miscellany

image from tweet on 2023-01-18 by antiwar.com*

Chomsky on the invasion of Ukraine that began February 24, 2022:

Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn't refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion. By now, censorship in the United States has reached such a level beyond anything in my lifetime. Such a level that you are not permitted to read the Russian position. Literally. Americans are not allowed to know what the Russians are saying. Except, selected things. So, if Putin makes a speech to Russians with all kinds of outlandish claims about Peter the Great and so on, then, you see it on the front pages. If the Russians make an offer for a negotiation, you can’t find it. That's suppressed. You’re not allowed to know what they are saying. I have never seen a level of censorship like this.

source: Common Dreams, 2022-06-25, archived*

from an op-ed by the then associate editor Seamus Milne in the Guardian, April 30, 2014:

After Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, the bulk of the western media abandoned any hint of even-handed coverage. So Putin is now routinely compared to Hitler, while the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime has been airbrushed out of most reporting as Putinist propaganda.

So you don't hear much about the Ukrainian government's veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government's ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down, and false identifications of Russian special forces are relayed as fact.

The reality is that, after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west's attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure, via an explicitly anti-Moscow EU association agreement. Its rejection led to the Maidan protests and the installation of an anti-Russian administration – rejected by half the country – that went on to sign the EU and International Monetary Fund agreements regardless.

No Russian government could have acquiesced in such a threat from territory that was at the heart of both Russia and the Soviet Union. Putin's absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive, and the red line now drawn: the east of Ukraine, at least, is not going to be swallowed up by Nato or the EU.

source: The Guardian, archived*

image source: tweet in note below

"During the hot mixing process, the lime clasts develop a characteristically brittle nanoparticulate architecture, creating an easily fractured and reactive calcium source, which, as the team proposed, could provide a critical self-healing functionality."https://t.co/4jYJ4VMmRK

— Paul Graham (@paulg) January 8, 2023

The company has energy as a service (!*) as its business model to “develop, build, maintain, and decommission a fleet of autonomous reactors, … to sell energy as a service through the heat transferred to [its] customers via 560°C hot salt and metered by the MWh.”

image from tweet in notes below

please see also James Hansen on nuclear power in the post thorium: no meltdowns, no bombs

For us to halt and reverse climate change at our current level of energy use or higher requires us “to develop a new generation of nuclear-power plants, which use thorium-fueled molten salt reactors [an alternative nuclear technology] that fundamentally cannot have a meltdown.” James Hansen (Rolling Stone, 22 December 2016 )*

from Free Black Thought:

Extremist social justice theology betrays Unitarian Universalist principles

"The worst excesses of 'woke culture' are now found in the Unitarian Universalist church: Dogmatism, self-righteousness, racial essentialism, censorship, call-out and cancel culture."

HOW TO DESTROY A LIBERAL CHURCH

NEW in the Journal of FBT:https://t.co/F6ohBqnCU4

— Free Black Thought (@FreeBlckThought) January 4, 2023

see tweeted article, archived*

Caitlin Johnstone:

If you live in one of the so-called free democracies of the western world, the worst mistake you can make is to buy into the hype. To believe you are a free individual in a nation that respects and protects your freedom and individuality.

Whenever I broach this subject I always get a deluge of objections along the lines of, “Well I’d much rather live where I live than under an authoritarian regime like in Iran or China! You would never be allowed to criticize your rulers the way you do if you lived in one of those places!”

And I always want to ask them, what do you think drove you to make that objection? Why are you falling all over yourself to defend your country and the people who rule over you, while condemning foreign countries that your own government happens to dislike? Could it be because that’s how you’ve been trained to behave from a young and impressionable age, and that your objection is arising from the same place as a cult member’s objections to criticisms of their cult?

Because that’s ultimately what holds power structures together in the US-aligned nations of the global north: indoctrination. The same thing used to program religious extremists and cult members. The only difference is that rather than scripture and religious leaders, the means of indoctrination is school, mainstream media, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation.

Without mass-scale indoctrination into power-serving narratives about nation, government and world, the power structures which rule over us would immediately collapse. People would cease voluntarily behaving in ways that benefit those power structures, cease acknowledging their government as a legitimate authority, cease pretending elections are real procedures for determining their government’s actions, cease believing they’re receiving truthful information from the mass indoctrination media, and use the power of their numbers to organize in ways which benefit the many rather than an elite few.

This is what people are defending when they object to being told they don’t live in a free society. The objection is itself the product of the reality they are denying.

Read more »

source (and transcript TK)*