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.
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…
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.”
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…….
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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’
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’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…
Incredible as it sounds, most voters most of the time are likely to vote for some degree of authoritarianism if the person or policy promises benefits based on shallow needs and wants and/or parochial interests. It’s not a left or right, Democrat versus Republican, thing. Regardless of your left or right leanings or your party affiliation, you have been subconsciously indoctrinated through socializing agents and acculturation to not think deeply or according to ideals and principles, which makes you relatively easy to control.
Today we make note it is mostly Democrats who are keen on authoritarianism, but they are not the sole progenitors of authoritarianism! Authoritarianism is basically a monopoly of power and control by a snall hierarchical cadre, often but not always led by a dictator or monarch, without any practical accountability to anyone.
Democrats are not the problem, at times past especially, and probably in the future, Republicans also bend toward this trait. The Republican leadership typically offers reactionary resistance to most anything that addresses poverty or racism or any real social injustice. This belies their claims to be all about freedom and prosperity, because if you deny justice and equality to some, even if just through neglect, you are not truly for freedom and prosperity. Just as the left wears justice and equality as a banner to repaint their authoritarianism, so the right tend to wave the banner of freedom and prosperity, neither side’s leaders actually live up to these branding claims.
Why then do Republicans in primaries and general elections often promote authoritarians like Mitt Romney and the Bushes? Why did the GOP become essentially a sort of fan club for one man, Donald Trump, whose own behavior and some of his views also tend to go against a true freedom and prosperity agenda? (Being for or against Trump isn’t the issue, the issue is that many simply follow Trump and don’t really have any other reason to support Republicans.)
Why do Democratic voters let people control their party who genuinely reject the fundamentals of civil rights whenever it is convenient and/or hurts their opponents? Why do Democratic voters tend to support an abundance of laws and regulations that fail to deliver on their promised benefit while simply making life harder for more people?
The basic question is, why, after one scratches the surface and finds a politician and/or a policy that tends toward authoritarianism do voters in both parties vote for these people and policies? More basically, why do voters vote for authoritarianism?
The average person and the mass mind follow basic animal instinct, they judge every book by its cover and they weigh most every choice on shorter term personal gain of the most basic of needs and wants. The average person and the mass mind live in a shallow way, they don’t dig too deep or look too high, they cannot see very far in the future or very far into the past. The entire premise of marketing is to understand and influence the instinctive aninal brain and to depend on a population not being trained to dig deeper, to know history, or to use logic and critical thinking to ascertain long-term future probabilities.
If you were to explore, learn, understand, and apply the deeper and more sublime ideals and principles of freedom, the balance of virtue, liberty and independence and the core ideals, you would find that you are not very free, that most all your political options tend to oppose these freedom ideals and principles to some degree, and that you can be more free. But most people don’t think in terms of ideals and principles and they don’t consciously or with any discipline evaluate anything on the basis of ideals and principles.
The word “indoctrination” is usually a negative term for people. When schools stop teaching essentials and skills and seek only to indoctrinate children into following a radical leftwing authoritarian ideology, even though it is not presented openly for what it is, we think of indoctrination as something very bad. But indoctrination is just the internalization of doctrine and if the doctrine is good and the indoctrination process is open, transparent, and engaged in freely, it’s just a way to internalize a compass that gives direction to our decisions and behaviors and thus increases our chances for success and happiness.
The insidious and deliberate use of socializing agents of influence and control to subconsciously inculcate us with what are bad doctrines rooted in authoritarianism is the kind of indoctrination we need to guard our hearts and minds against. The use of this form of indoctrination has never been worse or more prevalent in human civilization. On the other hand, we have never had more information and insight into how socialization and acculturation work than we do now, so we can protect ourselves from this like never before.
Most people are not self-indoctrinated to understand freedom ideals and principles, therefore they can be made to support people and policies that undermine their own freedom, do them injustice, create massive inequalities, and reduce prosperity for most people. It is true that justice, equality, and prosperity matter and tend to promote success and happiness, but the foundation of these things is freedom.
To be clear, our concept of freedom is not to be confused with the brand of freedom used to help elect Republicans. Often this is itself rather shallow and limited and doesn’t include freedom from abuse, injustice, and exploitation.
Freedom exists when you are mostly governed by a combination of your own individual choices and the common standards and norms of your own free associations with other people. Justice happens when all laws and policies by ALL institutions equally and consistently protect your freedom and both respect and nurture your human dignity, human rights, and human flourishing without bias or favor, privilege or prejudice. Whatever other needs and wants are promised by any politician or policy, if they tend to shift the governance of your life towards coercive systems like the system set up by monopoly corporations or the state, then they will tend to be a drag on your life, not a benefit.
But most people cannot fathom this because the causal relationship isn’t direct and immediate, it is indirect and more long-term in its effects. An authoritarian policy can bring short-term benefits to some people, usually the targeted voter base of the party proposing such policies, but the longer term effect is that those very same people experience a decrease in freedom and an increase in cost that doesn’t justify the benefits of the policy.
Welfare as constructed and provided has gutted the family unit and rendered whole cities third-world-like nightmares riven with corruption and violence. Few will ever understand that voting for the party that offered these “benefits” is the reason they were raised by a single parent, went to crappy schools, have brutal police who see them as animals, can’t find a good paying job, and can’t find a faithful mate who will love them for life. Most of these people would never even read these words because The Freedomist itself isn’t endorsed by their quisling leaders who sell their communities to the Party for a pittance and then peddle bogeyman fears and utopian promises as a hallucinogenic.
People vote for authoritarianism because they cannot or will not indoctrinate themselves with a freedom ideology that they can internalize to make better choices, including their own daily life and who and what they vote for. Few people will ever agree to and embrace the truth that ideals and principles should guide our choices, including how we vote, or that every choice should basically be subjected to the litmus test of those ideals and principles.
A quote wrongly attributed by H TrevorRoper to Joseph Goebells, Nazi Propaganda Minister, sums up the methodology of all authoritarians:
There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.
The only counter to this is to have and hold a deeper freedom ideology based on sound logic and reason and that promotes success and happiness both broadly and for each individual. Yielding to anything, whether force or empty promises to meet shallow wants and needs should never be an option. But history shows that such intellectual and moral courage and discipline is always the exception for individuals and almost never the rule for the masses.
Obtaining and internalizing a freedom ideology isn’t just a good way to make better voting choices, it is a secret formula for personal success and happiness that, if you use it consistently, will tend to make you more free and more prosperous and will tend to protect you from injustice and unequal treatment based on bias, prejudice, and bigotry. If you want justice, you must start with freedom, but to protect freedom, you must uphold and advance justice.
Until we see a new day emerge where most voters follow ideals and principles before promises and shallow parochial interests, we will always see authoritarianism gain some support from most voters.
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