John Helmer about Sigizmund Khrzhizhanovsky writings

 In 1939 a little known writer in Moscow named Sigizmund Khrzhizhanovsky published his idea that the Americans, then the Germans would convert human hatred into a new source of energy powering everything which had been dependent until then on coal, gas, and oil.

Is Russia becoming Asian?

Russia becomes an Asian nation 

Gilbert Doctorow on Poland’s ambitions

Here

“ According to SVR, Poland is coordinating this issue with the United States. The idea is to establish military and political control by Warsaw over the “its historic territories” which today fall within the boundaries of Ukraine. Poland would introduce its troops into the Western regions of the country under cover of a mission to “protect the territory from Russian aggression.”  Eventually this would be expected to lead to a partition of Ukraine. The Poles would install a friendly government in the territory they control, ousting the Ukrainian nationalists.”

India looking for assets in Russia?

 India looks to scoop up offloaded Western assets in Russia – media

Check also https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/govt-asks-state-firms-to-consider-buying-russian-oil-assets/articleshow/91159230.cms

Linking colonialism and climate change

 Colonialism: why leading Climate Scientists have finally acknowledged its Link with Climate Change

Vijaya Gadde in a bit of trouble?

 Twitter Policy Head Vijaya Gadde Cried At Board Meeting Following Elon Musk Takeover; Billionaire Slams Her For Censoring News Agency

Check also https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/4/27/elon-musks-44-billion-dollar-twittocracy

Solar power from Darwin to Singapore

Biggest Solar-and-Battery Installation in World, at Darwin, Australia, to Power Singapore 3,000 miles Away 

Spengler on China-India-Russia

 Demographics push China-India-Russia triple entente

An update from a (pro-Russian) blog

 Here Part of it about the developments in Transnistria, a strip between Moldavia and Ukraine which has Russian peace keepers,

Another A Recap Of The War In Ukraine - by Gonzalo Lira

Both have lots of comments.

Hellaro dance

 

https://youtu.be/X4kIDt2EUdo

Another https://m.youtube.com/watch?fbclid=IwAR1nN7UXnZMRrqrJ1K2kSciLynyOt0PwRL2DKyKcHEc40-wRrUdjaEJ5FJ4&v=cqof4tlkEp0&feature=youtu.be

Aaron Mate on Syria and Ukraine

 'Al Qaeda is on our side': How Obama-Biden team empowered terrorists in Syria by Aaron Mate 

Ukraine is the Obama-Biden team's second major proxy war against Russia. The first was Syria, where US support for the insurgency helped create an Al Qaeda safe haven.

Geetanjali Shree

 Geetanjali Shree I never heard of her before. Her recent novel translated by Daisy Rockwell has been shortlisted for Booker Prize.

Full court press

US warns China about Pacific base

Turkish foreign minister comments on Ukraine conflict

 Turkey Says Some NATO Members Want Longer Ukraine War to Hurt Russia

“ The view among some NATO members on the war was summarized by a recent report from The Washington Post. The report said: “For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.”“

Emmanuel Todd on China

China unlikely to become a dominant superpower: Emmanuel Todd 

Chinese economy

 How Big Is The Chinese Economy Compared to The West?

"To summarize then: China is:

1. the number 1 trade partner of more nations than anyone else, and more than the US had in 1990.
2. the world’s largest manufacturing nation
3. Technologically near even with the West, and in some places ahead.
4. The nation that helps the most other nations develop.
5. When you adjust for PPP and service sector crap, a larger economy than the US. With Russia, a larger economy than the US and the EU combined."

Transparency

 Lockheed Martin and Friends Don’t Want You to Know What They’re Up To

Conversible economist on slavery in Brazil and USA

 Slavery and Economic Development in Brazil

Slavery and the History of US Economic Growth

An excerpt from the second article:

"However, as numerous writers have pointed out over time, the coexistence of slavery with British and American capitalism of the 17th century does not prove that slavery was necessary or sufficient for an emerging capitalism. As many writers have pointed out, historical slavery across what we now call Latin America. At that time, Spain and Portugal (among others) were also active participants in the slave trade, yet their economies did not develop an industrial revolution like that of the UK. Countries all over Latin America were recipients of slaves, like the area that became the US, but those countries did not develop a US-style economy.  Clearly, drawing a straight line from slavery to capitalism of the Anglo-American variety would be wildly simplistic. "

Yves Smith takes stock of the Ukraine conflict

 Russia’s Campaign in Ukraine and the West’s Response: The End of the Beginning?

A confession

I grew up in left wing circles. But I was never a communist, partly because I did not understand what it was and secondly I did not believe in a philosophy of every thing. But Russia always had a hold on me as far as I can remember. It is possibly due to MIR books that were available and also the influence of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy who I read when I was in my teens, I think it was in the 1990s, I was travelling possibly to visit Peter Scott and the plane stopped longer than usual in Moscow. It was hot and they opened the doors and the plane’s step ladders were down. There was a sudden and strong urge to go down and touch Mother Russia. I decided that it was a silly feeling for an agnostic like me and refrained. May be if I get a chance again and if health permits, I will visit Russia.

P.S. It turned out to be an interesting trip. At one stage after Moscow, the toilets on our side were engaged and I went to another section of the plane. I found PPC Joshi ( a friend and a communist. His father was killed during The Telangana struggle around 1950) there who was going to the British Museum to get photocopies of Telugu books. I think, I met him later in Chicago which he visited for some book exhibition. It is possible that I am mixing up different trips.

P.S.

Ashutosh Jagalekar writes:Russia has always been a great country with terrible leaders. Freeman Dyson was so taken with it that he wanted to emigrate there instead of to the US after the war. But Stalin made it clear that he would not welcome foreigners.

Sergey Lavrov interview with 'India Today'

 

https://youtu.be/ecpRrep0twE

Robin Dunbar's newbook

 How Religion Evolved by Robin Dunbar review – sharp history of belief

Another review

Second phase of Russian operation in Ukraine

 Russia invades Ukraine from CNN

"We are completely surrounded," he[Maj. Serhii Volyna, commander of Ukraine's 36th Separate Marine Brigade] said. "There are about 500 wounded military, it is very difficult to provide them with medical care. They literally rot. There are civilians on the territory. They are also suffering from explosions, blasts on them, next to them. They [the Russians] use heavy aircraft bombs against us and strike with artillery."

A song from Awara

 

The Arabic origins of an iconic song in Taj Kapoor's Awara

A poem by Dana Giola ‘Being Happy’

 This is what poets do. Put words in to our mouths. We do not really know what we feel or felt then.

Being Happy

by Dana Gioia

Of course it was doomed. I know that now,

but it ended so quickly, and I was young.

I hardly remember that summer in Seattle—

except for her. The city seems just a rainy backdrop.

From the moment I first saw her at the office

I was hooked. I started visiting her floor.

I couldn’t work unless I caught a glimpse of her.

Once we exchanged glances, but we never spoke.

Then at a party we found ourselves alone.

We started kissing and ended up in bed.

We talked all night. She claimed she had liked me

secretly for months. I wonder now if that was true.

Two weeks later her father had a heart attack.

While she was in Chicago, they shut down our division.

I was never one for writing letters.

On the phone we had less to say each time.

And that was it—just those two breathless weeks,

then years of mild regret and intermittent speculation.

Being happy is mostly like that. You don’t see it up close.

You recognize it later from the ache of memory.

And you can’t recapture it. You only get to choose

whether to remember or forget, whether to feel remorse

or nothing at all. Maybe it wasn’t really love.

But who can tell when nothing deeper ever came along?

Moved to a new house

 Belonging to one of our daighters. May stay here until Ethan does not need us.

https://www.facebook.com/749518284/posts/10159235600023285/

Michael Hudson and Patrick Bond discuss China

 China – a sub-Imperial ally of the West? From two weeks ago. The first part from a month ago https://michael-hudson.com/2022/03/is-chinese-socialism-working/

Gilbert Doctorow's latest on Ukraine conflict

 The Russian Way of War: Part Two

"At the very start of the armed conflict, I remarked on the specifics of what I called ‘the Russian Way of War’ now being applied in Ukraine. This approach does not inflict death on huge numbers of civilians, does not count on a ‘shock and awe’ initial attack to demoralize and overrun the enemy.  I said at the time that the overriding considerations on the Russian side were the traditional ‘brotherly’ relations between Ukrainians and Russians, who were extensively intermarried and had relations on both sides of the national frontiers. The intent of Vladimir Putin and his war collegiums was to do minimal damage to the Ukrainian people, to try to separate the ‘healthy’ elements in the Ukrainian military command from the rabid nationalist Azov and similar irregular forces that had become embedded in the army over the past eight years. If the two could be separated, the war could be won with absolute minimum expenditure of materiel and loss of life.

However, in the early weeks of the operation, after it had become manifestly clear that these were illusions, that Russia was facing a unified military force supported by widespread popular civilian backing, still there was no change visible in how Russia was operating on the ground.  The only hint of change to come was the refocusing of available forces on the capture of Mariupol, to secure the whole Azov Sea littoral and the progressive redirection of the ground forces to the encirclement of the major part of the Ukrainian army that was entrenched just to the west of the line of demarcation with Donbas. In compensation, there was the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kiev and Chernigov, in the north."

He goes on to discuss "From the beginning, I have directed attention to what Russian social, academic and political elites have to say about the ‘special military operation.’  One of my key markers has been the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov political talk show and yesterday’s edition provided a lot of food for thought."

Stalemate in Ukraine

 Says Defence Politics Asia. Apart from what is secured already, further progress is difficult foot Russia. Ukraine seems to have got a second wind but sustaining it will depend on continued western help. The economoceffe cc TS on various countries involved will have a long term role. It seems to be a bit like the Syrian situation. 

https://youtu.be/Mz8mJo9_9yM

P.S. Russia possibly has an edge because it is closer to Russia. On the other hand, Ukraine and the West had eight years to build entrenched defences. So, the final contours may take at least a couple of years to form and will depend on the staying power of various parties involved.

John Helmer forecast for Ukraine

 Via Naked Capitalism “ The sources say this is not a plan for the breakup of the old Ukraine, nor is it a plan for the accession of Novorussia.   It is a plan “to keep the Ukraine broken”, in which the big fracture lines will be moved to the west — and kept there.”

Second part of Jacques Baud article

 The Military Situation in Ukraine is here as well as the first part.

The Daily grind of fighting reported redularly at Defence Politics Asia videos. Here is one ofDay 48: https://youtu.be/F53yBZElHUg

Below Day47:

A short review of THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING: A NEW HISTORY OF HUMANITY BY DAVID GRAEBER AND DAVID WENGROW.

 Look back in angerby Michael Robbins

Review of a new book on noise in human judgement

 Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment—A Review A review of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein.

Another Bill Gates book review

 Is this how your brain works? Review of a book by Jeff Hawkins ‘A Thousand Brains’

Wheeling and dealing in private armies

 Exclusive: Documents Reveal Erik Prince's $10 Billion Plan to Make Weapons and Create a Private Army in Ukraine Long read from Time magazine.

Michael Hudson: The Dollar Devours the Euro

  Michael Hudson: The Dollar Devours the Euro with lots of comments at Naked Capitalism. 

" I would not be surprised to see some African country become the “next Ukraine,” with U.S. proxy troops (there are still plenty of Wahabi advocates and mercenaries) against the armies and populations of countries seeking to feed themselves with grain from Russian farm and oil or gas from Russian wells.

The world economy is being enflamed, and the United States has prepared for a military response and weaponization of its own oil and agricultural export trade, arms trade and demands for countries to choose which side of the New Iron Curtain they wish to join."

Already, there is change of government in Pakistan. Biden is supposed to speak to Modi today https://www.dawn.com/news/1684466/biden-will-speak-to-modi-over-russian-imports Possibly full global press. 

John Michael Greeron the end of the European Age

The end of the European Age The author is a Druid and also writes on the occult. From the article:

“ That said, it’s the European age that’s ending, not the American age. The American age hasn’t begun yet. The United States these days is a Third World country catapulted by a chapter of historical accidents into a temporary position as global hegemon. Its Europeanized elites, in the usual Third World fashion, are a small minority maintaining a tenuous temporary mastery over restless masses that don’t share its ideals and its interests, and are beginning to sense their potential power. America is still young, and pregnant with the future; centuries from now, long after the European veneer has been thrown off, she will give birth to something else wholly new, and it will inevitably be even more unacceptable—and indeed wholly incomprehensible—to the conventional wisdom of Europe-as-it-is.” 

I do not understand this part of the article. May be there are hints in the comments. Here is a 2005 article by him which seems interesting https://www.ecoshock.org/transcripts/greer_on_collapse.pdf (How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse).

Andrei Martyanov On Ukraine conflict so far

 

https://youtu.be/j8a_e09FvXA

A collection of translations from Telugu to English

 https://www.facebook.com/749518284/posts/10159223015323285/

Critical Discourse in Telugu

'We are suspended in language'

 From Color to Consciousness: The Trouble With Describing Experience

The title is from Niels Bohr quotes

Jacques Baud On Ukraine

 The military situation in The Ukraine

An analysis from John Helmer

  HOW TO READ THE WAR IN REVERSE WITHOUT OUTSMARTING YOURSELF According to John Helmer, there are possibly several phases to this was and the second phase has started.

A review from Melbourne of a Telugu film

 RRR from Cinemachat

Oliver Golden, a story of Amercans in Russia

 Oliver Golden and one of the descendents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelena_Khanga

Anti-lynching bill

This Is Why It Took More Than 100 Years to Get an Anti-Lynching Bill 

Andhra Pradesh high court jails IAS officers

 Andhra Pradesh high court almost sends 8 IAS officers to jail for contempt

For one of them, it is the second time and seems to be more serious the first time.

Victoria Nuland comments about India -Russia relations

 In Russia's war on Ukraine, India has remained neutral. Will it stay that way?

“ I think that they are quite uncomfortable, particularly as they see how Russian weapons have performed and the fact that they're likely not going to be a very reliable supplier going forward. And you know, Steve, for a long time, the United States was not willing to supply weapons to India ourselves. So now that has changed. And now we are talking about how we help them make that transition.”

George Kennan

 He seems to be a diplomat who was sometimes correct and sometimes influential. He also had strange opinions “ Acheson was so offended by a report Kennan wrote in March 1950 in which he suggested that miscegenation between Europeans, Indians and African slaves was the root cause of Latin America's economic backwardness that he refused to have it distributed to the rest of the State Department.” From the Wikipedia article 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan

Dangers of protracted war in Ukraine

 Avoiding the Dangers of a Protracted Conflict in Ukraine QUINCY BRIEF NO. 23 Long report and seems very reasonable.

Two reports on the Ukraine conflict

 Is a peace treaty to end the Russia-Ukraine war in sight? By Gilbert Doctorow

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 31 from Institute for the Study of War

A long and depressing discussion

 https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/04/joe-lauria-interviews-michael-hudson-and-richard-wolff-on-consortium-news.html

It is mainly about USA, China and Russia and the current Ukraine. It does not discuss the internal dynamics of other countries except a bit about Cuba,

About the Russian demand in rouble payments for oil

 Rouble payments 

Why paying in roubles for Russian gas and oil might matter 

By Alexander Mihailov  

Sakuntala Narasimhan about her life

 

Sakuntala Narasimhan: 'Rakshasi' Reaching For The Rainbow

Her husband was the late M.S.Narasimhan, my ph.d. guide. Even such talented lady had problems in the Indian set up.

A daily summary of Ukraine crisis

 https://www.trtworld.com/europe/live-blog-russia-ukraine-trade-accusations-over-black-sea-naval-mines-55888

Most of the newspapers seem to be full of propaganda. I wonder whether this is a bit more neutral than others.

See also https://www.ianwelsh.net/reorienting-about-how-well-russia-is-doing-in-ukraine/

Aaron Mate interview of Chas Freeman

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Maté

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chas_W._Freeman,_Jr.

Mother Jones

 From the magazine with the same name

Mother Jones and Pancho Villa

Long cold war ahead

 Did Biden just escalate in Ukraine? "The greater question one must ask is: Why? Why on Earth would Biden wade into this geopolitical crisis that could go nuclear at any moment at a time when both the Ukrainian government and the Russian government appeared to be taking de-escalatory steps? And why hasn’t Biden come out immediately to correct the record, if he did indeed misspeak?"

An Igor Tamm story

 Told by George Gamow:

During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti-communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukrainian communist agitator and dragged him off to their leader.

Asked what he did for a living, he said he was a mathematician. The sceptical gang leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung round his neck. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation to a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free. Fail and you will be shot.’ Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished, the bandit cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way.

Tamm won the 1958 Nobel prize for physics but he never did discover the identity of the unusual bandit leader.

……..

The following excerpt from Dirac-Tamm correspondence suggests that it may be true:

“ There is a possibility of the story being true. I came across this bit “e spent the years of the revolution and the Civil War quite adventurously, appearing, for instance, in June 1917 in St.Petersburg at the first All—Russian Congress of Soviets as a representative of the Men’shevik party (Social Democrats, rivals of the Bolsheviks), in 1919 as a member of a local Soviet in his home, in 1920 as a physics assistant at Tavria University in the Whitee stronghold Crimea. Several times he slipped across the front lines and several times was arrested by all possible political regimes. Survival was a matter of luck and chance.”

https://cds.cern.ch/record/258359/files/P00020744.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0m9i0S1F3q7YxpWrqfhl2msQUOMUyY-D7_IVUwbbo6OIZK-RsDBVjX4SY

'pro' Russian parties in Ukraine

 https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/21/why-did-ukraine-suspend-11-pro-russia-parties informative article as Dan Kervick says.

A glimpse of Russian operation in Ukraine

 Russian soldiers release Ukraine town’s mayor and agree to leave after protests

So, it seems not all  in Ukraine want Russian occupation and that Russians are not too keen to occupy allof Ukraine.

Summary of the Ukraine war after 30 days

 From Defence politics Asia in video. This may possibly be a neutral site giving video reports few times a day.

The site information here and they are also on Facebook.

A canonical Indian tree Kherji (Jammi in Telugu)

 A sacred tree:

"After a severe famine in Marwar 500 years ago, Jambeshwar Bhagwan formed a community that would live in harmony with nature to survive even in a worse famine. The community is known as Bishnois or twentyniners' on account of 29 principles that they follow. They not only protect trees and wild animals with great dedication but follow several customs that conserve nature. Bishnois allow wild animals to forage on crops from their fields. They do not cremate dead bodies because that needs firewood; they instead bury them to give back to the elements. They even do not use blue coloured clothes because blue die has to be produced from trees. A village 'Khejarli' in Thar desert near Jodhpur has many Khejari trees (Prosopis cineraria) which the Bishnois consider to be very valuable. They are one of the few trees that survive in the deserts of Rajasthan.

On a fateful 10th day of Bhadrapad in 1730, Maharaja Abhaysingh of Jodhpur sent men to cut Khejari trees in Khejarli village. A lot of firewood was needed to produce lime for the new royal palace. Amritadevi, a local Bishnoi sent them back in defense of Khejari trees. They retaliated with armed soldiers but Amritadevi embraced Khejari trees and challenged the soldiers to axe her head to spare Khejari trees. The obedient soldiers not only severed Amritadevi's head but went on to kill 363 Bishnois who dared to follow the courageous lady. The news of Bishnois sacrifice for Khejari trees reached the king who then apologized to Bishnois and assured protection to trees and wild animals of that region.  
Since the day of Khejari sacrifice, Amritadevi's embrace has become immortal 'Chipko' movement among dedicated conservationists, who gather at a monument in Khejarli every year in Bhadrapad month to salute the great Khejari sacrifice. Bhadrapad month is the sixth lunar month in the Hindu Calendar."

India -Russia currency swaps

 India-Russia currency swaps bypass US sanctions from Asia Times "Several of India’s state-owned banks will execute the swaps under the supervision of the Reserve Bank of India, starting as early as next week, according to A. Sakthivel, president of the Federation of Indian Export Organizations (FIEO)."

And in an interview with Saker:

Michael Hudson:  There seem to be two ways for hostile countries to buy Russian gas. One seems to be to use Russian banks that are not banned from SWIFT. The other way would indeed seem to be to go through what looks to develop as a formal or informal third-country bank or exchange. India and China would seem to be the best positioned for this role.  U.S. diplomats will be pressing India to impose its own sanctions on Russia, and there is a strong pro-U.S. constituency there. But even Modi sees the obvious superior benefits of benefiting from India’s geopolitical position with Russia and China’s Belt and Road Initiative relative to whatever the U.S. has to

Back in the 1960s the West dealt with the Soviet Union using barter deals. Arranging this barter became a big banking business. Barter is the typical “final stage” of the deterioration of a credit economy into a money economy that breaks down.  Over the medium term, a new international financial organization needs to be created as an alternative to the dollarized IMF to handle such intra-bloc transactions in today’s new multipolarizing world. https://thesaker.is/the-saker-interviews-michael-hudson-5/

Bloomberg on the grand illusion of capitalism

The problem with the article is that it mainly pins it's hopes on Biden. He is some thing of a war hawk himself and appointed other war hawks like Victoria Nuland in key positions.

 Putin and Xi Exposed the Great Illusion of Capitalism

From the Wikipedia article on 'The economic consequences of peace's by Keynes

 [Clemenceau] took the view that European civil war is to be regarded as a normal, or at least a recurrent, state of affairs for the future, and that the sort of conflicts between organised Great Powers which have occupied the past hundred years will also engage the next. According to this vision of the future, European history is to be a perpetual prize-fight, of which France has won this round, but of which this round is certainly not the last. From the belief that essentially the old order does not change, being based on human nature which is always the same, and from a consequent scepticism of all that class of doctrine which the League of Nations stands for, the policy of France and of Clemenceau followed logically. For a peace of magnanimity or of fair and equal treatment, based on such 'ideology' as the Fourteen Points of the President, could only have the effect of shortening the interval of Germany's recovery and hastening the day when she will once again hurl at France her greater numbers and her superior resources and technical skill.[7]

from the Wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_the_Peace?fbclid=IwAR2TJn8zJ7hqGyNB95qPmX-IEkww7VBWQ99l5D8FMxU6ZPaOjr6I9o-i0YE

Dennis Sullivanwins Abel prize

 Postscript describes in his own words some of the developments

A short description of his work

Shoes inside or outside

 Wearing shoes in the house is just plain gross. The verdict from scientists who study indoor contaminants

On Russian Sanctions

 Michael Hudson Discusses Russia Sanctions Blowback on the Renegade

Interview with Filippo Osella

 Who was recently reported from Kerala. Interview

Articles on covid

Three posts below about covid in Africa,America and one in The Guardian about several countries in the west. One observation from The Guardian article is that one of the things that matters may be interpersonal trust of people in the society, apart from other interventions.

 In Africa In Anerica In general

March of De-Dollarization

 March of De-Dollarization: Russia Selling In Rubles BY IAN WELSH

Money laundering vs money washing

 Wash "... rich Russians (no joke) hold as much money outside Russia as the entire Russian people hold inside Russia."

Branko Milanovic on Eastern Europe

 Democracy of convenience, not of choice: why is Eastern Europe different

Lang Pritchett about his background from the interview with Shruti Rajagopalan

 Lant Pritchett about his background:

”Both of my grandfathers were just completely working class. They finished grammar school but not higher, and one became a cement finisher and benefited from the fact that they were building a freeway across Utah. He used to say that he knew Utah well because he crawled across it backwards, finishing cement. And one was a carpenter.

I always felt that I am in some ways closer, by being a nonelite, not that far from pretty hardscrabble, rural backgrounds. I have an empathy with the development experience that sometimes is harder today for kids coming from the generation behind me. They have to look back several generations to find equivalent conditions of how people survive and thrive. Whereas, again, my parents were born in the Depression, and my grandparents survived it and lived in Utah in a time when it was a very poor place. My grandparents cut ice out of the lake in the winter to keep their food cool. I do think that background has helped.

The second thing is—and I’ve never said this to anyone before—but Mormonism is an American religion that was founded because a 14-year-old kid named Joseph Smith was living in upstate New York during a religious revival in which there were all these tent preachers and denominations coming around, preaching the true word of God. And Joseph Smith at 14 years old said, “It sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me. I don’t believe any of it,” and went off and had his own revelation and started his own church.

He believed that organized religion conveyed dogma but not any true, sincere truth. I’m a member of a denomination who believes that the devil had introduced religion into the world. I think I came away from a religious upbringing with a really enormously high level of doubt that anything that anybody says to me is true, which I take as a characteristic of the founder of our religion, that it was a religion that was grounded. That before you had faith, you had to have doubt because if you just believe what you’re told, that’s not even real faith. I’m a huge believer in doubt, if that makes sense.“

Excerpts from Lant Pritchett interview with Shruti Rajagopalan-3

 Now I come to the first part of Lant Pritchett interview. My take away: There is a hockey stick like growth in the West,now mainly represented by OECD countries, which have sustained growth of around two percent for more than a hundred years. Some other countries like China, India, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore too have entered this hockey stick growth, often with larger growth rates for some periods exceptChina which had long sustained growth. India is essentially a deals economy. The divergence between the western economies and the rest which was already large is increasing. The reasons may be 'institutions' and their relative well functioning. When the state capacity is low, it may be good to simplify rules which cannot be implemented.

For the next parts, I have already posted the quotes; these are about the educational system. There is also a long discussion on RCT in which Lant Pritchett does not have much faith.

Excerpts from the first part of Lant Pritchett interview:

Hockey stick

 "In part because, as you know, if I had to name my biggest contribution to the economics of growth, it’s the emphasis that for whatever reasons—and we can get back to that—the growth process in the OECD countries, conditional on the takeoff that has since solidified by about 1870, has been just amazingly stable over time. The rich world is now rich not because they ever actually had super rapid growth like India and China we’ve seen, but because they had steady growth of about 2% per capita for 100 and more years."

"Then, of the countries that were lagging, more and more of them have gotten into the hockey stick growth themselves. The pace at which their growth happens, conditional on getting into the hockey stick, is actually much faster—much, much faster than anything that happened in history. Anyway, I think, overall, it’s been a period in which several very big and very important countries like China and India, but also Vietnam and others, have gotten into and stayed in a sustained GDP per capita growth. It’s still the case that India is probably at a tenth of the leading countries in the world in terms of levels."

"That said, precisely my contribution to the growth literature is that growth in the non-OECD countries has been extraordinarily episodic, in the sense that it’s chugged along, again, at slightly the same, if slightly lower than the OECD on average across countries, but the dynamics have been very different. There’s been many more episodes of very rapid growth, followed by a whole variety of different outcomes in terms of just moderately slowing growth as one converges on the leaders, as we saw with Japan. "

"I’ve written a paper called “Asiaphoria Meets Regression to the Mean” that argues, even if there isn’t something called a middle-class trap—which we’ll get back to; maybe there is—but even if there weren’t a middle-class trap, just regression to the mean would suggest that if you’ve seen a country growing very fast for a very long time, what we should expect is a very substantial deceleration of growth rather than a continuation."

"The quickest way to not get a routine government to work is to say, “Do you know who I am?” That line will get you treated worse than any other thing you can say [in the west]. Whereas in India, in the past and maybe more so today, it’s a deals economy."

"What happens to your investment has to be indexed on you either in terms of identity or indexed on you in terms of the accommodations you are taking to adapt yourself to the rules. There isn’t, in fact, a completely neutral, predictable rule of law. Deals on investments are not completely and totally secured by rule of law. Again, this is what has made episodic growth so pronounced, in my view—in the developing world versus the OECD—is that in a deals economy, shifts across deals become a major source of uncertainty in the growth process.

You can easily get stuck because the further you dig into a growth process secured by deals around a particular regime, the harder it is to reconstitute those deals when the regime shifts—even in a democracy."

"One of my views is, very strongly, up to about 25,000 GDP per capita countries just need growth in order to be able for all their citizens to have access to what anybody would reasonably consider the material basics of an adequate lifestyle. I think the focus on dollar-a-day poverty has just been morally obscene. To act as if our aspirations for humankind is for every person to get to what is now in inflation terms $1.90, that’s just morally obscene. And we could go on about how terrible poverty has been for the development crowd.

Second, I think the potential for redistribution to improve livelihoods is just radically overestimated for poor countries. One of the things about being poor is your economy tends to not be in the position to have the levers to generate large amounts of revenue. One way in which developed countries generate 40% of GDP in revenue is they have a large, formal, highly productive economy that, therefore, is easy to observe, easy to tax in relatively low-cost economic ways. That’s precisely what poor countries don’t have, so we should expect total revenue yield to be low as a fraction of GDP."

Excerpts from Lant Pritchett interview with Shruti Rajagopalan-2

 The later parts of the Lant Pritchett are about RCT and indian educational system. Here are a couple of quotes :

”Like I said, other places that were equally weak can do it. Then the only way I disagree with your characterization of the Indian schooling is that you, in your description, said people were assuming there was learning, and then there was selection. I think it was worse than that. I think teachers went into it assuming that only certain kinds of kids could learn.”

About the other places, he said earlier:

”Then, in other countries, municipalities in Brazil, large-scale things in Africa have done this, where they’ve just said, “We have completely lost our way. We need to reconfigure the curriculum, reconfigure the attitudes, reconfigure what the goals are.””

Caste system seems to come in a part of the selection process:

”Even though the massive expansion in public government has allowed the Dalits into school, they still see the teacher as being not an instrument of their liberation, but as an instrument of social selection. ”

More from Lant Ptritchett about writing a paper with Chandra Bhan Prasad:

”We wrote a paper together about the change in status and life well-being of Dalits over the reform period, which, if I had to name my most under-cited paper, I think it’s this paper. Because it’s very important, but most people don’t want to hear it. Anyway, but we went to visit his village. We’re walking around the village with a Dalit. We’re sitting around with a group of maybe 16 men, and we’re talking to somebody who is a Dalit that had been a public schoolteacher—a very respected guy, obviously, in his community and the broader community.

We’re sitting around, and he tells this joke. The joke he tells is, “You’re walking through the forest, and you come across a snake and a teacher. What do you do?” He says, “Oh, you pick up a stick and you beat the teacher.” Everyone just rolling on the ground laughing, and I’m like, “What in the—?” I’ve clearly got this mystified look on my face, and he says, “Oh.” He looks at me, he says, “Because the snake, it’s just a brute; it doesn’t know what it does. But the teacher should know better.” Again, I’m not saying that’s a huge sample, but that is, in some sense, the social reality.”

Excerpts from Lant Pritchett interview with Shruti Rajagopalan-1

Excerpts from the Lant Pritchett interview-1, posted below:

“ Anyway, my super strong view is that growth is a necessary and sufficient condition for achieving high levels of human well-being.

I think all of the evidence is completely consistent with that. No, you can’t redistribute your way to prosperity at below-average levels of GDP per capita. Because in the end, the average is what would happen if everybody had exactly the same. Well, if your average is, as most countries are, well below the 10th percentile of a rich country, well, you’re not going to redistribute your way. Now, that said, my second strong view is we have been perhaps too dogmatic, not about the in-state, but about the transition path for my take . . .”

“ RAJAGOPALAN: It’s a little bit like the “Anna Karenina,” Leo Tolstoy kind of development story. All happy families are alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. There’s a little bit of that going on here, which is, all rich countries—

PRITCHETT: You know that I have that as an epigram for my first growth episodes paper.”

“ Because by about the late 1990s, early 2000s, nearly everybody who had been in development as a field since the 1980s, and had really worked in countries and in the trenches, were convinced that a, if not the, major problem with the effectiveness of development as an endeavor and development assistance as an endeavor, was that it was inadequately political—inadequately embedded in a realistic, positive, political economy of how positive change actually happened, and therefore, inadequately embedded in history, society, politics.

The way the field was headed was that even to do a successful World Bank project and even if the World Bank was forbidden from doing politics, you had to be embedded in a more realistic politics. That you couldn’t fix the problems that were made to be fixed in a purely technocratic intervention mode that “Seeing Like a State” wanted you to, and that we had to grapple with that.“

“ I have to say, people in the field were stunned by this level of naivete. How could you imagine that the problem with our failure to achieve takeoff and growth or to achieve adequate development outcomes was merely the result of this one tiny little technocratic fix? It was just stunning. It was just so ludicrous on the face of it that I think one of my main regrets is not having devoted more time to pointing out how ludicrous on the face of it their fundamental claims were.”[rct]

........

Lant Pritchett interview

 Ideas of India: Where Did Development Economics Go Wrong? Shruti Rajagopalan and Lant Pritchett

There is also a discussion at Marginal Revolution https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/03/shruti-rajagopalan-podcast-with-lant-pritchett.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=shruti-rajagopalan-podcast-with-lant-pritchett

The intelligence of magpies

 Magpies have outwitted scientists by helping each other remove tracking devices

Earlier stories of J.D. Salinger

 Link here And quotes from one of the stories here.

Book review

 The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War by Nicholas Mulder. By Tom Stevenson.

Some links to Ukraine crisis

 The History Behind Putin’s War in Ukraine AN INTERVIEW WITH ANATOL LIEVEN by Doug Henwood. From the interview:

“But I think it’s worth remembering that in the 1980s, as the children of the Soviet elites became aware of how much better they could live in a Westernized Russia than a Soviet Russia, that played a huge part in the fall of Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. If you are plugged into the wider Russian elites and listening to what they’re saying in private, and what some of them have even started to say in public, you see that they are becoming really anxious. And they understand better than the rest of the population, even the educated population, just how badly this is going to affect them. If the Ukrainian quagmire goes on for a long period, then I think discontent against Putin will mount very, very high.” This is also the case with many other countries like India. But the differences have decreased with a lot of propaganda and harassing people who did not condemn Russia. But with the economic sanctions, the differences may increase again and in the long run, it will play a role.

Samo Burma makes three prediction: one of them is that China will be main beneficiary.

John Helmer on the possibilities of fake news; it seems that we cannot really believe any thing in the main stream newspapers. http://johnhelmer.net/the-zelensky-summit-meeting-in-kiev-on-march-15-with-polish-czech-and-slovenian-prime-ministers-was-a-fake-devised-in-warsaw-the-meeting-was-at-przemysl-poland-zelensky-also/?fbclid=IwAR2AVzZ2hWwQkdJajAJAOlWCmdmkQscln1cOEtcW8lbjeZHvxk0XQgEWcPY

Why the global south is not taking sides

 By David Adler 

The map of global participation in the sanctions against Russia suggests a new non-aligned movement might be on the rise

Paul Mason on Ukraine Crisis and Brexit

 https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2022/03/the-ukraine-war-has-invalidated-brexit

Branko Milanovic on Ukraine Crisis

 Russia’s Long term prospects

Short term

How a childhood accident helped Shane Warne strengthen his shoulders

 How a freak childhood accident that forced Shane Warne to pull himself around on a trolley after breaking BOTH legs helped pave the way for him to become the world's greatest leg spinner

James Galbraith interview

Resource Limits to American Capitalism & The Predator State Today interview by Lynn Fries

More than a film reviewfilm review

 “MISSISSIPPI MASALA” @30: REVISITING A FILM CLASSIC IN AUTHORITARIAN TIMES by Debra Mitra discusses I dian diaspora in US. There are various interesting passages like “ My mother would often say that in Christianity, she found a principle that was unavailable for Hindu women outcast like her: forgiveness. Her experience of the Indian diaspora in America stood in stark contrast to the provisional acceptance she felt with the local Black community. In the Indian gatherings, she was marked by her divorce, her lack of economic mobility, and our status as a broken, poor family. Indian men would leer at her, while wives would resent her presence and whisper to each other. Perhaps we were technically no longer Hindu; nevertheless, my mother’s conversion offered little protection from the stringent policing of social and sexual norms in the conservative Hindu diaspora. There was also widespread anti-Black racism. Membership in the “Indian community” came with unspoken rules of propriety and exclusion.”

Ukraine on Fire,

 https://youtu.be/5-UJ8S63Tsw Produced by Oliver Stone, Directed by Igor Lopatonok.

A fascinating discussion between Ezra Klein and Alex Tabarrok

 Via Chris Blattman https://chrisblattman.com/2022/02/23/gangsters-want-to-be-good-people-too/?fbclid=IwAR2VpkZFQq9utSB_IoRuAAs8HfYl3GAxkq7eDB4O1ddYkrfNdaeukOWc5zY

The link to the transcript of the interview is in Blattman’s post. It is also posted in Marginal Revolution but the link to the transcript gives only part of it. But one can read the comments.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/tabarrok-on-the-ezra-klein-podcast.html 

More on the recent conflict in Ukraine

 

https://youtu.be/IexFtDCJNsM 

America defeats Germany for the third time in a century by Michael Hudson.

New Map of Meaning in the Brain Changes Ideas About Memory

 New Map of Meaning in the Brain Changes Ideas About Memory from Quanta:

“A lot of people have this intuitive idea that the perceptual experience is like a roaring flame, and the memory experience is like a flickering candle,” said Brice Kuhl, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon. But memories clearly aren’t just a weaker echo of the original experience. The physical shifts seen in these recent experiments instead suggest that systematic changes in the representations themselves encode an experience that is entirely distinct but still tethered to the original.

Huth’s work provides new insights into the nature of that transformation. Perhaps memory isn’t as visually driven as we thought. Maybe it’s more abstract, more semantic, more linguistic. “We often have this impression that we have these fantastic visual representations of things,” Baker said. “You feel like you can see it. But maybe you can’t.”

Two on Ukraine

 Why didn't they stop it? By Tony Wood at LRB

Just before the assault. He seems to be getting against it. But it happened. May be 'After method deluge' moment of Putin. May be the aim is still to get Ukrainians to the negotiating table. After from the discussion is the whyof Nato expansion and who is behind it. Waxing the military industrial complex?

P.S. A discussion of the last aspect here

Two on the current tensions about Ukraine

 Is the Ukraine ‘crisis’ just another US charade? By Jack F. Matlock Jr

The reason the US wants war in Ukraine is ultimately all about the dollar by Thomas J. Penn

See also the first author's blog https://jackmatlock.com/2022/01/putins-aims-in-ukraine/

Links to consciousness discussions

 Consciousness and the Physical World, edited by V. S. Ramachandran and Brian Josephson, Review by Ashtosh Jagalekar

What’s So Hard About Understanding Consciousness? : We brought Antonio Damasio and Anil Seth together to share their insights into neuroscience’s big question.

Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: The Bridge Between Mind and Brain by Filippo Cieri and Roberto Esposito

A BESTIARY OF TOPOLOGICAL OBJECTS

 By N.P.Strickland here. I get a mention:

"12.3. Swarup’s homotopy classification. Let M be the category of 3-manifolds with a given basepoint. The morphisms from 𝑀 to 𝑀′ are homotopy classes of pointed maps which have degree one (in other words, we require that 𝑓∗[𝑀] = [𝑀′] ∈ 𝐻3𝑀′).

Let 𝒢 be the category of pairs (𝜋, 𝑢), where 𝜋 is a group and 𝑢 ∈ 𝐻3𝐵𝜋. The morphisms from (𝜋,𝑢)to(𝜋′,𝑢′)arehomomorphisms𝑓:𝜋→− 𝜋′ suchthat(𝐵𝑓)∗𝑢=𝑢′.

Given a manifold 𝑀 ∈ M, there is an obvious map 𝑞: 𝑀 →− 𝐵𝜋1𝑀, and we can define 𝜁𝑀 = 𝑞∗[𝑀] ∈ 𝐻3𝐵𝜋1𝑀. We thus get an object 𝐹𝑀 = (𝜋1𝑀,𝜁𝑀) of 𝒢, and it is easy to see that this gives a functor 𝐹 : M →− 𝒢 . Swarup proved that this functor is full [43]. It follows that 𝐹 𝑀 is isomorphic to 𝐹𝑀′ if and only if 𝑀 is homotopy equivalent to 𝑀′, by an orientation preserving equivalence. In other words, 𝐹𝑀 is a complete invariant of the homotopy type of 𝑀."

Mark Borrello and David Sepkoski Write about E.O.Wilson

 Ideology as biology

Consciousness and the Physical World

 Edited by Brian Joephson and M.S.Ramachandran, proceedings of a conference in 1978-79 is available in the archives here https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.3737.pdf Foreword by F.J.Dyson

Marx on alienation, book Review

 https://www.leftvoice.org/marx-alienation-and-communism/?fbclid=IwAR1w25O97MFDUUv79Jtxi4y5W-CesebkA-3Yue6QTOMidBAvuOwHpbKqgLs

Dylan Daniel on Helmholtz

 "The key to this understanding came from Kant’s distinction between appearance and reality. Helmholtz then used his physiological knowledge to update Kant’s thinking to say that although we have no direct access to the thing-in-itself, we do receive information about it which allows our brains to update the model our minds have of it, and so the world. Research into the workings of the senses and nerve fibers allowed Helmholtz to construct this theory, just as today cognitive neuroscientists test and research various ideas related to it. Modern cognitive neuroscience has so far been unable to improve on his observation that “Inductive inferences, as acquired by the unconscious work of memory, play a prominent part in the building up of concepts” (Koenigsberger, p.428). This seminal idea of the influence of the unconscious on the brain’s construction of our thought is (again) the direct offspring of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the science of Hermann von Helmholtz."

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894

The next question is how we are able to communicate with others and can be sure whether we are talking of the ‘same’ thing? Is is it because we share genes from some common ancestor and come up with similar models?