…in most respects it seems like comparisons between events in ukraine & gaza…are somewhat unhelpful…but this one tripped me up

In less than two months, more than twice as many women and children have been reported killed in Gaza than in Ukraine after two years of war.

…”we”…& certainly a fair bit of press coverage…don’t seem to have had any compunction about describing russian tactics as…to pick a not-entirely-random euphemism…deplorable…though there appears to be an odd construction by which applying that epithet to bibi & his boys that way is taken by some to invoke the antisemitism card…& at least to the limited extent I can follow it…the legality of employing what are broadly medieval principles of siege warfare…to a population that has not in the main been in a position to flee even if they had the inclination…is allegedly…umm…kosher?

Israel has cast the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip as a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern conflict, pointing to the heavy human toll from military campaigns the United States itself once waged in Iraq and Syria.

…it’s hard to get my head around…over & above the part where it’s brutal to so much as contemplate

But a review of past conflicts and interviews with casualty and weapons experts suggest that Israel’s assault is different.

While wartime death tolls will never be exact, experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century.

People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.

Precise comparisons of war dead are impossible, but conflict-casualty experts have been taken aback at just how many people have been reported killed in Gaza — most of them women and children — and how rapidly.

It is not just the scale of the strikes — Israel said it had engaged more than 15,000 targets before reaching a brief cease-fire in recent days. It is also the nature of the weaponry itself.

Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say.
[…]
More women and children have been reported killed in Gaza in less than two months than the roughly 7,700 civilians documented as killed by U.S. forces and their international allies in the entire first year of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to estimates from Iraq Body Count, an independent British research group.

And the number of women and children reported killed in Gaza since the Israeli campaign began last month has already started to approach the roughly 12,400 civilians documented to have been killed by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan during nearly 20 years of war, according to Neta C. Crawford, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
[…]
In the nine-month battle of Mosul, which Israeli officials have cited as a comparison, an estimated total of 9,000 to 11,000 civilians were killed by all sides in the conflict, including many thousands killed by the Islamic State, The Associated Press found.

A similar number of women and children have already been reported killed in Gaza in less than two months.
[…]
Women and children account for nearly 70 percent of all deaths reported in Gaza even though most combatants are men — an “extraordinary statistic,” Rick Brennan, the regional emergency director for the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean office, said at an event this month.

Normally, one would expect the opposite, Mr. Brennan said. In past clashes between Israel and Hamas, for example, about 60 percent of the reported deaths in Gaza were men.

…I know how it seems to me…but…what do I know?

In an address on Oct. 30, for example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the accidental bombing of a children’s hospital by Britain’s Royal Air Force when it was targeting the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen in 1945. And during visits to Israel by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Israeli officials privately invoked the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which together killed more than 100,000 people.

…but now is probably not the time for me to get all bent out of shape about the way that the phrase “begging the question” is increasingly used to mean something other than what it strictly used to mean…& I’m pretty sure I’m unqualified to judge whether the premise that comparing the deployment of nuclear weapons on the rationale that the civilian toll those exacted might have been dwarfed by the deaths that could have ensued by continuing to prosecute WWII is the appropriate parallel to draw…rather than…say…the one where we got all “never again” about the idea

Modern international laws of war were developed largely in response to the atrocities of World War II.

In 1949, the Geneva Conventions codified protections for civilians during wartime. International law does not prohibit civilian casualties, but it does say that militaries must not target civilians directly or indiscriminately bomb civilian areas, and that incidental harm and the killing of civilians must not exceed the direct military advantage to be gained.

…I mean…I get the whole tunnels thing…& I remember the term “bunker-buster” being a thing…but…I guess I’m confused…blast radius vs depth of penetration isn’t exactly a calculation I can do…even were I capable of poring over imagery I would admit to trying to limit my exposure to on the grounds that curling up in the fetal position & sobbing isn’t conducive to the pretense of functionality I attempt to get away with most days…still…it seems a lot like…well…there’s something else at work in this sort of calculation

In the first two weeks of the war, roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs weighing 1,000 to 2,000 pounds, according to a senior U.S. military official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Those bombs are “really big,” said Mr. Garlasco, the adviser for the PAX organization. Israel, he said, also has thousands of smaller bombs from the United States that are designed to limit damage in dense urban areas, but weapons experts say they have seen little evidence that they are being used frequently.

In one documented case, Israel used at least two 2,000-pound bombs during an Oct. 31 airstrike on Jabaliya, a densely populated area just north of Gaza City, flattening buildings and creating impact craters 40 feet wide, according to an analysis of satellite images, photos and videos by The New York Times. Airwars independently confirmed that at least 126 civilians were killed, more than half of them children.

…it’s certainly no exaggeration to say I can’t really comprehend the hypotheticals against which it might appear to be judicious rather than intentionally indescriminate

Colonel Conricus, the Israeli military spokesman, said that Hamas and its deliberate strategy of embedding itself in — and underneath — the residents of Gaza are “the main reason why there are civilian casualties.”

He said that hundreds of Israeli strikes on Hamas have been diverted “because of the presence of civilians, children, women and others who appear not to be connected to the fighting.”

…but…well…I can’t really claim I find that argument persuasive…& when there’s some context offered…it sure looks a whole lot like something else

More children have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli assault began than in the world’s major conflict zones combined — across two dozen countries — during all of last year, even with the war in Ukraine, according to U.N. tallies of verified child deaths in armed conflict.

…&…it’s not just me?

When civilian areas are in the cross hairs, the threat does not end when the bombing does, experts say. The destruction left in the wake of war leaves people facing a struggle to survive long after the conflict has ended. Decimated health-care systems and compromised water supplies alone can pose major public health risks, said Professor Crawford, the Costs of War Project researcher.

“In every war it’s like that,” she said. “But this is a scale of immiseration over such a short period of time that it’s really difficult to comprehend.”

Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace

…& while I do get that it isn’t exactly realistic to imagine a counter-factual response to the events of oct 7th whereby good faith negotiations of the sort that had previously failed to materialize would have plausibly gained traction…it’s hard for me to see how in that event israel wouldn’t have been coming to the table with a moral high ground in terms of broad spectrum sympathy which would have potentially clawed a bargaining position out that the settlers in the west bank would at first blush seemed to have made unrealistic under what passes for normal circumstances in that corner of the world

On the face of it, it does not seem promising. The brutal attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 and the massive Israeli retaliatory assault on Gaza have already led to too much death and destruction and have ignited communal hatreds in the United States and beyond. Every eruption in the past — whether war, intifada or military raid — has only demonstrated that neither side can achieve its longed-for security, dignity or peace through violence. On the contrary, every eruption only hardens divisions and ensures more bloodshed next time.

In fact, what peace might look like is not a mystery: The shape of a Palestinian state has been explored in minute detail by successive peace conferences, meetings, negotiations and private initiatives, collectively known — or derided, in their apparent futility — as the peace process. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s were a major breakthrough in bringing hardened Palestinian and Israeli commanders to the table and establishing basic principles of coexistence. In 2000, Ehud Barak, Israel’s prime minister at the time, put a significant offer on the table to the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat for a two-state solution, which he rejected as insufficient and failed to meet with any serious counteroffer. Several years later, Mr. Barak’s successor Ehud Olmert and the Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas, met 36 times over nearly two years to hammer out a detailed plan that involved swapping some land, sharing Jerusalem, creating a free passage between the West Bank and Gaza and cooperating on business and resources.
[…]
How the current fighting ends will shape much of what happens next. There is no telling whether a truce and hostage-prisoner exchange mediated by Qatar and the Biden administration will hold or, if it does, for how long. But there is still every reason to think beyond the fighting, if only because the terrible cost it is exacting demands sanity. These are areas that bear deliberation:

The fact that no Arab states have openly endorsed the Hamas invasion and two — Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates — denounced it outright while expressing concerns for the impact on Gaza’s civilians is important. It shows that the last thing Arab leaders want is for Hamas, backed by Iran and long dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state, to be strengthened by the current war with Israel.

That said, these states — mostly out of frustration with the Palestinian Authority’s corruption and unwillingness in past negotiations, with Mr. Barak and with Mr. Olmert, to agree on a painful, end-of-all-claims compromise with Israel — began to wash their hands of the Palestinian cause. These states needed and wanted their own direct ties to Israel, primarily to counterbalance Iran. So in the Abraham Accords and subsequent discussions about normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Palestinians were effectively left aside. If one outcome of this war is a still moderate Palestinian Authority with better leadership, the natural partnership between it and the Arab states can be renewed. This could, in turn, revive a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians, as well as widening normalization between Israel and Arab or Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Indonesia.
[…]
But we have no illusions: Through its use of terrorism, Hamas has destroyed whatever legitimacy it had as a governing force. For these negotiations to be meaningful, the Palestinian Authority has to be overhauled. It needs new leadership and institutional reform. To generate and maintain any stable peace with Israel, the authority needs to be able to demonstrate that, in comparison with Hamas, it is more capable of governing Gaza and the West Bank effectively. In its present condition, it cannot.

At the same time, Israel and its supporters must accept that this is not an equal contest. Israel is the dominant power here, and in the current conflict, Israel will once again need to be first to move toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. For many Israelis, their primary concern is finding security, or bitachon, a Hebrew word that also encompasses trust and faith, and it requires a leap of both to believe that this will come from an independent Palestinian state. But the alternatives — continuing the occupation and incorporating occupied territories into Israel — are demonstrably worse.
[…]
Mr. Netanyahu cannot lead Israel in the search for peace. Now 74, he has been in and out of the prime minister’s office since his first election victory in 1996, in the wake of Mr. Rabin’s assassination by an Israeli extremist for signing the Oslo Accords. In 2009, Mr. Netanyahu gave a famous speech at Bar-Ilan University embracing the principle of a Palestinian state alongside Israel — on condition that the state was demilitarized and that the Palestinians recognized Israel as the state of the Jewish people. But everything he has done since has been to expand settlements in the West Bank and to stymie the peace process. His strategy was to undermine the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, even though he knew it was cooperating with Israel’s security services to help maintain calm there, while tacitly helping Hamas consolidate its power in Gaza. This allowed him to tell every American president: I’d love to make peace, but I have no Palestinian partner; they’re divided.

Many Israelis now blame Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet partners for fracturing the Israeli armed forces with a dangerous attempt to undermine the judiciary and diverting the army’s attention from the Gaza border by fomenting trouble in the West Bank. The Israeli media has reported that well before the Hamas invasion on Oct. 7, Israel’s military intelligence warned Mr. Netanyahu that Hamas and Hezbollah had noticed the fractures in Israeli society — and were tempted by them.

Holding Israel’s leaders to account in no way lessens the responsibility that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad bear for the present suffering in Gaza. Hamas knew full well that a murderous attack on Israeli civilians would ensure a massive retaliation against the helpless civilians of Gaza, including innumerable children — the very people Hamas purported to represent and govern. Hamas has gained advantage by deliberately slaughtering civilians in Israel and justifying the deaths of thousands of its own people as martyrdom. The current leaders of Hamas, who have never renounced the obliteration of Israel as a goal and have pledged to continue inflicting violence to that end, have effectively rejected any role in seeking a lasting settlement.

The Only Way Forward [NYT]

…so…when the best news there’s been hasn’t exactly been embraced by either side

Hamas’s armed wing said they will delay Saturday’s brokered second release of hostages until Israel allows aid trucks to enter northern Gaza.
[…]
Hamas’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam brigades added that the hostage releases would be delayed if Israel does not adhere to the agreed terms for the release of Palestinian prisoners, according to Reuters. There was no immediate Israeli response to the statement.

…the phrase “in good faith” seems to just about drip irony…which is fucking with my habitual stance of being a fan of the stuff

The four-day ceasefire marks the first break in seven weeks of conflict that has killed more than 14,000 civilians in Gaza, and more than 1,200 people in Israel, most of whom were victims of the surprise Hamas cross-border attack on 7 October.

Of the deal, Qatar’s foreign ministry previously said the ceasefire will allow “the entry of a larger number of humanitarian convoys and relief aid, including fuel designated for humanitarian needs”.

The ceasefire would be extended by a day for every 10 additional hostages released, the Israeli government said.

In response, an Israeli military spokesperson told French television channel BFM that Israel fully respected the truce.

Osama Hamdan, a Hamas representative in Lebanon, told the Lebanon-based Al Mayadeen TV channel that the suspension was due to violations of the truce committed by Israel “linked to aid (entering Gaza), in addition to shootings and the rising death toll … Some of (these violations) happened yesterday, and repeated today,” Hamdan said.

There was no immediate comment from the International Committee of the Red Cross on whether the release of hostages and detainees had been delayed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/25/hamas-says-it-will-delay-next-hostage-releases-over-gaza-aid-dispute

…disproportionate influence is…apparently…something of a sign of the times

Billionaires, or their equivalents, have been around a long time, but there’s something different about today’s tech titans, as evidenced by a rash of recent books. Reading about their apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies, outlandish social media pronouncements, private space programmes and virtual world-building ambitions, it’s hard to remember they’re not actors in a reality series or characters from a new Avengers movie.

Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society. Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension. Unlike their forebears, they do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest underground lair in New Zealand, colony on the moon or Mars or virtual reality server in the cloud.

While plans for Peter Thiel’s 193-hectare (477-acre) “doomsday” escape, complete with spa, theatre, meditation lounge and library, were ultimately rejected on environmental grounds, he still wants to build a startup community that floats on the ocean, where so-called seasteaders can live beyond government regulation as well as whatever disasters may befall us back on the continents.

…I know I’ve muttered about ways musk seems to have profoundly misconstrued the work of iain m banks…so I won’t bore you with allusions to the esoteric community that calls the plastic mass of the pacific garbage patch home in one of william gibson’s outings…but…if anyone is familiar with how that goes…they might not be surprised to note that I’d be a lot less troubled by the fate of its putative scion being visited upon thiel than I am by what’s raining down on civilian heads in an unbearable number of places that are sadly not even a little bit fictional

To escape “near-term” problems such as poverty and pollution, Jeff Bezos imagines building millions of space colonies housing trillions of people on the moon, asteroids and in other parts of the solar system, where inhabitants will harvest the resources of space for themselves and those left back on Earth. Elon Musk is convinced he will build a city of a million people on Mars by 2050 at a cost of up to $10bn a person. The ChatGPT impresario Sam Altman, whose board of directors sacked him as CEO before he made a dramatic comeback this week, wants to upload his consciousness to the cloud (if the AIs he helped build and now fears will permit him).

Oddly enough, while their schemes are certainly more outlandish, on an individual basis today’s tech billionaires are not any wealthier than their early 20th-century counterparts. Adjusted for inflation, John Rockefeller’s fortune of $336bn and Andrew Carnegie’s $309bn exceed Musk’s $231bn, Bezos’s $165bn and Gates’s $114bn.
[…]
What evidence we do see of their operations in the real world mostly take the form of externalised harm. Digital businesses depend on mineral slavery in Africa, dump toxic waste in China, facilitate the undermining of democracy across the globe and spread destabilising disinformation for profit – all from the sociopathic remove afforded by remote administration.

Indeed, there is an imperiousness to the way the new billionaire class disregard people and places for which it is hard to find historical precedent. Zuckerberg had to go all the way back to Augustus Caesar for a role model, and his admiration for the emperor borders on obsession. He models his haircut on Augustus; his wife joked that three people went on their honeymoon to Rome: Mark, Augustus and herself; he named his second daughter August; and he used to end Facebook meetings by proclaiming “Domination!”

While we should be thankful he has chosen to emulate Augustus instead of, say, Caligula, he is nonetheless aspiring toward the absolute power – and hairstyle – of a Roman dictator. Zuckerberg told the New Yorker “through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace”, finally acknowledging “that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things”. It’s that sort of top down thinking that led Zuckerberg to not only establish an independent oversight board at Facebook, dubbed the “Supreme Court”, but to suggest that it would one day expand its scope to include companies across the industry.

At least Zuckerberg’s anti-democratic measures are expressed as the decrees of a benevolent dictator. Musk exercises no such restraint. In response to the accusation that the US government organised a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia in order for Tesla to secure lithium there, Musk tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

…from the horse’s ass’s mouth & all that

Musk not only owns X and Tesla but also SpaceX, StarLink, the Boring Company, Solar City, NeuraLink, xAI, and someday, he hopes, another finance company like PayPal (which he co-founded with Thiel but then sold to eBay). Similarly, Bezos doesn’t just control Amazon – the world’s biggest ever retailer, if that even does justice to the monolith – but the Washington Post, IMDb, MGM, Twitch, Zoox, Kiva, Whole Foods, Ring, Ivona, One Medical, Blue Origin and, of course, Amazon Web Services, which owns at least one-third of the cloud computing market. Included in Gates’s 20bn dollars’ worth of Microsoft stock and assets are Microsoft Azure (his 23% of the cloud), LinkedIn, Skype and GitHub. He also, incidentally, owns 109,000 hectares (270,000 acres) of US farmland.

This is unprecedentedly broad, or what could be called “horizontal” power. It is success across such a wide spectrum that has given today’s tech billionaires false confidence in the extent of their own expertise. Gates, who regularly dispensed advice on vaccines and public health in television interviews, eventually issued a report in which he graded each country’s pandemic response as if he were a school teacher who knew better than every nation’s department of health (no one got an A).

…while we’re at it…feel free to check out the findings of the ongoing assessment of the UK government’s response to covid to see how far off that tangent of the grading curve another elitist with a penchant for comparing himself to figures from antiquity looks to have shown himself to be…at the expense of…not to put to fine a point on it…a significant number of what we were introduced to as “excess deaths”

By combining a distorted interpretation of Nietzsche with a pretty accurate one of Ayn Rand, they end up with a belief that while “God is dead”, the übermensch of the future can use pure reason to rise above traditional religious values and remake the world “in his own interests”. Nietzsche’s language, particularly out of context, provides tech übermensch wannabes with justification for assuming superhuman authority. In his book Zero to One, Thiel directly quotes Nietzsche to argue for the supremacy of the individual: “madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule”. In Thiel’s words: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” This distorted image of the übermensch as a godlike creator, pushing confidently towards his clear vision of how things should be, persists as an essential component of The Mindset. You don’t get hockey stick stock charts without such totalised, dominion thinking.
[…]
This is not capitalism, as Yanis Varoufakis explains in his new book Technofeudalism. Capitalists sought to extract value from workers by disconnecting them from the value they created, but they still made stuff. Feudalists seek an entirely passive income by “going meta” on business itself. They are rent-seekers, whose aim is to own the very platform on which other people do the work.

The visions of the feudalist are more self-interested and abstract than even the most egotistical displays of the capitalist. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, for example, was New York City’s biggest retailer’s way of thanking the city in which it operated. Yes, it was an advert, but it was also a great public service, taking place in public streets. When Bezos took his first flight in his Blue Origin space vehicle (demonstrating little more than the fact that a private individual could now afford to do what we had accomplished collectively more than 50 years ago), he acted as if the mission had public virtue. “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this,” he admitted. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart very much. It’s very appreciated,” he added, in the strangely passive, impersonal language of a customer service rep. The launch was like Amazon’s version of the Macy’s parade, except instead of marching down Broadway with giant balloon characters for our kids, the company’s largesse consisted of letting us bear witness to its founder’s superhuman achievement. As if recognising the anticlimax, Bezos put William Shatner on Blue Origin’s next flight, for improved entertainment value.

For that’s what is really going on here. The antics of the tech feudalists make for better science fiction stories than they chart legitimate paths to sustainable futures. Musk and Zuckerberg challenge each other to duels as a way of advertising their platforms. Musk is less X’s CEO than its troll in chief. They are not gods; they are entertainers.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/25/we-will-coup-whoever-we-want-the-unbearable-hubris-of-musk-and-the-billionaire-tech-bros

…except…I am not…entertained…by the shit they ask us to entertain under the auspices of concepts they wholeheartedly fail to embody even as they claim until they’re blue in the face that they embrace…call me a cynic…but there’s no altruism leavening their avarice…however much they attempt to retro-engineer post hoc justifications for inflicting their adolescent understanding of a social contract they routinely breach for the sake of narrow self-interest with the insanely overweight thumb on the scales their out-of-all-proportion wealth awards them…horrified would be closer to the mark as far as I’m concerned

Stare at a climate map of the world that we expect to inhabit 50 years from now and you see a band of extreme heat encircling the planet’s midriff. Climate modelling from 2020 suggests that within half a century about 30% of the world’s projected population – unless they are forced to move – will live in places with an average temperature above 29C. This is unbearably hot. Currently, no more than 1% of Earth’s land surface is this hot, and those are mainly uninhabited parts of the Sahara.

The scenario is as dramatic as it is because the regions of the world affected most severely by global heating – above all, sub-Saharan Africa – are those expected to experience the most rapid population growth in coming decades.

But despite this population growth, they are also the regions that, on current trends, will contribute least to the emissions that drive the climate disaster. So extreme is inequality that the lowest-earning 50% of the world population – 4 billion people – account for as little as 12% of total emissions. And those at the very bottom of the pile barely register at all. Mali’s per capita C02 emissions are about one-seventy-fifth of those in the US. Even if the lowest-earning third of the global population – more than 2.6 billion people – were to raise themselves above the $3.2-a-day poverty line, it would increase total emissions by a mere 5% – that is, one-third of the emissions of the richest 1%.

Half the world’s population, led by the top 10% of the income distribution – and, above all, by the global elite – drive a globe-spanning productive system that destabilises the environment for everyone. The worst effects are suffered by the poorest, and in the coming decades the impact will become progressively more extreme. And yet their poverty means they are virtually powerless to protect themselves.

…&…sure…sweeping generalizations are unhelpful…as are unwarranted exaggerations…but…it is actually either to point at the reasons why the term “obscene wealth” might be…well…justifiably applied?

This is the triple inequality that defines the climate global equation: the disparity in responsibility for producing the problem; the disparity in experiencing the impacts of the climate crisis; and the disparity in the available resources for mitigation and adaptation.

Not everyone in the danger zone of climate breakdown is poor and powerless. The American south-west has the resources to help itself. India is a capable state. But global heating will pose huge distributional problems. How will climate refugees be resettled? How will the economy adapt? For fragile states such as Iraq, it may prove too much. The risk is that they will tip from just about coping into outright collapse, failing to provide water and the electricity for cooling – the bare essentials for survival in extreme heat. In Iraq this summer, thousands of people huddled in their air-conditioned cars, running their engines for hours just to survive heat spikes that exceeded 50C.

You might say, plus ça change. The poor suffer and the rich prosper. But the consequences of the climate triple inequality are radical and new. Rich countries have long traded on unequal terms with the poor. During the era of colonialism, they plundered raw materials and enslaved tens of millions. For two generations after decolonisation, economic growth largely bypassed what was then known as the third world.

Since the 1980s, with the acceleration of China’s economic growth, the scope of development has dramatically widened. The middle 40% of the world’s income distribution now account for 41% of global emissions, meaning they have achieved a considerable level of energy consumption. But this “global middle class”, concentrated above all in east Asia, crowds out the carbon budget remaining for those on the lowest incomes, and their growth inflicts irreversible damage on some of the poorest and most disempowered people in the world.

This is the historic novelty of the current situation. As we run ever closer to the edge of the environmental envelope – the conditions within which our species can thrive – the development of the rich world systematically undercuts the conditions for survival of billions of people in the climate danger zone. They are not so much exploited or bypassed as victimised by the climactic effects of economic growth taking place elsewhere. This violent and indirect entanglement is new in its quality and scale.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2023/nov/23/climate-emergency-crisis-conference-cop-28

…it’s…well…let’s just say I get how you might be tempted to invoke terms like “insane”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/08/insanity-petrostates-planning-huge-expansion-of-fossil-fuels-says-un-report

…at either end of the scale scale

Coal-fired power plants killed at least 460,000 Americans during the past two decades, causing twice as many premature deaths as previously thought, new research has found.

Cars, factories, fire smoke and electricity plants emit tiny toxic air pollutants known as fine particulate matter or PM2.5, which elevate the risk of an array of life-shortening medical conditions including asthma, heart disease, low birth weight and some cancers.

Researchers analyzed Medicare and emissions data from 1999 and 2020, and for the first time found that coal PM2.5 is twice as deadly as fine particle pollutants from other sources. Previous studies quantifying the death toll from air pollution assumed all PM2.5 sources posed the same risk, and therefore probably underestimated the dangers of coal plants.

Government regulations save lives, according to the research, which is published in Science, as most deaths happened when environmental standards were weakest and PM2.5 levels from coal-fired power stations highest.

“Air pollution from coal is much more harmful than we thought, and we’ve been treating it like it’s just another air pollutant,” said the lead author, Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry department of civil, environmental and infrastructure engineering at George Mason University. “This type of evidence is important to policymakers like EPA [the US Environmental Protection Agency] as they identify cost-effective solutions for cleaning up the country’s air, like requiring emissions controls or encouraging renewables.”

Henneman led a group of researchers who used publicly available data to track air pollution – and its health effects – from the 480 US coal power plants that operated at some point between 1999 and 2020. A model was used to track the wind direction and reach of the toxins from each power station. Annual exposure levels were then connected with more than 650m Medicare health records that covered most people over age 65 in the US.

…some might call it a numbers game…but I guess I tend to think of games as things you have a choice about playing…so…I’d probably have to call it something else

About 85% of the total 460,000 coal plant-related deaths occurred between 1999 and 2007, an average of more than 43,000 deaths per year. The death toll declined drastically as plants closed or scrubbers – a type of sulphur filter – were installed to comply with new environmental rules. By 2020, the coal PM2.5 death toll had dropped 95%, to 1,600 people.

“By linking records of where Medicare beneficiaries lived and when they died, we found that risks due to PM2.5 from coal were more than double the risks related to PM2.5 from all sources,” said co-author Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics, population and data science at the Harvard TC Chan school of public health.
[…]
Globally, coal-generated power is still rising, with South Africa, China, India and Poland among the countries most dependent on the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

US coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people in past 20 years – report [Guardian]

…counter-intuitive would likely be a concept that made an appearance…&…well…appearances…which are acknowledged to sometimes be deceiving…definitely come in to it

Public trust in some of the world’s most repressive governments is soaring, according to Edelman, the world’s largest public relations firm, whose flagship “trust barometer” has created its reputation as an authority on global trust. For years, Edelman has reported that citizens of authoritarian countries, including Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and China, tend to trust their governments more than people living in democracies do.

But Edelman has been less forthcoming about the fact that some of these same authoritarian governments have also been its clients. Edelman’s work for one such client – the government of the UAE – will be front and center when world leaders convene in Dubai later this month for the UN’s Cop28 climate summit.

The Guardian and Aria, a non-profit research organization, analyzed Edelman trust barometers, as well as Foreign Agent Registration Act (Fara) filings made public by the Department of Justice, dating back to 2001, when Edelman released its first survey of trust. (The act requires US companies to publish certain information about their lobbying and advocacy work for foreign governments.) During that time Edelman and its subsidiaries have been paid millions of dollars by autocratic governments to develop and promote their desired images and narratives.

Polling experts have found that public opinion surveys tend to overstate the favorability of authoritarian regimes because many respondents fear government reprisal. That hasn’t stopped these same governments from exploiting Edelman’s findings to burnish their reputations and legitimize their holds on power.

Edelman’s trust barometer is “quoted everywhere as if this is some credible, objective research from a thinktank, whereas there is a fairly obvious commercial background, and it’s fairly obviously a sales tool,” said Alison Taylor, a professor at New York University’s business school. “At minimum, the firm should be disclosing these financial relationships as part of the study. But they’re not doing that.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/24/edelman-pr-trust-barometer-uae-saudi-arabia

…it’s…complicated

One of China’s biggest financial conglomerates with links to the country’s ailing property market has admitted a shortfall of nearly £30bn as it warned investors that it is “severely insolvent”.
[…]
China’s vast shadow banking system – which operates outside the regulations that govern traditional banks – involves selling wealth management products to retail investors. That financing then often flows into the property sector, which has faced a liquidity crisis in recent years as Beijing imposed strict limits on debt levels for property developers.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/23/chinese-shadow-bank-zhongzhi-30bn-shortfall-china-property-market

…& that’s before we get all existential about what constitutes currency…or indeed a global standard one

It’s no surprise that the US Treasury — whose remit includes combating threats to the dollar and protecting the integrity of the financial system — is warning Congress that dollar-based digital instruments, stablecoins, and crypto exchanges pose significant risks.

But risks to whom?

Crypto “dollars” won’t collapse the world financial system, but they could disrupt the cosy greenback-based settlement system. Pre-eminence of the dollar as the currency of choice for contractual settlements, coupled with the depth and sophistication of US capital markets, has enabled the US and other Western governments to police bad actors by imposing economic sanctions on people they don’t much like.

Unfortunately for the US and its allies, as events currently unfolding in Hong Kong accelerate, CCP-controlled crypto stablecoins and related exchange transfer platforms will eviscerate this prerogative.

The French have long complained about exorbitant privilege — the ability of the US to finance fiscal policies by printing dollars. For the past fifteen years, the BRICS have taken this to heart, seeking an alternative to avoid Uncle Sam’s heavy hand and freedom to snoop on all their financial dealings.

But the BRICS don’t need to invent a new currency or transfer system. The best “new” money is here: digital dollar stablecoins and other tokenised crypto pseudocurrencies. Unlike the “old” dollar — easily regulated, tracked, and tethered to Washington DC — offshore crypto transfer systems operate outside the extant global regulatory net. They’re effectively stateless. 

…complicated would appear to be an understatement…in fact…calling it an understatement risks being an understatement…though “exorbitant privilege” feels like a term that could apply to more things than the one about the dollar…anyway…where were we?

Large-scale acceptance of crypto tokens can provide a robust settlement mechanism for legitimate economic activities. But they really shine as tools for illegitimate activities, letting all manner of criminals conduct business in dollars while bypassing the oversight mechanisms of the Federal Reserve, the CFTC, the SEC, the IRS, and banks subject to American regulation

One collateral consequence of broad-based acceptance of offshore crypto tokens would be the evisceration of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 and the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. These provide the foundation for US government sanctions against countries and individuals “to deal with any usual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States.” Those statutes create a national security/emergency hook for actions that are, primarily, driven by foreign policy, criminal enforcement, and economic objectives. 

Consider this: had Russia held crypto tokens on a hard drive instead of holding reserve assets at G7 central banks, $600bn of reserves that were blocked by Western sanctions would have been frustrated. Ditto the accounts of hundreds of Russian oligarchs, and those of another 12,000-odd individuals and companies currently under American sanction. 

Binance this week pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to money laundering and breaching international financial sanctions, having failed to report suspicious transactions with organisations the US described as terrorist groups including Hamas and al Qaeda. Reuters reported in June that “hackers, fraudsters and drug traffickers”, including groups under US sanctions for assisting North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, have moved at least $2.3bn through the exchange over the past five years.

Threats to the current order are being rendered operational by the Hong Kong-based crypto companies and exchanges with direct ties to the Chinese Communist party (CCP). Everything in Hong Kong requires CCP approval: it’s well documented that the CPP seeks to dethrone the US dollar and the dollar clearing and settlement systems. Not least because of bitter CCP complaints over US sanction policies. It’s natural that the CCP would drive the institutionalisation of Hong Kong as a centre for digital assets — even to the point of “suggesting” Western banks, like HSBC and Standard Chartered accept Hong Kong-based crypto exchanges as clients, thereby creating a critical conduit link to the traditional banking system for the crypto exchanges.
[…]
The space is ripe for a CCP takeover. Roughly $123bn in dollar stablecoin tokens are in circulation elsewhere. Tether alone accounts for some $83bn in capitalisation. Tether is owned by iFinex, a Hong Kong company that already has a long relationship with China. The FT and the Wall Street Journal cover Tether extensively, including its opaque ownership, dubious accounting for purported 1-for-1 US dollar reserves, and popularity in illicit finance. A top ISIS figure allegedly uses Tether as his piggy bank. More recently, Tether, facilitated by the Tron stablecoin transfer network (where 93 per cent of all transactions involve Tether), seemingly unwittingly, failed to catch that its stablecoin was funding terrorist groups in the Palestinian territories. 

Hong Kong hosts newer entrants: it’s CCP’s digital asset testing ground. TrueUSD ramped to $3.3bn in circulation since late 2021; it’s controlled by Techteryx, which is connected to the crypto exchange Binance, which originated in China and, despite denials, is reported to retain ties.

[…] The beneficial owners of Techteryx and First Digital aren’t disclosed. A respected crypto analyst, Adam Cochran, has linked both entities with a crypto tycoon named Sun Yuchen, better known as Justin Sun. Sun denies any connection,
[…]
Sun is also the inventor of an “algorithmic” crypto dollar coin, USDD ($72mn in circulation). In March of 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission lodged a civil fraud complaint against him. By one account, he’s also the subject of a US Department of Justice Department criminal investigation. An investigation of Tron, another of Sun’s crypto token transfer platforms, by blockchain analytics firm Chain Argos suggests transactions linked to Hamas, Hizbollah and other terror groups “in the billion-dollar range.”

For further reference: in 2021, Sun joined a research project with the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. Citing a government statement, CoinDesk reports the project was approved by the Central Party Committee to consider using blockchain in social governance. The project’s team “includes members from the People’s Bank of China, Central Cyberspace Administration — China’s internet watchdog — as well as scholars from CAICT, the China Information Association, Tsinghua University, and Peking University.”

For the US and Western institutions more generally, there’s enormous risk in the possibility that the CCP will be successful in establishing Hong Kong as a hub for global trading and clearing of crypto. Hong Kong-based digital instruments and exchanges will be opaque to the outside world with disclosure exclusively provided to Chinese authorities: all others will find them impossible to monitor — much less tax or control via domestic sanctions actions. Western notions of a rule of law, and the institutional scaffolding of modern capitalism — imperfect as they might be — will be absent.

What’s more, the Chinese government issues its own Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), a digital yuan, giving it better visibility and granular control over those funds. According to the Human Rights Foundation, implications for human rights are significant: paper cash can transact outside of the oversight of a totalitarian regime, CBDCs are tools of surveillance and social engineering.” Tron is now issuing its own yuan-denominated currency, which is likely to be convertible with the official yuan.

It’s not just that dollar-based stablecoins and the related crypto exchange and transfer platforms controlled, effectively, by the CCP would create a headache for Western law enforcement. Economic policymakers may find that, in the longer term, dollar-based stablecoins and extraterritorial exchanges and transfer systems could be used to dilute the dominance of the dollar in global trade and finance, consequently increasing the cost of funding the vast existing US debt stock as well as ongoing fiscal and balance of payments deficits incurred by the US.
[…]
It’s all well and good for the US Treasury to warn of a coming storm, but, given the chaotic domestic political environment, it’s difficult to imagine Congress engaging productively without a non-partisan understanding of the urgent need to protect the primacy of the US as the centre of the global settlement system.
[…]
The emergence of an opaque, unregulated offshore dollar-denominated transfer mechanism is directly counter to US interests. It’s up to the US to offer an alternative or to define what constitutes acceptable compliance.

It doesn’t look like much today, but the Hong Kong-based crypto dollar and dollar-based offshore transfer systems are like US national debt: don’t matter until they do. As Hemingway might have put it, crypto adoption and facilitation driven by the CCP may well happen gradually, but, suddenly, it could become a new standard. 

By then, the “old” dollar and incumbent global settlement system will have escaped US control for good.

US dollar dominance is facing a crypto-yuan hostile takeover [FT]

…so…I guess…when you look at one thing in the context of another

Thirty years ago, a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed achievable. The story of how it fell apart reveals why the fight remains so intractable today. [NYT]

…have a care

Many experts are concerned that companies such as OpenAI are moving too fast towards developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), the term for a system that can perform a wide variety of tasks at human or above human levels of intelligence – and which could, in theory, evade human control.

[…for example…much the same way they shifted the goalposts for what constitutes AI so they could market a better class of algorithmic machine learning as “intelligence”…that G-for-general has similarly started to look like it’s being graded on a favorable curve…if not necessarily one that does the rest of us any favors…to wit…A.I. Belongs to the Capitalists Now…per the NYT]

The ChatGPT developer states that it was established with the goal of developing “safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity” and that the for-profit company would be “legally bound to pursue the nonprofit’s mission”.

The emphasis on safety at the nonprofit led to speculation that Altman had been sacked for endangering the company’s core mission. However, his brief successor as interim chief executive, Emmett Shear, wrote this week that the board “did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety”.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/23/openai-was-working-on-advanced-model-so-powerful-it-alarmed-staff

…uh huh…so…uh…we taking their word for that?

OpenAI’s reported ‘superintelligence’ breakthrough is so big it nearly destroyed the company, and ChatGPT [TechRadar]

…only…I dunno about y’all…but I don’t seem to be capable of taking them at their word about so much as the word “superintelligence”…so…it’s safe to say opinions differ considerably…& where the war of words comes with a butchers’ bill…it feels like we could use a righteous superintelligence…or…failing that…some basic humanity?

Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to achieve two things when he launched a ground invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack on Israel: to destroy the militant group and free the 240 hostages captured as its fighters rampaged through the south of the country.

But even as Israel began inching towards one of those goals this week — by striking a deal with Hamas to free 50 hostages in exchange for a four-day truce and 150 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel — Netanyahu insisted that the fighting had much longer to run.
[…]
“It’s fair to assume that the firepower and infrastructures of Hamas have been significantly degraded, much more than in any previous [Israeli] campaign,” said Jean-Loup Samaan, senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore.

“But because the objective was the total destruction of the movement, including its leadership, the campaign is far from achieving it.”

…something something…war on terror…something…lessons of history…something something…doomed to repeat?

In the weeks since [Oct 7th], the Israel Defense Forces has gradually expanded its control of the north of the strip and encircled the hub of Hamas’s political and military activities in Gaza City. The 70 fatalities among Israeli troops are far fewer than its military planners had expected.

A senior Israeli military official said the assault had “significantly hurt” 10 of Hamas’s 24 battalions, which before the war each had about 1,000 soldiers. Including the roughly 1,000 militants killed in Israel after Hamas launched the October 7 attack, Israeli officials estimate that 5,000 of Hamas’s roughly 25,000 fighters have now been killed. “It’s not 10,000, but it’s not 1,000. It’s something in the middle,” the senior military official said.

The invasion has also had a big impact on Hamas’s ability to fire rockets at Israel. In the early days of the war, Hamas regularly launched huge volleys at cities such as Tel Aviv and Ashkelon and the border areas around Gaza. But as the Israeli military has overrun critical launching positions in the north of the enclave, the fire has become more sporadic and less precise.

“The centre of gravity for [Hamas’s rocket-launching capabilities] was the Gaza City metropolitan area,” said Zvika Haimovich, former commander of the Israel Air Defense Forces. “Today we are talking about a salvo of four or five rockets every three days. In the first two weeks, it was a salvo every four or five hours. It’s a huge difference.”
[…]
For Gaza’s 2.3mn inhabitants, the cost has been devastating. The Israeli assault has killed almost 13,000 people, including more than 5,300 children, according to local health officials, while 1.7mn have been displaced.

Much of the north has been rendered uninhabitable, with at least 50,000 buildings damaged. The medical system in the strip has been forced into collapse, while Israel’s restriction of supplies of fuel, food and water to the strip has prompted aid groups to declare a humanitarian catastrophe.

Yet despite the outrage that the destruction has provoked throughout the Arab world, the assault has not yet prompted other groups such as Hizbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, to enter the fighting — something Israeli and US leaders, who have sent two aircraft carriers to the region, have been desperate to avoid.
[…]
For all Israel’s military gains in northern Gaza, Israeli officials admit that if they are to achieve the aim of defeating Hamas, the next phase of the fighting will have to involve an advance into the south of the strip.

Israeli forces have already begun to prepare for such a move, and officials have begun warning residents of Khan Younis to flee towards what they have said will be a “safe zone” in Muwasi, a 14 sq km area in the south-west of the territory.

Aid groups have dismissed the idea of cramming hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have already been displaced from the north of the strip, into such a tiny space as unworkable. But Israeli officials insist there is no other way to defeat Hamas, as its top leaders in Gaza, such as Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, are thought to be hiding there, and because Hamas has also redeployed numerous fighters from the north to the south.
[…]
“Once we [take all of Gaza] it will probably take almost a year to clear the whole Gaza Strip, and to explore all their underground infrastructures, and find all their rockets and missiles . . . The strip is one big bunker,” said Avivi. “It’s full of booby traps, full of IEDs everywhere, bombs, munitions — it’s unbelievable what they built. So there’s going to be a lot of work.”

But even if Israel succeeds in those tasks, analysts say that the lack of a clear plan for how Gaza should be run if Hamas is ousted means that Israeli forces could yet end up being deployed in the enclave long after the fighting has ended, with an ever-evolving set of objectives.

The bigger question is whether it is possible to destroy a group that has been deeply embedded in the fabric of the enclave for 16 years and that represents an ideology as much as a political and military entity.
[…]
“It’s likely to create a phenomenon of ‘mission creep’ where the [Israeli military] finds itself forced to stay in Gaza for a much longer period than expected. At the end of the day, this is the natural outcome of a military operation without a clear political plan.”

Military briefing: has Israel achieved its war aims in Gaza? [FT]

…I mean…shit…it doesn’t matter beyond the laughably insignificant stakes of subjecting a relatively negligible number of people to an increased risk of RSI from excessive scrolling (&/or eye-rolling)…but look at the mess I routinely get myself into on account of lacking a discernible criteria…much less a clear plan…for when…or indeed how…to bring these posts to an end…but I’m pretty sure I haven’t killed so much as a single innocent…or even guilty…party in the process…so…no harm, no foul?