I've been mystified by the massive swings upward in the stock market whenever Trump makes a sttement backing off his tough tariff talk. After ten years of listening to Trump throw out stalling lines whenever he feels cornered, no human investor would believe him. So why would the markets take...
The stunning, but entirely predictable, collapse of the Afghan military marks the latest installment of our failure to understand what wins wars. Short answer: it’s not weaponry; it’s morale. This pattern of failure goes back 60 years to Vietnam, and even further. We load up corrupt autocrats and war lords with weapons, only to see war profiteers siphon off and distribute the bounty, while the other side pursues their goal with patience, and a deep sense of mission – however wrong-headed we might think that is.
There’s a tell in this pattern. When a superpower continues to hew to a failed strategy of counter insurgency after 60 years of failure, someone must be making out, big time. We don’t need to look very far to see who that is. Defense contractors get to sell the weapons that we hand over to our feckless allies, and then, after tens of billions of dollars in materiel are left behind as we withdraw, they get to sell all over again as we restock. Thus, losing becomes a win-win strategy. In that sense, winning would be a losing strategy because they don’t get to double-dip. So, once again in Afghanistan, Mission Accomplished!
The American Meteorological Society names Fire and Flood its book of the year for 2023, awarding it the Louis J Batton Author's Award.
"Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.
Starting with the 1980s, Linden tells the story, decade by decade, by looking at four clocks that move at different speeds: the reality of climate change itself; the scientific consensus about it, which always lags reality; public opinion and political will, which lag farther still; and, arguably, most importantly, business and finance. Reality marches on at its own pace, but the public will and even the science are downstream from the money, and Fire and Flood shows how devilishly effective monied climate-change deniers have been at slowing and even reversing the progress of our collective awakening. When a threat means certain but future disaster, but addressing it means losing present-tense profit, capitalism's response has been sadly predictable.
Now, however, the seasons of fire and flood have crossed the threshold into plain view. Linden focuses on the insurance industry as one loud canary in the coal mine: fire and flood zones in Florida and California, among other regions, are now seeing what many call climate redlining. The whole system is teetering on the brink, and the odds of another housing collapse, for starters, are much higher than most people understand. There is a path back from the cliff, but we must pick up the pace. Fire and Flood shows us why, and how." From Catalog Copy
