Search
Recent comments
- the secret....
8 hours 43 min ago - bomb scare.....
10 hours 14 min ago - ABC defghijk......
11 hours 27 min ago - a NOTAM....
14 hours 4 min ago - war with NATO
14 hours 32 min ago - murky and foggy....
19 hours 4 min ago - the deal is.....
19 hours 44 min ago - opinions...
21 hours 46 min ago - reduced to rubble?....
23 hours 31 min ago - bregret.....
23 hours 46 min ago
Democracy Links
Member's Off-site Blogs
the greater game of non-democratic diplomatic deception...
Blair, Bush, Bill Clinton, Obama et al should be in prison for having rorted and having rotted the game of democracy IN FAVOUR OF WAR. Internationally, they have devised ways to subjugate other countries in successive/parallel aggressive situations in which Russia and China had to react to.
While Gaddafi deplored the five members right of veto from the security council of the United Nations system, Gus would argue that this veto has to some extend helped prevent a few more GREATER wars than we have had since 1945 (65 “little” local wars or so till around 2009) — and since the creation of the United Nations.
Formulas never express reality, but they help explain the flow of whatever CHANGES. It is always necessary to question the why and therefore of intent, of ourselves and of what we think is. We are beasts that try to make sense of things and, with luck on our side, we might succeed.
At this level, we cannot pass the difficult explanation of Sean Carroll of Einstein most important equation. No, not that one that explains the relationship of Energy, Mass and the Speed of Light, but that which explains the curvature of Space/Time, which tells us about GRAVITY. We, the populace, are never told how this works because it reaches a level of annotations and relationships that only mathematicians can understand — or accept…
Such ideas and formulas do not fall from the apple tree. According to Carroll, Isaac Newton told a furphy about his discovery of the Universal planetary motion. The apple was pure disinformation. The apple was only used as an illustration of what he had thought of, not the inspiration thereof. BIG difference.
Now, in our societies, there are people who search for knowledge — in order to understand nature, principally — and there is a bunch of psychopaths, sociopaths and ignorant priests, whose job is not to help people understand, but to propagate ignorance and prejudices, to CONTROL our ideas and suck our MONEYS as well. We know.
In some “simple” societies, people are happy with the explanation: the gods created the space for us to manage as best we can, without too much trauma about life and death. We celebrate a new birth and honour/mourn a life lost with rituals. This is the way, the gods made us happy/pained mortals in between. We accept this… but.
Our knowledge is limited by what we are told, not what is being properly sought. These days, the magnificent social influencers have become the new preachers, mostly of inane no-through road in the thinking department but happy in the mud. Use this make-up on your face and your butt will look good. Nothing wrong with this. For women, painting one’s face is a way to attract a mate.
this can satisfy many people, because questioning values that are outside the box is hard yakka, and the program on the ABC (Australia) Question Everything is thus entertaining inanity, for struggling laughs.
This is where the media — the main-stream media — LIKE NEWS CORP — in our western sphere, SELL AMERICAN HEGEMONIC SUPERIORITY RATHER THAN REFLECTIVE UNDERSTANDING.
We get trapped by various discreet subterfuges, from the Disney Classics to the Life-Style decorations to define our own self-Importance. We trust (relatively) one or the other sociopath who by their clever skills of deception and propaganda, end up at the top of the tree of ruling over us. These sociopaths are POLITICIANS, who as we know too well become “corrupted by the POWER”. But rest easy: we do not have to think — Gaddafi BAD, Obama GOOD…
The media explains: Gaddafi is killing his own people. We need to stop him “because we care”. Simple. But this hides a ton of sins: America has tried to get rid of Gaddafi for the last 45 years, till the coup de grâce in 2011, and the Pentagon has worked hard to make sure “Gaddafi’s own people revolt against him”. It’s an old trick: you create a disturbance for you to squash. It’s the fire fighter-arsonist technique of old… Eventually, we are relieved. The “tyrant” is gone. Why would America try to get rid of Gaddafi? Hidden behind the wood pile, Gaddafi wanted independence from the claws of the USA/Europe/UK control colonial mechanisms, while developing Libya with innovation, financial restructuring and clear vision. “We” couldn’t allow this…
The American Neocons, including Madam Clintonite, hated Gaddafi with sheer hegemonic anger bordering on psychotic amusement. Psychos don’t care about knowledge, unless they can use it to destroy something or make someone else submit to their power. And America is the neoconic sociopathic centric country by excellence; Americans are made to believe in their superiority, in god bless America and in “might is right” from the moment they are born with a gun in hand…
In this landscape, there is is little room for equality, except the present Administration compensates with an artificially created favouritic “wokism” that will be extinguished by the 2024 presidential elections.
MEANWHILE WE ARE TOLD TO SHOP…
Amazon wants you to shop. For weeks, they have been pushing an aggressive ad campaign to drive you to their platform for Black Friday bargains.
Amazon is betting that their bargain prices will make you forget — forget about their exploited workers, about their environmental destruction about their tech services acting as the engine for the Israeli military’s assault on the children of Gaza.
But we do not forget, and we do not forgive. And this Black Friday, we are taking action.
All around the world, workers and activists are turning up this Friday to Make Amazon Pay day for its damage to workers, our communities and the planet.
The “rights” of workers and those of women have been distracted and diluted by “wokism”. Women don’t exist in the language any more… MEANWHILE, wars are still raging — to protect “the rights of people”… while these rights are loaded with emotional parameters of choice that can be expressed mathematically.
The American Empire boffins will support “Ukraine” and Israel. The Russians will try to protect the “Russians” in “Ukraine” and protect the Palestinians being eradicated by Israel. To understand why these opposing views, we need to understand the LOAD OF HISTORY.
We know that the American Empire has been focused on destroying Russia since at least 1917. I will repeat: We know that the American Empire has been focused on destroying Russia since at least 1917. This is worse than the Game of Thrown… This is the game of OF NON-DEMOCRATIC DIPLOMACY for superiority. This is not new in the sphere of international relations. Power does not grow on the tree of equality. Power is gained by making someone else submit to your will…
At this stage, Putin is in the firing line. Under instructions from the Pentagon, the western media is gunning for him. The tricks to avoid understanding use lies, porkies, falsehood, crude ideas and sheer threats. WE DON’T WANT TO UNDERSTAND beyond “Putin is a thug”.
Should we not be careful, we’d get bamboozled. We get caught and corralled. For some people, telling the truth is FRAUGHT with being booted out of YouTube or being sent to prison. Our sociopaths in government make sure of this by using all the might of crooked laws that are not fit for purpose.
As well we can fall prey to charlatans or phone-calls from an automated message telling us our Amazon account is about to get cancelled unless we ring a particular number. With different level of elevated wits and with no Amazon account, we, human individuals, can fall flat on our face.
In general, sciences try hard to minimise disinformation, yet politicians will highjack sciences for their pet projects: WAR, DECEPTION AND CONTROL via “health” and other devices.
And we shouldn’t confuse ART with science. Economics, politics, finance are ART forms that can use scientific methods and mathematical statistics, BUT THEY ARE NOT SCIENCES. The original parameters that define these activities are MADE-UP to suit an outcome, RATHER THAN BEING environmentally OBSERVED.
On the pure form of scientific investigation, Einstein saw that the Newtonian equation was not enough to define the relationships between TIME, SPACE AND GRAVITY. He wasn’t the first dude thinking about this. Under Napoleon, Laplace revised the Newtonian formulas to remove the “hand of god” that Newton had used to take care of some unaccountable values.
To some extend, Einstein did not have the FULL mathematical knowledge to formulate what he felt. But he could rely on friends and antecedent thinkers to formulate a closer function of RELATIVE REALITY.
Is mathematics an ARTFUL form/language of deception?
Or is it the truest form of understanding reality, in which the truest relationships are abstracted away from prejudices, emotions and from MATTER itself — in order to explain its behaviour?
Vectors, tensors, parameters, numbers, matrices become tools of definition for the space and time we live in. Most of us can live without understanding an ounce of such, except in the amount of dollars and pesos we need to buy our survival necessities — GET a roof, food and amusing distractions…
At this level, Newton understood such values at a greater level — that in which a whole country can become rich or go broke. He devised tricks to manipulate the price of gold and silver to enrich Britain. And he tried to make sense of GRAVITATION.
This is where a few characters come in…
Two of Marcel Grossmann's fellow MATHEMATIC students were Mileva Maric and Albert Einstein. All three became close friends and Einstein, who did not attend many lectures, borrowed Grossmann's lecture notes in order to take his examinations in 1898. This was a good choice by Einstein TO CHEAT ON HIS EXAMS, for Grossmann took careful notes - in fact these notes by Grossmann have survived so their quality can be seen today. In the final diploma examinations taken by six candidates in 1900 both Grossmann and Einstein were awarded diplomas, while Mileva failed.
After Einstein and Grossmann graduated in 1900 they continued their friendship. Einstein was looking for position and Grossmann wrote to him on 13 April 1901 telling him that his father, who was a friend of the Director of the Patent Office in Bern, had recommended Einstein for the next vacancy. Einstein was delighted to have Grossmann's support and replied in a letter written on the same day:-
Dear Marcel! When I found your letter yesterday, I was deeply moved by your devotion and compassion which did not let you forget your old luckless friend ... I would be delighted to get such a nice sphere of activity and I would spare no effort to live up to your recommendation. I came here to my parents three weeks ago in order to search from here for an assistant's position at a university. I could have found one long ago had Heinrich Weber not played a dishonest game with me. All the same, I leave no stone unturned and do not give up my sense of humour …
By this time Mileva and Einstein were deeply in love…
Enters Hermann Minkowski A FEW YEARS EARLIER....
Einstein was a student in several of the courses professor MINSKOWSKI gave — and the two would later become interested in similar problems in relativity theory.
Minkowski first showed his talent for mathematics while studying at the Gymnasium in Königsberg. Already at this stage in his education he was reading the work of Dedekind, Dirichlet and Gauss. The outstanding abilities he showed at this time were noted in a letter that Heinrich Weber, then at Königsberg University, wrote to Dedekind in 1881 (see [14]). He studied at the University of Königsberg, entering the university in April 1880. He spent three semesters at the University of Berlin, for example spending the winter semester of the academic year 1882-83 there. His became close friends with Hilbert while at Königsberg, for Hilbert was an undergraduate at the same time as Minkowski. In 1884, while he was a student at Königsberg, Hurwitz was appointed to the staff. The student Minkowski soon became close friends with the newly appointed academic Hurwitz. He received his doctorate in 1885 from Königsberg for a thesis entitled Untersuchungen über quadratische Formen, Bestimmung der Anzahl verschiedener Formen, welche ein gegebenes Genus enthält Ⓣ Minkowski became interested in quadratic forms early in his university studies. In 1881 the Academy of Sciences (Paris) announced that the Grand Prix for mathematical science to be awarded in 1883 would be for a solution to the problem of the number of representations of an integer as the sum of five squares. Eisenstein had given a formula for the number of such representations in 1847, but he had not given a proof of the result. In fact the Academy had set a problem for the Grand Prix which had already been solved, for Henry Smith had published an outline of a proof in 1867. However the Academy were unaware of Smith's contributions when the prize topic was set.
Eisenstein had been studying quadratic forms in n variables with integer coefficients (or LOADS) at the time he published his unproved formula in 1847 but as he was already ill by this time details were never published. Minkowski, although only eighteen years old at the time, reconstructed Eisenstein's theory of quadratic forms and produced a beautiful solution to the Grand Prix problem. Smith reworked his earlier proof, adding detail and submitted that to the Academy. On 2 April 1883 the Academy granted the Grand Prize in Mathematics jointly to the young Minkowski at the start of his career and to the elderly Smith at the end of his. Minkowski's doctoral thesis, submitted in 1885, was a continuation of this prize winning work involving his natural definition of the genus of a form.
In 1887, a professorship became vacant at the University of Bonn, and Minkowski applied for that position; according to the regulations of German universities, he had to submit orally to the faculty an original paper, as an Habilitationsschrift. Minkowski presented Räumliche Anschauung und Minima positiv definiter quadratischer Formen which was not published at the time. The lecture was published in 1991.
Dieudonné writes:-
This lecture is particularly interesting, for it contains the first example of the method which Minkowski would develop some years later in his famous "geometry of numbers”.
Minkowski taught at Bonn from 1887, being promoted to assistant professor in 1892. Two years later he moved back to Königsberg where he taught for two years before being appointed to the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum Zürich. There he became a colleague of his friend Hurwitz who had been appointed to fill Frobenius's chair after he left Zürich for Berlin in 1892.
If my understanding is correct, Minkowski actually thought of the SPACE-TIME relationship, while Grossmann developed the concept of the curvature of space. EINSTEIN married the two.
We, the populace, are still ignorant of what all this means… We are lucky though, as plebs, that a few people know how to use the RELATIVITY formulas to make the GPS network work with high acuracy.
So, while the scientists and mathematicians develop understanding to a high level, our PSYCHOPATHS/SOCIOPATHS in charge of nations make sure we limit our understanding to that of sheep in a paddock.
I think that, at least, Elon Musk understands MATHS, but the people in power are trying hard to shut him down. He’s taken a pseudo-government outfit to court. We shall see.
This is where algorithms find their glory, as some clever guys can manipulate OUTCOMES.
Elon Musk’s X Corp., formerly known as Twitter, accused Media Matters for America in a lawsuit of “maliciously” trying to drive away advertisers from the social media platform by reporting that ads for Apple Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and Oracle Corp. were running next to pro-Nazi content.
“Media Matters designed both these images and its resulting media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.,” the company said in a complaint filed Monday in federal court in Fort Worth, Texas.
MAY ELON MUSK WIN….
This riddle is simple. But Elon knows more — enough to make Einstein proud, I hope...
The equations must be wrong! Although the theory and the equations have passed every test, they are intrinsically incompatible with quantum theory (which has also passed every experimental test). The problem is that the equations require the energy and momentum to be defined precisely at every space time point, which contradicts the uncertainty principle for quantum states. This is not a just a problem at high energies or short distances, it is a conceptual incompatibility that applies in every lab.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/intranet/pendulum/generalrelativity/
GUS LEONISKY
CARTOONIST SINCE 1951
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...............
- By Gus Leonisky at 23 Nov 2023 - 1:56pm
- Gus Leonisky's blog
- Login or register to post comments
the heartland century....
BY PEPE ESCOBAR
Once upon a time, by the Don river, in the southern steppes of what today is still known as “Ukraine”, the Great King of Persia, the mighty Darius, leading the most powerful army ever assembled on earth, received a puzzling message from a foe he was pursuing: the nomad ruler Idanthyrsus, King of the Scythians.
A Scythian envoy arrived at the Persian camp carrying a bird; a mouse; a frog; and five arrows.
And then he left, in a rush.
Wily Darius interpreted the message as the Scythians ready to submit to the Persians.
Not so fast. It was up to Darius’s senior foreign policy advisor, Gobryas, who also happened to be his brother-in-law, to break the code:
“Unless you Persians turn into birds and fly up in the air or into mice and burrow in the ground or into frogs and leap into lakes, you will never get home again but stay here in this country, only to be shot by Scythian arrows.”
Well, apparently this tale from the depths of the pre-Silk Roads proves the strategic nightmare of waging war against elusive nomadic horse archers on the Eurasian steppes.
But that could also be a tale about waging war against invisible urban guerrillas in sandals and RPGs hidden in the rubble in Gaza; flash mini-squads emerging from tunnels to hit and burn Merkava tanks before disappearing underground.
History also tells us that Darius failed to bring the Scythian nomads to a head-to-head battle. So, in the autumn of 512 B.C., he pulled a pre-American gambit in Afghanistan 2,500 years before the fact: he declared victory and left.
That Landed Aircraft Carrier
Everyone familiar with West Asia – from US generals to grocers in the Arab Street - knows that Israel is a landed aircraft carrier whose mission is to keep West Asia in check on behalf of the Hegemon.
Of course in a dog eats dog geopolitical environment it’s easy to misunderstand all wag the dog shenanigans. What’s certain is that for hegemonic circles of the US Deep State, and certainly for the White House and the Pentagon, what matters in the current incandescent juncture is the uber-extreme/genocidal Likud-led Netanyahu government in Israel, not “Israel” per se.
That projects Netanyahu as the exact mirror image of the beleaguered sweaty sweatshirt actor in Kiev. Quite the geopolitical gift – in terms of deflecting blame away from the Hegemon for a genocide deployed live on every smartphone on the planet.
And all that conducted under a veneer of legality – as in the White House and the State Department “advising” Tel Aviv to act with moderation; yes, you can bomb hospitals, schools, medical workers, journalists, thousands of women, thousands of children, but please be gentle.
Meanwhile, the Hegemon has deployed an Armada to the Eastern Mediterranean, complete with two very expensive iron bathtubs, sorry aircraft carrier groups plus a nuclear submarine close to the Persian Gulf. That’s not exactly to survey guerrillas in underground tunnels and to “protect” Israel.
The ultimate – neocon and Zio-con - targets are of course Hezbollah, Syria, Hashd al-Shaabi in Iraq and Iran: the whole Axis of Resistance.
Iran-Russia-China, the new neocon-defined “axis of evil”, which happen to be the Top Three Actors of Eurasia integration, for all practical purposes have interpreted the genocide in Gaza as an Israeli-American operation. And they have clearly identified the key vector: energy.
The inestimable Michael Hudson has noted how “we’re really seeing something very much like the Crusades here. It’s a real fight for who is going to control energy, because, again, the key, if you can control the world’s flow of energy, you can do to the whole world what the United States did to Germany last year by blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines.”
BRICS 10 on the Move
And that brings us to the fascinating case of the OIC/Arab World delegation of Foreign Ministers now on tour of selected capitals promoting their plan for a complete ceasefire in Gaza plus negotiations for an independent Palestinian state. The delegation, called the Gaza Contact Group, includes Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria and Palestine.
Their first stop was Beijing, meeting Wang Yi, and the second stop Moscow, meeting Sergei Lavrov. That tells us all we need to know about BRICS 11 in action – even before the fact.
Well, that’s actually BRICS 10, because after the election of pro-Hegemon Zionist Javier “Chainsaw Massacre” Milei for President, Argentina is now out of the picture, and possibly discarded by January 1st, 2024, when BRICS previously 11 starts under the Russian presidency.
The OIC/Arab League special conference on Palestine in Saudi Arabia had yielded a meek final declaration that disappointed virtually the whole Global South/Global Majority. But then something started to move.
Foreign Ministers started to coordinate closely. At first Egypt with China, after previous coordination with Iran and Turkey. That may sound counter-intuitive – but it’s all due to the gravity of the situation. That explains why the Iranian Foreign Minister is not part of the current traveling delegation – which is led, in practice, by Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The meeting with Lavrov coincided with an extraordinary online BRICS meeting on Palestine, called by the current South African presidency. Crucial point: the flags of new members Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia could be identified behind the speakers.
Iran’s President Raisi went no holds barred, calling for BRICS member states to use every political and economic tool available to pressure Israel. Xi Jinping called once again for a two-state solution and positioned China as the mediator of choice.
For the first time Xi in his own words laid it all out: “There can be no security in the Middle East without a just solution to the question of Palestine. I have emphasized on many occasions that the only viable way to break the cycle of Palestinian-Israeli conflict lies in a two-state solution, in the restoration of the legitimate national rights of Palestine, and in the establishment of an independent state of Palestine."
And it should all start via an international conference.
All of the above implies a concerted BRICS 10 unified position, in the next few days, applying maximum pressure on Tel Aviv/Washington for a ceasefire, fully supported by virtually the whole Global Majority. Of course there are no guarantees the Hegemon will allow it to succeed.
Secret negotiations involving Turkey, for instance, have floundered. The idea was to have Ankara cutting off the supply of oil to Israel coming from the BTC pipeline from Baku to Ceyhan: the oil is then loaded on tankers to Ashkelon in Israel. That’s at least 40% of the oil fueling Israel’s military machine.
Ankara, still a NATO member, balked – spooked by the inevitably hardcore American response.
Riyadh, in the long run, could be even more daring: no more oil exports until there’s a definitive solution to Palestine according to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. Yet MbS won’t do it – because Saudi wealth is all invested in New York and London. It’s still a long, winding, bumpy road to the petroyuan.
Meanwhile, realpolitik practitioners such as John Mearsheimer correctly point out that a negotiated solution for Israel-Palestine is impossible. A quick glance at the current map shows how the two-state solution – advocated by everyone from China and Russia to the Arab world – is dead; a Palestinian state, as Mearsheimer noted, “is going to be like an Indian reservation” in the US, “cut apart and isolated, not really a state.”
No Hedging When it Comes to Genocide
So what is Russia to do? Here is a very good informed hint.
“Putin in the Labyrinth” means Moscow actively involved, in a BRICS 10 manner, to bring about a peaceful West Asia while maintaining internal stability in Russia under the ever-evolving Hegemon Hybrid War: it’s all interconnected.
The Russia-China strategic partnership’s approach to West Asia set on fire by the usual suspects is all about strategic timing and patience – which the Kremlin and the Zhongnanhai exhibit in droves.
No one really knows what goes on in the background – the deep shadow play behind the fog of intertwined wars. Especially when it comes to West Asia, always enveloped in serial mirages arising from the desert sands.
At least we may try to discern mirages around the Persian Gulf monarchies, the GCC – and especially what MbS and his mentor MbZ are really playing at. This is the absolutely crucial fact: both the Arab League and the OIC are controlled by the GCC.
And yet, as both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi become members of BRICS 10, they certainly see that the Hegemon’s new gambit is to set back the advances of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in West Asia by setting the region on fire.
Yes, this is the War against China morphing from Hybrid to Hot, side by side with the Final Solution for the “Palestinian problem”.
And as a bonus, from the Hegemon’s perspective, that should bring this bunch of desert bedouins firmly on board the new D.O.A. gambit, the IMEC (India-Middle East Corridor), which is in fact the Europe-Israel-Emirates-Saudi Arabia-India trade corridor, in theory a competitor to BRI.
A major running theme across all nooks and crannies of the Arab street is how killing off the Palestinian resistance is an even more passionate issue for the sold out GCC elites than confronting Zionism.
That explains, at least in part, the non-reaction reaction of the GCC to the ongoing genocide (they are now trying to make amends). And that is parallel to their non-reaction reaction to the Hegemon’s methodical, slow motion genocide, rape and pillaging over time of Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, Libyans, Yemenis, Sudanese and Somalis.
It's absolutely impossible – and inhuman – to hedge when it comes to genocide. The verdict is still pending on whether the GCC has chosen a side, thus turning completely apart, spiritually and geopolitically, from the wider Arab street.
This genocide may be the defining moment of the young 21st century - realigning the entire Global South/Global Majority and clarifying who’s on the right side of History. Whatever it does next, the Hegemon seems destined to totally lose the entire West Asia, the Heartland, wider Eurasia and the Global South/Global Majority.
Blowback works in mysterious ways: as the “aircraft carrier” in West Asia went utterly insane, it only turbo-charged the Russia-China strategic partnership to mold History further on down the road to the Eurasia Century.
https://sputnikglobe.com/20231121/pepe-escobar-will-russia-china-strategic-patience-extinguish-the-fire-in-west-asia-1115110062.html
READ FROM TOP.
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW NOW NOW..................
hell flick......
In early January 2009, a thirteen-year-old girl named Almaza Samouni watched in horror as 30 members of her family were killed while her home in Gaza was shelled by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during Operation Cast Lead. Among the victims was her brother, who was struck by a missile while exiting the house to look for wood.
Corporate War Profiteers Finally Put on TrialBy Jeremy KuzmarovThe lethal missile that killed her brother was fired from an Apache AH-64 attack helicopter, which had been supplied to the IDF by Boeing, a top American defense contractor with headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
On November 12, 2023 a group of peace activists associated with World Beyond War convened a war crimes tribunal designed to hold Boeing and three other top defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and General Atomics—accountable for the kind of war crimes that led to the death of Almaza Samouni’s brother and most of the rest of her family.
The coordinator of the tribunal, Brad Wolf, is a former prosecutor from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who works with the group Peace Action Network. He said that the aim of the tribunal was to provide documentation over several months that would prove how the defendants had produced weapons they knew would be used to kill civilians in violation of international law.
Prior to the opening of the tribunal, Wolf and his co-coordinators Kathy Kelly and Nick Mottern, both long-time peace activists, hand-delivered subpoenas to the corporate office in Washington, D.C., of the defendants who stand accused of malicious disregard for human life.
When the defendants failed to respond after 90 days, a contempt citation was issued.
Nick Mottern emphasized in his remarks at the tribunal’s opening that a key model for the “merchants of death” tribunal is the Nuremberg trial following World War II, in which Nazi leaders were put on trial for their actions during World War II.
Largely forgotten about those trials was that, in 1947, executives of the three largest German war profiteers, Krupp, I.G. Farben and Flick, were put on trial and held legally accountable for participating in war crimes.
In the 1930s, Krupp and Farben had been among 25 German corporations that paid $30 million to bail out the Nazi Party and ensure its rise to power. They supported Adolf Hitler because of his promise to eliminate the trade unions and communists and because of the allure of war profits under his rule.
Mottern pointed out that, sadly, the tribunal, under U.S. pressure, dropped the most important charge accusing the corporate executives of planning and waging a war of aggression and, instead, prosecuted them for the lesser crime of slavery and theft of property from other countries.
After the war, the U.S. was intent on reintegrating German industrial capacity into the global capitalist order and bolstering West Germany’s economy for purposes of the Cold War.
By 1951, Alfred Krupp and other war industry executives were released from prison under orders of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, and in 1957 Krupp was featured on the cover of Time magazine, which published a flattering article celebrating his command over a $1 billion business empire.
Mottern said that today’s world has eerie similarities to the 1930s and 1940s, where war corporations are fueling U.S. aggression across the globe and creating an environment in which a world war could break out at any moment. Since 9/11, the U.S. military has killed millions of people of color in the Middle East and around the world as it has engaged in a war of colonial conquest and plunder driven by arms merchants.
In the Shadow of the Nye CommitteeTitle of a best-selling 1937 book by H.C. Engelbrecht and F.C. Hanighen, the term “merchants of death” was first popularized in the aftermath of World War I when the American public woke up to the fact that weapons companies and bankers like J.P. Morgan had provoked the U.S. intervention in the Great War.
In the early 1930s, Senator Gerald Nye (R-ND) led congressional hearings that exposed the machinations of the death merchants and advocated for the nationalization of the arms industry.
At the beginning of the hearing Wolf emphasized that the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war would be the focal point for the tribunal’s first session because of the grave humanitarian crisis. The featured speaker, Christian Sorensen, an Air Force veteran and military expert, detailed the extensive U.S. weapons supplies to Israel by the tribunal’s defendants who, Sorensen said, had to be aware that their weapons were being used to kill Palestinian civilians.
Sorensen specified that U.S. weapons sales to Israel total $3.8 billion per year and include:
All of the above weapons sales are in violation of the Leahy Law (named after former Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy) that forbids U.S. weapons supplies to governments and military and police units that have been credibly alleged to have committed human rights violations.
On October 31, JDAM bombs were found to have been used in strikes on the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza that killed at least 50 Palestinian civilians and buried another 100 under rubble.
A former Pentagon chief of high-value targeting in Iraq, Mark Garlasco, said that “JDAMs will burrow through the ground and have a delayed detonation, causing buildings [in the refugee camp] to collapse on themselves. This helps to explain the extent of the damage.”
Profits over PeopleAlthough Craig Mokhiber, the now former director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called Israel’s attack on Gaza a textbook case of genocide, executives at Raytheon, Lockheed and Boeing see in it a great business opportunity.
Wall Street stocks of weapons-makers have risen 7% since the war started. Journalist Matthew Gault reported that Lockheed, Northrop Grumman and RTX (Raytheon) all mentioned the potential business opportunities of the Israel-Hamas war on earnings calls this week.
The head of aerospace and defense equity research at Morgan Stanley said during RTX’s October 24 earnings call: “Looking at the White House’s $106 billion supplemental funding request, you’ve got equipment for Ukraine and missile defense for Israel and replenishment of stockpiles for both. And this seems to fit quite nicely with Raytheon’s defense portfolio.”
These comments exemplify Wolf’s point about the war industry’s malicious disregard for human life as the quest for higher profits overrides any humanitarian considerations.
Further underscoring this point, a video that was presented to the tribunal about Israel’s 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead detailed egregious war crimes carried out with weapons supplied by the defendants. Fragments from bombs that killed Gazans were linked back to Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, whose Apache helicopters and F-16 jets carried out the bombing that pulverized much of Gaza.
Lockheed Martin’s connection to the Israeli military was so close that it established an Israeli subsidiary in 2014.
This is despite the fact that the IDF deliberately struck civilian buildings where people were sheltered while using white phosphorus, a napalm-like weapon that burns people’s flesh to the bone, and Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIMEs) supplied by the U.S., which release deadly shrapnel particles in order to maximize the suffering of the Gazan people.
The evidence presented on the first day of the tribunal was, on the whole, both jarring and compelling. Already, one comes away convinced of the moral and legal culpability of the defendants for crimes on a scale not far removed from the Nazis. Future hearings and testimonials should provide even more definitive proof of guilt.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/11/20/corporate-war-profiteers-finally-put-on-trial/
READ FROM TOP.
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW NOW NOW..................
clare does it....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26d12wbpgrE
Clare Daly Destroys Israel's Evil Narrative | The Monthly Daly | SpecialREAD FROM TOP.
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW NOW NOW..................
new maths?.....
MUCH OF THE "NEW MATHS" IS OLD MATHS "LANGUAGE AND EQUATIONS" USED BY MATHEMATICIANS FOR YONKS, BUT THAT HAVE ENTERED THE MAIN STREAM TEACHING AT SCHOOL LEVEL... THIS USED TO BE THE DOMAIN OF ENGINEERS, SCIENTISTS, PHYSICISTS AND ACCOUNTANTS...
IN REGARD TO THE ARTICLE AT TOP BY GUS, HE HAS SEEN THREE LECTURES BY SEAN CARROLL ON YOUTUBE, AND THE EASIEST ONE TO UNDERSTAND IS THAT TO THE PSW (PHILOSOPHERS SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON):
https://pswscience.org/meeting/2478/
MEANWHILE HERE IS A CARTOON FROM THE 1960s/EARLY 1970s FROM THE NEW YORKER....:
READ FROM TOP.
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW NOW NOW..................