Thanks, lj. I didn't realize how much had changed. Although in retrospect that number for photovoltaic manufacturing should have been a clue -- those factories don't appear all at once.
lj - I’d observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we’ve been told are minimally trained.
Well, it's not as if DHS has not had a problem with the sort of people that hairshirthedonist mentioned being employed in their ranks for a lot longer than just this last year. The US Justice Department was doing its best to rid itself of right-wing militia members under Biden after finding that there were hundreds of Oath Keepers working in federal law enforcement:
Truthout highlighted one particularly telling quote from the report when they covered it shortly thereafter:
The Oath Keepers’ overlap with agencies within DHS is ideologically consistent with the way that many of these agencies operate. Border Patrol and ICE carry out the U.S.’s most cruel anti-immigration policies, for instance. As one Border Patrol agent wrote, per the report, “Most Border Patrol Agents are Oath Keepers, we just haven’t signed up yet.”
(I'm not linking to that article only because I don't want to end up in the spam filter.)
In 2022 Biden issued an executive order (EO 14074) aimed at screening out white supremacists and others with dangerous biases against minority groups, and Raskin and Casten were pushing Garland to fully implement the EO in 2024 ahead of the elections. That did not get done in time.
Naranja Nero rescinded that EO along with pretty much every other order issued by Biden, and deactivated the database that was put together to track these sorts of things:
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12515
So any new recruits who are ideologically oriented towards white supremacy and white nationalism are going to find that there are plenty of others already there to welcome them in.
That's true, but the line I hear emerging from dem politicians is that it is because ICE is undertrained that these problems are emerging. I may be missing stuff, but anyone who is talking about this on the various programs from the dem side rails on ICE and makes no mention of Border Patrol.
Re: coal, in Tooze's lecture, (roughly here in the youtube video) he points out that after Kyoto, China undertook a national industrialization project that, according to estimates, killed 1.4 million chinese citizens a year, because of increased air pollution, which is why wj refers to coal.
However, there has been a 'hard pivot' against that. Here is the youtube transcript, cleaned up a bit
we're talking here of a truly violent process of transformation which the Chinese regime can be fairly said deliberately opted into as a choice and then pivoted hard against and that pivot begins in the 2010s. It is a matter widely understood of regime survival because there's only so many times people can see their babies choking to death before uh you need to pivot. By the early mid2010s the air pollution standards imposed on Chinese coal fired power stations were actually more strenuous than those in either the United States or Europe. As unpalatable and as uncomfortable it is, we need to reckon with the fact that the cleaning up of China's first phase of dramatic hypergrowth was accompanied under the leadership of Xi Jinping by a extremely explicit commitment to environmental protection at first on a limited scale and then secondly on a global scale culminating in that Chinese appropriation of Europe's vision of green modernization in 2020.
whereas the US’s total installed solar capacity is on the order of 250GW, “China currently has the capacity to churn out 1,200GW of photovoltaic panels in a single year.”
China has a huge power infrastructure, which currently is overwhelmingly coal-based. Nothing effective happens on the climate front without that changing. Not that we shouldn't all be doing what we can. Just that Chinese power generation is the elephant in the room.
With that kind of capacity to build solar panels, they should be dramatically changing their generation mix. Which, IMHO, is something to celebrate. Not to mention that economies of scale in building them should make Chinese solar panels more affordable for the rest of the world.
Tooze's observation fits in with what I think are the bullshit quality of SDGs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals The SDGs are universal, time-bound, and legally non-binding policy objectives agreed upon by governments. They come close to prescriptive international norms but are generally more specific, and they can be highly ambitious. The overarching UN program "2030 Agenda" presented the SDGs in 2015 as a "supremely ambitious and transformative vision" that should be accompanied by "bold and transformative steps" with "scale and ambition"
One could argue that the Orange douche blew that one out of the water, but I thought it was western-centric from the start.
I also listened to this Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast with an energy analyst
https://youtu.be/i__iaPepixk?si=dKiCa75BrryAhVNP
I only understood half of it, but coupled with Tooze's observations, leaves me deeply uneasy.
I'd observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we've been told are minimally trained. There are a number of narratives that this could lead to and I'm not sure which one is true (and which is most likely to be seized on, which is often very different from the true one) but it does point to some interesting dynamics in all this.
...will have to decide whether and on what terms they want to work with an economically dominant China on the climate problem.
Here's the fuel mix for my pissant little non-profit local power authority for the last 24 hours. 20 years ago it was, except for the same amount of hydro, all fossil fuels. The wind is from turbines built somewhere in the US. The solar is from panels built in Georgia. Another 100MW of solar comes online late this year, along with a 100MW 400MWh battery system. The batteries are from a Korean company's US plant. For coal, 100MW is the minimum plant output that still allows for a warm start. The wholly-owned coal plant's power is as cheap as the wind or solar because local circumstances, so gets dispatched by the balancing authority.
Despite Trump's efforts, there are still things going on in the US, even if we aren't leading.
At the New School, Tooze made a similar argument. He cited another favourite statistic: whereas the US’s total installed solar capacity is on the order of 250GW, “China currently has the capacity to churn out 1,200GW of photovoltaic panels in a single year.” In those Chinese solar panels Tooze sees a climate-era analogue to the Soviet T-34 tanks. At development and climate meetings, he said, you can go a long time without hearing anyone acknowledge that China matters vastly more to the climate-change story than anything happening anywhere else, very much including the US. The point of all this, Tooze insists, is not to chasten liberal self-regard – or not only that. The point is to get people to confront our radical new reality.
Tooze told me that the climate book he started working on after Crashed, which is now nearing completion, will argue “that if we’re serious in the west, if you’re serious about climate, then you have to face the popular front question”. In other words, many of the same countries that chose 80 years ago to ally with the Soviet Union to fight Germany will have to decide whether and on what terms they want to work with an economically dominant China on the climate problem.
Interesting, no? I wasn't expecting to read something like that.
hairshirthedonist - I’m sure the “black helicopter” types are ready to use all the guns they’ve been telling everyone they needed to overthrow an oppressive government and protect our constitutional rights.
They're not only ready to use those guns, they are willing. Who do you think has been showing up at all those ICE/CBP recruitment seminars?
And they never thought they needed to overthrow an oppressive government to protect our rights. They were only worried about their rights.
I'm sure the "black helicopter" types are ready to use all the guns they've been telling everyone they needed to overthrow an oppressive government and protect our constitutional rights.
Right? Isn't that what they said? I mean, they have to be really upset about this stuff, don't they?
IANAL, but this opinion seems extraordinarily blistering.
It's not unusual for a judge to cite the US Constitution in a ruling. Even citing the Declaration of Independence isn't unknown. (Although quoting multiple of its complaints against George III probably is.) But this?
The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.
or
Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency.
or
With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike,
Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.
And I mean that in the innocent way, which is to say I am prepared to take advantage of any useful ideas, from anywhere, to help combat my adversaries, who in this case are the MAGA movement. Successful campaigns to fight authoritarian regimes - hallelujah. The difference between mobilisation and organisation, and the different effects campaigns focussed on them have had in the past - bring it on. From what I read, including here, almost nobody thinks the Democrats have done a good job of enthusing and galvanising the voting public, and particularly the working class, to win general elections and support their policies. Anything which stands a chance of changing that is worth some attention IMO.
And another one, a Guardian piece on Tooze
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/15/the-crisis-whisperer-how-adam-tooze-makes-sense-of-our-bewildering-age
Don't worry, nous, I remember when McKinney cited Freddie de Boer explaining that this was a guy who understood the left. (though I'm not suggesting you are doing the same with Krugman, it just always comes to mind when I think about who one cites and why)
About the Krugman link, Tooze and Klein both note, with astonishment, that the tariffs on India is higher than the tariffs on China.
A section I didn't highlight but was interested in, was Tooze's comparison with defeating Germany without Russian help to dealing with climate change without the Chinese on board, which was certainly thought provoking.
Fun chinese proverb for y'all
宁为太平犬，不做乱世人
Better to be a dog in times of peace than a human in times of chaos.
It seems I am often prefacing links (as I am here) with a mention of how often I disagree with the author on many particulars. Don't take my link to Krugman as an endorsement of Krugman as anything but an observer of this recent deal:
It's about the free trade agreement just negotiated between the EU and India. I'd have to go back and look over what Krugman says to see if his view is compatible with what Tooze is saying, but I think that the deal itself is very much in line with Tooze's (and Carney's) assertions.
The world is losing faith in the Peace of Westphalia. It will be interesting to see what sort of new order emerges out of that collapse -- assuming that we survive the environmental collapse that is likely to be brought on by all of this lack of a functioning order.
I think there is a lot to be said for "a multipolar order, which isn’t a single order but is multiple different orders that are overlapping, very unlike a simple hegemony, more like a mesh " Just for openers, it avoids the risks which are inherent in having a single point of failure.
That, I think, is the lesson of the moment. We had a (relatively) stable world order. With lots of disorder in local areas, but overall stability. But it was based (like it or not, believe it or not) on an implicit assumption that the US, for all its flaws and complicity in local disruptions, would act to keep the overall system stable. But that, whether we recognized it or not, made the US a single point of failure.
Worse, and definitely not recognized by anyone, it turned out the single point of failure was a single individual: whoever happened to be President of the United States. The failing at that one point has been an unfolding disaster, not only for the population of the US, but for the general stability of the world. The collapse has been slower on the international level. But it also looks less reversible.
As an aside, I would point out that the Chinese far prefer stability to chaos (both at home and abroad). They have chafed at America's dominance internationally. But I suspect they are starting to be concerned along the lines of "Be careful what you wish for." Having a loose cannon leading the US is ending the era of American dominance. But the chaos that accompanies the way that is happening....
Since I have the dashboard open, I'm going to quickly move GftNC's link to a separate post as I think that it is worth considering outside what has been discussed here.
Actually, that New Yorker piece is extremely interesting. It chimes with some of the stuff people have talked about here, but there's obviously a lot more detail about the defining characteristics of what has worked and not worked in the past.
The Kims are essentially god kings (in an officially atheist country).
Their births are accompanied by miracles and the current one was even claimed to be so perfect that he has no digestion.
That idea could be an adoption from something Mao said. He told the story that one day he by chance witnessed his (previously admired) teacher vomiting as the result of too much alcohol and that from then on he despised him. He then declared that the leader must never be associated with something like that, that people had to be indoctrinated to not even be able to imagine their leader having any human weaknesses, so people could not lose respect for him like he himself had.
Well, MAGA world has tendencies in that direction, and the religious part even more so. All images and videos contradicting that must eo ipso be fake. And Sharpie-Gate was just proof that His Orangeness was a better meteorologist than the guys doing it for a living.
In North Korea (as opposed to Russia or China) what we basically see is a monarchy in all but name.
That has the general upside, internally, of keeping the succession clear. Assuming that the successor is an adult, as was the case the first two times.
But the downside shows in cases like this where the obvious successor is very young. Perhaps her mother will be regent until she is older. Most likely, however, someone outside the family gets made regent. Which can be problematic.
A lot depends on how long Kim pere keeps going.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Adam Tooze”
Thanks, lj. I didn't realize how much had changed. Although in retrospect that number for photovoltaic manufacturing should have been a clue -- those factories don't appear all at once.
On “Moral insanity”
lj - I’d observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we’ve been told are minimally trained.
Well, it's not as if DHS has not had a problem with the sort of people that hairshirthedonist mentioned being employed in their ranks for a lot longer than just this last year. The US Justice Department was doing its best to rid itself of right-wing militia members under Biden after finding that there were hundreds of Oath Keepers working in federal law enforcement:
https://www.pogo.org/investigates/hundreds-of-oath-keepers-have-worked-for-dhs-leaked-list-shows
Truthout highlighted one particularly telling quote from the report when they covered it shortly thereafter:
The Oath Keepers’ overlap with agencies within DHS is ideologically consistent with the way that many of these agencies operate. Border Patrol and ICE carry out the U.S.’s most cruel anti-immigration policies, for instance. As one Border Patrol agent wrote, per the report, “Most Border Patrol Agents are Oath Keepers, we just haven’t signed up yet.”
(I'm not linking to that article only because I don't want to end up in the spam filter.)
In 2022 Biden issued an executive order (EO 14074) aimed at screening out white supremacists and others with dangerous biases against minority groups, and Raskin and Casten were pushing Garland to fully implement the EO in 2024 ahead of the elections. That did not get done in time.
Naranja Nero rescinded that EO along with pretty much every other order issued by Biden, and deactivated the database that was put together to track these sorts of things:
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12515
So any new recruits who are ideologically oriented towards white supremacy and white nationalism are going to find that there are plenty of others already there to welcome them in.
"
That's true, but the line I hear emerging from dem politicians is that it is because ICE is undertrained that these problems are emerging. I may be missing stuff, but anyone who is talking about this on the various programs from the dem side rails on ICE and makes no mention of Border Patrol.
On “Adam Tooze”
Re: coal, in Tooze's lecture, (roughly here in the youtube video) he points out that after Kyoto, China undertook a national industrialization project that, according to estimates, killed 1.4 million chinese citizens a year, because of increased air pollution, which is why wj refers to coal.
However, there has been a 'hard pivot' against that. Here is the youtube transcript, cleaned up a bit
we're talking here of a truly violent process of transformation which the Chinese regime can be fairly said deliberately opted into as a choice and then pivoted hard against and that pivot begins in the 2010s. It is a matter widely understood of regime survival because there's only so many times people can see their babies choking to death before uh you need to pivot. By the early mid2010s the air pollution standards imposed on Chinese coal fired power stations were actually more strenuous than those in either the United States or Europe. As unpalatable and as uncomfortable it is, we need to reckon with the fact that the cleaning up of China's first phase of dramatic hypergrowth was accompanied under the leadership of Xi Jinping by a extremely explicit commitment to environmental protection at first on a limited scale and then secondly on a global scale culminating in that Chinese appropriation of Europe's vision of green modernization in 2020.
"
China has a huge power infrastructure, which currently is overwhelmingly coal-based. Nothing effective happens on the climate front without that changing. Not that we shouldn't all be doing what we can. Just that Chinese power generation is the elephant in the room.
With that kind of capacity to build solar panels, they should be dramatically changing their generation mix. Which, IMHO, is something to celebrate. Not to mention that economies of scale in building them should make Chinese solar panels more affordable for the rest of the world.
Take the damn win.
On “Moral insanity”
CBP has a history of shooting people. Also of doing the "stand in front of the vehicle so I can say my life was threatened" thing.
On “Adam Tooze”
Tooze's observation fits in with what I think are the bullshit quality of SDGs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
The SDGs are universal, time-bound, and legally non-binding policy objectives agreed upon by governments. They come close to prescriptive international norms but are generally more specific, and they can be highly ambitious. The overarching UN program "2030 Agenda" presented the SDGs in 2015 as a "supremely ambitious and transformative vision" that should be accompanied by "bold and transformative steps" with "scale and ambition"
One could argue that the Orange douche blew that one out of the water, but I thought it was western-centric from the start.
I also listened to this Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast with an energy analyst
https://youtu.be/i__iaPepixk?si=dKiCa75BrryAhVNP
I only understood half of it, but coupled with Tooze's observations, leaves me deeply uneasy.
On “Moral insanity”
I'd observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we've been told are minimally trained. There are a number of narratives that this could lead to and I'm not sure which one is true (and which is most likely to be seized on, which is often very different from the true one) but it does point to some interesting dynamics in all this.
On “Adam Tooze”
...will have to decide whether and on what terms they want to work with an economically dominant China on the climate problem.
Here's the fuel mix for my pissant little non-profit local power authority for the last 24 hours. 20 years ago it was, except for the same amount of hydro, all fossil fuels. The wind is from turbines built somewhere in the US. The solar is from panels built in Georgia. Another 100MW of solar comes online late this year, along with a 100MW 400MWh battery system. The batteries are from a Korean company's US plant. For coal, 100MW is the minimum plant output that still allows for a warm start. The wholly-owned coal plant's power is as cheap as the wind or solar because local circumstances, so gets dispatched by the balancing authority.
Despite Trump's efforts, there are still things going on in the US, even if we aren't leading.
"
From lj's Guardian link:
Interesting, no? I wasn't expecting to read something like that.
On “Moral insanity”
hairshirthedonist - I’m sure the “black helicopter” types are ready to use all the guns they’ve been telling everyone they needed to overthrow an oppressive government and protect our constitutional rights.
They're not only ready to use those guns, they are willing. Who do you think has been showing up at all those ICE/CBP recruitment seminars?
And they never thought they needed to overthrow an oppressive government to protect our rights. They were only worried about their rights.
Pluralism is for chumps and failed states.
"
I'm sure the "black helicopter" types are ready to use all the guns they've been telling everyone they needed to overthrow an oppressive government and protect our constitutional rights.
Right? Isn't that what they said? I mean, they have to be really upset about this stuff, don't they?
"
remember when the first amendment meant the government couldn't punish you for criticizing it?
good times
"
IANAL, but this opinion seems extraordinarily blistering.
It's not unusual for a judge to cite the US Constitution in a ruling. Even citing the Declaration of Independence isn't unknown. (Although quoting multiple of its complaints against George III probably is.) But this?
or
or
Zing!
On “What’cha doing?”
Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.
And I mean that in the innocent way, which is to say I am prepared to take advantage of any useful ideas, from anywhere, to help combat my adversaries, who in this case are the MAGA movement. Successful campaigns to fight authoritarian regimes - hallelujah. The difference between mobilisation and organisation, and the different effects campaigns focussed on them have had in the past - bring it on. From what I read, including here, almost nobody thinks the Democrats have done a good job of enthusing and galvanising the voting public, and particularly the working class, to win general elections and support their policies. Anything which stands a chance of changing that is worth some attention IMO.
On “Adam Tooze”
And another one, a Guardian piece on Tooze
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/15/the-crisis-whisperer-how-adam-tooze-makes-sense-of-our-bewildering-age
"
Adam Tooze lecture. Rather dense, tossing a raft of references off
https://youtu.be/gLnxzkiB-GI?si=v2Zw4M6Ky6VcuQ1d
"
Don't worry, nous, I remember when McKinney cited Freddie de Boer explaining that this was a guy who understood the left. (though I'm not suggesting you are doing the same with Krugman, it just always comes to mind when I think about who one cites and why)
About the Krugman link, Tooze and Klein both note, with astonishment, that the tariffs on India is higher than the tariffs on China.
A section I didn't highlight but was interested in, was Tooze's comparison with defeating Germany without Russian help to dealing with climate change without the Chinese on board, which was certainly thought provoking.
Fun chinese proverb for y'all
宁为太平犬，不做乱世人
Better to be a dog in times of peace than a human in times of chaos.
"
It seems I am often prefacing links (as I am here) with a mention of how often I disagree with the author on many particulars. Don't take my link to Krugman as an endorsement of Krugman as anything but an observer of this recent deal:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-world-files-for-economic-divorce
It's about the free trade agreement just negotiated between the EU and India. I'd have to go back and look over what Krugman says to see if his view is compatible with what Tooze is saying, but I think that the deal itself is very much in line with Tooze's (and Carney's) assertions.
The world is losing faith in the Peace of Westphalia. It will be interesting to see what sort of new order emerges out of that collapse -- assuming that we survive the environmental collapse that is likely to be brought on by all of this lack of a functioning order.
"
I think there is a lot to be said for "a multipolar order, which isn’t a single order but is multiple different orders that are overlapping, very unlike a simple hegemony, more like a mesh " Just for openers, it avoids the risks which are inherent in having a single point of failure.
That, I think, is the lesson of the moment. We had a (relatively) stable world order. With lots of disorder in local areas, but overall stability. But it was based (like it or not, believe it or not) on an implicit assumption that the US, for all its flaws and complicity in local disruptions, would act to keep the overall system stable. But that, whether we recognized it or not, made the US a single point of failure.
Worse, and definitely not recognized by anyone, it turned out the single point of failure was a single individual: whoever happened to be President of the United States. The failing at that one point has been an unfolding disaster, not only for the population of the US, but for the general stability of the world. The collapse has been slower on the international level. But it also looks less reversible.
As an aside, I would point out that the Chinese far prefer stability to chaos (both at home and abroad). They have chafed at America's dominance internationally. But I suspect they are starting to be concerned along the lines of "Be careful what you wish for." Having a loose cannon leading the US is ending the era of American dominance. But the chaos that accompanies the way that is happening....
On “Moral insanity”
Since I have the dashboard open, I'm going to quickly move GftNC's link to a separate post as I think that it is worth considering outside what has been discussed here.
"
Actually, that New Yorker piece is extremely interesting. It chimes with some of the stuff people have talked about here, but there's obviously a lot more detail about the defining characteristics of what has worked and not worked in the past.
On “When will someone take this approach with our administration”
The Kims are essentially god kings (in an officially atheist country).
Their births are accompanied by miracles and the current one was even claimed to be so perfect that he has no digestion.
That idea could be an adoption from something Mao said. He told the story that one day he by chance witnessed his (previously admired) teacher vomiting as the result of too much alcohol and that from then on he despised him. He then declared that the leader must never be associated with something like that, that people had to be indoctrinated to not even be able to imagine their leader having any human weaknesses, so people could not lose respect for him like he himself had.
Well, MAGA world has tendencies in that direction, and the religious part even more so. All images and videos contradicting that must eo ipso be fake. And Sharpie-Gate was just proof that His Orangeness was a better meteorologist than the guys doing it for a living.
"
Most likely, however, someone outside the family gets made regent.
Perhaps Min Tal Lee Il.
"
In North Korea (as opposed to Russia or China) what we basically see is a monarchy in all but name.
That has the general upside, internally, of keeping the succession clear. Assuming that the successor is an adult, as was the case the first two times.
But the downside shows in cases like this where the obvious successor is very young. Perhaps her mother will be regent until she is older. Most likely, however, someone outside the family gets made regent. Which can be problematic.
A lot depends on how long Kim pere keeps going.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.