Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Compare And Contrast

Heard In Passing,

Sergei Lavrov just said a lot of important things to global diplomats, I picked this one out. Thanks Eleni:
Obviously, lasting stabilisation in the Middle East and North Africa is unrealistic without overcoming the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict, including the creation of an independent, viable and territorially integral Palestinian state in the safe and recognised borders of 1967 with possible exchanges and with the capital in East Jerusalem. The attempts to promote non-transparent plans that contradict UN resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative cannot bring a lasting or fair solution and merely perpetuate old hotbeds of confrontation and create new ones.  

​Ilargi at The Automatic Earth, (broad discussion in the comments section, too)
Joe Biden is working for Donald Trump, right? I haven’t heard either of them say it outright, but it’s the only reason I can see that would explain why Biden is running for president.

Kunstler beats the dead horse, which is our daily lives...
How to account for Americans being the most anxious, fearful, and stressed-out people among the supposedly advanced nations? Do we not live in the world’s greatest democratic utopia where dreams come true?
​ ​What if the dreaming part is actually driving us insane? What if we have engineered a society in which fantasy has so grotesquely over-run reality that coping with daily life is nearly impossible. What if an existence mediated by pixel screens large and small presents a virtual world more compelling than the real world and turns out to be a kind of contagious avoidance behavior — until reality is so fugitive that we can barely discern its colors and outlines beyond the screens?
​ ​You end up in a virtual world of advertising and agit-prop where manipulation is the primary driver of human activity. That is, a world where the idea of personal liberty (including any act of free thought) becomes a philosophical sick joke, whether you believe in the possibility of free will or not. You get a land full of college kids trained to think that coercion of others is the highest-and-best use of their time on earth — and that it represents “inclusion.” You get a news industry that makes its own reality, churning out narratives (i.e. constructed psychodramas) to excite numbed minds.


​"Homeless" = "IV drug addicts" in cities that decriminalized possession. Guess who moved there. Ouch!​
Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten was a key symbol of anti-establishment rebellion in the 1970s, but now he is freaking out because homeless people are making life very difficult for him and his wife in Venice Beach, and what he recently told Newsweek’s Paula Froelich is making headlines all over the nation…
​ ​He told her the homeless situation in his swanky LA neighborhood is so bad that thieves are tearing the bars from the windows of his multimillion-dollar home, lobbing bricks, setting up unsightly tent cities and littering the beach with syringes.
 ​“A couple of weeks ago I had a problem,” the former punk prince opined. “They came over the gate and put their tent inside, right in front of the front door. It’s like . . . the audacity. And if you complain, what are you? Oh, one of the establishment elite? No, I’m a bloke that’s worked hard for his money and I expect to be able to use my own front door.”
​ ​It is more than just a little bit ironic that a man that used drugs, sex and rock and roll to shoot to global fame now sounds like a tired old crank that just wants to get the hippies off of his front lawn.
​ ​And he also says that the beach in front of his home is almost unusable because of all the needles and human poop in the sand
 
​Missing a principled leader, 50 years without Charles de Gaul​le... Thanks Wigs.
With amazing effrontery last October, Macron told his people to stop complaining and be more like de Gaulle, after a meeting with a pensioner who complained he only had a small pension. This is the same Emmanuel Macron who accused his own people of being as "Gauls who are resistant to change" on a visit to Denmark.
 The truth is that the French people today have a lot to complain about. Macron's policies are in fact, the reverse of de Gaulle'sThe General 'did not care for those who own wealth.' Macron doesn't seem to care for anyone else.
Another big difference between de Gaulle and the politicians of today was his attitude to money. Has there ever been such an uncorrupt leader? As I noted in 2008, "Despite occupying the highest office in the country for a decade, he died in relative poverty. Instead of accepting the pension he was entitled to as a retired president and general, he only took the pension of a colonel. The contrast between de Gaulle and the money-obsessed career politicians of today could not be greater." 


Yellow Vest protesters who have suffered life-changing injuries at the hands of French police have launched their own association, promising fresh actions against police brutality.
Called “the mutilated for the edification of others,” the collective aims to accurately calculate the number of people who have been injured nationally by police during Yellow Vest protests. It also called for an end to the use of the non-lethal weapons deployed by French police — namely tear gas canisters and Flash Balls — and a large national demonstration is scheduled in Paris on May 26.
Among those attending was Jerome Rodrigues, a prominent Yellow Vest leader who was hit in the eye with a gas canister during a demonstration in January. “You have 19 people in front of you and you have only 26 eyes that look back,” he told the press conference. “Count, there is a small problem,” he added...
According to statistics gathered by the activist group Desarmons-les (“Disarm Them”), at least 154 people have been seriously injured by police use of non-lethal weapons during protests. Of that number, 22 people have lost the use of an eye due to Flash Balls. A further five have had their hands torn off by gas canisters.


​Thanks Eleni. Donald Trump AND Mike Pompeo help smash the empire against the rocks of political and economic reality.​
The European Union informed the United States government that it will resort to the World Trade Organization (WTO) if the US tightens its economic blockade against Cuba by enforcing chapter III of the Helms-Burton law...
In fact, the owners of all movable or immovable property which was nationalized in the past did receive compensation from the Cuban revolutionary government but those who chose to go into exile in the United States, as well as US transnational corporations, refused to accept the compensation...
 In 1996, the European Union and Canada negotiated the suspension of Chapter III of the Helms-Burton Act with the Clinton administration. Since then, successive US governments have confirmed the suspension every 6 months. But in January 2019, the Trump administration reduced the suspension period to 45 days and is now ready to repeal it definitively...
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Federica Mogherini, states that the EU will be obliged to put the issue to the World Trade Organization.
 The EU’s letter to Washington, signed by Mrs. Mogherini and by the European Trade Commissioner, Cecilia Malmstrom, underlines that in order to compensate European companies for damages, the EU could retaliate with the confiscation of American interests in Europe
  At the same time, an EU legal challenge against the United States via the World Trade Organization could open the door to an avalanche of similar procedures from the numerous companies affected by the unilateral "sanctions" which Washington is currently imposing against other countries, such as Iran.


​What if Russia actually had the policies focused on making the US over-extend and waste it's resources? (Not strictly necessary, is it?)

​ ​A FEDERAL COURT IN TEXAS issued a ruling on Thursday afternoon preliminarily enjoining enforcement of Texas’ law banning contractors from boycotting Israel. The court ruled that the law plainly violates the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment. Following similar decisions by federal courts in Kansas and Arizona, the ruling becomes the third judicial finding – out of three who have evaluated the constitutionality of such laws – to conclude that they are unconstitutional attacks on the free speech rights of Americans.
​ ​The case was brought by Bahia Amawi, a longtime elementary school speech pathologist in Austin, Texas, whose contract renewal was denied due to her refusal to sign an oath certifying that she does not participate in any boycotts of Israel. In December,​..​
​ ​We thus now have a direct collision between, on the one hand, the attempts by elected political officials to please their pro-Israel constituencies by legally punishing anyone who boycotts Israel (while allowing boycotts of other countries or even states within their own country) and, on the other, court rulings decreeing that such attempts are attacks on free speech rights.
​ ​If the First Amendment was designed to do anything, it was to ensure that the latter attempt prevails over the former
. This latest ruling by a Texas federal court is a major vindication of this pro-free-speech principle.

 The populations are ​notably ​different, with lots of drug abuse and poverty in America.​​ US Vaccine companies have protected political speech.​
Japan Leads the Way in Child Health: No Compulsory Vaccines. Banned Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) Vaccine
​  ​In the United States, many legislators and public health officials are busy trying to make vaccines de facto compulsory—either by removing parental/personal choice given by existing vaccine exemptions or by imposing undue quarantines and fines on those who do not comply with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) vaccine edicts. Officials in California are seeking to override medical opinion about fitness for vaccination, while those in New York​ ​are mandating the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine for 6-12-month-old infants for whom its safety and effectiveness “have not been established.”
 ​ ​The U.S. has the very highest infant mortality rate of all industrialized developed countries, with more American children dying at birth and in their first year than in any other comparable nation—and more than half of those who survive develop at least one chronic illness.
American children would be better served if these officials—before imposing questionable and draconian measures—studied child health outcomes in Japan. With a population of 127 million, Japan has the healthiest children and the very highest “healthy life expectancy” in the world—and the least vaccinated children of any developed country...
​  ​In 1994, Japan transitioned away from mandated vaccination in public health centers to voluntary vaccination in doctors’ offices, guided by “the concept that it is better that vaccinations are performed by children’s family doctors who are familiar with their health conditions.”...
​  ​Japan also banned the MMR vaccine in the same time frame, due to thousands of serious injuries​ ​over a four-year period—producing an injury rate of one in 900 children that was “over 2,000 times higher than the expected rate.” It initially offered separate measles and rubella vaccines following its abandonment of the MMR vaccine;


Fishing to Feed Salmon Farms Is Emptying the Seas, Claims Report
Millions of tonnes of sardines, anchovies, mackerel, herring, krill and other species are caught and ground into fishmeal and fish oil, known as FMFO. This is fed to salmon caged in hundreds of farms along the west coast.
Now an 80-page report by campaign groups, Changing Markets Foundation and Compassion in World Farming, warns that growing dependence on FMFO is threatening human food security, putting marine wildlife at risk and harming animal welfare.
The new report says that almost a fifth of the world’s total catch of wild fish is currently processed into FMFO, most of which is used to feed farmed fish.  


​Grinding Fish Sausage​

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