Mebbe You Can't Grab the World By the Pussy - And Get Away With It?

moonofalabama |  Trump said he would ask Iraq to pay for the bases the U.S. has built should the U.S. troops be kicked out of Iraq. The U.S. already has binding legal agreements with Iraq which stipulate that the bases, and all fixed installations the U.S. has built there, are the property of Iraq.

Trump had already asked Iraqi Prime Ministers -twice- if the U.S. could get Iraq's oil as reward for invading and destroying their country. The requests were rejected. Now we learn that Trump also uses gangster methods (ar) to get the oil of Iraq. The talk by the Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Mahdi happened during the recent parliament session in Iraq (machine translation):

Al-Halbousi, Speaker of the Iraqi Council of Representatives, blocked the speech of Mr. Abdul Mahdi in the scheduled session to discuss the decision to remove American forces from Iraq. 

At the beginning of the session, Al-Halbousi left the presidential seat and sat next to Mr. Abdul-Mahdi, after his request to cut off the live broadcast of the session, a public conversation took place between the two parties. The voice of Adel Abdul Mahdi was raised.

Mr. Abdul Mahdi spoke with an angry tone, saying:

"The Americans are the ones who destroyed the country and wreaked havoc on it. They are those who refuse to complete building the electrical system and infrastructure projects. They have bargained for the reconstruction of Iraq in exchange for giving up 50% of Iraqi oil imports, so I refused and decided to go to China and concluded an important and strategic agreement with it, and today Trump is trying to cancel this important agreement."

The American President's threatened the Iraqi Prime Minister to liquidate him directly with the Minister of Defense. The Marines are the third party that sniped the demonstrators and the security men:

Abdul Mahdi continued:
"After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I also refused, and he threatened me with massive demonstrations that would topple me.

Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event of non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, so that the third party (Marines snipers) would target the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from the highest structures and the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and cancel the China agreement, so I did not respond and submitted my resignation and the Americans still insist to this day on canceling the China agreement and when the defense minister said that who kills the demonstrators is a third party, Trump called me immediately and physically threatened me and defense minister in the event of talk about the third party."

Washington Knew EXACTLY What It Was Doing

theguardian |  Iran has already vowed to respond to a killing it described as an act of war. The country’s ambassador to the UN said on Saturday that it would not go unanswered. “There will be harsh revenge,” Majid Takht Ravanchi told CNN. “The time, the place, will be decided by Iran.”

The US Department of Homeland Security said the response could include cyber-attacks. More conventional targets might include US installations, diplomatic and military personnel, or oil facilities. US citizens have been warned to leave Iraq.

Billboards with Suleimani’s instantly recognisable face appeared on major streets in Iran overnight, many bearing a warning from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that “harsh revenge” awaits the US.

The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, also said Washington did not realise what a great mistake it had made, during a visit to pay condolences to the general’s family. US citizens would be feeling the impact for years to come, he said.

The Baghdad funeral procession began at the Imam Kadhim shrine, one of the most revered sites in Shia Islam. 

Mohammed Fadl, a mourner dressed in black, said he had come out in a show of loyalty and defiance. “It is a painful strike, but it will not shake us,” he said.

Two helicopters hovered over the crowd of mourners, who included Iraq’s prime minister, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, and leaders of Iran-backed militias.

Iran’s envoy to Baghdad, Iraj Masjedi, told Iranian state media that Abdul-Mahdi had insisted on holding a public funeral for Suleimani and al-Muhandis in Baghdad.

Power Moves - See the Pattern? Take the Lesson...,

scroll |  Former National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon on Friday said that the Citizenship Amendment Act and the withdrawal of special status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution had led to India being isolated from the international community, even by its traditional allies, the Hindustan Times reported. 

“There has been no meaningful international support for this series of actions, apart from a few committed members of the diaspora and a ragtag bunch of Euro MPs from the extreme right,” Menon said at an event in New Delhi. He said many world leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and even King Harald V of Norway have criticised India’s actions.

Merkel had on November 1, during a visit to India, said that the present situation in Kashmir is “not sustainable”. 

“We seem to know that we are isolated,” Menon said, referring to External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s decision to skip a meeting with the foreign affairs committee in the United States due to the presence of Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who has been critical of India’s actions in Kashmir.

Is 2020 The Year Shit Starts Getting Real For You Other 9%'s Here Too?

I find it hard to listen to establishment fake news front Amy Goodman and crew. However, this is recent Arundhati Roy, and thus, I'm making an exception. The real shizzles and bizzles - where Roy breaks it down even for the slow cats who don't pay close attention - can be found here.  Since I don't expect you to pay $5.00 for this lecture, I surely wouldn't, here's a temporary link that should enable you to listen to it for free for the next couple of weeks. Click on the January 1st 2020 9:00am radio broadcast when it goes live at this location in a few minutes. 

Oh, lastly, you're welcome for the KKFI hookup. Of special note (you need to check out these shows) are The Boogie Bridge, Old-G's Hangout, and Lynn's Beautician's Blues. You will thoroughly enjoy each one of these. Yesterday's Beautician's Blues was straight FYRE!!! Don't say I never did you any favors.

Yogi Adityanath Genuinely Intends to Cleanse the Muslims

scroll |  In March 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party decisively won the Uttar Pradesh elections after its leaders openly pitted Muslims against Hindus, with no less than Prime Minister Narendra Modi insinuating that the majority community was not getting a fair deal. “If you create kabristaan [graveyard for Muslims] in a village, then a shamshaan [cremation ground for Hindus] should be created, he declared at one rally.

India’s ruling party had not fielded a single Muslim candidate. The new assembly, dominated by the BJP, had fewer Muslims than any time in its history. This was bad enough – for anyone who believes India’s most populous state cannot afford to politically marginalise one-fifth of its 200 million people.

Then, one evening, the news broke: Adityanath had been chosen by BJP to become the chief minister of the state. 

To say it was a shock would be an understatement.

Here was a firebrand monk whose entire politics revolved around fuelling hostility towards Muslims. A five-time member of Parliament, he had criminal cases against him for leading violence against Muslims. He had brazenly justified this violence on national television. 

One of the first decisions Adityanath took as chief minister was to order raids on slaughter-houses and butcher shops. This was done ostensibly to enforce regulations. But the state could not explain why its concern for health and hygiene was limited to a single industry. Muslims, as the largest producers and consumers of meat in the state, were not fooled: they saw this as an attack on their livelihoods and food habits.

India is Ruled by a Nazi Party with its own Sturmabteilung (RSS)

newyorker |  Muslim-Hindu harmony was central to the vision of India’s founders, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who laid the foundation for a secular state. India is home to all the world’s major religions; Muslims constitute about fourteen per cent of the population. As the British Empire prepared to withdraw, in 1947, Muslims were so fearful of Hindu domination that they clamored for a separate state, which became Pakistan. The division of the subcontinent, known as Partition, inspired the largest migration in history, with tens of millions of Hindus and Muslims crossing the new borders. In the accompanying violence, as many as two million people died. Afterward, both Pakistanis and Indians harbored enduring grievances over the killings and the loss of ancestral land. Kashmir, on the border, became the site of a long-running proxy war.

India’s remaining Muslims protected themselves by forging an alliance with the Congress Party—Gandhi and Nehru’s group, which monopolized national politics for fifty years. But the founders’ vision of the secular state was not universally shared. In 1925, K. B. Hedgewar, a physician from central India, founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization dedicated to the idea that India was a Hindu nation, and that Hinduism’s followers were entitled to reign over minorities. Members of the R.S.S. believed that many Muslims were descended from Hindus who had been converted by force, and so their faith was of questionable authenticity. (The same thinking applied to Christians, who make up about two per cent of India’s population. Other major religions, including Buddhism and Sikhism, were considered more authentically Indian.)

Hedgewar was convinced that Hindu men had been emasculated by colonial domination, and he prescribed paramilitary training as an antidote. An admirer of European fascists, he borrowed their predilection for khaki uniforms, and, more important, their conviction that a group of highly disciplined men could transform a nation. He thought that Gandhi and Nehru, who had made efforts to protect the Muslim minority, were dangerous appeasers; the R.S.S. largely sat out the freedom struggle.

In January, 1948, soon after independence, Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a former R.S.S. member and an avowed Hindu nationalist. The R.S.S. was temporarily banned and shunted to the fringes of public life, but the group gradually reëstablished itself. In 1975, amid civic disorder and economic stagnation, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended parliament and imposed emergency rule. The R.S.S. vigorously opposed her and her Congress Party allies. Many of its members were arrested, which helped legitimize the group as it reëntered the political mainstream.

The R.S.S.’s original base was higher-caste men, but, in order to grow, it had to widen its membership. Among the lower-caste recruits was an eight-year-old named Narendra Modi, from Vadnagar, a town in the state of Gujarat. Modi belonged to the low-ranking Ghanchi caste, whose members traditionally sell vegetable oil; Modi’s father ran a small tea shop near the train station, where his young son helped. When Modi was thirteen, his parents arranged for him to marry a local girl, but they cohabited only briefly, and he did not publicly acknowledge the relationship for many years. Modi soon left the marriage entirely and dedicated himself to the R.S.S. As a pracharak—the group’s term for its young, chaste foot soldiers—Modi started by cleaning the living quarters of senior members, but he rose quickly. In 1987, he moved to the R.S.S.’s political branch, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.

That's a Lot of Ashy Little Rascals with Big Ole Ass-Whooping Sticks!

afp |  As Indian protests against a new citizenship law have intensified, so has police use of "lathis", sturdy sticks used to whack, thwack and quell dissent since British colonial times -- to sometimes deadly effect.

At least 27 people have died in the past two weeks of protests, mostly from bullets, but hundreds more have been injured in clashes between demonstrators and riot police wielding the bamboo canes.

Images shot by AFP and other media of officers hitting people with them, in some cases apparently indiscriminately lashing out at passers-by and even minors, has only fuelled public anger.

One video of a group of Muslim women in New Delhi protecting a cowering male fellow student from a police lathi barrage spread like wildfire on social media in India.

Those who have experienced a blow from a lathi, measuring five or six feet (1.5-1.8 metres) and made of stout bamboo or plastic, say it leaves a numbing sensation that lasts for days.

Multiple strikes can break bones, cripple and even kill.

"From being used as means to regulate crowds, lathi has turned into a lethal weapon," said V. Suresh, the secretary general of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), a non-profit rights group.

"It is... being freely used, so much so that as a country we have become inured to it. Lathi is seen as a normal but it is a horrible weapon," Suresh told AFP.

"Nothing legitimises its brutal use."

- Fear and awe -

Many believe the lathi originated as a martial arts accessory in South Asia. It was also used by feudal landlords against poor peasants, emerging as a symbol of unquestioned power and authority.

Juxtaposition and Superimposition Show What Became of the Original Americans...,

Not a repeat - it starts at a specific part of the video - so just click it.

nautil.us |  What’s more, a flickering flame in the cave may have conjured impressions of motion like a strobe light in a dark club. In low light, human vision degrades, and that can lead to the perception of movement even when all is still, says Susana Martinez-Conde, the director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz. The trick may occur at two levels; one when the eye processes a dimly lit scene, and the second when the brain makes sense of that limited, flickering information. 

Physiologically, our eyes undergo a switch when we slip into darkness. In bright light, eyes primarily rely on the color-sensitive cells in our retinas called cones, but in low light the cones don’t have enough photons to work with and cells that sense black and white gradients, called rods, take over. That’s why in low light, colors fade, shadows become harder to distinguish from actual objects, and the soft boundaries between things disappear. Images straight ahead of us look out of focus, as if they were seen in our peripheral vision. The end result for early humans who viewed cave paintings by firelight might have been that a deer with multiple heads, for example, resembled a single, animated beast. A few rather sophisticated artistic techniques enhance that impression. One is found beyond the Hall of Bulls, where the cave narrows into a long passage called the Nave.

High on the Nave’s right wall, an early artist had used charcoal to draw a row of five deer heads. The images are almost identical, but each is positioned at a slightly different angle. Viewed one at a time with a small circle of light moving right to left, the images seem to illustrate a single deer raising and lowering its head as in a short flipbook animation. 

Marc Azéma, a Paleolithic researcher and filmmaker at the University of Toulouse in France, has studied dozens of examples of ancient images that were meant to imply motion and has found two primary techniques that Paleolithic artists used to do this. The first is juxtaposition of successive images—the technique used for the deer head—and the second is called superimposition. Rather than appearing in sequence, variations of an image pile on top of one another in superimposition to lend a sense of motion. Superimposition can be seen in caves across France and Spain, but some of the oldest examples come from Chauvet cave in France’s Ardèche region. Burned wood and charcoal streaks along Chauvet’s walls indicate that campfires and pine torches lit the cave.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Dying Time's Here....,

courier-journal |   Somewhere deep in Mexico's remote wilderness, the world’s most dangerous and wanted drug lord is hiding. If someone you love dies from an overdose tonight, he may very well be to blame.

He's called "El Mencho."

And though few Americans know his name, authorities promise they soon will.

Rubén "Nemesio" Oseguera Cervantes is the leader of Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, better known as CJNG. With a $10 million reward on his head, he’s on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Most Wanted list.

El Mencho’s powerful international syndicate is flooding the U.S. with thousands of kilos of methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine and fentanyl every year — despite being targeted repeatedly by undercover stings, busts and lengthy investigations.

The unending stream of narcotics has contributed to this country’s unprecedented addiction crisis, devastating families and killing more than 300,000 people since 2013.

CJNG’s rapid rise heralds the latest chapter in a generations-old drug war in which Mexican cartels are battling to supply Americans’ insatiable demand for narcotics.

A nine-month Courier Journal investigation reveals how CJNG's reach has spread across the U.S. in the past five years, overwhelming cities and small towns with massive amounts of drugs.

kctv5 |   As the officer in charge of COMBAT, Jackson County’s Drug Trafficking Task Force Dan Cumming deals with a lot of dangerous people.

“About 100% of what we recover, if you follow it back far enough up the drug train so to speak, comes from Mexico and is cartel related,” Cummings said.

Just last week, COMBAT worked a case at the request of Independence police.

A tip led them to a Kansas City, Missouri street where a search warrant led to the seizure of tires filled with meth.

“My guess is that’s the way it was shipped from Mexico to Kansas City,” Cummings said.

Cartels get creative when smuggling drugs in customs and border protection has a few recent examples.

Fentanyl in a vehicle transmission, heroine in a gas tank, marijuana inside a car door and cocaine in clay figurines.

Cummings says he’s seeing more cartel related drug busts in Kansas City now than he has in his 35 plus years in law enforcement.

“We switched from meth labs to Mexican cartels,” Cummings said.

kmbc |   Two Mexican nationals have been sentenced in federal court for their roles in a conspiracy that distributed more than 14 kilograms of heroin in the Kansas City metropolitan area, some of which is believed to have resulted in overdoses and deaths.

Julian Felix-Aguirre, 46, and Martin Missael Puerta-Navarro, 38, were sentenced in separate hearings before U.S. District Judge Gary A. Fenner on Wednesday. Felix-Aguirre was sentenced to 24 years and seven months in federal prison without parole. Pueta-Navarro was sentenced to 14 years and eight months in federal prison without parole.

fox4kc |  "No where is immune," said Erik Smith with the Drug Enforcement Administration. "There are people who become dependent on controlled substances and have need to satisfy that addiction, and any place there is a consumer, an addict or user, somebody will supply that drug for that."

The DEA special agent in charge said feeding the demand for drugs in Johnson County goes well beyond teenage drug dealers.

Smith said Mexican cartels really are living here in Johnson County.

"Historically, a decade ago, two decades ago, a lot of cartels would limit themselves to the inner city," he said. "But as they become more established and they become more wealthy, it's quite common to see them branching out into suburban areas including Johnson County."

We Switched from Meth Labs to Mexican Cartels

kctv5 |  As the officer in charge of COMBAT, Jackson County’s Drug Trafficking Task Force Dan Cumming deals with a lot of dangerous people.

“About 100% of what we recover, if you follow it back far enough up the drug train so to speak, comes from Mexico and is cartel related,” Cummings said.

Just last week, COMBAT worked a case at the request of Independence police.

A tip led them to a Kansas City, Missouri street where a search warrant led to the seizure of tires filled with meth.

“My guess is that’s the way it was shipped from Mexico to Kansas City,” Cummings said.

Cartels get creative when smuggling drugs in customs and border protection has a few recent examples.

Fentanyl in a vehicle transmission, heroine in a gas tank, marijuana inside a car door and cocaine in clay figurines.

Cummings says he’s seeing more cartel related drug busts in Kansas City now than he has in his 35 plus years in law enforcement.

With or Without Compact Fusion - Mankind IS ALREADY WILL GET Permanently Off-World

energy.gov | NNSA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) joined forces to address a unique challenge: developing a power source able to support deep space travel and outlast existing fuel sources. NNSA came through with the technical expertise required to achieve this goal.

“The relationship between NNSA and NASA is a ‘win-win’ partnership,” said Patrick Cahalane, NNSA’s Principal Deputy Associate Administrator for Safety, Infrastructure and Operations. “NASA gets a prototype demonstration for a kilowatt-range fission power source, and NNSA gets a benchmark-quality experiment that provides new nuclear data in support of our Nuclear Criticality Safety Program.”

The experiment, nicknamed KRUSTY (Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling TechnologY), was part of NASA’s larger Kilopower project. KRUSTY was designed to test a prototype fission reactor coupled to a Stirling engine. Stirling technology is efficient, doesn’t require significant maintenance, and does not degrade in performance over time.

Scientists from NNSA’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Nevada National Security Site partnered with NASA to develop and test the KRUSTY design at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC).

Researchers designed and performed initial testing of the KRUSTY reactor design using a surrogate, or non-fissile, reactor core and resistive heating elements. Experts from NNSA’s Y-12 National Security Complex manufactured the uranium reactor core, which was delivered to the NCERC in the fall of 2017. 

Surprise, Surprise, Japanese Racism NOT a Homegrown Phenomenon...,

wikipedia |  Eugenics in Japan has influenced political, public health and social movements in Japan since the late 19th and early 20th century. Originally brought to Japan through the United States (like Charles Davenport and John Coulter), through Mendelian inheritance by way of German influences, and French Lamarkian eugenic written studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.^[1] Eugenics as a science was hotly debated at the beginning of the 20th, in Jinsei-Der Mensch, the first eugenics journal in the Empire. As the Japanese sought to close ranks with the West, this practice was adopted wholesale, along with colonialism and its justifications.^[2]

 

The concept of pureblood as a criterion for the uniqueness of the Yamato people began circulating around 1880 in Japan, while eugenics in the sense of instrumental and selective procreation, clustered around two positions concerning blood, the pure blood (純血 junketsu) and the mixed blood (混血 konketsu).^[2]

 

Popularity of the pure-blood eugenics theory came from a homegrown racial purity or monoculture national belief that has been part of Japanese society since ancient times^{[citation needed]}. The local movement was however less focused on modern scientific ideals and more on the "outside person" vs the "native or inside person" and blood purity.^[2]

 

Later legal measures were supported by certain politicians and movements that sought to increase the number of healthy pure Japanese, while simultaneously decreasing the number of people suffering mental retardation, disability, genetic disease and other conditions that led to them being viewed as "inferior" contributions to the Japanese gene pool.^[3][4]

 

Opposition to the eugenics movement persisted amongst several right-wing factions, including members of the Diet of Japan and obstetricians, who perceived eugenics as suggesting that the Japanese people were only animals, not inhabitants of the "country of the kami" (神国 shinkoku) as believed by the Japanese national Shinto tradition.^[5] Yoshiichi Sōwa (曽和義弌), author of "Japan's Shinto Revolution",^[6] wrote in 1940, "When we look up into the past, the people of our country are descended from the kami. Are they claiming we must sterilize these people?"^[7] Similar resistance to these theories occurred within conservative and traditional Christian communities in the United States.

wikipedia |  Racial discrimination against other Asians was habitual in Imperial Japan, having begun with the start of Japanese colonialism.^[62] The Meiji era Japanese showed a contempt for other Asians. This was exemplified in an editorial titled Datsu-A Ron, which advocated that Japan treat other Asians as other western empires treat them. The Shōwa regime preached racial superiority and racialist theories, based on nature of Yamato-damashii. According to historian Kurakichi Shiratori, one of Emperor Hirohito's teachers: "Therefore nothing in the world compares to the divine nature (shinsei) of the imperial house and likewise the majesty of our national polity (kokutai). Here is one great reason for Japan's superiority."^[63]

 

According to the An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus, a classified report in 1943 of the Ministry of Health and Welfare completed on July 1, 1943, just as a family has harmony and reciprocity, but with a clear-cut hierarchy, the Japanese, as a racially superior people, were destined to rule Asia "eternally" as the head of the family of Asian nations.^[64] The most horrific xenophobia of the pre-Shōwa period was displayed after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, where in the confusion after a massive earthquake, Koreans were wrongly maligned as poisoning the water supply. A vicious pogrom resulted in the deaths of at least 3,000 Koreans, and the imprisonment of 26,000. 

Attacks against Western foreigners and their Japanese friends by nationalist citizens, rose in the 1930s under the influence of Japanese military-political doctrines in the Showa period, after a long build-up starting in the Meiji period when only a few samurai die-hards did not accept foreigners in Japan.^[65] For an exception, see Jewish settlement in the Japanese Empire. 

Racism was omnipresent in the press during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Greater East Asia War and the media's descriptions of the superiority of the Yamato people was unwaveringly consistent.^[66] The first major anti-foreigner publicity campaign, called Bōchō (Guard Against Espionage), was launched in 1940 alongside the proclamation of the Tōa shin Shitsujō (New Order in East Asia) and its first step, the Hakkō ichiu.^[67]

 

Mostly after the launching of the Pacific War, Westerners were detained by official authorities, and on occasion were objects of violent assaults, sent to police jails or military detention centers or suffered bad treatment in the street. This applied particularly to Americans and British; in Manchukuo at the same period xenophobic attacks were carried out against Chinese and other non-Japanese.

 

You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Gotta Get The Hell Up Out Of Here!!!

scmp |  Having obtained a dual bachelor’s degree from a US university and climbed to a senior software engineer’s position within two and a half years of working for an American company, Owen Wang was forced to dramatically scale back his salary expectations when he decided to come home to China.

Currently working in Kansas City – where the average annual senior software engineer’s salary is US$100,000, according to glassdoor.com – the best offer from a Chinese firm he has received so far is a package from a Shenzhen-based start-up worth around 240,000 yuan (US$35,250).

But while he had expected salaries in the southern Chinese city to be lower than those on offer in the US – the per capita income in Kansas City is over four times more than the average in Shenzhen – he had been hoping someone would offer him a pay packet worth around 500,000 yuan a year.

“We’re still negotiating. I guess I will finally accept a compromise if there’s no better choice, but the quality of my life will drop significantly,” said the 27-year-old.

Wang’s plan to return home is not motivated purely by financial considerations – he worries that tighter US immigration policies will make it harder for him to stay and his parents have been hoping that he will be able to come home and visit them more often – but his disappointment is mirrored by many of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who return home from studying and working overseas every year.

A recent survey by a Beijing-based think tank of more than 2,000 Chinese returnees found that about 80 per cent said their salaries were lower than expected, with around 70 per cent saying what they were doing did not match their experience and skills.

China's Exploitation of Africa

caseyresearch |  Justin: Is China exploiting Africa?  

Doug: Of course “exploit” is a loaded word; it implies one-sided, unbalanced dealings, and unfair business—although the word “fair” also has lots of baggage, and politically charged meanings.

But, yes, they’re definitely exploiting Africa. We’re seeing a veritable re-colonization of Africa. Every time I visit Africa I see more and more Chinese. It doesn’t matter which country; they’re everywhere.

It’s important to remember that Africa doesn’t produce anything besides raw materials. There’s close to zero manufacturing, like 1% of the world’s total, in sub-Saharan Africa. And almost all of that is in South Africa. The little there is, is only produced with the help foreigners—Europeans, but increasingly the Chinese.

The Chinese basically see Africans as no more than a cheap labor source. That’s at best. Other than that, they’re viewed as a complete nuisance. Basically an obstacle, a cost, standing in the way of efficient use of the continent itself.

What do the Chinese people think of Africans? They don’t hold them in high regard. Of course, you’ve got to remember that China has viewed itself as the center of the world since Day One. They see all non-Han peoples as barbarians, as inferiors. That was absolutely true when the British sent an ambassador, Macartney, to open relations at the very end of the 18^th C. He was treated with borderline contempt—pretty much the way Europeans and Americans have treated primitive peoples since the days of Columbus. It’s actually the normal human attitude, when an advanced culture encounters a backward culture. The Chinese see their culture as superior to even that of the West, and believe—probably correctly—that they’ll soon be economically and technologically superior as well.

Africa doesn’t even enter the equation. The continent has no civilization, no economy, no technology, no military power. The famed Zimbabwe ruins are just some semi-finished rocks piled on one another—and they’re considered iconic. The Chinese see the place the way the Spanish saw Mexico and Peru in the 16^th C. Of course they won’t say that in public. In fact it’s very non-PC for anyone to make that observation…

Nonetheless, Africa is going to be the epicenter of what’s happening in the world for years to come. It’s gone from being just an empty space on the map in the 19^th C, to a bunch of backwater colonies in the 20^th C, to a bunch of failed states that people are only vaguely aware of today. Soon, however, it will be frontpage news. And this is both because Chinese are moving to Africa in record numbers and Africans are leaving as fast as they can.

Many Africans are now trying to make their way to Europe. Every year scores of thousands of them—all young men by the way—cross the Mediterranean on rafts. When they arrive in Europe, they somehow survive by selling bobbles on the street, dealing dope, or stealing. And figuring out how to game the welfare system. Now, I realize this doesn’t sound very promising. But that’s the way things are headed. It’s a growing trend.

Mama Said Knock You Out....,

Guardian |  Historians have emphasised how male workers, humiliated by such repressive industrial practices as automation and time management, also began to assert their manhood by swearing, drinking and sexually harassing the few women in the workforce – the beginning of an aggressive hardhat culture that has reached deep into blue-collar workplaces during the decades-long reign of neoliberalism. Towards the end of the 19th century large numbers of men embraced sports and physical fitness, and launched fan clubs of pugnacious footballers and boxers.

It wasn’t just working men. Upper-class parents in America and Britain had begun to send their sons to boarding schools in the hope that their bodies and moral characters would be suitably toughened up in the absence of corrupting feminine influences. Competitive sports, which were first organised in the second half of the 19th century, became a much-favoured means of pre-empting sissiness – and of mass-producing virile imperialists. It was widely believed that putative empire-builders would be too exhausted by their exertions on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow to masturbate.'

But masculinity, a dream of power, tends to get more elusive the more intensely it is pursued; and the dread of emasculation by opaque economic, political and social forces continued to deepen. It drove many fin de siècle writers as well as politicians in Europe and the US into hyper-masculine trances of racial nationalism – and, eventually, the calamity of the first world war. Nations and races as well as individuals were conceptualised as biological entities, which could be honed into unassailable organisms. Fear of “race suicide”, cults of physical education and daydreams of a “New Man” went global, along with strictures against masturbation, as the inflexible modern ideology of gender difference reached non-western societies.

European colonialists went on to impose laws that enshrined their virulent homophobia and promoted heterosexual conjugality and patrilineal orders. Their prejudices were also entrenched outside the west by the victims of what the Indian critic Ashis Nandy calls “internal colonialism”: those subjects of European empires who pleaded guilty to the accusation that they were effeminate, and who decided to man up in order to catch up with their white overlords.

This accounts for a startling and still little explored phenomenon: how men within all major religious communities – Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish as well as Christian and Islamic – started in the late 19th century to simultaneously bemoan their lost virility and urge the creation of hard, inviolable bodies, whether of individual men, the nation or the umma. These included early Zionists (Max Nordau, who dreamed of Muskeljudentum, “Jewry of Muscle”), Asian anti-imperialists (Swami Vivekananda, Modi’s hero, who exhorted Hindus to build “biceps”, and Anagarika Dharmapala, who helped develop the muscular Buddhism being horribly flexed by Myanmar’s ethnic-cleansers these days) as well as fanatical imperialists such as Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement.

The most lethal consequences of this mimic machismo unfolded in the first decades of the 20th century. “Never before and never afterwards”, as historian George Mosse, the pioneering historian of masculinity, wrote, “has masculinity been elevated to such heights as during fascism”. Mussolini, like Roosevelt, transformed himself from a sissy into a fire-breathing imperialist. “The weak must be hammered away,” declared Hitler, another physically ill-favoured fascist. Such wannabe members of the Aryan master race accordingly defined themselves against the cowardly Jew and discovered themselves as men of steel in acts of mass murder.

This hunt for manliness continues to contaminate politics and culture across the world in the 21st century. Rapid economic, social and technological change in our own time has plunged an exponentially larger number of uprooted and bewildered men into a doomed quest for masculine certainties. The scope for old-style imperialist aggrandisement and forging a master race may have diminished. But there are, in the age of neoliberal individualism, infinitely more unrealised claims to masculine identity in grotesquely unequal societies around the world. Myths of the self-made man have forced men everywhere into a relentless and often futile hunt for individual power and wealth, in which they imagine women and members of minorities as competitors. Many more men try to degrade and exclude women in their attempt to show some mastery that is supposed to inhere in their biological nature.

Meanwhile, Profit-Seeking Bankster Parasites Busy Eyeballing What Sustainably Remains....,

eurasiareview |  Indigenous Peoples have ownership, use and management rights over at least a quarter of the world’s land surface according to a new study published this week in the journal Nature Sustainability.

The 38 million square kilometers (14.6 million square miles) are spread across 87 countries or politically distinct areas and overlap with about 40 percent of all terrestrial protected areas.

The results of the study provides strong evidence that recognizing the rights of Indigenous Peoples to their traditional lands and waters is not only an ethical obligation it is essential to meeting local and global conservation goals. The authors say that more collaborative partnerships between Indigenous Peoples and governments would yield significant benefits for conservation of ecologically valuable landscapes, ecosystems, and genetic diversity for future generations.

“Understanding the extent of lands over which Indigenous Peoples retain traditional connection is critical for several conservation and climate agreements,” said Professor Stephen Garnett from Charles Darwin University in Australia who led the international consortium that developed the maps. “Not until we pulled together the best available published information on Indigenous lands did we really appreciate the extraordinary scale of Indigenous Peoples’ ongoing influence,” he said.

There are at least 370 million people who define themselves as Indigenous, are descended from populations who inhabited a country before the time of conquest or colonization, and who retain at least some of their own social, economic, cultural and political practices. The proportion of countries with indigenous people is highest in Africa and lowest in Europe-West Asia.

No Man, Having Acquired Purpose, Skill, and Calm - Would Relinquish Violence

theconversation |  Are you optimistic or pessimistic about possibilities for exit from violence?

R.C: On the micro level, I am optimistic. Face-to-face, humans are not good at violence. They bluster and threaten and curse, but most small-scale violence – whether in quarrels or in protest demonstrations – ends in stalemate.

Physical damage happens when one side achieves emotional domination, confronting a weak or momentarily passive victim whom they can attack without resistance. When both sides mirror each other, maintaining a steady face and voice, replying without escalating, threats dissipate. Prospects are good that more people will learn techniques of keeping anger and fear from escalating, and thus cooling down the possibility of violence. Knowledge of the social psychology of interpersonal conflict is now spreading – in business corporations, in schools, hopefully among police and the people who encounter them. On the micro-level we may get a more peaceful everyday life.

This will not come because the world has solved the structural problems that cause the malaise and desubjectivation that Wieviorka has described. Causes for anger remain, but we can make the situational eye-of-the-needle into violence even narrower.

On the macro level, I am more pessimistic. In asymmetric war between rich states and embittered insurgents, the cat-and-mouse game continues. Rich states devise more and more electronic surveillance tools and more precise remote-controlled weaponry.

Insurgents respond with electronic hacking and hiding in the civilian population awaiting the moment to commit atrocities against other civilians; anonymous attacks and counter-measures make life more unpleasant for all of us. The politics of would-be charismatic leaders and routinising bureaucrats keeps stirring up political disputes. International crises are repetitive because they are de-escalated only after they become too costly to continue, and crises reappear because perceptions of the evil done by the enemy stirs up cries for intervention and revenge. Perhaps my macro-analysis is too pessimistic. In any case, it is a reason why I focus on micro-analysis, with its elements of optimism.

Quiet As It's Kept, Musical Chairs Ain't No Joke...,

nakedcapitalism |  And yet… and yet… what’s most troubling is not what’s changed but what hasn’t, which includes what poverty feels like in the body, the psyche, and the soul. In the body, it mostly results in the development of chronic or untreated ailments in a world in which nutrition is poor and, even if available, unbalanced. Asthma is one example that can be found now, as then, in nearly every family living in poor rural areas and inner cities such as the one in which I grew up.

In the psyche, poverty begets fear, anxiety, tension, and worry, constant worry. In the soul, poverty, which feels like the loss of you know not what, is always there like a cold fist to remind you that tomorrow will be the same as today. Such effects are not outgrown like a child’s dress but linger for a lifetime in a country where the severest kinds of poverty are again on the rise (and was just scathingly denounced by the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights), where each tax bill, each favor to the 1%, passes a kind of life sentence on the poor. And that is the definition of hopelessness.

Americans who barely made it through the recent recession now find themselves in conditions (in supposed good times) that seem to be worsening. In poor neighborhoods and rural areas, even when people listen to the pundits of cable TV chatter on about economic inequality, the words bleed together, because without the means to make real change, the present is forever. At best, such discussions feel like a teardrop in an ocean of words. Among professionals, pundits, and academics barely hidden contempt for those defined as lower or working class often tinges such discussions.

If media talk shows were ever to invite the real experts on, those who actually live in neighborhoods of need, so they could tell us what their daily lives are actually like, perhaps impoverishment would be understood more concretely and provoke action. It’s often said that poverty’s always been with us and so is here to stay. However, there have been better safety nets in the relatively recent American past. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s, though failing in many ways, still succeeded in lifting people out of impoverished lives. Union jobs paid fairly decent wages before they began to be undermined during the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Better wages and union jobs aided people in finding better places to live.

During the past few decades, however, with huge sums being poured into this country’s never-ending wars, unions weakening or collapsing, wages being pushed down, and workers losing jobs, then homes, so much of that safety net is gone. If Donald Trump and his crew of millionaires and billionaires continue with their evisceration of the rest of the safety net, then food stamps, welfare aid directed at children’s health, and women’s reproductive rights, among other things, will disappear as well. Add to that the utter disregard the Trump administration has shown for people of color and its special mean-spiritedness toward immigrants, whether Mexican or Muslim — and for growing numbers of non-millionaires and non-billionaires the future is already starting to look like the worst, not the best, of times.

It seems that those who foster ideologies that deny decent lives to millions believe that people will take it forever. History, however, suggests another possibility and in it perhaps lies some consolation. Namely, that when misery reaches its nadir, it seeks change. Enough is enough was the implicit cry that helped form unions, spur the civil rights movement, launch the migrant grape boycotts, and inspire the drive for women’s liberation.

In the meantime, the poor remain missing in action in our American world, but not in my mind. Not in me.

#ThatAss Works Objectively! Accept No Substitutes...,

NewYorker |  Still, the force works selectively. “I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party,” said Franken, referring to Donald Trump and the Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. Trump and Moore are immune because the blunt irresistible force works only on the other half of the country.

That half is cleaning its ranks in the face of—and in clear reaction to—genuine moral depravity on the other side. The Trump era is one of deep and open immorality in politics. Moore is merely one example. Consider Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican who won his congressional race earlier this year after not only being captured on tape shoving a newspaper reporter but then also lying to police about it. Consider the tax bill, which is stitched together from shameless greed and boldface lies. Consider the series of racist travel bans. Consider the withdrawal from a series of international agreements aimed at bettering the future of humanity, from migration to climate change to cultural preservation. These are men who proclaim their allegiance to the Christian faith while acting in openly hateful, duplicitous, and plainly murderous ways. In response to this unbearable spectacle, the roughly half of Americans who are actually deeply invested in thinking of themselves as good people are trying to claim a moral high ground. The urge to do so by policing sex is not surprising. As Susan Sontag pointed out more than half a century ago, Christianity has “concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue” and, consequently, “everything pertaining to sex has been a ‘special case’ in our culture.”

 

Lotta Restless Unemployed Killers Out'Chere Yo!

theintercept  |  The White House press secretary did not directly dispute the revelation that Blackwater founder Erik Prince and former Iran-Contra figure Oliver North pitched a plan to develop a private spy network to members of the Trump administration.

The plan, detailed in a story broken by The Intercept on Monday, is to develop a private intelligence network to counter perceived “deep state” enemies within the ranks of government. Prince denied the report, and North did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“I’m not aware of any plans for something of that definition or anything similar to that at this time,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, in response to a question from CBS News’s Major Garrett about the story.

Garrett followed up to ask if President Donald Trump “would be opposed” to an outside spy network operating on his behalf. Sanders said she was unaware.

Garrett asked to Sanders to confirm whether any administration official had been briefed on such a network.

“I’m not going to answer some random hypothetical. Did some random person off the street come in and say something? I don’t know,” Sanders said.

And finally, Garrett asked if it was an idea Trump would consider.

“Again, I haven’t asked him, but its not something that’s currently in the works,” Sanders replied.

A White House official later told New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that the proposal was indeed pitched to the Trump administration, but that there is no sign the president himself was briefed.