A Water Crisis Threatens the People of the Middle East

Freedomist Editor August 23, 2021

PGC – The bloom of the Middle and Near East in the 20th Century that has become the spectacular urban expansion of the 21st century may be built on sand that is running out water beneath it. As populations have expanded, growing states in this region have been relying on pumping water from underground to match the rain shortfalls the region is now experiencing as far as sustaning human life at this expanded populated level.

The nations are choosing to keep pumping from below, but the waters are running out as rain fails to replenish what was taken out. The added concern for this region comes from the potential for climate change to drive the temperatures up even higher, and also what would be the expected prolonged droughts from such a change. It could well be that these regions simply will not be able to provide for the amount of humans that live here, with our best technology, and our best planning factored in.

The Middle East is running out of water, and parts of it are becoming uninhabitable. : Futurology

From www.reddit.com
2021-08-22 14:07:31
/u/filosoful
Excerpt:

Such problems are familiar in many parts of the Middle East — where water is simply running out.

The region has witnessed persistent drought and temperatures so high that they are barely fit for human life. Add climate change to water mismanagement and overuse, and projections for the future of water here are grim.

Some Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Iraq and Jordan, are pumping huge amounts of water from the ground for irrigation as they seek to improve their food self-sufficiency, Charles Iceland, the global director of water at the World Resources Institute (WRI), told CNN. That’s happening as they experience a decrease in rainfall.

“They’re using more water than is available routinely through rain. And so groundwater levels are consequently falling because you’re taking water out faster than it’s being replenished by the rainfall,” he said.

That’s what’s happening in Iran, where a vast network of dams sustains an agricultural sector that drinks up about 90% of the water…

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Amazon Wants to Be Conglomo

Freedomist Editor August 23, 2021

PGC – It appears that Amazon is set to move into the brick and mortar business on a much-larger scale than it has today. Amazone has announced its plans to open up massive department stores to rival Walmart, and it will begin its experiment in California, where it hopes it can quickly expand across the US and then the World.

Some believe the move is not about wanting to become a department store business, but it’s more about two things, eliminating brick and mortar competition and, more importantly perhaps, gathering more data to enhance its online business, which it fully intends on remaining its major focus.

What it intends on doing with that is not just about enhancing its online super department store, but about creating new digital products and services so that it can one day even rival Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Amazon Social could be just around the corner, well, not literally, but don’t be surprised to see such a move soon after these department stores start to spread.

In the 90s cartoon show Rocko’s Modern Life, the whole town was essentially owned by the only corporation around, Conglomo. It’s slogan was simply “We own you.” Perhaps Amazon’s Jeff Bezos watched that show in the 90s (It was an adult-themed show) and rather than coming away from it like most of us did (Conglomo sucks and such a thing is an abomination to all things good and decent), I think perhaps Bezos came away from that whole exchange thinking, “One day, I too might be a Conglomo.”

After Killing Department Stores, Amazon Now Plans to Make Department Stores

From futurism.com
2021-08-21 16:30:48
Tony Tran
Excerpt:

In an almost cruel twist of irony, Amazon is allegedly planning on opening large physical stores akin to department stores in the near future.

These brick-and-mortar locations will allow customers to purchase clothes, electronics, kitchen appliances, and more, according to The Wall Street Journal. The ecommerce and web hosting giant is slated to first open their department stores in California and Ohio.

The Amazon stores are expected to occupy roughly 30,000 square feet. That’s smaller than your typical Macy’s or Target, but are about in line with recently opened department stores from Nordstrom, the WSJ reports.

Amazon’s push for more brick-and-mortar stores such as their bookstores can all be brought back to one dark yet simple reason: data.

As it stands, the tech giant is lagging behind Facebook and Google when it comes to the digital ad industry…….

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Making Plants Better Chemical Factories

Freedomist Editor August 23, 2021

PGC – The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has released findings that claim scientists there have developed a method to efficiently convert plant matter to numerous useful chemical bioproducts. The scientists engineered yeast to interact with plant matter in such a way that it was able to produce a number of useful cehmicals from the plant that had heretofor not been possible. The team used xylos and acetate to interact with a part of the plant called Lignocellulose.

This material is what gives plants their rigidity and structure. It has long been suspected of being a source of biofuel, and now, after these experiments, the sceintists from the University of Illionois Urbana-Champaign are claiming they have an effective method to harvest from plants tremendous new biofuels, meaning someday you might have something like a farm tower in your community that is used to grow the fuel that primarily runs your cars.

Other possibilities for this breakthrough might lead to hospitals one day being able to grow plants in their own on-site farm towers that can be converted to a much wider range of inhouse medicine production than previously imagined. Coupling this technology with chemical 3D printing, going to your neighborhood medical manufacturing center icould become a potential reality in the next few decades. The center might have a couple of farm towers attached to some processing centers and 3D print stations, ready at a moment’s notice to print on demand the medical needs of the community.

Bioprocess for converting plant materials into valuable chemicals — ScienceDaily

From www.sciencedaily.com
2021-08-17 17:14:46

Excerpt:

A team of scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed a bioprocess using engineered yeast that completely and efficiently converted plant matter consisting of acetate and xylose into high-value bioproducts.

Lignocellulose, the woody material that gives plant cells their structure, is the most abundant raw material on Earth and has long been viewed as a source of renewable energy. It contains primarily acetate and the sugars glucose and xylose, all of which are released during decomposition.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, the team described its work, which offers a viable method for overcoming one of the major hurdles impeding the commercialization of lignocellulosic biofuels — the toxicity of acetate to fermenting microbes such as yeast.

“This is the first approach to demonstrate the efficient and complete utilization of xylose and acetate for the production of biofuel,” said food science and human nutrition professor Yong-Su Jin. An affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, Jin led the research with then-graduate student Liang Sun, the first author of the paper.

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Son of Legendary Mujahideen Commando Resists Taliban in the Panjshir Valley

Freedomist Editor August 23, 2021

PGC – A last remnant of Taliban resistance in Afghanistan remains in the Panjshir Valley, in the Northeastern regiion of the embattled country. A legend in his own right, Ahmad Massoud, the leader of what the Taliban themselves refer to as the Panjshir state, is also the son of a legendary mujahideen Fighter and Commando Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated just before the successful 9/11 assault on America led by Osama Bin Laden.

The American military appears not to be a factor in the fate of this holdout area within Afghaanistan that has managed to muster a resistance force of some 9.000 fighters peppered throughout the mountains that catacomb the valley the Taliban must walk into and claim.

Taliban Says “Hundreds” Of Fighters Heading For Holdout Afghan Valley

From www.ndtv.com
2021-08-22 16:59:19

Excerpt:

Afghanistan Crisis: Panjshir, north of Kabul, is long known as an anti-Taliban bastion.

Dubai:

The Taliban said on Sunday that “hundreds” of its fighters were heading to the Panjshir Valley, one of the few parts of Afghanistan not yet controlled by the group.

Since the Taliban overran Afghanistan, flickers of resistance have begun to emerge with some ex-government troops gathering in the Panjshir, north of Kabul, long known as an anti-Taliban bastion.

“Hundreds of Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate are heading towards the state of Panjshir to control it, after local state officials refused to hand it over peacefully,” the group wrote on its Arabic Twitter account.

Since the Taliban took control of the country following a lightning charge into the capital Kabul, thousands of people have made their way to Panjshir, according to a spokesman for anti-Taliban forces.

In Panjshir, Ahmad Massoud, the son of legendary mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud who was assassinated by Al-Qaeda two days before the September 11, 2001 attacks, has sought to assemble a force of around 9,000 people to counter the terrorists, the spokesman, Ali Maisam Nazary, told AFP.

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Chinese State News Gets Preferential Treatment from Our

Twitter and Facebook Like China Better than They Like Americans

Freedomist Editor August 23, 2021

PGC – China’s state news media outlets are clearly dedicated to spreading misinformation on a daily basis that serves the interests of one man, Chairman Xi, the absolute fascistic dictator of China and head of the Chinese Communist Party, the big brother of the American Democrat National Committee. These organizations are given free reigh on American social media platforms, operated, owned, and run by human beings who openly hate America, the Bill of Rights, and liberty in general. These platforms regularly remove American citizens from their platforms for allegedly spreading misinformation while they continue to allow an enemy of the American people, the CCP (DNC ally and inspiration), to spread disinformation on their platform designed to destroy the American democratic republic limited by a bill-of-rights-based constitution.

They win because they have allies in our boardrooms, not because they’re clever. They’re jsut really good at offering bribes, like access to a massive money-making market in exchange for acting more in line with the CCP than our own Bill of Rights.

Xinhua Infiltrates Western Electronic Media, Part 2: Relationships with News Agencies and Distribution Services

From jamestown.org
2021-08-17 18:31:43

Excerpt:

Author’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part article series in China Brief exploring methods by which Xinhua and other Chinese state-owned media organizations are seeking greater presence and influence for their propaganda material in English-language online media. The first article examined recent examples of “advertorial” advertising, in which Xinhua content has been hosted on the websites and promoted in the e-mail advertising of prominent English-language news and foreign affairs publications (China Brief, April 12).

Introduction

Xinhua, the state news agency of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), serves a role very different from that of its nominal counterparts in democratic states, such as Britain’s BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, or Taiwan’s Central News Agency. Xinhua (新华 or “New China”) functions as the official mouthpiece of China’s ruling party: Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping, reinforcing a long-standing…

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US Claims It’s Protecting Afghanis By Scrubbing the Internet of the Afghan War

Freedomist Editor August 23, 2021

PGC – The United States State Deparment has made it clear it is attempting to delete from the Internet the history of the Afghan War in the name of protecting the Afghanis who stood with the US against the Taliban. The move could be on its face just what it says it is, but given the nature of an emboldened state that now has the full coopreation of the massive corpostates that support and enable it, and even move coervcively against its opponents in ways the state itself can’t, one should be paying close attention to attempts by this government to gaslight Americans into being whatever the state wants to believe about what actually happened in Afganistan.

The US Is Removing Records of Its War in Afghanistan From the Internet

From www.vice.com
2021-08-18 16:19:27
Matthew Gault
Excerpt:

America’s war in Afghanistan is vanishing from the internet. Federal agencies are wiping websites of videos, articles, and photos and saying it must be done to protect the lives of the Afghans left behind who may face retaliation from the Taliban.

State Department Spokesperson Ned Price told the Associated Press that the process of scrubbing online evidence of Afghans working with coalition forces “is of the utmost importance” and that State’s policy is “only to remove content in exceptional situations like this one. In doing so, department personnel are following records retention requirements.”

The United States Agency for International Development—the agency in charge of much of the more than $100 billion America spent reconstructing Afghanistan—is also purging records. “Given the security situation in Afghanistan, and out of an abundance of caution for the safety of our staff, partners, and beneficiaries, we are reviewing USAID public websites and social media…

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Black Man Gets CRT Cancelled from His California School District

Freedomist Editor August 23, 2021

PGC – The American standards of the Bill of Rights are under direct assault as DNC operatives and their fanatical true believers attempt to coercively unleash on American chidlren an ideology of hate and bigotry that promises to end evil by perpetuating worse evil than the evil they profess to be fighting. It will be our immigrants, it will be our very disenfranchised that will see more clearly than the white suburban ‘allies’ could ever see, just how dangerous it is to go down the road of defining humans based on their race,their gender, their sexual orientation, etc.

One person that fits into that category is the black man, who has faced centuries of real discrimination that has performed habits of action that continuously diminishes their agency and their humanity. One black man sees that the ones promising him relief from this real injustice are worst than the injustice he actually faces. This black man went to a school board meeting in his California School District and layed out just how damanging this ideology of hate and fear is not just to the people it allegedly targets (white heterosexual males and cisgendered females) but it also diminishes the agency and humanity of the people it allegedly is seeking to rescue.

If Whie Americans were as truly “woke” (not Orwellian woke, as the CRT folks are), then this whole awful experiment would be over, and we could get to the adult business of actually righting the injustices of the past, and the ones still occuring.

Black Father’s Impassioned Plea on Critical Race Theory Leads School District to Ban It – RedState

From redstate.com
2021-08-22 11:45:16

Excerpt:

And another one bites the dust.

A black father in Colorado delivered an emotional speech in which he thoroughly destroyed Critical Race Theory during a school board meeting last week — for which he earned a standing ovation from other parents. Moments later, the board members voted to ban CRT in the district.

Coincidental? Dunno.

But I do know the number of school boards — and states — banning CRT continues to increase, as more and more angry parents speak out against the radical-left orthodoxy, which teaches (indoctrinates) that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” — simply and solely by virtue of the color of their skin, and as a result must spend their entire lives atoning to people of color for the “sin” of being born white.

Colorado school district bans critical race theory after black father delivers rousing speech: ‘We are not victims of America’

Via ⁦@theblaze⁩
https://t.co/5I2bzTR5RD

— Tim Gradous (@tgradous) August 21, 2021

As

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Washington State Attempts to Force Christian Ministry to Accept LGBTQ Values As Their Own

Freedomist Editor August 23, 2021

PGC – Next to California, Washington State might be the most unamerican of all our 50 states, having fully embraced CCP values over Bill of Rights Values. The Washington Supreme Court has recently ruled that religious organizations must have members and employees that live lifestyles the religion does not approve of. The Ministry is the Seattle Union Gospel Mission and it is seeking relief from SCOTUS. It remains to be seen how “American” SCOTUS is at this point, but either way, at least our American remnant will know what is real versus what is hoped after the ruling, or the decision to not invervene, occurs.

Seattle Homeless Ministry Asks Supreme Court to Help After LGBT Lawsuit Tries to Force It to Violate Christian Beliefs

From www1.cbn.com
2021-08-17 20:06:55

Excerpt:

Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission has filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to decide its case after the Washington Supreme Court ruled in favor of a bisexual lawyer who sued the mission over its faith-based hiring policy.

Attorney Matt Woods sued Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission in 2017 when the nonprofit refused to hire him to its free legal aid clinic after he disclosed he was in a same-sex relationship, the Seattle Times reported.

The mission, one of the largest homeless services nonprofits in the Seattle area, argued it was exempt from the state’s anti-discrimination law as a religious employer. A King County Superior Court judge agreed, dismissing Woods’ lawsuit.

However, the Washington state Supreme Court overturned the judge’s decision in March, kicking Woods’ case back to the lower court and questioning whether the exemption applied to a staff attorney at a legal aid clinic within a religious organization.

Nonprofit’s Public Credibility Lost if Attorneys Do Not…

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Corporate DNC Seeks to Undermine GOP Covid Governance in Texas

Freedomist Editor August 16, 2021

As the DNC and the Corpowoketarianz become more and more dependent on one another for power, they will inceasingly walk lock step with each other in terms of the types of human action governnce they are willing to attempt to affect using coercive action, be it the direct action of the state, or the soft-power extension of the state (the part the DNC controls), the Corpowoketarianz, the American international corporations that all decided to go all-in with the Corpowoketarianz agenda and surrender any semblance of Bill-of-Rights-Based Americanism in how they treat their employees and their customers.

The Corpowoketarianz are most likely at the zenith of their power, and I have little doubt the government-powered faction of this unholy alliance will eventually move to strike down the power the corpowoketarianz currently poesses, but, for now, the state and the corporation are one, and will be for the near-foreseeable future. Texas is becoming a battleground of sorts, a proving ground, really for corowoketarianz power. If the corpowoketarianz, through the use of their considerably market monopoly power, a power protected directly by state guns, can flip Texas blue, then the end is near for all political parties outside the DNC-Corpowoketarianz one.

Once that power consolidation is complete, the infighting between the very wealthy families of tech and the very wealthy families of legacy (government and legacy business) will begin. I am betting the old guard will eventually purge and claim the toys of the new guard (the wealthy new corpowoketarianz feudal lords and ladies) for themselves. But let’s hope we never have to ask theat question, as it is on that will never be answered if they faill to consolidate political party power.

In Texas, the GOP is against mandates in general regarding Covid. The official DNC policy is mandate and control and capitalize on this ’emergency’ to continue to sieze wealth from the many that is given to their billionaire allies while also developing habits of police-state submission and expectation from the masses. And our American corporations, the corpowoketarianz, have signed on, for the sake of their government ally, their brother in seditious arms, the DNC.

This is not to suggest that I know exactly how to handle our Covid reality, or that mandates, be it vaccines or masks, might or might not be justified, this is to suggest that the usefulness to we the poors, the powerless, is the least of the concerns or motivations for the DNC and the Corpowoketarinz that do its soft power bidding.

Texas GOP’s All-In Focus on Culture War Spurs Corporate Backlash – Bloomberg

From www.bloomberg.com
2021-08-12 15:17:31

Excerpt:

Business and politics are colliding in Texas, where Republican Governor Greg Abbott is facing backlash over a conservative social agenda that companies say will make it harder for them to attract and retain the best talent.

The latest flare-up came Wednesday, when Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, a Democrat, issued an executive order that requires masks be worn inside businesses and schools, defying Abbott’s ban on such mandates. Issues like voting rights and the treatment of transgender children have also recently divided the governor and corporations operating in the state. Dell Technologies Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. have publicly criticized priorities of the Republican-dominated state government.

It’s an awkward position for a politician who has painted himself as a champion of economic development, ready to tout successes in luring Oracle Corp., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Tesla Inc. to the Lone Star State and helping oversee the nation’s biggest jobs increase from 2010 to 2020. But facing re-election next year along with declining popularity and ultra-conservative challengers in the Republican primary vote, Abbott has pushed for legislation that plays well with his base even if it’s increasingly at odds with major corporations.

“Since the time George W. Bush was governor, we have seen that economic development as a cornerstone for growth for the Republican party in Texas,” said Jim Riddlesperger, a political science professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. “What he is doing here is playing to the audience for the Republican primary and not to the general public.”

There’s a risk to that strategy come general election time, amid an influx of newcomers from companies relocating to the state as well as pandemic-era transplants lured by warm weather and zero income taxes. Many of those new residents have a more liberal disposition than life-long Texans, threatening the Republican party’s dominance of the state, which boasts the world’s ninth-largest economy.

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Belarus Cancels Extremist News Sites

Freedomist Editor August 16, 2021

PGC – There are a lot of people out there that call themselves ‘leftists’ who also claim to support consensual exchange, while at the same time continue to support the DNC version of leftism that uses moral supremacist tactics to create police state powers for corporations and governments alike.

Though warned long ago that their tactic of ‘punching Nazis’ would lead to what we see today, Corpowoketarianizm, where their very core ideals have been commodified and altered to fit the agenda of the same billionaires these leftists claim to want to stop, these consensual-seeking leftists continued to stand behind the DNC as corpowoketarianizm spread throughout the land, starting in our colleges and universities, spreading like the plague in social media, then extending to our financial institutions which emboldened the rest of the corporate world to join in with full zeal, seeing the opportunity to elimiate competition among the poors by perepatuating divisions amongst the powerless.

Now we see in Belarus, a dictatorship in the truest sense of the term, the tactic of stigmatiizng people based on the label extremist being used to shut down news outlets that don’t advance the party line. It’s the government itself that’s doing this, though, to be sure, if government had an industry in its back pocket, it too would be happy to use that soft power over direct state power. They must envy the position of the DNC compared to themselves.

They had to actually pass anti-extremist laws, which was easy enough to do in a disarmed country with no Bill of Rights sown into the fabric of the narratives of a people, such as we still have in America today. They passed the laws and had no legal roadblocks to impede them such as the government would face in America, even now.

They are well within the ethical standards of the corpowoketarianz that currently occupy our lands. They are using the label extremist to cancel the extremists, just as the corporations are using that label to cancel opposition to the one-party–to-be-DNC. Eventually, it is hoped by the DNC, they will be able to declare people extremists too and use the full power of the state to cancel them as well.

Belarusian court bans Tut.by and affiliated news website Zerkalo.io as ‘extremist’

From cpj.org
2021-08-16 16:15:17

Excerpt:

Stockholm, August 16, 2021 – Belarus authorities should refrain from contesting the appeal of news website Zerkalo.io against its designation as “extremist,” and cease using the country’s anti-extremism laws to stifle independent reporting, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

On May 18, authorities raided the offices of the independent news website Tut.by, interrogated about 130 members of its staff, blocked the outlet’s website, and detained at least a dozen employees for suspected tax evasion, according to CPJ reporting from the time and Anna Kaltygina, former news desk manager at Tut.by, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.

Several of the outlet’s employees fled Belarus, and on July 8 launched Zerkalo.io as a temporary replacement for Tut.by, according to Kaltygina, who now works as the acting editor-in-chief of Zerkalo.io. Belarus authorities blocked access to the website within the country immediately after its launch,…