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The Daily Bell – Are We Ready for the Fall of Baghdad?
The Daily Bell – Are We Ready for the Fall of Baghdad?.
I recently was in Vietnam and spent some time in prosperous, capitalist Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, and toured the American War Museum. I believe there are a number of parallels between the Vietnam and Iraq War and that history could repeat itself now in Baghdad. Who can forget the former Vietnamese supporters of America being left behind as the last helicopter left the roof of the US embassy? Today, America still has the strongest military in the world but our manufacturing capacity and financial situation shows the US is on a downhill slide like earlier over-extended and bankrupt empires throughout world history. We’ve already watched the frightening incompetence of the Obama Administration and the CDC in dealing with the Ebola virus. One would have to be blind not to see the petrodollar deathwatch as Russia, China and the BRIC countries build new trading alternatives to avoid using the dollar world reserve currency when trading energy and other financial dealings.
– See more at: http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/35748/Ron-Holland-Are-We-Ready-for-the-Fall-of-Baghdad/#sthash.rAeLuT9g.dpuf
The Challenges of Defending Your Child’s Mind from Propaganda | Liberty Blitzkrieg
The Challenges of Defending Your Child’s Mind from Propaganda | Liberty Blitzkrieg.
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace.They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.
– Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations
Let’s face it, your child’s mind is fertile ground for oligarchs, corrupt politicians and any other thieving member of the so-called “ruling elite” who aim to enslave the masses both mentally and monetarily. Unfortunately, the propaganda that comes from the government and our largest corporations is perceived as being absolute truth by most people. If you’re like me, at one point in time you had to wake up to it all and accept that you had been completely brainwashed for the first few decades for your life.
On a parental level, defending my child’s mind against blatant lies and deceit from the media, military industrial complex and corporatism is really not that difficult. But what about their grandparents, cousins or the kids next door?
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The US Can’t Outsource Warfighting | The Diplomat
The US Can’t Outsource Warfighting | The Diplomat.
America has hung out a shingle: HELP WANTED. Offshore powers — powers beset by few if any overland threats — habitually do. But good help doesn’t come cheap, in world politics as in private industry. One hopes Washington gets this as it tries to accomplish big things while slashing the resources needed to fulfill its purposes. Simply appealing to mutual interests is not enough to marshal and sustain multinational enterprises. Deeds — and resources devoted to the common cause — speak louder than words.
Look back to look ahead. In its imperial heyday, not-yet-weary titan Great Britain was constantly on the lookout for a “continental sword” to project force onto faraway shores. Finding capable land allies would spare London the need to raise and maintain large standing armies. Prussia’s King Frederick the Great, for instance, acted as Britain’s continental sword during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), known in these parts as the French and Indian War.
The theory underlying such arrangements was simple: Britannia ruled the waves, so British industries and merchantmen could carry on overseas commerce with little fear of interference. Commerce sluiced tariff revenue into the imperial treasury, providing kings and prime ministers the wherewithal to finance continental allies’ martial efforts. Everyone’s happy, right?
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Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Will the U.S. Go to “War” Against Ebola? | TomDispatch
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Will the U.S. Go to “War” Against Ebola? | TomDispatch.
Sometimes, if you want to catch the essence of a moment, however, grim, you need to turn tohumor. Recently, the New Yorker’s resident satirist Andy Borowitz produced one of his patented fake news stories that began this way: “The president of CNN Worldwide, Jeff Zucker, attempted on Wednesday to defuse the brewing controversy over his decision to change the network’s official slogan from ‘The Most Trusted Name in News’ to ‘Holy Crap, We’re All Gonna Die.’”
Can there be any question that a pandemic disease, which may, by December, be spreading at the rate of 10,000 cases per week in West Africa and, in a deeply interconnected world, can head anywhere is worthy of attention, preparation, and planning? Can there be any question that a major global humanitarian effort to stem Ebola’s course in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea is imperative? Still, you have to wonder whether the second-by-second coverage of the two cases so far transmitted in this country, including the quarantining of a dog, isn’t just the usual media overkill. It’s a story that, like massive storms and extreme weather, has so many upsides for a media world that feels itself up against the wall: it’s easy to write (or film); there’s no need for “balance”; it’s guaranteed to instantly glue eyeballs at a time when your audience can be elsewhere in no-seconds flat; and it breeds overreaction and the sort of hysteria that brings in yet larger audiences, the sort that Borowitz captured so well. On the other hand, it makes reality almost impossible to grasp by denying context or perspective. Think of Ebola as the disease version of ISIS beheading videos.
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ClubOrlov: How to start a war and lose an empire
ClubOrlov: How to start a war and lose an empire.
A year and a half I wrote an essay on how the US chooses to view Russia, titled The Image of the Enemy. I was living in Russia at the time, and, after observing the American anti-Russian rhetoric and the Russian reaction to it, I made some observations that seemed important at the time. It turns out that I managed to spot an important trend, but given the quick pace of developments since then, these observations are now woefully out of date, and so here is an update.
At that time the stakes weren’t very high yet. There was much noise around a fellow named Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer-crook who got caught and died in pretrial custody. He had been holding items for some bigger Western crooks, who were, of course, never apprehended. The Americans chose to treat this as a human rights violation and responded with the so-called “Magnitsky Act” which sanctioned certain Russian individuals who were labeled as human rights violators. Russian legislators responded with the “Dima Yakovlev Bill,” named after a Russian orphan adopted by Americans who killed him by leaving him in a locked car for nine hours. This bill banned American orphan-killing fiends from adopting any more Russian orphans. It all amounted to a silly bit of melodrama.
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