Thursday, November 9, 2017

To Be Or Not

Thinking Again,

Founding President of Facebook, Sean Parker, says that they worked hard to do whatever it took to make Facebook and related platforms "consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible"... "It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains"

Hezbollah has done a lot in the past 30 years, has become something like a well functioning nation, due to constantly pressing necessities of the people of Southern Lebanon. Hezbollah has become a military actor capable of successful urban combat, after being formed to resist and degrade Israeli tank invasions. Hezbollah is highly respected and appreciated for broad, high quality schools, hospitals and social support services, and tolerance to other religions. Hezbollah has a whole lot of rockets and tunnels and combat experience. Israel will lose many inexperienced soldiers in any attack against Hezbollah. Hezbollah is prepared to counter-attack israel, including invasion of cities and other territory. They don't want to.

Saudi Arabia orders all citizens to leave Lebanon immediately.

Saudi King Salman may transfer the throne to his son, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman today or tomorrow (we hear).

UK has more than quadrupled sales of munitions to Saudi Arabia since the start of it's war on Yemen. Most deaths have been civilians in schools, hospitals, cities, etc. (US moreso, i presume.)

This excellent article looks at the internationalization of finance, which has hollowed out national industrial economies and let infrastructure go to waste, as the tax base hid in the Caymans, London and Amsterdam. this has been enabled by politicians at the top, who shackled regulators and cut their budgets every step of the way. (What are the consequences of rule-by-parasite?)

Here is a German article on where the big money is going, how it gets tax-exempted through certain special reltionships, and how that could be stopped. Amsterdam tax-shelters a lot of American money, which was meant to be much better supervised. Internationalization of finance has led to a "race to the bottom", when it comes to following the rules. Lax standards are most profitable, at the expense of national economies, and actual financial stability. these corrupted standards of oversight may be more pervasive and more corrupt than in 2008 and the Savings and Loan crisis. (Very hard to be sure, isn't it?)

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet command more wealth than the poorer 161 million (50%) Americans combined. (At the current rate two of them will pull it off in a year or two.)

The UK will now (finally) back the EU ban on bee-killing neonicotinid pesticides.

Not to Bee

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