Links 10/6/2025

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1. The Rev Kev October 6, 2025 at 7:14 am

   ‘Lord Bebo
   @MyLordBebo
   Oct 5
   🇺🇸 It is now 18 months since Key Bridge fell in Baltimore.
   As of last week, this is the total rebuilding progress so far.
   WOW’

   I don’t suppose giving the Chinese the contracts for repairing that bridge was ever an option, was it? They probably would have chucked in a free monorail going under that bridges and free wifi to boot.

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   1. PlutoniumKun October 6, 2025 at 8:05 am

      The works shown in that clip are not rebuilding the bridge – they are removal and demolition works for the remains of the former bridge – these works started in July and are scheduled for 9 months.

      It is being replaced with a significantly larger (wider, longer, higher clearance) new structure – a cable-stay design – along the same alignment – the preliminary design was completed and approved in February this year. The opening is scheduled for 2028. This is actually an extraordinarily tight deadline – equivalent bridges (in China or anywhere else) are very rarely complete within 3 years of initial ground breaking, let alone getting designed and pushed through the regulatory system. A minimum of 2-3 years for site investigation, design and preliminary works and then 4-5 years would be the normal timescale for a project of this scale. Some major bridges (such as the Kerch Strait bridge) have been built a little faster, but usually only by throwing a lot of money at the project and cutting corners with design and construction.

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2. none October 6, 2025 at 7:31 am

   I watched a little bit of Gary’s Economics on youtube. Is that guy considered legit? He is something of an equality reductionist (maybe that’s ok) and he’s rather full of himself. He is fairly easy to listen to though, and he makes everything sound so simple. That last, of course is always a worry: maybe too simple.

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   1. TiPi October 6, 2025 at 8:38 am

      That is a very interesting comment.

      Gary and fellow UK tax campaigner Richard Murphy, have been identified as being on the ‘same side’ as regards taxing wealth as members of the commentariat in the UK , but both plough their own furrows and have seemingly incompatible views on how to do the job in detail.

      Both propose taxing ‘flows’ rather than ‘stocks’ which might raise more tax revenues but does nothing much to recognise, let alone reduce, inequality. Their tax reform proposals are to increase revenues from the wealthy, to permit lower tax takes from the poorer sections of society, but only on very limited grounds.

      Murphy is against LVT and wealth taxes, arguing they are both too difficult to implement. I have not seen any proposal from him that effectively taxes stocks of wealth, so can only assume he accepts current patterns of wealth distribution.

      Gary made a lot of money as a bankster, prior to his Damascene conversion, and now seems to be in favour of a oneoff wealth tax, but I heard him argue against taxing those same stocks of wealth only a few years ago, so am unsure of his actual ethical position.

      Neither is a socialist. As far as I can see, both are liberal capitalists. Some of Murphy’s critics label him as ‘far left’ – but that is simply ignorance and a desire to denigrate by attacking the person not the argument.

      Neither seems to argue their case on socialist egalitarian principles or even the pragmatic positions against social decay taken by Wilkinson and Pickett in the “Spirit Level” (now 15 years old) in recording the pernicious impacts of inequality, or the social equity arguments of Piketty in his book. (now 12 years ago).

      Personally, I find both are more than a “bit full or themselves”, and that seems to preclude much co-operation in their campaigning – which is a shame as they clearly have a lot of common ground, and both are articulate within their specialised fields.
      These days being a polemicist is a career choice, and both Richard and Gary need to make a living.
      Social media amplifies polemic discourse and generates clicks, so encourages more red-top style disputatious blogging.

      Of course, Murphy has fallen out with most of his previous MMT allies, and Gary gets an awfie lot of right wing pushback from his erstwhile finance sector chums. Alliances in this vaguely left of centre grouping seem fragile, which is a shame.
      Even Steve Keen and Bill Mitchell, both highly reputable heterodox economic academics, sadly have a major disagreement on the import/export issue within MMT.

      I think in the UK Lord Prem Sikka is probably the main voice of reasoned argument for many on the left on tax reform.
      He actually uses facts and figures to support his views, and has increased credibility as a result.
      He does not rely on blog revenues, and that helps his independence and rationality.
      I am not quite sure why he accepted his elevation to the House of Lords, which would seem to contradict his personal values, but it does not appear to be motivated by self aggrandisement, unlike so many commentators.

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3. AG October 6, 2025 at 7:55 am

   re: US interventions since 1776 study

   hmmmm

   This is another English-language interview by German Michael Holmes from German blog NACHDENKSEITEN.

   This time on how bad – or good – US intervention(ism) has been – with Sidita Kushi from Mount Holyoke College and a major data study “„Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy“”

   Sidita Kushi is a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College and co-author of the book “Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy.” The data is based on the most comprehensive data set on US foreign policy: the Military Intervention Project. It records all uses of military force since 1776. In an interview, Kushi explains that the US has never shown military restraint at any point in its history. As early as the 19th century, it waged countless wars against indigenous nations and expanded its power in Latin America and the Pacific. Later, it intervened militarily in every region of the world. According to Kushi, the history of the US is, from the very beginning, the history of an empire extremely prone to intervention. The interview was conducted by Michael Holmes.

   70 min.
   https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=139995

   It´s a bit like being warped backed in time.

   Views which one used to laugh about stated by post-Reaganites like Thomas Carothers are now experiencing a revival. Judge for yourself. But after the first third comes that aha-moment, when Kushi argues in favour of the Kosovo bombing.

   What the hell happened? What have these young people been reading since? Was I on planet Mars back when protesting, when argueing with people, when writing letters? How is this rewriting of history possible?
   Of course it is more progressive and honest than pro-US stances by ivory tower-ers in the past.

   But ideas about the benign empire have been actual book and study titles for ages. It´s not willing to die.

   I haven´t read the study itself yet. It´s data sets are available free she says. The study itself is not.

   Some flaws in the conversation which are puzzling:
   Holmes in the interview is forgetting that 80% of US bombs fell on South Vietnam not the North.
   Srebrenica is not a closed case at all.
   NATO bombing in 1999 was simply illegal.
   No mention of how controversial the Kosovo independence in reality was.
   (re: Holmes – I probably met more Kosovars in my life than Holmes, most are in favour of indepedence but that still doesn´t make it right.)
   Even less so the fact that Germany was leading on in the destruction of Yugoslavia.
   I wonder why they keep using the term “policeman” for the US.
   Not to speak of scholarship from outside the empire.

   I also don´t follow Holmes. On the one hand he always parades around his visiting the Global South. But when it comes to qualitative assessments of casualties he time and again turns very eurocentric. At least he is strangely flip-flopping.

   It is an engaging conversation. But with some major bumps which need further serious discussion of a fundamental nature. It cannot be that in 2025 (2023 published) a study on empire of this size repeats talking points which we have been familiar with already in the Cold War.

   Kushi would like to do a study about other empires for comparison. But needs the funding.
   She mentions British, French, Russian.
   I am curious what she would be saying if one suggested to her that e.g. the 3-5M dead in RU in the 1990s due to excess deaths could be attributed to US empire too.

   She has various categories of intervention in the study as the nature and level of US involvement is concerned. Some more direct than others. After all it has 400 pages.

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4. Ben Panga October 6, 2025 at 8:02 am

   Re: Mount Everest rescue under way after snowstorm traps nearly 1,000 people

   “The weather this year is not normal. The guide said he had never encountered such weather in October. And it happened all too suddenly.”

   I’m the other side of the mountain range and I hear this refrain a lot. I’ve also heard it in every country I’ve visited the last year or so.

   Here, it’s not bad. Unseasonably cold (and we don’t have heating) and heavy rain the last 36 hours but no disasters. The state, Himachal Pradesh, is only slowly recovering from August and September’s cloudburst initiated floods and landslides. Life is precarious here, and nature is powerful. The people here are nice, and do not abuse nature; they still pay the price of other’s actions.

   As everywhere else, nature is disturbed and I fear for the future. Some days I feel I don’t want to see how this all turns out.

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   1. PlutoniumKun October 6, 2025 at 8:13 am

      I’ve been on both sides of the range and yes – weather systems nearly everywhere in the world have been off the charts this year. I visited Tingri County in late September many years ago and it was considered then normal to be getting cold, but very dry weather – I don’t think any substantial snow was ever anticipated so early. If it was, nobody told me, I was equipped for sharp cold and altitude sickness only. HP is very beautiful, but also of course a very precarious landscape. I’ve hiked and cycled in Ladakh and nowhere else in the world I’ve been do you feel so much on the outer edge of where people can live. And yet the locals are incredibly calm and warm.

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5. Ben Panga October 6, 2025 at 8:08 am

   Re: Chinese exoskeletons

   Anduril’s Palmer Luckey (AKA Dollar Store Tony Stark) is into these as well.

   “Find in page: exoskeleton”:

   https://podcasts.happyscribe.com/shawn-ryan-show/171-palmer-luckey-superhuman-soldiers-ai-missiles-and-exoskeletons-in-warzones

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6. The Rev Kev October 6, 2025 at 8:17 am

   “ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team”

   Why are they trying to re-invent the wheel? This has probably been happening for many years now so all ICE would have to do is to plug into the system in use at the moment. Certainly all the social media corporations are already feeding all the raw feed to some government agency. Privacy? What’s that? They couldn’t even tolerate Tik Tok as it was not under their control.

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7. lou strong October 6, 2025 at 8:26 am

   For those interested , another witness about the treatment in Israel for the Sumud guys (J.Nivoi , Genoa dockworkers union )

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pznAxnTCV5Q&t=619s

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8. Ben Panga October 6, 2025 at 8:30 am

   Re: the flotilla tweet

   According to D’Agostino and multiple accounts, Israeli forces subjected Greta to severe cruelty, forcing her to crawl and kiss the Israeli flag…

   …Greta Thunberg was wrapped in the Israeli flag like a war trophy. They sat her in a corner; officers surrounded her, taking selfies.

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   1. The Rev Kev October 6, 2025 at 8:37 am

      That sort of thing may play well in downtown Tel Aviv and out in the Settlements but if those images make it out to the internet, most of the world will simply conclude that Israeli soldiers & officers are just a bunch of d****. Even people that don’t particularly like Greta Thunberg.

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