Opinion | Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster | Jeffrey D. Sachs
▻https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/06/28/ukraine-latest-neocon-disaster
Opinion | Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster | Jeffrey D. Sachs
▻https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/06/28/ukraine-latest-neocon-disaster
’Not Even Close to Being Over’: WHO Chief Says Despite Some Progress, ’Pandemic Is Actually Speeding Up’ | Common Dreams News
▻https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/29/not-even-close-being-over-who-chief-says-despite-some-progress-pandemi
“This is a time for renewing our commitment to empowering communities, suppressing transmission, saving lives, accelerating research, and political and moral leadership,” he added, summarizing top priorities for governments amid global efforts to develop a vaccine. “But it’s also a time for all countries to renew their commitment to universal health coverage as the cornerstone of social and economic development—and to building the safer, fairer, greener, more inclusive world we all want.”
’Important Step’ as Federal Judge Orders ICE to Release Detained Immigrants at Heightened Risk for COVID-19 | Common Dreams News
#Covid-19#migrant#migration#US#centrederetention#liberation
▻https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/09/important-step-federal-judge-orders-ice-release-detained-immigrants-he
“It is unfortunate we had to resort to the courts for this relief; ICE should be doing this on its own,” said the San Francisco public defender.
Big Brother in the Age of Coronavirus : 100+ Groups Warn Against Exploiting Pandemic to Permanently Expand Surveillance State | Common Dreams News
▻https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/02/big-brother-age-coronavirus-100-groups-warn-against-exploiting-pandemi
“These are extraordinary times, but human rights law still applies.” As the number of COVID-19 cases climbed toward a million worldwide on Thursday, over 100 human rights groups issued a joint statement warning that governments’ response to the coronavirus pandemic “must not be used as a cover to usher in a new era of greatly expanded systems of invasive digital surveillance.” "Now more than ever, governments must rigorously ensure that any restrictions to these rights is in line with (...)
#PrivacyInternational #EPIC #Amnesty #HumanRightsWatch #BigBrotherWatch #surveillance #santé #COVID-19 #BigData #vidéo-surveillance #reconnaissance #métadonnées #facial #géolocalisation #biométrie #smartphone (...)
##santé ##algorithme
Terrified Atomic Workers Warn That the COVID-19 Pandemic May Threaten Nuclear Reactor Disaster
Harvey Wasserman, Common Dreams, le 10 avril 2020
▻https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/10/terrified-atomic-workers-warn-covid-19-pandemic-may-threaten-nuclear-r
▻https://www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/styles/cd_large/public/views-article/three_mile_island_-_gettyimages-110954022_0.jpg?itok=SLO0tn-S
The NRC may also certify skipping vital repairs, escalating the likelihood of major breakdowns and melt-downs. Nearly all US reactors were designed and built in the pre-digital age, more than 30 years ago. Most are in advanced decay. Atomic expert David Lochbaum, formerly with the NRC, warns that failure risks from longer work hours and deferred repairs could be extremely significant, and could vary from reactor to reactor depending on their age and condition.
Voir aussi #Tchernobyl #Ukraine:
►https://seenthis.net/messages/841505
Voir aussi #France:
►https://seenthis.net/messages/832057
#coronavirus #nucléaire #USA #un_malheur_n'arrive_jamais_seul #il_ne_manquait_plus_que_ça
Toilet Paper Wars and the Shithouse of Capitalism
The run on toilet paper has brought the failings of capitalism front and center to the bathroom of every house across Australia, a trend that has now spread to other countries. We are witnessing, in real-time and with stunning consequence, the stone-cold fact that markets are an ineffective mediator of resources, prone to the worst vagaries of herd mentality. Perceived impending shortages of toilet paper owing to the spread of COVID-19 set off widespread panic. We might be inclined to laugh at the implausibility of the whole scenario, but whether the situation is real or imagined is beside the point. The truth, which in this case may appear stranger than fiction, is that markets operate in the sweet spot between scarcity and fear.
Those who stockpiled toilet paper are in no danger of running out, and many undoubtedly have way more rolls than they could ever hope to use in the course of several months. These individuals have successfully avoided catastrophe while stuffing up their fellow citizens in the process. The whole situation is quite literally a stinking mess. What is particularly tragic though, is that this story of scarcity and hoarding is a common one. It is the story of capitalism itself.
Let’s pretend that we are talking about housing rather than toilet paper for a moment. The same principles actually apply. Those who got into the property market early, or have the ability to enter into the housing market at this stage, are the big winners. By early, we are talking several generations ago when land was cheaper and people were far fewer. It was a time when savvy buyers could accumulate vast portfolios. The payoff is that their children and grandchildren had to do very little to maintain the wealth that they inherited, other than continuing to extract value in the form of rent from the properties they owned.
This is Donald Trump’s story, and it is one of extreme privilege and exploitation. His critics are often appalled by his lack of empathy, but Trump appears to have no conception of caring for the poor precisely because he doesn’t have to. In a similar fashion, if you have a good stockpile of toilet paper, you’re likely not so worried about what everyone else in your neighborhood might be doing. You’re just looking out for number one, so you can continue to do your number twos in peace. Much like the run on toilet paper produced winners and losers by creating a situation of scarcity, so too does the housing market have the same effect.
Few can afford housing precisely because there has been a decades-long run on this commodity. The extension of the time scale makes it less obvious as to what is going on, but it is the exact same mechanism at play. Those who got into housing first have nothing to fear. They are not prone to the uncertainties that plague the experiences of those who lost out. Insecurity often comes in the form of inflated prices. While there have been examples of people trying to sell toilet paper at exorbitant prices on eBay, so far the demand has not matches sellers’ exploitative expectations. Housing is another matter, where those who did not get in early must pay inflated prices, subject themselves to an ongoing extraction of their means in the form of rent, or find themselves homeless.
The fact that there are fistfights in grocery stores is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the desperation that a populace can express when placed in a context of crisis. Violence becomes inevitable, which is a terrifying thought when we recognize that housing is a systemic crisis. On the one hand people turning on each other is a reflection of an individualist society, a cultural understanding that only emboldens the wealthy. The poor seldom form solidarities that encourage them to turn on their oppressors by organizing events like rent strikes. They are too busy fighting each other over scraps to make ends meet.
Who does hoarding hurt? The answer should be clear. Whether in housing or in toilet paper, it is poor people and working families living paycheck-to-paycheck who are worst affected. They can’t afford to stock up on commodities like toilet paper because they are continually paying rent so that they can have access to the most basic, and yet most hoarded commodity of all: housing.
The toilet paper apocalypse is already prompting people to reconsider their strategies for managing their bodily needs in ways that do not fall prey to further hoarding, paying huge ransoms, or resorting to violence. There is, for example, a lot of discussion on social media about the benefits of bidets. While responding to a shortage of toilet paper might seem trivial in the grand scheme of capitalism, it has provided us with a small glimpse into what it means to explore other ways of being in the world. In the context of housing, such experimentation comes in the form of cooperatives, intergenerational living arrangements, and even housing squats.
There is a key difference between toilet paper and housing though. Toilet paper shortages are unlikely to be a prolonged phenomenon. The boom will soon bust. Major retailers have already begun placing limits on the amount people can buy. They have intervened in the market, recognizing that any supposed invocation of it being “free” is a dystopian fantasy that is detrimental to the community as a whole. The housing situation, on the other hand, is a protracted affair, and one that leaves many people out in the cold. It is not going to fix itself, and successive governments all around the world have proven that they are unwilling to regulate in ways that are equitable. In the face of such ineffectuality and inequality, the question then becomes: how much shit are people willing to take?
▻https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/15/toilet-paper-wars-and-shithouse-capitalism
#papier_toilettes #coronavirus #confinement #Simon_Springer #capitalisme #marché #mentalité_de_troupeau #panique #PQ #rareté #peur #privilèges #exploitation #prix #logement #violence #crise #crise_systémique #individualisme #solidarité #pauvres #riches #classes_sociales #bidets #coopératives #squats #inégalités #pénurie
Despite One of World’s Worst Outbreaks of Deadly Virus, US Hits Iran With ’Brutal’ New Sanctions | Common Dreams News
▻https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/18/literally-weaponizing-coronavirus-despite-one-worlds-worst-outbreaks-d
“As Iranians are ravaged by the coronavirus, the U.S. is complicit in their death. This is a crime against humanity.”
(et dans le titre il y avait aussi ’Literally Weaponizing Coronavirus’ que je ne garde pas en titre de ce seen, pour éviter toute lecture de travers)
Report Shows ’Stunning and Dramatic’ Scenes of Thawing #Permafrost in Siberia That ’Leaves Millions on Unstable Ground’ | Common Dreams News
▻https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/04/report-shows-stunning-and-dramatic-scenes-thawing-permafrost-siberia-l
In some parts of the world, permafrost lies in a relatively thin layer just below the ground’s surface. But in much of Yakutia, the permafrost is of a special, icy and far thicker variety. Scientists call it Yedoma.
Formed during the late Pleistocene, the Earth’s last glacial period, which ended about 11,700 years ago, Yedoma consists of thick layers of soil packed around gigantic lodes of embedded ice. Because Yedoma contains so much ice, it can melt quickly—reshaping the landscape as sudden lakes form and hillsides collapse.
[...]
Scientists estimate that the Earth’s Yedoma regions contain between 327 billion and 466 billion tons of carbon. Were it all released into the atmosphere, that would amount to more than half of all human-caused emissions from greenhouse gases and deforestation between 1750 and 2011.
Avec trois degrés de plus, la #Sibérie se métamorphose - Page 1 | Mediapart
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/051019/avec-trois-degres-de-plus-la-siberie-se-metamorphose?onglet=full
Selon l’analyse du Washington Post, la région de Zyryanka, en #Yakoutie, dans l’est de la Sibérie, s’est réchauffée de plus de 3 °C depuis l’époque préindustrielle, soit environ le triple de la moyenne mondiale.
On l’ajoute à la troisième compilation :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/680147
#effondrement #collapsologie #catastrophe #fin_du_monde #it_has_begun #Anthropocène #capitalocène
US Army Tweet Inadvertently Triggers Responses Revealing ’Real, Painful, and Horrifying Human Costs of War’ | Common Dreams News
▻https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/05/26/us-army-tweet-inadvertently-triggers-responses-revealing-real-painful-
“How has serving impacted you?” the Army asked. The responses poured in.
Is Climate the Worst Casualty of War?
▻https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/07/31/climate-worst-casualty-war
the big environmental organizations seem to have tacitly agreed that the U.S. military is the entity we won’t talk about when we talk about the biggest contributors to climate change.
The Pentagon uses more petroleum per day than the aggregate consumption of 175 countries (out of 210 in the world), and generates more than 70 percent of this nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions, based on rankings in the CIA World Factbook. “The U.S. Air Force burns through 2.4 billion gallons of jet fuel a year, all of it derived from oil,” reported an article in the Scientific American. Since the start of the post-9/11 wars, U.S. military fuel consumption has averaged about 144 million barrels annually. That figure doesn’t include fuel used by coalition forces, military contractors, or the massive amount of fossil fuels burned in weapons manufacturing.
What Do We Teach Our Students About #Hiroshima and #Nagasaki?
▻https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/08/07/what-do-we-teach-our-students-about-hiroshima-and-nagasaki
I have worked in four different high schools in New York City, and have hardly heard these nuclear disasters mentioned. The few lines of a history book devoted to the stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki get skimmed over and are quickly forgotten. We would be shocked to hear of a school not teaching its students about the attacks of September 11th, in which nearly 3,000 died, but we gloss over the stories of the more than 200,000 people who died as a result of the U.S. bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When we choose to not fully teach this portion of our country’s history, we fail more than just the victims and survivors in Japan, we fail our own students by depriving them of knowledge that might move them to accomplish what other generations have not—a world free from the threat of nuclear weapons.
#occultation #mémoire #états-unis #histoire #manuels_scolaires #enseignement
Rania Khalek on Twitter : « This is alarming. The Atlantic Council—which is funded by gulf monarchies, western governments,NATO, oil and weapons companies, etc will now assist #Facebook in suppressing what they decide is disinformation. »
▻https://mobile.twitter.com/RaniaKhalek/status/997179235000340480
Facebook à bien compris que le problème n’est pas les #fake_news en soi, mais tout (que ce soit délirant ou- SURTOUT- pertinent) ce qui peut semer le doute quant aux fake news de l’ordre établi.
“Alarming”: Facebook Teams Up With Think-Tank Funded by Saudi Arabia and Military Contractors to “Protect” Democracy
▻https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/05/18/alarming-facebook-teams-think-tank-funded-saudi-arabia-and-military-co
Writing for In These Times last year, Julianne Tveten noted that, thus far, Facebook’s attempts to combat “fake news” through algorithm changes and other adjustments “haven’t stifled propaganda.”
“On the contrary, they may have stifled dissent,” Tveten concluded.
US Shootings: Gun Industry Killing More People Overseas
▻https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/04/05/us-shootings-gun-industry-killing-more-people-overseas
I live next door to the world’s biggest gun manufacturer. Here in Mexico, the murder rates are close to civil war levels. They broke records last year, for a total of 41,217 homicides, with 25,339 first degree murders over the course of the year. And those are the official figures – which if anything, tend to under report reality.
President Trump has labeled Mexican migrants heading to the US as “criminals” but has ironically overlooked the fact 70% the guns coming into Mexico originate in the US.
The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs | By Chris Hedges | Common Dreams
▻https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/12/deadly-rule-oligarchs
Oligarchs, though they speak of deconstructing the administrative state, actually increase deficits and the size and power of law enforcement and the military to protect their global business interests and ensure domestic social control. The parts of the state that serve the common good wither in the name of deregulation and austerity. The parts that promote the oligarchs’ power expand in the name of national security, economic growth and law and order.
The 10 Step Scheme for One-Sided Class War | By Ben Schreiner | Common Dreams
▻https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/12/20/10-step-scheme-one-sided-class-war
Scream about the debt and deficit. Then shrink revenue by slashing taxes and spend a ton of money on wars of choice. Repeat.
The Killing of History
▻https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/21/the-killing-of-history
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings.”
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans – it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences. In the series’ press release in Britain — the BBC will show it — there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans.
“We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.
All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the Twentieth Century: from “The Green Berets” and “The Deer Hunter” to “Rambo” and, in so doing, has legitimized subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy.” Cue Bob Dylan: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”
What ‘Decency’ and ‘Good Faith’?
To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly “South Vietnam,” the country America claimed to “save” and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse.
The “meaning” of the Vietnam War is no different from the meaning of the genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the leveling of every city in North Korea. The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American.
Quoting Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, “There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.”
Nothing has changed. When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on Sept. 19 – a body established to spare humanity the “scourge of war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its 25 million people. His audience gasped, but Trump’s language was not unusual. His rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a nation of more than 80 million people. This is the American Way; only the euphemisms are missing now.
Returning to the U.S., I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground.
▻https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-fabrique-de-lhistoire/guerre-du-vietnam-34-les-images-de-la-guerre
#Guerre_des_images et imaginaires de guerre dans le cinéma de science-fiction nord-américain
Depuis la #guerre_du_Viêt-nam, le cinéma de Science-fiction Nord Américain, avec notamment des cinéastes comme John Carpenter, John McTiernan ou James Cameron et Paul Verhoeven, s’est fait l’écho de l’histoire sociale, politique ou belliqueuse du pays, à travers des systèmes d’échos, d’échanges et d’influences entre l’imaginaire et l’histoire d’une part, et entre le cinéma et la télévision d’autre part. Ces auteurs augurent moins des dérives à venir qu’ils n’énoncent des problématiques contemporaines, leurs imaginaires du futur, en se nourrissant de ces histoires inventées, nous parlent d’une histoire « en train de se faire », tout en s’inscrivant au cœur d’un questionnement sur la place de l’image dans les représentations historiques, mais aussi son rôle passé, présent et à venir dans l’évolution des sociétés modernes.
▻http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=517
❝We had to be extremely careful because we had limited amounts of film that had been distributed to us by our paper. For us, one photo was like a bullet ❝
Nguyen Dinh UU
Arte aurait donc diffusé le même reportage : ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/631910
@Kassem
Je crois que les américains ont droit à 18h de documentaire, effectivement il s’agit du même.
Ken Burns Says the Vietnam War Was “Begun in Good Faith.” So Was Every Other Lousy War.
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/09/24/ken-burns-vietnam-war-decent-people-good-faith-afghanistan-soviets
Except that actually wasn’t a U.S. State Department cable about Vietnam and Nguyen Van Thieu. It was a December 27, 1979 missive from the Soviet Foreign Ministry about the new Afghan president Babrak Karmal, who had been installed by the Soviet troops who had just entered Afghanistan. All that was changed from the original Soviet cable is a substitution of references to Vietnam with Afghanistan and mentions of the U.S. with the Soviet Union. (As Thieu’s predecessor Ngô Dình Diem had dissatisfied the U.S. and somehow ended up dead, so too with the Soviets and Karmal’s predecessor.)
So what does this Soviet cable — filled with sincere moral fervor about helping Afghanistan — demonstrate? That all catastrophic wars are started by people who believe they’re the good guys.
So Burns and Novick aren’t wrong, exactly, about the good faith of the decent Americans who devastated Vietnam. But what truly matters is, what difference does it make? Saying that these U.S. officials wanted to do the right thing is the same as explaining, “America’s involvement in Vietnam was begun by human beings, who breathed air, ate food, and used their legs to walk around.”
There Is No Rehabilitating the Vietnam War | By Robert Freeman | Common Dreams
▻https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/24/there-no-rehabilitating-vietnam-war
There is enormous pressure and a lot of money working to rehabilitate Vietnam, to put the guilt and the shame of it behind us. But it was precisely the guilt of the people, their shame at what was being done in their name, and their courage to denounce it that made it impossible for their government to carry out the savagery any longer.
“It’s important to remember that neither Vietnam, nor Laos, nor Cambodia for that matter, ever attacked the United States. They never wanted to attack. They never tried to attack. They never had the capacity to attack. They had simply wanted their own way of life.”
Those are not the words of a leftist pundit or a scribbling anti-American. They are the words of H.R. McMaster, the sitting National Security Advisor to the President of the United States.
VIETNAM FULL DISCLOSURE
▻http://vietnamfulldisclosure.org
On May 25, 2012, in announcing a 13-year long commemoration of the war in Viet Nam funded by Congress at $65 million, President Obama proclaimed: “As we observe the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, we reflect with solemn reverence upon the valor of a generation that served with honor. We pay tribute to the more than 3 million servicemen and women who left their families to serve bravely, a world away… They pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. Through more than a decade of combat, over air, land, and sea, these proud Americans upheld the highest traditions of our Armed Forces.”[i]
Commemorations are acts of choosing what to remember about something presumably of significance. There are two parts to this:
creating a memory which is inevitably a direction to remember some things rather than others; a memory with a purpose; ostensibly to honor and thereby define honor for some future purpose;
defining some event as significant: making a major contribution to our world, a turning point.
So I will try to make an argument for the significance of the war and point at what I think ought to be remembered which will diverge from hyperbolic salutations of soldierly valor – though valor there was — to something more substantive. It will end up at cross purposes to Obama’s, I fear.
So let me develop an argument at three levels:
the war’s impact on the U.S.;
its impact on Vietnamese;
its impact on the world.
THE KEN BURNS VIETNAM WAR DOCUMENTARY GLOSSES OVER DEVASTATING CIVILIAN TOLL
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/the-ken-burns-vietnam-war-documentary-glosses-over-devastating-civilia
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdTx6zLY0Zk
Vietnam War: The Face of the Enemy (Vietnamese Perspective)
Why Americans still can’t move past Vietnam
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/10/10/why-americans-still-cant-move-past-vietnam/?tid=sm_tw
The law of war does not shield the CIA and John Brennan’s drone kill list
▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/08/law-war-cia-john-brennan-drone-kill-list
Par Morris Davis, un officier à la retraite de l’armée étasunienne.
La CIA, rappelle l’auteur, est coupable de crimes de guerre dans la mesure où ses opérateurs de drones tuent alors qu’ils ne portent pas d’uniforme.
C’est exactement l’acte d’accusation qui avait été porté par les Etats-Unis contre le Canadien Omar Khadr, comme l’expliquait déjà un article de 2010 du New York Times ▻http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/us/26gitmo.html?_r=2&ref=world& (alors même que, Khadr étant un enfant au moment des faits, cette poursuite créait un précédent fustigé à l’époque par HRW)
La pièce maîtresse de l’acte d’accusation n’est pas un acte terroriste classique – cibler des civils -, mais le fait de tuer un soldat ennemi au combat. Habituellement en temps de guerre, tuer sur le champ de bataille n’est pas passible de poursuites. Mais les Etats-Unis ont soutenu que M. Khadr ne pouvait bénéficier de cette immunité parce qu’il ne portait pas d’uniforme, entre autres exigences des lois de guerre.
Justice for Omar Khadr: Child Detainee to Receive Apology, at Least $10 Million From Canada | Common Dreams
▻https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/07/04/justice-omar-khadr-child-detainee-receive-apology-least-10-million-can