alanjjohnstone
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Where have i heard all this before?
Starmer promises a “decade of national renewal”
“…There is no substitute for a robust private sector, creating wealth in every community.”
” we won’t be able to spend our way out of their mess ….the party won’t be “getting its big government chequebook out again”.
In a podcast, Prof Mark Conversino, chief academic officer, and provost of Air University in Montgomery, Alabama; Anna Batta, associate professor of International Security Studies at the university’s Air War College, and Andy Akin, assistant professor of National Security Studies at the university’s Air Command and Staff College discuss the war and also whether it could turn nuclear. (starts 14.40)
A Pentagon-commissioned Rand Corporation study examines U.S. options for responding to four scenarios in which Russia attacks a range of NATO targets.
These four scenarios are all hypothetical and premised on a Russian escalation beyond the borders of Ukraine. But the analysis reveals just how fine and precarious the line is between limited and proportionate military responses to Russian escalation and a spiral of escalation that can spin out of control and lead to nuclear war.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PEA2000/PEA2081-1/RAND_PEA2081-1.pdf
Summary and interpretation at
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/finding-diplomatic-progress-in-ukraineStephen Shenfield’s take on the latest developments.
Stephen, a Russian speaker, has taken a special interest in the situation since 2014.
New Israeli government minister provokes Palestinians
A third of the global economy will be in recession this year, Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64142662
“Even countries that are not in recession, it would feel like recession for hundreds of millions of people,” she added.
“The Bureau of Land Management is no better under Tracy Stone-Manning’s leadership than under Trump.”
The Propaganda War
“…Since the war broke out in February, experts have been struck by a convergence in Russian and Chinese media narratives. While some of the convergence was likely happenstance, occurring when storylines aided both governments’ goals, documents found in a trove of hacked emails from Russia state broadcaster VGTRK show that China and Russia have pledged to join forces in media content…”
Danish Reporter Says Ukrainian Intelligence Tried to Coerce Her Into Working as a Propagandist
“Matilde Kimer, who has reported for Danish television from the front lines of the conflict since the Russian aggression began in 2014, revealed last week that Ukraine’s intelligence service had canceled her work permit and would only return it if she agreed to let the spy agency direct her reporting.”
Unintended Consequences
Few realise just as the US sponsored the Afghanis who became the Taliban and Al Qaida that Israel initially encouraged the growth of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas to oppose the more secular “Marxist”-orientated resistance groups, in a divide and conquer strategy.
Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal. Cohen explained “instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas”.
Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party.
Yasser Arafat referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”
“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.”
Hamas has unjustifiably got the popular image of being intransigent in its relations with the Israeli state.
Yet, Hamas has effectively recognised the existence of Israel by accepting the 1967 borders as the basis for a new Palestinian state.
Hamas also offered a form of truce or armistice under Islamic tradition, a 10-year hudna. A Hudna implies a recognition of the other party’s existence.
Co-existence is better than confrontation.
It was a new Israeli government which walked away from a possible settlement back in 2001 at the Taba Talks, not the Palestinians
“We made progress, substantial progress. We are closer than ever to the possibility of striking a final deal,” said Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s negotiator.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, said, “My heart aches because I know we were so close. We need six more weeks to conclude the drafting of the agreement.”
A bit loaded a question.
Let’s take it to the extreme
What would I vote for, the death of all my family and friends or socialism?
I won’t answer for TM but when socialism is fully going, I don’t foresee even reduced meat-eating being on the menu. It will go the way of crime and religion, disappearing in due course because of the changes in how people think and behave.
It won’t be an overnight transformation but like many other negative aspects of today’s society, if there is no need or necessity, it will become redundant.
A summary of the war from Feb-July by the military think-tank Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies.
It is well worth a read.
“The Kremlin’s confidence that it could invade Ukraine without significant international interference was an important reason for undertaking the full-scale invasion.”
https://static.rusi.org/359-SR-Ukraine-Preliminary-Lessons-Feb-July-2022-web-final.pdf
“Russia’s military build-up against Ukraine began in March 2021 when large numbers of conventional troops were added to existing forces along Ukraine’s borders. This build-up performed three functions.
First, it put pressure on Western governments to re-engage in the Minsk II negotiations to encourage Kyiv to make concessions and thereby avert a conflict.
Second, it pre-positioned military equipment around Ukraine that would allow for a more rapid build-up of forces when the time came for the invasion.
Third, it provided an opportunity for Moscow to assess the reaction of Ukraine’s international partners.”Further inducements
Russia soldiers and state employees deployed in Ukraine will be exempt from income tax. Soldiers, police, members of the security services and other state employees serving in the four regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. no longer have to supply information on “their income, their expenditure, their assets.” It also applies to the partners and children of those serving, and is back-dated to February 24, 2022.The decree also grants them the right to receive “rewards and gifts” if they are of “a humanitarian character” and received as part of the military operation in Ukraine.
https://www.brecorder.com/news/40217588/russia-grants-tax-amnesty-for-soldiers-in-ukraine
I don’t think the possibility of far greater atrocities that can be inflicted upon a more or less unarmed Palestinian population is fully appreciated by many people. There is a great potential for bloody pogroms and the Palestinians are very much defenceless.
Jewish-Israeli extremists seek the ethnic cleansing of ALL Palestinians, both inside Israel and in the occupied territories. They want a theocracy.
I don’t think that they presently have the consent of the majority of Jewish-Israelis to conduct such. But it is close. It is presently half-half.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/plurality-of-jewish-israelis-want-to-expel-arabs-study-shows/
A policy of escalating violence would only exacerbate the situation and reinforce their siege mentality increasing support for another Nakba and expulsion of the Palestinians.
Violence in the past, and there has been much of it, has not succeeded in shifting the mind-set of Jewish-Israelis.
With American Jews and the Jewish diaspora elsewhere slowly becoming less supportive in their pro-Zionist sympathies and more critical of Israel’s government policies, such violence would be counter-productive and end such progress, discouraging any US endeavour to pressure Israel into offering concessions.
Non-violent civil disobedience, crucially within Israel itself, the full acceptance of the existence of Israel by supporting the One-State federation option, in effect, satisfying the Zionist demand for “Eretz Israel” which solves to some extent the West Bank settler question but, most importantly, demanding a secular state with full equality to all citizens, turning a national liberation struggle into a movement for civil rights.
I have said I am somewhat of a pessimist about any solution and don’t suggest that such a proposal will bring any speedy support from either side and that political opposition between the communities would still continue. But I recall the Israel author Amos Oz saying, I don’t need to love my neighbours, but I do need to live alongside them.
There are too many sticking points such as the Israeli Law of Return versus the right of return for Palestinian refugees that require to still be overcome. But they are not totally irreconcilable problems. Basically, it is about numbers and time-scale.
As an aside, it is refreshing that on this topic we can have a somewhat friendlier exchange where we can comradely disagree because we both have the interests of our Palestinian fellow workers at heart. But I think I go one step further and recognise Jewish-Israelis need security reassurances as well to reach peace.
The industrialised meat system is again found to be continuing health-risk adulteration of food with nitrites but is the answer to home-cure?
Yet another study adds to the evidence showing preservative additives can increase the risk of cancer.
