TikTok needs to get ahead of the curve on this US ban by aggressively pushing creators to advertise VPNs.

There's no reason ByteDance would divest TikTok, it makes no sense from a profit perspective. Far more likely is that TikTok gets banned in the US and US users are forced to go through a VPN.

Same reason Alphabet won't divest it's global Google operations to operate in China.

"Resistance is continually benefitting. Whatever you pay in resistance, if you don't reap it in your lifetime, you will get the results later." —the revolutionary, resisting martyr Basil Al-Araj

From the Resistance News Network. I don’t read Arabic, I’m not sure I understand the word “benefitting”, context clues tell me it’s just something that generally positive.

Yemeni spokesman for Ansarallah interviewed by Rania Khalek

i'm not a politician or anything but "2024: building a bridge to genocide" maybe isn't the best re-election slogan

Israel bombed Rafa again

Fake report of IDF spokesperson 'mass resignation' goes viral on social media

We're clearly not bullying enough.

U.S. Seeks Semiconductor Supremacy with New Funding Initiatives

Or: If CHIPS was so good, why isn't there a CHIPS 2-- oh.

Randomly remembering a guy I met who said he wouldn't have to worry about food after a nuclear holocaust because he knows how to hunt deer

One minute talking about "freedom and democracy" and the next minute praising Finland and Sweden for joining NATO with absolutely no democratic input.

haiti does little bit prison abolition

Edit: to be slightly less nebulous, from aj

Gangs led by Jimmy Cherizier, a former police officer known as Barbecue, are trying to force Henry from power.

Pierre Esperance of the National Network for Defense of Human Rights said only about 100 of the National Penitentiary’s estimated 3,800 inmates remained inside after the assault on Saturday night.

One voluntary prison worker on Sunday said that 99 prisoners had opted to remain in their cells in the main jail for fear of being killed in the crossfire. These included several retired Colombian soldiers who were jailed for their alleged involvement in the assassination of former President Jovenel Moise.

The prime minister’s exact whereabouts remained unclear on Sunday. Henry had been due to return from a visit to Kenya where he signed a security deal to tackle gang violence.

Nearly 15,000 people have been forced to leave their homes in recent days, with 10 sites hosting internally displaced people emptied over the weekend, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Henry, who became prime minister in 2021 after Moise’s assassination, was supposed to step down by early February, but told a regional summit in Guyana before travelling to Kenya that he would only hold elections by August 2025 once the situation was more stable.

The last elections took place in 2016.

What’s the story with Moon of Alabama? I occasionally see posts linked here and in naked capitalism. The posts themselves seem ok but there seem to be a lot of nazis in the comments.

According to a new study by University of California Riverside researchers, roughly two weeks of training for GPT-3 consumed about 700,000 liters of freshwater. The global AI demand is projected by 2027 to account for 4.2-6.6 billion cubic meters of water withdrawal, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of Denmark or half of the United Kingdom.

Much of the water to cool the cloud is lost in steam emissions “where the water will evaporate and remove the heat from the data center to the environment,” according to one of the authors of the study, Shaolei Ren.

Other research has pointed out the growing carbon footprint of AI. For example, in 2019, researchers found that training one of the larger AI models can emit as much greenhouse gas as five average American cars over their entire lifetimes.

400k songbirds killed by organized crime in Cyprus - CW dead birds

Your Thursday Briefing

Also here on the website.

We have a collection of pieces on the reaction to Victoria Nuland's resignation. Bhadrakumar is, as he usually is, fairly objective and netrual about her and her history in the region and agrees that Nuland's exit is a reflection of the collapse of the American strategy with Ukraine.^IP^ Moon of Alabama is a lot more belligerent and celebrates her resignation.^MoA^ And Naked Capitalism highlights that her career over the last four or so years has generally been of failure and backfiring, what with her visit to Niger, though obviously her ideology has succeeded magnificently in killing a LOT of people for no real reason in Ukraine, so perhaps, like with Kissinger, we shouldn't overly celebrate.^NC^

Macron has called for a "strategic leap" in thinking in Ukraine, deciding not to back down on his comments about sending NATO troops to Ukraine (which could very much be a trigger for WW3), though his officials did the Biden thing and said "No, he was actually talking about demining soldiers and trainers.".^BNE^

An Australian defence official has warned that Washington must clear regulatory impediments in AUKUS in order to catch up to Russia and China, who are outpacing the West in some areas militarily.^SCMP^

Ralph Nader has asserted that the real Gaza death toll is at least 200,000, which is entirely plausible (though I personally think that this is sort of the "guaranteed" number of deaths even if Israel's government collapsed tomorrow and aid started pouring into Gaza, due to how many people must be essentially dead from malnutrition and disease and various injuries and cannot be helped - and thus the number might be off significantly but still get the general picture correct).^NC^

Global South climate groups are significantly funded by the German government, which has been threatening to withdraw funding if those groups criticize Israel.^CCN^

Meanwhile, South Africa's Minister of International Relations has said that countries should use force to break Israel's blockade of aid entering Gaza, saying that Western countries should use their soldiers to escort trucks into Gaza under the assumption that Israel will not fire upon them, which, uh, doesn't seem especially historically accurate given a certain ship that starts with L and ends with iberty.^AN^

Chile's President, Boric, has said that Israeli companies cannot attend the 2024 aerospace FIDAE event in April.^MP^

The EU has been discussing banning Russian aluminium but has decided to not do so because it would cause shortages and raise prices. I am genuinely surprised that this has stopped them so far and don't expect it to stop them for much longer.^BNE^ Meanwhile, the EU is slapping retroactive tariffs on electric vehicles from China as they pour into the EU and reduce profits for European manufacturers.^SCMP^

Five US tech giants have been cleared in a cobalt child mining case in the DRC.^RT^

The UK's House of Lords has once again set back a bill which would allow the UK to deport migrants to Rwanda after doing so before in January, but Sunak has vowed that the circus will continue.^AN^

France has enshrined abortion in its constitution, making it the world's first country to do so.^E^

Bulgaria's Prime Minister has tabled the resignation of his government as part of an agreement made nine months prior, as the two coalition parties are fierce opponents and are rotating power between themselves.^BNE^

Croatia will soon have a general election, with the Prime Minister expressing confidence in his party's chances. This is occuring in the context of protests and motions in parliament calling for immediate re-elections, and scandals inside the current government. Opposition conservative parties are banding together to try and defeat the incumbent party.^BNE^

A Chinese-built flood control project in Poland has been recently completed, five months ahead of schedule, with the flood control system now able to withstand 300-year floods.^PD^

A Qatari waste management company has said that it's constructing a hydrogen plant in Nigeria worth $350 million, which could address waste management challenges but also generate clean electricity.^BNE^

Workers in the Turkish textile industry have been widely exploited after the earthquake over a year ago which killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions, with most pressured into returning to work mere weeks after losing their homes, with all the mental and physical problems as a result in addition to the financial.^ET^

Egypt signed an $8 billion deal with the IMF, more than double the original $3 billion, with the Egyptian central bank simultaneously deciding to float the Egyptian pound, raising the key rate to 27.25% causing the pound to fall by more than a third against the dollar. Egypt is also obviously going to have to privatize things.^MEE^

Somalia has gained full membership of the East African Community after first applying in 2012, joining the DRC, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya. This will allow them to have more trade, investment, industry, free movement of people, and so on.^AN^

Ghana's proposed LGBTQIA+ criminalization bill could lead to a loss of $3.8 billion in World Bank financing within the next five to six years, and $850 million this year alone, amid an economic crisis. The President is thus taking his time thinking about signing it.^A^

Pakistan's new Prime Minister has vowed that he will stabilize the national economy, by - you guessed it - privatizing any state institution that isn't showing growth.^PD^

Sizable lithium reserves have been discovered in Kazakhstan, consisting of over 75,000 tons or about $16 billion worth.^EN^

Sri Lanka's economy may finally be out of its gigantic rut (experiencing 6 consecutive contractions in quarters from 2022 to 2023) with recovery beginning in the second half of 2023 and now continuing into 2024. Inflation dropped dramatically over this time period from 70% to 5.9%.^PD^

China is considering providing equal social benefits for its 300 million migrant workers as the rest of the Chinese population enjoys, and wants to move those who are eligible to permanent urban residency, which produces more consumer demand than for rural residents.^SCMP^ China is also boosting its investment in science and technology by 10% this year, amounting to $52 billion. China is the second biggest spender on R&D after the US.^SCMP^ China is cutting back on one of its 2025 climate goals, with the government targeting only a "modest" cut to the amount of energy needed to power its economy this year.^CCN^

Peru's Prime Minsiter has resigned amid a scandal of an irregular hiring, which he denies ever happened.^MP^

Paraguay has reported 0% average inflation from January's values, although there have been increases in education and good and increases in the Consumer Price Index by 0.5%.^MP^

Michael Roberts' latest piece on China, where he dunks pretty hard on Western China Understanders. It is genuinely bewildering that these economists are giving economic advice to a country that is beating them in many ways, while that same advice is used in the West and is producing stagnation and recession. I get that these people don't give a shit about the actual economy and are merely focussed on funnelling more profits into the top 0.01% with all this fancy jargon as a smokescreen, but you'd think cognitive dissonance would kick in at some point.

Like, Russia is doing better than you! The same country that you predicted would experience unsalvageable economic collapses in 2022 is now doing considerably better than you in economic growth! If I was in their position and had even a shred of dignity, I'd say "Fuck. Well, my economic theory doesn't seem to be working, then. Let's see if there are any better ones, which are predicting events better than me."

Can China succeed in achieving both its growth target for this year and reach the longer-term objectives over the next ten years or so, taking nearly 1.4bn people up to living standards only enjoyed by a small group of nations in Europe, North America and East Asia?

If you were to read the Western press and their economists, you would conclude that the chances of China doing that are no better than a snowball surviving on being thrown into the sun. It is the almost unanimous cry of Western economists, particularly the ‘China experts’, that the China ‘miracle’ is over, and worse, China is heading into a debt deflation spiral that will mean growth targets will not be met at best, and more likely there will be a major slump. This is despite the fact that in 2023 China had an official growth rate of 5.2%, more than double that of the ‘booming’ US economy, and five times the rate of growth in the rest of top capitalist economies of the G7. (Don’t get me into the argument that China’s growth figure is fake and growth is much lower. Those that argue this have little supporting evidence.)

Ah, but you see, manufacturing is in recession (as measured by official surveys), consumption is weak (still below pre-pandemic levels) and foreign investment, seen as the life-blood for the Chinese economy has dried up. And even worse, prices of goods and services are falling. Readers may be surprised to hear that Western economists, who spend much of their time demanding that inflation rates in their countries be reduced to no more than 2% a year after the post-COVID inflationary spiral of the last three years, see no merit in the lack of any rising prices (and therefore rising real wages) in the Chinese economy: it’s ‘inflation bad for the US; but no inflation bad for China’.

In a recent article, John Ross has shown that to achieve China’s Plan GDP target for 2025 ie a doubling GDP from 2021, it would require an average annual growth of 4.7% a year. So far, China is ahead of this goal with annual average growth in 2020-2023 of about 5%. Indeed, since the beginning of the pandemic, China’s economy has grown by 20.1% and the U.S. by 8.1%—that is China’s total GDP growth since the beginning of the pandemic has been two and half times greater than the US.

Yes, China’s annual growth rates have slowed from the breakneck pace of the 1990s onwards and the Chinese workforce is declining. But just look the increase in GDP per person that China has achieved compared to the G7 economies since 2019, some of which have even contracted (IMF data). The rise on per capita basis is even higher against the US (nearly four times).

Yes, increasingly China cannot rely on an expansion of a cheap workforce from rural areas to achieve more output, but instead must raise the productivity of the existing labour force, especially through investment in technical innovation. And it is doing so. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows that ‘total factor productivity’ (which is a crude measure of innovation) is growing at 6% a year, while it has been falling in the US.

Despite this evidence, every year the Western ‘China’ experts (and even many in China itself) predict stagnation, given the huge debt levels in all sectors. China is going to stagnate like Japan has done in the last three decades. The only way to avoid ‘Japanification’, say these experts, is to ‘rebalance’ the economy from ‘over-investment’, ‘excessive savings’ and exports to a domestic consumer-led economy as in the West and reduce the state control of the economy so that the private sector can flourish.

This year on the occasion of the NPC, Martin Wolf, the Keynesian guru of the Financial Times, returned to this theme, echoing the arguments of other Keynesian China experts like Michael Pettis. According to Wolf, China’s growth will now slow to a trickle as in Japan because it overloaded with excessive debt and because it has not rebalanced the economy towards “the consumer”. China needs to get its consumption share up to Western levels or it will not be able to grow and so stay locked in a ‘middle income’ trap.

...

But how can anybody claim that the mature ‘consumer-led’ economies of the G7 have been successful in achieving steady and fast economic growth, or that real wages and consumption growth have been stronger there? Indeed, in the G7, consumption has failed to drive economic growth and wages have stagnated in real terms over the last ten years, while real wages in China have shot up. Moreover, these consumer-led economies have been hit by regular and recurring slumps in production that have lost trillions in output and income for their populations. The irony is that China’s consumption growth rate is way higher than in the G7 economies.

China has not had a contraction in national income in any year since 1976, while the consumer-led G7 economies have had slumps in 1980-2, 1991, 2001, 2008-9 and 2020. Much has been made of China’s ‘disastrous’ zero COVID policy. But apart from saving millions of lives, China still did not enter a slump in 2020, unlike all the G7 economies in 2020.

...

Moreover, the arguments of the Western experts that China is stuck in an old model of investment-led export manufacturing and needs to ‘rebalance’ towards a consumer-led domestic economy where the private sector has a free rein are just not empirically valid. Is China’s weak consumer sector forcing it to try and export manufacturing ‘over capacity’? Not according to a recent study by Richard Baldwin. He finds that the export-led model did operate up to 2006, but since then domestic sales have boomed, so that the exports to GDP ratio has actually fallen. “Chinese consumption of Chinese manufactured goods has grown faster than Chinese production for almost two decades. Far from being unable to absorb the production, Chinese domestic consumption of made-in-China goods has grown MUCH faster than the output of China’s manufacturing sector.”

There's more in the article for enjoyers of Chinese economics statistics, but to summarize the argument, I think it's really as simple as: China needs to do the exact opposite of whatever Western economists are telling them to do.

It would be wrong to say that neoliberal economics "doesn't work", because it's actually working stunningly well at its real purpose, which is accumulating profit and repressing the working class, despite failing dramatically and increasingly regularly at its stated purpose, which is some hand-wavey shit about economic growth and stability or whatever. But the contradiction between these two points can only be delayed so long as you don't have a major competitor. Once you do, you must institute a different kind of economics which actually does produce economic growth across society and has some provisions for labor, which is of course the real motive force of the entire economy, because it's now in your material interests to do so in order to maintain imperialism and monopolies.

I'm unsure what the breaking point will be, or when it will happen, but a war against China (proxy or otherwise) seems like a pretty safe bet. The only thing then is whether the current class of capitalists will resist this new state of affairs, and doom Western hegemony, or accept it, plunging us into the biggest Cool Zone of human history with a reinvigorated American working class slaving away for an American bourgeoisie fighting against a Chinese communist superpower.

Gonna start slapping reminder bot requests on tweets saying the uncommitted votes don’t matter and that Biden doesn’t need those votes.

Rubbing it in their faces on November 6th is about the only good thing I can get out of this election.

per curiam: states can't enforce section 3 of the 14th amendment for federal office holders; the don lives on

Production of PCBs was banned in the US in 1979.

“The study’s assumption that about 43,000 tonnes of PCBs could have been legally produced in 2019 in the US may well be the case despite uncertainties. This would outstrip Monsanto’s 1970 peak US production of 39,000 tonnes in 1970. On a global scale current unintentional PCB production could be much higher and needs urgent investigation.”

Houthi Attack on Commercial Ship Leaves 3 Dead and 4 Injured

After this attack CENTCOM claimed that the Huties are a great threat to world trade

Yemeni forces attacked a merchant ship passing through the Red Sea last Wednesday, leaving three sailors dead.

According to the Central Command of the United States (CETCOM), these were the first deaths due to Hutu attacks since they initiated the assaults on ships of imperialist countries, according to Yemeni forces these actions are in support of the genocide in Palestine.

CETCOM further reported that four people were injured and the ship, owned by Greece and Barbados, was severely damaged.

The action against the vessel occurred 50 miles from the port of Aden. Yahya Sarea, a Houthi spokesman, confirmed that Yemeni rebel forces were responsible for the attack.

According to Sarea they sent warning signals to the ship that were ignored. The attack caused a fire on board.

Mathew Miller, spokesman for the US State Department, responded by saying that the attack will not go unpunished and that Washington will take action against the Houthis.

Yesss... please more fascist infighting. https://news.yahoo.com/delusional-think-germany-had-changed-182251099.html

PBS: Here’s why you poors are wrong to feel like the economy is bad.

I hate this video so much. I wish I hadn’t watched it. A lot of the replies are good though.

The cringe of this deeply unserious nation I inhabit will never be purged but with blood. They're now "working on a big screen solution" for the funeral of the pompous fascist shitbag who was leader of the conservative party until comrade cerebral hemorrhage connected him to Satan's wifi a couple of days ago. The planners of the event are expecting people to be flocking outside the church like it was a football match just because they're so sad to see the local dollar store Mussolini go.

Obviously fuck the Royals, but Katespiracy is turning into a rabbit hole:

First post-op photo of Princess of Wales withdrawn due to ‘manipulation’

For an organisation whose role is to be a PR agency, this is utterly bizarre, and gives me hope that there is actually some sort of crisis happening for those bastards

The Russian Ministry of Defense reported the downing of a MiG-29 of the UAF in its daily briefing. Nevertheless, some Ukrainian news sources said that the fighter jet was downed by Ukrainian air defenses in a friendly-fire incident.