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#military industrial complex
catshinji · 2 days
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Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory, explains how Israel tests their weapons in Gaza, and advertises their destructive capabilities to other countries that wish to use these weapons to similarly repress their own populations.
Israel forms a crucial part of the supply chain for the global arms industry, and the impunity with which they operate sets a dangerous precedent for populations around the world.
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sayruq · 2 months
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So when you hear about Biden slowing down arms shipment
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It's not because he cares about Palestinians (cutting UNRWA funds, because of confessions obtained through torture, should tell you otherwise), it's because he doesn't have a large stockpile of weapons to send.
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politijohn · 8 months
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directactionforhope · 1 month
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U.S. Free Palestine Protests this Weekend: 2/17 through 2/19
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2/17 Denver, Colorado Indianapolis, Indiana San Diego, California Seattle, Washington
2/18 Boone, North Carolina Milwaukee, Wisconsin New Orleans, Louisiana
2/19 Aransas Pass, Texas Chicago, Illinois Los Angeles, California - Jews for Ceasefire All-Day Shiva
And there are many more! Check out the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Code Pink, and your local Palestinian and/or Muslim groups for protests in your area!
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headspace-hotel · 9 months
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Researching herbicide resistance in weeds.
A decade ago, everyone said rotating applications of different herbicides was key to stopping herbicide resistance.
Then, around 2015, evidence from a large study emerged saying that this actually causes weeds to be MORE resistant, so the best thing to do is to spray a combination of multiple herbicides mixed together at once.
Now that is being called into question too. Whoda thunk it...
Herbicide resistance among weeds is only getting stronger. Recently, scientists found an annual bluegrass (Poa annua) on a golf course that was resistant to seven herbicide modes of action at once. Seven. SEVEN. Amaranth plants been found with resistance to six herbicide modes of action at once. Twenty years ago, the narrative was that resistance to glyphosate (Roundup) was unlikely to become widespread; today it's the second-most common type of resistance.
What's more, plants are developing types of herbicide resistance that are effective against multiple herbicides at once and harder to detect. Instead of changing the chemical processes within them that are affected by the herbicides so the herbicides don't work as well, they're changing the way they absorb chemicals in the first place. Resistant plants are producing enzymes that detoxify the herbicides before they even enter the plants' cells.
It took Monsanto ten years to develop crop varieties resistant to Dicamba (after weeds made 'Roundup Ready' crops pointless). Palmer amaranth evolved Dicamba resistance in five years.
So I asked, "Why are all the proposed solutions dependent on using more herbicides, when we know damn well that this is going to do nothing but make the weeds evolve faster?"
The answer is that chemical companies have the world in a death grip. They can't make money off non-chemical solutions, so chemical solutions get all the funding, research, and outreach to farmers.
But why do chemical companies have so much power?
One of the biggest reasons is the U.S. military.
In the Vietnam war, all of Vietnam was sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange, which was incredibly toxic to humans and affected the Vietnamese population with horrible illnesses and birth defects. Monsanto, the company that made the herbicides, knew that it did this, but didn't tell anyone. The US government didn't admit that they'd poisoned humans on a mass scale until Vietnam veterans started dying and coming down with horrible illnesses, and even then, it took them 40 years. (My Papaw died at 60 because of that stuff.) And the soldiers weren't there for very long. As for the Vietnamese people, the soil and water where they live is contaminated.
Similarly, during the "war on drugs," the US military sprayed Roundup and other chemicals on fields to destroy coca plants and other plants used in the manufacturing of drugs. This killed a lot of crops that farmers needed to live, and caused major health problems in places such as Columbia. The US government said that people getting sick were lying and that Roundup was just as safe as table salt. (A statement that did not age well.)
So chemical companies make money off arming the USA military. The American lawn care industry, and the agricultural system, therefore originates in more than one way from the United States's war-mongering.
The other major way is described in this article (which I highly recommend), which describes how after WW2, chemical plants used for manufacturing explosives were changed into fertilizer producing plants, but chemical companies couldn't market all that fertilizer to farmers, so they invented the lawn care industry. No exaggeration, that's literally what happened.
This really changes my perspective on all the writings about fixing the agricultural system. The resources are biased towards the use of chemicals in agriculture because the companies are so powerful as to make outreach and research for non-chemical methods of agriculture really hard to fund. All the funding is in finding new ways to spray chemicals or spraying slightly different chemicals, because that's what you can actually get ahold of money to look into. It is like the research has to negotiate a truce with the chemical companies, suggesting only solutions that won't cause lower profits.
Meanwhile my respect for Amaranth is skyrocketing.
Who would win: The USA military-industrial complex or one leafy boi
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afloweroutofstone · 5 months
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At long last, here's my investigation into how defense contractors use the DC subway to target government policymakers in hopes of greater profit.
The first thing commuters saw when stepping into the Metro station beneath the Pentagon in late August was a poster for RTX: the world’s second largest defense contractor, formerly known as Raytheon. RTX made $30.3 billion in sales to the U.S. government last year, 45% of its total income. To advertise to its biggest customer, why not target government decision-makers in the places they visit most? Thus, the thousands of commuters entering the Pentagon station each day were greeted by more than 60 RTX advertisements plastered across the walls, floors, escalators, and fare gates such that it was physically impossible to pass through the station without seeing one. This ad campaign wasn’t the company’s first rodeo, either. Ten years ago, RTX placed advertisements in the Pentagon station to promote a satellite control system. That same project is now seven years late and billions of dollars over-cost. The catch is that, technically, advertisers aren’t supposed to be able to do this, as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA, which operates the greater D.C. metro system) forbids advertisements that “are intended to influence public policy.” But government contractors, reliant on public policy for their survival, are nonetheless allowed to promote their brands and hawk their products to the officials responsible for deciding whether or not to buy from them... As the home to countless government agencies, Washington DC’s population is dense with people whose choices at work can affect the entire world. This has made the capital metro system a magnet for government contractors and other advertisers looking to shape policymakers’ activities. Yet a systematic analysis of that advertising has proven difficult. WMATA does not make advertising data available to the public, and has yet to respond to multiple requests for the data. A similar request was denied by Outfront Media, the private marketing firm contracted by WMATA to handle transit ads. So, I obtained what information I could the old-fashioned way — I rode the Metro, a lot. For five consecutive weeks, I visited 11 WMATA Metro stations and recorded the names of every advertiser. All were located within one mile of major policymaking institutions.
Click through to dive into my findings! For example: 100% of ads I spotted in the Pentagon station were from contractors.
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escuerzoresucitado · 2 months
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hussyknee · 8 months
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Another thread by Senator Ben Ray Luján here.
A book on the subject (haven't read it myself):
One of the sources in another one of Alisa's furiously impassioned twitter threads have been debunked, so I didn't include that. But she claims that her own family was caught in the fallout zone when her mother was a baby, which eventually led to her and large numbers of her community developing cancer. It's human for that kind of grief to be caught up in inaccuracies. People are already being ghastly and racist to Hispanos and Indigenous people criticizing the hype for the movie. They're not attacking Oppenheimer for being Jewish, they're criticising the erasure of the human cost of these bombs and the continued valorisation of the U.S military's actions in World War II as some kind of moral saviourism.
While Oppenheimer himself believed that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified (they had planned to drop them on Germany except they surrendered before they could), he also felt had blood on his hands and regretted his role as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb". He spent the rest of his career vehemently opposing further development of thermonuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb accurately predicting the concept of mutually assured destruction. This eventually made him a victim of Senator McCarthy's Red Scare and his clearance was revoked. I haven't seen the movie (Christopher Nolan is the kind of casual white racist I avoid on principle) but people who have seen it say that it doesn't glorify nuclear weapons and depicts the man himself with the complex moral nuance that seems to be accurately reflective of his real life.
The backlash to Indigenous and Hispanos people's criticisms and to people pointing out that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocides is also frustrating because...both world wars were a clash of genocidal empires. The reason they were world wars is because the countries colonized by Japan, China, the European powers and the US were all dragged into it, whether they wanted to or not. Jews were one of the many colonized peoples that suffered in that time, who were left to die by everyone until they could be used to frame the Allied powers as moral saviours, establishing a revisionist nostalgia for heroism that powers the US military industrial complex to this day.
As early as May 1942, and again in June, the BBC reported the mass murder of Polish Jews by the Nazis. Although both US President, Franklin Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, warned the Germans that they would be held to account after the war, privately they agreed to prioritise and to turn their attention and efforts to winning the war. Therefore, all pleas to the Allies to destroy the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ignored. The Allies argued that not only would such an operation shift the focus away from winning the war, but it could provoke even worse treatment of the Jews. In June 1944 the Americans had aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex. The Allies bombed a nearby factory in August, but the gas chambers, crematoria and train tracks used to transport Jewish civilians to their deaths were not targeted.
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Uncritical consumption of World War II media is the reinforcement of imperialist propaganda, more so when one group of colonized people is used to silence other colonized peoples. Pitting white Jewry against BIPOC is to do the work of white supremacy for imperialist colonizers, and victimizes Jews of colour twice over.
Edit: friends, there's been some doubt cast on the veracity of Alisa's claims. The human cost to the Hispanos population caught downwind of the nuclear tests is very real, as was land seizure without adequate compensation. However, there's no record I can yet find about Los Alamos killing livestock and Hispanos being forced to work for Los Alamos without PPE. There is a separate issue about human testing in the development of said PPE that's not covered here. I'm turning off reblogs until I can find out more. Meanwhile, here's another more legitimate article you can boost instead:
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idiot-trashpanda · 6 months
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just saw The Creator and i am having thoughts
a lot of reviews seem to focus on the sci-fi aspects, the fact that there's a war against A.I. and saying "this is a glimpse of what our world could be" without any hint of understand that this is what the world already is
sure, there's no war against A.I. but i think the more important part of the film is the depiction of U.S. imperialism and the wanton destruction and murder the U.S. military leaves everywhere it goes. in there muerderous quest to destroy all A.I. in revenge for something that was actually a human error, they murder thousands of innocent humans, adults and children alike. U.S. imperialism doesn't care how many it leaves dead, as long it achieves its objective.
to many people around the world watching this movie, where American missiles are launched at distant targets with no regard for who they kill, this film will be saddly familiar. over here in the imperial core, we have no idea what it feels like to be helpless in the face of such cruel destruction, but hundreds of millions of people around the world do.
so, like all good sci-fi, this wasn't a look at what the world could be if we let A.I. keep developing, but a look at how the world already is because we let the U.S. military industrial complex run amok
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intersectionalpraxis · 2 months
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memphisfoodnotbombs · 4 months
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“They got money for war, but can’t feed the poor. - Tupac Shakur”
“No US Military aid to Israel”
Anti-war sticker spotted in Albany, New York
Via @radicalgraff
#Palestine #FreePalestine #Israel #MilitaryIndustrialComplex #2Pac #TupacShakur #NoWarButClassWar #Poverty #FeedThePoor #FoodIsAHumanRight #FoodNotBombs #CeaseFire #CeasefireNow #FoodNotBombsMemphis #MemphisFoodNotBombs #Graffiti #RadicalGraffiti #Leftist #Leftists #humanitarianism #ProPeace #AntiWar #AbolishWar #EndAllWars #JewishVoicesForPeace
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klassicknight · 1 year
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sayruq · 23 days
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politijohn · 8 months
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odinsblog · 4 months
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Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has called for an all-Russian ban on “encouraging women to have abortions” in order to combat the demographic crisis
“As a member of the clergy, I testify that an abortion is a disaster and a tragedy for the woman and those close to her,” Kirill said in January, per the BBC.
Putin sees it as “an acute problem,” per the BBC. Kirill says anti-abortion policies are the solution.
(continue reading)
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evies20dollars · 2 years
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God this episode really was such a good critique of capitalism and how it's literally destroying our planet, but those with power don't care so long as they turn a profit. When Amity said this line, it hit so hard for me and the metaphor only kept going from there. 
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This right here is a feeling that I think a lot of gen z and millennials feel. We’ve been protesting for years and of course we shouldn’t stop raising our voices, but it seems like no matter how much we do, even the world leaders who pretend to care won’t lift a finger if it means they don’t continue to get the political donations and profits they want.
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In terms of the capitalism critique as well we have Odalia shown to exploit her workers (as well as abuse her husband) and threaten to force their children into child labor as well if he does not comply with her demands (and tbh we've already seen towards the start of season 2 that she forces Amity already to demonstrate for Blight Industries).
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The shipment imagery of a tired Kikimora picking things up draws comparisons in my mind to Amazon warehouses and the haste in which things must be shipped to people, always to the harm of the workers in the factory.
Also, to drive the point home further, we have Odalia using the word ‘business’ constantly, even when not literally talking about Blight Industries.
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And of course, we can’t forget the way companies wipe their hands of any responsibility for how their products might be used, drawing a huge comparison in my mind to the U.S. military industrial complex, for instance how the U.S. companies (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, etc.) and the U.S. government itself routinely sell arms weapons to other countries, frequently in support of genocides like what is occurring in the show (Bangladesh is one example off the top of my head, but there are many others).
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The U.S. military also happens to be one of the biggest carbon emitters in the world (see here and here), bringing the climate crisis metaphor full circle. 
This episode was so fucking good and I really appreciate everything the team did here-- they really went all out this episode to criticize capitalism and on the platform of Disney, a notoriously capitalistic and monopolizing company no less? Fucking iconic.
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