Etiquette

DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Second State Dept. Official Resigns over US Gaza policy

State department official’s resignation highlights rifts over US Gaza policy

Annelle Sheline says ‘I no longer wanted to be affiliated with this administration,’ claiming Biden is flouting US law over Israel

The Guardian

by Julian Borger

Wed 27 Mar 2024 18.03 EDT

Last modified on Wed 27 Mar 2024 18.48 EDT

A human rights official has resigned from the US state department over Gaza saying the Biden administration is flouting US law by continuing to arm Israel, and is hushing up evidence that the US had seen on Israeli human rights abuses.

Annelle Sheline, said she had hoped to have an influence on policy by staying at her post in the Near Eastern section of the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, taking part in discussions, signing dissent cables and raising her concerns with her supervisor. But she had lost confidence she could do anything that would affect the flow of US arms to Israel.

“The fundamental reason was – I no longer wanted to be affiliated with this administration,” Sheline told the Guardian. “I have a young daughter. She’s not yet two, but if some day in the future, she is learning about this and knows that I was at the state department and she asked me [about it] – I want to be able to tell her that I did what I could.”

Sheline is only the second state department official to resign over US policy on the Gaza war (another official left the education department over the issue), but she said that many of her colleagues had told her they would resign if they could afford to lose their job, and had urged her to speak out about her reasons for quitting, rather than to leave quietly.

Annelle Sheline. Photograph: Annelle Sheline

The 38-year-old, who studied the foreign policy of Arab governments for her doctorate, said the state department was aware of plenty of evidence that Israel was violating international law in its conduct of the Gaza war, and that the Biden administration was violating US law by continuing to supply weapons.

She pointed in particular to the Leahy laws, which forbid assistance to foreign military units implicated in atrocities, and section 620 (I) of the Foreign Assistance Act, which states that no assistance should be given to any government which “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance”.

On Monday, the state department said it had received assurances from Israel officials and “not found them to be in violation of international humanitarian law”. But Sheline said: “The law is clear here and we do have evidence. But the specifics are just not being followed.”

The state department has said it is reviewing evidence of civilian harm under a mechanism established by the Biden administration last year, weeks before the Gaza war broke out, but Sheline said the results of those investigations would only be made public when the White House wanted them to be.

“There are a lot of people working on this at State but at the end of the day, the public policy does have to be something that the White House signs off on,” Sheline said. “Until the White House is ready to take a different line, some of the other things happening in State are just not going to come out.” She said she believed administration policy was being driven by domestic political considerations, but argued that domestic politics were shifting on the issue, pointing to the significant “uncommitted” protest vote in the Democratic presidential primary election, and suggested that the Biden administration had misjudged the mood.

On Wednesday, Gallup published a new poll showing a significant drop in American public support for Israel’s conduct of the war, from 50% in November to 36% now, with 55% disapproving of Israel’s actions.

Sheline credited this shift for helping lead to the US abstention on a UN security council resolution on Monday, allowing it to pass after the US vetoed three earlier draft texts over the nearly six months since the war started.

“I am glad to see that slight shift, but it hasn’t really made any difference to the people in Gaza yet,” Sheline said. “So it’s really too little, too late.

“Not only are these policies devastating the people of Gaza, but I think they’re also devastating the US image in the world,” she argued. “This administration came in promising to rebuild American diplomacy and America’s moral leadership after the Trump administration, but so many of these issues that the administration said were so important – including human rights – seem to be less important to this administration than the US-Israel relationship.”

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Also fr yesterday's Guardian:

Biden administration’s Gaza strategy panned as ‘mess’ amid clashing goals

Strain of aiming to influence Israel’s actions without leverage and also avoiding starvation is showing, say analysts (full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/26/biden-gaza-strategy-criticised-israel

The Biden administration’s policy on Gaza has been widely criticised as being in disarray as the defense secretary described the situation as a “humanitarian catastrophe” the day after the state department declared Israel to be in compliance with international humanitarian law.

Washington was also on the defensive on Tuesday over its claim that a UN security council ceasefire resolution on which it abstained was non-binding, an interpretation that put the US at odds with other member states, international legal scholars and the UN itself....

Israel announced on Monday it would stop working with the UN relief agency Unrwa, the main aid agency serving Gaza. Unrwa said its aid convoys had been blocked since 21 March.

How surrounded are you?

I’m very surrounded. By “rednecks” that is.

It’s very scary. As Judy Collins said in the song “Pirate Jenny,” “You never know to whom you’re talkin’.” Beg to differ. For the most part, I do.

Link here.

I checked with Siri, and this man lives ~30 miles from me. When the news said “an Ohio man,” I just had to look it up. Sure enough, my instincts were right.

While it’s true we never know who surrounds us, how ‘bout you? Do you live in such a hard MAGA area? Are you as suspicious of your neighbors as I am? Any stories to tell?

(by PrimalSoup)

The federal debt & herd psychology; Radical right & the moral rot of cronyism

The Hill reports about an issue that has been personally increasingly concerning for years, namely the psychology of things that trigger herd panic:

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Phillip Swagel warned the United States could suffer a similar market shock as seen in the United Kingdom during former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s brief stint leading Britain, citing the nation’s “unprecedented” fiscal trajectory.

In an interview with the Financial Times this week, Swagel discussed the country’s rising debt, while warning of the dangers of the U.S. facing “what the U.K. faced with former prime minister Truss — where policymakers tried to take an action, and then there’s a market reaction to that action.”

Truss roiled markets in October 2022 as she pressed for significant tax cuts, including changes lessening the tax burden on wealthier individuals without offsets, as well as other economic measures. The budget proposal spurred a major selloff of British debt, forcing U.K. interest rates to decades-long highs and causing the value of the pound to tank.

While Swagel said the U.S. is “not there yet,” he raised concerns of how bond markets could fare as interest rates have climbed.

He added that the nation has “the potential for some changes that seem modest — or maybe start off modest and then get more serious — to have outsized effects on interest rates, and therefore on the fiscal trajectory.”

Some budget experts, however, have cast doubt on Swagel’s alarm.

Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, pointed to improved deficit projections in recent years, as well as forecasts from the CBO he said “don’t project anything that looks like a panic.”

“If someone were thinking about, ‘Should I panic or should I not panic?’ I would just say, ‘hey, the underlying situation has gotten better, right?’” Kogan said, adding “there’s been lower, long-term projected deficits in the Biden administration.”

“You either should have been worried a long time ago, or you should be less worried now,” he said. “Because we’ve been on roughly the same path for forever, but to the extent that it’s different, it’s better.”

A couple of things in that are not comforting. First, although Swagel says the U.S. is “not there yet” in terms of Britain’s economic situation, there is no way to know what might trigger an out of control reaction by debt holders. Maybe we are there now, but maybe we are not. We are talking about a herd (of wealthy investors) that can get spooked if a panic gets triggered by all sorts of things. A change in tax policy can do it. So can a high enough level of US federal debt, on the books or off. )Estimates of unfunded off the books debt obligations runs into the tens of trillions.) So can an enraged, crackpot president who incites a civil war.

Second, the “logic” that experts who downplay the threat evinces arrogance grounded in gross ignorance of basic human cognitive biology and social behavior. The question, should I panic or should I not panic?, cannot be blithely rationalized away by simply saying ‘hey, the underlying situation has gotten better, right’? That ‘reasoning’ is childish and asinine. Panic can arise in the face an allegedly improving underlying situation, because complex situations may not in fact be improving by simply looking at one factor.

What other factors might be relevant? How one encapsulated by this blithe vapidity quoted in The Hill article: “Because we’ve been on roughly the same path for forever, but to the extent that it’s different, it’s better.” That is a testament to the fact that the TTKP (Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party) no longer cares about piling up debt. That has been the case at least since George Bush was in office. A part of the mindset kill government at all costs TTKP mindset is called Starve the Beast, which is significantly responsible for increasing debt even in good economic times.

If we have been on the same bad path forever, that is direct evidence the path remains bad and no fix is in sight, so therefore, don’t worry, be happy.

An expert says, don’t worry, it has always been

getting worse but we are still just fine!

_________________________________________________________________

The NYT reports:

How Justice Thomas’s ‘Nearly Adopted Daughter’
Became His Law Clerk

Justice Clarence Thomas gave Crystal Clanton a home and a job after she left a conservative youth organization in controversy. Then the justice picked her for one of the most coveted positions in the legal world.

“Crystal Clanton’s clerkship for OT ’24 was announced by Scalia Law today!” wrote an assistant to Virginia Thomas, the justice’s wife, who is known as Ginni. The email referred to the 2024 October term of the court, and the tone was jubilant: “Please take a look at these posts of congratulations and support. Consider reposting, replying or adding your own!”

The Thomases and Ms. Clanton, a 29-year-old conservative organizer turned lawyer, have built such a close relationship that the couple informally refer to her as their “nearly adopted daughter.” Ms. Clanton, who was previously accused of sending racist text messages, including one that read “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE,” has lived in the Thomas home, assisted Ms. Thomas in her political consulting business and joined her in a “girls trip” to New York.

Ethics experts say there is nothing in the Supreme Court’s new ethics code that prohibits a justice from hiring someone accused of racism, or even a close family friend.

This is just more evidence of the deep moral rot that dominates TTKP (Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party) thinking and behavior. Ethics are not even an afterthought. We saw the same with the corrupt, clueless and useless Jared and Ivanka in government. Here we see the moral rot operating in the USSC. We also see the sick joke that “ethics in government” actually is.

_________________________________________________________________

From the TTKP Crackpots and Liars Files: The WaPo reports about hypocritical, baseless finger pointing by TTKP liars in the aftermath of the bridge collapse in Baltimore:

Day after bridge collapse, Republicans are blaming Democrats,
floating unfounded and sometimes racist theories

Some Republican officials, candidates and right-wing pundits attempted to connect the tragedy to some of their most frequent political targets: diversity initiatives, illegal immigration, coronavirus lockdowns and the Biden administration. And early reaction to the incident also provided fresh ground for unfounded theories that the collapse was not an accident at all.

Several sitting Republican officials have sought to tie the Biden administration to the collapse of the nearly 50-year-old bridge.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) told Newsmax on Tuesday that the government is focusing on spending federal funds on “waste,” “when it could be going to things that are the government’s purpose, just like this.”

“We’re not spending it on roads and bridges. Look at the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that was done a couple of years ago that the left hails as this massive success. But it was mostly Green New Deal, actually, in that bill,” Mace said, referencing the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law by President Biden.

Republicans previously criticized Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as not visiting East Palestine, Ohio, quickly enough after a toxic train derailment there last year. But after the secretary visited Baltimore on the day of the bridge collapse, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) suggested without evidence that the visit was politically motivated and that Buttigieg was preoccupied with diversity policies.

“Well, this is an election year, so he probably, if it was two years ago might have been a month before he went at all,” Van Drew told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday. “He’s worried too much about pronouns, worried too much about DEI policies, worried too much about being the cool kid on the block. … I’m disappointed in the job that he does.”

Along with Van Drew, conservative political candidates and right-wing media personalities have turned to blaming diversity, equity and inclusion policies — a loosely defined term broadly used to refer to efforts to diversify the workforce and academia — for the collapse. It’s the latest in a series of issues that the right has blamed on DEI.

Again, the moral rot in the form of lies, crackpot conspiracy theories, shameless hypocrisy and slanders comes out loud and clear. For example, TTKP members of congress bitterly opposed the Democratic infrastructure bill but now they lie, telling us it is a failure due to an accident having nothing to do with the infrastructure bill.

TTKP moral rot knows no bounds, ethical, legal or rational. The rot is constant, shameless and packed full of lies and slanders.

_________________________________________________________________

News about DJT’s worldwide support for dictatorship:

Trump calls his globe-trotting ex-diplomat ‘my envoy.’

Neither is in office. Richard Grenell is meeting with far-right foreign leaders, attacking President Biden and offering a glimpse at what U.S. foreign policy could be like in a second Trump term

After an anti-corruption crusader unexpectedly won last year’s presidential election in Guatemala, democracy teetered on the edge in the Central American country. Amid law enforcement raids on election offices and threats of violence, the Biden administration worked feverishly to lay the groundwork for a peaceful transfer of power.

But not Richard Grenell, a former diplomat and intelligence official in Donald Trump’s administration, who arrived in Guatemala in January, days before the new president was to be sworn in — and threw his support behind a right-wing campaign to undermine the election.

Grenell met with a hard-line group that sued to block the inauguration, which thanked him for his “visit and trust.” He defended Guatemalan officials who had seized ballot boxes in an effort to overturn a vote declared “free and fair” by the United States and international observers, and he attacked the U.S. State Department’s sanctions against hundreds of anti-democratic actors.

“They are trying to intimidate conservatives in Guatemala,” Grenell said in a television interview. “This is all wrapped into this kind of phony concern about democracy.”

The take-home point is crystal clear:

DJT considers defending free and fair elections to be a phony concern about democracy, therefore DJT is a full-blown dictator

Grenell - defender of dictators everywhere

Get ready to have some new neighbors if you live in a city

Two sources:

https://www.courthousenews.com/north-american-cities-may-see-a-dramatic-shift-in-urban-wildlife-species-due-to-climate-change/

https://www.cp24.com/lifestyle/climate-change-expected-to-drive-shifts-in-urban-birds-animals-bugs-1.6824650#:~:text=X-,A%20study%20suggests%20climate%20change%20will%20drive%20a%20massive%20shift,Canada%20could%20welcome%20new%20animals.

Both refer to the same study:

The authors of a new study published on Tuesday in the journal PLOS One say the warming climate is likely to displace thousands of species that inhabit urban centers in the U.S. and Canada by 2100.

I have to admit I never heard of PLOS till now, but I bookmarked their home page because they have some awesome material about the climate:

https://journals.plos.org/climate/

Quoting the cp24 source:

The mix of urban birds, bugs and other critters that humans have grown familiar with is due for a big shift because of climate change, a new study says.

On the one hand, cities with temperate climates such as those in Canada could welcome new animals.

By the end of the century, cities such as Ottawa and Edmonton could become hospitable for hundreds of new species while losing habitat for a couple dozen.

Quebec City is the champion. Filazzola's simulation suggests the Quebec capital could support more than 500 new species.

“When we get these slightly warmer temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns, a lot more species are coming in than they are leaving,” he said.

But is all this a good thing or a bad thing. Depends on what life moves in and what life moves out.

“Imagine hearing different birds in the morning when you go out to have your coffee,” Filazzola said. “It means a lot.”

However:

And many of those new arrivals are likely to be insects. Varieties of centipedes, butterflies, spiders and cockroaches are all likely to pop up in places they've never been before, Filazzola suggests.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Obituary: Daniel Kahneman

Dan Kahneman died at 90. His 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was a significant influence on how I understand people and politics. Fast refers to the unconscious mind and Slow to consciousness. Although he was a psychologist and not trained in economics, he won an economics Nobel Prize in 2002 for his Prospect Theory. That theory focuses on how humans make asymmetric decisions when facing risk, particularly financial risk. A core discovery was that pain comes more easily than pleasure, hence asymmetry in decision-making.

Part of a NYT obituary comments:

As opposed to traditional economics, which assumes that human beings generally act in fully rational ways and that any exceptions tend to disappear as the stakes are raised, the behavioral school is based on exposing hard-wired mental biases that can warp judgment, often with counterintuitive results.

“His central message could not be more important,” the Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker told The Guardian in 2014, “namely, that human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. That’s a powerful and important discovery.”

Professor Kahneman delighted in pointing out and explaining what he called universal brain “kinks.” The most important of these, the behaviorists hold, is loss-aversion: Why, for example, does the loss of $100 hurt about twice as much as the gaining of $100 brings pleasure? [an aspect of Prospect Theory]

Khaneman in 2002

If I recall right, during the 1967 war in Isreal, Khaneman flew back to Israel and volunteered for the Army. He was put to work as a psychologist to look for things that would help the Israeli military. He founded lots of improvements that are still in place. One was looking in Israeli army trash to find foods the soldiers liked and disliked. Disliked foods were in the garbage, but not foods the soldiers liked. The army changed its military rations after that.

Khaneman also looked at mistakes and successes that military officers and enlisted personnel made to see what individual traits correlated with success and failure among both groups. He came up with a questionnaire that was highly effective in spotting people who would be good as officers and ones who would not. My recollection is that his questionnaire or variants of it has been adopted by essentially all militaries in all or nearly all countries.

After Prospect Theory came out, I recall seeing graphs of pain and pleasure being plotted based on empirical data of how humans actually respond to gains and losses. It was literally graphable on a piece of paper. The curve was not symmetrical. Pain counted for more than equal gain.

Khaneman was the real deal. He was a true expert, not a blowhard pretender.

The toxic power of Israel in American politics

Israel is a small country, about the size of New Jersey. It has a tiny population, less than 10 million. It receives more American foreign aid than any other country. It appears to have more political power in American politics than any other country, although Russia may be close or even more influential. Israel aggressively defends itself against any threat, real, reasonably perceived or faux, fabricated. Since 1948, America has supported and defended that pipsqueak little country time and time again, often or usually to the significant detriment of US interests and international standing.

A WaPo opinion by Perry Bacon discusses how Israel intends to change the US congress to make the US more pro-Israel than it already is:

The House’s left was right about Gaza.
That could cost them their seats.

Some of the best members of Congress could be ousted this year. They are facing huge spending campaigns against them, as punishment for taking positions not shared by the wealthy and powerful, most notably their strong opposition to Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

The targets of Israel

Eighteen members of the House, all Democrats, started calling for a cease-fire months ago, as it became clear Israel’s response to the attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7 would be full-scale destruction of Gaza. .... All 18 of these members are Americans of color. Several were elected with the help of leftist groups such as Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party.

The very pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee seems to think these members are having an effect, too — and therefore it wants them out of office. AIPAC has recruited more moderate Democrats to run against these progressives in primaries and will reportedly back those challengers with tens of millions of dollars.

These members are in real danger of losing. They are very liberal on economic issues, too, calling for higher taxes on the wealthy and more regulations on corporations. So there isn’t going to be a heavily funded super PAC coming in on their side to save them.

That is how Israel plays hardball politics in America. American defenders of Israel reject criticism of this targeting of Democrats by saying that if they lose their seats in congress it is because voters do not support them. That argument conveniently ignores the corruption of American politics by the Citizens United USSC decision that legalized corruption of politics by money.

Qs:

1. Is it unreasonable for Americans (like me -- I see Israel as more enemy than friend) to be angry at Israel for explicitly using our corrupted pay-to-play system of politics to target Democrats in congress who advocate for a ceasefire to try to protect innocent, starving Palestinians?

2. Is it reasonable to justify Israel targeting Democrats who want a ceasefire simply because it is legal to use special interest money posing as free speech to obliterate political opposition instead of letting voters decide for themselves on a level playing field among candidates?

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Some context for the wonks

Things like this are why I have soured on supporting Israel.

1. Israel Has Formed a Task Force to Carry Out Covert Campaigns at US Universities -- A major Israeli news site says Israel’s foreign affairs and diaspora affairs ministries are behind the operation. Under the heading “Legal Axis,” the Israeli government plan calls for “taking legal action outside the law [what ‘outside the law’ means exactly is not specified in the YnetNews article] against activities and organizations that pose a threat to Jewish and Israeli students on campuses, such as Students for Justice in Palestine.”

MBFC analysis of YnetNews

2. Draft UN Report Finds Israel Has Met Threshold for Genocide -- “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler-colonial process of erasure.”

3. Israel Is a Strategic Liability for the United States -- The special relationship does not benefit Washington and is endangering U.S. interests across the globe. Unwavering U.S. support for Israel has been a consistent element of U.S. Middle East policy since the establishment of the state in 1948. President John F. Kennedy coined the phrase “special relationship” in 1962, explaining that Washington’s ties to the state were “really comparable only to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs.” By 2013, then-Vice President Biden argued that “it’s not only a long-standing moral commitment; it’s a strategic commitment.” Washington continues to provide Israel with roughly $3.8 billion annually in addition to other arms deals and security benefits. (Some of the other top recipients of U.S. aid, such as Egypt and Jordan, receive large amounts in exchange for maintaining normalized relations with Israel). Israel and its supporters are hugely influential in Washington, commanding attention on both sides of the political aisle through different forms of direct and indirect lobbying and influence.

MBFC analysis of Foreign Policy

4. The Israeli right undermines Biden’s Middle East agenda -- The right-wing prime minister has spent much of his political career chipping away at the prospect of a two-state solution and came back to power with allies further to the right who explicitly reject any talk of Palestinian statehood. They also advocate further Jewish settlement of the West Bank and even of war-blighted Gaza. The rhetoric coming from within Israel has made U.S. attempts to hatch a regional plan to calm the crisis more difficult.

5. American traitor, Israeli hero -- The Pollard case shows that the interests of Israel and America are often sharply at odds. The U.S. government’s announcement that Jonathan Pollard will soon gain his release from prison is cause for celebration in Israel, and understandably so. There, Pollard is considered a patriot and hero. By engaging in espionage on Israel’s behalf, he placed himself at great risk. Once caught, he endured considerable punishment — 30 years in a federal penitentiary. Israelis have no problem grasping why their take on Pollard and ours should differ. They fully understand that on many occasions U.S. and Israeli security interests are at odds. And when that occurs they do not doubt what comes first. It’s Americans, insisting that “no daylight” exists between the United States and Israel, who perpetuate a false understanding of this relationship — a pretense that may benefit Israel, but certainly does not benefit the United States. .... Their hero is simultaneously our traitor because the prerequisites of Israeli safety and well-being differ from the prerequisites of American safety and well-being. (Jonathan Pollard, the American who spied for Israel, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987. While working for US naval intelligence, he had stolen suitcases full of top secret documents and passed them on to Israel. Last Friday, having spent 30 years in prison, he reached the end of that sentence and was released on parole at the age of 62. Pollard was, as he insists, acting out of love for Israel and concern for its security – and, despite the wads of cash and fat diamonds he was paid for his spying, despite the allegations that he tried to sell sensitive US intel secrets to other countries, too, Pollard’s self-proclaimed motivations are what bind Israelis to him.)

MBFC analysis of Politico Europe

NOTES:

1. For decades Israel has, and still does, aggressively spy on the US and what they learn is sometimes used against us.

2. I strongly disagree with the argument that Israel knows Israel’s best interests. Looking back at decades of blood and misery, Israel has consistently undermined its own best interests in the name of extremist theocratic, authoritarian Zionism and the arrogance, hate and bigotry it inspires. If the US had forced and maintained a two-state solution for the benefit of Israel and the Palestinians long ago, the current war very likely would not have happened. Would not have happened because it could not have happened if the two states were monitored and peace competently militarily enforced. Now it is too late for that. In the US, a directly analogous situation is America’s extremist authoritarian radical right constantly blocking laws that would deal with the US-Mexico border situation.