kidbush

Brown University - which for twenty years has been tracking the human and financial cost of the “war without end” or “war on terror” - has drawn up the following provisional results:

 The general human cost (excluding missing persons) is estimated to be between 897,000 and 929,000 fatal casualties. This figure only reflects human losses in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen. At least 120,000 people killed in Libya should be added.

 The financial cost incurred by the United States alone is in the vicinity of $ 8,049,000,000. To these 8 billion dollars, funded by US taxpayers, should be added several hundred billion siphoned off Afghan, Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian and Yemeni taxpayers whose countries have mostly been left as just a pile in ruins.

us

In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Keating argued that the Morrison government’s confrontational stance with China was absurd, given that Australia “is a continent sharing a border with no other state” and “has no territorial disputes with China.”

WAR

The chaotic end to the war in Afghanistan coincides with a debate in the Senate on a bill which would curtail the unrestrained power of the executive to take the country to war.

Both point to the pressing need to examine Australia’s habit of fighting in faraway places.

greens

Germany: Left-of-center parties call for lowering voting age to 16. 

Three of Germany’s main political parties have called for the federal voting age to be lowered from 18 to 16. According to a recent study out of Berlin, there are few arguments against the idea.

Fifty years after Germany lowered the voting age for federal elections from 21 to 18 years old, some politicians are calling for the age to be dropped once again. 

"I am convinced that young people at 16 are very capable of making a responsible choice," German Family Minister Franziska Giffey told news agency dpa in Berlin on Thursday. "We should give them this opportunity." 

thinktank

Washington, D.C., is the think tank world capital and home to the eternal seminar. There has always been at least one panel, forum, conference, luncheon, party, or something similar every day to discuss issues of great moment. It’s simply what think tanks do.

Bringing reputedly important thinkers together is supposed to promote discussion of the vital issues of the day. These gatherings help sell philosophies and policies to those who rule, mostly in the executive and legislative branches. Public events also justify donations, demonstrating activity to those who help pay the bills. And there are few better ways to suck up to power than to invite a noted politician or staffer to headline a discussion. The entire process is an enormous industry, with food and drink often the informal bribe to get people to fill a room.

romans

This is a fictitious interview between the last brass standing and an "intelligence” lamppost disguised a a journalist from the New York Washington Clarion, collected by Gus the Elder — on the post-mortem of a retreat gone apecrap. 

Journo: — Could the Taliban have been defeated?

Brass: — Of course…

— So, what happened?

— I guess our “forever war” on-going system was responsible for the “defeat”… See if you defeat your enemies completely, you have no need for a gigantic army with a million contractors manufacturing complex weapons systems and bombs… Eventually, one gets tired of “forever” routine on the same spot… We need a change of landscape and motivations… We’re changing location.

death of time

History offers so many examples of epic underestimations. These run from Goliath’s dismissal of David as “little more than a boy” to NATO’s misjudgement of the fighting prowess of the scrappy, dishevelled Taliban. We also find this pattern in today’s miscalculations about COVID-19.

We are subject to what Israeli psychologist Tali Sharot calls an “optimism bias”. In tough times, optimism enables us to carry on. But sometimes our need for good news woefully misleads, even as it coaxes us on. We not only underestimate what we’re up against, but we’re also overly impressed by our own prowess — especially when it comes to technology.

scomological

Scott Morrison has changed tack from ridiculing COVID-zero states to saying he “acknowledges” their worry about opening borders, with the Prime Minister telling the Coalition to start preparing for an election.

As the saying goes, a week is a long time in politics.

Just days ago, Mr Morrison was telling Queensland and Western Australia to get out of “the cave” of lockdowns, claiming they were ‘undermining’ the reopening plan and comparing them to children’s movie The Croods.

mvax

The US Government regulator for drugs, the Food and Drug Administration, has just announced that it has voted full approval for the mRNA genetic vaccine of Pfizer and BioNTech, or did they? This supposed new status is being used by the Biden Administration and many states and companies to impose mandatory vaccinations.

The notoriously conflicted Biden covid adviser, Tony Fauci of the NIAID, using that ruling, is calling for national mandatory vaccination for the country. What is not being revealed is the cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest between the FDA and the major drug companies, including Pfizer, that stand behind the rushed approval. And it’s not full approval for Pfizer’s jab, only for BioNTech’s legally different vaccine.

freedom

The cruelty of god’s justice

The kindness of freedom

The music of morning peace

The prisons of a kingdom

The little merle sings every dawn at my window

To let me know that I am still alive

That’s what I believe though he does not know

That we are strangers awakening in the same hive 

He only sings to find his mate in his domain

Where he is free to be kind

Unless he’s just happy to trill for fun

Without any hint of god’s justice in his mind

The cruelty of god’s justice

The kindness of freedom

The music of morning peace

The delusions of my kingdom

                       — Robert Urbanoski

fences

The debate is raging about the “Vaccination Passport”, the “Covid-Pass” or whatever it is called. At this stage, it seems we don’t trust anyone. The social fabric which was already frayed by the Democrat/Republican barney(s) is further distended by the Covid effect. The insurers and the lawyers are awaiting for any wrong moves by private organisations say like the US Open…

Imagine that you contract Covid-19 by sitting next to an infected person at a tennis match. Have you been vaccinated? has the person next to you been vaccinated? Can you prove that you got Covid-19 from this other person, not from another fellow three rows behind you? Thus people running shows have to have protection against lawsuits… The “passports” are not to make sur you catch nothing, but that the companies don’t get sued for negligence.

plunger

From time to time we need to see how others think. This isn't "disinformation", but different points of view on the theme of risk management and cost-benefit analysis...

pizza

Give a man a car and he will learn to drive.

Give a man a gun and he will learn to kill.

Give the man a bomber and he will learn to bomb.

Give a man a prayer and he will believe in god.

Give all these to a man and he will kill in the name of god.

                                        — Robert Urbanoski

Donnez une voiture à un homme et il apprendra à conduire.

Donnez une arme à un homme et il apprendra à tuer.

Donnez un bombardier à un homme et il apprendra à bombarder.

Donnez une prière à un homme et il croira en Dieu.

truth

... but in general, the reason is much simpler and less sinister. It is because we employ a rational framework of cost-benefit analysis, whereby, when making public policy choices, we do not examine only one side of the ledger (number of people who will die if cars are permitted) but also consider the immense costs generated by policies that would prevent those deaths (massive limits on our ability to travel, vastly increased times to get from one place to another, restrictions on what we can experience in our lives, enormous financial costs from returning to the pre-automobile days).

By Glenn Greenwald

fairy

New South Wales has reported 1218 new locally acquired cases of COVID-19 – another daily infection record – and six deaths.

The entire state is currently locked down and police are cracking down on compliance measures as authorities battle to contain the spread of the virulent Delta strain.

The six deaths recorded in the 24 hours to 8pm on Saturday included three people in their 80s and three in their 70s. None were fully vaccinated.

The death toll for the current outbreak now sits at 89.

There are now more than 810 COVID-19 patients in NSW in hospital, with 126 in intensive care and 54 ventilated.

Of those 126 in intensive care, only one was fully vaccinated.