AFTERMATH OF TERROR
All good news in this section, including one of the best articles on national security I’ve read in a very long time — Lydia Wilson reports the sordid truth of the “countering violent extremism” industry and the governments that have no interest in finding out what actually motivates terrorism. How many people died in the War on Terror? The total death toll may be 5-6 million. There’s never been proper accountability for the role played by corporate media in the War on Terror — because the media is incapable of holding itself to account. And the War on Terror was corrupt right from the get-go.
CONSEQUENCES
For a long time I’ve been interested in the social ramifications of basing a society’s values on economic worth. Here’s a new take: why are we so interested in losers when we’re told to love winners so much? Hypocrisy really is important: why so many “religious” leaders don’t live their Christian beliefs, and what’s so wrong about it. The global housing market is broken — it’s not just Australia. And it will have generational ramifications. Amid a major gas price spike in Europe, European MPs suspect the Russians of manipulating prices. And their comes a point when attempting to compromise is self-defeating. America went past that point a long time ago.
LOCAL NEWS
Frank Brennan picks over the legal detritus from Clive Palmer’s attempt to force WA open to COVID. Angela Smith on the capitalist fetish of customer care. And Rachael Weaver has an essay on the currawong that is well worth a Meanjin subscription.
THE ELECTRIC NIGHTMARE
How Facebook inflicted troll farm content on tens of millions of Americans. Latest hot take from freedom advocates: fact-checking is censorship. At the Wall Street Journal, trying to retain journalistic rigour in the face of extremist op-eds and Murdoch’s malignant influence. The site my be down but the technology is there: site offers to insert anyone’s face into deepfake pornography (I say anyone, we know that really means “any woman”).
IN THE LAB
From the Marvellous What We Can Do These Days department: we can levitate (small) stuff with acoustics. And there might be some really useful applications. The robots will take our jobs, but not quite so fast: robot productivity growth is slowing (Business Council responds: maybe if they cut their wages and impose more workplace “flexibility” things will improve). The secret of Stradivarius is finally revealed (if there was indeed a secret). And dark matter detection researchers may have detected dark energy instead — if it’s not a fluke (if you don’t understand the difference between dark energy and dark matter — and why should you, they’re only 95% of everything in the universe — this article actually explains it pretty well).
FINALLY
Which one are you? Cats that don’t want to see the vet. For those wondering, I’m number 3. (Bonus content: dogs not wanting to go to the vet either).
I thank Bernard Keane and Crikey for quoting Nafeez Ahmed’s estimate (in turn quoting my book “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”) of 6 million deaths in the War on Terror if one includes excess deaths from war-imposed deprivation. However if one considers 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since 9/11 one estimates 34 million Muslims have been killed through violence, 5 million. and war-imposed deprivation, 27 million, in the 2-decade and continuing US War on Terror.
Deaths in what must be called an Afghan Holocaust and Afghan Genocide are as follows for the period 2001-2021: under-5 infant deaths 2.1 million; avoidable deaths from deprivation 2.9 million; violent deaths 1.1 million (based on comparison with the Iraq War and assuming that the Afghan War was 4 times less violent); total violent deaths plus avoidable deaths from deprivation 4.0 million. At the other end of the scale, such Occupied Palestinian deaths in this period totalled “only” 100,000 (roughly the same as Australian military deaths overseas in 120 years of UK and US wars, and violent Indigenous Australian deaths in the 233 year Australian Aboriginal Genocide).
For a detailed and documented analysis of US and Muslim deaths in the post-9/11 War on Terror see Gideon Polya, “Lying America did 9/11 and then killed 30 million Muslims”, Countercurrents, 20 September 2021: https://countercurrents.org/2021/09/lying-america-did-9-11-and-then-killed-over-30-million-muslims/ and please tell everyone you can – US-beholden Mainstream media certainly won’t.