A member of German Green Party visits Xinjiang again with his wife from the region.
Chinese society is run so much better than US and US Vassal and Occupied states, I think we'd be better off if Chinese were running the world.
While I bitterly oppose US Imperialism in principle, and especially the way it destabilizes the world by supporting religious and other extremists to endlessly and mercilessly attack "enemies," I have not done enough to stop it to wash my hands of guilt.
Hi David,
I loved your presentation for the Freethinkers today. It seems to me if we are already being visited by extraterrestrials, as recent disclosures suggest, then the are almost certain not to be "takers," otherwise, they would already have taken us. They are apparently just studying us now, and perhaps they may help us later. There is only a remote chance they are takers but they are just biding their time, perhaps waiting for us to do ourselves in and save them the trouble. But it seems unlikely they would want to wait and would have better means at their disposal to get the job done more quickly, perhaps sterilizing the planet with heat or radiation. Which gets to another thought of mine. It doesn't seem worthwhile for ET to come here just for raw materials, which can almost certainly be obtained more cheaply elsewhere. The most useful thing they might want would be The Planet Itself situated in a wonderful orbit for carbon and water based life. But anyway, if they've been here a long time, it seems more likely they are studying or even perhaps helping already. I wouldn't think they would be needed for the Pyramids, but what they might be needed for is saving us from nuclear accidents and the like. It seems we have already survived great dangers against difficult odds. Finally I think Hawking and others are thinking too much of the limits. With billion year science and technology, it might be more like the Heart of Gold spaceship and Infinite Improbability Drive, where you can just set the coordinates to any point in spacetime. And then, given that such god-like technology were available, such ET's would no doubt be everywhere in the universe already. Why? It would seem most reasonable to believe because they would like to see more natural beauty, even if they have to help it along in most cases. I too love Sagan and am watching Episode 13 of Cosmos tonight. Just because you brought it up, I finally unwrapped my box set. Thanks!
https://www.worldhistory.org/canaan/
Canaan was the name of the place, not the name of any particular "people." There were many many different peoples in the region, in different locales and times. Some of them were the Phoenicians, inventors of the phonetic alphabet. The Phoenicians started from coastal cities in the southeast Mediterranean in the Bronze age, originally as far south as Gaza, and established a maritime empire throughout the Mediterranean foreshadowing Greece and Rome. They were great exporters of paper and purple dye and became very rich. "Canaan" and "Phoenicia" are both names for purple, the latter being the Greek name for purple, though not all Canaanites were Phoenicians. Originally extending to Gaza, their major city state became Tyre, in modern Lebanon. The Phoenician civilization was destroyed by Rome in 64 BCE with great prejudice...salting the earth in Carthage which was their greatest African settlement.
After Herodotus called the region previously known as "Canaan" (as originally inscribed in early Bronze Age mesopotamian texts) "Palestine" (after the then Philistine cities on the coast, though there are other theories, such as the Canaanite god Pales) in his 5th century BCE texts, the newer name gradually replaced the old names.
https://www.worldhistory.org/palestine/
A funny dialog about maps of the middle east.
These maps show claimed "control" over the area, not necessarily who lives there.
Zionists seem to have the weird idea that because they have ancestors back in Israel, including ancestors that during some intervals controlled the region, they should control it exclusively now.
Virtually everyone alive has ancestors in that area during one epoch or another. This is probably more true of 1917 Palestinians ("Arabs" in the borders of Mandate Palestine) than any other group you could specify, including European Jews.
When Jews were said to have left Israel after defeats in 70 CE and 130 CE, it was NOT everyone who left. It was soldiers and elites...NOT farmers. (I need to read "The Invention of the Jewish People" to get a better idea of this, reviews say the book claims there is NO historical record of mass numbers of people leaving "Israel" during these times at all! So that would mean, most likely, the Palestinians of 1917 may well have been the descendents of the people who lived there in Biblical times and before as well. I would only qualify with a phrase like "mostly" and "most descent." We are all descended from everyone who has descendants from 2000 years ago and more, but some are more descended from some in that era than others. This becomes comprehensible when you realize that the increments of proportionate descent over 100 generations is a very small quantity, 1e-30 or so. In other words, to describe someone's descent in the most compact possible form it would take over 30 decimal digits.)
Anyway you evaluate it, the dispossession of Palestinians and the theft of their self determination over the entire region of 48 Palestine is a crime against humanity that will not go away until the Palestinians have full rights in their homeland of 48 Palestine, or within the meager and unfair-to-them 67 borders two state compromise with no reductions. No amount of posturing over who controlled what in the past, or who is descended from whom, will change that.
Laws which systematically discriminate against Palestinians in community planning and leasing are a continuation and extension of that crime against humanity.
Dr Norman Finkestein on the 2021 Gaza Invasion and Israeli 'Apartheid'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FWUR-U2550
In the above video, Finkelstein compares the 2021 with earlier attacks on Gaza, and notes the sea change in US and worldwide opinion regarding Palestine, as shown in the huge Free Palestine protests and the B'Tselem and Human Rights Watch report calling out Israel as an Apartheid State which Persecutes Palestinians, both of these being Crimes Against Humanity. He relates the meaning behind Sec Brinklen's remarks in a press conference that he "had not seen the intelligence" regarding the Hamas operations that justified the bombing of the AP tower. He said normally the SoS would simply lie about such things, brushing aside the question with insistence that Israel had right to defend itself, but in saying he had not seen the intelligence, Blinken was sending message to Israel on behalf of Biden administration "We're not going to lie for you as before." Likewise, though many are disappointed with Biden's initially stonewalling the Cease Fire in the Security Council (China proposed it 6 times to be shot down by US) and sending additional $735 million in replacement arms donations (and now another $1 billion is being requested), Finkelstein believes that more than before, Biden seems to be putting "parameters" on future aid. To wit, no ground invasion massacres as in the 2014 "Protective Edge." Biden, and allies around the world, are feeling the heat, and they are letting Israel know, in private, which seems to be the way Biden prefers doing things.
This video is wonderful, both in what it says and what it doesn't say. It is nice to see a sea change in public opinion. But IMO this does not necessarily mean a resolution is at hand anytime soon. So I worry about overconfidence that might come from extrapolating from Finkelstein's remarks to an inevitable resolution. Instead, they should encourage us to do more of what we have been doing.
A friend of mine has submitted the following pro-Israel videos (and a few articles). My comments.
Palm Oil? Yes, it's evil also. But two evils does not make Israel right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgcfgTTuku0
Qu'ran's sweet sounding verse has some ugly parts removed. Yes...but the word "innocent" replaces the removed text. I don't care for either one. But people ought to be able to believe whatever they want to believe, and while I feel all religions make people less free (and therefore also less self-actualized and less universally-purposed), we cannot socially discriminate based on tribalistic beliefs but on actions. On that grounds, in view of still existing world "Christian" empire and rest-of-world subjugation, it is Christendom which still (and historically) has more to apologize for, despite all the "love" in the holy book (and it's not all that either, far from it). In fact, and more insidiously, what Christianity does is divorce "love" and such from their true meaning, leaving us all isolated and shaking with fear. Islam is just more like "old testament" jealous God without all the happy talk. The bigger evil in the world is empire, and religions are just the window treatment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfqduwXVSgQ
About Mecca, will read later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTjNbT2-gmE&ab_channel=ApostateProphet
Description of Shekh Jarrah claims from Israeli perspective--critical missing information (dismisses international claims that East Jerusalem is Palestinian not Israeli, doesn't describe how current Palestinian residents were settled and that they had been promised Jordanian deeds prior to 1967, how these homes were replacement for their previous homes in West Jerusalem which was resettled by Israel in 1948, and that Jordan made their deeds official in 2021).
[article] I can't remember what my friend said about this, but it is a protest for "co-existence" and recognition of the Palestinians between Sea and River as equals. Organized by a communist party (Meretz) among others. This is one of the protests I think I would approve of.
Gaza-Sinai state??? Later...
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/7/24/is-gaza-sinai-state-a-possibility-for-palestinians
Antisemitism report on CBS news. All racism is deplorable, including antisemitism, and some may be occurring. However there is no mention of anti-arab racism. Yasha Levine, Max Blumenthal, and others have studied a number of recently alleged antisemitic incidents, including one of those shown in this segment (I think) and shown that they actually started with racism and violence from Zionists who were following the recent Free Palestine demonstrations all over USA and seeking confrontations to discredit it. But the "antisemitic incident" reports systematically removed this prior context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zapRkrD7R0&ab_channel=CBSEveningNews
Young women operating Israel's aeronautical spy system. Operating the apartheid state is a full time job for everyone, no?
https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/rkH2Yb00D00?utm_source=Taboola_internal&utm_medium=organic
This is the exact incident which was deconstructed by Yasha Levine, who lives in Los Angeles. He shows that at a critical part before the violence started, the Israel supporter making the video put the phone down, suggesting that was when the Israel supporters started throwing more than insults at some men in the protest march. He's begging for more information. But it could not possibly be "premeditated antisemitism" as claimed in media. It grew out of a random incident between protestors and counter-protestors. If there was any premeditation, it had to have been on the counter-protestor side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNTfg3A6ME4&ab_channel=FoxNews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_ZsISE4eO4&ab_channel=TheView
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7qCZHPcXYo&ab_channel=NYSofmind
Zionist media baron starts out claiming Iran never honored JPCOA. Actually, it was USA who never honored and then quickly broke JPCOA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1_Sf8i-cz8&t=12s&ab_channel=HonestReportingVideos
Honest ReportingUN WatchMEMRIYnet
