SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) --
“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
(Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
"(Afghan) military is funded by the United States at a cost of around $4 billion per year. This support is going to continue..." PLUS U.S. special forces and bases.
Excerpts--recommend reading whole thing. We're going to miss this guy.
"On April 9th, Ramsey Clark passed away at his home surrounded by his family.
Clark was Attorney General of the United States from 1967-1969 under Lyndon Johnson, during which time he led the way on voting rights for African-Americans, and school desegregation and drafted the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1968, better known as the Fair Housing Act, which addressed housing discrimination."
***
"A man of strong ideals and few words, Clark would provide a simple
response. “Democracy is not a spectator sport,” he was fond of saying.
He believed that for a country to truly be democratic, the people must
participate. They must hold their government accountable for its
actions. And he spent his life trying to do that.
“By the way,” Ischenko added, “the Americans do not give a damn whether Ukraine will hold out for any time or whether it will be blown to pieces in an instant. They believe they stand to gain from either outcome.”
NATO’s pressure against Russia exacerbated and joined with extreme
Ukrainian nationalists—including fascists such as the Azov Battalion—to
drive an anti-Russian cultural and political movement in the country.
Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who benefited from Western
backing, put forward a language law in 2017 that hampers the teaching of
the minority languages in the country’s schools. The target for the law
was to de-Russianize the population, but it had an impact on the
country’s smaller minorities. For that reason, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary
and Romania filed complaints with the Council of Europe.
Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said
on Facebook in late 2020 that his government would “stand up for
Transcarpathian Hungarians in every international forum.” Ukraine, he said,
“not a member of NATO, has launched an attack against a minority group
originating from a NATO member country.” The contradictions of
Ukraine-NATO’s anti-Russian agenda run afoul of other NATO members for
reasons that were not calibrated carefully.
Firing across the Ukraine-Russia border has stepped up, egged on by
Biden’s full-throated support of Zelensky’s newly found anti-Russian
ambitions. A senior United Nations official at the Department of
Political and Peacekeeping Affairs tells me that they want military
forces to withdraw from the border. All the main platforms for
negotiation—the Normandy Format and the Arria Formula meetings at the
UN—are in a stalemate. “We need cool heads to prevail,” said the UN
official. “Anything other than that could lead to a catastrophic war.”
MINSK, 26 March (BelTA) - The Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Ministry
supports the aspirations of the American people for a better future,
reads the commentary of the press service of the Belarusian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs released in response to the U.S. Embassy's statement of
25 March 2020, BelTA has learned.
“In connection with the
statement of the U.S. Embassy of 25 March 2021, we express our sincere
appreciation to the United States for finally showing readiness to shift
the bilateral rhetoric onto a constructive track and for congratulating
our country on the significant date in our history. We would welcome
the extension of this practice to public holidays,” the commentary
reads. *“We acknowledge our mistake and take the opportunity to apologize
for failing to congratulate the United States on the recent 160th
anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of the Confederate
States of America, whose flag is still dear to many Americans. On the
other hand, the BLM movement has tens of millions of activists across
the country."
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted with
regret that today the American society is deeply divided and quoted the
current U.S. President Joseph Biden: “My whole soul is in bringing
America together, uniting our people, and uniting our nation... I know
the forces that divide us are deep and they are real… Let us start
afresh. Let us listen to one another. Hear one another. See one
another.”
“We support the aspirations of the American people for a
better future – on this day and every day! Therefore, we believe that
only a genuine inclusive dialogue will help the American nation to unite
at this difficult moment in history. As a selfless gesture of goodwill,
Belarus, having experience of hosting the negotiations of the TCG
[Trilateral Contract Group for the peaceful settlement of the situation
in eastern Ukraine] is ready to offer its services in organizing such a
process,” the press service noted.
The ministry noted that
although more than two centuries have passed since the United States
declared its independence, the recent events in the country show that
the struggle of the American people for freedom still continues.
“Hundreds of thousands of Americans of all ages are publicly demanding
the right to define their country's future. In attempting to have their
voices heard many of them pay a heavy price as the regime resorted to
lethal force and gunned down several people to maintain its grip on
power and lock in results of the election,” the statement reads.
“We
admire the courage and determination of American heroes, including
Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, who sacrificed
almost everything for the sake of true freedom and harmony in the
American society. Belarus supports the American people and looks forward
to the day when every common American will be able to walk by the
Capitol freely,” the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
said.
The Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is also
grateful to the new U.S. Ambassador to Belarus Julie Fischer for "an
invaluable help in telling the entire Belarusian people when and how to
hold elections.” “Due to their primitive and poor thinking the
Belarusians would never be able to solve this issue on their own. As a
token of incredible appreciation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is
ready to fast-track Her Excellency's application for Belarusian
citizenship in order to include her in the electoral roll and give her
the right to vote. This can also be done without Belarusian citizenship
using some digital platform recognized by Julie Fisher,” the ministry
quipped.
“We cannot ignore the USA's assistance with
organizing the election. Such achievements of the American electoral
system as voting by mail and the Electoral College instead of direct
voting can be useful and should be explored by Belarus,” the press
service noted. “We are deeply touched by the attention of the United
States to Belarus' life. In response we can make a selfless contribution
to the development of Alaska's agriculture and effective development of
its lands. We are ready to look into the possibility of shared control
over Alaska. We could also send Belarusian construction crews based in
the region to share experience and help residents of the southern states
deal with the aftermath of the natural disaster,” the press service
pointed out.
"We sincerely wish the entire American people
unity and smooth ascension up the ladder of the American dream. We hope
that the positive trend in our relations will continue and we will live
to see the moment when we can welcome the U.S. Sixth Fleet near the sea
shores of Belarus!” the press service concluded.
From
BelTA's editorial office: “It is obvious that the commentary of the
Ministry of Foreign Ministry's press service should be taken with humor,
as ironic trolling of the United States. The commentary uses some
phrases from the statement of the U.S. Embassy in Minsk in connection
with the 103rd anniversary of the declaration of the Belarusian People's
Republic of 1918. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs press service has
mirrored these statements to reflect upon the current realities in the
United States, the existing division of the society and related issues.
Belarus has always advocated the principle of non-interference in the
internal affairs of other countries, which a number of foreign countries
do not mind doing.
Women and girls, the ILO study shows, carry out three quarters of the unpaid care work that is required to maintain families and society. If those who perform unpaid care work received the minimum wage in their respective countries, the wage bill would amount to US$11 trillion (or up to roughly 15% of global Gross Domestic Product, the size of the total digital economy). The necessity of this unpaid care work – including taking care of children and the elderly – has prevented women, and some men, from entering the paid workforce. In 2018, according to the ILO, 606 million women said that unpaid care work meant that they could not seek paid employment outside the home; 41 million men said the same thing.
International Music Festival volunteer coordinator and representative of Crimea Federal University Polina Bolbochan:Mr President, I have a somewhat personal question for you. Yesterday, President Biden got quite tough in his interview, including with regard to you. What would you say to him?
Vladimir Putin:With regard to my US colleague’s remark, we have, indeed, as he said, met in person. What would I tell him? I would say “stay healthy.” I wish him good health. I am saying this without irony or tongue in cheek. This is my first point.
Secondly, taking a broader approach to this matter, I would like to say that difficult, dramatic, and bloody events abound in the history of every nation and every state. But when we evaluate other people, or even other states and nations, we are always facing a mirror, we always see ourselves in the reflection, because we project our inner selves onto the other person.
You know, I remember when we were children and played in the yard, we had arguments occasionally and we used to say: whatever you call me is what you are called yourself. This is no coincidence or just a kids’ saying or joke. It has a very deep psychological undercurrent. We always see ourselves in another person and think that he or she is just like us, and evaluate the other person’s actions based on our own outlook on life.
With regard to the US establishment, the ruling class – not the American people who are mostly honest, decent and sincere people who want to live in peace and friendship with us, something we are aware of and appreciate, and we will rely on them in the future – their mindset was formed in rather challenging circumstances which we are all aware of. After all, the colonisation of the American continent by the Europeans went hand-in-hand with the extermination of the local people, the genocide, as they say today, outright genocide of the Indian tribes followed by a very tough, long and difficult period of slavery, a very cruel period. All of that has been part of life in America throughout the history of the United States to this day. Otherwise, where would the Black Lives Matter movement come from? To this day, African Americans face injustice and even extermination.
The ruling class of the United States tends to address domestic and foreign policy issues based on these assumptions. After all, the United States is the only country to have used nuclear weapons, mind you, against a non-nuclear state – Japan, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW II. There was absolutely no military need for the bombing. It was nothing but the extermination of civilians. I am bringing this up, because I know that the United States and its leaders are determined to maintain certain relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to the United States and on its terms. Even though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to uphold our interests. We will work with the United States, but in the areas that we are interested in and on terms that we believe are beneficial to us. They will have to reckon with it despite their attempts to stop our development, despite the sanctions and insults. They will have to reckon with this.
We, with our national interests in mind, will promote our relations with all countries, including the United States. This is generally all I want to say about this.
Recommended as a "must read" by Huwaida Arraf. I agree, humbly. (pretty long)
EXCERPTS:
Searching for a universal, non-Biblical justification for Israel’s existence, secular Zionists asserted that persecuted Jews had deserved a safe haven. But this argument contained a number of flaws. A need for refuge is not a license to dispossess. Zionists did not come to Palestine seeking to integrate into local society, but to establish their own exclusive state at the natives’ expense. The need for safe haven was not the original motivation for establishing a Jewish national home. As Michael Stanislawski, the Nathan J. Miller Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, writes:
The all-too-frequent claim that modern Jewish nationalism was born in response to anti-Semitism or to the outbreak of violent attacks (“pogroms”) against the Jews which began in the Russian Empire in 1881–[18]82 is quite simply wrong: the first expressions of this new ideology were published well before the spread of the new anti-Semitic ideology and before the pogroms of the early 1880s. …the fundamental cause of the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism was the rise, on the part of Jews themselves, of new ideologies that applied the basic tenets of modern nationalism to the Jews, and not a response to persecution.
The original aim of modern Jewish nationalism was to prevent the assimilation of Jews into the nations in which they lived—the rescue of Jewish identity, not of Jews. When, in the period 1903–1905, the Zionist movement was presented with a choice between an actual, immediate refuge—offered by the British, in East Africa—and the pursuit of an uncertain dream in Zion, it was the argument for the latter that won. The pogroms that followed the rise of modern Jewish nationalism increased the attractiveness of Zionism for some Jews, but many more responded by immigrating to the United States. Even well after those pogroms began in 1881–1882, and until the end of the Holocaust, Zionism remained a minority movement, rejected by most rabbinic and lay leaders. Today, when Israeli flags are at the front of many American synagogues, it is easy to forget that during its first half-century, Zionism was a sect within a dissident sect: most Jews were not Jewish nationalists, and even many Jewish nationalists were not Zionists but members of the secular, socialist Bund, which called for Jewish autonomy in the places in which Jews resided, not in Palestine. Almost all the Jews who did seek to escape persecution chose to go elsewhere. From the start of Zionist settlement in 1882 to the outbreak of World War I, some 2.5 million Jews left Eastern Europe, mostly to America. Only 60,000 went to Palestine, of whom about 8,000 were committed Zionists—comprising less than 0.5 percent of the Eastern European Jewish emigration. More than half of these immigrants left Palestine.
***
The Israeli “peace camp,” contrary to what the country’s political right and the settlers claim, has no desire to turn Israel into a liberal, universalist state with equality for all its citizens. It seeks, in fact, to preserve Israel as a Jewish ethnocratic state. The peace that it proposes is less one of reconciliation than of separation. In the words of Yitzhak Rabin, “It is better for the Arabs not to be swarming around here.” Religious and right-wing Zionists see enormous hypocrisy in the left’s presentation of itself as a noble seeker of peace, with the settlers cast as villains. In the Yesha Council’s monthly magazine, Nekuda, Vered Noam, a Tel Aviv University professor of Talmud and winner of the Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor, described the Zionist left’s support for enclosing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza behind fences and walls in this way:
The left views a barrier as a didactic means, an accelerator of the Jewish recognition of the need to separate between the populations, an exercise in Palestinian statehood.… However, the central motivation is not the concern for the civil rights of the Palestinians. The continued suffocation and starvation of two million people [in Gaza] does not sit well with such a concern.…the true stimulus of the left is separation from the Arabs. The closure [of Palestinian areas] exposes a surprising similarity between the majority of leftists and the extreme right which upholds the idea of transfer [of Palestinians to other countries]. The central aspiration of both is to dispose of Arab presence.
Every Israeli settlement plan—from the Allon to the Sharon, Drobles, and Super Zones plans—discarded most of the densely populated Palestinian cities in Gaza and the West Bank, leaving them to the Palestinians for self-rule. Israel wanted to take over Palestinian land only when it didn’t require absorbing too many of its non-Jewish inhabitants. This Israeli aversion to integrating urban Palestinian areas—where Israel has instead implemented its policy of hafrada, or segregation—is the foundation of worldwide belief in the possibility of a two-state solution. Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that “we don’t want to govern them,” and from this true statement a number of wild leaps have been made, most notably that autonomy in a handful of disconnected Palestinian cities can be stretched, bent, and twisted into a Palestinian state.
The Zionist left’s primary objection to annexation is that it would harm the goal of having as few Palestinians as possible within the borders of the Jewish state. One of the groups illustrating this was The People Against Annexation, formed in 2020. It was handsomely funded by a board member of the bipartisan pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, Stacy Schusterman, whose family foundation supports numerous Israel advocacy groups (in the 2020 election campaign, Schusterman donated $550,000 to defeat the Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and more than $1.2 million to a pro-Israel group that ran ads against Senator Bernie Sanders). The People Against Annexation was headed by the former Israel director of J Street, the Democratic Party-aligned pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, D.C. Among the ads produced by the organization was a poster demonizing Palestinians as Islamist terrorists by implying that annexation would mean renaming a Tel Aviv street after Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founder of the Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as Hamas.
***
In Israel’s liberal, anti-settlement circles, it is often asserted that the Occupation is a terrible blight, an aberration from the democratic values of the first nineteen years of the state. In fact, those years provided the template for the segregation, land confiscation, ethnic domination, and separate legal regimes for Jews and Palestinians that characterize the present-day West Bank. In more than seventy-two years of statehood, there have been only six months when Israel did not place most of the native population under military rule while it confiscated their land and deprived those people of basic civil rights.
Since 1967, Israel’s policy has been to have its occupied subjects pay for their own occupation, primarily through Israeli-collected taxes (though also through Israel’s extraction of natural resources). The army’s blueprint “Operational Principles for the Administered Territories,” published in the war’s aftermath, states that “the economy of the administered territories should weigh on the Israeli budget as little as possible.” Today, much of Israel’s occupation is underwritten by the United States—not only through the $3.8 billion the US gives Israel every year, but also through infrastructure projects in the West Bank that are paid for from a separate USAID budget. Ostensibly, this is for Palestinian development; in practice, it means that US taxpayers are subsidizing the infrastructure of ethnic segregation in areas that Israel is steadily colonizing. In 2013, the year that USAID upgraded the Jaba road in Area C, the organization spent $440 million in the occupied territories, $50 million of it on infrastructure. The US provided an additional $3.4 billion to the Israeli military that year.
Residents carry the body of several civilians killed in a US airstrike in Mosul, Iraq on March 24, 2017. Felipe Dana | AP
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military
defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death. -- Martin Luther King Jr.
And this was said in 1967. I think we have overshot the spiritual death runway.
"Writing in 2013, Schmidt and Cohen stated,
'What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.'"
A curiously inflexible brand of race-first neoliberalism has taken root in American political discourse.
In order to legitimate what Michaels describes as “racial
rent-seeking,” a curiously inflexible brand of race-first neoliberalism
has taken root in American political discourse, proposing a trickle-down
model of racial progress, anchored in the mysticism of organic black
community. Against this exoticized backdrop, neoliberal race leaders
stage the beguiling fantasy that individual “entrepreneurialism” is the
key path to rising above one’s circumstances—i.e., the standard American
social myth that obscures the deeper need to combat systemic
inequalities. The most tragic, and pathetic, expressions of this faith
are the versions of the “gospel of prosperity,” which fuse pop
self-realization psychology and a barely recognizable Christianity to
exploit desperation and the desire for life with dignity and respect
among their black-majority congregations. The false hopes of the
prosperity gospel encourage already vulnerable people to fall prey to
all sorts of destructive get-rich-quick schemes; they are the “sigh of
the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of
soulless conditions” channeled through a market-idolatrous Protestant
psychobabble. Black ministers and other proponents of entrepreneurialist
ideology as racial uplift also played a largely unrecognized role in
pushing subprime mortgages, and even payday loans, in black communities.
The racial trickle-down success myth is partly a vestige of an
earlier era, during which individual black attainments could be seen as
testaments to the race’s capacities—and a refutation of the
white-sanctioned view of black people as generally inferior. Even then,
however, this model of black uplift was enmeshed in the race theory of
the time—notably the belief that a race’s capacities were indicated by
the accomplishments of its “best” individuals—and it was always
inflected with the class perspectives of those who saw themselves as
such individuals. The class legacies of this foundational moment in
modern black politics may well contribute to the firm insistence among
today’s “black voices” that slavery and Jim Crow mark the transcendent
truth of black Americans’ experience in the United States—and that an
irreducible racism is the source of all manifest racial inequality. That
diagnosis certainly masks class asymmetries among black Americans’
circumstances as well as in the remedies proposed to improve them.
Nevertheless, we continue to indulge the politically wrong-headed,
counterproductive, and even reactionary features of the “representative
black voice” industry in whatever remains of our contemporary public
sphere. And we never reckon with the truly disturbing presumption that
any black person who can gain access to the public microphone and
performs familiar rituals of “blackness” should be recognized as
expressing significant racial truths and deserves our attention. This
presumption rests on the unexamined premise that blacks share a common,
singular mind that is at once radically unknowable to non-blacks and
readily downloaded by any random individual setting up shop as a racial
voice. And despite what all of our age’s many heroic narratives of
individualist race-first triumph may suggest to the casual viewer, that premise is the essence of racism.
Adolph Reed is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania
AJP: You do Palestine organizing in New Mexico. How did you get involved in being a Palestine solidarity organizer?
Jeffrey Haas
JH: It was a natural development because the
Panthers talked about human rights and equal rights and so when you’re
open to that, you really don’t want to accept injustice anywhere. I had
grown up in a reform Jewish congregation in Atlanta that wasn’t
particularly Zionist, but we had heard all the myths about “if we give
money, we’re planting trees to make the desert bloom,” not to hide what
had been done to Palestinian villages. As I and many others took up the
liberation struggles of Central Americans fighting for liberation, the
issue of Palestine came up directly when we learned about what was
happening in Guatemala. The corrupt junta was killing and putting masses
of indigenous people in internment camps aided directly by the state of
Israel. Why was Israel doing the dirty work of the US? Why did Israel
continue to support the apartheid government in South Africa to the very
end? It became clear that Israel was an apartheid state itself and had
not only sided with other authoritarian colonial oppressors, but sought
to benefit financially by selling the surveillance and military
technology they used to repress the Palestinian people to other colonial
and imperialist powers.
With the first attacks on Gaza in 2014, I helped organize a group
called Another Jewish Voice of Santa Fe. There was also Another Jewish
Voice of Albuquerque and we joined together. We continue to organize and
raise issues, to protest as Santa Feans For Justice in Palestine. We
put up some very explicit artwork on a very public wall depicting
Israeli atrocities to Palestinian youth a year ago and raised a lot of
awareness . . . and not unsurprisingly got some Zionist backlash. We
worked closely with the Red Nation because they are frequently drawing
the connection between the struggles of Native Americans and the
struggles of Palestinians against colonialism. A lot of the techniques,
military gear and devices that Israel uses against Palestinians have
been taught to and acquired by US law enforcement and used against the
Black movement in Ferguson and the indigenous-led Water Protectors at
Standing Rock.
"The announced purpose of the 'maximum pressure' campaign – to change the Government of Venezuela – violates the principle of sovereign equality of states..."
President Joe Biden's administration plans to continue to seek to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the United Kingdom to the United States to face hacking conspiracy charges, the U.S. Justice Department said.
The Sun is all the colours mixed together, this appears white to our eyes.
The Sun is composed of hydrogen (70%) and Helium (28%).
The Sun is a main-sequence G2V star (or Yellow Dwarf).
The Sun is 109 times wider than the Earth and 330,000 times as massive.
The Sun’s surface area is 11,990 times that of the Earth’s.
The distance between the Earth and the Sun is an Astronomical Unit (AU)
One million Earths could fit inside the Sun. A
hollow Sun would fit around 960,000 spherical Earths. If squished
inside with no wasted space, then around 1,300,000 would fit inside. The
Sun’s surface area is 11,990 times that of the Earth’s.
The Sun contains 99.86% of the mass in the Solar System. The
mass of the Sun is approximately 330,000 times greater than that of
Earth. It is almost three quarters Hydrogen, whilst most of the
remaining mass is Helium.
The Sun is an almost perfect sphere. There
is a 10-kilometre difference between the Sun’s polar and equatorial
diameter. This means it is the closest thing to a perfect sphere that
has been observed in nature.
The Sun will consume the Earth. When
the Sun has burned all its Hydrogen, it will continue to burn helium
for 130 million more years. During this time, it will expand to the
point that it will engulf Mercury, Venus, and the Earth. At this stage
it will have become a red giant
The Sun will one day be about the size of Earth. After
its red giant phase, the Sun will collapse. It will keep its enormous
mass with the approximate volume of our planet. When this happens, it
will have become a white dwarf.
The temperature inside the Sun can reach 15 million degrees Celsius. Energy
is generated at the Sun’s core, by nuclear fusion, as Hydrogen converts
to Helium. Hot objects expand, the Sun would explode if it were not for
its enormous gravitational force. The temperature on the surface of the
Sun is closer to 5,600 degrees Celsius.
Light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth. The
Sun is an average distance of 150 million kilometres from the Earth.
Light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second. Dividing one by the
other gives us an approximate time of 500 seconds (or eight minutes and
20 seconds). Although this energy reaches Earth in a few minutes, it
will already have taken millions of years to travel from the Sun’s core
to its surface.
The Sun travels at 220 kilometres per second. The
Sun is 24,000-26,000 light years from the galactic centre. It takes the
Sun 225-250 million years to complete an orbit of the centre of the Milky Way.
The distance from the Sun to Earth changes throughout the year. This
is because the Earth travels on an elliptical orbit around the Sun. The
distance between the two bodies varies from 147 to 152 million
kilometres.
The Sun is middle-aged. At
around 4.6 billion years old, the Sun has already burned off about half
of its store of Hydrogen. It has enough left to continue to burn
Hydrogen for approximately 5 billion years. The Sun is currently a type
of star known as a Yellow Dwarf.
The Sun has a very strong magnetic field. Magnetic
energy released by the Sun during magnetic storms causes solar flares.
We see these as sunspots. In sunspots, the magnetic lines twist and they
spin, much like a tornado would on Earth.
The Sun generates solar wind. The
wind is a stream of charged particles. This travels at approximately
450 kilometres per second through the solar system. Solar wind occurs
when the magnetic field of the Sun extends into space.
Sol is the Latin for Sun This
is where the word “solar” comes from, which is used to describe things
that are derived from, related to, or caused by the Sun
