[The Soup Nazi]

Putin you fucking piece of shit.

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny sentenced to 19 years

Navalny wrote this before the sentence was read:

The sentence will be read in twenty-four hours and I want to say several words before it's read. I just want to put several figures in a context.

It's going to be a huge term. This is what's called a «Stalinist» term. The formula for calculating it is simple: what the prosecutor asked for minus 10-15%. They asked for 20 years so they will give 18 or something around it. It doesn't really matter, because the terrorism case is on the way. I could get another 10 years there.

So my first request is. When the figure is announced, please do not show solidarity with me with wails and cries: «As under Stalin». It is better to show solidarity with me and other political prisoners by thinking for a minute. Think about why such an exemplary huge term is necessary. Its main purpose is to intimidate. You, not me. I'll even say this: you personally, who are reading these words.

Have you noticed that the propaganda is silent about this process? They don't talk about it on TV. Just because the story will have an ambiguous effect on the «ordinary Russian». Eighteen years for some «extremism» without victims and consequences will seem obviously unfair to this person, and he or she will even start to secretly sympathize. You all know everything. You need to be stunned, intimidated. The severity of the sentence should knock out of your head any thoughts of resistance.

Please consider and realize that by jailing hundreds, Putin is trying to intimidate millions. We live in a country where tens of millions of people right now are against corruption, war, and lawlessness. Right now, tens of millions are in favor of fair elections, democracy, change of power and want Putin gone. We know for sure that if one in ten of those outraged by the corruption of Putin and his officials took to the streets, the government would fall tomorrow. We know for sure that if those who are against the war took to the streets, they would stop it immediately.

It's all just wishful thinking. It doesn't work that way. Someone has to be first, and it's scary to be the first. Russia is not an exception. It's just that dissatisfied people don't take to the streets in countries with dictatorial regimes almost to the very end of those regimes: not in our country, not in the USSR, not in Iran, not in Cuba, not in the GDR. All changes are achieved by 10% of citizens — the most active ones. That is you. To repress (imprison, punish, fine) even 10% from them — that's one and a half million people — is now impossible neither politically nor organizationally. So we need to daze and intimidate them, to discourage them from doing anything.

This Putin's (in fact any dictator's) strategy works. One example. The main invulnerability of our organization has always been that we have never been cut off from money: we are financed by tens, hundreds of thousands of people in small payments. You can't cut it off. However, by inflating the cases of financing extremism (one of the accusations on which I will be sentenced tomorrow), the authorities have achieved the fact that it has become «a little bit risky» to support our organization from inside Russia, which is 95% of our donors. Finances are the basis of activity, you can't get anywhere without them. The intimidation worked perfectly. I remind you, by the way, that here are instructions on how to support us anonymously and safely through cryptocurrency if you are in Russia and here is the link to support us if you are not.

To be honest, we always help Putin's strategy of intimidation by throwing hysterics and clutching at our hearts over every arrest, and frightening both ourselves and others even more. We must talk about everyone, and we must not forget about anyone, but at the same time, we must firmly realize that power in Russia has been usurped and illegally seized. Those in power can't hold it without arresting the innocent. They imprison hundreds to intimidate millions.

This should be treated cold-bloodedly. Putin must not achieve his goal. I really want him not to achieve his goal in terms of sentencing me either. Therefore, my request number two is: when the sentence is announced, please think about only one, really important thought — what else can I personally do to resist? To stop the villains and thieves in the Kremlin from destroying my country and my future? What can I do, weighing all the risks and taking into account all the circumstances?

The third request is the most important. When answering this question to yourself, please do not dare to say, «Nothing.» You surely can. Everyone can do something. Talk to your neighbors, and put up a flyer. Share with others our investigations. Send 500 rubles a month to us or other opposition organizations and media. Do a blog. Participate in our The Good Truth Machine 2 project, and spread awareness on your social media. Support political prisoners. Paint graffiti. Go to a rally.

There is no shame in choosing the safest way to resist. There is shame in doing nothing. It's shameful to let yourself be intimidated. Whatever sentence they have planned, it will not achieve its goal. If you have understood what it is all about and you answered, «I am not afraid», do your own daily cold-blooded, small contribution to the fight for freedom in Russia.

[!@#$%!]

i love it:

"please do not show solidarity with me with wails and cries"

"To be honest, we always help Putin's strategy of intimidation by throwing hysterics and clutching at our hearts over every arrest, and frightening both ourselves and others even more"

"There is no shame in choosing the safest way to resist. There is shame in doing nothing. It's shameful to let yourself be intimidated."

this is really really good. i will study and memorize it.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i love it:

"please do not show solidarity with me with wails and cries"

"To be honest, we always help Putin's strategy of intimidation by throwing hysterics and clutching at our hearts over every arrest, and frightening both ourselves and others even more"

"There is no shame in choosing the safest way to resist. There is shame in doing nothing. It's shameful to let yourself be intimidated."

this is really really good. i will study and memorize it.

I wonder how he was able to express that from jail. There's no way they let him have a cellphone there, and as a letter this would not have passed the censorship, so... in a "regular" phone call to his wife, maybe?

[The Soup Nazi]

Speaking of debt and da Krug, here's his newsletter from today:

Wonking out: Is a U.S. debt crisis looming? Is it even possible?

Afraid of a debt crisis? Try doing the math.

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

On Tuesday, Fitch, one of the Big Three credit rating agencies, startled many observers by downgrading U.S. debt. Biden administration officials weren’t the only people who were shocked and angry; quite a few economists, including some who had warned strongly against big spending, pronounced the decision “inept,” “bizarre,” “absurd” and worse. Indeed, it was hard to think of any way in which the U.S. fiscal outlook had deteriorated since last year, when Fitch gave us a clean bill of health.

Nonetheless, U.S. borrowing costs jumped, with the interest rate on 30-year government bonds surging from 4.03 percent on July 31 to 4.32 percent on Aug. 3. Did Fitch do that? What was the market thinking? I have no idea.

But it is worth asking what it even means to downgrade U.S. debt. America is not a corporation, which can simply run out of cash. It isn’t even a country like Greece, which owes money in a currency it doesn’t control. America issues debt in dollars, which it can also print. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we can’t have solvency problems or that the level of government debt is necessarily irrelevant. But it’s much harder to tell a plausible story about a U.S. debt crisis than many people realize, and both arithmetic and history suggest that such a crisis is unlikely to happen for the foreseeable future.

I’ll come back to the conceptual issues later. For now, let’s note that most economists believe that there is some limit to how much debt the U.S. government can take on as a percentage of gross domestic product. (Pro tip: The ratio is what matters, not the absolute dollar value. Never take anyone who rants about TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS seriously.) But history and the experience of other countries suggest that we’re still a long way from that limit.

The most obvious example is Japan, which has accumulated a lot more debt relative to G.D.P. than we have, but which has defied predictions of an imminent debt crisis for decades:

 

An even more striking example is Britain, which spent much of both the 19th and 20th centuries with debt levels far above that of the United States today, without ever facing a debt crisis:

 

So what might make people suddenly concerned about U.S. debt? One thing that has attracted considerable attention lately is rising interest payments. The Federal Reserve has been raising rates to cool off inflation, and this has translated into a spike in government interest payments both in absolute terms and as a percentage of G.D.P.:

 

Even now, interest payments are substantially lower relative to G.D.P. than they were in the early 1990s, but they’re up a lot from recent years. This has led some people to worry about a debt spiral: Higher interest payments lead to rising debt, which leads to even higher interest payments, adding even more debt, and we enter a sort of fiscal doom loop. Is this something to worry about?

No, not really. To see why, we need to do a bit of math. Sorry, I’m going to write down a simple equation here.

Bear in mind that we’re talking about the ratio of debt to G.D.P., not simply the level of debt. Deficits, which lead to more debt, increase the numerator of that ratio. But both inflation and economic growth increase the denominator, which, other things being equal, reduces the ratio. Do a bit of algebra, and you get this expression for debt dynamics:

Change in debt/G.D.P. = primary deficit/G.D.P. + (r-g)*(debt/G.D.P.)

The primary deficit is the budget deficit not counting interest payments, r is the interest rate on government debt, and g is the economy’s growth rate. You can get a debt spiral if r is significantly larger than g; in that case rising debt leads to faster accumulation of debt, and we’re off to the races.

But a few years ago, Olivier Blanchard, one of the world’s most respected (and, dare I say, respectable) macroeconomists, gave a presidential address to the American Economic Association in which he showed that historically, r has generally been less than g. Hence, no debt spiral.

Have rising interest rates changed this conclusion? Not much. Even after the rate surge of the past few days, the interest rate on inflation-protected 10-year U.S. bonds was 1.83 percent, which is close to most estimates of the economy’s sustainable growth rate. If you take the low end of such estimates, we could possibly face a debt spiral, but it would be a very slow-motion spiral. Put it this way: If r is 1.8, while g is only 1.6, stabilizing the debt ratio with debt at 100 percent of G.D.P. would require a primary surplus of 2 percent of G.D.P.; increase debt to 150 percent, and that required surplus would increase only to 3 percent.

So if we do face the prospect of large future increases in debt — which we do — interest payments on existing debt aren’t a major culprit. The problem instead lies with those primary deficits.

Which means that the issue is essentially political. As I said, you should ignore people who rant about TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS. You should also ignore people who rant about wasteful government spending. The federal government is basically an insurance company with an army: It spends mainly on things the public wants, like the military, Social Security and health programs. But we have an effective blocking coalition against raising taxes enough to pay for those programs. So we’ll keep accumulating debt until that impasse is resolved.

As I also said, however, history suggests that America still has considerable running room. And there’s even a reasonable argument to the effect that the level of debt doesn’t matter at all.

No, I’m not talking about Modern Monetary Theory. Trying to talk with MMT types feels like intellectual Calvinball — whenever you try to pin down what they’re saying, they insist that you just don’t get it. I do, however, see considerable merit in the doctrine of “functional finance” — which may or may not be part of MMT — as laid out by Abba Lerner in 1943. Lerner declared that the size of the debt doesn’t matter: “As long as the public is willing to lend to the government there is no difficulty, no matter how many zeros are added to the national debt.”

I’m not entirely convinced by Lerner’s argument, but this newsletter is already getting too long, so I’ll reserve that discussion for another time. What is true is that when you look at countries that borrow in their own currencies, it’s extremely hard to find historical examples of the kind of crisis debt doomers tend to predict. In fact, I’m aware of only one example: France in the 1920s, which was more or less forced by a loss of market confidence to inflate away part of the debt it ran up during World War I:

 

And even that wasn’t a catastrophe for the real economy; the French economy actually grew quite rapidly during the 1920s.

Bottom line: Is the United States likely to face a debt crisis anytime soon, or even in the next decade or two? Almost surely not. And if you’re worried about the longer run, I’d suggest that you pay less attention to the possibility of runaway debt and more to what increasingly looks like runaway climate change.

[The Soup Nazi]

Oh this is fucking rich:

https://news.google.com/stories/CAAqNggKIjBDQklTSGpvSmMzUnZjbmt0TXpZd1NoRUtEd2piOX JEUUNCSHZSWnh4T0RoT0dTZ0FQAQ?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

The New York Police Department took social media influencer Kai Cenat into custody Friday and is considering charges such as “inciting a riot” after thousands-strong crowds gathered in Union Square for a giveaway, leaving multiple people arrested and several police officers injured.

THAT guy's gonna get charged RIGHT AWAY with "inciting a riot"? Shit, too bad the NYPD wasn't running the show in D.C. on Jan. 6...

[The Soup Nazi]

From Politico:

Feds alert judge to Trump’s ‘If you go after me, I’m coming after you!’ post

Prosecutors say the former president’s message on Truth Social raises specter he might use evidence to target witnesses.

[The Soup Nazi]

To all who say the "founding fathers" never envisioned the current shit:

"The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. [...] When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, [...] despotic in his ordinary demeanour, known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty, when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity, to join in the cry of danger to liberty, to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion, to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'"

—Alexander Hamilton, early 1790s

 

[The Soup Nazi]

Here we go with The Cannonball Run...

Judge Aileen Cannon Comes Out Swinging in Trump’s Favor—Again

In a Monday ruling, Cannon questioned the “legal propriety” of using an “out-of-district grand jury” in Trump’s classified documents case.

[!@#$%!]

i don't know to which one i should reply.

re: the krugman, yes, he's more progressive than, say, larry summers, but summers said fitch was "flailing for relevancy" with the rating.

and sure the debt is money we owe ourselves but there's such thing as foreign exchange, and when your currency devalues you might export more but you pay more for avocados from mexico, chilean copper, canadian steel, japanese cars, etc.

the founding vaters yeah they saw that and more, they were against political parties even.... hamilton and madison for example.

anyway re: demagogues, i'm trying to brush up on my political philosophy but those existed in athens and rome already. i'm looking for a good translation of thucydides but can't find one that i like 100% yet. thomas hobbes did one, and i am not suprised, he has the same view of the "state of nature."

as for cannon: fuck her

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

as for cannon: fuck her

 

[The Soup Nazi]

OH!

Makes me think of the time Ohio was a swing state. Remember, back in the day...?

I want to believe this is a warning to the GQP. SCOTUS may have fucked us, the Republican Legislatures may have fucked us, but keep it up with this shit, assholes, and you're gonna LOSE.

[The Soup Nazi]

From Politico, something we already know but is very well stated here, so:

Opinion | Here’s the Intelligence Assessment of Donald Trump that the Government Can’t Write

Homeland Security officials can’t use politicians’ names in their assessments. But I can.

[Screaming Skull]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

To all who say the "founding fathers" never envisioned the current shit:

"The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. [...] When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, [...] despotic in his ordinary demeanour, known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty, when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity, to join in the cry of danger to liberty, to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion, to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'"

—Alexander Hamilton, early 1790s

 

Yup, he could see the likes of the Biden Family Crime Syndicate from over 200 years away.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

From Politico, something we already know but is very well stated here, so:

Opinion | Here’s the Intelligence Assessment of Donald Trump that the Government Can’t Write

Homeland Security officials can’t use politicians’ names in their assessments. But I can.

that was a good read and i shared it in other places, thanks.

you're right that it's stuff we already know but it's very well put together.

anyway, in the meantime: democracy won in ohio, and the republican strategy of turning away voters and blocking legislation has blown up in their faces.

also in today's news, florida stopped teaching ap psychology (ap courses are high school courses that count as college credit) because it's "against the law"

lol @ american taliban

[The Soup Nazi]

 

 

[Screaming Skull]

Not a single mention of the special counsel appointed to the Hunter Biden investigation? This is the politics thread, right? I would say that’s a pretty big political story, no?

[The Soup Nazi]

...Aaaaand there goes TangoTown:

Far-right populist emerges as biggest vote-getter in Argentina’s presidential primary voting

Milei, an admirer of former U.S. President Donald Trump, says Argentina’s Central Bank should be abolished, thinks climate change is a lie, characterizes sex education as a ploy to destroy the family, believes the sale of human organs should be legal and wants to make it easier to own handguns.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

...Aaaaand there goes TangoTown:

Far-right populist emerges as biggest vote-getter in Argentina’s presidential primary voting

hahahahaaa yeah

i think this speaks more of the fatigue with the utter failure of kirchnerism and exhaustion of peronism in general than anything else.

argentina has been ruined economically by leftist populism. it's a country rich in resources, with a fairly well educated people, but hamstrung by consumer subsidies and rampant kleptocracy.

you say "there goes..." but they've been gone for a while already, their resources wasted, their middle class reduced, their poor multiplying and getting poorer every day, their currency worthless, their debts mounting beyond the stratosphere, their economy stuck in the mud, their international influence reduced to... nothing really, except in football... which is mostly played abroad these days because whoever can flee does so immediately.

milei may be a clown, but until peronism arrived in the middle of the last century argentina was a very rich country, and an important one in latin america. sure they had their problems with inequality and a shit history (same as the rest of the continent), but they were extremely prosperous. then, decades of populism, cults of personality, a tragic military dictatorship interim, more leftist populism afterwards, statism and infinite political corruption have pulverized their chances at prosperity. when they had a brief chance at normalizing their economy with macri they just got deeper into debt.

that poor country is a walking disaster. crisis after crisis, bank run after bank run, national banrkuptcy always around the corner (remember menem?), and the politicians always thieving. kirchner would be in jail if it weren't because of her current post.

so i... understand these sorts of protest votes. argentinians are fucked, have been getting fucked for a very long time now. milei offers no real solutions, just fake libertarian scams, but where are they going to turn to now? they're ready to burn it all down.

[!@#$%!]

 

montana utes:

"In the first ruling of its kind nationwide, a Montana state court decided Monday in favor of young people who alleged the state violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment” by promoting the use of fossil fuels.
The court determined that a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act has harmed the state’s environment and the young plaintiffs, by preventing Montana from considering the climate impacts of energy projects. The provision is accordingly unconstitutional, the court said.
The win, experts say, could energize the environmental movement and reshape climate litigation across the country, ushering in a wave of cases aimed at advancing action on climate change."

fuck yeah! go utes!

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

you say "there goes..." but they've been gone for a while already

Indeed. I meant it specifically in the Trump Tumor Global Metastasis sense.