Has America run out of B52 bombers, napalm, agent orange to donate to Vietnam? What about the three nuclear bombs offered to France to wipe out the Viet Minh and Vietnam? Or has America simply run out of decency altogether? It might recover a scrap if it donated one year of “defense” budget–around $700 billion–as war reparation for 4 million Vietnamese dead in America’s war of aggression. At any rate, has Vietnam accepted or needed America’s morally grotesque offering or does America plan to go door to door, “Geopolitical Hearts and Minds 2-0 calling here.”
Default Editor Patrice de Bergeracpas
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Freedom Trails Take Their Toll in Animal and Human Suffering
28 minutes readPATRICE GREANVILLE—These developments pleased (but scarcely surprised) the oil and auto industries. Hardly a disinterested observer, the auto industry, in particular, led by General Motors, had long pressed the American government for the dismantlement of most forms of public transportation. The switch eventually doomed numerous rail and bus systems across the nation; by the late ’40s the car and its inseparable sidekick, the highway, had won. From that point on, the yearly advance of the asphalt ribbons became a fact of life in the young, car-addicted republic.
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Saagar Enjeti: The Pseudo-Populist Mainlining Neocon Ideas into Progressive Politics
37 minutes readALAN MACLEOD—While he is undeniably a charismatic and confident host, Enjeti’s schtick is remarkably similar to that of his former employer Tucker Carlson, who also rails against elites while being one of them. Other establishment hawks like General Michael Flynn and General Robert Spalding (another Hudson employee) have also attempted to sell themselves as anti-establishment populist outsiders, but with far less success. Enjeti has been more successful partly because he is a more likable figure and partly because the others have decades-long histories in the heart of the swamp.
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FRED REED—“A scientist is part of what the Polish philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck called a “thought collective”: a group of people exchanging ideas in a mutually comprehensible idiom. The group, suggested Fleck, inevitably develops a mind of its own, as the individuals in it converge on a way of communicating, thinking and feeling.
This makes scientific inquiry prone to the eternal rules of human social life: deference to the charismatic, herding towards majority opinion, punishment for deviance, and intense discomfort with admitting to error. Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for, and over the long run, it does a good job of it. In the long run, however, we’re all dead, quite possibly sooner than we would be if we hadn’t been following a diet based on poor advice.”
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What is Wrong with the “Humanitarian Crossing” into Syria?
15 minutes readRICK STERLING—There are important facts which western media stories typically leave out or distort. Here are some reasons why the Bab al Hawa border crossing should NOT be renewed.
* The aid is supporting Syria’s version of Al Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS). They control the region on the Syrian side of the crossing. They are the foreigners and hard-core extremists who invaded Idlib from Turkey in 2015 plus those who left Aleppo and other cities when the militants were defeated by the Syrian army. Even if the United Nations inspects all the trucks going into Idlib province in northern Syria, the truck deliveries are ultimately controlled by HTS (formerly called Jabhat al Nusra).
* The aid is effectively supporting the partition of Syria. Idlib province, and the militants which govern there, seek to separate permanently from Syria. They are attempting to Turkify the region through sectarian education, promoting the Turkish language and even using Turkish currency.
* The aid violates the United Nations Charter which says all member countries shall refrain from threatening the territorial integrity of another member state. Turkey and the USA are the major violators, since they have military troops illegally occupying Syrian lands. But it is a shame for the United Nations to be complicit through the authorization of aid to the breakaway Al Qaeda dominated region.