Pissants Jes Bitchcoin Fitna Slide Forever Into Somebody's Digital Wallet....,

nakedcapitalism |  Governments around the world are quickly but quietly designing, assembling and piloting digital identity systems, often with biometric components. They include the European Union, which itself comprises 27 member countries, the UK, Australia, Canada and dozens of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The spread of these systems across the Global South is being spurred by a new development consensus that asserts that digital identification can foster inclusive and sustainable development and is a prerequisite for the realization of human rights.

As the World Bank noted in 2017, over 1.1 billion people in the world are unable to prove their identity and therefore lack access to vital services including healthcare, social protection, education and finance. Most live in Africa and Asia and more than a third of them are children. In an ostensible bid to address this problem, the World Bank launched the Identification for Development (ID4D) program in 2014 with “catalytic contributions” from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as the governments of the UK, France, Norway and the Omidyar Network.

A Dangerous New Road

The program provides loans to help countries in the Global South “realize the transformational potential of digital identity,” and has been rolled out in dozens of countries, mainly in Africa but also in Asia and Latin America. The program is wrapped up in cosy buzz words such as “digital development” and “financial inclusion”, but it has led to the promotion of a dangerous new approach to digital identity systems. That’s the damning conclusion of a new 100-page study by the NYU School of Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), titled Paving the Digital Road to Hell: A Primer on the Role of the World Bank and Global Networks in Promoting Digital ID:

Through the embrace of digital technologies, the World Bank and a broader global
network of actors has been promoting a new paradigm for ID systems that prioritizes what
we refer to as ‘economic identity.’ These systems focus on fueling digital transactions and
transforming individuals into traceable data. They often ignore the ability of identification
systems to recognize not only that an individual is unique, but that they have a legal status
with associated rights.

Still, proponents have cloaked this new paradigm in the language of human rights and inclusion, arguing that such systems will help to achieve multiple Sustainable Development Goals. Like physical roads, national digital identification systems with biometric components (digital ID systems) are presented as the public infrastructure
of the digital future…

The problem, notes the paper, is that this emerging infrastructure has “been linked to severe and large-scale human rights violations in a range of countries around the world, affecting social, civil, and political rights.” What’s more, the benefits remain “ill-defined and poorly documented”:

Those who stand to benefit the most may not be those “left behind,” but a small group of companies and security-minded governments. The World Bank and the network argue that investing in digital ID systems is paving the road to an equitable digital future. But, despite undoubted good intentions on the part of some, they may well be paving a digital road to hell.

Three Core Functions of Digital ID

The report identifies three core functions of digital identity: identification (“the process of establishing the identity of an individual”); authentication (“the process of asserting an identity previously established during identification”) and lastly, authorization (“the process of determining which actions may be performed or services accessed on the basis of asserted and authenticated identity”).

Sum'n Jes Not Right About These Front-Running Crypto Temporary Autonomous Zones...,

technologyreview  |  Libertarian attempts to create autonomous mini-civilizations go back at least to the 1960s, but crypto is reinvigorating this old dream with a fresh infusion of cash and hype.

For an idea of what a corporate-run Bitcoin City might be like, look to a burgeoning project called Próspera, supported by the Free Private Cities Foundation in Honduras. While it’s not explicitly billed as a crypto community, a heavy emphasis on the crypto industry and the backing of heavyweight Bitcoin investors place Próspera in the same ideological milieu—a fusion of crypto evangelism and libertarian credos.

Próspera (Spanish for “prosperous”) occupies a small enclave on the Honduran island of Roatán. The developers have been handed the chance to model a society from scratch, including its own health, education, policing, and social security systems.

Honduras amended its constitution in 2013 to allow the creation of special economic zones managed by corporations and operating largely outside the country’s legal and regulatory oversight. The resulting enclaves are known in English as Zones of Economic Development and Employment (ZEDEs, pronounced “zeh-dehs”).

The decision was based on American economist Paul Romer’s proposal for charter cities—a type of special economic zone in an existing state but managed by another nation’s government. Considered one of his more outlandish ideas, they reflect his theories about how to promote foreign investment and alleviate inequality. Honduran ZEDEs are among the first tests of this concept, though Romer has held talks with some other governments.

Romer collaborated with the Honduran government at first, but they parted ways following disagreements over how his idea was being implemented. (Romer didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Próspera, which broke ground in 2020, plans to implement ultra-low taxes, outsource services typically managed by the public sector, establish an “arbitration center” in place of a court, and charge an annual fee for citizenship (either physical or e-residency) that involves signing a “social contract” the company hopes will discourage misbehavior.

When I visited the site in February, a central office was one of the few completed buildings. There was no private Próspera police force, but on the front desk was a number for Bulldog Security International, a private security company engaged by hotels on the island that consider the local police force inadequate. A pair of two-story buildings housed office workers. The rest was largely a construction site, although a residential tower block is underway.

A rendering of the future Próspera shows apartments that appear to take inspiration from the shells of the island’s indigenous conch—soft curves in pearly coral, cream, and glass. A strip of white sand separates the apartment block from the gentle lap of the Caribbean Sea.

The businesses most likely to be drawn here are those keen to escape regulation in their own countries—Próspera’s chief of staff, Trey Goff, highlights medical innovation, health tourism, and just about every facet of the cryptocurrency industry. 

“There’s an automatic degree of overlap with the crypto industry and what we’re doing,” he says. “Because they see themselves as at the forefront of financial innovation, and we want to enable that.”

 

What Do Kids, Drug Users, Sex Workers, Political Radicals, Terrorists And The .0001% Have In Common?

pluralistic |  Kids, drug users, political radicals, sex workers and terrorists are all unwelcome in mainstream society. They struggle to use its money, its communications tools, and its media channels. Any attempt to do so comes at a high price: personal risk, plus a high likelihood that some or all of their interactions and transactions will be interdicted – their work seized and destroyed or blocked or deleted.

Using a new technology comes at a cost. If it's 1979 and you're Walt Disney Pictures, you've got no reason to explore the VCR. The existing system works great for you – and it works great for your audience. You can always find a movie theater willing to show your movies, your audience is happy to be seen entering that cinema, and the bank gladly accepts ticket revenues as deposits.

But if you're into smutty movies, none of that is true. Just mailing your 8mm films across state lines is risky – maybe it gets seized and incinerated, maybe a postal inspector shows up at your door with a search warrant. Most theaters won't show your movies, and most people don't want to be seen in the ones that will.

Given all those structural barriers, it makes sense that the technophiles who also happen to be involved in the sex trade will get a hearing from their colleagues – unlike the traditional media execs whose endorsement of the VCR made them persona non grata within their companies. That is, technophilia is a deficit if you're doing something socially acceptable, and an asset if you're doing something that's socially disfavored.

Which is why technophiles are leading figures among terrorists and kids and sex workers and drug users and political radicals. The kids who left Facebook for Instagram weren't looking for the Next Big Thing; they were looking for a social media service that their parents and teachers didn't use. The kids who were technophiles discovered Instagram and the others followed their lead. They endured the hassle of learning a new service and re-establishing social connections, because that hassle was less than the hassle of staying on Facebook, subject to scrutiny by the adult authorities in your life.

One corollary of this phenomenon is that technophile circles have disproportionate numbers of socially disfavored people. If you're a normie who just likes new tech, the services and systems you seek out will have higher-than-baseline numbers of people into sex, as well as radicals, kids, druggies and terrorists.

Another corollary of this phenomenon is that the founders of new technologies will always start out by courting these marginal groups – they are the vanguard, after all – and then, eventually, turn on them.

Sex workers know this story well. Sex workers' content and transactions turned companies from Tumblr to Instagram, Paypal to Twitch into multi-billion-dollar enterprises, whereupon these companies turned on sex workers and kicked them off the platform, seizing their money and destroying their creative work in the process.

No one knows this story better than Susie Bright, a pioneering sex-positive, high-tech feminist author, critic, educator and performer. Bright helped found the seminal lesbian magazine On Our Backs, practically invented serious film criticism for pornographic videos, edited many classic erotic books, and has used the courts to win justice for many sex-positive causes.

Bright is also a technophile. I met her on The WELL, an early online service, in the early 1990s. She was already a desktop publishing pioneer by then (On Our Backs was the first magazine to be laid out in Pagemaker). Since then, Bright has been at the forefront of every technological development and human rights struggle for sex workers.

If Your Political Identity And Pride Celebrations Are Inherently Sexual....,

reddit | Yes, exactly- someone being the minority doesn't mean they should be out of sight, and it doesn't mean that the majority's rights are being infringed by seeing it or having to (the horror!) explain it to kids. One, kids are a lot less fragile than people think, and two, you can't shield them from everything. Like you pointed out, the same people would probably hate to explain the existence of black people, Jews, the disabled/people in wheelchairs/people with amputations/people with heavy scarring, pregnant people... Actually, really take a long think about that last one. Pregnancy is about the closest it gets to explicit sex, because pregnancy is proof sex happened at some point. And sure, you can explain the baby's presence without sex- but you can also explain attraction towards the same sex without sex, too, by describing it the way you would a straight relationship. They're in love, they're holding hands, they're kissing. If you can do one, you can do the other. (Worth noting: the same Texas GOP platform that declared LGBT identity abominations, also says that all children must be taught that fetuses are people and that live begins "from fertilization". How do you explain fertilization without explaining what sex is? The GOP's own platform undercuts their claim that this is about protecting children from sex.)

I understand your reluctance to think of children having sexualities. This is why the split attraction model is used. Have you ever heard terms like "homoromantic asexual"? The model was used for people like that, who don't experience sexual attraction but do have romantic, but I think it would help for you to think of everyone in those terms to understand this. Most adults are heteromantic (fall in love with adults of the opposite sex) and heterosexual (want to have sex with adults of the opposite sex.) Most kids are heteromantic, but don't have sexual feelings yet, which is why they're okay with movies like Beauty and the Beast. But some kids are homoromantic. They don't have sexual attraction yet either, but they do have romantic ones. If you can understand a 12 year old girl having a boyfriend, you can understand a 12 year old girl having a girlfriend, too.

I think you are falling into a fallacy of fundamental attribution error. You, and other heterosexuals, have feelings which may or may not include sex. But LGBT people are sexualized so severely that people try to assign sexual meaning even to us just holding hands or kissing each other on the lips. Our motivations are stripped away by people who insist we are driven only by sexual desire. That's part of the reason "love is love" has been such a big part of our messaging; because we have had to convince people that we even experience love and other emotions separate from sex in the first place.

When we get accused of "grooming" kids (and note that they chose a word associated with child molestation, when they could have, if they really felt we were changing kids into something else, used "converting" which would have worked just as well- this is deliberate) we are being made out such that our existence is inherently that of a sexual deviant predator.

Truth be told, that's another insidious layer to the denial that LGBT youth even exist. If they occur naturally, it weakens the argument that children are being preyed upon. Only by furthering the narrative that this is an unnatural behavior that occurs only in either adults or in children who have been "tainted" by a perverted adult can the narrative be upheld. In other words, people don't call LGBT people groomers because they are truly worried about the kids; they mention the kids because it supports the narrative they have already created.

I hate to invoke Godwin's Law, but as a Jew, I thought I would bring up some similarities in the genocidal language and actions used.

1. You are probably familiar with a certain picture of a Nazi book burning immediately before Hitler rose to power. What you are likely not aware of is that this was the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a sexuality institute, that studied LGBT people extensively. The first successful gender confirmation surgery was performed there. The books being burned in that photo? They were years of studies on LGBT people.

2. Weimar Germany, in the years leading up to Hitler seizing power, was known as the best place in the world to be LGBT. Transgender people were even allowed to get special markers on their IDs to exempt them from gender-restricted dress codes. When Hitler seized power, those IDs were used to imprison trans people. Trans women were treated the same as gay men and given the pink triangle. Trans men were treated as lesbians and, while persecuted, were not sent to concentration camps.

3. After WW2 ended, LGBT people in the camps were sent back to prison to serve out the remainders of their sentences. Some weren't freed until the 1970s.

4. LGBT people, leading up to the Holocaust, were accused of grooming and molesting children. Not coincidentally, Jews were also depicted as stealing and converting children to Judaism and sinful lifestyles, particularly in political comics and caricatures.

5. The current anti-trans movement is symbiotically fused with antisemitism. There are countless conspiracy theories that Jewish elites- particularly George Soros- are funding pharmacies to "trans the children" so they can make money from the medications and surgeries. Anti-semitism and transphobia almost always occur clustered together.

6. The rise of the Great Replacement Theory is also linked to both of these. Jews are accused of bringing the immigrants into this country to replace white people. They're also accused of pushing "the trans" so that white children will be rendered infertile (despite the huge numbers of trans people of color, which they ignore) and drive down their numbers. An Idaho legislator who penned an anti-trans law explicitly says she sees it as an extension of the pro-life debate due to her worries about "teenagers losing perfectly healthy reproductive organs."

7. In Nazi Germany, the role of women was primarily to make more good little Aryans and raise them properly. While abortions were often performed involuntarily on Jews and other undesirables, they were forbidden for white women. There was a high stigma for infertile women.

Taking all of these facts into account, I think you can see how it's hard for a lot of people to believe that the concern over children is actually genuine. It's something much more sinister and linked to a lot of other forms of bigotry, and we are seeing echoes of it now.

You don't call a group of people "groomers" if you want to live peacefully with them. Pedophiles are seen as subhuman, as dangers to society. Not one person on the planet wants to coexist peacefully with pedophiles. (And despite your insistence that they mean "grooming" as in converting, they never try to invoke that imagery. It's always claims of perversion, of sexual abuse- pedophilia without ever actually touching a child.) Once a group is perceived as being a front for pedophiles, it takes decades of advocacy for them to be seen as human beings again- if they are so lucky as to not be targeted for extermination instead.

This is genocidal language. It doesn't have to mean genocidal as in trains and gas chambers. It can also mean things like forcing them in the closet (which is to say: if you let Jews live, but said them going to temple was banned, and didn't let them wear their traditional clothing on the grounds that this was upsetting to children, that would be a form of genocide), taking their children away (there is a growing sentiment that LGBT couples should not be allowed to have or adopt children, and there is only one place that line of thinking leads. If it's grooming to tell someone else's kids it's okay to be gay, then it's grooming to tell your own kids, too, which means any LGBT adult with a child is now a groomer. Not to mention Texas's new initiative to have parents of trans kids investigated by CPS, which DeSantis has indicated he is interested in bringing to Florida), and otherwise making their lives unbearable in an attempt to drive up suicide rates (Trans people already have a 40% rate of attempting suicide, and this is higher when they are in unsupportive environments or those in which they can't access gender-affirming care, which both Abbott and DeSantis have said they want to ban in all circumstances in their states).

Further, there are increasing calls for pogroms against LGBT people from elected officials, those running for office, and/or people with heavy influence on elected officials. This has resulted in a sustained campaign of terror against LGBT people from the alt-right. Just twenty minutes from my hometown, two weeks ago, a U-Haul full of Patriot Front members was stopped on their way to attack an LGBT Pride event. At the same event, there were instances of harassment perpetrated by other groups, including, you guessed it, parents with kids being called groomers.

The LGBT community is in danger right now. I understand people like you who may have concerns, but the problem is that those concerns are often used as a pretext for the alt-right to radicalize people against LGBT people. The entire "groomers" rhetoric, for reference, started as a campaign on 4chan a year or two ago. And look how effective it has been just in the last six months. Five years ago, anyone who objected to LeFou being gay in the new Beauty and the Beast movie was laughed off the internet; if that movie was released now, there would be riots in Anaheim. This is getting out of hand at an alarming rate, and this really isn't a good time to be on the fence or "have concerns."

Speaking Of Sexual Degenerates, Let's Not Forget Illinois Very Own Harkonnen Family (Pritzkers)

tabletmag | One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

I first wrote about the Pritzkers, whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call “transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

Through investments in the techno-medical complex, where new highly medicalized sex identities are being conjured, Pritzkers and other elite donors are attempting to normalize the idea that human reproductive sex exists on a spectrum. These investments go toward creating new SSI using surgeries and drugs, and by instituting rapid language reforms to prop up these new identities and induce institutions and individuals to normalize them. In 2018, for example, at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at the University of California Los Angeles (where the Pritzkers are major donors and hold various titles), the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology advertised several options for young females who think they can be men to have their reproductive organs removed, a procedure termed “gender-affirming care.”

What Becomes A CIA Hiring Purple-Haired, Gender-Fluid, Sexual Degenerates?

sonar21  |  Are we witnessing the consequences of legalized marijuana causing contact highs among the intelligence community that surrounds Washington, DC? How else to explain the parade of political and military analysts now seized with angst over the growing gulf between what they claimed would happen to Russia in Ukraine and the stark reality. Hell, even the CIA is trying to figure out what went wrong with its analysis and is still getting it wrong. Remarkable.

The problem with the CIA is simple–when you prioritize hiring people because of their embrace of pronouns and degenerate sexuality over recruiting accomplished, genuinely educated people equipped with critical thinking skills, do not be surprised that the juvenile mediocrities perform poorly. How is a gender fluid “them” with no military experience and no foreign language skills going to predict the military outcome of a conflict where the attacking force is outnumbered 3 to 1?

Failure is supposed to be a great teacher. But that instruction only succeeds if the pupil is open to learning hard lessons. The CIA has become a purple haired clown show. Just take a gander at the of this article from the Business Insider–US intel officials admit they didn’t see that Russia’s military was a ‘hollow force.’ Here’s what they did see and how they missed it.

Russia is now a “hollow force?” The only hollow thing in this example are the empty noggins of the morons masquerading as intelligence analysts. Check out their excuses for getting it wrong:

• The Russian force the US military and intelligence agencies believed to be a near-peer adversary hasn’t shown up. The force that did appear had its main thrust blunted by smaller Ukrainian units.
• “What we did not see from the inside was sort of this hollow force” that lacked an effective non-commissioned officer corps, leadership training, and effective doctrines, Berrier said of the Russians.
• While US intelligence agencies misinterpreted the effectiveness of the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, they provided accurate information about Russia’s intentions in the months prior to Russia’s attack, which began on February 24.
• “When you deal with a foreign actor, analysts can fall prey to a number of mental traps, from confirmation bias, availability bias, or even favoring existing analytic lines over new information,” Michael E. van Landingham, a former Russia analyst at the CIA, told Insider.

But this is all nonsense. There is this thing called the internet. It actually allows an inquiring mind to go back in time and see what the CIA was saying in February and March. This is not my opinion. You may read the facts for yourself:

American Police Are Poorly Trained And Perversely Incentivized Liars, Bullies, And Cowards....,

hotair |  This ties up a loose end from yesterday’s post. According to the timeline laid out by Texas DPS chief Steve McCraw, one of the Uvalde school district cops on the scene told the other officers that he’d been on the phone with his wife, Eva Mireles, a teacher at the school who’d been shot in room 112. She was dying, she had said. He relayed that information to them at 11:48 a.m.

United States cops watch in amazement while other country's police do their jobs without taking any lives. pic.twitter.com/iGh71VugTN

— 🥀_Imposter_🕸️ (@Imposter_Edits) June 20, 2022

Police didn’t enter the room and confront the shooter for another 62 minutes.

How could the officer, Ruben Ruiz, not have ignored the warnings to stand down and rushed into the room to try to save his wife?

They detained him, disarmed, and kicked him out of the building while his wife bled out on the other side of the wall. That’s not the only example of cops detaining people who were willing to risk their own lives to try to stop the shooter either.

If I were Ruiz, I don’t know how I’d function. Every hour would be consumed wondering whether my wife would have been saved if the police had made their way in sooner. How can he ever work with those cops again? For that matter, why did he allow himself to be escorted from the scene instead of defying orders and barging into the room?

Were all of the officers at the scene under the impression that the doors were locked — even though, per McCraw, it turns out they weren’t? No one tried the knob once in desperation?

Again, Ruiz told his colleagues at 11:48 a.m. that his wife was shot but alive. Mireles was still alive 22 minutes later, per a 911 call by one of the children trapped in the classroom:

“There is a lot of bodies,” a 10-year-old student, Khloie Torres, quietly told a 911 dispatcher at 12:10 p.m. — 37 minutes after the gunman began shooting inside the classrooms — according to a review of a transcript of the call. “I don’t want to die, my teacher is dead, my teacher is dead, please send help, send help for my teacher, she is shot but still alive.”

Incredibly, Mireles was *still* alive when cops finally burst in and killed the shooter. “Officers could be seen in video footage rushing a few children out of the room and carrying out Ms. Mireles, who appeared to be in extreme pain,” the Times reported earlier this month. “She reached an ambulance, but died before reaching a hospital.”

What if they had reached her an hour earlier?

If not for Mireles’s phone call to Ruiz, one could imagine that the cops in the hallway might have believed they were in a hostage situation. If the shooter had stopped firing, they may have assumed that everyone inside the classroom who had already been shot was dead and now it was a matter of trying to wait him out in hopes that he’d surrender before harming anyone else.

But once they knew that someone was alive inside and bleeding, waiting should have been unimaginable. Even if they didn’t know about the 911 calls from the kids due to poor communication with dispatchers, they knew from Ruiz that they had to get in there to save Mireles ASAP, at whatever cost. But they didn’t. And they didn’t let him try either.

 

 

First Comes Job-loss/Precarity, Then Comes Addiction, Then Mental Illness

Wired |   To promote policy that actually works, reporters and editors need to act more like science journalists and less like stenographers who—whether implicitly or explicitly, accidentally or deliberately—bolster political campaigns that use ignorance to drive fear.

It would be hard to find a better example of this problem than Nellie Bowles’ recent essay in The Atlantic, which argues that San Francisco is a “failed city,” in large part because liberal policies have worsened addiction and mental illness. These policies persist, she suggests, because local politicians refuse to confront the empty-headed but well-intentioned delusions of the hippies and their descendants who just want to let it be. She also claims that the recall of progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin in a June 7 election demonstrates that the city is finally awakening from this daze.

Bowles’ work is far from alone in its failure to look at evidence of effectiveness of various policies when discussing the politics around them. In one 24-hour period in June, a columnist for The Washington Post argued that “Boudin’s recall proves that Democrats have lost the public’s trust on crime”—without any mention of data on which policies work best. A similar news analysis from The New York Times also mentioned no actual data. And a New York magazine essay on “Chesa Boudin and the Debacle of Urban Left-Wing Politics” similarly ignored the question of whose preferred approaches are supported by evidence—and whose aren’t.

Bowles writes that her hometown “became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.” She describes the city’s de facto supervised injection site in the Tenderloin as a place that looks like “young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.”

Her argument falls apart in the face of scientific data. Hundreds of studies support the “harm reduction” approach used in clean needle programs and supervised injection sites—and none of them show that it makes drug use or civic life worse.

Indeed, harm reduction was deliberately adopted based on research evidence, not platitudes from the 1960s. Further undermining her analysis, studies overwhelmingly illustrate the counterproductive nature of using cops and coercion first. For one, red states with old-school tough prosecutors actually have worse crime rates than liberal ones like California.

However, since Bowles apparently assumes that harm reduction tactics were adopted because they seemed groovy, she ignores this research base. (Which, ironically, is the type of mindless approach she critiques San Francisco policymakers for supposedly having used.) What she and many other journalists frame as the failure of harm reduction is actually the failure of criminalization.

A brief tour of the data: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and dozens of other obscure organizations like the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Medical Association, clean needle programs dramatically reduce HIV transmission without increasing drug use rates. One study published in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment showed that, compared to people on the street who do not, those who participate in syringe service programs are five times more likely to seek more traditional forms of recovery and three times more likely to quit injecting.

What about supervised drug consumption? Here are three reviews of the literature, which show that it reduces HIV risk, injecting, harm associated with injection, and overdose death rates—while not increasing and sometimes reducing local crime and needle litter. (A 2018 review widely touted by critics for suggesting that supervised consumption did not have a significantly positive outcome had to be retracted by the International Journal of Drug Policy due to poor methodology.)

How about the “problem” that Bowles identifies with reduced penalties for drug possession and the increased use of incarceration and coerced treatment she apparently prefers?

 

What's Going On In The Tenderloin?

realclearinvestigations |   The epicenter of the political earthquakes rattling San Francisco’s progressive establishment is a 30-square-block neighborhood in the center of downtown known as the Tenderloin. Adjacent to some of the city’s most famous attractions, including the high-end shopping district Union Square, the old money redoubt of Nob Hill, historic Chinatown, and the city’s gold-capped City Hall, it is home to a giant, open-air drug bazaar. Tents fill the sidewalks. Addicts sit on curbs and lean against walls, nodding off to their fentanyl and heroin fixes, or wander around in meth-induced psychotic states. Drug dealers stake out their turf and sell in broad daylight, while the immigrant families in the five-story, pre-war apartment buildings shepherd their kids to school, trying to maintain as normal an existence as they can.

“If you happen to be walking through the Tenderloin and you feel unsafe, imagine what it feels like to live there,” said Joel Engardio, head of Stop Crime SF, a civilian public safety group. “The Tenderloin has one of the largest percentages of children in the city. It’s untenable, inexcusable to ask them to confront this hellscape.” 

“The Tenderloin is out of control,” said Tom Ostly, a former San Francisco prosecutor who used to work there and lives nearby. “It has never been worse than it is now.”

Nancy Tung, a prosecutor who once handled drug enforcement in San Francisco, called it “ground zero for human misery.” Kathy Looper, who has run a low-income, single resident occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin for more than 45 years, said, “It feels like we’re in Gotham,” adding that she once considered putting a spotlight on her hotel roof and projecting a Batman signal into the sky.

The crime and disorder of the Tenderloin may appear to be symptoms of deep and mysterious sociological forces. Chesa Boudin, who was ousted last week as San Francisco’s district attorney because of his lenient policies, argued, “We can’t arrest and prosecute our way out of the problems that are afflicting the Tenderloin.”

But there is a fairly straightforward kind of order beneath the chaos: an illicit market economy operating in plain sight. The Tenderloin is home to two sprawling, overlapping transnational organized crime networks – one centered on drugs and the other on theft – which thrive in that neighborhood because of the near-total absence of the enforcement of laws.

 

 

 

Nice, Plain English Synopsis Of The Present World Situation

thesaker  |  There have been many explanations for what is going on and the most common is the fight between two possible futures; a multipolar world where there are several power centers in the world, and a unipolar world where the West governs the world. This is correct as far as it goes, but there is another reason which explains why this is happening now and all the urgency and panic in the West.

Recently the New Zealand tech guru Kim Dotcom tweeted a thread about the debt situation in the US. According to him all debt and unfunded liabilities of the US exceed the total value of the entire country, including the land. This situation is not unique to the US. Most countries in the West have debt that can only be paid back by selling the entire country and everything it contains. On top of that, most non-western countries are buried in dollar-denominated debt and are practically owned by the same financiers who own the West.

During the last few decades, the economy of the US and Europe has been falsified on a level that is difficult to believe. We in the West have been living far beyond our means and our currencies have been massively overvalued. We have been able to do this through two mechanisms:

1. The first one is the reserve status of the dollar and the semi-reserve status of the euro which have enabled the West to export digital money and receive goods in return. This has created enormous financial power for the West and enabled it to function as a parasite on the world economy. We have been getting a lot of goods for free, to put it mildly.
2. The second falsification mechanism is the increase in debt to a level where we have essentially pawned everything we own, including our houses and lands, to keep up our living standards. We own nothing now when the debt has been subtracted. The debt has long since become unserviceable – far beyond our ability to pay interests on – which explains why the interest rates in the West are in the neighborhood of zero. Any increase would make the debt unserviceable and we would all go formally bankrupt in a day.

On top of all this, the falsification has created artificially strong currencies in the West which has boosted their purchasing power for goods priced in non-western currencies. These mechanisms have also enabled the West to run bloated and dysfunctional service economies where inefficiencies are beyond belief. We have giant groups of people in our economies that not only create no value but destroy value systematically. What maintains the West’s standard of living now is a small minority of productive people, constant debt increase, and parasitism of the rest of the world.

The people who own all this debt actually own everything we think we own. We in the West own nothing at this point – we only think we do. But who are our real owners? We know more or less who they are because they meet every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos along with the western political elites who they also happen to own.

It is clear that our owners have been getting increasingly worried, and their worries have been increasing in sync with the increased pressure applied by the West on the rest of the world, particularly the Independents. During the last Davos meeting, the mood was bleak and panicked at the same time, much like the panic among the western political elites when the isolation of Russia failed.

What is about to happen

The panic of our owners and their politicians is understandable because we have come to the end of the line. We can no longer keep up our living standards by debt increase and parasitism. The debt is reaching beyond what we own as collateral and our currencies are about to become worthless. We will no longer be able to get free stuff from the rest of the world, or pay back our debt – let alone pay interest on it. The entire West is about to go bankrupt and our standard of living is about to go down by a massive percentage. This is what has our owners panicked and they see only two scenarios:

1. In the first scenario most countries in the West, and everything and everyone within them, declare bankruptcy and erase the debt by diktat – which sovereign states are able to do. This will also erase the wealth and political power of our owners.
2. In the second scenario, our owners take over the collateral during the bankruptcy. The collateral is us and everything we own.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which scenario was chosen. The plan for the second scenario is ready and being implemented as we speak. It is called ‘The Great Reset’ and was constructed by the people behind the World Economic Forum. This plan is not a secret and can be examined to a certain degree on the WEF website.

The Great Reset is a mechanism for the seizing of all debt collateral which includes your assets, the assets of your city or municipality, the assets of your state, and most corporate assets not already held by our owners.  Fist tap Dale.

Do You Suppose Any Of The Western Leadership Sincerely Believes This Nonsense?

sonar21  |  Dear President Putin:

I write with the greatest of respect and sorrow to inform you that your gamble in Ukraine has failed and you have lost a strategic battle. How do I know? Well, UK Admiral Tony Radakin, the head of the UK’s Armed Services says so. Here is what he said:

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said Russia was suffering heavy losses, running out of troops and advanced missiles and would never be able to take over all of Ukraine.

“This is a dreadful mistake by Russia. Russia will never take control of Ukraine,” Tony Radakin told PA Media in an interview published on Friday.

The country’s highest-ranking military officer said the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had lost 25% of Russia’s land power for only “tiny” gains and it would emerge a “more diminished power” while strengthening Nato. . . .

“The Russian machine is grinding away, and it’s gaining a couple of – two, three, five – kilometres every day,” the admiral said.

“And Russia has vulnerabilities because it’s running out of people, it’s running out of hi-tech missiles.

“President Putin has used about 25% of his army’s power to gain a tiny amount of territory and 50,000 people either dead or injured. Russia is failing.”

If Admiral Tony says it is true you can take it to the bank. I mean, who can deny the British victory at Dunkirk and their smashing successes in quelling the natives in India, Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to be presumptive Mr. Putin, but when Russia comes to grip with the mighty military prowess of the United Kingdom, I can understand why you will quiver in your snow boots.

Oh sure, just because you now control the areas of Ukraine that produce the bulk of its grain exports, does not mean that you can remain a big player in grain exports (notwithstanding the fact that your country is the 7th largest grain producer in the world). And ditto for your vast reserves of oil and gas. I hear that the Europeans are quite prepared to burn cow and sheep dung to stay warm rather than submit to the indignity of buying your gas and paying rubles.

And speaking of rubles, do you not realize that no one wants your ruble? Joe Biden told me that your ruble is rubble, so it must be true. Biden is known for his veracity. You are acting as if the ruble is stronger now than at the start of your special military operation. That is delusional sir.

And how do you hope to continue to produce new missiles and rockets and other munitions to replace the hundreds of thousands you have fired so far? You act as if Russia is a major manufacturing/industrial center that does not depend on foreign exports to sustain itself. Just because your country is the major exporter of critical minerals and metals that the United States and Europe need to make everything from catalytic converters to computer chips, does not give you the upper hand.

Do you not remember how the United States could no longer make the rocket engines required to carry astronauts to the International Space Station and found an outside provider? See, the west always has some dandy alternatives. You act as if Russia was building those rocket engines and we in the west know that cannot be true because, speaking frankly now sir, you Russians are a bunch of vodka soaked, illiterate peasants.

The fact that you require your students to take three times the number of courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology is further proof of Russia lagging behind the west. See, we understand what is really important. First, small children need to understand there is no such thing as male and female. Once they understand that they do not have to waste their time learning about chromosomes. Men get pregnant and need tampons (though a shortage of those has cropped up). Second, we believe deeply in promoting racial division based on the pigment of someone’s skin. You crazy Russians operate under the delusion that national unity is something important. Not here. We have come to understand that we need to destroy our heritage and recreate something new, which includes recognizing there are at least 72 genders.

The Russia-Iran-India Corridor - CHECKMATE

A Russian Kinzhal missile at 12,000 kilometers per hour, 10 times faster than sound, was, reportedly, used today to destroy a Ukrainian weapons depot 136 meters underground. (Listen to the astonishment of the American reporter when he suddenly saw this). via @Dmitry65smols pic.twitter.com/hbP4BsmFlb

— 알렉산더 대왕 (@51st__State) June 18, 2022

thecradle  |  A key node of the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC) is now in play, linking northwest Russia to the Persian Gulf via the Caspian Sea and Iran. The transportation time between St. Petersburg and Indian ports is 25 days.

This logistical corridor with multimodal transportation carries an enormous geopolitical significance for two BRICs members and a prospective member of the “new G8” because it opens a key alternative route to the usual cargo trail from Asia to Europe via the Suez canal.

The International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC)

The INSTC corridor is a classic South-South integration project: a 7,200-km-long multimodal network of ship, rail, and road routes interlinking India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran, Azerbaijan and Russia all the way to Finland in the Baltic Sea.

Technically, picture a set of containers going overland from St. Petersburg to Astrakhan. Then the cargo sails via the Caspian to the Iranian port of Bandar Anzeli. Then it’s transported overland to the port of Bandar Abbas. And then overseas to Nava Sheva, the largest seaport in India. The key operator is Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (the IRISL group), which has branches in both Russia and India.

And that brings us to what wars from now will be fought about: transportation corridors – and not territorial conquest.

Beijing’s fast-paced BRI is seen as an existential threat to the ‘rules-based international order.’ It develops along six overland corridors across Eurasia, plus the Maritime Silk Road from the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean, all the way to Europe.

One of the key targets of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine is to interrupt BRI corridors across Russia. The Empire will go all out to interrupt not only BRI but also INSTC nodes. Afghanistan under US occupation was prevented from become a node for either BRI or INSTC.

With full access to the Sea of Azov – now a “Russian lake” – and arguably the whole Black Sea coastline further on down the road, Moscow will hugely increase its sea trading prospects (Putin: “The Black Sea was historically Russian territory”).

For the past two decades, energy corridors have been heavily politicized and are at the center of unforgiving global pipeline competitions – from BTC and South Stream to Nord Stream 1 and 2, and the never-ending soap operas, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) and Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipelines.

Then there’s the Northern Sea Route alongside the Russian coastline all the way to the Barents Sea. China and India are very much focused on the Northern Sea Route, not by accident also  discussed in detail in St. Petersburg.

The contrast between the St. Petersburg debates on a possible re-wiring of our world – and the Three Stooges Taking a Train to Nowhere to tell a mediocre Ukrainian comedian to calm down and negotiate his surrender (as confirmed by German intelligence) – could not be starker.

Almost imperceptibly – just as it re-incorporated Crimea and entered the Syrian theater – Russia as a military-energy superpower now shows it is potentially capable of driving a great deal of the industrialized west back into the Stone Age. The western elites are just helpless. If only they could ride a corridor on the Eurasian high-speed train, they might learn something.

Decide For Yourself If Russia Is Issuing Checks It Can't Cash!!!

indianpunchline |  Fundamentally, the Western economies are facing a systemic crisis. The complacency that the reserve-currency-based US economy is impervious to ballooning debt; that the petrodollar system compels the entire world to purchase dollars to finance their needs; that the flood of cheap Chinese consumer goods and cheap energy from Russia and Gulf States would keep inflation at bay; that interest rate hikes will cure structural inflation; and, above all, that the consequences of taking a trade-war hammer to a complex network system in the world economy can be managed — these notions stand exposed. 

When the money printing presses whirred in Europe and America, no one felt uneasy about the structural flaws in the system. In a haze of ideological bluster, the Biden Administration and its junior partner in Brussels didn’t pay any due diligence before sanctioning Russia and its energy and resources. Europe is much worse off than America. Inflation in Europe is well into double digits. A European sovereign debt crisis may already have begun.

The accelerating inflationary crisis threatens the standing of western politicians, as they will encounter real popular anger once inflation eats away at the middle class and high energy prices gut business profits.

How to arrest the unfolding slow burn political debacle for both Europe and the US? The logical way is to force Zelensky to go to the negotiating table and discuss a settlement. The narrative of continuing the attrition against Russian forces for the coming months, to inflict hurt on Russia, does not help European politicians. Mariupol, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia have fallen. Donbass might also, soon. What’s the next red line? Odessa? 

Paradoxically, the long war in Ukraine could only work to Russia’s advantage. President Putin’s speech at the SPIEF at St. Petersburg on Friday shows how thoroughly Moscow studied the western financial and economic system and identified its structural contradictions. Putin is adept at using the weight and strength of his opponents to his own advantage rather than opposing blow directly to blow. The West’s overextension can ultimately be its undoing. 

That’s where the actual inflection point lies today — whether the structural contradictions in the western economies have matured into disorder. Putin sees the West’s future as bleak, hit simultaneously by the blowback from its own imposition of sanctions, and the resultant spike in commodity prices, but lacking agility to deflect the blows due to institutional rigidities. 

The big question today is at what point Russia retaliates against the countries who are involved in the gun-running business in Ukraine if they accelerate on that path. The air strikes by Russian jets last Thursday on the militant terror groups harboured in the US garrison at Al-Tanf on the Syrian-Iraqi border may well have carried a message.

Joseph Robinette Biden (Complete Transcript And Appropriate Video)

thestar |  A transcript of an Oval Office interview Thursday with President Joe Biden by AP White House reporter Josh Boak. Where the audio recording of the interview is unclear, ellipses or a notation that the recording was unintelligible are used.

AP: I wanted to thank you for taking the time to do this.

BIDEN: Sure, happy to.

AP: And I’m really interested in how you’re thinking and how you’re making choices during what seems like a really unique time in American history.

BIDEN: Well, I’m making choices. It’s an interesting question. I’m making choices like I always have, in the sense that circumstances change but my objective doesn’t change. Does that make sense to you? For example, I have, uh, from the time I’ve entered public life, it’s been about how to give ordinary working-class and middle-class folks a shot (inaudible) .. instead of everything being viewed as from the top down. I’m not a big, is it working (a reference to the tape recorder).

AP: Yeah, we’re good.

BIDEN: I’m not a big believer in trickle-down economy, and, um, and so everything I look at from the time I took this office, but even before that when I was a senator all those years, is what’s the best shot to grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out because when that happens everybody does well. The wealthy do very, very well. And the biggest thing I think that, when I came into this job, that I have the greatest frustration with the last four years, is that, um, uh, everything was constructed and built and arranged in order for the top 1 to 3% of the population to do very well. The rest was sort of, I mean that literally, everything else seemed to be an afterthought.

AP: So, let me ask about that, right, because you’ve seen the polls. There’s a lot of voters who are very pessimistic. When I look at the consumer sentiment survey the University of Michigan puts out, even Democrats began to get really worried about a year ago regarding the economy and we’ve had people that have basically been through a pandemic, shortages of basic goods, inflation, some of the political divisions you’re seeing right now on the Hill with the Jan. 6 hearings, and also a war in Europe. And how do you as a president provide a sense of stability and strength ... (crosstalk)

BIDEN: Well, if you notice, until gas prices started going up, which was about the same time, the University of Michigan survey, they had a very different view. Things were much more, they were much more optimistic. We came in and we started to grow the economy in significant ways. We were able to, ah, you know, go from 2 million shots in arms to 225 million. People were having access to dealing with the pandemic. We started opening up businesses, and opening up access to go back to work, etc. But then, in my experience, the way I was raised, if you want a direct barometer of what people are going to talk about at the kitchen table and the dining room table and whether things are going well, it’s the cost of food and what’s the cost of, of gasoline at the pump. I mean literally at the pump.

And if you notice, you know, uh, gasoline went up a, you know, $1.25 right off the bat, almost, when, the, Putin’s war started. Um, and as I said at the time, by the way, I made it clear with helping Ukraine, and organizing NATO to help Ukraine, that this was going to cost. There was going to be a price to pay for it. It was, this is not going to be cost-free, but we had, the option of doing nothing was worse. If he in fact moved into Ukraine, took hold of Ukraine, and Belarus, where it is, and he’s been a threat to NATO, all those things would have even been more dire.

AP: Why is that? Because it seems like you knew the risks on Ukraine with regard to higher gasoline prices ...

BIDEN: Sure.

AP: ... that carried political risks for you at home ...

BIDEN: Sure.

AP: ... so when, when your aides said, “Look at the situation,” how did you make that choice? What would you tell someone in Latrobe, Pennsylvania?

BIDEN: I’m the president of the United States. It’s not about my political survival. It’s about what’s best for the country. No kidding. No kidding. So what happens? What happens if the strongest power, NATO, an organizational structure we put together, walked away from Russian aggression of over 100,000 troops marching across a border to try to, to occupy and wipe out a culture of an entire people. What, then, then what happens? What happens next? What do we do next?

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (Complete Transcript And Video)

Pernicious frauds have tricked miseducated subjects into the absurd delusion that the whole Russian awakening and change of course has been the result Putin's takeover. But ask yourself, who chose him and made Yeltsin put him up as PM? 

Russia may not have the deep state in the same way that the U.S. does, but influential and respected Russian elders had and continue to have a way to make themselves heard. Very obviously, a group of elder Russian statesmen got together - worried about Russia going to the dogs - and engineered a quiet changeover. However it happened, Putin did not make it to the top by himself, and most certainly he has not been alone in running things, as the West would like its most simple-minded subjects to believe.

So do not worry about Valodya's health and Russian leadership's succession.  Everyone in Russia has learned the lesson from the 1990s. The support that Russians extend to Putin is not so much personal, it is instead support for his policies for making Russia strong, independent and proud. 

The idea that the Russian people would fall for Western "beads" again is ludicrous.

RG-RU.Translate.Goog  |  Vladimir Putin: Thank you very much! Dear Kassym-Jomart Kemelevich! Dear friends, colleagues!

I greet the participants and guests of the anniversary XXV St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

It is taking place at a difficult time for the entire world community, when the economy, markets, and the very principles of the global economic system are under attack. Many trade, production, and logistics ties that were previously disrupted by the pandemic are now going through new tests. Moreover, such key concepts for business as business reputation, inviolability of property and trust in world currencies have been thoroughly undermined - undermined, unfortunately, by our partners in the West, and this was done intentionally, for the sake of ambition, in the name of preserving outdated geopolitical illusions.

Today ours - when I say "ours" I mean the Russian leadership - has its own view of the situation in which the global economy finds itself. I will dwell in detail on how Russia is acting in these conditions and how it is planning its development in a dynamically changing environment.

A year and a half ago, speaking at the Davos Forum, I once again emphasized that the era of the unipolar world order is over - I want to start with this, there is no getting away from it - it has ended despite all attempts to preserve it, to conserve it by any means. Changes are a natural course of history, since the civilizational diversity of the planet, the richness of cultures is difficult to combine with political, economic and other patterns, patterns do not work here, patterns that are rudely, without alternative, imposed from one center.

The flaw lies in the very idea, according to which there is one, albeit a strong power with a limited circle of approximate or, as they say, states admitted to it, and all the rules of business and international relations - when it becomes necessary - are interpreted exclusively in the interests of this power , as they say, work in one direction, the game goes in one direction. A world based on such "dogmas" is definitely unsustainable.

The United States, having declared victory in the Cold War, declared itself to be the messengers of the Lord on Earth, who have no obligations, but only interests, and these interests are declared sacred. They do not seem to notice that over the past decades, new powerful centers have been formed on the planet and are louder and louder. Each of them develops its own political systems and public institutions, implements its own models of economic growth and, of course, has the right to protect them, to ensure national sovereignty.

We are talking about objective processes, about truly revolutionary, tectonic changes in geopolitics, the global economy, in the technological sphere, in the entire system of international relations, where the role of dynamic, promising states and regions is significantly increasing, whose interests can no longer be ignored.

I repeat: these changes are fundamental, pivotal and inexorable. And it is a mistake to believe that the time of turbulent changes can, as they say, sit out, wait out, that, supposedly, everything will return to normal, everything will be as before. Will not.

However, it seems that the ruling elites of some Western states are just in this kind of illusion. They do not want to notice obvious things, but stubbornly cling to the shadows of the past. For example, they believe that the dominance of the West in global politics and economics is an unchanging, eternal value. Nothing is eternal.

Moreover, our colleagues do not simply deny reality. They are trying to counteract the course of history. They think in terms of the last century. They are captivated by their own delusions about countries outside the so-called "golden billion": they consider everything else to be the periphery, their backyard, they still treat them like a colony, and the peoples living there consider them second-class people, because consider themselves exceptional. If they are exceptional, then everyone else is second-class.

Hence - an irrepressible desire to punish, economically crush the one who stands out from the general ranks, does not want to blindly obey. Moreover, they rudely and shamelessly impose their own ethics, views on culture and ideas about history, and sometimes question the sovereignty and integrity of states, create a threat to their existence. Suffice it to recall the fate of Yugoslavia and Syria, Libya and Iraq.

If some "rebel" cannot be hounded, pacified, then they try to isolate him or, as they say now, "cancel". Everything is used, even sports, the Olympic movement, a ban on culture, masterpieces of art - for the sole reason that their authors are of the "wrong" origin.

This is the nature of the current attack of Russophobia in the West and insane sanctions against Russia. Crazy and, I would say, thoughtless. Their number, as well as the speed of stamping, knows no precedents.

Sergei Lavrov - In A Russian State Of Mind

Lavrov, in a snippet from his interview with the BBC at about the 21:50 mark:

I then turned to Russian relations with the UK. It is on Russia's official list of unfriendly countries, and I suggested that to say relations were bad was an understatement.

"I don't think there's even room for maneuvre any more," Mr Lavrov told me, "because both [Prime Minister Boris] Johnson and [Liz] Truss say openly that we should defeat Russia, we should force Russia to its knees. 

Go on, then, do it!"

The American Dilemma

consortiumnews |  The West has been inhabiting a fanciful world that could exist only in our imaginations. Many remain stranded in that self-deluded mirage. The more that we have invested in that fantasy world, the harder we find it to exit and to make the adjustment — intellectual, emotional, behavioral. 

An assessment of where we are, where we might go and the implications over time of the reactions of other parties is a singularly complex undertaking. For it requires not just specification of time frames, but also the varying definitions of national interest and strategic objective that government leaders might use as reference marks.  

The number of permutations created by the array of players involved, and the low confidence margins associated with forecasts of how each will act at key decision points down the road, exacerbate the already daunting challenge. Before one even contemplates embarking on such a task, there are a few crucial considerations to bear in mind. 

Those in Charge

First, the people who count at the head of governments are not pure thinking machines. Far from it. They are too often persons of narrow intelligence, of limited experience in high stakes games of power politics, who navigate by simplistic, outdated and parochial cognitive maps of the world. Their perspectives approximate montages composed of bits of ideology, bits of visceral emotion, bits of remembered but inappropriate precedents, bits of massaged public opinion data, and odds-and-ends plucked from New York Times op-ed pieces.

In addition, let’s remind ourselves that policy-formation and decision-making are group processes — especially in Washington and Brussels — encumbered by their own collective dynamics.  Finally, in Western capitals, governments operate in dual currencies: policy effectiveness and electoral politics.  

Consequently, there are two powerful, in-built tendencies that inflect the choices made: 1) inertial extension of existing attitudes and approaches; and 2) avoidance wherever possible of endangering a hard-won, often tenuous, consensus on a lowest common denominator basis.  

One thing we know with certainty: no fundamental change in thinking or action can occur without determination and decisiveness at the top. 

Necessity is the mother of invention — or so it is said. However, grasping what is “necessary” can be a very slippery business. An actual recasting of how one views a problematic situation normally is a last resort. Experience and history tell us that, as do behavioral experiments.

The psychology of perceived necessity is complex. Adversity or threat in and of itself does not trigger improvisation. Even the survival instinct does not always spark innovation. Denial, then avoidance, are normally the first, sequential reactions when facing adversity in trying to reach an objective or to satisfy a recognized interest. A strong bias favors the reiteration of a standard repertoire of responses.

True innovation tends to occur only in extremis; and even then, behavioral change is more likely to begin with minor adjustments of established thinking and behavior at the margins rather than modification of core beliefs and patterns of action.

 

Sanctions Having No Effect On Russia But Crushing Everyone Else...,

WSJ  |  Sanctions on Russia, offset by a windfall from high-price energy exports, haven’t inflicted enough economic pain so far to hurt Moscow’s war effort or push President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.

That resilience isn’t expected to last, with many economists predicting a deep recession later this year, a rise in poverty and a long-term degradation of the country’s economic potential. For now, the slow pace of sanctions, Russia’s successful efforts to stabilize its economy and its ability to keep oil and gas flowing overseas have cushioned the blow for Moscow. 

That is allowing Russia to continue its war effort in Ukraine for now, said Janis Kluge, an expert in the Russian economy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

“Right now, the economic sanctions are not an incentive for Russia to negotiate,” Mr. Kluge said. “The Kremlin is convinced it can withstand a few years with a bad economy and wait for better days. Russia is emboldened by its own success in fending off the West’s sanctions.”

On Thursday, some of Russia’s top economic officials spoke at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which was empty of its normal crowd of global political, economic and business leaders. While staying positive, they acknowledged the long-term problems the economy faces.

“We’ve managed to persevere, we’re a strong people and we just need to believe in ourselves,” Maxim Oreshkin, economic adviser to Mr. Putin, said at the forum.

The economic resilience means that Moscow is able to exert pressure on European countries, which are dependent on its oil and gas supplies. Russia’s energy leverage was on display this week as state-owned Gazprom PJSC curtailed gas shipments to Germany and Italy in what the German economy minister, Robert Habeck, called “a strategy to unsettle and drive up prices.” Russia had previously cut off gas supplies to Poland, Bulgaria and Finland.

Despite Europe’s frantic efforts to wean itself off Russian energy, including through a phased oil embargo by the end of this year, Russia is still earning hundreds of millions of dollars every day from its oil and gas sales because of elevated global prices. Even as Europeans limit purchases, Moscow has been able to reroute some of its oil flows to India and other customers across Asia.