Tag Archives: war

Ralph Nader on Gaza

I haven’t made up my mind on the Gaza situation, and therefore I haven’t talked a lot about it. And I probably shouldn’t, but I want to get my own thoughts in order. You can stop reading here if you want.

The October 7 attacks were horrific and it is entirely understandable why Israel would choose an overwhelming and violent response. In case we forget the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. invaded not one but two sovereign countries after those attacks, and occupied them for 20 years. There were not so many video cameras in those countries as we have in Gaza now, so the civilian suffering was not in the western public eye to the extent it is now, but the suffering was undoubtedly horrible. This is more like the Vietnam war, which was very public and which people had a very visceral reaction to.

Second, there are people in positions of power on both sides who espouse hateful, racist ideologies. These people have intentionally monkey-wrenched the peace process at least since the hopeful moment of the Oslo accords in the 1990s. The participants in that peace accord were murdered by racist ideologues (one assassination 100% documented; the other somewhat obviously poisoned in my opinion, but maybe not established 100%.) Antisemitism has been a problem since Roman times, and is a problem throughout the Muslim world today. Hateful, fundamentalist ideology also drives the settler movement. I do have a position on the settlements – I agree with the international consensus that they are wrong and illegal, and they need to stop.

Now to war crimes. I am not an expert on the subject, but I know there is an international consensus against collective punishment and against ethnic cleansing. The Israeli government is quite clearly engaging in these two things under any logical textbook definition, and I don’t think this is justified as a response to the original attacks. As for genocide, I don’t believe they are intentionally exterminating civilians, which is what many people associate with genocide. Under the UN definition of genocide, the ethnic cleansing (forcible and permanent moving of populations) counts as genocide, and they are guilty of it. There is a question of whether the Israeli government intends the movement to be permanent, but I am convinced that there is at least an element within the Israeli government that would like to reduce the Palestinian population of Gaza permanently by forcing people across the Egyptian border. I have always found the UN definition problematic though because some of its sub-parts are so obviously more violent and evil than others. There are degrees of unimaginable depravity. For example, murdering 6 million people is a higher plane of depravity than taking children away from their parents for reeducation to destroy their traditional culture and language (the Chinese approach in Xinxiang, the U.S. treatment of Native Americans well into the 20th century – of course, the U.S. military shot and displaced plenty of Native Americans in support of settler colonialism in the 19th century, lest we forget).

So back to civilian suffering, which is horrible. Is it justified as unavoidable collateral damage in an otherwise proportionate response to the original attack? I can’t answer this, but it seems there is much more that can and should be done to alleviate the suffering. The extreme ideological elements on both sides seem mostly indifferent to this suffering.

I promised to get to Ralph Nader. He says the real death toll is closer to 300,000 than 30,000. The 30,000 counts only official deaths reported by hospitals, while he believes there are hundreds of thousands of bodies buried under rubble that have not been counted.

With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000? With 5,000 babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine, and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas Health Ministry’s official count is warranted.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death and injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting them, and not building shelters. Hamas grossly underestimated the savage war crimes by the vengeful, occupying Israeli military superpower fully and unconditionally backed by the U.S. military superpower.

The Health Ministry is intentionally conservative, citing that its death toll came from reports only of named deceased by hospitals and morgues. But as the weeks turned into months, blasted, disabled hospitals and morgues cannot keep up with the bodies, or cannot count those slain laying on roadsides in allies and beneath building debris. Yet the Health Ministry remains conservative and the “official” rising civilian fatality and injury count continues to be uncritically reported by both friend and foe of this devastating Israeli state terrorism.

Ralph Nader

Strong words. If true, it is an impressive piece of propaganda for the Israeli government to question the Hamas estimate as being too high by a factor of 10, when it is actually too low by a factor of 10.

As for the aftermath of the operation, I picture something like the Chinese government’s approach in Tibet and Xinjiang, where the location and behavior of individual people is individually tracked and people are taken away for incarceration or reeducation. This also meets the UN definition of genocide, but at least it would be relatively bloodless compared to the intense suffering we are seeing now (and Chinese government’s genocide is relatively bloodless compared to the U.S. invasion and occupation of neighboring Afghanistan). For Palestine, I don’t see much hope for a return to the optimism of the 1990s any time soon.

what are U.S. special forces up to?

Naked Capitalism has a long article which links to a lot of other long articles.

SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialised and secret missions. These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations[.]

One of [SOCOM’s] key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. 

Naked Capitalism

Training other countries’ militaries at their invitation seems okay. The question is always who is running that country, what is their human rights record, etc. Tracking and killing terrorists is problematic because just designating someone a terrorist makes it okay to kill them. Like for example, any individual involved with an “Iran-backed group” in Syria, Yemen, or wherever. Which are countries our troops are most definitely not invited to be in. If you have troops on the ground in a sovereign country that you are not invited to be in, how is that not a war against that country? These are often “disputed territories” of one sort or another, but again if you can just label as place you want to invade a disputed territory and then invade it (as Russia has done repeatedly), that is clearly problematic.

Finally the really scary thing about special forces is they can kill politicians and take over countries, if they want to. Including ours. Let’s hope they don’t want to, but if someone ever wants to do that and has control over the special forces, this is the direction a straight-up military coup could come from. They would just come up with a narrative that it is necessary to “protect the constitution”, and the demands of the dead founding father-gods would then trump whatever living civilians are actually nominally in charge at that moment. Don’t worry about the other branches of government – the Cowardly Congress will go along with it, and the Supreme Court will decline to hear the case.

how many U.S. troops in Yemen?

Well, the answer to this one has to be zero, right??? According to the War Powers Report submitted to Congress by the White House in December, the answer is “a small number”. The summary letter I have linked to also lists other deployments the U.S. considers part of its “counterterrorism” efforts in the greater Middle East. So the “war on terror” is very much continuing. Most of this is about combating “ISIS” and “ISIL”, more or less at the invitation of the host government. These groups are not “Iran-backed” as far as I know, and in fact are even threatening to Iran.

The U.S. is also sometimes attacking Iran-backed groups and Iranian military advisers under the umbrella of counterterrorism. This particularly catches my eye:

As reported on November 22, 2023, I directed United States forces to conduct discrete strikes on the night of November 21, 2023, against facilities in Iraq used by the IRGC and IRGC-affiliated groups for command and control, logistics, and other purposes.  These strikes followed attacks against United States personnel and facilities in Iraq and Syria that threatened the lives of United States personnel and Coalition forces operating alongside United States forces, and that were perpetrated by the IRGC and militia groups affiliated with the IRGC.  A United States contractor suffered a fatal cardiac incident while moving to shelter during one of these attacks.  I directed these discrete military actions consistent with my responsibility to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive and to conduct United States foreign relations.

whitehouse.gov

I’ll try: “Iran-backed” groups are fighting “US-backed” groups in various countries. Iran and the US both have military advisers in various countries. U.S. troops and contractors are occasionally getting hurt in attacks maybe aimed directly at them, and maybe aimed at more local parties. We’re there because they are fighting us, and they are fighting us because we’re there.

January 2024 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: 2023 was “a year of war“, and so far 2024 is not looking better. Those diplomatic grand bargains you always hear about seem to be getting less grand. And the drumbeat for a U.S. attack on Iran got louder.

Most hopeful story: According to Bill Gates, some bright spots in the world today include gains in administering vaccines to children around the world, a shift toward greater public acceptance of nuclear power, and maybe getting a bit closer to the dream of fusion power. He pontificates about AI, and my personal sense is it is still too soon, but AI does hold some promise for speeding up scientific progress.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The return of super-sonic commercial flight is inching closer.

the drum beat for a U.S. attack on Iran continues

The media always refers to “Iran-backed” and “Iran proxy” groups responsible for various events in the Middle East, but we never really see proof that Iran is participating in specific attacks. We often hear that Iran is providing aid, arms, or has military advisers on the ground. I’m not saying any of this is outright lies, as I wouldn’t know, but it raises my propaganda hackles. Just substitute “US-backed” or “US advisors” and see how many situations around the world you could write and article about suggesting the US is a nefarious force behind all sorts of events. And of course, this is exactly what happened.

This is not hypothetical. The US has military advisers in Jordan, for example, who were just attacked by an “Iran-backed” group (why do we have troops in Jordan, or Syria for that matter, and is this article is suggesting we have troops in Iraq?). And here are some quotes from the warmongers, courtesy of Axios:

  • “Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), said in a statement the attacks the U.S. has carried out on Iranian proxies outside Iran “will not deter Iranian aggression,” calling to “strike targets of significance inside Iran.”
  • “The only answer to these attacks must be devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces, both in Iran and across the Middle East,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). “Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward unworthy of being commander-in-chief.”
  • Sen. John Cornyn, in a post on the social media site X, said: “Target Tehran[.]”
  • “The head of the snake is Iran,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee and former Air Force brigadier general, told Axios.”

The other talking point we are hearing from Republicans is that we are “acting like it is September 10”. This is a rhetorical attempt to link migration at the Mexico-Border to the Hamas attacks on Israel. The U.S. should of course be alert for an attack by radical Islamist groups who would see it as justified self-defense for America’s support for what they see as human rights abuses and war crimes committed by Israel. I am not taking a position here, just pointing out that it is a vicious cycle of escalating violence and all sides are stoking the flames rather than trying to interrupt the cycle. No evidence has been provided of any plot that would involve crossing the US-Mexico border.

2023 in Review

Warning: This post is not 100% family friendly and profanity free. 2023 was just not that kind of year!

I’ll start with a personal note. After 24+ years of engineering consulting practice, I have decided to leave the world of full-time professional employment and go back to school for a bit. This is some combination of mid-life crisis and post-Covid working parent burnout. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, ran all the financial numbers, and decided I can swing it for a year or so without major implications for my eventual retirement 15-ish years down the line. So, gentle reader, you too can do this sort of thing if you want to. Just be patient, plan, prepare, do the math, and be rational about it.

The Year’s Posts

Stories I picked as “most frightening or depressing”:

  • JANUARY: How about a roundup of awful things, like the corrupt illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court, ongoing grisly wars, the CIA killed JFK after all (?), nuclear proliferation, ethnic cleansing, mass incarceration, Guantanamo Bay, and all talk no walk on climate change? And let’s hope there is a special circle of hell waiting for propaganda artists who worked for Exxon.
  • FEBRUARY: Pfizer says they are not doing gain of function research on potential extinction viruses. But they totally could if they wanted to. And this at a time when the “lab leak hypothesis” is peeking out from the headlines again. I also became concerned about bird flu, then managed to convince myself that maybe it is not a huge risk at the moment, but definitely a significant risk over time.
  • MARCH: The Covid-19 “lab leak hypothesis” is still out there. Is this even news? I’m not sure. But what is frightening to me is that deadly natural and engineered pathogens are being worked with in labs, and they almost inevitably will escape or be released intentionally to threaten us all at some point. It’s like nuclear proliferation, accidents, and terrorism – we have had a lot of near misses and a lot of luck over the last 70 years or so. Can we afford the same with biological threats (not to mention nuclear threats) – I think no. Are we doing enough as a civilization to mitigate this civilization-ending threat? I think almost certainly, obviously not. What are we doing? What are we thinking?
  • APRIL: Chemicals, they’re everywhere! And there were 20,000 accidents with them in 2022 that caused injuries, accidents, or death. Some are useful, some are risky, and some are both. We could do a better job handling and transporting them, we could get rid of the truly useless and dangerous ones, and we could work harder on finding substitutes for the useful but dangerous ones. And we could get rid of a corrupt political system where chemical companies pay the cost of running for office and then reward candidates who say and do what they are told.
  • MAY: There are more “nuclear capable states” than I thought.
  • JUNE: Most frightening and/or depressing story: Before 2007, Americans bought around 7 million guns per year. By 2016, it was around 17 million. In 2020, it was 23 million. Those are the facts and figures. Now for my opinion: no matter how responsible the vast majority of gun owners are, you are going to have a lot more suicides, homicides, and fatal accidents with so many guns around. And sure enough, firearms are now the leading cause of death in children according to CDC. That makes me sick to think about.
  • JULY: Citizens United. Seriously, this might be the moment the United States of America jumped the shark. I’ve argued in the past or Bush v. Gore. But what blindingly obvious characteristic do these two things have in common? THE CORRUPT ILLEGITIMATE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT!!!
  • AUGUST: Immigration pressure and anti-immigration politics are already a problem in the U.S. and Europe, and climate change is going to make it worse. The 2023 WEF Global Risks Report agrees that “large scale involuntary migration” is going to be up there as an issue. We should not be angry at immigrants, we should be angry at Exxon and the rest of the energy industry, which made an intentional choice not only to directly cause all this but to prevent governments from even understanding the problem let alone doing anything to solve it. We should be very, very angry! Are there any talented politicians out there who know how to stoke anger and channel it for positive change, or is it just the evil genocidal impulses you know how to stoke?
  • SEPTEMBER: “the accumulation of physical and knowledge capital to substitute natural resources cannot guarantee green growth“. Green growth, in my own words, is the state where technological innovation allows increased human activity without a corresponding increase in environmental impact. In other words, this article concludes that technological innovation may not be able to save us. This would be bad, because this is a happy story where our civilization has a “soft landing” rather than a major course correction or a major disaster. There are some signs that human population growth may turn the corner (i.e., go from slowing down to actually decreasing in absolute numbers) relatively soon. Based on this, I speculated that “by focusing on per-capita wealth and income as a metric, rather than total national wealth and income, we can try to come up with ways to improve the quality of human lives rather than just increasing total money spent, activity, and environmental impact ceaselessly. What would this mean for “markets”? I’m not sure, but if we can accelerate productivity growth, and spread the gains fairly among the shrinking pool of humans, I don’t see why it has to be so bad.”
  • OCTOBER: Israel-Palestine. From the long-term grind of the failure to make peace and respect human rights, to the acute horror causing so much human suffering and death at this moment, to the specter of an Israeli and/or U.S. attack on Iran. It’s frightening and depressing – but of course it is not my feelings that matter here, but all the people who are suffering and going to suffer horribly because of this. The most positive thing I can think of to say is that when the dust settles, possibly years from now, maybe cooler heads will prevail on all sides. Honorable mention for most frightening story is the 2024 U.S. Presidential election starting to get more real – I am sure I and everyone else will have more to say about this in the coming (exactly one year as I write this on November 5, 2023) year!
  • NOVEMBER: An economic model that underlies a lot of climate policy may be too conservative. I don’t think this matters much because the world is doing too little, too late even according to the conservative model. Meanwhile, the ice shelves holding back Greenland are in worse shape than previously thought.
  • DECEMBER: Migration pressure and right wing politics create a toxic feedback loop practically everywhere in the world.

Stories I picked as “most hopeful”:

  • JANUARY: Bill Gates says a gene therapy-based cure for HIV could be 10-15 years away.
  • FEBRUARY:  Jimmy Carter is still alive as I write this. The vision for peace he laid out in his 2002 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech is well worth a read today. “To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war.”
  • MARCH: Just stop your motor vehicle and let elephants cross the road when and where they want to. Seriously, don’t mess with elephants.
  • APRIL: There has been some progress on phages, viruses intentionally designed to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Also, anti-aging pills may be around the corner.
  • MAY: The U.S. Congress is ponying up $31 billion to give Houston a chance at a future. Many more coastal cities will need to be protected from sea level rise and intensifying storms. Now we will see if the U.S. can do coastal protection right (just ask the Dutch or Danish, no need to reinvent anything), and how many of the coastal cities it will get to before it is too late.
  • JUNE: It makes a lot of sense to tax land based on its potential developed value, whether it has been developed to that level or not. This discourages land speculation, vacant and abandoned property in cities while raising revenue that can offset other taxes.
  • JULY: There is a tiny glimmer of hope that Americans might actually value more walkable communities. And this is also a tiny glimmer of hope for the stability of our global climate, driver/bicyclist/pedestrian injuries and deaths, and the gruesome toll of obesity and diabetes. But it is only a glimmer.
  • AUGUST: Peak natural gas demand could happen by 2030, with the shift being to nuclear and renewables.
  • SEPTEMBER: Autonomous vehicles kill and maim far, far fewer human beings than vehicles driven by humans. I consider this a happy story no matter how matter how much the media hypes each accident autonomous vehicles are involved in while ignoring the tens of thousands of Americans and millions of human beings snuffed out each year by human drivers. I think at some point, insurance companies will start to agree with me and hike premiums on human drivers through the roof. Autonomous parking also has a huge potential to free up space in our urban areas.
  • OCTOBER: Flesh eating bacteria is becoming slightly more common, but seriously you are not that likely to get it. And this really was the most positive statement I could come up with this month!
  • NOVEMBER: Small modular nuclear reactors have been permitted for the first time in the United States, although it looks like the specific project that was permitted will not go through. Meanwhile construction of new nuclear weapons is accelerating (sorry, not hopeful, but I couldn’t help pointing out the contrast…)
  • DECEMBER: I mused about ways to create an early warning system that things in the world or a given country are about to go seriously wrong: “an analysis of government budgets, financial markets, and some demographic/migration data to see where various governments’ priorities lie relative to what their priorities probably should be to successfully address long-term challenges, and their likely ability to bounce back from various types and magnitudes of shock. You could probably develop some kind of risk index at the national and global levels based on this.” Not all that hopeful, you say? Well, I say it fits the mood as we end a sour year.

Stories I picked as “most interesting, not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps a mixture of both”:

  • JANUARY: Genetically engineered beating pig hearts have been sown into dead human bodies. More than once.
  • FEBRUARY: It was slim pickings this month, but Jupiter affects the Sun’s orbit, just a little bit.
  • MARCHChickie Nobs have arrived!
  • APRIL: I had heard the story of the Google engineer who was fired for publicly releasing a conversation with LaMDA, a Google AI. But I hadn’t read the conversation. Well, here it is.
  • MAY: Peter Turchin’s new book proposes four indicators presaging political instability: “stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt“. I found myself puzzled by the “overproduction of young graduates” part, and actually had a brief email exchange with Peter Turchin himself, which I very much appreciated! Anyway, he said the problem is not education per se but “credentialism”. I have to think some more about this, but I suppose the idea is that education, like health, wealth, and almost everything else, is not equally distributed but is being horded by a particular class which is not contributing its fair share. These are my words, not Peter’s, and he might or might not agree with my characterization here.
  • JUNE: The U.S. may have alien spacecraft at Area 51 after all. Or, and this is purely my speculation, they might have discovered anti-gravity and want to throw everybody else off the scent.
  • JULY: We are all susceptible to the “end of history effect” in that we tend to assume our personalities will not change in the future, when in fact they almost certainly will. So one way to make decisions is to imagine how a few different possible future yous might look back on them.
  • AUGUST: There are a number of theories on why “western elites” have not been (perceived to be) effective in responding to crises in recent years and decades. Many have to do with institutional power dynamics, where the incentives of the individual to gain power within the institution do not align with the stated goals of the institution. Like for example, not killing everyone. The possible silver lining would be that better institutions could be designed where incentives aligned. I have an alternate, or possibly complementary, theory that there has been a decline in system thinking and moral thinking. Our leaders aren’t educated to see the systems and or think enough about whether their decisions are on the side of right or wrong.
  • SEPTEMBER: Venice has completed a major storm surge barrier project.
  • OCTOBER: The generally accepted story of the “green revolution“, that humanity saved itself from widespread famine in the face of population growth by learning to dump massive quantities of fossil fuel-derived fertilizer on farm fields, may not be fully true.
  • NOVEMBER: India somehow manages to maintain diplomatic relations with Palestine (which they recognize as a state along with 138 other UN members), Israel, and Iran at the same time.
  • DECEMBER: Did an AI named “Q Star” wake up and become super-intelligent this month?

And Now, My Brilliant Analytical Synthesis!

Climate Change. Well really, I’m likely to just say things now I have said many times before. The climate change shit is really starting to hit the fan. Our largely coastal civilization and the food supply that sustains it is at risk. The shit we can obviously see hitting the fan right now is the result of emissions years if not decades ago, and we have continued to not only emit too much but to emit too much at an increasing rate since those emissions, and we continue to not only emit too much but to emit at an increasing rate today. This means that even if we stop emitting too much right now and going forward, the crisis will continue to get worse for some time before it eventually gets better. And we are not doing that, we are continuing to not only emit too much but we are doing it at an increasing rate. We are already seeing the beginnings of massive population movements fueling a downward spiral of nationalist and outright racist geopolitics, which makes it even harder to come together and address our critical planetary carrying capacity issue in a rational manner. We are not only seeing “the return of great power competition”, we are insanely patting ourselves on the back for aiding and abetting this, and piling nuclear proliferation on top of it. Is a soft landing possible in this situation? I am not going to tell you I think it is, or even if it is possible that our species and cowards that pass for our leadership have any hope of making it happen. I think about the best we can hope for is some kind of serious but manageable collapse or crisis that brings us to our senses and allows some real leaders to emerge. To throw out one idea, maybe we could come to a new era of arms reduction for the major nuclear powers, and halts to proliferation for all the emerging nuclear powers, in exchange for civilian nuclear power for everyone who wants it, all under a strict international control and inspection regime. This would begin to address two existential risks (nuclear war and climate change) at once. Or maybe, just maybe, we are on the verge of a massive acceleration of technological progress that could make problems easier to solve. Maybe, but new technology also comes with new risks, and we shouldn’t put all our eggs in this basket. Besides, the singularity is nearing but it still feels a decade or so away to me.

UFOs. Aside from all of that, maybe the weirdest single thing going on in the world right now is the UFOs. There seems to be no real controversy about them – they are out there. They are flying around and if not defying the laws of physics as we know them, defying any technology that is able to accommodate the laws of physics as we know them. And what this logically leads to is that somebody (or some intelligent entity) knows something about the laws of physics that the rest of us do not know. Einstein explained how gravity behaves, but he wasn’t able to fully explain what gravity is or certainly how or why it came to be the way it is. Einstein’s predictions have since been proven through incontrovertible evidence, and the predictions of quantum theory have also been incontrovertibly proven, but the two theories are still at odds and in need of unification despite the efforts of the most brilliant minds today. But…are the most brilliant minds today operating in the open, or are they behind closed doors at private defense contractors and subject to censorship on national security grounds? If there has been a major discovery, would it see the light of day or would it be suppressed? I have no information here, I am just saying this is a narrative that would fit the evidence, and I don’t see other plausible narratives that fit the evidence. Why would aliens be playing with relatively easily discoverable toys in our atmosphere, while in the meantime we have discovered no radio signal evidence, no evidence of their existence in our telescopes? Those things would be very hard if not impossible to cover up, so I think we would know. The Fermi Paradox persists.

Artificial Intelligence. I tend to think the AI hype is ahead of the reality. Nonetheless, the reality is coming. It will probably seize control without our noticing after the hype has passed. Is it possible we could look back in a decade and identify 2023 as the year it woke up? There were a couple queer (in the original dictionary sense – I just couldn’t think of a better word) stories in 2023. One was a Google engineer getting fired after publicly declaring his belief that a Google AI had become conscious. The other was the “ethics board” of a major corporation firing its CEO in relation to a rumored artificial general intelligence breakthrough. Only time will tell what really happened in these cases (if it is ever made public), but one thing we can say is that technological progress does not usually go backwards.

Synthetic Biology. It’s pretty clear we are now in an age of synthetic biology breakthroughs that was hyped over the last few decades, and the media and publics of the world are predictably yawning and ignoring. But we are hearing about vaccines and cures on the horizon for diseases that have long plagued us, genetically engineered organs, synthetic meat, engineered viruses to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and anti-aging pills among other things. And then there is the specter of lab accidents and biological weapons, which might be the single most scary thing in the world today out of all the terrifying things I have mentioned in this post.

2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Ugh, I’m still not ready to think about it, but it is going to happen whether I am ready to think about it or not. I’ll get around to thinking and writing about it soon, I’m sure.

Happy 2024!

Project Syndicate 2024 Look-Ahead

There is nothing extremely surprising here, but here are a few things their commentators mention:

  • Things in Africa seem to be going in the wrong direction recently, for those who prefer peace and democracy, with a variety of military takeovers and regional conflicts in many parts of the continent. In North Africa, things are just kind of politically and economically stagnant.
  • The crypto-currency hype bubble seems to have burst for the time being.
  • The Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza conflicts just grind on, with horrendous human consequences. It doesn’t seem crazy to think that we could hope for some sort of negotiations to start over the course of the next entire year. What will these lead towards – a demilitarized zone, semi-autonomous federalist regions of some sort, promises by NATO to table any expansion talk for a decade or so? These all seem rational to me. Biden could try to get this done before the U.S. elections. I like to think that at the situation in Gaza can’t be worse a year from now than it is this New Year’s Eve (as I write this), because it is about as awful as anything can get. It also occurs to me that this may be a particularly awful war in terms in civilian suffering, but it is also a very public and well-reported war partly because there were so many international and media organizations present in Gaza to begin with. I suspect all wars are horrible for civilians, and we just happen to be seeing more of this one up close and personal than we usually see. For example, there is a horrible conflict in Myanmar that we don’t hear much about in the U.S. media. And I think I already mentioned ugly conflicts in Africa. So let’s stop pretending there is any such thing as humanitarian war and start getting serious about peace and human rights in 2024.
  • Some people think there will be a U.S.-China military throwdown over Taiwan in 2024. I sincerely hope not, and I my sense is that China is a bit too rational and long-term thinking to let this happen. The U.S.? I’m not so sure. I will expect lots of heated rhetoric, maybe some dirty election/spy tricks, and maybe some limited naval conflict which hopefully won’t turn into a world war which clearly is in nobody’s interest. Everybody will try to show that they have the biggest, hairiest balls in the room during the U.S. election season. Or could some charismatic leader emerge with a compelling peace message? I am not this hopeful.
  • The U.S. election season is going to be simply looney tunes. I don’t know what else to say. Well, I will probably think of plenty to say when I get a chance to start thinking it through. There are also elections happening in other parts of the world, of course.
  • Hopefully the U.S. and world economy will continue to bump along, with inflation gradually subsiding and no major recessions. Inequality will continue to increase most likely.
  • The artificial intelligence hype bubble will continue to inflate in 2024. It will burst of course, but if I had to wager I would wager on this being the year it happens. A hype bubble bursting does not mean the technology will cease to progress, of course.
  • Serious action on climate change will be overshadowed by all the wars and geopolitical dirty tricks going on in the world today. And the crisis will continue to build. It’s about the security of our food supply and the continued existence of our coastal cities, idiots. Leaders, where are you?

2023: a year of war?

Richard Haas says 2023 was characterized by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and also by the world starting to wake up to the climate change threat (but falling far short on its response.) His bright spots are that the U.S.-China relationship did not devolve into a hot war, and Japan and South Korea are getting along a bit better. To me, it is unforgivable that world leaders are leading us towards war when we have such dire challenges staring us in the face including food security, loss of major coastal cities, nuclear proliferation, and pandemic threats both natural and manmade. Climate change is also fueling a vicious cycle of migration, anti-migration political movements, and geopolitical instability, which in turn makes it even harder to focus on solving problems together.

“if there’s one thing we don’t want here in South America it’s war”

This seems like a sensible quote from President Lula of Brazil. But countries that threaten to or actually nationalize lucrative industries controlled by U.S. based companies (Cuba, Iran, and Iraq come to mind) have a tendency to get invaded by the U.S. I know next to nothing about the politics of South America, but I do know the U.S. establishment has been itching for a fight with Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro for quite a while, so this seems like it would be a huge self-inflicted wound for a country already going through a lot of turmoil. And the world clearly does not need another war on another continent right now. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.