Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,333]

Just now, Vesper said:

China has no claim on the Solomon Islands

where are you seeing they want to invade them?

 

It's not far and it's the place from where you can take good aim at Australia.
The Japanese tried hard.
The Chinese at this stage are trying to talk the government of these islands into giving them some naval bases.

[Vesper 28,967]

13 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

It's not far and it's the place from where you can take good aim at Australia.
The Japanese tried hard.
The Chinese at this stage are trying to talk the government of these islands into giving them some naval bases.

in other words, you just made it up

China is NOT seeking to invade the Solomon Islands

and it IS far away from China

there are large amount of sovereign nations in between the two

 

the qualitative level of discourse on this forum at times is just horrific

falsehoods, obfuscation, non germane ramblings, and utter batshittery walk hand in hand with demonstrably proven facts and/or valid points that are actually worthy of debate, with all tossed out as equals, thus making a mockery of rational discussion

 

Edited November 18 by Vesper

[NikkiCFC 8,017]

 

Edited November 18 by NikkiCFC

[Vesper 28,967]

Musk appears to pressure Trump on Cabinet and tariffs, irking advisers

Elon Musk, the billionaire who has become Donald Trump’s “first buddy,” appeared to publicly pressure the president-elect on economic policy and a key Cabinet pick.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/16/elon-musk-trump-treasury-tariffs/

Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire who has become President-elect Donald Trump’s “first buddy,” appeared to publicly pressure Trump on economic policy and a key Cabinet appointment Saturday.

In a Saturday morning post on X, the social network he owns and runs, Musk praised a foreign leader’s decision to cut tariffs — the same import taxes that Trump wants to raise to the highest level in a century. Several hours later, Musk posted that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s co-transition chair, would be a better choice than hedge fund executive Scott Bessent for treasury secretary.

“My view fwiw is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas @howardlutnick will actually enact change,” Musk posted. “Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt, so we need change one way or another.” He encouraged his nearly 205 million followers to weigh in, too.

Musk’s endorsement of Lutnick is likely to exacerbate the substantial confusion and even fear in Trump’s orbit about the central role Musk appears to be playing in personnel and policy decisions for the new administration.Follow

The president’s allies were grateful to have had Musk’s financial and political backing during the campaign, but his growing influence has irritated some of Trump’s backers. Several people in Trump’s circle expressed astonishment Saturday that Musk would publicly push for his choice for a crucial economic role while the president-elect was still weighing his decision.

“People are not happy,” said one person in contact with campaign officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations. This person said the statements suggested Musk was acting as a “co-president” and potentially overstepping his new role in Trump’s orbit.

Musk, who spent more than $100 million in support of Trump’s campaign, has been by Trump’s side since he was elected the 47th president of the United States, appearing on calls with foreign leaders, sitting in on transition meetings and appearing on the golf course with the president-elect’s grandchildren at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. Musk has also spent substantial time with Lutnick at Mar-a-Lago in the days since the election.

Musk and Trump still appear to be close: Musk, Lutnick and several top Trump aides traveled with the president-elect from Florida to New York to attend a UFC fight at Madison Square Garden on Saturday evening. But Musk’s constant presence and increasingly public input have started to grate on transition officials who feel he is radically unfamiliar with the ways of Washington, according to people familiar with the dynamics.

Musk has publicly praised many of Trump’s choices. But his support of Lutnick before any public announcement — and his call to crowdsource opinions on the matter — marked a less deferential approach to Trump’s staffing decisions.

Bessent and Lutnick have been jockeying for the role of treasury secretary over the past week, with allies of each candidate potshotting the other to transition officials. Lutnick has asked Trump to pick him for the role, while Bessent met with Trump to interview for the Cabinet post at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, though no final decision on the appointment has yet to be announced. Bessent has reaffirmed his commitment to Trump’s agenda several times in the last week, publishing a Fox News opinion piece about the importance of tariffs and a Wall Street Journal op-ed bashing economists who doubted Trump’s record.

That behind-the-scenes maneuvering spilled fully into public view Saturday with Musk’s tweet and a follow-up X post from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health secretary, supporting Lutnick. Presidential picks for Cabinet positions do not generally publicly weigh in on the choices for other posts before those decisions are made.

The backroom jostling between Bessent’s and Lutnick’s allies also continued Saturday morning, when Trump was presented with information that Lutnick was a major donor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, according to people familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions.

A person familiar with Lutnick and Trump’s relationship dismissed any attempt to cast doubt on the financier’s loyalty to Trump, noting that Lutnick’s political donations have long been scrutinized and that his relationship with Clinton arose out of their work rebuilding New York City post-9/11, when Clinton was serving in the Senate.

“It’s a friendly joke between them,” said the person. “Howard’s friends with the Clintons and friends with Trump. I mean Tulsi [Gabbard, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence] was a Democrat until yesterday. This isn’t a big deal.”

Still, the impasse over the senior economic position has led some Trump officials to speculate whether he may turn to a third candidate. Trump trade adviser Robert E. Lighthizer, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tennessee) and Apollo Global Management chief executive Marc Rowan have been floated as potential alternatives to the squabbling Bessent and Lutnick, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Although he didn’t expressly indicate that he was contradicting Trump, Musk on Saturday also publicly praised Argentine President Javier Milei’s decision to slash tariffs.

“Good move,” Musk wrote on X in reaction to a post about Milei “SLASHING IMPORT TAXES.”

Milei, a libertarian who has been embraced by other far-right world leaders, has also been embraced by Trump’s conservative circles. At a recent America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-a-Lago — where Musk and Trump were photographed with Milei — the Argentine president praised Musk, saying X is helping to “save humanity.”

Musk endorsed Trump shortly after the former president was wounded in an attempted assassination at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, and spent the remainder of the campaign season investing heavily into helping him win the election.

After the election, Trump announced plans to create a “Department of Government Efficiency,” an outside body to advise the White House, led by Musk and entrepreneur turned conservative firebrand Vivek Ramaswamy.

Trump on Saturday announced that he’s picked Chris Wright, a fracking firm CEO, to lead the Energy Department. He also announced that he intends to appoint attorney Will Scharf to be White House staff secretary. Scharf was one of the lawyers who represented Trump in his presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court.

[Vesper 28,967]

1 minute ago, NikkiCFC said:

 

the full FT article

Biden allows Ukraine to strike Russia with US-made long-range missiles

Outgoing president makes big policy shift after North Korean soldiers are deployed in the war

 

https://www.ft.com/content/cc565d8e-e5c2-4b04-9b61-b05fb8edcb49

 

The US-made Army Tactical Missile System, which Ukraine is now expected to use on targets inside Russia © Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

US President Joe Biden has authorised Ukraine to launch limited strikes into Russia using US-made long-range missiles, in a big policy shift before the end of his White House term in January, two people familiar with the decision said.

 

The move by Biden comes in response to the deployment of thousands of North Korean troops to support Russia in its war against Ukraine, and after a barrage of new strikes by Moscow on Ukrainian cities at the weekend.

 

Tuesday will mark the 1,000th day of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

 

The US-made long-range missiles are likely to be first used by Ukraine to target Russian and North Korean forces in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops seized territory during the summer, according to people briefed on the matter.

 

Biden has allowed Ukraine to use HIMARS — the American High Mobility Artillery Rocket System — to strike targets inside Russia.

 

But he has long resisted authorising Kyiv to launch strikes within Russia using US-made long-range missiles known as the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, on the grounds that it could escalate tensions with Moscow.

 

ATACMS missiles have a range of up to 300 kilometres, or 190 miles. He is now dropping those objections more than two months before he leaves office to make way for Donald Trump.

 

The Republican is sceptical of additional military aid to Ukraine and has vowed to bring a swift end to the war — without saying how exactly he would do it.

 

The White House declined to comment. The Pentagon declined to respond to a request for comment.

 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday noted media reports “talking about the fact that we have received permission” to use American ATACMS missiles inside Russia, although he did not confirm Biden’s decision.

 

Zelenskyy has pleaded for months for the US and other partner countries to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of western-made, long-range weapons inside Russia.

 

He has argued that cross-border strikes with the American ATACMS, British Storm Shadow and French Scalp missiles were necessary to hit Moscow’s forces before they could launch new attacks on Ukrainian targets, including critical infrastructure.

 

“Two countries are against us, against Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said on Friday, referring to Russia and North Korea. “We would very much like to be granted the ability to use long-range weapons against military targets on Russia’s territory.”

 

Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister, said the use of ATACMS missiles would allow Kyiv to set its sights on “high value targets” and “potentially disrupt Russian operations”.

 

“There are targets which can only be addressed by high payload missiles such as ATACMS or equivalent aerial missiles. This is, of course, a decision giving Ukraine troops a chance, though as with many previous decisions coming after a significant and extremely painful delay.”

 

Biden’s decision to allow the Ukrainians to use ATACMS missiles followed the deployment early last month of 12,000 North Korean troops to Russia.

 

This was the first foray into the war by a foreign military and a major expansion of North Korea’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

 

Pyongyang had previously provided Moscow with hundreds of ballistic missiles and millions of artillery shells. In exchange, Moscow has provided Pyongyang with military technologies to help with its missile programmes and money, a senior Ukrainian official said.

 

In recent weeks, Russia has massed some 50,000 troops, including 10,000 North Korean soldiers, ahead of an anticipated offensive in its Kursk region to retake about 600 sq km of territory held by Ukrainian forces since their incursion in August.

 

A Ukrainian intelligence assessment shared with the Financial Times revealed that North Korea has supplied Russia with long-range rocket and artillery weapons, including 50 domestically made 170mm M1989 self-propelled howitzers and 20 updated 240mm multiple launch rocket systems.

 

Some of these weapons have been moved to the Kursk region for the planned assault involving North Korean troops.

 

“Even if limited to the Kursk region, ATACMS missiles put at risk high value Russian systems, assembly areas, logistics, command and control,” said Michael Kofman, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a US think-tank.

 

“They may enable Ukraine to hold on to Kursk for longer and raise the costs to North Korea for its involvement in the war.”

 

Bill Taylor, former US ambassador to Ukraine, said Biden’s decision makes “Ukraine stronger and increases the odds of a just end to the war”. “The decision may also unlock British and French missiles. Possibly even German,” he added.

 

Russia has not yet responded Biden’s decision.

 

In September, President Vladimir Putin suggested Ukrainian use of western-made missiles against Russian targets would mean “the direct involvement of Nato countries, the US, and the EU . . . It would mean they are at war with Russia — and if that’s the case, we will make the corresponding decisions.”

 

Russian military bloggers close to the Kremlin responded on Telegram with fury and frustration to Biden’s decision.

 

Rybar, a channel with more than 1.3mn subscribers, said the threat of ATACMS missiles would force Russian command and control centres, air defences and airfields further from the front lines. 

 

When asked about the escalatory risk from Biden’s policy shift, António Guterres, UN secretary-general, told reporters at the G20 in Rio de Janeiro: “We have a very consistent position regarding escalation in the Ukrainian war. We want peace . . . in line with the UN charter and international law.”

[cosmicway 1,333]

26 minutes ago, Vesper said:

in other words, you just made it up

China is NOT seeking to invade the Solomon Islands

and it IS far away from China

there are large amount of sovereign nations in between the two

 

the qualitative level of discourse on this forum at times is just horrific

falsehoods, obfuscation, non germane ramblings, and utter batshittery walk hand in hand with demonstrably proven facts and/or valid points that are actually worthy of debate, with all tossed out as equals, thus making a mockery of rational discussion

 

It's not far.
They don't go there with channel ferries. They have carriers, nuclear subs.
Their first try is of course through political influence.

[Vesper 28,967]

Just now, cosmicway said:

It's not far.

false

no clue why you insist on clutching to this

London is closer to Kabul, Afghanistan than Shanghai, China (coastal btw) is to the Solomon Islands

 

[Vesper 28,967]

laughable that you think China is on for invading the Solomon islands

it was a false claim

you have offered zero evidence backing it up

and are now, as is so typical of you

trying to drag the convo off the rails with another false claim regarding proximity

 

[Vesper 28,967]

Airstrikes Hit Central Beirut for First Time in Weeks

The attacks came as Israel’s military has been pounding an area just outside the Lebanese capital with some of the heaviest waves of bombardment in months.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/world/europe/beirut-lebanon-israel-hezbollah.html

 

Two waves of Israeli airstrikes hit Lebanon’s capital on Sunday, rare attacks inside Beirut that come as Israel’s military has been pounding areas outside the city where Hezbollah holds sway.

Israel’s intensified push appears aimed at pressuring the Lebanese government and Hezbollah to accede to terms for a cease-fire for Lebanon worked out between Israeli and American officials, in what Israeli analysts describe as a strategy of “negotiations under fire.”

Lebanon’s Health Ministry said at least six people were killed in Sunday’s strikes in Beirut, the first to hit the city in weeks. The attacks rattled residents, reviving fears that the city could be consumed by the larger war.

The infrequent strikes inside the capital have tended to target individuals belonging to Hezbollah. On Sunday, the first attack killed Mohammed Afif, the head of Hezbollah’s media office, according to Hezbollah and the Israeli military.

As the de facto spokesman of Hezbollah, Mr. Afif was one of the group’s few remaining figures with a public profile. His role had gained more prominence in recent weeks after Israel killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in September along with much of the group’s top command and leadership.

The Israeli military said late on Sunday that it had killed Mr. Afif in a “precise, intelligence-based strike,” calling him Hezbollah’s chief spokesman and saying he was “directly involved in advancing and executing Hezbollah’s terrorist activities against Israel.”

On Sunday evening, the Israeli military again struck in Beirut in the area of Mar Elias, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, which said that at least two people were killed and 22 wounded in the strike. The attack ignited a large fire in the building that was hit, sending plumes of smoke billowing into the neighborhood. There was no immediate comment from Israel’s military about the second strike.

The strike in Beirut earlier on Sunday destroyed a seven-story building in the neighborhood of Ras al-Naba, Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported. It said that search teams were working to rescue a number of people trapped under the rubble and that Mr. Afif was “coincidentally present” when the building was struck. The Lebanese Health Ministry said on Sunday that four people were killed in the attack on Ras al-Naba.

The building housed the Lebanese headquarters of the Arab Socialist Baath party, a small political faction aligned with Hezbollah. In a statement, the party said that its leader, Ali Hijazi, was not in the building at the time of the strike.

“The building was nearly empty” when the strike hit, Mr. Hussein said, as medics tended to his wounds.

Mr. Afif had appeared in public in recent weeks to speak to reporters at news conferences in the Dahiya. During one news conference last month, Mr. Afif told reporters that Hezbollah had taken responsibility for an aerial attack that targeted the home of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. When Israeli warnings of an imminent strike sent journalists scrambling to gather their equipment and leave, Mr. Afif told them, “The bombardments don’t scare us, so how should the threats scare us?”

A week ago, Mr. Afif said at a news conference that Hezbollah had not yet received any official proposal for a cease-fire deal — though he noted that there had been “contacts between Washington, Moscow, Tehran and other capitals” on the issue since the election of former President Donald J. Trump.

Hezbollah, he cautioned, remained “ready for a long war.”

Israel began an intensified military campaign against Hezbollah in September, nearly a year after the group began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. The offensive set off a humanitarian crisis in Lebanon, displacing nearly a quarter of the population and buckling the country’s health system.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry said on Sunday that Israeli attacks had killed 29 people on Saturday, bringing the death toll since the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah began in October 2023 to more than 3,480 people. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The campaign against Hezbollah initially focused on southern Lebanon, where Israel’s military said it sought to stop the group from being able to fire rockets across the border. But the military operations have expanded in recent weeks to include cities and towns across the country, including some far from that border. And Hezbollah has maintained its ability to launch rockets into Israel.

The Israeli military said on Sunday that about 35 rockets were fired into the country from Lebanon, setting off alert sirens in the area around Haifa, Israel’s main northern port city, and other places. Some of the rockets were intercepted by Israel’s air defenses, and others fell in open areas. One person was moderately injured, according to Israel’s emergency medical services.

[Vesper 28,967]

Russian dissidents lead anti-Putin march in Berlin

Exiled opposition figures rallied against the war in Ukraine, but their influence at home is waning

https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/russian-dissidents-lead-anti-putin-march-in-berlin-h795zhncb

Yulia Navalnaya told the crowd: “We must come out [to protests] and struggle against the Putin regime, come out and struggle against this war that Putin started with Ukraine, come out and remind people about political prisoners.”

FILIP SINGER/EPA

There was a time when Russia’s opposition movement, inspired by Alexei Navalny, its uncompromising leader, could fill the streets of Moscow with demonstrators. “Russia will be free!” they chanted and, very briefly, it seemed as if they might be right.

On Sunday, nine months on from Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison, the opposition was out again, this time to rally against Russia’s war in Ukraine. But instead of marching through Moscow, where they would face instant arrest, they gathered far from the Kremlin’s walls, in Berlin, at a protest that concluded at the gates of the Russian embassy.

Led by Yulia Navalnaya, the opposition leader’s widow, and the formerly jailed activists Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, their aim was to prove to the world that “a peaceful, free and civilised” Russia can still exist.

Carrying placards reading “No to War”, “My country has turned into a Gulag”, and “Free political prisoners”, they shouted their opposition to President Putin’s autocratic rule and his invasion of Ukraine.

Starting near Potsdamer Platz, the demonstrators progressed to the embassy via Checkpoint Charlie and Friedrichstrasse with smiles on their faces. There were effigies and images of Putin in a prison uniform. Estimates of attendance ranged from 1,800 to 6,000.

Protesters carried effigies of Vladimir Putin who has been in power for almost 25 years

LISI NIESNERREUTERS

“I think it’s important to show that Russia is not Putin, that Russia is us, and we must get back our country,” one protester chanting “No to War” and carrying a Russian flag told the Dozhd television channel.

Speaking from a stage, Navalnaya, 48, said: “We must come out [to protests] and struggle against the Putin regime, come out and struggle against this war that Putin started with Ukraine, come out and remind people about political prisoners.”

To cheers, Kara-Murza, 43, called for Russian “occupiers” to be driven out of Ukraine, and for Putin to be toppled. Pointing at the Russian embassy, he added: “We believe in our country and our future. And I know the day is not far away when that building, which is now a nest of Putin’s spies in Europe, will become the embassy of free Russia.”

Protesters shouted: “No to Putin! No to war in Ukraine! Freedom for political prisoners”

LISI NIESNER/REUTERS

Yet despite the confident words, the exiled opposition has been shaken by infighting and demoralised by the loss of Navalny, probably the victim of a Kremlin-ordered poisoning. There is no longer any serious expectation of ousting Putin, the former KGB officer who on New Year’s Eve will mark a quarter of a century in power.

“Never before during Putin’s entire rule has there been such a level of political repression, such a level of censorship, such a situation where the entire opposition has been destroyed inside Russia, and those who have not been destroyed have been forced to leave Russia,” Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s FBK movement, said before the march.

“Unfortunately, no one has invented any clear instructions on how to fight dictatorships. And this is not only a problem for the Russian opposition in exile because Russia’s aggression, Putin’s aggression, is now a problem for the entire civilised world.”

But while Navalnaya, Yashin and other leading figures are united in their condemnation of the invasion of Ukraine, the exiled opposition is trying to perform a delicate balancing act between seeking an end to the war and trying not to alienate its potential supporters back in Russia. Navalnaya said before the rally in Berlin that while she wanted the Kremlin’s forces to be driven out of Ukraine, she did not want to see Russia defeated in a wider sense.

Alexei Navalny, with his wife Yulia in 2013, was probably poisoned on Kremlin orders

DMITRY LOVETSKY/AP

As a result, Kyiv remains wary of, or even hostile to, the Russian opposition, despite its anti-war rhetoric, believing calls for a negotiated settlement could play into Putin’s hands.

Oleksiy Makeev, Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, dismissed the Berlin march as an “undignified and inconsequential November stroll”.

He accused the organisers of staging the protest purely to court German politicians and described the “Russian opposition” as a contradiction in terms.

“[It’s] an admittedly creative application from a useless NGO for funding from the German federal government and the EU,” Makeev wrote in an article for Die Zeit. “They’re not battling against the Russian regime, but for German attention. This demonstration is only a demonstration of their own weakness.”

Yashin, 41, declined to comment to the Dozhd TV channel, saying Makeev had a right to his opinion. “It seems obvious to me that all who are, one way or another, connected to the democratic opposition, agree that Russian forces must be withdrawn from Ukraine, [and that] Putin is a war criminal,” he added.

The opposition’s uphill struggle against Putin has been made harder in recent months by a number of conflicts between competing groups of exiled Kremlin critics.

The Kremlin has piled on the pressure, dismissing the anti-war march in Berlin as an irrelevance and its organisers as “monstrously detached” from their homeland.

Despite the risks, there are some isolated pockets of resistance to Putin’s rule left in Russia. Lev Shlosberg, a veteran opposition politician, is one of the few relatively well-known Kremlin critics who has refused to flee the country since the start of Moscow’s ruthless crackdown on dissent.

A member of Yabloko, Russia’s oldest liberal party, Shlosberg, 61, was designated a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin last year after speaking out against the war in Ukraine. He now faces up to two years in prison on charges of failing to identify himself as a foreign agent in social media posts, a requirement under the law. Despite this, he said he had no regrets about remaining in Russia because he believed his words carried greater weight than those of fellow opposition figures in the West.

“Why should I leave my home?” he said in an interview from his hometown of Pskov, a city near Russia’s border with Estonia. “Yes, I’m restricted in everything. I have to think about every word. I’ve been deprived of the right to take part in elections. I didn’t want this time to come, either for my country or for my life. This era is very dangerous for everyone. But does that mean I should pack my suitcase and look for another country?”

[Vesper 28,967]

Edited November 18 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,967]

Disestablish the Church of England

 

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/im-a-believer-but-times-up-for-the-church-of-england-wjxmp0dhn?region=global

No previous Archbishop of Canterbury has been forced from office because of scandal. Thomas Cranmer was burnt at the stake because the monarchy had reverted to Catholicism after the reign of Edward VI, but that is rather different.

The John Smyth scandal was so disgusting — both the sadistic acts themselves and the cover-up — that it is understandable that all the discussion, in its immediate aftermath, has been about “safeguarding”. The grovelling apologies from Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends, assuring the victims of their prayers, has rather overlooked what the scandal and the method of Archbishop Welby’s departure actually showed us.

It is this. As far as institutional Christianity is concerned in Great Britain, the game is up. The Church of England by Law Established, bishops sitting in the House of Lords dressed like walk-on parts in Wolf Hall, the glorious world depicted in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels, in which shovel-hatted high Tory archdeacons await the call from Downing Street to tell them they are to occupy bishoprics — all that is over. It was over, in reality, years ago.

Whatever you think of the arguments for or against the expulsion of illegal immigrants to Rwanda, the behaviour of Welby and his bishops in the House of Lords actually demonstrated, more clearly than the Smyth sadism scandal, why there is no longer a case for an established church. These bishops were not just speaking against a bill which had been introduced by a democratically elected Commons, they were seeking to amend it. They were using — abusing, surely — political power. And that must be wrong. They represent the tiny minority of people like myself who actually believe the Christian religion, and who choose to practise their faith in the CofE.

Those who go to Holy Communion believing that there they encounter the living and risen Christ, recognise that, for this rite to be perpetuated, they need a church. That means having the orders of the church: priests and bishops, who, in the early church, were the same thing. That’s all we need. It was out of this requirement that institutional Christianity was born, with its glorious buildings, its hierarchies, its councils, its encrustations of doctrines and mythologies and devotional practices.

The CofE grew from a particular set of circumstances in the 16th century, and everyone who worships within its confines knows it has deep flaws and inconsistencies, while rejoicing — when they find it being used — in its old Prayer Book. In colonial times, it expanded and became the “Anglican Communion”, so that the Archbishop of Canterbury became “Leader of the Worldwide Anglican Communion”, a sort of quasi-Catholic, quasi-Protestant pope.

At each succeeding Lambeth Conference, the gathering of the bishops worldwide, the sheer unsustainability of this anomaly is revealed. Bishops from African countries where the practice of homosexuality can be punished by death sit down with American liberals whose entire mindset and socio-economic circumstances are so utterly different that it is farcical to pretend that an Archbishop in Lambeth palace can “hold them together”. As the naughty sub on one newspaper once wrote in a headline, “Anglican Bishops Split Over Gay Sex”.

When an institution is no longer in touch with reality, it will eventually break and dissolve. This has happened to “Anglicanism”, a word I put in inverted commas, because it is questionable, really, whether it has ever in fact existed. The colonial phenomenon of northern European and American Christians trying to pretend they are in the same psychological position as Christians in Pakistan or Uganda cannot be sustained. Nor, in England (for it is only in England that the CofE is by Law Established) can the Anglican bishops, representing fewer than 2 per cent of the population, claim the right to sit in the House of Lords or to be “established”. With their pathetic virtue signalling, they have long behaved like a minority sect, because that is what they are.

They cannot keep their own house in order, whether it is over the question of women’s ordination, LGBTQ+ matters or anything else. Knowing that they can’t do so, the bishops retreat into the never-never land of apologies for past wrongdoings. Not the real, recent wrongdoings, such as the sadism of Smyth or the appalling abuses practised by the late Bishop of Gloucester, the rightly imprisoned Peter Ball, (sins also institutionally covered up for years) but the generalised sins of having supported the evil slave trade. For these wrongdoings Welby authorised the spending of millions of the Church’s money in “reparation”, while the poorer parishes in our inner cities, which desperately need cash to sustain their buildings and their schools, were not merely neglected but are regularly persecuted by their bishops, starved of support or money.

Some readers will think that the logical conclusion of what I am saying is for Anglicans to jump ship and join the Church of Rome. Maybe in the Providence of God, these convulsions will lead to both churches coming together but the woes of Welby are merely echoes of what has gone on in the great Church of the Ages. In both cases, the hierarchy has supposed that the institution of the church must be preserved at the cost of individuals. This is a fundamental blasphemy against the original idea of the church, which was that Christ died for each and every human soul, not to preserve a club. Welby’s cover-up of Smyth and the CofE’s cover-up of innumerable child abuse cases pales in size beside the sheer magnitude of the Roman Catholic cover-up which has left two generations angry and traumatised.

As Archbishop of Canterbury, Welby crowned Charles during his coronation ceremony in Westminster Abbey

VICTORIA JONES/REUTERS

Every month of my long life, I believe more and more in Christianity and less and less in the institutional churches. But I try to keep the faith by reading to myself the passages of Scripture assigned each day. On the day Welby resigned we had the chapter of the Book of Daniel when the King of Babylon sees the writing on the wall and does not know what it means. In the case of the Church of England, it means disestablishment.

The nationalisation of the church began with Henry VIII

ALAMY

Nice work for the lawyers. When the nationalisation of the church began, with Henry VIII, the First Succession Act placed the crown on Anne Boleyn’s children — this turned out to be simply one child, Elizabeth I. It was their moral inability to submit to this Act which cost Thomas More and John Fisher their lives. Elizabeth, the most brilliant leader this country ever had, carefully trod the balance between her love of the old rites and her tenderness towards the Protestant spirit. She created not merely the CofE as we know it but the position which later came to be called Anglo-Catholic.

The absorption of monastic and other church lands and revenues by Henry was sweeping, but many potentates have done this sort of land grab in the past. It leaves the modern Church of England with an enormous portfolio of property and, when disestablished, it will not be clear exactly to whom these estates belong. Without the revenue, at present administered by the Church Commissioners, the church would be bankrupt; but it will not be clear, after disestablishment, how much of its revenues should be purloined by conservation bodies such as Historic England to ensure the maintenance or future of the parish churches.

Who would own, or be responsible for, the cathedrals? These are all questions that were resolved reasonably swiftly after the disestablishment of the Anglican churches in Ireland (in 1869) and Wales (1914). In England, the properties are more numerous and the historic strands are more deeply woven into the fabric of national life. So there will undoubtedly be problems.

The burning of Thomas Cranmer, a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury

HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG/GETTY IMAGES

Then, there are the 4,630 CofE schools in England. These include many of the best schools in the state sector, both primary and secondary. They are also places, where the parish priest has the wit to realise it, of mission: not in a creepy, brainwashing way, but in a way that allows children, of all religions and none, the chance to grow up with a knowledge of what the faith of this country once was, and still officially is. One of the great scandals of the CofE in the last century is its failure, in many dioceses, to see the point of church schools, and its unwillingness to strengthen links between the local school and the parish church to which it is attached.

It is perhaps in the schools that the strongest arguments can be made for having an established church. The CofE schools both are, and are not, “faith” schools in the way that Roman Catholic, Jewish or Muslim schools are “faith schools”. Obviously, they profess a belief in Jesus but they go back to an era when the phrase “CofE” meant “for Everyone”.

Before the development of register office weddings, all marriages were registered in parish churches and most people, even if nonconformist, had funerals conducted by the local vicar. The church schools, just as much as the parish churches, continue to be great social unifiers. Children of all backgrounds mix and the parents’ evenings and school events, including carol services or Remembrance Day commemorations with cubs and scouts, bring people together.

There is no reason why this should end when the church is disestablished but there is no doubt that establishment is a useful glue which ensures, theoretically at least, that the Christian identity of the country, and all its links with the past and all its associations, is not lost, merely because most people nowadays are not practising Anglicans.

In the past, the question of disestablishment has arisen, within the church, for doctrinal reasons. Now it is a matter of urgency because it can no longer plausibly be argued that most people in England regard themselves, even notionally, as CofE. In 1928, for example, when the church wanted to make very modest changes to the Book of Common Prayer, this had to be agreed by parliament, By then, the House of Commons was composed, among others, of Jews, nonconformists, overt atheists, Presbyterians and Roman Catholics, but this did not stop them from feeling entitled to reject the proposed Prayer Book. Many Anglicans at the time followed the path of the witty and learned Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson, in deciding this was intolerable, and the church should disestablish.

But it didn’t. Instead, it muddled along until 1970 when the General Synod was instituted. Most liturgical and doctrinal issues affecting the church are now debated and decided by this costly and inane body. (At present, the Pope and the Catholic leadership are attempting to make their church “synodal”: if they had studied the deliberations of the General Synod, it is open to question whether they would rethink.) The aspect of establishment of which most people are aware is the link between the church and the monarchy. CofE bishops are still, officially at least, appointed by the Crown. And most of the major royal events in the past 100 years have been choreographed by the Anglicans. Welby put the crown on Charles’s head, Welby married Meghan to Harry.

This link, which many find symbolically significant and helpful, only really works when the monarch is a practising Anglican, as, for the last hundred years or so, the monarchs quite clearly have been. Prince William is, equally clearly, not a churchgoer, and he has gone on record as saying he sees no reason why his son Prince George should feel obliged to be CofE. The 1701 Act of Settlement remains in force to this day, forbidding monarchs to marry, or become, Roman Catholics, and this, presumably, would be one of the first Acts to be repealed in the event of disestablishment. It is hard to think of any good reason why it has been retained so long.

In Wales, after the church was disestablished in 1914, the church enjoyed a great injection of life. A Welsh Anglican no longer needed to feel sheepish, as if attending the “English” church. The liturgy in Welsh and the traditions of Welsh sanctity could be enjoyed. From a religious point of view, I would be cautiously optimistic about some form of religious revival if the CofE stopped being established. Ideally, the rather nasty cabal of evangelicals who put Welby in place, and then plotted to remove him when he weakened their cruel ideas about homosexuality, would go off and form their own anti-gay Protestant church, and the Catholic Anglicans could concentrate on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Of course, the history of England, from Henry VIII to the present day, is interwoven with a great cloud of Anglican witnesses. But that history is over: witness the fact that in Oxford, where every single one of the chairs of theology was once only occupied by Anglican clergy, that requirement has now been dropped. There simply would not have been enough learned or godly Anglican clergy to fill the places. It is surely very indicative of something that the most intellectually distinguished Archbishop of Canterbury of modern times, Rowan Williams, had been a professor at Oxford, but he had never been a parish priest or, really, belonged to the Church of England, having been nurtured in Wales and then in colleges.

His successor, Welby, badly mismanaged things. But he cannot be held responsible for a total decline and change which has been taking place within the CofE for decades. His resignation is just a symptom, just the beginning, and in a few years we shall watch the whole edifice of the established church tumble. It breaks my heart to write these words, because, as well as being a Christian, I love the “vast moth-eaten musical brocade”, as Larkin called it. But the game is up, and enough is enough.

Edited November 18 by Vesper

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Likely raped to death.

A doctor.

A stellar surgeon.

The embodiment of Palestinian ethics.

Likely raped to death.

The racism of Western media who are not covering this, and Western politicians who are not denouncing this, together with the thousand other testimonies and allegations of rape and other forms of mistreatment and torture that Palestinians have suffered in Israeli jails, is absolutely sickening.

 

 

Edited November 18 by Vesper

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The True Scale Of Modern Nuclear Weapons 🤕

 

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Austerity déjà vu: the return of the wrong economic medicine

The EU faces a stark choice: invest boldly in a sustainable, competitive future or risk repeating the mistakes of austerity, jeopardizing jobs, industry, and its global standing.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/austerity-deja-vu-the-return-of-the-wrong-economic-medicine

When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented the political guidelines for her new mandate last summer, she announced that “this will be an investment Commission”. The talk around the need for more investments has completely scaled up since then. Mario Draghi put the cherry on top of the cake in his report on competitiveness by calling on the EU to invest 5 per cent of GDP every year in decarbonising and digitalising the economy in order to make it more competitive. Almost everybody from left to right seems to agree that more ambitious investments are needed. But big misunderstandings arise on how to finance them.

Nevertheless, the only real thing happening on ambitious investments in the EU at the moment is the talking, because there are no new initiatives on creating the necessary funding. Meanwhile, the only concrete measures in the making seem to be those on fiscal consolidation, announcing a new wave of austerity. The contradiction between the walk and the talk could not be greater. Those of us who lived in the aftermath of the 2008-09 financial crisis are experiencing a strong ‘déjà vu’ effect, as past mistakes are about to be repeated. It might not be wrong to assume that Draghi has recognised some of these past mistakes while he was the ECB President and is now raising some red flags towards the opposite direction with his report pushing for investments.

Over a decade since the failed experiment of austerity, we are now reading again recommendations for fiscal consolidation and structural reforms in reports from the big financial institutions (like the OECD or the IMF) and from policymakers (recent Eurogroup statement). The fiscal consolidation and structural reforms imposed after the financial crisis led to a self-inflicted economic recession in the EU and had the opposite effects to those initially intended. It resulted in a dramatic contraction of both public and private investments, as Member States had their hands tied by the Stability and Growth Pact, which prevented governments from supporting private investments through public incentives.

Meanwhile, demand dropped substantially, especially in those countries most affected by the crisis, as a result of wage freezes or wage cuts, which forced workers to pay for a crisis that they did not create (but that was created by irresponsible corporate strategies of big banks, which was enabled by deregulation). The US has never adopted frugal economic governance rules (like the EU Stability and Growth Pact), betting instead on investments to overcome economic crises. And this clearly works much better than austerity, given the persistent gap between the US and the EU in terms of productive investment and the risk it entails for the EU’s competitiveness.

Trade unions were hoping that the EU has finally understood this, with the positive response to the COVID-19 crisis that led to unprecedented support through programmes like Next Generation EU or SURE. But unfortunately, this response risks becoming a good one-off memory with the reformed economic governance rules coming soon into force. The new rules will severely erode public investments in most Member States, as acknowledged by the European Investment Bank: “the reinstatement of fiscal rules is likely to result in fiscal consolidation, which tends to affect public investment disproportionately. Historical data for 16 OECD countries show that such fiscal retrenchment usually has a disproportionate and long-lasting effect on public investment.” With eight Member States being exposed to an excessive deficit procedure, the impact of EU fiscal rules on government spending will soon materialise. This might severely undermine a series of key EU political objectives, since research shows that the new rules allow only three Member States to make the necessary social and green investments to reach their climate targets.

Another wave of fiscal consolidation and structural reforms risks being the ultimate fatal ingredient of what is slowly but surely becoming a perfect storm. Particularly concerning is that the Eurogroup’s statement comes at a time when more and more companies are announcing plant closures and job cuts across Europe. The big European companies in the automotive sector, which count 13 million workers along the value chain, have been in the headlines over the past weeks. But announcements are also reaching us from the chemicals, basic metals, aerospace, and energy sectors. We fear a cycle of restructuring reinforcing itself unless policies that promote investments with social conditionalities are established. Now is the moment to invest, not to cut.

We cannot help but wonder whether some policymakers are not trying to make it easier for companies to lay off workers, instead of protecting jobs. We know that unemployment stagnated in Europe, despite the recent difficult economic outlook, which is probably a positive result of the short-time work schemes. However, companies will not keep holding on to skilled workers if the recovery keeps being delayed. Therefore, we need policies that can prevent the ongoing restructuring wave from turning into a tsunami, sweeping through our economy.

We welcome the European Commission’s commitment to present a Clean Industrial Deal during the first 100 days of its mandate, as industriAll Europe has been calling for a real European industrial policy for years. But we fear that without concrete additional funding, this will be a missed opportunity. We need a Next Generation EU 2.0 to finance a future-proof EU industry, with quality jobs at its core and mandatory involvement of trade unions in the governance framework. We also need concrete measures to protect jobs and avoid layoffs, such as a SURE 2.0 fund that should support industry and the workforce through this crisis. It should be obvious that any form of public support should be linked with social conditionalities.

The time to act is now, and we need ambitious policymakers who are not afraid to change course. The worst we can do is keep repeating failed recipes. This medicine will not heal; it will hurt Europe’s economy.

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The real story of inflation

Pandemic-era stimulus isn’t the culprit.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/14/inflation-american-rescue-plan-covid/

Inflation turned out to be a defining issue of the 2024 election, but the common story about its cause — covid-era stimulus — is more wrong than right. We should not learn a mistaken lesson.

The culprit is often identified as the American Rescue Plan, a $2 trillion stimulus package enacted in March 2021, which followed other relief packages provided in 2020. According to this theory, the government might have meant well, but it put too much money into people’s pockets, drove up demand and unleashed inflation.

This story is intuitively appealing, and it is no surprise it became a popular narrative with the media. The weight of the evidence, however, suggests that the package had only a modest impact on the path of inflation.

The central cause was the pandemic itself — and the nearly unprecedented supply-side shock it caused, which extended beyond the crisis itself.

Along with Robin Brooks of Brookings and William Murdock of Lazard, I have parsed a variety of economic data through the arc of the pandemic, including a commonly used measure of demand, supply indicators such as delivery times, and a proxy for how firms manage their inventories.Follow

The results show that supply-chain variables directly accounted for 79 percent of the rise in underlying inflation in 2021. These effects then continued into 2022, with ongoing supply issues directly explaining 60 percent of the rise in inflation that year. The rest was more than accounted for by spillovers from the 2021 supply-driven inflation. All of which leaves only a modest role for demand-driven effects like the covid relief package.

Why did these effects play out over such a long time? At the start of the pandemic, Americans shifted their spending from services (like travel, eating out and going to the movies) to goods (like computer hardware and exercise equipment) — just as a snarled supply chain caused those goods to be in short supply. This caused prices to spike.

Supply chain disruptions, as traditionally measured by delivery times, largely righted themselves by 2022, so on the surface it might seem like these effects would have then, too. But in response to the severity of the shock, which has no modern comparison, inventory managers were cautious through at least this summer.

As a global CEO recently said, companies did not want to get caught not having what consumers wanted in stock again. Increasing prices to dampen demand and extend inventory life meant that the prices charged to consumers rose further above the cost to the seller. This meant profit margins went up, not because of “greedflation” but instead because of a rational response to businesses managing their inventories.

Other effects, including the impact on housing and the catch-up in services spending that occurred after the economy reopened, also meant that the inflationary impact of the pandemic lasted long after the pandemic itself had ended.

In this multistage process of inflation’s arc, the American Rescue Plan played a minimal role. The stages would have occurred regardless of whether the plan was $2 trillion, $1 trillion or $500 billion. It simply takes a long time for economies to adjust to massive shocks like the pandemic.

This conclusion might strain credulity to those accustomed to hearing the typical mantra that fiscal excess triggered inflation. There are some common-sense pieces of evidence supporting our conclusion.

For starters, look across countries. If the American Rescue Plan caused inflation, we should see that countries that provided more of such covid relief experienced more inflation. Yet other countries, including Germany and Britain, did a lot less covid relief and experienced similar inflation to the United States. An analysis including a wide array of countries suggests no broader relationship, as the chart shows. (The cross-country evidence, if anything, suggests the U.S. enjoyed the benefit of more rapid growth without paying the price of higher inflation.)

Another approach is to look across states within the United States. If pandemic relief was the primary culprit, then we should see that the states where households received more support also experienced higher inflation. That is also not the case, as a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper concluded.

Finally, if elevated demand from covid stimulus was the cause of inflation, reducing inflation would have required a big hit to that demand. This is why some economists predicted unemployment would need to rise dramatically to bring inflation down. Instead, consumer price inflation has fallen from 9 percent in June 2022 to roughly 2.5 percent today while the unemployment rate has risen relatively modestly, from 3.6 percent to 4.1 percent. This is the “dog that didn’t bark”: Inflation largely wasn’t caused by demand, so it wasn’t necessary to slash demand to bring inflation back down. (The stunning implication is that inflation would have fallen significantly even without the Fed’s tightening.)

If inflation was not primarily caused by the fiscal response to the pandemic, that in turn raises the question: Would voters have punished the Biden-Harris administration as harshly if it were clear the inflation was mostly just because of the pandemic?

The backlash against governments across the world, especially in Europe, suggests it might not have mattered. In those countries, fiscal relief packages were much smaller and could not have been plausibly blamed for the inflation. Incumbents across the board did badly in elections after inflation hit.

There will be future health and economic crises. Misunderstanding the underlying causes of recent inflation risks hampering effective policymaking when the next crisis happens. Leaders might be hesitant to provide significant fiscal relief out of fear of stoking inflation. Though each situation is different, it would be a mistake to reach that conclusion from this covid episode.

Edited November 18 by Vesper

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Trump picks Brendan Carr, who laid out agenda in Project 2025, as FCC chairman

Carr has promised to challenge Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft, which he called a “censorship cartel.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/11/17/fcc-transition-brendan-carr/

President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday he was naming Brendan Carr as the next Federal Communications Commission chairman, positioning the regulatory agency to do battle against social media companies and TV broadcasters that Republicans portray as too liberal.

Carr, 45, the senior Republican among the FCC’s five commissioners, has vowed in recent days to take on what he called a “censorship cartel” including Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft. Earlier this year, he laid out an aggressive agenda for the FCC in Project 2025, a conservative proposal for Trump’s second term developed by the Heritage Foundation. Carr has been a vocal supporter of billionaire Elon Musk and an advocate of tougher restrictions on China.

“Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy,” Trump said in a statement Sunday evening. “He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America.”

Carr said Sunday night on X that he was “humbled and honored” to serve in the position, and that he would seek to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”Follow

The FCC, which regulates TV and radio broadcasting, telephone and internet service providers, as well as satellites, is an independent agency, but it has pursued a more Democratic agenda during the Biden administration, under the leadership of Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat.

Carr began making moves even before he was named to take charge under the incoming Trump administration. On Wednesday, he sent a letter to Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, warning that he believed they were improperly censoring some viewpoints. He wrote that the new Trump administration may review their companies’ activities.

“Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship,” he wrote. “Your companies played significant roles in this improper conduct.”

Carr has also indicated that he would scrutinize TV broadcasters in instances that Republicans view as political bias, through the narrow legal authority that the FCC has over such issues. When Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on “Saturday Night Live” days before the election, Carr blasted NBC for trying to “evade” an FCC rule requiring networks to give candidates equal time. NBC later said it gave Trump a commensurate slot following a NASCAR race.

Carr’s ascent also bodes well for the business prospects of Musk, the world’s richest man, with the two cultivating a closer relationship in recent months. Carr has visited SpaceX facilities multiple times this year, including trekking to southern Texas last month to witness SpaceX’s Starship rocket booster float back to Earth in a historic landing.

Musk, who after going all-in on Trump’s campaign has been playing a central role in assembling and vetting key figures in his new administration, on Sunday praised Carr’s plans to take on the “censorship cartel,” posting “based” on X, a slang term meaning approval.

Pending decisions before the FCC include whether to allow Musk’s Starlink satellites to orbit closer to Earth, which would make its internet service speedier and a fiercer competitor to traditional broadband providers. Carr has advocated for Starlink to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in FCC grants. Musk’s social media platform X also stands to benefit from Carr’s vow to scrutinize its rival internet giants such as Facebook and Google.

“His deregulatory views and his affection for Elon Musk are well-known. I expect few surprises,” said Andrew Schwartzman, a veteran telecommunications lawyer.

One issue on which Carr has been out of step with Trump is TikTok, which the president-elect has said he will “save” from a looming nationwide ban. Carr, an outspoken China hawk, has repeatedly called TikTok a danger to national security and has supported banning the app.

Carr has worked at the FCC since 2012 and was appointed a commissioner in 2017 by Trump. He rose through the ranks as an aide to Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, advising him for years on public safety and international issues, and accompanying him on trips abroad.

Pai called Carr a “brilliant advisor and General Counsel” on X on Sunday evening. “I’m confident he will be a great FCC chairman,” Pai wrote.

Carr has developed a lively social media presence over the years, beginning in 2014, when he started experimenting with live-tweeting Pai’s remarks during monthly FCC meetings. He has more recently used X, where he has 102,000 followers, to criticize the Biden administration and to advocate for policies he would pursue under a Trump presidency.

Carr’s appointment drew criticism from left-leaning groups, including the Chamber of Progress, which posted on X on Sunday that if he were confirmed, it would be up to Democrats to defend a content-moderation protection policy that “keeps the internet from becoming a cesspool.”

Craig Aaron, co-CEO of the liberal advocacy group Free Press Action, said Carr’s apparent willingness to target news organizations over their coverage of Trump should be “disqualifying.”

“Brendan Carr has been campaigning for this job with promises to do the bidding of Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” Aaron said. “He’s being rewarded with a promotion, but it’s the American public who will pay the price.”

Carr wrote in the FCC section of Project 2025 that Big Tech posed a threat through its “attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.”

“The FCC has an important role to play in addressing the threats to individual liberty posed by corporations that are abusing dominant positions in the market,” Carr wrote.