Among the 248 armed conflicts that occurred in 153 regions across the world from 1945 to 2001, 201 were initiated by the #US, accounting for 81% of the total number. pic.twitter.com/Kjn81VIVXP
— Chinese Embassy in Russia 中国驻俄罗斯大使馆 (@ChineseEmbinRus) February 25, 2022
The applicable wisdom here: "Why do you pick the mote from your neighbors eye and ignore the beam in your own?"
...and, as we know, NATO stands for "Needs America To Operate"
Remember Kosovo! (The U.S. "invades" a breakaway Serbian/Yugoslavian area with its military). Russians are doing the same thing.
We give you U.S. Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville (boldface mine):
Tuberville discussed the escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine. He claims that a large part of Vladimir Putin’s desire for further annexation of Ukrainian land is due to the amount of farmland in Ukraine.
“He can’t feed his people,” Tuberville said. “It’s a communist country, so he can’t feed his people, so they need more farmland.”
If Alabama voters are this stupid, maybe, like happens in D.C., Congress should have to approve their budgets too.
Aside: Admittedly, the Substack Bois and the Anti-Antis have said stupid shit, but I think this takes the prize
More from Professor Mearscheimer (the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science):
The Bhagavad Gita, which is surely the basic text on the practice of detachment, is wonderfully explicit on this point. Krishna tells Arjuna that acting with detachment means doing the right thing for its own sake, because it needs to be done, without worrying about success or failure. (T.S. Eliot paraphrased Krishna’s advice when he wrote, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”)
from here.
The CDC determines an area's level of virus transmissibility based on the average number of cases relative to a county's population and the Covid test positivity rate. If two indicators suggest different transmission levels, the higher level is selected.
Low transmission: fewer than 10 new cases per 100,000 and less than 5 percent positive test rate.
Moderate transmission: 10-49.99 new cases per 100,000, 5-7.99 percent positive test rate.
Substantial transmission: 50-100 new cases per 100,000, 8-9.99 percent positivity rate.
High transmission: 100 or more new cases per 100,000, 10 percent or higher positivity rate.
Masks are recommended in areas with substantial or high transmission.
For all those removing mask mandates, I repeat a graphic I've been using since March 2020. We keep doing this over and over and over. pic.twitter.com/LjYpukLi0G
— Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) February 8, 2022
For convenience, we often think of politics in terms of "right" and "left"--a classification that stems from the position of legislators in the chambers of the French legislature when the right were royalists and the left were not. For our purposes here, though, it's probably more accurate to call the left the party of labor, while the right is the party of business or capital.
Complaints about the predominance of the right (capital) over the left (labor), elicit protests from those capital has convinced. And the spending on marketing to convince the public that capital (the right) is a persecuted minority virtually no limit. The Kochs, the epitome of the political right, spent a reported $889 million on politics in 2016, for just one example.
The Kochs are extremists, too. Their father, Fred Koch, patented the processes by which we still refine crude oil into useful products. As the CEO of Koch Industries, Fred built refineries all over the world, including for Hitler and Stalin. He reportedly hated the Russians, but loved the Germans. He even hired a German nanny to raise his sons. That nanny was a Nazi--no, not a stern disciplinarian, a member of Hitler's party.
So raised-by-a-Nazi Kochs are pretty hard right, and helped found numerous right-wing think tanks, including Cato (libertarian), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Heritage, Manhattan, Mercator, etc. They also were founding members of the John Birch Society--an organization that called Dwight Eisenhower a commie (or commie dupe). For a little perspective, I'd say Attilla the Hun would be slightly to the left of the Kochs.
Complain about the dominance of right-wing propaganda, and you'll hear "What about George Soros?"...the "lefty" who supposedly balance this right-wing bias. But Soros' political spending in 2016 was reportedly only $27 million--a lot of money, but Kochs spent more than 30 times more in that election. Soros is also no friend of labor. He made his bones speculating in currency, and is a capitalists' capitalist.
An actual lefty would be someone like Bernie Sanders, a New Deal Democrat who understand that monopolies in particular are best run by the state. This is evident in the Sacramento region where a publicly-owned utility (SMUD) supplies power. Privately-owned PG&E supplies the nearby areas with electricity. SMUD is 35% cheaper, and its executives are not consulting with criminal attorneys about their lack of maintenance leading to negligent homicides as their power lines spark forest fires. Lest you think Sacramento is just getting what it's paid for, SMUD's chief executive is paid far less than PG&E's CEO too.
Single payer healthcare--something that Sanders and a majority of the American population support--would also be cheaper and better. It's not at all controversial that Canadians have longer life spans and pay roughly half what the U.S. spends, per-capita, on health care.
The "progressive" ideas discussed or supported by Biden--from protecting the climate to providing child care, from better health care to fairer taxation, from gun control to voting rights--are all supported by two thirds or more of Americans.
Yet pundits typically complain about anything resembling labor-friendly or
socialism-based as though it would be more costly, or more bureaucratic,
or just plain bad. Even the word ("socialism") is enough to turn most people off. The preponderance of news simply ignores the possibility.
(c) by Mark Dempsey
Everyone knows national 'debt' is bad. Why...all debt is bad! It reduces your economic freedom! You are in a kind of quasi-slavery to creditors if your household has debt. And you must always pay your debts, too!
Except none of that is true. If a bank lends me money because I have a hot tip on the fourth race at Santa Anita, does anyone really believe the public sector's courts and sheriffs have a duty to enforce payment of that debt? There's even law that predates the American Revolutionary War that says loans designed to default and give the lender title to the security in foreclosure are not legal. The sub-prime/derivatives scandal is the most recent reminder that impossible-to-pay-back loans are not fair, never mind legal.
There's also an enormous amount of propaganda designed to make the public believe currency creators are just like households... but what household can pay its mortgage with what it prints in the back bedroom?
Popular opinion thinks "tax and spend" describes the fiscal operation of the federal government--the monopoly creator of legal currency. But...where do people get the dollars to pay those taxes if government doesn't spend the dollars first?
The real-world sequence of fiscal actions must be "spend first, then retrieve some dollars in taxes." That's how the real world actually works. Taxes remain important because they create the demand for the otherwise useless pieces of paper we call "dollars," but spending must precede the receipt of tax revenue, so taxes do not and cannot provision federal programs.
Alone in the economy, the federal government is fiscally unconstrained. Remember that the next time you hear the "Eeek! We're running out of money!" talk. We will never run out of money. We might run out of resources, goods and services, but the symbols of wealth are never ending.
Incidentally, for the inflationistas ("If you just print lots of money, you'll get [gasp!]...[hyper-] inflation!"): According to our central bank's own audit--required by the congressional mandate--it issued $16 - $29 trillion in credit in 2007-8 to the same financial sector whose frauds crashed the economy. Where was the inflation? (And where was the tax rise?)
What do we call the money spent, but not retrieved in taxes--the dollars with which people conduct their business? First, we call them the dollar financial assets of the population. But, just as accurately, we call them the national 'debt.' That's not exotic economics, it's double-entry bookkeeping.
In a way, it's analogous to your bank account. That's your asset, just as it is the bank's liability. The "deficit hawks" are adamant in advising people, in effect, to march down to their bank and demand it have less debt. An honest bank officer would say "But that would shrink your accounts, too!" The American public is supposed to say "We don't care! We just hate the word 'debt'!"
I'm moved to write these words because, once again, propagandist George Will has written a column decrying federal 'debt.' Will is a pundit whose ethics were flexible enough that in the run up to the 1980 election, he stole President Carter's debate briefing book and handed it to the Reagan campaign. Nevertheless, Mr. Will he feels he has enough ethical standing to to critique "profligate Democrats and delusional Republicans."
One economist, Stephanie Kelton, answered the current 'debt' panic on her blog (and with her book The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy). The truth, says Dr. Kelton: "government deficits supply the non-government sector with net financial assets—i.e. the government’s red ink is our collective black ink."
"But what about Greece?" True, Greece had a relatively high national debt, and as a consequence was at one time paying 35% interest to sell the debt. But Greece is a European Union member, and uses the euro. It's not a monetary sovereign, like the U.S. and Japan. It can't print drachmas any more, but the U.S. and Japan can issue dollars and yen literally without limit. That critical distinction escapes the press and the likes of George Will.
One might think Mr. Will, or any of the other promoters of 'debt' panic would appreciate the distinction between household debt and national 'debt,' or between those who print their own money and have to get others to do that... but no. Will apparently has difficulty distinguishing between theft and legitimate reporting, too.
Meanwhile (from Mona Ali): "Just this week, COVAX, the WHO program created to deliver vaccines to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, revealed that it is fresh out of cash. It needs $5.2 billion to continue vaccine rollout in low-income countries that have received fewer total vaccine doses than richer economies’ residents have total booster jabs. Our crisis-prone system breeds instability whose effects fall unevenly. Unless our disordered world economy is reoriented toward protecting the interests of the majority, it may not withstand this catastrophe—let alone the next one."
Let’s check in on Sweden’s 🇸🇪 natural infection herd immunity strategy of their mass-infection patron saint Tegnell… ➡️ chasing 85% population antibody immunity after suffering an epic 100-year record high excess mortality did jack squat. #COVID19 https://t.co/VL0FoQc30G
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) February 9, 2022
Same thing in New York. Majority Dems, and they killed the Single Payer bill.
— Prof Zenkus (@anthonyzenkus) February 4, 2022
The CA legislature, run by a super majority of Democrats, just killed a bill that would give healthcare to every adult and child in the state. There are no progressives in the Dem Party. Just a bunch of jerks living off the working class as they stick the knife into our backs.
— Prof Zenkus (@anthonyzenkus) February 1, 2022
