Ghosts of Christmas Past,
The Christmas Truces of WW-1 were effectively crushed by the military machines, after the souls of men called for peace on Earth. David Stockman looks clearly at the forces we toil to serve today, the "military, industrial, congressional complex", which enforces war on Earth.
"What should have happened is that Bush the elder should have declared "mission accomplished" and slashed the Pentagon budget from $600 billion to $200 billion; demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development, procurement and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; slashed the US standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world disarmement and peace campaign, as did his Republican predecessors during the 1920s... Iran has only a tiny fraction of Israel's conventional military capability. And compared to the latter's 200 odd nukes, Iran has never had a nuclear weaponization program after a small scale research program was ended in 2003...Houthis forces now in control of substantial parts of Yemen are not some kind of advanced guard sent in by Tehran. They are indigenous partisans who share a confessional tie with Iran, but which have actually been armed by the US... "
Social media is real enough in its own terms, but it is not a substitute for real relationships and positive social roles. Perhaps this is the addictive pull of social media: the idea that we can substitute a carefully controlled social-media substitute (avatar) for our less-than-perfect real-world self. If Facebook vanished, our "real" lives would still be intact. If we turned off our phones and social media, how much would we miss them in a week, or a month? How much "smaller" would we become? What would we lose, and how much of ourselves would we lose? What might we gain that's been lost? Charles Hugh Smith on our new controlling addiction to those little screens, the new Menthol-Cigarettes...
Looking at the end of Net-Neutrality. More rent and more mind control make for good business opportunities. The internet commons is about to be like Las Vegas.
Bitcoin mining (keeping Bitcoin working) consumes more electricity than do 159 individual countries. At this rapid rate of increase, Bitcoin will use all the electricity in the world ny Valentine's Day 2020. (We need Artificial intelligence to run this show soon, and save us all.)
President Trump throws another small wrench in the works, following Sochi peace talks for the middle east, which the US did not attend. President Trump, talking to Turkish President Erdogan. vows not to arm the Kurdish nationalist armies in the area. US military has no immediate comment, but appears to be able to route the weapons through various alphabet-soup-freedom-fighters, anyway. No Peace on Our Watch!
More history of Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Israel and the US: "Cheney wanted far more sites in Syria hit than the bogus nuclear plant. In his memoirs, the then-secretary of defence, Robert Gates, observed that Cheney was “looking for an opportunity to provoke a war with Iran”.
Sudanese army "mercenaries" are taking a lot of casualties in Yemen, after their President looks for a way out, having just survived an assassination attempt. "Coalition" collapsing.
Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir has been dubbed "president of the mercenaries" for accepting over $2.2 billion from Saudi Arabia and Qatar in order to provide canon fodder for the Saudi ground war in Yemen in the form of thousands of young Sudanese troops, but he's threatening revolt. To escape his untenable position, he is reportedly seeking help from Putin.
Pat Buchanan compares the illegal US/Saudi starvation-blockade of Yemen to the US/UK starvation-blockade of Germany during and right after WW-1. It is the worst humanitarian crisis in our current world, your tax and gasoline dollars at work.
Repudiating our Tyrants
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