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?

Joseph Schumpeter and the Economics of Imperialism

Joseph Schumpeter and the Economics of Imperialism from Jacobin Madazine:

At the start of this concluding section, Schumpeter returned to the prevalence of “non-rational and irrational, purely instinctual inclinations towards war and conquest.” He believed that many — and perhaps most — wars throughout history had been waged without any adequate reason. According to Schumpeter, this in turn was strong evidence that “psychological dispositions and social structures acquired in the dim past . . . tend to maintain themselves and to continue in effect long after they have lost their meaning and their life-preserving function.”

On the strength of this analysis, Schumpeter rejected the argument of Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist thinkers that there was a necessary link between imperialism and capitalism. Imperialism was in fact “atavistic in character” and stemmed from “the living conditions, not of the present but of the past — put in terms of the economic interpretation of history, from past rather than present relations of production.” In political terms, we should see imperialism as the product not of capitalist democracy but rather of the earlier stage of “absolute autocracy.”