Open Thread March 3, 2023
Open thread Feb. 24, 2023 – Angry Bear (angrybearblog.com)
Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.
Open thread Feb. 24, 2023 – Angry Bear (angrybearblog.com)
An early climate warning lies in the paintings of JMW Turner and Claude Monet, study says
Boston Globe – March 3
Claude Monet is best known for his stunning depictions of water lilies at his garden in northern France. But throughout the mid-1800s and early 1900s, the artist also frequently painted less romantic urban surroundings, with bridges, buildings, railways and factories often rendered faintly under a hazy patina of subdued colors.
That moody touch was actually smog, according to a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that argued Monet and his contemporary, Joseph Mallord William (J.M.W.) Turner, were also chronicling the worsening effects of air pollution on London and Paris during the Industrial Revolution.
Turner’s early works, for instance, often feature sharply visible landscapes under clear skies. But his later paintings, such as his 1842 “Burial at Sea,” which currently hangs at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, and his 1844 masterpiece “Rain, Steam, and Speed” depict hazier scenes. Both were painted as London’s skies were being choked by industrial smog, the researchers point out.
The artists’ paintings, the findings suggest, provide an early warning about environmental degradation and the climate crisis. And, the authors posit, they show how pollution helped inspire new artistic styles.
“Instead of turning away from the pollution, [the painters] use these environmental changes as a new creative impulse,” said lead author Anna Lea Albright, a climate physicist at Sorbonne University in Paris, who works on air pollution.
The authors analyzed changes in color and style in nearly 100 paintings of London and Paris by the two artists, who both worked in Western Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. They found that as sulfur dioxide concentrations from burning coal increased in the two cities, the scenes in their paintings increasingly became blurrier, the skies whiter, the colors more muted — changes that reflect the effects air pollution can have on a landscape. …
In other (art) news…
Supreme Court May Force Us to Rethink 500 Years of Art
NY Times – March 3
A copyright case about Andy Warhol’s work could change the future of Western art — and, in a sense, its history, too.
Any day now, the Supreme Court will hand down a decision that could change the future of Western art — and, in a sense, its history, too. Blame the appeals court judgment from 2021 declaring that Andy Warhol had no right to appropriate someone else’s photo of Prince into one of the Pop artist’s classic silk-screened portraits.
The art world quailed at the ruling.
“It strikes at the heart of the way artists today have been raised to make and understand art,” the Brooklyn Museum opined in a brief to the Supreme Court, which is now reconsidering the appeals court’s conclusion about copyright law.
Artists piled on with a brief slamming the appeals court for “denigrating art that borrows, appropriates and replicates prior works as something akin to plagiarism or exploitation.”
In its own brief, the Andy Warhol Foundation, whose fight with the photographer Lynn Goldsmith got the case started, quoted a certain Blake Gopnik, writing in this newspaper: “The act of ‘retaining the essential elements’ of an extant image is Warhol’s entire m.o. as one of the most important of all modern artists.” I had gone further: “There’s a lot that judges can do with the stroke of a pen, but rewriting art history isn’t one of them. They’re stuck with appropriation as one of the great artistic innovations of the modern era.”
Is the Entire Economy Gentrifying?
NY Times – March 5
Companies are trying to maintain fat profits as the economy changes, making “premiumization” their new favorite buzzword.
Big companies are prodding their customers toward fancier, and often pricier, versions of everything from Krispy Kreme doughnuts to cans of WD-40.
It’s evidence of the corporate world’s new favorite buzzword: “premiumization.”
Businesses are hoping to keep the good times rolling after several years in which they seized on strong spending by consumers and rapid inflation to raise prices and pump up profit margins. Many firms are embracing offerings that cater to higher-income customers — people who are willing and able to pay more for products and services.
One sign of the trend: the notion of premiumization was raised in nearly 60 earnings calls and investor meetings over the past three weeks.
It is an indication of a changing economic backdrop. Inflation and consumer spending are expected to moderate this year, which could make it more difficult for firms to sustain large price increases without some justification.
The premiumization trend also reflects a divide in the American economy. The top 40 percent of earners are sitting on more than a trillion dollars in extra savings amassed during the early part of the pandemic. Lower-income households, on the other hand, have been burning through their savings, partly as they contend with the higher costs of the food, rent and other necessities that make up a bigger chunk of their spending.
“The pool of people willing to spend on small to large premium offers remains strong,” said David Mayer, a senior partner in the brand strategy practice of Lippincott, a consultancy.
As products grow more expensive and exclusive, big swaths of the economy are at risk of becoming gentrified, raising the possibility that poorer consumers will be increasingly underserved. …
Businesses have long segmented customers, trying to push richer ones into pricier and more profitable purchases: think of the spacious premium seats on an plane versus the cramped economy-class alternatives. But the trend picked up during the pandemic, and the lurch toward luxury is now spanning a wider array of products and services. …
Other companies are emphasizing premium offerings as an alternative to discounts. Krispy Kreme spent last year attracting customers using deals — including a “Beat the Pump” discount that matched the price of a dozen glazed doughnuts to the national average price of a gallon of gas. But it is planning to do less discounting this year, an executive said on a call, aiming instead to generate “excitement around our premium specialty doughnuts,” which include fancier, higher-priced offerings around holidays.
Pushing premium products has come up in some unexpected corners of the corporate world. WD-40, the firm that makes the lubricant of the same name, has found that customers will pay more for products with enhancements, like a can with a “smart straw” to spray the lubricant in two different ways — in either a precision stream or more of a mist. …
The question now is what the shift toward more premium products means for the broader economy. It could be a sign that companies are making last-ditch efforts to justify higher prices and cling to fat profits as the economic outlook darkens.
To fight inflation, the Federal Reserve has been rapidly raising interest rates, which is meant to slow economic growth and cool consumer demand. That could make it harder for businesses to continue charging more, cooling inflation and potentially cutting into profits in the process. …
To Prepare for a Pacific Island Fight, Marines Hide and Attack in California
NY Times – March 5
A 10-day exercise gave a new Marine regiment the chance to test war-fighting concepts the Pentagon may one day need in a battle with China.
TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. — Sitting around a plastic folding table in a dusty tent, a half-dozen officers of the Hawaii-based 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment took a very short break from days of fighting on little to no sleep.
The war, they said, was going well.
The unit, newly created and innovative in nature, was facing its toughest test yet — a 10-day mock battle across Southern California, where a series of military bases played the role of an island chain. Though outnumbered by the regiment it was fighting, the team from Hawaii had an edge.
The team was built to fight on islands and along coastal shorelines, the “littoral region” in military parlance. It had also been given special equipment and the freedom to innovate, developing new tactics to figure out one of the service’s highest priorities: how to fight a war against Chinese forces in their own backyard, and win.
Although far from the ocean, the base at Twentynine Palms offers about 1,200 square miles to train, more than all of the Marine Corps’ other training bases combined. Days ago the two sides were dropped off here about 12 miles from each other. Then it was time to fight.
No live ammunition was used, but that was essentially the only rule. Evaluators alongside them graded everything they did, assessing hits and misses and pulling troops out of the action when they had been “killed.”
Over the next two years, the new unit will have a relentless schedule, with about four or five times as many exercises as most infantry regiments. Its next big test will be in the Philippines in April.
The Marines anticipate a very different kind of battlefield in the future than those of the post-9/11 wars. Today, enemy and civilian spy satellites alike fly overhead and anyone turning on a small radio or cellphone can be targeted with long-range rockets and missiles.
“We have to unlearn the way that we were trained,” said Gen. David H. Berger, the service’s top general, noting that 20 years ago, infantry Marines in the field typically called their commanders via radio on the hour every hour. “You have to have an incredible amount of trust when you haven’t heard from your Marines for several days.”
The exercise is essentially a life and death version of hide and seek, with far-flung military bases in California — at Barstow, Camp Pendleton, Twentynine Palms and an outpost on San Clemente Island about 70 miles offshore from San Diego — all standing in for an unnamed Pacific Island chain. …
With America’s relations with China deteriorating over Beijing’s actions — most recently due to its aggressive moves on Taiwan, its attempts to intimidate Japan, its violation of U.S. airspace with a spy balloon and its support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — the mission of preparing for a potential future conflict in Pacific island chains was important enough that about a half-dozen generals, including the Marine commandant, came to see the results of the exercise for themselves.
“Each year they are expanding their deployments,” General Berger said of the Chinese naval forces in an interview. “Not only in terms of the complexity of them but also the distances they cover.”
China’s navy, General Berger said, was now taking a page from the U.S. Navy, operating in strike groups, with destroyers and other warships escorting an aircraft carrier.
The littoral Marines may serve as spotters who pass along the position of enemy forces to American warplanes, ships or submarines to attack. Or, the Marines could take those shots themselves.
They are learning how to place networked sensors that monitor tiny fluctuations in the electromagnetic spectrum — from walkie-talkies, radars and other transmitters — to find enemy troops, using classified surveillance technologies previously available only to three-star generals.
To fight in that part of the world, General Berger created the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment as a fighting unit unlike any other. Instead of having three infantry battalions of roughly 800 Marines each, it has one — the other two are ideas borrowed from much larger task forces: an antiaircraft battalion that is testing new weapons and tactics, and a logistics battalion. …
CIA chief: China has some doubt on ability to invade Taiwan
CNN – Feb 26
U.S. intelligence shows that China’s President Xi Jinping has instructed his country’s military to “be ready by 2027” to invade Taiwan though he may be currently harboring doubts about his ability to do so given Russia’s experience in its war with Ukraine, CIA Director William Burns said.
Burns, in a television interview that aired Sunday, stressed that the United States must take “very seriously” Xi’s desire to ultimately control Taiwan even if military conflict is not inevitable.
“We do know, as has been made public, that President Xi has instructed the PLA, the Chinese military leadership, to be ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan, but that doesn’t mean that he’s decided to invade in 2027 or any other year as well,” Burns told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“I think our judgment at least is that President Xi and his military leadership have doubts today about whether they could accomplish that invasion,” he said. …
War With China Would Be Unlike Anything Americans Faced Before
NY Times – Feb 27
A major war in the Indo-Pacific is probably more likely now than at any other time since World War II.
The most probable spark is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. President Xi Jinping of China has said unifying Taiwan with mainland China “must be achieved.” His Communist Party regime has become sufficiently strong — militarily, economically and industrially — to take Taiwan and directly challenge the United States for regional supremacy. …
War With China Would Be Unlike Anything Americans Faced Before
NY Times – Feb 27
A major war in the Indo-Pacific is probably more likely now than at any other time since World War II.
The most probable spark is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. President Xi Jinping of China has said unifying Taiwan with mainland China “must be achieved.” His Communist Party regime has become sufficiently strong — militarily, economically and industrially — to take Taiwan and directly challenge the United States for regional supremacy.
The United States has vital strategic interests at stake. A successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would punch a hole in the U.S. and allied chain of defenses in the region, seriously undermining America’s strategic position in the Western Pacific, and would probably cut off U.S. access to world-leading semiconductors and other critical components manufactured in Taiwan. As president, Joe Biden has stated repeatedly that he would defend Taiwan.
But leaders in Washington also need to avoid stumbling carelessly into a war with China because it would be unlike anything ever faced by Americans. U.S. citizens have grown accustomed to sending their military off to fight far from home. But China is a different kind of foe — a military, economic and technological power capable of making a war felt in the American homeland. …
The military scenario alone is daunting: China would probably launch a lightning air, sea and cyber assault to seize control of key strategic targets on Taiwan within hours, before the United States and its allies could intervene. Taiwan is slightly bigger than the state of Maryland; if you recall how quickly Afghanistan and Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, you start to realize that the takeover of Taiwan could happen relatively quickly. China also has more than 1,350 ballistic and cruise missiles poised to strike U.S. and allied forces in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and American-held territories in the Western Pacific. Then there’s the sheer difficulty the United States would face waging war thousands of miles across the Pacific against an adversary that has the world’s largest navy and Asia’s biggest air force.
Despite this, U.S. military planners would prefer to fight a conventional war. But the Chinese are prepared to wage a much broader type of warfare that would reach deep into American society.
Over the past decade, China has increasingly viewed the United States as mired in political and social crises. Mr. Xi, who likes to say that “the East is rising while the West is declining,” evidently feels that America’s greatest weakness is on its home front. And I believe he is ready to exploit this with a multipronged campaign to divide Americans and undermine and exhaust their will to engage in a prolonged conflict — what China’s military calls enemy disintegration.
Over the past two decades, China has built formidable political warfare and cyber warfare capabilities designed to penetrate, manipulate and disrupt the United States and allied governments, media organizations, businesses and civil society. If war were to break out, China can be expected to use this to disrupt communications and spread fake news and other disinformation. The aim would be to foster confusion, division and distrust and hinder decision making. China might compound this with electronic and probably some physical attacks on satellites or related infrastructure. …