International Events Next-

[Zorral]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/01/i-felt-wheelie-awful-amsterdam-no-wonder-want-british-tourists-stay-away

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

17 minutes ago, Werthead said:

When we went, it was a very interesting experience. We had a mixed group of men and women, people who went for the weed and others who went for drinking and people who went for neither, and we had a couple of locals advising us on how things worked. One of the most notable things - aside from the fact that the red light "district" was absolutely tiny compared to what people think it is - is how much security they had and also how they discourage people going "window shopping," you have to be pretty serious about it and actually go into the establishments. If they think you're out for a perv and not serious business, they slam shut the windows and wait for you to fuck off. It was  all very professional (and I understand it's gotten far moreso since then, and they've moved a lot of the locations out of the city centre).

That's relatively kind however.

Herbertstrasse the ladies working there had buckets of, let's say filth. Ready to drop from their first store windows to drive away mere tourists without any intention of business.

[TheLastWolf]

The Bernini fountain made black...

[Zorral]

Israeli protesters return to streets as judicial overhaul stays on ‘pause’

The photos show the breadth and depth of the protestor numbers -- truly vast.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/01/israel-protests-netanyahu-judicial-reform/

Quote

 

TEL AVIV — Israelis opposed to their far-right government flooded the streets in protest Saturday, turning out in force for the first major demonstration since Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s prime minister, announced a pause to legislation that would overhaul the judiciary earlier this week.

Protesters showed up at more than 100 locations, according to the organizers, including in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where they hoisted Israeli and American flags. The U.S. flags were a nod to President Biden’s public opposition to the proposed legislation, which, if passed, could give the government a greater say in judicial appointments, including to the Supreme Court and those presiding over Netanyahu’s corruption trial. The Supreme Court in Israel provides the sole check on legislative and executive power.  ....

Opponents of the legislation, from across Israel’s political spectrum, have denounced it as little more than a judicial coup. Protesters said they worried Netanyahu’s decision to “pause” the package was simply a delaying tactic — and that the government would move forward with the bills once the opposition died down.

“Netanyahu’s attempt to put the protesters to sleep failed,” the protest movement’s umbrella organization, the Umbrella Movement of Resistance Against Dictatorship in Israel, said in a statement Saturday. The group claimed that more than 450,000 Israelis demonstrated in the streets.

“We will continue to be in the streets until we guarantee that the State of Israel is a democracy,” the statement said.

The crisis has mobilized a wide cross-section of Israeli society, including tech companies, trade unions, and military reservists. Trade unions successfully announced a general strike last week, grinding Israel’s economy to a halt and contributing to Netanyahu’s decision to back down — for now. ....

 

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

The massive Chernobyl exclusion zone, about the size of Yellowstone, has provided a fertile research area for scientist hoping to better understand the radiation effects on fauna and animals.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a43457220/chernobyl-dogs-dna-evolution/

[AncalagonTheBlack]

Purging of history from school textbooks in India.

https://thewire.in/education/ncert-mughal-empire-gujarat-riots-class-12

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A number of scholars on the Mughal empire have reacted strongly to the move. Simon Schama, a British historian, tweeted, “This is another preposterous war on history – the Mughals were a magnificent civilisation producing transcendent art, music, architecture”.

Katherine Schofield, who is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India, tweeted, “This RIDICULOUS. The Mughals ruled over much of India for over 200 years (technically over 300) and left behind an enduring legacy.

Love them, loathe them, or really not care — leaving the Mughals out of school history textbooks won’t magic them away.”

Author and historian Audrey Truschke said that the move marks another “chapter in the embrace of ignorance over knowledge that is increasingly common in Indian society under Hindu nationalist rule”. She tweeted, “Indian history remains untouched by such censorship. Modern ignorance thereof is another matter.”

 

[Zorral]

Gone global -- "Don't like the facts so I change them, and kill education too, in a single blow."

These authoritarian fascist nationalists, btw, study history very carefully, learning how to do it.  Take history away from everyone else and nobody can stop them from disappearing facts, including the facts that throughout history, everywhere, women led armies and did it successfully (in Europe the 14th C was particularly rich in women doing so; not solely Jeanne d'Arc -- she must have gotten the idea from somewhere in order for God to tell her to do it, right?).  So many inconvenient fax that must be gotten rid of!

[Zorral]

 As this is from the London Review of Books, thus a long read and subscription read, I pulled out a tranche to share here regarding Modi's India and how it, and his crooked crony financial facilitator, Gautam Adani, once just about the richest man in the world, have, and  continue to contribute to and participate in the fascist greed croneyism around the world, while fostering climate catastrophe with their corruption and greed.

The casual endorsements and less muted admiration for Modi and his ways in the western press, particularly the financial media, reminds one inexorably of how Forbes et al. gushed over Mussolini, giving him huge spreads with photos in their publications.

The Big Con
Pankaj Mishra

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n08/pankaj-mishra/the-big-con

Quote

 

.... There is nothing unique about this amalgam of domestic repression, ideological messianism and state-pampered oligarchy, or its legitimation by Western political and financial institutions. In Russia, despotic rulers helped loyalists amass vast private fortunes by showering them with privatisation deals, banking privileges, government contracts, and tax and trade concessions. Western corporations and banks channelled tainted Russian money into the pool of global capital, and law firms and PR companies made New York and London safe for Russian oligarchs. Bill Clinton complimented Boris Yeltsin on his ‘superb’ work after he ordered tanks to fire on the Russian parliament and ensured his victory in the rigged presidential elections of 1996. George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroder and Silvio Berlusconi helped bleach the blood-stained record of Yeltsin’s chosen successor. In 2001, Blair told the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had been investigating Putin’s war crimes in Chechnya, that ‘it’s my job as prime minister to like Mr Putin.’ (Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow on Putin’s birthday in 2006.) In Putin’s People, Catherine Belton describes many occasions when Russia’s autocrat was confirmed in his assumption that the West’s ‘financial interests would outweigh concerns about his regime’s abuse of the law and democracy.’

Those interests now account for another ethical and cognitive breakdown. Visiting New Delhi in January to explain to readers of the New York Times why ‘Russia’s war could make it India’s world,’ Roger Cohen quoted Arundhati Roy – ‘Hatred has penetrated into society at a level that is absolutely terrifying’ – then glossed: ‘That may be, but for now, Modi’s India seems to brim with confidence.’ The Western rush to embrace Modi’s India isn’t only fuelled by the profit motive. Increasingly, the mollycoddling of yet another exponent of crony capitalism and ethnic-racial supremacism is driven by the imperatives of the new Cold War: the Biden administration’s resolve, deepened by the war in Ukraine, somehow to contain China. Adani’s lavish purchase of the port of Haifa came after the US put pressure on Israel to disallow his Chinese rival, the Shanghai International Port Group, from managing a port frequented by the Sixth Fleet of the US Navy.

A persistent problem, however, for strategists and propagandists of the new Cold War is that Modi’s way to power was paved by grisly – and well documented – violence. The British Foreign Office was not alone in concluding in 2002 that Modi was ‘directly responsible’ for the killing of more than a thousand Muslims in Gujarat. In 2005, George W. Bush’s State Department invoked the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act to deny Modi’s diplomatic visa application, and also revoked his existing business visa under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Ignoring his claim of exoneration from India’s Supreme Court, the US rejected Modi’s application again in 2012. Yet by September 2014 he was being shown around the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial in Washington DC by Barack Obama. In June 2016 he addressed a joint session of Congress on the subject of his and America’s shared ‘philosophy of freedom’.  

Rupert Murdoch anointed Modi as India’s ‘best leader with best policies since independence’. Addressing packed stadiums in India and the US with his ‘loyal friend’, Trump confirmed Modi’s place in a global far-right constellation. But it was liberal and centrist politicians, businessmen, economists and journalists in the West who built regimes of casual untruth about Modi and his India. ‘There is something thrilling about the rise of Narendra Modi,’ Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, wrote in April 2014. As Modi arrived in Silicon Valley in 2015, and his government shut down the internet in Kashmir, Sheryl Sandberg declared she was changing her Facebook profile to honour the Indian leader. (In January this year, Twitter and YouTube agreed to enforce the Indian government’s ban on the BBC documentary.) In 2019, Bill Gates ignored a letter from three Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Iran’s Shirin Ebadi, protesting against his decision to ‘give a humanitarian award to a man whose nickname is the “Butcher of Gujarat”’.

Obama recalled talking to Modi about the teachings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King for readers of Time’s 2015 list of the hundred most influential people. He described him as if he were a character in a Horatio Alger story: born in modest circumstances but now the leader of the ‘world’s largest democracy’, Modi reflected ‘the dynamism and potential of India’s rise’. Obama, the first Western leader to embrace Modi, became the only American president to visit India twice in two years, once as chief guest at the Republic Day parade. Less than a year after leaving the White House, he was back in India on a speaking tour, praising Modi’s Adani-fied efforts against climate change at a ‘leadership summit’ organised by a pro-Modi newspaper (the same VIP shindig recently paid Boris Johnson £260,000 for a speech, no doubt its bargain basement rate).

Like the Russian elite, Modi and Adani have succeeded in bending, repeatedly, the moral arc of politics and journalism towards greed. Jo Johnson, who had to disentangle himself with haste from Adani’s global cash nexus last month, was, as a reporter for the Financial Times, a rare practitioner of sober Western journalism on India during the 2000s, when opinion-making periodicals such as Time, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek and the Economist were hailing the country as a ‘roaring capitalist success-story’. ‘Unless India makes a dramatic investment in its human capital,’ Johnson wrote in 2006, ‘its demographic advantages will turn into a demographic disaster in the form of a massive unemployable labour force.’ His prognosis has become even more menacing today as the country’s population overtakes China’s, the scope for labour-intensive jobs in Indian industry shrinks further, the large middle class long fantasised about by foreign corporations stubbornly fails to materialise, and private investment keeps falling despite lavish government spending on infrastructure. Modi’s government has not made the budgetary allocations for public health and education that, as Johnson observed, would be necessary for securing a large demographic advantage. Instead, it has sought to deploy many of the unemployable and frustrated labour force as storm-troopers of Hindu supremacism, indoctrinating them with a garishly fabricated Indian past and equally kitsch daydreams of India’s future as a world guru. In his later avatars, however, as a Tory MP, science minister in David Cameron’s cabinet, Baron Johnson of Marylebone, fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and dabbler in Adani’s honeypot, Johnson has turned to describing in the Spectator how the ‘new India’ is ‘helping shape this young century’.

Such U-turns occur frequently in the crisscrossing global networks of journalistic, academic, business and geopolitical opportunity forged by Modi and his oligarchs. (The crudity of manoeuvre can still be breathtaking. While visiting Adani at his headquarters in Gujarat last year, Johnson’s brother Boris took time off to plug JCB, the day after the company’s bulldozers were photographed demolishing Muslim-owned properties in Delhi. JCB’s owners paid for some of Johnson’s wedding last year and currently host the disgraced former prime minister at their $25 million mansion in London.) Yet private avarice, which Putin cannily identified as central to public life in the West today, does not entirely explain the whitewashing of Modi or the greenwashing of Adani. Ideological delusion also plays a role. In the mainstream Western narrative shaped during the Cold War, India – with its regular elections – long starred as a counterexample to many authoritarian and anti-Western countries. The tattered old fable about India’s democracy is being urgently revamped as the Biden administration pursues its new Cold War against Chinese and Russian autocracy. Walter Russell Mead, a leading foreign policy commentator, argues in the Wall Street Journal that the US should pursue greater intimacy with Modi’s party since it ‘will be calling the shots in a country without whose help American efforts to balance rising Chinese power are likely to fall short’. ....

 

 

Edited April 8, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

Sudan which had been trending towards fledgling Democracy until a military coup a few yrs back, is now in the midst of nasty guerrilla warfare as the two former leaders of the overthrow, wrestle for thier factions to take control.

US special forces have evacuated government personal from thier embassy and the country is classified as a "Do Not Travel" destination.

Edited April 23, 2023 by DireWolfSpirit

[Zorral]

The currency of Sudan, with Wagner a major player there as well in so many other African nations, as well as Ukraine, makes mentioning this book about to be released pertinent here.  Everywhere is volatile, and volatile and interlated on all fronts (author labels this polyvocality), intersecting politics with everything (including, yes, even menstruation here in the USA, thanks to dumass Florida governor):

Russia has returned to its pre-20th century role, tension between Greece and Turkey is heightened and the revolutions of 1848 feel less distant

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/23/ancient-rivalries-19th-century-russia-greece-turkey-revolutions

Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark 

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.... I have spent the past few years writing a book about the 1848 revolutions – a cascade of political tumults that extended across the European continent – and here too I have been struck by the many resonances with our own time. The present anxiety around social precarity, the working poor and the cost of living – exacerbated today by the return of supply chain disruptions and fuel and grain price shocks – is reminiscent of the panic around the “Social Question” of the 1840s. Then, as now, people argued over whether mass impoverishment was the consequence of over-regulation, whether it resulted from deregulation and the resulting erosion of older forms of social cohesion, or whether it could be something produced by the modern economic system itself.

The fascinating – and vexing – thing about these revolutions is their polyvocality, the fact that so many programmes and aspirations found simultaneous expression. The political forces that coalesced in the revolutionary spring of 1848, shaking the foundations of monarchies across the continent, soon spiralled off in different directions. The slow liberal politics of chambers and the fast radical politics of clubs and demonstrations came unstuck from each other. The rivalry between national groups pitted German and Croatian liberals and radicals against their Czech and Hungarian fellows.

Nothing cohered. For contemporaries, it was difficult to make out the general direction of travel, so paradoxical and contradictory were the forces that the revolutions had unleashed. The complexity of 1848 was not primarily a function of the intrinsic difficulty of the problems confronting European societies, but rather of the great number and diversity of political groups and perspectives brought to bear on them. Karl Marx anticipated this when he observed in an essay of 1842 that the many-sidedness of the world was a function of the one-sidedness of its countless constituent parts.

History does not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain remarked, it often rhymes. What do these moments of déjà vu mean? They may in part be symptomatic of a narrow “presentism” that can see in the past nothing but endless reflections of its own preoccupations. But we should not exclude the possibility that such resonances reveal authentic affinities between one moment in history and another.

The revolutions of 1848 seemed as old as ancient Egypt when I learned about them at school in the 1970s. Their complexity was a futile, antiquarian scrawl. But it’s different today. We are re-emerging from something that they did not yet know. The era of high industrialisation; the “take-off into sustained growth”; the rise of the great ideological party-political formations; the ascendancy of the nation-state and the welfare state; the rise of the great newspapers and the national television audience. These things, which we used to call “modernity”, are now in flux, their hold on us is waning. And as we cease to be the creatures of high modernity, new patterns of attention become possible. As the 20th century begins to lose its power over our imagination, it becomes engrossing, even instructive, to contemplate the people and situations of the 19th century: the fissured, multifarious quality of their politics; the churn and change without a settled sense of the direction of travel; the anxieties around inequality and the finiteness of resources; the entanglement of civil tumult with international relations; the irruption of violence, utopia and spirituality into politics.

In 2011, as a chain of political upheavals cascaded across the Arab world, attention turned once again to the forgotten revolutions of 1848, which had exhibited a similarly contagious quality. In the west, too, we have seen symptoms of instability – chamber invasions, pop-up protest movements, crosscurrents of activism on social media – that recall the volatility of 1848. If a revolution is coming, it may look something like 1848: poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions.

 

 

[The Anti-Targ]

Wagner being an army for hire needs conflicts to make money. You can't really run a decent private army with soldiers on zero hour contracts, and ordinance sitting in storage for long periods of time.

[Zorral]

The real reason Mexico suddenly dominates global beer exports

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/28/mexican-beer-rules-america/

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After the Great Recession, the Dutch had a solid grip on the global beer market, powered by Holland hop heavyweight Heineken. But within a decade, the Netherlands — indeed all of Europe’s hoppy heartland — would be unceremoniously thrashed by a New World upstart: Mexico.

Today, Mexico ships out more than twice as much beer as any other country and single-handedly accounts for 30 percent of the world’s entire export-beer market, according to Geneva-based trade statistics provider Trade Data Monitor. That puts Mexico far above the Netherlands (14 percent), Belgium (13 percent) and even Oktoberfest progenitor Germany (9 percent).

.... The United States is the world’s largest beer importer, accounting for almost 2 out of every 5 cross-border beer dollars. About 80 percent of that money goes to Mexico. That’s up from a paltry 17 percent in the early 1990s. For Mexico, the United States has become the only market that matters. In a recent 12-month span, 97 percent of Mexican beer exports flowed north across the border. ....

.... After Mexico, America’s next-biggest sources of suds are the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada, Germany and Belgium. Until very recently, Belgium was third, but Belgian exports to the United States evaporated in 2021 as Stella Artois’s current owners, AB InBev, started brewing the ubiquitous Flemish pilsner in breweries scattered throughout these United States. (The company says it has made significant investments in U.S. breweries to ensure the beer’s quality.)

Even in an ultra-consolidated industry, AB InBev stands out as a border-and-brand-straddling colossus. Based in Belgium, it operates in almost 50 countries, owns more than 500 brands and sells something like 1 in every 4 beers worldwide. And it’s but one tentacle of 3G Capital, a Brazilian-led juggernaut that has swept up everything from Burger King and Popeyes to Kraft and Heinz foods.

3G now owns less than a fifth of the publicly traded AB InBev and plays in many other high-volume consumer businesses. But its big moves started — as many big moves do — with beer. ....

 

Gotta say the local beers drunk in Spain were a thousand times better than anything I've drunk on this side of the water in years. It's local, fresh and doesn't have to travel far -- and a just the right temperature.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Paris seems rowdy. 

[Zorral]

Paris has experience with that.

[DireWolfSpirit]

Fucking with peoples pensions moves the sleepy masses to redline alert!

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Nobody talking about Haiti?

 

[Zorral]

We are, at home and in our circles, every day. 

What are YOUR thoughts about the catastrophe that is Haiti?

Edited May 2, 2023 by Zorral

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Underreported catastrophe. 

Haiti has turned into a failed state, and nobody really seems to care that much.

I mean, we are seeing fed up civilians forming death squads that go out to lynch (suspected) gang members. The gangs itself have apparently managed to corrupt the goverment and law enforcement at every level, who have now zero trust from the civic society to protect them and actually enforce laws. At some point, there probably has to come outside intervention (in the form of UN troops) to restore some basic resemblence to order and normality. I am well aware of the colonial undertones of that, and how the last humanitarian aid from outside played out. But the status quo is not sustainable.

I just found it curious, that ty mentioned Paris being rowdy, while this is really nothing compared to Port-au-Prince.

[Zorral]

9 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

I just found it curious, that ty mentioned Paris being rowdy, while this is really nothing compared to Port-au-Prince.

That is ever Haiti's fate, isn't it.