And then other problems would perhaps turn up down the track that would call for "discovering new ways to discover new ways of discovery" and so on.
1,897 karma · joined January 18, 2017
And US violates its own law in donating this huge pile of murder weapons to this occupying party: Section 502B(a)(2) (22 U.S.C. 2304(a)(2)) stipulates that "no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights." https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/IF11197.pdf
B'tSalem/HRW/Amnesty have voluminous records of the said violations.
[0] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/john-hagee-hitl...
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230605-the-israelis-...
[2] https://jewishcurrents.org/the-gops-plan-to-build-the-third-...
/s
[0] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/is-america-an-ol...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/2...
[0] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israeli-embassy-rep-caug...
[1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220214-espionage-is-a-di...
“Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq,” he writes after describing his first kill, a woman who walked into a street with a grenade in her hand as marines advanced into her village. After a moment’s hesitation, he drops her with a shot.
“That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages,’” he writes of this scene. “There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.”
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-2tEmqM1_E
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/report-nsa-sharing-u-s-citizens-data... It is hard to miss how the Israeli newspaper Haaretz is a lot more no-nonsense in tone and coverage than, say, the NYT.
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/world/middleeast/israel-g...
[0] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/43-times-us-has-used-veto...
In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis.
Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; it was her 'Triumph of the Will' that reputedly cast Hitler's spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the "messages" in her films were dependent not on "orders from above" but on a "submissive void" in the German population. "Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?" I asked.
"Everyone," she replied, "and of course the intelligentsia."
[0] http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-return-of-george-orwell-a...
... This general "crisis of democracy," the commission held, resulted from the efforts of previously marginalized sectors of the population to organize and press their demands, thereby creating an overload that prevents the democratic process from functioning properly. In earlier times, "Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers," so the American rapporteur, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, reflected. In that period there was no crisis of democracy, but in the 1960s, the crisis developed and reached serious proportions. The study therefore urged more "moderation in democracy" to mitigate the excess of democracy and overcome the crisis. ...
The Trilateral Commission study reflects the perceptions and values of liberal elites from the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the leading figures of the Carter administration. On the right, the perception is that democracy is threatened by the organizing efforts of those called the "special interests," a concept of contemporary political rhetoric that refers to workers, farmers, women, youth, the elderly, the handicapped, ethnic minorities, and so on-in short, the general population. In the U.S. presidential campaigns of the 1980s, the Democrats were accused of being the instrument of these special interests and thus undermining "the national interest," tacitly assumed to be represented by the one sector notably omitted from the list of special interests: corporations, financial institutions, and other business elites.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Necessary_Illusion...
This is also true in the US; if Eisenhower were to time travel today, he would find himself to be on the left.
The roles of such mandarins as Lippmann accelerate the regression of democracy. Contrast that with the democratically constructive roles of people (whistleblowers, participants in labor/antiwar/civil rights movement etc.). There is no impossibility theorem proving that people cannot socially organize into functioning democracies. Slavery looked like an inevitability at some point, and certainly Lippmanns in that era were enagaged in theorizing about effective slave-ownership rather than about ways to abolish slavery.
The "farce" becomes more farcical as power keeps getting concentrated more and more into the hands of the elites, a trend that is facilitated in no small ways by the mandarins. And farcically, they do not stop calling it a "democracy" even then.
The reps and bureaucrats are meant to be (public) servants. There can be and should be efforts to effectively organize such roles in bottom-up fashions, and to keep them in line with their stated roles. If the supply water is found to have impurity in it (some large ppm), the next step is to improve it, rather than taking sewage line as its alternative.
During the past two decades, three zoonotic coronaviruses have been identified as the cause of large-scale disease outbreaks–Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Swine Acute Diarrhea Syndrome (SADS). SARS and MERS emerged in 2003 and 2012, respectively, and caused a worldwide pandemic that claimed thousands of human lives, while SADS struck the swine industry in 2017. They have common characteristics, such as they are all highly pathogenic to humans or livestock, their agents originated from bats, and two of them originated in China. Thus, it is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China. Therefore, the investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent issue for the detection of early warning signs, which in turn minimizes the impact of such future outbreaks in China. The purpose of the review is to summarize the current knowledge on viral diversity, reservoir hosts, and the geographical distributions of bat coronaviruses in China, and eventually we aim to predict virus hotspots and their cross-species transmission potential.
Is this prescient or purely coincidental or something else?
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/if-corp...
... not enough Americans know or care about what happens in other countries or what their government and military is doing in their name. Do many Americans know that there are at least 1000 American military bases around the world, or that there is a fast growing Africa Command branch of the military that is involved in almost every country in Africa? Certain politicians would like to cut “discretionary” spending for such unnecessary things as education, health care, infrastructure, and protecting the environment, but over $1 Trillion a year in allotted to the military, secret intelligence, and “homeland security” in order to continue such unholy activities we have seen for over 100 years.
It is telling that such a high profile person like General Butler could give such influential speeches in the ’30’s, and that even a president (who was also a general, perhaps not coincidentally) could warn against the military-industrial complex in 1961. Such a thing has been unimaginable since the Carter presidency. With the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, there are no politicians today brave enough to take on this problem, and certainly none with as high a profile as president. Maybe it’s time for less money in the hands of arms producers and war profiteers. It’s time for less war and weapons in general. Sadly, this means that it must be time for new politicians. Only a citizenry which not only votes, but is also informed and involved, can do this.
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/15/war-is-still-a-racket/
It made even one involved soldier to speak out: https://www.wired.com/2011/04/ethan-mccord/