The response of the American public to the cognitive dissonance between our wrong assumptions about the world and the real world they keep colliding with has been to turn inward and embrace an ethos of individualism. This can range from New Age spiritual disengagement to a chauvinistic America First attitude. Whatever form it takes for each of us, it allows us to persuade ourselves that the distant rumble of bombs, albeit mostly American ones, is not our problem.
The U.S. corporate media has validated and increased our ignorance by drastically reducing foreign news coverage and turning TV news into a profit-driven echo chamber peopled by pundits in studios who seem to know even less about the world than the rest of us.
Mr. Yoonâs secretary for foreign affairs, Yi Mun-hui, told his boss, National Security Adviser Kim Sung-han, that the government âwas mired in concerns that the U.S. would not be the end user if South Korea were to comply with a U.S. request for ammunition,â according to a batch of secret Pentagon documents leaked through social media.
The secret report was based on signals intelligence, which meant that the United States has been spying on one of its major allies in Asia.
Both Mr. Yi and Mr. Kim stepped down last month for unclear reasons. Neither man could be reached for comment.
(...)
Instead, according to the document, Mr. Kim âsuggested the possibilityâ of selling 330,000 rounds of 155-mm artillery shells to Poland, since âgetting the ammunition to Ukraine quickly was the ultimate goal of the United States.â
Mr. Yi agreed that it might be possible for Poland to agree to being called the end user and send the ammunition on to Ukraine, but that South Korea would need to âverify what Poland would do.â It is unclear exactly what he meant by this, since South Koreaâs export control rules stipulate that its âweapons or weapon parts sold to a foreign country should not be resold or transferred to a third country without Seoulâs approval.
The senior South Korean official on Sunday declined to reveal details of what he called âinternal discussionsâ within Mr. Yoonâs government. But he added that ânothing has been finalizedâ and that there was still âno changeâ in Seoulâs policy on Ukraine. South Korea has been shipping humanitarian aid to Ukraine but has insisted that it would not directly provide any lethal weapons.
âSouth Koreaâs position has been that it will cooperate with the United States while not clashing with Russia,â said Yang Uk, a weapons expert at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. âThe documents leaked put South Korea in a more difficult position.â
And the mere fact of the spying taking place, leaving aside what it might uncover, is a damaging revelation, he said.
âItâs reasonable to suspect that the United States spies on top defense and security officials in Seoul, but itâs bad news for the general public ahead of the South Korea-U.S. summit,â he added. âPeople will ask, âWe have been allies for seven decades, and you still spy on us?ââ
The response of the American public to the cognitive dissonance between our wrong assumptions about the world and the real world they keep colliding with has been to turn inward and embrace an ethos of individualism. This can range from New Age spiritual disengagement to a chauvinistic America First attitude. Whatever form it takes for each of us, it allows us to persuade ourselves that the distant rumble of bombs, albeit mostly American ones, is not our problem.
The U.S. corporate media has validated and increased our ignorance by drastically reducing foreign news coverage and turning TV news into a profit-driven echo chamber peopled by pundits in studios who seem to know even less about the world than the rest of us.
It's astonishing to me that we 'the greatest country' can let this happen. There are many studies that clearly define the issues - Gun suicides in the southwest, diabetes in the southeast, social isolation and access to care everywhere. The number of people who die before age 40 is so high that ~1 person in every kindergarten class is likely to die before they can even plan for retirement. Meanwhile, other civilized nations (and many less civilized as well) march on with steady improvements, while the US screams "rugged individualism" before swerving into the ditch. I just don't get it.
Born in 1952 I've already exceeded my life expectancy which was 68.4 years. I'm now 70.4. Or now well into overtime.
Wow - that's ten years less than Canada.
That was what the life expectancy was for someone born in 1952 in the US at the time of birth according to the posted chart. The next highest age was for Europe which was 64.0 years. According to this chart, the life expectancy for someone born in Canada in 1952 was 68.8 years
The Tragic U.S. Choice to Prioritize War Over Peacemaking Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies explain how American ignorance and jingoism, even at supposedly elite levels, allow neocons to continue to foment war, despite their record of failure.
The Iran policy debate in Washington suffers from a poverty of ideas. Despite the trail of failures left behind by policies based on coercion and threats over the last two decades, the debate over Iranâs nuclear program usually comes back to some combination of backfiring sanctions and reckless proposals for war and regime change.
A new report by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is just the most recent example of this. The report describes the findings of exercises that the think tank conducted, and it concludes by recommending that the U.S. broaden its threats of military action to include targeting the Iranian political and military leadership as well as their nuclear facilities. Nothing could be worse for the cause of nonproliferation or for U.S. interests than to seek regime change again.
It seems incredible that anyone in Washington still floats the options of war and regime change 20 years after the invasion of Iraq showed how disastrous these policies are, but there has been no real learning from the crime of the Iraq war. One of the main reasons why Washington hasnât learned from the Iraq war is that there was never any accountability for any of its architects and cheerleaders, and the incentives in our debates still tend to favor aggressive and militarized policies. Instead of repudiating wars for regime change, many people in Washington have no problem using the same fatally flawed policies against other countries.
âDonât talk about Nord Streamâ
For all the intrigue around who bombed the pipeline, some Western officials are not so eager to find out. At gatherings of European and NATO policymakers, officials have settled into a rhythm, said one senior European diplomat: âDonât talk about Nord Stream.â Leaders see little benefit from digging too deeply and finding an uncomfortable answer, the diplomat said, echoing sentiments of several peers in other countries who said they would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved.
If thereâs a phrase that (supposedly) defines what U.S. foreign policy is all about these days, itâs âthe need to uphold a rules-based order.â Case in point: a desire to strengthen the current order is one of the main reasons the Biden administration has worked so hard to assemble a set of like-minded nations this week, in the second iteration of its so-called Democracy Summit. One can understand why: Saying the United States is just trying to uphold the rules is politer than saying its goal is to preserve U.S. primacy in perpetuity, weaken China permanently, topple governments it doesnât like, or undermine its other adversaries.
Of course, when U.S. officials say ârules-based order,â they mean the current order, whose rules were mostly made in America. Itâs not the existence of rules per se that they are defending; any order involving modern states must by necessity be rules-based, because the complex interactions of a globalized world cannot be managed without agreed-upon norms and procedures. These norms range from foundational principles (e.g., the idea of sovereign equality) to mundane everyday practices (e.g., the use of English as the standard language for international air traffic control). This raises the question: Which parts of the current order is the United States most eager to defend? Which norms matter most? (...)
Further to this, I'm in the midst of reading The Nutmeg's Curse by Ahmitav Ghosh. You might enjoy it. Here's a link to a recent interview with him: https://emergencemagazine.org/...
Guess who continued to buy Israeli spyware through a shell company right after the public ban?
That's right! The US government!
Hey, do you actually understand where this disenchantment with politics comes from? Me neither!
On April 25, 1980, President Jimmy Carter gave a televised address to update the nation on the 52 American hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran. The day before Carterâs speech, U.S. army special forces attempted to rescue them. But the mission failed, and eight U.S. servicemen died in a helicopter crash. President Carter took responsibility and vowed not to give up on the captive Americans.
âThroughout this extraordinarily difficult period, we have pursued and will continue to pursue every possible avenue for the release of the hostages,â Carter said.
The Carter administration faced more opposition than the president knew, though.
The hostage crisis was a key issue in the 1980 presidential election, in which Carter faced a re-election challenge from Republican Ronald Reagan. If the hostages were released before the election, Carter would get a big boost in the polls. (...)
(...) All this is powerful evidence that the Reagan campaign did â as has been alleged for decades â strike a deal with the Iranian government to prevent the hostages from being released. While that has never been proven, whatâs known beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the Reagan campaign was deeply worried that Carter might get the hostages out before November and thereby give a big boost to his prospects.
You might understandably ask: If this actually happened, how could it have been kept secret? Why hasnât anyone with knowledge of it spoken up before? The answer is that it hasnât been kept secret, and many, many people have said it occurred. But most of the people doing so have been foreigners. Barnes is merely the most important American to finally come out and support the story.
The 1980 October Surprise theory has always been plausible on its face. Casey had worked on Richard Nixonâs 1968 presidential campaign (and was later named head of the Securities and Exchange Commission by Nixon). Itâs since been proven that the Nixonâs presidential campaign secretly collaborated with the government of South Vietnam to prevent President Lyndon Johnson from striking a peace deal ending the Vietnam War. The Nixon campaign was concerned that peace would help his opponent in the race, Johnsonâs vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Nixonâs cynicism can be measured by the fact that thanks to his gambit, 20,000 additional American soldiers, plus unknown hundreds of thousands of other people, died as the war continued for many years.
The concept of the October Surprise seems almost benign in comparison. A mere 52 American hostages had been seized by Iranian revolutionaries at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and all the scheme required was keeping them there for another few months. (...)
Re. the life expectancy charts below, there was also another interesting story this week re. the decline in traditional values - God & country.
pic below didnt copy over correctly - lines are 20%, 40%, 60% and 80% - and relate to patriotism, religion, community involvement, children and money, respectively, from 1998-2023
There was a steep drop off during the pandemic (all are now below 40%, except money), but clearly a downward trend prior to that for the first three. It would appear the âsocial contractâ is coming unsealed. The curtain has been pulled to reveal the wizard as a fraud. We all knew this 30, 40, 50 years ago, but it seems the last decade or so, we are less inclined to be polite about it (manners, another value, were dropped). E.g, 30 or 40 years ago if you were at a party and you overheard a friend or neighbor say something you thought was ridiculous, like humanâs play no role in climate change, you were more apt to ignore for the sake of not creating a fuss (manners), or at the very least engage in a cautious debate. No longer, as people now feel obliged to correct this personâs statementâ¦ignoring manners, increasing discourse, but also disrupting the previously allowed harmony. So when you find yourself not able to even get along with neighbors, friends and family, that leads to questioning values. Unfortunately, I think once moving beyond God, family and country (all challenged by the pandemic, and our politics), most people donât have a grasp of what their values are (other than $). So, they either dig in (conservatives) or look for new, better ways (liberals). Both are fraught with danger and harmful if not done as a group/society. While the pandemic has had a role, this deterioration of values, without implementing a broad, socially acceptable replacement could also be why US life expectancy is falling. We all know how psychology or our mental states play a roll in our physical well being. Anyway, my meandering thoughts...you can ignore as most are apt to.
If thereâs a phrase that (supposedly) defines what U.S. foreign policy is all about these days, itâs âthe need to uphold a rules-based order.â Case in point: a desire to strengthen the current order is one of the main reasons the Biden administration has worked so hard to assemble a set of like-minded nations this week, in the second iteration of its so-called Democracy Summit. One can understand why: Saying the United States is just trying to uphold the rules is politer than saying its goal is to preserve U.S. primacy in perpetuity, weaken China permanently, topple governments it doesnât like, or undermine its other adversaries.
Of course, when U.S. officials say ârules-based order,â they mean the current order, whose rules were mostly made in America. Itâs not the existence of rules per se that they are defending; any order involving modern states must by necessity be rules-based, because the complex interactions of a globalized world cannot be managed without agreed-upon norms and procedures. These norms range from foundational principles (e.g., the idea of sovereign equality) to mundane everyday practices (e.g., the use of English as the standard language for international air traffic control). This raises the question: Which parts of the current order is the United States most eager to defend? Which norms matter most? (...)
