Hello again to readers, here’s another post compiling some of the most interesting content I’ve seen online recently. I’ve realized I like this style of post, so I’ll likely keep doing it in the future. Warning in advance, these posts won’t have as much attention to grammar or writing quality as my more focused essays – these focus on dumping interesting content with enough commentary to summarize what’s in the articles and why they’re interesting, so eloquence and formality aren’t as big of a priority. Honestly I think I do a better-than-average job on this kind of writing, because other link dump-style posts I’ve seen online don’t even bother with these semi-descriptive summaries and reactions to articles and instead just give 5-10 word summaries for each one. Anyway, back to the actual content of this post.
Starting with stuff related to current events:
This is one of the best articles I’ve found so far on the ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the absolute hell that it is, worth reading. A terrifying read on how USAID cuts and western apathy have produced chaos in a small mining town in the DRC (for details on impact of the USAID cuts, rather than a solely objective look at “what’s happening,” Kristof wrote a decent article in NYT). On a side-note, I was rather pleased to see Declan Walsh is now NYT’s chief Africa correspondent – aside from having enjoyed his book “9 Lives of Pakistan,” he has an impressive history in journalism, and I recommend checking out his Wikipedia page if you haven’t already. If Pakistan kicked him out of the country, Egypt tried arresting him, and he then got a Pulitzer for reporting on the Sudanese Civil War, he’s clearly doing something right haha.
Here is some very interesting theorizing on Saudi Arabia’s refusal to share airspace with the US
I’m not sure if House of Saud has found the correct explanation, but this is certainly an interesting theory. Tldr, Saudis have a huge fiscal crisis, and the White House’s peace plan would’ve gotten rid of the conflict premium on oil prices and pushed it well below Saudis’ fiscal breakeven price => war is cheaper than peace for the Saudis. Also, the US-Saudi negotiations are being brokered by Jared Kushner, who’s growing fat on Saudi money, i.e. the guy running those talks is simultaneously being paid by the party that benefits most from the war. Conflict of interests much?
On a side-note, House of Saud is a really interesting site, and if you’re interested in the Middle East and geopolitics stuff, I recommend adding it to your media diet if it isn’t there already.
Pivoting to Latin America – if you want some fun political chaos to follow, keep an eye on the runoff elections in Peru and Colombia this month. Two nutty far-right candidates with a decent chance of winning, let’s see how it goes. Colombia’s far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella is truly fascinating, here are some things that stuck with me from my reading.
The above details mostly come from this El País article
Not going to blabber as much about Peru’s far-right candidate Keiko Fujimori – she’s pretty much a carbon copy of her father, so there isn’t much “new” over there, unlike Espriella who represents a complete break with the traditional right-wing and a shift to more colorful populism. But of course, I wouldn’t have mentioned her unless I had an interesting story about Peru also. Here it is:
If you don’t know about the controversy around Alberto Fujimori’s wife, it’s a must-read. She publicly denounced her husband’s government for corruption and authoritarianism and was then thrown out of her position as First Lady. She later claimed that Fujimori’s intelligence services tortured her and she showed scars to prove it (Fujimori claims it was some strange Japanese medical treatment that caused them) – although Fujimori’s rebuttal lost credibility after a former intelligence agent testified to having seen her “naked and cowering in a basement cell at army intelligence headquarters in 1995” (from a 2002 AP article).
And now the daughter’s aligned with daddy dearest and campaigning for another season of corrupt authoritarian dystopia – what a family…
For less depressing news from Latin America, I recommend this El País article on Iván Cepeda, the left-wing candidate in Colombia’s upcoming runoff election who will face off against cat-killer. It doesn’t talk much about his policy proposals but provides a very interesting biography of his life; although it’s a visibly biased endorsement piece, it’s worth reading because Cepeda has an inspiring life story of resilience (his father was assassinated for his left-wing politics) and fighting for justice (prominent advocate for the victims of right-wing paramilitary violence). I don’t know enough about his policies to say for sure whether they will be good for Colombia, and his refusal to distance himself from Petro’s failures isn’t promising; but speaking solely from the perspective of morals and who seems to be a better human being, Cepeda would have my vote over Espriella any day if I was a Colombian.
Moving over to the US now, there’s even more entertaining+interesting insanity here.
Samurai vs squatters! Sounds like the title of a bad cyberpunk video game, yet somehow this is real. Extreme tenants’ rights legislation has made it nearly impossible for landlords to evict squatters in parts of California, leading to some people now employing these samurai-wielding squatter removal services. This is a very interesting read, as well as a morbidly entertaining one. In the absence of viable legal solutions to problems, shady extrajudicial solutions usually fill the gap, as this article painfully demonstrates. Yet another example of California’s regulatory mess, purportedly in defense of the poor and marginalized, actually working more towards the detriment of property-owners and society as a whole (which benefits from property-owners’ productive use of capital) rather than towards the benefit of poor people. If anyone has gained from this type of bureaucracy-increasing legislation, it’s the criminals and miscreants who are most inclined and best-equipped to take advantage of the legal loopholes created.
Staying on the topic of California, here’s a similar case of bureaucratic insanity – California’s Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). I was introduced to this monstrosity through a Reason.com article on how the CASE union representing state-employed legal workers is threatening to sue Gavin Newsom under CEQA, because his demand for state-employed workers to show up in-person four days a week hasn’t been accompanied by an environmental study investigating the effect that this additional commute will have on CO2 emissions. A law that allows employees to sue the state’s governor over being asked to show up to work – what a great idea!
More specifically, CEQA requires government agencies to study the environmental impacts of any ‘projects’ they begin, with citizens being enabled to sue the government if they feel that obligation is not being adequately met. I’ve put ‘projects’ in quotation marks because of its dangerously vague definition under CEQA, which encompasses government construction but also personnel policies (as in this case), projects started by private corporations that just so happen to be obtaining government approval at some stage, and all other kinds of sketchy extensions of the definition.
My initial reaction to the article was “wait, wouldn’t this let anybody stall any government or corporate action for as long as they want using the flimsiest justification loosely related to environmental concerns?” Aaaand, yep, that’s exactly what it does. I got curious and opened a bunch of links from the original article, and WOW what a mess.
Here’s another story on CEQA (from 2024) and how it allows property developers’ competitors to ‘greenmail’ them with CEQA lawsuits, indefinitely stalling new projects by demanding studies of environmental impacts until they get paid off (euphemistically known as ‘out-of-court settlement’). The low threshold for filing a CEQA lawsuit (some of these lawsuits’ objections are truly absurd), combined with the months-long litigation process, has made the law ripe for abuse – developers often find it cheaper to just pay off the plaintiff rather than fight their case and waste time in court and then even more time awaiting the results of their further environmental studies. In one case, a greenmailer explicitly said “You know the drill. It’s going to take a check to make this go away.” Isn’t this just… extortion?
Since then, there have been some attempts at reform, such as eliminating the requirement of noise pollution studies (a recipe for abuse, since any building project generates noise), but much remains to be done because reforms are having to block specific provisions case-by-case, while miscreants are coming up with new legal loopholes faster than legislation can be passed. Maybe… maybe this just wasn’t a good idea?
And another equally illuminating story on CEQA greenmailing from 2019, this one on how unions abuse the law to force companies to use their labor, something developers try to avoid because of the overly bureaucratic workplace rules and higher labor costs.
This article is especially interesting because towards the end, it highlights how CEQA greenmailing is also worsening California’s housing crisis by delaying the construction of new housing with frivolous lawsuits and increasing projects’ costs by forcing developers to use more expensive union labor. Another example of how housing affordability issues are fundamentally a supply-side problem rather than a case of evil landlords extorting their tenants.
Finally, here’s a 2023 story on how NIMBYs abused CEQA to block UC Berkeley from building additional student housing due to a lack of studies on how it would affect noise pollution.
Shifting to the other end of the US now, New York City: Zohran Mamdani’s democratic socialism has gotten a lot of people’s hopes up, but let’s see what’s actually happening behind all the grandstanding.
Here’s a good NYT article on Mamdani’s handling of the Economic Development Corporation (EDC). Five months into his tenure, he has still not appointed an EDC head due to administrative paralysis over what the EDC’s goal should even be in this new democratic socialist paradise; although the EDC has traditionally been used to spur economic growth by supporting select projects with city real estate and tax breaks, Mamdani and his supporters want the EDC to now focus more on social justice programs such as city-run grocery stores. This broader shift in focus from economic development to social justice and economic regulation is sparking justified concern among many experts, as explained in the NYT article. My view is that, while both economic growth and social justice are important, Mamdani’s handling of the EDC suggests that he isn’t broadening the administration’s scope so much as completely shifting it, sacrificing economic development for his politics of always backing the little guy against large corporations. What this approach neglects is that economic development and social justice are interconnected rather than mutually exclusive: welfare spending and state ownership of essential services is good, but inadequate if unaccompanied by government support for entrepreneurship and job creation. The EDC turmoil, combined with similar anti-business policies such as tax hikes and demonizing the rich on social media, might prove problematic for both rich people and poor people, as much as Mamdani might like to pretend that only the rich benefit from economic growth right now.
And another NYT article on how Mamdani is collaborating with Governor Kathy Hochul to solve the budget crisis. The article somewhat discredits his claim that the budget balancing was “democratic socialism” and “government that delivers for the people who make this city run”; despite Mamdani’s boasting about some savings being obtained through a new tax on luxury second homes and slashing of unnecessary spending, most of the $12 billion came from the governor providing a massive infusion of cash from state tax revenue, as well as delaying several programs promised by Mamdani in his campaign such as reducing class sizes in schools and delaying payments to pension funds (risky much?). Seems like a classic case of kicking the can down the road rather than actually solving the budget deficit issue…
Moving on to music – I haven’t been exploring too much new stuff lately, but I have two nice new kpop discoveries to share.
First is ITZY’s new mini-album Motto. The title track is really good, and for me, it was the highlight of the new release. Worth listening to if you enjoy kpop. Good instrumentals, catchy tune, just fun to listen to.
The other awesome discovery is NMIXX’s performance at the Festival de la Canción de Viña del Mar in Chile (Latin America’s oldest and largest music festival) in March. I had seen this on Youtube a while ago and watchlisted it, but my laziness kept me from watching it until recently. It’s an incredible performance with lots of energy, great vocals and dancing, and really cool stage/visual effects. You have to skip around the talking segments a bit since it’s a video of the full performance, but this is otherwise worth watching in full. However, I do have to note that I did watch the talk segments the first time I saw it, just because it’s such a cool sight to see a Korean group speaking Spanish to an entirely Chilean audience with very little preparation. The whole performance is a great achievement of capitalism and the globalization of culture – yes, yes, environmental degradation, neocolonialism, and the marginalization of indigenous voices, BUT it also gave us a Korean group singing a song with a mix of Portuguese and English lyrics to an entirely Chilean, Spanish-speaking audience! Quite the achievement, in my opinion. Maybe Marx would’ve been a kpop fan if he lived in our century.
On a side-note, NMIXX is my favorite kpop group at the moment, and if you haven’t listened to their full discography yet, I highly recommend it. At least half their tracks rank among my “top-tier kpop songs” mental list.
That concludes today’s post. Hopefully some of this is interesting, look forward to a more regular posting schedule over the next few weeks thanks to my summer vacation.