CIA. And the task force was a mix of academics, experts on conflict, and data analysts. And basically what they wanted was: In all of your research, tell us what you think seems to be important. What should we be considering when we’re thinking about the lead-up to civil wars?

Originally the model included over 30 different factors, like poverty, income inequality, how diverse religiously or ethnically a country was. But only two factors came out again and again as highly predictive. And it wasn’t what people were expecting, even on the task force. We were surprised. The first was this variable called anocracy. There’s this nonprofit based in Virginia called the Center for Systemic Peace. And every year it measures all sorts of things related to the quality of the governments around the world. How autocratic or how democratic a country is. And it has this scale that goes from negative 10 to positive 10. Negative 10 is the most authoritarian, so think about North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. Positive 10 are the most democratic. This, of course, is where you want to be. This would be Denmark, Switzerland, Canada. The U.S. was a positive 10 for many, many years. It’s no longer a positive 10. And then it has this middle zone between positive 5 and negative 5, which was you had features of both. If you’re a positive 5, you have more democratic features, but definitely have a few authoritarian elements. And, of course, if you’re negative 5, you have more authoritarian features and a few democratic elements. [The U.S. was briefly downgraded to a 5 and is now an 8.

And what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone. And there’s all sorts of theories why this middle zone is unstable, but one of the big ones is that these governments tend to be weaker. They’re transitioning to either actually becoming more democratic, and so some of the authoritarian features are loosening up. The military is giving up control. And so it’s easier to organize a challenge. Or, these are democracies that are backsliding, and there’s a sense that these governments are not that legitimate, people are unhappy with these governments. There’s infighting. There’s jockeying for power. And so they’re weak in their own ways. Anyway, that turned out to be highly predictive.
[…]
I remember saying: “Dad, what’s really different about America today from Germany in the 1930s is that our democracy is really strong. Our institutions are strong. So, even if you had a Trump come into power, the institutions would hold strong.” Of course, then Trump won. We would have these conversations where my dad would draw all these parallels. The brownshirts and the attacks on the media and the attacks on education and on books. And he’s just, like, I’m seeing it. I’m seeing it all again here. And that’s really what shook me out of my complacency, that here was this man who is very well educated and astute, and he was shaking with fear. And I was like, Am I being naive to think that we’re different?

That’s when I started to follow the data. And then, watching what happened to the Republican Party really was the bigger surprise — that, wow, they’re doubling down on this almost white supremacist strategy. That’s a losing strategy in a democracy. So why would they do that? Okay, it’s worked for them since the ’60s and ’70s, but you can’t turn back demographics. And then I was like, Oh my gosh. The only way this is a winning strategy is if you begin to weaken the institutions; this is the pattern we see in other countries. And, as an American citizen I’m like, These two factors are emerging here, and people don’t know.

So I gave a talk at UCSD about this — and it was a complete bomb. Not only did it fall flat, but people were hostile. You know, How dare you say this? This is not going to happen. This is fearmongering. I remember leaving just really despondent, thinking: Wow, I was so naive to think that, if it’s true, and if it’s based on hard evidence, people will be receptive to it. You know, how do you get the message across if people don’t want to hear it? If they’re not ready for it.
[…]
After January 6th of last year, people were asking me, “Aren’t you horrified?” “Isn’t this terrible?” “What do you think?” And, first of all, I wasn’t surprised, right? People who study this, we’ve been seeing these groups have been around now for over 10 years. They’ve been growing. I know that they’re training. They’ve been in the shadows, but we know about them. I wasn’t surprised.
[…]
Does it make you at all nervous when you think about the percentage of people who were at, say, January 6th who have some military or law enforcement connection?

Yes. The CIA also has a manual on insurgency. You can Google it and find it online. Most of it is not redacted. And it’s absolutely fascinating to read. It’s not a big manual. And it was written, I’m sure, to help the U.S. government identify very, very early stages of insurgency. So if something’s happening in the Philippines, or something’s happening in Indonesia. You know, what are signs that we should be looking out for?

And the manual talks about three stages. And the first stage is pre-insurgency. And that’s when you start to have groups beginning to mobilize around a particular grievance. And it’s oftentimes just a handful of individuals who are just deeply unhappy about something. And they begin to articulate those grievances. And they begin to try to grow their membership.

The second stage is called the incipient conflict stage. And that’s when these groups begin to build a military arm. Usually a militia. And they’d start to obtain weapons, and they’d start to get training. And they’ll start to recruit from the ex-military or military and from law enforcement. Or they’ll actually — if there’s a volunteer army, they’ll have members of theirs join the military in order to get not just the training, but also to gather intelligence.

And, again, when the CIA put together this manual, it’s about what they have observed in their experience in the field in other countries. And as you’re reading this, it’s just shocking the parallels. And the second stage, you start to have a few isolated attacks. And in the manual, it says, really the danger in this stage is that governments and citizens aren’t aware that this is happening. And so when an attack occurs, it’s usually just dismissed as an isolated incident, and people are not connecting the dots yet. And because they’re not connecting the dots, the movement is allowed to grow until you have open insurgency, when you start to have a series of consistent attacks, and it becomes impossible to ignore.
[…]
What do you say to people who charge that this is all overblown, that civil war could never happen here in the United States — or that you’re being inflammatory and making things worse by putting corrosive ideas out there?

Oh, there’s so many things to say. One thing is that groups — we’ll call them violence entrepreneurs, the violent extremists who want to tear everything down and want to institute their own radical vision of society — they benefit from the element of surprise, right? They want people to be confused when violence starts happening. They want people to not understand what’s going on, to think that nobody’s in charge. Because then they can send their goons into the streets and convince people that they’re the ones in charge. Which is why when I would talk to people who lived through the start of the violence in Sarajevo or Baghdad or Kyiv, they all say that they were surprised. And they were surprised in part because they didn’t know what the warning signs were.
[…]
I wish it were the case that by not talking about it we could prevent anything from happening. But the reality is, if we don’t talk about it, [violent extremists] are going to continue to organize, and they’re going to continue to train. There are definitely lots of groups on the far right who want war. They are preparing for war. And not talking about it does not make us safer.

What we’re heading toward is an insurgency, which is a form of a civil war. That is the 21st-century version of a civil war, especially in countries with powerful governments and powerful militaries, which is what the United States is. And it makes sense. An insurgency tends to be much more decentralized, often fought by multiple groups. Sometimes they’re actually competing with each other. Sometimes they coordinate their behavior. They use unconventional tactics. They target infrastructure. They target civilians. They use domestic terror and guerrilla warfare. Hit-and-run raids and bombs. We’ve already seen this in other countries with powerful militaries, right? The IRA took on the British government. Hamas has taken on the Israeli government. These are two of the most powerful militaries in the world. And they fought for decades. And in the case of Hamas I think we could see a third intifada. And they pursue a similar strategy.
[…]
I can’t say when it’s going to happen. I think it’s really important for people to understand that countries that have these two factors, who get put on this watch list, have a little bit less than a 4 percent annual risk of civil war. That seems really small, but it’s not. It means that, every year that those two factors continue, the risk increases.

The analogy is smoking. If I started smoking today, my risk of dying of lung cancer or some smoking-related disease is very small. If I continue to smoke for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, my risk eventually of dying of something related to smoking is going to be very high if I don’t change my behavior. And so I think that’s one of the actually optimistic things: We know the warning signs. And we know that if we strengthen our democracy, and if the Republican Party decides it’s no longer going to be an ethnic faction that’s trying to exclude everybody else, then our risk of civil war will disappear. We know that. And we have time to do it. But you have to know those warning signs in order to feel an impetus to change them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/03/08/they-are-preparing-war-an-expert-civil-wars-discusses-where-political-extremists-are-taking-this-country/

…the deep pockets tend to belong to people who…may have interests other than ours at heart, shall we say?

The lobbying industry had a record year in 2021, taking in $3.7 billion in revenue as companies, associations and other organizations pressed Congress and the Biden administration over trillions of dollars in new pandemic spending and rules affecting health care, travel, tourism and other industries.

The revenue figures, compiled in recent weeks from government records by OpenSecrets, show that lobbying spending began steadily growing in 2017, President Donald Trump’s first year in office, before mostly flattening in 2020 as the pandemic began. The jump in 2021, when lobbying spending was about 6 percent higher than 2020, came as the government’s pandemic interventions and record expenditure took center stage, including an additional $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief and a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package.
[…]
Thousands of companies and organizations appeared to hire lobbyists for the first time during the pandemic, as more than 3,700 companies and other groups that spent no money lobbying the government in 2019 paid lobbyists last year.
[…]
Some of those groups may have hired lobbyists as a temporary measure initially but decided to increase their spending as the pandemic continued, said Dan Auble, an OpenSecrets senior researcher.

“Every aspect of the economy the past couple of years has been in full-blown crisis mode, so everyone got involved in lobbying,” Auble said. “I think it’s likely there are some people who came to Washington a couple of years ago and have stuck around, or industries that realized the benefits they could accrue by having an active presence in Washington.”

Auble said even well-entrenched industries that have lobbyists in Washington every year spent more in 2021 than usual, such as technology and defense firms. Live entertainment and recreation companies spent more than $10 million in 2021, 43 percent more than in 2019. That included heavy additional spending by sports leagues, including the National Football League and Major League Baseball.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/12/lobbying-record-government-spending/

…& for some…if you can’t beat them…just getting the right person to say you did will do just as well

Secretary of state races have historically attracted little notice and even less money. The winners of these elections assume rather bureaucratic roles, and their duties may include managing state records, overseeing the department of motor vehicles and keeping the state seal. But in many states, the secretary of state also serves – crucially – as the chief election official.
[…]
While Trump did not endorse any candidates for secretary of state in 2020, he has already endorsed three in the 2022 cycle: Hice in Georgia, Mark Finchem in Arizona and Kristina Karamo in Michigan. All three candidates have embraced the lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election by allowing fraud to affect the results. Biden’s margin of victory in each of those states was less than three points, and their input could prove decisive in the next presidential election.

“They are willing to overturn the will of the voters in order to choose the winner,” said Kim Rogers, executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. “It is disempowering, and it is akin to giving an arsonist keys to the firehouse.”
[…]
According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, donations for secretary of state races in six battleground states are three times higher than they were at this point in the last election cycle, in 2018, and eight times higher than the 2014 cycle. Fundraising has particularly increased in Arizona, Geor­gia and Michigan, which also happen to be the three states where Trump has issued an endorsement.

“A lot more money is going to these once sleepy, bureaucratic races,” said Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s elections and government program. “The places that we’ve seen the biggest increase – which is basically Arizona, Georgia and Michigan – each of those places had some degree of nationally covered election controversy around 2020.”

The Brennan Center analysis also indicated that out-of-state donations to secretary of state candidates are increasing at an even faster rate than overall donations. Finchem, who has called on the Arizona legislature to decertify the 2020 presidential results in three major counties, already has six times as many donors as every secretary of state candid­ate in the 2018 elec­tion combined. Two-thirds of those donors live outside Arizona.
[…]
But to Democrats like Rogers, the outcome of secretary of state races in key battleground states represents nothing less than the fate of American democracy.

“These folks want to rig the game, and they are out to do that,” Rogers said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/12/us-elections-secretary-of-state-democracy-brad-raffensperger

…which is sort of shitty note to leave this on…so if I have the wherewithal before this goes up I’ll try to find something more fitting of a sunday to put down here…along with some tunes…but I might fall short on both counts since my plans for this particular sunday got thrown a last-minute curveball

…speaking of which…it might straighten out…but it’s entirely possible that this is the part where I appeal to the kind souls who mentioned they might be willing to sub in for a DOT…I’d be due to put one together for tuesday, thursday & whichever day next weekend meg finds less appealing…so if you’re one of those kind souls & you think you might be able to swing one or two of those this could be your week?