AE

In 2018ish, I remember telling a self-described progressive Bernie voter friend of mine in casual conversation that my view of sex work is: “decriminalize, legalize, unionize.” He looked at me like I had grown a 2nd head. My stance hasn't changed much since then, but this is the first time I've read something that challenged it. I learned my terminology was oxymoronic, but the spirit of my original stance has been honed by this book.

This book is not salacious. It tells no sexy stories. It is as dry and analytical as any typical book talking about an overly exploited sub-sect of the working class.

It does thoroughly repeat the points over and over again to make them as strong as possible. If you're already on the author's side, it can come off as overly repetitive.

When people talk about “sex work,” they get so hung up on the first word that they often forget about the 2nd. The call for decriminalization isn't about wanting to further exploit women and marginalized minority groups. Quite the opposite. This is about empowering workers with labor protections instead of further criminalizing their work, thus further alienating the worker, and preventing them from moving beyond said work. Criminalization does not make sex workers safer any more than drug criminalization makes people with drug addiction safer.

Like the book I just previously read “quick fixes”, sex work, like drugs, isn't really about sex work, it's about control. It's about those with power thinking they're doing the right thing but are ultimately making things worse.

Sex trafficking is a serious problem across the world. This book repeatedly emphasizes that there is not enough funding to actually help the victims of sex trafficking and that many of the laws are fundamentally counter-productive. The biggest being the high cost to cross borders. I'm not doing justice to the authors' arguments but I assure you they're quite thorough and compelling. Here's 4 quotes about that:

“Immigration status is the most important single factor engendering migrant workers' vulnerability to exploitation in the UK sex industry.” (This quote is from a UK research study the book quotes)

“People are not, en masse, being snatched off the street. A report from the UK's anti-slavery commission notes that cases of kidnap are very unusual, essentially because it would make little sense to ‘give' someone the services of taking them across a border for free, when people are willing to pay up to thirty thousand pounds to be taken across that same border.”

“People smuggling tends to happen to less vulnerable migrants: those who have the cash to pay a smuggler upfront or have a family or community already settled in the destination country. People trafficking tends to happen to more vulnerable migrants: those who must take on a debt to the smuggler to travel and who have no community connections in their destination country. Both want to travel, however, and this is what anti-trafficking conversations largely obscure with their talk about kidnap and chains.”

“Our position is that no human being is ‘illegal'. People should have the right to travel and to cross borders, and to live and work where they wish. As we wrote in the introduction, border controls are a relatively new invention – they emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century as part of colonial logics of racial domination and exclusion.”

There are 4 general camps regarding the legality of sex work:

1. Criminalization and Incarceration

“Feminism that welcomes police power is called carceral feminism. The sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein, one of the first to use this phrase, uses it to describe a feminist approach that prioritises a ‘law-and-order agenda'; a shift ‘from the welfare state to the carceral state as the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals'. Carceral feminism focuses on policing and criminalisation as the key ways to deliver justice to women.”

Some carceral feminists think this is actually helping sex workers, which is absurd. The criminal justice system is designed to ruin the lives of people thrown into it. This is a feature of the system. Infinitely more lives are ruined by it than “saved.”

It's hypocritical for supposed “feminists” to think that empowering the police and border enforcement, inherently patriarchal institutions designed to uphold existing patriarchal structures, are somehow whitewashed when doing so against sex workers. If you actually listen to what sex workers say, you'll know that borders and police are as big of enemies as violent managers or clients.

In my humble opinion as a white guy, I don't think carceral feminism is real feminism and should be denigrated the same as TERF's.

“Carceral feminism has gained popularity even though the police – and the wider criminal justice system – are key perpetrators of violence against women. In the United States, police officers are disproportionately likely to be violent or abusive to their partners or children. At work, they commit vast numbers of assaults, rapes, or harassment. Sexual assault is the second-most commonly reported form of police violence in the United States (after excessive use of force), and on-duty police commit sexual assaults at more than double the rate of the general US population. Those are just the assaults that make it into the statistics: many will never dare to make a report to an abuser's colleague.”

The police are not your friend.

2. The “Nordic Model” AKA: “Don't criminalize the selling of sex, criminalize the buying of sex.”

This is seen as the “gold standard” of “progressive and forward thinking” Nordic countries.

This law is fundamentally counter-productive and does not make the lives of sex workers safer or better in any way. On the contrary. When it's criminalized for just the buyer, it's more likely that buyers will be violent and the worker would have to stay out later to make ends meet.

“(Pro–Nordic Model politician Rhoda Grant even described this dynamic while advocating for its introduction in Scotland, saying, ‘While those who currently break the law [i.e., violent abusers] will not see the criminalisation of the purchase of sex as a deterrent, many others will.') Thinking of sex work as always, intrinsically violent, of course, hides the difference between a respectful client and an abusive one.”

“A 2004 report by the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security found that ‘the Swedish street prostitutes experience a tougher time. They are more frequently exposed to dangerous clients, while the [legitimate] clients are afraid of being arrested ... They have less time to assess the client as the deal takes place very hurriedly due to fear on the part of the client.'”

It doesn't solve the underlying problem and does not make anyone safer.

Not only that, sex workers may not get prosecuted for sex work, but they can (and do) get evicted, arrested, and even deported.

“[A] sex worker working under the Nordic Model still has a lot to fear. If she's a migrant – even one with a visa – she can be arrested and taken to a deportation centre today. If her name is on the tenancy of a flat she shares, she can be prosecuted. Would you call the police if doing so would make you homeless today, or open you up to prosecution?”

3. The Nevada Model, AKA: “Legalize and regulate”

This overly bureaucratic solution does not give power to the worker, but to the managers. Those who don't adhere to the managerial structure are still criminalize. It's not about protecting people, it's about control.

One thing I'm not quite sure I can agree with from the author was their belief that “mandatory testing is a violation of human rights. Everybody deserves medical privacy and medical autonomy, and mandatory testing violates those core human rights.” I'm sort of more on the idea that workers' rights also need to counterbalance with consumer rights. Maybe that's a bad take.

“To regulate and control sex workers – with the threat of punishment if they don't comply – is to abandon the poorest and most vulnerable to the shadows. To these workers, legalisation is criminalisation, since the ability to work within the law is in practice beyond them. [...] “Penalties mean taking power from workers and giving it to the police, employers, or clients.”

4. The “New Zealand Model,” AKA: “Decriminalize & Unionize”, AKA: The best solution.

“Full Decriminalisation: A legal model that decriminalises the sex worker, the client, and third parties such as managers, drivers, and landlords and regulates the sex industry through labour law.”

Yeah. That. That's what I support. This is why my original stance of “Decriminalize, Legalize, Unionize”. Because Legalization actually means regulation...

“Under legalisation, some sex work, in some contexts, is legal. This legal sex work is heavily regulated by the state – generally not in a way that prioritises the welfare of workers. [...] Often, to legalise means to implement new laws related specifically to sex work, including new criminal penalties, rather than repealing the existing ones.”

Right. Don't want that.

New Zealand has gone the farthest, but that's seen as a starting point, and more progress should be made. A lot of additional progress is additional improvements to the material conditions of the working class to eliminate systematic desperation, depriving those who seek to exploit vulnerable and marginalized people of that vulnerability (and hopefully the marginalization as well).

“Decriminalisation cannot wash away class conflict between the interests of management and employees; instead, it aims to mitigate the intense workplace exploitation that is propped up and fuelled by criminalisation.”

Decriminalization means: Workers' Rights, Defunding Police of their ability to abuse and further exploit sex workers (as is often the case), & harm reduction.

“Through the lens of economic need, people's reasons for engaging in sex work reappear not as aberrant or abject, but as a rational survival strategy in an often shitty world.” People do it for money. The best way to eliminate sex work is not criminalization, it's improving the material conditions of the poor and working class. It's really that simple.

Great book. Very enlightening.

And as always, I'd like to end with some of my favorite quotes and my thoughts about them:

“The bravery and resilience of sex workers has played a part in many liberation struggles. In the 1950s, prostitutes were part of the Mau Mau uprising that led to Kenya's liberation from British colonial rule. In the 1960s and 1970s they were part of the riots at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco and the Stonewall Inn in New York that kickstarted the LGBTQ liberation movement in the United States. In times of rapid social change, working class sex workers are often at the heart of the action. As sex worker activist Margo St. James has put it, ‘it takes about two minutes to politicise a hooker'.”

I wonder if those in power deliberately try to quash and criminalize specific sects of the populous to prevent grassroots radical movements.

“Along with racism, anxieties about commercial sex are embedded in the histories of immigration controls. These are legislative spaces where race and gender co-produce racist categories of exclusion: men of colour as traffickers; women of colour as helpless, seductive, infectious; both as threats to the body politic of the nation. These histories help us see that police and border violence are not anomalous or the work of ‘bad apples'; they are intrinsic to these institutions.
“The feminist movement should thus be sceptical of approaches to gender justice that rely on or further empower the police or immigration controls. Black feminists such as Angela Davis have long criticised feminist reliance on the police, and note that the police appear as the most benevolent protectors in the minds of those who encounter them the least. For sex workers and other marginalised and criminalised groups, the police are not a symbol of protection but a real manifestation of punishment and control.”

ACAB includes CBP

“For feminists, this preoccupation with feminine ‘innocence' should be a red flag, not least because it speaks to a prurient interest in young women. Conversely, LGBTQ people, Black people, and deliberate prostitutes are often left out of the category of innocence, and as a result harm against people in these groups becomes less legible as harm. For example, a young Black man may face arrest rather than support; indeed, resources for runaway and homeless youth (whose realities are rather more complex than chains and ropes) were not included in the US Congress's 2015 reauthorisation of the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act.17 Anti-trafficking statutes often exclude deliberate prostitutes from the category of people able to seek redress, as to be a ‘legitimate' trafficking victim requires innocence, and a deliberate prostitute, however harmed, cannot fulfil that requirement.”

Example of insufficient/counter-productive legislation.

More quotes regarding borders:

“The clash between people's need to migrate and intensifying border fortifications has predictable outcomes. Migration scholars Nassim Majidi and Saagarika Dadu-Brown write that intensifying border restrictions creates ‘new migrant-smuggler relationships', adding that ‘smugglers will take advantage of a border closure or restriction to increase prices'.”

“Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX), an NGO that tackles the exploitation of migrant workers in Europe, notes that ‘fear of immigration authorities is a major barrier to reporting for undocumented workers ... The threat of reporting to police or immigration authorities is routinely used by unscrupulous employers to hold workers in abusive situations.”

“Both the US and UK typically tie domestic workers' visas to a specific employer. As a result, a staggering 80 per cent of migrant domestic workers entering the US find that they have been deceived about their contract, and 78% have had employers threaten them with deportation if they complain.”

“[F]or carceral feminists, the problem is commercial sex, which produces trafficking; for us, the problem is borders, which produces people who have few to no rights as they travel and work. The solutions we propose are equally divergent. Carceral feminists want to tackle commercial sex through criminal law, giving more power to the police. For sex workers, the solution includes dismantling immigration enforcement and the militarised border regimes that push undocumented people into the shadows and shut off their access to safety or justice – in other words, taking power away from the police and giving it to migrants and to workers.”

Border are unjust and can cause more problems than they solve. They exist to serve the interest of the power elite and not the interests of the people.

I have been a proponent for complete drug decriminalization for nearly a decade now. I got this book to help reinforce this radical stance. But while this book didn't reverse my stance, it did alter it into a more cohesive and holistic one.

First and foremost, the most important thing to remember when talking about drug use and drug laws is that it has almost never actually been about the drugs. Drug policies throughout the last 100+ years or so have always been primarily about:

1. Targeting & criminalizing specific minority groups for a political purpose,
2. Using the state to enrich political allies, corporate interests (AKA: the deep state running drugs, guns, money, and humans across the globe),
3. Extracting wealth from the poor via police brutality and the legalized theft of “civil asset forfeiture.

This is true still today when one half of the political duopoly rails against fentanyl coming across the US-Mexico border by “illegal immigrants” despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl actually gets smuggled by white US-citizens, a fact rarely pointed out by the other half of the political duopoly, shockingly.

So it goes through various political scares of the last century, manufactured in whole or in part by corporate media in conjunction with law enforcement, the cycle continues.

The book goes through legal and illegal drugs, including coffee, tobacco, coffee, alcohol, coca, and the fun ones. I wish it talked more about sugar. Maybe that's too loosely related and it already covered a lot of colonialism associated with cash crops. Its theory regarding childhood diagnosis of ADHD was described as “sounds like reactionary BS”.

The ultimate lessons this book outlines are that: people will always use drugs to cope with living in a crushing society. Criminalization doesn't work, is maliciously enforced only against the poor and people of color, and doesn't solve the underlying societal issues. If you actually want to reduce drug use, make society better for people through things like universal single-payer healthcare (M4A) and universal jobs programs. Also, insufficiently mentioned throughout the book, is the need for universal housing. These 3 solutions, in tandem with drug decriminalization, will greatly reduce the crushing suffering people experience in 21st-century America.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject of drug use in the US.

~~

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book and my thoughts on them. It's ok to skip this part of the review if you want:

“American drug use today is truly world historical. At 4 percent of the earth's population, Americans consume 80 percent of its opioids, including 99 percent of its hydrocodone, and 83 percent of its attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medications.1 One in three Americans suffers from anxiety, depression, or both (globally, that number is about one in twenty), and one in six is on a psychiatric medication.”

Remember this the next time you see a liberal roll their eyes at a conservative or a crystal mommy who thinks the drug companies have too much power and influence over the people and their “elected leaders.”

Regarding coffee markets, the US fixed coffee prices to keep them high in order to keep the market afloat in South America. “ Despite America's reputation for free-trade fanaticism, the US was a willing participant in a new system to keep prices stable and high. The reasons were, unsurprisingly, political. The first agreement, signed in 1940, was intended to keep countries like Brazil on the right side during WWII. The second accord—the International Coffee Agreement (ICA), signed in 1962—was an explicit instrument of Cold War anti-Communism.” Capitalists will always betray their ideals of a “free market” in order to maintain power.
This artificial price inflation ended in 1989 since there was no longer an enemy in need of “defending against”:

“The ‘coffee crisis' that followed was a massive disaster in all producing countries: dispossessed farmers turned to violence, to the guerrillas, or else to coca and opium poppy cultivation. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was preceded by the value decline of coffee, which had accounted for 80 percent of the country's exports. Letting the ICA lapse was the functional equivalent of the United States halving its world aid budget.” Insane. No need to help out other countries when there was no longer a risk of them allying with the Soviet Union, so might as well throw them to the dogs.

The first drug control act in the US was the Harrison Act of 1914, prohibiting opium and coca products without a prescription. “In the nineteenth century, morphine use was more respectable than drunkenness, given the oppressive temperance culture. And while those drug users that fell into abuse were moral reprobates, lazy, feminine, sinful, and so on, it was only with these swift legislative actions that they became dangerous criminals—at first simply according to the new laws, but inevitably in actual fact as well. Placed on the other side of the law—‘by 1930, 35 per cent of all convicts in America were indicted under the Harrison Act'—it was only natural that users turned to actual criminal behavior to produce and consume drugs.”

While the US was criminalizing and imprisoning its own people, it had no qualms working with organized crime elements to help transport drugs back to its own people. “World War II made strange bedfellows of the Mafia and the nascent deep state: mobsters Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Vito Genovese all struck deals to help the Allies, and these connections survived the war. One of the CIA's first projects upon its founding in 1947 was to bankroll the Corsican Mafia to disrupt Communist-led unions in France. The Corsicans just so happened to be running laboratories in Marseille that transformed Turkish and Southeast Asian opium into heroin en route to North America. The CIA not only deliberately ignored this infamous “French Connection,” but also stifled the efforts of Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) agents to do much about it.”

As previously and repeatedly stated: the ‘Deep State' is a consortium of unaccountable corporate oligarchs, banking institutions, intelligence agencies, and organized crime operating without the consent of the governed to maintain US imperial hegemony and corrupt profit maximization by any means necessary. They do this by trafficking in guns, drugs, people, and anything else.

The US government was, and arguably still is, the largest orchestrator of controlled substance trafficking on earth.

“Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the FBN (now the DEA) from 1930 to 1962, did a good deal to undermine the success of his own bureau. ... In addition to being a vicious and conniving drug warrior, Anslinger was also arguably the biggest dealer around. The war had made clear how important the flow of raw materials to US pharmaceutical laboratories was, and access to those materials, along with the promotion of the consumption of American mass-produced drugs abroad, became a key priority of the FBN.” Play both sides so you're always on top.

“In Southeast Asia, the CIA went well beyond financing and feigning ignorance.61 It was an active participant in the drug trade, building links between different crime networks and even directly transporting ‘miscellaneous cargo' through its front airline, Air America. When drought in the Golden Triangle moved the center of opium production back to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the CIA was there once again, arming the Mujaheddin Afghan guerrillas who, in now typical fashion, grew poppies and fought the Communists.” Apropos of nothing: don't you think it's weird that Fentanyl came roaring in almost immediately after the US war in Afghanistan ended? Almost like there was a vacuum in the market... unfortunately the book doesn't talk about that. I suspect there's not enough info out about it just yet.

“In addition to establishing mandatory minimum sentences, the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, the fruit of years of Biden's and Strom Thurmond's efforts to get tough on crime, allowed law enforcement to seize any assets on the basis of “probable cause.” ... The bill also allowed police to keep the proceeds of forfeited assets. Money, cars, homes—anything associated with suspected drug use—were now all potential revenue to bolster local law enforcement budgets. But police still need enough “proof” to get search warrants, right? Yes, technically, but in the Supreme Court's Illinois v. Gates decision in 1983, they ruled that police can get warrants based on anonymous tips. And after United States v. Leon in 1984, “evidence seized under tainted warrants is admissible provided the police met a subjective standard of ‘good faith.'” With these two precedent-altering cases, nothing prevents police from calling in their own tips or simply lying on their warrant requests. With Illinois v. Gates, United States v. Leon, and the 1984 crime bill, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments effectively became optional. ... Based on little more than their own “reasonable belief,” police today can legally enter your home, take whatever they want (including your home), and not give it back—ever.”

President Genocide Joe (formerly Senator Jim Crow Joe) was the primary pusher of the legalized lawlessness that is the “civil asset forfeiture” system, a complete erosion of our constitutional freedoms from government tyranny by jackbooted thugs.

“Only one thing is certain about the causality of opiate addiction: the colder and more inhospitable the world becomes, and the more we punish people seeking refuge, the larger those holes will be.” Maybe throwing these people in jail won't actually be of any help.

“As with opioids, methamphetamine abuse took off in many areas of the country lacking in decent healthcare. In both cases, it's not difficult to see these phenomena as by-products of unwitting self-medication, a sensible enough option when options are few.“ This is why people use hard drugs like meth and opioids. If you give them access to real healthcare and give them purpose with a jobs guarantee program. Housing guarantee wouldn't hurt either.

“Worried for their children's future in a cutthroat economy, or simply wanting them to sit down and be quiet, parents easily convince doctors of the applicability of the ADHD diagnosis—the boundaries of which have grown broader over the years. They are encouraged to do so by heavy-handed pharmaceutical advertising and supported by lobbyists and ADHD advocacy organizations, themselves sometimes funded by pharmaceutical companies. The game is neatly rigged from all sides, resulting in a steady growth in the prevalence of ADHD in American children (10.2 percent in 2015–16).” The author goes on to compare this rise in ADHD diagnoses and prescription drug usage as the modern-day version of the speed epidemic in the late-‘60s/early-70's. I've been told that this description of ADHD diagnosis is “

The most interesting part of the book is how psychologists have morphed describing the same problem over the last ~150 years using different terms and blaming different causes. “Neurasthenia,” coined in 1881, was the first modern term used to describe the exhaustion and worry associated with modern life:

“Neurasthenia is best conceptualized as the first instance of a diagnostic dialectic, which includes anxiety as its second pole and depression as its final one. Neurasthenia was a mess of a category: Beard and others used it to indicate such a wide range of phenomena that really the only way to concisely describe how they understood it at the time would be something like “all of the bad things that capitalist society does to our health.” The postwar anxiety that replaced neurasthenia repressed its characteristics of fatigue and enervation, but society remained the cause. The neoliberal period brought back the depressive element of neurasthenia but eliminated the social causes in order to justify pharmacological dependence. Today our brains make us sick, only able to process the degradation of society mimetically through the degradations of our prefrontal cortices.”

Same problem, different name, initially it was caused by societal pressures, now described as being caused by having a bad brain. Curious.

Then of course there's the fact that anti-depression medications are largely ineffective for a lot of people, and for those who do benefit (barely greater than placebo), the medication has large side-effects and works in ways modern medicine barely understands. The prescription of SSRI's is a bandaid over a societal problem of atomization, loneliness, and disconnection caused by our modern capitalist system. “If there's one thing we know about depression, it's that it's caused by isolation, loneliness, and disconnection—in other words, the atomized affective state brought on by the political economic shifts of the neoliberal period. As described in more detail in the Introduction, during this time unions and membership organizations were gutted, deindustrialization tore apart working-class communities, and a wave of consumerist individualism carried us into the sea of post-politics. We are more alone than ever; no surprise that we are also more depressed than ever.”

If they work for you, good on you. Keep it up. They worked for me all through college and several years after that. But I got off them and have learned to manage my “Neurasthenia” through other means. Do what works best for you.

There's a lot more good stuff in here but I'm tired of writing. Read the book.

After years of trying to ignore the term “deep state”, corporate media is overseeing an astroturf campaign to redefine it in order to downplay its meaning when used sincerely.

“Deep State” has always meant: “A consortium of unaccountable corporate oligarchs, banking institutions, intelligence agencies, and organized crime operating without the consent of the governed to maintain US imperial hegemony and corrupt profit maximization by any means necessary.”

However, the astroturf campaign is now trying to convince people that the term is synonymous with “bureaucrat”. E.g.: “the ‘deep state' EPA regulators are trying to keep poison out of the drinking water. I love the deep state!” Anyone who conflates the two is intentionally trying to be condescending.

After reading a dozen or so books about US intelligence operations in the 20th century, it is obvious that not only the Deep State real, but it is still the driving factor of US international policy, not the voice of the people.

This book never once uses the term “deep state”. But that is what it's about.

The CIA, and its predecessor the OSS, began working with organized crime elements in the 1940's during WW2. They used any means necessary to maintain US hegemony, defeat the US's geopolitical enemies both foreign and domestic, and they enriched themselves as icing on the cake.

The means they used, as thoroughly outlined in this book, included the sexual blackmail of people

Why didn't J. Edgar Hoover's FBI go after organized crime until it was already out of control? Because they had sexual blackmail on him, his well documented cross-dressing and homosexual proclivities kept him in line.

Hoover continued the cycle by sexually blackmailing others, including MLK and other threats to the powers that be.

This book lays the historical foundation for how Jeffrey Epstein managed to maintain his child sex trafficking empire under the nose of the most powerful people on earth. He was simply taking a roll that countless others have done over the last century: manufacture Kompromat in order to blackmail those who dare threaten the interests of the deep state.

They also had a great section on the Octopus Murders. It went way deeper and did a way better job explaining the connections than that mediocre Netflix documentary.

There were so many fascinating pieces of info from this extremely long PART 1 OF 2 book that it became too arduous to write a thorough review. It left me in a reading slump just thinking about tackling the mountain of riveting quotes and incites. But I had already written a good opener so I'm knocking it out and moving on with my life.

FANTASTIC BOOK. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

After reading the MLK assassination book, it felt only right to read about the RFK assassination.

When discussing the political assassinations of the 1960's, it's often said that the RFK one was “an open and shut case.” However, if you were to review the recordings and transcripts of witness interviews, autopsy report, chain of custody for evidence, and the criminal case information for the indicted shooter, Sirhan Sirhan, then you would realize that it is extremely far from “open and shut.” The evidence for conspiracy is astounding. You don't need to go far afield to find it.

I said in my MLK book review that the evidence of conspiracy and cover up in that case dwarfed that of the JFK assassination and that no logical person could look at all the evidence and conclude that the official story from the police and FBI could possibly be credible. What I didn't mention is that most of the evidence pointing to that was from eyewitness testimony, and that there was few (yet still quite compelling) bits of physical evidence.

Comparably, the RFK assassination has exceptionally more physical evidence pointing to the fact that the accused shooter did not fire the lethal shots to Kennedy, if he actually fired any bullets at all. Marrying that to an equal, or possibly even larger, trove of eyewitness testimony, and the mountain of evidence pointing to conspiracy actually DWARFS the MLK assassination! This author meticulously lays out every bit of evidence publicly available, cross-referencing it with new testimony of witnesses, providing her own interviews with witnesses, and other key facts in the development of the story. All laid out, it is clear to anyone with an open enough mind to admit that maybe the government might lie to its people sometimes, that there were more than 1 gunmen that night, and more than 1 guns firing at Kennedy.

Here's a brief summary of how the official narrative does not make sense:
* The Gun Sirhan used held 8 rounds. Eight rounds. Therefore the “official narrative” is that 8 shots were fired.
* Multiple witnesses heard more than 8 shots.
* Multiple witnesses saw more than 1 gunman.
* An audio recording of the entire incident heard more than 8 shots.
* A witness got powder burns on his face in a way that does not make sense with Sirhan being the lone shooter.
* None of the bullet wound trajectories in Kennedy make sense based on the “official narrative”.
* Multiple bullet holes were identified around the scene in the door frame and ceiling. All of the physical evidence was inexplicably destroyed
* Police altered reports from eyewitnesses who said they heard more than 8 shots.
* Witnesses heard, saw, and felt shots coming from other places than where Sirhan was openly firing from.
* Multiple witnesses saw a gunman shooting from atop a table, a location impossible for Sirhan to have been on given what happened during his apprehension.
* Multiple witnesses saw multiple gunmen running from the scene with unconcealed or poorly concealed guns
* “Based on the totality of the evidence, it appears two bullets, not one, entered Kennedy's brain from the same near-contact entry point. Bang-bang.” It is not physically possible for those shots to have been fired by Sirhan.

A dozen or more witnesses provided very specific testimony of certain individuals walking with and talking with Sirhan. They all describe the same 1-3 people. Several witnesses saw one of these people, a woman in a white dress with black polka dots run out shortly after the shooting saying “we shot him! Senator Kennedy!” These witnesses were psychologically tortured by the FBI into recanting their statements because they didn't coincide with “the official narrative.” The audio transcripts of their interrogations are deeply disturbing and show that the police have no interest in the truth, merely to maintain the official facade. All it takes is a reading of, or listening to, these transcripts and it won't take an ounce of logical leaping to believe that the police have something to hide with this case.

Many of the witness interviews were intentionally not transcribed in order to obfuscate the evidence from the public. Every single one of the interviews not transcribed (written on the envelope with the tapes “do not type”) contain a witness giving a statement that lends credence to a conspiracy.

There has been zero physical evidence tying the rounds exhumed from the victims and the scene to the gun taken from the possession of Sirhan. Rounds fired from a gun leave what's called “rifling”, like a finger print that is slightly different for each gun and always on fired bullets. None match Sirhan's gun. None matched from the rifling range Sirhan was seen shooting at in the weeks prior.

The chain of evidence for the bullets were so incredibly lousy that there is clearly evidence of tampering from LA police and/or the FBI. The bullets from the Kennedy Autopsy were marked by the surgeon. The bullets currently in evidence do not match what the surgeon extracted.

There is substantial evidence that more bullets were fired than what Sirhan's gun was capable of holding. Bullets were dug out of door frames and likely thrown into Sirhan's car. Bullet holes were in the ceiling.

“We've been over the kitchen area twice, and we're going at least one more time. It's unbelievable how many damn holes there are in that kitchen ceiling.” The door frames and kitchen tiles were removed for evidence. They have since been destroyed. There is indisputable physical evidence, photographs, interviews, official statements, pointing to the fact that more than 8 shots were fired. Defenders of the official narrative come up with all sorts of cockamamie explanations as to “which of these 3+ locations could the 8th bullet have gone? There's so much compelling evidence for each of them!” It is more fantastical, more supernatural, more irrational to assert that only 8 bullets were shot than to say there were more than 8.

The killing shot(s) to Kennedy were fired at the back of his head from less than an inch away from him. We know this because the gunpowder fired at that close a range gets embedded into the skin, resulting in tattooing. This was seen on Kennedy. Not one single witness claims Sirhan was ever less than 1 foot away from Kennedy. It is not physically possible for the markings found on Kennedy to have been shot by Sirhan. It is simply physically impossible for the “official story” to be true. It's really that simple.

Sirhan was holding a .22 caliber revolver. .22 rounds, as the name implies, have a diameter of 0.22 inches. Here is an exact quote from the X-Ray autopsy: “The largest metallic fragment is situated in the petrous ridge and at about the arcuate eminence. This measures 12 mm in transverse dimension, 7 mm in vertical dimension, and approximately 12 mm in anteroposterior dimension.” 12mm x 7mm x 12mm = 0.47”x0.28”x0.47”. The bullet inside Kennedy is the wrong caliber to fit Sirhan's gun.

“High school student Scott Enyart had been standing on a table in the pantry, waiting for Kennedy so he could take his picture, when the shooting began. He took pictures ‘while the shots were being fired' or ‘maybe a little afterward,' he wasn't sure. He jumped up on one of the steam tables so he had a good view of the room. Enyart mentioned his friend Brent Gold was there with him, taking pictures as well. [...] Forty years later, Enyart would win a lawsuit against the LAPD over this film...”

“These photos were purportedly stolen from a courier's car at a gas stop on the way between the California State Archives in Sacramento to the courthouse where Enyart's case was in session in Los Angeles. Given that nothing else from the car was stolen, we have to ask who wanted to keep Enyart from receiving these photos, and what the photos may have shown that was worth pilfering in an elaborate operation.
It wouldn't be the first time evidence was sabotaged. Less than two months after the assassination, the LAPD took the extraordinary step of burning some 2,400 photos from the case in Los Angeles County General's medical-waste incinerator. Why destroy thousands of photos in an incinerator if there was nothing to hide? The LAPD kept hundreds of innocuous crowd scene photos that showed no girl in a polka dot dress and no suspicious activities or individuals. Why were those photos preserved? Perhaps because those photos had nothing in them that warranted their destruction?” HUH. THAT'S WEIRD. DON'T YOU THINK THAT'S WEIRD? WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT? SURELY THERE'S NOTHING SUSPICIOUS HERE. DON'T WORRY FOLKS WE GOT THE GUY. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

One of the officers pivotal to the prosecution of Sirhan was LAPD criminalist and member of the LAPD crime lab, Officer DeWayne Wolfer. He spearheaded the investigation for LAPD, his team gathered evidence, he fired test bullets in order to determine if the rifling from Sirhan's gun matched the bullets being presented to the jury as those recovered from the scene. He was the key to the whole investigation. Surely he's a straight shooter, right? No. The LAPD has been corrupt for decades. He and the LAPD were SO corrupt that the California Court of Appeals “railed against Wolfer's actions and testimony in [a separate shooting case with similar ballistic evidence], stating he had ‘negligently presented false demonstrative evidence in support of his ballistics testimony,' that ‘Wolfer's acoustical testimony was false,' and that ‘his testimony on qualifications as an expert on anatomy was also false and borders on the perjurious.' In other words, the Court of Appeals stopped just short of calling Wolfer a liar.” Key ballistics expert for the RFK assassination is a known liar who manufactured false evidence and gave false testimony. HUH. WEIRD. SURELY JUST THE ONE TIME, RIGHT?

6 separate suspects were wanted for questioning that night. Several were even brought into custody.
Everyone who mentioned a separate suspect mysteriously had their police radio communications go silent shortly afterward and the story changed.
Michael Wayne was arrested for running away from the shooting. His story didn't hold up compared to witnesses' testimony. Many people pin him with a gun as he was running from the shooting. He was taken into custody by a security guard because people were shooting “stop that man”. He lied to the FBI about what happened, a federal crime, but no consequences for that for some strange reason. WEIRD.

There is so much more to this book that I have failed to cover. I didn't even talk about the farce of a trial, Sirhan's defense attorneys were very clearly not interested in providing a legitimate defense and conspired with the prosecutor and judge.

Large swaths of testimony and reporting is still classified. Because in this fake country, we the peons cannot know what the government doesn't want us to know. There was no “Warren Commission” for RFK. There's been no significant effort to release classified documents related to his assassination.

The people who helped cover up the conspiracy got promoted. The people who asked questions or threatened to “official narrative” got harassed, blacklisted, or disappeared. Hell, the person who denied Sirhan's parole a few years ago became the present sitting Vice President of the US.

No rational person can review the evidence and assert in good faith that the official narrative is credible. I implore anyone who has an iota of skepticism for the federal government to read this book and research the matter yourself.

I recommend this book to everyone.

I've read enough books to be convinced that the CIA assassinated JFK as retribution for his refusal to conduct a full-on invasion of Cuba after the Bay of Pigs debacle and otherwise displeasing the powers that be. But I think it's not unreasonable to be skeptical of the conspiracy theory. There's not enough declassified evidence to satisfy the ardent supporters & maintainers of the status quo. Maybe when more is released, the history can be more thoroughly reevaluated that would prevent corporate media from being able to continually deny reality.

Comparably, the conspiracy to assassinate MLK by the FBI and Memphis Police Department is SO UNDENIABLY TRUE, that no rational person could possibly refute the MOUNTAIN of evidence. It is night and day.

The author has spent decades conducting interviews and calling for new trials on this assassination. His investigation is incredibly thorough. Throughout it, he has been stymied by federal officials stalking him, bullying his witnesses, and refusing to cooperate in any way.

“Skeptics” often use the semantic satiation phrase “if it were a conspiracy, then hundreds of people would have to be in on it! Surely someone would have talked by now.” But what's clear is that people have talked! At least 70 different people have gone on the record in a court of law arguing that the official story about the assassination is false. These are people who were there at the day, who've overheard conversations by police, who spoke to witnesses that end up getting mysteriously killed, even people involved have admitted their involvement. It is truly baffling how thorough the author's investigation is.

In 1999, the author and the King family filed a Civil case against

70+ people have come forward to speak on the record in a civil trial in 1999 that proved James Earl Ray was an unwitting patsy and a conspiracy orchestrated by the FBI in cooperation with the Memphis Police Department and US Army Intelligence. Why didn't you ever hear about this trial?

“Some seventy witnesses and thirty days later, a jury took fifty-nine minutes to find for the King family and against Loyd Jowers and agents of the government of the United States, the state of Tennessee, and the city of Memphis. Jowers's liability was assessed at 30 percent, while the government's liability was put at 70 percent. The extraordinary array of verbal testimonial and documentary evidence is set out in detail in my second book An Act of State. Suffice it to say, the roles and link between the Mafia, the military, local law enforcement, and government officials became crystal clear.”

Where was the media for this trial?

“The media camera, like the media itself, would come and go. They were nearly always absent, with the notable and sole exception of local anchorman Wendell Stacey, who almost lost his job at the time over his insistence that he attend every day. He was eventually fired but won a wrongful dismissal action and was rehired.”

Truth to fucking power indeed.

The author not only thoroughly debunks the US government's official story with mountains of evidence, but even annihilates other authors who wrote books that reinforced the government's official story, pointing out all of the blatant ignoring of contrary evidence, distortion of the evidence they do use, and outright fabrication.

It is inherently dishonest and disingenuous to argue that we can support the official government story when information is still classified more than half a century later. No one in good conscience can argue the US is a “free democracy” when so much critical information about what the US Government does on its own soil to its own citizenry is hidden away for decades “for our protection.” That is, at its very core, bullshit.

While I DO NOT subscribe to a majority of conspiracy theories, I DO think that the current system of document classification, as well as the overt ties mainstream corporate media has with federal agencies, and the actual, undeniable, proven conspiracies conducted by the federal government (MK Ultra, COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra) give enough credibility to those who do not immediately accept the official stories provided by US government officials.

The US government has failed to provide its people with enough reason to trust their word. Though I think plenty of the conspiratorially minded take it too far. But that's not surprising given how much insane shit the US government has actually, demonstrably, undeniably done over the last 100 years.

The Jesse Jackson involvement was the most shocking revelation to me. I had no idea he was involved. It is clear as day that he wanted the fame and notoriety for himself, so he made a deal with the devil to get it. What did South Park say about him again?

Anyway...

The author goes in depth about how corporate media has continually stymied any substantive reporting on his decades-long investigation, cancelling his appearances, refusing to publish his books, refusing to report on the revelations, always either siding with the government's flimsy story or ignoring him outright.

“By 1967 the CIA was spending 1.5 billion dollars a year without any effective fiscal control over individual expenditures on operations. Covert domestic activities and operations were paid for by “unvouchered funds” (expenditures without purchase orders or receipts). As a result of the 1949 Central Intelligence Act, Director Helms had the authority to spend money “without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds.” Helms's signature on any check, no matter how large, drawn on any CIA bank account, was deemed to be sufficient. Interagency cooperation, particularly with the army and/or the State Department, was frequently necessary and this was accomplished through the establishment of Special Operations Groups (SOG) created for particular projects or missions. SOG activity inside the United States against “Willie” (blacks and dissidents) was not publicized or known.”

We know these people funded fascists in Europe and South America. We know these people orchestrated political assassinations across the globe. We know these people ran guns and drugs in order to get more unaccountable funding. And I'm expected to believe a word they say about “no involvement?” Gimme a break

“On June 16, 1978, while at the United Nations to talk with members and staff of the UN Special Assembly on Disarmament, [Daniel] Ellsberg [leaker of the pentagon papers] became quite friendly with [Brady] Tyson [then an aide to UN ambassador Andrew Young]. [...]
In the affidavit Ellsberg stated, “I asked Tyson whether he thought there had been a conspiracy and who he thought might have done it. He said very flatly to me, ‘We know there was a conspiracy and we know who did it.' ... I asked him who it was, if he would feel free to say, and he said again in a way that was very surprising to me in its lack of equivocation or reservation, ‘It was a group of off-duty and retired FBI officers working under the personal direction of J. Edgar Hoover.' He said further that this was a group working secretly and known to almost no one else in the FBI. This group Tyson said included ‘a sharpshooter,' who had actually done the shooting.””

Would you look at that, someone DID talk! Why would somebody with rock solid credibility, the guy who leaked the pentagon papers, not let this revelation become international news? The House Select Committee On Assassinations in the 1990's didn't seem to care. WEIRD. After the affidavit was brought to the committee's attention, the author and his cohorts addressed the media: “Abernathy, in his offhand manner, informed them that, yes, we had had a very productive meeting with the staff and leadership of the committee, we hoped that they would go on and complete their work, and we had given them certain information implicating the FBI in the killing of Dr. King. I was amazed that none of the press picked this up: there was virtually no response.” WEIRD.

“At this point, it appears entirely reasonable, in light of this sordid history, of disinformation with collaboration between mainstream media and the government, to conclude that the more we learn about contemporary publishing and news reporting in the United States, the more accurate does it appear was Carl Bernstein's conclusion in Rolling Stone in October 1977 about the extraordinary degree of influence and control over—and actual working presence in all aspects of print, audio, and visual media by the intelligence community and its assigned agents. The willingness of corporate media to collaborate and the consolidation of that collaboration has, for the most part, made it impossible for a free and independent press to operate in this Republic.”

The corporate media doesn't care about the truth. They are not there to speak truth to power. Quite the opposite, they're there to make you THINK they're speaking truth to power so you don't think critically beyond what they show you.

The author became the lawyer of James Earl Ray. He, along with the King family, wanted to have an actual trial for Ray. The corporate media doesn't want this because the US government doesn't want this. So...

“The media continually sought to undermine the strength of the family's commitment to a trial. Distortions abounded. Take the New York Times coverage on February 21 of our motion to test the alleged murder weapon. Drummond Ayres Jr. reported Mrs. King's testimony:

>Mrs. King, speaking after years of silence about Mr. Ray's legal maneuvering, took the stand this morning, and acknowledging the incongruity of her appearance on his behalf and behest, said, “We call for the trial that never happened.”

This was a gross distortion of what she actually said, which was: “We call for the trial that never happened.... If we fail to seize this fading opportunity for justice to be served, the tragedy will be compounded by the failure of the legal system.” Nowhere in her statement did she refer in any way to James being pressed to tell anything.”

Not only is the crime clear, but the cover-up was clear from the beginning. The crime scene was immediately tampered with when the bushes (where the real shooter was located) got cut down the MORNING AFTER the shooting. A taxi driver who saw the real shooter running from the scene was murdered. Witnesses were harassed to prevent them from coming forward.The author was being followed by the FBI while he was trying to meet with witnesses. “I would learn later from a mutual street acquaintance that an FBI contact was trying to locate where I was staying. Now, why would they be doing that?“ HUH. WEIRD.

I could go on, but I've said all I need to say and it would be beating a dead horse. Read this book if you want to know what really happened to MLK. Every single argument he makes is backed up with logic, reason, and mounds of evidence.

Cory Doctorow is the cooler, more radical version of Douglas Rushkoff. This book is like a shorter, less boring version of the book “Surveillance Capitalism”.
So few people are going to understand these comparisons....

Doctorow is one of the few great technologists who isn't a grifter or an oligarch demon. He understands the power of modern technology and how it is being used for the enrichment of the wealthy rather than the betterment of masses.

The problem is that neoliberal deregulation spearheaded by Reagan, and Thatcher resulted in every industry becoming overly monopolistic, including the tech industry. The tech monopolists achieved their power not because they're smarter or better than their competitors, but because they leveraged the broken system to keep competition down.

The Chicago School of Demons and Ghouls, led by the hellhounds Friedman and Bork, have indoctrinated courts into accepting their crackpot economic ideals, such as that monopolies are actually good, as normal: “Bork's investors consolidated their gains. They sponsored economics chairs and whole economics departments and created the Manne Seminars, an annual junket in Florida, where federal judges were treated to luxury accommodations and ‘continuing education' workshops on Bork's unhinged theories.”

This is what we're supposed to believe qualifies as a “democracy.”

These corporations could never get this big if not for the shift in economic theory spearheaded by the Chicago Ghouls. The corporations then use their power to strengthen regulations that primarily benefit themselves and not the people. The “lovers of free market” will always leverage the arm of the state to protect their corporate interests. This is inevitable under capitalism.

This includes fighting against, say, the right to repair. The power of the state is used to crush you from doing what you want with the product you own. “Apple uses patent to prevent the independent manufacture of some parts; it uses anti-circumvention to prevent the independent installation of other parts; it uses contractual arrangements with recyclers to ensure that most used phones are not broken down for parts; it uses trademark to block the re-importation of parts that have escaped the recyclers' shredders.” All of this behavior should be criminalized. People who care about deflating or breaking up big tech should look precisely at THIS to do so. This is what needs to be deregulated. Yet conservatives never talk about this. Isn't that curious? Like they actually stand on the side of capital and not the people....

Some more fun quotes as a reflection of our “democracy”...

“Regulators can't regulate tech because they're clueless, sure. But why are they clueless? Because the process by which regulators and lawmakers understand issues starts from the presumption that there will be an adversarial process and a neutral referee, and monopolies turn that into a chummy backroom deal between a handful of executives from the industry and a handful of their former colleagues who are temporarily regulating their former colleagues.”

Or look up the story of Mark, who took medical photos of his son's groin to send to his doctor, but that photo was uploaded to the Google Cloud, got marked as CSAM (child sexual abuse material). The cops talked to him, realized this was all a misunderstanding, but not Google...

“Google deleted his account and all his data, including every family photo he'd ever taken. He lost his phone number (he was a Google Fi customer). He lost his phone, too (he was an Android user). He lost his email address. He lost the two-factor authentication he used to log in to accounts, which meant that he lost every other account that relied on either 2FA, a phone number or email to log in. He lost every document he had on Google's cloud.”
What a great thing to have one company have all this power with absolutely zero oversight!

“Today's tech giants have not invented an interop-proof computer. They've invented laws that make interoperability illegal unless they give permission for it. A new, complex thicket of copyright, patent, trade secret, noncompete and other IP rights has conjured up a new offense we can think of as ‘felony contempt of business model'—the right of large firms to dictate how their customers, competitors and even their critics must use their products.”

The book goes into detail as to how to fix the problem.

It's all very interesting stuff. I highly suggest it to anyone who cares about understanding the tech industry.

Minimal solutions for STEM professionals.

Listened to this on a plane ride to Japan.

Was disappointed it was just anecdotes and very few bits of useful information about traversing Japan. A few cultural faux pa's but nothing terribly substantive.

It's an autobiography of a young man with a slightly interesting life. Loved the YouTube channel. not impressed by the book.

A nice, short pop-sci/pop-history book about the history of the SI units, the metric system, and how humanity's systems of weights and measures have evolved alongside their material conditions.
I needed a breather after giving up on my 24 hour audiobook about the history of Cuba. something lighter and less riddled with colonialism.

And yes I do mean “less riddled with colonialism,” but not “without colonialism”, as forcing developing nations to adopt the weights and measures of the colonizers did have a (in my broken brain, insufficient) roll in the adoption of the metric system.

I think if Joseph Dombey had made it to the U.S. in the mid-1790s to share the early metric system, at the request of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, the US wouldn't be the last holdout. But alas his ship went off course and pirates got to him first.

It's fascinating how since then the anti-metric weirdos in the US kept morphing their opinions to fit the times. In the 1800's they said the metric system was godless. In the early 1900's they said it was as irrational as the evolution deniers.

The stupid ASME also helped halt the transition. Never trusted mechanical engineers...now I know why....

I was fascinating hearing about the history of weights and measures, the creation of the metric system, the slow evolution to the SI standard, and the eventual elimination of the “prototype meter” to a scientifically measured value rather than a real-world object. The book talks about the replacement of the “prototype kilogram” to either the big silicon crystal ball or the calculated value by fixing Planck's constant. But it was published before either of those decisions were made. Now both the €2 billion ball is built and h is fixed. So we don't have any real-world objects to base any of our measurements on.

The last few chapters got a little weird, talking about the “modern meteoscape” or the phenomenology of measurement. It's about how to tools of measurement impact our own philosophy of measurement. I don't think it would have been a far step to rephrase the author's final point to be about how the material conditions of our modern existence impacts our ideologies.

Also one of the last chapters was about the complexities of measuring women's breasts for the proper fitting of a brazier. Interesting stuff but sorta out of left field when before it was all about “and then in 19 dickity 2 the international consortium of old white guys decided that the blah blah constant will be adjusted by one one-millionth in order to eliminate the need of this fancy metal stick” etc.
I liked it. Check it out of you're into that sort of stuff.

This book was just a slog to get through. The audiobook is 24 hours long. It is full of very dense, yet interesting, material that became increasingly more daunting to get through, causing me to greatly slow down and resulting in me taking over 2 months to get through it. But i finished and I'm ready to talk about it!

This book outlines the new era of neoliberal mega-corporations' unquenchable thirst for user-generated data to better maintain systems designed to manipulate said users into buying more crap.

That's really the gist. It's genuinely depressing to think we have the brightest minds in Silicon Valley working for the largest, most valuable companies and they're putting forth all of that energy and brain power for the sole purpose of...figuring out better ways to manipulate you into buying more crap.

“Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, the corporation's scientists are not recruited to solve world hunger or eliminate carbon-based fuels. Instead, their genius is meant to storm the gates of human experience, transforming it into data and translating it into a new market colossus that creates wealth by predicting, influencing, and controlling human behavior.”

That's the dead-end of our modern late-capitalist autocracy. It's the best thing these people can do. They're all pure evil, don't get me wrong, but even comic book villains have more enticing end goals. SV is just: ‘you'll be able to more quickly know what shows you might like, so please accept this toaster's terms of service and update its firmware.' Such a boring dystopia.

There's a common turn of phrase that liberals blindly repeat whenever stuff like this gets brought up: “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. And yet when this is turned around onto the corporate ghouls, they have a tremendous amount to hide. They are never transparent about their methods of surveillance, or their reasons why. They fight tooth and nail any effort to be more transparent, or they flip the script to get ahead of any legislation by saying ‘these new transparency features are to help you, not to cover our asses from lawsuits'.

Nothing of real life-changing value has come out of SV in at least a decade. The start-ups coming out now are just better ways to suck up data or better ways to replace good paying jobs with poverty waged gig workers.

We used to gather raw materials to process, create goods, and build things. Now the raw material is data. Extremely easy to correct but hard to process into something of value without large volumes of it. Once processed, it is used to create predictive algorithms to better understand how people operate. But people are too random, so they turn their tools into a way to manipulate us into more easily predictive beings.

If you've ever seen the show “Westworld”, it's basically just season 3 with the giant robot controlling all the humans' lives, pushing them down paths of success or failure or oblivion. That very clearly appears to be the long-term goal of the corporate ghouls in charge.

The book is very thorough in its explanation of this new age; but in order to effectively explain how it all works, new nomenclature must be coined and normalized. This new nomenclature also coincides with specifically defined terms that reach a level of complexity and intellect that sometimes made me go “I should know what all of those words mean, but it's been 2 weeks since I last picked this book back up and now I've forgotten half of it, but I can't go back now because it's too damn long.” I wish I had a list of defined terms to reference back to on occasion to help me keep everything straight.

It's a very good book but very dense and highly intellectual, almost to the point of being esoteric. But maybe I'm just dumb. I still liked it though. Here's some quotes:

“Behavioral data, whose value had previously been “used up” on improving the quality of Search for users, now became the pivotal—and exclusive to Google—raw material for the construction of a dynamic online advertising marketplace. Google would now secure more behavioral data than it needed to serve its users. That surplus, a behavioral surplus, was the game-changing, zero-cost asset that was diverted from service improvement toward a genuine and highly lucrative market exchange.”

That's the other thing. When you talk about this, the brain-dead neoliberal mind-prison response is always “just don't use it” or “that's the price of a free app!” No! This is bullshit. It's a false dichotomy. There is no alternative because our hellworld economic system makes less-evil options “not fiscally viable”.

“Behavioral data, whose value had previously been “used up” on improving the quality of Search for users, now became the pivotal—and exclusive to Google—raw material for the construction of a dynamic online advertising marketplace. Google would now secure more behavioral data than it needed to serve its users. That surplus, a behavioral surplus, was the game-changing, zero-cost asset that was diverted from service improvement toward a genuine and highly lucrative market exchange.”

“Although the saying tells us ‘If it's free, then you are the product,' that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism's crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism's actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.”

We're not the customer. We're not the product. We're the coal miner, and we're given whatever shiny object or novelty they come up with to keep digging for them.

“We are no longer the subjects of value realization. Nor are we, as some have insisted, the ‘product' of Google's sales. Instead, we are the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated for Google's prediction factories.”

“If new laws were to outlaw extraction operations, the surveillance model would implode. This market form must either gird itself for perpetual conflict with the democratic process or find new ways to infiltrate, seduce, and bend democracy to its ends if it is to fulfill its own inner logic. The survival and success of surveillance capitalism depend upon engineering collective agreement through all available means while simultaneously ignoring, evading, contesting, reshaping, or otherwise vanquishing laws that threaten free behavioral surplus.”

So we can't change the laws because the ghouls own the politicians. That's why we haven't seen any meaningful laws around privacy passed.
In 2000 the FTC pushed for robust privacy policy that would have prevented all of this from happening, but, well i know you didn't forget what happened next...Privacy eroded away after 9/11 and the ghouls swooped in to suck up as much information about you as they could get their hands on. With that that power and money made at your expense, they turn back around to keep things just the way they are, or make them worse for their own benefit.

“The commodification of behavior under surveillance capitalism pivots us toward a societal future in which market power is protected by moats of secrecy, indecipherability, and expertise. Even when knowledge derived from our behavior is fed back to us as a quid pro quo for participation, as in the case of so-called ‘personalization,' parallel secret operations pursue the conversion of surplus into sales that point far beyond our interests. We have no formal control because we are not essential to this market action.”

Spying on us to learn how to manipulate us. Manipulating us into buying more crap. Calling it a feature.

“Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, content is a source of behavioral surplus, as is the behavior of the people who provide the content, as are their patterns of connection, communication, and mobility, their thoughts and feelings, and the meta-data expressed in their emoticons, exclamation points, lists, contractions, and salutations. That book on the bookshelf—along with the records of anyone who may have touched it and when, their location, behavior, networks, and so on—is now the diamond mine ready for excavation and plunder, to be rendered into behavioral data and fed to the machines on their way to product fabrication and sales.”

The book does pad its length by repeating, reiterating, and rephrasing the same point over and over again.

“...[T]he NSA paid Google for a ‘search appliance capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.' Google extended its services for another year at no cost in April 2004.”

“...[T]he Supreme Court has imposed few privacy restrictions on business records and information that people give to third parties. E-mail is typically held in private servers, making its protection ‘limited if not nonexistent.' This absence of law made private companies attractive partners for government actors bound to democratic constraints.”

Corporate ghouls and government spying, name a better duo. Spying from your government is illegal and unethical, but utilizing the tools necessary for functioning in our modern world means that your constitutional rights are no longer valid. Sorry sweaty, you gotta build your own email if you don't want the government to spy on you.

The ghouls and their fanboys say it's inevitable that they stay in charge, so we might as well stop trying to change the world so they don't have control over every facet of our existence. Easy stance to take. I wish the book had a stronger final push about how to stop this hellworld (like, say, in the last book I read about pipelines) but it ends with a generic “don't get complacent, don't just try to fight this with obscuring softwares, vote harder” sort of boring message.

Very good book but extremely long.

“I swore never to read again after ‘To Kill a Mockingbird' gave me no useful advice on killing mockingbirds. It did teach me not to judge a man based on the color of his skin, but what good does that do me?” - Homer Simpson

This book calls for sabotage of private property to halt environmentally devastating actions. The author outlines that the environmental movement has been extremely peaceful, and how property destruction has been seen to be a more effective means of making change.

This is a sister text to one of my favorite books: “In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action” by Vicky Osterwell (2019)
Both books reveal the not-so-peaceful true history of various political movements of the last 120 years. Non-violence is all well and good when it works. But property destruction has historically shown to be an effective motivator in pushing political agendas. Slavery wasn't defeated without violence and property destruction. Neither was women's suffrage. Nor the civil rights movement, despite what liberal whitewashers claim.

“The civil rights movement won the Act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power.” This is the purpose of destructive, disruptive action.

In “Utopia for Realists: How we can build the ideal world” (2017) by Rutger Bregman, he wrote: “The Overton window can shift. A classic strategy for achieving this is to proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive that anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible. In other words, to make the radical reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical.”

The point is: being more radical, taking radical action as opposed to nonviolent action, can be more effective in actually seeing change. The reactionaries, liberals, and SocDems are far more likely to cut a deal with the “reasonable flank” when the radical flank is causing a substantive ruckus. Or better yet, the radical flank takes over and that's even better. Because peaceful protests aren't working fast enough, and if we don't do something, we're not gonna have a very pleasant world to live in.

“The theory of the radical flank effect has application far beyond the African American struggle. The history of working-class politics in twentieth-century western Europe serves as an illustrative example. The vote, the eight-hour working day, the rudiments of a welfare state – the progress made by the reformist labour movement would have been inconceivable without the flank to the left and east of it.”

That's one of the reasons why the fall of the Soviet Union was THE worst geopolitical catastrophe of the latter half of the 20th century. While it wasn't perfect, the mere existence of a large socialist state stood as a galvanizing tool toward positive reforms. This is why the US government has spent the last 70 years destroying tiny countries that dare to become mildly less capitalist. If there's a good example to point toward, people will be more eager to fight for comparable systems at home.

“The fact that (as of this writing) [the climate movement] has not engendered a single riot or wave of property destruction would be taken as a sign of strength by the strategic pacifists, proof of correspondence with their ideal. But could it not also be seen as the opposite – as a failure to attain social depth, articulate the antagonisms that run through this crisis and, not the least, acquire a tactical asset? Does this movement possess a radical flank? Greta Thunberg might well be the climate equivalent of Rosa Parks, an inspiration she has acknowledged and often been compared to. But she is not (yet) an Angela Davis or a Stokely Carmichael.”

The book provides ideas of what some freedom fighters have done that climate activists could pick up.
• deflate the tires of SUV's (this slashed demand for them in Sweden by 27%)
• destroy construction equipment (I think there's a c00kb00k you can find easily enough with some helpful hints)
• actually destroying pipelines (done by Iraqi Nigerian, & Palestinian freedom fighters throughout the decades)

Something to keep in mind.

I really loved this book and recommend it to anyone. Fight the power.

It's really tough for me to get through books about US's criminally un-just system. Luckily this book is short. It lacks any filler. I like to highlight passages as I read but it would have resulted in highlighting every page. This is just jam packed with valuable insight in how our criminal justice system works and how it fails to achieve its directly intended goal.

The author offers heartbreaking stories of the systematic cruelty that runs rampant. It is not objectively possible for the United States of America to call itself the “leader of the free world” while detaining 25% of the world's prisoners, and doing so in the most needlessly cruel and horrible conditions on earth. We are not a “free” nation. This is propaganda to keep us complacent. We are an authoritarian regime that endlessly throws poor people and people of color into a bottomless pit.

Our system does not exist to “reform.” It exists to make people suffer. There is no rational basis to how the system operates other than “it's how we've always done it” or “criminals should pay”. When you take a step back and look at it rationally, the brutality is truly horrifying.

The author writes from the point of view as a lawyer and to an audience of lawyers in order to convince enough of them to try and fight for systematic changes. Lawyers have a unique role as those with power and enough agency to make systematic change, as long as they recognize their power and are willing to actually fight for the people rather than maintain their status as a cog in the “punishment bureaucracy” as he puts it.

A civilized society would not base their system of laws around how to most effectively brutalize and punish its citizenry. Every law that is broken, every crime committed is not an individual failure, it is a societal failure. Resolving these failures require societal solutions to things like: poverty, addiction, homelessness, white supremacy, poverty, poverty, and also poverty. But we don't live in a civilized society. We live in a society that has to be “tough on crime”. So we toss black bodies into the open maw of this hellworld we call a “justice system”.

I could go on forever about this. It really upsets me how broken this system is. I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks we live in a “nation of laws” or anyone associated with criminal justice, or any lawyer, or just anyone at all.

The book ends with this call to action:

“Legal academics, judges, and lawyers of conscience must take up this two-pronged challenge: we must bring intellectual rigor to legal discourse and doctrine that shape the punishment system, and we must use the energy that animates our bodies to ensure that the legal system looks in practice as it appears in our scrolls and on our marble monuments.”

Here are some other good quotes I found, they're all very long because they're so incredibly good:

“A lot of people are talking about ‘criminal justice reform.' Much of that talk is dangerous. The conventional wisdom is that there is an emerging consensus that the criminal legal system is ‘broken.' But the system is ‘broken' only to the extent that one believes its purpose is to promote the well-being of all members of our society. If the function of the modern punishment system is to preserve racial and economic hierarchy through brutality and control, then its bureaucracy is performing well.”

“[I]n 2015, more people were handcuffed and caged for marijuana offenses than for all ‘violent' crimes combined. In many jurisdictions, the single most common criminal prosecution is for driving with a suspended license, and about forty percent of suspended American drivers' licenses were taken away not for any reason related to driving, but because a person was too poor to pay court debts.”
We supposedly abolished indentured servitude and debtors prison. But not really. We just better bureaucratized it.
Also this shows why the state would oppose more public transportation: it would result in them having less control over its citizenry. If you have to drive, then the state has an exceptionally effective weight to hold over your head in the event you step out of line. And they have an exceptionally effective tool to criminalize poverty.

“A major achievement of the punishment bureaucracy is that it has retained mainstream respect even though its “law enforcement” choices crush unprecedented numbers of people with no evidence of any unique social benefit while simultaneously allowing enormous amounts of lawlessness that cause massive harm. Why are these choices still viewed as legitimate?
First, the groups who wield power in our society benefit from the punishment bureaucracy. It privileges their private property, their racial supremacy, their jobs, their voting rights, and their segregated neighborhoods.
Second, the growth of the punishment bureaucracy itself changes our culture and economy. As the bureaucracy expands, it employs larger and larger numbers of police officers, prosecutors, probation officers, defense attorneys, prison guards, contractors, and equipment manufacturers. People working in the system become dependent on its perpetuation for their livelihoods and even their identities. The path of least resistance is to grow more. Jobs are created, local political power is consolidated, and “law enforcement” activities are normalized and then rendered economically essential—such as roadblocks, prison guards, home raids, drug interdiction teams, neighborhood patrols, armed police in schools, SWAT teams, stop-and-frisk practices, social media monitoring, video surveillance, probation drug testing, and ‘intelligence' divisions.”

“[T]he punishment bureaucrats who created the contemporary ‘criminal justice system' are broadly comfortable with the way that our society looks. They market a crime problem in need of ‘law enforcement' in order to keep our society looking the way that it does. They do not want to solve the ‘crime' problem if that means a society that looks much different—say, more equal and with less private profit. Hence they both construct and respond to ‘crime' with strategies that increase inequality and control, but do little to stop the same problems they purport to care about—and that often make those problems worse, thereby justifying a circular call for more (selective) punishment. And that is why courts do not enforce the rules of law that are intended to make our society more equal when those rules conflict with the goals of the punishment bureaucracy.
The ‘law enforcement' religion is hostile to the view that a society that is more equal would have less crime, not because that idea is untrue, but because the very goal of the criminal legal system is to preserve certain elements of an unequal social order even if that inequality creates ‘crime.'”

“[F]ew ideas have caused more harm in our criminal system than the belief that America is governed by a neutral ‘rule of law.' The content of our criminal laws [...] and how those laws are carried out [...] are choices that reflect power. The common understanding of the ‘rule of law' and the widely accepted use of the term ‘law enforcement' to describe the process by which those in power accomplish unprecedented human caging are both delusions critical to justifying the punishment bureaucracy. ”

“No matter what one's views on drugs, there is one thing that all agree on: these laws were never based on empirical evidence about the best way to create a society with less use of harmful substances.”

“No government in any jurisdiction in the United States has proven that human caging is a way to reduce drug use at all, let alone the least intrusive way. Instead, a mountain of evidence suggests that the punishment approach to drugs has actually increased drug use and the harms associated with it, including by diverting funds from evidence-based alternatives.”

Decriminalization is objectively a more rational way to handle drug use. Anyone who says otherwise is merely sadistic.

The punishment disparity for crack vs powdered cocaine possession was once 100:1. This is one example of laws with a very clearly racist intent behind them. “For decades, even the cautious U.S. Sentencing Commission wanted to remove this disparity because there is no legal or scientific basis for it. And when Congress did reduce the disparity after a unanimous Senate vote in 2010—and millions of years in prison later—no one offered a justification for why it had existed. But for reasons that were never articulated, the government did not remove the disparity; it chose to lower the disparity from 100:1 to 18:1. And for more than eight years after that ‘Fair Sentencing Act' passed, the government chose not to make even these limited ‘fair' changes retroactive to help the thousands of human beings already in prison because of a law that everyone agreed had no basis.”
Yeah we sure do live in a “country of laws”: The country of AmeriKKKa.

There's lots more but this is getting too long. Every line is worth quoting. The book is fantastic but also very depressing.

This book seemed right up my alley. An unabashed history of the first 60 years of the CIA, only citing direct documents and on-the-record interviews.

But then I noticed something strange in the book: It often times does not name the CIA's operations directly. It's truly baffling how much the author goes out of his way to NOT directly name the specific CIA operations he's covering.

Here's an example. Compare this direct quote...

“On Forrestal's orders, Wisner created networks of stay-behind agents–foreigners who would fight the Soviets on the opening days of World War III. The goal was to slow the advance of hundreds of thousands of the Red Army's troops in Western Europe. He wanted arms, ammunition, and explosives stockpiled in secret caches all over Europe and the Middle East, to blow up bridges, depots, and Arab oil fields in the face of a Soviet advance”

...to this Wikipedia opening paragraph.

“Operation Gladio was the codename for clandestine “stay-behind” operations of armed resistance that were organized by the Western Union (WU), and subsequently by NATO and the CIA,[1][2] in collaboration with several European intelligence agencies during the Cold War.[3] The operation was designed for a potential Warsaw Pact invasion and conquest of Europe.”

They're describing the exact same thing. And yet the word “Gladio” does not show up in Weiner's book.

Here's another example:

Compare this quote from the book....

“From his first days in power, Allen Dulles polished the public image of the CIA, cultivating America's most powerful publishers and broadcasters, charming senators and congressmen, courting newspaper columnists. [...] Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation's leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time's Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek's man in Tokyo.”

...to this quote from the book “Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia” by Paul L. Williams (2015)...

“Knowing the importance of issuing such false reports, the CIA, under Allen Dulles, initiated Operation Mockingbird in 1953. This operation involved recruiting leading journalists and editors to fabricate stories and create smoke screens in order to cast the Agency's agenda in a positive light. Among the news executives taking part were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and James Copley of Copley Press. Entire news organizations eventually became part of Mockingbird, including the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps Howard, Newsweek, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald Tribune.”

And yet “Mockingbird” doesn't show up in the book either.

Notably neither does “Paperclip”, “Cyclone”, “Condor”, “Demagnetize”, or “Anvil”.

It does have “Nightingale”, “Mongoose”, “Chaos”, “Ultra” (instead of “MKUltra”) and “Phoenix” though. Google “Operation” and any of those words for a bit of light reading.

These are all code names for operations the CIA orchestrated within the time frame the book covers. He includes the actions covered in these operations but very obviously does NOT include a lot of the code name.

That shows me the author might be trying to obscure the actions of the CIA as much as he was trying to reveal them. Without this critical shorthand, it becomes far more difficult for the reader to conduct independent follow-up research or better directly recall the contents itself. The only reason I even noticed this issue is because this isnt my first book chronicling the misdeeds of the CIA. It's my...fourth? Fifth?

It is indefensible for the author to leave out this critical information.

The author doesn't cover the operations very thoroughly, focusing more on the office politics presidential fuckery over the last 60 years.
~

Another disappointment was his take on the Kennedy assasination. Since the book is from 2007, it doesn't include the recently released reports that directly shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was an asset of the CIA. Maybe he'll release a 2nd version?

~~~~

But it wasn't all bad.
What the book shows is the insane ineptitude of the CIA since its inception. They wanted to be a spy org, then before even getting that off the ground, pivoted to focus on a covert psy-ops, funding fascists, and destabilizing countries they know very little about.

The US government would have better standing in the world if the CIA did nothing but spy and all the money for funding ops was lit on fire. Less people (on both sides) would be dead and the world would be a more peaceful place.

The actions of the CIA from its inception to present has been nothing but shabby, incompetent, and counter-productive. It's not rugged geniuses trying to stop a catastrophe, it's shmucks airdropping gold and guns to literal Nazis or trying to get people in trouble with the law to flip them into becoming spies or it's people moving heroin from A to B. That's what the CIA does. They fund fascists, give bad intelligence resulting in the bombing of civilians, fail to predict any major world event or catastrophe; basically the author showed there's nothing of value here.

Or they send spies into hostile countries, who immediately get captured or killed. And if they get captured, they're forced to call in saying everything's fine so the CIA'll airdrop supplies, literally funding the enemy.

That's if they're not actually funding extremist groups that turn around and attack the US. #OperationCycloneResultedIn911

The biggest takeaway from this book is that the argument “the CIA should be abolished” is far less extreme and far more reasonable a take than I originally believed. The org has been on life support for decades. It's been ripped apart and put back together so many times; each president has used and abused it. Mind you, I don't feel bad for how sad they feel because they, ya know, didn't predict 9/11 or were blamed for Iran-Contra or whatever, fuck em. But every section ends with how the agency is in shambles, then it moves on to another decade, and again ends with how the agency is in shambles. Just close up shop, boys. It's over.

The CIA cannot succeed in its assigned tasks because there are not enough people that are knowledgeable enough AND willing to actually work there. It's no wonder they're now trying to pivot with “woke CIA” ads.

I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks the USA is a good country who doesn't do bad things, or thinks the CIA is an overall positive organization that isn't incompetent and evil.
If you've already lost your rose-tinted glasses over the USA and CIA, then there are better books.

“The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande (2009)

This book shows the benefits of writing things down, compiling procedures into a checklist, and adhering to it during times of intense pressure.

The author covers different professions and how they've successfully incorporated checklists into their daily operation. He covers...

• Surgery
• Pilots checklist
• Patient vitals chart
• Project management for building construction
• Emergency Management
• Encouraging proper higeine in developing countries
• Deciding to invest in a company

It also goes way to into detail of some kinda gross surgeries. Got kinda needless after like the 4th surgery.

I've been saying this for years. I love checklists. I love creating standard operating procedures. I've done so for every job I've had since graduating from college. It's so much easier to just write down how to do things than to use recall. I'm lazy and forgetful. So documenting and adhering to procedure is a no-brainer.

The author helped craft the surgery checklists for the WHO in ~2007. Literally saving lives just by maintaining a basic checklist of procedures that sometimes get overlooked, resulting in a decrease in efficacy and increase in death.

It's insane to me that the revolutionary concept of...writing things down and following the set procedure...has successfully PLUMMETED the rate of surgery complications whenever implemented. And this revolutionary concept is somehow less than 20 years old? Like...my god. The realm of medicine really seems to have just recently evolved out of its infancy. I guess surgery before GWB was a crapshoot of renegade surgeons who just trusted their instincts. Insane.

Regarding the emergency management, the author talks about the failures of Katrina response in New Orleans. He points out that the most effective solutions involved flattening hierarchies and providing support via mutual aid at the local level. He then fails to see how this shows not just the failure of the federal government in that circumstance, but a failure of our economic system as a whole. Oh well.

Book was short. I really liked it.

Short review: It was good. Got a bit confusing with the philosophical nomenclature.

How did the West bring war to Ukraine? The answer may surprise you...
...it's NATO expansion. It's always been NATO expansion.

This is more of an extended article than a book. The audiobook is only an hour long. So very easy to consume if you're interested in the subject. I think it was really detailed while still being brief.


Here's my book report...

Let me make something perfectly clear from the jump. Regarding this conflict,
• I do not support the government of Russia,
• I do not support NATO or the US Government,
• I do not support the government of Ukraine.

The US populace has never been known as a people who knows their history, or having a basic understanding of the actions of their government. But let's break this down as simply as possible
• WW2 is won on the backs of millions of Soviet soldiers overwhelming and defeating the Germans.
• Stalin expects to be folded into the new world order alongside its fellow superpower, the US Empire.
• The US Empire is ruled by Capitalists who would rather betray their allies than dare surrender another dime of profits to the working class. Normalizing relations with the USSR would normalize the concept of worker-controlled enterprise. Cue the Cold War.
• NATO is created, does a lot of coups around the world.
• 1962, NATO installs missiles in Turkey, right at the Soviet front door. The USSR, in kind, installs missiles in Cuba. The US comes minutes away from nuclear Armageddon. Then every makes a deal to withdraw the Cuban missiles in exchange for the Turkey missiles. Crisis averted.
• Yada Yada Yada
• 1990, The Soviet Union collapses. US & European enterprise pick to the bone all social programs in the former soviet states, resulting in a crashing of life expectancy and other health indicators. For some strange reason, a large % of people surveyed in these countries wished it never collapsed. Huh. Weird.
• The Russian Government, AFTER losing the Cold War, thinks it'll FINALLY be folded into the now unipolar world order.
• Instead, the US and NATO continue to provoke Russia with NATO expansion. The purpose of NATO has always been to fight Russia. Always. Its expansion is a clear and present danger for the existence of the Russian state. The Russian government understands this clearly.

• “According to an analysis by the National Security Archive of George Washington University, where relevant declassified documents are posted, ‘a cascade of assurances about Soviet security [were] given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991.' These assurances pertained not only to the question of NATO's expansion into East Germany, as is sometimes asserted, but also to the expansion of NATO into the countries of Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, within a few years, NATO began to expand toward Russia's border. Although the assurances had not been instantiated in formal treaties, ‘subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion' were not simply Russian propaganda but, rather, were ‘founded in written contemporaneous [memoranda] at the highest levels' of Western governments.

• So we lied to them saying that their existence was secured since NATO would not expand. But NATO expanded anyway. Golly I wonder why Russia doesn't trust us. Putin must be paranoid, that's it. Only logical explanation.

• 1999 NATO brings in Poland among other countries. “In a recent interview, Army Colonel (retired) Douglas Macgregor, Ph.D., a storied Iraq commander who helped develop U.S. war plans for Europe, commented on the admission of one of these countries: ‘[W]hen we decided in 1999 to bring in Poland...[t]he Russians were very worried—not so much because NATO was hostile at the time but because they knew that Poland was. Poland has a long history of hostility toward Russia.... Poland is, if anything, at this point in time, a potential catalyst for war with Russia.'”

• 2001, GWBush withdraws the US from the Antiballistic Missle Treaty with Russia. This is seen as yet another western provocation. Treaties help prevent war. Withdrawing from them helps antagonize and goad toward war.

• 2004, “NATO admitted additional East European countries, including Romania and Estonia, the latter of which borders on Russia. By this point, NATO had expanded close to a thousand miles toward Russia.” This is more provocation.

• 2008, at a NATO summit, NATO announced its intentions to admit Ukraine and Georgia as members. Both countries border Russia. “Although European members of NATO had serious reservations, the administration of President George W. Bush used the position of the United States as senior member of the alliance to push the issue, and the following unequivocal statement was included in the memorandum: ‘We agreed today that these countries [Ukraine and Georgia] will become members of NATO.'”

George W. Bush is one of the key players at fault for the war in Ukraine. This is a red line for Russia. an unacceptable scenario for the very existence and autonomy of their country.

• 2008, In an official cable from the then-U.S. ambassador to Russia (William J. Burns headlined “Nyet Means Nyet [No Means No]: Russia's NATO Enlargement Redlines.” and read: “Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.”

• 2008, Georgia
• “United States led a 2,000-man military exercise inside Georgia.”
• Days later, Georgia “launched a massive, fourteen-hour artillery and rocket assault on a semi-autonomous Georgian district (South Ossetia). That district borders on Russia and has close ties to it.”
• In response, Russia invades Georgia, fighting against soldiers armed and trained by the US.
• The US Media called it “an unprovoked invasion.” Did i say “media”? I meant “consent manufacturers”
• Colonel Macgregor explains: “The Russians ultimately intervened in Georgia, and the whole purpose of that intervention was to signal to us [the United States] that they would not tolerate a NATO member on their borders, particularly a member that was hostile to them, as at the time the Georgian Government was. So, I think what we're dealing with now [the war in Ukraine] is exactly the outcome that Ambassador Burns feared when he said ‘no means no.'”

• In 2014, the US government backed a coup in Ukraine. Why? The same reason why the US has been backing coups for 100+ years: more money for investors. Open the markets to more effectively drain the wealth of the target country. The US succeeded in installing a pro-west government in a country that borders Russia.

• In response to the 2014 US-backed coup, Russia annexed Crimea to prevent Ukraine from blocking access to “its vital warm-water naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea—access to which Russia had previously negotiated....”

• After the annexation of Crimea, “the U.S. began a massive program of military aid to Ukraine. According to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, a partial accounting since 2014, not including most of the military aid initiated since the 2022 war began, amounts to over four billion dollars, most coming through the State Department and Department of Defense.”
This was essentially a way to unofficially bring Ukraine into NATO. They wanted to “improve interoperability with NATO” even though Ukraine wasn't in NATO (yet).

• 2016, The US installs a an anti-ballistic missile [ABM] system in Romania. “Though ostensibly defensive, the ABM system uses the Mark-41 ‘Aegis' missile launchers, which can accommodate a variety of missile types: not just ABMs, designed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles, but also—crucially—nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile.” Wow. Missile sites at the Russian border. Where have I heard this before?? Surely this won't be seen as provocative, right???

“The American response to Mr. Putin's concerns about the ABM sites has been to assert that the United States does not intend to configure the launchers for offensive use. But this response requires the Russians to trust America's stated intentions, even in a crisis, rather than to judge the threat by the potential of the systems”

• 2017, The US begins selling lethal weapons to Ukraine, a change to a 2014 policy that only non-lethal items were sold (like body armor).

• 2019, “the United States unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 treaty on intermediate-range nuclear weapons.” They claimed the Russians were cheating, but “the key point is that the United States withdrew unilaterally rather than aggressively seeking to resolve the issues. In deciding to do so, the Americans may have sensed a military advantage, because the missiles in question would be placed in Europe, close to Russia, whereas Russia did not have plans to place weapons at equivalent distances from the United States”

• 2021, “Ukraine and America co-hosted a major naval exercise in the Black Sea region involving navies from 32 countries. Operation Sea Breeze almost provoked Russia to fire at a British naval destroyer that deliberately entered what Russia considers its territorial waters.”

That's it. That's the road to war. Was it all “Russian Aggression?” is “Putin crazy?” And “as bad as Hitler?” I don't think so. I think if you back someone into a corner, they lash out. You back Russia into a corner, they lash out. Do I support this war? No. Do I support Russia? No. But I can see where they're coming from.

Imagine if you will if the shoe were on the other foot. What if the USSR overthrew the government of Canada or Mexico to install a puppet government for them to control? Would the US sit idly by? Of course not, they'd invade immediately. Would the media frame this as “unprovoked US aggression?” Of course not. It'd be called “liberating the people from the new tyrannical government” or the US media would be completely silent on the matter.
And yet somehow “freethinking bleeding heart dove liberals” don't seem to grasp what's happening here. They immediately fall into the same trap every time: “US good. US enemies bad”.

The key takeaway is that we need to understand our history or else we'll keep getting dragged into one bullshit conflict after another.

What's the resolution here?
• Ukraine is in NATO, their economy gets destroyed by more corporate ghouls as well as the US wanting to get some of the money back that it lent to em. (Most probable)
• Russia takes over all of Ukraine and absorbs it into Russia or some new confederation (least probable)
• Ukraine and the US sue for peace and sign a treaty saying Ukraine will NOT join NATO ever. (2nd-least probable but what I think would be most ideal)

This book connects the past research of the 19th century with the atrocities of the 20th century and the continued eugenic efforts in the modern era. The author has a PhD in genetics and knows first hand knowledge of the modern capabilities of genetic biology.

The foundational history of eugenics in the 19th & 20th century were anything but scientific. People with inherent biases (sometimes) used the tools of scientific analysis to come to an already predisposed conclusion: “the rich white people who are currently in charge are superior to everyone else.” How convenient. The 20th-century eugenics movements were merely an effort to shroud classist and white-supremacist ideologies with fabricated scientific legitimacy and fantasies of “Declinism” and called for “Nordic purity”.

Eugenic thinking is still prevalent, still espoused by our leaders, and still forced upon people not just in far away lands, but right here in the imperial core. Eugenics has never been ideologically neutral and is always used as a reason for the powerful to prey upon the less powerful.

The scientific discoveries and technological developments in the 21st century are not sufficient to achieve any sort of “designer baby”, and the more humanity learns about genetics, the more we realize how utterly impossible it would be to achieve.

The current level of genetic testing, embryo selection, end reproductive self-determination is not “eugenics”.
Though some of the claims made by genetic testing companies about what they can screen for are reaching beyond scientific fact. These tools should be liberated as an option for the masses instead of being locked away for only the super rich. These include...
• Genetic counseling
• pre-implantation diagnosis, screening fertilized eggs for genetic diseases
• Embryo selection to select for embryos without genetic abnormalities or disease genes to be implanted.
• prenatal screenings and testings
• Access to abortion in the event a genetic abnormality is discovered.
These are not eugenics, these are medical techniques specifically conceived and designed for the alleviation of suffering in individuals.

We should slowly, carefully, and safely progress with advances in genetic microbiology, gene editing, and genetic research what the ultimate goal of eliminating inheritable diseases, not toward any sort of far-fetched “enhancement” effort.

We as a society should continue to strive toward a better understanding of the human genome and how it is impacted by outside conditions. The solution to improving humanity is not through mass culling of the “unworthy” or sci-fi genetic alterations to load the dice. It is by raising the minimum standard of living, improving universal education, instilling universal access to healthcare. Eliminate poverty, hunger, and homelessness and you'll see a decrease in “inferior” people.

Likewise eliminate or flatten the power structures capable of giving rise to forced eugenics on the people. Any state apparatus willing and capable of legalizing forced eugenic practices upon the population is one that should be dismantled.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who has any interest in (or disgust toward) eugenics and genetic modification. I think it was really well written and eye-opening.

~~

Here are some quotes and fun facts I liked from the book...

“We often deploy the clumsy ideas of nature and nurture to describe what is innate in us, and what is extrinsic. What this really means is: genetics (that is, what is encoded in DNA), and everything else in the universe. [...] Nature was never versus nurture; it is and always was via.”

“I'm a scientist, and we are a tribe whose pursuits, in theory, serve a higher purpose. We constantly strive for real truth, via our tried and tested methods that seek to supress the political, or the subjective, and amplify a reality that exists independently from these flawed minds and feeble bodies that we inhabit. What we do, in principle, transcends politics and morality.
Scientists can tell themselves this lie as often as they like, but it will never be true. When we talk about the control of lives, the question of who gets to live or reproduce, we are in a territory where biology and politics are inseparable.”

“The United Kingdom's principal African colonizer Cecil Rhodes, Francis Galton, a young Winston Churchill and many other leaders were open in expressing the sense that White supremacy was the moral duty of the British: to fill the world with the dominant race of the best type of men. This era [1890 to 1910] provided a rich soil for the formalization of eugenics. The idea of racial decay was the fertilizer. Superiority could be achieved with science as the engine of social change.”
Eugenics has never successfully been separated from racial superiority. And since race is an artificial social construct, it means eugenics cannot be scientifically implemented.Winston Churchill was a racist and a eugenicist.

“All these people and so many others of cultural and historical significance were great supporters of an idea we have learned to despise. A common response to this truth is that they were women and men ‘of their time.' This is vapid. All people are of their time, and it is impossible to be alive at any other time. It is perfectly possible and indeed desirable to criticize the past, and to criticize the views of people in the past through the lens of our values and those of their contemporaries. That is the definition of history. Hitler was a man of his time, and was legitimately (albeit among political chaos) appointed to the position of German chancellor in 1933.
Too often, the argument that the past was a foreign country where people did things differently, and that they were simply acting appropriately for that era, is deployed to end or avoid discussion and debates, or to reinforce a cultural history that serves only to make the powerful feel comfortable.”

Eugenic thinking falls apart because it assumes every negative and positive trait is inheritable, rather than environmental. “We inherit our environment from our parents, family and peers, so for many of the traits that animated the eugenicists, the prospect of breeding them out of families and populations was always doomed to failure. Criminality can run in families, but there is no gene for it. Alcoholism can run in families, and while there are genes that increase the risk of addiction, there is no gene for alcoholism. You can have every one of those risk factors, but never become an alcoholic if you never drink alcohol. Poverty runs in families, but there is no gene for being poor.” A lot of the “feeble minded” people targeted for extermination by eugenicists would later turn out to actually be people suffering from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, a non-heritable environmentally-induced issue.

Eugenics simply does not work

“...[C]omplex traits rarely have single genetic causes, they always involve the nongenetic environment and genetics is probabilistic, not deterministic. This is a key reason that the eugenics project was always on precarious ground: the conditions under scrutiny, whether it was feeblemindedness or epilepsy or alcoholism, do have a genetic component to them—almost everything in human biology and psychology does—though they are never single genes, and those genetic causes are rarely if ever deterministic.”

There is no “intelligence gene” to breed for or cull for or genetically modify. And even if we knew how to do it, it could backfire.

“The first major [genome-wide association study] on cognitive abilities (in 2013, this time via the metric of educational attainment) featured 126,559 people and it uncovered 3 single-letter genetic changes of significance. Three years later, the sample size had doubled, but the genetic landmarks of interest had gone up to 74. Or there was the landmark 2018 study that had 269,867 participants and found genomic locations of note in 1,016 genes. Or the other 2018 landmark paper that had 300,486 individuals and found 148 genetic markers and 709 genes. Or maybe the big daddy, also in 2018, when the number was 1.1 million people and 1,271 places in the genome that were associated with cognitive abilities.
Finally, after a hundred years of searching, we had found the 709 genes associated with general intelligence. Or the 1,016 genes. Or whatever the correct number turns out to be.”

Now we could throw more data into the machine to try and figure out “what gene[s] make us smarter” even though we have a very limited (and extremely Western) understanding of intelligence. OR we could look at the chronic stress associated with poverty and its relation to “intelligence”. Maybe kids would be smarter if they weren't hungry & poor.

“IQ correlates with many things, some considered positive such as income and longevity, and other not so desirable, such as mental health problems.”

“...we already know how to improve the intelligence of populations with better education, health care and access to physical exercise, without having to fantasize about tinkering with genes that would only be accessible to a minuscule minority.”

“When people start anxiously or glibly opining about gene editing for designer babies or selecting embryos for blue-eyed children, they're not really talking about our contemporary understanding of genetics. Instead, they are relying on a hugely outdated or a never true version of altering heredity that is pretty much impossible.”
This was the most revelatory quote of the book. I remember posting about the morality of “designer babies” ~5 years ago. I thought we were maybe a generation away before these thought experiments became a reality. Seems more like a century away or more likely never.

“Would I want to select embryos with those variants, or even edit the genomes of embryos to harbor those variants? No. Not while the roles of those bits of DNA are poorly understood. Not when we don't know if selecting for something means you are inadvertently selecting against something else. One study found that IQ positively correlates with anorexia, anxiety disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and asthma. Though, as I've argued, the gains might be slight, a nudge taller or smarter, you may also be nudging that child toward an eating disorder or other unforeseen health problems.”

“If a couple have histories of inherited disorders in their families, the first step would be genetic counseling. [...]The next stage could be pre-implantation diagnosis. An in vitro fertilization can be screened for sex and for an ever-increasing number of genetic diseases. Embryo selection comes next, where only those without any genetic abnormalities or disease genes are implanted into the mother's womb. The pregnancy can then be monitored for normal progress, including the prenatal screens for Down syndrome and other potential abnormalities.
I want to be explicitly clear here. In my considered opinion, none of these interventions are eugenics. What they are is medical techniques specifically conceived and designed for the alleviation of suffering in individuals. They are medical treatments that reduce the risk of serious illnesses, and give options to parents who wish to have children but, for no reason other than blind luck, carry a higher risk that their kids (and by extension their family) will suffer hardships or reduced mortality well beyond that of a typical life.”

“You may have noted that most of the people who knock around the idea of embryo selection tend not to be the ones who will have to endure the daily rounds of injections to induce ovarian hyperstimulation, or the needle through the vaginal wall to get access to the ovarian follicle. The people who seem most excited by the idea of eliciting molecular control over reproduction don't tend to have wombs at all.”

Whoa Social Democracy is better than Eugenics? What a shock!

“I would also not want embryo selection when the gains of those variants are so marginal that they can be overwhelmed by solutions that are known, and understood, and can be deployed to populations instead of individuals—things as radical as education for all without privilege, tailored to individual needs. Things like better nutrition, health care, exercise, welfare. If we want the betterment of our people—and who doesn't?—we don't need to turn to a scientific creed that is at best poorly understood.”

I started reading this book because I have a member of my family who actually thinks Elon Musk isn't a useless weirdo.
Tesla's stock has dropped 20% from the week it's taken to read this book.

I was once a Tesla stan and a Musk bro. I watched “Who Killed the Electric Car” in high school and dreamt about the day of EV's becoming mainstream. And to his credit, Elon Musk did help spearhead a movement to make EV's mainstream and “cool”.
Was it at the cost of running a company so poorly and creating such poorly designed products that it actually harmed the image of EV's? Maybe.
Did the rebranding of an EV as a status symbol hinder the adoption of its more reliable, less flashy competitors, thus being counter-productive toward the goal of mass adoption? Perhaps.
Is Elon Musk a weirdo carnival barker who can't run a company to save his life? Absolutely.

~~
Government Cheese

The reason why Tesla hasn't gone bankrupt already is because of government subsidies (and questionable accounting). Tesla would have died in the 2008 crash if it didn't get Obama money. It would have shuttered shortly after that if California didn't have its well-meaning, yet seemingly easily manipulatable Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) credit system.

“85% of Tesla's 2009 gross margin (which only includes the parts and labor to produce cars) came from ZEV credits, and in 2008 its negative gross margin would have been four times worse without the credits.”

“In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80 percent of their range in under fifteen minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn't. [...] By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability. [...] If an automaker fails to sell enough ZEVs in a given year to earn a positive credit balance, it must purchase credits from an automaker with excess credits or face a fine. Since the fine for each credit shortfall was $5,000, Tesla could sell these three additional credits to other automakers for as much as $15,000 in marginal profit on each car it made.”

I'm no libertarian, but goddamn.

~~
The Hype Machine
Tesla has proven that companies don't have to be good at what they do to be successful. A hype machine can become self-sustaining for a limited time. Tesla went the same route later seen used by Andrew Tate: get paid for shilling the BS product. With so many weirdos evangelized by the lie, the stock price skyrockets beyond the realm of the rational.

“Best of all, selling Musk's vision didn't require industry experience, technological expertise, or the ability to analyze financial disclosures. The novelty of Tesla's approach to the car business meant that belief in Musk was more important than any of the lessons learned in a century of automotive history, which only trapped the established automakers and investors in their uninspiring prison of rationalism. As long as you believed in Musk and his high-tech and environmentally friendly future, you too could join the ‘winning team' and make money by evangelizing his visions.
The introduction of this financial feedback loop was a game changer. Combined with the power of online forums, social media, and the cheap price of entry into the online media business, Tesla evangelism became an enterprise. As the movement grew, more and more opportunities emerged, from publishing Tesla-specific news to selling Tesla accessories and eventually even selling Teslas themselves, all fueled by a shared belief that for many was becoming a core aspect of their identity.”

It's a cult. Plain and simple.

~~
Culture Clash — Tech Bros can't make cars

One of the main issues with Tesla are that it's run as a fledgling tech company, not as a serious automotive manufacturer.
“The worlds of car making and Silicon Valley startups couldn't be more different. Successful automakers are giant, process-driven bureaucracies that rely on rigidly systematized cultures to manage a continent-spanning ballet of manufacturing operations, supply chains, service infrastructure, and regulatory compliance. Their fundamental challenge is not so much designing the most innovative or desirable cars possible, but rather, designing vehicles that can be built at massive scale and at high levels of quality.” Tesla just wanted to “be disruptive” and “move fast and break things.”

But you can't do that when trying to mass produce a 2 ton piece of highly regulated equipment. You can do that with an app. You can do that with a computer or phone or other piece of consumer electronics. But it simply does not work with something like a car.

This book is very interesting if you have any interest in the complexities around large-scale product manufacturing. I find that extremely interesting because it's such a delicate balance of keeping down prices while trying to make something compelling enough for the customer.

Designing the car of the future is the easy part. Manufacturing the prototype is the less easy part. Manufacturing 10,000 is the hard part.

Tesla does not have the discipline to hone in the design to a point where its mass-manufacturing becomes feasible. It does not have the discipline to solve systemic design issues. Thus, it creates shitty, poorly designed and poorly constructed cars. But don't worry, they're iterative designs, meaning the car that comes of the line in March is shittier than the car that comes out in May. Because that's what you want in your 5- or 6-figure product, right?

Regulators can't even nail down the causes of issues because the company itself doesn't maintain effective records of when parts are replaced with better (or worse) versions. So there's no way to really say for certain if the cause of your car killing you was this or that. What does that result in? More preventable deaths!

It doesn't help that Silicon Valley startup ideology means pressuring/forcing your workers to put in 80-hour workweeks. Surely that won't result in...MORE errors and defects...right? I want the guy creating my 2-ton 80mph transport machine to have had as little sleep as possible during the design and manufacturing process...right?



~~
It's a 6-figure toy.

“...Musk knew his high-end clientele and he was ultimately right. The lower the price of a car, the more the owner is likely to rely on it and thus the more important quality is. At the high end of the market, factors like performance, styling, and brand prestige are the main concern, and customers are a lot less demanding of quality and reliability. Luxury and premium car brands like Ferrari and Land Rover are infamously unreliable relative to the rest of the market, but they are bought for performance and status rather than utility.”

This philosophy results in making shitty cars with lots of problems and a premium price tag.

“...quality problems were evident in the cars that were delivered to customers; threads soon began to appear on Tesla forums complaining of poor body panel fit, creaks and rattles, and missing software features. Musk would later admit to Ashlee Vance that Tesla struggled to convert Model S reservations to sales because ‘word of mouth was terrible,' but at the time Musk said the opposite: ‘It really is spreading quite wildly by word of mouth,' he told analysts on Tesla's Q3 2012 call.”


~~
The coverup
Nothing kills a hype machine quite like cold reality.

What do you do to maintain your image as the “revolutionary and super cool company” while simultaneously selling pieces of junk? Why you deny, lie, threaten to sue, and shut people up with non-disclosure agreements! That was the most insane thing this book revealed to me:
To shut customers up from talking about how shitty their Teslas were, the company refused to fix manufacturing defects under warranty unless the customer signed an NDA. The car could literally be killing people but we can't pop the hype bubble and we can't do a recall so we gotta shut em up from talking to, Reddit or the government.
A very cool and normal company.

“Having built up so much hype and anticipation around itself, the brand damage caused by a single recall could lead to a loss in confidence in its prospects. Without a solid business to support its heady valuation, a loss of confidence could have catastrophic, cascading consequences that could affect its ability to hire talent, raise fresh capital, and ultimately survive.” Can't pop the hype bubble!

“This precariousness, along with Tesla's world-saving mission, is part of what feeds an ‘ends-justify-the-means' culture inside the company. The powerful twin motivations of survival and salvation make it easy to wave off issues like regulatory compliance and cover up defects with nondisclosure agreements. They also make convenient cudgels with which to attack critics, shifting the focus away from the company's questionable actions to speculation about the critic's motivations for wanting to destroy a company that is only trying to save the planet.”

Here's another fun way they cover up their bullshit...
Regarding their self-driving cars continually crashing into things... “Because Tesla's data-recording capabilities did not fit the precise definition of an event data recorder (like the black box on an airplane), the company did not have to comply with legislation that gave ownership of the data to the vehicle's owner and required that they make a third-party data reading tool available. In numerous cases, Tesla used that data to publicly refute customer accusations of Autopilot involvement in a crash without ever offering access to the data itself. If Musk could tout misleading statistics about Autopilot's safety, could the public trust Tesla's unverifiable statements about what vehicle data said? Until the company finally released a data-reading tool in 2018, in the wake of a lawsuit in which the owner was able to maintain custody of onboard vehicle data and demand a third-party reading, they had no choice but to trust the company.”

What kind of sleazy bullshit is that? Par for the course at Tesla

~~
Elon Musk is just bad at his job.

“The Model X may have taught Musk hard lessons about modern vehicle design, engineering, and economics, but even at his most reflective and self-critical, he seemed to miss the larger issue. The core problem wasn't that Musk let his ideas run away with him; it was that Tesla's internal culture couldn't empower its cost accountants, manufacturing engineers, and suppliers to stand up to their CEO, chief product architect, largest shareholder, spokesman, and mascot.”


“Just as he had during the troubled Model X production ramp, when Model 3 ‘production hell' hit, Musk took to spending days on the Fremont plant's assembly, and sleeping on a couch or air mattress in a nearby conference room. Though his dedication was popular with fans who imagined him personally solving the company's problems, employees are nearly unanimous that his presence added more stress than it relieved.
‘He says it himself—he's not a manufacturing guy. He's an engineer, he's an innovator,' explains one former manager. ‘The problem with him and the plant is he's only really putting the pressure on the management team. He doesn't really understand where the true bottlenecks are because most of [the managers] who have a true bottleneck are not going to tell him. Therefore, when he's there it just causes animosity between the rest of the management team, and he's not benefiting himself or the company or the stockholders by being there.'“

~~
Self-Driving
Tesla uses optical cameras for its self-driving system. This is not capable of operating in fog and can easily fail under certain conditions. Musks overly zealous push for an under-regulated, over-hyped “autopilot” system has resulted in at least 1 preventable death and shows that human beings' lives should not be “beta tests” for a half-assed system.

Musk has continuously lied/oversold the capabilities of this system, lulling people into a false sense of security, resulting in crashes.

I want self-driving cars too, but i wouldn't trust anything short of a lidar-radar-optical image hybrid offered by a company not run by a lunatic.


~~
The gist:

Elon Musk is a carnival barker who says intentionally outrageous and impossible things to manufacture hype. He has cultivated a cult of personality led by Reddit weirdos who take his word as gospel. He's a liar and a narcissist. His far-fetched claims are constantly reigned in by more capable and intelligent people. He has never created anything in his live besides hype. His greatest achievement is how to most effectively maintain legions of brainwashed followers while overworking+underpaying the laborers who do the actual work and sucking up as much government money as possible.

As the reality distortion field around him has continually crumbled over the past few years, his ego has gotten quite the bruising. But since he's a narcissist, and habitually online, he won't simply fade away. No, he has to remain the center of attention. So what does he do? He buys the place where all of his haters congregate because he thinks he can prove they're all actually bots and that everyone actually loves him. He tied the financial future of 2 different companies together and to himself. And when one goes down, they all go down.

This is the first book in my unofficial series I'm calling “Understanding US Immigration”.

This book talks about the seven countries of Central America: Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. It briefly talks about the rise of Spanish colonialism, and the creation of a caste system between “Ladinos” (people of Spanish ancestry) and Indigenous peoples or “Indians”. Sound familiar? “As in the United States, racism against Central America's Indigenous populations existed on multiple levels and was expressed in policies ranging from genocide, erasure, coerced assimilation, legal exclusion, forced labor, and myths about ‘disappearing Indians.” Most exploitation was of the natives, compared to the US, which mostly imported slaves instead of forcing the natives to labor. Both used the lie of “civilizing the savage” to justify subordination and even extermination.

The US also has had an extremely large impact on the history of all Central American countries. This includes, but is not limited to:
• Refusing to accept election results if it didn't go the way they wanted (Guatemala 1952, Nicaragua 1984)
• Literally annexing and creating the country for the interests of corporations (Panama)
• Invasion (Guatemala 1954, Nicaragua 1912-1933 & 1981-1990, Panama 1989)
• US-backed coups (Guatemala 1954, Honduras 1963 & 2009)
• Slavery/corporate colonialism (google: Banana Wars)
Etc.

What this book really shows is that the USA does not care about democracy or self-determination for nations within its political influence (i.e. any country) if that country's actions results in negatively impacts the bottom line of US-based international corporations. That is the modus operandi of US foreign policy.

Specifically for Central America, the corporations of interest are the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) as well as coffee, sugar, and cotton plantations. The story is always the same:
• Country elects political leaders who want to make life easier for peasants who work on plantations owned by multinational corporations.
• They enact a welfare state and the dreaded LAND REFORM
• Corpos run to the US government
• The US lies and claims the country is being influenced by the USSR (no longer necessary these days)
• the US invades or funds rebels to instigate a coup or both so they can install a new puppet dictator to brutalize the people and appease corporate interests
• Neoliberal Chicago Boy economist ghouls come in to do “structural adjustment,” AKA: write laws to dismantle and privatize all government industry and services, gutting social safety nets. Then, replace them with “free trade zones,” signing away the nation's wealth to foreign investors. This resulted in plummeting median wealth and health for the people.

“‘By the end of the Cold War,' writes Greg Grandin, ‘Latin American security forces trained, funded, equipped, and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody terror—hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured, millions driven into exile—from which the region has yet to recover.'”

A tail as old as time. It's not just Central America, but essentially any country that crosses the US.

But I've told this story over and over again. what did I learn that's different here compared to similar books?

1: The US government was (is?) absolutely involved in the international drug trade.

“US-built airstrips and US-funded private airlines [...] became key nodes in the transport of cocaine and marijuana from Colombia into the United States, and the secretive bases in Honduras proved an irresistible transit point. The US Drug Enforcement Agency briefly opened an office in Honduras in 1981. When the office began documenting the extensive Honduran military involvement in the drug trade, the office was abruptly closed in 1983.”

2: This gave me a better understanding of colonialism and racism.

“Where populations were small and virtually impossible to control, as in North America, the British developed a kind of colonial enterprise called settler colonialism. Rather than ruling over the people they colonized—like the Spanish in Mexico and Peru, or the British themselves in India—settler colonial projects were based on eliminating the people who were there and replacing them with a white, European population.”

“Traditional colonialism and settler colonialism shared an ideology of European superiority that continues to infuse the world today, now commonly termed racism. What we today call people of color are formerly colonized peoples. Simply acknowledging the colonial roots of race and racism helps us to understand how profoundly the past has shaped the present.”

“It's also worth noting that most of the wealth and power in today's world is concentrated in the former colonial powers (the United States and Europe), while most of the poverty is concentrated in their former colonies (Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia). This division too has its roots in a long history of colonialism.”

3: How US-backed Neoliberal hyperindividualism resulted in rising Central American immigration to the US

The US government destabilized Central America through a century of neocolonialism, repression, coups, puppet dictators, counterinsurgencies, and “structural adjustments”. The dogmatism spread by the US and its ilk since the 1980's has been “hyperindividualism — Look out for yourself, don't expect anyone to help you!”

These two facts resulted in something obvious. The people who want to make a better life for themselves in their families do what makes the most sense for themselves as individuals: emigrate. And where do they go? Why the largest economy they can reach, of course! The good ole US of A.

The book went more into the the complexities of the US immigration system and its history. That's a topic I hope to talk about further along in my quest.

4: The AFL-CIO has historically stood with the US government against pro-labor nationalist governments in Latin America (and likely in other places).

“Although the AFL-CIO campaigned against Reagan in 1980 and opposed many of his domestic policies, the federation wholeheartedly adopted his framing of Central American revolutions as communist threats to the security of the United States. [...] The organization offered money and resources to unions that agreed to follow its political orientation. It intervened in unions' internal politics, promoting candidates and positions that eschewed radicalism. It worked closely with the US Embassy, US multinationals operating in Latin America, and the CIA, earning the federation the nickname ‘AFL-CIA' among many critical Latin Americans.”

One of the many reasons why I'm not a big fam of the AFL-CIO. More specifically the first half of that acronym. See: “A History of America in Ten Strikes” by Erik Loomis for more on that.


That's about it.
Read the book if you're into this sorta stuff.

This is a feminist text that argues the witch burnings of Europe and the US were primarily about keeping women subservient and maintaining the patriarchy. The author then draws a direct line from the barbarity of that era to the misogyny and sexism women still face in the modern era, including but not limited to: reproductive rights, unrealistic beauty standards, double-standards with regards to aging men vs women, societal pressure regarding marriage and motherhood, women being unknowingly used as science experiments while under anesthesia by medical school students, etc.

The theory about why the witch burnings occurred do make a lot of sense to me:

“Talking back to a neighbor, speaking loudly, having a strong character or showing a bit too much awareness of your own sexual appeal: being a nuisance of any kind would put you in danger. [...] every behavior and its opposite could be used against you: it was suspicious to miss Sunday Mass too frequently, but it was also suspicious never to miss it; it was suspicious to gather regularly with friends, but also to have too solitary a lifestyle.”
The witch-hunts were a reactionary response to women striving for equality in a highly puritanical and patriarchal society. They were not just crazy Christians going nuts. Though they were definitely that too.

She argues that as modern medicine began taking shape, its pioneers (white men) used the specter of witchcraft to push out the healers, medicine women, and midwives to be replaced by an arguably barbaric early form of obstetrics and other highly dogmatic medical fields, all if which ignored centuries of evidence-based practice from said healers & “witches” to instead use old classics like leaches: “Despite their parallel activity as sorceresses, about which we may be skeptical, and much more than the era's official doctors, the female healers targeted by the witch-hunts were already working within the parameters of the rational; indeed, they are characterized by Ehrenreich and English as ‘safer and more effective' than the ‘regular' doctors. These doctors had studied Plato, Aristotle and theology; prominent among their repertoire were bloodletting and the application of leeches.”

It's written from a first-world perspective and makes zero mention of trans people.
Other than that, I thought it was pretty good and an excellent choice this spooky season.

Doug Rushkoff became famous from predicting the 1999 dot com bubble. He's written 20 books. He's a professor at Queens College. He's been heavily involved in critiquing and defending digital culture.

As such, he gets frequently invited by billionaire ghouls to talk about how/where things are going. The billionaire ghouls are finally recognizing that their slash and burn, exponential growth at all costs capitalism is actually not sustainable and will inevitably result in a societal collapse. Therefore, during recent visits, they asked Rushkoff how they can maintain control of their wealth and power post-societal collapse.

This is the textbook definition of “Capitalist Realism” as defined by the titular 2009 book by Mark Fisher: The belief that the world will end before capitalism does and there is no feasible alternative to capitalism.

Instead of using that term, he calls it “the mindset” held by the corporate ghouls destroying the biosphere and grounding us down into dust. I prefer the term “liberal mind prison” as coined by Thought Slime. Any of the 3 terms are valid.

Rushkoff always manages to thoroughly explain the issues we face in this digital age but without outright saying “we gotta burn this whole thing down and start anew”. He's thoroughly critical without coming off as radical. I mark this down as a fault.

His book does not mention the term “capitalist realism”. His solutions are quickly brushed through with minimal explanation. I think this is because he wants to reach a mass audience and doesn't want to scare away too many people with overtly anticapitalist ideologies & nomenclature. This is also a fault.

This is the 2nd book I've read from Douglas Rushkoff. The previous one was “Team Human”, which was also the name of his podcast. I listened to that for a while after finishing the book. The books have very similar themes: technology isn't designed for the betterment of people, they're designed to control us and suck money out of us.

If you've never read a Rushkoff book, pick this one up, as it's good and concise on what he thinks is wrong with the world (spoilers: capitalism) and how to fix it (spoilers: less capitalism). If you've read of his books, I doubt you'll get much out of this one.

I liked it, but it seems like a lot of the same stuff repackaged into a new book thanks to one weird meeting he had with some ghouls. The book is short. I knocked it out in a day. Read it if you've never read one of his books. If you have, just listen to his interview with TrueAnon.

This book is about the legalized brutality of the British empire in India-Pakistan, Palestine, Kenya, South Africa, Cyprus, Ireland, and Malaysia (formerly Malaya) throughout the 20th century. The author is a foremost historian on the true, non-whitewashed history of British Imperialism and was an expert witness to a famous lawsuit filed in 2011 by the victims of the empire's regime in Kenya decades ago.

When I say “legalized brutality” I mean the most horrible brutality a government can do to a subjugated people. The author came up with an interesting term for it: “‘legalized lawlessness'—or the colonial violence that produced laws that, in turn, legalized extraordinary acts of coercion and suspensions of due process.”

Another critical term used was “Liberal Imperialism” meaning liberalism at home (free trade, generally free speech, electoralism, democracy, etc), and brutal, dictatorial regimes for the colonies.

To summarize, the MO of British imperialism in the 20th century consisted of
• declaring a state of emergency
• instating “legalized lawlessness” by passing authoritarian laws to crack down on descent: censor the press, outlaw assemblies, throw people in jail without a trial or right to appeal, search people and property without a warrant, torture and kill people, etc
• put anyone who disobeyed into a concentration camp to brainwash them into becoming a loyal subject of the crown, (they called it a ‘hearts and minds' campaign. Yeah they created that too)
• The colonized peoples would stage reprisals, the Brits would stage counter-reprisals
• then the Brit's retreat and be forced to let the country become independent because they're losers
• Then burn all records of their crimes against humanity so no one can prosecute them.

Rinse and repeat across the entire planet.

Here's one quote example from Palestine that sums up the same basic strategy:
“Necessity and legitimate violence—issues that had animated legal debates over state-directed violence in colonies like Demerara, Jamaica, Ireland, and India—would be resolved through an extraordinary regulatory measure in Palestine, where the high commissioner, and with him, all security forces, including the police and military, could do whatever they liked, which included punitive destruction of property and trial by military courts without right to appeal. Legalized lawlessness—ideologically rooted in the birthing of liberal imperialism, and having evolved over decades in various empire theaters and courtrooms, and at home under the Defence of the Realm Act—was now fully matured.”

Here's my book report:

~~
Everyone knew they were just like the Nazis.

The biggest theme from this book is that “Fascism is Imperialism come home”. This isn't like a philosophical thought experiment. It's just objective fact. The British Empire was incredibly similar to fascist dictatorships. But because their cruelty was done mostly to non-white people in distant colonies, we don't ever hear about it.

Often when people in the 21st century compare the evils of British imperialism to Nazi Germany, they're met with feigned shock and swift rebuttals like “By comparing them you're downplaying the severity of nazi war crimes” or “it's absurd to measure these past actions by today's standards” or some malarkey like that. But even the people at the time, in the thick of it, could very clearly see the parallels between what the British Empire was doing in real time and what the Nazis were doing/did.

1938 Palestine: “According to one British soldier, David Smiley, when Arab suspects refused to talk, the police turned one of them upside down and beat the soles of his feet ‘with a leather belt'; another applied ‘a lighted cigarette to his testicles' before they got him to spill the proverbial beans. At the time, Smiley observed that ‘this sort of thing savours of the Gestapo,' and his likening of British tactics to those of Europe's rising fascist regimes was not isolated. Such comparisons were also based on visual images of the police force who, according to Burr, ‘stuck large Swasticas' on the ‘fronts of [their] shields,' and when ‘passing one another in the street' gave the ‘Nazi salute.'”

“[Reginald] Sorenson was no stranger to imperial critique, having leveled charges at the Labour Party Congress in 1933 that ‘the operation of Imperialism in India is in essence no different from the operations of Hitlerism....We are appalled by what is happening to the Jews in Germany, but what has been happening in India is just as bad.'”

In 1937, “[Jomo] Kenyatta wrote a piece in the New Leader with the headline ‘Hitler could not improve on Kenya.' He lambasted ‘British Labour organisations' for being unable ‘to distinguish the difference between the imperialist forces and the anti-imperialists,' and pointed to the detention camps in Kenya as ‘similar to concentration or labour camps in fascist countries.'”

1938, The New Leader magazine published: “We have done this because there is a great danger at present time that our hatred of the tyranny of Fascism may cause us to forget the tyranny of imperialism. Our pages show that the barbarities which Mussolini and Hitler practice in Italy and Germany are being practiced constantly within the British Empire....The truth is that four-fifths of the British Empire is as much a dictatorship as the Fascist countries....The democratic rights which we enjoy in the British Isles are due only to the oppression which is practiced within the British Empire.”

Hitler greatly admired the British Empire, writing in his famous book “No people has ever with greater brutality better prepared its economic conquests with the sword, and later ruthlessly defended them, than the English nation.”

The Bengal Famine of 1943 in India was caused by the British Empire and was exacerbated by the white supremacist Winston Churchill. “At the time, Secretary for India Amery accused Churchill of having a ‘Hitler-like attitude' toward the entire lot, though he himself insisted that the famine was the result of some kind of Malthusian dilemma and refused to send relief.” 2-4 million people died.

Operation Anvil, 1954, Kenya — “Observers described the operation as ‘Gestapolike,' and by the time Erskine declared it a success, his forces had packed over twenty thousand Mau Mau suspects into caged-in trucks for transit to Langata Camp.”

~~
Concentration camps

Concentration Camps — South Africa
The Brits invented the concentration camp during the Boer War in present-day South Africa, 1899-1902.

“British troops also razed homesteads, poisoned wells, and corralled into concentration camps Afrikaner women and children as well as African laborers.“

“[Herbert Kitchener] designed concentration camps, about one hundred in all, as punitive hostage sites. Women and children of active guerrillas endured harsher treatment with smaller rations as Kitchener sought to ‘work on the feelings of the men.' [...] As far as Milner and Kitchener were concerned, the Afrikaners in the camps were ‘verminous,' no doubt emaciated from meager rations and poor sanitation's effects. Kitchener's forces had to either capture the “infested” Afrikaner population or kill them.”

‘Verminous'...'infested'...concentration camps...where have I heard this before?

That was just some of the many war crimes committed by the empire during that war. After the war, the Africans had to pay the Brit's reparations and then the Brit's oversaw the rise of apartheid. Cool and good country.

Concentration Camps — Ireland

They put the Irish in concentration camps too. The MO wouldn't change country to country. But funnily enough the colonies started learning more from each other too so they'd be better at fighting their oppressor.

“In the wake of the Easter Rising, the British government detained fifteen hundred men without trial under Regulation 14B. Largely held in the Frongoch internment camp, a crude conglomeration of huts and an abandoned distillery on the Welsh coast, detainees like Michael Collins took the lead in transforming their incarceration into a recruitment opportunity. [...] Collins and others gave lessons in revolutionary ideology and guerrilla tactics, which included those deployed in South Africa.”

The Irish also helped radicalize Indians.
“Arguably, it was Dan Breen's ‘My Fight for Irish Freedom' that had the greatest impact on Bengali revolutionary activity. Published in 1924 and translated into Hindu, Punjabi, and Tamil, the book was the first memoir by an Irish Republican Army member. It quickly became a how-to manual for rebellion and outlined the necessity of taking out “Irish ‘traitors,' police, informants, and high government officials.” Bengali revolutionaries referred to the text as ‘one of our bibles.'” Beautiful.

Concentration Camps — Malaya

• British Malaya's concentration camps and forced migration: “In total, officials displaced and relocated approximately 650,000 workers into the “labour lines,” which brought the overall forced migration and resettlement of British subjects and alleged aliens to nearly 1.2 million.”

• The terrorist campaign against Chinese civilians in Malaya was the first example of a “hearts and minds campaign.” Just like all subsequent attempts, it did not go well. “No analysis bears out any kind of full-scale socioeconomic reform effort in the midst of government-sponsored terror, intelligence gathering, hit squads, deportations, mass resettlements, and detentions.“

Concentration Camps — Kenya

• “Kenya's minister for defense assessed the colony's works camps where labor was ostensibly voluntary and paid, remarking, ‘We are slave traders and the employment of our slaves are, in this instance, by the Public Works Department.'”

~~
Notable ware crimes and massacres worth a google:

• “Jallianwala Bagh massacre” AKA the “Amritsar massacre”. Winston Churchill tried to justify this horrible massacre. Winston Churchill is a piece of shit.

• Hola Massacre - massacre of hundreds of people in the Hola Concentration Camp in Kenya.

• War Crimes in Iraq: “Iraq became a playground for weapons testing. In late 1922, London's Air Ministry circulated a “Forms of Frightfulness” memo in which it considered smoke bombs, aerial darts, tear gas, phosphorus bombs, war rockets, long-delay “action” bombs, tracer ammunition, man-killing shrapnel bombs, “liquid” fire (the precursor to napalm), and crude oil to pollute water supplies.”

• “According to [Desmond] Woods, his men put ‘Arabs from the cage [a temporary holding pen]' in commandeered taxis to lead army patrols, which was a form of human mine sweeping that left Arabs blown to bits. When taxis filled ‘with Arabs, the naughty boys' weren't heavy enough to detonate the mines, the Ulster officer recalled that ‘we got hold of buses and we used to fill them with Arabs and send them down the road in front of our patrols and that did the trick.'”

• A 1947 report from the UK-run Bad Nenndorf torture facility: “With several detainees dead, and the overwhelming corroborating evidence of physical and psychological torture, malnutrition, humiliation of various kinds, the use of Nazi-era instruments such as shin screws, and routine use of prolonged solitary confinement, Hayward's report made for disturbing reading.” Lieutenant Colonel Robin Stephens was court-martialed for overseeing the torture but was ultimately set free. “He would soon reemerge in the empire as part of MI5's operations clamping down on nationalists who threatened Britain's imperial resurgence efforts.”

• Other torture facilities & concentration camps include “Camp 020”, Langata Detention Camp,

• Operation Anvil (1954), Operation Shark (1946)

• The Brits inspired Apartheid: “It was for good reason that South Africa's Afrikaner Broederbond looked to the British Empire for cultural inspiration and legal guidance. In the early 1950s, the apartheid state's prime minister, D. F. Malan, praised Kenya for having ‘given him an example of how to treat discontented Africans.'”

• Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa - The UK-backed government running the same exact playbook as their former imperial overlords

~~
Indoctrination & Consent Manufacturing

In order for Britain to do all of these horrible crimes, they needed to indoctrinate their people into believing what they were doing was right. Indoctrination is critical to maintain control, and they had it down:

“School textbook publishers similarly peddled a civic pride in the empire and provided teachers with history and geography texts that extolled Britain's civilizing mission and reminded Britain's youth of ‘native savagery.' Whether in or out of the classroom, generations of British schoolchildren were weaned on a triumphant imperial narrative that depicted their nation as waging a moral battle to defend civilization while also bringing light.”

They pretended to have a “free press” but just like the US's corporate media, their press stood on the side of empire and manufactured consent for the empire's brutality. They didn't even pretend to hide it like the US's news does:

“Alfred Harmsworth, declared that the raison d'être of his newspaper [The Daily Mail] was to stand ‘for the power, the supremacy and the greatness of the British Empire.‘”

“Here again the fourth estate, including The Daily Chronicle, echoed the government's right to repression as well as its nationalist demonizings and ever-elusive search for moderates who understood the civilizing, if forceful, ways of their colonizer.”

“The mainstream press cleaved to a positivist reporting style and preferred not to run a story if it meant contravening government-ready facts with the slimmest of suggestive evidence—evidence that the press could rarely verify given its limited access to the camps and villages as well as to security forces, who seldom broke rank.”

~~
Numbers Game

This is a side note tangent not directly related to this book...

Those who have been indoctrinated by Capitalist propaganda often repeat some wildly absurd number of killed under Communism. Ignoring the laughable and blatantly falsified calculus used to come up with such numbers, no one ever seems to look at the other side of that balance sheet, what are the death tolls in the black book of Capitalism? Here's a good one: the Capitalist British Empire killed 1.8 BILLION people in their colony India. Give that number a google.

Additionally, there's the propaganda about famines. But no one ever talks about the famines caused by the Capitalist British Empire. Namely:
• The Great Bengal Famine of 1770, and the Bengal Famine of 1943 in India
• The Irish Potato Famine (1840's). Yeah. Bet ya didn't know that whole potato thing was actually caused by Britain.

That's 3 different famines caused by 1 country.

~~~
Human Rights and the United Nations

One of the book's most interesting points is the rising tide of international human rights campaigns that came to prominence after WW2 and how the British Empire saw these efforts as a threat to their colonies. They knew their evil acts would be thrown into question, so they sabotaged and undermined the humanitarian end goals in order to prevent their nefarious actions in their colonies from getting international scrutiny.

This is because Britain had a different ideology around human rights compared to US progressives: “Churchill processed the language of rights in a different register than Roosevelt did. Britain and its empire—and all modern European nations and their empires—did not regard rights as universal. Rather, they were something that a state created and bequeathed to its citizens.” Hey Fuck Winston Churchill btw.

• UN Charter — Article 73 was written to legitimize the existence of the British Empire's colonies. “Under the charter, League mandates would become Trust Territories, and the new International Trusteeship System—as opposed to an International ‘Partnership' System—differed little from the former Permanent Mandates Commission except for the fact that it was even more attuned to issues of sovereignty and was explicitly aligned with great power interests.”

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) — Unenforceable thanks to the Brit's efforts to decouple the declaration (which Britain signed) from the legally binding covenants with its colonies. “In the words of the Colonial Office, Articles 13, 21, and 25 of the declaration—freedom of movement, right to participation in government, and right to basic standards of living—‘may be extremely difficult to reconcile' in the empire.” The empire refused to publish its contents or make reference to it in colonial papers. Why would they? Telling colonized people about the UDHR might make them revolt!

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 — Common Article 3 “rendered the conventions applicable to noninternational armed conflicts. Its initial draft reached not only into domestic state matters but into imperial ones as well.” The British and French empires successfully watered down the definitions in this article to make its not applicable to their ongoing global imperial terrorism. “Britain and France put up all sorts of fuss, and they were either individually or collectively behind the removal from the conventions of any reference to ‘colonial wars' and the elimination of the preamble with a ‘blanket' mention of ‘human rights.'” Since they had the power and they wrote the rules, they could do whatever they wanted to their subjugated peoples.

The European Convention on Human Rights — Article 15 was specifically designed as “an out clause for liberal imperialism's unrestrained use of force.” Article 63(3) “enabled Britain to ratify the convention in 1951 ‘without immediately committing the dependent territories,' according to one official.”

In the 1950's, the Brits obstructed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from providing humanitarian relief in Kenya, claiming Common Article 3 didn't apply.

~~
The Cover-Up

There is already a laundry list of evil things the British Empire has done listed above, but one that I want to call out specifically is their efforts to cover up the crimes.

Every time they had to abandon a colony, they would burn as much of the documents as they could. These documents showed the cold, hard evidence of their war crimes. They knew how bad it would make them look, so they burned every file they had.

Why this angers me so much is that it destroys history, erases the true legacy of British Imperialism, and allows them to manufacture their own history of being “righteous stewards to uncivilized children”. Truly truly evil.

“British practices of systematized violence were to be expunged from the imperial record. Plumes of document ashes littered India's independence day ceremonies, but they would recede in future end-of-empire exits. [...]like the violence they inflicted on local populations, they became better at covering them up. [...] British officials around the globe embarked on processes of document removal and destruction that reflected an increasingly secret Cold War government and further shaped the myths of British imperial benevolence and triumph.”

“In [1956] Malaya, colonial officials began sorting, culling, transferring, and burning files. Much like interrogation systems and those created for deportation, resettlement, and detention, those spawned for document sifting and destruction had evolved from haphazard processes, such as those in India and Palestine, to ones that were increasingly bureaucratized”

Operation Legacy — “The document-purging process, called Operation Legacy in some parts of the empire, drew on systems of destruction that had unfolded in Malaya and India.”

Anyway, moral of the story is: British Imperialism is as evil, if not more evil, than US Imperialism.

I have tried my damndest to keep this review short. I wanted to read something critical to modern America for the 4th of July weekend but there is no audiobook for “When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973” (1996) so I got this one.

The first third was interesting, covering a lot about anti-federalism, pre-revolutionary stuff, the war of 1812, and other things I didn't really know about. Then we get to Lincoln, reconstruction, and the 20th century and it's just more stuff I've heard a thousand times.

This is like baby's first “US Bad” book. It's a broad overview of things our US history textbooks whitewashes, ignores, or covers in half a paragraph. The content is decent, but it has to keep moving to cover ~400 years of crap. It was written by a history professor and really reads like a guy going through his lesson plan.

Once the book got to the 20th century it was just “then we got this president and he sucked because XYZ and the things his detractors said about him weren't true but he definitely wasn't as great as people remember” rinse and repeat from until we get to Obama. He's no Marxist (he teaches at West Point, the military academy), but he does criticize all presidents despite the color of their tie.

Definitely read this if you want to understand why American Exceptionalism is bad. If you already know that, check it out to fill in some gaps to that knowledge, as this does cover a lot.

The long short of it is: The US is an empire, the Civil War was about slavery, the revolutionary war was about slavery, the Mexican-American war was about slavery and imperialism. The Spanish-American War, WW1, WW2, and all the rest of the US wars were about imperialism. The US was built upon white supremacy and it stands as a white supremacist nation to this day. All presidents are war criminals. Obama was also bad and a war criminal.

Alright I lied. There were some provocative quotes. Here are my favorites:

~~ 1600s to 1700s~~

Bacon's Rebellion (1676-1677) was “a populist army savagely assaulted hated Native Americans and aristocrats alike. A mix of black and white former indentured servants demonstrated the fragility of Virginian society. The planter class was terrified. To avoid — at all costs — a repeat, the landed gentry made a devil's bargain. To ensure stability, they realized they must co-opt some of the poor without ceding their own privileged status. Enter America's original sins: racism and white privilege. Plantation owners simply hired fewer indentured servants and became more reliant on black African chattel slaves for their labor force. [...] Bacon's Rebellion linked land, labor, and race in nefarious ways. Landownership remained the path to freedom. Labor remained essential to profiting from the land, and race came to define the relationship between land and labor. After 1676 a class-based system morphed into a race-based system of labor and social structure.“

“Colonial New England was inhabited by zealots — conformist and oppressive fundamentalists who strictly policed the boundaries of their exalted theocracy. Forget the Thanksgiving feast: this was Islamic State on the Atlantic!”

George Washington started the tradition of US Presidents all being War Criminals. He started the French and Indian War (1754–1763) “This was supposed to have been as much a diplomatic as a military mission, and no state of war had been declared. Washington's choice to open fire was strategically and ethically questionable; however, his inability to control his native allies and the assassination of a prisoner must certainly constitute a war crime.”

We've been an empire since before we were even an independent country. “Despite contemporary memories to the contrary, in the coming revolution against Britain the colonists hardly rebelled against the concept of empire itself. Rather, they desired a new, expansive American empire, unhindered by London and stretching west over the Appalachians and deep into native lands.”

Most people of the colonies weren't even on board with independence. “Probably no more than one-third of all colonists were actually anti-imperial ‘patriots.' Our Founding Fathers and their followers weren't even in the majority.” One third wanted independence, one third supported the British Empire, and one third were fence sitters. Not a ringing endorsement for bloody revolution.

“Some colonists simply resented military occupation. The British decision to send uniformed regular army troops to rebellious hotbeds like Boston had an effect opposite to what was intended. This is an old story. American soldiers in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have learned this lesson again and again as foreign military presence angered the locals and united disparate political, ethnic, and sectarian groups in a nationalist insurgency.” Burn.

“The patriot minority used threats and violence to enforce their narrative and thrust their politics on the loyal and the apathetic alike. There was little that was democratic about it. Discomforting as it may be, the patriot movement was hardly a Gandhi-like campaign of peaceful civil disobedience. Patriots were passionate, they were relentless, and they were armed. Firearms were ubiquitous in the colonies, more so, even, than in Britain. Guns are as American as apple pie. So is street violence.” Remember that the next time the White Moderate tells you to be peaceful.

The Revolutionary war was about slavery. The Brits were on their way to abolish the practice, and slavery kept the colonies' economies flowing and kept the wealthiest colonizers (the “founding fathers”) obscenely wealthy. George Washington was the richest person in the newly founded country:

“The ostensibly tyrannical British practiced very little chattel slavery within the United Kingdom itself. In fact, in the Somerset v. Stewart case of 1772, England's highest common-law court ruled that chattel slavery was illegal. This judgment spooked many southern colonial gentlemen, who began to fear that the British metropolitan authorities were ‘unreliable defenders of slavery,' and this convinced many to join the patriot cause.”

Native Americans and black people weren't stupid. They were fighting against the “patriots” because the “patriots” were going to genocide and/or continue to enslave them. “In proportion to their numbers in the population, black men were more likely than whites to serve as combatants in the Revolution, only by and large they fought against the side that had proclaimed all men were created equal.”

“Lord Dunmore raised eight hundred to a thousand slave volunteers by offering freedom to those who would flee their masters and gather under his banner. Word of Dunmore's proclamation spread rapidly through the colonies, giving hope to slaves and striking fear in planters throughout the Americas. It convinced many fence-sitting slaveholders that there could now be no reconciliation with the Crown. As Edward Rutledge, a South Carolina signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, the Dunmore proclamation effected ‘an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies...more than any other expedient.'”

Blah blah blah Genocides, systematic rape, backstabbing the natives, slavery, blah blah blah. Tale as old as time.

The founding fathers really did not like Democracy. They were elitists. They wanted the rich and powerful and white and male people to be in charge. The Constitution was written in secret by (and for) those of wealth and power. They wanted to keep their wealth and power so they wrote the rules accordingly. And don't give me that “it was just the way things were back then” because there were plenty of people who recognized the indefensibly unjust reality these elitists were forcing upon them at the time.

There was a lot of interesting stuff about federalism vs anti-federalism, and apparently the Constitution was treasonous at the time because the Articles of Confederation were in effect at the time. My thoughts on federalism have wavered over the years and now I might just have to support US Balkanization, as that would result (at least in the short term) in less global imperialism, which would be better for the 3rd world.



~~~Okay but how many US wars were started with false flags, exactly?~~~

I kept getting this recurring theme popping up as I read. A LOT of US wars were started under false pretenses.

• War of 1812, supposedly declared because Britain was commandeering US merchant vessels which they claimed were full of British deserters. (The Brit's were correct in this). So the US declared war first, the Brit's rescinded the law that let them commandeer ships, but the rambunctious young empire would never let a good war go to waste, and used it to do more Native genocide, colonizing, and even tried to conquer Canada. But by golly those Canooks came down and lit the White House on fire. Hilarious. The powers that be claimed the Brit's were trying to take their colonies back (false).

• Mexican-American War - “Until 1836, Texas was a distant northern province of the new Mexican Republic, a republic that had only recently won its independence from the Spanish Empire, in 1821.” Mexico had abolished slavery, but a bunch of Yankees kept crossing the border south into Texas, the province of Mexico, bringing their slaves. The Mexican government tried to enforce their own country's laws (about how you can't have slaves any more) within their own country's borders (Texas, a part of Mexico). Santa Anna marched his army north, so a bunch the invading Yankees held up in the Alamo (a fort). “The men inside the Alamo walls were pro-slavery insurgents. As applied to them, Texan, in any real sense, is a misnomer. Two-thirds were recent arrivals from the United States and never intended to submit to sovereign Mexican authority. What the Battle of the Alamo did do was whip up a fury of nationalism in the United States and cause thousands more recruits to illegally ‘jump the border' — oh, the irony — and join the rebellion in Texas.” So we claimed we were attacked when we were the aggressors...hmmmmmm.......

The US stole Texas from Mexico because the migrants weren't obeying the laws. Oh god I hate irony so much my head hurts. Manifest Destiny is just Imperialism. Amerika Bad.

• Spanish-American War - USS Maine blew up on its own, but we didn't let that tragedy go to waste, so we declared war and scooped up more colonies.

• WW2 - We were already helping the allies well before the Japanese attacked.

I'm keeping this review short so I'm cutting this off here.

“In my 30-year career in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.” — Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit.

This is the craziest book I've ever read. This is the type of book that, even describing it, sounds insane. But it is heavily sourced and written by a respectable author. High recommend for anyone who wants to learn about US crimes against humanity.

To describe Project Gladio in one sentence...
Project Gladio was a CIA-backed operation to sell heroin to the Italian-American Mafia and give that money to the Vatican Bank to fund fascist paramilitary organizations and mobsters tasked with subverting democracy and committing false-flag terrorist acts to frame and derail anti-capitalist political groups in Italy and across Europe.

Part 1: The USA has always sympathized with Nazis

The fact that the US was not on the same side of the Nazis in WW2 is a historical fluke. They were (and still are) much more closely ideologically aligned with Nazi Germany than their ally of circumstance: the Soviet Union. Before, during, and after WW2, the US government and business interests have had strong sympathies with Nazis and their ideology.

Allen Dulles, director of the OSS (precursor to the CIA), said “We're fighting the wrong enemy” in 1942, in reference to Nazi Germany. He planned treasonous back room deals with the Nazi high command while the war was still happening, trying to achieve a separate peace. Read “The Devil's Chessboard” for more on him.

“Hohenlohe [a liaison between Dulles and German High Command] was surprised to learn that Dulles not only endorsed the Nazi proposal, but also maintained that a strong Germany was necessary as a bulwark against Bolshevism...”. See: Operation Sunrise
These guys loved Nazism if it meant stopping communism. This is a foundational ideology of US capitalists to this day. They will always side with fascists to protect capitalism. Whether libertarians, Soc-Dems, Neoliberals, when it comes down to it, they always end up backing fascists.

Dulles worked with Nazi General Reinhard Gelhen to create Nazi “stay-behind units” as a police force against the soviets. “Gehlen had been asked by the OSS to set up stay-behind units made up of fellow Nazis to spy on the Soviet Union.” They later became the BND under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1956.

A US director of a covert agency working with literal Nazis to keep Nazis in power during and after WW2. The US funded and supplied these Nazi units with the help of Dulles' other Nazi friend Karl Wolff.

These stay-behind units became integrated into “Operation Gladio”.

Part 1.1: US&Vatican-backed Nazi ratlines

The Vatican and OSS helped Nazis escape justice around the end of WW2, helping them flee to SA (primarily Argentina)

“At the close of the war, the pope [Pius XII], along with Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, his Undersecretary of State, had worked with Dulles and the OSS to create the ratlines used to help Nazis escape Europe, something he viewed as an essential means to address the threat of Communism. Several prominent Nazis, including Walter Rauff—who had led an extermination unit of the SS across Italy—still remained sheltered within Vatican City, ready to join in the struggle against the Red Menace.”

Klaus Barbie, “[t]he so-called ‘Butcher of Lyons' was responsible for 4,342 murders and 7,591 deportations to death camps during his two-year posting in the French city. After the war, US intelligence placed him in a safe house in Augsburg, provided him with a sanitized identity, and granted him a generous stipend of $1,700 a month. In 1983, the Justice Department belatedly admitted that US intelligence officials had arranged for Barbie's escape to Bolivia (where he became known as Klaus Altmann and opened a sawmill in La Paz), and that they had lied by denying to French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld that he was under their protection.” This Nazi was critical in the CIA's anti-communist terror campaigns throughout South America.

Part 1.2: US-Backed Nazi Argentina

“On March 25, 1976, two days after the coup, William Rogers, assistant secretary for Latin America, advised Kissinger that the military takeover of Argentina would result in ‘a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood.' To this warning, Kissinger responded, ‘Yes, but that is in our interest.'” If there were really any justice in this world, Henry Kissinger would be rotting in a jail cell.

In April, 1976, the US gave the Argentinian military dictatorship $50,000,000. Also “In April 1976 the public was invited by two groups calling themselves the Aryan Integral Nationalist Fatherland and the Pious Christian Crusade to attend Masses in the Buenos Aires cathedral ‘for the eternal rest of our blood brother in Christ, Adolf Hitler.'” The regime went on to commit a Jewish Pogram.

Argentina's “Dirty War” (1976-1983) resulted in up to 30,000 people killed or disappeared.

Part 2: Drugs for Guns

The newly anointed CIA did not want the citizenry of the United States of America to know about the fact that they were arming fascists to overthrow democracy in ally nations, but they needed money.

“Gladio was a covert operation and had not been initiated by an act of Congress or a mandate from the Pentagon. Few federal officials knew of its existence. The $200 million in original funding came from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations. But a new and steady stream of revenue had to be created almost overnight....”

Therefore, the CIA oversaw the growing of poppies for the manufacture of heroin, which was sold to buy guns and bombs for the fascists in Europe & SA. The heroin was sold to gangsters in the USA and resulted in the skyrocketing of opiate addiction in the US after WW2. In 1947, the CIA began working with the Mafia to transport heroin into the US.

Part 3: The Mafia and the Vatican

“During the summer of 1947, the terms of the working relationship between the CIA and the Mafia were ironed out by Frank Wisner and Angleton. Meyer Lansky and Helliwell would work in tandem to handle the financial aspect of the narcotics venture through General Development Corporation, a shell company in Miami. Angleton would handle any legal disputes between the mob and the CIA through New York lawyer Mario Brod.”

The CIA oversaw the Italian-American Mafia as they sold heroin, specifically targeting Harlem and other black areas. The CIA's money couldn't go to the fascist paramilitary groups directly... “It had to be channeled through a financial firm that would not be subjected to scrutiny by US treasury agents, Italian bank examiners, or international fiscal monitors. Only one institution possessed such immunity, and it was located in the heart of Vatican City.”

The Vatican Bank served as a money-launder to turn the CIA's dirty drug money into clean money for the Gladio stay-behind units. This makes sense, given that they were also sheltering literal Nazis.

“In 1945, the pope had held private audiences with Wild Bill Donovan [executive director of the OSS and chairman of the World Commerce Corporation] to discuss the implementation of Gladio and had decorated him as a crusader against Communism with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sylvester”

The Vatican has already been proven to be a cesspool of pedophiles and their protectors. It is not a legitimate democracy. It is a rogue state with diplomatic immunity from Italy. It's not a surprise at all to assert that it is full of crime. The damn place has no regulatory body! “As a sovereign state, the Holy See cannot be subjected to any ruling by any foreign court. It remains an institution with over $50 billion in securities, gold reserves that exceed those of some industrialized nations, real estate holdings that equal the total area of many countries, and opulent palaces containing the world's greatest art treasures.”

Perfect place to do crimes. A gangsters paradise.

Part 4: Subverting Democracy

The CIA had carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. Their fundamental ideology was the maintenance of the US as a oligopolistic superpower, and destabilize any government or organization that even slightly threatened US hegemony. To them, the ends justified the means. So whether it was rigging elections, assassinating political figures, overthrowing democratically elected governments, funding death squads, bombing civilians, or funneling addictive drugs into the USA's underprivileged communities, that was all perfectly acceptable to them.

As previously mentioned, two world wars caused by imperialist capitalist nations resulted in a skyrocketing of anti-capitalist sentiment. Italian Communists helped win the war against Mussolini.

“Postwar Italy stood poised to become the first Communist country in Western Europe. Hundreds of thousands of northerners had either actively supported or actively fought for the partisan movement that had finally forced the German army out of Italy. It was the partisans who had captured Mussolini and who had hung him upside down with his mistress; it was the partisans who continued to assassinate Fascists after the war ended; and it was the partisans who constituted the [Italian Communist Party]. By 1946, the division in the country had become acute, with the people in the north wanting a Communist republic and the people in the south wanting a Catholic monarchy.”

Guess which side the USA sided with! The 1948 election in Italy started the new era of US imperialism: The US-backed subversion of democracy to install fascist dictators that were pro-US business interests. To achieve this, the US funded fascist paramilitary groups.

“In the months before [Italy's] 1948 national election, the CIA dumped $65 million of its black money into the Vatican Bank. [...] The CIA's black money for mob muscle was paid out by the Vatican bank from ecclesiastical organizations, including Catholic Action. [...] Don Calo and an army of thugs, including Vito Genovese's cousin Giovanni Genovese, burned down eleven Communist branch offices and made four assassination attempts on Communist leader Girolamo Li Causi. The gang...also opened fire on a crowd of workers celebrating May Day in Portella della Ginestra, killing eleven and wounding fifty-seven. [...] Throughout 1948, in Sicily alone, the CIA-backed terror attacks resulted in the killing of on average five people a week. [...] Monsignor Don Giuseppe Bicchierai, acting upon papal authority, assembled a terror gang charged with the task of beating up Communist candidates, smashing left-wing political gatherings, and intimidating voters. The money, guns, and jeeps for the Monsignor's terror attacks were furnished by the CIA from surplus World War II stockpiles. [...] On Election Day, Don Calo and his men stuffed ballot boxes and bribed voters with gifts of freshly laundered drug money.... The mob's tactics worked, and the Christian Democrats triumphantly returned to power. In his memoirs, William Colby, who would later become the director of the CIA, wrote that the Communists would have gained 60 percent of the vote without the Agency's sabotage.”

The quotes above are just a small fraction of what the US government did through Project Gladio, and Project Gladio is just one small piece of their international terror campaign.

When I say ‘The United States Federal Government is the largest terrorist organization on earth,' I mean that quite literally. Whether the CIA, the DoD, the State Department or the rest, they are together responsible for the vast majority of global terror over the last 70 years. When I say “Everyone to the left of Bernie Sanders gets assassinated by the CIA” I mean that literally. Historically everyone within The West who garners any political power and is politically to the left of Bernie Sanders ends up getting assassinated by the CIA or one of their terror groups.

Part 5: Vietnam, et al.

As the CIA-backed terror campaigns exploded across Europe, their heroin money started to run dry. So they expanded to French Indo-China: Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, with the help of the Corsican Mafia.

“In 1949, the CIA and the Luciano syndicate sorely needed the talents of the Corsicans for the creation of a new narcotics network. But the labor unions in Marseilles [France], where the heroin laboratories were located, remained controlled by Communists, who refused to load and unload ships coming from French Indochina, where the rebel army of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (a force that would morph into the Viet Cong) was fighting for independence from the French Union.”

This really makes the tapestry of history come together nicely. Why did we invade Vietnam, a French colony on the other side of the world? “To stop the spread of Communism?” Yes, by shoring up the heroin manufacturing in Vietnam to fund their covert operations and overt global terror campaigns. Fucking bananas.

Part 6: The US-led Global Terror Campaign - SPEED ROUND

The US-led global terror campaign is so vast and extensive that my summary can never do it justice. Here are some things you can google to learn more...

• Operation Paper (not to be confused with Operation Paperclip)
• Operation Mockingbird
• Counter-Guerrilla: CIA backed military coup in Turkey in 1960, resulting in the extremist Nationalist Action Party to take power. Also staged another coup in 1980 “that toppled the government of Bülent Ecevit and the Democratic Left Party. Upon hearing the news, President Jimmy Carter phoned Paul Henze, the CIA station chief in Ankara, and said, with great relief, ‘Your people have made the coup!'” Shouts out to war criminal Jimmy Carter.
• Grey Wolves of Turkey: “the CIA unleashed them to fight the PKK—the Kurdistan Workers Party. Formed in 1978, the PKK sought to establish a Marxist-Leninist state in a swath of land [...] which they called Kurdistan.”
• Fethullah Gülen - A guy trying to undermine the Turkish government whom the CIA protects from extradition to a NATO country. Worked with Graham Fuller.
• Yaşar Öz, whom the FBI busted for drug smuggling but was let go because he had “diplomatic immunity, along with special NATO clearance”
• Operation Demagnetize
• Operation Eagle, 1968
• Operation Condor
• Liberation Theology - A sect of Christianity taught by many South American Catholics. “In 1975, the Bolivian Interior Ministry—a publicly acknowledged subsidiary of the CIA—drew up a master plan with the help of Vatican officials for the elimination of liberation theology.”
• Argentina's “Dirty War” (1976-1983)
• Project Haven - The 1977 IRS investigation into Castle Bank, which was used for the transferring of heroin money. “Such evidence led to a grand jury investigation. But after the jury was assembled, the investigation was called off. The CIA had issued a warning to the US Justice Department that the pursuit of criminal proceedings against the Castle Bank would endanger ‘national security.'
• Operation Phoenix - “a Stalin-like program that resulted in the assassination of an estimated forty thousand South Vietnamese civilians who were suspected of collaborating with the Viet Cong.”
• Operation Cyclone - spreading radical militant islam throughout Central Asian republics, resulting in the rise of Al Qaeda
• The BCCI, one of the CIA's favorite corporate banks for transferring drug money
• Kintex - Bulgarian illegal arms trafficker and “used extensively by NATO and the CIA”
• Air America, Frederick Luytjes, & Wilkes-Barre/Scranton airport - The plane company, pilot, & route set up by the CIA to smuggle drugs and money for Pablo Escobar.
• The October Surprise - The time George H. W. Bush committed treason to help Ronald Reagan win the presidency
• The Brabant Massacre in Belgium
• Iran-Contra: Am I really supposed to believe that was a one-off?
• The Uyghurs and Graham Fuller (the craziest part of the book. Stupid text limit)
• “European Parliament resolution on Gladio - Joint resolution replacing B3-2021, 2058, 2068, 2078 and 2087/90”

Part 6.1: Just Italy

• Piano Solo - A CIA-backed coup plot in Italy in 1963
• The Golpe Borghese - December 7 1970, Another CIA-backed coup plot in Italy
• The Sicilian Coup plot of 1972, which almost resulted in Sicily becoming the a US State.
• Piazza Fontana bombing, December 12 1969 - CIA-backed false flag attack that killed 17 and wounded 88. Giovanni Ventura, a collaborator of the attack, provided “confidential CIA files. One document, dated May 4, 1969, listed a number of detailed steps to be taken, including ‘a possible wave of terror attacks to convince public opinion of the dangers of maintaining the [government's] alliance with the left.'”
• Peteano Massacre - May 31 1971, Neofascist terrorist attack blamed on communist groups
• Piazza della Loggia bombing
• Italicus Rome-Munich Express Bombing
• Prime Minister Aldo Moro Kidnapping & murder
• CIA plot to assassinate Pope John-Paul II - “The arrangements had been made by members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, P2, and the Safari Club, a covert organization that had been established by Henry Kissinger. The gunmen would be Çatlı and Ağca.”
• Coup plot outlined in “Memorandum sulla Situazione Italiana” and “Piano di Rinascita Democratica”
• “Parliamentary Commission of the Italian Senate for the Investigation of Terrorism in Italy” and “The So-Called Parallel SID—Operation Gladio”

Part 7 - “Reigning in” the CIA
“In the wake of Watergate and revelations about the CIA's involvement in the toppling of the government of Salvador Allende in Chile, Congress passed the Foreign Assistance (Hughes–Ryan) Act in 1974, which stipulated that the president must be personally informed of all covert operations and must endorse a ‘finding' that such operations are necessary for ‘national security.'”

From its founding in 1947 to 1974, the CIA had ~3 decades of free reign to do whatever without oversight even by the President.

But nothing has changed since 1974 in the CIA. Their reign of global terror has continued on to this day. We must call for nothing short of the CIA's complete abolition and prosecution of crimes committed by its agents and directors.

Part 8 - Operation Cyclone

After the US lost the war in Vietnam, they needed a new place to grow heroin. They chose Afghanistan. In 1975, there was a conflict between the Afghan government and fundamentalist Pashtun tribesmen. “The tribesmen were led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who became the new darling of the CIA.”

“Hekmatyar urged his followers to throw acid in the faces of women not wearing a veil, kidnapped rival Islamic chieftains, and, in 1977, began to build up an arsenal, courtesy of the CIA.” Coooool.

The CIA was aiding radical Islamic sects in Afghanistan way before the Soviet Union invaded. “Throughout 1978, a year before the Soviet invasion, Hekmatyar and his mujahideen burned universities and girls' schools throughout Afghanistan and gained feudal control over many of the poppy farmers.” Poppy cultivation skyrocketed. In 1979, the Afghani president was killed in a coup. The new guy, Hafizullah Amin, previously served as president of a CAI front organization, was educated in the west, and was highly amenable to the interest of the CIA, which was funding his regime.

“Fearing a fundamentalist, US-backed regime at its border, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979.” And who can blame them, really?

“To provide more support for the mujahideen, the CIA used Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden's mentor, to set up a cell of al-Qaeda within Masjid al-Farooq on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. The cell, known as the al-Kifah Refugee Center, acted as a front for the transference of funds, weapons, and recruits to Afghanistan.” ...uuhhh...Did Operation Cyclone inadvertently result in 9/11?

There has been an explosion of junk science resulting in countless lives thrown into the meat grinder of the US criminal justice system. It's only been within the last decade or two that the truth has come out and innocent people are becoming freed.

My complaint with this book is that it goes from talking about the history of various junk science elements, but ends with long transcripts of cross examinations of “experts” in court cases the author participated in. Meanwhile he drops a bomb about how apparently shaken baby syndrome is junk science? But doesn't go into it at all while going way into bite mark matching. Very frustrating. I wish it were more equally thorough about the history of each junk science concept. Other than that, the book is great, though sad.

Here are some quotes and thoughts:

Everyone wants to live in a just society. The scientific method has the best track record for discovering objective truth. No one wants to see an innocent person sent to prison for a crime they didn't commit. But it is nearly impossible for people to live with unsolved violent crimes, especially the victims of said crimes. And our police system is designed first and foremost to “solve” crimes and convict “criminals,” not to find objective truth.

“Good science is objective; it has no stake in the outcome of the trial; it rests on research grounded in the scientific method, rather than simply ‘training and experience.' ‘Junk science' sounds like science but there is no empirical basis for the ‘expert opinion'; it is subjective speculation masquerading as science, typically tilted in the government's favor against an indigent person of color.”

There are people locked away in prison forever that were sent there thanks to junk science. Many have been freed, but likely not all of them. There have also undoubtedly been people executed by the state thanks to junk science. This is one of the many reasons why the death penalty should be abolished. No matter how certain we are on the day of sentencing, there is a likely chance that the tools used to prove guilt were actually faulty. The risk of killing an innocent person is too high. The number of innocent people the state has killed via the death penalty should be zero. They have already surpassed that number, proving they cannot be trusted with that authority. Therefore, the death penalty should be abolished.

“Few appreciate that the ‘subdisciplines' of forensic odontology [dentistry] have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, though they can be made to sound like they do: Forensic dentists identify people through their teeth, and through the bite marks their teeth make. That sounds straightforward, but it's actually more like a geologist claiming that because he can identify rocks, he can identify the rock that was used to bash in someone's skull.”

“Forensic science in the United States [...] is an entirely unregulated industry. The only thing standing between the use of ‘scientific' evidence and a jury is a judge. The judge, however, will almost certainly rely on legal precedent—not science—to make a decision.” So once they got the made up bite mark analysis into a courtroom, it opened the floodgates for other bullshit: “ballistics, shoe prints, tire treads, and especially microscopic hair comparison evidence. All without requiring empirical evidence of reliability.”

“Forensic boards, like most guilds, are extremely hierarchical and largely dominated by older white men. Aspiring experts are dependent on the mentorship the guilds offer for credentials and professional development. Second-generation practitioners seek to make their contributions to the field by building on their mentors' work—not by questioning it. The cultural norms create powerful disincentives to challenging orthodoxy or asking the guild masters tough questions. Questions like, What evidence is there that this method works?“

Everything in the below list is junk science with no basis in factual reality:
• Psychological profiles of violent killers
• Hypnosis to unlock memories
• Bite-mark analysis
• Microscopic hair matching
• blood spatter analysis
• comparative bullet lead analysis
• polygraphs
• voice spectrometry
• handwriting

Through police manipulation and coaxing, even things like...
• eyewitness testimony
• false confessions
• snitch testimony
...can be made up. Police often manipulate suspects and witnesses into making false confessions. It happens all the time.

“'Snitch testimony' and junk science [...] are two of the leading causes of wrongful conviction.”

“The ‘confession' Walker signed bore all the hallmarks of a false confession, which we know today to be the third-leading cause of wrongful conviction. And we know why innocent people can be compelled to confess, even to capital crimes: personal character traits such as age, intelligence, race, and fear of authority play a role; and coercive interrogation tactics—physical and psychological—also contribute. Young, naive, fearful, isolated suspects are particularly susceptible to coercive questioning.“

And in case you think you are immune from the risk of being falsely accused, know this: “Though Walker was uniquely vulnerable, psychologically coercive interrogations like the one he endured are effective against far more empowered suspects. Lies, threats, and more subtle manipulations, coupled with physical isolation, can break down anyone's defenses, even in the absence of physical coercion, the ‘third degree.' It takes time and pushing the right buttons.”

From the 1970's to the 1990's, the US saw “the exponential growth of the American legal system, fueled by two parallel forces: the rise of mass incarceration, and the explosion of personal injury litigation. In both the criminal and civil arena, litigants relied evermore on scientific evidence to ‘win.' These dynamics created the expert witness industry as we know it today, and board-certification entities proliferated to meet the demand. Bald assertions of scientific validity made by board-certified experts were never seriously questioned by the courts. Judges deferred to the forensic boards, few of which vetted their members beyond the ability to pay dues. Virtually none engaged in basic scientific research.”

With the erosion of regulations, unions, and the social safety net, the only option for recommence against a negligent employer or business became the courts. With the conservative “tough on crime” laws, the number of people (mostly black and brown men) in prison exploded.

DNA analysis, while having a rocky start, is a legitimate science. With every person proven guilty via DNA, countless more have been proven innocent, including the currently incarcerated. The number of people being proven innocent, including men on death row and even men who've already been executed is astounding. This is evidence alone to abolish the death penalty.

One's philosophy on criminal justice boils down to how you answer this question: ‘Is it worse for society if an innocent person is imprisoned or a guilty person set free?' I think most people, when you frame it like that, will say it would be theoretically worse if we imprison innocent people. But in practice, the criminal justice system in this country, at every level, prioritizes results. Coupling that with people in power who materially benefit from trusting the infallibility of the system, despite its obvious biases, bullshit, and corruption, results in countless innocents dragged through it.

There's this idea in criminal prosecution called the “Principle of Finality,” which basically means that whatever the jury decides is the final truth no matter what. This philosophy is so counter-intuitive to justice I find it horrifying. This is authoritarian absurdity with no basis in reality. And it's the principle that's kept falsely imprisoned people from seeking justice.

“Long before forensic evidence is delivered to the crime lab, implicit and explicit biases conspire against people of color, drawing them into the
criminal justice system—or to their deaths at the hands of police officers. [...] ‘Afrocentric features' are given longer prison sentences than defendants perceived to have fewer ‘Afrocentric features'; prospective jurors are more likely to interpret the same conduct as ‘aggressive' by someone with a name associated with African American culture than someone with a ‘white name'; judges set bail at 25 percent higher rates for Black defendants than similarly situated white defendants.”
We've always been a racist country.

“[...] most state district attorneys and judges are elected officials, answerable as much to constituents as to the rule of law, and convicting innocent people is bad politics. Careers, reputations, municipal liability, and professional pride are all on the line. Mistakes and misconduct may have stolen decades of freedom, maybe even cost a life. All of which provide powerful disincentives to even consider the possibility of a wrongful conviction.”

The system is designed to lock away innocent people and those in charge are incentivized to leave them locked up. Clinton made it harder to reversing death sentences because of course he did. Bill Clinton sucks. Prosecutors can (and often do) bury exculpatory evidence, both before trials and years after the revelation proves someone was convicted via false testimony or junk science.

Remember:
• Do not talk to the police without your lawyer present
• Do not consent to unwarranted searches under any circumstances
• Remember that the police can and will lie to you at every stage of your interaction with them
• The police have thrown lots of innocent people in jail and they can do it to you if they wanted. Don't make their job easy.