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The power to make decisions in society must remain primarily in the hands of a democratically elected government. In private hands, there is only one concern, and that is the bottom line. We have too much ‘bottom line’ directed policy as it is.
“There’s a striking difference between physicists and economists. Physicists don’t say, hey, let’s try an experiment that might destroy the world, because it would be interesting to see what would happen. But economists do that. On the basis of neoclassical theories, they instituted a major revolution in world affairs in the early 1980s that took off with Carter, and accelerated with Reagan and Thatcher. Given the power of the United States compared with the rest of the world, the neoliberal assault, a major experiment in economic theory, had a devastating result. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Their motto has been, “Government is the problem.”
That doesn’t mean you eliminate decisions; it just means you transfer them. Decisions still have to be made. If they’re not made by government, which is, in a limited way, under popular influence, they will be made by concentrations of private power, which have no accountability to the public. And following the Friedman instructions, have no responsibility to the society that gave them the gift of incorporation. They have only the imperative of self-enrichment.
Margaret Thatcher then comes along and says there is no such thing as society, just atomized individuals who are somehow managing in the market. Of course, there is a small footnote that she didn’t bother to add: for the rich and powerful, there is plenty of society. Organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, ALEC, all kinds of others. They get together, they defend themselves, and so on. There is plenty of society for them, just not for the rest of us. Most people have to face the ravages of the market. And, of course, the rich don’t. Corporations count on a powerful state to bail them out every time there’s some trouble. The rich have to have the powerful state — as well as its police powers — to be sure nobody gets in their way.”
Meghan Murphy doesn’t hold anything back as she decries the tomfoolery of the gender-magic on display from the US federal government.
“Yesterday, we witnessed a historic moment: US assistant health secretary Rachel Levine was sworn in as the first ever female four-star admiral of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. Wait, no. That’s not right… Let me start again.
Yesterday, the man President Joe Biden selected as assistant health secretary became the sixth man to be named four-star admiral of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.
Yesterday, America became a laughing stock, as the president elected by the good people of America (not to be confused with the bad people of America) and all of mainstream media presented the appointment of an old, fat white man (with long hair!) as admiral of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps as a historic moment.
“Dr. Rachel Levine, the nation’s most senior transgender official, made history again Tuesday by becoming the first openly transgender four-star officer across any of the country’s eight uniformed services,” NBC News reported.
The New York Times went even further, tweeting:
“Dr. Rachel Levine was sworn in as the first female four-star admiral in the history of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a uniformed service of more than 6,000 health, science and engineering professionals.”
To be fair, they were only repeating what had been announced by the Biden administration, which was that “Admiral Levine now serves as the highest ranking official in the USPHS Commissioned Corps and its first ever female four star admiral.” But to also be fair, it is the job of the New York Times (and all media) to report the truth, not to simply parrot whatever the government feeds them. And, to be fair, Rachel Levine is not female and never will be. And, to be fair, everyone knows it.
What kind of planet are we living on wherein we all pretend putting yet another man into a role that has always been filled by men equates to “a giant step forward towards equality as a nation”? Or “a history-making show of diversity and inclusion”? Has there never before been a man who enjoys wearing women’s clothing in such a position? Do they screen men for fetishes before they can be appointed to admiral? Clearly they don’t screen them for having spent time as military officers, as Levine has not had any military career to speak of. I suppose his time spent in dresses makes up for his lack of service.”
The very last thing we need in the world is a military conflict with China, David Vine writes in Counterpunch about the folly of taking the Cold War path again.
“The Biden administration and the United States must do better than resuscitate the strategies of the nineteenth century and the Cold War era. Rather than further fueling a regional arms race with yet more bases and weapons development in Australia, U.S. officials could help lower tensions between Taiwan and mainland China, while working to resolve territorial disputes in the South China Sea. In the wake of the Afghan War, President Biden could commit the United States to a foreign policy of diplomacy, peace-building, and opposition to war rather than one of endless conflict and preparations for more of the same. AUKUS’s initial 18-month consultation period offers a chance to reverse course.
Recent polling suggests such moves would be popular. More than three times as many in the U.S. would like to see an increase, rather than a decrease, in diplomatic engagement in the world, according to the nonprofit Eurasia Group Foundation. Most surveyed would also like to see fewer troop deployments overseas. Twice as many want to decrease the military budget as want to increase it.
The world barely survived the original Cold War, which was anything but cold for the millions of people who lived through or died in the era’s proxy wars in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Can we really risk another version of the same, this time possibly with Russia as well as China? Do we want an arms race and competing military buildups that would divert trillions of dollars more from pressing human needs while filling the coffers of arms manufacturers? Do we really want to risk triggering a military clash between the United States and China, accidental or otherwise, that could easily spin out of control and become a hot, possibly nuclear, war in which the death and destruction of the last 20 years of “forever wars” would look small by comparison.
That thought alone should be chilling. That thought alone should be enough to stop another Cold War before it’s too late.”
Well I’d like to change the channel from the Pandemic Gloom & Doom to the similarly depressing and helplessness inducing topic of climate change. The actors in feel similar in both channels, for instance, the vaccinated can only sit by and watch as the ignorant anti-vax crowd spreads Covid-19 to each other and fills the ICU wards past capacity. Concomitantly we can observe China and the US vie for world dominance economically and militarily while continuing to put stunning amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, catastrophically heating the planet.
Micheal Klare sets out the bare-bones minimum guidelines to avert the upcoming climate catastrophe. Unfortunately said guidelines involve China and the US backing down from their military buildups, finding a peaceable solution to Taiwan, and focusing their economies on moving away from using fossil fuels.
Awesome. No problem. We got this…
“Only when China and the United States elevate the threat of climate change above their geopolitical rivalry will it be possible to envision action on a sufficient scale to avert the future incineration of this planet and the collapse of human civilization. This should hardly be an impossible political or intellectual stretch. On January 27th, in an Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis, President Biden did, in fact, decree that “climate considerations shall be an essential element of United States foreign policy and national security.” That same day, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a companion statement, saying that his “Department will immediately take appropriate policy actions to prioritize climate change considerations in our activities and risk assessments, to mitigate this driver of insecurity.” (At the moment, however, the thought that Republicans in Congress would support such positions, no less fund them, is beyond imagining.)
In any case, such comments have already been overshadowed by the Biden administration’s fixation on dominating China globally, as have any comparable impulses on the part of the Chinese leadership. Still, the understanding is there: climate change poses an overwhelming existential threat to both American and Chinese “security,” a reality that will only grow fiercer as greenhouse gases continue to pour into our atmosphere. To defend their respective homelands not against each other but against nature, both sides will increasingly be compelled to devote ever more funds and resources to flood protection, disaster relief, fire-fighting, seawall construction, infrastructure replacement, population resettlement, and other staggeringly expensive, climate-related undertakings. At some point, such costs will far exceed the amounts needed to fight a war between us.
Once this reckoning sinks in, perhaps U.S. and Chinese officials will begin forging an alliance aimed at defending their own countries and the world against the coming ravages of climate change. If John Kerry were to return to China and tell its leadership, “We are phasing out all our coal plants, working to eliminate our reliance on petroleum, and are prepared to negotiate a mutual reduction in Pacific naval and missile forces,” then he could also say to his Chinese counterparts, “You need to start phasing out your coal use now — and here’s how we think you can do it.”
Once such an agreement was achieved, Presidents Biden and Xi could turn to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, and say, “You must follow in our footsteps and eliminate your dependence on fossil fuels.” And then, the three together could tell the leaders of every other nation: “Do as we’re doing, and we’ll support you. Oppose us, and you’ll be cut off from the world economy and perish.”
That’s how to save this planet from a climate Armageddon. There really is no other way.“
It’s easy to get caught up in day to day events, but let’s not forget the quietly ticking bomb of a nuclear *oops* that could end us all.
The Black Swan We Can Never See
Let us turn to the other (and traditional) concern of the atomic scientists who adjust the Doomsday Clock: nuclear weapons. The current threat of nuclear war amply justifies their January 2015 decision to advance the clock two minutes toward midnight. What has happened since reveals the growing threat even more clearly, a matter that elicits insufficient concern, in my opinion.
The last time the Doomsday Clock reached three minutes before midnight was in 1983, at the time of the Able Archer exercises of the Reagan administration; these exercises simulated attacks on the Soviet Union to test their defense systems. Recently released Russian archives reveal that the Russians were deeply concerned by the operations and were preparing to respond, which would have meant, simply: The End.
We have learned more about these rash and reckless exercises, and about how close the world was to disaster, from U.S. military and intelligence analyst Melvin Goodman, who was CIA division chief and senior analyst at the Office of Soviet Affairs at the time. “In addition to the Able Archer mobilization exercise that alarmed the Kremlin,” Goodman writes, “the Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. The Pentagon’s risky measures included sending U.S. strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, and naval exercises in wartime approaches to the USSR where U.S. warships had previously not entered. Additional secret operations simulated surprise naval attacks on Soviet targets.”
We now know that the world was saved from likely nuclear destruction in those frightening days by the decision of a Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, not to transmit to higher authorities the report of automated detection systems that the USSR was under missile attack. Accordingly, Petrov takes his place alongside Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov, who, at a dangerous moment of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, refused to authorize the launching of nuclear torpedoes when the subs were under attack by U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine.
Other recently revealed examples enrich the already frightening record. Nuclear security expert Bruce Blair reports that “the closest the U.S. came to an inadvertent strategic launch decision by the President happened in 1979, when a NORAD early warning training tape depicting a full-scale Soviet strategic strike inadvertently coursed through the actual early warning network. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was called twice in the night and told the U.S. was under attack, and he was just picking up the phone to persuade President Carter that a full-scale response needed to be authorized right away, when a third call told him it was a false alarm.”
This newly revealed example brings to mind a critical incident of 1995, when the trajectory of a U.S.-Norwegian rocket carrying scientific equipment resembled the path of a nuclear missile. This elicited Russian concerns that quickly reached President Boris Yeltsin, who had to decide whether to launch a nuclear strike.
Blair adds other examples from his own experience. In one case, at the time of the 1967 Middle East war, “a carrier nuclear-aircraft crew was sent an actual attack order instead of an exercise/training nuclear order.” A few years later, in the early 1970s, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha “retransmitted an exercise… launch order as an actual real-world launch order.” In both cases code checks had failed; human intervention prevented the launch. “But you get the drift here,” Blair adds. “It just wasn’t that rare for these kinds of snafus to occur.”
Blair made these comments in reaction to a report by airman John Bordne that has only recently been cleared by the U.S. Air Force. Bordne was serving on the U.S. military base in Okinawa in October 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a moment of serious tensions in Asia as well. The U.S. nuclear alert system had been raised to DEFCON 2, one level below DEFCON 1, when nuclear missiles can be launched immediately. At the peak of the crisis, on October 28th, a missile crew received authorization to launch its nuclear missiles, in error. They decided not to, averting likely nuclear war and joining Petrov and Arkhipov in the pantheon of men who decided to disobey protocol and thereby saved the world.
As Blair observed, such incidents are not uncommon. One recent expert study found dozens of false alarms every year during the period reviewed, 1977 to 1983; the study concluded that the range is 43 to 255 per year. The author of the study, Seth Baum, summarizes with appropriate words: “Nuclear war is the black swan we can never see, except in that brief moment when it is killing us. We delay eliminating the risk at our own peril. Now is the time to address the threat, because now we are still alive.”
These reports, like those in Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control, keep mostly to U.S. systems. The Russian ones are doubtless much more error-prone. That is not to mention the extreme danger posed by the systems of others, notably Pakistan.
9/11 and the resulting concurrent military debacle and ascendancy of the American Military Industrial Complex continues to haunt us to this day. Americans and the rest of the free world suffered severe setbacks to their individual liberties and privacy, and perhaps most importantly, the rule of law. Not that America was super good at following the rule of law when it’s own interests came into play, but perhaps the facade of us being the ‘good guys’ is an illusion that can never be restored.
Many military leaders in the US still parrot the GWB line trying to defend the indefensible War On Terror, nothing particularly surprising there. The military, institutionally speaking, will always prioritize its interests first. Looking further down the line though, we can see that people of conscience are coming forward with their stories about the horrors of the WoT and how they simply cannot continue business as usual.
Of course, these people will be punished by the state apparatus for violating the secrecy surrounding the acts of terror and bloodshed that the US is responsible for yet these individuals persisted. The two individuals both ended up losing their freedom because they were compelled by their conscience to do the right thing.
I’m not a big fan of the military industrial complex in the USA and their imperial spread across the globe – too many people in America and across the world are blind to the actions perpetrated in their name. In a democratic nation the truth must be known to the citizenry so they can be informed and equipped to make the best choice possible with regards to who will represent and lead them.
If I was an American and either of the following individuals ran for office, they would garner my vote. They spoke their mind to did what was right demonstrating an ethical and moral backbone that seems so rare in our body politic.
“Recently, some more minor players in the post-9/11 era have apologized in unique ways for the roles they played. For instance, Terry Albury, an FBI agent, would be convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking documents to the media, exposing the bureau’s policies of racial and religious profiling, as well as the staggering range of surveillance measures it conducted in the name of the war on terror. Sent to prison for four years, Albury recently completed his sentence. As Janet Reitman reported in the New York Times Magazine, feelings of guilt over the “human cost” of what he was involved in led to his act of revelation. It was, in other words, an apology in action.
As was the similar act of Daniel Hale, a former National Security Agency analyst who had worked at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan helping to identify human targets for drone attacks. He would receive a 45-month sentence under the Espionage Act for hisleaks— documents he had obtained on such strikes while working as a private contractor after his government service.
As Hale would explain, he acted out of a feeling of intense remorse. In his sentencing statement, he described watching “through a computer monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of Hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering purple-colored crystal guts.” His version of an apology-in-action came from his regret that he had continued on at his post even after witnessing the horrors of those endless killings, often of civilians. “Nevertheless, in spite of my better instinct, I continued to follow orders.” Eventually, a drone attack on a woman and her two daughters led him over the brink. “How could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness” was the way he put it and so he leaked his apology and is now serving his time.”
The cost of a clear conscience shouldn’t have to be your freedom, but kudos to Terry Albury and Daniel Hale for being true to themselves and their country.
Well I’d like to think that our publicly elected officials actually gave a damn about the people that elected them. Obviously not.
“Wong says the messaging from policymakers and public health officials in the Prairies throughout the pandemic has been one of “individual responsibility” when it comes to following guidelines, getting tested or getting vaccinated.
“Now the narrative is very much pushing the societal blame and anger and frustration away from, frankly, policymakers and toward people who are unvaccinated,” Wong said. In his view, the “shifting of blame” may have further increased vaccine hesitancy.
“Even when the whole healthcare system is literally collapsing you’re just not going to get any kind of buy-in at a societal level anymore to actually care.”
Unlike Manitoba, Wong says Saskatchewan and Alberta will likely pay a “heavy human price” that will be “painful” in the weeks ahead, which he sees as unavoidable even if the government were to make the unlikely move of imposing another lockdown, or if vaccination rates climb.
Health-care systems in Alberta, Saskatchewan ‘broken’ by COVID surge, doctors say
6 days ago
16:41Dr. Aisha Mirza, an ER physician in Edmonton, and Dr. Hassan Masri, an ICU and critical care physician in Saskatoon, share how the provinces’ hospitals and medical professionals are struggling amid a fourth wave of COVID-19. 16:41“This is not a pandemic of the unvaccinated, this affects absolutely everybody — it’s everybody whose surgeries are cancelled, and who won’t have access to urgent surgeries if they get into an accident, or if their appendix bursts or if they have an aneurysm,” Schwartz said.
“And whether there is ever the sort of political reckoning that is required in order to actually change course, to prevent these lives from being lost — I’m starting to lose hope.”
![](https://thumbnails.cbc.ca/maven_legacy/thumbnails/186/383/1-nn-covid-sask-alberta-heath-care-270921.jpg?crop=1.777xh:h;*,*&downsize=510px:* 510w")
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