Sunday Cutdown XVI (3/17/2024)
Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document
1) Another data point on the way to the Military Singularity
NYT: U.S. Troops Still Train on Weapons With Known Risk of Brain Injury
NYT: The Alarming Findings Inside a Mass Killer’s Brain
The thought I have been nurturing here for a while: there comes a time, far faster than expected, when the role of ground forces basically disappears, primarily because they become too vulnerable in the battle space.
I have previously pointed out some of the more stunning examples (troops targeted and killed at muster, troops targeted and killed in their sleeping quarters, soldier checks his Instagram and gets targeted and killed, etc.)
That vulnerability increasingly extends to some of the most impressive platforms (tanks, capital ships) out there, as we’re seeing unfold increasingly in Ukraine. Too dangerous for troops, too wasteful for traditional platforms, and the war reduced to shelling the other side as fast as you can manufacture the shells — a sad sort of WWI redux where the artistry of killing humans has advanced to the point where troops become more liability than asset — in net terms.
I cite the above news stories because they speak to this trend, just from another angle: we are learning that just having troops operate numerous weapons and weapon systems is enough to damage their brains long-term. That means that simply using the modern tools of warfare is enough to destroy your mind.
Think that secret won’t get out? Well, so did the NFL.
The more we learn of this, the faster the perceived utility of ground forces in battle spaces will drop, making the alternative that much more attractive — even imperative.
This handover will likewise be accelerated by the inevitable temptation to develop and employ weapons that are primarily about ruining your opposing troops’ brains versus decimating the landscape you hope someday to possess.
We are lurching toward a post-human battle space where — sooner than you can imagine — it will dawn on military leaders that there is no good reason for ground forces in a world where it’s area-denial-or-nothing.
When it comes down to the strategic logic that say, If I can’t have it then nobody can (!), then the logic of traditional warfare essentially expires.
Bring on the Transformers Wars. The Military Singularity is almost here.
2) When broad-framing any new threat, bet on complementarity
REUTERS: Trump launched CIA covert influence operation against China
So yeah, as a rule, if we discover something dastardly that they are doing — and choose to make that a public issue, then we should be similarly non-shocked to discover that we’re attempting the same stuff vis-a-vis the very perpetrator in question.
Understand: the shock is never the deed itself, because in virtually every instance, America either invented it or got there first or does it more than the rest of the world combined.
No, the shock is that competitors now feel capable of doing the same to us.
As a rule, that freaks us out to no end.
3) Every child got left behind
WAPO: Pandemic left much of the world on lower human development trajectory
You’ve seen the reports and graphs on how US students lost ground during the pandemic — a rather inevitable downstream outcome.
Well, the UN just confirms that the same has happened on a global scale in the broader category of human development statistics measuring the quality of life across all manner of domains.
From the story:
Dozens of poor nations have yet to regain their pre-pandemic levels of overall well-being, amid signs that the pandemic may have permanently depressed the world’s development trajectory, according to a U.N. report.
Four years after societal lockdowns disrupted the global economy, every affluent nation has regained its pre-pandemic score on a U.N. ranking called the Human Development Index (HDI). Yet half of the world’s poorest countries, including Nigeria, Pakistan and Sierra Leone, continue to languish below their 2019 readings.
Note also the rich-v-poor recovery gap that we have also seen inside the US in terms of wealth accumulation: the richest tiny slice got incredibly wealthier while virtually everyone else lost ground. Well, the same has unfolded among rich versus poor countries, thanks to the pandemic.
To me, the pandemic is a valid glimpse of the same sort of division-exacerbation that we will see unfold globally with climate change. In terms of the populist anger that such grotesque inequality elicits today, just imagine the anger the Global South will muster over climate change across the coming decades.
And yes, the answer is to tax the rich a lot more than they’re contributing right now.
4) China’s export push — bound to rankle
ASIA TIMES: China’s Global South exports surge in first two months
FINANCIAL TIMES: Chinese trade rebounds on electronics and exports to Russia
NYT: China’s Exports Are Surging. Get Ready for the Global Backlash
Every expert agrees that what China needs to be doing is creating the domestic conditions for much higher consumption. But, to Xi Jinping, that’s too scary a path, or one without enough CCP hegemony over all things.
So we’re watching China go back to its old bag of “riser” tricks by pushing exports through subsidies.
Can it be done throughout a relatively rising South? Sure.
From the NYT story:
Europe and the United States also face threats from China to their longstanding economic relationships in developing countries, which increasingly choose cheaper Chinese goods. Across much of Latin America and Africa, countries now buy more from China than nearby industrial democracies, and the United States and Europe can do little about it.
Can it be done with trade vassal Russia? Like Moscow has a choice!
But can it be done globally on a scale that surmounts China’s economic trajectory woes? Unlikely, in no small part because it will trigger a protectionist backlash across the West and especially inside the US.
From the NYT story:
From steel and cars to consumer electronics and solar panels, Chinese factories are finding more overseas buyers for goods. The world’s appetite for its goods is welcomed by China, which is enduring a severe downturn in what had been the economy’s biggest driver of growth: building and outfitting apartments. But other countries are increasingly concerned that China’s rise is coming partly at their expense, and are starting to take action.
Any such Western trade protectionism dovetails with America’s ongoing efforts to deny Chinese firms access to the most high-end IT advances, sort of squeezing China on both ends (inputs and outputs).
Making life even worse for China are looming trade taxes purporting to punish it for its dirtier economy:
In addition to looming tariffs on imported clean energy products, Europe will soon phase in a tax on imports from all over the world based on the quantity of climate-changing carbon dioxide emitted during their production.
The new tax is known as a carbon border adjustment mechanism, or CBAM. But it has been nicknamed the “C-bomb” in Europe because it will fall heavily on imports that come directly or indirectly from China. Two-thirds of the electricity in China is generated by burning heavily polluting coal, which means many of its exports to Europe could be hit with the new tax.
China doubling down while playing down to the Global South and Russia on exports will not make it a global leader in high-end industries. That strategy just won’t work.
The answer remains so clear: unleash the power of the Chinese consumer and make China too big of a demand target for the West to ignore.
But Xi refuses to go down that route, seemingly dooming China’s economic trajectory to the middle-income trap.
Either the man or his policy has to go for China to reach its potential, meaning Xi is now the biggest obstacle to the nation achieving the China Dream of his articulation — ironic.
5) “Colorblindness” as a means of forgetting the past and denying the present
NYT: The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap
First off, let me say that Nikole Hannah-Jones is seriously brilliant, and that comes from a guy with a seriously high opinion of his own brain. Her works blows me away.
Do I agree that she captures a definitive slice of American history?
Actually, I do.
It’s not all of American history, but it is a definitive slice, and her brilliance lies in her conveying that knowledge to audiences that need to have their thinking and remembrance and perceived history more broadly framed.
I was one of those people, and thus feel an enormous gratitude for her work and all that she endures because of it.
I still consider the 1619 Project to be the single best podcast series ever made — hands down.
So, when Hannah-Jones writes, I read.
The key takeaway here:
Conservative groups have spent the nine months since the affirmative-action ruling launching an assault on programs designed to explicitly address racial inequality across American life. They have filed a flurry of legal challenges and threatened lawsuits against race-conscious programs outside the realm of education, including diversity fellowships at law firms, a federal program to aid disadvantaged small businesses and a program to keep Black women from dying in childbirth. These conservative groups — whose names often evoke fairness and freedom and rights — are using civil rights law to claim that the Constitution requires “colorblindness” and that efforts targeted at ameliorating the suffering of descendants of slavery illegally discriminate against white people. They have co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.
Whites in America are definitely suffering a crisis of confidence due to the ongoing racial makeover of the country.
The journey we’re collectively on has NEVER been attempted in a modern society, as so, we have already seen, and must expect far more of, efforts to forestall that loss of privilege, standing, and centrality by claiming that Whites are now the primary victims of racism in the country.
I know, even writing that seem ludicrous, given how Whites control the commanding heights of just about everything in America.
But the wider fear is there, and the GOP has grown very adept at leveraging that fear — particularly Trump, with his harkening back to America’s golden age of the 1950s and 1960s.
As always, Hannah-Jones takes the reader on a long historical journey so that you can understand just what a back-to-the-future reaction this all represents. Her ability in this regard makes her not just my favorite historian right now but arguably the best one out there on America — in addition to being the most needed.
Her powerful ending (and please note the distinction between status and race because it is incredibly powerful):
What we are witnessing, once again, is the alignment of white power against racial justice and redress. As history has shown, maintaining racial inequality requires constant repression and is therefore antithetical to democracy. And so we must be clear about the stakes: Our nation teeters at the brink of a particularly dangerous moment, not just for Black Americans but for democracy itself.
To meet the moment, our society must forcefully recommit to racial justice by taking lessons from the past. We must reclaim the original intent of affirmative-action programs stretching all the way back to the end of slavery, when the Freedmen’s Bureau focused not on race but on status, on alleviating the conditions of those who had endured slavery. Diversity matters in a diverse society, and American democracy by definition must push for the inclusion of all marginalized people. But remedies for injustice also need to be specific to the harm.
So we, too, must shift our language and, in light of the latest affirmative-action ruling, focus on the specific redress for descendants of slavery. If Yale, for instance, can apologize for its participation in slavery, as it did last month, then why can’t it create special admissions programs for slavery’s descendants — a program based on lineage and not race — just as it does for its legacy students? Corporations, government programs and other organizations could try the same.
Those who believe in American democracy, who want equality, must no longer allow those who have undermined the idea of colorblindness to define the terms. Working toward racial justice is not just the moral thing to do, but it may also be the only means of preserving our democracy.
I plan on listening to this article several times. It is knowledge I want and need to own mentally.
6) American farming has a migrant crisis
NEWSWEEK: America Has a Farming Crisis
The gist up front:
The United States lost 141,733 farms over the course of five years, in part due to a broken workforce system that has led to a worker shortage. But a report with 15 recommendations unanimously agreed upon by a bipartisan group of lawmakers aims to address that shortage, and it has immigration laws in its sights … overhauling the H-2A visa program.
That program is how farmers access migrant labor. Last year they did so to the tune of almost 400,000 workers. Problem is, that’s about two million short of what’s needed, in terms of unfilled jobs.
Add shooting-ourselves-in-the-foot-on-farm-workers to the long list of ironies associated with our immigrant crisis.
We could have a better and more just and responsive system: there are simply too many industries that thrive off how they can abuse undocumented workers for it to happen. Meanwhile, as the crisis grows (and is increasingly manufactured), we’re starting to see some real damage to what is arguably our most important national asset in terms of delivering global stability: our ability to feed the world with our excess.
For a long time we were the biggest exporter of food. Now that crown rests on Brazil’s head, thanks to self-inflicted wounds like this and Trump’s idiotically handled trade war with China.
America’s capacity for self-harm knows no bounds.
7) Modi succumbing to incrementalism
ABC NEWS: India's new citizenship law excludes Muslims. Why?
The gist:
India has implemented a citizenship law that excludes migrants who are Muslims, a minority community whose concerns have heightened under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.
The rules for the law were announced Monday. It establishes a religious test for migrants from every major South Asian faith other than Islam. Critics argue that the law is further evidence that Modi’s government is trying to reshape the country into a Hindu state and marginalize Muslims.
The Citizenship Amendment Act provides a fast track to naturalization for Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians who fled to Hindu-majority India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan before Dec. 31, 2014. The law excludes Muslims, who are a majority in all three nations.
Modi sees benefits in increased Hindu nationalism as he leads India through a very difficult transformation. However, for a leader who has vowed he will not succumb to incrementalism when dramatic — even transformative — growth is required for the nation to cash-in its unprecedentedly large demographic dividend, he engages in short-sightedness here.
Making India’s rise a Hindu-only Miracle is self-defeating both internally and externally because it rules out universal appeal in what is supposed to be a secular democracy. Such a choice repeats the ethno-nationalism of Xi’s China Dream.
What has always made the American Dream so powerful is its accessibility. Modi is damaging India’s appeal — up-front in a historical sense — out of fear that the transformation he’s leading will tear India apart if he doesn’t keep the nation coherent through increasingly extreme expressions of Hindu nationalism.
Once imbibed, India will have an incredibly hard time reining in such chauvinism. If you believe your race is special (and risers always fall victim to that nonsense), then you’ll end up making all sorts of mistakes out of hubris.
Modi may think he’s sowing the seeds of India’s ultimate victory but he’s only establishing a much lower ceiling than India could otherwise achieve.
8) No need to build that wall
THE INTERCEPT: U.S. Government Seeks “Unified Vision of Unauthorized Movement”
Citing the article, which later became a chapter in this book.
A key finding of my research on the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency — our nation’s largest law enforcement agency:
Capability Gap #2 – Technology Acquisition and Integration
The Trump Administration publicly makes its case for “the Wall” as a direct plea from CBP for help. While true, that argument misrepresents the agency’s far-greater prioritization on integrating new technologies into its operational tool-kit. Per CBP’s own 2017 Capability Gap Analysis Process (CGAP), of the almost 1,000 gaps identified by agents along the southwest border, only a quarter were classified as addressable by man-made barriers of any type. In contrast, roughly two-thirds were designated under the solution-sets Domain Awareness and Mission Readiness, two operational capabilities largely advanced by technological inputs. The proliferation of aerial drone technology is a prime example: drug cartels increasingly move product across the border using drones on either round-trip or one-way flights, launching them from both land and sea. No wall will address that vulnerability, which demands an increase of agents’ speed-of-response based on pervasive and persistent surveillance assets – e.g., CBP’s recent pilot program to evaluate Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (SUAS) in the Tucson Sector.
Zooming out from CBP’s Southwest-border focus, the agency – like so much of the U.S. economy – increasingly finds itself sprinting to catch up with the Amazon Effect, defined as e-commerce triggering an explosion of just-in-time small-package deliveries to both businesses and consumers. A significant portion of this massive flow crosses U.S. borders daily, with many packages emanating from small-and-medium businesses identified by CBP as “less proficient” in meeting regulatory standards. This forces CBP to update and adapt risk-management practices originally created for traditional, large-scale shippers. A recently issued CBP “E-Commerce Strategy” addresses the paradigm shift, emphasizing an aggressive – and for now largely aspirational – mix of “data analytics, data mining, and an array of powerful analytical tools.”
Over the past five years, CBP personnel have struggled to keep up with these skyrocketing flows, to include a 50% increase in express consignment shipments and a four-fold jump in international mail shipments. Smugglers have naturally piggy-backed on these growing volumes, further complicating the agency’s still labor-intensive inspection practices in these environments, where presently 90 percent of CBP seizures of pirated and counterfeit goods occur. Yes, pre-submitted manifest information can be processed in an automated fashion (less so for international mail, where such data are often lacking), but once suspicious packages are identified, non-intrusive inspection techniques (x-/gamma ray imaging) inevitably yield to manual inspection and arrests coordinated with local police departments.
Over time, CBP’s risk-management of e-commerce will resemble its ongoing approach to managing travel – namely, the segmentation of risk both vertically (here, goods ranked low- to-high) and horizontally (individual process-steps similarly parsed). That segmentation approach, while valid, nonetheless creates unprecedented big-data management and analysis challenges that invariably propel CBP into cutting-edge applications of cognitive computing and artificial intelligence. In practical terms, this means that – certainly within a generation’s time – CBP must evolve from mere law-enforcement organization to a de facto federal technology enterprise on par with lead elements of the defense and intelligence communities. This necessary transformation will generate extraordinary management requirements, which, in turn, will mandate a radical upgrading of the agency’s leadership development agenda. Logically, CBP’s leadership-training programs should come to resemble – in both strategic breadth and technological depth – those currently applied throughout the higher echelons of the national security community. Again, CBP either “plays up” to the national security community or that community will be forced to “play down” to that resulting capability gap.
The story cited above fits this logic: it ain’t about a wall, it’s about all-domain awareness — here, at the border.
From The Intercept’s disapproving story:
AS THE IMMIGRATION crisis continues and the Biden administration pursues a muscular enforcement strategy with an eye to public opinion and the 2024 presidential election, the Department of Homeland Security prospers. One obscure $6 billion program has grown silently: a network of over 1,000 surveillance towers built along America’s land borders, a system that it describes as “a unified vision of unauthorized movement.”
Not all Big Brothers are the same. You don’t want the wall? Well, then it looks like this — for good reasons.
The militarization of homeland security isn’t as scary as it first seems. In many ways it reflects the larger national shift from defense-mindedness to security-mindedness. That is a natural fellow traveler with our transition from market-make-without-peer to more of a traditional market-playing persona competing with other great powers.
It also corresponds to an unfolding future where climate change remaps global security and forces North-South integration on a scale almost unimaginable from today’s perspective.
So, just consider the alternative.
9) Is China not socialist enough?
FOREIGN POLICY: The Hidden Dangers in China’s GDP Numbers
NEWSWEEK: US Intel Report Paints Bleak Picture of China's Economy
Just to beat the dead horse that is Xi Jinping’s limited thinking and leadership. From the Newsweek story:
China's economic hurdles will likely increase as Xi Jinping doubles down on his state-directed approach to development, according to an assessment by the U.S. intelligence community.
"During the next few years, China's economy will slow because of structural barriers and Beijing's unwillingness to take aggressive stimulus measures to boost economic growth," read the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's (ODNI) annual worldwide threat report released Monday.
The Foreign Policy story sums it up even more tightly:
Deflation and lack of consumption are big problems for Beijing.
Where’s a true socialist leader when you need one?
10) Rich people problem with climate change
DAILY BEAST: $500K Dune Built to Protect Coastal Homes Lasts Just 3 Days
The gist:
In a drastic attempt to protect their beachfront homes, residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, invested $500,000 in a sand dune to defend against encroaching tides. After being completed last week, the barrier made from 14,000 tons of sand lasted just 72 hours before it was completely washed away, according to WCVB.
Hard to cry for folks who have that kind of money for that kind of King Canute effort, but get used to this story. The same rich folks who don’t want the wind turbines ruining their view of the ocean will eventually come for government relief, meaning they’ll try to get the rest of us to pay for their beach houses with their private beaches.
11) The future is bright — just not White
VISUAL CAPITALIST: Mapped: Population Growth by Region (1900-2050F)
Just a reminder.
12) They make a desert and call it peace
LAT: Israel’s Gaza strategy: Create facts on the ground that can’t be undone
UN: Ukraine: Report reveals war’s long-term impact which will be felt ‘for generations’
I can’t help but notice the similarities here: Both Russia and Israel laying waste to land they can’t have but can’t stand having their enemies (real and/or just accused) occupy. The destruction they pursue basically sentences the targets in question to non-habitability for the foreseeable future — a cruel and unusual definition of “victory” sought.
Also in both instances, there is this sense that, if not for the wrong/bad man on top, this crisis could be managed much more humanely.
Schumer is correct: Netanyahu should make way for another to pick up the broken pieces and forge something else.