“Amazon Clinic” is Here
Healthcare without the health or the care
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Historic Population Decline
This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.
• GDP increased 3% in 2022
• Historic population decline
• Nearly 60,000 COVID-19 related deaths in the last month
• The ‘Three Body Problem’ debuts on TV
Post-pandemic Blues
Innocence destroyed.
A Hard-Edged Rock: Waging Economic Warfare on Humanity
Why is much modern food of inferior quality? Why is health suffering and smallholder farmers who feed most of the world being forced out of agriculture?
Mainly because of the mindset of the likes of Larry Fink of BlackRock – the world’s biggest asset management firm – and the economic system they profit from and promote.
In 2011, Fink said agricultural and water investments would be the best performers over the next 10 years.
Fink stated: “Go long agriculture and water and go to the beach.”
Unsurprisingly then, just three …
Social Media: “Who Would You Like Me to Be?”
Way back in the 1830s, the brilliant Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting the American experiment of “democracy,” found a nation of persons afraid to disagree with the “tyranny of the majority.” Despite Ralph Waldo Emerson’s inspiring Self-Reliance of 1841, there remained very few free-thinking individualists to be found. Some 10 years later, when Thoreau published Walden and “Life Without Principle,” he found very few readers indeed.
The 1950s was a time of mass conformity. Americans thought, acted, and looked the same.It took another century, but post-WW2 social scientists became increasingly …
Solving the Debt Crisis the American Way
Our forefathers turned their debts into currency. That Constitutional approach could work today.
On Friday, Jan. 13, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrote to Congress that the U.S. government will hit its borrowing limit on Jan. 19, forcing the new Congress into negotiations over the debt limit much sooner than expected. She said she will use accounting maneuvers she called “extraordinary measures” to keep U.S. finances running for a few months, pushing the potential date for default to sometime in the summer. But she urged Congress to get to work on raising the debt ceiling.
Lifting it above its current $31.385 trillion limit …
Fukushima’s Toxic Dumping Flashpoint
“We must remind Japan that if the radioactive nuclear wastewater is safe, just dump it in Tokyo, test it in Paris and store it in Washington, but keep our Pacific nuclear-free.” (Vanuatu’s celebrated former ‘Turaga Chief’ Motarilavoa Hilda Lini)
In the face of considerable worldwide criticism, TEPCO is moving ahead with its well-advertised plans to dump contaminated water from storage tanks at the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster zone into the Pacific Ocean. They are running out of storage space and the Pacific Ocean is conveniently right next door.
The Japanese government is courting trouble, as a contracting party to: (1) …
More than a “Syndrome”: Trauma, Distress, and Pain
I can’t even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don’t even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.”
? Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family
You don’t need a thousand hours studying what trauma is, what forms it might take, delving into wars and conflicts, from the great war, when the psychologists in Europe attempted to study (sic; sick) shell shocked veterans, and, of course, how many civilians are there in that process of witnessing the most horrific treatment of humans and animals at the hands of, well, …
The Slavophile Russian Cosmists
Reds, Scientists and Mystics
This beautiful Earth is no more than a brief resting place between the sea of salt where we were born and the sea of stars which we must now. venture forth
— Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the Future
Orientation
In cross-cultural psychology, the major world divisions are between the West and the East. But what about Russia? Is it closer culturally to Europe or to China and India? As you will find out in this article, the answer is neither.
Absence of a bourgeois spirit, specialization, rationalism or empiricism in Russia
For political and economic reasons, …
How They Get Away with It
Those who have no empathy or moral compass.
A Civic Investment for the Ages in a Just Society
The super successful mega-investor, Warren Buffett, CEO of the giant conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, was heard to say: There are only 535 members of Congress, why can’t 300 million Americans control them? That’s a pretty fundamental question since our senators and representatives are given their sovereign power by the people. Remember the preamble to our Constitution?
Buffett is a generous philanthropist. Among his contributions, he has given the Gates Foundation (public health projects) about $3 billion each year for over a decade. That’s over $30 billion dollars! Just one $3 billion contribution, devoted …
When the People Have Nothing More to Eat, They Will Eat the Rich
Maruja Mallo (Spain), La Verbena (‘The Fair’), 1927.
On 8 January, large crowds of people dressed in colours of the Brazilian flag descended on the country’s capital, Brasília. They invaded federal buildings, including the Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, and vandalised public property. The attack, carried out by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, came as no surprise, since the rioters had been planning ‘weekend demonstrations’ on social media for days. …
My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?
You’ve stood by me through everything. You didn’t flinch when I grabbed them by the pussy. When I revealed that Obama was born in an African shithole country, you nodded approvingly. When I pointed out that rapists, child-molesters, and drug smugglers were sneaking into Texas, you had my back. When I told my people to unmask, and urged their sluggish doctors to slice them open, slosh their insides with bleach, and stick them in tanning beds, you were right there with me. Even back in 2017, when I signed the God-given right of crazy people to express themselves with guns, …
Harry the “Traitor” and Lynch “The Grinch”
The Corporate Media's Automatic Smear Machine
If we were to choose a hill to die on, it would probably not be in defence of a British prince.
In truth, we don’t need to like or support – and may even abhor – the targets of media bias highlighted in our analyses. Our goal is simply to provide examples that most clearly expose the propaganda function of ‘mainstream’ media. Inevitably, that involves our focusing on thorns in the Establishment’s side.
It should be no surprise that there is actually much that divides us from, say, the fiercely patriotic and …
It Has Always Been a “Religious War”
On Ben Gvir and the Adaptability of Zionism
In a self-congratulatory article published in the Atlantic in 2017, Yossi Klein Halevi describes Israeli behavior at the just-conquered holy Muslim shrines in Occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 as “an astonishing moment of religious restraint”.
“The Jewish people had just returned to its holiest site, from which it had been denied access for centuries, only to effectively yield sovereignty at its moment of triumph,” Halevi wrote with a lingering sense of pride, as if the world owes Israel a ton of gratitude in the …
A New Year’s Eve to Remember
“You leave fragments of your spirit here and there over the years.
These pieces are glued — like barnacles on a ship — to various
places, objects, people, memories, and unfinished business.
Although detaching from them can be extremely difficult,
detachment is a far more natural practice for your soul
as well as emotions and mental health than holding on
to the dead zone of your past.”
–from “Entering the Castle,” by Caroline Myss, p. 92
Today is the 40th anniversary of the quadruple terror bombing of December 31, 1982, when I happened to be serving a short sentence on the 5th floor of the Metropolitan Correction Center …
How Police Use Public-Private Partnerships to Spy on Americans
360 Degree Surveillance
We live in a surveillance state founded on a partnership between government and the technology industry.
— Law Professor Avidan Y. Cover
In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.
Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.
There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.
With every new surveillance device …
Allegations of Genocide Return to Peru
The Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office has placed she who claims the country’s presidency, Dina Bolurate under investigation for crimes including genocide, resulting from her government’s treatment of protesters who prefer the elected President Pedro Castillo. Now much of her government is under investigation for genocide (“genocide, qualified homicide and serious injuries”): Alberto Otarola (the prime minister who just resigned), minister of defense Jorge Chavez, minister of the interior Victor Rojas, a previous prime minister Pedro Angulo and previous Minister of the Interior Cesar Cervantes. ((“Genocide investigation opened against Peru president after protest deaths,” Agence France-Presse, Jan 11, 2023, Guardian.))
How did this happen? …
The Uninvolved
What it means to stand on the sidelines while others do the heavy lifting.
Aiding Myanmar’s Military Regime
A Picture of Global Complicity
International relations remains the sum game of vast hypocrisies, a patchwork of compromises and the compromised. Every moral condemnation of a regime’s conduct is bound to be shown up as an exercise in double standards, often implicating the accusers. In the case of the military regime in Myanmar, double standards are not only modish but expected.
A number of international declarations and measures have targeted Myanmar’s regime for its blood-soaked brutality, its genocidal practices against the Rohingya, and its general contempt for the human rights of its citizenry. In a statement last November, US Secretary of State, Antony …
Pottery, Poetry, and Protest
“Hear Me Now” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 1919, South Carolina’s Charleston Museum acquired an unusually massive jar bearing the inscription “made at Stoney bluff; / for making dis old gin enuff / May 13 – 1859 – / Dave & / Baddler”. The following year another large, alkaline-glazed vessel came into the museum’s possession bearing the same date and names within its inscription. At the time little was known about South Carolina’s pre-war stoneware industry or the highly skilled enslaved labor that it relied on at every level of manufacturing. It would not be until 1930 that “Dave” was identified as the “might good” potter, David …
How America’s “Defense” Contractors Control America’s Government
Probably no corporation possesses a bigger share of control over America’s Government than does the one that sells more to the U.S. Government than does any other: Lockheed Martin. Actually, its top owners, or the group of stockholders who dominate the firm and cooperatively together control its policies and determine whom the corporation’s top executives are, are, together with one-another, the individual persons who cooperatively produce the decisions that constitute this “bigger share of control over America’s Government” than any other corporation does (and vastly more than the American public does). Some of these top owners …
The Great Divide
What can you do when people refuse to consider the evidence?
Nuclear Submarine Doubts
US Lawmakers and AUKUS
The policymaking apparatus behind the AUKUS security pact was shoddy from the start. It has raised questions about the extent US power will subordinate Australia further in future conflicts; it has brought into question Australia’s own sovereignty; and it has also raised the spectre of regional nuclear proliferation via the use of otherwise closely guarded propulsion technology.
The other feature of this whole enterprise, as it always is regarding the procurement of submarines, is their rate of production. The US Navy’s fast attack submarine program, …
The History between Japan and China
Japan’s actions in a certain period of the past not only claimed numerous victims here in Japan but also left the peoples of neighboring Asia and elsewhere with scars that are painful even today. I am thus taking this opportunity to state my belief, based on my profound remorse for these acts of aggression, colonial rule, and the like that caused such unbearable suffering and sorrow for so many people, that Japan’s future path should be one of making every effort to build world peace in line with my no-war commitment. It is imperative for us Japanese to look squarely …
Stepping Back from the a Nuclear Brink
Review of Martin J. Sherwin’s “Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis”
The development and the deployment of nuclear weapons are usually based on the assumption that they enhance national security. But, in fact, as this powerful study of nuclear policy convincingly demonstrates, nuclear weapons move nations toward the brink of destruction.
The basis for this conclusion is the post-World War II nuclear arms race and, especially, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. At the height of the crisis, top officials from the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union narrowly avoided annihilating a substantial portion of the human race by …
Isn’t It Ironic?
Whatever your feelings about the government, as a worker, you must pay into a government-administered pension plan, so receiving a pension is collecting what you are due.
Rampant Speculation: Uranium, Dirty Bombs and Heathrow
The dirty bomb and its purportedly famed radiation dispersal attributes has an undeserved mythology. It serves to bloat budgets and confer grants on specious theories propounded by specious theorists. It is all rather easy to make a security threat up, and a celluloid, Hollywood scenario of a dirty bomb going off in the middle of a metropolis killing thousands is just one of those instances. Scaring people is child’s play and often the work of the unscrupulous.
This month, it was announced that staff …
Lucid Summations When Tomorrow Is Today and MLK Day
What they [regular people] need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves… what may be called the sociological imagination.
– C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination
In what follows, I offer some conclusions I have arrived at and am skipping all the steps taken to arrive there. Everyone needs to …
A Reminder King Called His Government: “The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World”
What if someone of consequence and world attention, difficult for US monopolized and controlled media to ignore, reminded us that one year before receiving a bullet to his brain, King had made bold print headlines in newspapers worldwide reading, “KING CALLS US “GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD. ((“Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” sermon delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.))
Would it not weaken US deep state media credibility as it tried to explain how this world-shaking event in the life of Martin Luther King has not been known by millions who celebrate …