Energy transition too slow, chip wars, the Blood telegram and Hegel news.
Great images, links and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
'Humanity' by Giovanni Iudice, a Sicilian self-taught artist from Gela and protagonist of contemporary figurative painting.
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Not growing fast enough
Martin Wolf on the need to accelerate the renewable energy transition, in the FT.
Brazil’s miserable decade
For subscribers only
First movers
Source: The Economist
East Asia as hub of global microchip production
From Chris Miller’s essential new book, Chip War (2022)
Blood Telegram - Bangladesh 1971
“Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy,” the telegram reads. “Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its own citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the [West Pakistani] dominated government and to lessen likely and deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy. ... Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional public servants, express our dissent with the current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected in order to salvage our nation’s position as a moral leader of the free world.”
A career Foreign Service officer, Blood spent 1970 and 1971 as the U.S. consul in Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh but then the major city in Pakistan’s impoverished, restive eastern wing. The posting in the isolated, military-ruled province made Blood the senior American witness to one of the worst humanitarian crises of the twentieth century, a campaign against separatists that erupted into a mass-murder of students, intellectuals and the local Hindu minority. Ten million refugees fled to neighboring India. … The problem for Blood was that Washington didn’t want to hear it. As far as Richard Nixon’s administration was concerned, Pakistan was a crucial cold war partner and the staffers calling attention to the violence were an unwelcome complication. … Kissinger, then the national security adviser, argued against even asking the Pakistanis to avoid violence, according to meeting notes from the time. To officers stationed in violence-haunted Dhaka, conveying reports of friends massacred, it was an excruciating policy to abide by. Two weeks into the crackdown, young colleagues from the consulate used the department’s newly established “dissent channel,” designed to let diplomats register their disapproval of American policy without being punished for it. Blood endorsed and joined the cable. The document “was probably the most blistering denunciation of U.S. foreign policy ever sent by its own diplomats,” in the words of Gary J. Bass, a Princeton professor and former journalist who wrote an award-winning book about Blood.
Excellent article by Michael Schaffer in Politico
Semiconductor innovator
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Hegel News
Writing with pencil
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Dina Haddadin concrete mixer series All paintings are raw concrete, coffee and chalk on wood, 2010. Puppies and Flowers