#major exports of russia

[eximpedia1]

[sinoswan-mobilestages]

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[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #24

June 21-28 2024

The US Surgeon General declared for the first time ever, firearm violence a public health crisis. The nation's top doctor recommended the banning of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, the introduce universal background checks for purchasing guns, regulate the industry, pass laws that would restrict their use in public spaces and penalize people who fail to safely store their weapons. President Trump dismissed Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in 2017 in part for his criticism of guns before his time in government, he was renominated for his post by President Biden in 2021. While the Surgeon General's reconstructions aren't binding a similar report on the risks of smoking in 1964 was the start of a national shift toward regulation of tobacco.

Vice-President Harris announced the first grants to be awarded through a ground breaking program to remove barriers to building more housing. Under President Biden more housing units are under construction than at any time in the last 50 years. Vice President Harris was announcing 85 million dollars in grants giving to communities in 21 states through the  Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing (PRO) program. The administration plans another 100 million in PRO grants at the end of the summer and has requested 100 million more for next year. The Treasury also announced it'll moved 100 million of left over Covid funds toward housing. All of this is part of plans to build 2 million affordable housing units and invest $258 billion in housing overall.

President Biden pardoned all former US service members convicted under the US Military's ban on gay sex. The pardon is believed to cover 2,000 veterans convicted of "consensual sodomy". Consensual sodomy was banned and a felony offense under the Uniform Code of Justice from 1951 till 2013. The Pardon will wipe clean those felony records and allow veterans to apply to change their discharge status.

The Department of Transportation announced $1.8 Billion in new infrastructure building across all 50 states, 4 territories and Washington DC. The program focuses on smaller, often community-oriented projects that span jurisdictions. This award saw a number of projects focused on climate and energy, like $25 million to help repair damage caused by permafrost melting amid higher temperatures in Alaska, or $23 million to help electrify the Downeast bus fleet in Maine.

The Department of Energy announced $2.7 billion to support domestic sources of nuclear fuel. The Biden administration hopes to build up America's domestic nuclear fuel to allow for greater stability and lower costs. Currently Russia is the world's top exporter of enriched uranium, supplying 24% of US nuclear fuel.

The Department of Interior awarded $127 million to 6 states to help clean up legacy pollution from orphaned oil and gas wells. The funding will help cap 600 wells in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, New York and Ohio. So far thanks to administration efforts over 7,000 orphaned wells across the country have been capped, reduced approximately 11,530 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions

HUD announced $469 million to help remove dangerous lead from older homes. This program will focus on helping homeowners particularly low income ones remove lead paint and replace lead pipes in homes built before 1978. This represents one of the largest investments by the federal government to help private homeowners deal with a health and safety hazard.

Bonus: President Biden's efforts to forgive more student debt through his administration's SAVE plan hit a snag this week when federal courts in Kansas and Missouri blocked elements the Administration also suffered a set back at the Supreme Court as its efforts to regular smog causing pollution was rejected by the conservative majority in a 5-4 ruling that saw Amy Coney Barrett join the 3 liberals against the conservatives. This week's legal setbacks underline the importance of courts and the ability to nominate judges and Justices over the next 4 years.

[determinate-negation]

The average American produces 1,704 pounds of garbage per year, roughly three times the global average, according to a new report by the research firm Verisk Maplecroft. Across 194 countries, the researchers found that the world produces 2.3 billion tons of municipal solid waste each year, which is enough to fill 822,000 Olympic-sized pools. Of this waste, just 16% is recycled, while 46% is disposed of unsustainably in ways that harm the environment.  [...] Countries like the US and Singapore are reaching their landfill capacity, while countries like China and Malaysia have refused to continue accepting trash exported from Western nations.  Although the United States accounts for 4% of the global population, it’s responsible for 12% of the municipal solid waste that’s created, and historically would ship a lot of trash to other countries.   China and India, meanwhile, account for 36% of the global population, but generate only 27% of all waste. 

also according to a lot of studies the majority of garbage in the US is food waste which can 100% be composted and is the most environmentally destructive when sent to a landfill because it creates methane

from this source

America has got a waste problem. An average American produces about 4.40 pounds of garbage per day and approximately three-quarters of a tonne per year. If you are thinking “this can’t possibly be right, there is no way I produce THAT MUCH”, get ready for another blow. The U.S.A holds the record of producing the highest amount of garbage in the world, more than Russia, India, and even China. All that trash has to end up somewhere and as a result, the 2,000 active landfills in the US are reaching their capacity. What will happen when we run out of the room? Well, let’s ask a better question. What can we do to manage our waste better and prevent a catastrophe? Overfilled landfills are a big problem. Some states decide to simply burn the landfills, as burning reduces the volume of the trash in the landfill significantly. This frees up a lot of space, but the problem of toxic gasses and fumes being released into the atmosphere persists. Not only do these gasses contribute to climate change, but they can also deteriorate human health and end up costing millions in medical expenses. On the other hand, simply leaving the landfills as they pose other issues. The chemical and biological reactions taking place in landfills can create a lot of issues as these chemicals leach into the ground and contaminate water that municipalities may extract for use in their water systems. The piles of organic garbage also release harmful methane, a greenhouse gas more 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide. So, what can be done to alleviate these issues?

[ohsalome]

the intention of comparing the reaction to Palestine vs Ukraine is typically not to criticize Ukrainian victims of war. The criticism is directed at American spectators, because the people in power here are insanely anti Palestinian but have made overtures to help Ukraines resistance efforts despite comparable situations. Regular citizens also mostly support Ukraine but many hate Palestinians. People are just comparing palestine to Ukraine as a point of reference to try to make those people understand.

As kindly as possible, I do not think you can educate people out of islamophobia by appealing to their conscience, at the very least because if they had one they wouldn't be islamophobic in the first place.

And when it comes to people in power, appealing to their empathy in the case with Palestine is fruitless because the help Ukraine got wasn't motivated by emotion either. I do not expect you to know the history of current russo-ukrainian war well, so you probably don't know that the western world was perfectly happy to watch russia roll all over us punishment-free as long as they felt that other "properly european countries" won't be involved. Russia has been butchering us since 2014, and nobody gave a fuck about it. Even during the first few weeks of the full-scale invasion NATO refused to send us any military help, because they expected us to fall and were okay with it.

The current support we have did not fall on us from the sky by the graceful kindness of "our american overlords" - it is a consequence of the cumulative effort of our diplomats, pre-existing agreements with NATO countries, and the economical ripples the full-scale war caused (Ukraine being one of the major world exporters of grain being one of the most relevant).

This is why, sadly Palestine cannot follow the Ukrainian scenario of foreign support. The surrounding circumstances of both of our wars are way to different, and while it is easy to ignore them while making simplistic quick-dopamine-hit posts on hellbr dot com, they do influence the real-world situation on the ground. Which is what posts like the one I replied to do - they create a no-nuance misinformed image of the war in Ukraine. Which amplifies the problem even more, because even though "most americans" can agree on a generic "war in Ukraine bad", their idea of what is going on here is hugely misinformed as it is. And this has harmful real-life consequences on which our very survival depends.

Look. I understand that the war between Palestine and Israel has been going on for decades. I understand that there are many contexts that are obvious to the people in the respective countries that I am oblivious to by the virtue of never being there and not speaking arabic nor hebrew. I understand that there is a lot of propaganda that I may accidentally spread out of my ignorance, and therefore I try to be careful to avoid doing so, out of respect to the people living there. So why is it too much to ask you to give the same respect to us?

Like I have said before, the biggest issue with that infographic post is that it spreads misinformation. In the simplest of terms, misinformation is bad. People are trying to do any smallest thing to help Palestinians - who are currently barely surviving in inhumanely horrifying conditions - and out of ignorance they are spreading anti-ukrainian propaganda. Downplaying the number of ukrainian victims (and, as a result, making russian war crimes look "not as bad") is anti-ukrainian propaganda. Making it seem as we are getting "too much american help" is anti-ukrainian propaganda, because USA is our biggest military exporter, and getting less ammo/vehicles/etc will have catastrophic effect on the amount of death.

Which is why am not staying silent on this, even if your collective intentions are noble and good. Because, I will repeat myself again, your intentions do not matter if the consequences of your actions are harmful. And if (a) comparing Ukraine and Palestine is uneffective; (b) it portrays your ignorance of either one or both of the wars; and (c) simultaneously with spreading support for the palestinian cause you are spreading harmful anti-ukrainian pro-russian propaganda, I do not think it is too much to ask you to stop.

[mariacallous]

While Russia has made a slew of outlandish assertions about Ukraine, including that the country is led by a Nazi regime, few Russian narratives have entrenched themselves more thoroughly in the Western far right and far left than that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was illegitimately removed from office in a Western-backed coup in February 2014. This claim has been a key element of Russian propaganda, echoed in the United States by such public figures as independent U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., filmmaker Oliver Stone, and Cato Institute defense expert Ted Galen Carpenter.

The idea that Yanukovych’s removal was illegitimate is easily refuted: After Yanukovych abandoned his office by fleeing from Ukraine to Russia, he was stripped of the presidency by a constitutional majority in parliament. Even Russia joined the rest of the world in recognizing the new Ukrainian government a few months later.

But the truth underlying the events of February 2014 is far more interesting: The preponderance of evidence suggests that it was Moscow itself that triggered Yanukovych’s departure in order to launch a pre-arranged Plan B—the invasion of Crimea and an engineered “uprising” in eastern Ukraine—after Moscow’s Plan A—a new treaty with a pliant government in Kyiv that placed it under Russia’s de facto control—was about to fail. Indeed, the timeline shows that preparations for Plan B were well underway before Yanukovych’s removal from office. All this, in turn, demonstrates that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans for Ukraine were far more predatory all along than merely preventing the country’s drift toward NATO, as many of Russia’s Western apologists contend.

The Maidan mass protests—which lasted from November 2013 to February 2014 in Kyiv and many other cities across Ukraine—erupted when Yanukovych pivoted from a wide-ranging association agreement with the European Union to a similar one with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union. Ukraine’s move toward closer relations with the EU was the trigger for Putin’s Plan A: the transfer of Ukraine to the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. To stop Yanukovych’s deal with Europe, Moscow pressured Kyiv with trade sanctions, including an embargo of key Ukrainian exports to Russia. In return for joining Russia’s economic bloc, Moscow offered Kyiv an emergency $3 billion loan to shore up a budget drained of resources by Yanukovych’s corruption. At the same time, Russia pressured him to violently crush the Maidan, suppress the pro-Western opposition, and thereby alienate him from the West. Toward this end, officials from the Russian security services and Putin aide Vladislav Surkov were frequent visitors in Kyiv.

Yanukovych, who had never established an absolute autocracy on the Russian model, resisted an all-out crackdown against the hundreds of thousands of largely peaceful protesters throughout western and central Ukraine. As his final actions as president would show, he also retained the hope of being able to balance Russian influence with continued relations with the West. It was to prevent that outcome that Moscow triggered his departure.

In all, more than 100 civilians and 13 police and security service operatives would die during the Maidan. Yet while the security services brutally attacked protesters all throughout the Maidan, the main deadly violence only occurred between Feb. 18 and Feb. 20, 2014—precisely the time when negotiations between the government and opposition over a political compromise were gaining traction. Brokered by the foreign ministers of Poland, France, and Germany—Radoslaw Sikorski, Laurent Fabius, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, respectively—with Putin envoy Vladimir Lukin present as well, negotiations had begun to gain momentum on Feb. 17. Over the next three days, 78 protesters and 11 police were killed.

This level of violence shocked and angered Ukrainian society. In response to mounting public fury and the threat of extensive Western sanctions, Yanukovych intensified negotiations on a compromise and moved to release detained and imprisoned protesters. For Putin, however, any path of negotiated compromise was a clear setback to his Plan A, which would have locked Yanukovych and his government into complete dependency on Moscow.

As deadly violence engulfed the streets of Kyiv, Yanukovych signaled his agreement to a broad government of national unity. After the opposition turned down the top post of prime minister, Yanukovych indicated that he would nominate Serhiy Tihipko, the billionaire former head of Ukraine’s central bank. For the Russians, Tihipko was a red flag: He had denounced politicians who were willing to “sacrifice Ukraine’s territorial integrity for electoral votes,” was a proponent of Ukraine’s integration with the EU, and opposed making Russian the second state language.

Coupled with the potential transfer of key ministries into the hands of the opposition and new elections by year’s end, Yanukovych’s willingness to compromise set off alarm bells in the Kremlin, whose representative, Lukin, withheld his signature from the agreement. Once before, during the 2004 Orange Revolution, Yanukovych had disappointed Putin by refusing to use brute force to stay in power after falsified presidential elections. When Yanukovych eventually returned to power by legal means in 2010, he further angered Russia with negotiations toward a free trade agreement with the EU, which he only aborted after extensive Russian economic sanctions and embargoes on Ukrainian exports. To Putin, Yanukovych was again vacillating and refusing to show an iron hand.

On the morning of Feb. 20, after two days of violence had failed to crush the Maidan and with Yanukovych on the verge of signing a compromise agreement with the opposition, the Kremlin pivoted. A delegation of Russian Federal Security Service officials, including Sergei Beseda, head of the Fifth Service in charge of international operations, arrived in Kyiv—the third such visit since the Maidan began. Officially there to “protect Russian diplomatic facilities,” Beseda’s real mission was to advise hardliners inside Yanukovych’s leadership team, block a compromise, and, failing that, set in motion a Plan B—Russia’s ambitious plot to splinter Ukraine.

As the EU envoys met with Yanukovych and opposition leaders to finalize the deal—and as Yanukovych did not agree to a request by Beseda to meet—the hardliners in the government escalated, presumably under Moscow’s instructions. Then-Ukrainian Interior Minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko and Security Service chief Oleksandr Yakimenko unleashed a brutal attack on the protesters in an apparent attempt to unravel the deal that that was in the process of being struck.

Indeed, Feb. 20 proved to be the bloodiest day, with police snipers shooting 48 protesters.

Zakharchenko’s role in the mayhem is well established, as are his close relations with Russia’s security services, who advised him tactics and had equipped his ministry with grenades, tear gas, and other crowd control munitions purchased for $100,000. His role as a trusted Russian asset was confirmed after his escape to Moscow, when he became senior advisor to Rostec, Russia’s state company in charge of sensitive advanced technologies, including for the military. He also ran a Russian fund that rewarded traitors from Ukraine’s security forces. Yakimenko, who had spent a decade as an officer in Russia’s armed forces and whose murky past suggested links to Russian security services, deployed snipers from the Ukrainian Security Service’s Alpha special forces unit. Ukrainian prosecutors would later allege that Yakimenko subsequently supplied pro-Russian insurgents in Ukraine with weapons as part of Putin’s effort to dismember Ukraine.

In the aftermath of the mass killings, Yanukovych signed the Agreement on the Stabilization of the Political Crisis in Ukraine on Feb. 21. But the bloodshed had changed the political calculus. Denounced by the opposition and abandoned by many of his allies in parliament, calls for Yanukovych to step down gained momentum. Yet even for the most radical elements in Ukraine’s opposition, there was no way to force him out, especially with the continued presence of thousands of militia and security forces that remained under the command of officials closely aligned with Russia. Hundreds of armed pro-Yanukovych vigilantes had also arrived from the Donbas.

Yet surprisingly, as the compromise was being ratified, this massive security infrastructure suddenly vanished. The Berkut riot police and the Alpha group exited the government quarter, where most of the protests were taking place, along with hundreds of other police. Sikorski described the sudden and systematic withdrawal as “astonishing,” noting it was not part of the agreement. This dramatic U-turn could not have happened in such rapid and orderly fashion had it occurred through internal divisions in the security services—the usual last and necessary step in the collapse of a regime. Nor were there any prior signs of security service defections to the opposition in Kyiv. The sudden stand-down can only be explained as a top-down decision by Russia’s fifth column in the security services leadership. The justification for abandoning Yanukovych overnight was soon afterward intimated by Putin: On March 4, 2014, he said that by compromising with the opposition, “Yanukovych had in fact surrendered all his power.”

Absent the Kremlin’s support, amid the disappearance of Yanukovych’s security services in the government quarter, and with a majority for a new coalition emerging in parliament, the isolated Yanukovych sought desperately to maintain his leverage and relevance. Hoping, perhaps, to maintain some semblance of power, he switched to Russia’s Plan B—the splintering of Ukraine. He traveled to Kharkiv later that day to lead a conference of regional government leaders from southern and eastern Ukraine, but was rebuffed by leaders from his own Party of Regions. Rather than attending an ineffectual rump conference, Yanukovych escaped on the night of Feb. 21 to Crimea, where Russia’s takeover of the peninsula was already underway.

It was in only in the aftermath of Yanukovych’s flight from Kyiv and disappearance from Kharkiv that Ukraine’s Rada met on Feb. 22, and by a constitutional majority stripped him of office. On Feb. 28, Yanukovych finally resurfaced in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, where he gave a press conference denouncing his removal from office. It was to be his last major public event. He then disappeared from the media and Russian propaganda, which soon switched to trumpeting the “Russian Spring”—the supposed uprising in Ukraine’s south and east, largely orchestrated by Russian assets. Plan B was now in full effect.

In the end, Russia’s efforts failed in Odesa, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mykolaiv. But it succeeded in much of the Donbas and led to Russia’s rapid annexation of Crimea. On March 26, 2014, the Russian Defense Ministry celebrated the annexation of Crimea by minting a medal. The medal, which initially appeared on a Defense Ministry website but was later removed, bears the date of the start of the “return of Crimea”: Feb. 20, 2014. It is highly unlikely that this dating of the launch of Russia’s operation to dismember Ukraine—two full days before the supposed “coup” that removed Yanukovych—is a mistake.

The Maidan mass protests and civic action were a landmark event in Ukraine’s history. The Maidan, without question, blocked Putin’s Plan A—Ukraine’s march, as a whole, into Russia’s orbit. The Maidan also forced Yanukovych to agree to new elections, compelled him to appoint a caretaker coalition government, and helped Ukraine’s democratic institutions endure. But it is no less true that it was precisely for this reason that, as an agreement was about to be struck in the final days of the Maidan, Russia rapidly shifted to its prepared Plan B, withdrew support from Yanukovych, and launched its operation to partition Ukraine.

A clear understanding of Putin’s actions and motives during this critical period in Ukraine’s history is not just a matter of setting the record straight. It is crucial in understanding Putin’s longstanding aims, which went far beyond blocking Ukraine’s accession to NATO or the EU. By early 2014, his ultimate aim was already the dismemberment of Ukraine and the eventual incorporation of many of its territories into Russia. Putin never abandoned his grandiose revisionist aims, which resurfaced in the large-scale invasion Russia launched on Feb. 22, 2022, eight years to the day that Yanukovych was removed from office.

[warsofasoiaf]

What do you make of Ukraine's incursion into Russia, and what do you think their objective is?

I think their primary objectives are:

Incite panic in the Russian lines. Having the enemy penetrate your home territory while you're away creates panic, and can potentially provoke an ill-advised relief effort that either gets friendly fire (not hard with Russia and their notoriously inaccurate artillery) or causes the lost of significant assets.

Create a morale boost at home. It's humiliating to have such a small country take territory. Especially Kursk, which was the site of a famous Soviet victory in the Second World War.

Threaten the Sudhza gas hub. With the lost of Nordstream 2, the Sudzha gas hub is the major Gazprom thoroughfare into Europe. If Ukraine destroys or damages it, it severely impacts Russian gas exports and damages Russian logistics in that theater.

Thanks for the question, Bruin.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[whencyclopedia]

The Causes of WWII

The origins of the Second World War (1939-45) may be traced back to the harsh peace settlement of the First World War (1914-18) and the economic crisis of the 1930s, while more immediate causes were the aggressive invasions of their neighbours by Germany, Italy, and Japan. A weak and divided Europe, an isolationist USA, and an opportunistic USSR were all intent on peace, but the policy of appeasement only delivered what everyone most feared: another long and terrible world war.

The main causes of WWII were:

The harsh Treaty of Versailles

The economic crisis of the 1930s

The rise of fascism

Germany's rearmament

The cult of Adolf Hitler

The policy of appeasement by Western powers

Treaties of mutual interest between Axis Powers

Lack of treaties between the Allies

The territorial expansion of Germany, Italy, and Japan

The Nazi-Soviet Pact

The invasion of Poland in September 1939

The Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbour

Treaty of Versailles

Germany was defeated in the First World War, and the victors established harsh terms to ensure that some of the costs of the war were recuperated and to prevent Germany from becoming a future threat. With European economies and populations greatly damaged by the war, the victors were in no mood to be lenient since Germany had almost won and its industry was still intact. Germany remained a dangerous state. However, Britain and France did not want a totally punitive settlement, as this might lead to lasting resentment and make Germany unable to become a valuable market for exports.

The peace terms were set out in the Treaty of Versailles, signed by all parties except the USSR on 28 June 1919. The Rhineland must be demilitarised to act as a buffer zone between Germany and France. All colonies and the Saar, a coal-rich area of western Germany, were removed from German authority. Poland was given the industrial area of Upper Silesia and a corridor to the sea, which included Danzig (Gdánsk) and cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany. France regained the regions of Alsace and Lorraine. Germany had to pay war reparations to France and Belgium. Germany had limits on its armed forces and could not build tanks, aircraft, submarines, or battleships. Finally, Germany was to accept complete responsibility, that is the guilt, for starting the war. Many Germans viewed the peace terms as highly dishonourable.

The settlement established nine new countries in Eastern Europe, a recipe for instability since all of them disputed their borders, and many contained large minority groups who claimed to be part of another country. Germany, Italy, and Russia, once powerful again after the heavy costs of WWI, looked upon these fledgling states with imperialist envy.

In the 1920s, Germany signed two important treaties. The Locarno Treaty of 1925 guaranteed Germany's western borders but allowed some scope for change in the east. The 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed by 56 countries. All the major powers promised not to conduct foreign policy using military means. In 1929, Germany's reparations as stipulated by the Treaty of Versailles were reduced from £6.6 million to £2 million. In 1932, the reparations were cancelled altogether. This was all very promising, but through the 1930s, the complex web of European diplomacy began to quickly unravel in a climate of economic decline.

Continue reading...

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Truthout:

In March 2022, the United Nations Environment Assembly agreed to begin negotiating a legally binding treaty between 175 countries that will determine how the world deals with such plastic pollution. The fifth and final negotiating session is now set to start in late November this year. Recognizing the scope and severity of the crisis, delegates for the 14 Pacific Island countries have been at the forefront of the international plastic treaty talks, advocating for strict limits on plastic production and the need to set tangible goals for waste management.

Other countries, including Rwanda, Peru and European Union nations, have also pushed for ambitious goals and plastic production caps. But the United States, alongside oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia and China, has historically opposed these proposals. The oil and gas industry wants delegates to carve out a treaty that focuses on things like plastic tracking and recycling rather than decreasing production — even though, for decades, plastics companies knew that recycling was an overwhelming failure.

But in August, in what could be a major breakthrough for the future of the planet, President Joe Biden’s administration indicated it would support plastic production limits and increased controls on the toxic chemicals that are used in the plastic production process.

Environmental groups praised the announcement, while industry groups like the American Chemistry Council — which has spent nearly $10 million in lobbying efforts so far this year — lambasted the administration for “caving” to environmentalists’ wishes and “betray[ing] U.S. manufacturing.”

While the Biden administration’s announcement gained little attention in a crowded news cycle, this shift in approach carries urgent importance. Less than 10 percent of plastic waste is currently recycled globally; the rest winds up dumped or incinerated, harming communities and polluting the Earth. If the years of negotiations yield a treaty that focuses on recycling — not production caps — as a solution to the crisis, then the world will be digging itself into an even deeper plastic pollution hole. And it would take a huge amount of additional international coordination to climb back out.

Plastic, which is derived from fossil fuels, is toxic throughout every stage of its life cycle, from production to disposal. The extraction and refinement of fossil fuels for plastic production emits hundreds of millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases each year, heating up the atmosphere and fueling the climate crisis. Research from the Center for International Environmental Law emphasized that the global plastics treaty needs “to incorporate ambitious obligations that specifically target global plastic production” if we are going to keep global warming below the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold.

Plastics also contain a slew of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, which are released during production at facilities that, in the United States, are often placed in low-income communities and communities of color. In January, a report by Amnesty International found that the Houston Ship Channel — a major hub for fossil fuels in the United States — is a racial “sacrifice zone,” where an immense and disproportionate burden of pollution is placed on people of color by fossil fuel companies. The report noted that the scale of harmful pollution amounts to a human rights violation.

At the end of plastics’ life cycle, wealthy nations, including the United States and the United Kingdom, frequently export their waste to poorer nations in a phenomenon that has been dubbed “waste colonialism.” Often, these countries have fewer resources to manage and tame the vast amounts of trash than the rich countries that are sending it. The term was coined as far back as 1989, when several African nations expressed concerns at the United Nations Environmental Program Basel Convention that wealthy countries were using countries in Africa as dumping grounds for hazardous waste.

[theculturedmarxist]

The contradictions of China-bashing in the United States begin with how often it is flat-out untrue.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the “Chinese spy” balloon that President Joe Biden shot down with immense patriotic fanfare in February did not in fact transmit pictures or anything else to China.

White House economists have been trying to excuse persistent US inflation saying it is a global problem and inflation is worse elsewhere in the world. China’s inflation rate is 0.7% year on year.

Financial media outlets stress how China’s GDP growth rate is lower than it used to be. China now estimates that its 2023 GDP growth will be 5-5.5%. Estimates for the US GDP growth rate in 2023, meanwhile, vacillate around 1-2%.

China-bashing has intensified into denial and self-delusion – it is akin to pretending that the United States did not lose wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and more.

The BRICS coalition (China and its allies) now has a significantly larger global economic footprint (higher total GDP) than the Group of Seven (the United States and its allies).

China is outgrowing the rest of the world in research and development expenditures.

The American empire (like its foundation, American capitalism) is not the dominating global force it once was right after World War II. The empire and the economy have shrunk in size, power and influence considerably since then. And they continue to do so.

Putting that genie back into the bottle is a battle against history that the United States is not likely to win.

The Russia delusion

Denial and self-delusion about the changing world economy have led to major strategic mistakes. US leaders predicted before and shortly after February 2022, when the Ukraine war began, for example, that Russia’s economy would crash from the effects of the “greatest of all sanctions,” led by the United States. Some US leaders still believe that the crash will take place (publicly, if not privately) despite there being no such indication.

Such predictions badly miscalculated the economic strength and potential of Russia’s allies in the BRICS. Led by China and India, the BRICS nations responded to Russia’s need for buyers of its oil and gas.

The United States made its European allies cut off purchasing Russian oil and gas as part of the sanctions war against the Kremlin over Ukraine. However, US pressure tactics used on China, India, and many other nations (inside and outside BRICS) likewise to stop buying Russian exports failed. They not only purchased oil and gas from Russia but then also re-exported some of it to European nations.

World power configurations had followed the changes in the world economy at the expense of the US position.

The military delusion

War games with allies, threats from US officials, and US warships off China’s coast may delude some to imagine that these moves intimidate China. The reality is that the military disparity between China and the United States is smaller now than it has ever been in modern China’s history.

China’s military alliances are the strongest they have ever been. Intimidation that did not work from the time of the Korean War and since then will certainly not be effective now.

Former president Donald Trump’s tariff and trade wars were meang, US officials said, to persuade China to change its “authoritarian” economic system. If so, that aim was not achieved. The United States simply lacks the power to force the matter.

American polls suggest that media outlets have been successful in a) portraying China’s advances economically and technologically as a threat, and b) using that threat to lobby against regulations of US high-tech industries.

The tech delusion

Of course, business opposition to government regulation predates China’s emergence. However, encouraging hostility toward China provides convenient additional cover for all sorts of business interests.

China’s technological challenge flows from and depends on a massive educational effort based on training far more STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students than the United States does. Yet US business does not support paying taxes to fund education equivalently.

The reporting by the media on this issue rarely covers that obvious contradiction and politicians mostly avoid it as dangerous to their electoral prospects.

Scapegoating China joins with scapegoating immigrants, BIPOCs (black and Indigenous people of color), and many of the other usual targets.

The broader decline of the US empire and capitalist economic system confronts the nation with the stark question: Whose standard of living will bear the burden of the impact of this decline? The answer to that question has been crystal clear: The US government will pursue austerity policies (cut vital public services) and will allow price inflation and then rising interest rates that reduce living standards and jobs.

Coming on top of 2020’s combined economic crash and Covid-19 pandemic, the middle- and-lower-income majority have so far borne most of the cost of the United States’ decline. That has been the pattern followed by declining empires throughout human history: Those who control wealth and power are best positioned to offload the costs of decline on to the general population.

The real sufferings of that population cause vulnerability to the political agendas of demagogues. They offer scapegoats to offset popular upset, bitterness and anger.

Leading capitalists and the politicians they own welcome or tolerate scapegoating as a distraction from those leaders’ responsibilities for mass suffering. Demagogic leaders scapegoat old and new targets: immigrants, BIPOCs, women, socialists, liberals, minorities of various kinds, and foreign threats.

The scapegoating usually does little more than hurt its intended victims. Its failure to solve any real problem keeps that problem alive and available for demagogues to exploit at a later stage (at least until scapegoating’s victims resist enough to end it).

The contradictions of scapegoating include the dangerous risk that it overflows its original purposes and causes capitalism more problems than it relieves.

If anti-immigrant agitation actually slows or stops immigration (as has happened recently in the United States), domestic labor shortages may appear or worsen, which may drive up wages, and thereby hurt profits.

If racism similarly leads to disruptive civil disturbances (as has happened recently in France), profits may be depressed.

If China-bashing leads the United States and Beijing to move further against US businesses investing in and trading with China, that could prove very costly to the US economy. That this may happen now is a dangerous consequence of China-bashing.

Working together (briefly)

Because they believed it would be in the US interest, then-president Richard Nixon resumed diplomatic and other relations with Beijing during his 1972 trip to the country. Chinese chairman Mao Zedong, premier Zhou Enlai, and Nixon started a period of economic growth, trade, investment and prosperity for both China and the United States.

The success of that period prompted China to seek to continue it. That same success prompted the United States in recent years to change its attitude and policies. More accurately, that success prompted US political leaders like Trump and Biden to now perceive China as the enemy whose economic development represents a threat. They demonize the Beijing leadership accordingly.

The majority of US mega-corporations disagree. They profited mightily from their access to the Chinese labor force and the rapidly growing Chinese market since the 1980s. That was a large part of what they meant when they celebrated “neoliberal globalization.” A significant part of the US business community, however, wants continued access to China.

The fight inside the United States now pits major parts of the US business community against Biden and his equally “neoconservative” foreign-policy advisers. The outcome of that fight depends on domestic economic conditions, the presidential election campaign, and the political fallout of the Ukraine war as well the ongoing twists and turns of the China-US relations.

The outcome also depends on how the masses of Chinese and US people understand and intervene in relations between these two countries. Will they see through the contradictions of China-bashing to prevent war, seek mutual accommodation, and thereby rebuild a new version of the joint prosperity that existed before Trump and Biden?

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute, which provided it to Asia Times.

[jimi-rawlings]

Mozambique's rubies: A blessing or a curse? | DW Documentary

In Mozambique, agriculture is the mainstay of the economy and the country has a great potential for growth in the sector. Agriculture employs more than 80 percent of the labour force and provides livelihoods to the vast majority of over 23 million inhabitants. Agriculture contributed 31.5 percent of the GDP in 2009, while commerce and services accounted for 44.9 percent. By contrast, 20 percent of the total export value in 2009 originated from the agriculture sector, mostly through the export of fish (mainly shrimps and prawns), timber, copra, cashew nuts and citrus, cotton, coconuts, tea and tobacco.[14]

There are large mineral deposits, but exploration has been constrained by the civil war (1977–1992) and poor infrastructure. The World Bank has estimated that there was the potential for exports worth US$200m by 2005 – in the late 1990s they totaled US$3.6m, some 1% of total exports, and a contribution of less than 2% of GDP. Minerals currently being mined include marble, bentonite, coal, gold, bauxite, granite, titanium and gemstones. Illegal exports from artisanal production are estimated at US$50 million.[original research?]

Mozambique exported its first batch of coal in 2011 and expects to become the world's largest coal exporter. It is also spending about US$50 billion in infrastructure projects to access its coal reserves. Mozambique is reported to have the fourth largest reserves of natural gas in the world, after Russia, Iran, and Qatar.[20]

The Our Lady of the Rosary Cathedral[1] (Portuguese: Catedral Metropolitana de Nossa Senhora do Rosário) also called Metropolitan Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary, is located in Beira,[2][3] a town in the African country of Mozambique[4] and is the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Beira.

Beira is where the Pungwe River meets the Indian Ocean. It is the fourth-largest city by population in Mozambique, after Maputo, Matola and Nampula. Beira had a population of 397,368 in 1997, which grew to 530,604 in 2019. A coastal city, it holds the regionally significant Port of Beira, which acts as a gateway for both the central interior portion of the country as well as the land-locked nations of Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.

A marina (from Spanish [maˈɾina], Portuguese [mɐˈɾinɐ] and Italian [maˈriːna]: "related to the sea") is a dock or basin with moorings and supplies for yachts and small boats. A marina differs from a port in that a marina does not handle large passenger ships or cargo from freighters.

A fishmonger (historically fishwife for female practitioners) is someone who sells raw fish and seafood. Fishmongers can be wholesalers or retailers and are trained at selecting and purchasing, handling, gutting, boning, filleting, displaying, merchandising and selling their product. In some countries modern supermarkets are replacing fishmongers who operate in shops or fish markets.

Beaux-Arts Architecture: Banco da Beira; Casa Infante de Sagres, Beira; Edifício do Almoxarifado, Beira; Escola de Artes e Ofícios, Beira; Palácio dos Desportos, Beira; Standard Bank Building, Beira; Tribunal da Beira

S & M GOALS TEAMPLATE

Stretch Goals: Central African Republic Ranks Top 8 in FIFA World Rankings for Men's and Top 5 for Futsal

Micro Goals: All Time Laureus World Sports Awards Winner for Africans, Laureus Team Award, All Time African Footballer of the Year, AFCON Host Nation Champion*, African Transfer Record*,  Insead and WSJ Conferences*, Jeune Afrique Cover*, Verified LinkedIn Member*, and Agriculture Startup Reality TV

CAPÔI HABITANT CURRENCY MODEL

Pigou Effect, Corporate Tax Havens, Capital Gains Tax Havens, Private-Public Sectors, Joint Venture Plantations, Market Extension Mergers, with Business Incubators, and Enterprise Foundation, Holding Company, Subsidiaries, and Horizontal Integration for Monopoly.

A currency union (also known as monetary union) is an intergovernmental agreement that involves two or more states sharing the same currency. These states may not necessarily have any further integration (such as an economic and monetary union, which would have, in addition, a customs union and a single market). [Pigou Effect Currency (Short FX), Currency Board Currency (Retirement Fixed Exchange Rate), Market Currency (FX Long Currency)]

Gross national product (GNP) GNP is related to another important economic measure called gross domestic product (GDP), which takes into account all output produced within a country's borders regardless of who owns the means of production. GNP starts with GDP, adds residents' investment income from overseas investments, and subtracts foreign residents' investment income earned within a country. Whilst GDP measures the total value of goods and services produced within a country's borders, GNP focuses on the income generated by its residents, regardless of their location.

Gross National Income (GNI) is the total amount of money earned by a nation's people and businesses. It is used to measure and track a nation's wealth from year to year. The number includes the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) plus the income it receives from overseas sources.

Agriculture Central Hedge Fund, Mining Unions: Peninsula Agronomique Engineering, Commodities Options Exchange (Credit Spread Options, Farm REITs, Crop Production; Fertelizers and Seeds; Equipment; Distribution and Processing Stocks, Ag ETFs and ETNs, Ag Mutual Funds), Tableau Économiques, Investments Farms REITs, Art Financing Mardi Gras

Index Franc: Tobacco-Tobacco Soil Index/Franc Tabac Currency Pair (TBS/TAF)

The overlapping generations (OLG) model; consumption-based capital asset pricing model (CCAPM); Endogenous growth theory; Material balance planning; Leontief paradox; Malinvestment; Helicopter money; Modern monetary theory

Mercantilism Spectrum of CDF/CFA

CDF Raw Materials and CFA Products. (Prices); CDF Holding Company and CFA Conglomerate Company. (Equity and Dividend Yield); CDF is Gold Standard and CFA is Helicopter Money. (FX Rate/Hedging); CDF Helicopter Money [Supplier Currency] and CFA as Purchasing Power [Consumer Currency] (Currency Union & Currency Board and Negative Interest Rates); CDF is Congolese Franc and CFA is Central African Franc

CHAMA ROXA

Purple Flame represents Spiritual Development for Martyrology in Mozambique

It is also a Slang Term for “What Religion do you practice?”

Team Name for Mozambique National Team

DOS SANTOS FREE-ROLE

Supporting Striker (Inverted Winger)

Central Winger (False 10)

Overlapping Run/Defensive Winger (Half-winger)

An inverted winger is a modern tactical development of the traditional winger position. Most wingers are assigned to either side of the field based on their footedness, with right-footed players on the right and left-footed players on the left.[65] This assumes that assigning a player to their natural side ensures a more powerful cross as well as greater ball protection along the touch-lines. However, when the position is inverted and a winger instead plays inside-out on the opposite flank (i.e., a right-footed player as a left inverted winger), they effectively become supporting strikers and primarily assume a role in the attack.[66]

The "false 10" or "central winger"[55] is a type of midfielder, which differs from the trequartista. Much like the "false 9", their specificity lies in the fact that, although they seemingly play as an attacking midfielder on paper, unlike a traditional playmaker who stays behind the striker in the centre of the pitch, the false 10's goal is to move out of position and drift wide when in possession of the ball to help both the wingers and fullbacks to overload the flanks. This means two problems for the opposing midfielders: either they let the false 10 drift wide, and their presence, along with both the winger and the fullback, creates a three-on-two player advantage out wide; or they follow the false 10, but leave space in the centre of the pitch for wingers or onrushing midfielders to exploit. False 10s are usually traditional wingers who are told to play in the centre of the pitch, and their natural way of playing makes them drift wide and look to provide deliveries into the box for teammates. 

In Italian football, the term mezzala (literally "half-winger" in Italian) is used to describe the position of the one or two central midfielders who play on either side of a holding midfielder and/or playmaker. The term was initially applied to the role of an inside forward in the WM and Metodo formations in Italian, but later described a specific type of central midfielder. The mezzala is often a quick and hard-working attack-minded midfielder, with good skills and noted offensive capabilities, as well as a tendency to make overlapping attacking runs, but also a player who participates in the defensive aspect of the game, and who can give width to a team by drifting out wide; as such, the term can be applied to several different roles.

On occasion, the false-10 can also function in a different manner alongside a false-9, usually in a 4–6–0 formation. Midfield collective of False 9, False 10, Box to Box, Holding, Half Winger, Attacking, Defensive.

Thiago Motta’s ‘Super Offensive’ 2-7-2 Formation Explained: Instead of the traditional way of looking at a tactical set-up horizontally, the Brazil-born manager instead split the field into three vertical lanes. This means he effectively has seven players in the central channel with two players out wide on each flank. 

We are not stretching the defensive line itsself, but the space between the defensive line and the goalkeeper

Adjust Free Role System to The Scoreboard 

The Central African Games was an international multi-sport event for countries within Central Africa. (Boxing, Athletics, Tennis, Football, Rallycross, Olympic Weightlifting, Volleyball, Trap Shooting, Basketball)

The Central African Football Federations' Union, officially abbreviated as UNIFFAC[a], is a sports governing body representing the football associations of Central Africa. 

Teenage Prospect World Cup Medium of Exchange Jersey/FIFA Potential Rating System 65-80 Minutes Time Played Instrument; Match Rating System

W; I; M; V; Box Keeping Formation with 3 Centre-Backs

Spacing, Possession, Pass Completion, and Counter Pressing with Pursuit and Ambush Predation One Team Box Touches and Capture the Flag with Analytics-Geometry Total Football Trixie Bet on CNS Drugs (Xanax and Modafinil); 1-1-2-1 Diamond Rover Futsal Pivot Formation

Define a run in one of two ways: (i) as a set of consecutive goals scored by one team, without the other team scoring a goal; (ii) as a set of consecutive scoring events by one team, each event being either a goal or one or more Set Piece. Play aggressive and with counter pressing and run it up on the score board in the first half and after halftime play defense. You get a break at half and it's easier to win when someone plays defense and looks for opportunities instead of Attacking.

Posterior Chain Super Compensation and Speed-Endurance (Elastic-Connective Tissue) Force-Velocity Curve; Crescent Moon Horizontal Plane Vertical Force Sprinting Mechanics.

WM or Diamond Rover Futsal Pivot Formation

Positional Game is Diamonds Tic-Tac-Toe with Enforcer and Avoider. Striker [Enforcer] (Inverted Winger and Centre Forward), Deep Lying Playmaker [Avoider] (Holding Midfielder and Inverted Winger), and Sweeper Wingback Deep Lying Playmaker [Avoider] (Centre Back). Use Playing Styles, Manipulated Positions, and Combinational Games for Positional Play as Johan Cruyff students.

Set Piece Stylistic Biomechanics: Shooting Knee at Wall for Curve and Placement Knee for Corner. Follow through with Shot with proper Body Alignment 

Knee to Feet or Shoulder to Feet Cradling for Touch/Entertainment 

UEFA Front Office Curriculum 

DOS SANTOS Placement Mechanics: Ankle-Heel Linedrive and Arch-Knuckle Raised Curve; Placement Foot and Reverse Rotation with Shoulder for power and Accuracy; Arch of Feet at Target for Follow Through Accuracy

Agility Ladder Eyes Pocket: Eyes Between Defenders Feet and Ball, Numbered Footwork V-Step (Shifting Defenders with Momentum) et L-Step (Explosive First Step), All moves should form a Triangle or an Incomplete Triangle

Sprint Size Up: A series of feint Karaoké dribble moves with Eye Tricks (Fake Pass) but Sprint Position Finish

Triangle Philosophy: All Dribbling Moves should form a Triangle or an Incomplete Triangle while using V-Step (Shifting Defenders with Momentum) et L-Step (Explosive First Step).

Thé Crescent: In Close Dribbling; Crescent Footwork with L Shapes 

On the Run Dribbling Moves: Letters and Shapes; Still Play 1 on 1: Numbered Footwork

À ma sauce Courts: Drills Side/Box Play with 1 Net; Design Vaporwave Action Painting Angels; Knee for Direction and Sole Drags for Dribbling Touch and Crescent Moon Sprint Mechanics 

Gambling Games: 5 Roll (Captain, Ship, Crew); Live-Pool Betting Monopoly 

Stylistic Biomechanics: Dribbling Foot To Ball Contact (Balls of Feet and Arch of Feet); Knee for Direction; Foot Drags; & Hip Angle, Crescent Moon Running Mechanics, and Laces Kick.

Futsal Courts: Drills Side/Box Play with 1 Net; Design Vaporwave Action Painting Angels; Knee for Direction and Sole Drags for Dribbling Touch and Crescent Moon Sprint Mechanics 

Diamond Football (15 mins)

Set Up

-Lay out two overlapping sets of 4 flat markers in the positions shown above.

-Ask the players to stand on a flat marker for their teams colour (Red on Red, Yellow on Yellow).

Instruction

-Whenever the ball goes out for a kick in or for the defenders ball, the players must stand on their markers before play begins.

-As soon as the ball has been played in, players are free to move.

-Reset everytime the ball goes out.

Coaching Points, Progressions Ect.

-Ask players to shout out what each position on the park is to devlop understanding of their roles.

-If you decide to go to a normal game , leave the markers out for a visual aid for the players.

-If more than 8 players, Add in Goalkeepers who would then play the ball out to the DF,LM,RM.

-Rotate Positions, Ask Players to stand on a marker they haven't been on before

RUSSE NOIR ACCENT

Lingua Franca of Renaissance Latin (Vocabulary) and Atlantic–Congo Fon (Grammar).

Volta–Congo is a major branch of the Atlantic–Congo family. Fon (fɔ̀ngbè, pronounced [fɔ̃̀ɡ͡bē][2]) also known as Dahomean is the language of the Fon people. It belongs to the Gbe group within the larger Atlantic–Congo family.

In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third.

Haitian Creole (/ˈheɪʃən ˈkriːoʊl/; Haitian Creole: kreyòl ayisyen, [kɣejɔl ajisjɛ̃];[6][7] French: créole haïtien, [kʁe.ɔl a.i.sjɛ̃]), or simply Creole (Haitian Creole: kreyòl), is a French-based creole language spoken by 10 to 12 million people worldwide, and is one of the two official languages of Haiti (the other being French), where it is the native language of the vast majority of the population. The language emerged from contact between French settlers and enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the 17th and 18th centuries. Although its vocabulary largely derives from 18th-century French, its grammar is that of a West African Volta-Congo language branch, particularly the Fongbe and Igbo languages.

Prose Accent Congo and Modern Accent Congo.

Full Lips Endings with Vertical Narrow Mouth and Soft Rs.

A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun.

BELMÔNT'S SIN INDEX FUND PORTFOLIO 

Sin stock sectors usually include alcohol, tobacco, gambling, sex-related industries (Cabaret and Burlesque), and weapons manufacturers.

Diageo 

Phillip Morris

Sports Betting Investment Trust

Pharmaceuticals

Business Clusters with Scrum Management and Accelerators to produce Festivals.

Example: Create a Index Fund Portfolio of 15-20 Stocks and using Supply Side Economics to create Decentralized Gambling Economy.

BELMÔNT'S DECENTRALIZED GAMBLING ECONOMY

Corporate-Capital Gains Tax Haven

High Stakes Minimum Buy In

Card Gambling (Signal and President): Top 2 highest bids fight for the Coup d'état and the other two are lesser men, the lesser men are subordinates that aid in playing cards for the warlord, the winning team splits the money, the warlords switches based on the 13 cards dealt and bets placed, the first team to shed all of their cards win.

Domestic Gambling: Boxing

Retirement Gambling: Boat Racing

Residency Program for Tax Benefits

BELMÔNT'S TURF ACCOUNTING MODEL

+EV

Python Programming Gaussian Distribution

Exotic Options Trading Live Betting

Parlays Minimum for Round Robins

Daily Fantasy Sports Rakes

RUSSE NOIR PALACE

Definitions of ballroom. noun. large room used mainly for dancing. synonyms: dance hall, dance palace**. types: disco, discotheque.

Go Go Music Influenced, Eurphoric Trance Chord Progression Melody, Progressive House and Drum n' Bass Percussion-808 Call and Response Staccato Polyrhythm or Layered Kick and Punch 808.

In his 1972 study of French lute music, scholar Wallace Rave compiled a list of features he believed to be characteristic of style brisé. Rave's list included the following: the avoidance of textural pattern and regularity in part writing; arpeggiated chord textures with irregular distribution of individual notes of the chord; ambiguous melodic lines; rhythmic displacement of notes within a melodic line; octave changes within melodic line; irregular phrase lengths.

Have the Snare and Kick say, "Hi, How are you?" And the 808 say, "I am good thanks for asking.”

Use progressive House to push the Drums Conversation to either Fast and Punchy for Happy or Slow and Deep for Sad.

In technical terms, "go-go's essential beat is characterized by a five through four syncopated rhythm that is underscored prominently by the bass drum and snare drum, and the hi-hat... [and] is ornamented by the other percussion instruments, especially by the conga drums, rototoms, and hand-held cowbells."[5]

Polyrhythm: In music, a cross-beat or cross-rhythm is a specific form of polyrhythm. The term cross rhythm was introduced in 1934 by the musicologist Arthur Morris Jones (1889–1980). It refers to a situation where the rhythmic conflict found in polyrhythms is the basis of an entire musical piece.[1]

Four-on-the-floor (or four-to-the-floor) is a rhythm used primarily in dance genres such as disco and electronic dance music. It is a steady, uniformly accented beat in 4. 4 time in which the bass drum is hit on every beat (1, 2, 3, 4).[1] This was popularized in the disco music of the 1970s[2] and the term four-on-the-floor was widely used in that era, since the beat was played with the pedal-operated, drum-kit bass drum.[3][4] (Punch 808-Kick)

Polyrhythm 4 on the Floor examples 2:4 or 5:4

Hard trance is often characterized by strong, hard (or even downpitch) kicks, fully resonant basses and an increased amount of reverberation applied to the main beat. Melodies vary from 140 to 180 BPMs and it can feature plain instrumental sound in early compositions, with the latter ones tending to implement side-chaining techniques of progressive on digital synthesizers.

Singles Only Email Raves Blogger then Multi Market Distribution Deal: A distribution deal is a contract to release the music to platforms, but not own the publishing or exclusively lock the artist in. Record Artist Producer Label: Have Polyrhythm Artist earn Streaming Percentage under a Recording Artist Deal. Label has Distribution Above Me and I have Manufacturing over Polyrhythm Artist. Have a end of the Year Album for New Year's Raves!

BELMÔNT'S SYSTEM: CAPÔI RETAINER AGREEMENT WITH ASSET PROTECTION TRUST

Capo: Describes a ranking made member of a family who leads a crew of soldiers. A capo is similar to a military captain who commands soldiers. Soldier: Also known as a “made man,” soldiers are the lowest members of the crime family but still command respect in the organization.

A capo is a "made member" of an Italian crime family who heads a regime or "crew" of soldiers and has major status and influence in the organization.

Consigliere: Defense and Corporate Lawyers

Head Boss: Ministry of Medicine

Underboss: Pharmaceutical Industry

Capo: CAPÔI RETAINER AGREEMENT

Soliders: Artisans

Commercialism is the application of both manufacturing and consumption towards personal usage, or the practices, methods, aims, and distribution of products in a free market geared toward generating a profit.

Commercial art is art created for advertising or marketing purposes. Commercial artists are hired by clients to create images and logos that sell products. Unlike works of fine art that convey an artist's personal expression, commercial art must address the client's goals.

The word 'Commercial' is defined as follows: Concerned with or engaged in commerce. Commerce is the exchange of goods or services among two or more parties.

Craftsmen are committed to the medium, not to self-expression. Artists are committed to their self-expression, not the medium.

A medium of exchange is an intermediary instrument and system used to facilitate the purchase and sale of goods and services between parties.

Stretch and Micro Goals

Music Medium System: Distribution and Retailers Contract Theory (System) for Music (Instrument)

Football Medium System: Analytics and Geometry for Free Role (System) Trixies (Instrument)

Age 16-19

Bond Funds

Farmland REITS

CFDS

Real Estate Brokerage Trust Account

Age 20-30

Farmland Recession Proof Stocks (Cosmetics, AgTech, Ag ETFS, AgETN)

Incubator and Startup Accelerators

Real Estate Joint Ventures

Age 30-40

Farmland Blue Chip Indexes w/ Credit Spread Options

CURRENCY, OIL, & GOLD COMMODITIES CANDLESTICK CHARTS

Swing Trading: Use mt4/mt5 With Heiken Ashi Charts, Setting at 14 or 21 Momentum Indicator above 0 as Divergence Oscillator and Volume Spread Analysis as Reversal Oscillator and Trade when bullish candlesticks above 200 exponential moving average and/or 20 exponential moving average (EMA) on H1 (Hourly) Time Frame; use H4 (4 Hours) and D1 (1 Day) as reference.

TUNNEL STRATEGY (OFFSHORE BANKING)

Purpose: Permanent Residency Card

$250k Deposit

$125k: 60/40 portfolio, 60% Fixed Income & REITs and 40% Blue Chip Stocks

$50k: Guaranteed Investment Certificates (GICs) and term deposits are secured investments. This means that you get back the amount you invest at the end of your term. The key difference between a GIC and a term deposit is the length of the term. Term deposits generally have shorter terms than GICs.

$75k: Spending Cash

SIN STOCKS PORTFOLIO

Sin stock sectors usually include alcohol, tobacco, gambling, sex-related industries, and weapons manufacturers.

Sports Betting Investment Trust

Pharmaceuticals

Example: Create a Index Fund Portfolio of 15-20 Stocks and using Supply Side Economics to create Decentralized Gambling Economy.

FESTIVALS DEAL

Singles Only Email Raves Blogger then Multi Market Distribution Deal: A distribution deal is a contract to release the music to platforms, but not own the publishing or exclusively lock the artist in. Record Artist Producer Label: Have Polyrhythm Artist earn Streaming Percentage under a Recording Artist Deal. Label has Distribution Above Me and I have Manufacturing over Polyrhythm Artist. Have a end of the Year Album for New Year's Raves!

NEUROPLASTICITY DRUG-CRIME NEXUS BASED ON TRAFFICKING

CPP, CNS Depressants, et FENTALOGS: Cul-de-sac

Defensive Penalty Capture The Flag Raiding Warfare

Grey-Decentralized Markets

Bastilles: Cul-de-sac Artist Résidences Penthouse Complexes

Polyrhythm Raves

Acid House Art Gallery

International Film Festival

Hôtel Chefs

Seigneurial System/Tableau Economique Raw Material Économics Production Spot

Surautomatism

Discount Networking Acid House Party

Opium Dens and Fragrance Festivals

Pill Pressers

CNS depressants

Upper-tier County System

Defense Lawyers are Traplords (Trafficking P4P and Malicious Prosecution)

Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC)

Brain Receptor Dealing

Neuroplasticity Drug-Crime Nexus

Religious Ecstasy

Entheogens are psychedelic drugs—and sometimes certain other psychoactive substances—used for engendering spiritual development or otherwise in sacred contexts

Live-Pool Betting Monopoly Board Game

Summary Sentencing

Urban Level: Street Culture Art Gallery (Street culture may refer to: Urban culture, the culture of towns and cities, Street market, Children's street culture, Street carnival, Block party, Street identity, Street food, Café culture, Several youth subculture or counterculture topics pertaining to outdoors of urban centers. These can include: Street art, Street photography, Street racing, Street wear, Hip-hop culture, Urban fiction, Street sports, Streetball, Flatland BMX, Freestyling), Art Pedagogy, Artist Residency, Art Schools, and Art Plugs

Art Pedagogy: Arts-based pedagogy is a teaching methodology in which an art form is integrated with another subject matter to impact student learning. 28-30. Arts-based pedagogy results in arts-based learning (ABL),11 which is when a student learns about a subject through arts processes including creating, responding or performing. Aesthetic Teaching: Seeking a Balance between Teaching Arts and Teaching through the Arts. In aesthetic education, learning must be developed especially with the inclusion of sensations and with the help of feelings. Sensations and feelings should lead to movement, representation, and expression. Aesthetic learning often entails learning to distinguish certain qualities or objects aesthetically in different ways depending on the situation and the purpose. Certain things can be experienced in negative ways in one activity and in positive ways in another.

A designer drug is a structural or functional analog of a controlled substance that has been designed to mimic the pharmacological effects of the original drug, while avoiding classification as illegal and/or detection in standard drug tests

Patchwork tattoos are a collection of tattoos collaged together to create an overall design. Each individual 'patch' of the tattoo can be a different design, symbol or element with a little space in between. Patchwork tattoos are a collection of tattoos collaged together to create an overall design. In short, the gun-toting angel was a multifaceted metaphor. “It undoubtedly also reflected the Catholic Counter-Reformation militaristic rhetoric,” wrote Donahue-Wallace, “which promoted the church as an army and heavenly beings as its soldiers.”

DECADENCE AESTHETICS THEORIES

Slogan

J'Cartier, Je cours après les vœux de champagne,

Subjective

Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions

Gastronomy

Precarious Balance

Precariously: If something is happening or positioned precariously, it's in danger. A glass could be precariously balanced on the edge of a table. If something is on the verge of danger, then the word precariously fits.

Grey & Decentralized Markets

Tableau Économique

Semblance

Semblance is generally used to suggest a contrast between outward appearance and inner reality.

High Socioeconomic Status & Tattoos

Phantasmagorical

Having a fantastic or deceptive appearance

adjective. having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination. having the appearance of an optical illusion, especially one produced by a magic lantern.

Socioeconomic Status Development Immigration Multilingual Sensory Play

Law of Polarity in Relationships

In any successful relationship that has an intimate connection and sexual attraction, there is polarity. What does this mean exactly? Polarity in relationships is the spark that occurs between two opposing energies: masculine and feminine. Gender does not affect whether you have masculine or feminine energy.

Second Reflection

Burden Aesthetics with Intentions

The Second Reflection lays hold of the Technical Procedures

Tattoos

SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGY

Keystone Theory Habits

Game Theory

Behavioral Finance

Self-actualization is the complete realization of one's potential, and the full development of one's abilities and appreciation for life. This concept is at the top of the Maslow hierarchy of needs, so not every human being reaches it.

Potential Psychology: Psychological potential is a very broad concept. It may include one's capacity to conform, change, re-invent oneself, bounce back from adversity, etc.

SOCIO-FORMAL SCIENCE

+EV Optimal Game Theory Poker

Civil, Agriculure, Solvent Levelling Effect Chemical Reaction, and Biomechanical Engineering

SOCIO-PHILOSOPHY

Ontology

IMPERIALISM, THE HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALISM

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,[1] originally published as Imperialism, the Newest Stage of Capitalism,[2][3] is a book written by Vladimir Lenin in 1916 and published in 1917. It describes the formation of oligopoly, by the interlacing of bank and industrial capital, in order to create a financial oligarchy, and explains the function of financial capital in generating profits from the exploitation colonialism inherent to imperialism, as the final stage of capitalism. The essay synthesises Lenin's developments of Karl Marx's theories of political economy in Das Kapital (1867).[4]

Tax Mergers Law; Market-extension merger: Two companies that sell the same products in different markets. 4.2.2 Corporate Taxation At the corporate level, the tax treatment of a merger or acquisition depends on whether the acquiring firm elects to treat the acquired firm as being absorbed into the parent with its tax attributes intact, or first being liquidated and then received in the form of its component assets.

SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT

Seconds Liberal Arts are often viewed as pre-professional since, while conceived of as fundamental to citizenship, they address the whole person in recognition that our moral and spiritual identities develop best through participation in a society that perpetually renews the rights and responsibilities of membership.

Executive management master's degree programs often result in an Executive Master of Business Administration, or EMBA. They are primarily designed to act as accelerated graduate programs for working professionals who already hold management or executive positions.

Engineering college means a school, college, university, department of a university or other educational institution, reputable and in good standing in accordance with rules prescribed by the Department, and which grants baccalaureate degrees in engineering.

Monopoly Family Boarding Schools: The socio-historical context refers to the societal and historical conditions and circumstances that influence events or individuals. It involves elements like the cultural, economic, and political circumstances during a certain time period.

Agriculturism is an ideology promoting rural life, a traditional way of life. It is characterized by the valorization of traditional values (the family, the French language, the Catholic religion) and an opposition to the industrial world.

CAPÔI CLASS STRUCTURE

Demonym Examples: CAR Congolese, Gabon Congolese, Afrikaans Congolese, and Congolese

Monopoly Family (Apartheid)

Chief Executive of State (Apartheid)

Political Class (RUSSE NOIR)

Upper Class (RUSSE NOIR)

Working Class (RUSSE NOIR)

JEAN-CLAUDE TRAORÉ BUSINESS ADVICE

Blue Ocean Strategy; Solvent Levelling Effect Chemical Reaction Engineering and Economic Science.

TENNIS AGRICULTURE

A clay-court specialist is a tennis player who excels on clay courts, more than on any other surface.

Due in part to advances in racquet technology, current clay-court specialists are known for employing long, winding groundstrokes that generate heavy topspin; such strokes are less effective on faster surfaces on which the balls do not bounce as high. Clay-court specialists tend to slide more effectively on clay than other players. Many of them are also very adept at hitting the drop shot, which can be effective because rallies on clay courts often leave players pushed far beyond the baseline. Additionally, the slow, long rallies require a great degree of mental focus and physical stamina.

CASAPIANOS MARTYROLOGY ORDER (CATHOLIC COUNTER-REFORMATION)

The Casa Pia is a Portuguese institution founded by Maria I, known as A Pia ("Mary the Pious"), and organized by Police Intendant Pina Manique in 1780, following the social disarray of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. For almost three centuries, thousands of young boys and girls were raised by Casa Pia, including many public personalities, called casapianos. Casa Pia is Portugal's largest educational institution dedicated to helping youngsters in risk of social exclusion or without parental support. The organisation is composed of ten schools and enrolls approximately 4700 students. In addition to standard schooling, the organisation also provides boarding for children in need. It strives to enable these youngsters to become healthy and successful members of society, by developing intellectual, manual, and physical traits, in an environment promoting spiritual, moral, and religious values. The institution is proud to have had amongst its students many outstanding Portuguese personalities, including politicians, journalists, and artists. A martyrology is a catalogue or list of martyrs and other saints and beati arranged in the calendar order of their anniversaries or feasts. Local martyrologies record exclusively the custom of a particular Church. Local lists were enriched by names borrowed from neighbouring churches.[1] Consolidation occurred, by the combination of several local martyrologies, with or without borrowings from literary sources.

The Canons Regular of St. Augustine are priests who live in community under a rule (Latin: regula and κανών, kanon, in Greek) and are generally organised into religious orders, differing from both secular canons and other forms of religious life, such as clerics regular, designated by a partly similar terminology. As religious communities, they have laybrothers as part of the community.

Clerics regular are clerics (mostly priests) who are members of a religious order under a rule of life (regular). Clerics regular differ from canons regular in that they devote themselves more to pastoral care, in place of an obligation to the praying of the Liturgy of the Hours in common, and have fewer observances in their rule of life.

Lay brother is a largely extinct term referring to religious brothers, particularly in the Catholic Church, who focused upon manual service and secular matters, and were distinguished from choir monks or friars in that they did not pray in choir, and from clerics, in that they were not in possession of (or preparing for) holy orders.[1][2][3][4][5]

In female religious institutes, the equivalent role is the lay sister. Lay brothers were originally created to allow those who were skilled in particular crafts or did not have the required education to study for holy orders to participate in and contribute to the life of a religious order.

Lay brothers were found in many religious orders. Drawn from the working classes, they were pious and hardworking people, who though unable to achieve the education needed to receive holy orders, were still drawn to religious life and were able to contribute to the order through their skills. Some were skilled in artistic handicrafts, others functioned as administrators of the orders' material assets. In particular, the lay brothers of the Cistercians were skilled in agriculture, and have been credited for the tilling of fertile farmland.[1]

Lay sisters were found in most of the orders of women, and their origin, like that of the lay brothers, is to be found in the necessity of providing the choir nuns with more time for the Office and study, as well as creating the opportunity for the illiterate to join the religious life. They, too, wore a habit different from those of the choir sisters, and their required daily prayers consisted of prayers such as the Little Office or a certain number of Paters.[1]

All canons regular are to be distinguished from secular canons who belong to a resident group of priests but who do not take public vows and are not governed in whatever elements of life they lead in common by a historical rule. One obvious place where such groups of priests are required is at a cathedral, where there were many Masses to celebrate and the Divine Office to be prayed together in community.

In modern astrology, Mars is the primary native ruler of the first house. Traditionally however, Mars ruled both the third and tenth houses, and had its joy in the fifth house. While Venus tends to the overall relationship atmosphere, Mars is the passionate impulse and action, the masculine aspect, discipline, willpower and stamina.

Mars rules over Tuesday and in Romance languages the word for Tuesday often resembles Mars (in Romanian, marți, in Spanish, martes, in French, mardi and in Italian "martedì"). The English "Tuesday" is a modernised form of "Tyr's Day", Tyr being the Germanic analogue to Mars. Dante Alighieri associated Mars with the liberal art of arithmetic. In Chinese astrology, Mars is ruled by the element fire, which is passionate, energetic and adventurous.

According to John Clements, the term martial arts itself is derived from an older Latin term meaning "arts of Mars", the Roman god of war, and was used to refer to the combat systems of Europe (European martial arts) as early as the 1550s

A religious congregation is a type of religious institute in the Catholic Church. They are legally distinguished from religious orders – the other major type of religious institute – in that members take simple vows, whereas members of religious orders take solemn vows.

In the Catholic Church, a religious order is a community of consecrated life with members that profess solemn vows. They are classed as a type of religious institute.[1]

Catholic School Girls Moon Evangelical Prophets: Consecrated life is "placed in a privileged position in the line of evangelical prophecy," whereby its “charismatic nature” and communal discernment of the Spirit "makes it capable of inventiveness and originality.”

Men Mars Angelology Conversion System: Church Enterprises (Planetary Intelligence Church District Real Estate; Liberal Arts Catholic Immersion Schools; Gold; Athletics; Cooking);

Church Gatherings (School Nights Virgil, Weekend Noon Mass then Weekend Sports League) Francis de Sales and Don St. Bosco Influence 

Harquebusier Angels Patchwork Tattoos: Biblical Crowns, Praying Hands, Gun Toting Angels, Dirty Dancing Angels, Drug Using Angels, Heavenly Choir, Summa Theologica Sherman, Saints and Pastors, Hebrew Tetragram, Council of Trent

HARQUEBUSIER ANGELS GANG BLUEPRINT: PARDISUS MEDIAE; Spirit Unity Oversoul Angelology Shaman, Eros Influence Angels: Ecstasy-Painkillers Trafficking Angel Spirit Type Oversoul, Jupiter-Mars-Venus with Planetary Intelligence; Erotes are Horcruxes, Google Imprint Oversoul, Choice of Choir is Heavenly Host, Lightning-Ice Element, Wings Transfer Invocation, MARS-JUPITER  Syncretism Planetary Intelligence, ESTJ Sensory Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator Syncretism, Church Expenses Occupation (Festivals, Venues, Freeports, Art Gallery, Underground Garages, Tobacco Store, Restaurants, Réal Estate Brokerage, Impure Aesthetic Thrillers Publishing Imprint et Production Company, Body Etching, Lipodissolve, and Hyaluronic Acid Fillers Cosmetics Surgery

ANGOLAN HARQUEBUSIER ANGELS STRUCTURE; Commission on the Social and Cultural Affairs; Commission for Ecumenism; The Commission on Christian Education; Liturgical Commission; Missionary Committee; Chief Executive of State and Military Religion Legislation; Stretch and Micro Goals

Material religion is a framework used by scholars of religion to examine the interaction between religion and material culture. It focuses on the place of objects, images, spaces, and buildings in religious communities. The framework has been promoted by scholars such as Birgit Meyer, Sally Promey, S. Brent Plate, David Morgan, etc.

Physiocracy (French: physiocratie; from the Greek for "government of nature") is an economic theory developed by a group of 18th-century Age of Enlightenment French economists who believed that the wealth of nations derived solely from the value of "land agriculture" or "land development" and that agricultural products should be highly priced.[1] Their theories originated in France and were most popular during the second half of the 18th century. Physiocracy became one of the first well-developed theories of economics.

The Bible typically describes the Heavenly host as being made up of angels, and gives several descriptions of angels in military terms, such as their encampment (Genesis 32:1–2), command structure (Psalms 91:11–12; Matt.13:41; Rev.7:2), and participation in combat (Job 19:12; Rev.12:7). Other passages indicate other entities make up the divine army, namely stars (Judges 5:20, Isaiah 40:26).[1][full citation needed] In Christian theology, the heavenly host participate in the war in Heaven.

The doctrine or theory of immanence holds that the divine encompasses or is manifested in the material world. It is held by some philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence. Immanence is usually applied in monotheistic, pantheistic, pandeistic, or panentheistic faiths to suggest that the spiritual world permeates the mundane.

The Dionysian Mysteries were a ritual of ancient Greece and Rome which sometimes used intoxicants and other trance-inducing techniques (like dance and music) to remove inhibitions and social constraints, liberating the individual to return to a natural state. 

Religious nationalism can be understood in a number of ways, such as nationalism as a religion itself, a position articulated by Carlton Hayes in his text Nationalism: A Religion, or as the relationship of nationalism to a particular religious belief, dogma, ideology, or affiliation. This relationship can be broken down into two aspects: the politicisation of religion and the influence of religion on politics.

Dioceses ruled by an archbishop are commonly referred to as archdioceses; most are metropolitan sees, being placed at the head of an ecclesiastical province. In the Catholic Church, some are suffragans of a metropolitan see or are directly subject to the Holy See.

The body of light, sometimes called the 'astral body'[a] or the 'subtle body,'[b] is a "quasi material"[1] aspect of the human body, being neither solely physical nor solely spiritual, posited by a number of philosophers, and elaborated on according to various esoteric, occult, and mystical teachings. Other terms used for this body include body of glory,[2] spirit-body, luciform body, augoeides ('radiant body'), astroeides ('starry or sidereal body'), and celestial body.[3] The concept derives from the philosophy of Plato: the word 'astral' means 'of the stars'; thus the astral plane consists of the Seven Heavens of the classical planets. The idea is rooted in common worldwide religious accounts of the afterlife[4] in which the soul's journey or "ascent" is described in such terms as "an ecstatic, mystical or out-of body experience, wherein the spiritual traveller leaves the physical body and travels in their body of light into 'higher' realms."[5]

The canon law of the Catholic Church (from Latin ius canonicum[1]) is "how the Church organizes and governs herself".[2] It is the system of laws and ecclesiastical legal principles made and enforced by the hierarchical authorities of the Catholic Church to regulate its external organization and government and to order and direct the activities of Catholics toward the mission of the Church.

An institute of consecrated life is an association of faithful in the Catholic Church canonically erected by competent church authorities to enable men or women who publicly profess the evangelical counsels by religious vows or other sacred bonds "through the charity to which these counsels lead to be joined to the Church and its mystery in a special way".[1] They are defined in the 1983 Code of Canon Law under canons 573–730. The Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life has ecclesial oversight of institutes of consecrated life.[2]

In Christianity, the three evangelical counsels, or counsels of perfection, are chastity (NEVER), poverty (or perfect charity), and obedience (RECKLESS ABANDONMENT).[1] As stated by Jesus in the canonical gospels,[2] they are counsels for those who desire to become "perfect" (τελειος, teleios).[3][4] The Catholic Church interprets this to mean that they are not binding upon all, and hence not necessary conditions to attain eternal life (heaven), but that they are "acts of supererogation", "over and above" the minimum stipulated in the biblical commandments.[5][6]

Catholics who have made a public profession to order their lives by the evangelical counsels, and confirmed this by public vows before their competent church authority (the act of religious commitment known as a profession), are recognised as members of the consecrated life.

The Council of Trent (Latin: Concilium Tridentinum), held between 1545 and 1563 in Trent (or Trento), now in northern Italy, was the 19th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. Prompted by the Protestant Reformation at the time, it has been described as the embodiment of the Counter-Reformation. The Council issued key statements and clarifications of the Church's doctrine and teachings, including scripture, the biblical canon, sacred tradition, original sin, justification, salvation, the sacraments, the Mass, and the veneration of saints[4] and also issued condemnations of what it defined to be heresies committed by proponents of Protestantism. The consequences of the Council were also significant with regard to the Church's liturgy and censorship.

Initiated in part to address the challenges of the Protestant Reformations,[3] the Counter-Reformation was a comprehensive effort arising from the decrees of the Council of Trent. The effort produced apologetic and polemical documents, heresy trials, anti-corruption efforts, spiritual movements, the promotion of new religious orders, and the flourishing of new art and musical styles. 

Tradwave is a Catholic artistic style using synthwave and vaporwave art to promote traditional catholicism. Tradwave usually uses traditional catholic paintings, sculptures, or photographs of saints, given with vaporwave effects, often with a bible verse or quote about catholicism. The art usually tries to convey a resurrection of catholic spirituality in the modern atheist world. Figures often depicted in Tradwave art include Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, Ven. Fulton Sheen, Cardinal Robert Sarah, and Mother Angelica.

Tradwave music often takes the form of two main styles. One of them is catholic hymns with vaporwave effects and traditional Vaporwave/Lo-Fi music. It can also have quotes from modern prolific Catholic figures, such as Ven. The other theme is Fulton Sheen and Cardinal Robert Sarah.

Heavenly Virtues: Another phrase to describe this obedience to the voice is “reckless abandon.” It simply means that we let God do what God wants to do through us. It means if He tells us to do something or say something—we do it.

Intercession or intercessory prayer is the act of praying to a deity on behalf of others, or asking a saint in heaven to pray on behalf of oneself or for others. Intercession of the Saints is a Christian doctrine that maintains that saints can intercede for others. To intercede is to go or come between two parties, to plead before one of them on behalf of the other. In ecclesiastical usage both words are taken in the sense of the intervention primarily of Christ, and secondarily of the Blessed Virgin and the angels and saints, on behalf of men.[2] The doctrine is held by the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox churches , and some Lutherans and Anglicans (chiefly those of Evangelical Catholic or Anglo-Catholic churchmanship, respectively).[3] The practice of asking saints for their intercession can be found in Christian writings from the 3rd century onwards.[4][5][6] Catholic doctrine supports intercessory prayer to saints. This practice is an application of the doctrine of the Communion of saints. Some of the early basis for this was the belief that martyrs passed immediately into the presence of God and could obtain graces and blessings for others, which naturally and immediately led to their direct invocation. A further reinforcement was derived from the cult of the angels which, while pre-Christian in its origin, was heartily embraced by the faithful of the sub-Apostolic age. The doctrine of intercession and invocation was set forth by the Council of Trent, which teaches that "... the saints who reign together with Christ offer up their own prayers to God for men. It is good and useful suppliantly to invoke them, and to have recourse to their prayers, aid, and help for obtaining benefits from God, through His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, Who alone is our Redeemer and Saviour".[10] Intercessory prayer to saintly persons who have not yet been beatified can also practiced by individuals, and evidence of miracles produced as a result of such prayer is very commonly produced during the formal process of beatification and canonization.

In short, the gun-toting angel was a multifaceted metaphor. “It undoubtedly also reflected the Catholic Counter-Reformation militaristic rhetoric,” wrote Donahue-Wallace, “which promoted the church as an army and heavenly beings as its soldiers.” These "Harquebusier Angels" or "Arcabuceros" are full-length depictions of winged angels, elaborately dressed, and carrying matchlock guns (harquebuses).

The related term astrolatry usually implies polytheism. In anthropological literature these systems of practice may be referred to as astral cults.

A friar is a member of one of the mendicant orders in the Roman Catholic Church. There are also friars outside of the Roman Catholic Church, such as within the Anglican Communion. The term, first used in the 12th or 13th century, distinguishes the mendicants' itinerant apostolic character, exercised broadly under the jurisdiction of a superior general, from the older monastic orders' allegiance to a single monastery formalized by their vow of stability. A friar may be in holy orders or be a non-ordained brother. The most significant orders of friars are the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Carmelites.[1]

Romans 8:31; Exploring Biblical Imagery is one of the most important keys to interpreting and gaining a deeper understanding of the Bible. The Bible often communicates truth to us through images and patterns.

Throughout history, armed priests or soldier priests have been recorded. Distinguished from military chaplains, who are non-combatants that provided spiritual guidance to service personnel and associated civilians, these priests took up arms and fought in conflicts as combatants. The term warrior priests or war priests is usually used for armed priests in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and of historical tribes.

Slang: In Romans 8:5-8, Paul presents a compelling contrast between living according to the flesh and living according to the Spirit. The flesh, with its disordered desires and rebellion against God, leads only to spiritual desolation. Martyr, one who voluntarily suffers death rather than deny their religion by words or deeds; such action is afforded special, institutionalized recognition in most major religions of the world. The term may also refer to anyone who sacrifices their life or something of great value for the sake of principle. A religious allusion is a brief reference to a person, event, place, or phrase from religious texts or traditions, without describing them in detail. 5 Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. 6 The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. 7 The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. 8 Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God. Martyr/Romans 8 Allusion Slang.

The Roman Martyrology is an official liturgical book of the Catholic Church, with ancient origins, that lists the martyrs, confessors, virgins, and other saints, each on his or her dies natalis, or birthday into eternal life, as well as major feasts of Our Lord and Our Lady.

The Roman Martyrology is also central to the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours—a daily set of prayers marking the hours of each day and sanctifying it with worship. During the Office of Readings, specific entries from the martyrology are recited to inform and inspire those in prayer.

Romeu e Julieta (Casapianos Order 1996 Adaptation 18+ Romance Thriller)

While it retains the original Shakespearean dialogue, the film represents the Montagues and the Capulets as warring mafia empires (with legitimate business fronts) and the Capulets were "a Latin family, sort of,"[15] played by Latin-American and Italian actors.[16] It is set in contemporary United States, where swords are replaced by guns[17] (with model names such as "Dagger", "Sword", and "Rapier"), and with a FedEx-style overnight delivery service called "Post Haste".[18] Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics explores ideas about art implicit in Shakespeare's plays and defines specific Shakespearean aesthetic practices in his use of desire, death and mourning as resources for art. In fiction, a subplot or side story is a secondary strand of the plot that is a supporting side story for any story or for the main plot. Subplots may connect to main plots, in either time and place or thematic significance. Subplots often involve supporting characters, those besides the protagonist or antagonist. Subplots may also intertwine with the main plot at some point in a story.[1]

THE ENCYCLICAL PASSIONARIES ABOUT YHVH CASAPIANOS (MARTYROLOGY BIBLE)

Specifically, the royal psalms deal with the spiritual role of kings in the worship of Yahweh. Aside from that single qualification, there is nothing else which specifically links the ten psalms. Each of the psalms make explicit references to their subject, the king. Royal (messianic) psalms deal with the king as God's anointed or chosen one. Many are prayers for the wisdom of the king, his long life or success in battle. Some are prophetic in nature in that they also point to the ideal future king, the Messiah or the King of kings. A martyrology is a catalogue or list of martyrs and other saints and beati arranged in the calendar order of their anniversaries or feasts. Local martyrologies record exclusively the custom of a particular Church. Local lists were enriched by names borrowed from neighbouring churches.[1] Consolidation occurred, by the combination of several local martyrologies, with or without borrowings from literary sources. Simple martyrologies only enumerate names. Historical martyrologies, also sometimes called passionaries, also include stories or biographical details. (Reckless Abandonment; Mars Shamanism and Casa Pia Wing Transfer Invocation)

The term "revolutionary martyr" usually relates to those dying in revolutionary struggle.[50][51] During the 20th century, the concept was developed in particular in the culture and propaganda of communist or socialist revolutions, although it was and is also used in relation to nationalist revolutions. In the martyrdom narrative of the remembering community, this refusal to comply with the presented demands results in the punishment or execution of an individual by an oppressor. Accordingly, the status of the 'martyr' can be considered a posthumous title as a reward for those who are considered worthy of the concept of martyrdom by the living, regardless of any attempts by the deceased to control how they will be remembered in advance.[1] Insofar, the martyr is a relational figure of a society's boundary work that is produced by collective memory.[2] Originally applied only to those who suffered for their religious beliefs, the term has come to be used in connection with people killed for a political cause. (Armed Friars and The War for Central Africa between Casapianos and The French; The Fall of Yoruba for Bembé; Arcubusier Angels in Africa)

The Metal Ages is a term for the period of human civilization beginning about 6,000 years ago during which metallurgy rapidly advanced, and human populations started using metals such as copper, tin, bronze and finally iron to make tools and weapons. By heating and shaping metals in hot furnaces, humanity also learned to use precious metals such as gold and silver to make intricate ornaments.[1][2] With these technological adaptions, human society became more productive and human settlements became larger and more prosperous, but also more violent.[3] The Metal Ages are divided into three stages: the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.[1][2] (Calcium Age of Mozambique)

Religious practices in ancient Greece encompassed a collection of beliefs, rituals, and mythology, in the form of both popular public religion and cult practices. The application of the modern concept of "religion" to ancient cultures has been questioned as anachronistic.[1] The ancient Greeks did not have a word for 'religion' in the modern sense. Likewise, no Greek writer known to us classifies either the gods or the cult practices into separate 'religions'.[2] Instead, for example, Herodotus speaks of the Hellenes as having "common shrines of the gods and sacrifices, and the same kinds of customs."[3] Various religious festivals were held in ancient Greece. Many were specific only to a particular deity or city-state. Altogether the year in Athens included some 140 days that were religious festivals of some sort, though they varied greatly in importance. (Festival Martyrology)

Gnostic cosmogony generally presents a distinction between a supreme, hidden God and a malevolent lesser divinity (sometimes associated with the biblical deity Yahweh)[1] who is responsible for creating the material universe. Consequently, Gnostics considered material existence flawed or evil, and held the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the hidden divinity, attained via mystical or esoteric insight. Many Gnostic texts deal not in concepts of sin and repentance, but with illusion and enlightenment.[2] Gnostic writings flourished among certain Christian groups in the Mediterranean world around the second century, when the Fathers of the early Church denounced them as heresy.[3]

The original sense of apotheosis relates to religion and is the subject of many works of art. Figuratively "apotheosis" may be used in almost any context for "the deification, glorification, or exaltation of a principle, practice, etc.", so normally attached to an abstraction of some sort.[1] In religion, apotheosis was a feature of many religions in the ancient world, and some that are active today. It requires a belief that there is a possibility of newly-created gods, so a polytheistic belief system. The major modern religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism do not allow for this, though many recognise minor sacred categories such as saints (created by a process called canonization). A mural crown (Latin: corona muralis) is a crown or headpiece representing city walls, towers, or fortresses. In classical antiquity, it was an emblem of tutelary deities who watched over a city, and among the Romans a military decoration. Later the mural crown developed into a symbol of European heraldry, mostly for cities and towns, and in the 19th and 20th centuries was used in some republican heraldry. (Mural Crown Wing Transfer)

In religious studies, an ethnic religion is a religion or belief associated with notions of heredity and a particular ethnic group. (CHAMA ROXA)

An illusion is a distortion of the senses, which can reveal how the mind normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation. Although illusions distort the human perception of reality, they are generally shared by most people.[1] (Sensory Process Sensitivity)

Capricornus is one of the 88 modern constellations, and was also one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Claudius Ptolemy. Its old astronomical symbol is  (♑︎). Under its modern boundaries it is bordered by Aquila, Sagittarius, Microscopium, Piscis Austrinus, and Aquarius. The constellation is located in an area of sky called the Sea or the Water, consisting of many water-related constellations such as Aquarius, Pisces and Eridanus. It is the smallest constellation in the zodiac. (Men)

Leo Minor is a small and faint constellation in the northern celestial hemisphere. Its name is Latin for "the smaller lion", in contrast to Leo, the larger lion. It lies between the larger and more recognizable Ursa Major to the north and Leo to the south. Leo Minor was not regarded as a separate constellation by classical astronomers; it was designated by Johannes Hevelius in 1687.[2] (Women)

Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s.[4][5] Initially, dancehall was a more sparse version of reggae than the roots style, which had dominated much of the 1970s.[6][7] In the mid-1980s, digital instrumentation became more prevalent, changing the sound considerably, with digital dancehall (or "ragga") becoming increasingly characterized by faster rhythms. Key elements of dancehall music include its extensive use of Jamaican Patois rather than Jamaican standard English and a focus on the track instrumentals (or "riddims"). Dancehall saw initial mainstream success in Jamaica in the 1980s, and by the 1990s, it became increasingly popular in Jamaican diaspora communities. In the 2000s, dancehall experienced worldwide mainstream success, and by the 2010s, it began to heavily influence the work of established Western artists and producers, which has helped to further bring the genre into the Western music mainstream.[8][9][10] (DOS SANTOS was this first generation of Dancehall Consumers)

5 SENSES CITY MARTYROLOGY BIBLE: LIGA CASAPIANOS (GOVERNMENT)

A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups.[1] The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of adversaries) during battle, from the Latin congressus.

A federation (also called a federal state) is an entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a federal government (federalism). In a federation, the self-governing status of the component states, as well as the division of power between them and the central government, is constitutionally entrenched and may not be altered by a unilateral decision, neither by the component states nor the federal political body without constitutional amendment.

The League of Corinth, also referred to as the Hellenic League (Greek: κοινὸν τῶν Ἑλλήνων, koinòn tõn Hellḗnōn;[a] or simply οἱ Ἕλληνες, the Héllēnes),[3] was a federation of Greek states created by Philip II[4] in 338–337 BC. The League was created in order to unify Greek military forces under Macedonian leadership (hegemony) in their combined conquest of the Persian Achaemenid Empire.[5][6][7]

The League was governed by the Hegemon (leader)[21][22][23] (strategos autokrator[24][25] in a military context),[26] the council (Synedrion),[27] and the judges (Dikastai). Delegates of the member-states (Synedroi) were responsible for administering the common affairs of the League. They were summoned and presided over by a committee of presiding officers (Proedroi), chosen by lot in time of peace, and by the Hegemon in time of war.[19] Decrees of the league were issued in Corinth, Athens, Delphi, Olympia and Pydna.[28] The League maintained an army levied from member states in approximate proportion to their size, while Philip established Hellenic garrisons (commanded by phrourarchs, or garrison commanders) in Corinth, Thebes, Pydna[29] and Ambracia.

Heortology or eortology is a science that deals with the origin and development of religious festivals,[1] and more specifically the study of the history and criticism of liturgical calendars and martyrologies*.

Religious Ecstacy Entheogens are psychedelic drugs—and sometimes certain other psychoactive substances—used for engendering spiritual development or otherwise in sacred contexts (Birth as a Festival Capital)

Taste: Lamb and Wool

Touch: Tomato Food Fight

Scent: Overnight Fragrance Festivals

Sight: Fireworks on the Waterfront

Sound: Bassline Genres

ANGELOLOGY GANG BLUEPRINT: CHAMA ROXA (MARS ANGELS MARTYROLOGY BIBLE)

Spirit Unity Oversoul Angelology Shaman

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[argyrocratie]

"In his 2002 dissertation, Dr. Pan Yue, the current commissioner of China’s Ethnic Affairs Commission, proposed that a mass migration of 50 million Han people to Tibet and Xinjiang would simultaneously address three major problems confronting China: overpopulation, demand for resources, and the problem of ethnic and religious difference.4 Pan, who became the first non-ethnic minority commissioner of ethnic policy in the history of the People’s Republic of China in 2022, suggested that Han migrants should be considered “reclaimers.” The “backwardness” of the frontier he suggested had become a danger to national security, fostering terrorist and extremist activities. He called on China to learn from a trifecta of contemporary colonizers: the United States, Israel and Russia. Taking elements of each as a model of how contemporary China should further colonize Tibetan and Uyghur lands, he suggests that the Western expansion of settler colonialism in the United States and Russia’s imperial settlement of Siberia, should be combined with the more contemporary example of Israel’s controlled deployment of West Bank settlers and infrastructure in Palestinian lands. 

Finally, drawing from a model that draws on China’s post-Maoist legacy of state-managed economy and export-oriented development, and I argue, coincidentally mirroring aspects of the economy that provided a paradigmatic example of racial capitalism, Apartheid South Africa, Pan proposed that minorities should be proletarianized through assigned industrial labor. In his study, it was clear that Pan wanted to combine a land grab with the dissolution of the Maoist system of ethnic minority autonomy within a socialist political and economic system. He was thinking comparatively about the world system of global capitalism not as an object of critique, but as a way of understanding mimetically what China’s place should be with in it. 

Part of what this implies, I argue in this book, is that Pan’s “post-ethnic” framework called for the abolition of the limited protections of difference that the Mao era had fostered, and—as to some extent in the U.S., Russia, and Israel—the replacement of civil liberties and autonomous claims for Muslim and Indigenous citizens, with markers of an imagined evil, the figures of the terrorist and the proto-terrorist, the non-secular “backward” other. Recalling Apartheid South Africa’s “color bar,” Xinjiang’s Muslim reeducation and assigned labor system should be thought of as a kind of “Muslim bar,” a legalized racialization of ethno-religious difference that holds in reserve the majority of positions of managerial and ownership power for Han settlers. 

Pan was explicitly looking to the capitalist-colonial past and present, because taking this comparative move seriously is also to take seriously China’s position within the global world system. In what follows I will think comparatively with Apartheid South Africa, and the Marxian world systems theory elaborated by Cedric Robinson (1983) and others that emerged from analysis of it, to show that racialization is an essential part of the global process of on-going original or primitive accumulation.5 This suggests that racialization—as an institutionalized process supported by the police, the law, the school system, and so on—is not simply an organic outcome of transhistorical process or an effect of particular political formations.6 On the contrary, it is a historical feature of global capitalism and the imperial economic expropriation—or legalized theft—on which it depends. 

Produced as a Terrorist

The account of one of my Uyghur interlocutors, someone I’ll call Abdulla,7 and the way his life path was redirected and shaped by the structural factors I describe above demonstrates what all of this means in everyday life. Abdulla was just one of the dozens of Uyghurs and Kazakhs whose stories shape the narrative of this book. Though many of the other Muslims I interviewed and observed came from lower class positions and had less formal education than Abdulla, many of the things I observed in Abdulla’s story happened to them too. His fast transfer from the camp and unfree labor system to neighborhood arrest and a return to medical school, are the primary differences between him and others. And these differences, which can be directly correlated to his near perfect Mandarin elocution and his practice as a physician’s assistant who was just two semesters away from receiving his degree as a medical doctor, demonstrate how finely graded the system of Muslim racialization and how it is reproduced.

Abdulla, like nearly all Uyghurs I met in the city, came from a rural village in Southern Xinjiang where Uyghurs formed a supermajority of over 90 percent of the population. For his first 18 years, all of his life happened in Uyghur. Then he arrived in the city as a college student and was confronted with world of Chinese. The first born of a village teacher, he knew from a young age that he wanted a life that was different from the farmers he was surrounded by. This is why he poured himself into learning Chinese and English, watching the entire Friends TV show on repeat. He wanted a Uyghur version of that fictitious life. To do this he understood that he had to present as urban and secular, he had to shave his moustache, wear clothes from the Chinese shopping mall, and speak in jocular Chinese with Han colleagues. At the university he studied biology and science in Chinese, preparing for a career in in the Chinese medical system. But at night, he and two other friends from villages near his hometown, studied English. In the space of several years, they became so fluent in American pop culture that they started their own English school training hundreds of other Uyghur villagers to speak the language of American TV and imagine a world outside of both the Uyghur and Chinese one they grew up in.  

His students and friends gave Abdulla the nickname “suyok,” meaning he moved like water, flowing effortlessly from one social scene to another, codeswitching, mastering the multiple consciousnesses that are necessary for a minoritized person to succeed in a racialized world. He was a smooth operator. But he was also influential among Uyghur young people, and over time the police began to take notice of him. They sent informants to the night school where he taught to report on things students said and how the Abdulla responded to them. But Abdulla anticipated this, so when he discussed the biography of Nelson Mandela he was careful not to make direct comparisons to the Apartheid conditions that Uyghurs experienced in the city.8 In the private-public space of the classroom they did not discuss the way only around 15 percent of Uyghur college graduates were able to find jobs regardless of how well they spoke Chinese and English.9 Nor did they discuss the stories his students told him privately of the way they had witnessed police brutality and how the same police protected the non-Muslim settlers that had inundated their villages as part of the large-scale migration Pan Yue had called for. 

But then in late 2014 three of his students disappeared from their dorm room, leaving behind their belongings. They didn’t tell their families where they were going until several weeks later when they re-emerged in Malaysia at the other end of the underground trafficking route that took them across the hills of Myanmar where they joined North Koreans and Rohingya fleeing state violence. The police questioned Abdulla for days. Abdulla vowed that he had no knowledge of their plan.

That incident, and the arrest of the parents of his students, the way the police began to search Muslim homes on a regular basis, and the new prohibitions on any form of religious speech, made him quite concerned. He started plotting his own escape. Utilizing all of his connections, in 2016 he managed to obtain a passport and visit Europe and me and other friends in the United States, thinking through the logistics of an international move and what it would take to get his medical training recognized abroad. It would be hard he realized, but it seemed like the only path forward. All he had to do was find a way to get passports for his wife and children and sell his apartment in the city. But he never did. 

In 2017 he was detained along with hundreds of thousands of other young Uyghurs and sent to a closed concentrated education and training center. His travel history, his association with students who the state now regarded as international terrorists, was more than enough for him to be regarded as untrustworthy. Yet unlike most other detainees, all of whom had similar digital dossiers of thought crimes and “abnormal” behaviors, Abdulla had an advanced degree in medical science, he spoke perfect Chinese and could recite all the laws and regulations related to ethnic policies. If the political and economic goals of the camp system were to train Uyghur villagers to speak Chinese and work in factories, why detain and train someone already working in a Chinese institution? 

Fundamentally, Abdulla and the hundreds of thousands of other migrants and farmers had been detained for particular political and economic reasons that had less to do with their past individual actions, though the digital footprint of these actions were collected and assessed, and more to do with their ethno-religious and generational status as young, rural-background Uyghurs. But simultaneously, the cost of producing them as workers was also being externalized to the village communities that had trained them, the families that had sacrificed their livelihoods to send them to school. Even workhouses need doctors. It appears that Abdulla was destined to become a rare Muslim doctor tasked with maintaining and reproducing the system of racialized carceral care. His devalued assigned labor was not in the factory, but for the factory workers and their child. He could never leave the city, instead his future was a permanent state of probation. He could always be sent back to the camp or demoted to the factory or worse. 

2017 Xinjiang :: 1972 South Africa? 

In many ways, discussion of what has happened in Xinjiang resembles discussions of Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. Among conservative and liberal proponents of the capitalist world order, both cases are often seen as exceptions rather than limit cases of capitalist logics. 

 However as radical historians such as Martin Legassick (1984), Walter Rodney (1972), and sociologist Michael Buroway (1974) have demonstrated, South Africa was in fact a capitalist state whose economy centered on the production and reproduction of difference.10 South Africa was a paradigmatic example of a state-managed capitalist order that codified a so-called “color bar” (Buroway 1974, 1054) that excluded black and brown people from certain forms of employment reserved for whites. This exclusion along with processes of removing native peoples from their lands and forcing them into external resource dependent, impoverished reserves resulted in two new modes of production. Subsistence living on reserves and a supply of surplus miners from those reserves. The color bar “fixed” in place the contradiction between capitalism and democratic politics, preventing black South Africans from preserving their own wealth, denying them social mobility in the workforce, and strangling systems of mutual aid.

It was from this example, among others, that scholars such as Cedric Robinson (1983 [1999]) and Mahmood Mamdani (1996 [2018]) began to build a general theory of the way capitalist-colonial development works through the production of difference—rather than homogenizing effect of “all boats rising” as national economies grow as a whole.11 By devaluing the labour and possessions of citizens and non-citizens deemed and legally categorized as different, state-subsidized and supported business interests and settler overseers are empowered to accumulate wealth in a fixed, ongoing manner. 

Fast forward five decades and the outlines of a similar “color bar” fix can be seen in motion operating through an anti-Muslim racial regime. As in South Africa, Xinjiang multinational and domestic corporations are deeply invested in maintaining continual growth. The system in Xinjiang relies on a dual mode of racialized capital accumulation in the form of labor and data. In a general sense, the labour theft element of the system relies not only on the theft of the individual worker’s life, but also a theft from the family and community that raised and cared for that worker. By stealing a daughter or son from an Uyghur family and community, the reeducation campaign externalizes the cost of producing an unfree worker. As the state hired 90,000 new non-Muslim teachers with high-school degrees from villages across China, the reproduction of this labor-force was further ensured by a residential school system that would produce the next generation of Uyghur factory workers.  

As with Apartheid South Africa, the world is the market for much of the prediction products and consumer goods produced by the unfree workers in Xinjiang. It also participates in the global discourse of anti-Muslim racism. These areas of convergence with the imperial North—through both memetic political relations and a shared global economy—point to the ultimate lesson of Xinjiang. In a world where the power of Chinese corporations and autocrats is unchecked they operate in much the same way as other colonial powers." 

-Darren Byler's preface to the simplified chinesse edition of his book "In the Camps", June 2023

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week.

January 19-26 2024

The Energy Department announced its pausing all new liquefied natural gas export facilities. This puts a pause on export terminal in Louisiana which would have been the nation's largest to date. The Department will use the pause to study the climate impact of LNG exports. Environmentalists cheer this as a major win they have long pushed for.

The Transportation Department announced 5 billion dollars for new infrastructure projects. The big ticket item is 1 billion dollars to replace the 60 year old Blatnik Bridge between Superior, Wisconsin, and Duluth, Minnesota which has been dangerous failing since 2017. Other projects include $600 million to replace the 1-5 bridge between Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, $427 million for the first offshore wind terminal on the West Coast, $372 million to replace the 90 year old Sagamore Bridge that connects Cape Cod to the mainland,$300 million for the Port of New Orleans, and $142 million to fix the I-376 corridor in Pittsburgh.

the White House Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access announced new guidance that requires insurance companies must cover contraceptive medications under the Affordable Care Act. The Biden Administration also took actions to make sure contraceptive medications would be covered under Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and Federal Employee Health Benefits Program. HHS has launched a program to educate all patients about their rights to emergency abortion medical care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. This week marks 1 year since President Biden signed a Presidential Memorandum seeking to protect medication abortion and all federal agencies have reported on progress implementing it.

A deal between Democrats and Republicans to restore the expand the Child Tax Credit cleared its first step in Congress by being voted out of the House Ways and Means Committee. The Child Tax Credit would affect 16 million kids in the first year and lift 400,000 out of poverty. The Deal also includes an expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit which will lead to 200,000 new low income rental units being built, and also tax relief to people affected by natural disasters

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted for a bill to allow President Biden to seize $5 billion in Russian central bank assets. Biden froze the assets at the beginning of Russia's war against Ukraine, but under this new bill could distribute these funds to Ukraine, Republican Rand Paul was the only vote against.

The Senate passed the "Train More Nurses Act" seeking to address the critical national shortage of nurses. It aims to increase pathways for LPNs to become RNs as well as a review of all nursing programs nationally to see where improvements can be made

3 more Biden Judges were confirmed, bring the total number of Judges appointed by President Biden to 171. For the first time in history the majority of federal judge nominees have not been white men. Biden has also appointed Public Defenders and civil rights attorneys breaking the model of corporate lawyers usually appointed to life time federal judgeships

[tomorrowusa]

People in Washington have belatedly been taking notice that Ukraine, a country with not much of a navy, has chased Putin's fleet out of much of the Black Sea. Things are relatively close to normal for Ukrainian grain exports which use shipping on that sea.

In the Black Sea, Ukraine forced the Russian fleet to retreat from the historic headquarters of Sevastopol in Crimea after hitting ships and key buildings repeatedly with drones and missiles. That was a personal blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who lauded the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.  The maritime success also opened a corridor for Ukraine to move grain shipments in defiance of Russia’s decision last summer to cancel an export deal, an economic and symbolic victory in the war.  “Ukraine won in the Black Sea,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a trip to Washington last month.  Zelensky has made the Black Sea victories a central part of his pitch to Western allies and supporters in the past couple of months — a sign of Ukrainian strength after the ground counteroffensive launched in June largely failed, delivering a stalemate on the frontlines of eastern Ukraine.  “This is huge,” said Olga Lautman, nonresident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “They literally shifted the balance in the Black Sea. … Besides practically reopening the Black Sea, they’ve taken out Russia’s navy and pushed them out for the most part. And the attacks continue.”  Ukraine has maintained an edge in the waters of the Black Sea since the war began in February 2022 — and Kyiv does not have a naval force, let alone one the size of the Russian fleet.  In the early days of the war, Ukraine secured its hold on Odesa, a Black Sea port city in southern Ukraine, and sunk the Russian flagship the Moskva.  Ukrainian troops also liberated Snake Island, where defiant Ukrainian troops emerged famous for cursing at a Russian warship, in spring 2022.  In August, Ukraine stepped up attacks on the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, a hub for the Russian navy since Moscow annexed Crimea, but which has historical importance for Russia going back to the 1700s. In September, one strike damaged the headquarters of the Russian navy in Sevastopol. That month also saw Ukrainian special forces retake oil platforms in the Black Sea from Russia years after Moscow first seized them.  For the next two months, Ukraine kept assaulting Russian ships, leading to a full Russian naval retreat from Sevastopol and western Crimea.  After the fall attacks, Zelensky hailed Ukrainian forces for “pushing the Russian navy out to the eastern part of the Black Sea,” saying they “totally changed” the situation in the maritime domain.  “Russia can no longer use our sea to expand its aggression to other parts of the world,”  Zelensky said in an Oct. 31 address, “Ukraine’s success in the battle for the Black Sea will go down in history books, although it’s not being discussed much today.” 

It's become increasingly difficult for Russia to resupply its positions by sea. Last month Ukraine sunk a Russian ship loaded to the brim with munitions. This took place in Feodosia in occupied eastern Crimea which is only 100 km by road from Kerch where Ukraine damaged a bridge which connects occupied Ukraine to Russia.

Despite heavy and embarrassing losses, Putin will not give up his desire to conquer Ukraine unless he is forced to. Ukraine has been holding its own, but it needs help obtaining weapons and equipment. The GOP House of Representatives is holding up aid to Ukraine for its own political purposes. We need to contact our representatives and tell them to quit acting like Putin's agents on Capitol Hill.

Find out who your House member is.

Find Your Representative

Then contact him or her using the contact information given at the site. With Republicans, invoke the name of Ronald Reagan and insist that they quit supporting measures which help the Evil Empire. Be firm but polite.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Jews, like many other peoples, did not see themselves as a “nation” until Zionism emerged in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Historically, they have been described as an ethno-nation, a people “living apart.” This was especially the case in Eastern Europe, where they existed as an “internal colony” in ghettos or the Pale of Settlement. Vicious pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe in the last two decades of the nineteenth century caused mass displacement and flight. So when Zionism arose in the context of modern European nationalism, it had a fertile ground from which to sprout. Indeed, Zionism was a Central/Eastern European form of ethno-nationalism. The nation-states of Russia, Poland, Hungary and Germany saw themselves as “tribes” set off from, often hostile to or threatened by, other nation-tribes. They needed to create a “pure” racial space reflecting “the authentic spirit of the nation,” ethno-nations enclosing themselves within an exclusive nation-state. This was the world of romantic nationalism in which the vast majority of Jews lived. It is no wonder that Zionism adopted this form of ethno-nationalism, and exported it to Palestine.

Jeff Halper, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State

[mariacallous]

Shortly before noon on Aug. 19, 2023, a Russian cruise missile sliced past the golden onion domes and squat apartment blocks of the Chernihiv skyline in northern Ukraine. The Iskander-K missile slammed into its target: the city’s drama theater, which was hosting a meeting of drone manufacturers at the time of the attack. More than 140 people were injured and seven killed. The youngest, 6-year-old Sofia Golynska, had been playing in a nearby park.

Fragments of the missile recovered by the Ukrainian armed forces and analyzed by Ukrainian researchers found numerous components made by U.S. manufacturers in the missile’s onboard navigation system, which enabled it to reach its target with devastating precision. In December, Ukraine’s state anti-corruption agency released an online database of the thousands of foreign-made components recovered from Russian weapons so far.

Russia’s struggle to produce the advanced semiconductors, electrical components, and machine tools needed to fuel its defense industrial base predates the current war and has left it reliant on imports even amid its estrangement from the West. So when Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, major manufacturing countries from North America, Europe, and East Asia swiftly imposed export controls on a broad swath of items deemed critical for the Russian arms industry.

Russia quickly became the world’s most sanctioned country: Some 16,000 people and companies were subject to a patchwork of international sanctions and export control orders imposed by a coalition of 39 countries. Export restrictions were painted with such a broad brush that sunglasses, contact lenses, and false teeth were also swept up in the prohibitions. Even items manufactured overseas by foreign companies are prohibited from being sold to Russia if they are made with U.S. tools or software, under a regulation known as the foreign direct product rule.

But as the war reaches its two-year anniversary, export controls have failed to stem the flow of advanced electronics and machinery making their way into Russia as new and convoluted supply chains have been forged through third countries such as Kazakhstan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, which are not party to the export control efforts. An investigation by Nikkei Asia found a tenfold increase in the export of semiconductors from China and Hong Kong to Russia in the immediate aftermath of the war—the majority of them from U.S. manufacturers.

“Life finds a way,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official, quoting the movie Jurassic Park. The official spoke on background to discuss Russia’s evasion of export controls.

Some of the weapons and components analyzed by investigators were likely stockpiled before the war. But widely available Russian trade data reveals a brisk business in imports. More than $1 billion worth of advanced semiconductors from U.S. and European manufacturers made their way into the country last year, according to classified Russian customs service data obtained by Bloomberg. A recent report by the Kyiv School of Economics found that imports of components considered critical for the battlefield had dipped by just 10 percent during the first 10 months of 2023, compared with prewar levels.

This has created a Kafkaesque scenario, the report notes, in which the Ukrainian army is doing battle with Western weapons against a Russian arsenal that also runs on Western components.

It is an obvious problem, well documented by numerous think tank and media reports, but one without an easy solution. Tracking illicit trade in items such as semiconductors is an exponentially greater challenge than monitoring shipments of conventional weapons. Around 1 trillion chips are produced every year. Found in credit cards, toasters, tanks, missile systems, and much, much more, they power the global economy as well as the Russian military. Cutting Russia out of the global supply chain for semiconductors is easier said than done.

“Both Russia and China, and basically all militaries, are using a large number of consumer electronic components in their systems,” said Chris Miller, the author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. “All of the world’s militaries rely on the same supply chain, which is the supply chain that primarily services consumer electronics.”

Export controls were once neatly tailored to keep specific items, such as nuclear technology, out of the hands of rogue states and terrorist groups. But as Washington vies for technological supremacy with Beijing while also seeking to contain Russia and Iran, it has increasingly used these trade restrictions to advance broader U.S. strategic objectives. For instance, the Biden administration has placed wide-ranging prohibitions on the export of advanced chips to China.

“At no point in history have export controls been more central to our collective security than right now,” Matthew Axelrod, the assistant secretary for export enforcement at the U.S. Commerce Department, said in a speech last September. U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has described export controls as “a new strategic asset in the U.S. and allied toolkit.”

Russia’s ability to defy these restrictions doesn’t just have implications for the war in Ukraine. It also raises significant questions about the challenge ahead vis-à-vis China.

“The technological question becomes a key part of this story and whether or not we can restrict it from our adversaries,” said James Byrne, the director of open-source intelligence and analysis at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

In the Russian city of Izhevsk, home to the factory that manufactures Kalashnikov rifles, shopping malls are being converted into drone factories amid a surge in defense spending that has helped the country’s economy weather its Western estrangement. Arms manufacturers have been urged to work around the clock to feed the Russian war machine, while defense is set to account for one-third of the state budget this year.

“We have developed a concept to convert shopping centers—which, before the start of the SMO [special military operation], sold mainly the products of Western brands—to factories for assembly lines of types of domestic drones,” Alexander Zakharov, the chief designer of the Zala Aero drone company, said at a closed event in August 2022, according to the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti. “Special military operation” is what the Russian government calls its war on Ukraine. Zala Aero is a subsidiary of the Kalashnikov Concern that, along with Zakharov, was sanctioned by the United States last November.

Defense companies have bought at least three shopping malls in Izhevsk to be repurposed for the manufacture of drones, according to local media, including Lancet attack drones, which the British defense ministry described as one of the most effective new weapons that Russia introduced to the battlefield last year. Lancets, which cost about $35,000 to produce, wreaked havoc during Ukraine’s offensive last year and have been captured on video striking valuable Ukrainian tanks and parked MiG fighter jets.

Like a lot of Russia’s weapons systems, Lancets are filled with Western components. An analysis of images of the drones published in December by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security found that they contained several parts from U.S., Swiss, and Czech manufacturers, including image processing and analytical components that play a pivotal role in enabling the drones to reach their targets on the battlefield.

“The recurring appearance of these Western products in Russian drone systems shows a keen dependence on them for key capabilities in the drone systems,” the report notes. Lancets are not the only drones found to contain Western components. Almost all of the electronic components in the Iranian Shahed-136 drones, which Russia is now manufacturing with Iranian help to use in Ukraine, are of Western origin, a separate analysis published in November concluded.

Early in the war, the Royal United Services Institute analyzed 27 Russian military systems, including cruise missiles, electronic warfare complexes, and communications systems, and found that they contained at least 450 foreign-made components, revealing Russia’s dependence on imports.

One of the principal ways that Russia has evaded Western export controls has been through transshipment via third countries such as Turkey, the UAE, and neighboring states once part of the Soviet Union. Bloomberg reported last November that amid mounting Western pressure, the UAE had agreed to restrict the export of sensitive goods to Russia and that Turkey was considering a similar move. Kazakh officials announced a ban on the export of certain battlefield goods to Russia in October.

Suspected transshipment is often revealed by striking changes in trade patterns before and after the invasion. The Maldives, an island chain in the Indian Ocean that has no domestic semiconductor industry, shipped almost $54 million worth of U.S.-made semiconductors to Russia in the year after the invasion of Ukraine, Nikkei Asia reported last July.

Semiconductor supply chains often span several countries, with chips designed in one country and manufactured in another before being sold to a series of downstream distributors around the world. That makes it difficult for companies to know the ultimate end user of their products. This may seem odd—until you realize that this is the case for many everyday products that are sold around the world. “When Coca-Cola sells Coca-Cola, it doesn’t know where every bottle goes, and they don’t have systems to track where every bottle goes,” said Kevin Wolf, a former assistant secretary for export administration at the U.S. Commerce Department.

While a coalition of 39 countries, including the world’s major manufacturers of advanced electronics, imposed export restrictions on Russia, much of the rest of the world continues to trade freely with Moscow. Components manufactured in coalition countries will often begin their journey to Moscow’s weapons factories through a series of entirely legal transactions before ending up with a final distributor that takes them across the border into Russia. “It starts off as licit trade and ends up as illicit trade,” said a second senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The further items move down the supply chain, the less insight governments and companies have into their ultimate destination, although sudden changes in behavior of importers can offer a red flag. In his speech last September, Axelrod, the assistant secretary, used the example of a beauty salon that suddenly starts to import electronic components.

But the Grand Canyon of loopholes is China, which has stood by Moscow since the invasion. In the first days of the war, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned that Washington could shut down Chinese companies that ignored semiconductor export controls placed on Russia. Last October, 42 Chinese companies were added to export control lists—severely undercutting their ability to do business with U.S. companies—for supplying Russian defense manufacturers with U.S. chips.

But as the Biden administration carefully calibrates its China policy in a bid to keep a lid on escalating tensions, it has held off from taking Beijing to task. “I think the biggest issue is that we—the West—have been unwilling to put pressure on China that would get China to start enforcing some of these rules itself,” said Miller, the author of Chip Wars.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) said: “Due to the restrictions imposed by the United States and key allies and partners, Russia has been left with no choice but to spend more, lower its ambitions for high-tech weaponry, build alliances with other international pariah states, and develop nefarious trade networks to covertly obtain the technologies it needs.

“We are deeply concerned regarding [Chinese] support for Russia’s defense industrial base. BIS has acted to add over 100 [China]-based entities to the Entity List for supporting Russia’s military industrial base and related activities.”

Export controls have typically focused on keeping specific U.S.-made goods out of the hands of adversaries, while economic and financial sanctions have served broader foreign-policy objectives of isolating rogue states and cauterizing the financing of terrorist groups and drug cartels. The use of sanctions as a national security tool grew in wake of the 9/11 attacks; in the intervening decades, companies, government agencies, and financial institutions have built up a wealth of experience in sanctions compliance. By contrast, the use of export controls for strategic ends is relatively novel, and compliance expertise is still in its infancy.

“It used to be that people like me could keep export controls and sanctions in one person’s head. The level of complexity for each area of law is so intense. I don’t know anyone who is truly an export control and sanctions expert,” Wolf said.

Export controls, experts say, are at best speed bumps designed to make it harder for Russia’s defense industrial base to procure Western components. They create “extra friction and pressure on the Russian economy,” said Daniel Fried, who as the State Department coordinator for sanctions policy helped craft U.S. sanctions on Russia after its annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russia is now paying 80 percent more to import semiconductors than it did before the war, according to forthcoming research by Miller, and the components it is able to acquire are often of dubious quality.

But although it may be more cumbersome and expensive, it’s a cost that Moscow has been willing to bear in its war on Ukraine.

Western components—and lots of them—will continue to be found in the weapons Russia uses on Ukraine’s battlefields for the duration of the war. “This problem is as old as export controls are,” said Jasper Helder, an expert on export controls and sanctions with the law firm Akin Gump. But there are ways to further plug the gaps.

Steeper penalties could incentivize U.S. companies to take a more proactive role in ensuring their products don’t wind up in the hands of the Russian military, said Elina Ribakova, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “At the moment, they’re not truly motivated,” she said.

Companies that run afoul of sanctions and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a U.S. federal law that prohibits the payment of bribes, have been fined billions of dollars. Settlements of export control violations are often an order of magnitude smaller, according to recently published research.

In a speech last month, Axelrod said the United States would begin issuing steeper penalties for export control violations. “Build one case against one of the companies extremely well, put out a multibillion-dollar fine negotiation, and watch everybody else fall in line,” Ribakova said.

And then there’s the question of resources. BIS has an annual budget of just $200 million. “That’s like the cost of a few fighter jets. Come on,” said Raimondo, speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum last December.

The agency’s core budget for export control has, adjusted for inflation, remained flat since 2010, while its workload has surged. Between 2014 and 2022, the volume of U.S. exports subject to licensing scrutiny increased by 126 percent, according to an agency spokesperson. A 2022 study of export control enforcement by the Center for Strategic and International Studies recommended a budget increase of $45 million annually, describing it as “one of the best opportunities available anywhere in U.S. national security.”

When it comes to enforcement, the bureau has about 150 officers across the country who work with law enforcement and conduct outreach to companies. The Commerce Department has also established a task force with the Justice Department to keep advanced technologies out of the hands of Russia, China, and Iran. “The U.S. has the most robust export enforcement on the planet,” Wolf said.

But compared with other law enforcement and national security agencies, the bureau’s budgets have not kept pace with its expanding mission. The Department of Homeland Security has more investigators in the city of Tampa, Florida, than BIS does across the entire country, Axelrod noted in his January speech.

On the other side, you have Russia, which is extremely motivated to acquire the critical technologies it needs to continue to prosecute its war. The Kremlin has tasked its intelligence agencies with finding ways around sanctions and export controls, U.S. Treasury Undersecretary Brian Nelson said in a speech last year. “We are not talking about a profit-seeking firm looking for efficiencies,” the second senior U.S. intelligence official said. “There will be supply if there is sufficient demand.”