Meanwhile much of Africa’s minerals are “owned” and extracted by Canadian companies. IIRC there’s also some sort of due diligence process Canadian regulators do when a foreign investor buys a significant portion of a company.

That couldn’t possibly be problematic though, African nations sold those mineral rights of their own accord and the people want to work in horrific conditions for little or no pay. /s

I wouldn’t put too much stock in what G&M writes, they’re a far-right rag masquerading as a serious national publication.

So much for the party of pacifism and demonstrations against militarization. Then again the party has been like this for a generation already, it’s just more out in the open now with conflict nearby and warhawks in the Bundestag.

I found the speech text via Auswärtiges-Amt.de. It’s really quite terrifying, although at the same time totally standard for Baerbock and the Greens. It’s entirely obvious that she has lots of training in the Washington Consensus, between her constant drumming of the holy “rules based international order” and this little gem:

It cannot be in our interest if China is creating excessive economic dependencies in its region.

These people act as if they’re the shining light at the top of the hill, governing the world for good and defending against forces of evil.

M365 is a data collection tool, plain and simple. Of course they’re hawking it like their lives depend on it.

Most famous universities in the west are famous because they’re social institutions of the capitalist class, they’re pipelines into upper management positions in big companies or federal political office. Of course they’re up to horrible shit.

Not only can Meta modify their infrastructure to host EU customer data in the EU, the ECJ or EC can more or less override the rulings of regulators. Don’t forget that the EU is just as captured by capital as the US is.

I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries lately and one thing that’s always missing from the mainstream ones is any sort of exploration into why the people or organizations involved do exploitative things. I understand of course why even a simple superficial questioning of the conditions that motivate bad behaviour is taboo. I’d love to see more documentaries with a dialectical materialist angle.

I want to see hopeful stories. I want to see a character start a story with some great idea about how to make the world better and see them start to make it happen, rather than be stopped by a super-powered imperialist “hero.” I want utopian stories which make us think about what humanity could accomplish and inspire us to work towards some of those ideals. I want to see the stories artists come up on their own time from their own heads, without deadlines or profit maximization infinite universes of never-ending fascism.

Not only was he wrong, if I remember the story correctly he basically went into the whole thing to come up with “scientific evidence” on why poor people should be fucked over even more.

The irony of neo-malthusians is that (if implemented) their policy ideas and general fear of new technology would create the conditions for a pretty conservative limit on a sustainable population.

I don’t think we’ll ever find out, for two big reasons. One, it happened so long ago now that unless some sort of incontrovertible contemporary evidence is released there will always be uncertainty. Two, there are so many powerful interests at play with regards to funding gain of function and bioweapons research that admitting in one way or another that Covid-19 was made in a lab would have the potential to end that kind of research.

One interesting thing I recently read (aside from the bits Jeffrey Sachs is talking about) is that a whole bunch of US states could have tested waste water samples for the virus, samples taken just before Covid-19 officially came to the US. Only two states have done so, and it was even implied (IIRC) that some samples have been destroyed. Sachs also mentioned in at least one interview that in the US NIH supported labs like in Wuhan, there’s basically no PPE required for working on samples of corona viruses, even very contagious ones like Covid-19.

The overturning of Roe wasn’t an executive branch thing though, and we already had the sense it was coming before his election. Biden kept up his general “vow of inaction” on that issue by not pushing Congress to legally codify abortion protections. He also won’t take any step towards checking the power of the legislative branch.

In discussing this the other day I came to a question about the semi-conductor topic in relation to this “Pivot to Taiwan.”

There’s very clearly a profit motive involved, with Taiwan producing a lot of computer chips and the US based companies needing to maintain control of this profit stream moving forward, particularly given the growth and technological improvement of the mainland Chinese semi-conductor industry.

What I have started to wonder about is how much this may also have to do with the hardware level backdoors implemented in nearly every western designed processor. If China takes over as the semi-conductor supplier of the world (either via mainland production or the reintegration of Taiwan), these hardware backdoors will be very quickly removed, or at the very least adapted to the needs of the Chinese people instead of American imperialists.

I think that makes sense from an imperialist point of view, especially one where the cracks are becoming blindingly apparent. Control of information is everything.

It’s not just about control for the sake of protecting profits, it’s about control for the sake of protecting information. These backdoors enable access to private/personal information on nearly any device, or to dictate what functions those devices are allowed to perform.

He kept the most important promise. “Nothing will fundamentally change.”

It’s so amazing that this US operation to reinforce the dollar area is what’s going to lead to the collapse of the USD hegemony.

This type of finance imperialism, or specifically “super imperialism” is how the US and allied institutions have kept a strangehold on the world economy since 1919. It wasn’t even intentional at first.

It’s evolved with conditions over time, but the most recent variation has been in place since 1971 when the US unilaterally declared that the USD would be the global reserve currency. All other nations would essentially have to fund the military spending driven US deficit in order to keep their lights on and stave off US invasion.

The phase of dedollarization is going to be rough, especially on the US but for the rest of the world as well.

It’s ok, Amazon’s just gonna buy up the clinics and hospitals so they have legal access to all the records.

I understand what Snowden did with the information and while I don’t agree with it he probably made the best choice for himself in a tough moment.

What bothers me is that the journalists (Greenwald, Poitras, MacAskill) had the whole treasure trove, and sat on it until intelligence and/or capitalists got to them and made sure the rest of the files would never be published.

Yes of course, that Germany was on the right side of history.

Greenwald and Poitras also had all the documents Snowden took and published very very few of them.

That’s what happens when you elect a warhawk Foreign Minister who was part of the Friends of Taipei club or whatever it’s called and went to foreign policy hawk school in DC. That’s also what happens when you’re a US vassal state and reliably anti-communist asset.

To your question, I don’t know that Germany has ever been on the right side of history.