.................RATIONAL THINKING.................. مرا جهل در کامِ دیو میبَرَد.............از آن دوستی میکنم با خِرَد
From: Discover Magazine July/ August 2021 (Page 42)
یکی از روشنگریهای همه گیر کرونا اختلاف نژادی بومی شده در سیستم پزشکی این کشور بود. به عنوان نمونه، یک سازمان حرفه ای پزشکی کشف کرد که در ایالت لوئیزیانا که از هر سه نفر یک نفر سیاه پوست است، از هر چهار بیمار کرونائی ، سه نفر آنها سیاه پوست بودند. واگیری و مرگ از طریق کرونا، بر طبق آمار گرفته شده از ۳۰۰ بیمارستان در ۲۱ ایالات در مناطق مختلف کشور، بین رنگین پوستان (سیاه، زرد، و لاتین) دو تا چهار برابر سپید پوستان بوده است
By: Nicholas Kristof (June 23, 2021)
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/opinion/america-security-competitiveness.html
Israel is not exercising "the right to defend itself" in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising "the right to defend itself." It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/21/a-letter-to-biden-on-gaza/
May 21
Dear
President Biden,
I am
writing to you about Gaza, a place that I have studied and written about for
the last 35 years, a place that I consider another home, filled with the
kindest and most generous people you will ever meet—have you ever been there?
But I am writing not only as a scholar of the region but as a Jew and one whose
parents survived Auschwitz.
I have a question for you, Mr. President: When is the death of a child acceptable? Or perhaps I should ask the question this way: When does the death of a Palestinian child become unacceptable? You have experienced the unspeakable loss of your own children so you are better placed than most to answer my questions.
Thomas Friedman May 23, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/opinion/israel-hamas-biden.html?searchResultPosition=1
Leon Trotsky once supposedly observed, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” To President Biden I’d say today, “You may not be interested in Middle East peacemaking, but Middle East peacemaking is interested in you.” Here’s why: All three key players in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been dealt some huge painful shocks over the past year. They know, deep down, that another round of fighting like the one we saw in the past two weeks could unleash disastrous consequences for each of them. Henry Kissinger forged the first real peace breakthrough between Israelis and Arabs after they were all reeling, vulnerable and in pain as a result of the 1973 War. They each knew that something had to change.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/16/world/israel-gaza-updates
Patrick Kingsley and
May 21, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/world/middleeast/gaza-war-ceasefire-israel.html
By David Hearst
Ten years ago, I walked down a tiled pathway in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood
and was led into a room where an old woman was sitting amid a pile of boxes and
packed suitcases.
The first thing I noticed about Rifqa al-Kurd was the burning
intensity of her eyes. She told me that she lived out of boxes because she was
expecting the police to throw her out of house and for the settlers to move in
at any moment. When that happened, she explained, she did not want her clothes
thrown into the street. Hence the packed bags.
She had been through this before, when she was evicted from her home in Haifa in 1948. What kept her there, sitting among her boxes? She gave a one word reply: "Sumud", which roughly translates as steadfastness.
By: Peter Beinart
Why has the impending eviction of six Palestinian families in East Jerusalem drawn Israelis and Palestinians into a conflict that appears to be spiraling toward yet another war? Because of a word that in the American Jewish community remains largely taboo: the Nakba.
The Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, need not refer only to the more than 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled or fled in terror during Israel’s founding. It can also evoke the many expulsions that have occurred since: the about 300,000 Palestinians whom Israel displaced when it conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967; the roughly 250,000 Palestinians who could not return to the West Bank and Gaza after Israel revoked their residency rights between 1967 and 1994; the hundreds of Palestinians whose homes Israel demolished in 2020 alone. The East Jerusalem evictions are so combustible because they continue a pattern of expulsion that is as old as Israel itself.
Whenever speaking of politics or government in the United States, the word democracy is heard several times. Sometimes it is combined with some adjectives, such as “the largest” or “the greatest”. There is no doubt that no country in the world has such a vast and untarnished democracy as the United States. However, no one asks who the beneficiary of this democracy is. The term is Greek, and it means the vote or the rule of the people. The question is who these people are.
Preparing taxes, I came across with elimination of some deductions, that was passed by congress on December 22, 2017, under Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The interesting common place among all the enacted status is their titles, which is usually the opposite of what the act is for. For example, this one is not to cut taxes, but to cut deductions, several of them at once, which would increase one’s taxes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/opinion/israel-palestinians-gaza.html
NICHOLAS KRISTOF
Saying Hamas must pay a “very heavy price” for belligerence, Israeli bombs destroyed a 13-story apartment building in Gaza that had a Hamas presence. And saying Israel “ignited fire” and is “responsible for the consequences,” Hamas launched more rockets at Israel.
Friday, May 14, 2021
Israel is not exercising "the right to defend itself" in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
Juan Cole- 4/19/2021
The Costs of War Project at Brown University has just brought out a new report on Afghanistan. The September 11, 2001 attacks were launched from Khost and Qandahar in Afghanistan by al-Qaeda, though it is not clear that this organization of Arab expatriates informed their Taliban hosts of what they were planning. The operation involved hijacking commercial airliners and using them as massive suicide bombs. It cost $500,000 or so to pull off, and killed nearly 3,000 persons. We could have avoided our war dead in Afghanistan and our wounded warriors by just getting out in the summer of 2002, in an enormous savings to our country in blood and treasure.
Juan Cole- 4/18/2021
The new report on 2020 by the International Renewable Energy Agency reveals that the world's renewable energy generation capacity increased by an astonishing 10.3% in 2020 despite the global economic slowdown during the coronavirus pandemic. It beats the previous record for an annual increase in this sector by a healthy 50%.
The largest corporation in the world is USA Inc. Not only it is the leading company, but it also is the most influential and the most tightly protected for-profit-organization in the world. The corporation has close to ten thousand owners and co-owners worldwide. The largest military in the world, by far, protects this conglomerate and all its subsidiaries all around the world. With more than 800 military posts in over 70 friendly (!) countries, it is a daring prospect to try to undermine this company. Of course, there are other entities (countries) that have been competing very carefully, due to their special circumstances. One of them is Russia, that is not economically a challenge for the Big Brother, but has not submitted to it either, due to its history. The other one, China, became an economic power taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the United States. Of course, these countries and some other few that have not become America’s plain field, are not considered “Normal” by American establishment, and there have been plans to convert them through smaller and weaker ex-alliances. This has been the case for Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Syria, with a prospect for a few others, such as Iran. Justifications for such military and covert actions are planned so intelligently (with the aid of majority Americans’ trust in their governments) that such excuses can easily be consumed by American public.
1929 “He should be the most thanked man in the world,” said the New York Times on his seventy-fifth birthday. No buccaneer like many self-made moguls, this enormously wealthy man sought more than money. He was George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak, the pioneer of roll film and the simple box camera. His company slogan: “You press the button, we do the rest.” By creating an affordable product that helped preserve memorable moments, George Eastman richened people’s lives.
Like his immediate predecessor, Joe Biden is committed to a
distinctly anti-China global strategy and has sworn that China will not “become the leading
country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most
powerful country in the world… on my watch.” In the topsy-turvy universe
created by the Covid-19 pandemic, it was, however, Jamie Dimon, the CEO and
chairman of JP Morgan Chase, a banking giant with assets of $3.4 trillion, who
spoke truth to Biden on the subject.
John Eligon and
MINNEAPOLIS — Just seven hours before prosecutors opened their case against Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering George Floyd, a Chicago officer chased down a 13-year-old boy in a West Side alley and fatally shot him as he turned with his hands up. One day later, at a hotel in Jacksonville, Fla., officers fatally shot a 32-year-old man, who, the police say, grabbed one of their Tasers. The day after that, as an eyewitness to Mr. Floyd’s death broke down in a Minneapolis courtroom while recounting what he saw, a 40-year-old mentally ill man who said he was being harassed by voices was killed in Claremont, N.H., in a shootout with the state police. On every day that followed, all the way through the close of testimony, another person was killed by the police somewhere in the United States. The trial has forced a traumatized country to relive the gruesome death of Mr. Floyd beneath Mr. Chauvin’s knee. But even as Americans continue to process that case — and anxiously wait for a verdict — new cases of people killed by the police mount unabated.
April 10, 2021
Here are some of the ways that people who have worked inside Amazon’s warehouses describe the experience: “The job crushed my spirit and crippled my body.” “The lowest point in my life.” An “isolating colony of hell.” “They’re killing people mentally and physically.” “I began to hate my day-to-day life.” “The way Amazon pushes people is not moral.” “I had whole days where I didn’t talk to anyone.” “The systematic devaluing of human bodies.”
Kim Barker, Mike Baker and
For
many long weeks last summer, protesters in American cities faced off against
their own police forces in what proved to be, for major law enforcement
agencies across the country, a startling display of violence and disarray.
