Until there is an unequivocal and total rejection of the delusional religion of "American Exceptionalism " and a complete repudiation of the belief that the US is an "indispensable nation," nothing will change. Like an alcoholic who believes he/she does not have a drinking problem, the neocon fanatics will continue their endless war making to maintain global hegemony no matter the cost in both blood and treasure.
Businessmen have waged war against the people of this country since the 1800s. Except for their minor setback after the Depression they caused, they spent the next 70 years undoing the relatively small gains of the New Deal. Now, wealthy kleptocrats run everything from the government to the banks to the "news". They have mostly undone the New Deal, and have waged war against most of the rest of the world. Until the US public wises up to their "divide and conquer" strategies, we are in for a rough ride. It is why I always say, people unite, left and right. As soon as regular people realize that their "hatred" of the Red or Blue teams is a manufactured rift, and not in their best interests, the kleptocrats are in for a rough ride.
Does that include the 1.5 trillion dollars over the next 6 years for upgrades and redesign of our nuclear arsenal? Ukraine and Israel "aid"?
Any good business plan should include "cost increases " for expansion and growth like the upcoming war I see on the horizon in the middle east (and possibly China and North Korea).
All to keep us safe in the US?
It's not so much that Americans are complacent, Americans are being ruled by brute force physically , financially and emotionally.
Physically you can be killed for protesting, running a red light or sleeping in your own home (if you have one).
Financially you have to deal with rising prices for essentials, shrinking wages and insecure employment and housing and medical care.
Emotionally we are deluged with lies and disinformation propaganda from the government and the media daily.
We are a nation of laws. Far too many with a corrupt unaccountable justice, political and economic system designed to control the majority of Americans and protect the wealthy. Americans are being terrorized by their own government and living in fear with justifiable reasons.
I suppose y'all have seen the ridiculous op-ed by Biden today in the WaPost. If not, try not to throw up. Here is the title & subheading:
The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas
Our goal should not be simply to stop the war for today — it should be to end the war forever, break the cycle of violence and build something stronger in Gaza.
Not to be rude but America really does love to get all hot and bothered about genocide. From the news to the Hill, there seems to be a constant hunt for the next big holocaust that only America can stop with all its omnipotent exceptionalism. Another "good war" to prove to the world that we're still really the good guys after all. With this quest in mind, every two-bit, tinpot despot seems to get hyped as the next Hitler on the brink of another Final Solution. Saddam Hussein must be stopped before he can gas the rest of the Kurds. Muammar Gaddafi must be stopped before he can turn Benghazi into Buchenwald. Bashar al-Assad must be stopped before Vladimir Putin must be stopped before Xi Jinping must be stopped...
There are just so many goddamn Hitlers to be stopped and so little time. Just cut a fucking check to Raytheon already so we can save the world again! Don't get my sarcasm wrong, I'm not trying to say there aren't monsters out there. It just feels like certain Americans need a holocaust to stop a little too badly and all too often the result tends to be a lot of really stupid wars against over-hyped monsters that end up looking like rodents compared to the creatures we replace them with. And then there's Gaza.
Some 12,000 people annihilated in just over a month, most of them women and children. That is 1 out of every 200 people in the Gaza Strip or 0.5% of a population of 2.3 million impoverished people dead, wiped from the map in a blitzkrieg carpet bombing campaign that has reduced everything that moves in that tiny enclave to guts and rubble. Refugee camps, residential neighborhoods, apartment blocks, schools, bakeries, hospitals, mosques, churches... No target is off limits, and every last Palestinian is painted as a potential enemy of civilization. All while Benjamin Netanyahu, a flamboyantly racist gangster with an open disdain for democracy, consolidates his power and plots to push an entire race of people out into the wastelands of the Sinai Peninsula with a steam shovel or kill them trying.
Well, here it is America, here's your fucking holocaust giftwrapped like a holiday goose and complete with its very own Hitler and a clearly mapped out Final Solution. You wanna be the hero so goddamn badly? Here's your shot. Bibi's bombing babies and somebody needs to stop him before it's too late. We'll even let you wear the cape if it turns you on.
There's just one little problem here. The campaign to erase Gaza from the face of the map may be the next big thing in genocide but it turns out that America-the-beautiful is the power behind the new Hitler making it happen. Every bomb, every bullet, every canister of white phosphorous that gasses the ghettos of Gaza comes directly from your pocket, and to make things even more confounding, all the usual assholes from the news to the Hill seem to be using the ghost of the Holocaust to justify committing another goddamn Holocaust.
The Israelis are Jews after all, and the Jews were the targets of genocide. There go, the Jews get to commit one free genocide against another stateless people even if they had nothing to do with the last genocide. By this bizarre logic, the Navajos should be allowed to wipe out the Basques and we should help them do it. It is a bastardly bewitching paradigm to fuck with but sadly, it is also far from a new one. In fact, this weird genocidal algebra is the voodoo that all modern western imperialism was built on.
An empire is an infernal machine that runs on a fuel called conquest and conquest requires two primary components to succeed, annihilation and justification. Nazi Germany and the original Hitler had the first in spades and they used America's conquest of the New World as a model for their plot to conquer the old one. Manifest Destiny was the first Reich, a savage campaign that successfully stole an entire hemisphere and turned that graveyard into a booming playground for a master race to reign over for a thousand years. 56 million indigenous people exterminated from Utqiagvik to Tierra del Fuego in just over a century flat.
This was the dream, the nightmare that Adolf Hitler aspired to. Contrary to popular mythology, there was nothing particularly special or even all that unusual about Nazi Germany. Fascism itself is just a colorful collection of excuses to elevate the state to take the place of God on the white man's mantle. The Third Reich was little more than an American copycat crime. Hitler just lacked the patience to pull it off. He tried to rush Manifest Destiny, killing 17 million civilians including about 6 million Jews in a decade before he could convince the world to let him get away with it. The Nazis failed because they committed their atrocities faster than they could justify them, which is half the game.
America on the other hand succeeded because we used monsters like Hitler to justify our own atrocities. World War Two, the supposedly "good" war, became the template for this grift. America spent its first century and a half committing every single horror that Hitler copied twice and then we took our campaign global to stop him. With the fall of the Third Reich, America managed to reinvent itself as the only solution to every other final solution and it worked.
It didn't matter that Hitler was actually done in by his fellow monster Stalin or that America vaporized entire cities like Dresden and Hiroshima just to steal his thunder, the mythology of America-the-indispensable-solution stuck and every time we get carried away with our latest massacre in Indochina or our latest quagmire in Babylon and our mask of sanity begins to slip, we just go right back to searching for another Hitler to stop.
All too often this quest has involved genocide too. America has used quisling thugs like Suharto and Muhammad bin Salman to slaughter over 200,000 people in East Timor and nearly 400,000 in Yemen, respectively. We wiped out entire tribes in Central America in the name of fighting communism, including 200,000 people in the tiny slave colony of Guatemala alone. And perhaps the sickest thing is that America has all too often used genocide to excuse genocide, whether we're killing Gypsy babushkas in Kosovo or starving half a million babies in Iraq.
Israel is just following our playbook because Israel is our playbook. The ovens of Auschwitz weren't even cool when we weaponized the anguish of the Jewish people and directed it at their fellow Semites in Palestine in order to build another European-style ethno-state on the doorstep of the Persian Gulf. And then there's Gaza. Sunrise, sunset.
America is right to seek the destruction of the next Hitler because as long as psychopaths have nation states and standing armies to hijack, there will always be another Hitler. But America doesn't need to travel far and wide to find him. They need only to search their bathroom mirrors. America is the next Hitler because America was the first Hitler, and we can put a stop to a thousand genocides from Papua New Guinea to the Gaza Strip just by bringing the war home and confronting the enemy within.
Don't forget the role that money plays in history, it is more than you usually read in conventional history because historians rarely study money. Look who is pulling the strings in America today... It has rarely been different.
https://theses.gla.ac.uk/81723/ The Bankers did it? I have read this before over the years in different places, so I did a search. Her is something titled,
The bankers of Brumaire: the financiers behind Napoleon's ascent
Stokle, Mark (2020) The bankers of Brumaire: the financiers behind Napoleon's ascent. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.
Due to Embargo and/or Third Party Copyright restrictions, this thesis is not available in this service.
Abstract
Napoleon Bonaparte’s relation with bankers and military contractors is not the first aspect which springs to mind when one reflects on his rise to power. And yet, the support of the influential business lobby and its political allies played a determining role in his toppling of the Directory – the last French revolutionary government – on 18-19 Brumaire (9-10 Nov. 1799). Who then were these financiers who wielded such power? What was their relationship with Bonaparte and the directorial regime? And why did they forsake the Revolution and support the establishment of military dictatorship in France?
By adopting a financial perspective and exploring the opaque networks connecting businessmen, politicians and military leaders during the directorial period, this thesis develops new interpretations of revolutionary events and assesses the influence exerted by leading magnates over the state’s political and economic policies.
no worries, rj... as you say, we need not all be peering thru the same lens to deduce what seems plausible for us to struggle towards in an effort to focus on what constitutes a beneficent, vivifying, and fecund life... concomitantly, to reach satisfactory goals on behalf of others, find clarity and purpose, in the optative hope that, by the time we achieve our respective endpoints, what has preceded those endpoints can be perceived as worth the struggle, even for myopic blokesses like me.
dennis, you, myself, and our multifarious consociate strugglers offer disparate pathways for contemplation, but one is no more valid than another, so long as the focus remains on beneficence rather than rebarbative slings. for instance, many of my students in the palestinian refugee camps this past year, as well as colleagues and local volunteers, were atheistic, apatheistic, agnostic, or insouciant nullifidians. liberating themselves from their cultural zeitgeist was a significant challenge, so they learned not to discuss religion, religious tracts, religious dogma, or doctrinaire religiosity altogether.
All of us can do what we can according the talents God and Nature gave us. I do what I can and this is a way for me sent yesterday;
@AymanMSNBC
I see you as one of the few TV Journalists with Integrity reporting on the Israeli WAR on the Innocent Civilians of Gaza. May I suggest you have Chas Freeman accomplished US Diplomat and former US Assistant Secretary of Defence as a guest.
This Is Not a War, but a Mass Murder Tragedy | Chas Freeman
Somebody needs to go to jail over this. But they won't. And the "defense/security" budget will just keep on growing, and growing, and growing. Along with the National Debt [now at $33.7 TRILLION and growing by leaps and bounds]... :
PENTAGON FAILS AUDIT FOR SIXTH STRAIGHT YEAR: Fiscal Times / 111723
The Pentagon failed its annual financial audit for the sixth straight year, the Defense Department’s chief financial officer announced Wednesday.
CFO Michael J. McCord told reporters that the Pentagon, with $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities, is making progress toward a clean audit, but that the failure “is not a surprise” and that the department still has years’ worth of work to do to reach its goal. “Things are showing progress, but it's not enough,” he said.
The annual audit is conducted by independent public accounting firms and the DOD Office of the Inspector General. Some 1,600 auditors and 700 site visits were involved and the Pentagon spent a reported $187 million on the process, which includes 29 standalone audits of military services, all of which must pass for the overall audit to be scored as clean. There is also an overall department-wide audit.
Just seven of the standalones passed this year, the same as last year, while one received a qualified opinion, which falls short of passing. Three component audits are still pending.
“While we acknowledged enhancements in the DoD's financial management procedures, significant challenges persist in generating thorough and precise financial statements,” Inspector General Robert P. Storch said in a statement.
The audit identified 28 material weaknesses, three significant deficiencies and seven instances of noncompliance with laws, regulations, contracts and grant agreements, the inspector general’s office said. No new Pentagon-wide material weaknesses were reported this time.
The auditors also found that about half of the Defense Department’s assets can’t be accounted for. "This does not mean that the other 50% is unaccounted for," McCord explained. "The department has tight control of its assets — but too many of our financial management systems, such as some of our property systems of record, still cannot meet auditing standards. We are working hard to accelerate the retirement of these older systems and bring more of our asset records up to accounting standards.”
The Pentagon has reportedly faced pressure from lawmakers to achieve a clean audit by 2027, but McCord and the DoD called on Congress and the defense industry to help.
“Our congressional defense committees can help,” McCord said, “by doing their part in stabilizing the budget process and avoiding continuing resolutions and repeated threats of government shutdowns, such as the one we are living through yet again this week; by ensuring timely continuity and confirmation of our military and civilian leadership; by providing adequate and consistent resources for replacing DOD legacy systems; and through continued support of the department's financial transformation efforts.”
The Decline of America ~ the Empire and the Nation-State ~ has ended; and the Fall has begun. Why? For the simple reason that America is ~ and has been for a long, long time:
- a Bankrupt Debtor State;
- an Imperialist Warfare State;
- a Redistributionist Welfare State;
- a Secrecy/Surveillance/Security/proto-Police State;
- an Autocratic/Oligarchic/Plutocratic/Patriarchal Deep State;
- a Failing or at best Flailing Nation-State;
- an Overshoot State; and, perhaps most importantly,
- a People and Nation no longer merely "divided," but fractured~ even to the point of disintegration~ in ways not seen in more than 160 years, since the eve of what may end up being merely the First American Civil War.
So the question then becomes: Will the United States survive to celebrate its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, 958 days from today? And if it does, will the American People be in any condition or mood to celebrate anything?
A better question than WILL the US survive is: CAN it survive? And an even better question is: SHOULD it survive?
For starters: Will there be a national election in November, 2024? And if there is, will there be an Inauguration and seating of the next Congress in January, 2025? What would it take to prevent those things from happening? Another 9/11? Another Pandemic, but one that kills young and healthy people like the last one killed old and sick ones? Another "too Big to let fail" 2008-esque financial "“¢risi$”? How about Wars in Europe, the Middle east, Asia, and with Mexico along the border?
And even if there is an election, what kind of choice is Biden and Trump? Or anybody else on the current national political theatrical stage or waiting in the wings?
The key thing to remember here is that virtually everybody and anybody who has ever come along wanting to "Save The World" actually, really has only ever wanted ~ and wants ~ to Rule The World. And that they will fail on either count.
And the main lesson to be learned from Napoleon and Hitler is very simple: Do not even think about invading, conquering, and ruling Russia. Because it ain't gonna happen.
"... the unending race to keep up with foreign military and economic competition threatens to erode the very values that make one's society worth defending in the first place."
That's from "...the heavens and the earth: A Political History of the Space Age" by Walter A. McDougall. I'd say ol' Walt hit the nail on the head.
A poll I'd like to see: How many members of Congress actually vote in accordance with the wishes of their constituents who, after all, sent them to D.C. as their representative?
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Challenging their automated computer sending the notices both were reversed
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Ray Joseph Cormier
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@TheRevAl Where is your obedience? To Christ Jesus or MSNBC? Joe Scarborough is the Propagandist for the IDF & Israeli Officials.
The Word of God says, Behold, I will make them of the Synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie;
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I wrote to the Reverend Al Sharpton for the 1st time this am, a paid regular on Morning Joe, hoping he will moderate Joe's unquestioning support of Israel's murderous bombardment of the Innocent Civilians of Gaza.
Nothing ventured nothing gained!
Joe Scarborough often says he's a Believer in Jesus and the Bible.
Until there is an unequivocal and total rejection of the delusional religion of "American Exceptionalism " and a complete repudiation of the belief that the US is an "indispensable nation," nothing will change. Like an alcoholic who believes he/she does not have a drinking problem, the neocon fanatics will continue their endless war making to maintain global hegemony no matter the cost in both blood and treasure.
Businessmen have waged war against the people of this country since the 1800s. Except for their minor setback after the Depression they caused, they spent the next 70 years undoing the relatively small gains of the New Deal. Now, wealthy kleptocrats run everything from the government to the banks to the "news". They have mostly undone the New Deal, and have waged war against most of the rest of the world. Until the US public wises up to their "divide and conquer" strategies, we are in for a rough ride. It is why I always say, people unite, left and right. As soon as regular people realize that their "hatred" of the Red or Blue teams is a manufactured rift, and not in their best interests, the kleptocrats are in for a rough ride.
"Military budgets now approach $1 trillion yearly....."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/report/the-new-nuclear-age/
Does that include the 1.5 trillion dollars over the next 6 years for upgrades and redesign of our nuclear arsenal? Ukraine and Israel "aid"?
Any good business plan should include "cost increases " for expansion and growth like the upcoming war I see on the horizon in the middle east (and possibly China and North Korea).
All to keep us safe in the US?
It's not so much that Americans are complacent, Americans are being ruled by brute force physically , financially and emotionally.
Physically you can be killed for protesting, running a red light or sleeping in your own home (if you have one).
Financially you have to deal with rising prices for essentials, shrinking wages and insecure employment and housing and medical care.
Emotionally we are deluged with lies and disinformation propaganda from the government and the media daily.
We are a nation of laws. Far too many with a corrupt unaccountable justice, political and economic system designed to control the majority of Americans and protect the wealthy. Americans are being terrorized by their own government and living in fear with justifiable reasons.
I suppose y'all have seen the ridiculous op-ed by Biden today in the WaPost. If not, try not to throw up. Here is the title & subheading:
The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas
Our goal should not be simply to stop the war for today — it should be to end the war forever, break the cycle of violence and build something stronger in Gaza.
A $Trillion Defence Budget, and a $Trillion in interest payments on the US National Debt.
US Wealth is an ILLUSION!
WILL THE NEXT ADOLF HITLER PLEASE STAND UP: AMERICA'S PECULIAR GENOCIDE FETISH FROM MANIFEST DESTINY TO THE NEW NAKBA by Exile In Happy Valley 1119234
https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2023/11/will-next-adolf-hitler-please-stand-up.html
Not to be rude but America really does love to get all hot and bothered about genocide. From the news to the Hill, there seems to be a constant hunt for the next big holocaust that only America can stop with all its omnipotent exceptionalism. Another "good war" to prove to the world that we're still really the good guys after all. With this quest in mind, every two-bit, tinpot despot seems to get hyped as the next Hitler on the brink of another Final Solution. Saddam Hussein must be stopped before he can gas the rest of the Kurds. Muammar Gaddafi must be stopped before he can turn Benghazi into Buchenwald. Bashar al-Assad must be stopped before Vladimir Putin must be stopped before Xi Jinping must be stopped...
There are just so many goddamn Hitlers to be stopped and so little time. Just cut a fucking check to Raytheon already so we can save the world again! Don't get my sarcasm wrong, I'm not trying to say there aren't monsters out there. It just feels like certain Americans need a holocaust to stop a little too badly and all too often the result tends to be a lot of really stupid wars against over-hyped monsters that end up looking like rodents compared to the creatures we replace them with. And then there's Gaza.
Some 12,000 people annihilated in just over a month, most of them women and children. That is 1 out of every 200 people in the Gaza Strip or 0.5% of a population of 2.3 million impoverished people dead, wiped from the map in a blitzkrieg carpet bombing campaign that has reduced everything that moves in that tiny enclave to guts and rubble. Refugee camps, residential neighborhoods, apartment blocks, schools, bakeries, hospitals, mosques, churches... No target is off limits, and every last Palestinian is painted as a potential enemy of civilization. All while Benjamin Netanyahu, a flamboyantly racist gangster with an open disdain for democracy, consolidates his power and plots to push an entire race of people out into the wastelands of the Sinai Peninsula with a steam shovel or kill them trying.
Well, here it is America, here's your fucking holocaust giftwrapped like a holiday goose and complete with its very own Hitler and a clearly mapped out Final Solution. You wanna be the hero so goddamn badly? Here's your shot. Bibi's bombing babies and somebody needs to stop him before it's too late. We'll even let you wear the cape if it turns you on.
There's just one little problem here. The campaign to erase Gaza from the face of the map may be the next big thing in genocide but it turns out that America-the-beautiful is the power behind the new Hitler making it happen. Every bomb, every bullet, every canister of white phosphorous that gasses the ghettos of Gaza comes directly from your pocket, and to make things even more confounding, all the usual assholes from the news to the Hill seem to be using the ghost of the Holocaust to justify committing another goddamn Holocaust.
The Israelis are Jews after all, and the Jews were the targets of genocide. There go, the Jews get to commit one free genocide against another stateless people even if they had nothing to do with the last genocide. By this bizarre logic, the Navajos should be allowed to wipe out the Basques and we should help them do it. It is a bastardly bewitching paradigm to fuck with but sadly, it is also far from a new one. In fact, this weird genocidal algebra is the voodoo that all modern western imperialism was built on.
An empire is an infernal machine that runs on a fuel called conquest and conquest requires two primary components to succeed, annihilation and justification. Nazi Germany and the original Hitler had the first in spades and they used America's conquest of the New World as a model for their plot to conquer the old one. Manifest Destiny was the first Reich, a savage campaign that successfully stole an entire hemisphere and turned that graveyard into a booming playground for a master race to reign over for a thousand years. 56 million indigenous people exterminated from Utqiagvik to Tierra del Fuego in just over a century flat.
This was the dream, the nightmare that Adolf Hitler aspired to. Contrary to popular mythology, there was nothing particularly special or even all that unusual about Nazi Germany. Fascism itself is just a colorful collection of excuses to elevate the state to take the place of God on the white man's mantle. The Third Reich was little more than an American copycat crime. Hitler just lacked the patience to pull it off. He tried to rush Manifest Destiny, killing 17 million civilians including about 6 million Jews in a decade before he could convince the world to let him get away with it. The Nazis failed because they committed their atrocities faster than they could justify them, which is half the game.
America on the other hand succeeded because we used monsters like Hitler to justify our own atrocities. World War Two, the supposedly "good" war, became the template for this grift. America spent its first century and a half committing every single horror that Hitler copied twice and then we took our campaign global to stop him. With the fall of the Third Reich, America managed to reinvent itself as the only solution to every other final solution and it worked.
It didn't matter that Hitler was actually done in by his fellow monster Stalin or that America vaporized entire cities like Dresden and Hiroshima just to steal his thunder, the mythology of America-the-indispensable-solution stuck and every time we get carried away with our latest massacre in Indochina or our latest quagmire in Babylon and our mask of sanity begins to slip, we just go right back to searching for another Hitler to stop.
All too often this quest has involved genocide too. America has used quisling thugs like Suharto and Muhammad bin Salman to slaughter over 200,000 people in East Timor and nearly 400,000 in Yemen, respectively. We wiped out entire tribes in Central America in the name of fighting communism, including 200,000 people in the tiny slave colony of Guatemala alone. And perhaps the sickest thing is that America has all too often used genocide to excuse genocide, whether we're killing Gypsy babushkas in Kosovo or starving half a million babies in Iraq.
Israel is just following our playbook because Israel is our playbook. The ovens of Auschwitz weren't even cool when we weaponized the anguish of the Jewish people and directed it at their fellow Semites in Palestine in order to build another European-style ethno-state on the doorstep of the Persian Gulf. And then there's Gaza. Sunrise, sunset.
America is right to seek the destruction of the next Hitler because as long as psychopaths have nation states and standing armies to hijack, there will always be another Hitler. But America doesn't need to travel far and wide to find him. They need only to search their bathroom mirrors. America is the next Hitler because America was the first Hitler, and we can put a stop to a thousand genocides from Papua New Guinea to the Gaza Strip just by bringing the war home and confronting the enemy within.
Don't forget the role that money plays in history, it is more than you usually read in conventional history because historians rarely study money. Look who is pulling the strings in America today... It has rarely been different.
https://theses.gla.ac.uk/81723/ The Bankers did it? I have read this before over the years in different places, so I did a search. Her is something titled,
The bankers of Brumaire: the financiers behind Napoleon's ascent
Stokle, Mark (2020) The bankers of Brumaire: the financiers behind Napoleon's ascent. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.
Due to Embargo and/or Third Party Copyright restrictions, this thesis is not available in this service.
Abstract
Napoleon Bonaparte’s relation with bankers and military contractors is not the first aspect which springs to mind when one reflects on his rise to power. And yet, the support of the influential business lobby and its political allies played a determining role in his toppling of the Directory – the last French revolutionary government – on 18-19 Brumaire (9-10 Nov. 1799). Who then were these financiers who wielded such power? What was their relationship with Bonaparte and the directorial regime? And why did they forsake the Revolution and support the establishment of military dictatorship in France?
By adopting a financial perspective and exploring the opaque networks connecting businessmen, politicians and military leaders during the directorial period, this thesis develops new interpretations of revolutionary events and assesses the influence exerted by leading magnates over the state’s political and economic policies.
no worries, rj... as you say, we need not all be peering thru the same lens to deduce what seems plausible for us to struggle towards in an effort to focus on what constitutes a beneficent, vivifying, and fecund life... concomitantly, to reach satisfactory goals on behalf of others, find clarity and purpose, in the optative hope that, by the time we achieve our respective endpoints, what has preceded those endpoints can be perceived as worth the struggle, even for myopic blokesses like me.
dennis, you, myself, and our multifarious consociate strugglers offer disparate pathways for contemplation, but one is no more valid than another, so long as the focus remains on beneficence rather than rebarbative slings. for instance, many of my students in the palestinian refugee camps this past year, as well as colleagues and local volunteers, were atheistic, apatheistic, agnostic, or insouciant nullifidians. liberating themselves from their cultural zeitgeist was a significant challenge, so they learned not to discuss religion, religious tracts, religious dogma, or doctrinaire religiosity altogether.
All of us can do what we can according the talents God and Nature gave us. I do what I can and this is a way for me sent yesterday;
@AymanMSNBC
I see you as one of the few TV Journalists with Integrity reporting on the Israeli WAR on the Innocent Civilians of Gaza. May I suggest you have Chas Freeman accomplished US Diplomat and former US Assistant Secretary of Defence as a guest.
This Is Not a War, but a Mass Murder Tragedy | Chas Freeman
https://youtu.be/JRb4QhZi2MA?si=VmGGhN77Ofmj2xaJ
Somebody needs to go to jail over this. But they won't. And the "defense/security" budget will just keep on growing, and growing, and growing. Along with the National Debt [now at $33.7 TRILLION and growing by leaps and bounds]... :
PENTAGON FAILS AUDIT FOR SIXTH STRAIGHT YEAR: Fiscal Times / 111723
The Pentagon failed its annual financial audit for the sixth straight year, the Defense Department’s chief financial officer announced Wednesday.
CFO Michael J. McCord told reporters that the Pentagon, with $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities, is making progress toward a clean audit, but that the failure “is not a surprise” and that the department still has years’ worth of work to do to reach its goal. “Things are showing progress, but it's not enough,” he said.
The annual audit is conducted by independent public accounting firms and the DOD Office of the Inspector General. Some 1,600 auditors and 700 site visits were involved and the Pentagon spent a reported $187 million on the process, which includes 29 standalone audits of military services, all of which must pass for the overall audit to be scored as clean. There is also an overall department-wide audit.
Just seven of the standalones passed this year, the same as last year, while one received a qualified opinion, which falls short of passing. Three component audits are still pending.
“While we acknowledged enhancements in the DoD's financial management procedures, significant challenges persist in generating thorough and precise financial statements,” Inspector General Robert P. Storch said in a statement.
The audit identified 28 material weaknesses, three significant deficiencies and seven instances of noncompliance with laws, regulations, contracts and grant agreements, the inspector general’s office said. No new Pentagon-wide material weaknesses were reported this time.
The auditors also found that about half of the Defense Department’s assets can’t be accounted for. "This does not mean that the other 50% is unaccounted for," McCord explained. "The department has tight control of its assets — but too many of our financial management systems, such as some of our property systems of record, still cannot meet auditing standards. We are working hard to accelerate the retirement of these older systems and bring more of our asset records up to accounting standards.”
The Pentagon has reportedly faced pressure from lawmakers to achieve a clean audit by 2027, but McCord and the DoD called on Congress and the defense industry to help.
“Our congressional defense committees can help,” McCord said, “by doing their part in stabilizing the budget process and avoiding continuing resolutions and repeated threats of government shutdowns, such as the one we are living through yet again this week; by ensuring timely continuity and confirmation of our military and civilian leadership; by providing adequate and consistent resources for replacing DOD legacy systems; and through continued support of the department's financial transformation efforts.”
[ https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/newsletter/20231116-Pentagon-Fails-Audit-Sixth-Straight-Year ]
The Decline of America ~ the Empire and the Nation-State ~ has ended; and the Fall has begun. Why? For the simple reason that America is ~ and has been for a long, long time:
- a Bankrupt Debtor State;
- an Imperialist Warfare State;
- a Redistributionist Welfare State;
- a Secrecy/Surveillance/Security/proto-Police State;
- an Autocratic/Oligarchic/Plutocratic/Patriarchal Deep State;
- a Failing or at best Flailing Nation-State;
- an Overshoot State; and, perhaps most importantly,
- a People and Nation no longer merely "divided," but fractured~ even to the point of disintegration~ in ways not seen in more than 160 years, since the eve of what may end up being merely the First American Civil War.
So the question then becomes: Will the United States survive to celebrate its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, 958 days from today? And if it does, will the American People be in any condition or mood to celebrate anything?
A better question than WILL the US survive is: CAN it survive? And an even better question is: SHOULD it survive?
For starters: Will there be a national election in November, 2024? And if there is, will there be an Inauguration and seating of the next Congress in January, 2025? What would it take to prevent those things from happening? Another 9/11? Another Pandemic, but one that kills young and healthy people like the last one killed old and sick ones? Another "too Big to let fail" 2008-esque financial "“¢risi$”? How about Wars in Europe, the Middle east, Asia, and with Mexico along the border?
And even if there is an election, what kind of choice is Biden and Trump? Or anybody else on the current national political theatrical stage or waiting in the wings?
The key thing to remember here is that virtually everybody and anybody who has ever come along wanting to "Save The World" actually, really has only ever wanted ~ and wants ~ to Rule The World. And that they will fail on either count.
And the main lesson to be learned from Napoleon and Hitler is very simple: Do not even think about invading, conquering, and ruling Russia. Because it ain't gonna happen.
No worries: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/11/us-deploy-new-land-based-missiles-armys-pacific-commander-says/392137/
Thank you. Succinct is your muse. You do it do well. Most diatribes go on and on. Less words so much better....at least for this reader.
"... the unending race to keep up with foreign military and economic competition threatens to erode the very values that make one's society worth defending in the first place."
That's from "...the heavens and the earth: A Political History of the Space Age" by Walter A. McDougall. I'd say ol' Walt hit the nail on the head.
A poll I'd like to see: How many members of Congress actually vote in accordance with the wishes of their constituents who, after all, sent them to D.C. as their representative?
X-Twitter sent me this notice for the 2nd Time,
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Challenging their automated computer sending the notices both were reversed
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Ray Joseph Cormier
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@TheRevAl Where is your obedience? To Christ Jesus or MSNBC? Joe Scarborough is the Propagandist for the IDF & Israeli Officials.
The Word of God says, Behold, I will make them of the Synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie;
Revelation 3:9 & 2:9
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I wrote to the Reverend Al Sharpton for the 1st time this am, a paid regular on Morning Joe, hoping he will moderate Joe's unquestioning support of Israel's murderous bombardment of the Innocent Civilians of Gaza.
Nothing ventured nothing gained!
Joe Scarborough often says he's a Believer in Jesus and the Bible.
Good piece. Shared to FB