Russia reportedly supplying Iran with weapons to retaliate against Israel

How does the US respond if Russia arms Iran to attack Israel? I've worried that it might come to this, given Russia's much improved relations with Iran which has supplied them with drones for their fight against Ukraine/NATO in that proxy war. I hope the 2 conflicts (Ukraine and Israel-Palestine) are not becoming interrelated in some unpredictable way by virtue of the  Iran factor. I don't know where this is going, but it's bad news. Here's the latest.

Times of Israel today writes:

Iranian officials say Russia has begun delivering advanced air defense and radar equipment to Iran after Tehran asked the Kremlin for the arms, the New York Times reported Monday.

While local Iranian media reported that Tehran had requested the equipment, a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and another official confirmed to the Times that not only had the request been made, but that deliveries had started.

The development came with the Middle East on edge at the expectation of a direct Iranian attack on Israel as revenge for Israel’s alleged assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the country must be ready to quickly go on the offensive in the event of an Iranian assault. The Times report did not say what equipment Iran had requested from Russia or what had been delivered. Iran already has some Russian-made S-300 air defense systems, though Moscow now has the more advanced S-400 system.

In April, Iran carried out an unprecedented direct attack on Israel it said was revenge for the killing of a senior army commander in a Syria strike it blamed on Israel. The wave of some 300 missiles and drones was almost entirely intercepted by Israeli air defense systems in cooperation with the US [In fact, without the US successfully intercepting more than half of the incoming drones and missiles, the Israelis would surely have suffered a devastating blow--ed.] and a roster of allies and Arab countries in the region. It caused only minor damage, though a young Bedouin girl was seriously hurt by falling shrapnel.

At the time, Israel apparently responded by striking an S-300 system near a nuclear site in Iran, though it did not confirm the matter.

 

The Times report came as Iranian state media said the country’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian told a visiting senior ally of Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin that Tehran is determined to expand relations with its “strategic partner Russia.”

“Russia is among the countries that have stood by the Iranian nation during difficult times,” Pezeshkian told Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia’s security council, Iranian state media report.

In further comments reported during the meeting with Shoigu, Pezeshkian said Israel’s “criminal actions” in Gaza and the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran last week “are clear examples of the violation of all international laws and regulations.”

Tehran has for years been arming and training proxy groups around the Middle East including Hezbollah, Hamas and Yemen’s Houthis to attack Israel and others.

War erupted on October 7 when Palestinian terror group Hamas led a devastating cross-border attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, during which terrorists abducted 251 people to the Gaza Strip. Israel responded with a military offensive to destroy Hamas in Gaza and free the hostages.

Russia, which has largely backed Hamas and allied terror groups since the October 7 massacres [Note: there is no record of Russian military support of Hamas, so this is probably a reference to Russian state media coverage which is, according to NYT, supportive of Hamas as described in this article-ed.] , has condemned the killing of Haniyeh and called on all parties to refrain from steps that could tip the Middle East into a wider regional war.

 See also NYT article here.

About making babies; The fight for piping plover beach access

For years 'n years, some people argued that there are not enough babies being made. One argument is that economic growth is predicated on population growth. Another is that Malthusian predictions of overpopulation and collapse have always been wrong, e.g., because science saves our bacon and it will continue to do so. 

For me, those arguments never made much sense to me. In my early years, overpopulation seemed to be bad enough despite advances in agricultural science keeping most people mostly fed most of the time. My logic was pretty simple: (i) The more people there are, the more pressure and damage there is to the environment, (ii) overpopulation generally puts downward pressure on quality of life and the value of all life including human, and (iii) sooner or later science, coupled with intractable wealth inequality, would not be able to keep up. These days, the logic includes (iv) overpopulation seems to put added pressure on democracies, nudging them to move toward authoritarianism. (My limited searching for the effects of high population on democracy vs authoritarianism does not turn up much data to support or refute opinion iv)

A NYT article discusses the political weaponization of the alleged lack of babies "crisis" (not paywalled):

Why Are So Many Americans Choosing to Not Have Children?

For years, some conservatives have framed the declining fertility rate of the United States as an example of eroding family values, a moral catastrophe in slow motion.

JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, recently came under fire for saying in 2021 that the nation was run by “childless cat ladies” who “hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous D.C. and New York status games.”

Last year, Ashley St. Clair, a Fox News commentator, described childless Americans this way: “They just want to pursue pleasure and drinking all night and going to Beyoncé concerts. It’s this pursuit of self-pleasure in replace of fulfillment and having a family.”

Researchers who study trends in reproductive health see a more nuanced picture. The decision to forgo having children is most likely not a sign that Americans are becoming more hedonistic, they say. For one thing, fertility rates are declining throughout the developed world.

Rather, it indicates that larger societal factors — such as rising child care costs, increasingly expensive housing and slipping optimism about the future — have made it feel more untenable to raise children in the United States.  

Right now, there are plenty of reasons young Americans might be pessimistic, [academic family demographer Karen Guzzo] said, including climate change, frequent gun violence and the recent pandemic [also cited in the article, high student debt, high housing cost and high child care cost].

Why is it that America's political right is always so damned quick to draw negative moral inferences about things they do not like about how other people live their private lives? It arguably is mostly because America's political right has become radical right and authoritarian, probably exacerbated by overpopulation and the irrationality that radical authoritarian dark free speech foments. From what I can tell, most American radical right authoritarians think they have every right to dictate nearly every aspect of everyone's lives according to their infallible moral values. Their values trump our values because they do not compromise or operate in good will or good faith. 

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A NYT article discusses the constant pressure on the environment caused at least in part by too many people:

These Birds Have Their Own Beach. 

Their Human Neighbors Want In.

Every summer, a neighborhood in Queens loses its beach to piping plovers, an endangered shorebird. Some residents want it back

On a mile-long stretch of the boardwalk in Edgemere, a neighborhood in the Rockaways that was a thriving resort destination a century ago, you can still see open skies, dunes and the ocean.

But for most of the summer, the beach here is closed.

Since 1996, this swath of sand and surf has been reserved for much of the spring and summer for nesting coastal piping plovers, which are endangered in New York and protected federally by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Along the Eastern Seaboard, from barrier islands to private and public beaches on the mainland, efforts are being made to provide safe habitats for them.

Some residents of Edgemere say the beach restrictions are unfair and further isolating for an area with a history of neglect that already lacks basics like a grocery store, a playground and reliable drainage on the often-flooded streets. Some are now asking if the beach can be shared during peak season with the surrounding community and leveraged for a revival of the neighborhood.

The grayish, brown and white birds, about seven inches in length, are at risk of extinction — about 6,000 currently live along the Atlantic Coast — because of human development, disturbances like vandalism and natural predators on the shoreline. (Plover species native to the Great Lakes and the northern Great Plains are also federally protected.)

The plover beach in Edgemere has evolved into a model of habitat preservation in an urban setting, drawing nature lovers from across New York. It is the only city-owned beach closed to the public and dedicated to plovers and other threatened shorebirds during their nesting season from April through August.

Qs: Can the beach can be shared during peak season with the surrounding community and leveraged for a revival of the neighborhood? How are the inevitable human vandals going to be dealt with? Or, should the plover just go extinct because humans just gotta be human and we need lots more of 'em?

There's about 6,000 of them left

About the blatant authoritarianism of JD Vance and America's radical right

An NYT analysis article comments (not paywalled) about power and what America's radical right thinks about the political left:

How JD Vance Thinks About Power

Mr. Vance has been blunt about wanting to break norms and test constitutional limits to execute his ideas: “We have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there”

In September 2021, JD Vance offered two predictions about former President Donald J. Trump and one piece of advice.

Mr. Trump would run again in 2024, Mr. Vance said. He would win.

And when he did, Mr. Vance counseled, he needed the right people around him this time.

“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Mr. Vance said on a podcast. “Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did,” Mr. Vance said, citing a (possibly apocryphal) quotation long attributed to America’s seventh president, “and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

He has urged Republicans to “seize the endowments” of left-leaning universities, punishing nominal ideological foes through dramatic changes to the tax code, and warmly quotes Richard Nixon’s observation about higher education: “The professors are the enemy.”

He has suggested that parents should receive extra votes in elections — one for each child in their care — to dilute the electoral power of the left.

“We’re still terrified of wielding power,” Mr. Vance complained of his party last year.

Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist and an ally of Mr. Vance’s who helped catalyze campaigns on the right against critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, said the move from a traditionalist like Mr. Pence to Mr. Vance exemplified “how the Republican Party is going to think about power moving forward.”

People whom Mr. Vance has cited to explain his worldview or detail who helped shape his thinking include Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame who has suggested that conservatives must harness the power of the state to counter “liberal totalitarianism”; Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist for whom Mr. Vance worked; and Curtis Yarvin, a prominent voice on the New Right who has argued that American democracy has devolved to the point that the country needs a monarchical leader.  

He has said that Alex Jones, the Infowars conspiracy theorist, is a more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow — in part to get a rise out of Democrats, he has allowed, but also because he recognized key truths in Mr. Jones’s animating arguments, according to 2021 remarks from Mr. Vance reported by ProPublica: “that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country,” Mr. Vance said, “that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts, too.”

The article is long and detailed. It makes clear that Vance and America's authoritarian radical right wealth and power movement sees the situation as fighting against “liberal totalitarianism”, “sex perverts”, “professors” and a country in need of a dictator in the form of a “monarchical leader” like DJT. What is truly terrifying here is Vance's deranged, incoherent assertion that radical right authoritarians are “terrified of wielding power.” That is beyond insane. Their lust for unrestrained power (and wealth) cannot be clearer. Their contempt for the Constitution and rule of law are just as clear.

The cruelty, viciousness, mendacity, moral rot and intolerance of the Republican authoritarian wealth and power movement is undeniable. All of it is now explicit.

Yabbut, waddabout Hillary,

Hunter's laptop, Joe's crimes . . . .

The coming election war

A few days ago, I posted about comments that Rachael Maddow made concerning DJT's recent public statements asserting that he "had plenty of votes" and people did not need to vote for him. Maddow hypothesized that DJT planned to steal the election by way of having election deniers in country and local elections offices refuse to certify vote counts. 

Now, more sources are making the similar arguments. Democracy Docket writes:

What Happens When Election Officials Refuse to Certify Results?

What was once seen as nothing more than a procedural part of the elections process has, in the past two election cycles, evolved into something of a battlefield in the election denial movement.

By all accounts, election certification is somewhat of a mundane statutory task: after tabulating all ballots — in-person, mail-in, provisional, absentee — local election officials certify that the ballot count is complete and accurate. That process is then repeated by election officials on the state level and, in the case of a presidential election, in Congress.

.... election certification has become one of the more pervasive, and legitimate, concerns of the upcoming election. What happens when rogue county and local election officials who refuse to certify their jurisdiction’s election results? A recent Rolling Stone investigation found there are at least 70 election officials in key swing states with a history of promoting conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election — igniting concerns that such officials would refuse to certify the election results in their jurisdiction should they not be happy with whichever candidate wins.

Lauren Miller Karalunas, a counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, explained “certification is the process by which local election officials sign off on the completion of the election results to say that: yes, the many processes to tabulate the results and confirm that they’re correct, have all taken place.” While that process is a necessary step in the election process, it’s more “a formality that’s procedurally important, but substantively very narrow,” Karalunas told Democracy Docket.

Some states use a single official, like the secretary of state, to certify all the election results from that state. Whatever the method, states do this within 30 days after the election, though some do it within one day. This certification process, Karalunas stressed, is a “mandatory process for election officials to do. It is not the time for them to investigate election results. And that’s because there are other procedures like election contests and court proceedings that are specifically designed to answer legal questions about election results.”

But what happens when an election official refuses to comply with a court order to certify an election? They could be removed from their position. In the 2022 midterm elections in North Carolina, two officials were removed for refusing to certify.

Do we need to be worried about rogue election officials disrupting the 2024 election?

Yes and no. As the Rolling Stone article noted, and as Marc Elias explained in his latest column, “we are going to see mass refusals to certify the elections” because the GOP is “counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”

Such refusals to certify local elections by rogue election officials are certainly going to cause a headache, but the important thing is that there are processes to ensure each election is properly certified.

“Voters should be rest assured that if they see an attempt to refuse to certify an election in their jurisdiction, that does not mean that there was a problem with the elections,” Karalunas said. “There are processes in place to make sure that certification ultimately will happen in a timely fashion and that their vote will be counted.”

Some states have legal means to reign in rogue election officials. So do not. Presumably, all states where election deniers who are in power will dispute the outcome if they do not like the result in their jurisdiction. The open question is what will happen in states that do not have laws that deal with corrupt election officials. And, what is to stop red states from getting rid of such laws, or even empowering rogues to wreck the entire state? 

In a separate article for Democracy Docket, election expert Marc Elias writes:

The Fight To Certify Elections Has Already Begun

Earlier this week, the Rolling Stone published a deep dive investigation into the pro-Trump election deniers who may refuse to certify accurate election results at the county level.

In the article, I voiced my concern for this possibility, predicting that “we are going to see mass refusals to certify the elections” because Republicans are “counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”

After Rachel Maddow featured the article on MSNBC, my concern quickly reached far and wide, with thousands of people taking to social media and flooding Democracy Docket’s inbox with questions about how this could happen and what can be done to prevent this seemingly new threat.

Except, this isn’t a new threat. I have been fighting against it in court for years.

We first saw Republicans deploy this anti-democratic tactic in the aftermath of the 2020 election. At the time, I was representing Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in recounts, election contests and litigation brought by Donald Trump and his allies.

As Michigan’s county certification date approached, we learned that the Trump campaign was pushing the GOP members of the Wayne County Canvassing Board to vote against certifying the election results in Detroit. Part of that effort, we have since learned, was a call from Trump himself, along with then-RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, to the local county canvass board members.

Ultimately, this scheme failed as did a subsequent effort to convince the Republican members of the statewide county canvassing board to refuse statewide certification. But its failure was not for lack of effort.  

So what are pro-democracy advocates like me supposed to do about it? Already, we’re fighting back. We’re in court to prevent Republicans from changing the rules so they can cheat later on. The excitement generated by Democratic candidates from top to bottom is aiding in our own volunteer efforts. And, there are dozens of election officials of both parties who take pride in their work and want a free and fair election.

This is the new normal. As long as the Republican Party remains morally corrupt and authoritarian, attacks on elections will continue. Remember, this 40 seconds of horror is from 1980:

Thoughts about authoritarianism as a label; About lies in a democracy

Authoritarianism

These days, I often write to editors, journalists and opinionators in the mainstream media and near-MSM complaining that they keep incorrectly calling America's radical right wealth and power (W&P) movement "conservative" and it's elites "conservatives". In fact, they are radical right and authoritarian. The main subspecies of American authoritarianism are corrupt autocrats with DJT as the current leader, corrupt brass knuckles capitalist plutocrats and/or corrupt, bigoted Christian nationalist theocrats. To be clear, all three are deeply corrupt. That is a state of affairs normalized and made popular by our deeply corrupt supreme court and its pro-corruption decisions like Citizens United in Jan. of 2010.

Despite my constant corrections, the elite MSM cognoscenti still usually, maybe ~97% of the time (?), refer to the various flavors of American authoritarianism and its elites as conservative or occasionally strongly conservative. On a rare occasion, the term autocratic pops up in connection with DJT, but that is about it. I see that kid gloves treatment as a major MSM failure. In my opinion, the failure amounts to a betrayal of the public trust, democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties.

But, is the MSM label warranted or justified? The only significant pushback I recall having ever gotten is that the MSM needs to stay neutral. Presumably that assertion comes from a sentiment of not wanting to inflame the situation. I guess it is possible that calling American authoritarians, and their kleptocratic authoritarianism, authoritarian, autocratic, plutocratic and Christian theocratic might inflame some who object to an authoritarian label and sincerely believe they are not authoritarian. 

But so what? An authoritarian label, e.g., kleptocratic dictator or corrupt Christian Sharia theocrat, is defensible. It is arguably factually true, not mere opinion. Power flows from (i) the people, and (ii) government defenses of democracy and protections of the people, to powerful authoritarians. From what I can tell, the American authoritarian W&P movement cannot be appeased, compromised with or shamed by blatant lies, slanders or crackpot conspiracy theories.* The whole damned thing has been normalized and sanctified** on the political right. The rest of us can just go pound sand if we don't like it. Our complaints mean nothing to the authoritarians, which is a key hallmark of authoritarianism, which by definition does not compromise unless forced to.

* Steve Bannon's rhetorical tactic for authoritarianism sums it up nicely: Flood the zone with shit! That is exactly what the radical right authoritarian W&P movement does.

** Sanctified by one, two or all three of the unholy, infallible ideologies, (i) love of a dictator and dictatorship, (ii) love of unfettered (unregulated, untaxed, freely polluting) brass knuckles capitalism, and/or (iii) unfettered, Christian theocracy and its bigoted (hate of the LGBQT community, hate of the establishment clause, etc.) Christian Sharia law.

Q: Is conservative or occasionally strongly conservative better than authoritarian or some form of it, e.g., kleptocratic plutocrat or corrupt dictator?

Science: Regarding lying in a democracy

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. .... And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. -- Hannah Arendt, one of the foremost analysts of 20th century totalitarianism 

Arendt makes a pretty good point. Fomenting distrust in just about everything is a key goal of authoritarian dark free speech (propaganda, lies, slanders, crackpottery, etc.) I find myself believing a lot less these days. From the radical right, I believe essentially nothing at all unless I independently know or believe there is some truth in it.

A recent research paper that Nature published considers lying, disinformation and the need for facts and truth in a democracy:

Liars know they are lying: 

differentiating disinformation from disagreement

Abstract 

Mis- and disinformation pose substantial societal challenges, and have thus become the focus of a substantive field of research. However, the field of misinformation research has recently come under scrutiny on two fronts. First, a political response has emerged, claiming that misinformation research aims to censor conservative voices. Second, some scholars have questioned the utility of misinformation research altogether, arguing that misinformation is not sufficiently identifiable or widespread to warrant much concern or action. Here, we rebut these claims. We contend that the spread of misinformation—and in particular willful disinformation—is demonstrably harmful to public health, evidence-informed policymaking, and democratic processes. We also show that disinformation and outright lies can often be identified and differ from good-faith political contestation. We conclude by showing how misinformation and disinformation can be at least partially mitigated using a variety of empirically validated, rights-preserving methods that do not involve censorship.

Introduction: One of the normative goods on which democracy relies is accountable representation through fair elections (Tenove, 2020). This good is at risk when public perception of the integrity of elections is significantly distorted by false or misleading information (H. Farrell and Schneier, 2018). .... Misleading or false information has always been part and parcel of political debate (Lewandowsky et al., 2017), and the public arguably accepts a certain amount of dishonesty from politicians (e.g., McGraw, 1998; Swire-Thompson et al., 2020). However, Trump’s big lie differs from conventional, often accidentally disseminated, misinformation by being a deliberate attempt to disinform the public.

An analysis of mis- and disinformation cannot be complete without also considering the role of the audience, in particular when people share information with others, where the distinction between mis- and disinformation becomes more fluid. In most instances, when people share information, they do so based on the justifiable default expectation that it is true (Grice, 1975). However, occasionally people also share information that they know to be false, a phenomenon known as “participatory propaganda” (e.g., Lewandowsky, 2022; Wanless and Berk, 2019). One factor that may underlie participatory propaganda is the social utility that persons can derive from beliefs, even if they are false, which may stimulate them into rationalizing belief in falsehoods (Williams, 2022). 

The circular and mutually reinforcing relationship between political actors and the public was a particularly pernicious aspect of the rhetoric associated with Trump’s big lie (for a detailed analysis, see Starbird et al., 2023). During the joint session of Congress to certify the election on 6 January 2021, politicians speaking in support of Donald Trump and his unsubstantiated claims about election irregularities appealed not to evidence or facts but to public opinion. For example, Senator Ted Cruz cited a poll result that 39% of the public believed the election had been “rigged”. Similarly, Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who is now Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, argued against certification of the election by arguing that “80 million of our fellow citizens, Republicans and Democrats, have doubts about this election; and 60 million people, 60 million Americans think it was stolen” (Salek, 2023).

Public opinion has shifted remarkably little since the election. In August 2023, nearly 70% of Republican voters continued to question the legitimacy of President Biden’s electoral win in 2020.

This nature paper really resonates with me. The authors are spot on to attack liars and those who defend lies with bad faith. Honest mistakes made in good will are one thing morally, but lies coupled with ill-will are much worse.

Lying implicates a core moral value on which democracies rely, i.e., respect for facts, true truths, and sound reasoning in good will, even when they are inconvenient. Public opinion without facts and truths does not and cannot replace facts and true truths. Moral philosopher Sisella Bok makes this point in her book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. I argued this point in 2020.[1]

Footnote:

1. A commentator commented about this paper:

The identifiability of willful disinformation For decades, the hallmark of Western news coverage about politicians’ false or misleading claims was an array of circumlocutions that carefully avoided the charge of lying—that is, knowingly telling an untruth with intent to deceive (Lackey, 2013)—and instead used adverbs such as “falsely”, “wrongly”, “bogus”, or “baseless” when describing a politician’s speech. Other choice phrases referred to “unverified claims” or “repeatedly debunked claims”. This changed in late 2016, when the New York Times first used the word “lie” to characterize an utterance by Donald Trump (Borchers, 2016). The paper again referred to Donald Trump’s lies within days of the inauguration in January 2017 (Barry, 2017) and it has grown into a routine part of its coverage from then on. Many other mainstream news organizations soon followed suit and it has now become widely accepted practice to refer to Trump’s lies as lies.

Given that lying involves the intentional uttering of false statements, what tools are at our disposal to infer a person’s intention when they utter falsehoods? How can we know a person is lying rather than being confused? How can we infer intentionality? 

Anecdotally, defenders of Donald Trump’s lies have raised precisely that objection to the use of the word “lie” in connection with his falsehoods. This objection runs afoul of centuries of legal scholarship and Western jurisprudence. Brown (2022) argues that inferring intentionality from the evidence is “ordinary and ubiquitous and pervades every area of the law” (p. 2). Inferring intentionality is the difference between manslaughter and murder and is at the heart of the concept of perjury—namely, willfully or knowingly making a false material declaration (Douglis, 2018).

I believe this summation describes the Misinformation Age: ‘Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’ -- Voltaire, 1765

Global wealth distribution; American abortion trends; Sexual violence data

American wealth inequality, 2010 data

In addition to wealth inequality in America. There are other forms of wealth inequality. Nature writes: 

Researchers have argued that wealthy nations rely on a large net appropriation of labor and resources from the rest of the world through unequal exchange in international trade and global commodity chains. Here we assess this empirically by measuring flows of embodied labor in the world economy from 1995–2021, accounting for skill levels, sectors and wages. We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labor from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labor was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level. This appropriation roughly doubles the labor that is available for Northern consumption but drains the South of productive capacity that could be used instead for local human needs and development. Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities. We find Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labor that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.

In this study, we use the EEMRIO model EXIOBASE to track flows of embodied labor between North and South, for the first time accounting directly for sectors, wages and skill levels (as defined by the International Labor Organization, ILO, described in Methods). This enables us to define the scale of labor appropriation through unequal exchange in terms of physical labor time, while also representing it in terms of wage value, in a manner that accounts for the skill level composition of labor embodied in North–South trade. Our category for the global North approximates the IMF list of ‘advanced economies’, with the South comprising all emerging and developing economies (see Methods). All monetary units are in constant 2005 Euros, corrected for inflation, represented in market exchange rates (MER), which is appropriate for international comparisons of income purchasing power in the global economy (see Methods).

We arrive at several major conclusions. (1) We find that the labor of production in the world economy, across all skill levels and all sectors, is overwhelmingly performed in the global South (on average 90–91%), but the yields of production are disproportionately captured in the global North. (2) The North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labor from the global South in 2021 (in other words, net of trade). This net appropriation occurs across all skill categories and sectors, including a large net appropriation of high-skilled labor. (3) The wage value of net-appropriated labor was €16.9 trillion in 2021, represented in Northern wages, accounting for skill level. In wage-value terms, the drain of labor from the South has more than doubled since 1995. 4) North–South wage gaps have increased dramatically over the period, across all skill categories and sectors, despite a small improvement in the South’s relative position. Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill as of 2021, and 83–98% lower for work of equal skill within the same sector. (5) Workers’ share of GDP has generally declined over the period, by 1.3 percentage points in the global North and 1.6 percentage points in the global South.

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The Australian and New Zealand science source Scimex reports:

More US women are attempting abortions without 

medical assistance since the laws changed

The proportion of women in the US who have attempted an abortion without medical assistance has increased since the country's Supreme Court overruled federal abortion protections, according to an international study. The researchers conducted a series of online surveys in late 2021-early 2022 and then again in mid 2023, asking women whether they had "ever taken or done something on their own, without medical assistance, to try to end a pregnancy". With just over 7,000 respondents each for the earlier and later surveys, the researchers say 2.4% of women in the earlier survey reported having self-managed an abortion, which rose to 3.3% in the later survey. The researchers say many who shared their stories were from marginalized groups and often used ineffective methods.

It is a small increase, but an increase was reasonably predictable. The research paper comments:

To our knowledge, this study represents the first population-based estimate of changes in attempts to self-manage abortion before and after the Dobbs decision. We observed an increase in the proportion of the US female population of reproductive age that reported experience with SMA [self-managed abortion] from 2.4% in 2021 to 3.4% in 2023, suggesting people are increasingly relying on self-sourced methods to end a pregnancy. This is likely a conservative estimate, given underreporting of abortion in self-administered surveys. Assuming people underreport SMA to the same degree they do past-year, facility-based abortion, the proportion with SMA experience increased from approximately 5% before Dobbs to 7% after Dobbs.

We all know where this is going.

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A Lancet research paper reports:

Intimate partner violence against adolescent girls: regional and national prevalence estimates and associated country-level factors

Intimate partner violence is a serious public health problem and negatively affects short-term and long-term health, development, and wellbeing of adolescent girls. Global estimates from WHO have shown that adolescent girls aged 15–19 years experience high rates of intimate partner violence. We aimed to estimate the lifetime and past-year prevalence and patterns of physical or sexual intimate partner violence against adolescent girls by male partners across 161 countries and areas, and to examine the country-level factors, including the prevalence of child marriage, associated with the lifetime and past-year prevalence of intimate partner violence in this age group.

Overall, the prevalence of both lifetime (154 countries) and past-year (157 countries) intimate partner violence against adolescent girls was higher in low-income and lower-middle-income countries and regions than in high-income countries and regions. Countries with higher rates of female secondary school enrolment and those with inheritance laws that are more gender-equal had lower prevalence of intimate partner violence against adolescent girls. Lower-income countries and societies with a high prevalence of child marriage had higher prevalence of physical or sexual intimate partner violence against adolescent girls.

Past-year physical or sexual (or both) intimate partner violence

Hey! Canada and Mexico are better than America -- not MAGA!