Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

2024

India Sovereignty

A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEMSELF A NATION ARE ONE:

Sikh Americans, citing ‘transnational repression,’ vote for an independent homeland (Richa Karmarkar, 2/01/24, RNS)

Last Sunday (Jan. 28), more than 120,000 Sikhs of all ages and occupations took part in a historic referendum in San Francisco on the creation of an autonomous homeland in northwestern India. They braved hourslong lines after already long commutes, in many cases from neighboring states, to reach the polling place in the City by the Bay.

These Sikhs, almost all of them U.S. citizens and residents, were voting aspirationally for the creation of Khalistan — a hoped-for but nonexistent “land of the pure” that would stand separate from the nation of India.

Organized by Sikhs for Justice, an activist group that is banned in India, the vote was aimed at raising the profile of Sikh efforts to convince the government of India to allow Punjab, the state where the Sikhi faith was born, to secede.

There is no India

Sovereignty

THE COLD WAR IS OVER:

I will be a first minister for all’: Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill marks historic moment for once unionist state (Rory Carroll, 3 Feb 2024, The Guardian)


The chamber’s ornate ceiling remained blue, red and gold, and Portland stone still held up the Stormont edifice, but the beaming Sinn Féin faces declared this was a historic moment for Irish nationalism.

Michelle O’Neill became Northern Ireland’s first nationalist first minister in a day of symbolism and pomp that restored devolved government and etched an epitaph on the tomb of what was once a unionist state.

The union endured – Northern Ireland remains part of the UK and a referendum on Irish unity is not on the horizon – but when the assembly nominated O’Neill at 2.33pm yesterday for republicans the countdown to potential unification ticked louder.

Once we faced no external threats our allies in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel had to settle their internal issues in favor of democracy.

Republican Liberty

UNDUE DEFERENCE:

The nitty-gritty of freedom: a review of Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society; By Philip K. Howard (Robert VerBruggen, February 1, 2024, Washington Examiner)


Howard believes these actors need greater authority to use their own judgment, coupled with norms of reasonableness and subject to oversight through clear lines of authority, to solve problems — and that this type of freedom, which he dubs “everyday freedom” or the “freedom to do what’s right,” has disappeared as individual rights, written regulations, and legal liability have expanded.

The change began in the 1960s, when “the social and legal institutions of America were remade to try to eliminate unfair choices by people in positions of responsibility,” rooted in a growing distrust of authority and a desire to confront very real abuses of power. One effect of this shift, alas, was to suppress basic judgment and common sense, replacing them with rules so detailed no one could possibly learn them all and demands for officials to justify each decision they made, with lawsuits from private parties waiting in the wings.

This led to a sense of alienation. Human beings thrive when they draw on their intuitions and talents to solve problems, and the new system discourages exactly that. It also led to massive inefficiency, dysfunction, and distrust as people in what should be positions of power shied away from doing their duties, focusing instead on compliance and lawsuit avoidance.

One Economy to Rule Them All

CAIN WINS:

The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers? (Gerrit De Vynck, Danielle Abril and Caroline O’Donovan, February 3, 2024, Washington Post)

The continued cuts come as companies are under pressure from investors to improve their bottom lines. Wall Street’s sell-off of tech stocks in 2022 pushed companies to win back investors by focusing on increasing profits, and firing some of the tens of thousands of workers hired to meet the pandemic boom in consumer tech spending. With many tech companies laying off workers, cutting employees no longer signaled weakness. Now, executives are looking for more places where they can squeeze more work out of fewer people.

“We’re going to continue to be careful on what we invest in, and we’re going to continue to invest in new things and new areas and things that resonate with customers. And where we can find efficiencies and do more with less, we’re going to do that as well,” Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said in response to a reporter’s question during a Thursday media earnings call.

“That is the way the American capitalist system works,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “It’s ruthless when it gets down to striving for profitability and creating wealth. It redirects resources very rapidly from one place to another.”

The liberation of wealth creation from labor is Man’s greatest achievement.

Deflation

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURE…:

Has the Great Upshift arrived?: Another strong quarter for US productivity growth is far from conclusive. But it’s also a super encouraging sign. Let’s enjoy it. (JAMES PETHOKOUKIS, FEB 1, 2024, Faster, Please)

[T]he US Bureau of Labor Statistics today released the 2023 fourth-quarter result for nonfarm business sector productivity, and it was pretty good — again. Productivity rose by a better-than-expected 3.2 percent during the final quarter of last year and was up by 2.7 percent on a year-ago basis. Even better, productivity growth has now increased at a rapid pace for three straight quarters, including 4.9 percent in Q3 and 3.6 percent in Q2.

Given both the advances in artificial intelligence/machine learning, which emerged before ChatGPT in 2022, and similarly strong productivity numbers in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, it’s certainly worth contemplating whether we’re seeing the start of a (hopefully sustained) period of elevated productivity growth. Which would be totally awesome for several reasons.

For starters — and this is the thing that’s top of mind for most people, including Wall Street — strong productivity growth has contributed to a “Goldilocks” scenario where inflation has declined even as the economy has continued to grow.

…as labor and energy costs trend towards zero.

Israel/Palestine

IT’S NOT GENOCIDE WHEN WE DO IT:

HOW 95% OF JEWISH ISRAELIS SUPPORT A ‘PLAUSIBLE’ GENOCIDE (ZACHARY FOSTER, FEBRUARY 2, 2024, Religion Dispatches)

Jewish Israelis, however, see things differently: 95% of Jewish Israelis believed the Israeli military had used either the “appropriate” amount of force or “too little” force in Gaza, according to a mid-January 2024 poll. That’s 95% support for a plausible genocide:

Polling data from the Agam Institute suggests that some 60% of Israeli Jews oppose allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza. That is, 60% of Jewish Israelis believe all 2.2 million people in Gaza should die of dehydration and starvation.

Israel’s problem is not its lunatic fringe, as Gideon Levy said earlier this week, “Israel’s problem is its mainstream.”

Identitarianism

RERUN RAQQA:

Texas border showdown is far-right magnet, hate trackers warn (Arelis R. Hernández and Hannah Allam, February 2, 2024, Washington Post)


EAGLE PASS, Tex. — A motley crew is gathering here this weekend: militia-style groups invoking 1776 and the Civil War. Christian nationalists praying for the chance to confront evil. Racists stoking fear about the “replacement” of White people. Election deniers, anti-vaccination crusaders, conspiracy theorists.

Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what’s true, false or in-between in politics.
And, at the center, a prominent Republican figure whose fiery rhetoric acts as a magnet.

Right-wing extremists are dusting off the blueprint for the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol and using it to rally support for their cause du jour: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s showdown with the federal government over border enforcement. Monitoring groups warn that Abbott’s posturing, like Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort, heightens the risk of political violence as supporters converge on Eagle Pass, a frontier outpost of 28,000.

Where’s Janet Reno when we need her? The hard part of fighting insurgencies is getting them to cluster and these guys are making target-acquisition easy.

Immigration Republican Derangement Syndrome

ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD…:

The Trump-Biden Consensus on the Economy Is Bad for Business (Michael R. Strain, 1/30/24, Financial Times)


Donald Trump and Joe Biden differ in many important ways, but both reject the broad consensus that largely governed economic policy in the decades before Trump’s 2016 election — one that is generally supportive of business and in favour of free enterprise. This is bad for businesses, workers and consumers.

Take free trade and industrial policy. Senior officials from both administrations have explicitly argued for abandoning the international economic order built after the second world war in favour of a new consensus that relies more on government planning and less on market outcomes.

But Trump and Biden’s break with the past goes beyond protectionism. Ronald Reagan chose to use his last speech as president to praise immigrants. “We lead the world,” he said, “because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.” Trump, in contrast, charges immigrants with “poisoning the blood” of America. Biden, though much less extreme, has surprised his supporters by not being friendlier to migrants and the businesses that rely on them.

Of course, opposition to immigration comes naturally to Democrats, who view the migrants as labor competition, for Republicans it’s disgraceful.

Energy

TAX THE EXTERNALITIES AND DRIVE INNOVATION:

How to decarbonize 85% of all industry using today’s technology (Loz Blain, February 01, 2024, New Atlas)

The industrial sector is responsible for about 25% of global CO2 emissions – or about 9.3 billion metric tonnes per year and growing. But a team at the University of Leeds says we don’t need to wait for magical new tech to clean most of it up.

In a new study published in the journal Joule, the researchers went through a range of different industrial sectors looking at the available options for decarbonization, their emissions reduction potential, and their technology readiness level (TRL) – a measure of how close a given technology is to being ready for widespread mass adoption.

They found that even if only medium and high-maturity options (TRL 6-9) were used – primarily involving carbon capture and storage (CCS), and/or switching fuel to hydrogen or biomass – most industrial sectors are already in a position to cut an average of 85% of emissions.

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