Sunday Cutdown XIX (7 April 2024)
Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document
1) Reglobalization? I like the intent and the definition offered
NYT: ‘Reglobalization’ to the Rescue?
A column on geopolitical jargon:
The term “reglobalization” emerged as “cracks started to appear in the facade of happy globalization,” said Roland Benedikter, co-head of a research center in Italy and an editor of “Globalization Past, Present, Future.”
Globalization itself took off in the 1990s, as technological advances made it easier and cheaper to do business internationally. China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 seemed to cement the era.
Enthusiasts have believed this interdependence would deepen as technology evolved, improving quality of life for all. But the global migration crisis and swelling wealth inequality prompted experts to reconsider, Benedikter said.
“Reglobalization” is a more inclusive vision, linking trade and climate policies and extending economic ties so that more populations benefit.
I don’t like the “happy” bit. Seems very straw man-like as an argument (Then it was followed by Sad Globalization?) Nor do I care for the facade snideness. A middle class growing from 2B in 2000 to 4B in 2020 is NOT a facade.
Strike three is labeling experts who see the value of interdependence as “enthusiasts.”
Still, a pat on the back for recognizing global migration as a deep structural stressor right now, one, I would add, is going to skyrocket with climate change’s progressive unfolding.
Overall, a fairly lazy and biased first three grafs by the NYT.
But I do like “more inclusive vision,” even as I’m tempted to ask As opposed to … what exactly? Less inclusive?
What saves the whole thing is the double-goal of linking trade and climate policies while extending network ties that benefit wider populations (read, Global South).
In that last sentence, I basically find great overlap and convergence with the messages of America’s New Map.
So, reglobalize all you want.
[As a side note: this is how I review material. It can suck throughout, but, if it gives me one nice idea or data point, then I find it of value.]
2) Still misinterpreting Israel’s goals
CNN: Six months into the war in Gaza, Israel has no exit strategy and no real plan for the future
WAPO: Six months after Oct. 7, Israel’s borderlands are frozen in time — and fear
CNN’s argument:
Israel launched the war immediately after the deadly October 7 terror attacks by Hamas. At that time, the Israeli government said the operation had two goals: eliminating Hamas and bringing back the hostages taken by the militants to Gaza.
Six months into the conflict, neither goal has been reached.
I’m going to say lazy journalism again, or maybe just bad analysis.
Why accept Israel’s statements as to its primary goals when none of the evidence really supports that?
Also, why have any assumption that the Israeli government feels any need to be honest with either the world or Hamas as to its true intentions? What would being open and honest get the government right now?
Let’s be clear: there is no real attempt to “eliminate” Hamas. That was always fanciful as a declaration, but the diversion has largely worked as far as foreign coverage and analysis goes.
As for the hostages? The Netanyahu government clearly has higher priorities, meaning, if that goal really mattered, that portion of the crisis would have ended long ago.
The real goal has been the same all along: eliminate Gaza as an entity — at whatever the cost.
Keep that in mind and all of this makes sense, per Israel’s very existential and very harsh logic.
As the second piece makes clear:
There is nationwide support for the military’s punishing war against Hamas, which has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says most of the dead are women and children.
The images from Gaza — of shatteredcities, families killed together in their homes, malnourished children — do not often appear on the nightly news here. Most of the world thinks Israel has gone too far. Most Israelis don’t think they’ve gone far enough.
The Israeli public is behind this war and its actual goals.
That’s what you get when — out of the blue — you commit atrocities against a nuclear democracy: stunning but determined disproportionality.
As I have said all along: speed is of the essence. Biden has said that. Trump has said that.
3) The war laboratory keeps heating up
WAPO: How Ukraine’s tech army is taking the fight to Russia
BUSINESS INSIDER: Video captures rare drone-on-drone combat as exploding Ukrainian quadcopters blow up Russian grenade-launching robots
David Ignatius on Ukraine offers up this fascinating graf:
“The nature of warfare has changed,” explains Giorgi Tskhakaia, a defense adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation. “It’s a technology war. If you don’t know the path to evade air defense and EW (electronic warfare), you will lose most or all of your drones. It’s a cat-and-mouse game. We are learning, and the oppressor is learning, as well.”
Air defense, EW, and drones.
Anything missing here in this technology war?
It gets better:
President Volodymyr Zelensky has pledged that Ukraine will build 1 million drones this year to supplement its dwindling supply of weapons and artillery from the West. On any given day, each side has nearly 3,000 drones in the air, Tskhakaia says. The front line has become a digital shooting gallery.
Digital shooting gallery.
So where are the troops exactly?
Ukrainian officials tell me that electronic jammers are everywhere at the front, blocking GPS and other signals. But some drones get through. Gruesome videos showing them pursuing desperate soldiers until they connect in a white burst of light look like military versions of a snuff film.
Ah yes, soldiers serving as nameless actors in snuff films for our enjoyment back on the home front.
The Military Singularity looms … and it’s becoming noticed:
Human Rights Watch is one of many activist groups warning about what it calls “digital dehumanization” in warfare.
Great phrase, as in: As the Military Singularity approaches, we see more and more evidence of digital dehumanization.
And troops getting snuffed out.
You gotta like this new warfare: the efficient killing, the stunningly static battle lines, the pointlessness of it all.
Still, it is romantic, is it not?
From the Business Insider story, it gets even sexier with drone-on-drone action:
Newly released footage shows Ukrainian quadcopter drones blowing up Russian grenade-launching robots, offering a rare glimpse of unmanned systems fighting each other on the battlefield.
Rare glimpse? Hardly. It’s becoming the norm faster than we can adjust our suddenly vulnerable force structure.
Replicate this, I say.
It is disturbing video to watch one drone kill another with absolutely no emotion displayed by either — chilling … a robot snuff film, if you will.
Then there is the larger, strategic excitement created by the competition of the involved players to see which side can manufacture drones faster so they can be put into battle against other drones being rapidly manufactured by the other side.
This, my friends, is the future of warfare.
I know. It’s hard not to drool with excitement, especially if you’re part of the Military Industrial Complex: stuff to blow up stuff with more stuff to come!
May it never end.
4) Economic liftoff: begins with agricultural modernization
NYT: Unproductive Agriculture Is Holding Africa Back
If you want to cash in that demographic dividend — and Africa’s is the largest yet as the better part of a billion souls head into working age over the coming decades, then you can’t squander them on inefficient agriculture, which needs to take off in productivity so all those laborers can move to the city and into factories or service jobs of various sorts.
Of course, climate change is making agriculture THAT much harder as the years go by. Africa still falls behind the rest of the world on agricultural productivity.
Right now, more than half of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population works in ag. That’s even worse than laggard India’s 45%.
Per the story, African farmers need innovation, help in propagating that innovation (ag extension offices), and better market incentives. One big problem:
Another reason for low productivity is that under the land tenure system that’s common in much of Africa, people keep the land only if they keep using it. So some farmers are doing just enough to maintain their claims.
But it gets even weirder:
Agricultural yields are declining the most in the places where farmers have the most opportunities to do something else with their time. The more that opportunities in cities multiply, the more farmers are drawn away from the land.
That is a new one for me: a sort of unproductive leap-frogging.
The really good NYT article ends with the statement that fixing agriculture in Africa is a huge prerequisite for the continent’s economic take-off.
No easy answers are offered, and yet, this must and will somehow be accomplished.
What a large and potentially highly profitable inevitability this is. Lots of money to be made in cracking this code.
5) Economic liftoff: the path forward changes?
NYT: Poor Nations Are Writing a New Handbook for Getting Rich
The gist:
For more than half a century, the handbook for how developing countries can grow rich hasn’t changed much: Move subsistence farmers into manufacturing jobs, and then sell what they produce to the rest of the world.
Simplistic, but correct, at least in terms of enabling dynamics.
The recipe — customized in varying ways by Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and China — has produced the most potent engine the world has ever known for generating economic growth. It has helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, create jobs and raise standards of living.
Buried in there is the demographic transition, without which you’d end up with a Marxian revolutionary situation in urban areas (i.e., peasants forced off the land).
It’s also misleading to cite only Asian states, as if it’s an Asian model, when it’s the way risers have risen throughout time.
But let’s not nitpick.
Now we are warned that advancing tech threatens this model, but I think that’s always been true. Then there’s shifting trade patterns, which are linked to geopolitical tensions but frankly would have happened anyway, as the disappearing wage differential (cheap labor) across Asia is shifting westward inexorably.
The example given (Bangladesh) just shows how nothing changes: a recent success due to farmers heading into towns and making textiles, those workers are now threatened by weaving machinery. That is the oldest story in the industrialization book.
So what is the big difference today?
Blame is squarely placed on the pandemic for triggering a period of vast debt accumulation followed by lower growth, all of which scares off foreign direct investment. Toss in robots and automation in general and there is the growing argument that the old manufacturing model won’t work — just not enough jobs for the demographic dividends to come.
Enter India, and the notion that you leapfrog into a service economy, either skipping or lightening the manufacturing portion of the rise.
Not exactly a new idea.
We are told something I think we all already knew:
Two-thirds of the world’s output now comes from the service sector — a mishmash that includes dog walkers, manicurists, food preparers, cleaners and drivers, as well as highly trained chip designers, graphic artists, nurses, engineers and accountants.
And let me toss in that more than half the value of global trade today comes in digital forms.
So here’s where the India hype will go: New Delhi has discovered a “new model” (“Think Bangalore, not South China”) that will rule the world.
And it will, for some period, until the demographic dividend plays out, and then it will shift to Africa, where we’ll likely run into some other “new” sort of model.
But the model doesn’t really change:
Improve agriculture
Push peasants off the land
Build cities to hold them
Attract FDI that creates jobs for them
Integrate yourselves into global value chains at speed
And hope you get rich before you get old.
What pops out of the export tube doesn’t really matter all that much: it needs to go abroad and it needs to have value. Technology is always going to push that, and demographics are always going to geographically shift trade and investment patterns.
6) Russia the homefront freaking out?
NEWSWEEK: Russia Deploying Decoys After Heavy Fighter Jet Losses: UK
DAILY BEAST: Panic as Drone Strikes a Record 800 Miles Inside Russia
The Newsweek story is nostalgic, coming on the heels of the US Congress awarding Gold Medal to the Ghost Army used to fake out Hitler and the German High Command by feigning a force set to invade France in June 1945 — but not in Normandy.
Seems the Russians are painting fake jets on tarmacs to make it look like their air fleet isn’t as depleted as it really is.
The problem?
They keep landing helos on top of them, sort of ruining the illusion.
No gold medal for you, Russia!
With the Ukrainians successfully executing drone strikes 800 miles inside Russia, I would expect all sort of fake images to come — like a huge painting of an oil refinery!
7) Climate change’s evolving threat to agriculture
NBC NEWS: Sacre bleu! Camembert and brie 'on the verge of extinction,' French scientists warn
BUSINESS INSIDER: Scientists are growing crops with salt water that could help save us from starvation
The cheese story naturally attracts the attention of this Persona Au Gratin (I abhor the term cheesehead!).
It’s complex.
Basically, cheesemakers have, over time, narrowed their use of various fungi to those types that produce the most consistent products — a narrowing of the genetic pool, so to speak.
The danger, in relation to climate change, thus looms: monoculture agriculture meets more tumultuous weather and is subjected to migrating pests and viruses, some of which arise from their thousands of years of zombie-dom when unfrozen.
The proof is in the pudding … or cheese:
There’s also the longer-term concern about having just one or two strains of an organism still around: If a disease or pathogen emerges to which the remaining strain is susceptible, it could wipe out the entire population.
It’s a similar threat to the one facing other popular foods due to dwindling global biodiversity that’s being exacerbated by climate change, scientists say.
Yes, we have no bananas! We have no bananas today!
Don’t get me started on that fungus threatening bananas as we have known them, because pretty soon you’re mumbling about The Last of Us.
Still, adaptation is the key: new cheeses, new bananas, new weapons for taking out Clickers.
Heck, even the ability to grow crops in soil previously ruined by salination.
We’ll get by, except for the stragglers.
Stay frosty out there.
8) China starts returning phone-calls
AXIOS: "Convince us to stay": U.S.-China ties see head-spinning shift
The gist:
For decades, Corporate America has raced to cash in on China's economy. Now China officials are in sell-mode, a stunning reversal from years past.
Even Xi Jinping is getting into the act.
The Great Correction is coming.
China has been full of itself for a while, projecting the confidence of an economic giant who assumes it cannot be replaced.
And then it registers those population drops, a profound baby bust, and FDI going elsewhere in response to the ONE signal you always watch for: What is local money doing?
Well, starting with Xi’s decision to make himself president-for-life and start hard balling everything ideologically and militarily, local money (always the most informed and thus smartest money) is leaving the country.
Basically, rich Chinese are checking themselves and their money out of China’s future.
That development immediately triggers a pull out by foreign investors — in the TRILLIONS of USD.
Xi and Beijing are waking up to this reality: the globalization hype train (and actual opportunity) has moved on to SE Asia and increasingly South Asia (India).
China now has to start behaving better and re-embracing reform, otherwise it drifts and drifts into developmental purgatory — the middle-income trap where you get only so wealthy and then stagnate.
The Great Globalization Dynamics still hold: Riser goes in, Responsible Stakeholder better come out the far side, otherwise, the parade moves on.
9) Climate change rewiring our brains
GUARDIAN: ‘Everybody has a breaking point’: how the climate crisis affects our brains
All experience rewires your brain.
I see the word Green and then encountered the word Bay shortly thereafter and my excitement brain kicks in.
Same when I see Packer colors.
I have spent a lifetime associating that imagery and words with tremendous emotion, so my brain is wired to notice them and to respond.
So, yeah, if something that seemingly trivial can rewire your brain some, certainly years of worry about, and adaptation to, climate change will do the same.
I feel it myself already: there are a lot of weather conditions that, in the past, if I encountered them, it was with very benign or positive feelings.
Now I interpret everything like that differently — more darkly. It preys on my mind, forcing me to think about the world my kids will live in.
So the question is asked:
Are growing rates of anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, Alzheimer’s and motor neurone disease related to rising temperatures and other extreme environmental changes?
Researcher looks at women pregnant during an infamous hurricane (Sandy, upper East Coast, 2012) and finds that, years, later, the baby subsequently born have a heightened vulnerability to certain stress patterns.
For example, girls who were exposed to Sandy prenatally experienced a 20-fold increase in anxiety and a 30-fold increase in depression later in life compared with girls who were not exposed. Boys had 60-fold and 20-fold increased risks of ADHD and conduct disorder, respectively. Children expressed symptoms of the conditions as early as preschool.
So, yeah, maybe it’s not all about smart phones and being online. Maybe our having changed the climate now rebounds on us mentally, particularly among our young.
As the world undergoes dramatic environmental shifts, so too does our neurological landscape. Fossil-fuel-induced changes – from rising temperatures to extreme weather to heightened levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide – are altering our brain health, influencing everything from memory and executive function to language, the formation of identity, and even the structure of the brain. The weight of nature is heavy, and it presses inward.
This is the essence of my message regarding the Zone of Turbulence that the world now enters: big structural changes change humanity on all levels: individually, families, communities, enterprises, governments, nation-states, and the system itself.
Simply put: everybody goes in and everybody comes out the far side — changed.
Or, more hopefully — evolved.
10) Costa Rica is going steady with whom exactly?
CGTN: Costa Rica experiences commerce boom as a result of trade relationship with China
NYT: Is This the Silicon Valley of Latin America?
Now there’s a chokepoint I could get used to.
So, which is true?
Costa Rica is the perfect example of being integrated into high value chains centered around China.
Cost Rica is the perfect example of being integrated into high value chains centered around North America.
Not mutually exclusive concepts, but indicative of the superpower brand wars unfolding.
Costa Rica is signing up with somebody, maybe multiple bodies, and, in the end, it will be most integrated in just one body.
Costa Rica exports pineapples and expensive medical instruments — a nice mix for a country blessed with environmental beauty and diversity. It also seeks to become the Silicon Valley of Latin America. You have to like that ambition.
But all that environment (natural and human) is going to be recoded by climate change in coming decades. Bet on it.
The country works to educate its own, so there are strong reasons for optimism.
But again, count on Costa Rica becoming deeply integrated over time. Its leaders will come to the obvious, inescapable conclusion that going-it-alone ain’t the answer.
We are told that Costa Rica is HUGE within US plans to curtail China’s IT dominance by denying it the latest chip technologies. Hmm. You get the feeling that the US wants to see Costa Rica become the new Taiwan. This I like and favor, because, to be brutally frank, the notion of blowing up the world order over Taiwan has ALWAYS struck me as crazy.
But Costa Rica needs to be viewed as an end unto itself — not just a means to deny China. The same is true for Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole.
11) Insuring our national future
NYT: They Grow Your Berries and Peaches, but Often Lack One Item: Insurance
NEWSWEEK: Homeowners Say Climate Change Is Destroying Their Home Values
Insurance emerges as the great Achilles heel of our economy with regard to climate change.
Farmers struggling with crop insurance, homeowners struggling with home insurance.
The system keeps pretending that we’re not headed toward a major redefinition of this industry, but it is coming, my friends. It is coming.
12) With no-limits-partners like these …
WAR ON THE ROCKS: Russian Threat Perception and Nuclear Strategy in its Plans for War with China
Xi and Putin like to brag about their “no-limits partnership” every time they meet.
Well, Russia still plans for the worst case like the barely coherent empire that it still is.
Even as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping a were forming “a new epoch in relations” between their two countries, Russia was still planning for the possibility of nuclear war against China as late as 2014. Recently leaked Russian documents reveal contingencies for such a war against China in Siberia, including potential scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons against China.
Siberia eh?
Warming lands. Chinese and other Asians to the South, pushed by climate change to migrate northward with the rest of the world’s species … Moscow may have a point.
But cheaper just to sell, is it not? That’s how we got Alaska.
The signs are everywhere here, as is a concentration of porta-potties the world has never before witnessed.
Tomorrow I enjoy my first total eclipse of the sun.
Always enjoy Sunday’s installment.