Muslims are Very Strange People

Thomas S. Harrington

After the bombing in Manchester and the bridge attack in London, it is more clear than ever: Muslims are very strange people, inherently violent and desiring of death in a way that few of us can even begin to imagine.

The proof is there for all to see.

For example, when the US-led “international community”, under enormous pressure from pro-Zionist power brokers decided, in 1948, to award the land occupied for centuries by Palestinians to a group of Jews from Europe, and then looked the other way while those same Jews engaged in ethnic cleansing and herded the surviving Palestinians into squalid camps far from their legally-titled homes and lands, some of those Palestinians got angry and, and as part of their attempts at redress, lashed out violently at some of those Jews.

Very strange. No non-Muslim that I know would ever think of doing such a thing under similar circumstances.

In the 1950s, a charismatic Egyptian army officer named Nasser got tired of having his country and its resources, including the strategically located Suez Canal, treated as British properties on which their native presence was tolerated only insofar as they showed proper deference to the foreign Sahibs. He thus began to educate his people, including the country’s women, in secular and modern ways, and made moves to nationalize important elements of the country’s means of production thus keeping Egyptian wealth in the country for Egyptians, while at the same time encouraging Arabs in neighboring countries to do the same.

His efforts were greeted with an unprecedented campaign of demonization and, in 1956, a French, British and Israeli invasion of his country. He continued undeterred in his efforts and 11 years later, was treated, despite what you might have read and been told elsewhere, to another unprovoked attack by the Israelis.

In the wake of his death, the Western powers succeeded in finally putting a “reliable” satrap by the name of Anwar Sadat in power in that country. For the last 40 years the satrapy he institutionalized, supported by billions of dollars of bribes from the US, has systematically betrayed the most basic aspirations of the great majority of the Egyptian people. As they starved and the country’s once encouraging leap into modernity stalled, a grotesque and bullying class of parasites weaned on the pork of American “aid” grew fat and happy. Egyptian dedication to the aspirations of freedom and non-colonial dignity among other Arab nations was replaced with slavish loyalty to US, Saudi, and Israeli strategic interests.

All this has made some Egyptians feel angry and hopeless and desirous of revenge against the people from abroad who engineered this turn of events. This, of course, is very odd and aberrant, indeed, pathological behavior, something that,  were it to happen to non-Muslims, would clearly result in much different and much more peaceful and accepting  behavior.

In 1952, Iran elected a leader who had the audacious idea of using the oil that lay under the ground of his proud country to finance the well-being of its people. This obviously ridiculous idea (how could he not know that the US always has first dibs on all natural resources in the world regardless of geographical location.) resulted in a coup planned and carried out by the CIA and MI6 which ended in his overthrow and imprisonment, and the installation of a pro-US puppet with the pompous title of Shah who tortured and terrorized his own people with impunity over the next quarter century, while simultaneously spending the part of his county’s wealth that US allowed him to keep,  on himself and on  the purchase of US weapons systems.

This angered a lot of people in the country and in 1979, having seen that the route of secular reform and modernization that they had initially chosen in the wake of World War II blocked (the aforementioned overthrow of Mossadedgh in 1953), and then turned into a grotesque and ghoulish parody of itself during the reign of the Shah (1953-1979), they turned to a religiously-grounded form of resistance.

This is clearly very strange behavior, indicative of a deep cultural sickness. No other non-Muslim nation that I know of would ever think of doing such a thing.

Can you imagine if during the communist era in Poland when most secular forms of resistance to the Soviet controlled dictatorship were blocked, people were to have turned to the inherently non-democratic and sexist Catholic Church led by Cardinal Wyszinski and then Cardinal Wotyla in their fight against the foreign domination of their society?  It would have been absolutely outrageous, something no one in the civilized would of freedom-loving peoples would ever tolerate or embrace, never mind support through billions of dollars in covert funding!

Upon the fall of the Ottoman empire,  the British plucked an obscure Wahhabist-oriented family,  disdainful of most forms of modernity as well as inter-sectarian tolerance, something  that—for all of the Ottomans’ other faults— had marked  their domination of the Mashriq and the Arabian Peninsula for centuries,  and turned them into the absolute rulers of  a new entity called Saudi Arabia.

The terns of the deal were clear. The Saudis could do whatever the hell they wanted to their people and to their Peninsular neighbors want as long as they kept the oil under their country flowing   to those, who by dint of their whiteness and superior culture actually hold title to it.  And with the exception of a few testy moments in the 70s when the Saudis suffered from unusual pangs of solidarity with their both their fellow Arabs and fellow oil-exporting nations, they have lived up to their side of the bargain.  And the Anglo-Americans have done likewise, letting the robe-wearing pre-moderns pretty much do whatever they want at home, including consolidating—with the inestimable help of US arms and technology—the most overtly oppressive civil society in the world, one that, for good measure,  operates on various forms of slave labor.

This made a number of people in that country and the satellite nations on the Arabian Peninsula that they effectively dominate feel downtrodden and hopeless, and in some cases, prone to attempts to salve their sense of locked-down desperation with violence.

Can you imagine any group of Christian people dominated by a corrupt and medieval caste of  “nobles” invented by a far away country and kept in power those same foreign people in order to insure the effective looting of the country’s resources, getting angry about such things?

As you and I know, there would be no excuse for any outburst of frustration and violence from such good Christian people. Yes, Muslims truly do have a unique predilection to violence

We can see this same tendency at work in Iraq, another satrapy cobbled together in 1920   to support British and American neocolonial interests.  Influenced by the rise of Baathism  (secular Arab Republicanism) in Egypt, Syria and other parts of the Arab world, the Iraqis threw off their British-invented monarchy 1958,  a move that greatly disturbed the hearty partisans of democracy in London and Washington. After few years of fumbling around, the CIA and MI6 were finally able to place one of their own men, Saddam Hussein, in control of the state.

All went well for a while. In fact, at one point Saddam proved extremely useful to the US, acting as a proxy warrior against the Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran. As long as he was he fighting those terrible Iranians, Washington was happy. So great was his prestige in the US “security community” that the US said nothing as he worked to solve his “Kurdish problem”  by gassing 3200 to 5000 people to death (injuring some 7,000-10000 more) in the Kurdish city of  Halabja on March 16th, 1988.

What Saddam probably did not know, however, was that at the very same time the US was supplying him with arms to fight the crazy and irrational Iranians, it was also sending weapons to the Teheran government. From the US point of view, the plan worked to a tee as the two oil-rich rich countries beat each up for eight long years (1980-88) with the Iranians suffering a mere 1 million  combat deaths and the Iraqis suffering  somewhere on the order of 300,000-500,000 war fatalities.

Surprisingly, watching an entire generation of people, not to mention much of the modern infrastructure of both countries, wiped out as a result of a war of attrition cynically engineered  in Washington to insure that neither of these two oil-rich countries would be able defend themselves against foreign encroachments for the foreseeable future, made some people in these places angry and desirous of revenge against the people who masterminded this caper.

Can you imagine a group of non-Muslims ever feeling that way? It would be unthinkable.

After the end of this carefully designed war of mutual destruction, Saddam started showing disturbing signs of working more forthrightly for the good of his regime than for his original CIA sponsors. So if the reports of more than a few observers are to be believed, the US decided—by having its envoy to Iraq April Glaspie express to Saddam that the US had “no position” on Iraq’s border conflict with Kuwait—to mouse-trap him into invading the small petro-kingdom in 1990, thus providing George Bush Sr. with a pretext for invading his country. When Saddam bit at the bait, the US pounced and waged war on him, smashing Iraq country to pieces.  The war is believed to have resulted in the slaughter of over 25,000 Iraqi soldiers and the further destruction of the country’s already battered infrastructure

Then over the next several years, the US placed the already shattered nation under crushing sanctions and a no-fly regime, tactics which were used to further destroy (and keep destroyed) most of the nation’s water purification systems, something that resulted in the death of some 500,00 babies and children, deaths that Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State when this charming regime of infanticide was implemented, famously qualified as a reasonable price to be paid for the achievement of US strategic goals in the country and region

Amazingly, this made a number of Muslins in Iraq other places country angry and desirous of revenge for this policy and the display of  moral arrogance that accompanied it.

Clearly, these poor Muslims lack a moral compass. No Christian or Jew that I know would ever become enraged if things like this were to happen to them or their national community.

It soon became clear, however, that even after the purposeful ruination of his country’s infrastructure through bombing and  embargo, the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers in the Gulf War, and those 500,000 children after it, Saddam still had a hard time understanding his responsibility to the international capitalist order and the strategic designs of the US.

So in 2003, for no good reason other than the fact that they knew they could get way with it before a propagandistically-zombified and chronically ignorant US population, the US invaded Iraq and finished the destruction of the country.  And then after this enormous act of democracy promotion, it actively fomented civil war and a campaign of targeted bribes and assassinations, a policy for which David Petraeus was ceaselessly lionized the press.

Contrary to all reasonable expectations, seeing the constant death and maiming of their brothers and sisters and realizing  that neither they nor their children would be able to live more or less peaceful and productive lives for at least a generation managed to anger a number of Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere around the world.

Once again signs of cultural pathology among their ranks were on display for  all to see.

In 1962, the Algerians finally threw off the regime of French colonialism that they had lived under since the 1830s, creating a  government generally devoted to the idea of modern and secular solutions to their country’s problems. The eight year war that had led to the end of the French domination of Algeria was as bloody and brutal as they come, with the French making no secret of their “right” to use torture and targeted assassination as tools of domination within it.

Within a few short years after the war’s end, however, it soon became clear that the French had no intention of allowing the now nominally independent Algerian government to operate freely on the world stage,  or in the realm of domestic policy.   In order to achieve this de facto control of the country, they worked assiduously to corrupt its leadership class at every turn. The plan was largely successful. By the end of the 1980s, many Algerians felt that they could no longer trust the secularly-minded generation which had led the struggle for independence,  thus  turning  their attentions to a new generation of Islamist activists who promised to free the country from its endemic corruption and continuing dependence on French power.

In 1991, on the eve of elections that all agreed would be won by the Islamists, the government suspended the electoral process and began rounding up thousands of Islamist activists, setting off a civil war that would last for the next 12 years and cause some 150,000 deaths, with France and the US firmly backing the corrupt if secular government that had thwarted the citizenry’s first attempt to effect true alternation of political power.

Hard as it might be to understand, seeing a government corrupted by the country’s former colonial rulers and backed by the world’s only superpower step in and cancel the country’s electoral process and jail tens of thousands of people whose only crime was to want to try out a new governing ideology, angered a lot of Algerians. And as incredible as it might seem, seeing the same government use French and American intelligence and arms to hunt down—to the tune of tens of thousands of deaths—those same dissidents against official power, managed to piss them off even more.

What went on in Algeria is another obvious manifestation off the unique and clearly aberrant Islamic embrace of violence.

Can you imagine, for example, good Christian people responding violently to attempts backed by outside powers to suspend their political processes in order to effect a virtual continuation of colonial policies?

In 20ll, after having recently rehabilitated the reputation of Moammar Gaddafi, a man who had brought Libya, if not to a state of shining democracy akin to  that which exists in Saudi Arabia, to a relatively high  standard of living and secular tolerance, the US and its European vassals suddenly turned on him and invaded his country, turning it into rubble and generating—surprise, surprise—an orgy of internecine fighting.

The stated Allied reason for the destruction of the country was that the Libyan strong man was murdering his own citizens.  But the real reasons were that a) Libya had some of the most easily accessible high quality crude in the world b) Gaddafi had not been a consistently dependable backer of US geopolitical initiatives and c)  as an email written from Sidney Blumenthal to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton makes clear, the Libyan ruler had some of the biggest known silver and gold reserves in the world, stores that he  planned to use to back the creation of a pan-African currency that would free the enormous and much abused continent and all its resources form the tyranny of both the French-controlled CFA Franc and the US dollar system with its well-known mechanisms (IMF, World Bank) for taming/enslaving nations that refuse play their rightful role as servants to US-led international capitalism.

Oddly enough, this calculated destruction of Libya and its leader’s dreams for a life free of subservience to the US and it European underlings made some Muslims angry.

Clearly, there is something deeply sick about a culture where emotions like this can arise and be brought to such open fruition over the mere matter of a premeditated patriacide.

After destroying Libya, the US and its allies used the same playbook in Syria, seizing upon some protests against the country’s secular, albeit not terribly kind, leadership to foment a raging civil war in the country. The US hope was to scare the Assad government into an early collapse. However, when it became clear he would fight back, the US and its allies fell back of the strategy they had used to great effect in the Iran-Iraq war: prolonging the war indefinitely through strategic arms shipments to its various warring groups.  Indeed, US intelligence, in an act of economizing that should warm the hearts of all US taxpayers, also set up a so-called “rat line” to run caches of arms seized in the destruction of Libya to its chosen rebel groups in Syria.

The overall goal here?

To insure the maximum degree of physical destruction and human misery in Syria so that the country would not be able to challenge Israeli and US hegemony in the region for several generations to come.

Incredibly, this cold-blooded destruction of one the most sophisticated, multicultural nations in the Islamic world, not to mention the endless flow of miserable refugees it has produced, has made some Muslims angry and desirous of revenge.

This, of course, demonstrates just how big the moral gulf is that separates these Islamic  “animals” from people like us.

Needless to say, the only option we have in the face of all this madness is to wage an endless war on these very different people whose way of reacting to events is, as I have clearly shown,  completely different than that of all other normal and civilized  people in the world.

Why Saudi Arabia and Its Allies Suddenly Cut Ties to Qatar

Patrick Cockburn

Qatar is unexpectedly under siege from its neighbours. Led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, supported by Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen, the five Arab states have cut diplomatic relations with Qatar, severed land, air and sea travel and are expelling Qatari citizens who have 48 hours to depart.

The Saudis and their allies are demanding, in effect, that Qatar end its independent foreign policy and tame or close down its television station, Al Jazeera. They claim that Qatar is complicit with Iran in supporting terrorism, though Qatar is one of the loose coalition of Sunni states supporting forces hostile to Iran in Syria and Yemen.

One pro-Saudi lobbyist in the US even threatens regime change in Qatar, tweeting to its Emir: “I would like to remind you that [elected Egyptian President] Mohammed Morsi did exactly the same [as you] and was then toppled and imprisoned.”

Saudi Arabia and Qatar have long been rivals and, despite Qatar’s small size, its great wealth and vast gas reserves have given it great influence. It backed the Arab Spring with its wealth and media outlets, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in Gaza.

Three years ago in 2014 there was a similar but less serious confrontation between Qatar and its neighbours, who accused it of interference in their internal affairs. Since then Qatar has been much more compliant in not confronting or pursuing radically different policies from those of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

What has changed in the Gulf to precipitate a crisis now? The answer is that the Trump wrecking ball passed through the region last month and the US President’s unreserved backing for Saudi Arabia, and in particularly for deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has disturbed the regional balance of forces. It has already emboldened the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain to crush the last Shia resistance to its dominance, killing five protesters in one village and closing down the only remaining independent newspaper.

Much more seriously, Mr Trump’s unqualified support for the Sunni monarchies and autocrats during his two-day visit to Riyadh emboldened the kingdom to start a second and, it hopes, final round in its confrontation with Qatar. Mr Trump may not have intended to touch off this latest crisis when he aggressively and inaccurately demonised Iran and by implication the Shia as the source of all terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa. But his words were interpreted by the Saudis as enabling them to move against Qatar though it is home to a major US base.

It will be difficult for Qatar to withstand what amounts to a form of siege. Under Mr Trump, the degree of protection it can expect from the US is uncertain and Prince Mohammed bin Salman, eager to secure his own path to the Saudi throne, cannot afford a failure. He may even want to go the limit and eliminate Qatar as an independent state, the first time this has happened in the Gulf since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Ancient Aliens in Paris

ROB SEIMETZ

The President of the United States, who has a haircut that resembles a fox pelt welded to his head, decided yesterday to announce to the world the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, and people lost their minds.

Let’s calm down and take a deep breath for a moment and realize that this agreement was fraudulent to begin with and was not going to stop the Sixth Mass Extinction on planet earth. Even James Hansen, the father of climate change, agrees with me on this. We will touch on this a little bit later, but first I want to touch on those supposed “woke ones” that are upset.

What happens is a lot of these people that are upset blame the elites for all their problems.  It’s all their faults we are in the situation we are in.  And when you peddle this line of garbage people look at you like you have an elevated consciousness about the happenings in the world.  I look at you like you’re throwing out a lazy line of crap and putting up a built in excuse for all of your actions.

Yes, the capitalist elites are a huge part of the equation as to why we are facing down our own extinction, but it’s not the only reason.  We are all complicit in this problem and every day we all contribute to activities that kill life on this planet.

Where do we get this “solely blame it on the elites” line to peddle?  We get it from none other than the bobble heading, eye popping, alt-righting Alex Jones.  Alex Jones calls them the “globalists” as his turns beat red and he starts sweating profusely.  Once you get past all of his “Joker character theatrics”, and you can dissect his problem and solution he’s presenting to you, you start to realize that he’s a…”performance artist” that’s “playing a character”.  Do those phrases sound familiar?

While Jones waxed poetic against the “globalists” that are imprisoning us from all having fantastic lives and freedoms.  He thinks Trump, who is occupies a seat in the globalist class, will solve all the problems.  So let me get this straight, “globalists” that amass large sums of wealth through corporate empires are bad, but a President and a lot of his cabinet who are “globalists” that amassed large sums of wealth through corporate empires are good?  So yes, the richest cabinet in the history of this country is going after the elites….sure Alex whatever you say, just go back in your corner and put on your Joker costume.

What this ideology fails to attack is looking at the entire system.  What happens next if we take down these “globalists”?  As long as the same system is in place there will be plenty more jockeying to fill the void.  Law Enforcement realizes that when they arrest a gang leader that plenty of other gang members will jockey for filling the recently departed leader’s position.  Why can’t we make that same connection with the “globalists”?

The rise of Alex Jones coincided with the rise of a television show on the History Channel called Ancient Aliens.  This show explores Ancient Alien Theory which, per the History Channel’s website, covers the belief that “According to ancient alien theorists, extraterrestrials with superior knowledge of science and engineering landed on Earth thousands of years ago, sharing their expertise with early civilizations and forever changing the course of human history.”

Really, I think this theory is completely bonkers, and if you like this show then fine that’s your business.  But if you use this show as one of your sources of critical thought to demonstrate that you’re a “woke one” this is where I am going to take issue with you because really you’re asleep at the wheel.

What Alex Jones and Ancient Aliens have in common is they point to another group for why the world is in its current state.  They help us disconnect from reality and from the harmonization of life on this planet.  They give us an excuse for any flaws in our society so we don’t have to point the finger at ourselves.  And they make sure to make us feel that humans are special and it’s our right to subdue the planet.

But I have news for the blame it solely on the elites and the Ancient Alien cults.  Humans are like any other species on this planet.  We have some extraordinary gifts and some extraordinary flaws.  One of these flaws includes our human supremacist mindset, because frankly we are doing such a horrible job at “managing” the planet that we are killing it along with ourselves.  This is our fatal flaw.

While you “woke ones” were watching a episode of Ancient Aliens to see if an old clay pot secretly had an astronaut craved into it or were trying to figure out if you could connect Batman or Superman to an extraterrestrial, I was examining why all the beautiful things in life are being destroyed.

I was making connections and understanding that we are fighting a war on life.  This war is the commoditization of life versus the continuation of life.  When looking at the battle plan for this war aka the Paris Climate Agreement, I realized it was a battle plan drawn of by the commoditization of life side.

The twenty seven page Paris Agreement does not address the following:

-The fact that we need to end the economic model of striving to achieve infinite growth since we live on a finite planet.  In others words it didn’t call for the end of Capitalism, it instead promotes “sustainable development”.

-It didn’t address that we have 7.5 billion people on the planet and we are adding an average of roughly 225,000 humans to the planet a day births minus deaths.

-And it didn’t fully address United States Imperialism by demanding a cease and desist from the endless wars this country is involved in.  It also didn’t oblige the United States military to cut carbon emissions despite the fact the the United States military is the single largest petroleum user in the world.

What the Paris Agreement did state is any nation that signed on to the agreement was committed to keeping the global average temperature to under 1.5 °C.  As Sam Carana of the Arctic News Blog recently pointed out to me in 2016 we were experiencing temperatures already at a global average temperature of over 1.5 °C when you use the year 1750 as your baseline, since the Industrial Revolution arrived in the mid 1700s.

So when you hear we are only at 1.0 °C above the global average temperature baseline these pundits are using a baseline from years 1880 or 1900 which ignores 130 to 150 years of the planet burning fossil fuels.

Former CounterPunch radio guest, Kevin Hester, argues we need to use the year 1698 as a baseline since the planet was burning coal during that year.

There’s also the problem of feedback loops that have kicked in and once they start there is no stopping them.  Like the Arctic soon becoming ice free during the summer.  Once the Arctic is ice free the sun will beat down on the methane below the surface that will be released into the atmosphere (methane has a global warming potential of 86 times more than Co2 over a 20 year timeframe, and 34 times more than Co2 over a 100 year timeframe.)

A 2008 paper from Dr. Natalia Shakhova confirms a 50 gigaton burst of methane from the Arctic is highly possible at any time which would increase the global average temperature by 1.3 °C.  Guy McPherson personally confirmed this figure increase to me as well.

If we reduce the burning of fossil fuels we will also increase the global average temperature due to concept of global dimming.  These fossil fuels provide a dimming affect to our atmosphere and once that dimming fades we will see a global average temperature increase of at least 1 °C.

The other aspect of climate change that must be addressed is carbon emission lag time.  Per Guy McPherson, “Due to the four-decade lag between emissions and temperature rise, the inconvenient fact that the world has emitted more than twice the industrial carbon dioxide emissions since 1970 as we did from the start of the Industrial Revolution through 1970.”

We have set carbon emission records from the year 2000 on which means we have yet to feel the impacts of these record setting emissions.

Hopefully you “woke ones” can see pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement is like protesting someone being murdered with a knife instead of a gun.  Why protest the weapon used when you should be protesting the murder itself?

So you may want to ask me why I care so much or why I fight if I believe we are facing our own extinction as a species.  That answer is simple, I look to nature as to what I should do next.  Nature will fight until the bitter end because Nature is stubborn, so I choose to fight along side of it.  We see Nature fighting everyday by spider webs in garages, plants growing between sidewalk squares, trees expanding even though they are surrounded by concrete, and birds building nests above street lights.

So I am telling you so called “woke ones” your alarm has been going off and you have hit the snooze button too many times, it’s time for you to get up and take a look in the mirror and realize you play a part in the planet’s unraveling.  Put down the Ancient Aliens garbage, realize your blame it all on the elites excuse came from a “performance artist”, and take the passion you have for television shows like Game of Thrones and Walking Dead and channel that passion for life instead of being hypnotized by violent television shows about death, all the while making excuses up for your inaction in life.  Always remember this the planet’s reaction to our decades of inaction.

Myopia is an Increasingly Serious Problem Among Chinese Children

Cesar Chelala

Shortsightedness or myopia, a condition where distant objects appear blurry while close objects appear normal, is an eye problem that is becoming increasingly serious among Chinese children. It is estimated that in China the myopia rate is 31 percent. However, among children and teenagers it can be as high as 90 percent. Because when it is uncorrected it can have health-damaging consequences, it must be dealt with more effectively by both parents and health authorities in the country.

Myopia is a global issue. According to researchers, rates of myopia have doubled, or even tripled, in most East Asian countries over the last 40 years. Although Singapore is considered to have the highest rate in the world, with approximately 80 percent of the population being affected by it, the prevalence of myopia in India in the general population is only 6.9 percent.

Rates of myopia have been rising in Western nations like Germany and the U.S. In this last country, as well as in some European countries, the rate has almost doubled in the last 50 years. According to some estimates, one third of the world’s population -2.5 billion people- could be affected by short-sightedness by 2020. Some experts say we are close to having a myopia epidemic.

A combination of both genetic and environmental factors seems to be responsible for myopia. Risk factors for this problem are doing work that focuses on close objects, spending a lot of time indoors and a family history for this condition. Although for many years genetic factors were considered responsible for this condition, it was proven that other environmental factors were also important.

One of the factors considered important was the amount of time spent studying and doing close-reading home work. It was shown that children who spent more hours reading and doing home-work inside their homes or at school had a higher probability of developing myopia. This theory, however, didn’t hold up. Close work, although it had an effect, was not, apparently, the factor most responsible for this condition.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge in England have found that a lack of outdoor play has been linked to myopia. There seems to be a protective effect of sunlight during children’s critical years of development, while their eyeballs are still growing. The reasons for this effect, however, are not yet known.

Ian Morgan, a myopia researcher at Australian National University, said that if children get outside enough it doesn’t matter how much study they do, since they don’t become myopic as frequently as children who spend much of their time inside their homes. Based on his studies, Morgan estimates that children need to spend around three hours per day under good light levels to be protected against myopia.

The problem with this approach, however, is that in many places and in different seasons children cannot get enough outside light. There are some experiments now carried out to allow more children to play and study in better artificial lighting conditions. No clear-cut results, however, have been achieved yet.

Some researchers suggest that children should spend more time playing outside which has the additional benefits of improving mood, increasing their level of physical activity and decreasing the likelihood of obesity, another significant problem among children. More research should be carried out as to why in India myopia is less frequent than in other Asian countries.

Although eye exercises are frequently done in China, there is no clear-cut evidence that they have been effective in lowering the rate of myopia among children. To be able to detect early any problem, all children should have a comprehensive eye examination by age three. Parents should be aware of any change in their children’s sight and take them for an eye examination since they are born. At the same time, children’s eyesight would probably benefit from less homework, less use of electronic gadgets and more activities carried out outdoors, an approach difficult to implement in today’s competitive societies. As with any other health problem, regarding children’s eyesight, prevention is more effective and less costly than a cure.

Terror As Opportunity: Exploiting The London Attacks

Binoy Kampmark

The hallmark of any administration worth its corruptly curing salt is making hay while the sun shines its searing rays.  Not long after the slashing and running down was taking place in London, moving from London Bridge to Borough Market, the tweets of blame and fire were already coming through.

That nasty sovereign known as social media was already agitating. One of the biggest themes: the rollback on human rights protections, and the marketing of pure fear.  Across the Atlantic, President Donald Trump was adding his little rough side to the debate.  “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’”

A spokesman for Sadiq Khan was hoping to deflect the Trump tweet as misdirected spittle, preferring to focus on the job at hand: “The mayor is busy working with the police, emergency services and the government to coordinate the response to this horrific and cowardly terrorist attack and provide leadership and reassurance to Londoners and visitors to our city.”

In short, Khan had “more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump’s ill-informed tweet that deliberately takes out of context his remarks urging Londoners not to be alarmed when they saw more police – including armed officers – on the streets.”

Alarm, however, can be quarried and built upon. The attacks on London Bridge and Borough Market has enabled Prime Minister Theresa May to revive the inner Home Secretary in her, one replete with suspicions and hostility towards free agents and choice in society.

With only hours to go to the polls, May has been promising flintier measures against extremists, notably in terms of controls using risk as a key indicator.  Even in the absence of concrete evidence for prosecution, the prime minister fancies making the lot of the state easier in how to control suspects and limit liberties.

More had to be done to “restrict the freedom and the movements of terrorist suspects when we have enough to show they present a threat, but not enough evidence to prosecute them in full in court.” If that nuisance known as human rights laws were “to stop us from doing it, we will change those laws so we can do it.”  Chillingly, this language would sit rather easily with the next fundamentalist reformer keen to ignore human rights in favour of undeviating scripture and the pure society.

Her words read like a laundry list of security promises and heavy-handedness, much of it pointed in the direction of the Human Rights Act, never a beloved instrument of those keen on trimming civil liberties: “I mean longer prison sentences for people convicted of terrorist offences.  I mean making it easier for the authorities to deport foreign terror suspects to their own countries.”

Tory lawmakers are also pondering the prospect of curbing communications and access to devices, curfews and restrictions on associating between claimed extremists. May is also open to extending the period for which a terrorist suspect can be held without trial.  (The current number is 14 days.)

Many of May’s promises are marked by contradiction.  The spirit of austerity still haunts the Tory drive to perform its protective duties for Britannia.  It wants a fully functioning and efficient security apparatus, but prefers to keep it cash strapped and hobbled.

Khan has reminded the prime minister that talk of robust security is all dandy, until you realise that cuts of up to 10 to 40 per cent in police numbers have been implemented, much of this presided over by May herself when she held the post of Home Secretary.

Steve Hilton, former prime minister David Cameron’s strategy chief, decided to also weigh in on that point, suggesting that May throw in the towel for her sloppiness.  It was the prime minister, he charged, who had to be held “responsible for [the] security failures of London Bridge, Manchester, Westminster Bridge.”[1]  Terror suspects had eluded the counter-terror web; radicalisation fears had been ignored.

May’s proposed legal measures will be subjected to judicial scrutiny when the time comes.  Labour, when in office, found the issue of control orders a problem, despite their championing by such figures as former home secretary David Blunkett.  Blunkett, a sort of amateur fascist, even insisted that May consider restoring such orders in the wake of the suicide bombing in Iraq by British ex-inmate of Guantánamo, Jamal al-Harith.

What is being proposed is a milder variant of permanent surveillance and indefinite control over someone not accused of any crimes, but highlighted as a threat.  This is actuarial risk assessment at its worst.  Coupled with the badgering of telecommunications companies to do their bit in undermining privacy, and hectoring companies to downgrade their encryption standards, and the world looks ever bleaker.  All this will keep human rights lawyers in clover for sometime.

Punishing Qatar

Binoy Kampmark

Are we in need of distractions?  The political masters obviously think so.  There have been hackings, cuttings, slayings and crushing events.  As battles continue raging in Syria and northern Iraq, European cities face the next round of urban slayings.

As that was taking place, eyes in the western media were taken off brewing troubles among the Gulf States.  Eager pots have been calling kettles the most unspeakable things. (Not so much black as crispy charred.)  No one would have been surprised by calling out that tenured terrorist state known as Saudi Arabia for its various actions in Yemen and its own vicious brand of fundamentalism advertised globally.

Yet it was Saudi Arabia, along with Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya insisting that Qatar was the destabilising influence in the region. (The others were naturally innocent of that.)  All land, air and sea traffic would be halted with the state, while diplomatic missions would be removed.  Qatari citizens would also be given their marching orders, having to leave within 14 days.

Disagreements between Doha and Riyadh are far from new. Being eager practitioners of censorship and media control, Riyadh has shown little time for such bold media efforts as Al-Jazeera. Bristling at what it has deemed negative coverage, officials in Riyadh have repeatedly insisted that Qatar be rebuked for backing its own horses in the Islamist struggle, much of this borne by the rumblings of the Arab Spring.

The Islamic Brotherhood is top of that list, and what is not surprising by looking at the list of states intent on strangling Qatar is that they have taken a dim view about the populist aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In Egypt, an elected head of state from the organisation was deposed in a coup that re-established the primacy of the military.  Qatar’s backing of Mohamed Morsi’s short stint at the helm was well and truly noted. In a measure of placation, Qatar closed down Al Jazeera Mubashir Misr, its twenty-four hour news channel in Cairo.

Since then, spats have grown in number.  Ambassadors have been sporadically recalled.  In September 2002, Saudi Arabia did so over what it regarded as unfavourable coverage of a Saudi plan which entailed normalising ties with Israel in exchange for a peace deal with the Palestinians.

In 2014, the three Gulf States intent on punishing Qatar also withdrew their ambassadors citing the usual grounds of interference in internal affairs and “jeopardizing regional security”. Those concerns have not changed, and the move of severing ties and effectively shutting off Qatar is a measure of how dissatisfied the other state have been towards Doha’s efforts.

More recently, Qatar’s efforts to secure the release of a group of falconers, among them members of the royal family, captured by a Teheran-backed Shia group in Iraq, drew attention from Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. The intended ransom could well have run into a billion dollars.

The isolating move has trigged obvious consequences.  Qatar has become a place of strategic importance for various powers.  The US, for one, has its largest airbase in the Middle East located in the state.

Nor has the provocative move gone unnoticed by others who have thrown their weight behind Doha. The Turkish parliament has passed legislation drafted in May permitting the deployment of troops to the country’s military base in Qatar. In 2015, Turkey’s ambassador to Doha, Ahmet Demirok, forecast an eventual troop number of 3,000.

Then comes that important matter of aviation.  Qatar’s flag carrier, Qatar Airways, has had to re-route flights over Turkey, Iran and Oman, given the forced closure of airspace to their planes.  On Tuesday, 70 flights were grounded.

Other airline carriers will be delighted by the move, given the relentless rise and appropriation of key routes of travel from Europe to Asia and Australasia by the Middle Eastern carriers. The gesture of isolating Qatar is looking, at best, one of economic self-harm, affecting such carriers as Bahrain’s Gulf Air, Dubai’s Emirates, Saudi Arabia’s Saudia and Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways.

The demands this time for resolving this monumental tiff are bound to be even steeper than they were in 2014.  Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi makes his own hazard at a set of guesses, and it involves a conventional, authoritarian ploy: muzzle media coverage, entailing the “shuttering of the Al Jazeera TV Network before any mediation can take place” (Newsweek, Jun 5).

That will just be the beginning.  The main course will feature the expulsion of Hamas figures and affiliates, along with such undesirables as Islamist writer Yasser Al-Za’atra and Azmi Bishara.  For dessert, the Egyptians will wish for a cessation of any pro-Morsi coverage, while the entire collective will push for shackles to be placed on charitable organisations.

Such demands are what is conventionally called unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of another state, but the despots of the Gulf are bound to miss that irony.  What Qatar is accused of will not only be matched but surpassed.

Australian economy barely avoids contraction

Mike Head

During the first three months of 2017, Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP) increased by only 0.3 percent in seasonally-adjusted terms, further exposing the fanciful forecasts in the federal government’s May 9 federal budget of growth surging to 3 percent within two years.

Australia’s output has grown by just 1.4 percent in the past 12 months, according to the estimates released yesterday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

The government tried to put a positive spin on the figures, saying the country has now avoided recession for 26 years. In reality, the statistics point to an underlying decline since the 2008 global financial crisis, compounded by the end of the boom in mining exports and investment.

During the past four-and-a-half years, Australia’s annual GDP growth has never been above 3 percent—the longest such run since the ABS began calculating quarterly GDP in 1959. Since the 2008 crash only four quarters have recorded annual growth above 3 percent.

GDP per capita growth—a better indicator of living standards—is even worse. In seasonally adjusted terms, it fell in March by 0.1 percent. Over the past year it grew by just 0.2 percent, the lowest rate since the 2008 meltdown and at a level historically associated with a recession.

The figures make a mockery of Treasurer Scott Morrison’s boast, made three months ago when the December figures showed a brief uptick to 1.1 percent quarterly growth, that Australia’s economy was growing faster than any G7 nation.

Yesterday, Morrison still attempted to put a gloss on the statistics. “The results today demonstrate the continued resilience of the Australian economy,” he told reporters. In reality, the results point to a protracted reversal, and ever-worsening social inequality.

Profits—as measured by corporate gross operating surplus—surged by 20.1 percent in the past year, largely on the back of a short-term spike in export commodity prices, which sent the terms of trade soaring by 25 percent.

But real wages continued to fall, and the total number of hours worked remained stagnant. The wages share of the economy fell to the equal lowest point since 1964.

In Australia, and around the world, companies are ruthlessly cutting jobs and conditions. Real labour costs fell 6 percent in the past 12 months—the biggest one-year fall in history. The jump in profits mostly went to the mining sector, where employment is down 12 percent on five years ago.

Without spending by deeply-indebted households, the economy would officially be in recession. Household final consumption expenditure increased 0.5 percent in the March quarter, mainly driven by higher outlays for electricity, gas and other fuel (up 2.9 percent).

Over the past year, this spending growth remained at an historically low 2.4 percent. And much of that rise was due to households reducing their saving rate, from 5.1 percent to a decade low of 4.7 percent. This rate has halved in four years.

The trends “remain worrying,” Su-Lin Ong, RBC’s head of Australian Fixed Income Strategy, told the Australian. “Highly-indebted households continue to save less to fund expenditure.” It was “questionable” how much further household savings could decline, given still-elevated unemployment, easing house prices, weak wages growth and below-average consumer confidence.

Investment in dwellings fell sharply by 4.4 percent in the quarter, reducing GDP growth by 0.2 percent. This is another indicator of the end of the five-year east coast housing construction boom that has largely propped up the economy since the mining boom began to unravel in 2012.

Corporate investment remains low, suggesting that a slump lies ahead. Gross fixed capital formation decreased 0.6 percent in seasonally adjusted terms in the March quarter.

The largest contributor to GDP in the March quarter was “change in inventories”—essentially companies building up their stocks. Growth was recorded in service industries such as finance (up by a profitable 4 percent over the year) and insurance, wholesale trade and healthcare, but the manufacturing sector slipped backward for the 10th time in 11 quarters.

The ongoing weakness is intensifying the pressure on the government, which has promised the financial markets it would eliminate the near $40 billion annual budget deficit by 2020–21. The global credit ratings agencies could end the country’s AAA borrowing status unless the government demonstrates its capacity to slash social spending.

Peter Van Onselen, the Australian’s contributing editor, commented: “Today’s quarterly growth numbers throw shade all over the unrealistic forecasts in the budget. If anyone still believes that the government can achieve the budget surplus in the out years as predicted they must also believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.”

Venting the demands of the corporate ruling class, Van Onselen said a surplus could be achieved only via “major structural reforms,” including cutting business taxes, reducing public spending and changing industrial laws. But these had been placed “in the too hard basket given the state of the polls and the divisions within the government on almost all policy fronts.”

Adding to the political crisis, Labor, the Greens and third-party “crossbenchers” in the Senate have said they will oppose some of the most egregious cuts to education, healthcare and welfare in the May 9 budget. They fear electoral backlashes if they support the government in any way.

The Australian recently estimated that at least $14 billion worth of cuts over four years face a “blockade” in the Senate, where the government holds only 29 of the 76 seats as a result of the near-defeat it suffered at last July’s double dissolution election. Unless Labor or the Greens assist the government, it needs the votes of 10 of the 12 Senate crossbenchers to pass legislation.

In response to the dismal growth figures, Treasurer Morrison urged Labor, the Greens and Senate crossbenchers to “meet us in the middle” and “work with the government to provide the policy certainty and stability that will encourage and support investment.”

However, the government’s plight worsened this week when university vice chancellors urged the Senate to defeat the government’s budget higher education package, which imposes another 5 percent reduction in per student funding, while hiking student fees.

Today’s editorial in the Australian again voiced its dissatisfaction. “The 2017 budget and its rose-tinted outlook are the product of political deadlock in the Senate,” the editorial declared. “Official forecasts of revenue lack credibility and a surplus by 2021 is just a pipe dream… With political dysfunction such as this, expect more bad economic news.”

The Labor Party is trying to position itself to take office and deliver the requirements of the financial elite. Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen attributed the 26 years without a recession to the “consistency of purpose” displayed by the previous Labor governments of Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd. These governments fundamentally restructured the economy, in line with global processes and corporate demands, laying the basis for the historic decline in the wages income share.

The working class and young people, who are bearing the brunt of the economic crisis, cannot expect any element within the political establishment to reverse this assault.

Tensions between US and China threaten catastrophe for Africa

Eddie Haywood & Thomas Gaist 

Tensions on the African continent are rising with China’s surge of economic investment and business ties with a host of countries. In response, Washington and Europe are countering this ‘economic trespassing’ by Beijing with the utilization of massive military power across the continent. Underpinning the conflict are the Western corporations and banks eager to capture the profits extracted from Africa’s vast economic resources and its working masses.

China’s expansion of economic investment in Africa is a part of its “One Belt, One Road” initiative through which Beijing seeks to revive a modern day ‘Silk Road’ trade route connecting China and Asia with Europe. The proposed expansion of transport and communications infrastructure is aimed at boosting the trade and economic interlinkages of China across the Eurasia and with Africa and the Middle East at the expense of the US, thus undermining its global domination.

The profiteering and exploitation of cheap labor by China in Africa is hardly benign and has prompted criticism, some of which, but not all, is prompted by those seeking to limit the expansion of China’s economic influence. While China is not an imperialist power, its capitalist operations in Africa are no less predatory than its rivals in the United States and Europe.

The Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, held in Beijing May 14-15, marks a significant turning point in China-Africa relations and in world politics as a whole. From all appearances, at least three strategically crucial East and Central African states, Kenya, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all military allies of the United States, are shifting decisively toward the Chinese government and its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) agenda.

This expansion of Chinese influence in Africa directly threatens American imperialism’s control over the lion’s share of Africa’s natural riches and disrupts Washington’s efforts to encircle China and strangle it economically.

In an interview following the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta signaled his government’s readiness for closer ties with China, necessarily at the expense of US-Kenya relations, in exchange for a reduction of Kenya’s trade deficit.

“If their win-win strategy is going to work, it must mean that, just as Africa opens up to China, China must also open up to Africa,” Kenyatta said. “The Belt and Road initiative gives our continent the opportunity to make a paradigm shift. Post-colonial Africa has been stuck in a rut.”

Even though Rwanda, one of the US military’s favored allies on the continent, was not invited to Beijing, Rwanda’s envoy to China, General Charles Kayonga, celebrated China’s OBOR as a positive development for Africa’s economy.

“The Belt and Road project, reaching Rwanda and beyond, will be a leap forward in the process of integrating Africa into the global economy and enhancing its political integration,” Kayonga said. “Western countries are critical because of their history in Africa. They were in Africa for centuries, but what do we see in the continent of Africa? Colonization and neo-colonization. Now, there’s a change on the face of Africa with Chinese involvement in the last three decades.”

“The Western kind of aid, most of the times, is political and is tied to some conditions, which China doesn’t do. I see China-Rwanda cooperation as a win-win partnership. I think this is the best for Africa,” he said.

The enthusiasm of Africa’s capitalist elites for the OBOR is a powerful index of the realignments taking place within the continent’s political order. Immense pressures are being brought to bear on Africa’s political system.

African governments and political establishments are torn between their military-political ties to the flagging American superpower and the potential gains from closer ties with Beijing, whose economic investments on the continent increasingly dwarf those of the US. The politics of the entire continent are being set on knife’s edge by the explosive interaction between the US drive to counter the breakdown of its hegemony through war and the emergence of China as a leading global economic power.

As part of the OBOR China is seeking to extend its new maritime Silk Road to Africa, and has committed $3 trillion to developing shipping lanes in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans linking the west and east of the continent to Asia and southern Europe. Beijing is also proposing massive investment in highway and rail line projects that will span the continent.

For their part, the African governments are seeking out economic agreements with Beijing because the terms are seen as more beneficial. Chinese loans are tied to more market-based interest rates compared to the strings attached to financial aid programs and loans offered by the US and Europe.

US and Europe seek to impose conditions, such as favorable tax rates (or none) for their corporations doing business in the country, and the agreement to hand over of the reins of entire economic sectors and industries completely to Western corporations and banks.

Over the past decade, China has made deep economic inroads into Africa. In the 2000-2015 period, China has invested or loaned $94.4 billion. In the last year alone, China committed $30 billion to Kenya alone.

The extensive investment projects China has undertaken in Africa include infrastructure, such as roads, power generation, telecommunications, and hospitals; and in the development of Africa’s resources, such as mining and oil extraction and refinement. Additionally, China has established trade relations with many African nations, exporting many Chinese products to the continent.

In the Congo, China has secured a contract with the government of Joseph Kabila for the largest cobalt mine in the world, representing some 62 percent of global production.

On June 1, Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway opened a new line for passengers between the port city of Mombasa and the capital Nairobi, thanks to a $3.2 billion loan from Beijing. In addition, a line is now open for commercial freight traffic between the two cities, and is expected to greatly enhance and streamline cargo transport.

Plans for the railway include the extension of the line into the neighboring countries of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo.

The African component of OBOR includes linkages connecting economic centers in Kenya, South Sudan, Uganda, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Angola to ports on both Africa’s Indian Ocean and Atlantic coastlines. The Chinese government is currently planning or building port complexes in Cameroon, Ghana, Tunisia, Gabon and Senegal, as well as pursuing dozens of other major infrastructure projects across the continent, including airports, power plants, sports arenas, and bridges.

The maritime component of China’s OBOR runs alongside thousands of miles of Africa’s eastern seaboard, from Mombasa north along the entire coastline of Somalia, where half of Chinese oil imports must pass through the narrow Mandeb Strait, just beside the largest US military base in Africa, Camp Lemmonier in Djibouti.

The contradiction between the interests of American imperialism and those of Chinese capitalism is fueling militarism and wars across the African continent. The American ruling class will never peacefully accept the realization of Beijing’s OBOR agenda in Africa, nor on any other continent.

It is increasingly clear that US military operations in Africa are focused on projecting power against Chinese interests. US Africa Command (AFRICOM) deployments are concentrated on Africa’s central heartland and around the transport corridors and port facilities that feed into the Indian Ocean.

The US-China strategic conflict in Africa finds sharpest expression in Congo. Congo’s mineral fields alone contain over 90 percent of the world’s cobalt, the rare earth metal necessary to the production of modern electronics and smart phones.

Washington’s drive to assert control over the mineral fields in eastern Congo has already produced two Congo Wars in the two decades, leading to the deaths of millions. US aggression against the Congo, driven inexorably forward by the insoluble crisis of American and world capitalism, is leading a third and larger Congo war.

There are increasing signs that Washington is preparing to move against the Kabila government in Brazzaville. President Kabila bucked Western demands that he leave office at the beginning of 2017, and on May 11 announced the formation of a new government, appointing Bruno Tshibala as prime minister.

Kabila faces a country in chaos. The value of Congolese currency has plunged by 50 percent since beginning of 2017. The American media is promoting Moise Katumbi, former governor of Congo’s Katanga province, as a suitable replacement. Reports indicate that Katumbi has travelled to Europe in an effort to position himself as the leader of de-stabilization operations against Kabila.

A logical infrastructure plan for linking Africa’s Indian and Atlantic Ocean coasts would cut directly through the heart of Congo, the largest and wealthiest country in the region. Instead, Beijing plans to bypass Congolese territory with two corridors, skirting around the northern and southern borders of Congo. This decision was obviously taken in consideration of the dozens of feuding militias and mercenary groups which emerged directly out of the CIA-backed wars. Washington has employed these forces for decades in an effort to seize direct control of Congo’s resources on behalf of American corporations and destabilize Congo’s central government.