Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/02/albanese-spooked-into-ditching-national-environment-watchdog-for-a-second-time-critics-say
Presumably the rest of the world can trade without tariff wars and with low or no tariffs as they variously determine and agree and leave the USA to trade with nobody since that is apparently what they wish.
I have argued for national selective autarky in some cases in that nations, depending on their own make-up and domestic needs might reasonably want to produce some stuff for themselves, keep their own people employed and keep a certain amount of strategic capacity. That seems reasonable and wise. But what the USA is doing seems way outside any such parameters.
Will the USA accept it if the rest of the world forgets about the USA and trades with each other? What is their end goal in all this? Or is the correct term “own goal”?
Unleashing COVID-19 hasn’t affected the population’s immune systems so all the authorities say. Really, the masses of evidence could not be more stark.
https://x.com/1goodtern/status/1885788146836648021
Tern can show you about another 20 graphs like that of rises in serious disease in the UK, in his Threadreader list.
COVID-19 has caused profound and irreversible damage (by now) to billions of humans. It may take one, two, ten or twenty years to catch up with them but catch up it will.
Of course, because of all the other calamities and insanities occurring, COVID-19 seems like small news or yesterday’s news. It isn’t. It is right up there as a continuing existential threat to all humans along with the pandemics it synergises, climate change, wars and impending economic and social collapse.
Meanwhile, Jan 2025 finished as the hottest January on record since 1940 and likely the hottest January in the last 110,000 years, at +1.745°C above the 1850-1900 IPCC pre-industrial baseline, using the Copernicus ERA5 dataset.
The Last Interglacial, also known as the Eemian, was the interglacial period which began about 130,000 years ago at the end of the Penultimate Glacial Period and ended about 115,000 years ago at the beginning of the Last Glacial Period. The Last Interglacial was one of the warmest periods of the last 800,000 years, with temperatures comparable to and at times warmer (by up to on average 2 °C) than the contemporary Holocene interglacial (i.e. circa last 11,700 years) with the maximum sea level being up to 6 to 9 metres higher than at present.
The Arctic sea ice extent is at record low for this time of the year.
And it seems the global sea-ice extent is continuing its plunge towards a new record low.
Nature Communications published on 3 Dec 2024 a paper by Céline Heuzé and Alexandra Jahn titled The first ice-free day in the Arctic Ocean could occur before 2030. Considering the worst-case scenario, the Arctic Ocean could go ice-free within three years. While the ice-free Arctic may not be the end of the world, it is evidence that we’ve fundamentally altered one of the defining characteristics of the natural environment in the Arctic Ocean.
Burning more coal, gas and oil means an Earth System warming beyond the threshold compatible for human civilisation before the end of this century.
Climate Code Red blog published yesterday (Feb 3) a post headlined The world is heading towards 3 degrees Celsius of warming. Will humanity have a future? Join David Spratt on Tuesday, Feb 11, at 7:30pm AEDT for an online discussion to explore these questions:
EPR reactors (cross-commented on the Substack site)
The French Cour des Comptes has published an update report on the EPR reactors being built, slowly and at enormous cost, by French public utility EDF. Summary in French https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2025-01/20250114-synthese-La-filiere-EPR–une-dynamique-nouvelle-des-risques-persistants_0.pdf , full report in French https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2025-01/20250114-La-filiere-EPR%20-une-dynamique-nouvelle-des-risques-persistants_0.pdf . One of the reactors is in England, Hinkley Point C. Another is planned, Sizewell C. Unsurprisingly the Cour advises against EDF being sucked deeper into this deluded boondoggle.
The Cour des Comptes is SFIK the oldest institution of public audit anywhere, and still one of the toughest. Refounded by Napoleon in 1807, it is one of the few French public institutions surviving from the ancien regime. Its motto could be “Hanging Ministers of Finance since 1315”, when Philippe le Bel’ s capable but unpopular finance aide Enguerrand de Marigny was executed on the multi-storey Paris gibbet at Montfaucon, now Montmartre. (In fact de Marigny successfully defended himself against the charge of peculation His enemy Robert of Artois then cooked up a bogus charge of witchcraft. Perhaps this could be revived for the crypto scam.)
Ah, the nuclear fans will say, EPRs are huge and over-complicared dinosaurs (true). SMRs are quite different and are guaranteed to come in on time and in budget, promise. Sure. Just as the King of France can be counted on to protect hid loyal servants.
Wow, sounds like the French are a much tougher crowd. I wonder if there is a field of comparative auditing? Like, is there a way for me to find out what the California high speed rail project would have looked like, had it been done by another country? (Excepting authoritarian regimes, as that is not a fair comp.)
I know there is Transparency Intl, who go around measuring corruption, but what about just general incompetence? (And I’m not sure that our people are incompetent … but I know the project’s not near to done yet and probably never will be, and has been massively more expensive than expected. Yet, it may be more likely that it was the pols who bleeped it up.)
I suppose investors must have people who analyze these things. Maybe it is not public though. Also with our history of bailouts, maybe they wouldn’t be measuring as closely.
Shorter me: as a civilian, it’s hard to know how grumpy I am justified in being.
The picture tells the story;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants#Comparisons_with_other_power_sources
Prof Eliot Jacobson posted at BlueSky late yesterday (Feb 4):
Roger_f, thanks for the link. I’d suggest it would not matter how much nuclear technologies cost. They are undeniably TOO SLOW to deploy from scratch to save the Great Barrier Reef and us from the worsening climate crisis!
ICYMI/FYI, the Australian Parliament House of Representatives Select Committee on Nuclear Energy published yesterday (Feb 4) my 2nd Supplementary Submission (#066.2). My latest supplementary submission focusses on the PROOF transcript of my testimony to the Committee on 11 Dec 2024 and additional comments I wish to add following from it.
On the existence of international law
Trump and Musk share a contempt for international law. They are not alone. There is a long line of self-proclaimed “realists” in intentional relations who ask “Where’s the police to enforce this so-called law?” as if it’s a killer objection. Contracts are not enforced by the police except as a last resort when one of the parties is in contempt of court.
I have news for Messrs Trump and Musk. If international law does not exist, neither does the United States.
In common with many other countries emerging from successful rebellions or independence movements, the USA has a heroic foundation myth in which the new nation created itself by a mutual pact of defiance and self-defence. The key documents in the American myth are the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Articles of Confederation (1777), and the Constitution of 1787. (The Reconstruction Amendments (1865 to 1870) are as much a source of division as of common celebration). The myth is not false; these were key steps in the construction of the new state on startlingly innovative lines.
But they were not all the story. If you ask the question “Where exactly are these United States you speak of?”, the three documents are silent, beyond their lists of signatories. One essential, defining, feature of a state is clear borders. Where do you find them? In treaties with other states. For the USA, this started with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, not only with the former colonial power, Britain, but also with France and Spain. Later border treaties involved Mexico and Russia as well. Recognition of borders is recognition of statehood by other members of the community of states. These treaties – necessarily involving other state partners – are part of the corpus of international law. Without them, you aren’t a proper state. Ask the Kurds: they have run their own territory for decades, with armed forces, courts, government institutions, and so on, but as yet nobody recognizes their statehood.
International law predates the existence of the United States. Most old treaties are dead: SFIK no treaty between Rome and Parthia has any relevance today. But a different Treaty of Paris in 1247 bought to an end a long war between England and France. It confirmed the cession to rhe Kingdom of France of the continental territories on the Duchy of Normandy – and the retention by the King of England, as vestigial Duke of Normandy, of the Channel Islands. Jersey and Guernsey cite the treaty in arguments resisting encroachment by London on their status as tax havens and independent jurisdictions, and it comes up in disputes with France over maritime exclusion zones for fishing and wind farms. The continuing validity of the treaty has survived the French Revolution and the Fifth Republic, which is the legal successor to the French monarchy.
There is more controversy over the cession of Gibraltar to Britain by the Peace of Utrecht (1713). On the other side of the Straits, Morocco would like Ceuta and Melilla back too, but again, fifteenth-century peace treaties stand in the way. It’s just as well that parchment is very long-lived.
I have long thought that the Kurds deserved a nation (I was going say) but they are a nation in many senses. They arguably deserve statehood as J.W. has clarified.
“Extantism” is a philosophical concept (specifically a concept in empirical ontology) which can be and is applied in International Law to clarify the issue of statehood.
Microstates rely on international norms and particularly the principle of extantism which confers rights to territorial integrity and independence to the smallest accepted members of the international system.
Those who ignore the standing of empirical ontology as the foundation of all properly ordered human thought in empirical matters and in formal matters (referring to real systems and formal systems) would do well to consider this International Law example. This is precisely because Law does not just touch on but must, as it were, operatively meld and reconcile the real and the formal. Law is not the only discipline which must do this. Indeed all disciplines in the sciences, social sciences and humanities must do this or collapse into “degenerate research programs” as per Lakatos.
“In classificatory relations of similarity and difference, things (in our case, states) cannot be known except through the relations of their properties. This constitutes a time-bound paradox: a relation, say ‘big to small’, is determined by the features of this very comparison, its relata, which are not absolute but fluid (through time) (MacBride, 2020). The only ‘absolute’ property is their existence per se. Extantism builds on the simple fact that existence precedes essence, the properties of a thing. In other words, the (developed historical or extant) reality of states antedates the need to problematise (and/or solve) features such as ‘too small’ or ‘large’. – “Forever small? A longue durée perspective on Luxembourg’s extantism, governance and security” – Thomas Kolnberger.
Bracketed words in the above quote as my additions as attempted further clarifications. Link to the paper is below:
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/2968e06a-cf30-4c5e-91fd-2d55e9a9dc1b/9781003356011_10.4324_9781003356011-7.pdf
As a general conclusion, I will simply state that empirical ontology (the ontology of “found”, or “so far found to be”, fundamental objects along with their relations and their categorisations/classifications/taxonomies) is the unavoidable foundation of all valid disciplines of real systems and formal systems and indeed of all those disciplines which must meld, reconcile and operationally implement attempted unification of the real and formal in theory and attempted satisficing in practice. There are valid ways to attempt these processes and invalid ways to attempt these processes. I will have to leave it here of course. Such arguments require thesis length arguments at least.
Suffice is to say finally, as I have said before, that conventional economics, in my view, neglects empirical ontology and does not take seriously enough the need for finding (empirically) ontologically fundamental objects (ontologically fundamental to its discipline and focus). On the face of it, some thinkers in International Law do understand this issue, philosophically and pragmatically, in relation to their discipline.
It was nothing to do with me, but I am still sorry about all this. (I read a piece by Robert Reich about this distraction/spectacle habit of his – I am still thinking about it.)
Robert Reich has written,
“The essence of Trump’s failure of leadership is not that he chose one set of policies over another, not only that he divided rather than united Americans, nor even that he behaved vindictively, but that he sacrificed the processes and institutions of American democracy to achieve his personal goals, including aggregating more power than any president before him.”
It goes further than that. The essence of Trump and his henchmen like Musk is that they will destroy America and the world. The path they are charting leads to complete catastrophe.
On the topic of complete catastrophe, I have already alluded to, with evidence, the complete hobbling and even gutting of the CDC. I have also alluded to and provided links to evidence re the disturbing increase in TB globally and in the USA and also to COVID-19 immune system damage as a likely causative agent in this development.
It now turns out that the bird flu has jumped to cats and human in the USA and the CDC under Trump WH orders is suppressing this fact.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1887248114588762317.html
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1887710100611125604.html
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2025-02-07/h5n1-bird-flu-found-in-san-mateo-county-pet-cat
H2H (human to human) bird flu infection is now suspected (and apparently being tested for) by states, hospitals, doctors and scientists still trying to do their job even though the CDC has pretty much been entirely prevented from doing its job.
If this isn’t resolved, the USA could be walking straight into a bird flu epidemic disaster.
The Ezra Klein podcast throws some light on recent events.
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000689253755